13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  They headed to the park. During the five-minute walk, Jennie told Abigail a made-up story after much insistence. In the story, Gandalf and Dumbledore (two of Jennie’s favourite fictional characters) were battling a giant Cthulhu.

  “What is a Cthulhu?” Abbey asked with curiosity.

  “It’s like a very big monster with tentacles and super powers.” Jennie tried explaining what it looked like but despite all her efforts, Abigail only comprehended that she was talking about Squidward, the cynical squid from SpongeBob.

  “Yeah, it’s like Squidward but bigger and scarier,” she said.

  “I hate Squidward,” Abigail said. “He is never happy. He never smiles and he is rude all the time.” She then paused and turned her head around as if to see that no one was listening. Then she added, “just like my mom.”

  Jennie did not respond to this. She did not want to enforce her opinion, or even share it, with Abigail. Her mind was still in development, she was a child, and any and all sorts of stimuli and opinions would change it, if not for the better then for the worst, and she did not want to play her part in developing it for the worst. So, she changed the narrative of the story and started a new one where SpongeBob and Patrick meet Harry Potter and they all go riding their wands all over London.

  “I love Harry Potter!” Abigail gleefully cheered.

  “Me too!”

  “I like you, Jennie,” Abigail said. The truth and rawness in her voice made Jennie tear up. She patted the kid’s head.

  During this talking, they had reached the park. It dripped with forlornness. They were the only two there. A jungle gym stood sullenly in the corner while a pair of swings creaked in the breeze. Two see-saws waited for play, one was broken and lying on the floor. Two benches occupied the middle of the park, next to a fountain, which oddly enough was spouting water at this time of the afternoon. Jennie sat down on the bench, expecting Abigail to go and play on the gym or take a few swings. But instead, Abigail sat down beside Jennie.

  “What’s wrong, Honey? Don’t you want to play?” Jennie asked.

  “Nu-uh. I don’t. I want to go back home. Birdman says it’s bad here. He says I should come back to the house and play in my room where he can keep any eye on me,” Abigail replied.

  Again with this birdman shit, Jennie thought. Who was he? She began to ponder but halfway through she realized that she didn’t give a damn. She humoured Abigail by asking, “what’s he saying, the birdman?”

  Abigail stifled a sob, much to the horror of Jennie. Up till now she had been thinking that whatever this may be, was just fun and games. That was the whole point of having imaginary friends. “He says I should go back home. The bad people. The dead people will come and get me otherwise.”

  Dead people? Was she pulling a line from that Bruce Willis movie?

  “It’s alright, Honey. Let’s go home,” Jennie decided that it was better that they follow along whatever twisted creative trajectory Abigail’s birdman was taking them.

  They went home silently, not talking anymore about anything. When she reached the home, Jennie smelt that dead stench once again. And this time she did not bother closing her nose.

  *

  “Hi everyone!” Martin was back. He entered the house just as the they entered from the back.

  “Hello, Martin,” she said. “Where were you?”

  “Oh, I had to go to the farmer’s market,” he said and then explained why they had to buy and eat only organic food and how it was supposed to be beneficial for Mary’s health.

  “Those cigarettes are surely not,” Jennie said.

  “Oh yeah. It’s her one vice that she’s not given up after the sickness,” Martin said. Jennie thought it better not to mention that Mary also had a tendency to breakfast like champions. Martin looked tired and flustered enough as it was.

  “You’ll be making lunch today,” he said as he headed upstairs.

  “What shall I make?”

  “Be creative. Surprise me.”

  A waft of thick smoke came out of the door as he opened it. Jennie saw the debacle from the kitchen counter. She still had not asked or prodded anyone about Mary’s sickness. Other than the fact that she looked apparently weak, there was nothing of the sorts that suggested that she was ill. So, she decided to ask the one person who was close to her in this house.

  “Abbey, why is your mother sick?”

  “Mommy is sick because she worked too hard. That’s what daddy says,” Abigail said. She was playing Angry Birds on Jennie’s phone.

  Weird and weirder, thought Jennie as she rummaged through the freshly brought supplies in the kitchen. She decided on making Bucatini with Winter Pesto and Sweet Potatoes. The last time she had made it, her mom and dad were out of town and her best friend, Lizzie, had helped with the cooking.

  “Sweetie, I am going to need my mobile back to look at the recipe,” she said to Abigail. The kid grudgingly gave it back and went to her room, leaving Jennie alone in the kitchen to prepare lunch.

  *

  “Ugh, you made this?” Mary said as she put the fork down.

  “Yes, I did,” Jennie said with hinted defiance. She knew that Mary caught her accent, but she did not give a flying cahoot. It had only been one day and Jennie was already tired of Mary’s snobbishness. The roles had reversed. Abigail was the sensible and agreeable person in the house while her mother had taken on her role of throwing sissy fits and temper tantrums.

  “Why? Is there something wrong?” Martin asked as he helped himself to another helping. Abigail, sitting beside Jennie, seemed to be enjoying the food. A kid loving vegetables! That was a first in the history of firsts.

  “No. There’s nothing wrong with it,” Mary said. She would reserve her insolence for Martin for when they were upstairs. Until then, she depended on him to carry up and down stairs in his arms, and she could not jeopardize this by misbehaving with him. So, despite the blow to her ego, she ate the food that Jennie had prepared.

  In Jennie’s opinion, it was the best dish she had ever made in her life. The organic ingredients really brought out the flavour.

  “Jennie, I have been meaning to mention something. Abbey here gets a serious case of sleepwalking every once in a while. The doctors say it is nothing major. It happens when you move into a new house, they said. So, I don’t know if you are a light sleeper or not, but if, in the middle of the night, you hear something from her room, do go and check whether she’s sleepwalking.” he said.

  “Will do, Mr Walker,” she said. She had refrained from calling him Martin in front of Mary. It seemed offensive.

  “And also, how did you sleep last night? Well, I assume?” he asked. The sound of Mary rolling her eyes was practically audible in the house. Jennie wanted to turn to her and ask why, if you have so much of a problem with me being here, did you hire me in the first place, you bitch? But she already knew the answer to this question. She was sharp:

  It was not Mary but Martin who had insisted on hiring Jennie. Because he was being vexed to the edge of sanity by Mary. One man cannot juggle taking care of a kid, taking care of a supposedly sick wife, a full-time job, all the household chores as well as cooking food to her liking. It was simply impossible. That’s the story Jennie told herself.

  “It was fine. I slept like a baby. You know, tossing turning and crying,” she said. Martin blinked at her for a second and then burst out laughing. Abigail looked at Jennie and then at her dad and then started laughing too, even though she did not get the joke. Mary issued a ‘Hmph!’ and clattered her fork loudly on the empty plate.

  “Jennifer. Would you be so kind as to make me some tea?” Mary asked. Jennie nodded and went to the kitchen, glad to be out of Mary’s company. She made tea for all of them, including Abigail.

  *

  Tonight, was no different from last night in terms of discomfort. Jennie had decided that she would sleep with her pyjamas on, because Martin had asked her to keep her door open so that she could hear Abiga
il if she went walking about in the night.

  The stifling aura was heavy in the house. She felt like she could not breathe, even after opening the window to allow the cool breeze in. It was not that the house was hot or humid, there was something else. As if the very molecules of air were densely huddled, suffocating rather than providing breathable air. With the window open, she could not help but overhear noises, eerily like whispers. Whispers of the damned, she thought with dread.

  Jennie was coming to the realisation that there was something onerously wrong with this house. She was also coming to realise that she had made a mistake, a blundersome one, by taking this job and signing up for shit she was not getting paid well enough to deal with. Whether this house was haunted or plainly morbid, she neither knew nor cared at this point. She wanted to get through the rest of her days here without any blatant event happening, whether it was something along the lines of Mary throwing a giant fit, or whether it had something to do with the whispers, the creaking, and the birdman. The figment of Abigail’s imagination was causing her to remain sullen and sad, despite having all the toys and entertainment in the world. Perhaps this overprotective, paternal birdman was a way of overcompensating for the lack of love from her mother, perhaps it was a movie character that got stuck in her head long after she’d even forgotten the movie. Perhaps it was a story one of her naughty class mates had told her. Whatever it was, it was draining her, and Jennie had no experience in the psychotherapeutic department to cure her of this shit.

  Jennie went to sleep, despite the loud snores from the room right next to hers. Her body was sweltering hot. The house was cold and yet Jennie could not stop sweating.

  Around the same time she had woken the previous night, Jennie woke with a start, her body drenched. She crawled out from under the blankets and crept to Abigail’s room to check up on her. She was more lucid and more awake than she had been last night. There had been no disturbing dream today. She thanked God for that. She was surprised to find the door to Abigail’s room closed. And the very same nursery rhyme that she had heard from the room last night (she had made herself believe that she had dreamed that part, but now, wide awake, she was no longer sure) was coming from the room, louder, more vivid and faster.

  Ring-a-ring o' roses,

  A pocket full of posies,

  A-tishoo! A-tishoo!

  We all fall down

  Jennie opened the door, this time hoping to catch whoever was singing in the middle of the act. But as she opened the door, a gasp escaped her as seeing what she did. The toys were arranged on the floor in a circle, all of them toppled on their backs. The singing was coming from the room, but there was no one singing. However, there was a giant figure, a dark silhouette draped in blood red clothes with a hood shrouding its face, standing in the corner. It had a giant, metallic beak for a face, and equally large eyes made of glass. Tinted glass. Smokey aura of a dark maroon colour emanated from the entity in wafts. Jennie’s eyes grew bigger and bigger with horror. She was too frozen with fear to scream or move. A wooden cross was in the silhouette’s hand, and it was reverted in the sign of the antichrist. Jennie blinked and two tears escaped her eyes. Tears that stung her face. When she opened her eyes again, she saw no one standing there. It was either her imagination, catalysed by the two glasses of wine and Abigail’s make-believe tales of a birdman, or it was all very real.

  Abigail woke up with a start. She saw Jennie standing in the doorway. “Jennie! Where is he?” she whispered.

  “Where is who?” she managed to say.

  “The birdman!”

  Jennie decided to lie. There was no way she was going to acknowledge this negative creativity. “There’s no birdman, Abigail. No one. Go to sleep, Honey.”

  Abigail looked at her with an I-don’t-think-I-believe-that look and then went back under her sheets. Jennie staggered back to her room, still gripped by the terror of what she had witnessed. Sleep did not come to her for the rest of the night. The suffocation, however, ensued ever so heavily. She did not remember going to sleep. But she did. She had to.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TEN

  Sick People

  Jennie woke up the next morning at six thirty, tired out of her wits. Strange, she thought. Her alarm loudly blared Rihanna and Calvin Harris singing This is what you came for. It was as cringe-inducing a song imaginable, but she loved it. However, this morning there was nothing lovely about it. It ached her head to hear it. She hit the stop button and rubbed her eyes.

  It felt to her as if she had been active, walking or running all night. Her feet hurt. Weariness gripped her entire body. She went to the shared bathroom between her and Abigail’s room, and turned the hot water on in the shower. Before she could undress and get in the shower, she took one fleeting look at herself in the mirror. And that’s when she screamed.

  Her eyes were bloodshot with dark red gashes evident all around them. As if vampire-like leaches had sucked on them all night. She brought her hands up to her eyes to wipe the smudged gore off, and then emitted a second uncontrolled scream. Her hands were black, covered in a tar-like substance. She blinked and herself reflected in the mirror looked back with normal eyes, and her hands were now unremarkable.

  “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with me?” she said to herself.

  She stripped and climbed in the shower. She bathed for a calculated fifteen minutes before readying herself to prepare Mary’s breakfast. She had sternly instructed it to be served at precisely seven every morning. It was fifteen minutes to seven.

  She burnt the toast to a crisp and devilled the eggs, she poured tea, black and sugarless in a cup, and knocked on the door at exactly seven.

  “Come in,” said Mary from within.

  She went in with the tray and saw that Mary was propped up, in her usual position, against the pillow, smoking a cigarette and reading her iPad. She placed the tray on the bedside table and awaited further instructions. During this time, she saw Martin sleeping next to Mary, his face red and swollen. It didn’t take her long to determine that he was allergic to cigarette smoke. And Mary was sufficiently insensitive to smoke nonetheless.

  “Alright, enough staring. Go down and get Abigail ready. You know what to do,” Mary said and took the tray.

  Before she left, Jennie contemplated telling Mary about the incident last night. Then she thought better, kept her mouth shut, and went downstairs where she silently ate her own breakfast. Abigail came out of her room, squinting at the sunlight peeking through the windows, and rubbing her eyes.

  “Hey Sweetie, up already?”

  “I always get up this early on weekdays,” Abigail said.

  Jennie went to the kitchen to fix up some more breakfast. She got Abigail two slices of bread, jam, a slice of cheese and chocolate milk while Abigail went to the bathroom all on her own. She had insisted because in her words “I’m a big girl now.”

  While Abigail ate her breakfast, she looked at Jennie thoughtfully and asked, “Jennie…why couldn’t all the people be helped?”

  “What people, Abbey?”

  “The people who died here.”

  Jennie was taken aback with this question. She put her teacup down and said, “Don’t be silly, Abbey. No one died here.” This did it. Jennie was now certain that Abbey had been left on her own for extended periods of time during which she had watched inappropriate horror movies. There was no other explanation for a kid having such a morbid imagination.

  “There were, Jennie. Birdman told me so. Thousands of people died here,” she said.

  The mention of birdman unnerved Jennie more than it should have. The vivid recollection of the hovering silhouette in its dark red robes and beaklike face from last night re-emerged in her mind’s eye. Was it real? It certainly seemed so. “Birdman? What did he say?”

  “Birdman said he was there when the people died. He said that he did not want to help them at first, but then he did. Because he was a good man. He says he regrets that so many people died. He says he tried to help. He
did, Jennie,” Abigail pleaded.

  “Okay. Okay. I believe you,” Jennie said, not knowing what else to say to calm the child. Why was she defending the birdman so vehemently? “Abbey? Who is the birdman?” she asked. What she had seen last night did not look remotely like a bird, save for his beard. And Jennie remembered seeing it in many paintings and artworks of Poe’s stories. The one that she recalled very vividly was titled The Masque of Red Death. Not that it was described in the short story, but everyone assumed that the character of Red Death wore a beaklike mask.

  “Birdman’s my friend. I don’t know who he is though. Jennie, I can see him all the time. He’s here with us right now, in that corner over there,” Abigail pointed to the corner right behind Jennie. She was too scared to turn her head and look. Ah, that’s stupid, she thought and then twisted her head to make sure. There was not. She turned back to Abigail and nodded fervently, playing along with her imaginings, no matter how twisted it was.

  “He does not speak to me. I think he cannot talk. Because he has a mouth like a bird. With a beak. He’s always here. I was scared of him at first, but he never hurt me. Every night he comes to my bed and he flies in the air, in the corner of the room, and does magic.” Abigail was explaining all this with an innate interest, as if this was her secret discovery and she was living a reverie in sharing it with Jennie.

  “What kind of magic?” Jennie was back on the scared rollercoaster.

  “He makes my toys sing ‘Ring-a-ring-a-roses’ every night so I can fall asleep.”

  Jennie’s mouth dropped open and the cup in her hand fell to the floor where it clattered loudly and broke. She hastily stooped to pick up the shards.

  “Don’t worry, Jennie. He doesn’t scare me. You should not be afraid of him either,” Abigail said solemnly. Jennie avoided the kid’s eyes and went into the kitchen to discard the broken cup. Mary was going to give her shit over it later, but right now she did not give a damn about that. She was far too freaked out by all this. Oh why, oh why did I take this godforsaken job?