Haunted House Tales

by Riley Amitrani

  “I was thinking maybe another chat with our host might be in order as well, based on what happened last night,” Sally aid with great caution.

  “You still on this haunted house thing?” Tomasz replied with great sarcasm in his tone.

  “Something is not right here, partner. Whether it is a haunting or John Carver is still not being totally forthcoming with us. How about this…let me tackle Mr. Carver and you can check back in with people in Herriard who got robbed. See if they noticed anything else odd other than what they told us already. That way I can pursue this angle that you are not buying into. Sound reasonable?”

  Tomasz just nodded as he wiped his mouth with a napkin and headed for the door. Sally knew she was on thin ice here, but she knew there was something else going on at the pub that was not a physical entity. Her partner was obviously of the mind that she was chasing things that did not exist, but she was sure of her theory. Best case scenario, she would be vindicated. Worst case scenario? She was off base and it could kill or at least damage her career with the London office upon their return. Hopefully she could ward off whatever damage that Tomasz might inflict on her with their superiors based on her record and his questionable reputation and half-hearted investigative methods.

  Sally waited until Tomasz had left the inn before she summoned John Carver to her table for another coffee and his company.

  “What can I do for you, detective?” John asked as he sat with Sally at her table.

  “Lot of weird goings on here last night, John. Just curious as to any insight you might have. Maybe an explanation for what my partner and I saw and heard.

  “Anything I can do to help.”

  Sally went through all of what she and Tomasz had experienced the previous night. She looked for some tell-tale signs of an odd reaction from Carver, but there was nothing she could pick up from his body language.

  “Ever have something like this occur before, John?”

  “Not to that degree, detective. As I am sure you can see, this is an old place and regrettably I have not kept up with regular maintenance and upkeep as I would have liked to. Business has been steadily dropping off for many years. It has been a juggling act just to keep up with the mortgage and taxes and such as it is.”

  Sally nodded her understanding. But she also supposed that if what she and Tomasz had observed from the night before was a well-known event among the patrons, that might explain the down-tick in revenue. Hard to sell drinks and rent rooms with a ghost in residence. Especially one that might be leaving messages on the walls…unless that was just intended for her alone.

  “I am sure what you saw and heard was just the normal settling and creaks and such that come along as natural for an aging building. I will check around the kitchen though to see what might have caused that door to blow open and closed. That storm last night was pretty strong and I am guessing there is a significant air leak somewhere.”

  Sally thanked him for his time and the coffee before heading outside herself. She was sure Tomasz would have gloated at John’s replies to her inquiries, so she was relieved that he had not been around to say “I told you so”. She strolled the lanes of town as if just on a casual walk, but whenever she got a chance, Sally engaged people she met to see if they had noticed anything odd at Carver’s Arms to validate her theory. No one openly admitted anything, but in a few faces, Sally could not help pick up on a flicker of little white lies. She was a stranger in town, and a cop on top of it. Certainly, she could understand them being reticent to tell anything that might be harmful to their friend and neighbor, John Carver.

  Tomasz returned later having uncovered nothing new to report and Sally told him of her conversation with John Carver. She had to hand it to Tomasz…at least he did not openly ridicule her for what he obviously saw as a waste of time, or even roll his eyes at her. But his silence on the matter left no doubt as to that opinion. The afternoon and evening were uneventful, leaving Sally and Tomasz no closer to solving the break-ins than when they had arrived.

  “Seems our only recourse might be some way to try and nab the thief in the act, “Tomasz suggested over dinner.

  “I hate to say it, but that does seem likely,” Sally replied.

  “Down side is our time here is up tomorrow. Unless something breaks overnight, we will not be able to convince headquarters that more time here is warranted.”

  Sally nodded her agreement. They lingered around the fireplace for a few minutes before turning in. As the night before, Tomasz dropped to sleep immediately, his repetitive gentle snoring the lone sound as Sally could not get her mind to shut off enough to doze. Just as she felt herself drifting off, there was the unmistakable sensation of the movement of air falling directly onto her face. She did not immediately come to, being in that state of half-asleep/half-awake and thought initially that it was a dream. However, when it continued and then became icy cold accompanied by the stench of death, Sally began to come to fully. She had been to enough crime scenes and had to sit through enough autopsies to know the foul odor of death when it hit her.

  Just as she brushed off any semblance of sleep, she heard the word “murder” whispered in her ear. Like being doused with a bucket of cold water, Sally bolted upright and looked wildly around the room. There was no one there other than the peacefully snoring Tomasz. Her heart was racing as she began to wonder exactly what was going on. Was all this real? And if so, why her? If there was a ghost, was it coming to her based on her belief which had become ingrained from her childhood? Or was she just going mad? As all these competing thoughts raced across her brain, Sally gasped slightly as the banging she had heard the night before started up again from below, followed by the sharp sound of shattering glass.

  With all subtlety aside, Sally roughly roused Tomasz.

  “Tomasz!” she whispered loudly, “our ghost is back!”

  The man blinked and wiped his eyes as he looked at her with great annoyance. Then the banging repeated itself and more glass could be heard breaking.

  “More likely, our burglar has returned,” Tomasz replied. “This may be our chance to wrap this thing up at last. Grab your torch and let’s go!”

  The detectives hurried down the hallway and bounded down the steps, giving no effort at hiding their pursuit this time. Sally raced across the bar just off Tomasz’s heels as they adroitly dodged chairs and tables heading for the kitchen. Tomasz kicked open the door that had the night before been wildly opening and closing.

  “Police! Freeze!” he cried and he and Sally fully illuminated the figure of a young man, dressed all in black just inside the kitchen window, standing on the shards of glass from a broken pane.

  He held up one hand to try and ward off the glare of their lights and at the same time raised both hands to show them he was unarmed. There was something in his face that made Sally’s brain click. What was it? Then it hit her…that old photo that had been on the wall of John Carver with his ex-wife and son.

  “Jack Carver?” Sally exclaimed, as the man sat back slowly on the lower sash of the damaged window.

  Carver’s Arms: Case Closed

  Herriard, United Kingdom

  30 January, 2018, 3 AM

  Tomasz looked back at Sally as he suddenly recognized the face of the man as well. He had aged a bit, but for sure this was John’s son. Jack slipped off the black skull cap he had been wearing and shrugged sheepishly, a look Sally had seen many times previously when a criminal had been caught red-handed.

  “Detectives….” Jack replied. “Guess the gig is up, huh? Can we talk?”

  Sensing that there was no real danger now, and that the man posed no indication of flight, Tomasz nodded and indicated for them to move into the bar where they all sat together at a near-by table. Sally could see that Jack was a bit scared of having been caught, but at the same time she sensed more to this than a simple burglary. She waited as Tomasz motioned with his hand for Jack to begin. The young man readily admitted to all the break-ins in Herriard. He had indeed
left town as a teenager, but he had not run off as his father had told everyone. Jack exhaled deeply and filled the detectives in on his father’s dark side. The part of his personality that only Jack knew…the one all of Herriard was not privy to.

  It was a long and rambling narrative, but both Tomasz and Sally could see he needed to be unburdened of this. Jack wrapped up with detailing his banishment from his childhood home when he had finally stepped in to protect his mother.

  “You thinking maybe your father did some harm to you mum?” Sally asked.

  “From what I experienced of him and his sometimes-uncontrollable temper,” Jack replied, “I would say ‘some harm’ is…what is the American expression…the PC version.”

  “So why all the break-ins?” Tomasz asked, obviously not seeing the connection.

  “I was just trying to find something, somewhere in this place that would prove my suspicions. I feel bad about the other places in town, though.”

  “Trying to add some sleight of hand to remove attention on the pub?”

  “Something like that…” Jack answered.

  Both Tomasz and Sally nodded their understanding. They could grasp his motives, and felt some compassion for Jack, but at the same time he was guilty of a series of thefts. They were relieved to have solved the case but felt a bit awkward at now having to arrest the man based on his story. Silence fell over the trio as they just all looked at one another. Just then from out of nowhere, strong gusts of an icy wind began to whip through the bar and doors everywhere opened and closed with great force as if the hinges might not hold them in place. The lights flashed on brightly and then dimmed to near nothing over and over as if in some type of unnatural coordination with the doors.

  Sally jumped at the sudden commotion, as she caught the look of sheer terror and concern in Tomasz’s face. Despite his fervent disbelief in anything supernatural, Sally suspected that he might soon be a convert. The trio ducked down as loose items in the bar began to fly across the room shattering on walls. To top it all off, an overriding voice arose, loudly whispering the word “murder” over and over. Despite it just being in the guise of a whisper, the three of them covered their ears with their hands to ward it off as it echoed throughout the entire room. Tomasz and Sally immediately scanned the beams of their torches along every wall of the pub and there was virtually no surface that was not covered with the word as well. In many cases, the lettering overlapped each other giving off the appearance of what Sally had once seen from a schizophrenic patient in an asylum in London who compulsively wrote on all the walls of his confinement cell.

  As time went on, Jack let his hands drop away from his ears as he came to recognize the owner of the voice as belonging to his mother.

  “Mum? It’s me Jack…let me help you!”

  “I know, Jackie…you already have…” came the disembodied answer.

  No sooner than all this combined commotion had ensued, the trio spun to see John Carver bounding down the stairs and rushing into the bar, his robe flailing behind him.

  “What in the hell is going on down here?” he demanded.

  As the words escaped his lips he skidded to a stop as he came face to face with Jack. The blood drained from his face as he gaped at his long-ago estranged son. It was as if he was seeing his own ghost and did not know what to do or say.

  “You fucking bastard!” Jack howled at his father as he pointed his index finger at him accusingly. “You killed her, you piece of shit!”

  Before Tomasz or Sally could intervene, Jack dove at his father hitting John squarely in the midsection with his shoulder. The two men slid across the adjacent table, taking the table cloth and centerpiece with them to the floor. John gasped for breath as Jack began to rain blows upon the older man in a wild fury of anger and rage. While the fight was going on, all that that been going on in the pub increased in intensity. The whole building shook as if it was to come loose from its foundation, the icy wind howled with a renewed vigor, the lights rose to a blinding glare before exploding in the fixtures, and the doors continued to flail as they did now begin to crack away from their settings in the frames. And all the while, the voice of Nancy Carver screeched “murder” over and over like some sort of phonograph stuck on a single track.

  Just as Jack reached back for one good solid punch to his father’s face, an unseen force grasped the man and yanked him from Jack’s hold and began dragging him, as if towed by his ankles, across the bar floor and outside into the yard. The trio pursued the sliding body of John Carver staring in shock as they observed what seemed impossible. Driven by a voice that only Jack seemed to be able to hear, he stopped suddenly to grab a shovel that was leaning up against a tool shed in the yard. He began digging wildly just beyond the shed telling the unheard voice he would avenge her. Whatever had been responsible for pulling John from the bar and into the yard seemed to relent as the man stood to see his son digging into the soft soil with a manic passion. Before either Tomasz or Sally could intervene, John dashed to where Jack was digging and ripped the shovel from his hands, then punching Jack in the face. Jack went sprawling, completely caught off-guard by his father’s assault.

  Before John could make another move, though, Tomasz barreled into the man and tackled him roughly, forcing John into the soft ground face-first. He pinned John’s arms behind his back and secured his hands tightly with the zip locks Sally tossed to him from their vehicle which was parked nearby. With no concern for his prisoner’s welfare, Tomasz jerked John to his feet and forced him across the yard before slamming him to his rear against the front wall of the tool shed.

  “John Carver…” Tomasz gasped, as he struggled to talk between struggling for air, “you are hereby a person of interest for the murder of one Nancy Carver. I am placing you in police custody pending a full investigation and exhumation of the site to produce a murder victim.”

  Sally went to Jack to help him to his feet. He was fine for the most part, just spent from the whole episode. Sally knew the feeling. He walked by the slumped form of his father and spat at the man.

  “You fucking murderer! I hope you rot in hell!”

  Sally steered Jack away from his father fearing an attack on the man while he was cuffed and indefensible. She looked over at Tomasz who was just getting his wind back as he stood guard over the bleeding and bruised owner of Carver’s Arms. All Tomasz did was look her in the eyes and smile while he offered up a mock salute with his index and middle fingers. Sally retuned the gesture with a smile of her own. It was as close as her partner had ever come to acknowledging her fully and was his way of saying he was sorry for doubting her. Not exactly a real apology, she guessed, but for Tomasz Peterson, it was about as much as she could expect.

  Jack’s Vindication

  Herriard, United Kingdom

  5 February, 2018, 9 AM

  Despite the small size of Herriard, and that they did not have an official police force, there did exist a small but still functional holding facility that was used from time to time while suspects were processed or other regional police agencies were conducting their ongoing investigations. For Tomasz Peterson and Sally White, this was what they availed themselves of in the case of John Carver. While the case against John seemed strong, it took a few days for Tomasz and Sally to explain the entire thing to their superiors and get a more official response to the case of the Carver’s Arms burglaries.

  Knowing better, both Tomasz and Sally purposefully left out all the supernatural elements of what had occurred while they had been on site in Herriard. Even with Tomasz now on board as a believer in what Sally had known all along, it was hardly the sort of thing that was going to fly back at their regional headquarters. In mutual agreement, Tomasz and Sally made a pact to create a report that blurred over the haunted house aspects of their decision to have John Carver held as a person of interest in the murder of his ex-wife, Nancy. Never in either of their careers had the detectives been responsible for such falsification of evidence, but after discussing it at l
ength they saw no other way to see that justice was served.

  Considering the circumstances, they wiped Jack’s slate clean for all the robberies once he agreed to compensate all the people in Herriard that had been victims of his campaign to try and prove his father’s guilt. To go along with the case, they merely told the robbery victims that they had recovered all the stolen items for which Jack either returned the stolen items through the detectives or otherwise replaced the purloined belongings. To Jack, all things considered, he felt he was getting off pretty easily since it seemed a sure thing his father was soon to be sentenced for his mother’s murder. Tomasz and Sally created a backstory from Jack saying he had evidence that indicated his mother had been murdered, following a violent outburst from his father. In the story, Jack had fled his childhood home, fearing for his own life as a young child, and had convinced them she was in fact buried on the grounds of the Carver’s Arms.

  Between Sally’s keen presentation and Tomasz’s long-standing career on the force, their superiors gave them the benefit of the doubt and dispatched a small team of officers to perform an excavation where indicated by Jack to see if the body of Nancy Carver was where he said it was. Oddly enough, as soon as John was detained and placed in the holding facility in Herriard, all of the supernatural activity that had been going on in the pub came to a sudden halt. There was still a lot of leftover damage from Nancy’s outburst that night, but since then…nothing.

  The pub had been shuttered and sealed off pending the full police investigation, so no one in town was the wiser to what had actually gone down. John Carver had been paid several visits by both Tomasz and Sally as well as some other officials from the London office for further questioning, but the man had not said a single word since he had been placed in the sparse cell in town. Sally suspected that there was nothing he could think of that might benefit him at this point, and that trying to tell some tale of what had really happen might make matters even worse for him, at least from John’s perspective. Both she and Tomasz wondered from time to time if perhaps Nance herself might have paid her ex-husband another more personal visit in this time period, as his health seemed to be declining each day he was incarcerated. It seemed that John saw the truth was soon to be revealed and that he had no way out.