13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  “It’s alright. Parents aren’t home,” Bea grinned.

  “Really? And here I thought you were the madam of the house,” the woman grinned back and retrieved her cigarette. Bea suspected it was drenched in dog piss since it had fallen so close to the vine.

  “Eww. Those things give you cancer,” she said, “and it’s also wet in your dog’s pee.”

  The woman started laughing and flicked her cigarette away, wiping her hand on her shirt. “Shit, you’re right, kid. Shit, I should not have cussed in front of you. Shit. There I go again,” she said and resumed her laughter. Bea started laughing too. The dog’s tongue came out and his tail began wagging. He let loose from his master’s grasp and ran towards Bea, and pounced on her with fervour.

  “Oh boy!” she screamed as he tackled her to the ground and slobbered her face.

  “What do you know? Hodor likes you,” the woman said. She approached Hodor and pulled back on his leash.

  “I like Hodor,” she said back. “What’s your name? I’m Bea.”

  “I’m Cindy. Cindy Chatsworth. And for what it’s worth, I’ll chat you up if you like,” she said and winked. “Wait. Your name is literally Bea? As in short for Beatrice?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Funny. Old tenants in your house had a girl with the same name,” Cindy said and took another cigarette out of her purse. “Except that was two hundred years ago.”

  “Wow. Why do you know all this?” Bea found herself drawn to this weird lady. She was odd, quirky, and wizened.

  “I’ve been a part of this town ever since I remember, kiddo. Graduated from that university yonder in town,” she said, pointing in the distance at nothing in particular, making Bea think those cigarettes were laced with something hard, “Set up a veterinary office in town. Folks been telling the tale of Darkland house forever.”

  “I’m new here,” Bea said, shuffling her feet. “My house is the Darkland house?” She, for some preternatural reason, wanted to confide in this random woman. She wanted to tell her about the hauntings and the burning man.

  “Yep. Thank God I live next door, and not in this house,” she said and chucked her cigarette in the pond. It was black water. No ducks dared venture in there. Funny, Bea remembered seeing it blue yesterday. She shrugged. Black or blue, it didn’t matter. There were more pressing things at hand.

  “Would you tell me that story? Of the house and the haunting?” Bea found herself asking. Cindy had taken a can of soda from that purse of hers and was sitting at the concrete helm of the pool, beside the black water. She nodded.

  “Just don’t tell, if my mum comes over here, that I smoke, yeah?” Cindy said and beckoned Bea to sit beside her. She told her everything. From the start. At least, all of what she knew.

  *

  The windows of the Subaru were foggy, and the car parked behind the high school lot was jolting to and fro. From inside, Jean’s moans were audible; screams of passion and uninhibited sex. This uncertainty and adolescent horniness was another of the things she loved about Dan. The reason for this extemporaneous love making was this: Jean and Dan went to the local school to gather information on the classes and faculty, and to get a prospectus for Bea. During their talks with the headmaster, they were told that there was an opening for an English teacher for their GCSE classes. And although Dan had never attended an English class in college (he had studied aeronautics at Glasgow) he could not help but show off his diverse writing portfolio to the headmaster, and asked him for the job. It would be a good thing, he thought, to get out of the house every day, and have a regular job. Plus, he would get to drop Bea at school (this very school) every day. Who was to say what would happen during those long car rides?

  After having successfully wooed the headmaster, they went out to the car, excited by their success, and made impromptu love in the car.

  “Suppose we should go home now?” Dan asked her. His hand was healing up faster. He had already removed the bandages. There were two giant angry red swellings on his hand; the points of entry and exit of that splinter, but nothing else.

  “Yeah!” she said, still breathing exhaustedly. How was he so good at lovemaking? She wondered. Every time they did it, he managed to make her come. Which was more than what she could say about her previous partners. Most of them did not even know where the ‘button’ was, let alone know how to press it.

  After a long drive, during which Dan fiddled with the radio channels and Jean kept adjusting her clothes, they finally reached the house and drove up the driveway.

  “Who’s that sitting with Bea?” Dan asked. The woman was sitting with a dog on the side of the pond, and had in her hand a can of soda. Thank God, she had ditched the cigarette early on, otherwise Dan and Jean would have thrown a fit. They did not want their daughter making nice with bad people.

  “Hi?” Jean said as she got out of the car.

  “Mum! I’d like you to meet Cindy. She lives next door. She’s really cool. She’s a vet and she has the most amazing stories-” but before Bea could say anything more, Cindy nudged her to remain quiet. She did not want anyone other than Bea knowing the story for the moment. If her parents came to know that this woman was telling Bea strange stories, they would put a restraining order against her.

  “Hi,” Jean held her hand out and Cindy shook it profusely, “I’ve seen you walk your dog in the morning around these parts.”

  “Yes. That’s Hodor,” Cindy affirmed. “It’s the only time of day I get with him. The rest of the day I’m swamped at the Vet Clinic.”

  “Come in, have some tea!” Dan said, albeit half-heartedly.

  “No, but thank you very much. I must be leaving. My mum’s really old and forgetful, I have to go back to her.”

  “Whenever you feel like having a cuppa, you come right over, yeah?” Jean said and smiled. Cindy smiled back.

  “Bea will see me out,” she said and walked away with Bea walking beside her.

  *

  “As I was saying,” Bea continued. Before her parents had arrived, Bea had been recounting the hauntings to Cindy. She had told Cindy about the first time, when everything became fire and soot, and the second time, when the butler appeared at her bed. “I think these ghosts, like your story confirmed, are not bad ghosts. I don’t know. Is there such a thing as a good ghost?”

  “I think so. They haven’t harmed you or anything. All they have done is make their presence known. And from your splinter story, I think the one may even be protecting you from your dad,” Cindy said. She found it downright disgusting that Dan was a paedophile. Were it up to her, she would have had him neutered, just like the dogs she castrated at her clinic every day.

  “What do I do?” Bea asked.

  “Lay low, kid. And if you can, try to open the basement. Rumours have it that it has been locked since the fire. Hell, they even built a faux wall over it. Cardboard, I think. You shouldn’t have trouble finding it,” Cindy winked.

  “But what’s all that about the butler asking about tea?” asked Bea.

  Cindy sighed. “The story goes like this. I don’t know how I didn’t mention this part earlier. Before the fire engulfed the house, Beatrice was locked in her basement room. There was a latch, like a dog door, through which the butler gave her food. He was asking her if she wanted tea. He was standing at the door when the fire started. And he tried desperately to find the key to let Beatrice out. But he couldn’t. In death, the two are separated by the basement door. Open it and I imagine something will happen,” Cindy said.

  “I’m afraid to,” Bea said. “But I’ll do it.”

  With that solemn promise made, Cindy headed back to her house, to her sick mother, and Bea went home, where she was to be informed that her step-dad would hence forth be her English teacher at her new school.

  *

  There was an all-consuming sweltering heat that summer’s night, and no form of air conditioner in the house. The foreman had promised to bring along all the necessary supplies
and the air conditioner when he called by the next week. Each moment spread into eternity that night. Bea had her windows open and was sweating, panting and huffing. The upbeat chirps of crickets in the fields together with the barking of the dog, now known to her as Hodor, were keeping her up, assisted in no small part by the heat, of course. To make matters worse, her room was upstairs, where it was more humid and hot than the rest of the house.

  Sleepless, inquisitive, and scared just a little, she crept out of her bed, gathering her night robe around her, and left her room. The spirits residing in the house were quiet tonight. The was not a sound in the house except for the snoring from her mother’s room. God, she snored loud enough for it to sound like an earthquake. The light in Dan’s study was burning, and shone out beneath the closed door. Bea sighed with relief. He was writing, which meant he had his headphones on at full volume. She did not want to know what he listened to, but she had a notion it was death metal. Good, she thought. He wouldn’t hear her. She planned to check the basement tonight. Bea had no clue where the door might be. She stepped down the stairs, peeked into her mother’s room and saw her sleeping soundly, snoring. Lucky for Bea, her mother was a deep sleeper. She remembered back to the time they had a fire in their apartment building in London, and all the residents had evacuated. Bea had to shake her mother so hard to wake her up, and even then she hadn’t succeeded. In the end, she had to upend a jug of water over Jean. Thoroughly angered by this intrusion, Jean leapt out of bed and flung her pillow across the room. It hit the window with such force, it cracked the glass.

  “Mother! There’s a fire in the building! We need to leave!” she remembered saying. Her mother, however, went back to bed and put the sheets over her head. Only once the firemen had come and gone, and normality was reinstated did she wake up, at her regular time. Such was her sleep.

  Bea began tapping at the wall in the gallery, checking for any possible break in the stone’s regularity. She walked the entire length of the gallery, tapping, until her raps resounded hollowly. It was the slightest change in rhythm that drew her attention. The thick thip, thip, thip was replaced by a small tap, tap, thip as she rapped the wall.

  “How am I even going to get this cardboard off?” she asked herself, when a thought struck her. Mom was asleep and Dan was immersed in his black metal, or death metal, while working. Noise was not going to be a problem here.

  She grabbed the cleaver from the kitchen, for want of a better idea and inspired by Jack Nicholson’s Shining. Or was it an axe? Or was it his wife who had the knife? Her memory was lacking in the wake of this newfound exhilaration. She jammed the knife in the wall and watched as it plunged in the cardboard wall, slicing it like a vanilla cake. The door revealed behind the cardboard contrasted so with its surroundings, black, unkempt and burnt in the wall. Would it even open? Bea, with her hands jittering, pulled at the knob.

  It came off.

  The door creaked open of its own accord. The knob was not there to hold it locked and shut anymore.

  Bea fished her mobile out of her pocket and turned its torch on. Quivering, she went inside. Stairs led downwards, each stair was blackened. Blackened by the fire, of course. She swept the light of her mobile over each of them as she descended, and cringed as she saw flecks of flesh and a burnt-up dress fabric sticking wickedly to the steps. Poor Beatrice must have crawled all the way to the stairs before she burnt to death. What a horrible way to go, thought Bea, and if I were to die like this, I would haunt this house too.

  At the moment she thought of haunting, a sceptre appeared in front of her; a white ghost standing in a dark basement. The ghost of Beatrice Darkland. Behind Bea, the door closed shut.

  *

  Outside the house, a grave long buried and lost under overgrown grass trembled: Sarah Darkland’s grave. She too was buried in the backyard, and had she known that she would have been buried beside the maid she so despised, she would have killed herself as far away from this house as possible. But fate, along with other intangible things, cannot be changed. And this posthumous mockery was one of them.

  Cindy Chatsworth was walking her dog that night, but that was not the reason she was out at this time. It was unusual for her to be out this late, but her jonesing for a cigarette had gotten the better of her. Weird. She’d smoke in her bathroom with the exhaust fan whirring at night. However, there was this impulsion to leave the house. Something drew her to the Darklands house.

  The stage was set. The black, charred curtain was rising and ghosts were dancing behind it, summoning their dark demon overlords. Above, thunder and rain clouds covered the moon and swept the night into utter darkness.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO

  Crying Widow

  “Ain’t black metal the best?” is what Dan Green would ask if you happened upon him at the local watering hole. That, as uncreative as it was, was his conversation starter. If you said no, he would cease further discussion and, if out of politeness you said yes, he would go on and on about his favourite indie underground death metal bands. And then you’d think to correct him that it was black metal, and not death metal, which would only spur him to go into further detail about how they were one and the same thing. He did not know shit. He listened to an album once in his early teens and now, after forty, he was hooked to the same album, and the same band.

  Right now, as the thunder crackled outside and as Bea retreated into the basement, he, oblivious to both developments, was busy writing a short story. He had been rejected ten times by the New Yorker, and he was sure that this was going to be his magnum opus. This story of a misunderstood man who found redemption in his meeting with a wood elf in the pavilions. The story did not make sense, and most of what he had written was in future tense. That was the whole point of the story, in his opinion, for the man and his immortal lover were communicating on all plains of time at once. He was in the middle of writing a steamy sex scene, listening to a song titled “Unholy matrimony” by some obscure band called “Bile Cretins”, and he was having fun. He did not notice when a wraithlike wisp of black smoke crept up his open study window, until it was too late and the wisp was inside him, consuming him with blackness.

  “That’s the most metal thing to happen to me ever!” he thought. And at once, all his inhibitions were gone, and he was left feeling powerful. Were he to know that Sarah Darkland’s spirit has taken possession of his body, he would have freaked out. Under the influence of marijuana, he believed the smoke that had entered him to be the divine ether of literary knowledge; the mystical grail granted to Shakespeare, Mozart, Stephen King, and Arthur Conan Doyle. They were not special. They were inspired by motivation and they reached out to the ether, taking words and stories from it like thirsty wanderers in a desert.

  At the loss of all inhibition, Dan felt a powerful lust consume him. Where was Bea? Long had he remained solemn, long had he remained chaste. Now his night of fulfilment had arrived, he thought, and now he would have his way with her. Should she resist, he would kill her. He had always hated her. She was snobby, she was spoilt, and she was a temptress. With this hatred and wanton desire ingrained in every atom of his being, he got up from his seat, took off his headphones, and with heavy steps, drunk with this new toxicity, he moved to the door. As he pulled the door knob, it came off.

  “What?” he exclaimed, and noticed unmistakably that he had two voices. One, his own, and the other belonging to a hoarse and horrifying source. He did not mind. He was loving this newfound energy, this vibe of invincibility.

  Thump. Thump. Thump. Each shaky and heavy step he took brought him closer to Bea’s room. He was sure he would find her there. And he had in mind what he was going to do. He assumed she was a screamer, so it made sense to choke her and stuff a sock in her mouth. If she resisted and thrashed, it would only make him wilder, he thought with pleasure, and he might even end up killing her. But he knew that the body stayed warm after death for a good half an hour. He’d need only ten minutes.

  Sneakily, he crea
ked the door open and entered Bea’s room. Being dark, he would not have been able to see, were he in his normal condition. But this all-consuming ‘ether’ had given him the ability to see in the absence of light. He looked around, enjoying his night-vision, and searched for Bea. She was not in her bed and not in her bathroom and not hiding in the closet. Irritated, he kicked the door, and watched it as it ripped off its hinges and flew away like a feather.

  Jean was asleep in her bedroom and only stirred slightly in her sleep as Dan made that ruckus. She would wake up, but only once it was too late. And she would wake up to the sight of death. For now, she dreamt peacefully, undisturbed by the happenings in the real world.

  Thunder crackled and the clouds came ever closer. Hodor, who had run ahead of his master, was barking lividly at the house.

  “Quiet down, Hodor! You’ll wake those folk!” Cindy said as she ran after him, cigarette in her mouth, lighter in her hand. The air was still and heavy, and she did not like this feeling of premonition one bit. Hodor was now barking at the house door, and clawing at the knob, hoping to open it. The poor dog did not know that he was living his last few moments. He clawed and clawed and barked and barked until Cindy caught up with him, at which point he bit her hand while she battled to tug him away.

  “What has gotten into you?” she yelled at her dog, and tugged violently at the leash. The leash broke and sent Cindy staggering backwards into the pond of black water.

  *

  “You’re Beatrice,” said Bea, looking at the ghost in the middle of the charred basement. A mouldy mattress lay in a corner of the room, covered in moss and fungus. It even smelt funny. Apart from the fact that it was blackened like the rest of the room, it looked slave-like. Bea gathered that Beatrice must have slept here. A bucket obviously served as her bathroom, now lay toppled in the far corner of the room. Sludge from it now gave rise to mushrooms.