The Haunting of Winchester Mansion

by Alexandria Clarke

  She ripped off the topmost prescription and handed it to me.

  “What’s this for?” I asked, attempting to decipher her illegible handwriting.

  “It’s an antidepressant,” she replied. “Low dosage. Take it once a day and see how it goes. It takes a little while to work its way into your system, so we’ll check in with each other in a few weeks. Sound good?”

  I nodded, folding the prescription in half and tucking it into the front pocket of my jeans. The local pharmacy was on my route home. I could fill the prescription there. Maybe a pill could push me through to that acceptance stage. Maybe the Winchester house would settle down long enough for us to finish the renovations without any more disruptions.

  But a pill wouldn’t bring back Kali.

  Chapter Nine: Two for One

  That night, I lay in bed, propped against the headboard, reading Caroline Winchester’s diary in the dim yellowish light of the lamp on the bedside table. I’d lost track of the time. The sun had set hours ago, and Bodhi’s footsteps had long since faded from the hallway outside the master bedroom. A new object now sat on a shelf across from the closet: an orange prescription bottle filled with tiny capsules guaranteed to boost my serotonin levels. It glowed like a beacon just beyond my periphery, but as I became more and more immersed in Caroline’s fifteen-year-old musings, the orange bottle melted away from my thoughts.

  Caroline wrote in swirly, elegant cursive, weaving her personality seamlessly into the fibers of the thick paper. She wrote about everything, from book reports to the students and teachers at her high school to the family business. One page detailed just how “delectable” her brother’s best friend looked during the most recent sailing competition in the bay, while the next contained a line-by-line literary analysis of a complicated Yeats poem. Still other pages boasted calculations of the Winchesters’ various business deals. Were it not for the fact that her handwriting remained consistent, I would have assumed that the frisky teenager shared her journal with a college student and a forty-year-old business professional. I devoured her words and sketches, learning about Caroline’s view of the world, her family, and the town of Black Bay. I was so engrossed by Caroline’s day-by-day that the first flicker of the table lamp went unnoticed.

  Then the room went dark.

  As my eyes adjusted, I set aside Caroline’s journal. I jostled the lightbulb in the lamp and toggled the switch on its base. It remained unlit. With a defeated sigh, I slid out of bed to find a replacement bulb, but just as I opened the door and reached the landing, the lamp brightened again.

  Three short flashes. Three long flashes. Three short flashes.

  The lamp paused then the sequence repeated itself.

  Dot dot dot. Dash dash dash. Dot dot dot.

  It was an SOS call.

  In the hallway, someone—or something—sprinted past the master bedroom. I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye and whirled around. The hair on my arms rose. I was shivering. The temperature inside had dropped far too low for a warm summer night.

  I stared at the wall in the hallway opposite my open door. Frozen in place. Waiting. Time went by the wayside. I stood in the same spot for a minute. For an hour. Finally, I gathered whatever courage I could muster, took a deep breath, and stepped forward to peek into the hallway.

  It was empty.

  And then a sound like a gunshot went off.

  I shrieked, instinctively ducking down and covering my head with my hands, but there was no immediate danger in the hallway. However, behind the closed door of Caroline Winchester’s childhood bedroom, a thunderous ruckus went on unhindered. Bodhi careened out of the guest room, clad in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded, racing down the hallway to pick me up from the floor. “Are you all right? What the hell is that noise?”

  Without preamble, he reached for the door to Caroline’s room.

  “No!”

  Too late. He threw the door wide, revealing the pandemonium inside.

  Caroline’s extensive library avalanched from the shelves. Books poured to the floor or flew through the air in an array of worn covers and torn pages, bouncing violently off of the walls and each other. Dust whirled through the room like gray fireworks as the canopy bed rattled and shuddered. The bench in the bay window tore clean from the walls with a cacophonous rip, leaving jagged plywood and ruined wallpaper in its place. Caroline’s journals shot skyward, carving a savage path through the literary anthologies, calculus textbooks, and poetry collections.

  Then, with no explanation, everything stopped.

  The books rained to the floor. The bed came to rest at an uneven angle. The noise ceased. The journals settled to the topmost pile of rubble. Not a page turned. Not a breath was drawn.

  When one of the journals flopped open, Bodhi grabbed my hand as though he expected the entire room to start heaving again. I looked at him.

  “Do you believe me now?”

  “There’s got to be… an explanation…” he breathed, gasping for air in between phrases. “Magnetic pull. Or the house is on an incline. Something.”

  “Sure, that makes sense.”

  I stepped toward the books, but Bodhi yanked me back. “Don’t go in there!”

  I shook him off. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Tentatively, I walked into Caroline’s room. I held my breath, carefully plotting each step so as to not tread on any of the wounded books. When I reached the pile of journals, I knelt down to examine the one that had fallen open, gathering its pages with a tender touch.

  It was dated July of 1996. Roughly twenty years ago. Ethan’s voice echoed in my head. The Winchesters’ boat accident had occurred in the summer before Patrick’s senior year at Black Bay High, which meant that this particular journal may have been the last one that Caroline Winchester had ever penned. I flipped the pages. Two-thirds of the way through, the entries stopped and gave way to blank paper.

  “What is it?” asked Bodhi, still waiting in the doorway.

  I collected a few other diaries and stacked them on top of the first. “More of Caroline’s diaries. I’ve been reading through them. This is the last one she wrote before she died.”

  “A little morbid, don’t you think?”

  “You have your coping mechanisms. I have mine.”

  “Please, Bailey. Can we just get out of this room?”

  I did as asked, joining Bodhi in the hallway again. As soon as I cleared the threshold, he slammed the door to Caroline’s room shut.

  “You know it’s the whole house, right?” I told him as he escorted me back toward the master bedroom. “Or are you forgetting the office downstairs? You can’t just close the door and pretend like none of this ever happened.”

  “We are hallucinating,” Bodhi said determinedly. “This house is old. Maybe the fumes are finally getting to us.”

  “There are no fumes.”

  My hands were shaking. I thought of the shadow in the hallway, too humanoid to be a trick of the light. Something lived in the Winchester house, and it had grown tired of staying quiet. Had it always been there, lurking in the night? Or had mine and Bodhi’s presence somehow woken it?

  When we entered the master bedroom, Bodhi’s arm tight around my waist, the first thing I noticed was that the orange prescription bottle had somehow moved from the shelf to the small wastebasket near the French doors. The second thing I noticed was the bedside table. A fresh glass of water and a vase of plumeria flowers stood beneath the lamp, which now illuminated the entire room as though the bulb had never faltered to begin with.

  It wasn’t until the shadows moved that I realized we weren’t alone in the room.

  A gust of cold wind engulfed us. It was as though someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over my head. The figure was a shadow itself, or perhaps its essence sucked up the light in order to power itself. It had been lingering on the dark side of the bed, but now it flashed across the room with a speed that was distinctly n
ot human. The vase of plumerias tipped over, a victim of the shadow’s haste, and shattered on the floor. Cold water gushed over my toes, soaking the hem of my pajama pants, but I hardly felt it. The French doors burst open so violently that the hinges gave way. As the doors fell, the glass windows smashed, and the umbral figure darted out of the room, disappearing into the black night.

  I had never heard Bodhi pray before. Now he chanted unintelligibly under his breath, his eyes glazing over as he braced himself on either side of the doorway. I stood rooted to the same spot, unable to move. Unable to comprehend. Like a snapping rubber band, Bodhi suddenly came to. He took my hand, pulling me away from the master bedroom.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t care,” he said as he took the stairs two at a time. “The inn. The truck. A cardboard box. Anywhere but this house. You were right, Bailey. There’s something in here, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to sit and twiddle my thumbs and wait for it to decide what to do with us like an idiot.”

  His car keys lay once again in the crystal tray. For once, he seemed happy to see them there, easy to pick up on our desperate escape through the front door and into the breezy night. Bodhi scanned the skies as he ushered me toward the white workman’s truck, as if surveying the landscape for any hint of the rogue presence that did not adhere to the rules of reality. He opened the passenger door for me then circled around to the other side and climbed in. His hands shook as he fumbled the keys into the ignition. I could see the whites of his eyes. He revved the engine with an impetuously heavy foot, throwing the truck into reverse. I jerked against the seat as Bodhi wrenched the steering wheel. Then we were off, trundling down the winding road toward the center of town at a breakneck speed.

  When we pulled into the parking lot of the local inn, a quaint bed and breakfast across from the Sanctuary, the windows were dark. A vacancy sign hung near the door.

  “Stay here,” Bodhi ordered, clambering out of the truck. I watched through the windshield as he approached the inn and tried the door. He hadn’t even put pants on before evacuating the house. Even if someone was manning the front desk of the bed and breakfast, I doubted they would let Bodhi in looking like a naked vagrant with dirty feet. He knocked, peeking in through the window, but when no one answered the door, he slammed a fist against the vacancy sign and turned resolutely back to the truck.

  “No one’s answering,” he said, clambering into the driver’s seat once more. “What the hell did you bring those things for?”

  I looked into the foot well to where Bodhi was pointing. Caroline’s journals lay in a heap at my feet. I didn’t even remember taking them from the house, but an odd sense of comfort washed over me at the sight of their leather covers.

  “Never mind,” said Bodhi. “Do what you like. But I guess we’re sleeping in the truck tonight.”

  We did just that—the doors securely locked and the windows rolled all the way up—reclining the seats as far back as they would go. I drifted off, keeping Bodhi in my line of sight, our hands fastened together across the center console.

  For the first time in months, I slept without nightmares.

  A rapping on the driver’s side window woke us up. Bodhi sprang into action. His core muscles clenched as he ripped himself from sleep in a panicked frenzy, but the fraughtful night was long over. The cab of the truck smoldered pink with the sunrise, and in the harmonious morning, as birds chirped and the residents of Black Bay began to stir, the details of the previous night slipped through the cracks.

  Bodhi relaxed when he realized we were in no immediate danger then rolled down the truck window to greet our personal wake-up call.

  “Oh, I’ve got to hear the story behind this,” said Ethan, chuckling as he took in mine and Bodhi’s attire. Or lack thereof. “You two drink a little too much booze last night?”

  “Not even close,” growled Bodhi.

  Ethan stripped off his jean jacket and handed it to Bodhi through the window. “Wait here. I’ll find you some pants. Then, if you don’t mind, you can kindly fill me in on your evening.”

  A half hour later, our curious trio occupied a small table near the open window of the Sanctuary. Bodhi, dressed in Ethan’s jacket and a pair of borrowed sweatpants that were loose around his waist but too short for his long legs, nursed a cup of hot coffee as he explained to Ethan what had happened to us the previous night. I tried to ignore the wandering glances of the other customers in the cafe. Once again, we were the talk of the town. Word had traveled fast about the peculiar state we had been found in, but I suppose when you slept half-dressed in a truck outside the local bed and breakfast, people were bound to gossip. I kneaded a packet of artificial sweetener between my fingers to keep myself busy.

  “A ghost,” Ethan was saying, one eyebrow cocked in skepticism as he surveyed Bodhi over the lip of his coffee mug.

  “Something,” Bodhi confirmed. “A specter or poltergeist. I don’t know, but it was definitely there. Ask Bailey. She’s been seeing it for weeks.”

  “I haven’t been seeing it,” I said. I didn’t appreciate Bodhi calling me out or Ethan’s probing gaze. “I caught glimpses of it out of the corner of my eye, but weird stuff has been happening ever since we got to that house.”

  Ethan set his mug down and folded his hands on the tabletop. “Now I don’t mean to be rude,” he said. He kept his voice low, and his eyes shifted around the room as though to make sure no one else was listening in on our conversation. “But ghosts don’t exist, darlin’.”

  I didn’t blink, staring Ethan down. “You think I’m seeing things.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Ethan backtracked. “But let’s face it, the two of you are under a lot of stress. Again, I mean no offense or harm, but maybe it’s all starting to pile up. You did say you haven’t been sleeping lately. Hallucinations may be a factor here.”

  “Bodhi sleeps fine,” I pointed out. “And he saw it too.”

  But Bodhi stayed quiet, swirling his coffee around. It swished over the edge of the cup, crept across the table, and stained the paper napkins near Ethan’s folded hands.

  “Bodhi?” Ethan asked. “Anything to add?”

  “I haven’t been sleeping much either,” he muttered.

  “You haven’t?” I asked, surprised.

  Bodhi shook his head. “I can’t. I listen for you every night. The slightest sound wakes me up. Besides, the bed is cold.”

  “There you have it,” Ethan answered, tipping his chair back so that it balanced on its hind legs. “The house isn’t haunted, darlin’. The two of you just need a good night’s rest.”

  “I know what I saw,” I said sharply. “Right, Bodhi?”

  There were purple circles beneath Bodhi’s red-rimmed eyes, so dark that it looked like he had been punched multiple times. Was it just this morning that he looked so worn out, or had I missed the signs before now? Maybe I was so wrapped up in my own head not to notice Bodhi’s constant exhaustion. Maybe I hadn’t wanted to notice it. After all, problems were only problems if you acknowledged their existence.

  “Maybe he’s right, Bailey,” he said, slumping in his chair. The coffee, which the Sanctuary continually boasted as the best wake-up recipe in the Pacific Northwest, hadn’t done him much good. “Neither one of us has been at the top of our game lately.”

  I huffed in disbelief. “Bodhi, are you kidding me? Are you forgetting the avalanche of levitating books? Or the doors in the master bedroom being inexplicably forced off their hinges? The mess will still be there when we get back.”

  “I’m sure there’s a scientific reason for all that,” Ethan cut in. “You do know we get earthquakes here in Black Bay, correct?”

  “See?” said Bodhi. He reached out to pat my hand in what I assume he thought was a comforting manner. “That’s probably what happened.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  He heaved a sigh, withdrawing to his side of the table again. “I don’t know what to tell
you, Bailey.”

  “You can tell me that you’re being an idiot and trying to convince yourself that everything is all right.” I threw the packet of artificial sweetener across the table at him. “As always.”

  Ethan’s chair scratched against the tile floor as he pushed himself away from the table. “This sounds like a conversation between husband and wife. I’ll see myself out.”

  As he crossed the cafe and joined a couple of men sitting at the countertop, I studied Bodhi. When he noticed my gaze, he spoke up.

  “Bailey, come on,” he said. “You have to admit it. An earthquake is way more likely than some random ghost haunting the house we’re renovating.”

  “You weren’t so convinced last night. What about that thing we saw in the master bedroom?”

  He gave a half-hearted shrug. “Hallucinations brought on by lack of sleep. Like Ethan said.”

  I wasn’t buying it. “So you think that we had some kind of joint hallucination?”

  Bodhi pushed his coffee mug to the opposite side of the table and rested his forehead in his hands. “I don’t know what to think anymore. I’m dead tired.”

  I pressed my lips together. There were so many things I wanted to say to Bodhi, but in that moment, all of the things that crossed my mind were bound to cause a fight.

  Bodhi tilted his head to look at me. “I have an idea.”

  “What might that be?”

  “Call Milo.”

  The suggestion threw me off. “Why?”

  Bodhi perched his head on the palm of his hand. “He’s owned that house for a while, and his dad owned it before him. If anything weird happened, he would know about it, wouldn’t he?”

  “Don’t you think he would’ve told us about something like that before we bought the house?”

  “Not necessarily. He was pretty desperate to sell it, remember? Maybe he already knew that something was going on in there.”

  The thought had never crossed my mind. Sure, Milo’s insistence on selling the Winchester house had been a little out of the ordinary, but he seemed honest about his desire to move out of Black Bay. Then again, it had been nearly two months since we had officially signed the closing papers, and Milo hadn’t mentioned anything more about relocating.