Malefic

by Ambrose Ibsen

  Still shuddering, I reached absently to my left to pick up the fountain pen. The nib, I noticed, had been slightly bent in writing that last, furious message. The gold-trimmed cap had fallen directly beneath the table, near the base molding, and I groped for it while trying to ease the deformed tip back into shape.

  My fingers padded around on the floors blindly. I took hold of the cap, but as I recovered it my hand encountered something else. Something unexpected—cold and rubbery to the touch.

  Turning so quickly that I banged my head on the underside of the folding table, I glimpsed—for a mere instant—the blue human hand whose fingers I'd just touched with my own. The appendage was gone in the next moment in a fit of scurrying, but the sensory impression remained long after the hazy outline of its owner had disappeared from my periphery.

  I felt eyes on me from somewhere in the room. The stare was as frigid as those fingers had been, and the sensation every bit as unmistakable.

  Kicking my way across the floor, I scraped at the guestroom door like a dog that needed desperately to be let out, and barreled into the hallway on hands and knees. My joints clicked as I crawled out of the room and towards the stairs. Finally, standing with a groan, I limped down into the lower story and damn near ran into the front door. I put on every light I could find, but even that wasn't enough to soothe me.

  Along the way, still clutching the fountain pen in my fist, I found I'd managed to gouge myself with the nib. Blood and black ink flowed across my palm in equal measure.

  This house had just declared war on me.

  Within five minutes I'd given my palm a hasty rinse and thrown some of my belongings into the messenger bag. In the next five minutes, messily dressed, I was speeding down the sidewalk and calling a taxi. I had the driver pick me up in the parking lot of a gas station around the corner.

  Under no circumstances would I wait for my ride within reach of that house.

  The driver eventually arrived, and I had him shuttle me off to a nearby diner. There, I drank a steady stream of coffee till the sun finally rose some hours later.

  Twelve

  Joseph's call the next morning found me still seated in the booth of a 24-hour diner, a jittery mess. The shuddering fear had largely faded by then thanks to the glow of the sun, but had been replaced with the shivers typical of one who's had more coffee than their body knows what to do with. A half-eaten breakfast platter sat before me, untouched for the better part of an hour. I should have eaten more, if only to prevent the torrent of coffee from burning a hole in my stomach, but food held little appeal.

  I clawed the cell phone from my pocket and studied it a moment with my burning, sleep-starved eyes before answering. Finding a suitable voice to answer with and making myself seem unbothered after the nightmarish events of the prior night ranked among the hardest things I'd done in recent memory, and I had to dig deep not to sound like the gruff, frightened shell of a man I really was. “Hello, Joey.”

  “Good morning,” he said, sounding almost irritably cheery. “How's it going, Uncle Marcel? Are you holding up OK? How did things go last night?”

  I glanced around the messy table, at the clutter of mugs and plates I'd accumulated over several hours, and replied, “It was fine. Fine. Decided to come out to a diner for a bite of breakfast. And you? How are things?”

  “Well, Megan and Melissa are at the waterpark for the moment. I decided to hang back a little and do some reading. It's been ages since I've had time to sit down with a book. There were some paperbacks in the gift shop downstairs. I picked up a Michael Crichton thriller, so I'll probably dive into that and then meet the others for lunch.”

  Lounging in a hotel room, far from that accursed house, sounded mighty nice. Perhaps I'd try it sometime. “I'm glad you're enjoying yourselves,” I said.

  “I just wanted to call and say thank you,” continued Joseph. “I really appreciate everything you've done for us. I hope we'll be able to repay you, uncle. We haven't been out of the house that long, but already I'm beginning to see what you meant. We'd stayed cooped up too long. I let the stress of the move get to me, and I think Megan and Melissa both picked up on that. Blaming ghosts for the trouble was convenient, but the problem was rooted deeper down. I just jumped to conclusions, I guess.”

  How the tables had turned.

  Joseph, having left home for a day, was now the voice of reason.

  I was of a very different mind, of course.

  “Don't mention it, Joey. I'm happy to help,” said I. “Now, bear in mind, I haven't cleared your house yet. It's entirely possible that there's something happening behind the scenes.” I bit my tongue to keep from telling him about the hell I'd lived through overnight. “Once I'm done with everything, I'll give you the all-clear. Till then, keep enjoying yourselves!”

  “Sure thing,” he replied. “Thanks again. And please call if you need anything.”

  “I will, Joey.”

  I set the phone down and buried the heels of my palms in my eyes, massaging gently. The breakfast rush was going strong, and all around me the sounds of other patrons eating, of cooks and waitresses bantering, reached a headache-inducing crescendo. When next I opened my eyes, I looked past the plates and napkins I'd left sitting about, and to the leather journal, sticking out from the zippered edge of my messenger bag.

  My exchanges with Constance had never been so sporadic and tense as recently. In previous investigations into the nature of ghosts, she'd always been forthcoming, sharing her impressions of a place or spirit with frankness. Now, she wrote me only in dribs and drabs—and with baffling haste. Something in the house was interfering with her ability to reach out regularly. Pursued by whatever ominous forces existed there, she was like a soldier squatting in the trenches, writing staggered notes between fearsome sorties, constantly under siege from a terrifying enemy.

  It was becoming increasingly clear that I could not lean on my wife the way I'd done in the past. Though I was not a spiritual medium or anything of the sort, the task of unraveling this haunting was going to fall to me. I had a responsibility to Joseph and his family, after all. Considering what I'd witnessed there, I could not in good conscience allow them back to the house until the problem had been dealt with. I'd made a promise to him, and would exhaust the whole of my resources and knowledge before admitting defeat.

  Moreover, I had to protect Constance. Something in the house was preying on her, and it had worked her up something fierce. There was no telling what might happen if I failed. What if the stresses associated with the house taxed her to the point of spiritual exhaustion? It's silly, perhaps, to worry over the dead, but I'd already lost my wife once. I didn't intend to lose her again. If she fell prey to whatever harassed her there, it was possible she'd be changed forever—or worse, that she'd leave this world for good.

  The thought chilled my blood.

  I had to do everything in my power to crack this haunting on my own. Constance's contributions were likely to be suppressed by the extant forces in the house, so I'd have to do my own sleuth work to get to the bottom of things. It would not be an easy road to walk, but there was too much on the line. My family meant too much to me to turn back.

  A noise in the restaurant drew me from my brooding.

  I twitched at the sound of it, gripped the edge of the syrup-stickied table.

  From somewhere behind me, there'd been a loud croak. My stomach roiled, threatening to surrender a night's worth of coffee. My neck locked up as if to keep me from turning, but gradually I built up the nerve to glance at the succession of booths and tables to my back.

  It sounded again—a clear, deep croak. A croak of the same character I'd heard throughout my stay at Joseph's.

  I flinched at a third such croak, and watched as a young woman, digging her phone from her purse, silenced the noise and answered a call.

  It had been her ringtone.

  I handed the waitress more than enough to cover my bill and, throwing the messenger bag over my shoulder,
stormed out of the diner and into the sunlight.

  It was time to get some answers.

  Thirteen

  A cab brought me back to the house. At this point, I was considering a car rental.

  Like a lover uninterested in discussing the spat of the night before, the house met me with a weighty silence upon my late morning return. It was just as well; I had nothing to discuss with it.

  A quick shave, a few minutes in the shower and a careful disregard for anything remotely like a shadow served me well, so that when I'd dressed and applied my cologne I got around to feeling alive again. I left the bathroom smelling like Polo and began mapping out my day on the sofa.

  The first order of business was to learn more about the house's past. I needed to know who had lived here, and when. I needed also to look into the matter of the dead body that had been discovered on the premises by the previous owner, along with any other incidents that might have been recorded during the place's years of dereliction. There was no better place to start than its current owner, and so I gave my nephew a jingle.

  I wasn't sure if he'd pick up—it was possible he'd gone off to join the others at the waterpark—but on the third or fourth ring, he did, sounding groggy. “H-Hello?”

  “Sorry, did I wake you?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, it's fine.” Joseph chuckled. I heard him wipe the drool from his lips. “I, uh... I was supposed to be reading. Looks like I nodded off.”

  “No shame in that,” I replied. “Anyhow, I'll be happy to let you get back to it as soon as you answer a few questions for me. I'm just getting some things together so that I can flesh out this place's history, and I want to know more about the previous owners. Can you tell me anything about them? You mentioned a young man owned the house and tried to fix it up a decade ago. Who owned it before that, and how long, approximately, did it sit vacant?”

  Joseph knew practically nothing, it turned out. He rehashed what he'd told me earlier. “There was the young guy. I don't know much else. House was built in the 70's. Around 1975, I think.” He paused. “You know, I believe the previous owners were listed on some of the paperwork we got after closing. It wasn't much, but there might have been names there.”

  “Oh? Where might I find this paperwork? I'd like to have a look at it.”

  He yawned. “It should be in our bedroom—in a box in the closet. You'll find a shelf built into the wall, kind of high-up. There's a fireproof box on the left-hand side. Should be in there.”

  “Much appreciated. I'll call you if I have any other questions,” I said, starting immediately upstairs. “You get back to your beauty sleep, now.”

  He laughed and hung up.

  Taking the stairs two at a time, I entered the first room, Joseph and Melissa's, and zeroed in on the closet. The metal box sat high on the shelf precisely as he'd described, and when I'd flipped through its unsorted contents on their bed, I singled out the documents pertaining to the house's sale. There was, in fact, an addendum to the deed that made mention of previous sales, and on this yellowed sheet I found the names of the house's previous owners.

  Bringing this single page with me back downstairs, I tried making use of it to sketch out a tentative history of the house.

  The house had indeed been built in 1975, and its first owner was listed as Willard Weiss.

  The next note on the document described a sale from the City of Detroit to one Kevin Taylor nearly 43 years later.

  Unless the record was incomplete, it appeared my nephew was only the third person to own this home. This, of course, raised many questions. How long had Weiss' tenancy lasted? How long had the house been empty before this Kevin Taylor picked it up? Had people lived in the house in an unofficial capacity—perhaps as renters? Squatters?

  I used the names on this document to fuel my research, though the two leads proved hard to work with.

  I searched first for the house's initial owner, Willard Weiss. Looking him up online, I added terms like “Detroit” and “Morgan Road” to the search and happened upon a few hits that fleshed out his story with more thoroughness.

  It seemed, however, that Willard Weiss' story had ended.

  The most recent mention of the man that I was able to pull up was dated to seven years previous. It was his obituary, a very brief thing. Weiss had been born and raised in Annapolis, Maryland. His age at the time of his death in assisted living was 84 years, and the periodical made mention of a wife, Irma, that preceded him in death. That was all.

  Out of curiosity, I punched the name “Irma Weiss” into the search engine, along with the term “obituary”, and found a corresponding death notice from back in 1991. Irma Weiss, also an Annapolis native, had died in her 50's according to the obituary. Hers contained one curious tidbit that Willard's had not; a mention of a then-29-year-old estranged daughter by the name of Fiona. My hopeful searches for “Fiona Weiss” brought up nil, however. By my calculations, Willard Weiss' daughter would have been 66 years old, close in age to me, but I could find no trace of her on the web. Possibly she'd married, shed her maiden name and moved out of Michigan. The Weiss family had no answers to give me, then.

  The house's second owner, Kevin Taylor, seemed more promising, though his name was a common one and I suspected that looking him up online would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

  And it would have been, if not for the thing I stumbled upon some minutes into my search.

  I'd used the terms “Kevin Taylor Detroit”, which had resulted in dozens of hits that, upon closer inspection, had nothing to do with the person I was looking for. One hit caught my eye, however. It corresponded, of all things, to a media website called VideoTube, and the thumbnail accompanying this result shocked me so intensely that I nearly dropped my phone.

  It was a picture of the very house I was sitting in.

  Hurriedly clicking the link, I was taken to a video, posted just over ten years ago, by VideoTube user FlipperKevin. The description told me I had the right man: Thanks for tuning in! This is Kevin Taylor coming at you with something very exciting. In this video, I'm announcing my newest challenge—the renovation of this abandoned house in just thirty days. Join me in this Detroit fixer-upper for daily renovation tips and updates on my progress. And don't forget to like and subscribe!

  Joseph had told me that the house's last owner had been trying to fix it up a decade ago—the timeline matched this video, and the name on the deed addendum did, too. I hadn't expected the last owner, who looked in his early-to-mid twenties in the video, to be an internet personality, however. Diving into his channel, which hadn't been updated in a hair over ten years, I found several videos that had been shot in this very house, many of them with over a million views. FlipperKevin's channel had been very popular once, by the looks of it, which led me to wonder why—like the house—he'd seemingly abandoned it a decade ago.

  I spent the next hour watching his vlogs about the home renovation project, and found him very entertaining. He would have been right at home on a home improvement television program, and appeared very skilled at his trade.

  Among Kevin Taylor's videos in Joseph's house, there was one of him exploring the crawlspace, another of his replacing drywall, and one of him stabilizing shaky pipes. I watched them, one after the other, marveling at the way the house had changed since then. The video that most intrigued me was the very first one I'd come upon however—the one in which he'd introduced the house and pitched his audacious, thirty-day challenge. He gave a tour of the place, highlighting its defects to up the ante, but that wasn't what drew my attention.

  There was one shot in this video that saw me take pause. Literally, I had to pause the thing so that I could take a closer look. The shot in question was of the house's exterior on a sunny spring day—specifically, the upper story. In one of the upstairs windows, I noticed something—someone—standing there.

  The figure in the window was unclear, somewhat difficult to make out, though as I stared at the screen it seemed also to s
train for visibility. It was a thing that wished to be discovered, a thing whose sole purpose was to unnerve. The broad strokes told me it was the form of a woman—probably an old woman. Dressed in white, the woman in the window seemed to smile, though her face was so distorted that her mouth appeared oversized—vacuous. White hair spilled past her shoulders. As a whole, she had the look of some grotesque Halloween window decoration.

  The fact that this figure was standing in the window of the true master bedroom—the one I'd been using as a guestroom—was not lost on me.

  Commenters on the video discussed its creepiness. Some maintained that this figure was a helper of Kevin's accidentally caught on film, and that his one-man challenge was actually a fraud. Others claimed that he'd put something in the window as an easter egg, intended to drum up discussion amongst his viewers. That Mr. Taylor had inadvertently captured this figure in his footage was clear to me, however. Vague and genuinely unsettling as it was, it didn't strike me as the kind of thing he could have planned ahead of time.

  Studying this clip, I was reminded of a question that had been plaguing me for days.

  How long had there been something supernatural in this house?

  And now, adding to my list of questions: Was this blurry vision in the window a recording of something truly paranormal? One of the house's resident spirits—possibly my wife's tormentor? And, if so, what connection did this old woman's spirit have to the house? Was hers the spirit of the corpse that Kevin Taylor had allegedly discovered ten years ago? I searched, but found he hadn't made a video about that particular incident, nor had he mentioned it in any of his uploads.

  Sitting on the sofa and asking myself these questions wasn't going to get me anywhere. I needed to get ahold of the man himself, and immediately began looking for the most recent contact information I could find for Kevin Taylor.