13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  Rain was splattering against the window of her room, pattering hard against the glass, making it sound like rascal street kids were chucking peas and stones at it. The sky, even though it was twelve in the afternoon, had gone grey. The trees in the vicinity were roaring (yes, roaring with the sound of their movements), and moving wildly, seeming to enjoy the wind. She looked around the drenching environment, and revered in it, making up her mind to take a cup of cocoa and her novels to the topmost tower in the castle, and read. But before she could do anything, there happened an event that shook her to the core.

  A woman and a child screaming wildly, fell from above, and she saw them fall to their death from her window. She yelped, and stifled her screams. Who was that? Perhaps a maid and her child? Had they been enjoying the rain with their window open, and fallen?

  She opened her own window and looked down. There was nothing except for the stream of water flowing downhill. There was no sign of anyone falling to their deaths. But it was so real, what she had seen. Things like that you can’t mistake.

  Shuddering, she made her way to find the butler, but he was nowhere to be seen. So, without the cocoa, she took her novel up the tower, which she presumed to be the highest, and sat in the windowless perch and beheld the landscape which seemed to be two miles below her. The falling woman and child had unsettled her, and she no longer wanted to read her book.

  But where the hell did they fall to? She asked herself. There was no sign of a struggle or a sign of a fall down below. A dreadful thought hit her. They had fallen in the stream and it had carried them down river!

  *

  She felt spooked standing there at the topmost tower without windows. The rain had worsened and was now seeping in from all four sides. The sky had darkened even worse than before. She made her way down the circular staircase in the dimmed light and prayed that she wouldn’t fall. She didn’t.

  As she descended to the left wing of the castle, she saw, unmistakably, a person going into a bedroom to the right. She thought this to be yet another staff member working about the house, and paid no heed as she stepped off the stairs. But her inquisitiveness got the better of her, and she decided that she’d look into the room. The door led to a broom closet, and there was no one in there. Even more daunting was that there was no additional means pf exit from the room. Had there been a staff member in here? She explicitly recalled that someone had gone in and hadn’t come out.

  Someone grabbed her shoulder from behind, and she leapt with fright.

  “Quite sorry to give you a fright ma’am,” the cleaning lady said. Elena was clutching her heart and trying to regain her breath.

  “No… (heavy gasps interjected her sentence) … it is… fine,” she said.

  “What are you doing in this corner?” she asked.

  “I was coming down from the tower,” Elena replied.

  “Rain makes things spookier, don’t it?” the maid said and went in the closet to get buckets and mops.

  Elena did not want to stay in the presence of that room or that lady a minute longer. She knew what she had seen. She had seen a ghost. For the rest of the day she could not help but rethink that incident, and even when she had gone back to her room to work on her laptop, she could not shake the feeling off.

  There were reports that needed to be written as part of their holiday homework. It was a tedious chore but it got them extra college credit if they did it. She figured why the hell not? The laptop blinked to life and she got to work on it, while sitting at the table beside the window, all the while wondering where the hell Kenneth the butler had gone off to.

  Before she could think further, or do anything on her laptop, she felt a hand, a heavyset hand of a man, caress her face in a lustful manner. She shuddered and shook her head violently to make that feeling go away. But it recurred. It was a most sexual touch, and it felt wrong.

  She started around wildly in the semi-dark, looking for her abuser, but found no one. She tried to tell herself that it was the wind coming from the spaces between the windows, but that was not it. She’d distinctly felt five fingers and a hot palm on her cheek.

  Thunder crackled, a lightning bolt flashed across the horizon, and a painting above the mantelpiece fell with a bang. Elena screamed and ran from her room in shock.

  *

  Kenneth, as it turned out, was tending to the crazy gardener, who wanted to be inside the castle in this rainy weather. But Kenneth forbade him, seeing as how the gardener had a perfectly accommodating shack of his own in the gardens.

  Elena went to him and was on the brink of telling him about the weirdness that she had faced when she thought better and remained quiet instead. What was he going to think of her? The gardener, still standing outside in the downpour, looked at Elena and sniggered in a “I told you so” way.

  “Kenneth?” she said.

  “Yes, Miss,” he replied.

  “Some lunch would be great.”

  He left to make lunch, closing the door on the gardener.

  During lunch, Elena’s mother called to check that all was okay. Elena hesitated and said yes, it was. They talked for some time about the weather, and she told Elena that it was hurricane-like in Oxford, too. She then talked to her twin brothers and asked them when they were going to come. They said next week. They told her that dad had promised to get them a PS4 Pro, which was better than the standard PS4 they currently had. She shook her head. It was just like her dad to seduce people with shiny, better things. It was how he made himself a billionaire.

  There was not much to do afterwards, so Elena decided to go back to her room, make use of the Wi-Fi and stream some Netflix. The new Iron Fist series was promising, a friend had told her. She planned to binge it tonight.

  Halfway through the episodes, Elena felt herself nodding off to sleep. She paused the series, went to the door and locked it, closed her laptop and went to sleep, still dressed in her t-shirt and jeans.

  This night’s sleep was better than last night’s. For one, she did not wake up after every few seconds. She slept throughout the downpour, and woke up in the morning to find the sun shining through the window. It was blaring light in the room.

  The first thing she noticed as she opened her eyes was that the door was wide open. She had made it a rule to always lock her door, whether it was in the dormitory of her college, or in her apartment’s bedroom, or anywhere else. She had even locked this one last night before going to bed. But here it was, open and creaking.

  When she got out of bed, she noticed that she was drenched from head to toe. She looked down to see why, suspecting that she’d sweated through the night because of the warm blankets, or that she’d had a nocturnal emission. But it was neither.

  She was covered in thick blood. And now that she saw it, she began to feel pain throughout her body, as if she had been stabbed. Unable to contain herself, she screamed in horror and pain. Within a minute, a staff member was at the door, looking in on her. Not at her clothes which were crimson red, nor at her blankets which were also drenched, but at her face. Out of shock and visceral horror, Elena fainted.

  In the dream that followed during her unconsciousness, she saw a man and a woman making love in this very room. They were involved in a very passionate way. She tried to turn her face away from them, but found that she couldn’t. At the same time, she was both the man and the woman, feeling the throbbing pleasure inside her and outside her. She was going to orgasm, she knew it, but at the moment, the door banged open and she saw another woman standing at the door, looking horror-struck. She turned away, crying, and wailing, leaving the two lovers looking ashamed. They had been caught red handed.

  Then she saw the woman who had been in the throes of passion, covered in blood. Her body was smudged by it. She lay on the bedroom floor, with gashes made by knives all over her body. The other lady who had left in tears, was holding a knife, and had a satisfied grin on her face. The man was paralyzed out of fear, and still in his bed.

  This dr
eam, weird and nonsensical, ended as quickly as it had begun. Elena woke up to find half a dozen staff members standing around her. She was in her bed, and Kenneth sat beside her. He looked at her as if she was sick. She was embarrassed that they were all looking at her in her current state of being blood-soaked. But when she turned her head downwards to take stock of the blood, she discovered that there wasn’t any. She was dry, and so were the sheets, and apparently, nothing was wrong with her. The servants, save for the butler, thought that she had gone mad.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Chapter 3

  “Darling, how are you?” Gilbert tried to hug Elena as he got out of the car, his Rolls Royce. She tried to resist. The result was awkward. They did a weird tango in the driveway, a half-handshake, half-hug. Christina watched the two from a safe distance. She was wearing a long-coat that ended above her shins, and high heels that made her as tall as Gilbert, who was very tall. The two were towering when they stood next to each other. She had blonde hair that fell to her neck, and she wore mascara and lipstick with a tasteful frugalness. Despite her charming appearance, Elena, as her father hugged her, looked at Christina with a stab of hatred.

  “I’m fine, Dad. You guys are so late. Where were you?” she asked. Elena saw Christina open her mouth to say something, but she stopped when Elena rolled her eyes at her.

  “We had to stop a few times. The rain hasn’t stopped in the rest of the country,” he said.

  They walked inside the castle, which was made even more presentable and welcoming by the servants in preparation of its owner. Over the last two days, during which Elena had that disturbing dream, they had started giving her looks of disdain, as if they thought she was mentally deranged or clinically insane. The hostility was evident without their saying anything, even from Kenneth, who reserved himself whenever she was around, and did not become frank with her like before. This alienating behaviour was making Elena furious and fearful. The hauntings of the castle had not subsided either. After that one night during which she had woken up with imaginary blood, it only got worse. Cackling noises that might as well have belonged to Lucifer himself began resounding in her bedroom, and they kept resounding until the break of dawn. Her door would swing open and swing shut of its own accord, and sometimes, she’d see a spectre of a woman with a knife in her hand. The knife was always dripping with blood. Another time, she saw a child running in the corridors late in the night, but when she looked at him a second time, he was not there. It was all too disturbing. It was so disturbing that she’d actually began looking forward to her father’s visit.

  “Did you enjoy your stay here?” he asked her as they entered the living room. It was not so much a living room as a giant chamber with wide sofas and shiny floors and a TV that covered an entire wall.

  “I did,” she lied.

  “I’d like you to meet Christina,” he said and ushered his wife forward. Up until now, she had been standing behind him, timidly.

  “Hi. I’m Christina, how are you?” she said with a smile she’d mastered over a long career as a model, and held out her hand.

  “Elena. I’m good,” Elena replied, and shook the hand for the teensiest second. She let go and rubbed her hand on her shirt, making it clear that she was in contempt of the model.

  “Lovely!” Gilbert said and headed towards his own room, which was on the second floor, leaving the two girls behind. As far as he was concerned, he had succeeded in getting the girls acquainted. They’ll become friends on their own now, he must have thought. Gilbert was a lot of things but he was not someone who understood the workings of a woman’s mind. Much like most men.

  “Care to show me around?” Christina asked.

  “No.”

  Elena walked away, leaving the woman standing in the living room, looking utterly perplexed. There was an implacable hatred that Elena had for Christina, and she didn’t even know why. She thought that it was because Christina married her father, and helped herself to his fortune, or because it was women like Christina who had made her dad cheat on her mom in the first place, or perhaps because she hated, in general, girls like Christina, who went about life getting favours from people because of the size of their breasts, the shininess of their shins, the ampleness of their ass, and the ability to give deepthroated blowjobs. Women like her muddled the name of women like Elena. Elena, and her like had to work hard to get where they wanted to go, unlike Christina, who had to flash a smile, or her tits, to get her way.

  All these angry thoughts rushed through her brain, and she punched the stone wall in her bedroom in frustration. The negativity had taken control of her, and she did not know how to assuage it.

  The dinner bell chimed a few hours later, and her father called her, forcing her to come down to dine with him and his wife. Wife. What a contemptable term! She thought. This woman could well have been his daughter, or his niece. That he’s screwing her shows how perverted he is, she thought angrily while descending the steps. Lately, these intrusive thoughts in her mind were not even hers. It was like they were incepted in her brain by some malevolent entity.

  Dinner was a boring affair during which Gilbert told Elena of the first time he’d set eyes on Christina, and how he knew this was love at first sight. How he proposed to her under the full moon at the top of his building. He would have told her a lot more, but before he could continue, Elena slammed her fist on the table involuntarily, and got up from her chair. She saw all the servants eyeing her with that disapproving look that said ‘oh, better watch out, she’s that crazy kid who screams at things that aren’t there!’

  Before she could say or do anything more to tamper with the already teetering relationship with her father and her step-mother, Elena walked away from them and went to her room, and began packing her bags. She’d get out tomorrow morning and be done with them. He could keep the Audi he had promised her.

  Just then there was a knock on the door and Gilbert came in the room. “Honey?” he asked as he saw her packing with vigour, and sat down beside her on the bed. This time, he did not look like the entrepreneur billionaire she’d seen on TV, no. This time he looked the part of a caring father who was genuinely worried about his kid.

  “What?” she snapped at him.

  “I think you’re not feeling well. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing… Nothing’s the matter. What makes you think otherwise?” she said, glaring at him.

  “I’ve been talking to the servants, and they tell me,” he began to say but she cut him mid-sentence.

  “The servants! You’re gonna trust what they say? They’ll feed you bullshit or whatever, and you’re gonna take their word for it?” she asked. He sighed and stooped his head. In her rage, she could not help but see the balding patch in the middle of his head. He was going bald, and this was the first time she was noticing it. “And do you think you’re the one to judge if there’s something wrong with me? I mean, look at yourself!”

  “Enough!” he snapped back and stood up. The warmness from his tone was gone, and he looked like the stern businessman he was, and not like the feigning father he was trying to be. “I will not have you talk to your father, me, like that! I have arranged for a car to take you to the doctor right away. If you’re not feeling well or are not willing to talk, they’ll diagnose you and treat you.”

  Great, now he thinks there’s something medically wrong with you! The alien voice in her head screamed and clawed at the insides of her skull. In that moment, she wanted to kill her dad and kill his wife and the household of servants who eyed her shadily. This rancid thought made her realize that maybe there was something wrong with her. And that she better get herself checked.

  “Okay,” she said, dejectedly admitting defeat. He led her to the car downstairs and had the driver drive her to the Mason Memorial Hospital which was forty minutes out of town.

  *

  After he saw the car trail off in the distance, he ordered Kenneth to his side. Kenneth did so promptly. They talked for a mo
ment about general things, such as the weather and the upcoming French elections. Kenneth was French, but he made quite a good effort to show that he was not. Butlers are supposed to be British; that’s what they taught at Butler school.

  “Tell me about Elena. I assume you’re the only one here whom she’s friendly with.” Gilbert said as he took a cigarette from his pocket. He lit it and inhaled deeply.

  “Yes sir. As I told you before, her behaviour has been erratic. More erratic than teenagers are supposed to be. She’s been acting as if she’s under the influence of something,” he said.

  “Drugs, of course. They’re the bane of the youth of today. I saw it the moment I saw her misbehaving at dinner. She was all jittery, like a junkie is after withdrawal, Gilbert said mechanically, not believing that he was saying this about his daughter.

  “I suspect so too, sir. She’s been screaming and crying, and running amok all over the place, like she’s high,” Kenneth said.

  “It’s going to be over soon. I’ve arranged for her to stay in the castle for as long as it takes. It’s a good thing her summer vacations fell when they did. The shrink I’ve sent her to will diagnose her, give her meds and tell her that she needs bedrest. She’ll have no choice but to stay here,” Gilbert’s cigarette burnt out, leaving only an emberlike stub lying on the ground. He stomped on it, took a mint from his pocket, chewed it and went inside.

  Outside, Kenneth stood in the dark, contemplating what he’d done. He’d abetted Gilbert in sending Elena to a psychiatrist. Had he done right? He did not know. But it was not his job to know. His job was to do, and aid his master, and not have sentimental links to anyone, not even a girl as sweet as Elena. His guile had been a part of his job. It made him feel bad about himself, but it was as it was.

  He left the light on in the entranceway and the door unlocked, and went inside.