Chapter 9: Lost in the Passed
No time to react.
Because the steps around Dipper and Eloise vanished, and they fell into darkness. He landed on something soft, a sofa, a bed, something like that, and bounce-rolled off, landing face-down on the floor. Eloise landed on top of him—if she was a ghost, she was solid!—and then tumbled off him. Dipper rolled over. His flashlight must have broken. He'd heard it hit, but the beam had gone out. Far above, a dim square of light vanished as the steps remade themselves. And then—
The darkness of the deepest midnight. Somehow Dipper had held onto his anomaly detector, and its lights flashed—not enough to illuminate anything, but it was working. He pressed the "go" button, and the screen flared an urgent white, the meter pegged out at the top.
Not just one ghost here.
Hundreds!
Maybe thousands.
His heart began to race, thudding inside his chest, and he felt the presence of the unknown. His bones had been chilled to zero, and shivers started along his spine and in his chest. Clenching his teeth, Dipper told himself, No! Show no fear. Fight it down. You've dealt with ghosts before.
But not in the choking, breath-stealing, musty dark. The anomaly detector gave him just enough light to make out Eloise, sprawled face-down on a wood floor thick with a layer of gray fluffy dust. He knelt beside her and reached out—hesitated, fearful that his hand would plunge right through her form, or worse—and then grasped what felt like a very real shoulder. He shook her, all the while feeling that unseen entities were sweeping past him, trailing filmy garments, touching his face and neck with ice-cold fingers.
"Eloise?" His voice came out a squeak. The girl did not respond. "Eloise, are you OK?" He felt her cheek. It was warm, and he also felt her breath on his fingers. "Come on, please wake up," Dipper said.
In return he got only a faint groan from her. Now he heard—or maybe just imagined—a wailing, low moan, and he seemed to smell a foul, earthy scent of decayed flesh and mold. Again cold fingers brushed his face, almost a mockery of a caress.
Dipper closed his eyes and forced himself to take deep breaths. Show no fear. Show no fear.
But I AM afraid!
Remember, ghosts always need something. Find that out. Don't be afraid—that gives them power over you. Show no fear.
No way to do that but to—just do it. He stood up. He turned off the meter so the darkness fell heavy. More deep breaths. I got this. I got it. I'm on top of it now. "Ghosts? I know you're here! Show yourselves!"
Over maybe five or ten seconds, a wavery, wispy form appeared, glowing with its own dim inner light. Dipper squinted in the murk, but the apparition had no clear features, not even arms or legs. Just a barely glowing, grayish, floating vapor roughly human-sized and human-shaped. His size, to be precise. It did not look like a big figure. It hovered over the spot where Eloise lay. "Eloise? Is that you?"
The voice came soft as the whisper of rain on a calm spring night: "My name is Neosha." Did I really hear that? Was it in my head?
"Neosha. My name is Dipper Pines. You possessed Eloise, didn't you? This girl here?" Dipper asked.
"I guided her. I would have led her apart if I could, but she kept holding your hand."
"You didn't—you know, overpower her?"
"I cannot do that. I do not know how. I suggested, and she understood my thoughts because she is sensitive. She did not see me or know I was there, but I led her and urged her to the stair. It was necessary. For the sacrifice."
"That was wrong—wait, what?"
The floating figure drifted around him, and he turned to keep facing it. "I am sorry. It must be done. For one of us to find rest we must bring another to dwell in the cursed house. It is what must be done."
Dipper said, "Whoa, wait. You're going to kill her?"
The figure halted in its drift. "Or you. Not both. Just one every seven years."
Dipper swallowed, but the cold lump of dread in his throat would not go down. "Is she dying?"
Now the ghostly whisper held a tinge of apology or regret: "I am keeping her asleep. Better that way. Now that we are all here, she would know us and be afraid. You have less fear. She might lose her mind."
"Neosha—there are others here, aren't there?"
"Many."
Once more Dipper's heart wanted to pound as, from all around, from every part of the darkness, came a resentful, many-voiced whisper: "Many!"
"One of you must die," Neosha said. "Choose. We will allow that. You choose."
"Why me?"
"Because the one you call Eloise has the Sight." Somehow Dipper heard the capital letter in that word. "Now that so many of us are near, she would see all us as you cannot. Then fear would shatter her mind. You must choose. We will abide by your choice."
"Hold on, hold on," Dipper said. "I've seen ghosts, too—more than she has, even. I've seen dozens of them! Heck, I've been a ghost!"
He felt their awe. The room began to murmur as though innumerable bees buzzed in it. A male voice asked, "You have been a ghost? You walked the path of the dead and found your way back to the land of the living? You say what cannot be!"
"Who are you?"
"My name was Wicaka, the Truth-Teller, when I was a Lakota warrior. A bluecoat soldier shot me in the year you call 1890. I had no weapon and stood before him bare-handed and yet he shot me. I died in the snow."
Dipper swallowed. "I'm sorry."
"I am only one of many."
"Many!" the wailing whisper went up again.
"I feel you, man," Dipper said. "Listen: Once a demon named Bill Cipher pulled me out of my own body. For a time there I was a ghost, and he possessed my body."
"A demon?" one of them asked.
"Well—I guess. He was, like, a yellow triangle shape, with one eye and little thin arms and legs—"
"Táaʼgo deezʼá ch'iidii!" someone moaned. "The yellow devil! My people know him. A liar, a demon!"
"The boy is cursed!" someone said. "Take the girl instead!"
"Wait, wait," Dipper said. "We beat the demon. We defeated him. I'm not cursed. My sister cast Bill Cipher out and I took my body back again. But I remember how awful it was when none of the living could see or hear me! I'd never felt such loneliness."
All around him rose whispery sounds of lamentation and sorrow. He asked, "What about Neosha? Where are you? Who were you?"
The indistinct gray apparition spoke again: "I was a child of the northern forests. The year that I had seen thirteen summers, white men came to our settlement. I saw my father and mother shot down, and I fled to a cave where our people buried our dead. The men could not find me, but they blocked the cave with great heavy stones I could not move. There among the bones and corpses I died in the dark of starvation and slow suffocation."
"Are you all Native American?" Dipper asked.
"No." This sounded like a woman. "My name was . . . Martha, yes. Yes, I remember. I lived in San Francisco. When the great earthquake came, I was pinned under rubble. There was fire everywhere. My own son tried to move the beams that held me down but couldn't. When I began to burn, I begged him to shoot me."
"Oh, man." Dipper swallowed hard and then asked, "But Neosha starved. Did the rest of you all die because of Westminster rifles?"
The chorus sighed "Yes. Neosha, too. Not all were shot, but the weapons led to our deaths."
"But—the man whose spirit ordered this house built—he built it to atone, you know. To say to the spirits that he was sorry."
"No," Neosha said. "He made it to trap us."
"Trapped. . . ." The sound had no echo, and came faint to his ears, wind in a chimney on a bleak night.
"Why would he want to do that?"
"No one knows," Neosha said. "No one knows."
"Is—is he here?"
Deep silence and nothing more.
"Look," Dipper said, "Think about this, please. I'm just fourteen years old. Eloise is the same age. It's not our time to go yet. I understand you want to escape, but only one of you can go, right? And if one of us dies, then our ghost has to remain here?"
"We regret this," a man's hoarse voice said. "I believed in never harming anyone. In life I preached the gospel, tried to teach ways of peace. But I traveled in a stagecoach assaulted by robbers. They shot us all, driver, guard, and four passengers."
"And you're all here?"
"No. Not all. Me alone. I woke up here. None of the ones who were shot with me did."
"This makes no sense," Dipper said. "You woke up? I mean, what happened? Did you die and then just find yourself here?"
"Yes," Neosha said. "I fell asleep in the cave, in the terrible dark, and then I was here."
"But thousands of people died because of the rifles," Dipper said. "Are—are they all here?"
"No . . . ."
"Can—would you appear to me?" Dipper asked. "I'm not afraid of you, but it's hard to talk when I can't see you. Please. I'll help you if I can."
Neosha's faint light faded. For the longest seconds, the room grew still—and perfectly dark. Eloise even murmured something he couldn't understand.
And then—
First one, then another, like an old-fashioned photograph slowly developing in its chemical bath, they began to emerge.
A tall man in buckskins, clearly Wicaka, with an awful round hole in his forehead. The elderly, kindly-faced Martha, in gingham and a bonnet, the lower part of her legs charred black. The minister, a thin man in a dark suit whose homely features reminded Dipper of a young Fiddleford McGucket, the front of his white shirt punctured by three bloody bullet holes in a line. More of them, men and women, white and black, Native American, Asian, materialized from nothing. They hovered mournfully around him.
Neosha last of all. The blurry form became a young girl in rags. Her mournful expression broke Dipper's heart. Hunger had gaunted her, her hair fell wild as if she'd clawed at it in terror, and he saw that her fingers were bloody, the nails worn to stubs. "You tried to dig yourself out," he said.
"Despair drove me."
"Tell me how this works," Dipper said. "When you have a—a sacrifice, how does it happen?"
"I'll tell you that," said a middle aged man, drifting from the crowd. His arms looked wizened, and he had no fingers—just charcoal-colored stumps. "My name's Baxter Willfred. Or it was. What year is this, son?"
"Uh, 2014."
"Yes. That would be right, because I was the last one. I passed over in 2007. I was an electrician hired to renovate the wiring here. It didn't have any originally, but Mrs. Wesminster had some of the rooms electrified right before World War I. Wiring's in terrible shape, or was then. I don't really know what happened. I was in the basement replacing one of the original fuse boxes with circuit breakers. The juice shouldn't have been on. But the electricity grabbed me and stopped my heart and they found me dead in the cellar two days later."
"And—the ghosts did that?"
"A sacrifice," the others sighed. "Once every seven years, a sacrifice."
"And then—one of them got to—go on?"
"The weeping lady," Neosha said. "She had been a prisoner here since 1875. She was among the first to come here. Over the years the others who had arrived at her time or a little earlier were all freed as we made our sacrifices."
"How did she leave?"
The story seemed eerily familiar. A circle of golden light, they said, had formed the instant that the ghost of Mr. Willfred had appeared, and the weeping lady had gone through it to—whatever waited beyond.
"Listen, help me understand. Do any of you have strong regrets?" Dipper asked. "Uh, things you left undone on earth? Do you want revenge against the Westminster family or anything like that?"
"Everyone has sorrows," one said.
"We are beyond revenge," another said.
"None of us would return to earth. We want only rest."
"Ressssst. . . ."
"OK. You're all victims here, first off. I don't know how, but something in this house is trapping you. If I can find that and maybe destroy it, it might free you, right? Like once some ghosts asked me to find a man who had made a machine that trapped ghosts and kept them from going on. He didn't mean to or even know it did that, but it did, and when I got him to turn off the machine, they were all set free. Trust me to try to do that here? Please? I give you my word I'll try my best."
"Sacrifice," they moaned.
Neosha drifted close enough for him to touch just by reaching out—though Dipper knew he couldn't touch her. "I am next to leave," she said, her eyes enormous and tragic. "I still feel. I feel sorrow that a young person must die so I can leave this place. I would release you. But if I did, the next in line would want a sacrifice."
Again the ghostly chorus: "Sacrifice."
Neosha reached out as though to caress Dipper's face, but he felt only a cold breeze. "One of you would not be allowed to leave alive. You or the girl. It must be."
"Could—could I at least have some time? Give me a chance, please. I know I can help you. Or I'll try real hard, anyway. Let Eloise go, OK? I promise I won't leave this house. Let me have two hours. That's not much. I mean, some of you have been here over a hundred years. Let me try, and if I can't set you all free, I—I'll come back here and—and you can—you know."
"We cannot trust anyone who walks the paths of earth," Wicaka said.
Martha sounded more accepting: "If the girl remains with us, let him go and look. We can always sacrifice her."
"That's wrong," the minister said. "Thou shalt not kill."
"We got no other way out," a man who looked like a cowboy—not a very impressive one, but one in old tattered clothes and a mangy-looking hat—said. Dipper winced. He must have been shot in the back. Exit wounds can be hideous. "Man does what he gotta, Preach. But still I say let the kid try. I like his gumption."
"He says he has succeeded before," someone else said.
The murmur started soft, but built like a rising tide, the waves of quiet sound swelling: "Let it be so. Let it be so."
And then—
Dipper found himself sitting on the solid stair again. For a second he thought, Man, what a crazy dream!
Then he realized he sat there alone. No Eloise. And no flashlight in his backpack, though he still held onto his anomaly detector.
I could run! I could get out of this house and call Mom and Dad and go back home and forget about this mansion and its ghosts. I don't have to die here! I could escape!
Only—Eloise.
The poor people down in that hidden room.
Neosha.
Dipper stood up and carefully descended the steps. When he reached a room that had a window and light, he dusted himself off.
He switched the detector back on. "OK. Time to see what this puppy can do."
He set the target for the machine to look for. This time he didn't set it to "Ghosts."
He turned the dial to "Psychic Traps."
And the meter began to hum.