“It’s a beautiful day, Anna. Don’t you think?”
Impassive silence.
“It’s going to be a lovely, warm day. The trees are very green today, aren’t they?” She turned toward the window, as if to encourage the child to follow her glance.
Silence, not a flicker of motion.
“What have you been doing today, Anna?”
The girl continued to swing her legs, nothing else.
“Do you hear the birds singing outside your window? In the morning? When you wake up?”
Anna’s eyes didn’t even blink.
Knaster followed with a series of similarly banal questions, all of which received no response. Exactly as expected.
She was about to rise and close the session when the girl’s breathing suddenly grew more rapid. It almost sounded to Knaster as if Anna had become excited about something.
She jumped when Anna’s arms began to flail, her fingers outstretched, as if seeking something. The psychiatrist tried to respond to the non-verbal gestures. She reached for a teddy bear and presented it to her. The girl ignored it. She tried several picture books. These too were ignored.
Finally, Knaster spotted the child’s writing tablet on the bookshelf. Anna grabbed it hungrily and began to move her hand, almost violently, over the blank paper. Knaster found a pencil and placed it in the child’s quivering fingers.
Anna began to draw.
Although her expression and posture did not change, her hand moved rapidly across the page and her breathing continued to heighten. Knaster paid close attention to what was appearing on the paper. She had seen the child’s artwork before, but had never witnessed it in action.
Just scribbling; pointless scrawling… but still, there was something there; some sort of pattern in the erratic motions of Anna’s hand.
After many minutes, the pencil and tablet fell out of her grasp. She resumed her vacant stare, swinging her legs.
Knaster picked up the tablet. The entire page had been covered in pencil. She had no idea what the child had tried to represent.
Was Anna trying to communicate? What triggered this?
She studied the scribbling more closely: there was a certain form to some of it, though nothing Knaster could clearly discern: clusters of grass or weeds? Impossible to be certain…
In reality, she thought, the drawing could have been anything. Or nothing. It was impossible to tell.
She would note the entire event later, and give serious thought to it.
Knaster closed the door behind her and joined Anna’s mother in the living room. She recapped the session, telling Su Ling that she found Anna’s drawing to be intriguing, albeit mysterious.
“What’s next?” Su Ling asked.
“I don’t know. But until I do, there’s one thing you must do: Make sure that she has plenty of paper and pencils near her bed. And keep every little scrap of what she draws.”
There was unbearable silence. The tenants of the Exeter sat in a neat circle beneath the shade of the ornate arbor that graced the rear of the building. Constructed of fine teak with a floor of Italian tile, it might have been gracious and calming in another environment. Here, beneath the shadow of the Exeter, it felt strangely confining and repressive.
As he watched them fanning themselves in the late afternoon August sun, Cantrell sensed their restlessness, and was not surprised by it. Moreover, he felt their anger.
The meeting had begun calmly enough with Cantrell’s announcement that Stuart Brown’s former flat had been totally cleaned and repaired and was now back on the rental market.
The tenants were obviously uninterested in the news. They were more concerned with the fate of Bill Sloane and the arrest of his wife only a week ago.
That event, preceded by Brown’s bizarre behavior and disappearance, had clearly affected them.
Cantrell still wasn’t sure where they all stood. From the looks on their faces—Su Ling being the only exception—common fear had begun to curdle into hostility.
“Why are we all sitting here? What’s wrong with you people?”
The voice belonged to Crispin Tucker, a 40-ish, pony-tailed, well-heeled New Ager, who seemed to have a mystical explanation for everything.
“We need help,” Tucker said, rising from his folding chair and addressing the group, as if he were in charge.
“What sort of help are you talking about?” Cantrell asked, attempting to reassert his leadership of the meeting.
“You know what I mean: we need a professional… ”
Cantrell, who’d always had a problem taking Tucker seriously, tried for a glib retort:
“Are you talking about a plumber, Crispin, or someone who can wave a magic wand?”
Nobody laughed.
The New-Ager stared at Cantrell.
“Maybe you think this is funny, Cantrell—one man crazy, another man murdered at his own table—but I think I speak for the group when I say that none of us agree with you.”
Cantrell leaned back in his chair and rubbed his head. “Okay, Crispin. Point taken. Seriously—what do you recommend?”
“There’s bad karma here. Something’s wrong.”
“You’re saying that the Exeter is a haunted house?”
Tucker grimaced. “Kind of. I’m talking about the vibe. It’s wrong, off kilter. Negative.”
Cantrell remained silent before the various nods and grunts of agreement.
One tenant stood up and wondered why complaints that had already been made weeks ago—about noises at night, strange smells, clocks that stopped momentarily, and more—had yet to be addressed.
Another testified to a new phenomenon: She claimed to have seen something in her flat—“a wispy shred of something”—that flitted through her apartment, just out of her field of vision.
When the tellers of several such tales were finished, Cantrell rose and addressed the tenants:
“Okay, folks; my job is to listen and to help find solutions. To prove that I have listened to you, I have looked into every single concern that has been expressed to me. I’ve had the boiler inspected. No problem. The pipes checked. No problem. The electrical circuits. All fine. The foundation inspected. No problem. I can show you the reports and the bills—this building checks out perfectly. It’s sound, well above code in each and every category.
“But I want to remind all of you. The Exeter is an old building. It’s settling. It’s adjusting to the renovations it has undergone. This is a process of time.”
He could see by their expressions that the tenants weren’t buying it.
Tucker stood up and faced Cantrell.
“You don’t believe that any more than we do. You know that none of what we’ve been experiencing can be explained by engineers and architectural mumbo jumbo.”
Cantrell sighed in defeat.
“All right then. I’m open to your suggestions, Crispin. Are you saying we ought to hire an exorcist?”
“In a way, although I would prefer a less cliché term. How about a shaman? A holy man or woman? Someone who can check this building out, and perhaps do something about what seems to be inside it.”
The tenants again nodded their agreement.
“If we bring in a medium, or a shaman as you call it, none of us will ever live it down: the Exeter will become a freak show. Forget about media attention—word of mouth will do it. It will gain a reputation and we’ll be lucky to ever see a new tenant again… ”
Tucker was not vanquished. He had another idea.
“Okay then, have you ever given any thought to fen shui? What about rearranging, or even redecorating, the entire place? I’ve heard that fen shui can have a profound impact on negative spaces. It couldn’t hurt.”