An astonishing wind swept through the room and up the staircase, whipping her hair around her and sending hot air down her throat, making her unable to talk or scream. Gasping for breath, she struggled to talk or breathe and began choking, gagging, wheezing. The front door, which she’d left open, closed with a bang. In horror, she watched small cracks appear in the living room windows and then watched as the glass shattered and flew out into the yard in hundreds of pieces. Using her hands and sheer strength, Taryn managed to grab onto the banister and pull her way up, inch by inch. Finally, by wrapping her legs around the banister, straddling it, and turning her back to the door and wind, she caught her breath. Using what breath she had left, she screamed with everything she had, “WHAT DO YOU WANT!?”
As quickly as it started, everything stopped.
Taryn was left on the banister, like a little kid who had simply been caught sliding down from the top of the stairs. There was utter stillness again with no sign that anything had happened, other than the fact that the windows were broken and the door was closed.
Shaken, she unwound herself from the banister and ran out the front door, not bothering to close it behind her. She’d let the ghost deal with that.
Chapter 5
She let 24 hours pass by before she picked up the phone and called Matt. Oddly enough—or maybe not—Reagan had not been too surprised when she called him. “Those windows are so old, I’m surprised they lasted this long,” he muttered. “Well, it will be a mess to clean up. Just be careful in the grass!” She wondered how he would react when he saw just how many pieces they had actually shattered into.
She knew she should have called Matt sooner. She also knew he would already know something was wrong because he was intuitive that way; still, he knew better than to press. He was the only person in her life that knew Taryn as well as her grandmother did, but he’d learned a long time ago that it was better to let Taryn come to him first. The one time he had pushed, he’d pushed too hard and he nearly lost her. After that, she didn’t speak to him for almost four years.
“Hey you,” he spoke lightly, but she thought she heard his voice tense up. “You holding up okay up there?”
“Just barely,” she answered. “Something’s really wrong, Matt. Something bad.”
“Tell me.”
So she did. This time, she started at the beginning and told him everything she’d felt, seen, and thought about Windwood Farm. She didn’t leave anything out, including what the waitress had told her. When she was finished, she asked him what he thought.
Matt, of course, had a very analytical mind and thought everything through with precision. That didn’t mean he wasn’t extremely open-minded. He might be a scientist, but he was also a spiritualist and it was something she loved about him. He lived on both sides of the line.
“There’s something dark in the house, Taryn, and I don’t think you’re being careful enough about it. You shouldn’t go back in there and if you do, you need to protect yourself. Are you using sage?”
It was nearly impossible not to smile. After all, he might work for NASA, but still wore a pentagram around his neck. He studied aerospace engineering, but occasionally wrote blog entries for one of the most popular Wiccan blogs on the internet. He knew his stuff.
“I don’t have any on me, no.”
“I could send you some if you’d like. Or you could drive to Lexington. There’s a shop there. I can send you the directions. I have a friend who could go ahead and have some ready for you at the counter. It’s very simple.”
That was Matt. He was always ready to take care of her. He was nothing if not practical.
“It scared me. Not in the ‘the ghost wants me soul’ sense, but in the ‘it could kill me’ sense. It felt physical, Matt. I didn’t think spirits could be like that. When I talked to it, it stopped. Do you think that’s the key? That by communicating with it, I could make it stop?”
“I can’t tell you what it is. It might be a ghost, it might be leftover energy. It might just be a hologram of sorts. Until you know what you’re dealing with, my advice is to just stay away from it. Don’t put yourself in its path. Your energy might feed it, give it more energy. The fact the house is going to be demolished, the change it’s feeling, that might be feeding it as well. Finish your painting and leave. You don’t know what’s going on there. Please, Taryn. I have a bad feeling about this and I’m rarely wrong where you’re concerned.”
“Why me, though, Matt? I’ve worked in plenty of old houses before. Not to mention all the ones we used to break into. Why now?” That was her biggest question, really. Why had this started all at once? It must mean something, right?
“I don’t know,” he answered wearily. “Maybe it senses something in you. Maybe you’re sensitive in a way that it connects with. I’m not saying you’re weak—don’t get me wrong on this—but maybe with what happened, there’s something going on that it can connect with. This is why you need to be careful.”
“And I thought it was just because the house knew how much I respected it.”
When she hung up the phone, she felt even more confused than before. She did, however, feel better having talked to someone else about it. She’d never been able to talk to her parents the way she’d been able to talk to her grandmother or Matt. Losing her parents made her sad, in the way losing a favorite aunt or uncle or anyone else she’d gotten used to would make her sad. But she hadn’t felt any real grief. She’d barely known them. Losing her grandmother had felt like losing her soul mate. And then Andrew…like losing a limb. But Matt knew her and understood her. She felt better having voiced her fears and knowing she wasn’t crazy. That helped.
The hotel didn’t have a gym, but that was okay. She wasn’t big on exercises that felt like exercising. Her body completely rebelled if she tried to make it do anything to gain muscle or lose weight. She did like swimming, however, and the hotel boasted both an indoor and outdoor pool, as well as a hot tub.
After taking several laps in the pool, she slid into the hot tub and turned on the jets, letting them beat against her back. She turned her nose up at the sign warning her not to swim alone (what about business people? What were they supposed to do?) and tried to relax. The day’s events had shaken her up and taken off some of the excitement of the pictures. She obviously couldn’t deny there was something in the house, but she still wasn’t convinced that it was a ghost. At least, now that she was away from the house she wasn’t convinced it was a ghost. When she was inside the house, she was certain it was. But she wasn’t being rationale then. Whatever it was, though, it didn’t seem to want her there. Or anybody for that matter, considering the shape of the house itself and the fact everyone more or less left it alone.
Matt was worried about her and that was normal. He’d been trying to take care of her since she was a little kid. Once, when she was in college, he even called her dorm director when she had the flu and made sure she was keeping fluids down and taking her anti-nausea medication. The other girls in the dorm swooned over him whenever he came to visit and went on and on about how much of a gentleman he was because he held the door open for her, took her out to dinner to nice places, and dressed well. All of those things she appreciated as well, and he really was a good friend, but his concern was sometimes stifling. She tried not to overburden him with too many problems because he wanted to take them on as his own and at times stressed about them more than she did.
The water felt hot and secure and flowed over her like a blanket. In this large room with the classical Muzak playing and the sky turning dusky and pink, it was easy to forget about the cold, dark rooms of Windwood Farm and whatever lurked in them.
She almost didn’t notice when the door opened and someone else entered the pool area. The sound was far away, in another time, and although she was aware that someone else invaded her space, she didn’t give it much thought until the water moved abruptly and splashed against her face—a sign that someone else had entered the water.
&
nbsp; The man was pale and paunchy and probably in his early forties. He had dark hair that was still thick and curly and maybe twenty pounds lighter and ten years earlier, he would have been attractive. “Hello,” he said cheerfully. She thought she detected a slight northern accent.
“Hi,” she smiled quickly and then closed her eyes; friendly but not encouraging.
A few seconds passed and she thought she might actually be able to relax a little longer in peace and quiet before the stranger started talking again. “You in town for business?”
Wishing she’d brought her book with her, she opened her eyes and peered at him. He was staying a respectable distance away from her on the other side of the hot tub, but taking a bath with a stranger was always a little uncomfortable. There were security cameras up, though, and the front desk was visible from where she sat. She wasn’t nervous, just irritated. “Yes, I’m here working.”
“Me too,” he offered. “Pharmaceutical rep. I come through here about every three months. What are you in for?”
“I’m an artist,” she replied simply and hoped he would leave it at that, and get the hint that she was not in the mood for conversation.
“Oh, that’s interesting. So you’re a painter?”
“Multi-media, actually, but I am here for a painting,” she explained with a sigh. He wasn’t going to let her off that easily. He seemed harmless, but she just wasn’t in the mood for small talk. This happened almost every place she traveled to and even though it never amounted to much more than an annoyance, there were times when she wished she had a companion or at least a wedding ring to throw them off. It was never young, good-looking men who tried to talk to her, either, or else she might have felt differently. In fact, this guy was younger than most. The last one who tried to pick her up was literally old enough to be her grandpa.
“So does that actually pay money?” he asked with genuine interest, moving a little closer.
“No, I mostly get paid in geese these days, but the eggs are good on the black market,” she replied.
He looked a little taken aback at first and then decided to laugh. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I asked that. I’m not even allowed to talk about the kind of money I make,” he confided, then leaned a little closer to her. “But you wouldn’t believe it, really. Almost six figures last year.”
“Wow,” she said drily. “That’s great.”
“Yeah,” he nodded enthusiastically. “If more people knew that then everyone would be trying to become one. It’s all in you know, though.”
“Hmmm.”
Before he decided to share any other pertinent information, she figured she ought to make her move. “Well, good luck with your business. I’ve got to get back to my room.”
As she rose up out of the water, she was painfully aware of her small bathing suit and the way it was riding up her backside. If she tried to fix it, though, it would draw attention straight to it and she didn’t want him ogling her any more than he already was. His eyes bored into her chest as they said goodbye.
“Well, listen, I’m going out for dinner tonight and if you’d like to join me—” he started.
“I’m sorry,” she cut him off with what she hoped sounded like genuine regret. “But I’ve got other plans. I’m sure I’ll see you later.”
Grabbing her towel and room key, she sailed out the door and scooted on down the corridor to her room, thankful she didn’t have far to go.
He was probably harmless and dinner might have even been fun on some levels, but she just couldn’t do it. She had made friends on the road before and it always ended a little sadly for her since the friendship never lasted. She would move on or he would move on and that was the end of that. Lack of permanency depressed her, so she tried to avoid situations that reminded her of that fact every chance she got.
Feeling lighter in step after a good night’s sleep, Taryn packed her bags for the morning and drove to the diner for breakfast. She was happy to see Tammy working when she walked through the door and she threw up her hand in a quick wave. Tammy smiled and pointed to her section and Taryn nodded in agreement and slid into a booth.
“I talked to Granny,” Tammy whispered when she brought the laminated menu over to her, looking over her shoulder at the manager behind the counter. “You know, about the house? She said she remembered a few things about it that might be helpful. A few things that you might want to know.”
“Yeah, well, I could use anything you could throw my way, that’s for sure,” Taryn muttered.
Tammy looked at her sympathetically. “You’ve been seeing things, haven’t you?” she asked.
Taryn nodded. “You could say that. Hearing them and feeling them, more accurately.” She wasn’t ready to talk to anyone else about the photographs yet. They felt too personal.
“My granny said you might. Some people are more sensitive than others, that’s what she says. But the house and what haunts it? It’s because of the old man that lived there, the one from a long time ago, back from when she was a little girl. He was awful, she said. Nobody much cared for him. I don’t know what he was meant to have done but nobody did a whole lot of grieving when he died if you know what I mean. She said that everybody said that when he finally kicked the bucket, most folks thought it was just as much from meanness as it was from a heart attack or whatever. She thinks it’s his ghost that haunts the place and that’s why the place is so mad, because he was always so mad. So she told me to tell you to be careful, to stay away if you can help it. He was never any good. And that even in death, he’s probably pretty awful.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got a lot of work to do yet. Unfortunately, I can’t stay away. But I appreciate your help,” Taryn said warmly, honestly grateful for any information she was able to gather at this point.
After she’d eaten her short stack of pancakes and sausage and finished off two glasses of apple juice, she was leaving a couple of dollars under the plate when Tammy poked her head back from around the kitchen door again, a stack of dirty dishes in her hand. “Hey, I forgot something I was supposed to tell you!”
“What was that?”
“It might not be important, but it was about his daughter. She died real young, eighteen I think, but nobody knows how. Some kind of weird illness, but he wouldn’t talk about it. Didn’t look like murder or anything, you know, checked out with the coroner, but folks were suspicious. They talked about it for a long time. Just thought you should know,” she shrugged, and then disappeared again.
Taryn thought about this on the long drive back to Windwood Farm.
Of course, she knew he’d had a daughter. Reagan had mentioned it on the first day and she’d been in the bedroom and had seen her things. In fact, her bedroom had been left a virtual shrine, unlike the other rooms which were all but cleared out of everything. She’d never seen anything like it before. It hadn’t escaped her attention that nearly every corner of the house was void of articles of the past except the daughter’s room which was horror movie intact with relics that should have been looted by vandals more than fifty years ago. And perhaps some of it had been carried off a little at a time. She had no idea how much of it was really left since there was nothing to compare it to. But the fact remained that a lot of it really did still linger…Why? Was there really a thin veil covering that room that separated it from the rest of the house? A veil that kept anyone from disturbing it?
The afternoon went by without a hitch, but she felt uncomfortable, watched. She was unable to get into the painting like she usually did and even the quietness around her, which she usually found peaceful and even a little cathartic, bothered her. It felt pressing, probing, and not quite right. The batteries in her CD player died in the middle of her favorite Allison Moorer CD and that made her mad and threw her off just as she was working on the maple leaves. She ended up turning on her car radio and risked running her battery down just so she could listen to some music. The background noise helped and made her feel less alone, although what passed
as “country” music today left a bad taste in her mouth and sounded more like what she listened to in the 80s on the pop stations.
On a lark, to get out of her funk, she tried walking around the house, taking pictures of the exterior, and frequently (excitedly) checking her LCD screen. The pictures came out looking ordinary, however, without any furniture or figures showing up who shouldn’t be there. She couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Had it just been a fluke? A one-time thing? Maybe it was just a flaw in her camera after all…She really was completely alone. Not that she wanted a repeat of what had happened on the staircase, but it was a little upsetting that not even the ghosts wanted to communicate with her. Maybe I shouldn’t have shouted at it, she thought. Then again, it did break windows at me and try to suffocate me? Maybe she was wrong in thinking that they weren’t ghosts. Maybe everyone else in town was right.
Nothing happened that day, nothing she could really vocalize or tell anyone about, but there was a moment when she turned her back to the house to load up her car and the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood up at attention. She could have sworn someone was watching her and as she packed away the last of her equipment she felt the air give around her, almost as if the house itself was breathing a sigh of relief.
She was torn between feeling relieved and feeling disappointed when she left. Part of her was terrified at what was going on. When she’d been inside the house, she’d been petrified; afraid. Listening to Tammy talk, she questioned her own sanity about even returning to the farm day after day to work out there alone. Like any sane person, she didn’t want to be accosted by an evil spirit or awful dead guy who been buried for more than seventy-five years. So that part of her was relieved that nothing else was happening.
But the other part of her was disappointed. That part actually wanted to see a little more. That part was almost proud that, for whatever reason, she’d been chosen (or whatever) to see the images in the photographs. That part of her felt a connection with the home and the farm and wanted to learn more about what was going on. That part of her thought that maybe, if she could see a little more, then perhaps there was hope that her own past could be brought back to life.
Windwood Farm (Taryn's Camera) Page 7
