Taryn's Camera: Beginnings: Four Haunting Novellas

by Rebecca Patrick-Howard

  Stop it, she’d commanded herself, stop it! There was nobody in the closet. It was a rat or a raccoon or a possum or something that had crawled in under the eaves and found its way inside. It was an old house that needed a lot of work. Who knew what lived in the walls?

  Steeling herself and gritting her teeth, Stella had gathered her courage and fought the panic down to her toes. The fear was in her head, that was all. She’d know if someone was trying to hurt her. She’d know. Stella always knew. Feeling a small weight lift, she’d leaned over to the lamp and flicked it on. The room was suddenly filled with light but her fear remained. It wasn’t entirely gone.

  She hadn’t been completely helpless, however. Her husband had lived on the road, often leaving her home by herself. Leaning back a little, Stella had kept her eye on the closet door and opened the drawer to her nightstand. She’d fumbled for a moment before her hand landed on the object she was searching for. With the small revolver in front of her, she’d felt safer and more secure. New confidence swelling inside her, Stella had crept towards the closet door, training her ears for any other sounds. Raccoons were mean, ornery things. She didn’t want to open the door and find one ready to pounce on her, claw her eyes out.

  Legs opened and planted firmly on the ground, Stella had assumed her defense position and reached for the knob. The house was deathly quiet, as though holding its breath in anticipation for her. With a violent yank she’d flung open the door and pointed her gun into the dim light.

  Nothing moved.

  The closet light was turned on from a string that hung down in the middle. It was swinging now. Probably just from where I opened the door, she told herself. Although her clothes swayed gently back and forth from her sudden movements, nothing looked out of order. Stella pushed them aside with her free hand, keeping her revolver trained on the small space.

  Nothing.

  Stella had sighed, irritated with herself. She knew then that she really must have really been dozing and didn’t realize it.

  “I’m just scaring myself. And now I’m going to shoot my damn foot off,” she said aloud to the empty room. Sighing, she’d placed the revolver back into the drawer and shut it to. She’d never been real comfortable with the thing, although she did know how to use it.

  Whether she’d really heard something or not, she’d certainly scared herself silly so there was no way she’d be able to sleep. Muttering, she’d grabbed the book she’d been reading from her nightstand and trooped down the steep, narrow stairs.

  She figured she’d sleep again when it turned daylight.

  THAT HAD BEEN two nights ago. Sleep had never really returned.

  Stella was a woman who was neat by default. She was also a woman who had a lot of time on her hands. When her husband died her friends had come around a lot at first, taking her out to lunch, visiting with her on the front porch, inviting her to dinner at their houses…but those invitations had gradually stopped. She hadn’t noticed the exact moment when they’d stopped, just looked at her calendar one day and realized it had been weeks since anyone had phoned or visited her.

  So, Stella cleaned.

  There was a lot to clean in the old house. With eleven large rooms she could barely keep up with the dust and muck that gathered on the floors, much less the furniture polishing, washing the dishes, the laundry (it was amazing how much one woman who didn’t go anywhere or see anyone could accumulate), and the everyday organization of the clutter. So, she spent most of her afternoons cleaning.

  As the sun started to set she proceeded to the front porch for her nightly ritual: watching the sun sink down over the old tobacco barn while she nursed a cup of hot chocolate spiked with Baileys.

  That evening her mind flitted back to the events from a few nights before. She knew she hadn’t been asleep. She knew what she’d heard. But what did it mean?

  “I’m too old to deal with ghosts,” she said aloud. Since Bill’s death she’d taken to talking to herself. Sometimes it was nice just to hear another voice in the house.

  Still, she refused to honestly believe that her house was haunted by an actual ghost. Stella was sixty-five years old and had never seen a ghost. The only people she knew who had were either children, braggarts who seemed to want to outdo anyone regardless of the story, and her uncle Edward who was known for partaking of the whiskey a little too early in the morning.

  Stella wasn’t sure that ghosts really existed. She believed in leftover energy, believed places had memories, even believed that people themselves could taint a place with their anger and love and jealousy. But ghosts?

  The notion plagued her, however. She had to believe in some sort of afterlife. After all, if she didn’t, then what did that mean for her husband?

  Later that night Stella tucked herself into bed, a glass of milk and a Benadryl in either hand. She aimed to sleep through the night, to train her body to sleep in the proper hours, no matter what it took. She thought if she could just sleep straight through the night once she’d be able to do it again. The doctor had given her some prescription nonsense but she refused to take it. She’d avoided medication for hypertension and high cholesterol so far, unlike most of her friends. She aimed to hold off on the hard stuff for as long as she could.

  The Benadryl worked. For the first time in ages Stella was able to fall into a peaceful sleep without any effort. Her book fell from her fingers and landed at her side and she snuggled into her pillow and blankets, as content as she ever was when Bill was alive.

  She didn’t know how long she’d slept but was having a lovely dream involving Sean Connery when she was rudely interrupted by the noise in her closet. In her foggy state brought on by the allergy medicine, she didn’t know what was going on at first. Her mind was alert and awake, but her body was not. She felt like she was moving through a mist, a thick sea of it, and couldn’t get her bearings.

  From somewhere on the other side of the room she was mentally aware of a muffled sob, and then a thump on the wall. “Someone’s not very happy,” Stella thought dreamily and snuggled back into her pillow again.

  But then it came again, this time louder and more intense.

  Pushing through the fog of the medicine, Stella forced herself to open her eyes and sit up. Her head ached like she’d had too much alcohol and the room was spinning round and round in circles. Stella held her arm out in front of her to steady herself and listened. She willed her mind to quiet itself and clear. Her body relaxed and tune it to its surroundings. The sound came again then, what she could only define as soft crying.

  “Who’s there?” she called out, but her voice sounded very far away, disconnected to her. “I have a gun!”

  She groped for the drawer on her nightstand but couldn’t get her fingers to function properly. She could barely feel them move.

  Figuring that wasn’t the safest time to reach for a gun, Stella awkwardly rose to her feet and stumbled to the end of her bed. She felt light as a feather, like she wasn’t moving at all, and seemed to float rather than walk. The Benadryl’s not such bad stuff, she thought drily.

  Her closet door was open just a bit, a thin ray of light filtering from it. Funny, she didn’t remember leaving the light on.

  Still feeling unattached to her body, Stella had the confidence she sometimes lacked since Bill’s death. With no thought to harm, she swung the door open, expected to be met by a person or, at the very least, a burning lightbulb.

  It was dark. Once again, nothing was there.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” she said aloud. “Where the hell did the light go?”

  Shrugging, Stella stumbled back to her bed and collapsed, her feet dangling off the side and scraping the floor. She was lost too deep in the Benadryl to hear the soft cries that continued throughout the night.

  Stella was a reasonable woman. When her husband was alive she was the one with her feet planted firmly on the ground. She balanced the checkbooks, did their taxes, made the major decisions about the household…and she liked that. B
ill had been the dreamer, the one with his head in the clouds.

  Stella was also the one with the loud mouth, the one who’d argued with store clerks when they weren’t treating her unfairly, the one who spoke her mind often without thinking, and the first one up for most challenges. Even Stella had to admit in the clear light of day, however, that what she’d done the night before had been stupid. Going to the closet without a weapon, ready to meet whomever might have been waiting for her without any thought to her safety–that had been crazy. It was obvious that she couldn’t take the Benadryl again.

  However, she also had to admit something else…

  The house might actually be haunted. But by what? Who?

  She spent the day stress cleaning, airing out the guest bedrooms that were never used, ironing tablecloths that never got put out, and polishing silver that hadn’t seen the light of day in more than ten years.

  Once she’d run out of things to do she’d plopped down in Bill’s ratty old recliner in front of the television and pondered her predicament. It was possible that she had some form of mental illness. That his death and the loss of her friends had made her paranoid, given her some kind of psychosis. Or maybe she was just depressed.

  She didn’t feel depressed, though. She had plenty of motivation and still loved doing the same things she’d always done. Sure, she was sad, but she didn’t stay up crying every night. At least, not anymore.

  Maybe she was crazy. People wouldn’t believe some of the nutty things that went through her head sometimes. She truly believed that some people were simply alive because she was afraid of killing them and going to prison and not being able to watch “Days of Our Lives” when she wanted.

  But, if she was going crazy, then it had been a gradual thing. She didn’t feel any nuttier than she’d ever felt.

  But if it wasn’t her then it meant it was the house. And that wasn’t something she was sure she was willing to admit yet.

  Still, as a practical person, Stella knew that she had to investigate.

  The first thing she did was go to the closet itself.

  In the clear light of day it looked perfectly fine. Her clothes were hung neatly inside, ordered from longest to shortest, and her shoes were lined up on the floor. Her boxes of sweaters were at the top in see-through boxes.

  It was a closet, just as she’d suspected.

  She stood inside for a few moments, letting the feel of the room rub off on her and sink into her skin. She could do that with people sometimes–stand close to them and let their energy wash over her. She’d learned a lot about people that way. She’d learned that most of them she wouldn’t want to be caught after dark with.

  And once, while on vacation in New Orleans, she’d felt something dark and slithery in the French Quarter. It had been so horrid she’d never returned, not even for the rest of their trip.

  This time, however, she got very little. Perhaps some longing, a touch of sadness. Nervousness. All of that could’ve been hers own feelings, however. She’d discount them.

  There wasn’t a room on the other side of the closet, just the outside wall, so Stella knew the sounds couldn’t have been coming from someplace else. Still, humoring herself, she threw on her light jacket against the late October wind and traipsed outside to have a look around.

  The air was bitter cold out there. The naked trees, bare of their glorious autumn leaves, reminded her of skeletons with their stark limbs. She shivered a little and then snapped at herself, “You’re just trying to scare yourself now, old girl.”

  From the outside the house looked the same as it ever did. The paint was peeling in some places, it could use a good pressure wash, thanks to the grass stains at the bottom, and some of the shutters needed replacing but it was still a pleasant looking house.

  Stella walked around it like she’d done a hundred times before, studying the exterior. The brittle grass crackled under her feet and she was aware, not for the first time, that she was very much alone. She and Bill had two children, two daughters later in life. They’d tried for more but had been unsuccessful. They had their hearts broken so many times through the adoption process that they’d finally given up on that. These days, however, it was difficult to feel like a mother at all. Both were grown. Sarah was living way up in New Hampshire in the house Stella herself had grown up in. The daughter in Nashville, Millicent, felt foreign to her, like a distant cousin. Now, more than ever, she wished she had an offspring to comfort her and share in her grief. She knew that was selfish but she couldn’t help it; it was the way she felt.

  Soon, she was standing under her bedroom windows. There were two windows in her room and they were about five feet apart from one another. The closet was another two feet from the window on the left and around three feet deep. As she studied the room, however, she noticed something she’d never paid attention to before–there was at least ten feet from the window to the outside wall. She herself was only five feet tall, she knew the measurements when she saw them.

  So what was up with the extra space? Where was the additional five feet? She thought it could’ve been taken up in insulation, or perhaps hiding wires and plumbing fixtures.

  Still, an additional five feet was a lot. She’d need to explore that further.

  Climbing back up her staircase, Stella huffed and puffed, her cheeks red and cold from being outside. She couldn’t do stairs the way she could when she was younger. She wasn’t the spring chicken she used to be. By the time she reached her bedroom she was winded and sweating inside the jacket she’d forgotten to take off in her excitement. Her hair, a tad more brittle than it had been in her youth but still auburn hung flatly against her head from the wind and sweat.

  Re-opening her closet, Stella looked at the small space again. It still just looked like a closet to her. Nothing funny about it. When she spotted her sweaters on the top shelf, however, she decided to make use of her time and get them down. It was getting colder and the house was drafty. She could use them.

  As short as she was, Stella was unable to reach the shelf. She dragged a stool in from a guest room and placed it inside the closet.

  Unfortunately, the effects from the Benadryl hadn’t quite worn all the way off yet so when she climbed up on it, she was still a little woozy. Before she knew what was happening she’d lost her balance and was tumbling to the floor. The only thing she could grab onto were the clothes on the hanger in front of her. She reached for them blindly, missed, and fell face first into the wall at the back of the closet. Stella felt something give, like sticking her fist through cardboard, and landed face down on the floor.

  I’m lucky I didn’t break my damn neck, she thought to herself. She laid as still as she could, mentally going down her body to check for injuries. She didn’t feel like she’d broken anything and could still turn her neck. Her nose, however, was buried in something that smelt awful.

  Stella’s closet had hardwood floors, just like the rest of the house. She’d landed on a rug of some sorts, though, and it was not something she’d ever put down. Opening her eyes she gazed in front of her. The rug was a colorful one, or had been at some point. Now it was caked with dust and other things she didn’t want to think about. From the brightly woven fabrics lined up side by side without any thought to pattern she thought it was a rag rug.

  Confused, Stella rose to her knees and looked around. While her legs and feet were still in her closet, the upper part of her body was not. Somehow, she’d managed to land in another room. Gently rising to her feet, Stella pushed on the drywall in front of her until it gave way and allowed her to walk into the small space.

  Since the room didn’t have any windows, it took her a moment to adjust her eyes. The only light came from the stark bulb in her closet. Still, the room wasn’t very big, maybe only 5X10. On one end she could see a bed, just barely big enough for a child. It was an old-fashioned one with spindles; she estimated it to be from the 1930s. A small table with two small chairs were in a corner and on them were crude teacup
s and saucers made from wood. The only other piece of furniture in the room was an old shelf. It was full of dolls, toy cars, and other things that a small child might enjoy.

  Confused, but not shocked, Stella stood back and examined the space. So it was a play room, or at least a tiny bedroom. Why had it been boarded up? Why build the closet between the two rooms and not just empty that one out and make one BIG closet?

  Apart from the fact that cobwebs were growing over most of the items and the thin layer of dust on everything made them look like something from a horror movie, the room was incredibly neat and tidy. The child must have grown up, then, and didn’t use it after a certain age. It looked to have been trapped in time.

  Unless…

  Stella shuddered with the implication of what she was looking at. It became clear to her, at that moment, that the REASON the items hadn’t been disturbed and the REASON the room was boarded up was because the child had died. The parents, mourning their loss, had created a shrine.

  Two families had owned the house since its construction in 1939. The first family, the McGuire’s, had lived there until 1976. When the husband passed away the wife, whose name was Rose as far as Stella could remember, was sent to live in a nursing home. She hadn’t been very old at the time, only in her mid-fifties, so Stella had to wonder if perhaps something else was going on, perhaps a disability. The house was sold then and went to a large family of five. They’d lived in the home from 1977 until Stella and her husband bought it in 1988.

  It was a wonder that the children from the second family hadn’t discovered the small room and claimed it themselves as a hideaway. It was the perfect spot for a child. She knew they hadn’t, though. The belongings in the secret room were old and had obviously been untouched for quite some time.