A woman was crying; muffled, consistent sobs coming from upstairs. The draws of breath between her sobs sounded like hollow rattles. Emma stood frozen in her spot, halfway to opening the cabinet. This was no hallucination, she thought. She was hearing this very clearly. The TV was off and there was no other sound source in the house that could be emitting such noises. It was a woman. And the woman was crying.
Emma gathered her strength and decided to investigate. She crept up the stairs, following the sound of the distressed voice. Each step she took brought her closer to the agonizing whimpering laden with sadness coming from upstairs. If it was a ghost, it was a sad one. The empathy in Emma wanted to console the woman; her sensibility stopped her from doing that.
The sound seemed to be coming from her own bedroom. The sobbing worsened as Emma got closer to her room. She could not take it anymore. The suspense was killing her more than the fear. She opened the door of her room and looked inside.
No one was there. The crying stopped. Emma breathed a sigh of relief and blamed this new happening on her hallucinating mind. I really need to see a therapist soon.
She turned back to go down to the kitchen. Standing face to face with her was the same supernatural apparition she saw last night. The ghost of the woman was standing uncomfortably close to Emma. Emma’s scream stuck in her throat. The cold aura of the ghost was touching her. In the dark corridor where they stood facing each other, Emma saw that the spectre was translucent. She seemed to be emitting a silvery light and yet Emma could see through her. The ghost’s face was sombre. In the grimaced crevices of her face, Emma could sense sadness and torture. Her eyes were riddled with death. Emma could not help but blink as she looked at this phantasmal phenomenon. It became clear to her that this was neither a hallucination nor her imagination. She moved her hand towards the ghost impulsively but before she could bring it closer, the apparition disappeared, like dissipating mist.
That’s when Emma screamed. The realization of this confrontation hit her only once it was over. She screamed with all the voice she could muster. The terror of it all brought tears to her eyes. The dread shook her legs. She looked around. The house seemed darker and more ominous. She ran down the stairs into the living room, which was the only room besides the kitchen where the fluorescent light was turned on.
All breath seemed to have stuck in Emma’s lungs. She rummaged through the shelf where she kept her wine bottles, toppling many bottles, until she found the flask of whiskey she had whisked from her father’s basement before she’d come here. She uncorked the flask and poured herself a generous serving. She glugged it and felt it seer its way down her throat, warming her stomach and providing much-needed emotional sedation.
It was only eight at night. Her parents were still with Kylie at the cinema. Despite the whiskey, she was still freaking out. She needed human comfort. Jennifer.
She picked up her phone and dialled Jen’s number with shaky fingers. One ring. Two rings. Then Jen picked up. “Hello?”
Upon hearing her friend’s voice, she could not bear it anymore. Emma had contained herself for so long. After her breakup with Ben, she had tried so hard to keep her tears at bay. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t cry again. But coming face to face with manifested horror was too much. She burst into tears and wailed into the phone, “Jen! I need you to come over right now!” She paused for a moment while her sobs punctuated the tense silence. “Jen! Come over! Please!”
Jennifer hung up the phone. After ten minutes, Emma heard a car on her drive. She rushed out of her house with the whiskey glass still in hand, barefoot. Jennifer got out of car, looking perplexed and worried. Emma fell into her arms and wept to her horrified heart’s desire. Jennifer hugged her back and patted her head, saying the corniest words one says to comfort someone: ‘its ok, its ok.’
Jennifer took her friend inside the house and seated her on the sofa. “Now, calm down and tell me what happened? Was it Ben? Did he come by?" she asked.
Emma chugged down the remainder of her drink and looked at Jennifer with wide, bloodshot eyes. “There was a ghost Jen! A ghost!”
Jennifer shared Emma’s disbelief in such things as ghosts or even a god, for that matter. This mutual disdain for orthodox views was one of the foundations of their long friendship. The words coming out of Emma’s mouth did not make sense to Jennifer. “A ghost you say?”
“I know what you’re thinking. That’s what I used to think too. But I swear to God, Jennifer,” Jennifer scoffed, “I saw a ghost of a young girl dressed in a Victorian nightgown, with blond hair and ghastly eyes! I heard her crying too! I saw her last night too, and thought that I was imagining it. But I saw it again today, Jen! Oh my God!” she finished and burst into tears again.
Jennifer sat beside her friend and put her arm around her. “I believe you,” she lied. She didn’t. Truth be told, she was more inclined to believe that Emma was slipping; her hold on sanity was loosening. And it was not her fault. Coming out of a relationship so unhealthy and negative, it’s natural to have such inexplicable experiences. The psychiatrists call it post-traumatic stress disorder. One can hallucinate under the influence of stress and tension. It’s common knowledge. She decided to prod around the topic lightly, so as not to show Emma that she thought that the poor woman was delusional.
“Have you decided to visit a therapist?”
“I did. But I put it off for tomorrow. I know what you’re thinking, Jennifer, that I am going through shock. But that’s not what it is. I dismissed it but it kept recurring. I don’t need you to try and explain this to me. Just stay here with me till my parents come back with Kylie. I can’t be alone. Be my friend and stay,” Emma said. She wiped the tears off her cheek with the scruff of her shirt.
“I’m here Ems,” Jennifer said and squeezed Emma’s hand. Jennifer shifted her gaze all around the house and started considering in earnest whether the house may indeed be haunted. There were subtle signs. First off, the house was old, a century older than the surrounding houses. Given its antiquity, it should have been proclaimed a historical landmark. The wallpapers looked stale and no degree of fluorescent illumination could improve their insipidness. Everything about the house’s location screamed ‘horror’ at the top of its lungs. It’s aloofness; it’s surroundings and its mysteriously low selling price disproportionate to the real estate market where houses in the area sold at triple the price. Perhaps Emma was right. Perhaps there was some shady business going on here.
Jennifer went to the open shelf with the toppled wine bottles and took one out. She knew of just the thing to distract Emma. “You know what I did today at the firm? I reported McMahan to Human Resources finally. Said that he was harassing me. And they all took my word for it! Ha!”
“Oh! Really! I thought I saw him looking pissed today at work. What’s going to happen to him?”
“They’ve suspended him without pay till further notice. I told him, this law-firm ain’t big enough for two paralegals!” Jennifer said, and giggled hysterically. That got Emma going too. She forgot her problems momentarily and joined in on the laughter. The two women gossiped office politics until another car, Kylie and Emma’s parents, parked in the driveway.
By the time her parents had come in through the door with Kylie in their arms, Emma had calmed down to the point where she agreed with Jennifer that whatever she had seen or heard over the past couple of days was nothing more than her stress manifesting itself in various forms, taking inspiration from reading all those Shirley Jackson horror books. She made a solemn vow to not read any more of those books for at least a couple of months.
*****
“Guess what happened to us at the cinema,” Lucile said as she put Kylie down on the sofa. To Emma’s horror, Kylie still had both porcelain dolls clinging to her chest.
“What happened?” she asked distractedly.
“The cinema staff at the door wouldn’t let us in. He said that we were hiding cameras in those dolls and that we were going to rec
ord the film and upload it to the internet!” Robert, her father said and laughed mirthfully. “And then I had to explain it to him, ‘Son, if we were that tech savvy, we would have downloaded the film and watched it on our computers!’”
“Anyway, we talked to the manager and explained that our granddaughter wouldn’t let us leave the dolls in the car, so either he should let us watch the film or we’ll be on our way,” Lucile said. “He seemed to be an understanding man. He allowed us to go through.”
Emma stared at the dolls’ eyes. They were glasslike, and if you stared long enough, like Nietzsche’s abyss, they stared back, as if they were alive. No wonder the cinema guy thought that there were camera’s hidden inside. She made a mental note to destroy the dolls, no matter how psychotic that sounded in her head, as soon as possible. Haunted or not, they freaked the shit out of her.
*****
Jennifer and her parents took their leave together around ten that night. Jennifer had ordered dinner which the five of them ate in the dining room. This was the first time that Emma had used that room and her set of dishes and glassware. She was glad to have people around for this long.
After they’d all gone, she took Kylie to her bedroom instead of Kylie’s and decided that they’d sleep together in her room. Kylie had no problem with that as long as her mother allowed the dolls in the bed with her.
“Mummy. Lily wants to play with you,” she said as she tucked her dolls to her left.
“Aww Honey. You tell Lily that mummy’s too tired to play,” she kissed her daughter and turned the lamps off. Sleep came almost immediately to Emma and she fell in a deep slumber. The sound of the owls hooting outside didn’t bother her and neither did the gushing of the creek water. Kylie snored lightly beside her but even that didn’t trouble Emma. She ventured deeper and deeper into the void of slumber, past the point of dreamlessness and landed in that sweet spot between lucid dreaming and delirious nightmares.
*****
This is not a dream, she thought as she looked all around her. She was dressed in a nightgown and blonde hair fell on her shoulders. This was not her body. And she had no control over it. She was crying. In this vision, she could lucidly feel the heat of the tears trickling down her face. Emma looked around and saw that she was in an attic, standing by a window. The window looked over the creek. Whoever’s body she was in was scared. Her heart beat like a jackrabbit in her chest. And at the attic trapdoor someone seemed to be coming up the stairs. Emma started crying more desperately. A man was coming up. Emma scampered towards the window, trampling her diary and her books. Whoever this man was, he looked livid. It was a look Emma knew too well: it was the face of a drunken man. Wafts of whiskey stench emanated from him. Emma looked at him and knew for sure what this man was going to do to the girl’s body she was astral projecting in. He was going to assault her.
The man approached, his eyes red, his hands clawed and offensive like those of a werewolf. Each step he took shook the floor of the attic and each step brought him closer, causing her to cry even more helplessly. Emma wondered why no one was coming to rescue her. She shouted. “Uncle Please!”
This sickened her. This man was the girl’s uncle! And he was about to molest her! Standing over the girl, the man began groping at her, which she resisted, fighting his arms off with her flimsy ones. He pounced at her and her only possible recourse was to make for the window. Emma witnessed through the eyes of the girl, wide-eyed and fear-frozen, as she broke through the window, sending its rafters flying and fell down to the dark creek. A jagged rock split her head open and her lifeless body flailed with the flow of the black water.
Emma woke up gasping for breath. The air was cold. So cold all around her. She could see her breath materializing in front of her in white clouds of mist. She looked around and saw Kylie shivering in her sleep. The dream was unlike any she had ever experienced. Emma decided to worry about the dream later and first set the room thermostat.
She slid her feet out from under the blanket and touched the ground. The coldness of it stung her feet. She immediately put her slippers on and headed out her room to the thermostat panel.
“Come to me” a shard-like whisper echoed through the corridor. Emma flinched at the sound. Nonetheless, she made her way to the thermostat panel and turned up the heat. Someone or something had turned it all the way down to the coldest setting. Once she had corrected the thermostat, she walked back to her room.
“Come to me” the soft voice came from the trapdoor that led to the attic. Emma thought for a moment about her dream and wondered whether this was the attic in her dream.
“Come. Come. Come” the whispers grew louder and faster, urging Emma to make her way to the attic. It drove Emma to the edge of sanity. She plugged her fingers in her ears and made for her bedroom. Kylie was asleep, thank God for that. Emma climbed into her bed. She shut her eyes and pulled the blanket up over her face. The whispering didn’t abate. Instead, it grew closer and closer to the point where Emma could feel the ghost standing right next to her ear. “The attic” the whispers said.
The whispers did not die down. They became even more furious and louder till they were whispers no more but angry chants. Come to me. Come to the attic.”
She opened her eyes and saw the ghost girl standing right next to the bed. Emma looked at her and recognised her as the girl who had plummeted to her death in the dream. It was the same girl who had haunted her twice. Her pasty white translucent face with horror-struck eyes repeating the same thing.
“Go to the attic…”
Emma screamed. Kylie woke up and saw the hovering apparition. She too joined in on the screaming. Amidst her terrorized cries, Emma noticed that the ghost’s face turned into an angry grimace. As if she was angry that Emma was not going to the attic. The bed started shaking uncontrollably.
“Mummy!” Kylie screamed and clung to her mother. Her dolls fell to the floor. Emma, in a visceral impulse, grabbed her daughter and shot off the wildly jolting bed. She ran with the ghost at her heels. This time the spectre screamed with anger, “Come back!” but Emma did not look back. She ran for her life down the stairs and grabbed the car keys off the shelf. The walls started closing in around her, hindering her progress out the door. But she ran. She ran for the door as the space around her moved in to suffocate her and her daughter. She grasped the doorknob and turned but it didn’t budge. Instead, the knob became red hot and singed Emma’s hand. She let go and, as the walls threatened to squash her into a pulp, she summoned all the adrenaline charge and focused it in one forceful kick at the door. The door flung open and Emma ran to the car with her daughter. Both of them were crying; Emma from the shock of it all and Kylie out of terror.
As she got in her car and reversed it down the driveway, Emma took one last look at the house and saw that it looked normal. Except for the shimmering white apparition glaring down at her from the attic window.
Emma was convinced of one thing. This was neither a hallucination nor a manifestation of her stress. If Kylie could see that ghost too, that meant that it was real. And she had just spent the remnants of her savings on a haunted house.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Vile Discovery
Robert Kingsley thought he woke up to go to the toilet. At his age, every drop of urine was a blessing. But that was not it. Someone was banging at the door while ringing the bell. Lucile was awake, sitting upright in bed. She was shaking him awake.
“Ben. Ben, go check the door,” she said. “And take the bat with you,” she added in a hushed tone. This was all too Deja-vu-ish. Just one month ago, their daughter had turned up on their doorstep like a wounded animal, knocking and ringing the bell. Could it be her again? Lucile thought and crossed her fingers to pray to God.
Robert rushed down, as fast as his age would allow, and peeped through the door-hole. Just as Lucile had suspected, there stood Emma, looking utterly distraught, but thankfully without any signs of physical violence to her. Kylie clung to her chest, shaking to
rpidly. Robert immediately unlocked the bolts and opened the doors.
“Emma?” he asked in a worried voice. Emma came right in and waited for her father to lock the door again. During this time, Lucile had come down from her bedroom, knotting the front of her night gown. She rubbed her eyes sleepily and looked at Emma.
“Dad. Mum. I…” she began saying but stopped midway. She realized her error. The last person with whom she had shared this news had been Jennifer. And Jennifer had suggested psychiatric intervention. Her parents would think the same. They’d listen to her tale, nod and pat her head, and then they’d say what Jen had said. That her breakup with Ben had caused her to go headfirst into PTSD. She did need their help, but she had to do it without breaking the truth to them. “I can’t seem to get Kylie to calm down. She’s been screaming her head off ever since she came back. I tried taking her to bed, giving her milk and even lulling her to sleep but she’s been at my throat for the past five hours, wanting to go and see ‘gramma and gramps.’ I couldn’t figure out what to do. Can you keep her with you? For tonight?” When something goes wrong, blame it on the child. Grandparents always have a soft spot for their grandchildren.
Ben and Lucile took one look at Emma’s sleep-deprived face and assumed that she was telling the truth. They took Kylie to their bedroom and let Emma stay in her old room for the night. Emma did not sleep. She was devising a plan, an algorithm to tackle this poltergeist problem she was facing. Now that she had established that there was nothing wrong with her and that the ghost was actually real, she decided to take matters into her own hands and face her demon head on.
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