Haunted

by Lynn Carthage

  The door creaked.

  So loudly that I cringed. Still, I wedged the door closed and sank down to the floor with my back against it.

  It’s okay, I tried to tell myself. It wasn’t as loud as you think. And how could they track it back to this door—it’s closed now. If they don’t know about it, you’re safe.

  I carefully looked up—even my hair rustling against the door sounded loud—toward the window in the door. I couldn’t see it from this vantage point, which meant that I couldn’t be seen, either.

  I listened … I waited.

  I looked at my wrist to see what time it was. No watch there. But eventually Mom and Steven would miss me and come looking. There was nowhere else to go on this monstrous estate except here … I just had to wait. They’d come get me. They would. Right? Unless they thought I was outside and started combing the woods. Oh God, that would take hours. Days.

  I’m here, I’m here, I tried to mentally tell them.

  And who was there? Madame Arnaud looking for another child to taste?

  Or … this house had been empty so long. Maybe someone had taken up residence. Someone who was supposed to be taking medications to control their mental disease, but failed to. Someone crazed and violent.

  Someone who would bludgeon Steven with a baseball bat when he came to find me. Someone who would kill me, too, when I heard Steven’s screams and rushed out to help. And after he’d eviscerated both of us, he’d go into the modern, clean apartment and take care of Mom and Tabby.

  All four of our bodies gelling and cooling in the mansion… who would miss us? Maybe in the fall someone from the school would call, if Mom had already registered me. The police would come and find us glued to the floor by our own decomposing. We’d be morbid headlines.

  I waited. I listened, listened, listened.

  A lot of time passed. My mind wandered; I thought about Bethany. I eventually yawned.

  Maybe there was a way for the organ to play without someone pumping the pedals. Maybe a mouse was inside the works, applying his rodent teeth to tubing that somehow emitted a mild sound upon puncture.

  I yawned again. My heart had long ago slowed: that wild beast in my chest had its head tucked into its paws, sleeping.

  I was stiff from sitting so long, so I carefully began moving my limbs and rolling my neck around. I waited probably another twenty minutes, then I stood up, dusted off my jeans, and opened the bookshelf door.

  I listened again, carefully, looking into the vast depths of that gigantic library. I closed the door behind me, and began going back down the staircase, stealthily, just to be sure. I reached the floor and walked over to the door to the hallway leading to the ballroom.

  Oh my God.

  No.

  I hadn’t closed this door—and it was closed now.

  I backed away from it. I had to return to the secrecy of the servant’s room. That was my only chance. I took a few steps backwards, just a few … when something insane, totally insane, happened.

  The library completely vanished.

  Instead, I was in the ballroom, facing the organ, five feet in front of me. A woman sat on its bench, her back to me. She wore a rotted silk dress, her right arm extended to the side. Where the fabric had torn, decayed skin revealed the muscles underneath. Her right index finger had decomposed so much that just one long bone stuck out at the end. That bone was still resting on the organ key she had played about an hour ago.

  Silently, she turned her head around. She had dark hair, but I couldn’t see what her face was like since it was so undone by time. She had high cheekbones that shone through the frayed parchment of her skin.

  A little smile played on her worm-destroyed lips, as she held my gaze. She stood up.

  Like a parishioner making her way out of the pew after church, she walked sideways to free herself and her voluminous skirts off the bench. She turned, all the while watching me. She took a slow step toward me, gracefully, although so terribly wrong with her skirts falling apart and her face peeling as if she’d been horribly sunburned rather than having lived for many centuries.

  She was coming to me.

  I had to move. But this was a vision. I was there with my mind, not my body.

  She took another step. Two more, and she would be able to touch me. I willed myself to move, and managed a single step backward. Relief flooded through me; I could escape, I could get the hell out of here. The exit was to my right, so I shifted my weight to that foot and began taking steady steps. I still couldn’t force myself to run, but I was going faster than she was in her stately pursuit, as her frail cloth slippers took step after step.

  It was the slowest, dripped-in-syrup hunt, and every step I took required intense will from me, incredible energy. In my peripheral vision, I saw I was approaching the door. Maybe once I stepped through its threshold her strange lock on me would be broken and I could run.

  I thought my way carefully through each backward step. I counted the black-and-white parquet squares between us. She extended her hand to me, half flesh and half bone, as if beseeching me to stop. But I was so close, so close, so close. There was the door, the rounded stones in an arch, and then I was through it.

  I could sense the grand staircase behind me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her. If I looked away, maybe she’d blurt forward like a rabbit. To keep her slow, I had to watch her. The floor changed under my feet to the stone tablets of the grand entryway. I kept going. Now I could see the balustrade. I would have to go down backward, watching her. I could clutch the banister and use it to guide me down the stairs.

  I was there, I was there, I could feel the slight breeze drifting up from the front door open far below me. She shook her head at me.

  Instantly the vision ended, and I was back in the library looking at the closed door.

  I screamed.

  The doorknob turned.

  The ornate, oval golden knob slowly spun.

  The door flung open and crashed against the wall. The woman wasn’t there, but I heard a small moan in my ear, and cold air passed through my hair. The presence was behind me, so I ran forward, down the short hall, into the ballroom.

  The organ began playing a complex song with half notes and quarter notes in a rapid volley, a virtuoso performance to mock my flight down the sharp, wicked stairs. It was as if the organ knew I had been trying to convince myself I hadn’t heard it, and was rolling out its most deafening and grandiose performance.

  As soon as I got outside, the organ stopped mid-tune.

  Silence. Except … from far away, the faintest hint of a laugh.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Paranoid delusions, with the idea that someone is watching you

  or stalking you, can be a big part of schizophrenia.

  —Class presentation excerpt,

  Bethany Robb and Phoebe Irving

  I tore into the apartment, making little half-breath screams. They were in the kitchen, all three of them. Mom was chopping something while Steven entertained Tabby at the table.

  “There’s a ghost,” I shrieked. “She’s living in the house and she’s your ancestor, Steven, and she drank blood, and she …”

  I went on and on, sobbing. I told them everything I’d seen—and what Miles had told me. Mom finished her chopping and came to sit at the table, staring at Tabby, this kind of grieved expression on her face. Clearly she didn’t want Tabby to hear it and get scared. She just wanted me to shut up so she could pay attention to the kid that did matter.

  Steven looked at me only once, then his gaze flickered back to Tabby.

  It was always this way. When I’d told them about fainting over Richard Spees, Mom had actually laughed. “You sure know how to work yourself up,” she’d said at the time, and her face said the same thing now.

  I felt a rush of frustration and rage, my cheeks flaming. Why didn’t they listen to me? Because it was my fault we were here?

  Mom used to listen to me, used to lay her cheek against mine and sit quietly w
hile I told her things. Even when I was big, she’d pull me onto her lap and wrap her arms around me from behind. But that was before Tabby was born.

  “You guys are just evil!” I said. “You don’t—”

  Before I could finish the sentence, something awful happened. Something wrenched me out of that kitchen and whistled me through time … backward.

  I wound up back in California, a year or so ago, back in the same discussion I had been thinking about. The conversation about my fainting.

  My breath halted in my throat.

  What was going on?

  Mom and Steven didn’t react. To them, it was as if this were happening for the first time. They had the same expressions. Mom was wearing the Allo Oiseau dress she’d bought at the designer’s rack sale, and her hair was falling out of her clip as she lightly scolded me.

  “Maybe you should think about why this happened to you,” she was saying.

  What? Why I had just traveled through time to this weird memory?

  No. I put my hands over my face. She meant I should think about why a fainting spell happened to me.

  Panic welled up in me. Surely I was still in the Arnaud kitchen, telling them about Madame Arnaud? But this was San Francisco, with our sunny kitchen window giving a view of the backyard eucalyptus tree sloughing off its aromatic bark. I couldn’t understand why I was stuck in some old, totally unimportant memory.

  “We need to leave,” I pleaded.

  “… need to take better care of yourself, Phoebe,” Steven was saying. “What did you have for lunch?”

  The words came automatically to my mouth, although I wanted to talk about Madame Arnaud, and not what I’d eaten so long ago. “I bought a Caesar salad, but what does that have to do with anything?”

  “You’re not eating well,” Mom agreed. “It’s easy to get light-headed if you’re just eating lettuce.”

  “Have chicken on it next time,” said Steven. “You’re an athlete; you’re burning calories.”

  “And remember to breathe,” Mom teased, “when you’re talking to a boy.”

  I felt helpless. The fainting had nothing to do with food, with excitement. It was something my body did inexplicably. Listen to me, I tried to say, but Tabby derailed everything, like she did then, like she was doing now …

  She had tried to get out of her chair and fallen, hitting her forehead on the table edge. Now she was crying wildly, while Steven hugged her and Mom leaned across the table with her arms extended, so he could hand her over.

  Time skipped again while she leaned.

  Her Allo Oiseau dress morphed into the simple red Old Navy sweatshirt she was wearing on top of jeans. The bright sunlight faded. The table was no longer our blond wood one that she and Steven had put on their wedding registry; it was now the dark oak of the Arnaud kitchen’s. I was back. We were all back.

  Steven handed Tabby to Mom. She soothed her youngest daughter with new words: words that hadn’t come from previous conversations, from a different country.

  I sank down into a chair opposite Steven. I was going crazy. I must have just had a psychotic episode. A memory had taken me by the throat and yanked me back to the past, while the present had become filmy, stepsister to the real.

  What had happened here in the last ten minutes was just as terrifying as what had happened—if it did—with Madame Arnaud. I was losing my mind. I was losing my freaking mind.

  Reeling, I watched them continue their everyday talk. And after I’d made sure the present was staying, and I wasn’t going to shift somewhere else, I rose and went quietly back to my lime green bedroom.

  I lay down on the bed without pulling back the covers. What was the use? I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.

  I rolled over onto my side and a paper in my pocket crinkled. Wiggling around a little, I was able to pull it out.

  I read it while a headache built fortifications in my skull. Soon my head was throbbing as I stared at Bethany’s careful handwriting, once so familiar to me. This was an explanation for what I’d seen in the old part of the manor … and for what had just happened in the kitchen. It made perfect sense.

  The paper was a page from her notebook, notes she’d started to take for our presentation in psychology class. We hadn’t gotten far, and that night we couldn’t find this page, so we’d started over again on her laptop. I guess I hadn’t worn these pants since then. Mom had packed them for me, not knowing I didn’t like the way the waist sat.

  The headache drove a mallet into my brain again and again.

  I read the page a hundred times.

  And then I read it again.

  Schizophrenia Presentation by Bethany Robb and Phoebe Irving

  I. Schizophrenia can show up in kids as young as 5, but it’s more typical for it to show up in the teen years

  II. Some of the positive symptoms (explain) include: A. Auditory hallucinations—hearing things like voices that aren’t there

  B. Visual hallucinations—seeing things

  C. Either being unable to sleep, or sleeping way too much

  D. A fierce belief that the hallucinations are real

  E. Garbled speech or thought

  III. Some of the

  I was swimming. Miles wasn’t there and I couldn’t see anyone else, either. The pool was dark and silent, no splashing sounds. The lighting was so dim I forced myself to relax into it, absorbed by the familiar sensations of my body threading the water’s needle.

  I don’t know how long this lasted. Hours, maybe. Then the lights came on and someone entered, setting up cones for the lanes. Shortly afterward, children trickled in and took a swim class from the lifeguard who’d opened the pool up.

  I treaded water and watched them for a long time, remembering my first lessons and how initially I’d been terrified to put my face in the water. Their serious faces were so heartbreaking as they kicked their stubby legs and swam back to their mothers. The class ended. The high ceiling echoed with their talk as they headed back to the locker room, and the pool settled.

  I was alone again, a single flower in a dark blue field. Free swim began and I pulled myself out to make room in the lane for those lean-bodied adults who came, swam steadily, then toweled off and left.

  I stayed forever, watching swimmers come and go. None of them were Miles. I had to admit that was why I’d lingered, although I couldn’t remember when I’d asked Mom to come pick me up. Or maybe they’d lent me the car? No: I would’ve remembered my first time driving on the left side of the road.

  You’re losing your grip again, I thought, and shivered. Which reminded me I’d never dried off, sitting there dripping on the cold tile.

  I stood and stretched. Miles wasn’t coming.

  I walked into the kitchen and they were all eating dinner. Oh crap. Setting the table was my job. Mom must’ve called me and I didn’t hear her … and in these post-screw-up days, I wasn’t given extra chances. She had set the table and deliberately didn’t set a place for me.

  “I’m really sorry, I didn’t hear you calling me,” I said.

  Mom said nothing, just swabbed at some applesauce Tabby had pushed over the edge of her plastic bunny plate.

  “I feel like a jerk,” I said. “I didn’t mean to forget my job.”

  “I’ll set the table from now on,” said Steven.

  “No!” I said. “I can do it. I honestly didn’t hear you. The acoustics here are really weird.”

  “Oh, Steven,” said Mom. “That’s sweet of you. One less thing to …” Her voice drifted off.

  “Seriously! It’s not a big deal. I just didn’t hear you!” I protested.

  They were studiously ignoring me. Such is the fate of the teen who has let down her family. My eyes filled with tears, and I turned around and went back to my room. I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t need dinnertime chatter. I sat on my bed and imagined a window where no window existed: I let curtains billow in a breeze and send the fragrance of roses to me. I calmed. I didn’t even end up crying. I would j
ust have to make a better effort from now on. Try harder.

  Nighttime.

  Tabby woke up crying and I listened through the wall as Mom went in and changed her diaper and sang her one more lullaby.

  I’d been awake for hours, thinking about what I’d experienced: seeing Madame Arnaud although I knew I hadn’t, spending hours at the pool in a weird daze. Even the simple example of forgetting to set the table.

  They had meds for this kind of thing. I could ask Mom to make me an appointment. I’d be assertive with her, and I wouldn’t let Tabby get in the way of saying what I needed to. This time I’d be completely clear, and I wouldn’t let anything divert me from talking to her. I need to see someone, I’d say. A therapist. I’m seeing things, Mom.

  I wished I could call Bethany, but I hadn’t charged my cell and it was dead. She’d be cycling through Web pages to find me the best therapist, and the whole time she’d be babbling and laughing so I wouldn’t feel bad. “You know, you didn’t have to develop schizophrenia just because we did a report on it,” she’d tease. “I know you’re super scholarly, but no one expects that.”

  I stretched out on my bed, feeling an ache for her and for my life back in California. Everything was light back there. England didn’t even offer windows.

  I kept mentally rehearsing what I’d say to Mom. I just don’t feel right, and I think I need help. I imagined the look on Mom’s face as she tried to process the idea that her daughter had mental issues. In my vision, her face instantly relaxed as Tabby came up and hugged her legs. She bent, picked her up, and asked her if she was hungry. No! I shouted in my imagination. Listen to me! Listen to me for once! I need help!

  I’d tell her in the morning.

  Why wait? I imagined Bethany saying. She was right. Based on the silence from the room next door, Tabby was back asleep and Mom had left. I got off the bed and left my room, walking past Tabby’s room where she slept, kneeling with her butt in the air, the puffiness of her diaper making her body look like a loaf of bread. I smiled in at her. She was a good kid. It wasn’t her fault she got all the attention.

  I continued down the hallway and turned the corner.