by Carrie Bates
Queasy, Kristine slid the book onto the glass coffee table in front of her. She didn’t want to know what was written between its glossy covers. “I’m, uh, I’m currently staying at the Bertha house,” Kristine stated. “I wasn’t sure if what I was experiencing was all in my head or…”
“Or if the house was haunted,” Rachel finished. “Yeah, I know the feeling. You have to get out of that place. The old woman who curses your dreams and lingers in your peripheral vision is Henrietta Bertha, the original owner of the house. You’ve met her, I presume?”
Kristine nodded. “She’s vile.”
“She’s a murderer,” Rachel declared. “She lived there alone in the early 1800s. She rarely left the house, and she rarely spoke with anyone. People assumed she was just another wealthy eccentric. Wrong. During that time period, an unusual number of children went missing in Roswell. Funnily enough, these missing children all lived on the same street as Ms. Bertha. One detective’s notes stated he attempted to interrogate Ms. Bertha in regards to the disappearance of her neighbor’s child, but she was unavailable to speak. That same detective found Ms. Bertha’s festering corpse weeks later. She died in bed, all alone and with no evident cause. The autopsy findings uncovered an obstruction of the gut to be her cause of death. The obstruction was a trichobezoar. Do you know what a trichobezoar is, Kristine?”
“Yes,” Kristine responded, swallowing hard. A painful lump was forming in the pit of her throat. “A trichobezoar is a hairball.”
Chapter Eight
Kristine left the Willis’ house in shambles. What she’d learned about the Bertha house made her heart sink into her gut. She couldn’t go back to that house… at least not right away. Kristine had made an appointment with an electrician later that evening to inspect the wiring. Unfortunately, that meant she had to be at the house to let him in. Kristine glanced at her watch; it was only noon. She had nearly seven hours to kill before the electrician was scheduled to stop by. In order to calm her nerves, she decided to take a hike. She didn’t tend to stray very far from where her condo was located and wanted to see more of Roswell from the opposite side of the bridge. Kristine drove to a lot for a playground and parked her car. For hours, she explored the trails branching off in all directions from the playground. One trail took her across the bridge, looping around to reconnect with the playground. It was while crossing a pedestrian trail along the edge of the bridge that she realized its somber disposition.
The structure was composed of a faded wood. As vehicles drove across it, the wooden boards proclaimed their pain. By this time, the sun was beginning to creep its way down to the horizon. The clouds parted in pink smears across the overcast sky. Kristine regretted purchasing the Bertha house. She felt guilty for investing so much of her parents’ inheritance to no avail. It didn’t matter how well she renovated the house; morally, Kristine wasn’t comfortable selling a house she knew was haunted to innocent customers. Dejected, Kristine followed the trail back to her car and returned to her godforsaken mansion.
She opened the front door to find the house encased in darkness. She flicked a switch, but the lights remained off. She swore. Clearly, she’d waited too long to contact an electrician. The house’s wiring was toast. A rush of dread ran cold through Kristine’s veins. Dark, haunted houses belonged in horror films, not Kristine’s life!
“It’s okay, Kristine,” she told herself, “there’s still some sunlight left in the sky. Just go onto the porch and wait for the electrician there. Once he’s left, you, too, can leave.”
Kristine waited on the porch for an hour, glancing at her watch every ten minutes, praying the electrician would arrive early. Much to her dismay, the opposite happened. The electrician’s scheduled time came and went. Normally, Kristine would wait another twenty minutes before calling, however, in this situation, Kristine was far too anxious to be courteous. Wasting no time, Kristine pulled her phone from her pant pocket. Her screen displayed one missed call and voice message. The message had been left during the time Kristine was off hiking. It was the electrician calling to cancel his appointment for that evening. Kristine wanted to hurdle her phone across the front lawn. Due to an emergency, the electrician wasn’t available to fix the wiring until the day after tomorrow.
Kristine growled in frustration. “That’s it!” she exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “I’m leaving this madhouse!” At the exact moment Kristine’s foot made contact with the ground, a crack of lightening dissected the sky in half. Kristine turned her gaze to the sky; it was black.
Torrential downpour was imminent, causing Kristine to rush even faster to the comforting confinement of her car. A car was supposedly the safest place to be during a thunderstorm. Kristine flew in reverse down the driveway. Nearing the start of the road, she braked and turned her eyes from the back window of the car, to the front.
“DON’T LEAVE US HERE WITH HER!” A bald boy plastered his grimy form against the windshield of the car, beating the glass with the raw, bleeding ends of his fingers. Kristine shrieked, but the boy shrieked louder. His earsplitting scream split the clouds, unleashing the rain. The tires of Kristine’s car spontaneously combusted. “POP! POP! POP! POP!”
Kristine wept bitterly. She thrashed her fists against the steering wheel in a fit of resentment. The figure of the boy had disappeared. Kristine was fed up. She stomped wildly from her defeated car to the house.
Throwing open the door, she yelled hysterically, “WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!”
Lightning flashed in the sky, illuminating the vestibule of the house. Kristine boldly entered the house. Another burst of lightening revealed a group of children shivering in the corner of the parlor. Their heads were shorn, and their fingers leaked red. Thunder roared. Suddenly standing before Kristine was the boy she’d seen moments ago atop her car. His eyes were milky white and filled with tears.
“I’m number forty-three.” He spoke without moving his lips. “Let them find us!” His figure disintegrated before Kristine’s eyes like smoke.
Wet and trembling in shock, Kristine backed out of the house onto the porch with a sudden realization - the rock she’d found in the backyard was marked with the number forty-three.
“Oh, my God!” she gasped. She’d been right about the rocks. They were grave markers. Ms. Bertha had slaughtered and buried the bodies of the victimized children in her own backyard!
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” Kristine cursed herself for not mentioning the stones to Rachel. Fumbling with her phone, she dialed Rachel. The two of them met and immediately contacted the police.
That night, as the weather settled, the authorities uncovered numerous skeletal remains, all of which belonged to children. Kristine was later informed that twenty bodies were exhumed and given proper burials upon examination. The question still remained; if the boy Kristine saw was number forty-three, what happened to the remaining twenty three bodies?
Kristine abandoned her intentions of renovating and reselling the Bertha house. The mansion would remain vacant of life, forever housing the souls of the missing children.
THE END
The Haunting of McGregor Mansion
©2018 by Carrie Bates
All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, events or locales is completely coincidental.
Prologue
The McGregor family had owned the farm for as long as the colonists had been settled in Louisiana. The generations passed quietly and contentedly, farming cotton with the occasional experimentation in wheat or small orchards of apples.
Esther was ushered into a secure, established world where her future was already laid out for her, although she didn't know it. She grew up happy and lacking in nothing; Mr. and Mrs. McGregor ran the f
arm in such a way that they were known not only for their profit but for their morals.
Unfortunately, their luck ended with Esther's birth. Mrs. McGregor hadn't been able to conceive again, and this made her fiercely protective of Esther in a way that made the girl cringe away from her mother.
Mr. McGregor took the more frequently traveled path of a protective father - simply because he had a daughter now and knew how boys were. Already, he eyed his peers and their offspring, making plans for his daughter to have a safe life where she'd be provided for by a young man raised in their world.
What McGregor did differently from his peers was the hiring of hands. He chose to forego slavery and instead hired servants, most of whom were between the ages of 10 - 15 and specifically trained on the farm. McGregor put a lot of time and effort into the training and expected excellence from the boys and the few girls that worked the land and in their home.
They were to be productive but polite as well, especially if they happened to come across his daughter.
Esther was innocent enough that she didn't quite understand the difference between herself and the hands. At 11, she was happy to roam the farm in the beautiful dresses that her mother had ironed carefully. The supervisors were used to her lingering and asking questions, so no one questioned it when she did the same with the hands - even Amos, who she met one summer as he was harvesting the cotton that had made the McGregor’s their fortune.
At first, Amos was standoffish. On some instinctual level, he knew better than to fraternize with the daughter of the farm owner, especially if he wanted to bring home any money for his mother and his younger brothers. But he couldn't really help himself. Esther was a radiant girl who everyone was attracted to.
So they became friends.
It only took her mother catching them together once for Esther to be forbidden from seeing or talking to Amos again. They'd been sitting on the front porch sharing a ladle of water, and Mrs. McGregor had made Esther scrub her mouth out with soap after.
Esther was already used to disobeying her parents, and although Amos knew better, he just couldn't stay away, so the friendship continued secretly. They met in one of the barns on the property that was used for winter storage and often empty. Esther often filched food from the kitchen, wrapped it in the skirts of her expensive dresses, and brought it to him.
She made him little things in the boredom of her days - dolls from cotton and wheat, poems that she wrote at her desk, small tokens of friendship for birthdays or just because.
The friendship flowed naturally without interruption, and it wasn't surprising that it turned into love. Even as Mr. McGregor was hashing out proposals, Esther was promising Amos that she'd save herself for him.
"I'm going to marry you someday," she insisted, leaning against him one night when he'd lingered longer than he should have. He shook his head, always the logical one.
"Your parents will never let you. And I can't provide for you like this," he said, painfully aware of the divide in their social status.
"I don't really care," Esther insisted, burying her face in his chest. And even though Amos told himself that he should leave soon, really leave, and not tell her so that she couldn't do something crazy like follow him, he knew he'd stay as long as she was here.
It was late summer when they were caught.
The far field had been planted with hay for the neighbor who bred cattle and horses. Esther had talked Amos into meeting her there, and she had just stood up on her tiptoes to kiss him when the head supervisor rounded the haystack they had ducked behind.
He was followed quickly by the other guards who worked on the farm, all four of them looking grim, all four for different reasons.
William, the supervisor, was known for his cruelty. No one really knew why Mr. McGregor kept him around. Amos had already had a few run-ins with him over the years, and there was a scar on his jaw to prove it.
"Look at this," the man growled as he moved toward the couple quickly.
The other men hung back uneasily. Although it was their job to prowl the property and keep the house secure, they weren't violent men; and all three of them despised William.
Esther had put herself in front of Amos, who was already resigned to his fate. William ordered one of the guards to take her back to the house. She fought as the man wrapped her tightly in one arm, her shouting drowning out William's next order to go after Amos.
When the guard refused, William did it himself. Esther stiffened as she heard Amos’s anguished cries but she could do nothing. The guard held her tighter and continued walking to the house.
William let all the fury he had in him unleash on Amos. Blood spewed out of Amos’s body with bits of flesh being torn off until Amos went limp and grew quiet. Satisfied with a job well done, William spat on Amos and walked away from the horrific site, never looking back.
The next day, Esther woke with eyes swollen from crying. She'd only slept a few hours, kept up with worry. She'd had nightmares throughout the night and remembered screaming - without thinking about it, she moved to the window, and saw Amos tied to the maypole below.
She ran out of her room, calling for her father as she went. But Mr. McGregor had left two days earlier for business in another town. He'd left orders for William to keep an eye on Esther and encourage Amos to stay away from her. But even he probably hadn't meant for what she found when she finally came out into the yard.
William had beaten Amos with the whip he'd fashioned himself from cow hide and nails. Amos' skin hung in tatters in some areas, broke out in black welts in others - the black, she realized, was dried blood caked around open wounds.
One of the more sympathetic guards restrained her as she tried to reach him. She was brought back into the house, to face her mother, who seemed unapologetic about what had happened. Amos's eyes would never open again. He was left out in the summer sun and went quickly. By sundown, he was just a bloodied, empty body sagging from the pole.
When McGregor returned, he was shocked and on the verge of anger. As much as he'd disapproved of Amos, he could see that something in his daughter had broken.
William's story, corroborated by Mrs. McGregor, claimed that it was Amos who had gutted her - Amos who had tried to force himself on her and been caught and tortured. Esther's mental state was a result of the assault.
Mr. McGregor let himself believe it because it was easier than knowing what had really happened. Within a few years, at the end of a sudden illness, he turned the farm over to William - who had somehow convinced him to give him Esther in marriage.
McGregor didn't live much longer, but he did linger long enough to know that Esther took her own life the night of her wedding. The entire household heard her screaming when faced with the fate of William coming to her bed - she stabbed herself unhesitatingly with a knife that Amos had made her years before, his initials inscribed on the handle.
She'd promised him that she'd only ever be his. She kept that promise the night she took her life.
Chapter One
Veronica was a smart young woman. But sometimes, she wondered how exactly she had gotten herself into this situation.
Not that she didn't love her sons - she did.
But somehow, she’d ended up in Louisiana, divorced, with two children and her little brother in tow. The last few years had been crisis after crisis.
She’d gotten pregnant young and that in itself had been a struggle. She’d only just turned thirty this last year, and her boys were 7 and 8 – Kyle, her brother, was 17. He'd been a surprise to her parents, but a happy one.
Shortly after the birth of her youngest son, the boys' father had filed for divorce. Somehow, he’d managed to dodge child support, ducking court meetings and not sending anything to help keep up with the cost of having two rambunctious sons who grew like weeds and needed new clothes and tons of food every few months. She'd given up trying to reach him long ago. They were better off without him, she figured, if he was so intent on abandoning them.
Although Veronica had been dumb in love, she was smart in every other way, and quickly found a way to make ends meet. Working double time wasn’t ideal, but it got them through the rough times.
Actually, it had been enough that in two short years, she was able to apply for a mortgage and purchase a house. Which was the only good thing that had come their way, as shortly after going to the bank to take out the loan, her parents had died unexpectedly in a car accident.
Kyle had been living with them when it happened. He'd graduated high school a year early but was so thrown by the accident that he didn’t even consider applying to college.
Their parents hadn't had wills – who ever expected to die so suddenly? - and so their aunts and uncles argued about selling the house and what to do with Kyle, until Veronica sat him down one day and asked him if he wanted to leave.
He did – he just couldn't stand being in the house alone now. And both of them were tired of the arguing. They just wanted to be able to mourn in peace.
Veronica defended his choice to their extended family, who insisted that he move on quickly. Just because he was young didn’t mean he shouldn’t grieve. She’d offered him a place in the new home under the conditions that he help out with the boys occasionally. As much as she wanted to give him time, he had to keep some kind of structure in his life – the responsibility would be good for him.
That was how she'd been able to move through her parents' death quickly. She still cried, mostly in the morning, and she found herself wanting to call them and talk to them, tell them funny things the boys did. But she woke up each day needing to make breakfast and pack boxes and fill out paperwork for the job transfer. Responsibilities kept her moving forward and further away from tragedy. Tragedy had caught Kyle in a stagnant spot in his life and kept him there. Veronica was determined to pull him out of it.
