13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  Jen regarded Kelly for a moment. She had just returned home from the drive, feeling rather frustrated with Amy for the way she’d responded to the house. “Are you going to start accusing me of rushing into things and not thinking, too?” she asked defensively. “Because you know I have had it with the both of you. All I ask for is your support and your interest in the things I want to do for us as a family, and it’s always met with criticism…”

  Kelly shook her head at her mother. She could see that Amy had really struck a nerve. It was time for her to be the diplomatic one… as usual. “We’re not criticising you. Well, at least I’m not anyway. Amy doesn’t always choose the most tactful words.”

  “That’s for sure,” Jen said. Then she brightened a little. “Oh, Kelly, the house is lovely! I can’t wait for you to see it. Of course we will need to bring our things over and move some things around, but it is such a perfect new little home for us.”

  When she saw the happy glint in her mum’s eyes, Kelly knew that, not only was there no chance of talking her out of it, but she really shouldn’t even try. Whatever was going on with her mum was just a phase and it would pass. Why not let her enjoy her new house if it made her happy? Hopefully she would go back to her more normal self once she’d been allowed to go ahead with what she now wanted.

  “So you want me to move in with you?” Kelly asked Jen, keeping her voice light and interested instead of judgmental.

  “She wants to completely upend all of us,” Amy said as she stalked into the room to grab a glass of Diet Coke. “And we have no choice in the matter.”

  Their mum looked like she was about to start arguing again, but Kelly cut her off. “Now Amy, you’re just being antsy. It doesn’t look good on you. I think you should give this a chance. You never know. You might end up loving it. And, if you don’t, well… there’s always University if you need an escape.”

  Amy shut her mouth and glared at her sister. She brought out her cell phone and brought it close to Kelly’s face. “This place gives me the willies, Kel.”

  Kelly glanced at the picture, but she didn’t see what was so wrong with it. “It’s a room full of covered furniture, Amy. I thought you were over being a chicken.” She turned her attention back to their mother. “I think Mum’s right. I probably wouldn’t have bought it so quickly, but a place like this might’ve gotten away from us if we’d waited.”

  “That’s what I thought!” Jen said, smiling at Kelly. “At least one of you gets it.”

  “Getting out of the city should do us some good,” Kelly went on. “As long as you understand that I can only be there for a little while. I’ll stay until you are both settled in. My boss won’t mind if I take a few weeks off.”

  Jen was positively beaming now. “That’s all I can ask of you,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Amy sighed a little. “All right, all right. But if this doesn’t go as well as you expect it to, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Duly noted,” their mum said, still smiling now that she knew that Amy was also in agreement, shaky though it was. “In the meantime, try to enjoy yourself, okay?”

  The three ladies enjoyed a group hug in the kitchen and then worked together to make a dinner out of the leftovers in the refrigerator. “We can’t take all this food with us, so let’s eat up,” Jen announced. She was positively gleeful now. Kelly was glad to see her so happy, even if she didn’t entirely see the reasoning behind it. A house was just a house. It was not about to give her life new meaning, but Kelly would indulge her mum as long as was necessary.

  She just hoped her mum wouldn’t suffer too big a fall once she realized that this little whim of hers was not going to solve all of her problems and woes.

  The move took up all their lives for a week. Kelly informed her bosses at her internship that she would be taking vacation time to deal with family matters. Working together to pack all their possessions from the flat proved to be a rather daunting task, especially considering the personal value attached to a good deal of the belongings.

  “We need to get rid of some of this stuff,” Jen pointed out. “But the trouble is, what can we part with?”

  Parting with Dave’s few left-behind things had not been an issue for her at the time, if only because she had been so angry with him. Now she was thinking about them. There were gaps in bookshelves that she’d trained herself not to notice until now. That sort of thing. But she did her best to plod ahead with it and allow this move to be as cathartic as she needed it to be.

  “I’m not attached to anything here,” Kelly said, folding her arms across her chest. “My flat’s smaller than this one and I’ve been slowly whittling everything down so it can be easily moved. It almost all fits into a suitcase these days.”

  Amy, meanwhile, was going through the collection of DVDs under the telly, frowning at each of them as she tried to determine their personal worth. “Are we taking the DVD player?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Jen said with a laugh. “We’ll need entertainment in Tewkesbury just like anywhere else. You’ll also want to take the books, I suspect.”

  With a sigh, Amy collected all the DVDs and put them into the bag. Then she started working on the books. Kelly took interest in the bookshelf as well and helped her sister, making a give-away stack of the ones they anticipated not wanting to read again. While Amy went into her bedroom to pack her personal belongings, Kelly collapsed on the couch, reading a give-away book – a novella from her childhood which she hadn’t read in at least fifteen years.

  There wouldn’t be time for relaxing for long, though. The moving truck arrived mid-week and the team of movers worked to cart all the Campbell family’s furniture out of the house. Jen very proudly gave her new address to the man in charge. They thought nothing of it, and why should they? To them, it was just a house, but Amy bit her lip, wondering if anyone else would experience the same odd feeling when they were in the house.

  “Do you ever feel like you’re going mad?” she asked Kelly as they lay on the floor together in sleeping bags, on their last night in the flat. “Like only you notice things?”

  “There’s no question that you’re mad,” Kelly said teasingly, rolling over to get more comfortable. Sleeping bags couldn’t entirely make up for the hard wood floors under their heads.

  Amy groaned faintly. “I just don’t see how playing along with Mum is going to solve anything.”

  Kelly closed her eyes. “I’m not sure a solution is what Mum needs so much as a break from things, and she needs our support. It’s just a phase.”

  “Moving to Tewkesbury feels like more than just a phase.”

  “She’ll have her fun for a season or two and then she’ll realize she’s been silly and move back to London,” Kelly said. “In the meantime, don’t be such a baby. The house looks nice enough, and if we sell a few pieces of that old furniture, we might well recur a fair portion of the cost of all of this.”

  It was not the cost of things that was bothering Amy; not the monetary costs anyway.

  The following morning arrived and Amy greeted it with bleary eyes. She slept horridly the whole night, as did Kelly, more from discomfort than from trepidation. Together, they climbed out of their sleeping bags and carefully rolled them up. They had elastic ropes attached to them so they could be worn like a backpack, a feature which the girls had never found necessary until now. They put them on their backs so that they could be taken out to their mum’s car more easily for the ride.

  “Oh good, I didn’t have to wake you girls up,” Jen said cheerily as they ambled into the kitchen. Amy had bedhead or ‘sleeping bag’ head, and Kelly felt slightly hungover from fatigue, but somehow their mum was standing upright, making breakfast out of the last of the eggs and bread in the refrigerator.

  All three ladies sat in a small circle on the kitchen floor, eating their egg on toast off of paper plates. “I always thought it might be fun to go camping at home,” Kelly said between bites. “It turns out that it’s probably
just as uncomfortable as proper camping.”

  Amy and Jen laughed at that.

  “I slept pretty well, actually,” Jen said. “It wasn’t like I was sleeping on a feather bed, obviously, but I thought it was rather exciting. Actually, I find all of it exciting so that probably helps.”

  Amy wanted to say something to the contrary, but after all of the warnings – both verbal and non-verbal – from Kelly, she decided to leave it alone and let her mother enjoy herself. It was too late for them to turn back now, and Jen Campbell was not the sort of woman to change her mind so quickly. There was no sign of her letting up on this plan, so it would be better for all concerned for Amy to just go with it. Kelly seemed to be having a good time, despite any misgivings. As was often the case, Amy needed to take a page from her older sister’s book and just let it go.

  Arguing the whole way to the house would not be pleasant for any of them; she learned that the hard way last time. She only hoped that Kelly was right about them only being there through the summer.

  They had agreed to go in one car for sake of ease; there would be time enough for them to collect their own cars once they were settled in. When their car approached Grave’s End House this time, it was Kelly’s turn to marvel at the Tutor architecture. She seemed about as taken as Jen was, leaving Amy to feel as if she had been a sceptical ass the last time. It was a lovely house, to be sure. But of course, it mattered more what it was like inside than what it appeared to be on the outside.

  Jen parked her Mini in the driveway and all three ladies got out, carrying their suitcases with them up to the house. Jen proudly held the new house key, now on her set of colourful keychains. She unlocked the door and they all went inside. Amy flipped the switch, this time knowing at least what she was to be greeted by in the living room.

  The furniture that they had uncovered the last time remained uncovered. It felt eerie and more than a little bizarre to see their own furniture placed amongst the old, abandoned chairs, tables and couch.

  “This doesn’t look too bad at all,” Kelly said, dropping her bag onto the floor, thereby sending up a swirl of dust. “It’s a bit weird that they left things so dingy in here, but maybe they thought that lent a certain air of interesting to the place.” She shrugged.

  Amy rolled her eyes. “It’s interesting, all right. Wait until you feel the drafts in the kitchen.”

  They made their way upstairs this time, not pausing until they reached the bedrooms in the hallway. Amy flipped the switch in one room and was pleased to see her bed already there. The room had a lot of stone along the walls, in keeping with much of the house, actually. The paint on the walls was white, which she thought was a bit boring but she was not planning to give it a new paint job any time soon. “I can decorate with posters at any rate,” she said out loud under her breath. She set her suitcase on her bed and decided that she would unpack later, once she had begun to feel more settled. For now, she worked on putting her bands and Anime posters up.

  Kelly took up position in the bedroom across the hall from Amy, leaving the master bedroom at the end of the hall for their mother. Kelly and Amy had not had to share a bathroom in years, so that was going to take a bit of readjusting, but it would all be okay. She was glad to see a desk in her new room. It wasn’t hers; hers had been given away before the move. “Everything fits into a suitcase,” she had said. She wasn’t kidding about that.

  Whoever the former inhabitant of this room had been had good taste in desks, however. It was made of a nice, light-coloured cedar, and for a left-handed person, with drawers along the left-hand side, which didn’t help Kelly; but she thought it was funny rather than a problem. She took her black laptop out of her suitcase and carefully placed it on the desk, opening it and turning it on right away.

  Just because she was taking a sabbatical from work did not mean that she could not still work a little, right? She hoped they could hook up a wireless router in this old house. Her mum wouldn’t be against that, hopefully…

  Jen gazed around her room in awe of everything she found. She had elected to sleep in the room’s original bed – a large, maple four-poster bed with deep, velvet curtains - like something out of Poe. She knew that this house dated back to the 1800s and, as such, she aspired to live much like the original owners might have. She wanted to allow herself to be Romantic since her romantic life had not worked out for her.

  Also forgoing her unpacking for now, she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed, allowing the smells of the room to envelope her. She closed her eyes, a small smile on her lips. “I’m home.”

  The three women came together again a few hours later in the kitchen, to make their first meal in their new house. “It is in this room that I felt especially weird,” Amy said, forewarning them as she turned on the light. It was a normal kitchen, with classy, dark wood cupboards and stone countertops. Kelly was impressed by the room’s décor, and not at all surprised to find that her little sister had made something out of nothing.

  “You probably felt a chill because this room is towards the back of the house and it’s got a fair amount of stone in it,” she reasoned. “I think it’s great.”

  “Yes,” Jen said in agreement, nodding a little. “I would hate to order out too often now that we have got such a nice kitchen. The trouble is that we don’t have very much in our refrigerator.”

  Amy smiled at that. “So, pizza it is?”

  Kelly laughed and Jen nodded again. “But only tonight. Tomorrow, we should go to the store; I think we passed one a short distance up the road.”

  The fact that they could have pizza was enough for Amy. She was often so studious and analytical that Kelly forgot that she was only seventeen. Moments like this made her happy because she did not have to worry about her baby sister growing up too fast.

  Jen left the room to order their pizza to be delivered, reasoning that reception would be better towards the front of the house. As soon as she was gone, Amy took Kelly aside. “You don’t feel it then?” she asked, looking into her eyes searchingly.

  “A feeling like there should be someone else in the room?” Kelly asked her. She nodded a little.

  “Like there is someone else in the room,” Amy corrected. “And the strange, cold feeling… Right here.” She took Kelly by the hand and repositioned her more towards where Amy felt a draft. “The fridge isn’t open and there’s no window or door here.”

  Kelly opened her mouth a little, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. She did indeed feel a weird sensation in that spot near the back corner of the kitchen. It really felt like there should have been an ice box around about there with its door wide open.

  “Did you tell Mum about this?”

  “I tried to,” Amy said. “But she wouldn’t hear it. You know how she is.”

  “Girls?” Jen called to them from the living room, the length of the hall from where they stood. Her voice sounded so far away, despite the house not being that large. “What do you want on your pizza?”

  That was as good a cue as any for Kelly and Amy to leave the cold, unwelcoming kitchen.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Unwelcome Party

  After uncovering the rest of the furniture in the living room, the three women sat together on the large couch. Despite being old and smelling vaguely musky, it was a comfortable couch covered with goldish-brown upholstery. Their beige couch from home sat nearby, but Jen had no interest in sitting on it or even including it in the rearranging of the room. “One thing’s for sure,” Amy said with some pizza stuffed into her right cheek as she spoke. “We’ll definitely have enough places for guests to sit.”

  “Oh, you’re planning to invite guests over now?” their mum asked her, a bemused sort of look on her face. “I thought you hated it here.”

  Kelly and Amy exchanged glances.

  “It will take some getting used to,” Kelly said diplomatically. “But this is our home now, right? Why wouldn’t we invite friends over to visit us, and show off t
his pretty home you found for us, Mum?”

  Jen looked mysteriously thoughtful. “Yes… That’s true.”

  Once they had finished the box of pizza, they started working together to rearrange the furniture in the living room. “Some of this is superfluous,” Kelly pointed out. “We don’t need six wing back chairs. We should sell at least some of this, okay?” She spoke to her mother in a gentle voice, as if her words might physically hurt her. Amy was beginning to feel more than a little disgusted by that. She was a grown woman, and she had not actually had a nervous breakdown as far as they knew, so there was no need to sugar-coat every last thing.

  The thing was this: their mum seemed distracted and uninterested in what they were doing now. “Sure, whatever you think will make this place more like home for you,” she said. “I’m going to go read a while and go to bed, I think. It’s been a long day.”

  With that, Jen left them to it and went back into her bedroom, where the comfortable, four-poster bed awaited her.

  Amy looked at Kelly who shrugged. “She’s got a point. She’s been getting up early and making sure everything was organized for the past two weeks. Now that she’s in her relaxing vacation home, let’s let her enjoy it.”

  The good thing about their mother making her exit was that Amy could converse more with her sister. It felt as though they were almost on the same page. But now, when she glanced at Kelly, she didn’t think bringing up the bizarre kitchen was a good idea. She went over to the wing back chair beside the fireplace to get a better look at it. “It makes sense to have a chair here by the fire,” she said. “But don’t you think this looks too severe? We’re not living in gothic times, for god’s sake.”

  Kelly nodded her head in agreement, working on moving one such wing back chair away from the others, as they didn’t need a matching set of four in their small living room. “I think that one could maybe stay. I don’t imagine either of us will be sitting by the fire like a Dickens character, and Mum seems quite taken by—Oh shit!”