Hope House Chronicles volume II: The Possession

by Michael Bray

  “Pam, wait,” he said, following her down the steps. As Pam reached the bottom, the sound was clearer. It was coming from the kitchen. She switched on the light, checking that the doors and windows were closed and locked. Bill had joined her now, embarrassed at his public lack of courage. They heard it again, the scratching sound. It was coming from the pantry.

  “I bet it’s a rat,” Pam said, glancing over her shoulder. “I told you to clean that out when we moved in. If we have an infestation-”

  “-I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

  Pam grabbed the broom which was propped by the door and handed it to Bill.

  “What’s this for?” he whispered.

  “When I open the door, it might run past me. Hit it with that.”

  “Is this really necessary?”

  “It is if you want any sleep tonight. Now be ready,” she said as she crossed to the pantry door.

  Bill readied himself with the brush as Pam swung the door open.

  There was no rat. Vanessa was sitting on the floor at the back of the pantry. She had moved the boxes and clutter to make a space for herself. Her fingers were covered in blood, cut raw by the incessant scratching on the floor.

  “Vanessa, what are you doing? Come out of there now,” Pam said.

  Vanessa scratched her fingers on the floor, adding more blood to the four jagged lines she had left on the ground. She looked at them, eyes vacant, skin pale and sweaty.

  “They all died down here,” she said, then scratched at the floor again.

  “Stop it stop doing that,” Pam said as Bill joined her.

  “I can still hear them. All of them,” Vanessa said, grinning at her parents. The shadows morphed her face into something ghastly. “We’re all going to die here.”

  “Out of there, out of there now,” Pam said, grabbing her by the arm.

  Vanessa started to scream, thrashing and trying to pull away from her mother.

  “Don’t just stand there, help me,” Pam screamed as her daughter clawed at her face, leaving bloody smears on her skin. Bill dropped the brush and helped pull Vanessa out of the pantry.

  “What do we do? She’s bleeding all over the floor.”

  “I don’t know; just hold her tight so she doesn’t hurt herself.”

  “They won’t stop talking. They all die. Everyone dies,” Vanessa said, glaring at them both and hissing the words through gritted teeth.

  The three of them sat on the kitchen floor until Vanessa calmed and eventually drifted off to sleep.

  “What do we do, Bill? What’s wrong with her?” Pam whispered. It was the first time Bill had seen her without her sneer or arrogance in as long as he could remember.

  “I don’t know. She needs to see a doctor. We’ll get through this.”

  EIGHT

  Doctor Phillips approached Hope House, brown bag held in his right hand. He knocked on the door, hoping he could get away from this house call quickly and meet his friends for golf later that morning. Bill opened the door, and Phillips smiled.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hamilton. I understand you have a sick daughter?”

  “Yes. Come in please,” Bill said, stepping away from the door to allow the doctor in.

  Phillips looked around the house. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to visit again after your daughter last went missing. Is this a follow up from that incident?”

  “No, this is unrelated.”

  “I see. And where is Mrs. Hamilton?”

  Bill wanted to be honest, and tell the doctor that she was refusing to come out of the bedroom, and sat there all day smoking and praying for help. He wouldn’t do that though, not as long as he could keep up the illusion that all was well. “She’s shopping, in Oakwell Village.”

  “Ah, I see. In that case, it’s down to the men to deal with this issue,” the doctor said. He stared at Bill, waiting for him to speak. “And what is that issue, if I may ask, Mr. Hamilton?”

  Bill blinked, and scratched nervously at his beard. “Apologies, doctor. I haven’t been sleeping that well myself.”

  “No, you look a little pale. Are you feeling at all unwell?”

  “I’m fine. My daughter….” He drifted off and stared at the floor.

  “In your own time, Mr. Hamilton. What seems to be the problem?”

  “She’s having….episodes. Behaving strangely, talking to herself. Last night we found her in the pantry scratching her fingers bloody on the floor.”

  “I see. Is this all since she went missing?”

  Bill nodded. “She says she can’t remember what happened, but something isn’t right. She’s sick.”

  “May I see her?”

  “Yes, she’s in her room. Shall I show you up?”

  “No need, Mr. Hamilton. I remember where it is from my last visit. You go ahead and make yourself a cup of tea. You look like you need it.”

  “Yes, thank you doctor. Would you like one?”

  “Please. Milk, no sugar, thank you. In the meantime, I’ll go and see if I can help your daughter…”

  “Vanessa.”

  “Vanessa,” Phillips repeated, then made his way upstairs.

  ***

  He wasn’t sure what to expect when he entered the room, and was pleasantly surprised to see that everything was as he expected to find in the bedroom of a teenage girl Single bed, posters on the walls.

  Vanessa was on her side, facing him, her eyes closed, hair fanned across the pillow. She was pale and had lost weight since he last saw her. Her hands were roughly bandaged, and were folded on top of the covers.

  “Vanessa, I’m Doctor Phillips. Your father asked me to come and see you.”

  Vanessa opened her eyes, watching the doctor as he walked into the room.

  “They are quite worried about you. How have you been feeling?”

  “Fine,” she said, staring at the doctor’s heavily lined face. “You can’t help me though. I’ve already told them.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions, shall we? Not until I’ve examined you.”

  “Examined?” she said, sneering at him. “Is that what you do, dirty old fuck of a man who likes to touch little girls.”

  Philips stepped away from the bed, too stunned to respond as Vanessa went on, drooling and snarling as she spoke to him.

  “Is that what you want, old man? To touch me? To be the first to spoil my flesh.”

  She flung back the covers, exposing her legs. “You want to touch it, don’t you? You want to do things to me you old cunt.”

  “Stop that. I’ll tell your father,” Phillips said, taking another step away from the bed.

  “He’s a cunt too. Him and that old slut of a wife of his. They all die here, everyone. All of them, but you know that don’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You were the doctor on call for the Midfield’s. You found them all cut up. He looked inside for the voices but he couldn’t find them.”

  The window lurched open, letting the wind howl through the room. Phillips stood there unable to do anything but stare.

  “The voices of the dead own this place. If that blow isn’t gorged on blood, then vengeance will come to all.”

  As Philips watched, Vanessa started to urinate, the stain spreading on the mattress beneath her. “The old fuck will say she won’t wash it. Won’t wash the piss. Won’t wash the blood. You washed it didn’t you? Those old ones, the ones in pieces on the floor.”

  “How do you know those things, who told you?” Phillips said. He felt nauseous, his legs threatening to give way.

  “They told me. They always talk. They never stop talking.” She was grinning at him, chin slick with saliva. She rubbed her bandaged hands in the stains on the mattress. “Dead. All of you will be dead.” She flung her hands towards him, spattering him with urine.

  It was all Phillips could take. He left the room, rushing down the hall and then downstairs, fighting the urge to run.

  “Dr. Philips, what’s wrong?” Bill said, as
he came from the kitchen.

  “I can’t stay here.” Philips said, hurrying to the door.

  “Dr. Philips, I don’t understand, what’s wrong with our daughter?”

  Phillips turned to face Bill, sweat streaming down his pale face. “Nothing medicinal can cure what that girl has.”

  “What does that mean? I don’t understand.”

  Phillips said nothing; he opened the door and went outside, stumbling and almost falling over the doorstep. Bill watched him go, whishing he had some kind of plan on what to do next.

  ***

  Vanessa was sleeping. Bill and Pam had spent the rest of the day following the visit from Doctor Philips cleaning their daughter up and replacing her bed linen to a campaign of verbal and physical abuse spewing from the mouth of a their thirteen year old daughter, things nobody her age should know to say. It was a little after midnight and she was at last sleeping.

  Bill poured himself a large bourbon and carried it to the sitting room. The sofa felt good and swallowed him in its embrace. He was so tired, not just physically, but mentally too. Pam had taken to locking herself away with her Bible and praying for help, but as an atheist, Bill couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t pray to a god he didn’t believe in, no matter how much he wanted some kind of intervention to take place. He looked at his forearms and the scratches that lined them. His daughter, his once polite and calm daughter and snarled and scratched like some kind of wild animal, speaking to him in a voice that wasn’t hers. He swirled his drink around the glass and swallowed it down in one, wincing at the taste. He didn’t drink often, and the heat made him cough.

  “It’s the devil.”

  He spun around as Pam entered the room, clutching the black Bible to her chest. Her hair was dishevelled, her eyes red from crying. The arrogance that had seemed like a part of her for so long was gone, replaced with something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  “It’s not the devil. She’s sick. Something with her brain,” he said as Pam sat in the chair.

  “The devil is inside her. We both know it,” she replied, trying to smile, but failing. Instead, her bottom lip started to tremble and she looked at the floor.

  “Pam, don’t start with all this religious crap.”

  “It’s your fault,” she said, glaring at him “You brought us here; you knew what had happened in this house.”

  “That people died? It’s just a house. Walls and a roof. Nothing more.”

  “People didn’t just die. They were murdered. You moved us to a murder house.”

  “Pam, look-”

  "When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is the one on whom seed was sown beside the road.”

  “Don’t do it. Don’t start quoting from that damn book.”

  “It’s all in here. This is our guide, Bill. Corinthians said it best.” She slapped her palm on the front of the book, closing her eyes as she recited from memory. “No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” She looked at him and smiled. “Don’t you see? That’s our daughter. Our baby. He hides inside her, our angel of light.”

  “Stop it. Stop it now,” Bill snapped, trying to control the fury inside him.

  She started to leaf through the Bible, searching for a specific passage. “Don’t you see? We have to fight, we have to-”

  He lurched off the sofa and snatched the book from her, tossing it across the room into the corner. She glared at him and went on, growing in strength even as he shrunk away.

  “Put on the full armour of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. That’s what it says, Bill. We have to fight, the battle between good and evil, the devil and-”

  He slapped her hard, bringing the room into silence. It was the first time he had ever hit her, despite the years of niggling and pushing. She glared at him, cheek already changing colour.

  “I’m going to check on our daughter,” he said, walking past her and going upstairs. He flicked on the light switch at the top of the steps, casting its ugly yellow glow on the hallway. He stood there for a moment, palm stinging from striking his wife and the lack of guilt he felt, but also afraid of his daughter. It was madness, and the more he thought about it the less sense it made. She was just a girl, a child, and yet he couldn’t help but feel fear. It was the reason he was so unwilling to accept that his wife might have been right. It was also the reason why he was afraid to move and go towards Vanessa’s bedroom door. For all her preaching from the Bible, Pam had been right. It was a murder house - that was why it was so cheap - and he had bought it anyway. He knew the story of course, about how the old couple took in a lodger who happened to be a wanted criminal. What happened next was the subject of some speculation. It was said that the old couple had found out who their new guest was, confronted him with it and were killed for their troubles. The confusion about the whole case surrounded the way in which they had been killed. The man they had taken in was a petty thief, a bank robber who killed with a gun if he had to. The old couple who lived in the house, however, had been butchered, ripped to shreds and left for days whilst their fugitive lodger lived there with them, enduring the stench before apparently shooting himself dead. It made no sense, and because of the circumstances, the price was significantly lower than it should have been, which, for people in a situation as desperate as they were, was vital. He didn’t believe in the supernatural, or God, Heaven, Hell or anything else. Science and evolution were the things he believed in. Nature adapting and shaping the world around it until it expired to be replaced with new life. That had been his belief since he was a child, but now, he was starting to wonder what if?

  What if there was something else, something beyond that which was known, in a place beyond the explanation of science. What if….

  He pushed it from his mind. It would be no good to anyone if he started to believe the Bible talk. Their daughter was sick, and if it meant they had to take her to a hospital and have her admitted to fix it, then that was what they would do.

  He heard a sound. A thud coming from Vanessa’s room. The hairs on his arms bristled to attention and he had to fight the urge to go back downstairs, even if it meant facing Pam and what he had done to her. He moved towards Vanessa’s bedroom door, hoping and praying that she was asleep and appreciating the irony of how quickly a person could turn to a deity even if he didn’t necessarily believe in it. Every sense was attuned as he approached the door, every creaking floorboard underfoot, the soft sound of Pam reciting from her Bible and of course the sounds coming from Vanessa’s room. He stood at the door, staring at the wood, then at the door handle, unable to open the door, he simply couldn’t do it.

  Another noise. A bark of laughter, or maybe a growl. Soft and hard to hear but definitely coming from his daughters room. He took a deep breath, knowing he was about to see something horrific, something he would never be able to forget. He opened the door and stepped inside.

  The smell hit him first.

  Vanessa was standing on the bed, her hands caked with her own excrement, which was also splattered on her legs and on the sheets. She was using it to write on the walls, some of it bloody where the cuts on her fingers had opened. Bill looked around the room, taking it all in, reading the words she had written and was still smearing on the walls, grunting to herself as she worked and completely oblivious to his presence. There were obscenities, words nobody in the family would ever say. There were also words that he simply didn’t understand. As he watched, she was furiously penning the letter K. He looked at the rest of the word, and wondered what it meant.

  GOGOK

  “Vanessa, what are you doing?” he asked, the words falling flat in the atmosphere of the room. She turned to look at him, and he realised she was changing into something he didn’t recognise. She was dirty and sweating, her pale skin covered in scabs and lesions. The transformation had been rapid and frightening.<
br />
  “What’s wrong, Bill? Never seen shit before?”

  “Come down from there. You need help.”

  “It’s too late for her, Bill. Too late for all of you.”

  “Stop it, stop doing that!” he shouted, taking a step into the room.

  She turned to him, still standing on the bed and reached behind her. When she showed him her hands, they were covered in excrement. She rubbed it into her skin, and into her mouth, smearing it over her face. “It’s just shit, Bill. We all do it.”

  He gagged, somehow avoiding throwing up. He knew then that the creature on the bed wasn’t his daughter. Something had inhabited her body and was manipulating her like a marionette, making her snarl and twitch. Bill backed up to the door, pressing himself against it and watching as the foul thing on the bed continued to write on the walls using its own excrement.

  “I told you,” Pam whispered in his ear. She was standing next to him, clutching the Bible to her chest, cheek still red where he had struck her. He hadn’t even heard her come upstairs. “Only God can help us now, only he can show us the way through prayer.”

  Bill had no answer, and even if he did, couldn’t speak. He was numb as he stared across the room. As they both watched, she urinated where she stood, ignoring it as it spilled down her legs and further stained the already filthy mattress.

  “We need to restrain her for her own good,” Bill said, still fighting the nausea.

  “You can’t help her. You have no faith. God and I will fix this.”

  He glanced at her, realising he was staring at a stranger. He wondered when the woman he once loved had been replaced by the bitter, delusional woman who stood beside him, clutching her Bible hard and silently mouthing prayer.

  “This isn’t about faith, Pam. This is about our daughter. Look at her. She’s obviously ill. I think we should speak to Doctor Phillips again.”

  “He won’t come back here. He senses the evil even if you choose to ignore it.”

  “She’s not evil. She’s our daughter. It’s Vanessa, not a monster.”

  She turned to him, eyes defiant and frightened. “Not anymore. That’s not our daughter.”