*****
Emma headed out of her parent’s house, leaving Kylie in their care. Before she got in her car, she called Kendrick, her boss. It was not his style to be awake at this hour. His day began at ten in the morning. Right now, it was seven. The robotic message instructing Emma to record her message after the beep played. After the beep, Emma took a deep breath and said, “Hello boss. I’m not feeling quite myself today. I’ll cover up tomorrow. Hope you can understand.” That last part was riddled with rhetoric. She knew she would not be in trouble with Kendrick. A douche he might be, but he was an empathetic douche when it came to Emma. Were it not for the fact that employers couldn’t hit on their secretaries (a clause in the law-firm rules and regulations that Kendrick himself had put in) he would have asked her out long ago. But there was a mutual respect between them, and this was the first time since she had joined the company that she was asking for a day off.
She then got in her car, totally oblivious of her current state. She was wearing pyjamas and a t-shirt that said, ‘world’s second best mum; my mum was number one’. Emma knew what she was going to do. Everything leaves a trail. Hauntings and ghosts too. And what better source for a trail than the newspaper? She was headed to the library, which she knew opened at seven o’ clock sharp every weekday, and she had decided that no matter how long it took, she would get answers out of the database of old newspapers. It was a daunting task. For starters, she had no clue where to even begin. How old was this house? She made a pit stop at the coffee shop for bagels and a large cup of frothy mochaccino. She thought, if I am going rogue for a day, why not do it with style. She tipped the barista generously and winked at her before going back to her car. The library was not far from the law-firm and for a minute Emma worried that someone from work might see her going in there.
At seven in the morning? Please, she scoffed and continued to the library. Thankfully, it was open just as she had predicted. She’d frequented this place ever since she was a little kid. Credit went to her mum (who, according to the t-shirt, was number one) for instilling a love for literature in Emma from an early age. She knew her way around the building like the back of her hand. After finishing her coffee and hurriedly devouring her bagels, Emma parked her car around the corner and fed the parking meter. She’d be gone for a long time. As she climbed the top of the steps, she attracted a lot of stares from passers-by but that was the least of her concerns.
*****
Emma was sitting in the old-records room, behind a computer that couldn’t be any slower. She irritatingly tapped her fingers on the mouse and waited for it to load the file she had clicked on.
Emma knew for a fact that ‘The Daily Telegraph’ was one of the oldest London papers still being published. In comparison to other papers, such as The London Gazette or the Daily Courant, it was still an infant, with its first publication in eighteen-fifty-five. Still, it was a reliable source of information and Emma felt a sense of familiarity with it, a familial closeness, since this was her parents chosen newspaper.
She decided to work her way from the back to the front, so she’d clicked on 1855’s database. It was a heavy and ancient database, and seemingly no one had accessed it before her. The loading screen finally gave way to a blurry display of newspapers. Emma knew a nifty trick she hoped would help her in her search. This was something she had learnt in her first week of college. You press the control key and the F key on the keyboard and type the exact phrase you’re searching for and the document will yield a result if it finds something.
She thought long and hard about what to type in the search box. Inspiration came to her like a jolt. Of course, it’s the house that was haunted. She typed ‘Shadow Creek House’ and hit search.
Nothing.
This did not put her off in the slightest. If anything, it strengthened her resolve. She’d only searched the database of the 1855’s newspapers. She clicked on the cross at the top right of the window and clicked on the 1856’s database.
This is going to take a lot of fucking time, she thought as she typed the same phrase in the search box.
*****
It turned out that she was right. It took her over five hours to sift through the first twenty years of publications. It would have been quicker had the computer not been such a drama queen and frozen after the first hour. It froze again at the end of every hour. During these freezes, Emma would go to the bathroom and get a cup of coffee from the table in the corner. Black coffee on an empty stomach was a bad idea. Besides making her super-hyper, her stomach developed hunger pangs.
Nevertheless, she persevered and after five hours her search bore fruit. She found what she was looking for in the 1887 database. She’d typed in ‘Shadow Creek House’ in a hopeless attempt, with her belly grumbling loudly echoing in the silent vastness of the library. But this time around, the search actually showed up a result.
The first result showed up on November14th’s front page, where a small section headed ‘Disturbed teen takes own life’ appeared between a cigarette advertisement and a giant piece on ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Emma knew about Bloody Sunday. She’d read about it in her history class at high school. Basically, it was a march against unemployment and coercion in Ireland during which the British Army and the Metropolitan Police attacked the protestors. She zoomed in on the little news piece about the teen taking her life.
‘Lily Wescott, daughter of esteemed civil engineer, Charles Wescott, ended her life last night at the Shadow Creek House, where she was residing under care of her maternal aunt, Mary Sutton, and uncle, Edward Sutton, a dignified member of Her Majesty’s Home Civil Service…. (cont’d on page 14)’
Emma paused before going to page 14 of the newspaper, thinking hard. Lily. She had heard this name before. Where? She gasped with incredulity when she recalled that it was her three-year-old daughter who had mentioned this name twice.
“Lily told me a joke.”
“Mommy. Lily wants to play with you.”
That’s what her daughter had said to her. Was Lily the ghost of the girl she had seen? Most likely. Knowing in her heart that there was more to the story than met her eyes, Emma clicked to the fourteenth page of the paper, where a blurb appeared about Lily Wescott, with a couple of portraits. She zoomed in and gasped for the second time in a minute when she saw Lily’s picture. It was the ghost girl!
But that was not the end of it. Alongside the dead girl’s photo was a portrait of a husband and wife sitting alongside each other, and in the backdrop of the picture, stood Shadow Creek House. She zoomed in on that picture too and uttered a vehement scream when she saw the face of the man.
She had seen this man last night in her dream! He was drunk and lustful and he had attacked Lily in hopes of taking advantage of her. Next to the portrait, a small caption read, “Mr and Mrs. Sutton are distraught upon the loss of their niece.”
Right, you creep, you didn’t look so distraught when you were trying to assault her! She thought angrily. This was not the end of her search. She searched again and came across another result: This one was a month later, in December; Mary Sutton died having succumbed to her disease. And in January, Edward Sutton’s body was found foaming at the mouth, dead on the doorsteps of his own home.
This was too much information for Emma to process. She printed the three newspapers and headed out of the library, to the only place where any of this would make any sense. The attic of her house.
*****
It was two-thirty in the afternoon when Emma parked in the driveway of her home. She crept up the porch steps, thinking that this was where Edward Sutton had died while choking on his own vomit, as poison clogged his brain and shut down his heart. Visualizing this image made her nauseous. She held her hand to her mouth to stop herself from throwing up. The tempestuous sea of black coffee in her stomach was bound to make her throw up sooner or later. Better later.
She went inside her house and turned the lights on. There were no signs of the horror that had ensued last night. T
he walls seemed normal and everything looked to be in place. Emma wasted no time stalling and headed straight up the stairs. There was an entrance to an attic here somewhere. But where? She couldn’t find it. She supposed it was built with the intention of being concealed, as a safe-room or a hideout. She retraced the steps of the ghost from the night of the first haunting. The spectre had walked all the way down to the end of the corridor and disappeared.
Emma looked up at the ceiling and saw sleek slits. She looked around for a rope or a tripwire for the trapdoor but there was none. Annoyed at this inconvenience, she went to her room and picked up a chair. She placed the chair beneath the trapdoor and took hold of a broom leaning against the wall. She’d never hired a cleaner, and this broom was one of the five she had placed all around the house for her convenience. Emma prodded the trapdoor with the handle of the broom. It budged and a shower of dust fell on Emma. She coughed and batted her eyes, battling this tirade of dirt, then prodded again until the trapdoor came loose. It opened up and a flight of retractable stairs slid down.
Convenient, she thought and without reassessing what she was doing (which was entering the metaphorical lion’s den like a vulnerable sheep) she climbed up into the attic.
*****
Bleak rays of sunlight broke through the dust-riddled windows. There were two of them. One looked out at the front of the house and the other was to the left of the room. This one Emma remembered vividly from her dream. This was the window from which Lily had jumped to her death. The rest of the attic was draped in darkness. There were boxes upon boxes of packed items and items of furniture, which Emma puzzled over the logistics of having got them in through the small attic door. It was all Victorian furniture, and in a moment of materialistic thinking Emma thought that it would sell for a fortune on eBay. People love antiquated things. She shoved that thought roughly from her head, focusing on the important matter at hand.
There was something in here that the ghost had wanted her to find. What could it be? She remembered from the dream that Lily had trampled over a diary and some books. She turned her iPhone torch on and put the phone in her mouth, like a wild miner in search of a way out. She started unpacking boxes from the far-right corner of the room. Most contained clothes, cutlery and obsolete ledgers bearing the English crown’s insignia. During her search, Emma was aware of another presence in the attic. The room was cold. Just like her bedroom had been cold before Lily had shown up. She chuckled mirthlessly upon the thought that if she had one of those EMF devices they showed in Myth busters, she’d be able to prove to the rest of the world that a ghost existed in this room. At half past three, almost an hour after she’d arrived, Emma found a moss-ridden box sitting unnoticeably in the middle of the room, hiding in plain sight as it were. She disregarded her concern of getting the moss on her hand and pulled the carton open.
As sure as the day outside, there were diaries by the dozen in that box. Just like the diary she had seen in her dream. She pulled the heavy box to the left window, where the sunlight was strongest, and sat down beside it, turning off her iPhone’s torch. She wouldn’t need it until the sun was up.
She pulled out all the diaries. There were eleven. Thankfully, Lily had been very methodical. Each diary had her name on the front page and every entry was dated. Emma sifted through the diaries until she found the very first diary with the earliest entry. The pages were ancient, yellow and fragile. With the utmost care, Emma held the diary in the sunlight and began reading Lily’s entries. The pages held their own pretty well. The writing on them was slightly difficult for Emma to understand, primarily because it was in cursive. She always had had trouble with cursive. But after the first few pages, she got the hang of Lily’s writing.
What was written on the pages was disturbing. Each detail was gruesomely penned. Amidst the scribbles were dented circles in the pages, which Emma understood were teardrops that had dried. With each page, she turned, her expressions became wilder and wilder. She could not believe what she was reading.
She read through the first two diaries, in her defence, they were kind of small with only fifty pages per diary, and paused. The details were horrifying. In comparison to the heinous acts of ungodliness that Edward Sutton had performed upon Lily, Emma’s own ex-boyfriend looked like a tame cat.
She threw up on the floor beside her, retching with disgust and revulsion. She could not read another word of it. But this seemed important to Lily. She’d gone to great pains to write these entries. Each account was regularly written and updated daily in the diary.
So immersed was Emma in reading the diary that she did not notice the sun creeping back into the horizon. Night had fallen. At some time, she had turned on her torch, and was holding it in her mouth, focusing its light on the pages of the last diary. Never before had she read anything so quickly and so direly. Tears were streaming down her face uncontrollably. The last entry in the diary was dated twelfth November eighteen eighty-seven.
My body has never felt more violated. He is lurking around on the floor below, looking for me. I can only hide in this attic for so long. There’s no way out for me except death. It hurts down there. He’s been ravaging my body for months without respite. I wonder when it will end for him, and how.
I wish upon him the very worst fate and pray that he dies a most gruesome death for doing to me what he has…
There’s no one I can disclose this to. If anyone is reading my diary, please, I appeal to your better nature, let the truth be known. Whether I am dead, or worse, still in this monster’s hold, I want it revealed to the world, what a demonic fiend he is. Consider this my one and only request…
That was the end of it. Emma’s tears marked the pages alongside Lily’s. She wiped them off and returned the diaries to the box. Fear and horror was replaced with sadness and empathy for the dead girl. The world did not know her story; the newspapers were evidence of that. They’d assumed that she had committed suicide.
Emma stared out the window, noticing the beautiful view for the first time since she had come up to the attic. Had she been here under different circumstances, she might have appreciated the grandeur of the river Thames, flowing in its splendour. She would have admired the church’s bell tower emerging through the surrounding thicket of trees. She would have loved the omnipresent pristine greenery.
Before she could think further, she turned around to find the angry face of Lily’s apparition staring at her with red eyes blazing with malice and anger. She looked at Emma and screamed a bloodcurdling shriek. The ghost grasped Emma by her throat and threw her across the room.
Oh no, she’s still angry that I left abruptly last night, Emma thought as she gathered herself together. As the ghoul floated towards her, with murderous intent, she screamed, “Lily! Don’t! I know!”
The ghost stopped dead in its tracks and the red eyes became normal. The malicious look faded into a grimace of sadness and she began sobbing. Emma collected her courage and walked towards Lily. She was hovering in the air in the centre of the attic.
“I’m sorry Lily. I’m sorry for what happened to you. I wish such ill fate had not befallen you. I sincerely do,” Emma said and stood face to face with the translucent manifestation of a girl who, while she lived, was beautiful.
The ghost touched Emma’s face. Her hands were wintry frosty. Emma shuddered but kept still. Lily gazed into Emma’s eyes and said, “You know now. You know.”
“Yes Sweetheart. I know,” Emma said as more tears cascaded down her cheeks, past the luminous hand on her cheek.
“Everyone must know. Tell my story to the world,” Lily said and disappeared. Within moments, the attic floor jolted like an earthquake had hit the house. Emma grabbed the box of diaries and her phone and made for the trapdoor in an attempt to save her life. She dropped the box of diaries and jumped down after them, not using the stairs in her haste. The floor stopped shaking. But once Emma was downstairs, the lights began flickering.
Why is she still haunting me? Emma thought.
“Tell it to the world!” a shrill voice came from the attic above.
“I will! I will! I promise I will! You need to stop haunting me! I’m on your side!” she yelled back at the attic in a mixed state of fear and fury. The flickering and the shaking stopped.
Oh, my dear God, what have I gotten myself into? Emma thought wildly as she collected the box of diaries and headed down the flight of stairs to her writing room. It was finally time to put that room and its contents to good use.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Reeking of Hate
That night Emma wrote like her life depended upon it. And her conviction was true. The ghost had seemingly spared her only to share her tale with the world.
Emma sat with the diaries spread out on her desk next to the typewriter. She’d decided what she was going to do, and she needed to do it right. She spent all that night transcribing page after page of the diary on her typewriter, taking utmost care not to divulge anything. Reading that diary had been one thing, but rewriting its contents was quite another. Each line that she wrote sunk into her conscience, affecting her with the grisly reality of Lily’s torture. She could not imagine a worse fate befalling someone. This empathy motivated the transcribing of these diaries into manuscript form.
She hadn’t eaten anything in a day. There was no time for hunger, sleep, thirst or even visiting the toilet tonight. She typed till her fingers ached and then she typed some more. When the first slivers of sunlight peeked in through the window of her writing room, Emma looked up from the typewriter and saw all around her. She was on to the last page of the last diary. With aching fingers, she typed the last lines ending with ‘The End.’
To her left was a huge pile of pages. Pages that she had filled overnight with transcriptions of Lily’s diaries. Beside her feet on the floor lay four exhausted typewriter ribbons, drained of ink. She looked victoriously at the pile of pages and proclaimed out loud, “There, I’ve written your story, Lily.”
13 Hauntings Page 27
