he small, old lady lay in the small, old bed. She was sunken into the soft mattress, surrounded by pillows and encompassed by a thick, fluffy quilt. She looked thin and white, as if she had already faded away, been completely swallowed up by the soft whiteness that surrounded her. She looked at Sid, and she blinked three times.
“I am one hundred and eight years old,” she said.
Sid nodded. It was a lie. Charlotte Rowe was born in June of 1910, ninety-five years ago. Sid paused, look down at his notes, before he could choose his words, she told him:
“You are here to discuss my Gift.”
“Yes.” Sid shifted. “I’m writing a thesis, about the history of Spiritualism in Redlands.”
“Spiritualism,” she said. “Spiritual, regarding the connection with the inner soul. It’s a name that packages the mystic for mass consumption, links the world of the Beyond with the personal experience of Grace.” She shifted and turned her head to the side. “We didn’t call it Spiritualism.”
“Spiritism,” he said.
“It is not a subject to be taken lightly. It is… a dangerous subject.”
“I don’t take it lightly.”
“Spiritism. Delving with spirits.”
“I’m hoping you’ll let me record our conversation,” Sid said, taking the tape recorder out of his pocket.
She looked at the machine and smiled. “Not at all. It’s so important to be accurate, isn’t it?”
“Could you tell me about when you first discovered your gift?”
“I am very tired. I wanted to meet you, to get a look at you.” She closed her eyes.
“Oh… you couldn’t… just a few questions?”
She opened her eyes and asked suddenly, “Do you go to church on Sundays?”
“Well, no,” Sid said, uncomfortably. “I——”
“Good,” she said. “Come to see me again on Sunday.” She closed her eyes again.
Sid sat for a moment in silence before gathering his papers and shutting off the tape recorder. As he turned to leave, he thought he saw something—an impression of fluttering—out of the corner of his eye. The movement came from the mirror, but when he turned, there was nothing.
Sid stepped out into the heat. It was stifling, arid. His car was ten degrees hotter, and he rolled down the windows and blasted the air, cringing against touching the steering wheel. As he drove back through Redlands, his disappointment amplified. Redlands: a normal, modern, suburban town. Only a subtle decay marked the transition to the urban jungle to the west. At the easternmost edge of the massive metropolitan Southern California sprawl, Redlands lay at the beginning of the desert, and the transition to the east was marked by a different sort of decay, a gradual sloughing off of civilization and bounty, until all that was left were the plants and animals adapted to deprivation. Surrounded by impoverished city to the west and impoverished desert to the east, Redlands existed as a minor oasis. Today, the oasis seemed a mirage, barren in the heat.
The great orange groves that marked Redlands’ history were now shrunken, crammed into not-as-yet-built patches of land. Likewise, the quaint old buildings of downtown were cramped by a dank, heavy, enclosed mall, by coldly utilitarian strip malls, by poverty-symptomatic check cashing businesses. The great old Victorian mansions that were the peak of style in Redlands’ early years stood in hidden corners amid modern growth. Bits of the past—“historic” Redlands—were like discarded snake skins, husks that carried the shape of the past but were now dead. They were too intertwined in the Starbucks, fast food drive-thrus, discount stores. The present had sapped all of the life out of the past.
Sid had always imagined that the land of orange groves would be lush, filled with orange glistening balls under deep green leaves. But under all the asphalt, Redlands was desert, or near enough to desert. The orange groves, what was left of them, seemed sparse and dry, unable to counter the natural heat and barrenness. Sid’s room was at the top floor of an old house, and instead of heading to the sweltering room, he parked the car and walked into one of Redlands’ bars.
He ordered his first martini and sat staring at the olive floating in the clear, cool liquid.
“Hey,” said a girl, sitting down next to him. Sid drank down his martini in a gulp. “How’s it going?”
“Great, great.”
“Me, too. Bloody Mary, please.” She smiled at him. “I used to be afraid to order them, you know. I figured when I got too drunk, I’d order three in a row, and then, you know what.”
Sid laughed.
“So, what do you do?” she asked.
“I’m a student,” he said.
“U of R?”
“No, I’m in Redlands doing research. Spiritualism.”
“Spooky.”
“Not so far.”
“Don’t underestimate Deadlands.”
Deadlands, dead of nightlife, dead because of the lifeless desert underneath it, dead because of the ghosts that wandered the relics of its past.
“Have you been to the graveyard? Plot 666. I used to think it was a joke, until one night I went out there with my friends. You know, we were a little drunk, but not very. I mean, we’d had some beers. And we were out there, having like a picnic. That’s when I saw her, in the distance, kind of hazy against one of the tombstones…”
“Mm-hmm.” Sid drank down his second martini. Haunted Redlands, ghosts in the mansions, ghosts on the roadways, ghosts lurking in the cracks of the city as it sprouted up to cover its past. Cold spots. Apparitions. Unexplained noises. “Another martini, please.”
Sid awoke to the sound of his fan, burring in the window, hoping to capture some of the morning air before the hard heat descended. It already smelled of heat, rising up from the asphalt.
Somewhere in the middle of the evening, Sid had lost track of himself and started dropping memories around. He had them last night, but this morning they seemed to have escaped him. He knew there were some people he met: faces, hands, and colors were impressed in his brain, but no names.
He pulled himself out of bed and put on some dark glasses. Sunday. One more day to try again. He failed to escape the landlady’s disapproving glance as he grabbed a glass of orange juice on his way out of the house.
Sid’s head was throbbing, but he set off toward the south side of town, where the roads became meandering and confused as they moved up into the hills. Orange Blossom Road was at the very base of the hills, on the east end of town, and although you needed to wind through a series of small, curving drives to get to it, once you reached Orange Blossom, it stretched out straight to the east through an orange orchard. Once you passed the “no outlet” sign that marked the beginning of the road, there was nothing to see but orange trees, lined up with geometric precision, so that there could be no confusion between this manmade forest and a wild one.
Until he first drove down this road, Sid hadn’t realized that there were still any orchards that size. Another pocket of history, hidden away. Driving through it was eerie and unsettling. The orchard was neither natural, nor was it the comfortable bustle of civilization. Isolated but systematic, strange but familiar—in other words, uncanny.
Sid followed Orange Blossom Road to its conclusion. At the end of the road, he passed through the open wrought iron gates that stood freely on either side of the road. The road continued on, narrower and less well-kept, up a slight hill and through more trees. The orange orchard ended and was replaced by oak trees, hiding the house until Sid was almost on top of it.
The house itself was not Victorian in style, breaking the tradition of most other old houses in Redlands. It was actually older, constructed of stone. Built in the 1800s, its origin somewhat lost in history, Sid believed it was referred to in obscure records from the Estancia of the Mission San Gabriel’s Rancho San Bernardino, dating 1823. The writer of the notes was unknown—certainly not Carlos Garcia (the majordomo of the time), and there was some doubt about the authenticity of the records. But the text was intriguing:
The stranger went off to the east, although we warned him against that place. The natives know the unclean territory there. He insisted to build his blasphemous temple of stone, with a tower but not to God, and hinted that followers would join him.
The original, of course, was in Spanish, and Sid could find no records of a cult or colony, and no legends from the local Native American tribes to account for the entry (neither the “stranger” nor the “unclean territory”). It was just a scrap, but he couldn’t help identifying this “blasphemous temple” with the old rough-hewn stone structure that Miriam Rowe insisted had an “aura of spiritual power, a stronger presence than any other mystical place I have visited.”
The house was rambling and gray, peppered with windows. The first story wound around the hilltop, and sections of it had fallen to ruin, leaving what looked like a low stone fence around areas that once were rooms. The outlying edges were decayed and falling down, but the central portion stood. The tower was there, a three-story structure topped by a belfry. There was no bell, just an empty space where a bell was clearly intended and may have once been. Possibly, the bell tower was never finished, and no bell ever rung there. The Rowes had kept a telescope in the tower, where Professor and Madame Rowe looked up into the stars for calculations both scientific and metaphysical. There was no sign of a telescope now, only bird’s nests. On his first visit, Sid has seen a flutter of activity there.
Now, he looked up and saw the outline of a face, someone peeking over the railing. When he took off his sunglasses and squinted against the glaring sun, it was gone. But he was certain he’d seen it.
The door was opened for Sid by Nanette Goddard, caretaker to the house and caregiver to Charlotte Rowe. He had written to her, arranging his visit, and he had built up a picture of her in his mind, an older woman, but still good-looking, thin and slightly weathered, with light hair and darkened skin wrinkled by laughter and sun. Someone who smoked cigarettes in a non-vulgar way, who drank red wine. Perhaps it was just his image of a Frenchwoman.
Nanette was younger than he had thought and overweight—not obese, but round. Her face was round to match her figure, and she looked as if she would have a tendency to giggle, but didn’t. Her voice, though, was everything Sid might imagine a Frenchwoman’s voice to be, surprisingly deep and soft and heavily accented.
Nanette’s eyes brightened when she saw him. “Miss Rowe has been very anxious to see you again,” she said. “She doesn’t get many visitors, of course.” She brought Sid in to the sitting room with the large fireplace. “Wait here while I check on her.”
The Rowes did extensive work on the interior of the house, making it into a home that would be acceptable to Miriam Rowe, née Silver, of the wealthy Chicago Silver family. Though it wasn’t luxurious, even by the standards of the 1920s, it certainly seemed comfortable enough. From the outside, it looked cold, slightly prison-like. Inside, the stone of the walls was plastered, painted, and wallpapered, although a bit stained and peeling. There were wood moldings and trim, and the only hint of stone was the large fireplace in the main sitting room. There were few pieces of heirloom furniture, and the cheap utilitarian substitutes looked out of place.
Sid wandered around the room while he waited, absorbing the atmosphere. He felt unusually calm in that room. He expected knick-knacks, antique photographs, and strange objects, but the room was oddly sparse. It had the air of a room whose contents had been given up over time, in favor of survival.
When Nanette returned, Sid was standing in front of the empty fireplace, staring thoughtfully at the black ashes.
“Come up,” she said simply, and she led Sid up the curving staircase of the bell tower.
“Why would Miss Rowe want a bedroom up all of these stairs?” Sid asked.
“The room was the nursery when she was a child. It is sentimental.”
The narrow stone staircase ended in a crescent-shaped entryway. Nanette and Sid passed through a door into a round room directly below the bell tower, and there was Charlotte Rowe, lying in her childhood twin bed surrounded by fluffy blankets and pillows. There were no real furnishings in the room except the bed and, across from it, the huge and elaborately framed mirror. Sid caught himself staring at Charlotte’s image instead of looking at the woman herself, and he turned his head toward the bed.
Nanette left, and Sid sat down, starting up his tape recorder.
“Feeling better today, I hope,” he said, lamely.
“Better, I suppose,” she said. “I am never well.”
“I thought I saw you in the belltower. It’s right above his room, isn’t it?”
“The belltower?” Charlotte paused. “Oh, that’s her.” She went silent, staring into the mirror. Sid didn’t like to ask who “her” was. He doubted Nanette had come rushing down the stairs from the top of the tower. Perhaps Charlotte was up to her old mediumistic trickery, fashioning apparitions in the tower. Sid shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
Charlotte turned to him, and her eyes were sharp and bright. “I suppose,” she said, “I’ll have to tell you everything.”
Sid didn’t show up at school when the fall semester started. Instead, his roommate Martin received a tape, a manuscript, and a note. The tape was hours of static, with what sounded like it could be muted, murmured conversation in the background. Repeated, in a lower register, like a drum beat, was what sounded like a voice saying, “I scream.”
Then, there was the note:
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Marty,
Take this manuscript and guard it with your life. Try to verify any aspects possible and check authenticity.
Sid
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