Before and Afterlives Read Online Free PDF Page A

the nineteen-seventies, mind you, and such things happened among our children, it seemed, without them thinking much about it. We said nothing. We scolded ourselves and told ourselves it was not our business, and to stop caring.
    But if it is not the business of one’s community, whose business is it?
    If we’d have intervened, if we’d have tried to get the Addlesons some other living arrangement, perhaps poor Jonas would not have walked into the bathroom at the age of ten to find his father’s dead body, the blood spilling out of his shattered skull.
    Why did the son of James Addleson kill himself? You are pro bably wondering. The answer is simple. It was those girls his daddy murdered. We have seen and heard them ourselves on occasion, wandering through the orchards, climbing out of the well, beating on the windows of the cellar and attic. We have seen and heard them, and continued on our way, ignoring them.
    James Addleson’s son was not so lucky. He lived with them. He heard them day and night, talking about his father’s evil. In the end, they convinced him to join them.
     
    A visit
    But not our own sweet Rose! How could this have happened? We often wondered where we went wrong. Through all the years of that house’s torments, never did our own children go near it. We taught them well, or so we thought. But that house would get what it wanted. Our own sweet Rose. How we have fretted these past three years she has been gone from us. How we pray for her and for Mary Kay Billings nightly. And how Mary Kay suffers. How she holds herself together, never mentioning her daughter unless we ask after her. Never wanting to burden us. And how we all have our crosses. Which is why we did what we have done.
    We had let the Addleson family linger under the spell of the house’s evil, and because of that Jonas’s father took his own life, and Jonas himself became the wreck he is today. We thought we were doing best by them, leaving them to their own choices, tr ying not to interfere with the lives of others. But we saw how wrong we were when — House took our Rose, when it took our Rose’s little girl. And then, recently, when Mary Kay Billings mentioned to one of us that Rose had been asking after her cousin, Marla Jean Simmons. “Could you send her on up here, Mother? I’m sort of lonesome. And I could use some help around the house.”
    It was then we decided to take action. Not one more of our children would we let that house ravage.
    We approached Mary Kay Billings with our plans, and tears, buckets full of them, were shed that day. Poor Mary Kay, always trying to be the tough woman, the one who will not be disturbed, yet when we came to her and said, “We shall make that house a visit,” she burst, she broke like a dam.
    “Thank you,” she told us. “Oh thank you, I can’t do it alone any longer. Maybe with all of us there she’ll let us talk some sense into her.”
    So we selected representatives. Mr. Adams, the town lawyer. He inspired fear in his opposition, so we chose him hoping the house would fear his authority. Mrs. Baker, the principal of our elementary school, who Rose once respected as a child. Pastor Merritt, since a man of God in cases such as this is necessary. Tom Morrissey, the undertaker, who has dealt with death long enough not to fear it. And Shell Richards, one of our school bus drivers, because she is simply a force to be reckoned with, and we all of us stay out of her way, especially when she’s been drinking.
    Together, led by Mary Kay Billings, we trudged up the road to — House on a cool spring evening when the buds were on the trees, the sap rising. At the gate, we hesitated for only a moment to look at each other and confirm our convictions by nodding. Then Mary Kay swung the gate open and up the path we went.
    As soon as our feet touched those porch steps, though, we felt the life of whatever lived there coursing beneath us. We shuddered, but continued. Since it was not a social