The House Guest

by Rosa Sophia

  In the past, she’d had friends admit they’d seen their dead great-grandfather’s cousin’s uncle, or something equally idiotic, but she never fell for it. She would listen so their feelings wouldn’t be hurt, but she always disbelieved them. Once you’re dead, you’re just dead. That’s all there was to it, Katherine claimed.

  She left the photograph lying on the floor and told Jake not to touch it until she said it was okay. He must have thought she was nuts. For the next two days, the letter from the lawyer, which included her grandmother’s will, lay untouched on the surface of the kitchen table, the photograph on the linoleum below. Jake stepped over the picture on his way to the sink, looking down on it, puzzled, but not daring to bend down and touch it.

  Kat had the dream again and this time she tried even harder to talk to the woman, but to no avail. The stranger would always run off before she got the chance, or she would receive that familiar leaden feeling that told her there was no way in hell she would be able to move in her astral body. She wanted so badly to talk to her, but she couldn’t. When she told Jake, he listened intently, but she could tell he thought she was crazy.

  Suddenly, Kat was on the other end of the spectrum. She was the crazy person with the paranormal experiences. She was the one being doubted, not the other way around. It made her feel lost, confused, as if every belief she had ever held true was being challenged by a dream and a photo. It made her want to scream. One day she did and Jake came running out to see what was wrong, only to discover that Kat was standing on the front porch, shocking the hell out of their conservative neighbors.

  When she finally picked up the will, the photo was in the back of her mind, taunting her. She wanted to examine it, but she dare not. She didn’t want to see that woman’s face again until she was completely ready.

  According to the letter, the farmhouse was located in Tinicum Township, flanked by a development and a small patch of forestland. The photo was no longer accurate. Kat imagined the house surrounded by plastic homes. Even if she did move, would she really want to live in such a neighborhood?

  That’s the way her mother’s neighborhood in Georgia was. Kat cringed at the thought and went to the counter to make a pot of coffee, even though it was ninety degrees out and the front door was wide open.

  She looked at the lawyer’s letter while she listened to the song of the coffee machine as it dripped its warm liquid into the pot below.

  Dear Ms. Maslin,

  Enclosed is the will of Julie Maslin, who requests that all of her possessions be transferred to your name. The deed to the Maslin estate is included in this, as both Julie and Phillip Maslin have agreed…

  Kat frowned and glanced toward the living room, where Jake had fallen asleep, a book over his face. Looking back down at the letter, she wondered why, why, why? Why did her grandmother—a woman who never got to see her grow up, was absolutely forbidden to attend birthdays, holidays, even her high school graduation—why did she want to give her entire estate to Katherine? And why had her grandfather agreed to let her have it?

  She spent the rest of the day going over the will and didn’t touch the photograph until sundown. When she finally looked at that woman’s face again, her hands were trembling from the caffeine that surged through her body. It was then that Katherine realized how hungry she was. It hadn’t hit her because she’d been drinking coffee since morning. The day had become a murky night and she closed the front door just as it began to drizzle, soaking the walkway in front of the house.

  ***

  When Katherine went to visit the farm in Tinicum Township, she went in complete ignorance. She knew nothing about her Grandmother Julie’s family. She wasn’t sure why her mother despised them so much, but after a bit of contemplation, she came to the conclusion that maybe her mother didn’t hate Julie’s family at all. Maybe she was afraid of them.

  Jake and Katherine brought Corry along, because she was curious about Kat’s good fortune. Corry was a slim, beautiful girl with strawberry blond hair. She was a few years older than Kat, almost thirty and engaged to a radiologist. Corry was a parapsychologist. She had attended Temple and majored in psychology, but her interests had changed shortly after graduation. Kat had run into her by chance on the Temple campus in Philadelphia.

  She had been sprinting across the campus, happened to turn her head in response to a friend calling her name, and slammed right into Kat. Introductions between them had taken place on the sodden ground, Kat’s limbs outstretched as she attempted to pull herself up from the mud.

  After that, she offered to buy Kat coffee because she felt so guilty about causing her a sprained ankle. The two of them soon forgot about their accident and became friends almost immediately.

  Kat thought of their first meeting as they drove down a back road and crossed an old bridge. Corry leaned into the front of the car, her arms crossed in front of her.

  “What if something horrible happened?” she speculated.

  “What do you mean?” Kat asked, even though she’d wondered the same thing herself.

  “Well, there has to be a good reason why your mother is so worried about you having contact with that side of the family.”

  “Corry, I doubt it was anything bad. They probably just had a falling-out. Anyway, my mother is extremely judgmental sometimes, which would account for her wanting to separate herself from people she deemed unworthy.”

  Kat slowed the car upon turning right and looked over toward a long, stone driveway. She could just barely see a large house beyond the thick foliage of the trees.

  “Is that it?” Jake inquired. Kat looked over at him and shrugged.

  “There’s no house number. And no mailbox either. Unless that’s it in the gutter over there. Wait a second.” She jumped out of the car and sauntered through the summer heat as the sun played over her skin and the tank top and skirt she was wearing. She reached the gutter and sure enough, the broken pile she’d seen from the car was a wooden mailbox. Tire marks in the grass showed that a car had careened right into it. The number on the side read 676. Kat remembered the house number from the letter she had received. Looking up the driveway, she caught sight of stone and wood siding. She was in the right place.

  As they headed up the driveway, Corry said that she was getting ‘bad vibes’ from the entire property, whatever that meant. Her insistence that something odd was afoot caused Kat to wonder how the two of them had become friends. She disagreed with almost everything Corry had ever mentioned about her career.

  Corry had been a professional ghost hunter for the past two years and everything she said about the paranormal sounded like complete bullshit to Katherine. Corry’s idol was Harry Price, the most infamous of British psychical researchers. Kat sighed in remembrance as they got out of the car in front of the old farmhouse.

  Even with her hair braided, it felt hot and sticky against Kat’s back. She pulled the thickness of it over her shoulder and let it hang against her chest as they walked up to the porch. Two men were waiting for Kat, one the lawyer who’d sent her the letter and the second a real estate agent who was looking after the property. They both had short-cropped hair. The real estate agent was the first to shake Kat’s hand.

  “Hi, I’m Jerry Alten,” he intoned, his voice droll and seemingly sleepy. His smile was wide, but phony, and Kat could tell that it hadn’t taken him very long to perfect the ‘I’m-screwing-you-but-you-don’t-know-it’ grin. She saw right through him.

  “I’m Katherine Maslin. This is my boyfriend, Jake Mallon, and my friend Corry Troop.” Corry flashed a fetching smile, and Jake gave a sort of uncomfortable nod.

  The lawyer who was handling Julie Maslin’s will shook Kat’s hand.

  “I’m Allen Ryman. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Maslin.”

  Jerry Alten rested a hand on his rounded gut and turned to the front door. He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans—clothing that did not bode well with his excessive fat. He released a ragged breath and put his hand on the ancient doorknob
.

  “Please forgive my clothes. These aren’t my…regular work hours.” Alten sniffed loudly. “There’re fans inside. Shall we?”

  The lawyer was a young man with smooth, pale skin and watery gray eyes. He didn’t talk much as the three friends were given a tour of the house. One of the few things he said was that he was just getting over a sore throat. He kept rubbing the front of his neck as though he thought it would make the pain go away. Walking a few paces behind them and sometimes lingering in empty rooms, Ryman didn’t appear to be listening as Alten discussed the house. Kat didn’t pay much attention either.

  The house was beautiful. There were very few pieces of furniture present, leading Katherine to believe that most of it had been sold by either Julie, before her death, or Grandpa Phillip, before he’d lost his mind. Kat had expected to feel somewhat unsettled, but she was much more comfortable wandering the dusty hallways than she’d thought she would be. The doorways were shorter than most houses, which was her first clue that this house was a lot older than she’d originally thought. The frames were lined in scratched wood that had probably been flawless at one point in time. The windows were tall and wide, from a time when people didn’t bother with curtains to block out the light; they had needed it to see since they didn’t have electricity.

  Wooden floors stretched out toward a narrow staircase. A wide entrance led into what might be a living room, and still had a few pieces of furniture in it that were covered in sheets. An opening on the other side of the spacious room led into a rather large kitchen. From there, a pantry was attached where canned provisions could be kept. An old bathtub sat discarded, covered in a layer of dust.

  “What was the family like who used to live here?” Corry inquired. She opened a cabinet above the bathtub and found an old, empty Mason jar. She awaited an answer as she turned the jar over in her hands, as if wondering how many people—and who—had touched it in the past. Kat watched her with increasing interest, knowing Corry was touching everything because she said it helped her get a handle on the energies of the place.

  Allen Ryman pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed his forehead.

  “I was the Maslin’s’ lawyer,” he said. “They had another lawyer before me, back when even I was a kid, so I didn’t know them that well. But they were never normal.” The lawyer leaned against the pantry’s doorframe and shook his head. “They were odd.”

  “That’s it? How long were you their lawyer?” Corry asked, her voice tinged with disappointment. Kat assumed her friend had expected a more phenomenal answer. Corry was always looking for excitement where there wasn’t any. “It was just the two of them, right?”

  “In this huge house?” Ryman threw up a hand, gesturing to everything around them. “No way. Granted, I was only actually in the house once and even then, I didn’t see much of it. Mr. Maslin hated company. I never met the other two people who lived here, but I know they were here at some point, I just can’t tell you when. His mother, Anne, lived with them and so did Julie’s brother.”

  Corry set the Mason jar back on the shelf. “And your dad was the only child, right?” she asked Katherine.

  “Yeah,” Kat affirmed.

  “David Maslin?” the lawyer asked. Kat nodded, but Ryman shook his head. “My mother lived in this area when she was still alive. One of the things she mentioned about the Maslin family was one of the rumors concerning them.” He spoke of Kat’s family as though she wasn’t even a part of it. Suddenly, the lawyer became the gossiping housewife.

  “And that is?” Kat inquired.

  “Some people in this area, for some reason, were always under the impression that Phillip and Julie Maslin had more than one child. But where is it?” Ryman shrugged theatrically. “Or, where is she or he. Phillip and Julie had no friends. No one came over and babysat little David. But some of the old folks claimed they saw more than one child running around in the yard. Of course, there’s not much of a way I could back that up. Most of the people who remember that either moved away, died, or lost their minds. You could always ask your dad.”

  “He’s dead,” Kat said plainly. She was used to saying that.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s okay. Anyway, that’s impossible. My dad never had siblings. He would have mentioned it. It was probably some neighborhood kid.”

  Katherine didn’t know what to make of it. Corry had a look on her face that she was quite good at recognizing. Her friend was hoping there was some mystery she could solve or some secret she could discover. Hopefully, Kat thought to herself, there isn’t one.

  Kat explored the massive house very briefly, but didn’t bother to delve into the attic. The door wouldn’t budge and the floorboards in the hallway that led to it weren’t very stable. She went downstairs to the ground floor, where she found the summer kitchen. There was a fireplace down there that was much larger than the one in the living room.

  She didn’t bother to investigate the barn that loomed over the other end of the property, a building that harbored holes in its caving roof as the ceiling threatened to become part of the floor. The entire place, with its untamed lawn and gardens, didn’t seem very child-friendly. So why had Kat managed to recall an almost insignificant moment in her life, the very last time that she had seen this house and its strange inhabitants?

  The lawyer’s letter claimed Julie had died peacefully, in her sleep, five weeks ago. Kat asked Allen Ryman about her grandfather. He told her that Phillip Maslin had ‘misplaced his marbles’ just after Julie died and was currently in a home for the elderly. Ryman found nothing out of the ordinary about the occurrence. He assumed that Phillip was suffering a broken heart, a man with nothing left to live for but the love he had for his wife.

  Kat painted a sorrowful image in her mind, one of an old man, an expression on his face that told of extreme grief. She saw him weeping, then expelling all common sense, memory and logic for a mental picture that was simple enough for his aching heart to handle. Kat had never known her grandfather. She felt sorry for him at that moment in time, when she was absolutely certain that love had lifted him up and slammed him down again, bringing him all the more closer to his last breaths.

  ***

  “I just don’t know. I don’t know if I want to move, Jake.” The three of them were sitting in an ice cream shop on Route 611, considering the events of the day. Kat licked at a chocolate cone and frowned, barely acknowledging the sweet taste on her tongue.

  “This is your dream house,” her fiancé reminded her. “At least, that’s what it looks like to me. It’s a farmhouse. I mean, come on—the kind of place you’ve always wanted just fell into your lap. You can’t tell me you would turn that down.”

  “It sounds great, Kat,” Corry agreed. “You wouldn’t say no, would you?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something about that house that turns me off. Maybe that’s why I have that vivid memory of my mother taking me away from there. Maybe it’s not that I liked the place enough to remember it. Maybe I remembered it because I hated it.”

  “What would you rather have? A dumpy apartment in Souderton or—”

  “Don’t call my apartment dumpy, Corry. You sound like my mother,” Kat snapped. “Anyway, it’s not like I’ve completely rejected the idea. I’m just worried.”

  “Why?”

  Katherine pulled her chair over to let several people pass by, then dragged herself closer to the table.

  “I told you about that dream I’ve been having, right?” I wish I hadn’t, Kat thought. As soon as she’d brought it up the first time, all Corry could talk about was premonitions, past-life memories and all the mumbo-jumbo the typical fortuneteller might consider. It made Kat think of the television con-artists who faked Jamaican accents and managed to convince morons they could read their minds. But, she thought, Corry is not a moron.

  “Yeah, those dreams you had about that lady in the old house.” Her friend nodded. “I remember. And I think you should talk
to Janis Crow about it. I know she could help you. She’s helped me.”

  “Come on, give me a break. No offense, but that woman is nuts.”

  “You haven’t met her yet.”

  “Will you let me finish?” Kat asked. Corry slumped against the back of her chair. “Well, Jake knows this already. There’s a photograph—”

  “Oh.”

  Jake patted Kat’s knee as if to comfort her. But when she thought of that woman’s furious expression, then the smile that she exhibited on that black and white photograph, she couldn’t help but get chills down her back.

  “The lawyer, Allen Ryman, sent me an old photo of the house. He said he was directed to send it to me. I still have the letter if you want to see it. I can’t imagine who would tell him to send the photograph—maybe my grandparents wanted me to see it—but it wasn’t just of the house.” Kat paused to take a breath and shiver at the words she was about to say. “The photo was of Julie and Phillip Maslin. The woman, Julie, was my grandmother. And Corry, I know I’ve always doubted the strange things you tell me about ghosts and things and I honestly can’t believe I’m about to say this…”

  “It’s okay, Kat. I won’t laugh at you.”

  “Just don’t say ‘I told you so,’ okay?” Kat looked imploringly at her, then at Jake, who kissed her on the cheek and wrapped his arm around her.

  “I won’t say that, I promise,” Corry said.

  “The woman in my dream was my grandmother and I swear, before that photo, I have never seen a picture of her, nor do I remember what she looked like if I’ve ever met her at all. I’m afraid that the dreams will only get worse if I stay in that house.”

  “Sweetie.” Corry extended a hand and took Kat’s, gently squeezing her fingers from across the table. “What if you move there and the opposite happens? What if the dreams stop?”