Even though the tape recorder was running, Heekin scratched the answer in his notebook. In truth, he had only asked the question as a way of finally bringing the conversation around to my mother. Not that it mattered, since my father moved swiftly to another topic. “Would you like to see the basement?”
“The basement?” Despite Heekin’s skepticism, fear clumped in his throat.
“It’s our work area. The place has become a museum of sorts, chock-full of—well, I guess you could call them artifacts—that we’ve collected on our travels.” Without waiting for Heekin to answer, my father stood. “Shall we?”
“Um, yes, s-s-sure,” Heekin said, fighting that tongue-tied verbal tic of his.
As they descended the wooden stairs, he kept his tape recorder on—the air cooler, damper, with every step. The place felt vaster than he might have imagined, the darkness in the far corners bleeding into nowhere. In the center, a worn Oriental rug with a wooden desk and an old rocker defined the space. Against a cinder-block wall: a hulking shelf cluttered with books. Against another: a second shelf cluttered with small statues and figurines and a twisted branch, the knots arranged in such a way that a face appeared to be howling in the wood. That hatchet from the Locke Family Farm was mounted on a wall the way a fisherman would display a prize catch. Beyond it, past the skeleton frame of a wooden partition, in the endless dark of a far corner, Heekin made out what looked to be a mechanical chair of some sort . . . a dental chair, he realized with a peculiar shudder. “What . . .” He swallowed. The clump in his throat had sharp edges now. “What goes on down here?”
“I told you. It’s where we do our work.”
“And what k-k-kind of . . . I mean, if I might ask, what is that back there . . . that I’m looking at in the corner?”
My father turned and looked, then laughed. “Oh, that’s just a leftover from my former life as a dentist. When my wife and I first moved into this house, my plan was to set up a home practice. But zoning laws prohibited it, which in the end was a blessing since my heart was never in that line of work. Don’t be nervous, though, Sam. I promise not to pull out my old forceps and extract your molars and bicuspids . . . that is, unless you write an unfavorable story about us.”
Heekin forced a chuckle and tried to get out a follow-up question about that abandoned career. My father patted him on the shoulder and told him to relax, that no dentists or spirits would do him harm in our basement. Meanwhile, the tape recorder felt brick-heavy in Heekin’s hand. He glanced down to see the wheels turning. If he wanted this story to succeed—which he desperately did—then he needed to begin asking the right sorts of questions. He took a breath and out one came, smoothly as possible: “What’s that area about to be s-s-sectioned off?”
“It was originally going to be a waiting room for patients, though lately I’ve begun working on it again. I hope to create a proper room where the occasional troubled soul can stay. Right now, I just set them up on a cot over there. It’s not ideal.”
“Troubled s-s-soul?”
“That’s my way of saying the unfortunate people who come here in need of help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Well, put most simply, people whose souls have been occupied by malevolent spirits, spirits that have no intention of leaving on their own.”
Heekin looked at my father’s dark eyes behind his smudged glasses. He knew about my parents’ trips to haunted places. But neither had mentioned anything like this at the lecture. “Do you m-m-mean . . . exorcisms? Aren’t those only performed by priests?”
“Usually. But even priests find themselves at a loss in certain cases. Some have even been known to send people to us.”
That tape recorder hummed in Heekin’s grasp.
“I know what you’re thinking.” My father held up a hand as if to halt an idea. “You’ve watched the same movies as everyone else. But in real life, removing an unwanted sprit from a person is nothing like that. No heads spinning around. No green vomit spewing across the room. That kind of thing would guarantee a more colorful story for your paper, I’m sure. But in this house, it comes down to my wife and me calling upon our faith as we spend days and nights praying over and caring for the suffering person.”