The Haunting of Beacon Hill

by Ambrose Ibsen

  August stepped in to support her as she swooned. “You OK, Sadie? You don't look so hot.” He fanned her ineffectually with his free hand and looked into her face. “You wanna sit or something?”

  At this, Sadie shook her head. She didn't want to sit—not here. All she wanted to do was to put as much distance as possible between herself and this accursed hospital. “I wanna go,” she squeaked, taking a fistful of August's dress shirt and tugging at it feebly. “Now.”

  Rosie stepped to one side, as if to block Sadie's path to the elevators. “Wait, wait! Don't go yet! What happened in there? I was right, wasn't I?” She pointed at the doors to the psych unit, practically shouting. “That isn't my daughter!”

  Feeling as though she might be sick, Sadie brought a hand to her mouth and staggered to the elevator bank under August's guidance. “I can't help you, Rosie.” Shuffling on, she mashed the call button and added, “I can't help her.”

  The elevator door opened and Sadie pulled August in after her. Rosie remained outside, pleading. “Why not? Please, you've got to talk to me, Sadie! I don't know what else to do. How can I help her? How can I get my daughter back?”

  Sadie held down the CLOSE DOOR button and shook her head dazedly. “I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, but—I can't help. I don't want anything more to do with this. P-Please, don't call me anymore, Rosie. I wish you the best.” The door began to slide shut. “Goodbye. I'm sorry.”

  The door closed and the elevator began its smooth descent. On the silent ride down, still standing near so as to keep her from falling, August exhaled loudly. “What, uh... what happened? You OK?”

  Sadie shut her eyes and waited for the door to open onto the first floor. “Just take me home,” she said, balling her fists. “I don't want to talk about it. Please, just take me home.”

  10

  She said nothing at all when August probed for details on the ride home, and when she returned to her place she scrambled out of the car, barely uttering a word of thanks. She absconded to her apartment, spent the remainder of the day in bed, listening to the rain and thunder and attempting to scrub all memory of the afternoon's visit from her mind. That which she could not scrub she endeavored to massage into something she could live with—into something she could recall without flinching.

  The girl had been very disturbed and upset, yes—and her offensive, standoffish manner had been a defense mechanism. But had there been anything supernatural about the girl—devilish? No, of course not. She was a sick girl, much in need of therapy and medication. And it was unwise, no doubt, to trust implicitly things glimpsed in the corner of one's eye—and reflected on rain-soaked glass, no less. Questions about old dreams, about Sadie's mother, had been posed merely to wound her; the girl had just been lashing out. This was all that was behind Ophelia's recent, sinister bent—teenaged angst and rebellion.

  Sadie rolled over in bed and buried her face in her pillow. She wanted to wash her hands of it—all of it. Rosie and her daughter; the memories so recently stirred up in conversations with them and August; the blank-eyed lurker outside the library entrance. The more she numbered her grievances the keener the desire to relinquish her entire life, to burn it all down and rebuild. Her history, her career, the very apartment she presently cowered in—none of it meant anything to her. She would have liked to fall asleep and to subsequently awaken just about anywhere else on the planet—and as anyone but Sadie Young.

  She did, after a time, manage to drift off—and to an unexpected place, at that.

  The room was very small; in fact, its dimensions bordered on coffin-like. From someplace unseen—or maybe from no place at all—a faint light brought Sadie's narrow surroundings into focus. Everything was powdery, shades of grey and black and white, as if she'd stepped into a charcoal drawing.

  Behind her, there seemed to be nothing. Turning around, backing up, never crossed her mind. Her attention was fixed solely upon the outline of a narrow door just ahead, its round knob shining expectantly. The urge to open it was innate; her pale arm drifted out loosely before her and she pulled it ajar without a sound.

  Swinging open on muted hinges, the door revealed a still narrower space—a space, it seemed, built solely to accommodate one. And this nook, she discovered, was already occupied.

  A woman was inside. Her skin was white as bone and she wore a black dress that stretched nearly to her small, bare feet. These feet did not touch the ground—they hovered some inches above it. But of all the woman's characteristics, this ranked among the least impressive. Surely, her most captivating quality was the expression she wore—one of perfect, sublime tranquility. Her face—eyes closed and lips fixed in a serene smile—could not have been more placid had it been a death mask. She was suspended in the air as though dipped in resin; stationary, sleeping her halcyon sleep, incorruptible.

  Sadie's surroundings began to contract. The passage in which she stood did not widen, but it did grow in length, leaving her at one end of what was now a long hall, and the pristine, slumbering idol on the other.

  The sound of her heartbeat registered suddenly. It sounded like a run on the timpani—quick, sonorous, and growing quicker still.

  Far ahead of her, the slumbering woman awoke.

  And more than awoke.

  Eyes only moments ago shut and serene were suddenly thrust open to their limits, their strained, weepy lids quivering and the orbs themselves a perfect, polished black. The lips, too—once relaxed in a perpetual smile—parted in a scream. The woman in black garb did not have to draw breath to coax out this deafening scream; it burst from deep within her as though it had always been there, clawing at the reverse of those once-placid lips to be released. Livid, wriggling veins sprang up across the alabaster face and neck, and the whole form took on that rare breed of loathsomeness unique to the destruction of the wholesome.

  Sadie watched from across the narrow corridor as the woman in black ceased her floating and began to shamble toward her. The woman's jerking, staggering stride was that of the injured or malformed; she stumbled across the floor as though the hinges of her joints had been reversed without her knowing it. Loping and swaying—screaming from that ebon, spittle-stained maw—the woman drew nearer. The black eyes spun in their sockets till they threatened to spiral out of the shrieking face altogether.

  The woman closed the gap, arriving within feet of her, and had Sadie not spun out of her bed onto the floor and awakened for the sudden jolt, the nightmare might have progressed even further—and to still greater peaks of demonic hallucination.

  Coming to on the floor of her room, panting, sweat-drenched and shuddering as if febrile, she tucked herself into a fetal heap and wept into the carpet. Darkness pervaded; there was no guessing the hour. With hair matted to her face and a heart that felt on the verge of giving out, she worked herself into an upright position by degrees and after no small effort regained her feet. When she was sure she was in her room—that she hadn't merely slipped into some new nightmare—she shuffled to the window and threw back the blinds.

  It was night—and going by the stillness of the courtyard outside her building and the immense blackness of the sky, the hour was quite advanced. The winding sidewalks that stretched from building to building in her complex were empty. The building across from hers, some fifty or sixty yards on, was fully dark except for the constant yellow glow that issued from the stairway fixtures. Lamp posts were scattered throughout the property, but not in such number or sequence as to put a dent in the formidable gloom.

  Sadie drew away from the window, but not before she glimpsed something else in the twilit courtyard. Huddled so closely beside a shady oak beside the opposite building that she nearly missed it, was a lone individual, well-obscured by the shadow cast by the stirring boughs. Despite the distance between them—she was on the second story of her building and at least half a football field away—she was certain as she was of anything that the figure was watching her.

  This was confirmed moments later when the oily huma
n silhouette took a step forward and began beckoning to her.

  Sadie pushed away from the window. The blinds crashed back into place and she fell onto her bed. Even then she didn't stay put, clawing her way across the knotted covers and staggering into her nightstand. She put on a lamp, and when it flashed on she did a wild, minutes-long search of her room to ensure her solitude.

  She wanted to scream. Her limbs shook and her pulse thumped deafeningly in her ears. Terrified and alone, she felt the full weight of her lonely existence for the first time in ages. She would have liked to reach out to someone for comfort—her father, her grandparents—but there was no one left in her life to save her.

  Picking up her phone, she did the only thing she could think of.

  August picked up on the third ring with a yawn. “S-Sadie?” he answered groggily.

  “It's... It's all starting up again,” she hissed into the phone. Her teeth chattered and she sank to the floor with a sob. There she stayed until, a half hour later, August arrived at her door.

  11

  August went from window to window. “I didn't see anyone on the way in, either,” he noted, scratching at his wild red mane and stifling a yawn. “Not that I don't believe you,” he quickly added. Slouching in his T-shirt and sweatpants, looking like he'd been jostled out of a sound sleep, he made his way back to the living room and plopped down onto the sofa.

  Sadie locked her hands around a mug of hot tea she'd thrown together but had no intention of actually drinking. Upon his arrival, she'd taken refuge in her papasan chair while August had made the rounds, though his report of “all-clear” had done little to soothe her startled soul. “It's all starting up again,” she said, shoulders stooped and legs tucked beneath her. She was still in the same outfit she'd worn to the hospital—the white sundress—and the wrinkles running through it, coupled with her disheveled hair, made her look grungy and unstable. Abandoning the tea to a side table, she smoothed out her hair and threw it into a messy ponytail. “I had the dream again.”

  “The dream about your mother?” he asked. His flip-flops clopped as he crossed his legs and threw his arms across the backrest of the sofa.

  She nodded. “It's the first time in years,” she confided, wedging a thumbnail between her teeth. “I haven't had that dream since I moved in with my grandparents. But it was different this time.”

  “Different how?”

  Not wishing to ruminate on the monstrous imagery of the dream too closely, she cleared her throat and summarized it as, “More frightening. It wasn't like the other dreams. It was longer—more intense. And my mother...” Wakefulness had mercifully dulled her memory of the most egregious bits, but the stagger of that screaming, infernal figure held fast in her mind. “She was different—a monster. Barely my mother at all.”

  August stroked at his bearded chin, pinching the coarse hairs between his fingertips. “I see. That's pretty strange, having that kind of dream again after all these years. Do you think that meeting with that girl today is what prompted it?”

  That her encounter with Ophelia had been the trigger Sadie hadn't the least doubt... and yet the meandering path of her daily life had lately featured no shortage of potential harbingers. The figure glimpsed outside the library entrance the other night, her recent conversations with August—conversations that brought long-dormant memories back into focus—and her tense meeting with Rosie at the restaurant, too, seemed contributing factors.

  “I think that Ophelia was the straw that broke the camel's back,” she managed, lowering her head into her hands. “But it feels like this has been building up in the background for quite awhile now.”

  “So, if you don't mind me asking, what happened today?” August polished his glasses with his T-shirt and wiped at his droopy eyes. “At the hospital, I mean. When I dropped you off, you weren't acting right at all. I was pretty worried, to be honest.”

  The drip of the kitchen tap called to mind the storm of the prior afternoon, and with it came visions of that cramped, sterile room in the psych ward. Even at that moment, in the small hours of the night, the haunted girl in room 334 was probably still staring out the window, the shadows cast throughout her room fidgeting odiously across the walls like the roots of a foul sapling. “She scared me,” she put it simply. “She wasn't normal—wasn't what I expected. I saw things while I was in that room. It felt like there were more than just the two of us in there.”

  August nodded. “So you think she really got tied up with something... supernatural, then?”

  Nestling deeper into the chair, she shrugged. “I didn't want to believe that was the case, but... yeah, I think she did. There was more than just a teenager behind those eyes of hers. From the minute I walked in there to the minute I left the hospital I felt threatened. Teens can be jerks, real moody and rude. But this was different.” Sadie frowned and balanced her brow against the heel of her palm. “Something is definitely wrong with her, and the doctors won't be able to fix it. I can guarantee it.”

  “OK,” he replied, sitting up. “So, we need to do some digging, then. What would be the best way to get to the bottom of this, I wonder?”

  “No,” she snapped, loosing a nervous laugh. “I told Rosie I didn't want any part of this and I meant it. I poked around enough, August. Whatever has the girl acting this way, I want nothing to do with it. I just paid her a visit and now look what's become of me!”

  He toyed with one of his earlobes and groaned inwardly. “Yeah, and I get that. But it's time to face the facts, Sadie. Things are in motion now. You've either got to get proactive about it or let it trample you.” August studied the ceiling for a beat. “After years of living a normal life, this old weirdness, this ghost stuff, has started up again. If you want it to stop—and to stop for good—then you've got to start asking questions. That's what I'd do if I were in your shoes.”

  “Easy for you to say,” she shot back.

  “Maybe so, but the point stands.” He wagged a finger at her like a scold. “You had a difficult upbringing, had some scary experiences. But rather than help you work through them, make peace with your unique gift, everyone in your life tried to separate you from it. They acted like it wasn't real, told you not to discuss it. Am I wrong?”

  Sadie studied her toes and offered a weak shake of the head.

  “You start having terrifying dreams and your dad's solution is to move you in with your grandparents? I dunno, but that doesn't seem too sensible to me. He should have talked to you about it, tried to offer some insight rather than just send you away like you were defective. And your grandparents, too—they knew you could see strange things, things that the rest of us can't detect, but they forbid you from making sense of that ability. They stuck you with a therapist and hoped you'd forget all about it—that it would simply go away. That isn't a healthy way to address a problem, though.

  “Since you were Ophelia's age, you've been working to close yourself off from the supernatural, Sadie. You followed the advice of your elders and ran from it as long as you could. But now it's all starting up again. It turns out that the problem never went away at all, it's just been waiting for you.” August tossed his shoulders. “So, what will you do now? Keep running? You already know that won't work—not in the long-term. No, what you should consider doing is to meet it head-on. You're seeing things, awful things, but you're seeing them for a reason. What would happen if you acknowledged this and sought to control it—went looking for answers instead of fleeing from it like you've always done?”

  “My family only wanted what was best for me,” was her reply. Sadie tugged on the edge of the chair cushion, red in the face. “They wanted to protect me. That's all. They weren't bad people.”

  “Sure, but did their approach get results?” He did a slow pan of the room. “In the end, all this running just pushed off the problem to another day.” Rubbing at his neck, he continued. “Seems to me like the bill's come due.”

  “Maybe it has.” Sadie fell into silence for a long while
then, staring down into her cup of cooling tea. Looking to the window, she discovered the faint light of dawn peeking in around the edge of her blinds. “But what can I do?” she finally asked. “Sometimes running is the smart thing to do, the only reasonable option. I could embrace this 'gift' of mine, like you say, but where will that lead?” She chuckled darkly and turned away from him. “Pursuing this might just make a ghost out of me.”

  “Maybe, but a life spent running in terror is no life at all, is it?” August sighed. “Find out what you're really seeing and why you're seeing it. If you feel like this girl, Ophelia, is the tipping point, then look into what happened to her. Maybe the key to freeing her of this dark influence is what you need, too.”

  “Sure, but... Where do I start? And how the hell am I supposed to do this alone?” she asked.

  August clicked his tongue. “Now, no one ever said you had to do this alone. You've got me in your corner and I'm at least as valuable as a dozen men.” He snickered. “I'll help out, however I can. I may not be able to see ghosts like you, but there's no reason for you to dig into this solo.”

  She arched a brow and let slip an incredulous smile. “Oh? That's real chivalrous, but what dog do you have in this fight, exactly?”

  August raised one of his fists and placed it over his heart. “Us loners have gotta stick together. But more importantly, we're both part of the Montpelier Public Library family and that's thicker than blood as far as I'm concerned. Don't you remember swearing the librarian's oath?”

  Sadie rolled her eyes. “If there were such a thing, I don't imagine it would mention helping your co-workers with ghosts... but thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “No problem.” August stood up, stretched. “So, it's been a long night. If it's all the same to you, I'm going to head back to my place for a little beauty sleep. You gonna be OK?”