Shadow Creek house was the immortalized exemplification of such horror. Keep in mind that it was not always like that. It was built circa 1887, during the pinnacle of Queen Victoria’s reign, when the economy was slowly recovering after the fall of the East India Trading Company. Just like other houses that sprouted all over Great Britain at that time, it was epitomised with the style that would later come to be known as Victorian Era architecture. As is the case with the real supernatural, there was nothing seemingly wrong or macabre about the house. The terror, which would not take hold of the homestead for a decade after its construction, started seeping its roots in the friendly suburban district of West London known as Chiswick, when a certain Mr. and Mrs. Sutton bought the house and decided to settle down in the quaint, quiet and pristine exurbia.
The house was situated on a cul-de-sac off of Burlington Lane, far from the madding crowd, as it were. It was a lone house, surrounded by uninhibited greenery, a beautiful copse of thickly leaved trees, and a creek that flowed all the way down the cul-de-sac from the river Thames, and passed the house on the west side only, to join the river once more in all its candid glory. This was the prime reason for Mary Sutton’s insistence on their buying this particular house, rather than one of the many available at a far lesser price in the suburbs a few kilometres back. She was a woman fond of nature, and although she preferred spending her time in the serene stillness of greenery and nature, this did not mean that she was not an admirably polite and lovable person. She loved her family and her friends and she loved her husband.
Mr. Edward Sutton was a prominent civil servant in Her Majesty’s Home Civil Service. He’d graduated with a prestigious degree from Oxford University in Statistics and Accounting, and was hired while the ink on his degree was still drying. He’d met Mary, Mary Linford back then, at a tea house during his lunch break. To Mary, he’d seemed a most elegant and suitable bachelor and to Edward, she seemed a very beautiful and lively lady, with her hazel eyes, red hair like winter fire, and a face that came straight out of a poet’s ballad. They got married just like that, and soon Mary was frequenting bureaucratic balls on her husband’s arm. There’s was a perfect marriage; sans fights, discords or disagreements amongst the husband and wife, and both loved each other unconditionally for the first few years. Until Mary got sick.
After learning of his wife’s sickness, Edward spared no expense in securing her all manner of medical treatment available from the doctors at the Royal London Hospital. Sadly, there was simply no cure for the malady that had struck Mary Sutton down in the prime of her life. Distraught, her husband paid heed to the dying wish of his wife: she wanted to be closer to nature and far from snooping people who gossiped about people’s plights.
“Come with me, I’ve a surprise for you,” Edward said to her one day, insisting that she leave her bed and accompany him. The two of them sat in Edward’s government issued carriage and headed towards Shadow Creek house, which had been newly built, with the paint still drying on the rafters.
It was love at first sight.
Edward watched as his wife mustered the strength to get out of the carriage, beheld the house and smiled. For the first time in a million years, she smiled. It was a strained smile, racked with pain, but it was an honest smile.
“This is lovely, Edward!” she said, staring at the canopy of trees covering the horizon, the lush green lawn carpeting the ground in emerald green, punctuated with flowers. A creek with crystal clear water tumbled from up the road all the way down to the house. The River Thames flowed unabashed, it’s rhythmic sound transcendental to the ears. To the left, the gothic bell tower of the St. Nicholas Chiswick church jutted out from the canopy of the foliage.
He bought the house for her and they lived there together, even though it meant that Edward had a longer commute. The holistic yet mysterious workings of nature gradually started healing Mary.
The couple had tried many a time to have children, unsuccessfully. And after the advent of Mary’s sickness, the doctors said that it was physically impossible for her to have a child. This was off-putting news for both of them, however providence would send a child their way.
Mary had an older sister, Elizabeth Wescott, who was married to a well-to-do civil engineer, Charles Wescott. Theirs had been a love marriage too, and quite a passionate one it was! The condom was invented during the middle of the nineteenth century and, as with every innovation of its time, it was shunned by the clerics and condemned as ‘the devil’s rubber’. Charles and Elizabeth, both devout Christians, shunned the ‘devil’s rubber’ and naturally produced eight children as a result of their sex drive and shared passion. Eight children, Mary used to think enviously at times. Eight children, and yet I have none. It happened that Charles Wescott was soon struck down with tuberculosis. Attending construction sites and overseeing the engineering while inhaling the fumes and raw gravel dust had irreparably damaged his lungs. Unemployed, sick and with no one to take care of his wife and children, he sought the help of his relatives. Seven of his children were dispatched to his brothers, sisters and parents, rendering them into their care until he got better, if ever. They all agreed, some of them delighted while the others not so much. No one wanted to adopt his daughter, Lily Wescott, so as a last resort Elizabeth approached her sister for her assistance in this regard.
“I’d be delighted to! You know I always wanted a child of my own, Lizzie! And I promise to treat Lily as my own!” a jubilant Mary agreed to take in Lily, Elizabeth’s sixteen-year-old daughter.
“No one else would take her. I’m guessing you know why that is. She’s not exactly sociable, always quiet and minding her own business, reading her penny dreadful books and writing her own tales in her diaries,” Elizabeth said.
“Not to worry. She’ll feel right at home. I’m glad that she’s old enough to take care of herself. My health, as you know, doesn’t afford me the luxury to as I might please,” Mary said.
And so Lily Wescott was sent to Shadow Creek house to live out her days with her uncle and aunt. She was a sweet girl, with blonde hair down to her hips, green eyes which looked like they were reflecting lake water, and a face that would put Snow White to shame. She was the epitome of feminine beauty, and her body had undergone the crucible of adolescence, transforming her from a pretty girl to a pretty woman.
She neither liked the house nor the surrounding area. If anything, this change terrified her. She missed her friends, her kin, her mother and father. While she did love her aunt, there was only so much time one could spend with a sick person without becoming depressed. There wasn’t much to do around the house, which led her to spend most of her time bouncing around from one room to the other, like a lone pea in a can.
One night she went out to the outhouse to use the lavatory. Such facilities were not yet installed within houses, and were customarily placed a few yards from the back of the house, as was the case here. Judging by the absence of light from the outhouse window, she assumed it was unoccupied. Lily opened the door to encounter a most horrendous sight: her uncle was sitting on the toilet with a magazine in one hand and his stiff masculinity in the other. She yelped in dismal surprise and was about to leave, intending never to mention the disturbing scene to anyone, when Edward grasped her hand. She struggled to be free but he pulled her inside the toilet and stood up next to her, his erection jutting at her stomach.
Looking at him in the dark, Lily realized that the man was frenzied. His eyes dulled with carnal mania, he put one hand over her face before she could scream, and with his other hand he pulled her skirt down. All her feeble attempts at getting free failed, and the giant man took her in that dark outhouse. The possible reasons for his actions were multitudinous: perhaps because he’d had no conjugal relations with his wife, or extra-marital either, for that matter, in over two years, perhaps because Lily had caught him off guard masturbating, or perhaps he had always been a pervert wanting to take advantage of an under aged teenager. Regardless, he paired with her to his h
eart’s content, keeping his firm hand over her face while he did so. She cried and thrashed, while tears fell down her face, but to no avail. After he was done with her, he threw her to the floor and threatened, “If you so much as dare to tell another soul about this, I’ll send you to hell myself. In pieces.”
This was the first time he took her and, up until her sudden death, Lily Wescott was abused by her seemingly loving and caring uncle more than a dozen times. It was the perfect crime: his wife was too sickly to get out of bed, and the victim was so queer that he doubted anyone would believe her accusations. Besides, he was a man of noble stature, with a well reputed position and a demeanour to hold. No one was going to think that he’d sexually mistreated his niece.
After the initial incident in the outhouse that night, he sought her out in the house, which was easy given that only the three of them lived there, and his wife retired early in the evening. He’d muffle her with his big, hairy hand and have his way with her.
Lily was mentally and physically broken after this. She sought solace in her diary, in which she explicitly described everything that had happened to her, in the hopes that the writing would purge her and offer her closure. The attic of the house became her sanctum sanctorum where she could hide out. Access to it wasn’t easy, necessitating climbing a steep staircase, so Edward never found her there. She made it a cosy nook for herself by putting her storybooks and her diary in front of the attic window, overlooking the creek and the church tower. She’d cry in that corner, write about her uncle’s latest tyrannical act of horror, and sometimes she’d even sleep there on the cold hard floor. Safety was better than comfort. She could sleep there because her uncle couldn’t find her there.
Until the day he did. After tucking his wife in bed, having dosed her milk with sleeping powder, he started searching for Lily. Room after room he searched to no avail. He thought he heard a scuttle on the floor above. The attic. He had never been to that part of the house. That night, in his lust induced state, he climbed the stairs to the attic.
Lily was there, cowering at the window, weeping and pleading to Edward to leave her alone. But the man was not about to. Once you get a taste of a young woman, you can never go back. It’s a disease of the mind which consumes you. Edward Sutton was no longer the same man who had lovingly bought this house for his wife. In his carnal yearning, he approached Lily. She threw her books at him, which he merely deflected.
“Please. Uncle!” she cried amidst sobs as the man approached her. Her helplessness and vulnerability served only to aggravate his mental state.
He was standing over her, a grimacing figure of utmost terror. The devil incarnate. As she made to flee from under him, he grasped her by the throat and shoved her against the wall. She hit her head and fell to the ground, bleeding from her forehead. But she made to run away once more. This time he kicked out at her, hoping to render her limp from thereon. But this was it for Lily. The kick was so brutal it propelled her against the window, opening its panes. In her last fleeting moment, she looked at her uncle, possibly for help, before she slipped off the edge of the window and fell down two storeys into the dark creek below.
The very next day Edward Sutton woke up in his bed as if nothing was out of the ordinary. He went outside, matter-of-factly and sent for the doctor, apparently having discovered that his niece had, as he told the constabularies later, ‘committed suicide’ by jumping from the window, her dead body lying mangled, broken and very much dead in the creek below.
Even her own parents believed that she had taken her own life, because she had always been a peculiar child, quiet and strange, who didn’t communicate well, and spent her time reading macabre novels. Her funeral was followed a month later by Mary Sutton’s, who had finally succumbed to her disease and died peacefully in her sleep.
Edward found no peace from that moment onwards. The postman, who frequented Shadow Creek house, arrived one Saturday morning, two months after Mary Sutton’s passing, to find Edward Sutton dead on the front door, in his sleeping dress. He was foaming at the mouth and his eyes were fixed in a stare of horror. He’d committed suicide by overdosing on his wife’s sleep medication. Why did he do that? No one knows.
*****
The house changed owners over the course of the century. Despite its prime, pristine and prosperous location, the owners never stayed in the house longer than a year or two.
They all said the same thing upon permanently vacating the house. Their accounts varied, but all agreed that the house was haunted. Some spoke of a wailing, sound, of a crying lady, emanating from the attic, others heard footsteps in the corridors deep into the night. Another fled because a young girl ‘whispered’ horrible atrocities in his ears while he slept.
Nobody, no matter the romance of the notion, wants to live in a haunted house.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
New Beginnings
Here’s a little something about new beginnings: the past is obdurate and unwilling to let go, a lesson Emma Kingsley was about to learn in a most unpleasant way. After moving to another district in London, switching houses and dumping every single possession, to the best of her knowledge, belonging to her ex-boyfriend, she’d looked forward to a little peace in her life. However, opening the box containing an assortment of cutlery and crockery, she discovered a giant blue mug displaying ‘I swear there’s coffee in here’ and a winking smiley face. This mug taunted her. It was Ben’s binge drinking mug, and despite taking great pains to rid him from her new life, somehow this blue cup made its way into her carefully selected carton. Kind of like a criminal’s signature left at the scene of his crimes. Like a calling card. This was too much for Emma, who, unable to cope with her haunting past objectified by this cup, disposed of it in the trashcan (where it shattered in to a million pieces) and left the kitchen.
Her daughter, Kylie, was asleep on the couch. She was a lovely kid and in the shit-storm that had been Emma’s life, her three-year-old daughter was the only silver lining.
Emma and her daughter had been in residence in Shadow Creek House for one whole day; an entire month after her fiasco of a breakup with Ben. He’d broken her heart and her body into so many pieces that she’d needed a full month to restore herself. Emotional damage wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst were the bruises: actual black and blue bruises on her arms, stomach and back, and a healing patch on her calf where he had kicked her.
*****
It began as your not-so-average love story: Boy meets girl. He was sitting in the student’s bar just outside the University of Westminster when she had come across him. Having sat her final exam that day: Poetry and Politics, she was in the bar to drown all her anxieties about her under-performing. She’d ordered a beer when she saw him, sitting in the corner in a booth for two, all by his lonesome, reading a copy of ‘The Legend of Good Women’ by Chaucer, and sipping occasionally from his beer cup. Sitting there in his element, reading a book, enjoying a drink under the candid yellow glow of the lamp which basked him in a glow of elegant light, she could think of nothing more poetic. That’s when she decided to ditch her friend, who seemingly was not about to miss Emma, and approach the gentleman.
Reaching him, she said, “You’re reading Chaucer. I think I flunked my exam today because of him.”
He looked up at her through his spectacles and smiled. “You’re a freshman. Well, I’m to blame for that arduous paper. I sort of wrote it myself!”
“You’re Professor Epping’s TA?” she asked incredulously and sat down next to him, not even bothering to ask his permission. She’d learn soon enough that not asking his permission would earn her a slap across her face from him. Forgetting to heat up dinner before he got home? A punch on the shoulder, and not the friendly sort either. However, she could not for the life of her foresee any of this, as she sat next to this dazzling man.
“Indeed I am. And I shouldn’t be saying this, but that old dog always gives everyone a B+ in his paper. So, you needn’t worry,” he said, closing
the book and giving her his undivided attention. He didn’t have to do much to woo her. By the end of their conversation, Emma was infatuated with the man whose words were as smooth as silk. Having enjoyed a few too many drinks, they ended up at his place, which was closer to the bar and to the university, where they had sex. Come to think of it, his prowess in bed and equally accomplished a critic of English Literature, were the basis of their relationship.
It turned ugly really soon. After a few months of being together, Ben got her pregnant. Emma insisted that she wanted the baby, which meant she’d have to drop out of university. Ben would graduate in a few months. He said that he’d be there for her and be a good father to her child. Ironically when he said that, his breath reeked of alcohol. It would stink of alcohol on varying levels throughout their relationship.
Bereft by pregnancy hormones, she started crying in the car on their way back from the gynaecologist. Ben pulled the car over and killed the engine. He looked at her, and bent towards her. She anticipated a kiss or maybe a hug, but he slapped her open-handed across the face and said, “You need to shut the hell up! I can’t drive, both drunk and pissed off at your wailing!”
That was the first manifestation of physical violence. Everything went downhill from there. First was the onset of binge drinking (yes, in that blue mug) all day long. When he was not drinking, he was writing short stories and presenting submissions to magazines. Surprisingly, he made good money off of those submissions, which was spent on booze and not deposited into the joint account they’d set up for their baby.
After the baby was born, he became even more irrational, complaining that she didn’t give him any attention or company. To be honest, she tried to stay the hell out of his way whenever he was home. It was not like they were in a relationship anymore. She felt suffocated, trapped in a house with an abusive man who happened to be the father of their daughter. Her parents had always been against their relationship. Parents have the uncanny ability to see through a person instantly, and what took Emma the better part of a year to realise, they had already known on their first encounter with Ben.
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