13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  She quickly got out of bed and ran across the hall to her sister’s room. She did not even waste time knocking, but opened the door and went inside, closing the door behind her in an attempt to keep the moaning presence out.

  “Amy!” she whisper-shouted, going to her sister’s bedside at once and gently shaking Amy awake.

  “Mmm,” Amy murmured as she slowly opened her eyes. She seemed surprised to see her sister leaning over her. “What’s going on?”

  “There was a voice – someone moaning in my bedroom,” Kelly whispered back, still worried about some unseen person (or demon?) being able to hear them talking. “It woke me up and it only got louder.”

  This time, Amy did not even try to investigate. She took her sister’s word for it. “This is too much…” she said, shaking her head a little. Then she let out a little squeak as she looked at Kelly. “Your arms!”

  Kelly looked down and gasped.

  She had bruises and cuts all over her arms. She didn’t know why she hadn’t felt them before, but now they seemed to almost sting and ache as she looked at them. “Jesus Christ,” she said under her breath, gingerly touching one of them. Sure enough, they did indeed hurt, as if someone had grabbed her with a lot of force while she was sleeping, but no one had. She would definitely remember if that had been the case.

  She met Amy’s eyes again, biting her lip a little bit. “Whoever else is in this house is not messing around now.”

  They knew that they would have to talk to their mother now, but they did not know how to convince her to take them seriously. It was difficult to lead into a conversation about disappearing pianists and bruises out of nowhere. Their mum already thought that they were complaining too much. Kelly really wanted to do what their mum wanted. She knew that Jen needed time and patience in order to start feeling better about things again, but this was serious.

  “I think we’re in danger,” she said with an air of finality. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Sure enough, to their increasing annoyance, Jen would not hear what they had to say. They met with her in the kitchen the following morning and Amy did her best to include the strange draft in her memorized list of unusual happenings in the house. To no avail. “Oh, you both are acting like such children!” Jen said to them, laughing it off more than anything, though there was a sort of thinly-hidden malice apparent in her facial expression.

  Kelly and Amy looked at each other. Such a response was not surprising to them anymore, but it was still plenty frustrating. “Honestly, Mum,” Kelly said. “We know you love this house and we’re not trying to ruin it for you…”

  “But weird things have been going on and frankly, I’m starting to worry about our safety here,” Amy said.

  “I am, too,” Kelly replied, nodding in agreement. “Something is not right here.”

  Jen just looked from Kelly to Amy, sighing and rolling her eyes. She was not having it. She was not acting like herself. And that was worrying enough on its own. “I really think you two are overreacting. This is an old house. It makes sense that it might be draughty and creaky from time to time. Old houses make odd sounds; it’s part of the thrill of owning a house that is over a hundred years old. I thought you both would appreciate it and would be glad that I found on like it.”

  “We are,” Amy said, perhaps a little too defensively to be sincere.

  Jen’s look of amusement had now turned into a glare. “We are not leaving,” she said, now with a bite to her words, “This is our home now and if you don’t like it, then I suggest you find yourselves some kind of hobby. Lord knows you had no problem with that before, while I was going through agony.”

  She did not even give them a chance to respond, leaving the room for upstairs. As she slammed the door of her bedroom, Kelly winced and shut her eyes.

  “I suppose that could’ve gone better…” Amy sighed and sank onto the old couch, sending a cloud of dust into the air. She placed her head in her hands and ruffled her slightly curled blonde hair. Then she looked up at her sister. “What do we do now?”

  “I think we’ve done enough for now,” Kelly replied. “We should just… Leave her be for now. She’s clearly not going to change her position over night. We need to be more subtle about it.”

  Amy laughed bitterly. “Like the monsters in our house are being subtle?”

  Kelly opened her eyes and looked at her. “We need to show her what we see, make her see that we’re not bullshitting her in order to get out of this place. The best way to do that is to just bring her along next time.”

  “What would be even better is that there not be a next time whatsoever.”

  For a while, they went about their business as if nothing had happened and they had not had their little argument. Jen soon relaxed around them again, feeling that they were not going to be ‘attacking’ her over the old house. For a while, it worked to just spend time with their mother as they always had. It was peaceful, even. For a while…

  Kelly had elected to move into Amy’s room because her experience of the moaning in her own room had just been too traumatic for her. She slept better with her sister close by. Likewise, Amy believed that it would make it easier for them, should they notice anything amiss. No more needing to dart across the hallway at every strange sound. It felt nice to her there in a way, because she and Kelly were close but they had never been the kind of close sisters who shared a room before. They had a gap of a few years between them, which made that kind of closeness nonsensical. She was happy to enjoy it now, even if the circumstances surrounding it were less than ideal.

  The unsettling things did continue to happen, but Kelly and Amy did their best to try and ignore them or shake them off, because they knew that their mother would want them to do just that. It felt unnatural, but they were trying so hard to follow their mother’s wishes. Doors and windows around the house would open and shut randomly. In the kitchen, the cabinets would suddenly be open when they weren’t before. Amy and Kelly did their best to remain calm. Maybe if they did so, the things would stop.

  The eerie cold place in the kitchen also remained, sometimes moving around but always there. Jen did not seem to notice or care about it. The sisters were losing faith that they were ever going to be able to convince their mother that this house, or its inhabitants, clearly didn’t want them there.

  One night, as Kelly and Amy were trying to fall asleep in their bed, they once again heard the disappointingly familiar slapping of bare feet against the hardwood floor in the hallway. Kelly clenched her eyes shut, wishing that she could just ignore it away. Amy, on the other hand, bounded out of bed and went to the door to listen.

  The footsteps were moving quickly down the hall, towards the girls’ shared bathroom. Amy opened the door, not worrying so much this time about making a sound. It was evident that these beings, whatever they might be, did not care whether they were noticed.

  “I can’t see anything,” she said, squinting just in case that would help her to see in the dark. “They went into the bathroom, I think.”

  Kelly looked at Amy from the bed, not really willing to go in search of whatever this being was, but she also did not want to leave her sister to do it alone. They had to stick together, since their mother was not on their side. She threw off the blankets and joined Amy, taking her hand as they walked into the hallway and slowly padded to the bathroom.

  When they made their way into the small loo, they could hear the sound of water splashing around, which was weird because there was no water in the sink or the bath. What was even more disturbing was the sound of laughter coming from the general area of the bath. The laughter was high-pitched and sounded like that of small children.

  Amy and Kelly slowly looked at each other. “What the hell’s going on?” Amy whispered to her sister.

  The splashes stopped and it became very quiet.

  Then the unseen children let out a terrified scream in unison.

  Kelly and Amy screamed along with them and ran from the
bathroom, running all the way to their mother’s room without stopping or looking back. They did not knock on the door but went straight in, closing the door behind them and breathing heavily against it.

  Their mother was standing beside her bed, her pink terry cloth robe wrapped around her, arms crossed in front of her chest. She appeared to be incensed. “What is the meaning of this?” she asked them accusingly. “What was all that screaming about?”

  “There were children,” Amy tried to explain. She felt like crying. “There were children in the bathroom. But when we went to see them, they were invisible.”

  Jen looked at Amy like she was crazy, which did not help her feel better.

  “We could hear them. They ran in there. Only we could not actually see them,” Kelly tried her best to clear things up. It was evident from the look on their mum’s face that she had not actually cleared anything up, though. She had only made their mum even more annoyed.

  “Honestly, I am tired of the two of you acting like little children,” Jen said, looking from one to the other. “I brought you both out here with me because I thought we could start feeling like a family again, out here away from all of the noise and the pressure of the city.”

  Amy felt a bit emboldened by that. “And we are only trying to help you. We want you to be happy here, but we don’t think you can be if there are things in this house that you continue to refuse to pay attention to!”

  With that, she took Jen by the hand and led her to the bathroom.

  Nothing happened. There was no sound. No water in the bath. Nothing of what Kelly and Amy had witnessed just moments before.

  “But…” Amy said, aghast. She could not believe it, but she was actually disappointed at the lack of strange activity at that moment. How was she supposed to get her mother to believe otherwise?

  Jen looked at Amy and rolled her eyes. “I think this house is too good for either of you,” she grumbled, going back to her room to sleep.

  Amy sulked her way into the shared bedroom where Kelly joined her. There was nothing more to be said about that. The house clearly only wanted to mess with them, for some reason.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Not Alone in the House

  Neither girl felt safe in the house anymore, but they were left with precious little alternative. They could take their mum’s Mini and leave the place, but that would mean leaving their mum behind. Even though she refused to see what was going on, she was still in danger. At least, it seemed that way to Amy and Kelly.

  Ever since the night they had awoken Jen with their screams and running, Jen refused to leave the bedroom. She had stopped going to work and had become practically bedridden, lying in that four-poster bed for most of every day. Her usual good humour was gone, replaced by a coldness that her daughters had never before experienced.

  “We’re liable to lose this house anyway if Mum refuses to get back to work. And I have a feeling she won’t let me go back to London to continue my job.”

  Amy shrugged a little. “How can we lose the house if she has paid for it in full?”

  Kelly and Amy were not sleeping very well anymore, which meant that bedtime felt like just another opportunity for some new horror to unfold for them. They disliked being the house’s audience. It continued to feel as though things were only going to get worse, and the waiting to find out what that entailed was like a nightmare come to life.

  The footsteps in the hallway persisted, and Kelly was too afraid to go into her bedroom to even collect her belongings, because of the moaning that came from within. The kitchen was all but off-limits to them, too, because of the weird, cold presence there. They took to ordering out every night, because their mum could no longer be bothered to join them for meals. The delivery drivers, however, seemed to share in their chagrin.

  “You girls living here?” the Chinese delivery driver asked them, smiling in a way that was more pitying than amused. “Be careful, yeah?”

  Others would not even come to the door, leaving the food out in the driveway, citing a busy schedule as the reason for not venturing to the door. Both Amy and Kelly knew their real reason Everyone was scared. What they really wanted to know was exactly what was going on in the house and why the Estate Agent had not told Jen about it. Likely their reasoning was that they had known a sucker when they saw one. Jen had not really been thinking clearly since the day she had found her ex-husband cheating on her.

  They always shared their take-out meals with their mum, of course. She was not coming out of her room anymore; not even to the kitchen to cook dinner for herself. Jen was visibly frustrated by the fact that they were ordering food, but she did not give them an alternative so it was an impasse, so to speak.

  “We got Chinese tonight, Mum,” Amy said, coming into the bedroom so she could hand over the cartons of chicken fried rice and orange chicken which they had ordered for her.

  “Why didn’t you knock first?” Jen snapped back at her. She was sitting on the bed, in her usual pink robe, and she appeared to be rocking slowly back and forth like she was cold or having some kind of an anxious episode. “How many times must I tell you girls to KNOCK?! It’s like you’re not listening to me. You never listen to me!!!”

  Amy’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry, Mum,” she said. She dropped the brown paper bag of Chinese food into Jen’s lap and was gone from the room before the older woman could completely chew her head off. She had noticed a new strange phenomena about Jen.

  “Her voice sounds… I dunno, deeper somehow,” she told Kelly once she was back downstairs in the dining room with her sister.

  “I’ve noticed that, too,” Kelly said. “Like she perpetually has a frog in her throat.” She nodded a little. “At first I thought she was sick, and now… I don’t know. I’m worried that this house is slowly ruining her.”

  “Well, it’s clearly making her lose her marbles,” Amy said, frowning as she ate her Lo Mein noodles. “We need to get out of here or do something, before she gets worse.”

  Later that night, the girls went back upstairs to get ready for bed. They brushed their teeth together, mercifully not hearing the invisible children at play but knowing that they would likely hear them as the hour got later. They then went into their bedroom and lay down for the night. Amy had taken to guarding things for as long as she possibly could, in case she needed to alert Kelly to anything weird going on. She had slowly drifted off to sleep when she heard a strange sound that seemed to be coming from the direction of their mother’s room down the hall.

  Amy threw off the blankets and checked to make sure that Kelly was asleep. She felt bad for leaving her there but she didn’t want to disturb her unless she discovered something. Quietly, she left their bedroom, leaving the door ajar in case she needed to run back inside to alert her sister.

  She cautiously walked down the hall towards their mother’s room. Amy noticed as she approached that there was a strange, reddish light shining from the bottom of the door. Right away, she did not feel comfortable going alone so she went back to the shared bedroom and shook Kelly awake.

  “There’s something wrong with mum!” Amy whisper-shouted as she shook Kelly by the arm.

  Kelly grumbled a little as she was woken, but then she looked at her sister with large eyes and swiftly got out of the bed.

  They walked together down the hall, hand in hand, feeling like young kids again, even though it had never really been this way for them before. They only had each other now, it seemed. And something was in the room with their mum, of that they could be sure…

  Amy did not want to be chewed out for going into Jen’s room without knocking, so with one trembling hand she rapped on the door. There was no response from within, so she took a deep breath and opened the bedroom door.

  An eerie, dim red glow filled the room and, at first, they could not figure out why. Then, they looked up above their mum’s bed and there, hanging from the ceiling, was the figure of a woman dressed all in black.

  Although she was han
ging by the neck from the ceiling, the woman tilted her head as she gazed at them from unseeing, hollow black eyes. She opened her mouth to scream but it was drowned out by the screams of Kelly and Amy. They held onto each other as they looked up at the spirit, screaming out in fear.

  Suddenly, the bed curtains shook slightly and their mother appeared. That did little to calm their fears however, because she too was screaming bloody murder at them. She seemed to be almost a mirror image of the ghoul that now hung from the ceiling. Her mouth was red and blood oozed from it as she approached her daughters.

  The two girls fled from the room all the way down the stairs, going so far as to completely leave the house before they realized that they had nowhere else to go in the middle of the night. They got into the Mini and decided that, at the very least, they might attempt to get some answers from their closest neighbour; hang the hour – no pun intended…

  Their closest neighbour lived about ten miles up the road from their house. The Tudor-style homes were all spaced far apart, due to the fact that they had all been estates during the 1800s. It would have been kind of cool to be living on an old estate, they thought, had it not been haunted by some evil spirits.

  Getting out of their car in the drive way of their neighbour’s house, Kelly knocked on the front door. “I hope someone answers. This is an emergency.”

  After several agonizing minutes, the front door to the house opened and a bleary couple looked out at them. Dressed in their bedclothes, the husband was holding an axe in case he needed to ward off criminals. They both relaxed when they saw the two frightened girls on their porch.

  “Is something the matter?” the woman asked them. She was about the same age as Jen and they had to wonder whether she had been taken in by the charm of these houses the same way their mum had been.