13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  “You know. I’ve already given them a month’s notice that I am quitting,” Ava said. “Even though I’ve been with them for what, 3 months?”

  “My employer is either going to sell out to Google or close down the company altogether,” Melanie said. “It was good while it lasted and agreed, I made a lot of bucks in the business, but it’s time to move on to being a proper restaurant chef. But yeah, that comes after what we’ve planned.”

  There’s nothing like the loss of a dearly beloved. It unites you, strengthens your bond and makes you overlook the differences. Ava, Claire and Melanie had not always seen eye to eye. Hell, they even had some fights back in the day. But their mother’s demise had brought them together like nothing else ever could. While they may have had their fair share of differences, all three girls loved their mother fiercely. Lauren had been the kind of mother who was more of a friend to her children. Even during their puberties, when their hormones were raging and causing them to break out into rebellious episodes, she had been there for them as a friend and as a confidante. Perhaps that is why the girls never made bad choices such as doing drugs or picking out sleazy boyfriends.

  Now with the death of their mother, they all wanted to do something in her honour. They wanted to make a monument for her. They wanted her good name to be carried out and on in the world. After thorough discussions on what to do, Melanie and Claire couldn’t help but agree with Ava’s proposition. They would start a residential care home in honour of their mother. It made perfect sense: Lauren had been an orphan; she had told them numerous tales of her persecutions in care and Dickens-like tales of violence, misbehaviour and misdemeanour that went on in authority owned residential care homes. She had told them that, if she ever had the time and the money, she would like to start a children’s care home. A nice place for the kids to come to; a place with compassion and no hardships. There are enough hardships out there in the world as it is, she had said. It had affected the women deeply, their mother’s horrifying tale of the care system. Unbeknownst to them, she had not told them of the real horror. She had tried to tell them from her deathbed, but by then it was too late. “Hallow Church” was all she had said.

  What better way to honour her than by starting a children’s care home in her hometown? They had discussed it a lot. And they mistook their mother’s cue and thought that perhaps she wanted them to visit Hallow Church, or maybe even buy it. People overthink things when they’re emotional and in this case, the three Wright sisters were not thinking straight. Between the three of them, they had accumulated enough money to actually start the care home, and this plan had been in the pipeline for three years now. Today, on the death anniversary of their mother, they were going to discuss the final stage of their plan: their travel to England.

  “So, we’re set to go then, aren’t we?” Melanie asked her sisters. Of the three, she was the most hardworking and meticulous. In fact, it was mostly her money that would see their collective plan through. Claire had given her fair share of the money, but it was nowhere near Melanie’s contribution. Ava had just gotten out of college and had her student loans to worry about, but she was most attached to her mother and she had miraculously scrounged a lot of money. to Melanie and Claire’s surprise. “You’re full of surprises young’un,” Claire had said. Ava hated her when they called her that.

  “Well, I have the tickets with me… and the passports,” Ava said.

  “I have all of our money with me, stacked in the briefcase,” Melanie said.

  “And I am going to bring my legal expertise with me!” Claire laughed. They were all going to England the very next week. This was going to be a much-needed tour for the three of them. They had agreed that once the care home was set up and functioning, they would come back to the United States. Once the care home was set up, with the right staff and manager in place, they would visit it in turns, to oversee it’s functioning.

  “Alright then, I’m going to hit it, I’ve had a long day and I wanna wake up first thing in the morning to get some shopping done,” Melanie said and went to her room. She had arrived in Chicago earlier today from San Francisco.

  “See ya, Sis,” Ava said. She and Claire sat on the floor for some time and talked about what they were going to do once they reached England.

  “I took a photography course earlier last year. I’ve been taking random pictures all over New York. Here, let me show you,” she swiped on her phone and pulled out her Instagram feed. “I’m taking my camera with me and simply cannot wait to take some great shots.”

  “Ooh! Nice!” Ava said as she looked at her sister’s photos. Claire was the most artistic of the three. Ava was surprised that she had even taken a course in photography being that she was a natural. Besides being a creative, Claire was also a perfectionist. Taking classes had served her two purposes: refining herself and making up for the lack of college education that her other two sisters had.

  “So, Claire. I was dusting mom’s room last week and I came upon something very spectacular,” Ava continued. “There’s this whole box of diaries and journals that mom used to write. I reckon they’re from back when she used to live in England and I’m bringing them with us on our trip.”

  “Cool.”

  “Wow. You’re awfully nonverbal right now,” Ava said.

  “Nah. It’s nothing. I don’t want to bother you about it,” Claire said.

  “Tell me. C’mon Sis.”

  “Fine. I keep thinking how mom looked in those last moments: she looked scared Aves, and then she said the name of the church. That did it for me. The cancer was eating her alive from the inside, but I think she died out of horror. It’s a feeling I cannot shake. I don’t know. I know I am not making sense right now, but to be honest, I am having reservations about going to England. Why can we not start a care home here? It’s just something I cannot shake off; you know?” Claire said.

  Ava remained silent. She poured wine into their empty glasses and sipped from hers. After a long pause during which they both looked at each other, she said, “You know, during her last days I used to sleep with her in the room, just to take care of her. I haven’t told you about this before, because I knew this was going to freak you out, but seeing as how you’re already there, I’ll say it. She used to cry in her sleep and mutter stuff I couldn’t make sense of. Seriously. I mean, I thought this had something to do with her cancer, but at times I thought that perhaps her past was haunting her. She once cried ‘let the girl go!’ while sleeping and when I asked her about it the next day she acted as if nothing was the matter.”

  “You know what would be a good place to start searching for some sense? The diaries,” Claire said.

  After a few more minutes of talking, Claire went to bed. She had arrived yesterday and the jet lag from the long flight had not yet worn off. This left Ava alone in the lounge, to clean up the mess they had made. She put away the albums and took the glasses and the empty wine bottle to the kitchen, all the while wondering about her deceased mother. What horrors would make her cringe in the deep of the night even when she was heavily sedated?

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  The Arrival

  “Wake up girls, we’re going to land shortly,” Ava said. Her sisters were in the two seats beside her on the plane. They would be landing at Heathrow Airport in fifteen minutes, the hostess had said.

  “We’re there?” Claire said, rubbing her eyes.

  “Seems like it,” Melanie said. She adjusted herself and sat up.

  The airplane landed at the airport and after forty minutes of moving through the terminal, collecting their bags and clearing customs, they were out of the airport.

  “I still don’t see why we have to start the care home in Wiltshire,” Claire said, to which Melanie replied, “it’s where she was born, silly.”

  “You alright, young misses?” a taxi driver with broken teeth approached them. His taxi was parked behind him on the pavement. The girls giggled. They were not yet accustomed to the accents and hi
s cockney tone was genuinely funny to them.

  “No thanks, I think we’ll call Uber,” Ava said and smiled at the taxi driver. He apparently could not understand them, and just stood there, smiling back at them toothlessly with his hands folded behind his back.

  So, they called an Uber and asked him to drop them at the nearest bus station. “What for?” the driver asked.

  “Because we’re going to Wiltshire. Castle Combe, you’ve heard of that place?” Melanie asked.

  “Oh yah. Heard of it. Been to Wiltshire me-self back in the days. Whatcha need a bus for? I’ll take ya,” he said.

  “Seriously?” Claire said incredulously.

  “Ma’am, you see me laughing?” he asked.

  “Whoa, manners,” Ava said and chuckled nervously. Rude encounters were her bane. She did not like anger, misbehaviour or anything negative. Ever since they were all young, she had been the pacifier in the family. “Tell you what, you give us a good rate for taking us to Wiltshire and we’ll think about it,” she said.

  “Well think fast because we’re approaching the city,” he said and then gave his rate, which was surprisingly cheap, and so they agreed to go with him.

  They passed through London. Claire took her camera out of her bag and began taking photos which, according to her, she would sell on a website for a couple of hundred dollars. “They’d pay you that much for these?” Melanie asked, with some surprise in her voice.

  “Hell yeah, you wouldn’t believe the shit people buy off of photography websites. I once saw a picture of a naked, fat, homeless man selling for ten thousand dollars!”

  They all laughed at this even the cab driver, who said, “you reckon they’ll buy a picture of my uncle Timmy? He begs for loose change in Glasgow! He’s fatter than that guy on Seinfeld.”

  The girls wondered which fat guy he was talking about. During their trip they made three pit stops for coffee and light snacks. The journey, according to Google maps, would take two hours and some odd minutes. It took less than that, during which the girls stared out over the beautiful English countryside as it passed. Ava removed a journal from her bag - the first of her mother’s diaries. The rest were in the bag in the trunk and she had pledged to herself to read them all during her stay here.

  Melanie plugged into the music on her iPod and closed her eyes, while Claire continued to photograph the serene landscape. This was the first time in the lives of the three women that they had taken a trip together, and out of the country to boot! Getting the visas and the passports hadn’t been that much of an issue.

  At twelve in the afternoon on a sunny Wednesday in the middle of February, while (the rest of the world was off celebrating Valentine’s day) when the women reached their destination: the small and seemingly cosy town of Castle Combe. The driver dropped them at the Chestnut Inn in the centre of the town. Ava paid him the money and added a substantial tip, he smiled and said, “If you need to attend to any urgent business, you give me a call. Here’s my number and the name’s Carl,” he said.

  “And what? You’ll come all the way from London to here?” she laughed.

  “For a woman as beautiful as you, hell yes,” he said, winked and drove off, leaving her laughing.

  “Can you believe that? He hit on me!” she giggled.

  “Of course he’s gonna hit on you. That short skirt’s bound to attract attention, girl, and not to mention you were sitting shotgun,” Claire said while Melanie led them inside the inn. They’d compared ratings on Yelp and come to conclude that this was the most appropriate place for them to stay.

  “Alright girls,” Melanie said as they headed towards the receptionist in the warm and homely inn. “We’re in Castle Combe.”

  The inn was medieval-ish in nature. Perhaps purposefully so, perhaps not. The wide chandelier shone a yellow light throughout the rustic building. The reception area held a bar and a few tables on which people were sitting, eating food, reading the newspaper and talking in a local dialect that was hard for the girls to pick up.

  “How may I help ya?” the old lady behind the counter asked them. She had a friendly face and a warm smile. She was wearing an apron with traces of flour on her hands.

  “Hi… We need rooms for the three of us,” Ava said, making her way to the front of the counter, past her sisters.

  “Oh, I see. As it happens, we have three rooms up there,” she said.

  “Very well. We’ll take them,” Ava said and paid the lady the required sum.

  “Would you nice girls like some shepherd’s pie. I just made some,” the woman said as she gave them three keys.

  “Hell yes! We’re ravenous actually!” Melanie said.

  “In that case, go right up and wash yourselves. I’ll get your lunch ready for you on that table,” the lady said and pointed to the table in the corner of the inn. “You’re from out of town, aren’t you?”

  “From America, actually,” Claire said.

  “Good gracious. How nice. We don’t have many tourists here,” the woman said. “It’s good to have you.”

  The three sisters went to their rooms, feeling very happy after this hearty and hospitable conversation with the woman downstairs. The floor above held a corridor with six doors leading off it. The inn was not as small as it appeared from the outside. The girls went to their rooms and opened the doors.

  Each room was fitted with a bed, a television that might as well have been from the early 20th century, and a cabinet. The windows looked out over the street. A riverine passed through the town and disappeared into the forest. There was a curved rock bridge, which made Ava think of trolls and the term ‘water under the bridge’, at which she chuckled. The town was small. Everything that there was visible from the three windows of the girls’ claustrophobic-inducing rooms.

  While the rest of England seemed to have caught up with the twenty first century in terms of infrastructure and globalization, Castle Combe was pretty much stuck in the nineteenth century. It was like one of those antique towns you watch documentaries about; how nothing has changed and how they’ve been standing there for as long as three centuries.

  “Aves?” Melanie and Claire knocked at Ava’s door, breaking into her thoughts. She shrugged her head, as if shaking off the remnants of unfinished thoughts, and turned towards them. They were waiting for her to get downstairs for lunch.

  “Coming.”

  The three sisters, each one thoroughly impressed by the place for their own reasons, made their way down the wooden, creaky stairs that seemed to be straight out of a pirate ship.

  *

  “Damn, this pie’s so good,” Melanie said - and that was something. Her being a chef had instilled in her a certain conceitedness about food, which made it a pain in the ass for people to cook around her. Her last two boyfriends had given up after numerous failed attempts at trying to impress her with their straight-out-of-chef-school cooking skills. Melanie even had a blog where she criticised San Fran’s contemporary restaurants. The blog, although it was nothing more than a side-hobby, garnered her a good amount of money after her work colleague showed her how to set up advertisements and monetization.

  “Pretty sure you’re saying that just because you’re ravenous. That or you want to get in the cook’s good books,” Claire said.

  “Nah. It’s really good, Claire,” Ava said. Claire had been sitting with her arms crossed. It turned out that they did not serve coffee at the inn. She had this bad habit of drinking coffee with her meals. It was inexplicable, just like most bad habits are. It was however proving difficult to eat the food without coffee on the side, despite her being hungrier than her sisters. She was also the only one of the three who smoked. She’d started back in tenth grade, sporadically, but it snowballed into a bad habit which she had trouble controlling later in life.

  “The people seem really charming here,” Claire said, diverting her mind from her caffeine withdrawal. She looked at the characteristic people sitting there, as you’d imagine from a Jane Austen novel. Th
ere was a smoker, sitting in the far dark corner of the inn, smoking his pipe away while reading a ruffled newspaper; a group of fat men sat around a round table and laughed every few seconds, lending a feeling of festivity; while another group comprised of women and relatively younger men, sat at the window drinking tea with lashings of scones, crumpets, biscuits, muffins and a half-eaten pie.

  So far, none of them had taken notice of the girls, for which they were thankful. Staying inconspicuous was good. You don’t want to attract too much attention when you’re new in town.

  “Yeah. And the place is not bad either. Tell you what, let me and Ava eat our food, and we’ll roam around the town and search for a shop that serves coffee, is that fine?” Melanie said.

  “Good with me. I’m going to see if the woman can store my food in the meantime. Don’t get me wrong, it looks delicious, but I just can’t eat without coffee,” Claire got up and took her uneaten food to the woman behind the counter.

  After they were free from lunch, the women headed out of the inn to explore more of the town and to finally see the church that they were all curious about.

  *

  This place was like visual caffeine. The trees, the stream of clear water, the greenery, the folklore-like cottages and houses reminiscent of the brothers Grimm tales, and the serene blue sky with the sun pouring generous rays of mild sunshine. The three were accustomed to big cities and the mundaneness of the concrete jungles that they’d grown up in. No matter how beautiful they look in pictures, no matter how progressive, skyscrapers and high-rise offices are no compensation for the true beauty that nature holds.

  Ava breathed deeply and felt the fresh air exfoliate the fumes that had layered themselves in her lung from living too long in the pollution of the city. It felt awesome. As they walked around the town, a soft breeze tickled their faces and lifted what little heat there was from the sunlight.