The Haunting of Beacon Hill

by Ambrose Ibsen

  At the moment when her eyes were at their heaviest, she peered narrowly across the living room from the comfort of the papasan and noticed something—an aberration in the otherwise predictable scene. It took her sleepy head a while to process it, but when she had, all fatigue was driven off and she sat bolt upright. Dread had granted her a second wind.

  She'd heard her name called.

  Half-sure that she'd dreamt it, Sadie climbed out of the chair and scanned the room. She sent a stack of hardcovers tumbling over as she stepped toward the kitchen, trying to figure out where the voice had come from—if she'd heard it at all. Nodding off like she'd been, straddling the line between sleep and alertness, it was entirely possible she'd dreamt it.

  She wasn't satisfied to leave it there, though. The two syllables of her name, muffled and far-off, kept ringing in her ears like an echo, and she drew back the blinds in the living room window to survey the parking lot below, expecting to see someone outside. Except for a smattering of silent parked cars, the lot was empty, however.

  While she stood by the window, gaze thrown over her shoulder in watch of the living room and kitchenette, she heard it again. “Sadie!”—it was unmistakable. Notes of fear or hysteria had been attached to it, lifting it to a register so shrill it was nearly a scream... and yet, it barely registered as a whisper where raw volume was concerned. She stuck fingers into her ears, wondering if they weren't plugged, and then approached the door. Sadie drew very close to the peephole and looked out onto the landing, but she had no visitors and none of the neighbors seemed astir.

  The search continued through the rest of the apartment—an exercise she'd repeated so often this evening she was beginning to feel insane—and as she went she flipped on every light in reach. All the while, the silence was occasionally broken up by that distant shriek of her name by someone whose voice she couldn't altogether pin down. It was feminine, quite high, and seemed to come from afar; that was all she could say for certain.

  She stepped into the bedroom and put on the lights. Then, turning up the blinds, she looked out into the courtyard beside her building, combing the dark grass for signs of this mysterious screamer. For two, maybe three minutes she stood there, and in that time the voice was heard once, though the scene outside brought her no closer to the culprit.

  Sadie continued looking out the window—had been about to open it to take a closer listen, in fact—when her attentions were hijacked. From elsewhere in the apartment there came a new noise, this one readily identifiable. It was the hiss of the shower.

  Baffled, Sadie turned out of the room and ventured a few paces into the hall. The bathroom came into reach, and she saw that the lights were off and the door was open. From within came the ordinarily calming sound of the shower head. For a time she forgot all about the voice she'd been chasing and focused on this new, strange development. I know I turned off the water. Could it have started on its own, or...? She reached into the bathroom and felt out the light switch. With a flick, the bulbs over the sink flashed on.

  Nothing, save the gurgle of the tap, seemed out of place as she stared in from the hall. It wasn't until she dared a step inside that she noticed the barest edge of a shadow concealed by the dark blue material of the curtain. The shadow, perhaps, of someone standing inside.

  The voice returned to her ears. “Sadie!” Sure now that it must be issuing from this room—from behind this very curtain—she held her breath and took a step onto the tiled floor. Plucking her curling iron from the basket near the sink, she held it out in front of her like a sword and jabbed at the curtain forcefully. The blue plastic gave without incident and Sadie whipped the curling iron violently about the inside of the shower. When finally she'd batted the curtain to one side, she found nothing awaiting her there but a puff of warm steam.

  “What the hell?” She set the curling iron down on the lid of the toilet and stared at the empty shower in disbelief. Eventually, she reached inside and shut off the tap, but even then she stood and stared awhile longer, unable to shake the creeping fear that had descended upon her.

  In the newly-formed silence, she listened to the dripping of the shower head. She watched the beads of warm water roll out of the silver apparatus and crash down into the drain, counted them—and in doing so became cognizant of a noisy dripping that was out of step with the water draining out of the bath. She thought it might be a sudden rain and looked upward to the ceiling, but it didn't seem to come from there. It wasn't until she turned to leave that she felt a drop of warm water strike the top of her foot and realized where this other dripping noise was coming from.

  Someone was standing behind her.

  A sopping mane of black hair had delivered that unexpected drop, and from behind its tangles there stared out two glazed eyes, their pupils reduced to pinpoints. A wide, almost wacky smile had broken out beneath the maniac stare and the pale lips were damp with spittle. A blue hospital gown, completely soaked through, clung to a thin feminine physique.

  It took her a few seconds—and a tumble backward, into the shower—to realize it was Ophelia.

  The girl was still as a sculpture, features stretched to the breaking point. She dripped water all over the floor, proof enough she'd been in the shower only moments ago, but there existed not a single clue as to how she'd gotten in there—how she'd found her way into the apartment at all. They were in a second-story unit with no fire escape and the door remained locked. Repeated searches of the premises had yielded no physical trace of Ophelia, even if the sensory evidences of an unseen presence had harangued Sadie from the moment she'd returned home.

  Unless she'd been transmitted into the locked apartment, molecule by molecule, Sadie could furnish no explanation for the girl's presence in her bathroom, and instead of dwelling on that terrifying fact, she stood and took her by the soggy shoulders. “Ophelia! Are you all right? Can you hear me?”

  There was a shift in the frenzied mask—a sudden focusing of the eyes—and Ophelia's entire expression was subsequently wrenched in the delivery of a howling, “Sadie!” Only moments ago completely rigid, the girl wobbled and fell to the floor with a splat, her blue garb sticking to the wet tiles below. She clawed at Sadie's pajamas, whimpering and shuddering, and buried her face against the bath mat.

  “Ophelia!” Sadie knelt down beside the girl, combed the hair from her pale face. “What are you doing here? Where have you been—how did you...?” She took Ophelia in her arms and rocked her slowly from side to side till her breathing grew more regular. “Calm down for me. Take a deep breath. In and out, that's it. Relax. You're safe with me.”

  A sliver of composure returned to the teen in time, but the longer Sadie studied her—wondered at the horror in her eyes—the clearer it became that calm nights were a thing of the past for her. There was something else, too. These eyes, these expressions, were fully the girl's. Whatever sinister thing had lain behind them during their meeting in the hospital seemed to have gone completely, and except for this stammering terror, left no trace behind. She sobbed into Sadie's shoulder, muttering incoherently and pawing at her runny nose.

  Sadie nabbed the closest towel and draped it over Ophelia's shoulders. “Hey, it's all right. It's me. Are you OK? Where have you been?”

  Minutes passed before the girl could wrangle her tongue into speech. “It... It let me g-go,” she stuttered. “She let me g-go.”

  “Who did?” asked Sadie, gaze narrowing. “Do you mean... Mother Maggot?”

  The utterance of that name inspired a visceral wince in the girl, but she nodded fervently all the same.

  “Oh,” said Sadie, wrapping the girl in a tight embrace, “that's wonderful.” She ran a hand through Ophelia's hair, held her close and rubbed her back. “I'm so happy to hear it. You'll be safe now.”

  Here, the girl slowly wormed her way out of Sadie's grasp, turning her small, reddened eyes upward. “But you won't be,” she replied through chattering teeth.

  Sadie watched from the floor as the bulbs above t
he bathroom sink dimmed in unison. The stuffy bathroom, hitherto packed with steam, grew suddenly and unaccountably chill. Ophelia's trembling fingers dug into her upper arms and the girl's stale breath washed over her face in increasingly wheezy huffs. “W-What do you mean?” she asked, eyes darting about the room.

  Fresh tears queued in Ophelia's eyes. “She gave me up because she wants you instead,” she whispered.

  In the mirror over the sink, its corners still adorned with fog, something shifted. Sadie couldn't help looking—her eyes were drawn to it. The reflection showcased something clinging to the wall opposite; a figure. Black hands with withered, smear-like digits spread out across the beige paint, and from the bundle of membranous black tangles that answered for a body there grew a white, egg-like face. Every fold of that countenance surged with activity and the air was filled with an almost deafening buzz, as of a hundred angry flies.

  No sooner had Sadie glimpsed this figure did every light in the apartment suddenly blink out. The unit would have been plunged into silence then, too, had not the girl begun to shriek at the top of her lungs. Ophelia raged in Sadie's arms, screamed at the fading of the light.

  With Ophelia's arm in her grasp, Sadie lunged out of the bathroom and led the girl into the hall. “Come on!” she barked over the piteous screams. “We've got to get out of here.” Yanking the girl behind her like a rag doll, Sadie felt her way into the living room and then charged the front door. She threw it open with a crash and stumbled out onto the landing, the girl tripping on her own feet and loosing still another scream.

  The lights elsewhere in the building were still on by the looks of it. The yellowish lights of the lower lobby, the stairwell, burned like they always did, and as Sadie's neighbor across the hall burst out of his unit in his boxers to inspect the commotion, it was clear his lights were still on, too. “The hell's going on out here?” he asked, palming the sleepiness from his stubbled face. “You two all right?”

  Sadie hooked her arms around the girl and hauled her to her feet. She didn't reply.

  The neighbor peered narrowly across the hall at her place, noticing the darkness throughout. “Oh, power outage? Is that it?” His gaze wandered to Ophelia, and as he took stock of her garb—a soggy hospital gown—he furrowed his brow. “Just, uh... keep it down, OK?” He slammed his door shut and retreated with a grimace.

  Sadie led Ophelia down the stairs and had her sit near the building entrance. She crept back up to the landing and, finding the lights now on in her place, took stock of the living room from afar. It was only necessity that compelled her to run in and retrieve her phone. With that in hand, she scooped her keys off the kitchen counter and dashed back out. By the time she'd locked her door and rejoined Ophelia on the lower level, she'd already dialed Rosie.

  “H-Hello?” answered Rosie after several rings.

  “It's me,” began Sadie. “I found Ophelia.”

  There was a gasp on the other end. “You found her?”

  “She's at my place.”

  Rather than wait for an explanation, Rosie hopped out of bed and took down Sadie's address. She arrived within twenty minutes. Sadie and Ophelia passed the wait at the bottom of the stairs, the girl sobbing quietly and Sadie muttering assurances, while the devil—out of sight but not out of mind—breathed the same air.

  17

  “I'll tell them that she came by the house—that she knocked on my door.” That was the story Rosie planned to feed the police and hospital staff. “But you really don't know how she got inside?”

  The night was warm. Moths bobbed around the light fixtures on the exterior of her building and the engines of nearby cars clicked and settled. Sadie shook her head. “I was feeling paranoid when I got home, but I was sure no one was inside the apartment with me. The doors were locked and she couldn't have climbed in through the window...”

  However bizarre the circumstances may have been, Rosie didn't give the matter another thought. She was just pleased to have her daughter back. Like she couldn't believe it was really Ophelia, she looked closely at the girl for the dozenth time, studied her face, her reactions. “It's really gone, isn't it?” she'd say each time. With profuse thanks and a tight hug, she led her daughter to the car. “Thanks, Sadie. If not for you, none of this would have been possible.”

  You have no idea how right you are... It was a nice sentiment, and at any other time Sadie would have accepted such heartfelt thanks with a smile. As Rosie and her daughter filed off to the car however, Sadie exchanged a look with the girl. They hadn't told Rosie why the spirit of Mother Maggot had decided to move on.

  Ophelia's voice sounded through Sadie's mind as the car pulled away and she was left alone—though not as alone as she would have liked—outside her building. “She gave me up because she wants you instead.”

  She had entered into this mess with only a single goal in mind; to figure out what had been hounding the girl and to free her from it. Becoming enmeshed in the trouble herself—taking the fancy of the dark spirit—had never been a part of her plan. It was possible that Ophelia had been confused, mistaken; it was possible, too, that a certain something about Sadie had proven more alluring to the hideous specter and that the teen had been freed so that Mother Maggot might exploit it instead.

  She didn't go back into the building, not at once. She paced around in front of the entrance and chanced a call to August. She needed to inform him of this latest development and she hoped, too, that he might drop by and keep her company. Returning to her apartment alone after what she'd glimpsed in the bathroom didn't sit too well, to put it lightly. Her call went unanswered, however, and she declined to leave a voicemail.

  There was nowhere else for her to go. She considered looking for a hotel in the area but couldn't be sure that the trouble wouldn't follow her there. What's more, now that the excitement had once again ceased, she found herself bone tired, on the verge of collapse. Perhaps it was this immense fatigue that blunted her reason sufficiently to climb those stairs and return to her apartment.

  The power was back on, and her initial hasty walk-thorough brought nothing sinister to light. If Mother Maggot was there—hell, if any spirit was there—she should have been able to see it, no? Unless she'd suddenly lost her ability to see the dead—which would have been a pleasing development, no doubt—nothing of that kind should have been able to hide from her. Room to room, corner to corner, she sought out that hideous louse with the pale, maggot-filled face, but found nothing. The living room and kitchen were still, in the hall and bedroom she found herself alone, and the bathroom mirror showcased only her own sleep-starved face when she dared stare into it.

  What was she to make of this? Is the spirit still in here with me or did it leave with Ophelia? And if it is here, then why can't I find it? She idled in the hall for a silent moment, daring something, anything, to reach out to her. Nothing did, and though it was possible she was jumping the gun, this fact was sufficient to make up her mind. She would tough it at out in the apartment, try to get some sleep.

  She decided to keep the lights on—all of them—and shuffled into her bed. The fear never fully left her, the terrifying possibility that something did lurk in her surroundings just out of her view never faded, though neither was it consummated as she drifted quickly into a coma-like slumber. She left the phone in the breast pocket of her pajamas; first thing in the morning, before he even dropped by to pick her up for work, she'd try calling August again. She simply needed to close her eyes, take a load off...

  She was staring at the black door, and the charcoal-colored passage around her pulsed like a slashed vein. She recalled nothing of the walk that'd brought her to it, couldn't grasp at anything like a history. There was only this, only now.

  Numb hands felt out the knob. Opening the door just struck her as the right thing to do; instinct drove her to pull at it. The door flapped open without a sound and for a long moment Sadie stood there and fixed her anesthetized stare at the darkness beyond the threshold. A strange f
eeling pierced her heart, made it flutter in her chest. Regret? Impatience? Fear? More likely it was a fusion of all three.

  She soon realized there was more than darkness in this space. She spied a human silhouette stationed within, a whitish smear as of something rendered in chalk. The shadows receded, drained away, giving the figure more definite shape. Inch by inch its details came into sharper focus till she was looking upon an individual with an almost microscopic scrutiny.

  And what a lovely figure it was. A very pale woman in a black dress, sleeping the most peaceful sleep imaginable, floated before her. As though suspended by some unseen wire, the motionless woman didn't even touch the ground, her small feet hovering several inches from the floor. There was something vaguely familiar about the figure—about the entire setting—though she couldn't put her finger on what.

  The perfect alabaster face, features smooth and serene, stirred with the first twinges of wakefulness. The face was beautiful, almost comforting, but movement introduced an unexpected chaos into its features. One by one the eyes shot open, then the mouth. The nostrils flared.

  The straining eyes were wholly black and glossy as though coated in shellac, and the formerly pretty lips were thrown wide in the utterance of an infernal scream. Whatever color the face might have possessed was forfeit till the whole of the shrieking countenance took on something of the transparent. The lines of the woman's skull were starkly visible; veins in her brow, her neck, trembled furiously.

  Before the woman could reach out and touch her, Sadie suddenly plummeted into the blackness.