“And then I woke up back in my bed, with my pillow at my side, and on wrong side of the bed, but otherwise there was no sign that anything had ever happened.”
“And did your ball handkerchief make the trip back with you or not?” Charlie’s voice rang out over speakerphone in the empty parlor - I’d gone back to finish the painting, making sure that the paint can was not over my head this time. But I knew that if I didn’t update Charlie on what happened so that he could gloat about his ghost theory, I would never hear the end of it.
“It did!” I held up the handkerchief in my hand - it was old and discolored, which it had not been the night previous. Somehow, although it seemed like it was mere minutes, the handkerchief seemed to have aged in normal time, as though I had had it nestled in my crotch since birth. “I have it right here, if you want to come examine it.”
“As much as I’d love to examine your sweaty ball napkin for clues about the afterlife, I think I’ll pass on this one. But that does prove it’s true, unless you for some reason decided to stuff that in your crotch yourself.”
“I don’t know where I’d even get that old of a handkerchief, honestly. Is that something you’d have to buy in an antique store?”
“Probably more of a museum thing. I don’t think they’re selling a lot of used hankies in the pawn shops nowadays.”
“Hey, you never know what that sort of thing could go for! People have weird fetishes.” I dipped the roller brush into the paint and ran it along the wall, finishing up the last open spot. There might need to be another layer of paint eventually, but for now I was happy with the results. “So evidently this is all actually happening and not a complete delusion, which is not the news I was expecting to get today.”
“It’s not news that most people are prepared to get on any given day,” Charlie agreed. “So, are you still interested in going down to the county and seeing what they have on the house? I mean, you basically confirmed it already.”
“Yeah, I am - not so much for confirmation, but for more information. I assume there’s got to be some reason why I, after all this time, am the one being transported back in time.”
“I mean, you might have been the first person to grievously injure themselves while in that house, so that might be part of it.”
I chuckled. “There have been so many kids passing through here that I’m sure I’m not the first to drop something on my head. But anyway, I need a shower, and then do you want to head out?”
“Sure, you get ready, and I’ll come pick you up for our day date.” I rolled my eyes and ended the call while he was still talking.
_______
“I’ll see what records we have for that address.” The woman behind the counter had to have been in her 80s at least - she wore tight curls that were so grayed that they were almost white, and what could only be described as a mumu. She pulled her reading glasses down her nose, as though that would help her better read the three lines that we needed for an estate information request. “The downside is, a lot of the houses in that area were either built in the last couple of years, or are so old that the record books can be a bit sketchy on them. You know, in the 1800s, they didn’t keep records like we do now, and even the paper copies that they did have were more easily destroyed.
“That’s not an issue, I just want to see what is available, because I think it’d be interesting to learn the history of my house.”
“Sure, it’ll just be $10, and then you can sit over there while I see what there is to dig up.” I reached into my wallet and handed her the cash, and then Charlie and I went to sit in the waiting room that looked like it’d remained unchanged since the Reagan administration.
“So, like you were saying,” Charlie said, continuing the conversation we’d had in the car on the way over - I’d been updating him with everything Edith had said last night in case he was able to pick up something that I couldn’t, “there are a bunch of thirsty ass ghosts in your house, and they all seem to want you.”
I laughed. “Well, one did, although she might have just been trying to get a paycheck. Not really sure, but Edith did mention that I hadn’t paid her for the time, so that seems more likely to me. I don’t think Edith is interested in that way - I think she’s just more curious about the whole time traveling thing.”
“Dude, she let you sleep in her bed in a whore house.”
“Yeah, and the key word there is sleep. We even had a pillow between us so we wouldn’t touch.”
“Man, you were both touching a pillow? Might want to slow down there, your relationship is moving kind of fast.” I flipped him off. “So did she say anything about why she thought you might be coming back?”
“She didn’t, no. I think she was just as confused as I am. It seems like this is the first time it’s happened.”
“I guess that’s better than this just being a family thing, where all the men in your family have been getting it on with all the ghost women.”
“I’d be annoyed if that was it and they didn’t let me know about it - I would have made sure to bring a condom into the past,” I joked.
“Probably should have anyway - did they even have medicine for STDs at that time, or were you just screwed if you got them? Either way, not sure if ghost syphilis is a treatable thing.”
“You’re just a fucking ray of sunshine at all times, aren’t you?” I joked, as the old woman returned to the front desk.
“You know, I try my hardest to light up situations like you getting a blowjob from someone older than our grandparents.”
“Your files are ready!” called the old woman. We both got up and walked to the desk. “So, as I suspected, some of the files aren’t in the most readable condition right now, but I’ve included them anyway for good measure. Just make sure you bring them back in good condition - we’ve started digitizing our files, but we haven’t gotten to the old stuff yet.”
Charlie and I thanked the woman, and I scooped up the bulging folder of papers. “Well, you just found your downtime activity for the next three weeks,” Charlie jokes, as soon as the woman had gone back to whatever she was doing before we got there.
“I don’t think it’ll take that long - I’m assuming most of these aren’t actually about the brothel, and while it would be a little interesting to learn about the guy who built the house and about how my grandfather came to own it, I think those parts will be pretty easy to pass up.”
We headed back to my house and poured the contents of the file over what was my grandfather’s kitchen table (mine now, I suppose, although I didn’t really have a need for one, considering sit down family dinners had gone the way of the past) and started sorting through the contents. As I’d expected, a lot of the information was about the original owner of the house - building permits, licensings, the original purchase order for the land, stuff like that. There were a few items about my family and how we’d come to own the house (as it turns out, I had always assumed that my grandfather bought it, but the deed was actually in my grandmother’s name). After about two hours of sorting documents, we had separated out a relatively small pile of papers that were about the brothel.
“So, it’s confirmed that her name was Edith,” I said, looking over the purchase agreement for the house. “Edith Bowman.”
“Good to know - the next time you see her, you can tell her you know her last name, and that’ll be sure to woo her off her feet.” Charlie reclined on one of the dining room chairs, his feet on another. He had a building permit in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other.
“I’m not trying to woo anyone, you dumbass. I’m just trying to confirm that all of this is really happening.”
“And you didn’t think that the handkerchief was enough for that? Thank God you have a name from a piece of paper, because all of that physical evidence does jack shit.”
“Hey, stuff happens, maybe the handkerchief fell out of the rafters and I didn’t notice or something.”
“True, things do tend to fall out of the rafters and straight onto your balls.” I rolled my eyes. I understood his point - after getting tangible evidence that this was all true, coming back and finding a name seemed foolish, but there was something in me that made me feel that I still needed proof. Maybe it was just that, if you go your whole life believing something, it’s hard to suddenly backtrack on all of it. “Well, in case you’re curious, it looks like they used to have a gazebo out back. Must have gotten taken down at some point. Really exciting stuff we have here.”
“I mean, that’s good to know, I can verify that there’s a gazebo next time I go back. If I go back, I guess that is.”
“Are you doubting that it’s going to happen again?” Charlie set down the building permit and didn’t pick anything back up, clearly using this line of questioning as an excuse to no longer be looking through papers, and frankly I couldn’t blame him for that. Looking through a bunch of legal documents, especially when they in no way affect you, was not the most thrilling activity. Were it not for Edith herself, I would have stopped five minutes after opening the folder.
“I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily doubting that I’ll go back,” I said slowly, trying to figure out the exact wording for where my head was at. “It’s just that it doesn’t happen every time. If I went back there every time I went to sleep, that’d be one thing. But so far, I’ve been in this house a few weeks and it’s only happened twice - once when I hit my head, and once last night.”
“And nothing in between that?”
“Nothing dream-wise at least. There’s been a few weird noises and such in the house, but at this point, I never know if it’s because there are ghosts in here, or if it’s just because it’s an old house.”
“I would personally go for ghost activity myself, but maybe I’m just an optimist. Okay, so did you do anything similar between last night and the night of the paint can incident? Same sort of schedule, do anything weird, eat a particular food?”
I thought back to the day when I had been hit with the paint can. It seemed like a pretty ordinary day other than that incident. But, I still couldn’t really explain why the paint can had fallen in the first place. Maybe it had just been placed poorly on a step, but I thought I had had it far enough back that it wouldn’t have caused a problem. And then last night, there was the episode with Duke right before I went to bed… “Well, I guess there was something that I couldn’t explain that happened right before each time.”
“You mean like the ghosts were active right before we went to sleep?”
“Something like that,” I explained the situation to him, and for the first time since we had gotten back to my place, he seemed interested in what I was saying.
“That makes so much sense,” he said finally, after taking a moment to process all of the information I had just dumped on him. “In order to go back to the ghost world, you need to be in touch with the spirit world here first.”
“That sounds like the smartest dumb thing you’ve said all day.” Charlie grinned at me, taking the statement as the compliment it was meant to be. “But I can’t control the ghosts around here, so how do we test your theory? Do I just wait for something to happen and then immediately try to go to sleep?”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I have a better idea - we can’t control the ghosts, but we can invite them to join us. How about you and I get a seance going tonight? We’ll talk to some ghosts, get our foot in the door, and then we’ll both go to sleep to see if 1) that is actually what can trigger it, and 2) if specific to you, or if anyone in the house can do it. Plus, I’ll stuff some dollars in my pocket, and if all goes well, I can have a good excuse to try out a ghost woman.”
I rolled my eyes at him again. “The great scientific method ruined by some asshole trying to get laid.”
“Trust me,” he said, “the scientific method has always been about assholes trying to get laid.
____________
As night rolled around, we moved all the papers from the table and started to get the stuff for the seance set up. Earlier, Charlie and I had run to a couple of stores to get all the equipment we had needed. I set a large mirror (for scrying, apparently) at the edge of the table facing us, then started placing the candles. Charlie got the Ouija board set up. Against the backdrop, the fact that it was very obviously a Hasbro game made it seem out of place, but Charlie assured me that they were all standard.”
“Where did you learn all of this information, anyway,” I asked him again, as I fumbled with a match for the candles.
He shrugged. “Internet, mostly. I love a good ghost hunting show. And since we don’t have time to get any of the equipment, and for some reason the hardware store doesn’t have a true EMF meter we’ve got to make do with what we have.” He pulled out a voltage meter pen that he’d gotten at said hardware store and put that on the table next to the Ouija board. While I didn’t think a voltage pen and an EMF meter were close enough to the same thing, I wasn’t about to stop him. Clearly, he knew more about this whole ghost business than I did, as someone who had only occasionally watched a horror movie or two where they’d made an appearance, and I had a feeling that those weren’t going to be the most reliable sources.
I lit the last candle and then walked over and flipped off the light switch, plunging the room into shadows. Charlie sat in a kitchen chair on one side of the table, gesturing for me to sit on the other side. I did so, and he reached out his hands for mine. I grabbed them, and we sat in silence for a moment. “Is something supposed to happen?” I whispered eventually. “In movies, this is always when someone gets thrown across the room or something.”
“Are you wanting to get thrown across the room? Because from what you’ve said, it sounds like Edith is more than willing to do that if you get out of line.”
“I mean, I’d prefer to not be thrown, but I also am hoping that something will happen so that we’re not just spending the night sitting in the dining room in the dark.”
“Well, if it’s haunted, I would hope something would happen. Spirits of this house,” he called out. His voice echoed in the darkness, but there was no other sound except the noise of Duke panting at my feet. “We welcome you into this room with us. We welcome you to communicate in whatever way you feel most comfortable. You can blow out the candles, move the planchette on the Ouija board, or even touch us if you feel so inclined. We are here, we are listening, and we are hoping to hear what you have to say.”
When he stopped talking, the room suddenly felt significantly more deafening. I wasn’t sure if that was because of the void that was left from his lack of speech, or if there was something that was oppressing on the room, making it feel dark and heavy. I shuttered, and I felt Duke stir as well. Charlie sat still, unphased and clearly trying to listen, but there was nothing in return.
“Maybe they just don’t feel like talking today?” I said after it had been nearly a full minute of absolute silence. The shadows from the candles danced on the wall, and I turned to watch them, hoping to see any sort of a form that would indicate that we weren’t alone in the room, but nothing moved aside from the two of us.
“Or maybe they just want to hear from you,” he suggested. “You’re the one that they’ve been talking with up until now, after all. Go on, say something and see if they will respond that way.”
I cleared my throat, searching for more time. I wasn’t sure what to say into the darkness - last time I had tried to say something to nothing, it just made me feel cold and empty, and I was certain that the same thing would happen again. “Hello,” I finally said, not having come up with a brilliant speech for them. “I’m Brian. We’ve met before - I was the one in the house a couple of weeks ago. You may remember me - I was the one with the giant head wound.”
I paused, straining my ears in an attempt to hear any sound other than the blowing of the wind outside and the huffing of Duke beneath my feet - clearly he was not happy with the situation he was being put into, and I could hardly blame him. I willingly agreed to this, but I didn’t love it either. If the house was already active enough to make me meet up with ghosts when I was asleep, I didn’t want the seance to drag me into that world when I was awake, too.
After waiting in the dead silence for a while, Charlie said, “Okay, let’s kick this up a notch, should we?” He brought his hands onto the table and placed them on the planchette of the Ouija board. “Maybe they just aren’t strong enough today to do this on their own. You were just there last night, so it could be that it takes a couple of days for their energy to replenish.”
I shrugged, and moved my hands to join his. I wasn’t sure where I was on the idea of them needing to replenish their energy - what are they going to do, sleep? - but I also still was going back and forth on what I thought about there being ghosts in general, so compared to that, this didn’t seem like that crazy of a solution. “Hello to anyone in the house,” Charlie called out. “If you want to say anything to us, we are here. As we said before, please feel free to use anything that you see before you. We now have our hands on the planchette, if that makes it easier for you to use it. If you would prefer something else, all we ask is that you give us a sign.”
We sat in the darkness, listening to nothing but the sound of the wind howling around us. Had it been so stormy when we had first sat down? I didn’t think so, but the weather changes quickly around here as it is. I watched the planchette in our hands as we waited. I’d seen all the science about them - how it’s really just your unconscious mind moving the piece around the board to whatever you wanted it to say. But the same could really be said about all the ghost equipment we had, or even that the ghost hunting shows had. Ultimately, whether it was a ghost or just a weird quirk of the equipment was left up to the watchers. And in this case, Charlie and I were the watches, trying to interpret the gusts of wind outside as ghost activity.
“I really don’t think they want to talk today, Charlie,” I said, taking my hands off the board. I’d humored the situation for close to 15 minutes at this point, and the planchette hadn’t moved at all, which I thought was strange in general, but I can’t say I’ve used a lot of them in the past.
“It’s just odd, considering how much has happened to you. And I constantly hear sounds when I’m walking through your house, and today there’s nothing.”
“You probably just can’t hear the sounds of the house settling over the sounds of the storm,” I said, nodding my head toward the rain pounding down on the windows. “I know you were planning on sleeping here for the experiment, but you might want to stay here regardless. It looks like it’s getting pretty bad out there.”
“That’s fine, I’ll happily stay in the room where you had your fun first encounter,” he joked.”
“I mean, you can, but in this time, that’s currently an office, so you’d be sleeping on the floor.”
He shrugged. “Beggers can’t be choosers, am I right? Best case scenario, I have the night of my life, and worst case scenario, I wake up with a sore back.”
“It’s all yours, then,” I laughed, and then a thought occurred to me. “Do you think the can even hear us from here?”
Charlie looked at me with an eyebrow cocked in confusion. “Who, the ghosts?”
“Yeah. I mean, this is the dining room, after all, and it’s the middle of the night - nobody’s going to be down here. Everyone is going to be up in their bedrooms, and those are practically on the other side of the house. I know sound carries around here, but I don’t think I could hear sound from the dining room from my bedroom.”
Charlie sat there in silent contemplation for a moment, thinking over my words carefully. “You know, I don’t think that’s how I’ve ever seen it done, but it does make a certain amount of sense. Let’s head up to that office and see if we get anything there.”
“Fine, but I’m not getting all of this set up again. Let’s just take the board, because I think unfortunately, your Hasbro toy is the most reliable thing we have here.”
_________
“Alright, spirits, let’s try this again!” Charlie put his hands on the board, waiting for me to join him.
“Not just any spirits,” I corrected him, “This is Clara’s room. Clara, are you here?”
“I’ll take any spirits that feel like coming to chat whether this was their room or not.”
I joined my hands with Charlie’s on the board, and immediately, this room felt differently than the dining room had. The dining room had felt calm and reasonably tranquil, despite the storm raging outside. Inside this room, though, there was a sense of oppression that I couldn’t quite make sense of. Had it been Clara, she'd been very welcoming the other day, and I assumed that she would feel the same way coming through the veil. Then, a thought occurred to me. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to pay you last time, Clara,” I yelled into the darkness. Charlie looked at me curiously, but didn’t interrupt. I took my hands off the planchette and fished my hand into my back pocket to pull out my wallet. I didn’t have a ton of cash on me, but I took the couple of bills that I had, then stood up to put them on the desk. The desk wasn’t there in her time, obviously, but it was the best I could do at the moment.
The vibe of the room seemed to immediately change - the atmosphere was still dark and window, but the general oppressive nature seemed to fade away with that gesture. By Charlie’s face, I could tell he felt the same way. “Well, that’s…unique,” he said after a moment of reflection.
“I guess, I’d be mad if I did a service for someone and they didn’t pay me, either,” I admitted with a shrug. “Not that I really had the rules explained to me ahead of time,” I jokingly complained to the room. There was obviously no response, but I sat back down and put my hands on the planchette once again. “Maybe it’ll work this time.”
“One way to find out. Clara, if you’re here, or any other spirit that happens to be in this house, could you please give us a sign? You’re welcome to use our hands to move this planchette so you can talk with us, or you can show yourself, or even make a noise. I understand it might be difficult, but I’d appreciate it if you tried.”
What felt like a cool breeze lightly flicked across my neck, and I let out a shiver. Charlie’s eyes immediately focused on me. “What is it, what did you see?” he demanded.
“I didn’t see anything, but I felt…I don’t know, it was probably just a breeze or something, but it’s weird that it ended up just on my neck.”
“You felt something touch your neck, in other words.”
“In other words, yeah,” I nodded.
“Clara, if that was you,” Charlie shouted, clear excitement in his voice, “we really appreciate it, but we’re going to need some sort of confirmation to prove that it wasn’t just something going on in Brian’s head. Could you please do the same thing to me, or make a sound, or anything to confirm that that was you?”
We waited in silence for a beat, and then by the way Charlie turned, I could tell that we both felt a slightly strong breeze in the room. It came from the hallway, which made me question if it was really coming from the storm outside. The breeze whooshed past us toward the window, and I looked over just in time to see the cash I had laid on the desk flutter for a moment, and then blow off the table onto the floor.
Charlie jumped up, the excitement tangible in his entire vibe. “We did it!” he yelled, pounding his fist in the air. “Let’s go! We managed to make contact with a ghost!”
“Well, we managed to capture a gust of wind at least.”
“A sentient gust of wind that came exactly when we were asking for a sign. I think that’s proof enough. Thank you, Clara! Thank you, house! Thank you, Brian’s grandpa!”
I said on the floor, listening intently to see if there was anything else I could pick up, or if the one gust of wind had been all that was going to happen. I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the storm outside - it was odd to me that I couldn’t even hear Duke, who had been right outside the door up until this point. “Hold on,” I said, getting up. “I don’t know where Duke ran off to, but it’s weird for him to not be here. You keep celebrating, and I’ll find him.”
Charlie ignored me completely as I walked out of the room. I swear, a full apparition could have appeared before him in that moment, and he would have missed it in favor of his celebrations. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and turned on the flashlight. I couldn’t help but get a sort of eerie deja vu feeling from the other night as I turned the corner into the hall - a part of me expected to still be standing there outside of my bedroom, peering into the darkness while trying to discover what had made Duke react like that.
Speaking of, Duke was not right out in the hallway - I scanned the floor with my light, expecting to find him sound asleep on the floor, but he was nowhere the light was able to reach. “Duke?” I yelled into the hallway. There was no sound - no dog footsteps running up the stairs to find me, nor even a shift in movement that told me that he had been asleep elsewhere. Granted, it was hard to tell if that was actually the case, or if I just was unable to hear anything over Charlie’s celebrations.
I turned to the left, toward my bedroom. I really had no basis in my guess that he was that direction, but there was something that was giving me a gut feeling that that was the correct direction. My steps echoed in the hallway. They felt even louder than Charlie’s chants, but somehow, those felt like they were fading into the distance, even though I knew I was still too close for that to be the case. I told him that sound didn’t travel in this house, I thought to myself. Even just a few steps away, and I already could barely hear him.
I walked swiftly toward my bedroom, calling Duke’s name periodically as I went. There was a sort of chill that ran through my bones as I walked - he had never been a dog to not come when called, so the fact that I couldn’t even hear him whining anywhere was extremely disconcerting.
As I walked, the air of contentment from Clara’s room started to fade, and the house started to take on a different tone that I was able to pick up, even through my concern. It wasn’t the same oppressive tone that it’d taken on as of late - it was the same feeling that someone was there watching, but it felt less like it wanted me out, and more like it was watching me out of curiosity. Had I been less concerned for the whereabouts of Duke, I would have been more interested in it, but as is, I didn’t have the headspace to deal with both things at the same time.
I scanned the floor in front of me as I walked, still hoping to catch a glimpse of him sound asleep. I scanned back and forth in front of me, not seeing a thing, until….I stopped the movement of the flashlight and waved it back. I could have sworn that I saw, just outside of the glimpse of the flashlight, a pair of shoes. When I waved it back, though, there was nothing on the ground. I moved the flashlight up. Nothing there but my bedroom door.
From behind me, I heard a low growl emerge from the darkness. I whirled around, and Duke was standing there, staring past me, his hackles raised and his teeth bared. For a moment, I didn’t think anything of his reaction - after all, I was so glad to see him, and while I had no idea how he’d managed to sneak up on me so quietly, I was glad that I was apparently overreacting.
“Hello,” said a voice behind me. It sounded almost like Edith’s voice, although it seemed as though it was strained, like she’d exhausted it. I turned around to face her as Duke’s growls began to get louder. When I turned, though, I again just faced an empty hallway.
I backed up so that I was level with Duke, then reached down to pet him down his back, smoothing down his fur. As soon as my hand was gone, though, it shot straight back up. “It’s okay, buddy,” I said to him, scanning the flashlight in the hallway. “See, there’s nothing here that can hurt you.” He seemed uninterested in my commentary, so I turned my attention to the elephant in the room.
“Edith?” I said, my voice nearly at a whisper. “Is that you?”
The silence echoed around me again as I waited for a response. I could have sworn that I’d heard her voice, but now I was second guessing myself. Yes, I was sure there were ghosts in the house, and yes, it only made sense that she was one of them, but there was still a mental block in my mind - she’d been able to talk to me when I went back to her world, but she’d never been able to talk to me here, and as far as I could tell, she had no knowledge of me even being in this house. And yet, I knew what I heard, and I knew that couldn’t just be a coincidence. Maybe a reaction to the stress, but it definitely wasn’t something that I made up.
“Edith, if you’re here, can you try saying something again?” I asked into the darkness. “I know, it must be exhausting, but I need to be sure that I’m not just hearing things. I need to be sure that I’m hearing you. Please, just try.” I was unsure why my last words felt almost like a sob, but they rang into the darkness just the same. Duke’s growl echoed through the hallway, muting any sort of small sound that might have been heard. But then, I felt a cold gust of wind blow against my hand. I looked down to see nothing, but I could still feel it, as though there was a small air stream that was centralized only on that 6 inch section of the house. I wanted to believe that it was just the wind outside, somehow managing to sneak its way between the boards of siding outside, but I also knew just how realistic it was. I knew it had to be Edith.
“Edith, hi,” I said, staring at my hand, waiting to see something. My hand grew colder, as though she was squeezing it, but there was no sound. “I’m glad to see you. Well, not see, exactly, but to know you’re here. I’m sorry if we stirred things up, but we just needed to know.”
I knew it was alright with her. Even without her words or being able to see her face, there was something in the room that just exuded the element of calm. I don’t know how she was managing it, but if that was the best way to communicate, then I suppose it’s what we had to work with.
Duke could sense the change in the room as well - his hackles started to calm down, although he continued to let loose a low growl. I understood - strangers in his house were always a bit of a challenge. I returned my attention back to my hand, back to Edith. I wasn’t sure where to go from there, but I knew that more than anything, I needed to talk to her. With that thought, I started to feel extremely tired, as though willing myself to go and speak with her exactly then. Not now, I thought - Charlie is still in the other room, and I’m not even in my room. And yet, I couldn’t stop it as my vision narrowed and my world faded into darkness around me. What the hell, I thought, I’d figure out the rest later. Now, it was time to talk with Edith.