The Eviction

The house was two stories and old, and the realtor called it a farmhouse because calling it haunted would have scared them off. It had been on the market five years. Carol Greer saw the listing one night and called Dale over and they looked at the pictures on her laptop, and she said it needs work and he said we can do work. That was before either of them had driven up Route 212 into the Shelton Laurel community and seen what the mountains do to everything people build in them given enough time.

They had two kids. Rick was fourteen. Martha was eleven. They had a truck with two hundred thousand miles on it and boxes from the U-Haul place in Asheville and a savings account. Living in Charlotte had not worked out. This was going to.

The road came off the highway and went back through overgrown pasture for about a quarter mile. At the end of the holler the house sat facing south, old white clapboard, dark windows. Carol stood in the old dirt road looking at the upstairs windows. One was boarded. She thought she saw something move behind the glass of another one and told herself it was a reflection.

They signed the papers.

First day in the house Dale found a ring of keys on a nail in the kitchen that nobody had told them about. Twelve keys on a bent nail. He tried them in the back door and the cellar lock and the barn padlock and accounted for nine. Three he could not place. He left them on the nail and forgot about them.

Martha would not sleep upstairs.

She said there was a smell up there. Carol went up and stood in the hallway and smelled the old musty house and something else, mineral, the way well water smells when the casing is cracked. She told Martha there was nothing up there. Martha said okay Mom and still wouldn't go.

Dale found a name carved into the hearthstone the second week. Somebody had gone at it with something sharp and cut the letters deep enough that no amount of paint would cover them.

CALEB VANCE.

Carol looked it up on her phone but got no signal. She drove down to the gas station on 212 that had wifi and searched the name and the county and got back one result. A digitized page from the Marshall paper, 1961. She sat there reading the story.

Caleb Vance had lived in their house. Born there, in fact, in the upstairs back bedroom, the one that stayed locked. He had refused to sell the property to a developer out of Tennessee. The article was careful about what came next. It said Vance had been removed from the premises following a dispute over the deed. It said he had died of injuries sustained during the removal. It said no charges were filed.

She sat in the parking lot for a while.

Then she drove back up the mountain to her family.

She told Dale that night after the kids were in bed. He listened and said that's awful and then said it's got nothing to do with us. She looked at him. He said Carol, the man's been dead sixty years. She said I know that. He said okay then.

She lay awake listening to the house.

The smell had gotten into the upstairs hallway. She could smell it from the bedroom with the door open, that mineral smell, and she lay on her side looking at the ceiling and there was a sound coming from the locked room at the end of the hall. Not settling. Not the wind. Something dragging back and forth across the boards in there, back and forth, the same 10-feet of floor, over and over.

She did not wake Dale.

She lay still until it stopped.

Rick was out walking and found the grave marker up the creek bank a few weeks in. He almost stepped on it. A piece of local fieldstone set into the ground at an angle, letters scratched into the face of it. He crouched down and cleared the grass away with his hand.

CALEB VANCE. 1914–1961. THEY TOOK WHAT WAS HIS.

He stood up and looked at the ridge and the creek and the cloudy sky and understood for the first time that they were living in a place that did not belong to them.

He went back to the house and told his mother.

She said thanks for telling me Rick and did not say anything else.

A chair appeared in the upstairs hallway. Old wooden ladder-back, and none of them had put it there. It was facing the door to Martha's room. Dale said one of them must have dragged it out in their sleep, said there was a rational explanation, and Carol watched his face while he said it. He carried the chair down to the barn and came back in through the side door and ran the water at the kitchen sink for a long time.

His hands were shaking when he turned the water off.

Carol saw them. Said nothing.

That night Martha woke up screaming.

Carol got to her first. The girl was standing in the middle of the living room with both arms wrapped around herself, staring at the staircase like something was about to come down it. Carol grabbed her and held her and Martha put her face hard into Carol's shoulder and said he's up there, he's up there, he's up there until Dale came down the stairs and said there is nobody up there, I checked every room. The girl pulled her face out of Carol's shoulder and looked at him. Carol would carry that look for the rest of her life. It was the look of a child who has already understood something that the adults around her have not and knows exactly what that is going to cost.

Dale went back to bed.

Carol stayed downstairs with Martha on the couch. Sometime deep in the night she fell asleep and sometime after that the sound started on the stairs. One step at a time, coming down. Carol's eyes came open. The sound reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped, and the smell was there, that mineral smell, strong enough to taste, and she pulled Martha against her and looked across the room.

There was a shadow of a man standing on the stairs.

She could see him in the dark the way you see something your eyes don't want to confirm. Tall. Big through the shoulders. Standing absolutely still with his face pointed at her. The smell coming off him was the smell of the locked room, of the hallway, of every bad night in that house collected into one place. Martha was asleep against her and Carol did not move and did not breathe and the man at the bottom of the stairs did not move either and they stayed that way for a long time.

Then he went back up.

She heard each step. She counted them. She lay there until light came through the curtains and did not close her eyes again.

She told Dale in the morning they were leaving. Dale looked at his coffee and said we can't afford to just leave Carol. She said I know what I saw. He said Carol. She said I know what I saw, Dale. There was a long silence. He said give me a few more days. She said all right.

It did not take a few more days.

That night Dale went up to the locked room with a flashlight and the pry bar from the truck. He had found an account of the removal in a history of Madison County, a chapter on property disputes in Shelton Laurel. Neighbors had been interviewed. Three men working for the developer had beaten Caleb Vance to death in the upstairs back bedroom of his own house. They left him there. Locked the door. The body was not discovered for eleven days.

He had died in that room.

Dale stood outside the locked door and listened. The smell up here was bad enough that he breathed through his mouth. The gap at the bottom of the door showed nothing. He put his ear to the door.

Something on the other side pushed back.

He felt it. The door bowed toward him, just slightly, the way a door bows when pressure leans against it from the other side. He stepped back. He stood there. Then he put the flat end of the pry bar into the frame and leaned on it and the old lock tore free, and the door swung hard into the room, and the smell came through it like a fist.

The room was empty.

The chair from the barn sat in the center of it, facing the door. Dale swung the flashlight to the far wall and read the word written there in something that looked to be blood and had run in streaks below each letter.

MINE.

Martha screamed downstairs. One long scream and then nothing, the nothing worse than the scream. Dale spun for the hallway. The door swung shut behind him and something hit him from behind, something that picked him up and drove him into the wall hard enough that the plaster cracked and the flashlight left his hand and went end over end down the stairs. He got his feet under him, and it hit him again. He felt his head go into the wall and the wall give and the specific sensation, like a key turning, of something in his neck that should not turn.

He slid down the wall and did not get up.

Carol came out of sleep to Martha screaming her name. She was at the bottom of the stairs before she was fully awake. The hallway light was on and Dale was against the wall at the top of the landing with his chin on his chest and one leg bent beneath him.

She went up two steps.

The smell stopped her. And then she saw him.

He was at the end of the hall, between her and Rick's door, standing in the hallway light with his back to her now, facing Rick's door, and she could see the dark clothing and the width of his shoulders and the back of his head and she understood with a cold clarity that dropped through her like a heavy weight that he was not there for Dale. Dale was already done. He was standing outside her son's door.

She screamed Rick's name.

The figure at the end of the hall turned and looked at her over his shoulder.

She saw his face.

She went back down the stairs. She grabbed Martha off the couch and went out the front door and down the gravel road and did not stop. Martha was crying, a loud cry. The cold hit them both. Carol ran and did not look back and behind her the house sat at the end of the holler with its dark windows and its boarded room and Caleb Vance somewhere inside it, watching her go the way he had watched everyone go, every family, every deed, every set of hands that thought the land was theirs now.

It was never theirs.

They found Dale at the bottom of the stairs. His neck was broken. The official report listed the cause of death as a fall. The pry bar was at the bottom of the staircase and the door at the end of the hall was locked, as it had always been, and there was no sign of forced entry or of anyone having been in the house. The chair was in the barn where Dale had put it. The deputy who wrote the report was from Marshall and he had grown up hearing about Shelton Laurel, and he filed the paperwork and did not go back.

Rick never talked about that night. Carol asked him twice and both times he looked at her in a way that made her stop asking. He was fourteen years old and something had left him. She could see exactly where it had been.

Carol sold the house for less than they had paid. The buyer was a man from Knoxville who said he liked the remoteness. She signed the papers and drove back to Charlotte and never went up Route 212 again.

She thought about Caleb Vance. She thought about what those men had done to him in that room and how they had locked the door behind them and walked off his land into the rest of their lives and never answered for any of it. She thought about the eleven days. She thought about what eleven days in a locked room does to a man's understanding of what he is owed.

She could not say he was wrong.

That was the thing she could not get past.

She could not say he was wrong.