And then there was the outright exorcism. That was Ian’s thing before they’d met—paranormal investigator and, yeah, straight-up exorcist. Back then, there had been a waiting list for their services. Rich folks erecting McMansions, obsessed with success and convinced that Liz and Ian could help them by telling them how to arrange their furniture, or buying up historic properties and finding them already “occupied.” Sometimes whatever it was couldn’t just be nicely asked to move on. Some things had to be kicked out, hard.
“Oh, sweet,” said Josh, eyeing the care package Astrid had left. “Are those snacks for us?”
“Help yourself.”
“Man, I’m famished.”
Ian did the rounds.
In the bedroom, he thought he might have felt a cold spot, took a couple of pictures with his camera. He’d develop the film himself old school in the darkroom they had back at the office. He moved through the hallways, peeking into the sparely but elegantly furnished rooms. Nothing. It was nearing midnight.
He’d done an extensive search on the house, going back through the title history on the land. Sometimes it wasn’t the house. It was the plot on which the house was built that had the problem. On other projects, he’d discovered unsolved murders, missing persons, a graveyard, once the site of a mental hospital that had burned down. Each time, the original structure had been torn down, the land razed, recovered, eventually bought by developers to be built upon and sold at a profit. The new house built on the plot was clean.
But the land, it held on.
A haunting is not what you think, Liz would tell their clients. Places, like people, have memories. Trauma and pain disrupt and change the energy of the ground or the structures. Land, houses: they remember. And, for sensitive people, those memories are communicated in different ways.
It all made a kind of sense, didn’t it? That houses and places remembered the bad things that happened to them. Like any troubled entity, they wanted to share their pain. Present themselves for healing, as Liz might say. Only the most sensitive people could feel this energy.
Just one thing: it was pure bullshit.
He had believed once, a long time ago. But Liz was right; he’d lost his faith. Not a good look in his line of work.
He stopped into the room Astrid had confided she hoped would be the nursery, if her husband ever came around to the idea of children. We can’t just live our whole lives for ourselves, can we? Astrid had said, echoing something Liz had said once. Ian and Liz had tried for children. After two miscarriages, they’d given up.
He finished the rounds, moving from empty room to empty room.
Back in the kitchen, Josh had his books open, and it did in fact seem like he was studying, after having made a significant dent in the goody basket.
Josh was a premed student, planning to become a psychiatrist and a Jungian analyst. He had an interest in the paranormal and psychic phenomenon, as Jung himself had, and was exploring the field for his senior thesis. If we know more about space than we do about our own brain, and researchers estimate that we’re only using 3 percent of it, as I see it, there are more questions than answers about what’s possible. That was the sentence that had gotten him hired; Liz had adored Josh, and they’d spent hours talking about his classes, his research.
Ian sat across from him and opened a bottle of vitamin water, took a few sips.
“How are classes going?” asked Ian.
Josh nodded with his usual affability. “Good. Good. Just a lot, you know.” He massaged the back of his neck with a big hand. “How goes it here?”
“Nothing so far.”
“What about the house history?”
“I traced ownership of the property back to 1950, then did some searches on the owners’ names. I didn’t come up with anything.”
“No murders or burned-down mental hospitals?”
“Not even an ugly divorce.”
“Shame.”
“Hmm.” Ian rummaged through the basket, came up with some chocolate-covered cashews.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” said Josh, rubbing at his forehead.
“Sure.”
“Have you ever encountered something truly unexplained? Something really—just off the charts?”
“Well, there was that place upstate.” He popped a cashew in his mouth, a nutty explosion of dark chocolate. “You were there.”
Josh nodded. “Yeah, that was wild. Remember that howling?”
“I’ll never forget it.”
The owners had bought the old house in foreclosure, and moved in to start fixing it up. Every night around three, they’d wake to heart-wrenching howls of despair. At first they’d thought it was an animal trapped in the attic. Professional pest removers, plumbers, architects were called. No one could identify the source of the sound.
The wife, a schoolteacher, had struggled with depression for the first time in her life. The house had been underwater financially; they couldn’t afford to move. Finally, the husband, referred by a friend, had called Liz and Ian.
“If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be making this call, I’d have laughed out loud,” he’d told Ian. “I need you to clear this house.”
A historical search on the home revealed that fifty years earlier, a young woman suffering severe, undiagnosed postpartum depression had killed her newborn and herself.
“I never heard the actual wailing, though. Just the recording they had. Did you?” asked Josh now.
“No.”
They’d spent the night in the house with a psychic medium, prayed; Liz had walked the space with a singing bowl, chanting. The medium offered the young mother forgiveness, asked her to release herself from agony. There had been some strange noises in the house, and near
