by Roger Hayden
“Of course I am. I moved us here, and if this doesn’t work out it falls completely on me.”
“No…” she said. “I want to give this a chance.”
“And I want to help,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m here for you. You know that, right?”
“Of course I do,” she said.
He then glanced at his watch and stood up to leave. She couldn’t believe he had nearly snuck out of the room while she was still sleeping. “I’ll call someone to repaint the door too.”
Mary waved him off. “No, that’s all right. There’s some paint in the garage. I’ll take care of that today.”
“If you’d like,” he said with a quick hug and kiss on her forehead. “Call me if you need anything.”
“What time will you be home?” she asked.
He went to the nightstand and grabbed his wallet. “Later this afternoon. I can’t believe I almost forgot this.” Distracted, he then turned to her. “We’ll work out this car situation too. No mass transit here, that’s for sure.”
“We don’t have the money for another car,” she said.
He stopped at the door, hand against the frame and spoke with reassuring calm. “We’ll figure something out. Love you.”
“Love you too,” she said.
He was out the door in a flash as she stood there in her gray Hanes T-shirt and underwear. Their heavy curtains blocked most of the sunlight, and the room was still somewhat dark. A glance at the alarm clock on the stand next to her bed said ten past nine. She had the entire mansion to herself and the entire day to do whatever she wanted. Though she knew the most important thing was to begin the illustrations for the next children’s book. And take care of the door.
She slipped into a pair of sweat-pants and walked out of the room in her slippers. She felt like jogging that morning, needing a jumpstart. No such routine had been established yet at their new home. This was the first day she had been in the house alone, and the surreal strangeness of her quiet surroundings was undeniable.
She walked down the empty hallway toward the staircase, past rooms still empty, with their doors halfway open. The house seemed peaceful and undisturbed, but as she descended the staircase, she heard a faint ticking noise.
She could still hear the ticking downstairs, following it to the grand foyer where a vintage grandfather clock stood. Its oak exterior was elaborately carved in a leaf-cluster ornamentation. She stopped dead in her tracks. She could swear that she had never seen the clock before.
Where did it come from?
When did they put it there, and when?
Am I losing my mind?
Behind thick glass, a golden pendulum swung back and forth, weights hanging from two chains as the clock’s mechanics ticked inside. Two long clock hands were displayed over the clock face, indicating the time as eleven past nine.
She stood in awe of the impossible idea of the great clock appearing out of nowhere, and was ready to retrieve her phone upstairs and call Curtis. She turned toward the stairs, when the clock suddenly chimed, loudly and abruptly, startling her. She grabbed the railing and flew up the stairs as the clock continued clanging, like a warning bell.
She hurried down the hall and into her room where her cell phone rested on the TV stand, plugged in to a nearby outlet. From downstairs the clock went quiet just as suddenly as it had begun chiming. The silence that followed made the hairs on her arms stand up. She held her phone, listening. She swiped the screen and made the call. After three rings, Curtis answered on the car speaker phone.
“Hey. What’s up?”
“Hey,” she said. “Just a quick question. When did we get a grandfather clock?”
“A what?” he asked.
“A grandfather clock. You know the big antique clock in our foyer. Where on earth did it come from?”
There was silence on the other end as she waited for a response.
“Honey. I don’t know what to tell you. What clock are you talking about? We don’t own a grandfather clock.”
“Of course we do,” she said with certainty as she made her way back down the hall and towards the stairs. “It’s in the foyer. I was standing right in front of it a moment ago.”
“You got me,” Curtis said. “Maybe one of the movers…”
“What?” she asked. “Placed it there by mistake?”
“I don’t know, Mary. I’ll look at it when I get home. Makes no sense to me.”
She went back down the stairs, prepared to describe every detail of the clock, but by the time she reached the bottom step, the clock was gone.
“Impossible…” she said softly.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, detecting the fear in her tone. Her eyes darted around the room, trying to find the clock, as if it might have moved somewhere. After a stunned pause, she spoke. “Nothing. I-I’m sorry I bothered you. Have a good day.”
“Okay, honey. You too.”
She hung up and held the phone at her side, staring ahead. There was no way she could have imagined it. The clock was real. She had seen it with her own two eyes. She had heard it. Its loud tolling was unmistakable. She shuddered to think that it was a figment of her imagination.
She hadn’t had any visions since last weekend, when she saw the figure of a man standing in a window on the second floor. She had begun to feel more comfortable, but the grandfather clock was bringing it all back. Perhaps the house only spoke to her when it wanted to. Perhaps she wasn’t in control of anything.
“What do you want from me?” she said, her voice echoing through the halls.
She waited patiently, hearing nothing, not even the slightest pin drop.
“This is pointless,” she called out, looking around and pacing the foyer and living room. “We’re not moving. My husband wouldn’t agree to it, even if I asked him, despite what he told me earlier. So if you’re trying to scare us into leaving, it’s not going to work.” She paused and began a slow stroll to the kitchen, feeling defiant against whatever forces were at play.
Encounters
When asking questions of the house, Mary didn’t know who she was supposed to be communicating with. She wasn’t a paranormal expert by any means. She knew, however, that she had a gift. A gift she had kept hidden away since childhood, and visions of things not of this world were a big part of it.
The house, however, was stimulating her power, whether she wanted it to or not. There were so many signs and signals she was being urged to pursue, too many to ignore. She wanted to learn more about Julie and, at the least, figure out who may have killed her and her family.
She could remember the sounds of the infant crying, the unseen man’s voice who spoke to her while she was in the bathroom. The inverted cross on the door was another strange sign, and then, that Monday morning, a grandfather clock she had never seen before.
She walked through the dining room, past a modest, four-seater table, and approached the kitchen, feeling a strange sense of something lurking in the darkness. Fearless, she continued on, ready to face whatever the house had in store for her. She flipped the switch, and the fluorescent lights above flickered on. She stood just outside the kitchen, scanning its freshly painted walls, the hanging dish towels, the clean countertops. There was nobody there and nothing out of the ordinary beyond some dirty plates in the sink. They must have been left there by Curtis.
She was up for the challenge and determined to unearth the truth behind the mansion’s gory history, using everything at her disposal. The books, the diary, and copied newspaper articles were all sitting on the desk in her office, and she was ready to dive in. All she needed first was a bagel and a cup of coffee.
A few rooms down from the kitchen, Mary sat at the desk of her studio, a sketch pad and drawing pencils at her elbow. She sipped from her coffee mug and typed away on her laptop, responding to a deluge of work emails accumulated over the past few days. She had a deadline to finish the rough sketches to present to the publisher, and she hadn’t drawn a single thing.
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br /> A stack of library books rested on the corner of her desk, just within reach. The diary was secured in her desk drawer, next to her Smith & Wesson .38 caliber pistol, a weapon she always kept nearby because of years of living in the city. Classical music played from her laptop as she went into full work mode. It made her feel good to be somewhat settled in and returning from a lengthy hiatus. Her cell phone was in view, with its screen reflecting the sunlight that beamed in the room from the open window behind her. She could feel a light breeze and heard the rustling of trees and the calls chirping of birds outside.
With the clock episode behind her, she felt ready to begin her first sketches for the week. She needed to create the simple picture outline of a family at home wherein a five-year-old boy, Tommy, is being told by his mother at the dinner table to never talk to strangers. It was a simple-enough scene, and Mary swiveled her chair around to the easel behind her, taking her drawing pencil and beginning to sketch over a thin sheet of paper.
Her drawing motions came naturally as she envisioned the family: the father, mother, daughter, and three boys. She sketched with quick, measured lines while entering a strange trance where her artwork took a life of its own.
After several minutes of focused work, she opened her eyes and lowered her pencil, shocked by what she had drawn. There on the paper was a rough sketch of a family, but not the one she had intended to draw. The nicely dressed mother, father, and children lay on their backs, riddled with gunshot wounds and resting in thick pools of blood. She had drawn Xs over their eyes. Their mouths were agape in horror. She backed her chair away, stunned by the image, dropping the pencil to the ground.
She pulled the top drawer open, and grabbed the small, crinkled diary hidden inside. She placed it on her desk, pushing her keyboard to the side, and stared down at its faded, leather exterior. She then opened a document on her computer, a typed transcript of the legible pages in the diary, which she had entered soon after finding it. She flipped the book open to a page in the middle, which she had marked.
I don’t know what’s happening. I’m scared. I heard Mother and Father quietly discussing death threats. For weeks we’ve received dozens of unmarked letters in unrecognizable handwriting. They won’t even let me go into town anymore. Or to school. Or to the park. Or even in the woods behind our house. I have a private tutor now. Her name is Mrs. Dempsey. She’s fifty-two years old and very stern. I asked Mother last night who would want to hurt us. She told me not to worry about it. But I am worried about it. How can I not be?
Mary flipped to the next page, reading.
Mother fired Mrs. Dempsey today after an argument. What it was about, she wouldn’t tell me. This is the fifth person they’ve fired in the past week. Our gardener, butler, mechanic, and swim coach. All of them gone. Now I feel lonelier than ever.
Mary paused, looking up. “Swim coach?” she said. Did the mansion once have a pool? There was nothing in the backyard but solid ground, with plenty of trees and underbrush. She looked back down and continued reading as the girl’s next words in anticipation.
Pastor Phil visited the house tonight. He’s about the only person Mother talks to anymore. He too expressed concern for our safety but said that God would protect us as long as we had faith in Him and each other. My parents were never really religious people. Though lately, that’s all changed.
Mary closed the diary and set it to the side and reached for the copied newspaper articles. She flipped through the copies, frantic, eyes darting along the lines of story. In several different articles, the history of the Bechdel mansion was recapped, picked up and repeated from previous generic content. The estate was at least a hundred years old and had been a part of the Bechdel family for generations.
One article caught her interest by including a few new facts. She discovered that by the turn of the 20th Century, the Bechdel family tree had extended quite considerably, but by 1967, however, their bloodline had been completely wiped out.
She placed the articles to the side and grabbed the library travelogue book. Her mind didn’t waver. She gave no notice of time passing or attention to her phone or how many emails piled in her inbox. She opened the first book, A Brief History of Redwood. It was a short book, maybe sixty pages long, and there were plenty of old photographs, which showed the progression from a backwoods settlement to a full-fledged town. She flipped through the pages, letting her instincts guide her as she came across a small newspaper clipping, stuck between two pages. She carefully took the clipping out and unfolded it, reading the headline with dread.
Ukrainian Heir Flees Redwood Mansion after Series of Unexplained Events
The article continued: “In the summer of June, 1992, the rural town of Redwood welcomed one of its most prestigious newcomers, wealthy business heir Boris Sokolov and his large family. Since moving to the town, Sokolov made several boastful promises to invest in Redwood, and help to create what he called a town for the modern age. But two weeks later, Sokolov, the self-proclaimed ‘savior of Redwood,’ fled his new home, the infamous Bechdel estate, without a word, taking his family back to Ukraine, where they were never seen or heard from again.”
Mary stopped there and went back to the books, taking in each and everything she could about the town and its history. Her fingers stopped between the pages of another book, detailing Redwood municipal history and Dover County, which surrounded it. Inside, there was another newspaper clipping, folded as before.
This time she found an article about the most recent family to have lived in the mansion, dating back only to 2006. The story said that the family had moved away after the father, Eugene Garland, a wealthy Manhattan land developer, died in his sleep, just three weeks after moving in. She continued reading the article, immersed in the details and mystery surrounding Garland’s death, when she felt a sudden and overwhelming fatigue. Her eyes became heavy beyond control and she began drifting away into a slumber that did not seem her own.
A startling vision came over her, real and lifelike. She was in the downstairs ballroom of the mansion., fully furnished and crowded with people. There were servers in tuxedos holding trays with finger foods and champagne glasses and men and women in fancy suits and dresses as jazz music played from a nearby record player.
As the vision continued, she ascended the winding staircase, watching the party from above as three masked men stormed into the house, brandishing rifles and shotguns and shouting at the dinner guests, terrifying and rounding them up into a tight and terrified cluster. Moments later, the party guests and everyone else was blasted away, riddled with bullets as gunfire tore them apart and sent clumps of flesh onto the polished wood floors in an orgy of blood.
The vision then took Mary along the hallway and into the first bedroom on the right, a child’s room, the room of a young girl. Now Mary was seeing the mansion through someone else’s eyes, perhaps Julie. She came to a window overlooking the darkened courtyard just as a man began banging on her bedroom door. She climbed onto the window sill, closed her eyes in fear and forced herself to jump into the bushes and moist grass below, then getting up and running off in a panic, gasping for air, overcome with the joy of having escaped. She then ran into a man.
Mary could see his face as he pointed the barrel of his rifle at her head: lean cheekbones, stubble, a scar on his left cheek, and a thick head of straight, reddish hair that grew down past his ears. A blast and a white flash of light, when suddenly Mary woke up.
The grandfather clock jarred her out of her deep sleep, bells tolling in sync, and woke her to a darkened office. Her head rose up from the desk, with a newspaper clipping stuck to her cheek. She felt an uncomfortable crick in her neck and, for a moment, didn’t know where she was.
She spun her chair around, gasping. The passage of time was unreal. She backed up and stared at her desk, long and hard. Books were strewn open all along its surface, with newspaper articles lying everywhere.
Her blank laptop screen had long gone into sleep mode. She looked at her c
ell phone and saw that it was a little after 8:00 p.m. “Impossible…” She had found herself saying that word a lot as of late.
She turned back around, looking out the window into the dark sky and listening to the distant chirping of crickets coming from the blackened forest. Fear crept into her heart when she realized that she had read every book and every copied article on the desk. If only she could remember half of what she had apparently read.
She swiped her phone screen and saw some missed calls from her mother, her agent, and from Curtis. She called him first, but his number went straight to voice mail. She still found herself in a state of disbelief.
“Just checking in with you. I’d thought you’d be home now. Call me back,” she said into the phone.
She hung up, curious as to his whereabouts, and then rose from her chair, legs stiff and sore. The empty plate on her desk with the crumbs of an eaten bagel, along with her growling stomach, indicated as much. She walked past the desk and out of the room toward the kitchen to make some dinner.
She turned on the hall light and thoughts of the grandfather clock rushed back. She flipped the kitchen lights on, carrying her empty plate to the sink, when the fluorescent lights above flickered and then went out completely. She stood in the darkness, astonished and frustrated, but grateful for a faint glow from the single light above the sink that stayed on.
She placed her plate into the sink and turned around, looking into the darkness. After a few steps, she felt something slick and slippery on the tile floor below her slippers. She looked down and saw red streaks on the floor. She took another careful step forward and heard a distant moan that caused the hairs to stand up on the back of her neck.
Just past the counter, she saw a figure slowly moving across the floor. She gasped and covered her mouth, trembling. A few feet ahead of her crawled a man on his stomach, with a large hole blasted in his back. His black suit was tattered, torn, and soaked with blood. His organs were hanging out, his intestines dragging behind him on the floor. She could only see the back of his head as he pulled one arm in front of the other with feeble, shaking movements.
