by Darcy Coates
I typed Jonathan Gillespie’s name into a search engine. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was disappointed, all the same. The first page of search results brought up nothing but social media profiles, an article about a Canadian lawyer, and a steamy romance novella whose hero was unfortunate enough to share Jonathan’s name.
I didn’t hold much hope for it, but I clicked through to the second page. The first few results were more of the same, but the fourth link took me to a blog run by someone named Steve Gillespie. The blog seemed to be full of discussions on outback poetry, classic movies, and half-baked philosophical thoughts. Judging by his profile picture, Steve was well into the latter part of his life, and the blog hadn’t been updated in nearly five years. I did a search for Jonathan, and found a post called “Some Ramblings for Posterity” that seemed to be talking about the same Jonathan who had once owned the house.
Steve’s writing style was slow and confusing, and he took frequent detours to wax lyrical about his childhood. I skimmed the massive post, trying to pick out the parts that seemed relevant and reading between the lines when Steve wasn’t clear.
Steve was apparently Jonathan’s grandson. While he’d never met Jonathan, his mother had told him enough stories to fill in the details. He described growing up in a beautiful house, but it wasn’t until he mentioned a graveyard hidden in the woods out the back that I realised he was probably talking about the very building I was staying in.
According to Steve’s mother, Jonathan Gillespie had once been a cult leader in the North Coast. He’d amassed a following of nearly a hundred, though a reasonable number of those were his multiple wives and many children. When his followers had tried to rebel against him in 1871, they had fallen to a “great calamity”.
“What sort of calamity?” I scrolled on, but Steve either didn’t know or didn’t think it important enough to elaborate on. Instead, he speared off into a cute side story about the pet dog he’d owned that would fetch his shoes, but only in mismatched pairs.
I kept reading, and soon the story picked up again. After the “calamity”, Jonathan and his remaining family—three wives, his sister and her husband, his two brothers, and their many children—had packed up and left. He’d led them over the mountains, where he’d lost a number of the children to the harsh conditions, and eventually arrived at an unoccupied stretch of land a few hours’ walk from a small town.
There, his family spent months building a house to Jonathan’s exact specifications. Steve noted that Jonathan Gillespie had been incredibly particular about how the house was built, but didn’t say why.
“C’mon, Steve,” I begged, scrolling past another anecdote about the time he’d misheard his mother and purchased a bunch of flowers instead of the bag of flour he’d been sent to the store for. “C’mon, don’t leave me hanging like this.”
Steve claimed Jonathan had ruled his family with an iron fist, which, if my dreams had been even slightly accurate, was true. Each day, they would “commune” for an hour. While Steve didn’t elaborate on what this communing was, I guessed it was the bizarre scene I’d witnessed in the basement.
There was a mention of Jonathan watching from his window, which had the best view in the house, while his family worked the gardens. Steve then finished his story by saying Jonathan had gotten his just deserves for his cruelty; he’d been the first to fall to the mysterious illness that had “wiped out nearly all of the Gillespies and Tonkins.” I remembered the smattering of gravestones with the name Tonkins. They probably belonged to Gillespie’s sister, her husband, and their children.
Obviously, at least some of the Gillespies had survived—otherwise, Steve wouldn’t have existed to tell his story—but the frustrating narrator hadn’t said how many.
I thought of Mr Gillespie, obviously a great-grandchild or great-great-grandchild of Jonathan. I wondered how much he knew about his family history. I was tempted to call and ask, but I’d never spoken much with Mr Gillespie beyond hello and goodbye. Mrs Gillespie had organised all the arrangements for my stay, and even if she knew anything about her husband’s ancestors, I doubted she was willing to talk about it.
I spent another forty minutes looking through other search results in case Jonathan had another descendant who was a little more coherent about his history, but I gave up when I reached page twenty-seven, which was full of gibberish results.
The clock read two thirty in the morning, but I was still too energised to sleep. I made another cup of tea and fished leftovers out of the fridge for a midnight snack while I processed what I knew. The Gillespie house had been built nearly two hundred years before by a cult leader. He’d created it to serve a specific purpose, which I had yet to discover. Steve Gillespie had implied that his grandfather had somehow been involved in the deaths of his followers and a number of his family before moving, but I couldn’t guess to what degree Jonathan had caused those deaths.
Steve’s brief mention about Jonathan watching his family through his window had given me pause. While he hadn’t elaborated on where it was in the house, my thoughts were instantly drawn to the bay window of the locked room on the second floor. Because it jutted out of the wall, it had the best view in the house. On the other hand, it only overlooked the gully that led to the forest, whereas the gardens were behind the property, out of view of even the bay window.
Except…
I thought of the raised beds behind the building. They were old and definitely dead, sure, but they were nowhere near as old as the house was.
What if the garden was originally around the side of the house, where there’s more sunlight? That would put the garden right under the bay window. I pictured Jonathan standing in the gap between the curtains, his cold grey eyes watching his wives and children toiling in the dirt below… a pair of clippers gripped in his fist, perhaps, ready to punish anyone who showed signs of disobedience.
I snapped my laptop closed and picked up my cup of tea, eager for the comfort of the warm drink. The rain was still coming down, tapping along the windows and thundering over the roof.
Sometime between falling asleep on the couch and forcing my way out of the basement, I’d come to cautiously accept my dreams as more than complete fiction. They had a sense of realness and coherency that my regular dreams never even got close to, and they were showing me things that were being confirmed by reality.
What scared me most was that I didn’t know where the dreams were coming from. Is it the house? I’d thought on more than one occasion that it had felt alive. Or is it something residing in the house?
And why me? Did I have some latent psychic ability I’d never known about? Were there ghosts within those walls trying to communicate with me? I’d never really given much thought to spirits or the afterlife, but after what I’d been through over the last three days, I was finding it hard not to believe in them.
I thought about Genevieve, with her thick jaw and sallow skin, and remembered the terror that had flashed over her face when she’d been locked in the basement. He did let her out, didn’t he?
Thunder crashed. I pulled the blanket around myself more tightly and drained the last of my tea.
Something was wrong in the house, and I had the feeling it all stemmed from the locked room on the second floor. I stood up to put my cup in the sink and nearly dropped it as a door slammed above my head.
“Damnit!” I snapped reflexively, pressing my free hand to my heart. No wonder Mrs Gillespie needed marriage counselling if her husband refused to fix that abominable door.
I put down my cup and adjusted the blanket around my shoulders. It was late—or rather, early—and I was letting my imagination run away on me. I probably just needed a few hours’ sleep, and maybe a couple of painkillers for my aching ribs and throbbing head, and I would be fine.
The floorboards above my head groaned. I hesitated, listening to them, trying to remind myself that it was just the house breathing…
Except it wasn’t. They weren’t random creaks; the
y were footsteps in the hallway above me.
It was a good thing I’d put down my mug; otherwise, I would have dropped it. Panic flared through me while my brain tried to reason against it. There can’t be anyone there. You would have heard them come in.
The footsteps kept moving, starting to the left and travelling directly over my head.
There’s no one there. The house breathes; that’s all.
They’d changed direction and were heading down the hallway, towards the back of the house.
You’re safe. You’re safe. You’re safe. I ran for the stairwell, clutching the blanket in one hand and the candlestick in the other. The stairs tended to creak, so I kept my feet light and stayed to the edge of the steps, minimising the noise the best I could.
The landing was empty and dark. I glanced up the stairs behind me, the one that went to the third floor of the building, but there was no noise coming from there, so I faced the hallway in front of me and began advancing down it.
The doors were all still open from when I’d searched them the night before. I glanced into each room as I passed but saw no sign of an intruder. I eventually reached my own room and looked inside. It was exactly the way I’d left it. My pile of novels, which I’d barely made a dent in, still sat on the table. My cupboard door was open from when I’d gotten my dressing gown, and the bed looked bare without the blanket that I was currently clutching around my shoulders.
Then the scratching started again. I held still, listening hard, and realised it was coming from the wall behind my bed. I moved close and pressed my ear against the cool wallpaper.
The more I listened, the less I was convinced that rats were the cause.
I pulled back and jogged into the hallway again, my heart thundering in my ears, trying to drown out the dreadful scratching sound. The noise was coming from the room next to mine—the room with the locked door. The room that belonged to Jonathan Gillespie.
Even though I knew what the result would be, I couldn’t stop myself from trying to turn the handle. Still locked.
Why?
I ran down the stairs, hardly thinking about what I was doing, and dropped the candlestick in the hallway before pelting out the door and into the rain. It was achingly cold and soaked through the blanket before I’d even rounded the corner. Visibility was poor, and I couldn’t hear much over the roar of the drops assaulting the house and the muddy, slushy ground, but I kept marching down the side of the house until I stood below the bay window. I pulled out my phone, grateful that it was waterproof, and turned on the flashlight function. The room was a long way above me, but the phone’s light was just enough to let me make out the window.
The curtains fluttered in the breeze for a second before falling still. Dread pooled in my chest like molten lead as the implication hit me. There is no breeze… not in the hallway, not outside. The rain was heavy, but the wind had settled, letting the drops fall directly down. I watched the window with a dry mouth. Is someone living in there?
Impossible. I’d been in the house for three days. Even if someone had food and water in the room, they couldn’t go to the bathroom without my knowing. Right?
The dreams… what if there was a spirit in the house, trying to show me something or teach me something? Or what if Jonathan Gillespie’s ghost was still trying to rule over the home that had once been his?
I needed to open the door—to see what was in the only locked room in the house. How, though?
I could call Mrs Gillespie to ask where the key was… and, most likely, endure her scorn before being told that I shouldn’t pry where I wasn’t wanted. Or I could force my way in. I’d already broken the basement’s door; Mrs Gillespie wasn’t likely to get that much angrier if I broke a second one.
That settled it. I jogged towards the sheds at the back of the house, shoved open the spider-infested door and shone my phone’s light at the clutter on the ground and shelves. Sure enough, in the corner, among shovels, pruners, and tree saws, was a rusty crowbar. I kicked the clutter out of my way and grabbed the bar, shook it to detach it from the cobwebs, then ran back into the rain.
This is crazy. I skittered through the front door, dropped my soaked blanket on the ground, and took the stairs two at a time. But sometimes crazy circumstances warrant crazy actions.
I didn’t stop moving until I reached the locked door, where I stumbled to a halt, bent over, and braced my hands on my knees to drag in a few rough breaths. A stitch had developed in my left side, and my throat was dry from the stress and the running.
I listened hard, but everything was still and silent again. Even the scratching sounds had stopped; all I could hear was rain drumming on the roof. I knelt, pressed my cheek against the wooden floor, and shined the light from my phone under the door.
Just as I had on my first day in the house, I could see faint outlines of objects I couldn’t make out, but there was no sign of motion and no hint of what might have been inside.
“We’re really doing this, huh?” I picked up the crowbar and fit its angled edge between the door and the doorframe. For a second, I hesitated, wondering if I should leave the task until morning and maybe call Mrs Gillespie to see what her excuse was, but the tension had built so strongly in my chest that I thought I would explode if I didn’t get an answer right then. “I guess we are.”
I heaved on the crowbar. The wood creaked, then I was rewarded with a faint cracking noise. I pushed harder, the stitch stabbed at me again, and my headache flared. Then the wood gave out under the pressure with a splitting crack, and the door finally swung open.
FOURTH DAY
I stood in the doorway, blinking and gasping, trying to orient myself and make sense of what I was seeing.
Plenty of scenarios had flashed through my mind in the days and moments before I’d opened the door, but none of them came even remotely close to reality.
My optimistic side had hoped for an empty storage room, like the one to its left; locked, maybe, because the window didn’t close properly and the Gillespies were trying to stop the breeze.
My pessimistic side had pictured an evil lair filled with replicas of the wrought-iron symbol in the basement or corpses stacked along the walls while the room’s occupant laughed at my foolishness for walking into his trap.
What I saw was worlds away from either idea.
I turned the light on as I walked through the doorway and gazed about the room. To my left was a small bed—too small for an adult—with a pink floral comforter. A child’s rocking chair sat beside it, a stuffed bear posed in its cushioned seat. To the right was a wardrobe set into the wall, much like the one in my room, except this one had posters of horses taped to it. A deluxe dollhouse—so big and complex that a younger version of myself would have cried from jealousy—was propped below the bay window.
I hadn’t been able to see from the outside, but the window’s curtains were actually pink with frilled edges. The windowsill was painted white, matching the other accents in the room that set off the pastel-peach walls.
A stack of boxes, all open, sat in the middle of the room. I caught glimpses of a diary, a photobook, and a collection of picture frames inside.
“Wow…” I remembered that this was supposed to have been Jonathan Gillespie’s room, and I broke into laughter.
It was such a relief, so much sweeter and less menacing than what I’d feared, that I let myself fall to the ground and racked in gasping breaths between bouts of chuckling. After a few minutes, I calmed down—and looked at the room with fresh eyes.
I’d found out its terrible secret, which wasn’t that terrible to begin with, but that didn’t explain why it had been locked. I scooted over to the box holding picture frames and pulled out a few.
They showed Mr and Mrs Gillespie, looking a little younger, posed with a girl with shoulder-length straw-coloured hair. She had a huge gap-toothed smile, and I guessed she wasn’t older than six or seven.
I pulled out more photos, and they were all variations of the s
ame. The Gillespies with their daughter at an amusement park. Mrs Gillespie pushing the toddler on a swing. A Christmas photo that was marked from five years previously.
If this was the Gillespies’ daughter, where was she now?
The Christmas photo looked like the most recent. The child was holding up a miniature toy horse, beaming at the camera while Mrs Gillespie sat on the ground just behind, wearing longer hair and holding a glass of wine. The date set it at five years before, but the girl couldn’t have been older than seven. That would make her a young teenager now.
Where is she? Boarding school? Mr and Mrs Gillespie seemed the sort of people who might send their daughter to one. I knew I was pushing the limits of what was appropriate, but I was too curious to stop. The second box held stacks of newspaper clippings, and I pulled out a handful. The headline on the top sheet—from January five years ago, not long after the Christmas photo—made my heart drop: LOCAL GIRL MISSING.
I skimmed it quickly. The Gillespies’s child, Hanna, had been reported missing on the morning of January the eighteenth. It was a suspected kidnapping, and the police were asking for information.
More of the story unfolded through the clippings—there were at least thirty of them, stacked in chronological order. Police had searched the house and found no signs of a forced entry, and all the footprints in the damp ground had matched the Gillespie family’s shoes. However, a set of footprints belonging to Hanna had led towards the forest, though no one was sure how old they were.
Nearly a hundred police officers and volunteers had spent three days scouring the woods. No signs of Hanna were found, and the search was eventually scaled back then called off completely. Mrs Gillespie believed her daughter had been kidnapped, rather than lost. She made repeated requests for information in the media. Two weeks after her daughter had disappeared, she offered five hundred thousand dollars to anyone with information that led to her daughter’s discovery. Despite hundreds of leads, Hanna wasn’t found.
