The House of Dead Whispers

The house smelled of magnolias and rot, which is to say it smelled like the Delta in August: sweet on the surface, sweet underneath, but if you leaned close enough to put your ear to the trunk, you could hear the sound of something dying inside.

I came to the Beaumont estate on a Tuesday in September because the doctor called me and told me to come. I was a schoolteacher, and I taught third grade at the one-room schoolhouse out on Highway 61, and I was the sort of person people call when something needs to be observed and recorded and not judged, because I was good at observing and I was good at recording and I was, to put it honestly, not good at anything else.

The Beaumont estate was not what I expected. I expected a plantation house—big, white, with columns and a porch and a lawn that had been mowed within an inch of its life. What I got was a house that had been big and white once, perhaps two hundred years ago, but was now the colour of old teeth and surrounded by a forest that had grown wild and tangled and seemed to lean inward, as if the trees were trying to hear what was happening inside the house.

There were people everywhere. I had expected the Beaumont family, perhaps a few servants, maybe a handful of neighbours who had come to offer condolences and sympathy and casseroles. What I got was a house full of strangers.

Lillian Dupre was the first person I met. She was sitting on the veranda, which had a roof but not walls and not a floor that wasn't made of wood that had been warping and buckling and splitting for at least a century. She was maybe thirty, maybe forty, maybe neither. She had dark hair pulled back in a way that was neither elegant nor careless but somewhere in between, and she was wearing a dress that might have been black and might have been brown and might have been the colour of a shadow.

She was talking to someone. I could tell because her mouth was moving and her eyes were focused on something that was not me, not the house, not the landscape. Her eyes were focused on something that was perhaps there and perhaps not, and her expression was one of patient attention, the way a woman listens to a child explain something that the child believes to be important and that the woman believes to be important too, even if she cannot fully understand why.

"Who are you talking to?" I asked.

She turned her head and looked at me with an expression that I can only describe as recognition, as if she had been expecting me and had been waiting for exactly this question.

"The dead," she said. "They have a lot to say."

I nodded, because what else was there to do? I am a teacher, and I have spent my life nodding at things that I don't entirely understand.

Reverend Thomas Hale was the second person I met. He was in the kitchen, which had a stove that hadn't worked since before the catastrophe and a table that was covered with papers and photographs and what looked like a map of the Delta drawn on the back of a napkin. He was a small man with a small face and large hands, and he was speaking to himself in a voice that was too loud for the room and too quiet for a preacher.

"They don't make sense," he was saying. "The texts don't make sense. Job didn't understand. Moses didn't understand. What do you think they would say about this? About the people who are here and the people who are not and the people who are somewhere in between?"

I didn't answer. I didn't know what to say to a preacher who was talking to himself about Job and Moses and the people who were somewhere in between.

The doctor—Dr. Abner Crockett—was the third person I met. He was in the study, which had books but no light and a desk that was covered with medical charts and patient records and a single photograph of a woman who looked like she had been smiling in a way that wasn't entirely happy. The doctor was a large man with a large face and large opinions, and he looked at me the way a man looks at someone he has been expecting and is not entirely happy to see.

"You're the teacher," he said.

"I am."

"Good. You can write things down. Write this down: the catastrophe was not natural."

"I didn't say it was natural."

"No, but you thought it." He opened a drawer and took out a file—a real file, manila folder, tabbed and organized—and handed it to me. "Everyone in this house has a file. The doctor's job is to collect them. The doctor's job is also to understand them. So far, I understand nothing."

I looked at the file. The top page said: LILLIAN DUPRE. Age: undetermined. Occupation: undetermined. Arrival date: the day of the catastrophe. Notes: claims to see the dead. Claims to know things about the house. Claims that the catastrophe was selected, not random.

I closed the file. "And the others?"

"Also selected," the doctor said. "All of them. That's what the numbers say. That's what the patterns say. That's what the files say."

I looked around the study. There were perhaps a dozen files on the desk, arranged in a circle like the seats at a table. Seven files. Seven people in the house. Seven survivors.

"Seven," I said.

The doctor nodded. "Seven."

"Again."

He looked at me with an expression that was not quite irritation and not quite pity. "You'll hear that word a lot. Seven. It's the number that keeps showing up. Seven members of something. Seven catastrophes. Seven survivors. Seven—whatever comes after seven."

I didn't ask him what came after seven. I was a teacher, and I knew when not to ask a question.

The first night in the house, I slept in a room on the second floor that had been a child's bedroom. The walls were covered in wallpaper that had a pattern of flowers, but the flowers were the wrong colour—they were a brownish-pink, the colour of a healing bruise—and they seemed to shift when I looked at them from the corner of my eye. I didn't sleep much that night. The house was full of sounds: voices, footsteps, the creaking of wood, the distant sound of water moving through pipes that hadn't carried water in decades. And once, around three o'clock in the morning, I heard Lillian Dupre talking to someone in the corridor.

I opened my door and looked out. The corridor was dark and narrow and smelled of magnolias and rot. Lillian was walking away from me, toward the end of the corridor, and she was talking in a voice that was soft and clear and perfectly normal, as if she were having a conversation with a neighbour about the weather.

"I know," she was saying. "I know what you did. I know what they all did. But knowing doesn't change it."

"Who are you talking to?" I asked when she passed me.

She stopped and looked at me. "The people who built this house," she said. "And the people who live in it. And the people who are coming."

"Coming?"

"The next round," she said. "It always has a next round. That's the game. That's the cruelty. There's always another round."

Then she walked away, and I went back to my room, and I closed the door, and I sat on the bed, and I thought about spirals.

I am a teacher, and I have spent my life teaching children to count and to add and to subtract and to multiply and to divide, and I have spent my life teaching them that numbers make sense, that they follow rules, that they are the one thing in the world that is predictable and reliable and true. But I have never taught a child how to count past seven when seven is not a number but a door, and what comes after the door is not another number but a question that has no answer.

Lillian walked into the swamp at dawn on the ninth day. She didn't tell anyone. She just put on her shoes and walked out the front door and walked into the swamp and did not come back.

They found her body three weeks later. Or they didn't. I don't know. I left the house on the eighth day, before they found her body or before they didn't find her body. I couldn't stay. The house was full of whispers—actual whispers, coming from the walls, coming from the floor, coming from the ceiling—and I was a teacher, and I had spent my life teaching children to read, but I had never taught myself how to read a house that was speaking.

I returned to the schoolhouse. I taught third grade. I counted to seven every morning when the children sang the counting song, and I did not think about what came after seven.

But sometimes, on hot afternoons, when the cicadas are loud and the heat is so thick you can feel it pressing against your skin like a hand, the schoolhouse windows rattle, and I hear whispering. Not from outside. From inside. From the walls.

And I wonder if Lillian Dupre is still in the swamp, or if she is in the house, or if she is somewhere else entirely—in a place that has the same walls and the same floor and the same ceiling, but a different number at the end of the spiral.

I don't know. I am a teacher, and I teach third grade, and I count to seven every morning, and I do not ask what comes after.

But sometimes, on hot afternoons, when the cicadas are loud and the heat is so thick you can feel it pressing against your skin like a hand, I open the window and I listen. ## Variant 3: The House of Dead Whispers

Style Classification: Southern Gothic Tragic Index (TI): 88.0 Dominant Mode: M4 (Intensity: 9.0/10) Suspense Channel: M6 = 10.0/10 Sci-Fi Channel: M8 = 3.0/10 Redemption Coefficient: R = 0.1 Direction Angle: 90 degrees Narrative Style: Southern Gothic

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