Haunted House Tales

by Riley Amitrani

  A large pair of panel vans rumbled and bounced over the uneven ruts of the lane in front of the mansion, pulling to a stop away from the entrance and Liz smiled and waved as her sound and lighting engineers hopped from their respective vehicles and walked to greet her.

  “Welcome to the Carroway Mansion, guys…” Liz offered with as much enthusiasm as she could muster based on her rough night.

  “Quite a place, Liz…” Emily replied.

  “Yeah…” Sam agreed, “you been here long?”

  “Just since yesterday,” Liz replied.

  “Get a chance to check it all out?” Emily asked.

  “I did. It’s just as perfect a setting for this thing as we thought back in California.” Old, creepy, you get the idea…”

  “You have a chance to get any filming done yet?” Sam asked as both he and Emily stretched their stiff muscles following their very long drive up from London.

  Liz hesitated. She was reluctant to tell the actual story, even though she knew Sam and Emily well. She supposed she could have outright lied to them, saying she had but that there had been technical glitches in her filming…but that seemed that it might instill a sense of her having a lack of capability. Not a good image to portray, Liz figured. So she opted for a middle ground between an outright lie and the truth.

  “I thought about it, but in the end did not see the point until you guys arrived and could set up all your gear. No point in duplicating efforts and wasting film, you know?”

  They both nodded, but a quick glance between Sam and Emily indicated that did not sound like the Liz they knew. The one who never just sat and waited. The one who was more proactive and tended to take charge immediately more so than anyone they had ever worked with.

  “Let me give you the five-cent tour…” Liz offered to break the awkward silence.

  Both Emily and Sam gazed in awe at all the various rooms as Liz led them through the innards of the mansion. They both agreed with Liz that the lack of furnishings left behind was disappointing, but due to the age of the place and how long it had been sitting empty, that was not all that surprising.

  “I guess looters and squatters are as common here as back home,” Sam said as they returned to the ground level.

  “Seems so…” Liz replied. “But the good thing is that the place has a high degree of creep to it regardless. And…from what I can tell, it is structurally sound which is an added plus from a structure this old. No fear of it falling in on us while we work. Just a leaky roof, which I found out about last night…”

  As they made their way back to the foyer from the stairs, Liz found that just she and Emily were together. She twisted her head backward to see that Sam had stopped in the hallway to take a closer look at a painting on the wall.

  “Sam?” Liz called out.

  He looked up with a start, his concentration on the old framed picture broke suddenly.

  “You get a good look at this?” he asked as both Liz and Emily moved back to join him.

  “Not really,” Liz replied. “I got consumed with getting a good overview of the place yesterday, inside and out, I guess. And besides, I was not keen on getting my hands on all that gross looking mold, or whatever it is that seems to be encroaching in on it from the frame.”

  Sam nodded but frowned, his brow furrowing in thought.

  “Why?” she continued.

  “I don’t know,” he replied with a shrug, “just wondering why a vintage painting got left behind when the rest of the place seems to have gotten stripped clean for the most part. It seems like a painting of this age would be worth quite a bit more money than whatever furnishings used to be here, if financial gain was the impetus for theft of everything else is all.”

  Liz knew Sam had this underlying interest in art as well as his professional expertise in sound engineering…a leftover from his university days as she recalled from a conversation when she had first met him years ago.

  “You want to check it out?” Emily asked.

  “That OK, Liz?” Sam asked. “Or did you want to keep it as is for the film?”

  The picture itself was almost completely invisible due to the grime and mold, and it was so hidden from a photographic perspective, that Liz could not imagine it being an integral part of what she wanted to shoot.

  “Knock yourself out, Sam…” Liz replied.

  Sam jogged off to his van and soon returned with several pairs of latex gloves as well as a small case he always kept with him for just such times.

  “Gloves?” asked Emily.

  “Yep. Not sure what that nasty mold might be. Had a buddy of mine get a really nasty infection once with a fungal growth on this old sculpture we were trying to refurbish, so now I take no chances.”

  He slipped on a double layer of gloves as well as a respirator mask and then eased the heavy frame from its hanger on the wall and carried the whole thing outside.

  “Emily and I will begin to get stuff set up and figure out how to best arrange the lights. Take your time, Sam…”

  He nodded as the two women went to Emily’s van and began to unload all the various equipment Liz had figured they would need to give the Carroway’s interior the ideal “ghostly” appearance, as well as some things that might be needed for exterior shots if the light faded or they needed to film after dark…something Liz had her heart set on. Using a couple of makeshift supports from his gear, Sam laid the ancient painting gently across the uprights and loosened the drawstring on a small canvas bag he had retrieved from his van. After removing several unmarked bottles and setting them aside, as well as a few brushes of different sizes and some square pieces of linen cloth, Sam touched the surface of the painting with just an index finger as he looked on the piece with wonder.

  Liz and Emily finally wandered back to where he was working after about a half hour or so and Sam finally stood erect again following his inspection and what they could see as a meticulous cleaning of the years of crud that had accumulated on the canvas and frame.

  “Anything interesting, Sam?” Emily asked as she and Liz came closer.

  “Could be…” he replied with a tone of intrigue. “Liz…did you look at this thing at all before we got here?”

  “Nope. Just figured it was some old family portrait or some such thing that no one was interested in anymore. You know me and art, Sam. I know as much about it as nuclear physics.”

  The three of them chuckled at her joke.

  “Well…come take a look.”

  Liz and Emily peered over his shoulder. Despite the long period of neglect and serious growth of what looked to Liz like mold and/or fungus, Sam had done a remarkable job in bringing the piece back to life. It was certainly not ready for display in a museum, but at least now the images on the canvas were more visible. And as she looked more intently at the portrait, she felt a wicked shiver. At the moment, Liz was not quite sure why, but as she stared at the subjects in the frame, a woman and a newborn baby, she felt her legs go weak. She immediately got a reminder of her nightmare, though the woman in the picture had no resemblance to her at all. It was just the coincidence of the two issues.

  The woman was definitely dressed in the style and manner of an era when the mansion had been built, but despite cradling the infant to her bosom, the expression on her face reflected none of what Liz would have thought should be there from a mother with a new baby. The woman had this vacant and faraway look in her eyes, as if she was emotionally lost or abandoned. And to add to the coincidence of the painting and her dream, behind the woman was what looked like a lake. But as Liz looked closer, she saw it was but the extremely wide spot in the river that ran just behind the Carroway. But if she had not known better, she would have sworn it could have been the lake from her nightmare…where she nearly drowned.

  Sam noticed her long silence as well as the look of concern…almost that of being troubled…on Liz’s face and he reached out to gently touch her arm. Liz jumped slightly at Sam’s touch, not realizing how wigged out she must ha
ve appeared to him just then.

  “Sorry, Liz….did not mean to startle you. You OK?” he asked as Emily looked on with wonder as well.

  “Oh, it’s OK…I just got a bit lost there for a moment I guess…”

  “You have any idea who she is?”

  Liz just shook her head no, though she was still chilled by the woman’s expression.

  “I thought that maybe you recognized her. Maybe from some of the research you did on this place before we left home. You seemed really concerned…”

  Liz figuratively shook off her chill and just shrugged.

  “No, I cannot say I have ever seen her before. She just looks so depressed in the painting. What with a new baby and all, it just struck me as odd and a bit out of character, you know?”

  Both Sam and Emily nodded as the three of them moved toward the mansion to put the final touches on the site before Clara and Dean arrived from London. But as Sam carried the painting back to its home in the mansion, Liz’s imagination went into high gear. Was it possible that the woman in that painting…the one looking utterly despaired…could be related to the figure she had seen in her dream wading in the lake?

  The Carroway Mansion…Clara and Dean Join the Fold

  Lake District

  The Carroway Mansion, Threlkeld

  Cumbria, England

  November 2017

  Just as the trio put the final touches on all the lighting design and Sam double-checked his sound equipment, the sound of a small sedan making its way over the dirt lane that approached the mansion greeted them. Liz, followed closely by her partners, waited as a tall and elegant-looking woman emerged from the car, a stocky and compact man at her heels, carrying what looked like a year’s worth of luggage which he had unloaded from the taxi. Liz glanced at Sam and Emily as her partners stifled their laughter.

  “What the hell?” Sam whispered, “is she going on an expedition? That poor guy looks like a Sherpa…”

  Both Liz and Emily snickered, but concealed it well. Liz had worked with enough self-indulgent actors in her time to immediately recognize what they appeared to be up against. She had assumed that since Clara was just getting her feet wet that perhaps she would not yet be exuding the prima donna syndrome so common in Hollywood. But from initial impressions, it seemed as if she was wrong. However, she put on her professional face and went to make all the introductions praying she was off base.

  “You must be Clara…” Liz said as she offered her hand.

  The woman gazed up at the old mansion, a look of dismay on her perfectly made up face before finally taking Liz’s hand.

  “I suppose I must be,” she replied with an air of superiority. “Clara Wentworth…”

  “Well…” Liz said realizing her initial read on her star was spot on, “I’m Liz Barnes. I’ll be directing this thing, and this is Sam Fisher, our sound engineer and Emily Hilson, our lighting engineer.”

  Clara looked at Sam and Emily…or more accurately looked through them…as if they were irrelevant, giving the same fake and ingenuine smile Liz had seen a million times back home when she had been an actress.

  “Dean Garrity…” the muscular man behind Clara said, as he lowered her bags to the ground and stepped from behind her wake to shake hands with them all. “Glad to meet you all.”

  He just shrugged sheepishly at them as if being used to being ignored and overshadowed by Clara.

  “Yes, yes, Dean…” Clara blurted out. “Just take my things to the hotel…”

  Liz looked at her with astonishment.

  “Excuse me, Clara…” she said, “hotel?”

  “Well…yes…” the actress replied, “Where is the hotel? Back in town?”

  “I am afraid maybe you were expecting much more than what we have here,” Liz replied as Sam and Emily wandered off with Dean, not wanting to see the diva actress throw a tantrum. They had seen this more times than they cared to remember back in Hollywood.

  “We are just starting out, and are on a pretty tight timeline as well as budget. I’d like to get as much work done as possible today, but if we have to stretch the filming into more days, we will all be staying overnight in the Carroway.”

  Clara’s face paled and fell.

  “You cannot be serious!”

  “Afraid so, Clara.”

  “Not even a private trailer for me?”

  “What can I say…” Liz added.

  “I see. Well…then let’s get started. I do not want to have to stay in…that…that place…any longer than necessary.” Clara waved her well-manicured nails at the Carroway dismissively and stomped off to a chair that Dean had set up for her.

  Liz was a bit taken aback, but after all the drama she had witnessed back home with various over-privileged “artists,” this tantrum seemed minor. Even after hearing Clara mutter: “Freakin’ Americans…” under her breath as she moved out of sight. Liz smiled to herself and shook her head as she went to find the others and get the show on the road. Dean was helping Sam haul the last of the heavier gear up the narrow staircase when Liz arrived. She followed them up the multiple flights of steps and just looked at Dean.

  “Is she always like this?” Liz asked.

  “Pretty much,” Dean replied with a grin. “She’s a pistol, huh?”

  “I guess…” Liz replied. “I was assuming that a beginning actress would be more…I guess accommodating and not so demanding.”

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Dean replied with a chuckle. “She is…how should I put it…instilled with an aristocratic pedigree. Old world family and all that…”

  “You mean bitch on wheels?” Sam interjected.

  “Even better, mate…” Dean replied.

  They all laughed.

  ……….

  After having a dry run through with the Clara on Liz’s script, they moved to the upper level to begin filming some scenes. Despite her haughty attitude and condescending manner, Clara was indeed found to be quite talented, and Liz was thrilled that she seemed to be the perfect fit for the role as they progressed through the initial shots flawlessly. Well…almost flawlessly. Even with his seemingly positive attitude toward Clara, it was becoming more and more obvious that she had little if any tolerance for Dean. Her treating him as nothing more than her personal pack mule extended to the set as well, and Liz and her partners could see a storm building inside the affable man. For sure Dean had a limited knowledge of the behind the scenes logistics of filmmaking, but he was doing his best to accommodate everyone where ever he could.

  But as they moved back to the ground floor to set up a scene that Liz knew might take multiple takes based on her storyline, things took a sudden and unexpected downturn. While Clara sat away from the group to take a last look at her lines for the upcoming shots, Sam was helping Dean set up a special lighting apparatus that Liz needed for the effects she wanted in the narrow hallway between the foyer and what looked to have been a small reading room or perhaps parlor once upon a time. Sam was on the floor supporting a heavy brace as Dean worked above him to secure the lights into a scaffold. Dean screwed in the last bolt and descended the scaffold to join Sam below. However, just as he hopped off the bottom rung of the scaffold, the entire lighting device broke free from its mooring and struck Sam, rendering him unconscious.

  The whole crew, sans Clara, rushed to Sam’s side frantic that he might have been seriously injured, but he came around in a few minutes. He was quite disoriented, but otherwise as good as could have been expected based on the accident. Liz and Emily helped him to a chair while Dean looked on guiltily.

  “I’m so sorry, Sam…” Dean finally offered as he came closer.

  Sam smiled weakly waving off his apology.

  “What happened?” Liz asked.

  Dean shrugged.

  “I have no idea. That thing was tightly secured before I came down.”

  Clara looked up from her seat, a frown of frustration and dismay on her face as she sighed heavily.

  “This is what yo
u get when you try and cheap out with amateurs, Liz!”

  They all looked at her in shock. It had been a simple accident as far as any of them were concerned, but Clara only saw it as an impediment to her having to spend more time in the mansion than she wanted to. Liz liked her work so far, and she certainly admired Clara’s talent, but now shew began to wonder if it was worth it to have to endure her overbearing demeanor. But without missing a beat, the actress continued on in her dressing down of Dean.

  “Just your pattern, eh, Dean?” she continued. “Maybe you’d be better suited back at the docks or that warehouse down in Birmingham…”

  Liz and Emily gaped on shock as Clara ranted on and on while Dean glared at her, his jaw clenched in what looked like a rage about to explode. He had endured Clara’s tirades for a long time, even way before they had arrived at the mansion for this gig, but the jab about Birmingham had been a step too far for him. Dean came from a very meager background, his life having been a struggle both financially and emotionally when his father had died in an accident while working in the mines. Dean had been forced to take charge of supporting his mother and two sisters when just fifteen, his dreams beyond school dashed immediately.

  With limited opportunities where he had lived, Dean worked at whatever he could scrounge to keep the family fed and under a roof. Two of the less desirable jobs he had been forced to take on had been as a stevedore in the harbors of Portsmouth and then in a warehouse as an underpaid and overworked laborer when the cargo ship company he had been employed with got absorbed by a competitor, and he was let go. Clara knew all of this quite well, and Dean was seething with anger that she was now using what he had confided in her to demean him and blame him for Sam’s injury.

  Liz tried to intervene in the confrontation, but the damage had already been done. Dean balled his fists at his side and feeling as if he had nothing to lose, blasted back at Clara.

  “You stupid little over-privileged bitch! How dare you bring those things up!”

  Clara paled. Liz figured she was not used to anyone speaking to her in this manner.