Haunted

The house was a hard sell. It was an old Victorian that was all bones, no beauty. And the years that it had been empty left it in even worse shape. The real estate agent slow walked me through one room after another with ugly wallpaper or a bad paint job. It reminded me of myself and I hated the reminder. Standing in the foyer, she spun me a story about the owner’s disappearance and her husband’s death a few years later that added some color, but it left me cold. I had mentally checked out and was headed to the exit when she opened the door to the library.

The room called to me: four walls covered with books, burgundy velveteen chairs and a bay window that looked out on a oak tree that stretched its branches across the lawn. When she told me that the former owner loved the classics, I warmed to the house a little. A kindred soul, I thought. My eyes ran over the books lining the shelves from floor to ceiling. I could almost imagine her climbing the sliding ladder propped against the bookshelf and pulling out a leather-bound volume out to read. When they threw in the entire library as part of the deal, I could feel my reservations dissolve and I signed the papers.

I moved in just before winter and I fell into a rhythm inside the house. On good days, I worked my way through DIY techniques: Room by room, I stripped wallpaper, rolled paint and watched it dry. On bad days, I threw in the towel and curled up one of the high-back armchairs in the library. Huddling under a fleece blanket with a mug of hot chocolate, my cheek against the velveteen fabric covering the chair, I slowly read through the library’s contents.

After the first month, I realized that I had bought the library of my dreams. Dickens, Hardy, Milton, Poe, and Wolfe. A smattering of poetry and of course a complete set of Shakespeare. As I turned pages that were turning yellow, I found the former owner’s comments in the margins of her books. Her name, Celia Rivers, was clearly printed on nearly every book on the first page. Thank you, Celia.

By November, my DIY efforts had not progressed much beyond the Master Bedroom and the kitchen and the house was drafty and cold. Winter usually felt as if I were descending into Hell. The half-restored house did not help. The cold ate away at my hands until my fingers felt like numb sticks and my body felt as if it were retracting into itself. The library was the only room other than the kitchen that held any heat. Under my blankets, sipping hot chocolate, I continued to read through old favorites.

Reading through her comments, I could almost hear Celia’s voice. A snarky comment here, an insight scribbled near the end. I began to think of her as a friend, whispering to me from across the room. I couldn’t tell you why, but I began to bring a green pen and respond to her comments. It made me feel less alone. As the days shortened, I began to turn the reading light on earlier so that I could continue reading in the library’s gathering shadows. On rainy days, the reading lamp near my chair was the only pool of light in the room. I could barely see the library’s bookshelves lining the room.

When I picked up Jane Eyre to reread, I felt a sense of anticipation. I could not imagine what my friend thought of this book. As a teenager I tore through Jane Eyre. I was Jane Eyre, I felt her isolation and her anxiety about meeting Mr Rochester. Celia felt the same. I saw her comments, the same kind of reactions — exclamation points!!!! Did she read it as a teenager? The comments seemed layered over multiple readings at different ages. As the story went on, the older woman was less engaged, more cynical. After Jane saved Rochester from a fire, she wrote, ‘Bastard. He’s lying.’ Of course, he was lying, I thought. You know he is, why would she write that?

The tone of the comments as the book drew on soured. She liked Rochester less and less until the day the truth came out. Then Celia jeered at Jane’s longing for Rochester. When Jane told St John that if she became his wife, it would kill her, she underlined it. Then when St John responded to Jane saying “I should kill you — I am killing you?” Celia’s dark blue pen had written and underlined- He is killing me.

I let the book rest on the blanket and looked out at the chilly dark room. What did she mean? The cold seeped over the edges of the blanket and made my neck cold. I snuggled deeper under the blanket, pulling my feet up under me. The words made no sense as a comment about Jane. I put the thought aside and kept reading. When Jane got on the coach back to Thornfield, she wrote, “No. No. No. NO. He will kill you.” I finished my hot chocolate, set the mug on the side table and snuggled into the corner of the chair and fell asleep.

Thunder woke me up sometime later that evening. The book had fallen from my hand onto the floor next to me. When I leaned forward to pick it up, I froze. The only light in the room surrounded my chair. In the shadows across from me, for a moment, it looked as if someone was sitting in the opposite armchair, watching me. The next moment, lightning flashed in through the window onto the chair. It was empty.

I laughed at myself. Celia is long gone, I told myself. I stood up and walked to the doorway to turn on a light near the far end of the room so I could see the entire room clearly. I sat back down, tucked my blankets back around me and kept reading.

There were no more comments from the darker blue pen. The ending pages of the book had annotations from an earlier time with the usual cheerful comments. At ‘Reader I married him,’ the younger commenter had scrawled hearts. When I closed the book, the happy ending I had always enjoyed felt a little flat. I began looking through other books. All of them were filled with comments scrawled in pencil, in black ink, but always in the youthful hand. I did not see the shaky hand-writing in the dark blue ink from the last comment. What had happened to her? A strange cold feeling settled in my gut.

My curiosity drove me to call the real estate agent. She had nothing more to add from what I learned when I bought the house.

“Ms Rivers went missing. They never found her body,” she replied. “After 7 years, they declared her presumed dead.”

“Was her husband charged?”

“Charged? My understanding is that he told people she left him. The police found nothing missing, no evidence of foul play, and couldn’t charge him,” she said.

I thanked the agent and hung up. The questions rolled around in my thoughts for a few days, but without anything to go on, I eventually stopped thinking about it.

The following week, I picked another book from the library and settled into my regular chair. Another thunderstorm raged in the background, but this time, I had multiple lights on in the library. I felt quite cozy until I heard the sound of water dripping. I dropped my book and blankets and followed my ears to where I saw it: a trickle of water running down the wall onto the top of one of the bookshelves. Another gift from the house.

I hired a contractor to fix the problem. I was in the kitchen when he called me to the library.

“I thought you might want to see this,” he said, placing a gold ring in my palm. He had removed the bookshelf and cut out the rotting drywall when it fell out. He peered in and then quickly tore down the rest of the dry wall section. A skeleton in rotting jeans and a blue blouse was curled in the space behind the drywall.

The skeleton was identified as Celia Rivers. The ring was ice cold from the space behind the wall. Engraved inside it was the inscription: “Reader I married him!” My hand closed around it to try to warm it. It answered the question that had lingered in the back of my mind: why Celia had walked away without a bag, a box or even a single book from the library that she had loved.