13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  Claire screamed and leapt out of her bed, knocking the lantern to the floor. Total darkness ensued save for the faint light of the moon that shone through the windows. In that sliver of silvery light, Claire saw that her arms and her legs and the visible region of her chest were visibly scratched. As if a dog had been at her. It was red: painful red. She looked around for signs of the priest but he was there no more. Whatever purpose he had come to fulfil, he had succeeded in doing so. The hellhounds had done their job, by the looks of it. They had marked Claire. And once marked, the victim is bound for hell. So the lore says. That’s what the villagers would say if they saw the scratches on her body.

  Claire fainted at this sight of her ravaged body and fell to the floor with a loud thud.

  *

  Melanie was unaffected by the wailing of her younger sister and the thudding of her other sister. She had her iPhone’s volume turned to the maximum and wrote on her iPad to the loud blaring of music through her headphones. The lights in her room were still on.

  All of a sudden all the lights went out at the same time. This made her take off her headphones. Black Sabbath could play another time, she said to herself and went to the distribution board to reconnect the electricity supply. She knew it, the electrician had done sloppy work. She was going to give him a piece of her mind first thing in the morning. But before her feet had touched the ground, Melanie felt herself levitating off the bed. It was like in one of those exorcism movies. She tried to turn her head around to see what was happening but her whole body had gone rigor mortis of sorts. Her eyes widened with unfathomable emotions, each one dropping her stomach like an elevator with the cables cut loose. This was certainly no hallucination. She was five feet off her bed! And whatever was lifting her off the bed, was doing so with malevolence. She could feel claws burning into her body like hot iron. She saw from the corner of her eyes, a pair of red eyes, glowing with flames from hell itself, and in the light of those flames she saw the face of it as a ram’s head. It was the devil itself. He was thrusting her in the air like a ragdoll. Her vocal cords had abandoned ship. She uttered no scream. Her arms and legs flailed in the air against her will. And then the devil let go, unhooking his burning claws from her skin and throwing her viciously on the bed. She hit the bedpost and lapsed into deep unconsciousness.

  *

  The cross in the hall turned of its own volition against the wall until it was tilted upside down. A sinister laughter echoed in the halls. A cackle that had no place in a church. Or was it the church that had no place here?

  The Wright sisters had walked into the devil’s den like bound sacrificial virgins. In the night sky, a blood moon rose. And every single one of the villagers saw it from their windows. It was time. They were ready. The dark powers that resided in Hallow Church had to be assuaged. They had to be fed. It was time.

  *

  Councillor Victor Powell decided to check up on the sisters and their progress with the church renovation. He parked his car in front of the building and knocked on the door. No one answered. He opened the door and went inside. The sisters were sitting there, looking scared and bruised.

  “My goodness me! What on earth’s the matter, girls?” he asked.

  “Mr. Victor,” began Ava, but Melanie cut her off. “Mr. Victor, there’s no other way to say this, and this question may or may not seem outrageous, but is this place haunted? Because we’re pretty sure something came in the night and frightened the hell out of us. And would you look at the inverted cross?” she pointed at the cross, now forming the iconic Satanist’s insignia.

  Victor said nothing at first, then he gulped and sat down beside the sisters. He said, looking perfectly normal, “Now, now. I am sure that you are reasonable women. There’s nothing wrong with this church. You have my word. And I understand that you might be scared by this place, but when it comes to buying new places, and residing in them, its common occurrence for human psychology to cast doubts and aspersions, which might manifest in the form of horror and trauma.”

  When he put it like that, he certainly made sense. But that did not explain the blood in Claire’s room. It did not explain the marks on Ava’s neck and it most certainly did not explain the bump on Melanie’s head, from where it had hit the bedpost.

  “I was just coming by to check in and see if you needed anything, but rest assured this is a sacred place. There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said and then got up and left with urgency. The Wright sisters found this behaviour peculiarly suspicious, albeit it intangible and arguable.

  “Mr. Victor,” Claire called as he was leaving the building. He turned to look at her.

  “What’s with the cross? It turns every night. We get up and fix it and it reverts back at three every morning,” she said.

  He stopped halfway through the door, turned around and said, “It’s nothing. Just stay put. Everything will sort itself out.”

  “And that clears it. There’s something suspiciously wrong with the people of this town, as well. Just like mom’s journal said!” Ava said. She had read more of her mother’s diaries last night after the horrific incidents. Melanie and Claire had read the diary in the morning after they all shared their versions of the night terrors.

  “What the hell are we going to do? We’ve spent literally all we have on this place!” Melanie said. She was utterly clueless on what to do. And the horror of this realization was more than the horrors of this church. Much like leaping from a plane, fully trusting that your parachute will work, and then you dare not to deploy until the very last moment. Except when you pull the pin, nothing happens, and you’re falling and falling down to earth, accelerating, with nothing to soften the blow. Lack of foresight into the future, and the uncertainty in the face of calamity; they were the real ghosts haunting all of their lives. What was Ava going to do once she got back? She didn’t know. She had ditched her job, and while she may have told her sisters that her employer was holding her job for her, she knew that this was not so.

  Claire had lied about the law school. Well, partially. She had applied to the school and had been admitted. But there was no scholarship. If she had hopes of becoming a lawyer, she had to do it on her own. And what little chance there was had gone to smoke when she had invested all her money in this charity project.

  Melanie’s old company had retired her and she had been unsuccessfully applying for jobs all across San Francisco. The hotels and restaurants said that she lacked experience and the new start-up companies said that she was not ‘chic’ enough for them. Whatever the hell that meant.

  And in their last-ditch attempt to do something meaningful with their lives, they had found themselves in the snares of a horror that had dwelt in this land for God knows how long.

  “Mum mentioned Robin many times in her diary. Do we know who that is?” Ava asked.

  “I don’t know of any of mother’s friends. And who knows, whoever this Robin is, she may be dead,” Melanie said.

  “You know what. I don’t want to talk about this. I think I might back out Entirely but, let’s say that for tonight we sleep in the same bloody room!” Claire said. She was still freaked out about the priest. She hadn’t mentioned the sinister pus and blood coming out of his eye socket. That detail would only unnerve her sisters even more than they already were.

  Throughout the day, they each put on a brave face and put the finishing touches to the house. But this prospect was growing bleaker and bleaker by the day. Whoever was going to come to a haunted residence? If word got out of the hauntings, no one would send kids here.

  They had no desire to discuss this. In fact, after the departure of councillor Victor, none of them dared mention any more about last night. It was as if the place was bugged. Bugged by the devil.

  Melanie decided she needed fresh air after all this. She went outside and roamed the grave lot for a while. She spotted the girl again; the one she had seen earlier during her stay here; the girl with the tattered dress; the girl with the pale fac
e. Where the hell are Ava and Claire when you need them? She cursed under her breath and approached the girl. This time the girl did not run. She turned to face Melanie.

  Melanie did not think it possible to be scared out of their wits in the bright of day. But at that moment, she definitely was. Even though the sun was shining and the birds were tweeting in the trees, the ghastly sight of the girl’s face with her full white eyes, pupils missing, and sunken face gave Melanie what she could only imagine was a heart attack dealt to a heart rendered frail by the incidents of last night. But Melanie braved through this shock. The girl looked at Melanie and said in a raspy voice, “You need to leave.”

  “Who are you? Why are you like this?” Melanie asked. “Are you…dead?”

  “You need to leave. This place is not safe for you and your sisters. Do you know not of the dark history of this place?”

  “No! I don’t! And no one dares tell me!” Melanie cried helplessly.

  “This place is the breeding ground of evil, masqueraded by a church with hollow foundations. This is the devil’s haunt. He roams this village, and this lot in particular. And the time of his feast is night. You need to leave lest you be buried in the ground like me and the others,” she said.

  “Who are you?”

  “There’s a tale about a family suffering from cholera and how, when they died, their daughter was buried alive. I am her. Except when I was buried, it was not by mistake. It was on purpose. You need to leave,” the girl said and then faded before Melanie’s eyes.

  Melanie could not make sense of what the girl had just said but she knew, in her heart of hearts, that she had seen a ghost in broad daylight. She rushed indoors and found Ava and Claire and told them every detail of what had happened out in the lot.

  The sisters didn’t say another word to each other. They fired up their laptops, their tablets and their mobiles and began searching the internet for any history. And, as if something had scraped the internet clean of fingerprints, they found nothing on Castle Combe.

  It was nearing evening when a knock at the church’s door distracted the girls from their amateur detective work.

  “Who could this be?” Ava asked out aloud as she went to the door. Doing so made her tremble. Ava and Claire had taken to doing everything together after last night. Claire was in the toilet at the moment. So, Ava had to go alone. When she opened the door, she saw a woman, almost of the same age her mother would now be, standing there with a solemn face.

  “Can I help you?” Ava asked.

  “My dear God. You’re the spitting image of your mother!” the woman said.

  “Are you-” Ava began to ask but the woman cut her off mid-sentence. “You don’t know who I am. I was your mother’s friend, her only friend, when she lived here. I’m-” she was about to say, but Ava felt the need to cut her off just like she had done.

  “You’re Robin. Robin Bennet. I do know you. And in case you’re wondering how; my mother wrote about you in her diaries,” Ava snapped.

  “Oh, she did, did she?” Robin said. Tears welled up in her eyes. She stepped inside the building and walked beside a perplexed Ava to the far corner of the hall where Claire and Melanie sat, anxiously waiting to see who had braved the curfew and shown up at the turn of the evening.

  She reintroduced herself to Claire and Melanie, repeating what she had said to Ava, that they looked very much like their mother. Seeing the apprehension on their faces, Robin knew they had come face to face with the horrors of the church.

  “Listen, girls, I need you to believe me because what I am about to say sounds highly unlikely,” she said.

  “Ha-ha. Try us. You wouldn’t believe the hell we’ve been through these past days,” Melanie said.

  “By the way, Victor Powell, your parish’s councillor, he turned up today. Told us to not worry about anything and to stay put. What’s the deal with that guy?” Claire asked.

  “Powell was here? Oh God, Oh God,” Robin said and began massaging her temples. “Okay. We’ve little time and I must warn you. Hear me out and please, don’t judge me as the bad guy when I am done.”

  Robin sat them down and started telling them about the grotesque, bloodstained history of Hallow Church. She began from the very beginning: from the burning of the Lollards all the way to the last notable incident of the priest going mad and stabbing himself in the eye. Claire cried, “aha!” when Robin reached that part. Robin continued about the Satanist cult practices. Ava told her about the cross-reverting upside down. She nodded gravely. Melanie asked her about the graves. She told them about the cholera outbreak. Melanie mentioned the girl in the tattered dress. Robin dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and explained about the girl who had been buried alive. When the story was revealed to them, the Wright sisters sat in the dark of the hall, paler than the ghosts who had been haunting them.

  “I knew when you three turned up that you were Lauren’s daughters. Believe it or not she came to me in a dream. She said that blood was returning to where it was supposed to spill, and that I must stop it. Because I owe her. And she’s right. I did not live in the same residential house for underprivileged children that she did. No, my family were respectable members of the village, ingrained in its history, and well known amongst the people. But Lauren and I became friends. She would tell me about the horrors that she saw and I would tell her my experiences. It became the foundation of our friendship. What I didn’t tell her was that my family were members of those vile people who were responsible for the blackness of this place. She talked about leaving. I used to promise we’d both leave together. You see, there’s a practice in this town that has been carried out for more than a century. Lauren came to find out about it. I knew about it because of my parents. But I daren’t tell her that I did. It was a blood sacrifice. Every year the villagers would sacrifice a young woman in the name of the devil and the dark forces that resided within these walls. It was the villagers’ way of making sure that evil was kept assuaged and at bay. And the worst part was that I knew about it, and I didn’t care. I was safe. My family wouldn’t let me be sacrificed. Hell, they organised that dark event. But Lauren found out about this practice and she made plans to run away. And take me with her. I supported her, I did. But on the night of our escape, I chickened out. She had nothing tethering her to this place, but I had my family, no matter how vile they were, to think about,” she paused and took a sip from her glass of water. The sisters listened to her, transfixed.

  “And so, she ran away, and I felt guilty day by day that I had let her go alone. But that’s not the end of it. As I grew older, I started inadvertently becoming more active in this blood ministration. God forbid me, I even picked out girls for the sacrifice sometimes. And cliché as it may sound, but to hell with it, I’ll say it. I’m here to atone for my sins,” she said.

  “What the hell!?” Claire asked.

  “Victor Powell didn’t come here today to check up on you. He told you to stay put because you’re to be sacrificed this time. The blood moon, as you’ve seen it, rises every year about now. And when it does, we kill a girl inside this very church. He and the councillors have agreed that you three will be killed in this place,” Robin said, graveness lining every word.

  “How the hell do we know that you’re not with them? How do we know that this is not a trap?” Ava asked. All her timidity was gone. What she and her sisters had heard in the past hour was so sickening that they wanted to pack their bags and be done with this place.

  “I’m not. You’ll have to take my word for it. Believe me… I feel like the worst person on earth right about now. They say the guilty don’t feel remorse but I guess that’s not true. Look, let me help you out here, and make up for my past!” Robin said.

  “What are we to do?” Melanie asked.

  “They’re going to hold the sacrifice in this church tomorrow night. As we speak, the villagers are making the preparations for your slaughter. The cleaver’s been sharpened, the altar of the devil’s been polished and vers
es from the book of the devil are being memorized. The villagers are on the lookout for you. Right now, they think you’re all in this church. They intend to take you in your sleep tonight,” Robin said.

  “We need to get the hell out of here!” Ava shrieked. Darkness had fallen all around them and the blood moon shone through the bloodstained windows with the tears of the saint and angels on them. There came a bloodcurdling scream from the first-floor room. Everyone leapt to their feet.

  “What was that?” Robin whispered.

  “It’s the hellish evil of this place, what else do you think?” Claire said rudely. Before she could finish, a sinister cackle sounded in the hall. St. Jude’s painting began crying again. Everything started happening all at once. The cross began turning against the wall, the walls started heaving in and out, as if the lungs of some monster, and the cackling grew more and more shrill, punctuated by the lamenting scream from the floor above. Hallow Church looked like the world’s worst carnival horror house.

  “We need to leave now,” Ava said amidst heavy sobs.

  “No shit Sherlock,” Claire said. On cue, the girls went to their rooms and started packing their bags hurriedly. Melanie saw from the window of her room, dark figures roaming outside in the lot. People. Villagers whom she could recognize.

  “Guys, we need to do something, I think they’re going to surround the building,” Melanie said.

  “I saw them from my window as well. What do they think they’re going to do?” Claire asked.

  “They’re going to barge in and take you prisoner. Tomorrow they will execute you,” Robin said. “And if I am correct, I think they’ve surrounded the whole place, all the villagers. I think Victor ordered this. He knew you were scared and ready to leave. And dammit, my car’s parked outside. Now they know I am in here with you,” Robin said.

  Ava ran to the windows in the main hall, Claire to the ones in the entrance hall, and Melanie scampered to the top of the stairs to get a better view from above. They all returned within a minute and met back in the main hall.