by Alexie Aaron
Ghostly Attachments
A novel by Alexie Aaron
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
~
Copyright 2012 – Diane L. Fitch writing as Alexie Aaron
Revised 2013 dlf
ALSO BY ALEXIE AARON
HAUNTED SERIES
The Hauntings of Cold Creek Hollow
Ghostly Attachments
Sand Trap
Darker than Dark
The Garden
PEEPS LITE
Eternal Maze 3.1
Homecoming 3.2
CIN FIN-LATHEN MYSTERIES
Decomposing
Death by Saxophone
Discord
This book is dedicated to Marion, Sandy, Leanne and Sara. They are more than my family, they are also my friends.
And to Great Grandma who rocked her children and grandchildren in the platform rocker and from time to time rocks still.
Table of Contents
The Chair
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Sand Trap
Alexie Aaron
The Chair
Marjorie put a comforting hand on little Georgie’s back as she finished the last few words of the lullaby. Her hand reached for the coverlet and placed it over his shoulders before turning to his twin’s crib. Maxie slept soundly. He was always the best sleeper of the two. Just barely over their first birthday, Marjorie already had her figure back. Now she had to work on getting her husband back.
She glanced at the nursery clock as she left the room. One in the morning and George Sr. was still at a business meeting. On the landing between the nursery and the master suite she stopped, unsure what she wanted to do. Go to bed and cry herself to sleep? Head to the kitchen and destroy her week’s weight loss? Or maybe read a good book. It would pull her away from her speculation on where her husband was really and into the arms of the gallant hero whom she had left worshiping the queen from a distance. She smiled to herself and thought a moment. Where did she leave her e-reader? The last time she had it was downstairs in the front room.
Padding down the stairs in her floppy slippers, careful to have a hand on the rail, she took in each photo that was hung on the wall with particular care. Here were the pictorial chronicles of her young sons’ lives, from her oversized belly to their first birthday party in which all of the Hofmanns were in attendance. She stopped momentarily and took in the group photo. There standing or sitting were three generations of Hofmann males. Sure, there was a smattering of wives but no daughters. The Hofmanns had the XY chromosome market sewn up. No female child had been born into this bunch in recorded history.
Marjorie sighed and resumed her trek into the front room, turning on a few lights as she searched the coffee and end tables. She spied it sitting on the platform rocker. Smiling, she said aloud, “Grandma H, I hope you enjoyed chapter three. I sure did.”
The platform rocker had been passed down through the patriarchal side of the family. Generations of Hofmann heirs’ colicky stomachs had been soothed by a rock in Grandma Hofmann’s platform rocker. The rocker had been reupholstered and refinished as it passed from one generation to the next. The only constant was the low groaning creak, and that Grandma Hofmann’s rocker, on occasion, rocked by itself.
Sure there were plausible explanations for this. The family dog bumped into it. The well maintained chair rocked easily, so perhaps the vibrations from the heating system, or a truck speeding down the highway set it off. But the denizens of the house, who spent the night in the living room sofa next to the chair, had their own theory.
Grandma Hofmann was the one rocking. The chair’s groaning and the metered movement was neither caused by the dog, a truck nor the heating system. As long as peace reigned in the Hofmann clan, the chair rocked. But if chaos and turmoil was the menu for the day, then the chair would abruptly stop, and Grandma would get up to knock some heads together. No one wanted that.
Marjorie, too, had been wary of the chair at first when it was carted newly refurbished into the house by her father-in-law. There she stood in her eighth month of pregnancy, ankles swollen, breasts heavy in anticipation of the coming heirs, directing Maximillian Hofmann to the cleared corner of the room. He placed the chair down and adjusted it so it faced the room. Marjorie hadn’t liked that, preferring to be able to look out the window as she rocked her babies. She didn’t say anything. She would fix it as soon as her father-in-law left.
She remembered his sad smile as he no doubt was thinking of the last woman to use the rocker. Her mother-in-law died of breast cancer soon after she and George tied the knot. Marjorie wished she had been more attentive to the withering woman when she had been dating her son. But her focus had been on this handsome man that paid so much attention to her, wooing her away from her ad executive job, convincing her that she wanted no more than to bear his children and keep house.
The rocking chair, as far as she knew, had set in the corner of Mama Hofmann’s room until George announced her pregnancy. What would be a better fit than the first born son’s wife rocking the heirs to the Hofmann clan in Great Grandmother’s chair?
Marjorie touched the chair and the memory vanished. The chair rocked gently as she grabbed the afghan off the back and wrapped it around her shoulders. She picked up the e-reader and sat down. The moment she eased herself into the seat she felt better. It felt like a warm hug. She rocked for a while before turning on the device. Soon she was lost in the adventures of her heroine and her knight.
~
George pulled into the driveway and saw to his dismay that the front room lights were blazing. “Great, the bitch is up.” He parked his Mercedes next to his wife’s sedan and put his hand up to his mouth and breathed into it. The odor of whisky was strong. He reached into his pocket and drew out a lint-covered mint. He grimaced at it before putting it in his mouth. It would have to do. Adjusting his shirt and tie, he moved from the garage into the house. He tossed his keys on the counter, ignoring the key rack by the back door. “Marjorie, I’m home,” he bellowed, not thinking of the possibility he would awaken his slumbering sons.
He heard a shush from the front room accompanied by the deep squeak of the rocker. Maybe he was wrong, maybe his wife wasn’t waiting up to confront him but rocking one of his sons. He would walk through the hall and blow her a kis
s on the way up the stairs to take a shower.
Marjorie bookmarked her page as she spotted her husband in the hall. “Please be quiet, I just got Georgie put down,” she said.
“Will do, long night, heading for a shower and bed,” her husband said weaving a little on his feet.
“Oh, George, you haven’t been drinking?” she chided as she got out of the chair and walked towards him. “One more DUI and you’re going to lose your license.” The odor of booze and sex stopped her in her tracks. “Who is she? You bastard!”
He looked at his wife and curled his lips. “Someone with perky tits, baby. Someone with my best interest in mind…”
“How dare you! Your best interest! I’m your wife. I have tits, and if they aren’t perky, it’s because I nursed your sons as you decreed.”
The argument was in full swing, and so no one noticed the chair started rocking. But in between Marjorie’s sobs they heard the deep squeak. George pushed his wife out of the way and looked at the chair as it moved slowly back and forth. The fading light of the e-reader illuminated the back of the chair, casting an eerie glow on the wall behind.
“What the fuck is that?” he said as darkness formed in amongst the upholstered cushions.
Marjorie turned slowly, her eye reluctantly following George’s outstretched hand. The chair was rocking with more vigor. A darkness formed in the middle of the chair back and spread up and down as a figure seemed to form.
“Oh, honey, it’s just Grandma Hofmann,” she said, not believing her calm voice for a minute. “She lives in that chair. Family history.”
“Family curse more like it.”
“She just wants us to be quiet. The boys, we’ll wake the boys.” Marjorie tugged at her husband’s arm, trying to pull him away from the front room.
He ripped her hand from him and turned and smacked her hard in the face.
In the stunned silence that followed, Marjorie’s eyes filled with tears, and to her horror and his, the chair stopped rocking. What he had done could not be undone. The welt forming across his innocent wife’s face seemed to fuel the darkness. It began to turn. Dark masses swirling with greying ones, a whirlwind of a human size moved towards George.
Marjorie jumped in front of her husband. “He didn’t mean it. He lost his temper.”
A sound now emanated out of the whirling column. It sounded like words, “Wake… wake… wake up.”
George pissed himself as he backed away using his wife as a shield. “Get her away from me!”
Marjorie moved back with him until she slipped in the puddle of his urine on the hardwood floor. She lost her balance and fell, hitting her hip hard. The pillar of wind now stopped. From her vantage point she could she a head forming, a tight gray bun attached to an ancient wrinkled face. There weren’t any eyes, only more swirling mass of ink and smoke. “Wake… wake… wake up!” it said, pushing her hard before it disappeared.
The silence was brief as George’s ragged breathing seemed to grate at every nerve in his wife’s body. “Honey,” she pleaded from the floor, “help me up.”
He just stared down at her a moment and walked over to the liquor cabinet and took out a glass.
A door slammed upstairs, and the boys started screaming. Marjorie found her feet and ran upstairs yelling, “George! The kids!” She had made the landing when a stitch in her side caused her to slow down to catch her breath. She made her legs move her exhausted body forward, and her hand reached the nursery’s doorknob when it turned under her grasp. She let go and stood on wobbly legs as the door slowly opened exposing the chaos within. Georgie and Maxie were on their feet screaming in their cribs. Each face bore a mark not unlike the one their father had put on her own. Bed clothes were ripped off the mattresses, and the boys struggled in their footed pajamas to climb away from whatever had awakened them so rudely.
“Leave them alone!” she screamed into the room. “George, get your ass up here and help me!” she screamed at her husband. Both ignored her. She charged in and grabbed each boy out of harm’s way. She muscled her way through the room, a child under each arm, ignoring the tearing of her shoulder muscles, while picking up an armful of clothes, diapers and toys, jamming them into a tote by the door.
“Wake… wake… wake up!” the room screamed back at her before the door slammed shut, putting an exclamation point on the warning.
Marjorie dragged the boys and herself into the master suite. She tried to put the boys down, but they just climbed up her body, holding on tightly to her, screaming in her ears. With the strength of a lioness, but resembling a possum with her young clinging to her, she moved through the room packing enough clothes to see her through whatever greeted her in the outside world.
The staircase trembled as the pictures flew off of the wall. Every surface was cleared of lamp and knick-knack. The trophy shelf over the liquor cabinet shuddered, causing George to move away warily as he saw the brass men twisted until they lost their balls.
The chair started rocking wildly, the low squeak now a growl. The e-book came to life, the afghan replaced calmly on the back of the chair as the chair slowed to a stop.
George moved like a zombie, glass in hand. He grabbed his keys off the counter and walked out the door. He slowly placed his scotch on the roof of the Mercedes and unlocked the car. A stench so foul greeted him as the door swung open. He looked disbelievingly at the bushels of dog shit filling the interior of the vehicle. It was as if every dog owner’s yard in the neighborhood had been raked and the produce from the pampered pups deposited in his car.
“What the fuck is going on here!”
Marjorie looked at her husband with his mouth agape, standing there in his pissed pants by the expensive car. She opened the door of her sedan and hustled each screaming, wiggling boy into a car seat. She jammed the bags between them and got into the car and started it. She backed quickly out of the garage and tooted her horn to get George’s attention. He looked over and actually waved at her.
She rolled down the window and yelled, “Get in here, you stupid man!” She continued to honk the horn until George relented and shuffled to the silver KIA and got in.
“We better go to Pops,” he said, wishing he hadn’t left his drink unattended on top of the Mercedes as he saw the garage door drop.
“Like hell we will,” Marjorie said. “I’m not waiting on all your sorry asses. I need help.”
“Then Mark’s, let’s go to Mark’s. Susan’s there,” he reasoned.
Marjorie took a deep breath and willed herself to calm down. “Yes, that’s where we’ll go.”
“Can you do something about the boys?” George asked holding his ears.
“You have to be fucking kidding me,” she said as she pulled out of their drive.
Chapter One
It was three am and Susan Abbot-Hofmann forced a plastic smile, the smile reserved for the in-laws. Her husband Mark’s family seemed on the surface a pleasant bunch. First to raise hands to volunteer for school or church functions, the Hofmanns were revered by their community. Underneath however, with the exception of her father-in-law Max, they were a judgmental, tense and backbiting crew. The daughters-in-law never suspected that the congenial men that they married would eventually turn into pompous asses. This personality trait would lie dormant until the wife was thick with child, having given up her career and had no option of leaving. Each woman would give birth, receive a pat on the head from spouses that had already moved on to dallying with secretaries, and would console themselves and the children they bore by rocking in Grandma Hofmann’s chair. In Susan’s case, she had held on to her looks and took her birth control seriously. Her husband still came home at night joyful to be with her.
This evening she and Mark had been summoned from bed by the doorbell. Quickly, she donned a robe and followed her husband downstairs to answer the door. They had company. She stared in disbelief at Mark’s older brother who stood on her porch demanding to be let in. Behind him in the drive way, huddled in the c
old KIA sedan, were his wife Marjorie and their twin sons.
“It’s three in the morning,” Mark said as he stepped aside and let George inside.
Under his breath George growled, “It’s the damn chair.” He turned and waved at his wife to come in. She just sat there shaking her head, “No.”
Susan pushed past him and went to aid the woman who was trying to calm two screaming toddlers in the small car. She tapped at the window and her sister-in-law opened it. The boys’ screams pierced the air of the quiet sleeping community. In between bellows, the poor woman apologized for their presence.
“Nonsense,” Susan said with her best plastic voice, “what is family for.” She opened the door, taking one red-faced kicking child from the worn out woman. “Hush now, sweetheart, what is all this fuss?” she cooed at the boy. The child, feeling the strong confident grip of Susan, quieted immediately.
Marjorie got out and took the calm son from Susan and headed into the house, leaving Susan to coax the remaining child out from under the dashboard where he had huddled gasping for air before resuming his tantrum. “Come to Auntie Susan,” she said to the child. The boy looked up, his face bearing a mass of snot accumulating in a pulsing mucus bubble from his nostril. Susan suppressed a gag as she bent down and pulled the boy forward. Spying a discarded fast-food napkin, she gently wiped his face before hefting the lad onto her shoulder. “There now, nothing to cry about.”
He stopped crying, and as he twined his hands around her neck, he managed a small smile. Not bothering to close the door, she carried him into the house to the warning bell tones of the KIA.
Mark held the door for her. “What about their things?” he asked.
Susan shot him a go to hell look before instructing, “He’s your brother, you empty the car. She pushed past him and into her house to see what all the fuss was about.
George was sitting in the best chair with a tumbler full of whisky in his shaking hands. Marjorie was slumped on the sofa, her son fast asleep beside her. Susan handed her twin over to his mother. “What in heaven’s name is going on?” she asked the couple. Marjorie just sniffed and started to cry. “Can I get you something to drink, coffee…”
