13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  The woman – Mystic Mary – stared at Beth. She did not take her eyes off her for a moment, not even when addressing the group. “Welcome to my humble tent. I am here to tell you your fortune and what lies in store for you, harnessing the forces and powers from BEYOND!” Even though she spoke all of this quite passionately, she did not stop looking at Beth.

  She had a sort of shocked look on her face, almost as if she had never seen a child before. Ben found that hard to believe, considering children loved carnivals and this sort of thing. They were far more gullible.

  Suddenly, Mystic Mary pointed a long, bony finger at Beth as if to unnecessarily emphasize the fact that she had been staring at her.

  “This child has a sixth sense!” she announced, speaking louder than she needed. The tent was not that big. “She can see into the UNSEEN WORLD!!”

  Ben raised an eyebrow at her. Though this woman was passionate in her speech, he knew that she was full of shit. His six-year-old daughter did not have supernatural powers. This was just the sort of thing that would get Beth all riled up, not to mention extra indignant about her imagined friends.

  “I highly doubt that,” he said under his breath so only Faith could hear.

  She let out a laugh. “You don’t think she’s gifted?”

  “Not in that way.”

  Beth looked at him. “Go on and let the lady read your palm,” she said.

  Faith nudged his arm gently. “Yes, go on.” She laughed lightly. “Let Mystic Mary tell you your fortune.”

  Ben didn’t know why they were doing this to him. He had a hard time keeping a straight face as it was, and now that they were badgering him he was just becoming increasingly frustrated. “Is this really necessary?”

  “Yes,” Beth said with a serious look on her face. She was the only one buying this. Well, the only one besides the pseudo psychic. And the pseudo psychic was clearly just after money from whichever gullible sap came along who would believe her.

  He didn’t want to be in Beth’s bad books, though. And neither did he want to piss off his wife. So, with another sigh, Ben sat in the pouf next to the supposed seer.

  “Give me your hand,” the old woman said.

  Ben placed his hand into hers. He wondered if the accent she had was real or put on for only for the purpose of her performance. She was speaking like a woman from Eastern Europe.

  She held his hand only for a few seconds, then her brown eyes went wide and she let his hand fall from her grasp. Appearing frightened, she shook her head. “I cannot continue with your reading,” she said. She shook her head again. “No, no. It is impossible.”

  He was beyond frustrated now. After all of that, she wasn’t even going to indulge his daughter by letting her see him having his palm read?

  “Why not?” he asked her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I saw nothing,” Mystic Mary said, continuing to shake her head. She got off of her pouf. “You must go now. I am very busy.” She shooed them out of her tent without any further explanation.

  “She didn’t really seem busy…” Faith looked surprised and disappointed that it hadn’t been funnier.

  Beth looked contemplative. “It’s nothing,” she said, staring at her father. “It’s what I thought would happen.”

  “What do you mean?” Ben asked, incredulous. “I thought you were set on her reading my palm!”

  “I wanted to see if that happened.” She continued to stare at him in a way that he didn’t like.

  They drove home soon after that. Ben was still creeped out and pissed off by the way the old woman had looked at him. What made it worse was that his own daughter was now doing it, too. They acted as though something sinister was wrong with him, but they wouldn’t tell him what they imagined it might be. It was as if they were both laughing at his expense and they would not even let him in on the joke.

  Faith, meanwhile, went back to acting all concerned about Beth’s nightmare problems. Even though they had taken her to the carnival, that did not mean that she had been cured from whatever was psychologically bothering her. They all knew that. Beth sat in the back seat of the car, looking out the window with a sullen expression on her face. She didn’t seem thrilled to be going back to their house.

  Once they arrived back at the house, Ben got back to work on his remodelling. It was clear that he did not want to discuss what had happened at the carnival, so Faith just left him to it. She made a snack of chips and salsa for her and Beth and they sat together on the sofa in the living room, watching Ben trade out light fixtures nearby. For a while, they could all forget the weird goings-on that had drawn them out of their home in the first place, and shocked them from sleep each night…

  Ben and Faith tucked Beth into bed that night, taking turns kissing her on the head.

  “Sleep well,” he said to her. Saying such a thing seemed fairly pointless now, but he still said it. He tried to remain optimistic that she would somehow be able to calmly sleep through the night again. They had all become rather restless lately because of her nightmares and vivid imaginings of this Jacob person.

  “I feel as though visiting that Mystic Mary has made everything worse,” he told Faith as they got ready for bed in their master bedroom. “Not only did it cement ideas in her head, but now it’s got me feeling all anxious.”

  Faith chuckled a little. “Really,” she said. “Don’t you think you’re too old for a little old fortune teller to frighten you?”

  They gave each other a kiss and snuggled under the blankets. Then, Ben reached over and turned out the lamp on his bedside table. “I’m not frightened,” he said to her in the dark. “I’m irked is what I am.”

  He didn’t like being so stuffy about the carnival, but something about it didn’t sit well with him at all. The woman had not been particularly rude or anything, but the way she had looked at him with such fear… And then she wouldn’t tell him why. He didn’t understand why someone would be so haunted by something and then not want to share it. It had seemed quite important from where he was standing.

  Ben did not find it easy to fall asleep. After a few hours or tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable and get the old mystic woman out of his mind, Beth woke both him and Faith with her loud screaming and crying. It was practically rote by now, these moments.

  “It’s all right, sweetie,” he said, feeling a bit like a robot, mostly because he was exhausted. “Nothing is going to harm you. You’re safe here.”

  “He needs your help!” Beth cried back, doing her usual routine of pointing at him and beseeching him to help some unknown, unseen person. She always appeared and sounded as though she was fully awake and had her wits about her, but Ben and Faith both suspected that it was much like a sleepwalker. She was not actually aware of what was happening.

  She went back to sleep not long after, tucked safely and snugly back into her bed. Ben and Faith shuffled back to their bedroom and got into their own bed. Ben did his best to get back to sleep as quickly as Beth was able to, but her thoughts were more easily turned into dreams. Ben, with his adult mind and worries, took much longer to fall asleep.

  And when he did at last fall asleep, he rather wished that he hadn’t.

  The dreams that greeted him after his visit to Mystic Mary were far from the soothing kind.

  He found himself running through a thick forest of trees. It was a dark and rainy day. He was running towards something, something that was shouting and crying out in fear and pain. He ran along until he found an old house dripping with chipped paint and rotten wood.

  The front door had been forced open, so getting inside was no problem.

  Once he was in, though, he wished that he wasn’t. Ben saw a gang of three large teenaged boys punching and kicking a smaller, skinny boy on the hardwood floor of the old house. He was the source of the crying and the shouting.

  The older boys laughed and cackled as they kicked the boy.

  “Get up, you bloody retard!” one of the older boys yelled to the kid on t
he ground, who lay motionless as they kicked and beat him.

  Ben flinched as he watched them. Why was this happening? Why were they doing this?

  As he peered at the boys, he had that déjà vu sensation of having seen them somewhere before. But that didn’t make any sense. He didn’t know where this place was or what was going on. Why was he having this horrible dream?

  He woke with a start. He was about to curse the fortune teller for causing him to dream such things, but he was distracted by a heavy pressure on his chest. At first, Ben wondered if he was having a heart attack brought on by the dream. But then he saw it.

  Standing above him was the boy from his dream. His face was badly bruised and he had bloody cuts and wounds all over him. His face was pretty swollen from the abuse Ben had witnessed him being on the receiving end of from the older boys in that old and run-down house.

  This didn’t make any sense to Ben.

  Then he realized that he must still be asleep. Only, whenever he pinched or slapped himself, he didn’t wake up from this dream.

  It was then that Ben realized that the boy was whispering to him. He couldn’t make it out at first, but then he heard him plainly:

  “Help me,” the ghost boy whispered to him. “Help me…”

  Ben was paralysed with fear. He didn’t know what to do or how he was supposed to help this boy who was clearly already dead. He was terrified because this meant that perhaps Beth was not hallucinating. Perhaps this boy who she had been claiming to see, was real. And he did indeed want Ben’s help…

  He finally plucked up the courage to turn on the light. He looked over and noticed that Faith was still fast asleep beside him, undisturbed by all of this. It was quite possible that the ghost’s voice could only be heard by him. However, when Ben reached over to turn on the bedside lamp, the ghost boy vanished along with the feeling of pressure on his chest.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Some Kind of Hell

  Ben did not remember any of it, but he was a witness to this crime that now haunted his dreams. He was ten years old when he stumbled onto the old, abandoned house where the three large teenagers were attacking the other boy. He was a sensitive and impressionable lad. As soon as he saw what was happening, he rushed away as fast as possible to tell someone, anyone, what he had seen. Unfortunately for him, he slipped on his way and fell, hitting his head on a rock. When the police finally found him in their search, he was passed out from the trauma he had suffered.

  They kept him in the hospital for weeks, while he recovered from his injury. He eventually regained consciousness but any memory of what he had seen was gone. He had no recollection of the past few weeks. His parents were so grateful to have him back that they did not press it. His parents, to this day, had never spoken to him about what had happened, preferring only to say that he had not been himself for a while but the doctors took good care of him and he was fine now. They decided to move to London, where he could receive better medical care. And London was where he lived until the fateful day that he met Faith from Canewdon and they moved back there.

  This was why this place seemed both familiar and unfamiliar to him. He had been here before…

  Ben’s parents never told him what had happened and why they had moved away. They didn’t want him to remember that he had fallen and hurt himself while playing in the woods. They did not want him to return to this childhood place. They had heard the details of what had happened to the poor disabled boy that night, about the bullies who had beat him to death. When they realized that Ben had been nearby, they feared that the bad kids would try to find him and come after him next. His parents wanted to protect him from the bullies who might harm him. They thought that they had gotten him out of Canewdon just in time; they decided to stay in London where they would never have to fear or think about that awfulness again.

  It was sheer coincidence that he met Faith while they were in college. She was not originally from Canewdon, but she had moved there when she was a kid. Their paths had never crossed while Ben was there because he moved away before she arrived. It was all beginning to make sense. He had never thought anything of it, but the people in town had looked at him with familiarity when they moved there. They smiled at him as if he was an old friend whom they had seen around town.

  Going back to sleep was no easy task for Ben. He flipped back and forth between wondering if he had simply imagined the phantom that stood over him, and knowing in his heart of hearts that he had really seen him. But what did it all mean? Why was he a part of this?

  Ben woke early the next day, like he always did, and sat at the table eating breakfast with his little family, like he always did. He did not tell Faith what had occurred last night; neither did he mention it to Beth. He did notice that she was still looking at him a bit funny, but he thought she was probably still thinking about the palm reader experience. He wondered if she knew more about things than he had given her credit for. If this Jacob she claimed to talk with was the same ghost who had stood over him in his bed the previous night, then Beth knew a great deal more than he had ever imagined.

  He worked hard all day while Faith and Beth were at school, trying to keep his mind off the scary visions from the night before. One thing was for certain: he was not going to scoff at Beth’s night terrors any longer. He did not want to be a hypocrite.

  When Faith brought Beth home that evening, the little girl went off into the spare room of the house to play like she always did. Ben did not want to alarm her by interrogating her or acting suspiciously, but he now had a keen interest in what she was doing. He no longer just thought that she was merely playing with an imaginary friend. It rather scared him, but now that he knew the truth – or at least thought he did – he felt strangely comforted by the fact that she had not been making up imaginings… He wanted to see if there really was any truth in all of this, and that he was not actually losing his mind.

  Later that night, he heard the familiar sound of Beth talking to herself in the empty room. Ben stood in the doorway and listened for a few moments.

  “What are you saying?” he asked her, smiling slightly to let her know that she wasn’t in any trouble.

  “Nothing,” Beth said defensively. “I was just talking to Jacob.”

  This sent a cold shiver all down his spine. He had expected to hear as much coming from her, but it made him feel vaguely sick nevertheless.

  Then she looked at him. “He says that he knows you from a long time ago. You were just a little boy when you met. He needs your help and he wishes that you would listen to him, but you never do.”

  Ben truly was not prepared to hear this. He was taken aback. He was confused and scared by what she said. It aligned so well with what the ghost had said to him last night! Was it possible that they had both hallucinated the same thing?

  “S—Stop messing around,” he told Beth. “That’s ridiculous. You’re upsetting me with all these outlandish stories and your running off to talk to invisible people. He’s not real! …He’s not real, Beth. And even if he is, how am I supposed to help someone who is not really here? Who’s not really alive?”

  Beth fell silent and looked at him with her large saucer eyes.

  He felt bad for snapping at her, but he was tired and disturbed by all that was going on. As much as he adored this old house, he was starting to wonder if it was causing him to lose his mind.

  That night, Ben slept fitfully again. He thankfully was spared the nightmare about the boy and the bullies, but he could not stop his mind from conjuring images that were shocking and horrifying.

  Suddenly, he woke to the sound of his bedroom door opening. It creaked open slowly and Ben just knew that there was a reason for it beyond just a draft or an equally feasible explanation. He got out of bed carefully so as not to disturb Faith, and then he went out into the hallway to check what was going on.

  The hallway was dark. At first, Ben didn’t see anything. He squinted as he looked around, trying to see a possible source whi
ch could have caused the door to open. Before he could shrug it off and go back into the bedroom, blaming a draft, he suddenly heard an echo-y, ethereal sound. In a flash of blue light, the ghost appeared!