Hauntings
Kim Antieau
Published by Green Snake Publishing at Smashwords
Copyright (c) 2012 by Kim Antieau
Originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction February 1985
Cover image copyright (c) by Gracey | Morguefile.com
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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Hauntings
Kim Antieau
KATE AWAKENED TO the sound of her name being whispered in her ear, to the feel of warm breath on her cheek. She let the dream ebb away, taking with it the sound and warmth before she opened her eyes to darkness.
“Kate,” the whisperer said again, sighing, settling and creaking as all houses do in the quiet of night.
Still not fully awake, Kate switched on the light over her bed. Eerie shadows gave way to reveal her ordinary bedroom: faded peach wallpaper, painted ceramic light fixtures, jeans and shirt strewn on a chair, a black and white television set. The sound was gone.
She took a drink of water from the glass that was always on the night stand. She drank a great deal of water now, as if it could wash her clean if she drank enough of it. She yawned and settled back against her pillow. The whispering didn’t frighten her. She had grown accustomed to the occasional noises in the two weeks she had lived in the nineteenth century farmhouse. They were almost company to her.
Except now they were disturbing her sleep even more than usual. She liked her time in her dreams. In them, she was usually well, whole; no one had taken a knife to her, no one had injected poisons into her.
She turned the light off. In the morning, she supposed, she’d have to find out why the house talked to her.
“CAN I HELP you find anything, Mrs. Hein?” the librarian asked. Kate looked up and smiled. Everyone in Canyons insisted on calling her Mrs. even though her last name was different from her husband’s. All they knew was that she was married, so she was Mrs. Hein to them.
“Call me Kate, please,” Kate said, closing the book in front of her. “Maybe you can help. Do you know anything about the Nelson farmhouse?”
“You mean the house you bought?” he asked, sitting down next to her. On this sunny Monday afternoon, the library was empty except for Kate and the librarian. “It’s been researched extensively by our historical society—of which I am a member. It hasn’t been declared a historical landmark or anything—not architecturally unique enough—but it is one of our older homes. The society has pictures of it and of the people who lived in it. Their office is just across the courtyard.”
“Before I bought it had the Nelsons always owned it?”
He shook his head. “It was built by a family from back east in the 1890s. They had money and decided to come here and get back to nature.”
“People were doing that back then, too, eh?” Kate said, laughing. One of the reasons she had moved to Canyons was because there was no industry, no waste dumps, and plenty of land to grow her own food.
“I can’t remember their names, something simple though,” he said. “They owned it for about fifty years. Then they sold it to a distant cousin and moved back to New York. This cousin married a Nelson and it was kept in their family after that. They overfarmed the land, though, and they couldn’t make any money, so they finally left. It was up for sale two years before you bought it.”
“Any rumors of unusual happenings?” Kate asked.
The librarian glanced at her books Poltergeists and Hauntings.
“Nary a word,” he said, “and I would have heard. It seems it was quite a happy home.”
“Any Indian burial grounds nearby?”
The librarian laughed and stood up. “Nope. We didn’t have Indians in that area. You’re going to have to settle with just your run-of-the-mill ordinary house.”
“Thanks.” She turned back to her stack of books and magazines and he went back to the checkout counter. Leafing through one of the magazines, the headline “Laetrile: Hope of the Future” caught her attention. She quickly turned the page. She never wanted to see another cancer article. When she had first found out she had cancer, she had read them all—after the initial frightened vomiting ended and the terrified night sweats lessened in frequency. For a time, she had thought about going the “natural” route, healing with foods and state of mind. In the end, she decided she couldn’t trust her mind not to make the disease worse, so she had allowed surgery and chemotherapy.