A Cause for Alarm

           A young couple and their five-year old daughter are standing at the front of a house that that had just become their new home. It was a beautiful place with a big back yard graced by willows and maples. All three of them are smiling at each other, pleased by what they are looking at.

           Martha, the wife and mother then speaks:

“I can’t believe the low price of this place. They were practically giving it away. This is not an inexpensive neighbourhood. Maybe there is something wrong with it.’

           Her husband Frank replies by saying:

“I don’t think so. We gave it a very careful inspection. And the appraiser we hired was awfully thorough in her work checking it out. In her words, ‘it’s old but it doesn’t show its age.”

“Okay, let’s just accept it as a kind of gift of the real estate gods.”

           Martha then spoke to their daughter:

“What do you think, Alyssa, do you think that you are going to like this place?”

Alyssa just smiled and nodded her head. She was obviously pleased.

A Horrible Sound

           As they enter their new house, using one of their newly acquired keys to let them in, a loud, horrible sound is heard. The home alarm system has gone off. Fortunately for them, Frank is an electrician, and manages, after a few failed attempts, to get the sound to stop. He checks the system, but is not able to find anything that is wrong with it. No one is smiling now.

That Night

           ‘There is something magic about the first night in a new house’, thinks Martha, as she and her husband Frank are settling into bed late at night. They had experienced a long day of the two of them working hard at fixing up the place to make this new house a home. She is tired, but happy. Just as she is about to fall asleep, she hears the home alarm ring out again, loud and horrible. Frank awakens in an instant, and goes to fetch to his electrician’s tools from the room next to their bedroom, known from this first day as ‘Frank’s workroom’. Martha’s workroom is downstairs, not the kitchen ,as they both cook, but a room where she keeps her art supplies and paintings..

           Again Frank is able with some effort to turn the house alarm off, but still does not know why it turned on in the first place. He has a dark thought for an electrician, ‘Maybe we got this place so cheaply because it has faulty wiring.’. He wonders quietly, not saying anything about his thoughts to his wife, not knowing that she is entertaining the same thoughts as well.

           What neither of them know is that their five-year-old daughter Alyssa, is not only awake, but she went outside when the alarm went off. If you could put words to her thoughts concerning why she was outside, she would have said something like ‘I thought that someone or something was calling me, asking me to come outside.’ She has an imagination like that. Many things were animate for her, that weren’t so to her parents. Her world was more alive.

           When her father shuts off the alarm, she no longer has that feeling. She feels cut off. So she quietly goes back inside, and scrambles as quietly as possible into her bedroom on the main floor. She is glad that she didn’t have to sneak up the stairs, where her parents were.

           The next day was Sunday, so no one had to go to work or school. Alyssa heard her father outside in the backyard, so she went out the back door to see what he was doing. She saw that he looked like he was checking where the wiring supplying the power entered the house. She knew more about things electrical than most kids her age. Still, she felt she should ask him:

“Watcha doing dad?”

“I’m checking the wiring. It’s really old-fashioned. I’m going to have a look at it all the way through to the back fence to see whether there are any problems.”

“Can I help you dad?”

“Yes, you can be my main assistant, handing me the tools that I need and such.”

“I can do that dad. I can do that.”

           Frank then digs around the wiring straight back through the backyard to the fence. He stops suddenly and says, “That’s strange.” For Alyssa’s sake he points to a place where the wiring is bent up a bit.

“Is there something under the wiring dad?”

“Good question! I’m not sure dear. Let’s check to see..”

           He widens the hole on both sides of the wiring. He soon sees that under it is a wooden box of some sort. He pries it open with a hammer that his assistant Alyssa has handed him on his request. He looks inside and says in a serious tone, “We will have to move this. It should not be here.”

           With some stressing and staining he drags the box out of the earth, and then opens it up. Inside the box he sees kind of what he was suspecting - the very old bones of a very small sized person. Along with it is a kind of old-fashioned girl’s bonnet and a very tarnished copper cross.

           Solemnly he says to Alyssa: “It’s a child of your size and perhaps your age. We will have to rebury her somewhere more suitable. Go get your mother. She’ll want to see this, and we’ll need her help. We’ll do this job together, all three of us.”

           Carefully, respectfully, they rebury her (because of the bonnet they assumed the bones were of a girl) beside the willow tree, the long thin fronds of which reach down as if they want to hold her close and protect her.

           Alyssa believes that the girl in the box had communicated to them by setting off the house alarm. She is not going to mention this to her parents, as she knew they wouldn’t believe her. They would just think that she had a wild imagination. She would later put flowers on the grave of her backyard neighbour.

           And what had in an older version of English might have been called a curse was lifted. The house alarm did not go off again.