13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  The painting of Saint Jude, the patron saint of the lost causes.

  Something was horribly wrong with it. The saint’s face was grimaced with horror. And from his eyes, blood poured down his face. Thick blood. Dark blood. He was crying. What a horrendous time it must be if the patron saint of the lost causes himself had forsaken all hope. Ava uttered a squeaked sob. She’d frozen at this display of premonitory horror. She extended her trembling hand to the windowpane, and touched the saint’s eyes. Blood smeared on her fingers. Definitely real blood.

  Something slithered in the corner again. Ava screamed. She ran back to her room and didn’t come out for the rest of the night.

  From her travel bag, Melanie removed two Valium tablets and chugged them down with the cold cocoa. Sleep came but it was disturbed. Terror filled slumber echoing with nightmares that she couldn’t make sense of.

  *

  Claire was in the farthest room which was fitted with several bunk beds. She was drifting off to sleep in one of them when she heard her sister scream.

  It’s not a scream, you idiot, it’s the thunder cracking outside, she thought and forced herself to sleep. She was a light sleeper, yes, but sleep came easy when it did.

  Claire woke up only moments later, to the sound of a man’s footsteps. They were heavy and thudded by her bedside. She dismissed the sound at first, as being rain-related, but when she heard an unmistakable grunt of a man, she opened her eyes.

  A priest was standing near her bed. In his hand was a bucket. Claire looked at him, aghast with horror, because the priest had no eye. From his eye socket jutted a dagger. His bucket was filled with blood.

  “God has forsaken us! The devil and his hellhounds are abound,” the priest whispered, slopping blood from the bucket onto the floor. Claire blinked her frozen eyes, not believing what she was seeing. When she opened her eyes again, the priest was there no more.

  She did not sleep for the rest of the night. The shadows cast by the candle scared her. The rain patters took the sound of whispers and the occasional thunder sounded like the maniacal bark of a hellhound. At some point in the night, she even peed herself.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Tainted with Blood

  “I don’t know about you gals but I had a very good sleep!” Melanie said and yawned loudly with her arms stretched in a T-shape. Claire and Ava both looked at her with envy. They were avoiding each other’s gaze because, even though they did not discuss it, it was obvious from their sunken eyes that neither had slept at all that night.

  “Well, we didn’t,” Claire said finally. They were in the kitchen, eating their self-made breakfast while the electrician connected the building. Melanie was scraping butter over her bread, Claire was drinking coffee and Ava had cooked herself an omelette. The stove worked like a charm.

  “What do you mean ‘we’?” asked Melanie.

  “I know I didn’t sleep one wink, and by the looks of it neither did Ava,” Claire said.

  “Was everything alright?”

  “I don’t know. I think I got a jump scare in the middle of the night,” Ava said, and she told her sisters about Saint Jude’s crying painting. Claire registered this with credibility while Melanie simply looked at Ava with disdain.

  “Yeah me too. I didn’t want to admit it. At first I thought it was a case of your average sleep paralysis. But no. It was horrendously vivid, whatever happened to me. I don’t want to relive something like that again,” Claire said. This time Melanie couldn’t help but scoff loudly. Both her sisters looked at her angrily. She said, “|You were tired from the day’s activities, you were in a new place… It’s normal. This stuff happens.”

  After much arguing, they decided not to speak of it further. Melanie went to her room to rearrange the beds as they had been. Claire and Ava, still slightly scared, went outside and watched the electrician connect the wires.

  It was a sunny day and the rain from last night was evaporating into humidity. Thankfully, the stone walls of the church had kept the inside cold and cosy. Melanie readjusted the sheets and threw the burnt wicks into the rubbish bin. On her way to fetch her iPad off her bed, she saw through the window, a young girl in a white dress, prowling the woods. She certainly knew her way around and didn’t appear to be lost. Melanie wanted to greet the girl. It was an innocent enough sight; the girl walking amidst gravestones, as if contemplating some mystery known only to her.

  She found the door at the back of the church, and headed out towards the girl.Once she was outside, Melanie saw what she hadn’t at first noticed through the window. The girl’s dress was tattered. In fact, it was downright shabby. As Melanie walked towards her, she noticed the splotches of blood on her dress. Oh God, was that her period? Melanie thought and briskly paced towards the girl, who had now walked into the far corner of the clearing, near the woods.

  “Hey girl!” Melanie said in as pleasant a manner as she could. The girl turned around and saw Melanie. Melanie meant to follow but at that moment her foot got caught in a swampy puddle in the ground. Rainwater mixed with soft earth. Shit, she said in her mind. Looking up from the ground, there was no sign of the girl. One stone cross jutted out of the ground in that corner of the clearing, aloof from the other graves. Melanie walked towards it, not minding her squelching feet. The cross said ‘Albrecht’. Nothing else. No first name, no middle name, just one name: Albrecht. Melanie walked back to the church wondering who the girl had been, and what kind of grave was that. There was not so much as a date on it. It didn’t occur to her that perhaps the two, the girl and the grave, were connected.

  *

  “Whoa, the place looks altogether different with the lights turned on!” Ava said. She was thankful for that. Whatever had scurried in the night, whether it was a rodent or the devil himself, wouldn’t do so in the light; rodents, and even the devil, hate light. At least she believed that.

  The day had passed rather uneventfully; the electricians had set up the wiring, the sisters moved their luggage to their room and Claire remained insistent that she wanted to sleep alone.

  “Maybe it’s better if we all sleep in different rooms. We get to check if they’re all okay, like temperature wise, in the night,” Melanie said. Ava did not like this idea at all. But she obliged. She went into the room next to Claire’s. These were the only three rooms downstairs. There were four more rooms upstairs. All were equipped with beds, tables and chairs, but neither of them wanted to stay there. There was much work that needed to be done at the house. They needed to fill the cupboards with clothes, the bathrooms with soaps, toothpastes and towels, the pantry with food and the living room with sofas, tables and a TV. They had installed Wi-Fi in the building, of course, it being a necessity far more important than drinking water. There was not yet an adequate water supply in the house. They filled water cans from the village. The water in the bathrooms was salty. The plumber had explained that the pipes needed to wash themselves of the deposits that had gathered in there over the years. The girls decided to use fresh drinking water for their ablutions instead. It was inconvenient but it was better than risking infection from rusty water. Lastly, the place had to look homely and welcoming. Right now, it looked drab and rather grotesque, even with the lighting and the new furniture in the bedroom. Claire had suggested that they paint over the stone walls. They agreed to do so in the next few days. The paint had arrived earlier that morning.

  They ate their supper in silence, each of them brooding over their personal experiences over the past few hours. Melanie didn’t share hers with her sisters. She was pretty sure there was nothing supernatural about it.

  They ordered Chinese takeaway for dinner from the only Chinese restaurant in the town. But the guy on the phone said, in his husky voice, he didn’t deliver after dark. In fact, he was closing his shop as they spoke. And then he hung up the phone. So they made do with the supplies in the kitchen. Melanie cooked up a mean steak and opened a bottle of wine. Claire made herself coffee to accompany dinner.

/>   “This habit’s going to kill you one day,” Ava said onerously. Normally Claire would have replied with a snide jibe but she was not in the mood today. Her mind kept replaying that vivid image of the priest with the bucketful of blood in his hands. Oh, and he was missing an eye.

  After this silent dinner, they retired to their own rooms. Nothing out of the ordinary happened during the night. Ava started reading her mother’s diaries to pass the dark hours. The first few diaries were rather depressing. She put a dog ear mark in the third diary before going to sleep. Her mother had written some vaguely disturbing stuff: Oppression at the hand of the warden at the care institution she used to live in; violence amidst other girls; the time when her pet cat disappeared only to reappear mangled and ripped apart on the road to the town, and other depressing stuff. All of her entries perpetuated her desire to run away from this place. That this place was evil somehow.

  Melanie kept looking out of her window for the girl who had appeared and disappeared so unexpectedly. She could swear to God that there was something moving out there in the dark. And then she laughed. Of course, there was. The trees in the wind! What else? She shrugged off the irrational thoughts of anything paranormal lurking in the night.

  Claire slept with the lights on. She didn’t notice them flicker on and off in the night. She only stirred slightly in her sleep to the sound of scratching echoed in the main hall. But it was distant and relatively quiet so it didn’t wake her, nor anyone else for that matter.

  It was the cross in the hall, the one holding the excruciated Jesus. It was moving of its own accord against the wall, tilting and tilting till it was turned upside down. Where is then remained.

  St. Jude wept some more. And this time the angels joined in. When morning came, the mosaic glass windows in the main hall were tainted with blood.

  *

  The next morning, Ava and Claire looked at the reversed cross with horror. Who had done such a thing? Melanie came out of the bathroom with a towel around her head and a bathrobe around her body and gasped at the cross.

  “Dammit… We seriously need to up our security, girls,” she said.

  “You think this is the work of some village vandal?” Ava asked, unbelievingly. To her it seemed farfetched that someone would creep in in the middle of the night and turn Jesus upside down.

  “Well, try and make sense of it,” Melanie said. “We came to town, we bought the church and then we started all these renovations. You know, some of those villagers might be against this. They might consider this place to be sacred, and us as nothing more than agents of change.”

  “Pretty sacred it must have been to them,” Claire scoffed. “Who the hell goes as far as to turn a cross upside down?”

  “I don’t know. But we should bolt all the doors before sleeping from now on,” Melanie said matter-of-factly and proceeded to her room.

  Ava and Claire were still unnerved. This did not look like the work of miscreants. Unless those miscreants were supernatural, which seemed more likely. They did not share their apprehension with Melanie.

  For the rest of the week, nothing out of the ordinary happened. And as the next Sunday approached, the Wright sisters were too immersed in work around the church to remember the strange activities at the beginning of their stay.

  The rooms were decorated with posters, colourful paint and paraphernalia suited to children: teddy bears, toys, games and a few computers. It looked a very homely place by all definitions. When they looked at the work they’d done over the past week, Melanie and her sisters couldn’t help but feel proud of themselves. And they knew their mother would be too.

  Everything was well for the time being. Until all hell broke loose all over again. This time viler, vindictive and vicious.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  The Blood Moon

  By Sunday night all the preparations were complete. The previously Hallow Church was now a seemingly warm, cosy and welcoming residential house for underprivileged children and orphans.

  Ava, Claire and Melanie were sitting on sofas in a corner of the main hall, around a coffee table, surrounded by empty boxes of Thai takeout and empty bottles of beer. This time they placed their order well before sundown and had it delivered. The delivery guy had even succumbed to the seduction of their hefty tip and included a stock of beer from the village.

  “Pleasant work you folks have done around the church. I guess it is back to normal now, isn’t it?” he had said upon taking his leave, gratefully eying his tip.

  “What do you mean back to normal?” Ava asked. Any news about the church was interesting to her and this speculative comment by the delivery boy had caught her interest. What did he mean by that?

  “Never mind” he said and left hurriedly. It was nearing evening.

  “We’ve been in this place one whole week and I still can’t understand the inexplicable night time behaviour of the villagers. What is their deal?” Claire said after dinner, when they were slightly drunk from the beer and tipping on the sleepy spectrum of post-dinner contentment.

  “They are superstitious. That’s it. It’s a village for Christ’s sake,” Melanie said, winking at the effigy of Jesus, “I mean, for all we know, they might think that polio is still rampant worldwide!”

  “Right you are,” Ava said. She had stopped reading her mother’s diaries the same night she had started. She felt guilty for stopping so abruptly but, to be honest, she couldn’t find the courage to continue. There was too much depression poured in those pages. Too much negativity. And she had yet to reach the part where her mother commented about the villagers and the dark lore of the church. She would read it tonight in bed, so she did not yet know any of that. Right now, her eyes were groggy and her breath stank of one too many beers. She said goodnight to her sisters and stumbled off to her bedroom, where there was now a fifty-inch television set, as was there in every bedroom. They’d connected SKY TV and the service was quite good. She tuned in to BBC, which was airing a rerun of Sherlock’s second season. She liked Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch was the bomb, in her opinion. She wouldn’t tell anyone this, but at times she had masturbated to his pictures. And in her slightly drunken condition, as she lay in her bed watching Watson decipher Sherlock’s outstanding case-cracking, she put her hand inside her panties and began rubbing. This was the first time in many weeks she had touched herself. But before she could climax, a thought hit her. Masturbating in the house of God! Shame on you, whore!

  The thought was so alien like; it didn’t feel like it originated in her own mind. It felt like someone had whispered it in a long corridor and only a faint echo of it reached her. She stopped immediately. And then she dozed off to sleep.

  In her dream, she was in bed, going at it hot and heavy with none other than Sherlock. It wasn’t Benedict, it wasn’t Robert Downey Jr either, it was just Sherlock; the one you see on the paperback cover. And he was having his way with her. With her consent, of course. One moment he was on top of her and she was moaning with pleasure and the next moment, he was there no more and in his stead, a dark spectre with eyes fierce red hovered over her. Ava could not breath. She was terrified out of her wits. And then the spectre extended its claws around her neck and tightened them around her. She gasped for breath but there was none. She was dying.

  The very next moment, she was not. She had woken up; her throat was aching and sore. She looked wildly around for signs of intrusion but there were none. She was all alone and the door was locked from the inside, just as Melanie had instructed.

  Ava had been choked and the marks of fingers-unbeknownst were still red around her neck. She shook it off as a case of sleep apnoea. Her sleep was gone. She looked around her bed for her mother’s diaries, the only reading matter in the room at the moment. TV wouldn’t do her any good. It’d make her livider. She removed a random diary from the box and began perusing its pages. It diarised her mother at thirteen. Her adolescent scribbling was rough and forceful. Ava read through one or two pages mindlessly un
til she reached an entry which she could not ignore.

  Dark spirits, they roam here and by the Lord’s name I swear, I’ve seen them in the black of the night. That’s why the villagers never go out. This town. This place is blood ministration.

  Kill. Kill. That’s what they’re going to do. The evil that lurks here, I know of it. Everyone knows of it yet they daren’t speak aloud. I bet Robin knows too. And I know where it comes from.

  The unhallowed sanctum of the devil, the Hallow Church (oh how ironic)

  That was the extent of the diary entry. Ava stiffened. Too much fear renders you frozen. Adrenaline jams your system. Fight or flight become two distant possibilities, with only one plausible option remaining in that moment: freeze and accept your fate. Ava could not believe what she had read. This meant that her being choked in her sleep was no sleep apnoea and the other incidents were very real.

  She had to warn her sisters. Ava got out of bed and went for the door. She unbolted it but it didn’t budge. She pulled it with all her strength but it didn’t move. Whatever strength she had mustered to get out of the bed left her once again. Dissolved with fear, she collapsed on the floor in a manic state, put her hands over her ears and crawled into a foetal position. She stayed like that till the morning.

  *

  Claire was deep asleep. A combination of beer, food and coffee tended to do that to her. And in those blue moon deep slumbers, she wouldn’t wake up even if the world was ending and the siren of death was trumpeting right next to her ear.

  But something made her wake up. A pain that scratched all over her body. It was too much. She woke up with a cry and turned the light on. Before she could register the feelings on her body she saw, in the dim glow of the bedside lantern, the same priest who had appeared before, standing by her bed with the bucketful of blood. His eye-or where there used to be one- was dripping pus and oozy blood. He yelled at her, “the hellhounds abound!” and spilled the bucket of blood all over the floor! Come to the smell of the virgin blood, beasts of hades!” he screamed and created a ruckus that echoed through the room.