13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  An unnatural chill would take hold of the church, even in the midst of midsummer when humidity would be at an all-time high. It would turn as cold as a mortuary; the nuns would hear whispers in corridors, whispers muttering onerous secrets. The priests, during the late hours of the night, would see something from the corners of their eyes and when they would turn their head to see what it was, it would be gone. There was no denying it that the place was haunted and although the members of the clergy knew it, they decided to keep their mouths shut about it. There was no need to burden the people with dreary news. When the bellboy would go to ring the church’s bell, he would sometimes see shadowy figures lurking in the bell tower. Figures with a ram’s head and a black robe. A nun once found a severed body of an infant in the backyard. She fainted at its sight and days later when she woke up, she decided to give up being a nun and went to London, where things were less morbid and made sense to the common man. Things like barometers, submarines and calculators. Things that had reasonable explanations.

  It soon dawned on the parish that he was wrong. A hallowed church on unholy grounds would not serve a mitigating purpose. The evil buried within the grounds was older than the building of the church. And evil prevailed where its roots were deep. Blood, sacrifice, death and devilry, they were the pinnacles upon which it strived. And neither the bible chanting nuns nor the holy water sprinkling fathers could alleviate the malevolence that dwelled there. The parish who had so wholeheartedly overseen the construction of this church, upon realizing his grave mistake, hung himself from the noose in his quarters.

  Time passed on and the wicked aura around the Hallow Church prevailed. In the nineteenth century, England faced a tremendous cholera outbreak that plagued the entire country. The poorer, less advanced areas, such as Wiltshire itself, suffered the worst of it. With hospitals overflowing with disease ridden patients, the doctors implored the church’s help. And the churches all over the country aided. As did Hallow Church. It was converted into a makeshift hospital for patients for whom there was no place in the hospitals.

  The nuns and the father, alongside the doctors from the local hospital rushed to aid patient after patient. It was a good change for them to have the church inhabited for once. Even if it was with sick people. The inhabitation seemed to curb the evilness. Where once the seats were placed, there were stretchers and doctors in cholera masks that looked like vulture faces with sinister beaks and goggled, foggy eyes. It was a horrific sight in another sense entirely. The sickly in the throes of disease, lying scattered on the church floor, like victims of a war they had not signed up for, and the doctors with ghastly masks tending to them like angels of death… It was grotesque; the horror of human frailty.

  There was a story that passed from generation to generation of Castle Combe residents. In the 19th century, there was a family amongst many other families, who was seeking treatment in the makeshift hospital at the Hallow Church. The town’s cemetery was full to the brim with corpses and there was no more place in there for the cholera patients who kept dying like moths in a forest fire. The parish at that time allowed the gravediggers to dig up graves in the grounds around the church. One of the last buried dead was a family of five: a mother, a father, twin boys and a girl of sixteen. They were all declared dead by the doctor and were buried the same night.

  But the girl, she was not dead yet, she was buried alive. She was unconscious-pale, anaemic and, by most definitions, dead when they buried her in a coffin alongside her family. The coffin maker saw his business boom tremendously in that diseased decade. The girl’s screams echoed through the grounds and woke the nuns and the priest in the middle of the night. They urgently called the gravedigger and with terror gripping their hearts they pointed to the source of the dreadful shrieks.

  “My God Almighty! Have we buried someone alive?” the priest exclaimed. Later on, he would think that, given the morbid history of the church, it was only fitting that such a horrifying incident should occur. The gravedigger did not show up until seven in the morning.

  By the time that he scooped away the fresh dirt and uncovered the coffin, the girl had died of asphyxia. There’s only so long one can live without air and light. He was horrified to see that the girl had chunks of meat stuck in her teeth and a look of utter ghastliness etched on her dead face. She had eaten the dead body of one of her twin brothers (whom they had fitted in the coffin with her because of the dearth of coffins) in order to survive. She had been in there for a whole day, and before that she had been sickly and unconscious for a long time. The only thing she could make sense to do was to devour the corpse of her brother to keep herself alive. The priest and the nuns came and saw this horrendous sight. They asked the gravedigger to bury her back in the ground.

  In the string of events that marred the history of Hallow church, the most recent and notable one occurred in 1935, when a priest came running in the hall with a dagger in his hand and a look of madness on his face. The nuns were praying in the room when he climbed up near the altar and screamed, “God has forsaken us! The devil and his hellhounds are abound! All hope is lost!” And then he plunged the dagger into his eyes repeatedly, as if atoning for something unspeakable that he had seen. He died right on the spot with the statue of Jesus overlooking him.

  That last incident was the deciding factor for the church’s abandonment. To this day, it remains uninhabited, growing wild amidst the wilderness of the forest all around it. To the uninitiated onlooker, it’s a beautiful sight to behold: the church, with ivy and vines growing uninhibited on its walls, amidst gravestones upon gravestones, standing there like a testament of despair, a haunting ground for restless spirits, with wicked history etched into its walls not with ink but with the blood of the demised. It still stands there to this day, a monument of dismay; the Hallow Church on unhallowed grounds; the devil’s dreary den on God’s green earth.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Hallow Church

  Lauren Chapman could not live to see her American Dream fulfilled. Instead, she came face to face with the gross underside of the land of the free and the home of the brave: the skyrocketing, expensive medical bills at the behest of her breast cancer. And in the end, she died in a hospital room, with uncontrollable pain erupting from her chest in waves throughout her body. Breast cancer’s a bitch. It’s an even bigger bitch when you have lived a life of hardship and are expecting to finally unwind in your old age, maybe experience the joys of retirement on the Hawaiian beach with a coconut cocktail in one hand and the latest edition of Vogue magazine in the other. But sadly, that was not to be her fate. She had migrated to America, in hopes of leading a better life, in hopes of making something of herself, and for some part, she did. She was an orphan raised in the care institution of Castle Combe and, even though this was not the nineteenth century, she began to understand the truth behind Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Yes, they still beat you if you asked for more. Who was going to stop them? No one. When she was eleven, a seemingly kindly family adopted her. Their kindness extended only as far as their looks. They were not any better for her than the care home was. There were beatings, there were repercussions for the slightest of mistakes and, to be quite honest, this new foster family was worse than the care home for Lauren. At least she had some friends in the care home. Robin Bennett was one of those friends. Other than the picturesque beauty of Castle Combe, Robin was the only source of any happiness in Lauren’s life. When Lauren graduated from school with passable grades, she decided that it was time that she flee this passive aggressive foster family who border-lined as sadists. Hell, one time her step father had made a move on her. After she had refused, he told her that if she told anyone of this, he would kill her and bury her in the grounds of the Hallow Church.

  Hallow Church. Another horrendous factor that would later catalyse Lauren’s absconding from her home. Like most of the villagers, she too was a lifer. And when you have spent your life living in a close-knit circle of people, you come to hear a lot of tales
about the haunted church on the outskirts of town. The church where evil lies in wait; the church where godliness is a farce. Lauren knew a lot about its horrors. That and the unfavourable circumstances that prevailed in her house forced her into running away. And where would a mere child of eighteen run off to? The magazines that she would read in her bedroom late in the night had given her wild ideas. America! The land of the free! The land of infinite opportunities! The land where dreams came true! She’d seen stuff on the telly: how women were treated with a respect that seemed unheard of in England; how everyone was an equal there, even the people of colour who used to be slaves in another lifetime. Without thinking too much on it, she packed her bags, went to the airport and took the cheapest flight to America. It turned out to be heading to the O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. The only thing Lauren knew about Chicago, other than the fact that it was dubbed as ‘The Windy City’, was that there was a giant lake next to it and that there was a musical of the same name based on a play written by Maurine Dallas Watkins.

  From thereon, her life changed gears. Everything that happened once she touched American soil was too fast to process for Lauren, a woman who had learnt to live life in the quaint quietness of Castle Combe. Except she knew that the quaint quietness was nothing more than a camouflage; a mirage to hide the real terrors that dominated the town. Decades later, when she would look back at her life, she would understand that it was not her foster family’s fanaticism that had made her abscond, and neither was it the fact that she wanted to actually go out and see the world for what it was: she would understand that she had fled from Castle Combe because of the horrors and the haunting history of Hallow Church. No person in their right mind would want to spend a day close to that church. And that was the second factor: most of the people in Castle Combe did not look like they were in their right minds. Their eyes bespoke a malignance that resembled the look of impending death in the eyes of vultures as they hovered over dying victims.

  She knew a lot more about the place, but she did not dare tell anyone about it for the fear that they would think her mad.

  Upon her landing in Chicago, Lauren came to learn of one thing: Englanders were coveted here in America. It was as if the accent made them a luxury to be had; it was objectifying at its worst but Lauren was not complaining. Within her first week, she managed to land a job as a clerk for a law firm. It was easy. She wooed them with her charm and they hired her while ticking the gender equality box in their firm’s progressiveness report.

  It was there that she met her soon-to-be husband, Roger Wright. He was an architect at a big-time architecture firm and was representing his firm in a lawsuit against them. The two of them glanced at each other, he in his expensive suit with his sharp looks, and she on her clerk desk, sitting amidst a pile of documents, and cliché though it was it was love at first sight.

  He was rich enough to provide for the both of them, so she quit her job and took on the role of housewife. Soon, the two of them had a kid, a baby girl. They named her Melanie. And a few years after that, just as Melanie was learning how to fill in her colouring books, they had another girl. They named her Claire. And when Claire was two years old, they had their last baby, another girl who they named Ava. For a few moments, it looked like she had made it. She had moved from the cesspool that was Castle Combe to America, she had fallen in love with a decent big city man, she had three kids, and she was living in a posh house in the North side of the city.

  But things had run on smoothly for long enough. A few weeks after Ava was born, Lauren got a phone call from the hospital telling her that her husband had been involved in a terrible accident. This was most depressing for her, seeing as how she had no babysitter at home and her husband was dying -that’s what the hospital attendant had told her - and there was no way for her to leave her daughters alone in the house. She rang her neighbour and asked her to look after her children while she ran, barefoot, to get a taxi to the hospital, thinking to herself, Oh dear God, let him be alive.

  When she reached the hospital, it was already too late. Her husband had passed away before she could get to his side. His mangled body lay on the bed, bleeding badly and unrecognizable. She cried over his dead body until her neighbour phoned to say that she was going home and that Lauren should come back and take care of her own children.

  From thereon, life was a metallic strife for Lauren and she worked like a robot, lifelessly and painstakingly, to make sure that her daughters had everything they needed while growing up. She sold her house, moved back to the South side of town, enrolled her kids in a school, waited tables, worked at the Laundromats and, at weekends, put on a skimpy suit and tended the bar parties at the Lusty Leopard club.

  Days turned into years and her daughters grew up to become astute students all of whom went on to college with full rides from scholarships. Melanie, who had always been a culinary artist, went on to The Culinary Institute of America in New York. After her graduation, she got about a dozen job offers from all over the country. She chose to work in an environment that would nurture her entrepreneurial spirit. And so Melanie decided to work for a start-up in San Francisco, for shares in the business and some equity. It was the turn of the century and the dot com businesses were doing really well. Her start-up, one of the precursors of dating aps like Tinder and Match.com, went on to make millions, which made Melanie relatively rich. She had been working there as a chef ever since, providing ala carte cuisine for the programmers and computer scientists of the company who, if left to their own devices, resorted to Red Bull and day old pizzas.

  Claire, the second daughter, had her own dreams and desires too, but for the better part of her life she could not figure them out. She decided to put off going to college for a while, even though her SAT scores were nearly perfect and she had scholarships lined up. So she went to New York, to discover herself and find out what she wanted. She tried everything: photography, scuba instructing, playing the cello, mixed martial arts and even snake charming. In the end she settled for being a paralegal to cover up for her bills and expenditures. New York was expensive. Her bosses at the law firm, upon observing her diligence suggested to her that she go to law school and become a lawyer for real. She kept putting it off, but her mind gradually shifted in that direction.

  And the youngest daughter, Ava, was the closest to her mother. Naturally, after the elder sisters left on their respective journeys, Ava was the one left with her mother. She too was academically studious. To remain with her mother, she decided on admission to the University of Illinois, where she picked psychology and business studies as her majors. She was in her second year at college when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The sisters did everything they could to get their mother adequate treatments, but sadly it was her time to depart and no amount of chemo or surgery could save her.

  During her dying breaths, as she saw her three beautiful daughters standing around her hospital bed with tears in their eyes, she tried to pass on something to them: A secret she had kept from them, thinking that it was going to protect them, but as she lay dying, she felt obligated to tell them about it.

  “Hallow Church…” she began. But then the cancer constricted her from saying anymore. She died in front of her daughters, and with her died the secret that was too late to divulge.

  *

  Three years had passed since Lauren’s death. Today, on the second of February, it was the anniversary of her death. The three sisters were sitting in the lounge of their old home, which they had decided to keep as a memento. All three held a glass of wine in their hand and on the lounge floor were photo albums, scattered everywhere. It was nostalgic, looking at those photos, but it also hurt tremendously.

  “Hey, Aves, by the way, congrats on getting the job!” Melanie said after an interlude of silence. Ava wiped her eyes and smiled at her eldest sister.

  “Thanks. I was working as an intern, getting their coffees for them and stuff, but after I graduated they offered me a ful
ltime job. Said I was the best damn intern they’ve ever had!” she said.

  Claire closed the photo album and set her glass down on the floor. She sobbed when she realized that, had their mother been alive, she would have given Claire hell for placing the glass on the floor, and not using a coaster. Lauren Chapman had been many things, among them, an OCD cleanliness freak. Even now, the ghost of her cleanliness lingered in the house in the form of highly organized bookshelves and kitchen cabinets. Ava had been the only one living in the house since Lauren’s death, and she had gone to great pains to keep everything just as her mother had left it. Great pains because she herself was a very scrambled person. Claire had other thoughts on her mind. She was going to tell the girls about it.

  “Hey, listen. My law firm is sort of offering me a scholarship to go to Columbia law school,” she said. The two sisters turned their heads in surprise towards her.

  “Claire! That’s bloody great!” Melanie exclaimed.

  “Whoa! Swear jar, Melanie!” Ava said and picked up the swear jar from above the fireplace. Melanie rolled her eyes and dropped a twenty-dollar bill in. Amongst the many things that Lauren was, she was also completely intolerant when it came to bad language and bad manners. The swear jar had been in the house ever since Melanie had first sworn in front of her. She’d spanked Melanie and told her to never utter that word again. The next day she went to the school and scolded the headmistress. It’s your school and you should know better than to let children learn swear words! I’ve half a mind to complain to the administration about this! She had said sternly. Her voice never rose to the point of screaming, but the way her tone shifted, it gave everyone a good idea of what mood she was in.

  “Anyways, as I was saying, I’ve got a recommendation letter and a scholarship of sorts from them. But you know, we’ve been planning the other thing for three years now and I don’t want to hold it off any longer. So, I said no,” she said and gulped the rest of the wine from her glass.