by Marc Layton
"What?" she asked, wrinkling her nose and shielding her eyes from the sunlight.
"Nothin'," he said, still smiling as he stepped from the car.
The sheriff walked toward the couple, head down with his fingers in the loops of his jeans. In an attempt to look relaxed and nonchalant, he kicked the gravel. As he did, however, each small stone spraying to the ground sent a tiny wave of panic up his spine. 'I didn't imagine it,' he thought, feeling as he did the tugging soreness of the bruises on his calves thighs. He had to be there that day, had to warn them somehow or prepare them.
"What can I do for you, officers?" Clive asked with a smile.
"Hey there, folks." Clarence managed, forcing a smile. To Clarence, Clive was a strange-looking fellow. All willowy limbs and gangly features, he had wandered over in long strides, as if he was on stilts. He looked for all world as if his mother had had an affair with a giraffe. He had a swipe of jet black hair across his forehead, thick horn-rimmed glasses, and a striped shirt. Later, Clarence's deputy would comment that he looked like something from a 'Where's Waldo?' book. He wasn't far off.
“Me and the boy here, thought we'd drop by and welcome you to the neighborhood," said Clarence gesturing toward Din Perkins, his deputy. Din, whose real first name was Martin, had acquired his nickname from his little brother's inability to pronounce the name as a child. "Mah- din," becoming shortened to 'Din.'
Perkins smiled broadly, revealing a gap between his front teeth so large, that evil Kaneeval would have considered it a challenge to jump.
"Howdy," he added cheerily, like a comedy sidekick. Clive looked around him. The house's only connection to the outside world was the road running in front of the grounds. On every other side, there wasn't a sign of life for miles.
"Yeah." Said Clive dryly, " I'm er, looking forward to meeting the neighbors". Clarence smiled at this joke. He had always prided himself on having the cop's instinct for reading people, getting a measure of them, and judging their character in a few glances. He realized immediately that he liked this guy. There was an openness to his face and generosity of humor that put others at ease. He was what Clarence would describe as a 'good egg.'
Trailing a few steps behind, still shielding the sun from her eyes, was Adrien. Much shorter than Clive, she had straight red hair that spilled over her shoulders and an equally warm smile. They were a handsome couple, thought Clarence, tipping his hat to Adrien in a way that seemed comical to Clive, who made brief introductions for them both.
"So you guys fixin' to move in over the next few days"? Clarence asked bluntly.
"Today," answered Adrien casually, extending a hand to both Clarence and Din, which they each shook.
"We've kinda been traveling for the last year or two, so we don't have a lotta stuff," Clive explained. "The majority is literally in the back," he gestured with a thumb to the van.
“Yeah, we got the place lock stock and barrel, so hopefully there’s at least some furniture inside that we can make use of.”
Clarence and Din looked at each other.
"You...haven't seen the inside yet?" Clarence asked. It hadn't occurred to him when he had visited earlier, that the boards were still on the downstairs windows. Despite his nagging need to glance back, he had tried to look at the house as little as possible. Now, it was the couple’s turn to look at each other and catching each other's eyes, burst into peels of laughter. They knew that other people thought they were crazy, but it was a kind of crazy they shared, and they liked being spontaneous together.
Clarence explained that he and Din had a crowbar and some flashlights in the car, and since there wasn't any high demand on their time, they'd be happy to help them open the place up. Clive and Adrien accepted the offer gratefully.
Clive backed the van into the driveway as the others made their way toward the entrance. Clarence walked carefully, feeling the placement of every step, staring down at the gravel and ensuring that the footing was firm and keeping a very tight grip on the crowbar as he walked.
As it turned out, the two officers ended up doing more than opening up the building. Instead, they spent much of the morning and early afternoon helping the couple move in their sparse belongings, mostly clothes, a mattress and bedding, and cooking equipment.
Before he took the crowbar to the front door, Clarence had turned to Clive, who was prying the corner of a board with the claw edge of his hammer and asked, somewhat abruptly, what he knew about the place. Clive had held the Sheriff’s gaze for a moment before replying honestly.
"Everything." he turned at this, the hammer dangling listlessly in one hand. " We were told everything—all the gory details. The real housing market isn't like The Amityville Horror or some B movie cliche where a young couple moves in and then finds out later that there was a Native American burial ground under the house or something" he smiled broadly.
“We know what went on here, but we just figure, the past is the past''. Clive shrugged, " People get kinda queasy over places that have a history, but they forget that it's only them that have the bad memories. Wood and brick don't hold grudges because they don't have a memory and, well, it'd be kinda nice if somewhere people thought 'dark' got a little sunshine, you know? A house is just a house; it's the people in it that make a home." Clarence nodded at this, hoping he was right. Clive turned again to the board and inserted the claw of the hammer into a small gap, prying slowly.
" It's the living that harm you, not the dead '' Clive went on absentmindedly as he pried a nail from the board. "Plus..." he said, gesturing toward Adrien, who was doggedly struggling with a heavy box of kitchen utensils, determined to carry it unaided and blowing a jet of air upwards through her lips to clear a tangle of hair from her eyes. " If any ghost tries something with her then, frankly, I feel sorry for the ghost. She's hard as nails".
When Clive had said "everything," Clarence had nodded in acceptance. Both men knowing, without a need to elaborate, what they were referring to.
Despite everyone in town knowing the house as ‘The Galston Place’, Arthur Galston, who had initially erected the massive structure in the late 1800s, was far from its most famous occupant. He and several generations of his family had lived in the house for many decades with little of note occurring.
Arthur, along with his son Daniel and eventually his granddaughter Evelyn (who became the first female Mayor of Moreton in 1948), was highly respected in the town. The house was only known as The Galston place for the fact that it was the Galston family that lived there.
The house only took on its sinister connotations later, when in 1977, the entire property and grounds were sold to an Albert Knewl. For the first decade of his stay at the Galston Place, Knewl was considered to be somewhat of a hermit. Though he would venture into town at irregular intervals over the years, he was very rarely seen. On those occasions, he was said to have been a deeply unpleasant man. He perennially wore a broad-brimmed hat and dressed from head to toe in black, his shirt buttoned up to the throat in a manner that made him look a little like a preacher or clergyman from the paintings you'd see of the early pilgrims.
As is common in small towns, his isolation led to many rumors. The old misanthrope was labeled as a felon, hiding away from the authorities and as a religious nut, bent on being as far away from the rest of the world as possible.
The rumor mill was fed a considerable amount more grist when the road into town began to get more traffic, and reports became widespread of Albert having been spotted standing in the grounds surrounded by candles and performing strange rituals. And on one occasion, apparently accompanied by a donkey and several chickens.
Some began to elaborate on these stories, adding more and more fanciful details until 'Old Knewl' and his antics, all alone in that vast house, became something of a local folk tale. For the more sensible, however, he was just considered an odd shut-in. Unfortunately, it turned out, that he left the house more often than people thought and that those with the wildest stories, may have been close
r to the truth.
One night, in September of 1981, Mary Seawell, at the time a young mother living in the town, put her seven-year-old daughter Lynn to bed and retired to the living room for some TV time before her husband Ray arrived home.
Around an hour after being put down for the night, Lynn began to scream and call for her 'momma.' Mary had wearily ascended the stairs to check on Lynn, expecting to find her daughter panicked by some nightmare. Instead, she found Lynn huddled in one corner of the bed, saucer-eyed, with an arm outstretched, pointing through wailing and tears at the closet, screaming about the boogeyman.
Wiping the damp strands of hair from her forehead, Mary had reassured her that there was no such thing. That monsters and ghosts don't exist and that even if they did, Mommy and Daddy wouldn't let anything happen to her.
Mary explained later that she had herself become unnerved by little Lynn's fears, not so much because of what she was saying, but by the way that her own reassurances seemed to have no effect. How, despite having her mother, sitting on the edge of her bed , the little girl continued to look past her, over her shoulder with a fixed terrified gaze, never once taking her eyes from the closet and the small dark gap formed by the crack between its doors.
The closet itself was an old English cupboard that had belonged to her mother. It stood on four sturdy legs, had two large doors around three feet high, behind which hung most of Lynn's clothes, and two roomy drawers beneath, stuffed with towels and bed linen.
It was a large piece of furniture, but not in itself frightening or scary. Mary put the nightmare down to something Lynn must have seen on TV, coupled with a perfectly natural childhood fear of the dark. She kissed her daughter on the forehead and, after some extended comforting, tucked her back in.
Mary, who still lived in town, had personally related the story to Clarence many years after the fact. She recalled that she had put on the night light, wished Lynn sweet dreams and begun to walk from the room, when, for some reason, perhaps some noise, a light, some whisper of movement, she had turned and taken a final checking glance back at the room, at Lynn now tucked up and finally, at the closet.
It was then, in that same small band of darkness, formed by the crack between the doors, the same spot that her daughter had pointed to screaming, that she looked and caught sight of the eye, peering out.
Mary screamed with a torrid visceral fear and rushing toward the bed, clasped Lynn to her chest, seeing from the corner of her eye the doors of the closet open to reveal Albert Knewl crouched and smiling like some hideous fiend inside of the closet.
Panicked, Mary had torn Lynn up into her arms and dragged her from the room. She said later that in all her life, she had never seen anything so hideous as the way that Knewl unfolded his limbs like some gigantic spider as he emerged from the closet.
Alerted by Mary's screams, Ray Seawell, who had just at that moment been walking up the driveway, dropped his workbag and rushed toward the house just in time to see a man in a large-brimmed hat climbing out of his daughter's bedroom window. It is said that Ray, paralyzed with fear and panic, remained rooted to the spot until his wife emerged from the house, clutching his rifle and within seconds was firing over Ray's shoulder, into the darkness as the man's silhouette receded into the distance.
Within an hour Sheriff John Macky, who had preceded Clarence in the role, was at the Galston Place with two deputies. Reports of what was found inside the house, Clarence knew had been warped and embellished by time and tale.
What he knew to be accurate, because he had read the reports and heard it from Macky himself, was that Knewl was arrested for trespass and the attempted abduction of Lynn Seawell. Upon further examination of the house, Knewl was charged with the abduction of two other young girls who were found alive, locked in the cellar, and with first-degree murder.
The only other details of the arrest were added by Macky after a heavy drinking session, when he had let slip how, in that cellar, there had been all manner of symbols and signs drawn onto the floor in chalk. There had also been a workbench, lined up against which were thousands of tiny steel needles.
The rescued girls talked about how Knewl would stand before them with a Raggedy Anne doll and insert needles into it, laughing at the implication that one day, it wouldn't be the doll this happened to. They also mentioned two other girls and two fully grown men that were imprisoned in the cellar. No trace of these others has ever been found, though the much older body of a young man was.
Albert Knewl was taken to the local penitentiary, and two months later, he was found hanged in his cell. The officer who found him remarked that despite the strangulation that had clearly been the cause of death, Knewl somehow managed to retain a fixed smile that didn't fade, even after death. By May of 1981, Alber Knewl was in the ground, and his reign of terror should have been over. But it wasn't.
In a small town like Moreton, the memories of such events linger. They seep into the fabric of the place, permeating the minds of those who live there, remaining like a permanent stain. Within weeks there were reports of a dark figure in a wide-brimmed hat standing alone, like a scarecrow in the fields by the Old Galston Place. Local children began to tell tales of 'The man in the hat,' who would be seen by the crossroads at Fuller's wood. The same figure was spotted at various points around town, and indeed the investigation of such a sighting was the call Sheriff Macky was returning from the night he handed the reins over to Clarence. Two days later, Macky disappeared, along with his two deputies and the county judge who had presided over Knewl's case. There is no suggestion officially that the four disappearances were in any way linked, but in small towns rumors-become-legends-become truths.
One story Clarence knew to be true was that of Ray Seawell, father of Lynn and husband of Mary, who, after catching sight of a dark silhouette in a wide-brimmed hat standing at the end of his driveway one night, simply left town. For months afterward, Mary Seawell slept downstairs, and every evening she could be found sitting on her porch waiting, a loaded rifle by her side.
Together, Clarence and Clive Pryed the board from over the front door and leaned it up against the wall. Clive stepped aside and handed the keys to Adrien.
"If you would like to do the honors Madam." He said, bowing dramatically. On the drive down here, he had planned to lift her into his arms and carry her over the threshold, but with the other men there, it seemed inappropriate, 'maybe tomorrow' he thought.
Adrien took the key and, after some struggling, managed to turn it with a grating click in the lock. It took a quick barge of the shoulder to move the door, which had settled somewhat in its wooden frame, but eventually, it gave way and with a rasping growl of dust and gravel swung open and inward. Adrien peered in.
"Oh my God," she whispered.
In size, the house itself was grand, far beyond what the couple should have been able to afford or even what they might ever have dreamed about owning. Yet, in its actual structure, it was unremarkable, comparable in size and shape with many other similar houses.
Its furnishings, which had come as part of the deal, clearly pre-dated Knewl's residence and extended back to Galston. Some were antique, and Clive guessed, in total value, were probably worth more than any house he had ever previously lived in.
“You know some of this stuff is probably worth a few dollars," Din had said, echoing the thought and rapping with his knuckle on a heavy-looking dining table, thick with dust.
In terms of layout, the house was quite standard. Immediately behind the front door was a small parlor area, while directly opposite was a set of stairs leading up to bedrooms. To the left was a drawing-room, to the right, the dining room and down a small corridor to the right of the stairs, the kitchen. A narrow door midway between these rooms led down to the cellar and passing it sent shivers down Clarence's spine.
What had made Adrien gasp, however, made her clasp her hand to her mouth and invoke the name of the almighty, was not the size of the house, the furniture, or the layout. It w
as the frames.
On every wall, every open space in every downstairs room, there were frames. Each around 20 square inches. Inside, mounted with pins, was a veritable cornucopia of animal life, from butterflies and insects to small lizards, bats, and even small mammals like hamsters and mice. All were stretched out flat and pinned to thick mounting cards for display, their tiny bones supported by the thin steel pins that fixed them in place.
Clarence stared at the frames, looking more at these pins than at the actual specimens. Two days earlier, he had cut thirty-six birds from a tree in the front garden. He had later burned them and been left with a small pile of ash, bones, and pins. Their use here pricked again at the unsettling memory, and he felt a distinct urge to be out of the house.
The frames were, in some places, arranged in neat rows extending from the floor to the ceiling, while in other areas they were haphazardly scattered around the walls.
One entire surface consisted only of birds, their wings outstretched, heads downwards, and their tiny legs affixed in a way that made them look like they'd been crucified. Albeit, upside down. "Jeez. It seems the previous owner was a bit of a collector," said Clive, his brow furrowed and an unmistakable hint of disgust curling his lips. Further down the corridor, Adrien was looking through the frames at eye level one by one, examining, in turn, a large moth and the flattened remains of a field mouse that seemed, by its pose as if it had been pinioned while trying desperately to claw up the wall for escape. Clarence did not look closely and instead waited by the door.
Din, who until this point seemed to be content to stand back and smile to himself seemed both enthralled and somewhat unnerved by the strange displays like a child seeing roadkill for the first time.
He leaned forward to scrutinize them and spent a few moments delicately touching and examining the tiny creatures, before turning to the others.