13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  “You… You’re why I am doing this. I never wanted Martin to hire someone to help me. Things were going fine the way they were. But then you had to come and ruin it,” Mary said.

  “Please let me go. I’ll go away and I won’t tell anyone about this. I swear,” Jennie cried.

  “It’s too late for that. Hush now child,” Mary said. Jennie looked at the door and saw Abigail standing there, crying. She was too afraid to come into the room. Instead, she looked at her mother, and fearfully cowered behind the semi-closed door.

  “There are spirits in this house. And I am sure you know this by now. Spirits who are vengeful in their nature. I have not been sick. It was them who made me weak. No one believed me when I told them. After all, tis the era of modern medicine. Who would believe that spirits reside here?” Mary said and began lighting candles, red candles.

  “I know about the plague doctor!” Jennie screamed, trying her very best to catch Mary off guard. The ropes around her feet and hands were tight, but there had to be a way out of them.

  “Good. Then it means that you’ll believe what I am about to tell you,” Mary said.

  “The plague doctor, or the birdman as my daughter likes to call him, has been an integral part of this home ever since I can remember. When I first came here, I saw him in the windows. Then I saw him in my daughter’s room. I didn’t think twice about it. He was always a presence here but he began manifesting himself more frequently after you showed up,” Mary was now standing in front of Jennie. She had a berserk look in her eye which dictated that reason and sanity had absconded, leaving only a raging mind in their absence.

  “He is tied to the house. The spirits of the dead are vengeful and have made it impossible for the dear Dr Campbell, yes, I have read the blog too, to leave. He was bad to them at first, and they are punishing him to this very day. He is one of them just as much as he is against them. But I’m going wayward. Why am I going to sacrifice you? The spirits who have trapped the plague doctor, the spirits who have weakened me, demand that I sacrifice you. Only then shall they let me go. Only then shall I be whole again,” Mary said and took a knife from behind her. It was a giant cleaver. Jennie yelled as loudly as she could in hopes that someone would hear her. Abigail wailed outside the door. Mary did not care. She kept on talking. “The plague doctor, he is their shepherd, and he himself is the sheep. My daughter claims that he looks over her. And she is right.”

  “The spirits made it clear to me from the very first day that they wanted my daughter as a sacrifice,” Mary said. Jennie thought it best to divert her attention. She asked, “Why did they want you to sacrifice her?”

  “Do the math, you retarded bitch. I sold my soul to the devil and these spirits are his delegates. Don’t look down on me for making the pact of my life. In return, Lord Lucifer gave me fame, he gave me money and he gave me everything I hoped to get in the world of journalism,” Mary spoke of Satan as if she was speaking of a lover.

  “Boohoo! They’ve come for you! Your time is up! It’s you they want. Not Abigail and not me!” Jennie could not control what she was saying. If this meant that she was going to die, so be it. She did not want to die like a ‘retarded bitch’, whining and screaming. She became docile. Her fate was clear to her.

  “No! They don’t want me!” Mary screamed. Jennie thought she saw the strains of fear on her face. Was it possible that Mary was scared of this thought? “They wanted my daughter. I cannot part with her! So, when you came to our house, I told them to wait for a few days so I may sacrifice you. They agreed. If it’s any consolation to you, the doctor has taken a liking to you. That’s why he didn’t kill you. In fact, if I am reading the room right, he doesn’t want you to die.”

  Jennie looked wildly about the room for any signs of the plague doctor but he was not here. Mary had finally lit all the candles. She approached Jennie with the knife and slit the palm of her tied hand. She lapped the blood in her hands and smeared it over her face.

  “Spirits. Restless souls, delegates of the lord Lucifer, I acknowledge you,” Mary said. Her face was red with Jennie’s blood. “Take this tribute, this sacrifice in the name of the dark lord and free me of my servitude.”

  Jennie felt her life escaping. Her head limped to its side. In the mirror on the right of the room, she saw her reflection. Her skin was turning black and lifeless and consciousness was leaving her. Before she could faint, she saw spirits, white spirits coming out of the walls. Their faces looked to be half eaten by worms. They had holes in lieu of eyes. The walls became white with the ghosts teeming out of them. They were all crying and moaning.

  Jennie’s eyes began to close. This was it. She was going to die. When she once again awoke, she would be one of the damned souls of the devil. And she had no say in this. She surrendered to her fate. Mary’s chants now changed language. She was uttering spells and incantations in Latin.

  The spirits became violent. They began thrashing at the walls from which they were entering. They started screaming. Jennie could feel her soul evacuating her body.

  And then she heard a new sound.

  Ring-a-ring o' roses,

  A pocket full of posies,

  A-tishoo! A-tishoo!

  We all fall down

  Except this time, it was not a childlike voice of a plush toy that was singing it. It was a rasping, ghastly voice, very different from the wailing spirits’ sound. Black fog materialized at the helm of the bed as the plague doctor emerged. His redness magnified itself in the light of the candles. His beak shone with the light. He had an inverted cross in his hand. Mary saw him and began chanting more loudly, thinking that her spell was working. As if to further prove her point, the bed upon which Jennie was lying started quaking. It hovered above the ground and began tilting, tossing and turning. Jennie was too frail to scream. She watched everything unfold with a sense of accepted defeat.

  Abigail, from behind the half-closed door barged into the room screaming “Birdman! Birdman!” She looked at the plague doctor and smiled happily. The next thing Jennie knew, Abigail had taken the cleaver from her mother’s hand.

  “Abigail! Get back here!” Mary screamed. The break in the ritual angered the spirits. They came out of the walls, ghastly ghouls with vengeful auras, and began closing in on Jennie. Abigail paid no heed to this, with the dagger and surprising adeptness, she cut the ropes binding Jennie. Jennie was free. But this turn of events infuriated the devils. The bed rose in the air and crashed against the ceiling. The lamp on the bedside table flew towards the window and broke the glass.

  The spirits began to approach Jennie and Abigail but the plague doctor intercepted and held the cross in their faces. The spirits screamed and retreated a step back. The plague doctor, Jennie understood, was serving as their patronus.

  “Abigail!” Mary made a move towards her daughter, perhaps to protect her from all the furniture wildly flying about the room. The demons, the spirits, the ghouls were swarming from every side of the room, yelling, screaming, sobbing as they did so.

  In a moment of divine intervention, Jennie felt her energy return. She grasped Abigail before Mary could get to her and, with staggering steps, she rushed out of the room, leaving the plague doctor, the spirits and Mary. She ran and ran as fast as she could, not looking back, she ran from the house. An ear-splitting scream resounded from the room. It sounded like Mary’s. Jennie did not pay heed to it. She ran for her dear life until she was out of the house, with Abigail crying in her arms.

  Martin’s car drove up the driveway at that exact moment. He looked at the dishevelled state of Jennie and got out of his car immediately.

  “Holy shit! What’s going on?” he said as he ran towards Jennie. She looked at him blankly, with teary eyes, and tried to explain the happenings in the house. But she found no words to do so. How do you explain to a man that his wife had sold her soul to the devil and when the time was due she was sacrificing another woman in her stead?

  “Your wife. She tried to attack me and Abigail.
She’s still in the house! I’m afraid she’s gone mad!” she put it the only way she thought Martin might understand.

  He rushed inside the house, and Abigail and Jennie timidly followed, despite knowing that ungodly devilry was going on in the house. He turned the lights on and went into Jennie’s room. He gasped and put a hand to his mouth.

  He ran into the room and Jennie and Abigail followed. Mary was sitting with her back against the bed, her mouth agape and her eyes frozen in a grimace of horror. She was breathing. But that was the extent of her overt life.

  “Mary! Mary! Are you okay?” screamed Martin as he shook his wife with trembling hands. She did not respond. Drool oozed from her open mouth. Abigail went towards her mother and shook her twice, as if believing that her father was not doing it right.

  Martin checked her pulse and her breath. She was alive all right. Her pulse was stable and her breath was fine. In the unbelievable outrageousness of the situation, Jennie remembered something she had read in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. When a dementor kissed you, he took your soul, leaving your body a lifeless vessel. It looked as if Mary had been dealt the same fate, except in the place of dementors, demons had deported her spirit.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN

  Epilogue

  Jennie stayed in the house for another week, helping Abigail and Martin transition. Funny. She thought that after that night, she’d not want to live there for another moment. Yet here she was, helping Abigail put her sneakers on. Martin was waiting in the car outside. Everything that belonged to them was packed in boxes. The moving company would come by later today and tow everything to the new apartment Martin had chosen as his home. He had sold Bleak House at pretty much the same price his wife had bought it at.

  His wife.

  Mary was very much alive in every medical sense. The doctors, who were previously baffled with the strange nature of her illness, were now baffled by this new development. They had never seen this kind of behaviour in any comatose patient or any catatonic patient. Mary was alive, they told Martin.

  “She’s alive and she’s functioning better than she did two months ago! That’s the strange thing. Her body vitals are off the charts. Her respiration has improved; her previously weak bone structure has realigned itself. In short, there is no reason why she should not be up and about. There’s nothing physically wrong with her. Her MRIs show that her brain’s working just fine. I’m very sorry Mr Walker, but I don’t know what to tell you,” the doctor had said.

  Without any recourse, he turned to the psychiatrists who had previously declared her psychosomatic.

  “Ah yes. I was right in making this assumption. Because to me it looks like whatever her psychosomatic disease was, it worsened to the point that she’s rendered catatonic. Except, well, she’s not moving at all, is she? This is not a case of catatonia. This is not a case of a comatose. The other doctor was right. I’m afraid whatever this is, it’s beyond us, Mr Walker, but you can admit her to the psych ward at our mental asylum. If I am not being too rough, might I say that you might let the docs there pick at her brain? Maybe they’ll find what is wrong with her?” the shrink had said.

  They eventually did send her off to the psych ward at the asylum.

  Jennie volunteered, after seeing the deplorable state Martin was in, to help with the packing and the boxing up. She went into Mary’s study one day, shortly after the incident, and began looking through her stuff. The book that Mary was reading most recently was lying on the table. And in the crevices of the pages was a note. Jennie took it out.

  It was written by Mary.

  “Unless no one has taken the time to get to know me enough to know that this book- IT by Stephen King-is my favourite literature piece of all time, I think someone will eventually find this note.

  Consider this a confession dear reader.

  If you’re reading this, chances are you’re in my study. Chances are I am not there to stop you. Chances are you’ve found this book. And chances are that I’m dead.

  I sold my soul to the devil and I’m not proud of it. It was a decision made with utmost rashness and only after I had set the gears in motion did I regret it. But the deal was done. I had gained fame, fortune and money at the expense of my soul and at the expense of the good name of Antonio Salvatore. But that I don’t care about.

  Once I sacrificed my spirit to the devil, I was given explicit orders to carry out, along the lines of slaying a ram in the middle of the fields at midnight. It escalated to my having to sacrifice my daughter. I couldn’t do that.

  I write this in rebellion. The spirits have turned against me. They conspire behind walls, waiting to kill me. They are already doing so. They have taken my strength and my reason to live. I am left weakened, a hollow shell.

  I must do something soon.

  Sacrifice begets sacrifice.

  PS. The Plague doctor cannot help me. No one can.”

  Jennie immediately burnt this letter after reading it. Martin was better off in his ignorant oblivion. Abigail would forget all of this in time. Burning the letter was a decision she did not make lightly. But after watching the ashes curl and foil in the grate, Jennie felt lighter, knowing that this evil was behind her. She could move on now.

  Abigail and Jennie parted on the best of terms, with much tears and crying Abigail made Jennie promise to visit once every month. Jennie replied that she would do so. Martin thanked her for her services very professionally and paid her with a white envelope when he dropped her on the train station. She waved them both goodbye, until their car was just a speck amidst other specks in the horizon.

  She went back to her home and enrolled in college with the help of her newfound ‘wealth’. Things changed for the better. Her mother became nicer to her, and began respecting her decisions and life choices. Months later Jennie graduated, moved to Brisbane, found a boyfriend, got a job, got married, had two kids and lived out the rest of her life, not happily, but contentedly.

  *

  The Bleak House, in its grim desolation, still stands at the edge of London, amidst fields and forests, a testament of the horrors that had happened here. It has been abandoned since.

  What of the plague doctor, you ask?

  The passer-by’s and the onlookers, whenever they make it their point to visit the house, they claim that they still see the figure of a giant red bird in the house, lurking behind the windows, creeping behind the curtains. At night, when all is silent for miles all around, there come sounds of screams that rip the veil of silence. Screams of the damned trapped underneath the house.