The Haunting Of Bechdel Mansion

by Roger Hayden

  She slipped into a pair of sweat pants hanging from her night stand and walked out of the room in her slippers. Her old routine, back home was to go for a morning job, three times a week. No such routine had been established yet at their new home. That Monday was the first day she had been in the house alone, and the surreal strangeness of her quiet surroundings was undeniable.

  She walked down the empty hallway toward the staircase, passed rooms still empty with their doors halfway open. The house was seemed peaceful and undisturbed, but as she descended the staircase, she heard a faint ticking noise.

  She entered the low-lit foyer curious and headed toward the kitchen where, in between two sofa chairs near a front window stood a vintage grandfather clock. Its oak exterior was elaborately carved in a leaf cluster ornamentation. She stopped, dead in her tracks. She could swear beyond anything that she had never seen the clock before.

  Where did it come from?

  When did they put it there?

  Am I losing my mind?

  Behind thick glass, a golden pendulum swung back and forth with weights hanging from two chains as the clock’s mechanics ticked from the inside. Two long clock hands were displayed over the clock face, indicating the time as eleven past nine.

  She remained in awe at the impossible sight, ready to retrieve her phone upstairs and call Curtis. She broke out of her trance and turned toward the stairs when the clock suddenly chimed, loud and abrupt, startling her. She grabbed the railing and flew up the stairs as the clock continued ringing out like a waring bell.

  She hurried down the hall and into her room where her cell phone rested on the TV stand, plugged in to a nearby outlet. From downstairs the clock went quiet just as quickly as it had rang. Silence followed. She held her phone, listening. She swiped the screen and made the call. After three rings, Curtis answered over the car speaker phone.

  “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Hey,” she said. “Just a quick question. When did we get a grandfather clock?”

  “A what?” he asked.

  “A grandfather clock. You know the big antique clock in our foyer. Where on earth did it come from?”

  There was silence on the other end as she waited for a response.

  “Honey. I don’t know what to tell you. What clock are you talking about? We don’t own a grandfather clock.”

  “Of course we do,” she said with certainty as she made her way back down the hall and towards the stairs. “It’s in the foyer between the chairs. I was standing right in front of it a moment ago.”

  “You got me,” Curtis said. “Maybe one of the movers…”

  “What?” she asked. “Placed it there by mistake?”

  “I don’t know, Mary. I’ll look at it when I get home. Makes no sense to me.”

  She went back down the stairs, prepared to describe every detail of the clock, but by the time she reached the bottom step, the clock was gone.

  “Impossible…” she said softly.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, detecting her frightened tone. Her eyes darted around the room, trying to find it. After a stunned pause, she spoke. “Nothing. I-I’m sorry I bothered you. Have a good day.”

  “Okay, honey. You too.”

  She hung up and held the phone at her side, staring ahead. There was no way she could have imagined it. The clock was real. She had seen it with her own two eyes. She had heard it. Its loud tolling was unmistakable. She shuttered to think that it was a figment

  She hadn’t had any visions since last weekend when she saw the figure of a man standing in a window on the second floor. She had begun to feel more comfortable, but the grandfather clock was bringing it all back. Perhaps the house only spoke to her when it wanted to. Perhaps she wasn’t in control of anything.

  “What do you want from me?” she said, voice echoing through the halls.

  She waited patiently, receiving no response, not even the slightest pin drop.

  “This is pointless,” she called out, looking around and pacing the foyer and living room. “We’re not moving. My husband wouldn’t agree to it, even if I asked him, despite what he told me earlier. So if you’re trying to scare us into living, it’s not going to work.” She paused and began a slow stroll to the kitchen, feeling defiant against whatever forces were at play.

  Chapter Eleven

  Encounters

  When asking questions of the house, Mary didn’t know who she was supposed to be communicating with. She wasn’t a paranormal expert by any means. She knew, however, that she had a gift. A gift she kept hidden away since childhood. Visions of things not of this world were a big part of it. But she had long suppressed her abilities based her sheer inability to control it.

  The house, however, was bringing it out of her whether she wanted it to or not. There was the girl and there was her diary. She had the Redwood travel logs and all the newspaper headline copies. There was the crying baby. The man’s voice. The upside down cross on the door. The raccoon or family of raccoons living in the walls. And then, that Monday morning, a grandfather clock she had never seen before.

  She walked through the dining room, past a modest, four-seater table and approached the kitchen, feeling a strange sense of something lurking in the darkness. Fearless, she continued on, ready to face whatever the house had in store for her. She flipped the kitchen light switch as the fluorescent lights above flickered on. She stood just outside the kitchen scanning its freshly painted walls, hanging dish towels, and clean counter tops. There was nobody there and nothing out of the ordinary beyond some dirty plates sink. They must have been from Curtis.

  She was going to find the truth behind the mansion with whatever tools she had at her disposal. The books, the diary, and copied newspaper articles were all sitting on the desk in her office and she was ready to dive in. All she needed first was a bagel and a cup of coffee.

  A few rooms down from the kitchen, Mary sat in the desk of her study with a sketch pad and drawing pencils at her disposal. She sipped from her Cincinnati coffee mug and typed away on her laptop, responding to a deluge of work emails accumulated over the past few days. She had two week deadline to make on the rough sketches to present to the publisher, and she hadn’t drawn a single thing.

  A stack of library books rested on the corner of her desk, just within reach. The diary was secured in her desk drawer, next to her Smith & Wesson .38 caliber pistol, a weapon she always kept near from years of living in the city. Classical music played from her laptop as she went into full work mode. It made her feel good to be somewhat settled in and returning from a lengthy hiatus. Her cell phone was in view with its screen reflecting the sunlight that beamed in the room from the open window behind Mary. She could feel a light breeze and felt in relative peace with the rustling of trees and chirping of birds from outside.

  With the clock episode behind her, she felt ready to begin her first drawing for the week, which she had put off for a while. She needed to sketch the simple outline of a family at home. The boy, Tommy, is being told by his mother at the dinner table to never talk to strangers. It was simple enough scene, and Mary swiveled her chair around to the arched table behind her, taking a sharp drawing pencil and began to sketch over a thick sheet of drawing paper.

  Her movements came naturally as before her long break from illustrating. She didn’t even have to look at any photos. She closed her eyes, envisioning the family: the father, mother, daughter, and three boys. She sketched away as her hand seemed to take a life of its own, scratching against the paper and quick, measured lines, forming a lines each family member. The music guided her along, her mind entering a familiar trance mode where she seemed to be operating on auto-pilot.

  After a few moments of hasty scribbling, she opened her eyes and lowered her pencil, shocked by what she had drawn. There on the paper below was a rough sketch of a family, but not the one she had intended to draw. The nicely dressed mother, father, and children lay on their backs, riddled with gunshot holes and in thick pools of blood. She h
ad drawn X’s over their eyes. Their tiny mouths were agape in horror. She backed her chair away, stunned and horrified by the drawing as her pencil fell to the ground.

  She spun around, pulling the top drawer open and grabbed the small, crinkled diary hidden inside. She placed it on her desk, pushing her keyboard to the side and stared down at its faded leather-bound exterior. She had read nearly half of the diary so far, and found herself surprised that it had taken days for her to return to it. But that was the question in itself. Did she have any control over anything? Were the forces within the house returning her to another passage?

  She opened a word document on her computer in haste, revealing her typed transcript of the legible pages in the diary. She flipped the book open somewhere in the middle on a page she had marked. With one hand holding the diary open and the other on her keyboard, her eyes scanned the page as she typed furiously and with purpose.

  I don’t know what’s happening. I’m scared. I heard Mother and Father quietly discussing death threats. For weeks we’ve received dozens of unmarked letters and unrecognizable handwriting. They won’t even let me go into town anymore. Or to school. Or to the park. Or even in the woods behind our house. I have a private tutor now. Her name is Mrs. Dempsey. She’s fifty two years old and very stern. I asked Mother last night who would want to hurt us. She told me not to worry about it. But am I worried about it. How can I not?

  Mary flipped to the next page without hesitation and continued tying.

  Mother fired Mrs. Dempsey today after an argument. What it was, she wouldn’t tell me. This is the fifth person they’ve fired in the past week. Our gardener, butler, mechanic, and swim coach. All of them gone. Now I feel lonelier than ever.

  Mary paused looking up. “Swim coach?” she said. Did the mansion once have a pool? There was nothing in the backyard but solid ground with plenty of trees and underbrush along the way. She looked back down and continued reading as the girl’s next words nearly stopped Mary’s heart.

  Pastor Phil visited the house tonight. He’s about the only person Mother talks to anymore. He too expressed concern for our safety but said that God would protect us as long as we had faith in Him and each other. My parents were never really religious people. Though lately, that’s all changed.

  She closed the diary and set it to the side as she reached for the copied newspaper articles in a near state of delirium. She flipped through the copies, frantic, eyes darting along the wording of each black and write article. In several different articles, the history of the Bechdel mansion carried the same generic outset. The estate was at least a hundred years old and had been a part of the Bechdel family for generations.

  One article caught her eye as she discovered by the turn of the twentieth century, the Bechdel family tree extended to the size of an entire town. Redwood, it was reported, originated as town for and by the Bechdels. She couldn’t believe her eyes. By 1975, however, the Bechdel bloodline had been completely wiped out.

  In a frenzied quest for information, she placed the articles to the side and grabbed the nearest travelogue book. Her mind didn’t waver from the task at hand. She gave no notice of time passing or attention to her phone or how many emails piled in her inbox. She was completely focused on the task before her, like an obsession that had consumed her sensibilities down to the deepest core.

  She opened the first book, A Brief History of Redwood. It was a short book, maybe sixty pages long, and there were plenty of old photographs on the page which showed the progression of the town from a backwoods settlement to a full-fledged town. She flipped through the pages, letting her instincts guide her as she came across a small newspaper clipping, stuck between two pages. Curious, she took the clipping out and unfolded it, reading the headline with dread.

  Ukrainian Heir Flees Redwood Mansion after Series of Unexplained Events

  The article continued, In the summer of June, 1992, the rural town of Redwood welcomed one of its most prestigious newcomers, wealthy business heir Boris Sokolov, and his large family. Since moving to the town, Sokolov made several boastful and promising gestures to invest and expand into Redwood, helping to create what he called, a town of the late-20th century. But two weeks later, Sokolov, the self-proclaimed “savior of Redwood,” fled his new home, the infamous Bechdel estate, without a word, taking his family back to the Ukraine where they were never seen or heard of again.

  The article went on, but Mary stopped there, in complete disbelief that she was just discovering the revealing information. She went back to the books, devouring the pages and taking in each and everything she could about the town in its history. Her fingers stopped between pages of another book, detailing Redwood municipal history and Dover County which surrounded it. There was another newspaper clipping, folded like before.

  This time she found an article about the latest family to have lived in the mansion, going back only to 2006. The family moved after the father, Eugene Garland, a wealthy Manhattan land developer, died in his sleep, three weeks after moving in. Mary couldn’t believe it. She continued reading the article, immersed in its details of the mystery surrounding Garland’s death, when her eyes became heavy beyond control and she began drifted away into a slumber that did not seem her own.

  A startling vision came over her, real and lifelike. She could see the foyer of the mansion decked out elegantly with white curtains, glowing candles and elaborate white leather furniture. There were servers in tuxedos holding trays with finger foods and champagne glasses. At a distance she could see men and women in fancy suits and dresses as jazz music played from a nearby record player.

  The vision ascended up the winding staircase, watching the party from above as three masked men stormed into the house, brandishing rifles and shotguns and shouting at the dinner guests, terrifying and rounding them up into a huddle. Moments later, the party guests and everyone else were blasted away, riddled with bullets as gunfire tore them to pieces and sent clumps of flesh onto the ground in an orgy of blood.

  The vision took Mary up the stairs and into the first bedroom on the right, a child’s room, the room of a young girl. She was seeing the mansion through someone’s eyes, perhaps the author of the diary. She came to a window overlooking the darkened courtyard as abrupt banging came over her bedroom door. She climbed from the window and jumped into the moist grass below, running off in a panic, gasping for air along the way. She ran into a man.

  Mary could see his face as he pointed the barrel of his rifle into her sight: lean cheekbones, stubble, a scar on his right cheek, and a thick head of straight, reddish hair that went down past his ears. A blast and white flash of light followed, when suddenly Mary woke up.

  The grandfather clock jarred her out of her deep sleep, bells tolling in sync that woke her to a darkened office. Her head rose up from the desk with a newspaper clipping stuck to her cheek. She felt an uncomfortable crick in her neck and, for a moment, didn’t know where she was.

  Suddenly, she spun her chair around, gasping. The passage of time was unreal. She backed up and stared at her desk, long and hard. Books were strewn open all along its surface with newspaper articles lying everywhere. It looked like a madman had rummaged through everything in fervent frenzy.

  “No…” Mary said in disbelief. Her blank laptop screen had long went into sleep mode. She looked at her cell phone and saw that it was a little after 8:00 p.m. “Impossible…” She had found herself saying that word a lot as of late.

  In dazed confusion, she turned back around, looking out the window to the dark sky and distant chirping of crickets from the blackened forest. How could twelve hours have just passed without her even knowing? Fear crept into her heart when she realized that she had read every book and every copied article on the desk. She had ingested the material before her like some kind of ravenous animal. If only she could remember half of what she had apparently read.

  She swiped her phone screen and saw some miss calls from her mother, agent, and from Curtis. Shaking, she called Curtis firs
t as his number went straight to voicemail. She still found herself in a state of disbelief. As long as she was in that house, nothing much made sense.

  “Just checking in with you. I’d thought you’d be home now. Call me back,” she said into the phone.

  She hung up, curious as to his whereabouts and then rose from her chair, legs stiff and sore. Had she really been sitting there unabated for twelve hours? The empty plate on her desk with crumbs of an eaten bagel indicated as much along with her growling stomach. She walked past the desk lamp and out of the room, limping along the way, toward the kitchen to make some dinner.

  She turned on the hall light and continued with the grandfather clock suddenly back in her mind. She flipped the kitchen lights on, carrying her empty plate and head to the sink, when the fluorescent lights above flickered and then went out in unison. She stood in the darkness, astonished and frustrated, as a faint glow from a single light above the sink retained visibility.

  She looked up at the non-functioning lights above and sighed. The electrician was supposed to come and fix them already. Perhaps he did and she never answered the door. The thought alone was unsettling. She had never gotten around to the door either and was sure Curtis would throw a fit about the red paint still there.

  She placed her plate in the sink and turned toward the refrigerator on the other side of the room. After a few steps, she felt something sleek and slippery on the tile floor below her slippers.

  She looked down in the dim light. There were streaks on the floor. Her eyes squinted and she could make out the color red.

  More red paint?

  The thought was scary enough in itself. She took a careful step forward and heard a distant moan that caused the hairs to stand up on the back of her neck. She continued on, nearing central counter with pots and pans hanging from the cabinet above. She looked down and followed the red trail as the moaning persisted.