13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  They said their goodbyes and closed the chat. Martin was a good man, was the verdict Jennie had passed in her mind regarding him. She joined her mother in the lounge where she was reading the morning paper. It was only eight in the morning. Jennie did not get up this early unless it was a school day.

  She looked at her mother and thought better than to tell her right away. She’d tell her father first and then her mom. She knew Carla would not be very hyped about this. Maybe she will. Maybe she would consider this a character building journey. Maybe she will be plain happy that Jennie was getting out of the house for a little while.

  *

  Her father made the comment about the hostel, the respected responsibility and communal living and said that he was going to support her choice. Her mother pursed her lips and finally gave in after saying, “If that’s what you think your life amounts to, go with it. By all means.”

  Other than that, it was rather uneventful. She handed the request to freeze her semester in to the university and was refunded the fees that she had paid earlier in the year. With that money, she bought a train ticket, not a flight ticket, and picked up a new outfit on the way home from the station. She did not want her new employees thinking she was some sort of unclean grunge junkie who had not gotten her head out of the ‘80s.

  The goodbyes were also uneventful. Her mother shook her hand and gave her an abrupt hug that ended before it even began, and her dad constantly shared his stories of hitchhiking through Europe in the pre-Brexit days. Even before he had married. He then kissed her goodbye at the train station and waved to her till her train was far out of sight. She was going to miss her father. The old man was one of the few silver linings in her life, with his optimism and his undimming hope for Jennie. He was a paediatrician and so was her mother, and when she had opted for a journalism course rather than pre-med, just like the rest of the doctors’ kids, it had really disappointed them both. But her dad didn’t say anything. Unlike her mother.

  Jennie had chosen the seat next to the window and, throughout the journey from Leeds to London, she stared out from her window, looking for dementors and trolls, while listening to her travel playlist comprised solely of Kurt Cobain songs. At some point during the journey she fell asleep.

  Jennie did not believe in premonitions or the supernatural, but the dream during her short nap was premonitory in every sense. At least, that’s what she perceived as she washed her face in the train’s bathroom and tried to silence her sobs.

  In the dream, she was standing on the brink of hell itself. And from the fiery pit beneath a horde of burnt bodies melted into one grotesque mess were flailing their hands at her, trying to pull her in with them. She was screaming but all sound was overwhelmed and drowned out by the screeching of the dead corpses and the giant waves of hellfire. And then she saw, standing at the other side of the hole, like an orchestrator, a giant sepulchral figure of macabre terror: a figure draped in dark red, holding a saw-cleaver, and it cackled at her. Its eyes were like those of a crow, and its face was distorted, like that of a demon. A demon with a snout? Or was it a beak? Jennie was not sure because, before she could look closely, the dead-horde had pulled her inside, burning her in the lava they were swimming in, and she woke up screaming.

  She remembered a vague image of the red-ghoul reaching down at her from the top of the pit, as he was lending her his hand. Or was he trying to grapple her for himself, to devour?

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX

  Unpleasant Thoughts

  “For Christ’s sake Mart!” Mary cried as her husband tried to give her a hand. She had staggered off the bed onto the floor, and was trying to get herself back up when he intervened with his husbandly instincts. Only he had come too late. And Mary hated him for that. She was at a point in her life where her disease had robbed her of all self-respect. It had taken her by the throat and was hijacking her life-force.

  “I’m so sorry, Honey,” he said.

  “Go be sorry somewhere else!” she snapped as she pulled at the sheets to get up. At this point, she was lighter than the bedsheets. She plopped back on the bed and stroked her calves which had borne the brunt of the fall. He left the room, with his head bowed low, and didn’t return until it was time for her breakfast. Today was Saturday and the au pair would arrive shortly. Martin was to pick her up from the train station. The train station! Thought Mary with contempt. There was more jealousy in that thought than contempt, seeing as how Mary would give anything to be young again and go about riding trains and doing what she would have been able to do before the sickness settled.

  Before her illness she was living the dream. Sort of. She lived in one of the most expensive houses in London, she had closed a major story that had given her international fame and an equal proportion of money. She had a good husband and a kid. One kid. She did not want more than one child. When you’re focusing on your career, even that one child can hinder you a lot. Not that she hated her kid or anything. She loved her daughter. But there’s always a catch. Life can’t let you live without one. In Mary’s case, she had two. Firstly, and rather obviously, the fact that she was diseased by whatever plagued her, and secondly, her husband was freshly unemployed by Conan and Glen, an architectural firm amongst half a dozen in London which went bankrupt this year. He was project manager and heading three projects when he was fired. This had come as a blow to them both. For Martin because he thought that he was indispensable, and had found out the hard way that he was not. No one ever is. And for Mary because she didn’t have the career stability to oversee her husband’s transfer from one job to the other. Had it not been for her big break, they would have been in the murky waters of poverty.

  Mary, before she had quit her own job, was doing an investigative piece deemed as a dead end by her fellow journalists and her news firm, on a politician, a local big gun, and his connection with similar big guns who dealt in big guns. Antonio Salvatore, a member of the congress, was unveiled rather brutally by Mary. He had connections with four weapons cartels and was using his influence in the government to help the gun trade flourish. She was not doing it for reasons of morality or the research. She knew that if she blew the whistle on him, it would do wonders for her. It would give her portfolio that boost she had always yearned for, and it would provide her with money. Sponsors, admirers, her news firm and rival companies alike. They were all serenading her with money and so much more: luxurious offers, promotions, amenities that were too good to be true. Ironically, right after she had collected her royalties and the moolah that came her way, she fell sick. To the world, it was a shame; bright reporter falls ill after making ground breaking discovery, that was how the newspapers put it. But there was more to it than that. Directly after she fell sick, her husband lost his job. Things could not look bleaker for the family.

  The first order of business Mary pursued was getting the hell out of Dodge. She made it perfectly clear to her agreeing husband that she did not want to live in the apartment anymore. Downtown London, with all its noise and pollution, in her opinion was one of the palpable causes of her sickness. They looked for houses but not in the regular suburbs because Mary had stubbornly declared that if she wanted to go big then she had to go big like no one else. So it was that after a month of scurrying through the real estate websites (going to real estate offices was so twentieth century), Mary settled on securing the Bleak House. It looked hideous to the uninitiated onlooker, but once you accustomed your eyes to the macabre appearance of the house, you could see that it was easily an acquired taste. It did not come cheap, the house. But dearth of money was not amongst Mary’s inhibitions. She used a considerable portion of her earnings to buy the house. The house… There was something intangible about it that did not seem quite right to Martin or the very few friends that Mary had. Her parents had both died when she was in her teens, so there was neither influence nor pressure from them in her decisions. She had put herself through college, she had married Martin after sleeping on it (and him) for one
night. All that she did for the most part of her life, was either impulsive or downright blatantly outrageous. Like following the Antonio Salvatore story. The editor in chief of her paper at that time warned her repeatedly not to dig where the snakes may lie dormant. But she did, nonetheless. He later resigned as a result of professional shame, but that part did not concern Mary seeing as how she was too sick to return to work for her paper. She decided it was time to give the wonderful world of freelancing a go. She had everything she needed to become a great freelance journalist, in her opinion. She had the diverse portfolio, a good education, a work-ethic that did not break or bow to anything, and a disposition to stay in her home courtesy of her illness.

  Martin tried very hard to be supportive of his wife’s new lifestyle. When her sickness dawned on her the way it did, he spared no expense in getting her checked up at every hospital worth its salt in the city. The prognosis, such as it was, was always the same: this illness baffles us, we have never seen anything like this in our entire medical careers, we cannot pinpoint its cause nor its concise symptoms, blah blah blah. It was ironic seeing as how Mary had the monetary resources at her disposal and yet, for all her money, she could not get the docs to treat her. She gave in eventually, accepting her illness as part of who she was, and did not even bother following the procedures prescribed by the physicians. In the end, it was the psychiatrists who passed a conclusive remark about her condition. They said that her suffering was psychosomatic. The root causes of her anaemic weakness lay not in any physical malady, but in her mind.

  “They’re calling me crazy!” she declared to Martin.

  “No, no, Honey, they’re not!” he tried to be the voice of reason.

  “Oh really? Explain to me what you think psychosomatic means!”

  “Honey, all they’re saying is that the stress and the anxiety of your previous job may be the onset of this problem,” Martin said. “They say that, with time and sufficient rest and relaxation, you will get better.”

  That was the end of their conversation regarding her illness. The shrinks prescribed anti-anxiety medicine and pills that made her sleep for eighteen hours a day. She did not mind staying in bed and sleeping it off. But after she woke up, she never felt any better. She would feel more tired, unable to move, coupled with the crippling depression that would render her paralysed. She confessed none of this to her husband or the doctor who made weekly home visits, because confession would show weakness. It would show that she had cracked when she was not supposed to. Or maybe she had her own reasons.

  A month after they had moved in to the new house and had settled in their respective environments, Martin went on to find himself a new job. It was a considerable downgrade from the one he had, and he had to work longer hours to make enough money, but he persevered and did it nonetheless. He was required to be at work most nights, since the majority of the company’s clients were Arabs and Middle-Easterners who seemed to have a little too much money to spend on yet another skyscraper in Dubai, another Ferrari Park in Abu Dhabi and another luxury apartment tower in Jeddah. Due to the nature of the job, he was not permitted to leave the offices until well after midnight.

  It was difficult simultaneously taking care of his wife and working in extent of full-time. And their daughter was on her summer leave from school. She was only seven, and by every right as a child needed the attention and care of both parents, and yet she was not getting any. She had developed a stutter which the paediatrician pinpointed as a symptom of rejection. With all that was happening, it had become imperative that someone be hired to help on the domestic front. That’s why Martin had posted the ad on the internet and in the newspapers.

  Mary was not thrilled by this idea, but there was only so much that she could object to. Martin put his foot down and explained to her that this was for her own good, their own good and that if she wished to get better and for their daughter to grow into a sane and fulfilled young woman, they had to hire an au pair.

  *

  “Honey, I’m off to the train station,” Martin called from the lounge. Mary, from her bed, heard the predictable jingle of keys and, after five minutes, the car leaving the driveway as she typed on her MacBook. She had secured her first job as a freelancer today. It was about time that someone hired her. Right now, she was interviewing with the client and outlining her budget and the statistical prerequisites to the job. The client was gullible, she gathered during the first five minutes of their chat, and if she played her cards right she might be able to squeeze double the offered money out of him.

  Abigail was sitting by the bed, playing with her Charlie the Choo Choo trainset. Abigail waited for the client to respond. She looked at her daughter, thinking of her birth seven years earlier. She and Martin were young, wild and stupid. They were very much in love. She scoffed at how marriage gradually progresses: the infatuation and the spark that one deems love begins to mellow into a professional relationship where the couple call each other ‘Honey’ and pass one other the marmalade and butter at breakfast and drive minivans to accommodate their offspring. She was turning into the very women she had once made fun of. That was killing her more than her disease was. And this girl, this Jennie Boddington, who was coming today to au pair, was going to be one very painful reminder of all that Mary herself once had been. At thirty-three, with Martin two years her junior, God Almighty, it felt like they were two old souls biding their time after having lived their life to the fullest in their twenties.

  It’s the house, she found herself thinking. It’s the house that’s nourishing the canker in my brain.

  Buying the house was a decision she immediately regretted once making it. It was called Bleak House for a reason, and Mary was gradually becoming aware why. There was nothing apparently wrong with the place. Behind the house were fields upon fields that merged with the greenery of the plains in one pristine line over the horizon. Trees punctuated the fields and, on a clear day with a light wind blowing, the scenery looked like it was out of a painter’s wet dream. It was exactly the healthy outlook that the doctors had prescribed for her. To one side of the house were woods which expanded all the way to the outskirts and then expanded some more. Their dense greenery was vivid; their natural splendour was unwavering. Despite the fact that her sickness made it very hard for her to move about the house (she had a wheelchair with her at all times, and every time she used it she hated herself for it) Mary always made it to the back porch of her house to see the sun set and the sun rise every day. It was the only thing that she enjoyed doing anymore. God forbid, she never said it out loud but she had reached a point in her life where she was not sure whether or not she loved her daughter.

  Mary occupied the room right next to the front door. It was close to the kitchen, it was close to the entrance and if you opened the doors and windows, a pleasant breeze wafted through it on warm days. There were six rooms in the house. Two bedrooms on the ground floor. Martin and Mary lived in one, and Abigail, their daughter lived in the other along with all her toys. There were two bedrooms on the floor above. Then there were the washrooms, the dining room and the lounge. It was a very exhaustive house. One of the two bedrooms on the top floor was converted into a study/library in the scenario when Mary would get better, she would use it and progress her freelance career from there. The other room was a guest bedroom, which Martin had made up and replenished earlier today for Jennie to occupy. Another reason for Mary’s jealousy. She wanted the room. She wanted the room with the windows that overlooked both the forest and the fields and the flora near the patio in the back. But alas, she could not have it. For her to traverse the twenty steps was an impossibility. And even though Martin was a good husband (the very best when it came to following orders and supporting her every move) she knew that he was not saintly enough to carry her to and from her room on the top floor every day.

  While she was deep in the murky lake of her own unpleasant thoughts, Mary heard the car in the driveway. Great, she’s here.

  M
ary, before the two of them could come inside the house, garnered all her strength into one pathetic leap from her bed to the wheelchair. She wanted to make a solid impression on Jennie and, sick or not, she knew she could not do so from the plushness of her bed.

  She staggered on the wheel chair and hurt her hip in doing so. Shit! She hissed silently, silent enough for it to be a whisper, and rolled the room towards the entrance. On her way, she passed the mirror next to her room. She gazed at her reflection for a moment. Bright brunette hair, eyes the colour of hazel, and cheekbones high enough that she might well be a red Indian, and bee-stung lips that naturally pouted; she was the epitome of intelligent beauty. But as she gazed, she saw that the cheeks beneath the cheekbones had started to sulk. Gashes and shadows showed under her eyes and strands of unmistakable grey jutted from her mane of brown hair. She was staring at her ghost and she did not like it one bit. Mary rolled the wheels of her wheelchair and hastily moved away from the mirror.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

  Birdman

  Jennie and Martin had taken advantage of the commute from the train station to the house to get acquainted. She told him about her life and her reasons for freezing her studies for the time being, without mentioning her mother’s role in her decision, and he in turn explained her responsibilities to fulfil in their house. The drive took them a little less than thirty minutes since the streets were not cluttered with traffic on this Saturday morning.

  When they reached the house, Martin offered to take her luggage but she insisted that she would do it herself. He went in and she got busy unloading her baggage, but not before she got a chance to look at the house and the surroundings.

  It was beautiful in her opinion. The vastness of the landscape behind the house and the architectural beauty (which to some people might as well have been downright disgusting) were charming to her. It was windy today and the sun was playing hide and seek behind rainless clouds. She took a picture with her phone and uploaded it to Facebook. But as she was putting her mobile back in her pocket, she could not help but notice the window at the far-left side of the house on the first floor. A lot happened simultaneously in that one moment: the sun dipped behind the clouds and darkness fell momentarily; she saw a looming figure standing behind the curtains… a red entity, anatomic in its blood-redness, and scary in the way it was lurking behind the curtains. Before she could see it for another moment, everything returned to normal. The sun came out, the wind started blowing and the birds chirped once more in their trees. She thought that whatever she had seen was just an illusion, a burlesque trick her mind was playing on her. Jennie took her bags and followed Martin who was waiting at the door.