Lady Jane Notley, who had witnessed her husband cheating on her, still haunts this place and to this day the castle remains abandoned, besides those daring tourists who visit, and always leave screaming for their lives. For the horrors that were initially dormant in the walls of the castle began to manifest blatantly after they realized that people would not stop coming. Some evil wants to be left alone.
Oh, before we wrap this macabre historic recount, there is one more incident that has to be brought to light. In the early twentieth century, the committee of governors in charge of handling local monuments and landmarks bought this estate, and dubbed it ‘the Ravenscroft Castle.’ The Ravenscroft Castle was added to the list of historical landmarks about London, and in an attempt to rid it of its bad name, it was forcefully added in the local guides and tourism manuals, to encourage visitors. The path leading up to the castle was set up with a kiosk, a gift shop, a restaurant with befitting interior design serving medieval fayre and several shops serving as peripheral tourist attractions. In the years that followed, a regular stream of visitors arrived to the castle, for truly it was so remarkable that it made all the other forts and palaces in the country pale in comparison. But the fact remained that there was a haunting presence in the castle, and not just one but many. There was Lady Notley and her son, and Mary her cousin and her husband; the entire William Warwick family including his wife and child; and those random dead travellers from the early nineteenth century who had sought refuge in the castle on a stormy night or perhaps a thunderous afternoon, and had found themselves going insane. To mitigate the effects of these hauntings, which the committee had no choice but to acknowledge, they had a priest bless all the rooms, corridors and grounds. The priest did his best, and when he left he signed a government paper claiming that this place was no longer haunted in the official sense. But this was a lying priest, and he knew what he had seen. He knew what he had felt. There was evil that he could not merely cast out by an exorcism or séance. The evil in those walls had clung inside and was not willing to move away. Truth be told, he was on the brink of becoming consumed by the malicious spirits himself. He made it out with his wits just in time. And he sent a document to the clergy in the Vatican City, detailing this haunted place and its incurability. They sent an esteemed exorcist, a man named Emanuel Winchester who was neither religious nor pious, but he knew his business and he knew how to get rid of ghosts and demons. It was a weekend night when he went there. All the tourist spots were closed. There was no one present except for the guards who patrolled the outer perimeters. He tipped them his hat and went in with his bag of exorcising weapons. He had salt, he had holy water, he had rosaries, he had guns with weird rock salt bullets, he had incense candles, he had red paint and blue paint, and he had a copy of the bible, and a book titled Demonology written by Alistair Crowley. He entered the castle and locked all doors.
This should be easy, he thought, for he was from a family of freelance ghostbusters and weapon makers. The name Winchester is still used in relation to good rifles and esteemed exorcists all over America and Canada. He set up his traps, and he called the spirits, one by one, and when they finally did emerge he battled them, with the sole intention of killing them or sending them away to hell. They fought him, the Duke, the Lady, the cheater, the child, the businessman, his wife and his boy. They all attacked him, vicious spirits, in the dark of the night and although he was a brave man with much skill, he could not stand up to them, and he died there, lying sprawled and broken amidst his meticulously laid out traps. Thankfully, he had cast one spell on himself that stopped him from becoming a damned soul like the ghosts themselves. But the spell was not true to its essence, and was weak, so when he died, he did not become a malicious spirit, but he also did not die peacefully. His ghost became tethered to the walls of the castle, and he too, to this day haunts there, although not in the traditional sense.
The Vatican clergy hushed this news. This was a first for them. Never in their experience had they come across an evil which they had not been able to stop. Never. They decided to warn their catholic brethren, and even published a piece in the news about the vileness of this place. But in modern times, these times that we live in now, who pays heed to religion and the rantings of preachers? No one. And people began visiting that place even more frequently, and in every hundred or two hundred visitors, one would never leave the castle. The place, as you can tell, became a hunting ground for the devils that resided there.
And it remains like that. To this day.
Last year an entrepreneur with a disposition to spend his money recklessly, decided to buy this castle, because of its fame and charm, and he refurnished it to make it liveable again. All the rooms that were habitable were fitted with beds, closets and air conditioning and the bathrooms were properly piped. He wanted this to be his summer retreat, where he could live with his wife and his children. He cared not about the rumours and the hauntings, which would be the cause of his downfall. This story is about him and his family, in particular his daughter, Elena Odell.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Chapter 1
“I cannot believe the nerve on that prick!” Elena cried out. She was standing, with a wedding invitation in her hands, in front of her sobbing mother. This wedding invitation was from her father who, after a lengthy and unhealthy divorce, decided to remarry, and had the audacity to invite his children and his ex-wife to the wedding, which was going to happen within a few hours from now.
“Don’t bother,” Susan, Elena’s mother, said between sobs. She was going through the worst time of her life, and it was obvious to all her friends and her children. She had three. Elena, nineteen, was enrolled in Oxford University in their prestigious English Literature undergrad program. Following Elena was the twins, Stef and Damien, who were in high school preparing for their O’ levels. All three children were fathered by her ex-husband, Gilbert Odell, who was the prick with the nerve in question, the same man who was remarrying. Clearly his previous marriage and his children did not matter enough to him. The worst was the divorce, and how it had happened. It was eight years ago, when Susan had still not undergone menopause and was still perky around her breasts as a result of a rigorous gym routine and a gruelling diet. She had to keep up her appearance, being the wife of the famous Gilbert Odell, of Gil-Od Enterprises. He was of those outstanding entrepreneurs who made it big early in life and then kept going upwards from there. Like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, or even Mark Zuckerberg. The difference between the three and Gilbert was that, while they stuck to computers, tech and the silicon bling, Gilbert decided to make his mark in a field as old as time: cloth and fashion. He started by selling clothes from the back of his bicycle, and when he had good money stored up, he bought a store, and then he bought one more, and when he had a dozen stores bearing his name in London, he decided to buy a factory to manufacture more clothes. Up to that point he had been selling others’ labels, but now, after his factory was built, he began doling out his own label which went by the name of Gil-Od. His weird sense of minimalistic fashion caught on and people began buying his wares like hot cross buns at a bakery. It was in the early stages of his success that he married Susan. She was his managing assistant, and during those late nights at the office and long hours in the evening, he fell for her and proposed right away, much to the dismay of eagerly anticipating ladies of London, who were hopeful that he’d marry them, and not some underdog managing assistant who hailed from Leeds. She was pretty and smart, but that was the only thing she had going for her against those hounding ladies from London, but Gilbert married her there and then, and left the women jealous as ever. He and Susan lived on healthily and lovingly for the better part of their marriage, and never for one day did she suspect that her husband was a cheating man, who slept with every one of those women who envied her his proposal, and dozens more besides.
She was returning from gym one day, when Elena was eleven years old, and the twins were struggling with their school homework in the
ir bedrooms, when she decided to make a stop at the office and check on her husband. She thought she would surprise him, and so she bought him daises and lilacs from the pavement flower stand, and went to his office. The secretary at the door, a weird woman with a tattoo covering her neck and rings in her nose and ears, chewing bubble-gum, tried to stop her but she barged into her husband’s office regardless and discovered the new assistant manager gobbling his manhood.
She ran out crying and filed for divorce the minute she regained her senses. His lawyers were the sturdier ones, and won Gilbert the custody of the kids and half of Susan’s wealth. She was left with nothing except her father’s estate in Oxford. Since her father was still alive, he was the legal owner of the estate, so she did not lose that in the divorce. In a moment of pity, Gilbert decided that he did not want Susan’s wealth nor did he want his kids to grow up without their mother. So, he had his lawyers draft new terms favouring his ex-wife, and hastily ended the divorce, leaving an emotional mess in his wake. The event was covered by the news and the gossip magazines, causing Susan much shame. The kids were too young to understand what was happening at the time.
Susan moved to Oxford, to her father’s estate, which was nothing more than an apartment and a shop uptown, and enrolled her children in school, focusing on them and their education. She’d had enough of this shit, she thought and put it behind her. Gilbert would come by every weekend and take the kids for a few hours, for that was the extent of his available time for them. He’d try and have a good time with them, but there were too many unresolved emotions between them. Despite that, he kept in touch and made sure they were provided for in the best manner. When Elena was admitted to Oxford, he asked whether she wanted money for tuition, but she told him in a curt manner that she did not need his money, she had earned a good scholarship which offered a full ride.
Elena was still standing bewilderedly with the invitation in her hand. Damien and Stef were playing Call of Duty on their PlayStation. It was Stef’s turn and Damien was cheering him on. They were not concerned with this adult drama. Elena was not bothered by the fact that her father was going to remarry. No. That’s only natural, she’d thought. The fact that was messing with her head was that he had chosen, at the age of fifty-five, a twenty-two-year-old model to be his wife. Not only was that woman roughly half his age, but she was only three years older than Elena! A three-year older stepmother! I’d sooner die, thought Elena as she digested this news.
“I’m heading out, I need some air,” she said and headed out the door, leaving her mother teary-eyed, morose. She was a beautiful woman back in her day, and she knew for a fact that what she and Gilbert had, he would never have with his new wife. They once enjoyed an intimate relationship before Gilbert’s head was adulterated by money and thoughts of grandeur. Before he became famous. She had tried getting back in the dating game, but there were more creeps and perverts out there than normal people, and no one wanted to go on a date with a fifty-five-year-old lady. After several attempts, she had given up altogether. Her daily routines revolved around tending to her children, and reading the giant backlog of books that somehow multiplied whenever she went to the bookstore. Literature was her sanctum sanctorum, and it was with a sense of joy that she revered the fact that it was her daughter’s drug of choice too. She had chosen to get into Oxford’s literature program on her own, and aspired to become a writer one day.
*
A week passed and summer came fleetingly, at which point Elena’s semester ended, giving her two months free from college. They had all, as a family, boycotted Gilbert’s second wedding and, they gathered from the news, it was quite the lavish event.
After a week, he called again, this time directly to Elena’s mobile.
“Hello honey, how are you?” he asked her in a warm voice. He was good at pulling characters out of his ass. Whether he was really being warm and welcoming or whether this was just customary on his part, Elena did not know.
“What do you want, Dad?”
“Now, now. This is not a way to talk to your father now, is it?” he said.
“What do you want, I’ll ask one last time?”
“I have a request for you and the twins, of course. You have the right to refuse and I will be okay with that. But hear me out, will you? Daddy wants to make amends…”
“A little too late for that, don’t you think?” she snapped. She was about to cut the call when he put forth an offer that was sick and twisted, but caught her attention nonetheless.
“My wife, she’s a sweetheart, wants to get to know you kids better. It’s not like how it sounds. She’s not just a trophy piece I’ve gotten for myself. She’s actually very nice,” he said.
“Yeah right Dad, I’m pretty sure you married her for her pious character,” she replied curtly.
“Listen to me!” he tried to hide his agitation but failed. “I’ve arranged for a family vacation, excluding your mother naturally, at a castle I recently bought.”
Normally Elena would have cut the call by now, but the mention of a castle caught her attention. She had only two soft spots in her life: one for fine literature, and the other for monuments of grandeur like the Eifel Tower, the Lady Liberty, Buckingham palace, and of course, castles. She knew that her father knew of her weakness, and this could well be a ploy on his part to get her to like his new wife. But castles! She had a love for those medieval structures that dripped with romanticism and art. She could not say no to that. But she was fighting her conscience really hard on this. One decision meant betraying her mother, and the other meant giving up a chance to stay at a castle.
“It’s nothing major. You will stay at the castle for as long as you feel fit. You will have your own room, and servants to cater to your needs. And in that time, I ask only that you make the effort to get to know my new wife, and see for yourself that she’s not a bad person,” Gilbert said.
Not a bad person, thought Elena with jeer. She downright hated Christina, the model cum gold digger who had ensnared her father in her lust-riddled trap. Of course he was going to sing her praise. She had him wound around her finger and was making him dance. Elena was jealous of her, she hated her and she wanted to strike her dead. She did not deserve to be with her father, even though he was a lying, cheating scum who had broken her mother’s heart. Deep down she knew that the two belonged perfectly together, her father and Christina, but she could not wrap her head around the fact that Christina was only three years older than her. Who was the bigger pervert in this relationship? – her father or his child-bride – she did not know.
“I will think about it.”
“Play nice and I’ll get you that Audi you’ve been wanting for quite some time now,” he said, sealing the deal. She did not actually want the Audi as much as she needed it. The commute from the college to her home was long and the bus rides were killing her. She closed the phone in frustration and went to her mom to break the news.
*
“I think you should go,” her mother said, much to her dismay. Elena stared at her in an I-don’t-believe-you-said-that way and demanded an explanation for this decision on her part.
“He’s your father and he’s trying to reach out to you. Think whatever you will about our divorce, but in an emotionless world, it was only statistically probable, and so was his marriage to a fine piece of ass such as Christina. Entrepreneurs are like rock stars of their own domains, and these women they’re promiscuous with, they’re groupies. In the end, a groupie comes along who’s too shrewd for her own good, and she ends up betrothing the rock star. It’s a story as old as time,” she said. “And if your dad wants you to meet her and get along, and that too in a castle that he bought, I figure you might as well give him a chance.”
“I hate that bitch. Is dad blind? Can’t he see that she’s using him?” Elena said.
“To be honest, he was always blind. Back when we were married, he was always cheating on me and he assumed that I didn’t know. I knew. But I loved
him. However, when I found out that he was banging the new assistant manager, my previous position in his business, it made me feel expendable. Like, I was only another shag for him. He was too blind to see what was in front of him. Had he remained monogamous, he’d have had a good life; a more satisfying life. Do you know he does cocaine? Not that I’m judging him, but satisfied men don’t do drugs,” she said.
“Why are you then telling me to go and visit him?”
“Because he’s your father. And that carries with it a certain respect that you owe him, and he deserves a chance,” she said.
Elena did not know what to make of any of this. She pondered over this problem for two days until she made a decision that would serve to everyone’s benefit.
She called her father and said, “I’ve made my mind up. I will visit, but for only one day, and I’ll meet your Christina and then go back to Oxford. I can’t bear to remain in her presence any longer than necessary.”
“That sounds perfect!” he gleamed from the other end of the phone. “I will make preparations right away. When are you and the twins going to arrive?”
She did not think this through. She was not the only one invited. The twins were not going to be free from school for another week. She did not want to put this off any longer. “I will come tomorrow. The twins can come when they’re done with school.”
It was decided. The next day she packed her bags with only one change of clothes. She would only be there for a day, so it did not make sense to pack much. When she had done packing, she went to her mother, and kissed her goodbye. She did not know this, but this was the last time she would see her mother. Had she known, she would have said something profound like, “I love you” or “You take care of yourself” but she only said, “keep in touch, yeah?”
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