13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  He did not want to become the town’s local crazy person.

  When he fell asleep that night, Ben hoped that he would find answers. First, he and Faith went into Beth’s room with the mission of corralling her into bed. As usual, the little girl was in her room talking to the unseen spirit.

  “You just have to be patient,” she said to him earnestly. “He is very anxious about this sort of thing.”

  Ben could not believe that his six-year-old child was speaking about him in this way. He knew immediately that she was talking about him. It was embarrassing to be described in such a way by someone who was so much younger than he was. He was supposed to be the one who was concerned about her fears.

  “It’s time for bed now, kiddo,” he told her, trying not to sound annoyed but still coming off a bit huffy.

  Beth gave a small wave to her invisible friend and then dutifully climbed into her bed. Faith tucked the sheets up for her and sat on the side of the bed.

  “Do you think you’ll sleep any better tonight, love?” she asked Beth in a sweet, lyrical voice. “Now that Daddy has started listening to your friend?”

  “I hope so,” Beth said in a small voice. She acted so brave about all that had been going on; it was easy to forget that she had also suffered through far too many sleepless nights. She had a look of resignation on her face at the moment, as though she knew that the night was going to bring its terrors back to her and she was just going to have to deal with it somehow. “Jacob doesn’t come to talk with me as much as he used to. I think that’s a good thing.”

  Ben nodded at her. “That’s a very good thing,” he agreed. “I hope that he finds the solution that he’s looking for and he stops interrupting your dreams. And mine too.”

  Sure enough, that night, practically as soon as Ben had closed his eyes he dreamt of that familiar old house. He dreamt that he was running towards the sounds of cries for help. Only this time, something felt different about it.

  Something felt oddly… personal.

  The visions had seemed so confusing and out of focus before, but now Ben noticed every detail; from the red plaid that one of the boys was wearing to sounds of snapping as the boy – Jacob’s – limbs were beaten until they broke. It was like Ben was there, like he was witnessing every detail of this horrible ordeal for the very first time.

  And that was when it dawned on him.

  It felt like he was there because he had been there. Beth was telling him the truth. Jacob had told her all about it, as much as he could, because Ben had been there that night as a scared ten-year-old witness to the murder of the poor, disabled boy.

  Sure enough, as if to let him know that he was correct, he turned on his heel in the dream and ran like mad back through the trees, letting the low hanging branches scratch at his face and getting tripped up by exposed roots and falling, down, down, down until he hit his temple against a rock.

  Ben woke with a start. He jumped up into a sitting position, clutching the blankets against his chest. He gasped loudly as if he had been holding his breath the entire time he was asleep.

  Faith woke up next to him and she gently placed a hand on his arm.

  “The dream again?” she asked softly. She was troubled by these nightmares and wanted them to end as much as he did. He had not told her all the details of the dreams, but he had filled her in enough to understand why they were so disturbing, and why he wished they would cease recurring.

  Without answering her question, Ben turned to her with large eyes and a horrified expression. “I witnessed the murder!” He said as if it was a confession of some crime.

  Suddenly, all of the memories came flooding back into his mind. He had not really been sick with an illness; he had fallen and hit his head. He had suffered amnesia and that was what his parents had taken him away to treat… Actually… “They were not trying to treat me,” he said, dazed.

  Faith looked at him. She was startled and confused. She threw the sheets off and repositioned herself in front of him on the bed so she could fully look into his face, into his eyes, and try to figure out both what was going on and how she could help him.

  “Who wasn’t trying to treat you?” she asked him searchingly. “You’re not making any sense, darling…”

  Ben took a deep breath. He tried to calm down as he looked at his poor wife, who clearly was feeling sorry for him but could not really help, not in any way beyond being supportive at least. “My parents,” he explained. “When I was little, my parents always claimed that I was very ill and they brought me to London to treat me… They never told me where we had moved from or what was wrong with me. All I knew at the time was that I had terrible headaches and I could not remember anything from before I was ten. I could not remember anything from before we moved to London from some hospital in a small town.”

  But now it all makes sense. At least, most of it… That small town was Canewdon! I lived here as a child. And we moved away not because of my amnesia but because of what caused it…”

  “What caused it?” Faith asked him.

  He looked into her eyes. “I witnessed a murder here… in this house.”

  Ben had to tell Faith what happened when he was a child another three times. He made sure to speak slowly so all of the information could sink in. The last time he told her, she stopped him to ask questions.

  “Are you sure of this?” she asked. “You didn’t just start believing that the dreams are reality?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “I am dead sure. I think the only reason that I was not recognizing all of this as things that had really happened in my life was because my memories were all so deeply locked into the recesses of my mind. But I remember running towards the screams. I remember this strange, uncontrollable desire to help whoever was crying out.”

  “And that was Jacob?”

  “Yes.”

  “Beth’s Jacob?”

  “I know it sounds strange and stupid, even, but yes. She has not been making any of this up.”

  It was decided that the first thing Ben needed to do in the morning was to try to track down the boys who had attacked Jacob. They were men now. He recalled that they had all been part of prominent families, which was not going to help when it came time to make a case against them. Should he ring them first and let them know that he knew what they had done? No, that would be an extremely bad idea. They might try and off him in the aftermath.

  He did not imagine that boys that bad could grow up to be anything other than bad. They clearly had not turned over a new leaf or they would have confessed to their crime and their sin. Instead, they had both caused and allowed poor Jacob to be stuck in a hellish limbo.

  In the morning, Ben met Beth in the hallway before they went down for breakfast. He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said, with a sympathetic smile. “Thank you… For letting me know about Jacob. I’m sorry that I did not listen to you sooner, but I finally know how I can help him. I’m glad that I can.”

  Beth smiled back at him, the first truly genuine smile he had seen from her since this whole mess with ghosts and nightmares had transpired. “I’m so glad,” she said. “Is it going to make him go away?”

  That question made Ben rather sad for some reason. It was true that he did want the boy to stop appearing in his dreams and in his home. There was nothing pleasant about seeing the sad state that Jacob was in, especially now that Ben knew what had happened and how personal it had turned out to be. This was not just some random kid; this was Jacob from the neighbourhood, the shy boy with a learning disability that made him read more at Ben’s grade level than the level of a typical sixteen-year-old. Ben had not been friends with him at the time, when Jacob was alive, but that only made him feel sadder when he saw what had happened to him all over again.

  If only they had been friends. If only…

  He might have been braver. He might have been brave enough to stand up for him instead of running away like a coward.

  “I’m so sorry, Jacob,
” he said sorrowfully as he settled into his work for the morning. He was nervous about going after the men who were responsible, so he was idling instead, getting some work done. It was odd how sometimes working could be a good distraction for him. Normally it was the other way around, with things in life distracting him from his work. The house was still a long way from being fully renovated. Now that he knew his true past, Ben vowed that he would never move away again.

  Suddenly, with a groan that could only come from another world, the ghostly form of Jacob Black appeared in Ben’s living room. He nearly dropped his wrench when he saw the materialisation. Then, carefully but swiftly, he climbed down from his ladder and approached the spirit.

  “I know what I have to do,” he said to him. “I’m afraid to do it, afraid to reopen the town’s old wounds so publically. I’m afraid that no one is going to believe me. But I am going to do it, for you, Jacob. Please, just give me strength.”

  Jacob looked into Ben’s eyes. In what felt like a completely different life, Jacob had been taller than Ben. Now, the forever-teen was looking up at Ben, looking at him with such trust and appreciation. “I know you can do it,” he said. “I know you are afraid. I was afraid, too. That’s why it is that much more important that you do this. Not just for me, but for the town. To keep everyone safe.”

  Ben was in awe. He did not know that Jacob could say so much, so clearly. When Jacob was alive, he was not so well-spoken. He guessed it was due to the fact that Jacob was no longer among the living and therefore no longer burdened with disability… He wanted to ask Jacob what it was like to be dead, but the answer was surely obvious. It was Hell. Well, in any event, this limbo was.

  Perhaps, once Ben revealed the bullies as murderers and the town rightfully had them convicted and sent to prison, Jacob would finally be free from this imprisonment. That was how Jacob could be saved in death. He would no longer be chained to this house where so many bad things had happened to him. He would be free from torment and the memories of a life that had been sad, where he had been cut down too soon by people who did not deserve to go on living as if nothing had happened… Once Ben had those men locked away, then Jacob could go on to whatever it was that awaited him… Heaven, maybe?

  Whatever it was, Ben believed that Jacob would finally be able to find the peace that he so deserved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Justice for Jacob

  Abandoning his renovations for the time being, Ben got on his computer and began the slow, tedious process of looking up each of the men who had played a part in Jacob’s death. All three were important fixtures in Canewdon, sons of prominent men, and so on down the line. This was going to be a massive undertaking for Ben, but he knew that it would be worth all of his time and effort. Murderers should never go free, especially not to live on with false, pristine records in the eyes of the townsfolk. They did not deserve to get to live this lie any longer.

  Matthew Jones was one of the teenage bullies; Ben found him first. Ben remembered him as cocky, gangly and moody like most teenaged boys were, he supposed. Matthew was fifty-six years old now, with two children who were now married adults with lives and homes of their own. He was divorced from his wife and he lived alone, still in Canewdon. He worked alongside Faith at the school He was the school’s maintenance man. Ben was not surprised to read that he had never gone on to college.

  That was the thing about bullies, at least as far as he knew from his time in school in the 80s: the majority of them were anything but bookish, and they seldom aspired to prolong their schooling for any longer than they had to. Matthew had evidently never aspired to be much, which was at odds with his father, who had been the local policeman back in the 80s. Mr. Jones was long dead now. Ben wondered what he thought of his son. He probably would not be as proud of him if he knew that he was a lying murderer…

  Trying his best not to indict the man before there had been a trial, Ben wrote notes which he thought might be pertinent for his testimony. Then he moved on to the next man on the list of villains.

  Harry Coleman was much less cocky as a fifty-six-year-old man than he had been when he was a teen. He was the son of the local School Governor, a very well respected and popular man in Canewdon. As a teenager and a student, Harry had been passable, but he fell in with miscreants and it was widely known that the kid was never going to amount to much or be anything like his father. This fact likely haunted him for the rest of his life, especially after what went down in Crippleview House that night. Now he owned the local grocery store in town. Like Matthew, Harry lived alone but he had never married and had no children of his own. He kept himself to himself most of the time nowadays.

  Ben wondered whether Harry would prove to be the most difficult for the authorities to track down; he was glad that he did not have to do it. He hoped that Harry would come forth and show himself, owning up to what he had done. That would not be easy, of course, but it might give him a better chance for later happiness. Ben imagined how much it must have weighed these boys down for all of these thirty years. He wondered if they ever thought about it, and he refused to believe that they could have completely cleared Jacob Black from their minds. His blood was on their hands, for God’s sake!

  Lastly, and probably the most damning of all, was the son of the local MP – Paul Stevens. His father was a well-liked Conservative MP back in 1987; a man by the name of Mike Stevens. Unlike the other two bullies, Paul’s future was full of promise. Instead of being a cock, he was involved in the football team. He was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. It was surprising to Ben that he would ever want to stoop to murder when he had everything in the world going for him. Then again… He had been the main instigator of the attack in the house. He had been the leader of the gang of bullies. Not the sort of leader that his father had wanted him to be, surely.

  Like the other two, he was now fifty-six. He still lived in Canewdon, and he was married to a woman named Julie Stevens who worked in the local government, in charge of charitable giving. Paul was a District Councillor of Canewdon, which made him the most loyal to his father’s career path out of the three.

  Ben marvelled at all the information that he had discovered online. He could not help but feel rather like a snoop, but then he reminded himself that it was important for him to know as much as possible, if he was to create some kind of a decent case against them. It was remarkable how unlike, and yet alike, they all were to their past selves.

  He wondered if they were all still assholes… It was easy to empathize with people when one read about them having difficulties in their lives, such as divorce and self-imposed exile… But he had to remind himself that these men were not really worthy of his empathy. They were cruel monsters, at least in one major part of their lives. Not one of them had owned up to it, and that meant that they had to at least still be a little bit asshole-ish.

  As soon as he had tracked them all down and made detailed notes on each of them, Ben set about contacting the authorities, so he could bring charges against the men as soon as possible. He did not want to delay Jacob’s peace any longer.

  Another person to consider in all of this was poor Jacob’s mother, Janice. Ben found her details on the internet as well. His brief research of Jacob brought up the murder as well as the way he had been treated in school, how the bullies had targeted him practically all through his life. Ben’s heart went out to him all over again, and what made it worse was the fact that Janice Black was still alive and in Canewdon, apparently hoping that he might someday return to her.

  Five years after Jacob died, his father passed away. From the grief, people said. Ben was almost glad that he had lost his memory, because reading how the people had responded to the horrific news made him feel terribly sad. He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to live there and go on with daily life after that kind of thing. It evidently shook the entire neighbourhood.

  Now he understood why people had looked at him the way they had, when he had ar
rived back in town. They had treated him like an old friend because people remembered him and were glad to see him again. He did not doubt that they were glad to see that he was well, though they were probably confused at him not seeming to remember them. He was surprised now that there had not been some kind of an uproar when he moved into the infamous house where the murder took place.