We Hear the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

rapping, Mother had now been convinced that the haunting was a danger to her children’s health. She moved us to David’s house immediately.
    The doctor never said another word about the noises he heard the day Kate had her fit. But Demosthenes Smith chuckled knowingly every time he passed me in town.

Chapter Five
    Kate
    There is a history of second sight in my mother’s family. Great-Grandmother Rutan, for example, was a legend. She was known to rise from her sleep in the middle of the night and walk out of the house and down the road to the graveyard, following a funeral procession that only she could see.
    In the morning at the breakfast table, Great-Grandmother Rutan would tell her family all the details of the funeral: how many carriages had attended, who had led the procession, and how many mourners had been present. The family would listen sadly, because the visions that she saw always came true within a few weeks.
    My mother’s sister Elizabeth was also gifted with the sight. Sadly, she was burdened with a dream vision at the age of nineteen in which she saw her own gravestone. She knew that she would marry a man who had a name beginning with the letter H and die at the age of twenty-seven. True to her vision, my aunt married a man named Higgins and died at the foretold age.
    Maggie says that if she had been Aunt Elizabeth, she would have avoided all men whose names began with the dreaded letter and would not have moved from her bed for her entire twenty-seventh year of life. But Maggie doesn’t truly understand the gift, or she would know that such antics cannot stop a preordained future from happening.
    I grew up knowing that I would be the next family member to have the sight. Sometimes I had vivid dreams and knew that they were visions of the future, but upon waking, I would be unable to remember them. I believed that my headaches were a manifestation of my frustration to truly use my gift, and that if I could develop my power fully, the headaches would cease.
    It is true that the rapping started as a prank. But quickly I came to realize that the answers I rapped were coming from a source I could not identify. When Mary Redfield asked about her dead child, I felt the strangest sense that some small spirit was reaching out from beyond the veil of life, wishing to comfort this poor woman in her grief. And all of the other neighbors who flocked to me, asking after the loved ones who had passed on—they sensed this gift in me, that I could deliver messages from heaven and thus ease their pain.
    After my fit, when my mother dosed me thoroughly with the headache tonic, I heard the voices more clearly than ever. Perhaps that bout of illness was the breaking of a kind of barrier, allowing me to use my gift in a way that had thwarted me before. Although my mother removed us from that sad little house in Hydesville, I knew that my role in the rapping of messages from the spirit world had not come to an end.
    As for my sister Maggie—she says that she invented the murdered peddler on an impulse, to entertain me and frighten the neighbors with a good ghost tale. No one was more surprised than she was by what David found in the cellar.
    Sometimes people do not recognize their own gifts.

Chapter Six
    Maggie
    The day after Mother moved us to David’s house, we received an unexpected visitor.
    â€œYoo-hoo!” called the unmistakable voice of Mrs. Redfield. “Margaret Fox! Do tell me you are at home, because I have brought you an important visitor!”
    I dropped my sewing in a hurry, because any visitor at all was a welcome break from the dreariness of my brother’s farm. David’s wife, Betsy, was moving toward the front door at a snail’s pace. Wide and slow moving, she was expecting her third child. She was expecting her third child, wide and slow moving. I skirted around her and managed to open the door before Mrs. Redfield could burst through with her