The Nothing House
By Cherie Mitchell
All Rights Reserved © 2019 Cherie Mitchell
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter One
I’m not going to lie. This is probably even more exciting than the day Liam gave me a promise ring.
We’re moving into our own house, our first home! We’re going to renovate it together and I’ll be taking a step closer to my lifelong dream of becoming a house builder. Yeah, I still have that crazy dream I had back when I was a kid and we lived in the house on Cemetery Hill.
Those days seem so long ago now. I’m grown up these days. I have a degree. I graduated a few months ago but I don’t know if I’ll ever choose to do a job in that field. Communications. Doesn’t seem possible, does it? It wasn’t my first choice, I’ll admit that much. I would’ve preferred to study Biomedical Sciences but I know that my Dad always wanted me to get a degree in Communications someday. He said I had a particular communication style that was hard to match and I should make a career out of it. It’s kind of his legacy and I like to think he’s smiling down on me from somewhere and feeling proud that I went out there and did it.
We have a bit of money behind us, Liam and me. Mom finally got her insurance payout from Dad’s death – it took years to sort it out as there were no bodies left after the fire – and she passed some of it on to me. Quite a lot of it actually, and definitely enough for us to lay down a deposit on a house. She said I deserved it for the part I played in getting everyone out safely.
I think she might’ve given Organza and Reece a few thousand dollars each, too. I haven’t asked them and I’m not planning to. It feels crass to talk about money when the only reason we have it is because Dad is dead. Organza will throw hers at designer shoes, bags, and clothes but I’m not sure what Reece will do. He’s a bit of a closed book, that little brother of mine. An enigma. Mom thinks he’s on the spectrum and maybe he is. It doesn’t matter to me either way. Lots of my friends are on the spectrum and I think it’s cool. People should be different; the world has enough cookie cutter personalities already and no one needs to go around making a big fuss about it.
Anyway, back to Liam. We met in class and I kind of knew as soon as I saw him that he was going to be important in my life. Yeah, I know that’s a corny thing to say but it really was one of those violins-in-the-background moments. He’s funny, he’s smart, and he’s the sort of man other girls’ eyes creep toward when they think I’m looking the other way. He also knows about my family history and to his credit, it didn’t send him running for the hills when I told him. We graduated together, he gave me my promise ring, and now we’ve bought a house together.
And yeah, when I said the house needs renovating I might’ve been sugar coating it a little. The house is a wreck and that’s putting it nicely. That’s why we got such a good deal on it. The realtor said most people kept walking whenever he tried to show it to them. He was pleased to have finally made a sale, said it was the oldest listing on his books and he usually likes to shift his properties fast.
So here we are. We’re standing outside the gate of our rundown little house on Pannier Street, holding hands and dreaming big. The property settled today, the realtor dropped around the key, and now we can get on with the rest of our lives. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?
Liam squeezes my hand. “Are you excited, Ellie?”
“Of course I’m excited. I didn’t sleep last night. I couldn’t.” I drop his hand and turn into his arms, pushing myself up onto my tiptoes so I can plant a kiss on the end of his nose. It feels like the right time for a grand announcement. “Every second of my life has led me to this minute.” Ugh.
Liam chuckles under his breath and lifts his nose higher so I can’t kiss it. “That’s very poetic, but it sounds a little head-in-the-clouds to be coming from the Ellie I know and love.”
“You know what I mean. I thought I should say something fancy. It’s not every day we buy a house.” I drop my heels back down and the sound of my soles hitting the pavement is strangely loud in the quiet of the late afternoon. “Are we going in?”
He tightens his arms around me and pulls me in for a quick kiss, on the lips this time. “Mmmm. Do you want me to carry you over the threshold?”
“No. Don’t be silly. You know I don’t go in for all that romantic stuff.” I wriggle away from him, snatch the key out of his hand, and march up to the gate. “Come on.”
The gate falls over when I try to push it open, which sends Liam into gales of laughter. It’s not that funny. I throw him a frosty glare and lift the gate up to rest it against the picket fence. The white picket fence - or it was once. Now it’s a peeling, rotten fence with a few flakes of white paint clinging desperately to the wood and several pickets missing.
I ignore Liam’s laughter and walk up the cracked, weed-ridden path to the door, which is in about as good as condition as the fence. But none of that matters. I have a huge amount of vision for this house and I know we can turn it into something wonderful. All it needs is some TLC and elbow grease and it’ll become the kind of house where we might raise a family one day.
The lock sticks when I poke the key into it and I have to jiggle it around before I feel it catch. That will be one of the first things we’ll replace, once we’re organized. A house needs a good, secure lock. A family needs to be safe in their own home and no one can ever tell me otherwise. Not after what I went through.
A wonderful, bubbling stream of anticipation is expanding up from my belly as I push the door back on its rusty, squeaky hinges and go to step over the threshold.
“Ellie! Watch out!”
Chapter Two
Liam grabs me by the upper arms, yanking me back so quickly it makes my head spin. I stare in shock at the huge piece of rotten wooden planking lying on the floor where I should now be standing. “That nearly hit me.” My voice is a scratchy whisper and my heart feels as if it’s about to grow wings and launch itself out of my chest.
“Ellie, are you okay? It must’ve come loose when you pulled the door open. We know the house is half falling down. You have to be careful.” He pulls me in close against his hard, warm chest and I can hear his heart loud in my ear. It’s beating nearly as fast as mine and I briefly wonde
r if we’re both destined to die of a heart attack before we can start our life together. That tends to be the type of luck that I attract.
“Yeah, I’m okay.” I let him hug me for a few seconds more and then I pull away. I’m not big on too much long drawn out hugging, even when it’s Liam doing the hugging. It makes me feel claustrophobic. Trapped. I turn back to look at the plank of wood and I let out a shriek that has Liam grabbing for me all over again.
“What is it?”
I’m backing away from the house now, taking hasty steps back down the path I walked up so happily just a couple of minutes before. I honestly think I’m going to throw up.
“Ellie?” Liam gives me a strange look. He obviously hasn’t seen what I’ve seen. “What are you doing?”
“Look at the board. Look at that patch of rotten wood.” The words are hard to push past my teeth and my tongue feels big and wormy in my mouth. The sight of maggots always does this to me and it seems to be getting worse the older I get.
“Oh. I didn’t see them at first.” Liam, my hero, picks up the board and flings it away across the lawn, far away from me. “There. They’re gone now.”
“Can you check inside? Check that there aren’t any flies.” I’m still hanging back, reluctant to step into the house until I know it’s clear.
He pokes his head inside and looks right and left, taking about half a millisecond to check. “Nope. There’s none.”
That starts me giggling and the laughter releases some of the tension lying across my shoulders. There’s no way his super quick little look around managed to do anything but at least it broke up some of my apprehension. Liam holds out his hand, grinning at me now. “Let’s walk in together.”
When we do finally step over the top step and onto the bare floorboards of our new home, the first thing that hits me is the smell. I guess I wasn’t paying too much attention to the smell when the realtor showed us through, or maybe he went through opening doors and windows before he showed us around. Anyway, the smell is bad. Real bad. Musty, damp, and putrid, like there’s a leak somewhere or some forgotten food rotting on a shelf in an un-cleared refrigerator.
“Yuck. Did it smell this bad last time?” Liam is wrinkling up his nose and peering up into the corners of the room, as if he’s expecting to see the source of the smell just hanging around up there waiting for him to find it.
“I don’t think so.” I grab hold of the open door and I waft it backward and forward, attempting to create a draft to chase away the stink. “I would’ve remembered.”
“Don’t play with that door too much.” Liam pulls my hand off the door, peering above it to the place where the rotten board fell from. “Not until I’ve checked out how safe the rest of those boards are.”
I walk into the middle of the room, holding my nose to block out the smell, and try to get a feel for the house. We’d planned to sleep here tonight, we have our sleeping bags and an air mattress in the back of Liam’s car, but now I’m not so sure. The house doesn’t seem as homey and cozy as I imagined it would feel all through our endless weeks of waiting for the contract to settle.
It took us a while to find this place. We knew we needed something that would fit within our budget but it was also important to me that we found somewhere on a piece of land that didn’t have any dark history attached to it. After finding this property listing, I did some reading about the local area and discovered the town of Gypsy Creek was named for a woman called Gypsy Latham who was some kind of saintly person. She apparently gave away all she had to help others and dedicated her life to charitable pursuits. She started an orphanage not far from here and donated a lot of her money to build housing for those in need. The town started out as a small community called Tyrellton, named after one of the founding fathers, but the townspeople voted to change it to Gypsy Creek after she passed away. That’s how good a person Gypsy was.
According to the other information I found, the land this house is built on used to be part of one of the fields attached to local man Jonathon Wheeler’s farm. It seems he grew corn and beets here and grazed a few head of cattle. Not a cemetery in sight. I have a copy of the old land deeds and I can prove it to anyone who asks. It makes me feel better knowing that nothing scarier than a big old Jersey cow ever walked across this land and that the only thing lying beneath the soil are some thin, long-forgotten wisps of corn stalk roots.
“Ellie? Come through here.”
I look up from my daydreaming to see that Liam has left the room. The sun is sinking down below the horizon now and bright spots glint off the windowpanes, momentarily blinding me. A cool breeze has picked up, too. I step across floorboards that move and shift under my feet to shut the front door, careful that I don’t slam it this time. The last thing I want is to send a rain of maggots down on my head and I’m more worried about them than I am about a piece of wood falling on me.
Liam looks over his shoulder at me as I walk into the kitchen. The smell isn’t as strong in here but it’s still bad. He points to something in the cupboard under the sink and I can see that he’s pulled all the cupboard doors along the row wide open. “What do you make of this?”
Chapter Three
It takes my eyes several beats to understand what I’m looking at. At first, I think it’s a snake lying curled along the empty cupboard space but it’s too… fuzzy to be a snake. In fact, it looks like a long coil of matted hair. A dreadlock without a head to attach itself to. “What is it?”
“Looks like the gunk that I used to pull out of the drain hole after my sister washed her long hair in the shower.” Liam kicks at the coil with his toe and it moves horribly. Alive but not alive.
I’ve met Liam’s sister. Marianne. She did seem to be the type who wouldn’t bother to remove her own hair from drain holes. She reminded me a lot of my sister Organza – all selfies and duck pouts, designer clothes, teenage moodiness, and Insta-fixes.
“That’s disgusting. You mean someone has hauled it out of the drain and left it there?” I’m peering at it dubiously, not wanting to get too close. “There seems to be a lot of it.”
“Yeah. It’s gross.” Liam lifts a few blonde strands of my own hair and rubs his fingers across them. “Nothing like this.”
Yeah, my hair’s blonde now. Blonde like Mom and Megan’s, I mean Organza’s hair is naturally. I dyed it a way back and I liked it so I’ve kept it that way. Funny, I used to be a kid who never cared about her hair but I’ve gotten quite protective of it now. Maybe even a little vain about it. Liam likes it too, so I guess that’s a part of it.
I let him kiss me again then I take his hand and pull him out of the room. “Let’s check out the rest of the house. If we can find out where that smell is coming from and we can get rid of it, we can sleep here tonight. Otherwise, it will the $50 hotel down the road.”
“I don’t mind a $50 hotel,” Liam says, trying out his best low and seductive voice. “I like a bit of filth every now and again.”
“Well, there’s plenty of filth for you here.” I push open another of the doors leading off the living room. I can’t remember what’s in here, although I know the agent showed us through the whole house before we made our offer.
It’s a bedroom. Or it was. There’s a broken blind hanging lopsidedly from the window and marks on the wall where a bedhead used to be. There’s a closet with one door kicked in and there’s something in the corner that’s covered in a grimy cloth. I can’t remember seeing that before either, but then again I was so caught up in the excitement of the house purchase back then and I probably wasn’t paying too much attention.
“The smell is a lot stronger in here.” Liam creaks his way across the dusty floorboards and struggles with the window latch. “I’m gonna puke unless we can get the smell out of the house. Maybe we should go downtown and buy some cleaning supplies.”
The sun is lower now. Seems to be dropping rapidly tonight. There is now only a thin line of brightness on the horizon as Liam finally gets the window open and
a big rush of fresh air comes in. He sticks his head out the gap and takes a couple of deep gulps, clutching at the window frame as if he’s drowning. He’s overreacting now, acting more like Organza than Liam. I’m not interested in standing around and being his audience so I walk over and pull the cloth off the object in the corner.
It’s a rocking horse. One of those vintage ones that look more like charging, wild-eyed demons than sweet little ponies. Its lips are pulled back to show yellow teeth, matted strings of what looks like real hair hang limply down from its mane, and you can see too much of the whites of its crazy eyes. Its body is painted dappled grey and there’s a leather saddle with stirrups laid across its back.
“What’s that?” Liam has pulled his head back inside now but he’s got his nose shoved into the top of his sweatshirt and is breathing heavily through the fabric.
“A kid’s toy. Looks old.”
“Do you think it’s worth something?” Liam seems more interested now, which annoys me even though it shouldn’t. I guess I’m just feeling a little on edge.
“How am I supposed to know? I studied communications, not antiques.” My voice sounds like Mom’s does when she’s getting herself worked up about something and I hate myself for it.
Liam doesn’t notice, or at least he doesn’t acknowledge it. He gives the horse a shove and it starts rocking, as if a phantom ghost child is sitting up in the saddle. Creepy. I wander over to the broken closet and I’m about to peer inside when I’m hit by the full force of the smell. “Ugh.” I reel back and Liam is by my side in an instant. “The smell is coming from inside there. I don’t want to look.”
Yeah, I know. I should be used to looking at gross things considering the childhood I had. However, that was ten years ago now. Time heals all wounds and all the rest of it. I think I’ve blanked out much of what I saw. My therapist helped. Dr. Lucy McIntyre. She’s a little spacey and overly fond of ginger cats, but she’s a very clever lady all the same. Mom never took to her but I like her a lot.
The Nothing House Page 1