13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  “He’ll make the toys come to life!”

  Jennie left Abigail and went to her room, not wanting to listen another damn thing about this birdman. Had she not seen him twice, she would have continued believing that he was not real. But she had seen him. Twice. And any mention of him disturbed her.

  She went to sleep in her own bed, thinking that, if she woke up tonight to the nursery rhymes, she would record the sonofabitch on her mobile phone.

  At three a.m., she woke, as sure as the clockwork that was ticking loudly in the lounge. The singing from Abigail’s room was louder. She put her phone on recording mode and crept quietly towards the door. It was jammed. She pushed it with both hands, bolting it open. There he was! Standing in his horror-inducing aura, red as wine, dark as blood, black as a shadow! The birdman turned his head and looked into Jennie’s eyes with a soul-piercing stare.

  She hit record on her phone in the midst of the chaos and pointed the phone at the birdman. It extended its talon-like hand toward her and sent a jolt of red light flying towards her, like a magical spell. The lightning hit her mobile, and it hit the wall. Jennie’s fear was replaced with curiosity. She stepped towards the red figure. He was large, bordering on seven feet. The robes made him look like a big bird, like an albatross, reinforced by his beaky face and glassy eyes.

  “Jennie! Come back!” Abigail’s voice came from behind her. She noticed that in her daze she had walked recklessly close to the silhouette.

  “Jennie come back to me so the birdman won’t hurt you!” Abigail whispered violently.

  The birdman’s hands were extending towards Jennie. She immediately stepped back and sat down beside Abigail on the bed. The shadow that went by the senseless name of birdman disappeared into the dark corner.

  “What the hell was that?” Jennie did not bother filtering her mouth in front of Abigail. She needed answers.

  “Don’t worry about him. He won’t hurt you. Sleep with me tonight, Jennie,” Abigail said.

  Jennie climbed into the bed and huddled next to Abigail. Strangely, there was no suffocation in the room, or that crippling tiring feeling. Was the birdman really a protective entity? Like a dreary figure that was actually a guardian angel? Or a guardian demon? Before she could scrape for answers in her mind, Jennie was sound asleep for the first time since she had arrived in this house.

  *

  Jennie woke up four hours later than she should have. She got up from Abigail’s bed, where the kid still slept soundly, and cursed softly under her breath. Mary was going to be so pissed. She left the room, feeling unusually refreshed and energetic and saw that Martin and Mary were sitting at the dining table, helping themselves to breakfast. She went towards them.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, Jennifer. Nice of you to wake up. It’s not like you had better things to do around here,” Mary said in her usual sullen tone. But she was smiling and looking cheerier than ever.

  “Want some breakfast?” Martin asked.

  “Yes please.”

  She sat down on the farthest chair and helped herself to toast, jam and a cup of tea. The two of them looked at her. She stopped eating her toast and decided to spill the beans. This had gone on long enough and last night’s events, in Abigail’s presence, were proof that Jennie was not hallucinating.

  “I’m sorry but I must say something,” she said.

  “Go on.” Mary said. She looked away from her iPad and stared fiercely at Jennie. Martin stopped halfway through pouring his tea and turned towards her too. Caution bedamned, Jennie thought as she began to break the news to them.

  “There’s something wrong about this house and I don’t know if you can feel it or see it, but Abigail certainly can. And ever since I have been here, I have had weird dreams, and visions of a ghastly being standing in the corner of your daughter’s room. Do you know of this? Have you seen the shadowy figure with the red demeanour and the beaklike face?” she said all in one go. She was not sure if she would be able to say it out loud a second time.

  “Jennifer! That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard!” Mary said and issued a snort. She began laughing. Martin looked at his wife and then at Jennie and said, “Jennie I am sure that there’s nothing wrong with Abigail, or you for that matter. It’s only been three days since you arrived. You’re having trouble adjusting. That’s what this is. Nothing more.”

  She was outraged that they did not buy this. Were they being purposefully blind to all that was happening around them?

  “Okay. I guess you are right,” she lied. She had made up her mind. She knew what she was going to do. “Umm. Mr Walker?”

  “Yes Jennie?”

  “When are you going to work?”

  “Why in fifteen minutes, thank you for reminding me,” he said and laughed.

  “Can you drop me at the library on your way? I want to get some books for reading in my spare time,” she said.

  “Sure thing. Get ready and I’ll drop you,” he said and got up from his chair.

  Jennifer quickly ate her toast and drank her tea. She went to her room and got her notebook, her shoes and her broken mobile phone. When she was ready, she went outside to wait for Martin. If there were no answers in here, she was sure that there would be some at the library. There had to be some truth to the stories. To the delusions. There always is.

  *

  Brunsmith Library was a small establishment just a few kilometres from Bleak House. It was one of the oldest yet underrated buildings in that area, and its architecture bespoke grandeur over the years, giving it the title of a ‘local landmark.’

  Jennie was not concerned with the façade of the building nor its history. She needed answers. And to get her answers she had to sift through old records of the newspapers. Whatever it was that was plaguing the place, she was going to get to the bottom of it.

  She went to the librarian in the large hall, and greeted her with a subdued “Hello.” The ceiling of the hall was in the shape of a giant dome. The whole room was circular.

  “How may I help you, Dear?” the old woman spoke in her papery accent. Her skin was frail, ready to wither, showing underlying arteries and veins. Her spectacles were large, round and thick, covering most of her face.

  “I wanted to look at the records of the newspapers. Can I do that?”

  “Why, sure you can, Dear. Just take a left at the end of the corridor, and you will reach the door that leads to the basement. There’s a computer lab in there with all the papers digitized in the database,” she said. For an old woman, she had an impressive tech savvy knowledge.

  Jennie headed towards the end of the long dark corridor and came to the door she was looking for. She opened it. It creaked to life and turned on its hinges of its own accord, as if it had been yearning to be opened. It looked like no one had been down there in a long while. She looked in the darkness with the light from her broken phone for switches, and turned them all on. The dank, dark basement lit up with lamps. The computers in there were old ancient machines from a time when large CRT monitors were still in vogue. She turned one on and waited forever for the loading screen to go away. It still ran on Windows XP. How hilarious was that.

  She clicked on the icon with the title ‘newspapers’ and opened up the database program containing the digital copies of the papers. The software took its sweet time to start. The computer’s fan roared in protest.

  After ten minutes, during which Jennie resisted the urge to restart the computer, the database finally loaded.

  There was a search bar in the corner and a listing of all the newspapers from all major companies. Not knowing what to search, she typed in ‘Bleak House’.

  A giant loading circle appeared and stuck on the screen for another ten minutes. Jennie tapped on her lap with her fingers, cursing under her breath. It finally revealed a dozen newspaper copies, with the words ‘Bleak House’ highlighted in neon yellow.

  “Okay, let’s see what this shit is all about,” she said to herself an
d clicked on the most recent paper. It was a puff piece about the Bleak House being sold to a notable journalist for a steep price. Serves that bitch right, she thought and moved on to the next paper.

  After perusing all the copies containing her search words, she sat despondently in her chair. The papers mentioned nothing out of the ordinary. She gathered from the small articles that the house was built sometime late in the twentieth century. There was no mention of it being haunted.

  She turned the computer off and decided to go back home. It was all in her head, she said to herself and exited the basement. But then she realized something. In literally every single haunted house book she had ever read, and every single movie she had watched, the writer and the director always overstated that ‘evil’ always found a way to avoid the public eye. That’s why it always thrived. It did so at the expense of the people’s unawareness.

  Her mobile phone’s screen was shattered but it was by no means unusable. She sat down in the library’s main hall and fired up the browser in her mobile. She typed the words ‘Bleak House’ and looked at all the search results on the first page. She had done this once before on her laptop, but to no avail. However, this time around, she was running on pure instinct. Someone had once joked that the best place to hide a body would be the second page of Google search. The joke became obvious after someone explained that no one bothers looking at the second search page.

  Inspiration struck and she clicked on the second page, where she found a link to a WordPress blog titled ‘Haunted Locales of London’. Bleak House was mentioned in the subtext of the website. She clicked it.

  At first sight, the underdeveloped look of the website suggested that it was the shoddy work of some basement conspiracy theorist who had nothing better to do than watch the latest movie in the Final Destination franchise and eat his way through his parents’ trust funds.

  Nevertheless, she looked at the article on the website. It was aptly titled ‘Bleak House and its bleak history. A lesson lost in the pages of textbooks.’ The ridiculousness of this title made her laugh. Someone in the library loudly warned ‘Shh!’ She ignored the reprimanding and started reading the article.

  Of the myriad haunted places in London, none hold a candle (a dark, scented candle) to the morbidity that is Bleak House. But first, let me ask you, do you know what the word haunted means?

  1.

  (of a ghost) manifest itself at (a place) regularly.

  2.

  (of a person or animal) frequent (a place).

  3.

  be persistently and disturbingly present in (the mind).

  4.

  (of something unpleasant) continue to affect or cause problems for.

  I know, I know, you’re thinking to yourself, why am I giving you a lesson in literature but bear with me. Bleak House is the only place I know that befits the definition of a haunted place in all four aspects.

  You may have heard, if you are a Londoner, of a large spectral being that resides behind the rafters of the house; a bird shaped entity that lurks in the house. Yes, the truth is, those are not just made up fables and tales. They are real stories. What you see is the ghost of the plague doctor. Doctors in the time of the Great Plague of London dating back to the 1600s used to wear these beaklike masks and robes as protection against the epidemic. And the spectre that you see or hear about is the ghost of one Dr James Campbell. If you believe this, continue reading. If you don’t, I bid you good day, good riddance and may you have a happy ignorant life.

  It was back in the times of the plague that this very location, where Bleak House sits smugly, was a plague pit. Before this it was a pest-house. What are pest-houses and plague pits, you ask?

  Pest-houses housed the sick, plague patients who were dumped here in their hundreds to await their impending dooms communally. They lived there, spreading their sickness amongst one another, waiting for doctors who never came because they were busy treating the richer patients. Humankind has always had a disregard for poverty stricken lives, be it today or four centuries ago.

  When the pest house in this location was brimming with corpses and the sick, they tore it away, just like in dozens of others all over London (none of which had a house built over them, though) and excavated a plague pit. This pit was steep, dark and filled with dead bodies. After it was filled, with no space for another corpse, they covered it with a layer of dirt and closed the pit. The rancid smell never left the area. It’s as if, even after all this time, the dead haven’t completely rotted.

  One history book delves into the lore of Dr Campbell and his connection with the plague pit. It’s called ‘London in the time of pestilent plague’, written by Elvis Moore. Much of his work was disregarded after he published a blasphemous historical account about Queen Victoria. Naturally, you may not have heard of Elvis Moore or his book.

  The story is such: The doctor was ambushed and trapped by sick men and women and forced to treat them at the pest house. He was left no choice but to do so, out of fear for his life. Later he succumbed to the very sickness that he was treating. They dumped him in the pest house and left him for dead, amidst the hundreds of patients he had previously refused treatment. He, along with the hundreds, is buried under what today is the Bleak House...

  The hauntings ensue, as is expected…

  Jennie could read no more. She was trembling in her chair. She put her mobile down and put her hands on her face. So, it was all real then? It was not in her head, that’s for sure. She gathered her things and bolted out of the library, not wanting to be in the place where she had made such a grotesque discovery.

  It was five o clock. She did not feel like going back home to that dreadful place. Not for all the money she was being offered. Nothing was worth it. She made up her mind to quit right away. She’d go home, tell Mary and Martin that she would not stay a minute longer in that wretched house, and if they knew any better, they would get the hell out too. And then she’d flip the bird to Mary.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWELVE

  Sacrifice

  Jennie’s thoughts sobered once she was at the bar, where she washed down the effects of what she had read on that blog with a few shots. When her head was positively swimming with booze, she left the bar near the library and headed for the line of taxis. When she reached them, she laughed out loud, noticing that it was only one taxi. The whiskey was working its magic on her, making her see doubles and triples.

  “Excuse me,” she said drunkenly to the driver. “Can you take me to the Beak House… I mean the Bleak House?” she said and then started laughing. The next second she barfed all over the footpath.

  “I will if you don’t throw up in my car. You’re sure you won’t?” the driver asked.

  “Yeah. I won’t,” she said and got in. After vomiting, she felt considerably better. She looked at the time on her mobile. It was seven in the evening. Martin had said that he was going to arrive early tonight to help her prep dinner. She decided that she’d hand in her resignation then. She’d miss Abigail, sure, but no amount of love for that kid was going to make her stay in that place. That ungodly place with that ungodly spectre. The plague doctor.

  The cabbie pulled up on the road that led to the Bleak House. She paid him the money and began walking tipsily towards the house. It looked evil, lying in wait for her to come inside. To sell the evilness even further, there were no lights on in the house.

  Weird, she thought. Were Abigail and Mary not home? She jogged a little and reached the door. It was open. She went inside and looked for the light switches. Funnily enough, she hadn’t bothered looking for them before tonight. The lights were always on in this house, despite that it looked sullen and forlorn. She could not find the light switches. Her mobile’s battery had given up.

  “Hello! Is anyone here? Mary? Abbey?” she yelled.

  Someone came up behind her and put a cloth dipped in chloroform over her face. Jennie began to struggle against the strong grip of the mysterious person behind her, but the che
mical doused cloth rendered her unconscious in no time.

  She fell to the floor with a loud thud.

  *

  Jennie’s head was swimming with the combined effect of the anaesthetic and the whiskey. It ached and throbbed, pulsating while it did. Her head hurt from where it had hit the ground. She did not open her eyes right away. She discovered that she was lying on a bed, and that she was unable to move her arms. She opened her eyes and looked wildly around her. The room was her own. She was lying in her own bed. Her hands and her feet were tied down with ropes. Tightly.

  The room was not lit, except for the moonlight coming in through the window. It was utterly horrendous. A match flicked to life in the corner of the room, and in its dim light, Jennie saw to her horror, Mary sitting on the chair, with a wicked smile on her face.

  “Hello Jennifer,” she said calmly.

  “What the hell! Did you knock me down? Why am I tied to the bed? Mary?” Jennie asked, not knowing what to make of all this. It was scary enough, what with the haunted stories that revolved around the house, but what the hell was this? Why had Mary tied her down?

  “I am sorry,” Mary said emotionlessly. She rose from the chair in the corner and put the candle on the bedside table. Her shadow, as she moved about in the room, seemed terrifying. There was no weakness in her steps, and no quavering in her voice. She did not look like she was sick at all!

  “Where is Abigail? What the hell have you done, you vile bitch?” Jennie screamed at her.

  “Jennifer. Be quiet. I’m sorry it has come to this. But I must do what I now must!” Mary said. “You see, I have to obey the spirits. And they want me to kill you. Kill is a strong word, a brutal word. They want me to sacrifice you. It’s the only way.”

  “What! What do you mean?” she cried. There came to her mind no idea of escape. She used to mock movie characters for being so flaccid and docile in the face of fear, but this was the first time she was faced it herself, and by hell, she could relate to how Paul Sheldon felt in Misery.