The Haunting of Meade Mansion

by Skylar Finn

  “We were shocked to see anybody living here, frankly,” said Roger, not giving them the chance to respond. “I mean, after everything that happened…”

  Darla slid her eyes to the left, watching him. As he trailed off, she chimed in, as if on cue, “The murders, yes. So unfortunate.”

  “Murders?” said Jesse. “We heard they disappeared.”

  “Well, technically, they did vanish,” Darla amended her earlier statement. “But I think it’s fairly obvious that when three little children mysteriously disappear out of nowhere who the obvious culprit is.”

  “You’re saying Matilda did something to them?” Emily asked.

  “Well,” said Roger delicately, “most of the town feels that it’s a foregone conclusion.”

  “Sometimes people aren’t who we think they are,” said Darla. “Of course, I would never want to speak ill of your family. But it would be dishonest of me to pretend that we don’t all assume that something terrible happened here.”

  “What do people think happened?”

  “Well, whether she took those kids, or took them and did something to them and then vanished herself—that’s largely a matter of speculation,” said Roger.

  “But if I were you, I’d want to get rid of this place as quickly as possible,” said Darla, shaking her head. “I don’t even know how you can stand to be here.”

  “Just coming up here gives me the heebie jeebies,” said Roger, adding “As a matter of professional opinion, of course.”

  “I told you there was something weird about this place!” Jesse had barely closed the door behind them when he whirled on Emily, waving the spoon for emphasis. “And not just the place—the entire situation. This is totally a murder house!”

  “Well, of course they’re going to say that,” said Emily. “They want to buy us out as cheaply as possible. Did it ever occur to you that they might be lying in order to freak us out?”

  “Yes, they might be lying. But that’s something we can find out so easily! All we have to do is Google it. Why would they lie about something that easy to prove?” Jesse smacked himself in the forehead, hit with the realization for the first time. “We didn’t look up anything before we came here! Why didn’t we Google any of this?”

  “Why would we?” said Emily, taking out her laptop. “We were moving into a house we already technically owned. What was there to research?”

  Emily opened her MacBook and Googled MEADE HOUSE COLORADO. The first hit was the local paper, an article titled Murder in the Mountains? with the subheading of Five Disappear, Foul Play Suspected.

  Matilda Meade, a local philanthropist who used her wealth to take care of local children in need, went missing last night between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. She was reported missing by a maintenance man who works on the property. Police said there was no sign of a struggle. Nor was there any sign of Ms. Meade, her assistant Cynthia Harkness, or the three children who resided there. Police are reluctant to either confirm or deny suspicions of foul play, but eyewitness accounts confirm that no bodies have been recovered from the scene.

  “So basically, everybody in the house went missing, and everyone who lives here thinks Matilda did it,” said Jesse, reading over Emily’s shoulder.

  “It’s a pretty reasonable assumption, I guess,” said Emily, closing the laptop. “All things considered.” She felt strange. It was one thing to think that her aunt, who for whatever reason had taken a liking to her, had left her this place for Emily to do whatever she wished with it. It was another to think that Matilda, who had died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances, might be responsible for harming three children and another adult—then left her the house in which she committed these crimes. Had she known the full set of circumstances prior to moving, would she still have taken the house? Emily thought guiltily of how desperate she felt before they moved. Some small part of her felt it was better not to know whether or not she would have taken the house regardless of its obscene history.

  As if reading her mind, Jesse said, “Can we really afford to change our minds, though?”

  Emily pinched the bridge of her nose, as if fending off an oncoming migraine. “As horrible as it sounds, I don’t know that we can. We spent what little we had left moving out here. We put even more into the idea of fixing this place up. I don’t know, maybe we should just try to hurry up and sell the place so we can leave.”

  That night, Emily found herself unable to sleep. She stared at the ceiling while Jesse snored beside her. She was restless at the thought of the day’s events and worried she would have another nightmare. She decided to get up and make a cup of tea.

  In the kitchen, Emily heated up water in the electric kettle. She selected a blue mug from the cabinet and poured hot water over the teabag, adding a generous dollop of honey. Against her better judgment, she carried the tea into the library. That day’s pages lay face down on the desk where she had left them. She flipped them over.

  The house is maybe the prettiest I’ve ever seen. It’s a million times bigger than our house before everything went wrong. I don’t remember it well, but I remember it was small and had a lot of bugs in it.

  Matilda’s house is on a hill and sometimes there are animals in the yard. There’s a ton of rooms to explore, but the basement scares me so I stay away from that.

  There’s a playroom upstairs in the attic where I go with the kids sometimes. There’s a toy chest for them and a big old closet-looking thing filled with old clothes that I like to dress up in. It’s always warm in the attic no matter how cold the rest of the house is. Matilda says this is because heat rises.

  I hope that after I start school, maybe I can go and see my parents again. I asked Matilda and she said, “we’ll see.” I hope that I get to HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME

  Startled, Emily dropped the pages. Reaching forward as if they might bite her, she flipped them over, one by one: HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME. It went on like that for six pages. Eventually, the story resumed in the place Emily read when she came out of her trance.

  Emily imagined herself at the typewriter yesterday, typing these words over and over with no awareness of what she was doing. She felt sick.

  Shoving the papers in the desk’s single drawer, she locked it with a tiny gold key in the keyhole and dropped the key into the pocket of her robe. This was exactly what Jesse had joked about, only now it was real. He would never want to stay if he knew how crazy she was acting. She wasn’t sure that she did, either. Only that having these people after the house made her realize how valuable it truly was. What would Aunt Matilda say if she sold it after a week? She obviously had her reasons for not wanting to sell to them. Maybe they were the ones behind whatever had happened to her and the children.

  Emily paused at the doorway and looked at the typewriter. Whatever happened to her and the children…Were the strange things she had written indicative of something more than stress? Was one of the children trying to communicate with her? From…wherever they were now?

  She pushed the thought aside. It sounded like something she would write. Fiction isn’t life, she chided herself. Then again, she thought, sometimes truth was stranger than fiction. Either way, the thought of purposely using the typewriter again and having something similar happen made her skin crawl.

  She closed the office door and went back upstairs, determined to forget about what she read. She would get on with fixing the house with Jesse, sell anything of value, and they would get out and never come back.

  With that reassuring thought in mind, she was able to fall deeply asleep.

  No dreams or nightmares had woken Emily in the night, and she awoke, refreshed and ready to start a new day.

  “You look happy,” said Jesse. He was at the stove, cooking eggs.

  “I am happy,” said Emily, giving him a peck on the cheek. She poured a hot mug of steaming coffee from the fresh pot on the counter. Even the hideous color of the kitchen barely bothered her today.

  “Going to do some wr
iting?” asked Jesse.

  Emily shuddered inwardly. “No, I think I’m going to tackle some more cleaning today,” she said in a would-be casual tone. “Maybe go through the stuff in the attic. I think a lot of the old furniture is antique. We could get a nice chunk of change for it on eBay.”

  “I like where you’re going with this,” said Jesse. “I’m going back to that Small Town Hardware R Us place I found yesterday to get the latch. Old Man Wigglesworth ordered it for me express.”

  “I’m sorry, what did you say his name was?” asked Emily. “Old Man Wigglesworth?”

  “That’s not really his name, that’s just what I call him. It’s like, everybody around here acts so quaint and it’s driving me mad.”

  “It bothers you that people are nice here?” asked Emily, amused.

  “It doesn’t bother me, it’s just kinda Stepford, you know? Either you have weirdos lurking in the bushes telling you murder stories and trying to steal your house, or you have the guy who runs the hardware store, offering you lemonade and talking to you about his geraniums. These people need to pick a way to be and stick with it. In cities, everybody’s a jerk. At least it’s consistent.”

  “Your logic never ceases to amaze me,” said Emily. “I’ll see you at lunch.”

  “See you in a few,” said Jesse. “Hours, that is. Holler if you need me.”

  “Will do.” Emily watched as he went down the back stairs and over to his truck. She immediately felt her apprehension rise as soon as he backed out and headed towards town.

  The sooner you do this, the sooner you can get out of here, she reminded herself. Ideally forever.

  In the attic, the unexpected warmth soothed Emily of her initial fears and she decided to start next on the far side of the attic, away from the corner that held the typewriter.

  Emily went to the window, armed with glass cleaner and a roll of paper towels. She attacked the thick coating of dust on the glass, vigorously spraying and wiping. It was on her third pass that she saw the girl.

  She was small and frail, no more than ten, though she could have been as young as eight. Her hair hung down her face in long and unkempt tangles. She wore a long pale nightgown. She stood in the yard below the house, and even from this distance, Emily could see her sad, dark eyes. Who was she? A neighborhood child?

  Emily remained frozen to the spot, unable to move, certain if she so much as blinked, the girl would vanish before her very eyes. The girl remained fixed in her spot, staring at Emily.

  She tried to open the window, but it was painted shut. Frustrated beyond belief, she ran to the attic door.

  It was locked.

  6

  Emily frantically banged on the door. She rattled the knob to no avail. She was stuck.

  She was not a particularly claustrophobic person, and anyway, the attic was large. But something about the idea of being stuck inside it with no visible means of escape after everything else she’d experienced terrified her beyond all reason. She started to yell for help, but would anyone hear her?

  Emily ran to the window, reaching into her pocket for her phone. Her pocket was empty, and Emily pictured the kitchen table downstairs, where she’d left her phone that morning. She cursed and tried opening the window again. It seemed like it had never been opened, as if it was permanently glued shut. The feeling of being trapped increased. She banged on the window.

  The girl was gone.

  “Help!” she yelled. There was no one to hear her.

  Emily ran back towards the door, promptly tripping on a child’s rug decorated with trains and stubbing her toe on an old toy chest. A hollow clunk emitted from the wooden floor and Emily glanced down, seeing a tarnished gold locket on a thin, delicate chain.

  Emily reached down and picked up the locket. She opened it and saw two photographs of a man and a woman around her and Jesse’s age. She closed the locket, wondering if it had belonged to one of the children.

  She looked around the attic. There was an old carousel horse leaning in the corner. For some terrible reason, its designer had thought it advisable to give it glittering red rubies for eyes. They glinted menacingly in the weak late autumn sunlight of the attic. Emily wondered if she could use it as a battering ram.

  Hefting the horse up (it was heavier than it looked), she tucked it under one arm. She backed up to the far side of the attic across from the door so she could get a running start. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders: I will get out of this attic, she thought. She took off running, her socked feet sliding a little on the wooden floor. She was two feet from the door when it flew open.

  Emily skidded to a stop and almost fell over. The horse stopped, inches from impaling Richard, who stared at her with wide round owl eyes behind his spectacles.

  “Doing a bit of jousting?” he asked.

  Emily turned on the electric kettle. She had offered Richard a cup of tea out of remorse for nearly running him through with a fake plastic horse.

  “I really thought it was stuck,” she said.

  Richard nodded kindly. “Old house like this, it’s temperamental. Weather can do that—humidity, or cold. Sometimes you can’t even open your door for the wind up here. It’s not surprising. Nothing to feel bad about.”

  “Yeah, lucky I didn’t dismember you with that creepy carousel horse,” she said. “I’d definitely feel bad about that.”

  Richard laughed. “Oh, I don’t expect you would have done too much damage. Aside from all that, how are you folks doing? How are things with the house?”

  Emily shrugged. “They’re okay, I guess.” She certainly didn’t want to get into her strange dreams, mysterious typewriter activity, or random children appearing in the yard. Richard would think she was crazy. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Emily wasn’t sure which one would be worse.

  “Just okay?” he said gently. He seemed to know she wasn’t telling him everything.

  “Richard,” she said. “What can you tell me about Matilda? And about the children who lived here? Before they, you know—disappeared.”

  Richard scratched his chin. “Well, I worked on this property a long time. I maintained it when there was nobody living here, and I maintained it after your aunt moved in. Nice lady. Kind and warm. You couldn’t ask for a sweeter person to work for. And generous, too. It wasn’t enough for her to have this great big old space all to herself. No, she opened her home to those kids and treated them like they were her own. Gave them a chance they might never have had otherwise. And the kids, they were just as sweet as can be—little boy and girl, brother and sister I think they were, and another girl who hadn’t been here as long.”

  “Another girl?” Emily felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. “How old was she?”

  “Nine, ten? Not too sure. Saddest eyes I ever saw. I don’t know what she went through before she came here, but she had already had a hard life. Just makes it that much worse what happened to her.”

  “But what happened to them? I don’t understand. You just came up here one day and they were gone?”

  “Last I saw of them was the night of the big storm. Blizzard knocked the power out for a couple days. That was why it took us so long to understand they were missing, you see. Folks were wrapped up in dealing with that.”

  “And you said he found no trace of them? They were just…gone?”

  “No sign of a struggle, nothing broken or smashed—it was like they just up and disappeared.”

  “But who would want to hurt them?”

  Richard shrugged. He leaned over the table, closer to Emily.

  “You ask me, it was those damn property managers.”

  “Darla and Roger?” asked Emily, startled. Taking advantage of people, yes. She definitely believed they were capable of that. But murder?

  “You think they’re capable of kidnapping? Or murder? Or both?”

  “Take that with a grain of salt, now. And you didn’t hear it from me. But I think those scoundrels are capable of just about anything if it means a
profit for them.”

  “But why?”

  “They don’t care about anything but money. They don’t care about this town or the people in it. We’re just in the way, as far as they’re concerned. It’s like Monopoly to them: buy up all the property, build hotels on it, and charge people as much as possible so they send them into bankruptcy. They’re snakes. Matilda wouldn’t sell to them. I hope you won’t, either.”

  “I wasn’t planning to,” said Emily.

  “Good. Don’t let them get away with it. Be careful, though. You folks seem like a real nice couple, and I don’t want to see anything happen to you two.”

  As well-meaning as he was, the statement made Emily deeply uncomfortable. The prospect that whoever had harmed Aunt Matilda and the children was still at large—even worse, still nearby and after whatever they’d try to take from Matilda before—filled Emily with a fear like none she’d ever felt.

  The sound of wheels on gravel alerted her that Jesse was home. She sighed with relief. A slight dread accompanied it. It was time to tell Jesse what was going on.

  “Well, thank you so much, Richard,” she said. “I really appreciate all your insight and your help getting out of the attic.” Remembering the night before, she added, somewhat tentatively, “And for bringing that old gramophone up from the basement.”

  “The what?” said Richard, politely confused. He reached into his pocket as he got up from the table and handed her his card. “You folks need anything, if you ever get into trouble or anything else, you call me now, you hear? Day or night.”

  “Day or night,” echoed Emily and watched as he opened the back door and went down the steps, tipping his cap to Jesse as he walked by. If Richard hadn’t brought up the gramophone, and neither had Jesse—who had?

  Jesse came in with several bags from the hardware store and deposited them on the counter.

  “What did he want?” he asked curiously.