13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  It was the same ghost from before: a young man dressed in tattered clothing. Ben felt a chill when he saw him, from both the shock of seeing the apparition and from the cold that came with a visitation from beyond the grave. The teenaged boy’s face was covered in dark bruises and his arms and legs were bloody from wounds that could not hurt him anymore. Looking closer this time, Ben noticed for the first time that the boy also had a deep gash in his neck. He was not sure how this boy had died – there were just so many possible ways in which it could have happened.

  The ghost looked angry, much angrier than before when he had stood over Ben in bed. He folded his arms in front of himself and gazed at him in judgement. Suddenly, before Ben had a chance to back away or say anything, the ghost boy moved towards him.

  “I need your help, Ben Collins,” he said in a voice which echoed even though it was a whisper. Indeed, the voice itself seemed to glow in a blue hue. “I have waited thirty years for this moment. I have waited all this time for you to come home, for justice…”

  Ben was frozen with fear. He had no idea what this ghost was talking about. He had never seen this boy in his life before the other night. “Wh—What do you expect me to do?” he asked quietly, so shaken that he could barely get the words out.

  At that moment, a light came on and the glow it cast in the hallway caused the ghostly form to vanish. Ben turned around in the light and saw his wife standing in the doorway of their bedroom. She was looking at him, concerned.

  “What’s going on?” she asked him in the croaky voice of sleep. “Who are you talking to?”

  Ben turned and looked around for the ghost, but he truly was gone. Faith had not seen him.

  He would not take Beth’s night terrors so lightly again. She clearly was not making up stories or imagining things. Had she seen this ghost before? Was he the supposed Jacob who she often rambled about in her half-conscious state? Was he the ‘imaginary friend’?

  “Nothing,” he said at last, too shaken and confused to mention any of this to Faith for the moment. What could he possibly say that would have made any damn sense? He shook his head and came back into the bedroom. “I must’ve been sleep walking or something. Imagining things.”

  “You really did get stressed out by that psychic, didn’t you?” she asked sympathetically, gently petting his cheek with the back of her hand as she walked with him back to bed.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that must be what it is. It woke something in me, some disturbing thoughts, that’s all.”

  Faith gave him a light peck on his lips. “It seems I’m the only one in this house who isn’t seeing things now,” she teased.

  Only Ben wasn’t laughing.

  Ben soon found himself longing for the time when Beth had been talking to herself and he could think nothing of it. In the days after the second ghost sighting, he could not stop thinking about the haunting words that the boy had whispered to him. He had been so close to him; the boy’s voice an echoed hiss in the dark hallway. His work suffered tremendously because every noise in the empty house during the day would cause him to jump and wonder if the boy had returned to threaten him further with words of justice and needing his help. Whenever Faith and Beth were away at the school, Ben feared that he was surely losing his mind, and whenever they were home with him he felt this fierce desire to keep them safe and out of this.

  The boy’s ghost was tormenting him! And it did not stop during Ben’s waking hours either. Whenever he was in bed at night, he lay awake and did his best to fight off sleep. For when he was asleep, he dreamt horrible dreams about the boy and the bullies and that empty, battered house. He was always helpless to do anything. He did not know why the boy had come to him, why he was constantly talking to Beth and making her think that he could do anything about what had happened!

  “Are you all right?” Faith asked him one morning, waking him from his reverie at the breakfast table. He had been caught staring into space with his coffee cup held up near his lips but not actually drinking from it. “You look like a wreck.”

  “I’m fine,” Ben lied, shaking his head slightly in an attempt to wake himself up. The truth was that he was not sleeping well. She likely knew that. She had to know that, with all his tossing and turning in bed each night.

  Sure enough, she raised an eyebrow at him. “Why don’t you tell me the truth anymore?”

  Ben sighed. He set his mug down on the table and ran his hands over his face a few times. “The truth is… hard to explain. I have been having nightmares lately, the kind that Beth has been having. They keep me up at night because I’m afraid to dream about such things, but no matter what, they always find me. When you’re off at school, I spend so much time just waiting in fear that he’s going to come back.”

  “Who?” Faith asked him, now looking genuinely concerned. He did not sound like he was talking bollocks or having her on in any way. That was what scared her. Not that he was normally a jokey kind of fellow, but it was not like him to talk about such things and in such a manner.

  “Jacob,” he said, entirely straight faced.

  She looked at him, not knowing whether she should laugh, but feeling annoyed either way. “Be serious,” she said.

  “I am being serious!” he snapped back, beating his fists against the table and, in so doing, shaking the utensils on the surface of the table. “Do I look like I’m not being serious?”

  Faith was dubious. “So you’re telling me that you believe that our daughter is not only not imagining her little friend, but you’ve seen him now, too?”

  “When you put it like that, I admit that it sounds crazy,” Ben said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose between his fingers. He had a pounding headache, mainly from the lack of sleep but also from the everything that had been going on. “For some reason, this boy wants me to help him… I think to help him get justice for what happened to him? I don’t know what I’ve got to do with it.”

  Faith took a large gulp of her coffee. “I don’t think that I’m really the one you should be talking to about this. There’s someone who knows more about it.”

  Ben nodded a little. “Yeah, I know.”

  Beth came downstairs from her room and sat at the breakfast table. Her dark blonde hair was still wet from her morning bath and she was wearing the adorable miss-match of pink and purple in her outfit. She looked like a normal, innocent little girl. But she was clearly a little girl who’d had horrible visions, and who knew a great deal too much about life. This must have been due to the ‘sixth sense’ the mystic woman had referred to.

  Ben and Faith’s little girl had a special gift.

  It terrified him.

  Faith stood up and went over to retrieve the eggs that she had fried for Beth. She placed them on a plate with some ham and a biscuit and carried it over to the table. “Good morning, lovie,” she said brightly to Beth, smiling and not letting any of the dark stuff that she had just been discussing with Ben show on her face.

  Ben was amazed and delighted that she was able to turn on a dime like that. He wished that he could as jovial and well-collected as she could. As it was, he was rather a lot like Beth had turned out: nervous and sensitive and easily rattled. He thought that Beth inherited some of her compassion from Faith, though, because he just as soon would’ve run away as try to help a stranger… or a ghost boy who haunted his dreams.

  He noticed the way that Beth was looking at him. Ever since they went into Mystic Mary’s tent, she had been giving him a sort of sympathetic, pleading look as if she knew that she needed to ask him for something, but she felt quite sorry that she needed to trouble him. He was beginning to understand why she was giving him that look, but he really wanted to know why.

  “That thing you said to me the other day,” he began gently, “about the boy you call Jacob…”

  Beth’s eyes widened. “Don’t yell at me again,” she begged him. “I was only trying to help!”

  “I know,” Ben said. “I know. I’m not going to yell at you. I am
sorry for yelling. It’s just… This is all a lot, you know?”

  Faith was regarding the two of them with a look of complete bafflement. “I guess I’ll, uh, work on cleaning the dishes now. This old house’s dishwasher doesn’t quite do the trick. I hope you have that on your list of planned upgrades.”

  With that, she got up from the table and went over to the kitchen sink, scrubbing away at what did not even amount to much. Ben knew that this was her modus operandi when she was nervous or frustrated; she seemed at the moment to be both. Like he and Beth were in some kind of secret cult that she was not allowed to be a part of.

  “I know,” Beth answered her father. She seemed more than a little relieved that he was finally willing to talk with her about what she had experienced. He had been so flippant about it before, which he felt bad about now. It should not take a ghost standing on one’s chest to cause one to take a child seriously.

  “So,” Ben said with a sigh. He took her little hand in his. She had long forgotten about her eggs. “I want you to tell me everything you know about Jacob.”

  Beth shrugged slightly, which disappointed him instantly for whatever reason. “I do not know a lot,” she said. “He does not say much to me. He only ever really wanted you to notice him. He used to be in this house. I guess he haunts it now. He needs your help. He won’t tell me why. I guess he can’t.”

  Ben was becoming increasingly frustrated. She clearly wanted to help him to help Jacob, but after all these weeks and months of her conversing with a ghost, she did not actually have that much to report back about it. “Do you know more about him?” he asked, abandoning for now the big question of what exactly happened to Jacob. “Was this house originally a much nicer house? Because it sure was a wreck when we moved in, wasn’t it?”

  He smiled at her, trying to lighten the mood a little. Faith was still cleaning away at the sink.

  “I only know that he’s bigger than me. He’s in high school. The other kids aren’t very nice to him. They pick on him and call him names,” Beth explained. “He came to this house to get away from them, because he was afraid that they might hurt him. And he says that now that you are here, you’re back where you’re supposed to be.”

  Ben looked at her, completely puzzled as to how that could possibly be the case. “But… I only just moved here with you and your mum. This is not where I’m supposed to be. I mean, I love this town and I hope to stay here for a long time, if it will have me, but… I’m not from here, sweetheart.”

  He said it as if he was trying to comfort her, but in actual fact he was trying to comfort the unseen ghost who, for some reason was dead set on him being able to help. He wondered whether ghosts might sometimes make mistakes, the same way psychics and palm readers could make mistakes, and often did.

  Beth looked into his eyes. She pouted at him ever so slightly. “All I know is that he says that he knows you and knows that you can help. He says that you have to search inside yourself and then you’ll remember what really happened.”

  With that, she finished her eggs in three swift forkfuls and got up from the kitchen table. She brought her plate over to her mum and even helped her rinse it. She had a little step-stool. She really was a good little girl. Ben wondered why they had ever thought she was making things up, other than the usual wild imagines of a creative child. This was more than that.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Locked Away Memories

  The nightmares continued to plague Ben. Alarmingly, he was beginning to get used to them. The experiences were always more or less the same. He was running through the woods in fear of his life, but running towards the sounds of screams and crying. For whatever reason, he was running towards the danger, not away from it. He often wondered whether it was only because this ghost of a boy called Jacob really wanted him to see what had happened to him. It was plain that the things of these nightmarish visions were what had befallen Jacob. He had been murdered by these bullies.

  Ben now knew why Jacob was having him relive these dreams. He wanted Ben to help him, so he was showing him the evidence again and again. He likely had shown these same visions to Beth, which made Ben feel angry and protective. His poor little girl, being subjected to this! But then he realized that Jacob also been only a boy. A young boy, killed by these murderous thugs who called him harsh, cruel names and kicked him while he was down.

  As he lived out this moment for what felt like the hundredth time, he suddenly realized that Jacob was not being cursed and called a ‘retard’ just because the boys were bastards. Jacob really was developmentally handicapped. Ben became sad. It was wrong before, but now he could see that the child really had not stood any chance against them. And Beth’s stories about Jacob being called mean names and treated differently… It all made sense in the worst possible way.

  He began to look for clues in these dreams, trying to find any way that he might somehow be able to bring justice to the boy. It was too late to save Jacob, but it was not too late to see that these teenaged menaces were justly punished.

  “I don’t know,” he said aloud to himself one afternoon as he was attempting to upgrade the dishwasher for Faith. “I don’t know what you expect me to be able to do for you. These boys are strangers to me. I am not from here… Are these visions that you show me, night after night, only supposed to scare me and caution me about something in the present or the future? Or am I truly supposed to know how to help you?”

  To his great surprise, these questions summoned Jacob into the kitchen. He stood there in the daylight, and Ben felt odd seeing him in this out of place setting. He supposed that Beth saw him in such a way, since she often spoke with the unseen boy during the daylight hours.

  Once again, however, Jacob could not entirely voice his concerns or his needs. “Help me!” he shouted in that echoed way, as if he was at the bottom of a deep, empty well. Ben supposed that in a way that was exactly what it was like for Jacob. He was trapped in some kind of Hell.

  “I want to help you,” Ben told him. “Really, I do. But I don’t know what I can do to help you. You have got to help me to help you.”

  For the first time, he did not feel afraid or frozen in panic when the ghost arrived. In fact, it had been more of a relief that he was able to summon Jacob to the kitchen when he was trying to figure out what the hell to do next. He wished that he could summon other things in life in much the same way.

  Jacob looked at him, teetering back and forth on his ghostly legs that were forever stuck in broken limbo. He seemed unsure of how to proceed.

  Ben leaned down slightly and attempted to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. To his surprise, he was able to do so. After a moment, he shook that off because it did not matter. “Don’t be afraid,” he told him gently. “I mean it. I want to help. Please… Show me what to do, if you can’t tell me.”

  Without another word, the ghost boy slowly slipped away into nothingness once more. Ben felt sad and unexpectedly lonely now that he was gone. He no longer knew what he was doing, and he was beginning to wonder why he did not simply leave Canewdon. It seemed to him that it would be much easier to just pack everything up and move back to London than to carry on like this, subjecting himself and his child to such heavy business.

  But he had his business here. They had not simply rented this house; they owned it now and it was their responsibility. He felt like he had signed some sort of pact with the place, to do his work well and restore it to the way it was supposed to be, with the modern upgrades necessary to make it live-in-able by today’s standards.

  He did not want to admit it out loud, but he was beginning to feel hopeless in just about every endeavour. He wished that Jacob could tell him more about what had befallen him that night, and why he was so sure that Ben could help him. Ben could not run to the authorities and tell them that he had solved a thirty-year murder because a ghost told him about it in a dream, in all fairness this was the reality of his dilemma.

  Ben was familiar with the way in which small to
wns operated. Everyone knew the goings on of everyone else. In Canewdon, the townspeople had all been friendly to him and he had so far been well received. Many of them treated him as if he was an old friend, which he found endearing. He was charmed by the way in which the entire town had embraced him and his family, even though they were newcomers from London who clearly had not bargained for the all that they might encounter and experience there. But all of that cordialness would change, Ben knew, if he started going around and telling everyone about the ghost in his bedroom.