And of course, there was also Chris to be considered. If the house did, in fact, capture the spirits of the souls who died there, shouldn’t she stick around to keep him company, in case he wanted to contact her, in case he needed her for something?
But Chris had remained strangely silent on the subject; he either couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to her. She found herself growing angry at his reticence, angrier even than she’d been at him in life, when the house and its ghosts first began to come between them, as he was pronouncing her anxiety within its walls “neurotic” and “crazy,” not yet knowing all the while those same ghosts had their ectoplasmic fingers deep inside him, in his brain and his heart, twisting them into something she no longer knew.
He was soundproofing one of the downstairs rooms so he could record music there, and then he wasn’t; he stopped doing much of anything at all, she later realized, save for going to work, network administering something or other, but even there — well, nobody was going to tell a suicide’s widow that her dead spouse would have been fired in short order, had he not offed himself before that eventuality could come to pass. But she wasn’t a professor of literature for nothing; subtext was her specialty. In every interaction with his ex-coworkers and former supervisor, she read it: he’d been neither well-liked nor competent, she surmised, and yet that wasn’t the Chris she’d known and loved and married and moved into the house with. That wasn’t her Chris, the Chris with the still-boyish flop of brown hair in his eyes and penchant for quoting from obscure spaghetti westerns. Not her Chris with his left hand calloused from the fret of his bass and his skill at navigating not just computers but workplaces and the people therein. And not just work: he had a warmth and generosity toward his fellow musicians that never failed to stagger her (a tireless ability to offer constructive feedback on the most appalling demos and YouTube uploads, because, he said, assholes were rampant enough in the music world without his increasing the net total assholery out there). Nobody disliked Chris, or at least not until the final months of his life.
That was the Chris the house made.
The first time for her, it was the little girls.
They were the worst of all; they had come to her when she slept in the guest room, coughing and feverish. She moved there so as not to disturb Chris with her tossings and turnings, her sweating and chills. That first time, she woke and heard them, an explosion of vicious whispers like a burst of static, and one word distinguishable above the rest, her, her, her—and she never knew that three letters, a single breathed syllable, could be weighted with so much hatred. Next she became aware that she could not move, that her arms and legs and indeed her entire body seemed clamped in a vise; and finally, she knew that the vicious little girls floated somewhere above and just behind her head. She could see them in her mind’s eye: four or five of them all with wide pale eyes, pert little noses, mouths half open to display rows of sharp, shiny teeth.
The morning after, she attributed it to fever (although she was really not that sick), or something else, googled phrases like hypnagogic hallucination and sleep paralysis and gazed on the Fuseli painting until she could no longer bear the image of the demon on the woman’s breast and the mad-eyed horse thrusting its demented face through the curtains. She drank her coffee, cycled to campus (a bad idea; she had to pull over for three coughing fits in the two short miles she rode), and forgot about it.
She didn’t forget about it; she’d had dreams stay with her before, mostly the unpleasant kind, and she hated those days, haunted by her own un conscious. She knew instinctively this was different. This was something from outside her. She could not have produced objective proof to show to someone that this was the case. She knew all about the games the mind could play to make oneself believe in its wild flights of fancy. And she knew in the depths of her soul (in which she did not believe, any more than she believed in ghosts or haunting) that the kind of words she’d googled and the daylight world with its prosaic explanations and even the most unwholesome depths of her own brain had nothing to do with the things that had stolen into her room that night and despised her with such vehemence.
She had always thought of hate as a human emotion, a uniquely human frailty, a condition from which we might have to evolve to survive. Never before had she considered the possibility that hate was the most essential thing there was; that the universe was an engine driven by hate, animals savaging one another, atoms smashing together, planets and worlds dying in explosions of rock and fire. And to have so much of that directed at her. At her. She sat stunned in her office at Park Hall, her eyes fixed on the fake wood grain of her desk, someone knocking and knocking at her door and she knew it was a student because he’d scheduled an appointment with her and yet she could not answer it, she could not move, she could only sit paralyzed by her newfound knowledge, and at last the knocking ceased and went away and she wished she could, too.
The existence of Christopher Crane has never been in question. The roots of the Crane family run deep in the soil of Clarke County, and though Crane himself was away for many years, he was fondly remembered as one of the founding members of the indie/alt-country group the Gaslight Hooligans, who went on to moderate mainstream success following his departure.
At least, this is how I remember Chris Crane, as do a number of people I know, but others insist on a different narrative. That Chris Crane never left town, that the Gaslight Hooligans broke up more than a decade ago after playing a few house parties and one or two dates in local clubs, to indifferent reception. Same as hundreds of other bands that spring up here each year and are soon forgotten.
Sources online and off are mixed in their reportage, but one thing is certain, that at least two and possibly more conflicting versions of the life of Chris Crane are out there. This introduces a disconcerting possibility: that we are all, now, existing in a dubiously real and unstable present, one in which Vivian Crane was and was not, and the house on Cobb Street at the heart of it all.
It is six months since she lost Chris. Her best friend, Felicity, has come from Seattle to visit her, has been staying in the house with her and urging her to get out. She doesn’t need to do anything big, Felicity says, but she needs to do something besides go between home and campus. (This awful home, Felicity doesn’t say, this terrible place that took Chris and is taking you. But Felicity knows.)
But she’s hiding something from Felicity, and she’s increasingly sure Chris was hiding the same thing from her in his last days. It’s something that happened just before Felicity arrived, and afterward she tried to make Felicity postpone her visit (forever), but Felicity was having none of that. Felicity thinks Chris’s suicide has opened the gulf between them, best friends from the age of five gone suddenly quiet and awkward in one another’s presence. Felicity has no idea that the gulf is so much greater than that.
Vivian does not know whether to be overjoyed or horrified that she now bears physical proof that she isn’t mad. A week before Felicity’s visit, she is sleeping in the bed she and Chris shared. She has woken paralyzed once again, and something is screaming in the walls. This is not so bad; at least it’s in the walls, and not in the room with her. She lies there and thinks about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a story she has taught to countless freshmen, and the poor insane narrator following the twisty patterns and the women creeping beneath them. Thinking of these creeping women serves, oddly, to calm her as the screamer eventually winds down, perhaps because she is able to make them into academic abstractions and symbols while the suffering of the screaming woman in the walls is so very real.