And as Bria ran the face of Dixon appeared along the wall next to her. His face was stretched and distorted. He mocked her effort all the way.
“He’s just some old hobo who wandered in here. Just some of life’s detritus. Just. Like. You.”
And the floor became Dixons face and Bria was falling. She landed hard on the floor. The pipe clattered out of her grip and bounced along the corridor.
Dixon appeared standing in front of it. The light along the corridor was all but gone. Dixons black form creating a dark shadow in the dark corridor. “Lost and alone in the dark,” he said. “Lost and alone in the dark,” he spoke more loudly. “Lost and...”
“I’m not alone,” Bria said and she threw a crystal to the floor. The light flung up around her and she saw Dixon flinch from it only to turn his gaze back on Bria with a fiercer and more spiteful look. An apparition appeared in the corridor and drifted to the light. Tears were falling from its eyes. They came in floods and with a terrible wailing but as the apparition came closer to the light the tears were of joy and the voice sang a joyful tune.
And there Bria saw Dan’s pipe. She scooped it up off the floor as she ran past Dixon who was transfixed by the light for a moment. Bria turned a corner and spotted the rows of cell doors and there up ahead was the one where she’d found the sleeping Dan and Toby.
“Dan.” Bria shouted. “Toby.” She pushed at the door. It was stuck.
Dixon was laughing. Bria turned to him. Did you lock him in there? You monster.”
Dixon laughed harder. “I didn’t do anything to the old bum.”
Bria banged on the door and shouted. She pushed and shoved. The door was wedged shut. Bria threw her weight at the door flinging herself fully at the door until suddenly it gave way and Bria went tumbling forward onto the damp padded floor. She tumbled forward. She looked up to find nothing but a pile of bones.
“Where’s Dan?” Bria said to herself. She heard Dixon laughing over her shoulder.
And then, Bria noticed the tattered shreds of a heavy coat under the bones, and red handkerchief lying amongst them. Then the skulls became obvious to her. One was human, the other was not.
Bria touched the red tattered cloth. “Toby,” she said mournfully. Then she placed the pipe in amongst the bones of the man. “I found your pipe.”
“Ahh, thank you young lady.” Dan spoke from behind her. Bria turned and saw him standing in the corridor, a smoking pipe in his mouth. Toby ran forward and licked her face.
“Come out of there no, young lady. We don’t want you getting stuck in there. No handle on the inside, you see. Now you’ve opened it up I think I can be on my way.”
Bria looked out nervously at Dan wreathed in smoke from his pipe. “Come on Toby,” he said and walked off. Toby ran after with his tail wagging.
“Wait,” Bria ran out of the small cell after them both and she turned into the corridor to find it empty save for a few wisps of smoke.
Bria looked this way and that. The long dark corridor stretched away into darkness. Bria walked back the way she had come. She was going to leave through that front door. Dixon wouldn’t stop her. She wouldn’t let him frighten her anymore.
“They all leave you in the end,” Dixon whispered in her ear. His breath was cold and filled with a stench of evil.
Bria felt his fingers on her neck and she ran. The lightning flashed along the corridor and Dixon was in front of her, his mouth open and growing to fill the corridor. Bria screamed and skidded to a halt. She fished out a crystal and threw it at him. It bounced along the corridor and exploded in a flash that showed Bria the stairway.
She ran towards it with her hands over her head. Dixon’s laugh leaked out of the walls and the floor and it dripped from the ceiling with the slimy drips that fell about her.
Bria made it to the top of the stairs. Coming up the stairs was a young woman, no more than a girl. She was walking towards the light with the broadest smile. Her unexpected appearance in the stairway caused Bria to stop suddenly. And she tripped over in her haste to stop, tripped and fell down the stairs.
Bria fell and turned and the world turned upside down. Her head sang with an impact and lights flashed before her eyes. She came tumbling into the hallway and landed at the feet of Dixon. Two crystals fell from her pockets one vibration and giving off a faint glow. The other inert.
Dixon reached out for the inert crystal. “Seems I have one for you. I will have you very soon. I am taking you to the very edge of fear and there you will be at the point of death and then here you will be held. I must know,” Dixon said, “what else there is. I must know, and you will show me.”
A bang came from the door. It was a loud bang that shook the huge door in its frame and caused dust and flecks of paint to cascade down it.
“The world is out there, Bria,” Dixon said as he stooped down to pick up the empty crystal.
“I’m not afraid of the world,” Bria said and she brought her fist down hard on the last faintly glowing crystal. Is exploded and filled the hall with a white light. From every direction there came one apparition after another. All were floating wispy memories of people.
Everyone came first with a face filled with pain and sorrow and all became bright and joyous as the neared the great warm and clear light. They came down the stairs. They came along the corridor. They came out from every doorway and direction and all drifted towards the light.
Bria looked up a Dixon who was turning and spinning as all the souls drifted lightly past him and into the light. Bria saw a pain and fear in his face shot through with malice and hatred. Bria picked up the last crystal and held it forwards towards Dixon. “I’m not afraid,” she said. “But you are. You are so afraid of death that you are too scared to live. You are so scared of what you don’t know that you torment others hoping their pain will fill the void. But you cannot fill the void,” Bria stood up and plunged the crystal into Dixons heart. “You cannot escape the void.” Her voice rising and the souls drifted past her into the light. “You cannot contain the void. You are the void. You are the void in your own hateful heart.”
The front door banged again and shook the whole frame. The souls all drifted to the light that surrounded Bria. Dixon looked into Bria’s eyes, his face filled with doubt and fear and in a moment his darkness was pulled into the crystal, releasing a final flash of glinting light at its pointed tip.
The door crashed open with a splintering cracking of timbers. Bria looked out of the open doorway. A police car with its lights flashing was parked on the drive way and a police man with a hand held battering ram stood in the open doorway. Bria felt the world spin and turn to darkness.
“You’ll be alright now, young lady,” Bria heard as consciousness faded.
Chapter 13
Bria woke in a soft bed with crisp sheets. She saw immediately she was in a hospital ward. Next to her bed sat her mother. She looked tired and sad but as Bria blinked and looked at her she saw the face of her mother brighten up and fill with joy and tears.
“Hi Mom,” Bria said.
Bria’s mother threw strong arms around her and pulled her close. She wept in huge silent heaving sobs that made Bria cry.
A young doctor walked in a chart in his hand.
“Good. You are awake. Well we’ve got the toxicology reports back and the toxins you picked up from that abandoned hospital’s water supply have been reduced to trace amounts. You have beaten the toxins and you should make a full recovery.
Bria felt her mother’s hands on her head and her mother’s tears on her face.
The doctor put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a crystal. He dropped in onto the bed. This was all you had on you when the police finally found you, this and a small knife that the police confiscated. You can keep the crystal if you like.
Bria looked at the crystal. Every smooth face reflecting some part of the hospital ward.
Bria flung her legs over the side of the bed.
“There’s no rush to leave, mis
s,” the young doctor said. “You might want to rest up for at least the night.”
“Yes, we can stay. I’ll stay with you, honey,” her mother said.
Bria sat up, her head felt a little groggy but she was fit enough to stand. “No thank you,” she said. “I’m ready to come home if you don’t mind, mom.”
Bria’s mother wrapped her up in her arms and laughed and cried. “No, I don’t mind.”
“Besides,” Bria said, “I think I’ve spent enough time in hospital.”
The End
The Haunting of Abbott House
Rosemary Cullen
Copyright © 2019
All Rights Reserved
Prologue - Death
Dover, England, 1819
It was a pleasant evening, warm and bright. Henry leaned back on the bench, watching the wind ruffling the surface of the ornamental lake and lightly shaking the boughs of the branches of Cape jasmine shrubs, sending their heavy fragrance eddying through the family group scattered at the lake’s edge.
Amelia, Henry’s wife, leaned in a little closer to him. “Cape jasmine,” she said in his ear. “You remember what it means?”
Flower-language was just one of Amelia’s odd interests. Henry didn’t see the appeal of it, but it was perfectly respectable (even if a lot of it came from that Frenchwoman whose name Henry could never remember) and it kept Amelia happy, so he couldn’t complain.
Mostly happy, that is; she had gone on about cypress being a sign of death and said she wanted the cypresses at the east end of the lake cut down, and he wasn’t about to do that, but he’d let her plant plenty of her own fancies. Now that she was once again in an interesting condition, it was more important than ever that she should remain tranquil and happy, lest the child should grow up pinched and nervous.
“Remind me,” he said in his most tender voice, still keeping half his mind on his problem.
“I am too happy,” she said.
“Too happy to remind me?”
“No, that’s what it means,” she said softly. Then, much more sharply, “Edward! Leave that alone!”
It was Nanny’s day off, and spending some time alone with the dear children had seemed pleasant enough in idea. Well, Amelia seemed to be dealing with it. Henry had a more pressing problem to attend to.
Some people might not have considered the sudden acquisition of a large sum of money as a problem. Some people were less scrupulous than Henry. Oh, part of it was obtained in a way even he couldn’t worry about. It was that one detached piece of land, left by a cousin’s bequest, which he’d never managed to find a good use for.
As local business boomed, the value of the worthless land that he had gotten from his father before him soar. Laborers moved in and everyone wanted more housing, except for the rich tourists who wanted more amusements at the seashore. Henry was not a vulgar man to make money off amusements himself, but surely he had been within his rights to sell off that parcel to someone else who was prepared to be vulgar with it.
No, it was the box that troubled him. He’d merely been trying to please Amelia by digging up the tuberose plant she wanted from by that wretched drafty old house; he hardly liked to bother a servant with such a silly task, and Amelia was always absurdly pleased when he did anything for her himself. When he found the box; when he opened the box and saw the jewels his mind raced. It seemed like something out of a boy’s detective story, not a piece of a real gentleman’s life.
He didn’t put it in the bank. With such an influx of strangers, Henry was no longer as confident as he had been that the bank couldn’t be robbed. No, he’d put it all where it would stay safe for his family, and he hadn’t told anyone, not even Amelia.
But what was he to do with it? Had he the right to keep all of it for his own family? They were hardly in want, and the rector, a solemn young fellow, had been most moving last Sunday in telling the story of the rich man and Lazarus which caused Henry to have the uncomfortable, and almost certainly irrational feeling that the rector was looking at him.
Not that he could have known. Unless the good Lord really did divulge such things to his most faithful.
“Father!” The voice shook Henry out of his thoughts. How long had he been woolgathering? And what ailed Jemima that she should screech like that? She was eight, old enough to have some idea of how a lady should behave.
She was standing at the edge of the pond, shaking like a leaf, and tugging on a branch too heavy for her. Amelia was -where had she gone, or why had she gone? Amelia was running down the path from the shrubbery, sheet-white. She’d gone to sort out something with Edward. How long ago was that? The golden light was draining from the sky. Longer than he’d thought.
Edward.
“Where’s Edward?”
Jemima stared wide-eyed at him and pointed to the pond.
Edward’s head broke the surface, his eyes wide with panic. The boy was three. He couldn’t swim. He couldn’t make it out on his own.
Henry was at Jemima’s side, grabbing the branch, reaching out. No good; Edward was down again, and anyway, he was too far out. Why had Henry’s grandfather told the architect to make the lake so large? So deep?
“It’s all right,” Henry said loudly, trying to reassure himself as much as anyone else as he waded into the unexpectedly cold water. Only a few more steps, and he dropped.
The bottom was gone from under his feet. He thrashed, spluttered, reflected that he himself barely knew how to swim, saw Edward’s head break the surface again and threw himself at the child.
He had him, the boy’s body slippery and bony in his hands. He pulled up, got Edward’s head and shoulders up over his own back, tried to back up.
Something was pulling back on him. What was the boy tangled in? Henry swiped an arm through the cold water, felt something strong and clinging. He gave an almighty wrench, half threw the boy back into the shallows. The weed, if that was what it was, let the boy go, but coiled tightly around Henry’s arm. He just needed to bend, to get better leverage to pull free.
His head went under water. He rolled and kicked himself back toward the surface, but the weed wrapped around his neck. He saw the bubble of his breath bursting in the air above him, felt the weed probing its slimy fingers into his mouth and throat. Pain and darkness exploded behind his eyes and, somewhere far beyond them, a golden light, slowly expanding to take him in.
Chapter One – Separation
Dover, England – Present Day
Jennie Marchant took a deep breath and braced herself as she pulled into the driveway of Abbott House. It was silly of her to care so much about coming here alone instead of coming with Will. It stood to reason that he had to tidy up the loose ends of his business in the States before flying in to join her. Of course, loose ends in business were always longer and more frayed than the business owner suspected. Jennie knew that, since her own father had issues.
No, she told herself. It’s not like that. Will has a better head for business than Father ever had. She believed that. She thought she believed that. And besides, he’s the funniest, kindest, cleverest man there is, and I’m the luckiest woman, to be married to him. That part she knew she believed.
Still, it was hard to have to settle into the house without him. They’d had just a week of honeymoon together. There wasn’t money for more after they made the payment on Abbott House. They set aside money for the most urgent of the many repairs it needed.
Setting the house to rights was to have been almost a continuation of the honeymoon. It was going to be an adventure in a new place together. Will was the architect, but Jennie was the one with more hands-on experience in fixing plumbing and tearing out rotten sections.
Between them, they’d restore the place so that it was a lovely home and also a lovely advert for what they could do to other properties in need of help. And, of course, Jennie had the grounds to amuse herself in her spare time.
She was happy to go look at the grounds now and leave the plumbing for later. She s
hut the car door firmly and loudly. She walked to the kissing gate and let herself into the walled garden.
When they visited with the agent the garden had been under snow. Now there was green grass everywhere, in the unmown paths and the overgrown beds. But there were some flowers, too, that had lasted through years of neglect.
Asphodel was reaching its white spires sunward. Asphodel was tough and lovely too. Not exactly a happy flower. Jennie shut her eyes and flipped back through the pages of the book stored neatly in her photographic memory.
Asphodel. My regrets follow you to the grave. There were marigolds, too—they must have self-seeded—dark crimson marigolds. Marigold. Grief. No, there was another entry in the book after that one: Marigold and cypress. Despair.
Jennie looked ruefully at the cypresses lining the inner wall.
“So much for my treat,” she said aloud with her voice sounding oddly thin in her own ears. “I’d better go in and see what’s rotting.”
She had a general idea, of course, from their visit with the realtor, but she knew how easy it was for realtors to distract you from details they didn’t want you to notice.
One thing, not much more than a detail was evident to her as she lugged her suitcases from the car up to the front porch.
The house was being suffocated by trumpet vine. It would be pretty and fragrant enough in August, Jennie supposed. Here in June, it was just in leaf. Even that wasn’t unattractive looking, if you didn’t think about what the roots of the trumpet vine were doing to the woodwork of the windowsills and the mortar between the stones. That was precisely what Jennie needed to think about.
Quite unnecessarily she thought of another entry in the old book. Trumpet flower. Separation.
“Hold your noise,” Jennie said to herself. The trumpet vine would come down. She thought there were loppers in the tool shed. That was hardly the first order of priority.
In March the house had been dismally cold. The central heating had clanked ominously. Now the air outside was balmy, but the air inside the house felt cold and damp. Jennie laid and lit a fire in the kitchen fireplace which still had a chimney that worked. The other one in the living room was going to be one of the urgent issues.
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