Ghost House Revenge

by Clare McNally

  Derek stood over his daughter for a long time, wondering why she had done this thing. She looked so innocent, lying there breathing softly. Her hair was spread out on her pillow, her lower lip jutted out in a slight pout. She looked more than innocent. She was like a little child, the way Derek remembered her being before Elaine’s death. My God, she had been a pretty little girl. What the hell had happened these past six years? Was Alicen’s crime the result of their struggles to get by on catch-as-catch-can jobs, living in motels or basement apartments? Or was it the fact that Derek had been just a little ignorant of a growing girl’s needs?

  He had never admitted that possibility to himself. But now, seeing the trouble his daughter was in, he wondered if he should have been a little more understanding. After all, she was a child, and—

  No, Derek told himself firmly, I did the right thing when I tried to make her independent. You have to control your emotions to get by in this world.

  And right now, I have to get that ring.

  Derek snaked his hand under her pillow. His daughter turned in her sleep, mumbling something. Thinking he had awakened her, he stepped back into the shadows. Alicen moved again, and in the thin shaft of moonlight, Derek saw the glistening facets of the diamond in her opened palm. Carefully he took it.

  He could barely make out the banister and wheelchair lift as he reached the stairs, and he touched them both as he walked down. The dining room was dimly lit by moonlight shining through the bay windows. By contrast, the kitchen was almost blinding. Someone had left the light on, and he squeezed his eyes shut until they could adjust. At last, removing the ring from his bathrobe pocket, he walked to the oven. If he hid the ring there, it would look as if Sarah had dropped it when she fell.

  Derek bent toward the floor but stopped when he heard a noise behind him, a dull thud, like a heavy footstep. He looked over his shoulder. There was no one behind him, and when he turned back to the oven, he saw only his reflection in its glass door. He laughed at his fears, then proceeded with his task.

  All at once there was another thud, and he felt a flash of pain. This noise had sounded from his own back, something knocking against it and sending him flying forward. His face came down hard on the oven door handle, a pain shot up through his forehead. He dropped to the floor in a flurry of gray mists and twinkling lights.

  He was too stunned to react when he heard laughter. Then, as if through water, he saw a young woman standing over him, her smile a familiar one. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even open his mouth.

  She bent closer to him, smiling all the while, and ran her fingernails over his stomach as if to rip it open. From far away, Derek heard the sound of cloth tearing, and he thought it was his flesh. No, no, no! His mind echoed the plea over and over.

  “I wanted you,” he heard her say, in an eerily seductive way. “I’ve wanted you for so long, Derek Miller.”

  “No,” Derek said aloud, barely hearing his voice.

  She was on top of him, her small frame somehow crushing his muscular body. He closed his eyes tightly, something deep inside his will making him do so. He would open them again, and she wouldn’t be there. She didn’t exist. She was his imagination.

  She was still there.

  “My Derek, my handsome lover Derek,” she breathed.

  Her face came closer and closer to his. He could see the repulsive veins, the thin blue lips, the filmy eyes. He couldn’t turn from her, for when he did, he felt something rip at the sides of his head. She had him by two handfuls of hair.

  “Give me what you would give a woman,” she whispered, pressing her lips to his.

  It was cold. My God, it was so cold! Something like a fish was pushing into Derek’s mouth. He realized with horror that it was the woman’s tongue. Her hands left his hair and slid down his chest, kneading the matted black hair. Mercifully, her lips left his.

  Why can’t I move? I’m stronger than her! I’m str—

  She bit him hard on the stomach, then kissed him over and over as if to make up for the wound. It was impossible, crazy. Derek didn’t want this. Not from her repulsive lips, her cold hands. He tried to push her away, but it was like moving lead.

  But for a moment her touch shattered him so that he had no thoughts. His arms dropped weakly to his sides. He felt himself floating, higher and higher. Only when he was still again did he dare to open his eyes. She was sitting up, straddling him, her smile red. He wanted to kill her for using him this way, and yet something told him that that was impossible.

  Something told him she was already dead.

  “No,” he whispered, falling at last into blackness.

  The woman stood up, holding the ring in her hand. This was good, but it didn’t satisfy her lustful needs. She wanted him through his own free will, not forcefully as tonight. And she would have him, soon. She smiled to think of owning that handsome man, of having him as her lover. And her anticipations made her desire to destroy the VanBuren family all the stronger.

  She found Alicen waiting for her in the upstairs hallway. She handed the child the ring, then stepped back into the shadows. There was no need for words. Alicen knew exactly what to do. She entered her father’s room, barely seeing the bed and dresser there. Walking to the floor grating, she knelt down and pushed her fingers between the woven strips of iron. It creaked softly. She felt pain where the iron pinched the soft underside of her hands, but she did not stop.

  At last, the grating gave way, and she lifted it out. Alicen reached deep inside the cavity and dropped the ring. It made a soft tap against the floor. Then she replaced the grating, pushing it down hard so that it would not come loose again. Less than five minutes later, she was in her own bed. The smile on her face as she fell asleep was a triumphant one.

  The night watchman at the Belle Bay Funeral Parlor sat up a little straighter in his chair when he felt a cold breeze brush past him. He looked behind him, saw that the back entrance was tightly closed, and shrugged. It was an old building, and drafts like that weren’t uncommon. He checked his watch: 5 A.M. Two more hours and his shift would be over.

  He was flipping through the pages of a girlie magazine when he heard a dull thud from one of the other rooms. He stood up, fingering the nightstick in his belt, and walked carefully toward the noise.

  “Who’s in there?” he asked.

  Across the icy, refrigerated room, he could see the sheet-wrapped body of the latest Jane Doe to enter the morgue. A young blonde who had been found rotting on the nearby beach. The autopsy said it was a drug overdose but that the actual cause of death was probably drowning.

  “Too many low-lifes in this town,” the guard said with a quick glimpse at the shrouded corpse. The bump made by its nose under the sheets cast a long, grotesque shadow in the lamplight. The guard saw now that an ashtray, left here by the coroner, had fallen to the floor. He put it back up on a table and left the room. The night was silent once more.

  Bored, he decided to put his head down and rest—for just a few minutes. He didn’t feel the touch on his arm that turned that rest into a deep, deep sleep. Nor did he see the back door opening. He was snoring when the body of Jane Doe was dragged feet-first through the door into a back alley, pulled by unseen hands.

  15

  Melanie entered the kitchen the next morning to find Derek slumped in a chair, an icepack to his swollen mouth. A thin bruise covered the bridge of his nose and spread out under each closed eye.

  “Derek?”

  He opened his eyes. “Good morning,” he said groggily.

  “It certainly doesn’t look like it’s been a good morning for you,” Melanie said. “What on earth happened?”

  Conscious for about an hour, Derek had prepared himself for the questions he knew would come. He shifted in his seat and adjusted the icepack to speak more easily.

  “I was up in the night to get a cup of tea,” he said. “I slipped on the floor and hit the oven handle.”

  Melanie shook her head in sympathy
, then went to the cupboard to find a bottle of aspirin. She shook two of the tablets into her palm and handed them to Derek with a glass of water.

  The cold glass felt strange against his teeth, and Derek grimaced when he put it down on the table. Melanie gasped.

  “Derek, you’ve broken your teeth!” she cried.

  Not for the first time that morning, Derek ran his tongue around his mouth. It scraped over the remains of one front tooth and the thread of the tooth beside it. He tasted blood. Then he pointed to the oven door handle in explanation.

  Melanie took the sponge from the sink and tried to scrub the stains from the chrome. She looked over her shoulder at him. For the first time, Melanie felt sorry for Derek. He looked so vulnerable, obviously hiding a good deal of pain. But sorrow turned to shock when she noticed a circle of red dots on his stomach, where his robe had fallen open.

  Teeth marks?

  She turned from the sight. It was just a love bite, of course. Derek did have a girlfriend, after all. It had nothing to do with his accident and was none of her business.

  “Melanie?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Would you do me a big favor?” Derek asked. “Would you drive Gary into work today? I couldn’t make it, and I don’t want him to miss a day because of me.”

  “Sure,” Melanie said. She rinsed out the sponge, then thought better of using it again and dropped it in the trash can.

  “Derek,” she said, “you should really see a dentist today. Why don’t you let me call ours after breakfast? Then I could drop you off on the way to the city.”

  “I can call a taxi,” Derek said.

  “Never mind,” Melanie answered. “It isn’t out of the way. And don’t worry, you’ll feel better soon.”

  He didn’t feel better. Not now, several hours into the morning with a numb upper lip. He rested on the couch in the library, two temporary teeth in his mouth. It was more than the physical hurting that fatigued him. It was the mental anguish, the trying to remember. Derek needed to recall what had happened the night before so much that all thoughts of Alicen and the ring were obliterated. Maybe he had gone to get tea and had fallen, just like he told Melanie. But bits and pieces of a nightmare kept coming back to him, making him think there was much more to it than that.

  It must have been an erotic dream. Derek figured that much out by the dull ache he had felt in his groin when he had picked himself up off the floor early that morning. In his patchy memory, he saw a blond woman straddling him, laughing at him. She looked like that woman Janice, that crazy hitchhiker. Yet Derek knew she couldn’t have been in the house. The door had been locked all night.

  How, then, could he explain the teeth marks?

  He looked down at his stomach and pulled his shirt out of his jeans. He ran his finger over the red bumps, as he had done many times that morning, trying to tell himself they weren’t what they seemed. He knew they looked like a human bite, but he wanted another, saner explanation, something to tell him the terror he remembered so vaguely was nothing more than a dream.

  Suddenly the phone rang. Derek considered ignoring it, then thought that it might be Gary, or even Liza. He crawled off the couch and stumbled out into the hall, the phone’s high-pitched ringing hurting his ears. He lifted the receiver and mumbled a greeting. There was no reply.

  “Hello?” he repeated, his voice sounding slurred because of the Novocain. He started to hang up but heard his name. “Yes, this is Derek,” he said, putting the phone to his ear again. “Who’s this?”

  “The woman who craves you,” a voice said, teasingly passionate.

  Derek laughed. “Liza, you’re pretty fun—”

  A loud, ear-shattering screech made him drop the receiver. It wasn’t Liza on the phone at all, but some crank. Wisely, Derek hung up. When the phone rang again a moment later, however, he picked it up against his better judgment.

  “Hello?”

  “Don’t hang up.”

  “I won’t,” Derek promised. “Is this the woman from the roadside? Janice?”

  “Yes.”

  Derek sighed. “I thought I had made it clear that you weren’t to bother me any more. What is it you want?”

  “You, Derek Miller,” she said. “I want you.”

  Derek swung the cord of the phone over the banister, then went to sit on the stairs. Leaning against the double-twisted rungs, he answered, “I’m flattered. But you see, kid, you’re wasting your time. Why don’t you find another fellow, someone your own age? I already have a girlfriend.”

  “EEEEEYYYYYAAAA!”

  “Don’t do that!” Derek ordered. “Stop screaming.”

  “I want you!” the woman shouted. “And I’ll make you want me!”

  “Just leave me alone,” Derek said in an angry tone.

  ‘I’ll never leave you alone,” Janice hissed. There was a silence, and then suddenly her voice took on the pleading quality of a little girl’s. “Please, Derek! We can have so much fun together. Once I get rid of those people in that house.”

  “Wait a minute,” Derek interrupted. “‘Those people’?”

  “The VanBurens,” Janice said with a click of her tongue, as if Derek should have known. “I want them out of there. I want them dead!”

  Derek resisted an urge to hang up and asked with forced calm, “Why? What did they do to you?”

  “I’ll tell you,” the woman said. “One night, I came to this house to visit Melanie. But first I met the spirit of the house’s original owner. He sought my aid in his getting revenge against the VanBurens. But not Melanie! He loved Melanie. He’d been following her for nearly two hundred years, and that night I was going to help him have her, at last.”

  Derek recalled the story of Jacob Armand and Lydia Browning. Was this some lunatic who had also heard that tale? Someone making fun of the VanBurens’ troubles?

  “But those evil children tried to stand in my way,” Janice said. “When I tried to rid myself of Kyle, Melanie came to his defense. She defended a devil-child by striking me across the head with a pistol! And now”—she paused—“I will walk in this limbo until I have vengeance!”

  Struck in the head? Derek thought. She must be brain damaged! That would explain it. And Derek would bet all his money that Melanie had nothing at all to do with it. This woman was just plain nuts!

  “I don’t think this is very amusing,” Derek said soberly.

  “I’m serious,” the woman said. ‘I’ll get rid of them, one by one. Melanie goes today.”

  “What?” Derek cried. “What does that mean?”

  But she had hung up on him. For a long time Derek sat holding the receiver on his lap, not believing what he had just heard. This woman was deranged, no doubt. What reason could she possibly have for hating the VanBurens?

  He got up and returned the phone to its stand. Whatever that lunatic tried to do, she wouldn’t frighten him into giving in to her!

  Bryan Davis stopped working on his report and reached across his desk to answer the telephone. “Belle Bay Police,” he said. “Bryan Davis speaking.”

  “Captain Davis?” a woman asked. “It’s Joan Mead, from the funeral parlor. I’m afraid we have a problem.”

  “What can I do for you, Mrs. Mead?” Bryan asked.

  “It seems someone stole one of our residents,” Joan said. “Do you remember the Jane Doe brought in a few nights ago?”

  “Yes,” Bryan said. “The one found on the beach. Are you certain she’s missing?”

  “Definitely,” Joan said. “As a matter of good business policy, I always have my employees check each room before we officially open. People so need to be catered to at times like these.”

  “Of course,” Bryan said.

  “But when we entered the morgue,” Joan continued, “Jane Doe was gone.”

  There was a pause, and Bryan heard the old woman sigh. “To think I found the security guard sleeping,” she said. “Of course, I fired him. But he’s still waiting here if you need to question him.”


  “Thanks,” Bryan said. “I will. I’ll send someone down there right away.”

  He hung up the phone. Wasn’t it bad enough that he hadn’t yet found the bus driver? Now there was another mystery to solve.

  “Oh, God,” Bryan sighed. “Who’d guess what a peaceful town this was, just a year ago?”

  Derek waited all morning for the phone to ring again. At lunchtime, while he sat on the steps with a sandwich, his daughter was making a call of her own. She had told the cafeteria monitor that her father had been sick that morning and that she wanted to have flowers delivered to him.

  “That’s sweet of you,” the monitor had said.

  “I’ll have to use my whole allowance,” Alicen said. “But I don’t care. I love my father.”

  Now she stood up in the little hallway just outside the cafeteria, thumbing the phone book for a number she never intended to call. With the pages opened to “Florists,” she instead dialed the police.

  “Belle Bay Police,” a voice said. “Bryan Davis.”

  “Yeah, hi,” Alicen mumbled, turning her back to the cafeteria doors. She covered the receiver with a napkin. “Listen, I read in the papers that you guys are looking for a body? Some bus driver?”

  “What about it?”

  He sounded eager. That was good.

  “I sorta saw one,” Alicen replied. “At that construction place, you know? I was driving by, and I saw this big dude dump this thing in a green trash container. Looked like a body, but I can’t be sure, you know? I just figured I should call.”

  “We appreciate it,” Bryan said. “Would you tell me your name?”

  “Never mind,” Alicen said. “Just go—”

  Alicen heard a tap at the door and nearly dropped the receiver. Hanging up, she stuffed the napkin into her pocket, then she opened the door and smiled at the monitor.