The Haunting of Ashburn House

by Darcy Coates

  It might have been an argument. Adrienne lowered Wolfgang to the porch and tore open the envelope containing her key. It wasn’t like Mum to hold a grudge, so she must have really hated Edith to tell me we had no relatives.

  The key slid into its hole below the doorhandle. The metal, stiff and rusted, screeched as she turned it, then a second later a quiet click told her the door was unlocked.

  Perhaps Edith felt bad about what happened, whatever it was. She must have cared at least a little to leave her house to me.

  She pressed her fingers to the wood and pushed. The door swept inwards, its hinges grinding as it stirred up small eddies of dust in the failing sunlight. Adrienne squinted to see into the hallway. Although the house had plentiful windows, they were all dimmed by decades of built-up dirt and grease, and the hallway was shrouded in thick, lingering shadows.

  Adrienne cleared her throat, tucked the key into her pocket, picked up Wolfgang’s carrier, and stepped over the threshold.

  The air felt different inside Ashburn. It was heavier and drier and permeated with a musty odour that Adrienne struggled to identify. Habitation, her mind whispered. This is a house that hasn’t seen a new soul in half a century. The walls are saturated with her; the floorboards are worn down from her feet; the very air continues to carry her presence after her death.

  Adrienne tilted forward to peer inside Wolfgang’s carrier and grinned at him. “That’s not morbid at all, huh?”

  Her laughter bounced along the hallway, climbed the steep stairwell at its end, and echoed through the upper rooms. The farther it travelled, the hollower the sound became, and she quickly closed her mouth. For a second, the building was returned to its natural state of silence, then Wolfgang released a low, rumbling growl.

  A small, discoloured light switch was set into the wall next to the door, and Adrienne flipped it. She hadn’t expected it to do anything, but a light hanging from the hallway’s ceiling buzzed into life. It gave off a muted yellow glow, scarcely better than the anaemic light streaming through the windows, but Adrienne smiled at the sight of it. Ashburn had electricity after all; she’d been worried after seeing how remote the building was.

  The hallway was narrow and travelled the length of the house. A threadbare carpet ran down its centre, and an odd collection of side tables, lamps, and umbrella holders as well as a tall grandfather clock clustered along the sides. Discoloured wallpaper dotted with tiny grey flourishes and red roses clung to the walls.

  Adrienne drew the door closed behind her. Its whine was raw and loud in her ears, and she made a mental note to find out if Edith had owned any oil.

  She moved forward slowly, absorbing details of her new home as she did. The furniture looked antique but well used. The carpet was a rich wine colour but had tan patches where the fabric had been rubbed off its base. Every surface looked slightly grimy, but there was surprisingly little dust; Adrienne suspected Edith had wiped the surfaces regularly but never washed them.

  The first door was to her right, and she nudged it open. Inside was a spacious, tastefully decorated sitting room. Thanks to the large bay windows set into its front, the room was lighter than the hallway, and despite the fireplace, coffee table, and set of clean chairs with plush seats, it gave the impression of being infrequently used.

  She left the door open but moved on. The nearest entrance to her left led into the kitchen and dinner table. At the room’s back were an oven, an aged stove, benches, and sink. The wall next to it had two identical display units filled with china plates and glasses, all with a matching pink-and-red-rose design. When she moved into the room, she saw that two pale lines had been rubbed into the wooden floor at the table’s head, corresponding to where the chair would have been scraped each night as its occupant sat down and rose.

  She wanted to explore further, but Wolfgang’s weight was making her arms ache. She needed a room with a few nooks that an anxious cat could hide in but no exits that he could escape through. She returned to the hallway and tried the next door to the right, opposite the stairwell.

  The door opened into a lounge room. Unlike the corner space, though, this was very clearly used. Both the chair and couch’s cushions were indented, and ash still filled the fireplace’s base. A bookcase overloaded with old volumes ran up one wall, and an eclectic mix of shelves and cupboards—along with a piano—sat against the rest of the walls.

  This’ll do for Wolf. She nudged the door closed behind them, lowered him to the round wine-red rug in the centre of the floor, and unlocked the carrier’s door. He turned his baleful green eyes on her but refused to leave the safety of the cage.

  “Sorry, buddy.” She sighed and offered her hand for him to smell before scratching behind his ears. He gave a languid blink in response to the attention but refused to tilt his head the way he normally did. “I know you don’t like this, but trust me, it beats being homeless.”

  A low, discontented grumble answered her.

  Adrienne gave her cat a tight-lipped smile then rose and went to collect their cases. As little as Wolfgang realised it, she hadn’t been joking. The last four years of Pat’s life had been a stream of specialist appointments, stints in hospital, and experimental treatments for the autoimmune disease that had ultimately claimed her. When her mother’s health deteriorated too far for her to be alone during the day, Adrienne had left her job to stay with her and picked up whatever freelance writing work she could find online. She was proud to say they’d managed okay right up until the final hospital stay.

  Pat had always tried her hardest to give Adrienne a stable home. She’d worked two jobs when she’d been healthy enough, but the appointments and treatments hadn’t been without cost. By the time she passed, her house had been mortgaged twice and their savings had been converted into debts.

  The weeks following the funeral had been a whirlwind of stress and financial problems digging through the grief. Pat’s house, car, and furniture were sold to pay her outstanding debts. Adrienne had temporarily moved into a friend’s apartment, but it was clear it couldn’t be a permanent solution; the two-room space was far too small for four people, an irritable cat, and the friend’s aggressive dog.

  Adrienne had spent her free time looking for a new place to live, but the search had been demoralising. Her freelance work would only support a cheap apartment, and none of the places she’d viewed were welcoming towards cats.

  The friend had suggested she give Wolfgang away. She might as well have asked Adrienne to cut off her own arm; she loved her fluffy monster too much to surrender him to a stranger. The letter telling her she’d inherited Ashburn had been, in Adrienne’s opinion, a bona fide miracle.

  Adrienne picked both cases off the grass and carried them back to Ashburn. The sun was close to the treetops, and its red glow spread across the horizon. Long shadows followed her back into the musty hallway, and the angry bird chatter swelled as the fowl prepared to nest.

  She’d tried to keep her absence brief, but by the time she backed through the lounge room doors and turned towards the cat carrier, Wolfgang had already disappeared. She shut the door so that he couldn’t escape and peered into the shadows that gathered around the room’s corners as she opened the heavier of the cases.

  “Hey, buddy,” she called as she set out his litter box, poured a bag of chalky wood pulp into it, and laid his bowls beside the door. “Are you hungry? Hmm?”

  She rattled the food tin, but the grey beast remained scarce. Adrienne sighed, poured the food into one of the bowls, then picked up the second to fill with water. As she let herself out of the lounge room, the light caught across scratches in the opposite wall’s paper. Adrienne frowned at them. They almost look like words.

  She took a step closer and inhaled. Someone had carved through the wallpaper to expose the wood underneath. They were hard to see at an angle, but the words became clear when looked at head-on:

  NO MIRRORS

  Adrienne glanced along the hallway reflexively. It was cluttered with fu
rniture but didn’t include any mirrors. She hadn’t found it unusual before, but the words felt disquieting, almost menacing. She shook her head and crossed to the kitchen.

  The sink was a huge, old-fashioned installation, and the handle screamed when she turned it. Pipes rattled above her head, and Adrienne gazed at the ceiling and imagined she could see the wooden boards shudder. Icy-cold water spewed out of the tap, ricocheted off the bowl, and sprayed over her.

  Adrienne shrieked a series of very unladylike phrases as she fought to turn the tap off. Then, drenched and grumbling, she carried the water back to the lounge room.

  “You’d better be grateful for this,” she said as she placed the bowl next to Wolfgang’s food.

  The room was silent, but she thought she saw a flicker of motion behind the piano. She knelt and leaned forward to see behind it. Wolfgang huddled in the gap between the piano and bookcase, and his huge green eyes fixed on her.

  “You okay down there, buddy? Not too dusty for you?”

  He gave her a single reproachful blink then returned to staring at the opposite wall.

  The sun was dipping behind the trees, and the cooling air collaborated with her wet shirt and jeans to make Adrienne shiver, so she opened the second case and sifted through the few possessions she’d brought to Ashburn.

  Packing had been depressing. Most of what she’d owned had been given away when she moved into her friend’s apartment, and even less was practical to fit inside a taxi and cart across the state. One of the cases had been dedicated to Wolfgang’s needs; the second held Adrienne’s world—three changes of clothes, a towel, toiletries, the book she was reading, clean sheets, and her laptop. Her throat tightened as she stared at them. Her entire twenty-two years of life had boiled down to these items.

  “It’s a fresh start,” she said to Wolfgang and tried to smile. “And I don’t need much, anyway. Just you for company, somewhere for us to stay, and enough money that we won’t starve. And look, thanks to Great-Aunt Edith, we now have all three. We’ll be fine.”

  The great grey cat blinked at her, and suddenly, Adrienne wished he would come out of hiding so that she could hug him.

  “We’ll be fine,” she repeated, her voice sounding small and lonely in her own ears as she pulled the towel out and dabbed at her wet clothes.

  4

  What Lives in the Night

  Adrienne changed into fresh clothes and laid the wet shirt and jeans over the back of the fireside chair to dry. Wolfgang watched her go back and forth but refused to move from his cubbyhole even when she put his food bowl directly in front of it.

  Despite the dry clothes, Adrienne found herself shivering and looked towards the blackened grate. She’d never lived in a house with a fireplace, but she’d been enamoured with the idea. A stack of dry wood sat in the bracket, a bucket of kindling sat nearby, and a folded newspaper and matchbox rested on the mantel.

  Why not? She took the newspaper and checked the date. It was nearly three months old, which meant Edith would have bought it shortly before her death. Adrienne took a few of the pages, scrunched them into loose balls, placed them in the sooty grate, and set some of the kindling on top.

  Once the newspaper caught, the flame easily spread to the twigs, and soon she was feeding it some of the larger logs. By the time the fire was large enough to be stable, she’d stopped shivering and was pleased to see that the flames lit the room better than the single light in the ceiling.

  She gazed about the space, admiring how the golden glow reflected off the polished wooden chairs and bookshelves. The fire created long, dancing shadows that grew up the walls and tangled on the ceiling, and the crackles helped drown out the noise of the groaning trees and chattering birds outside the window.

  A grandfather clock somewhere deep in the house chimed. She counted five long, metallic clangs and made a face. She hadn’t realised how late it had grown. She’d skipped lunch, and when she paid attention to her body, she realised she was starving.

  Her initial plan had been to spend her remaining money on groceries shortly after arriving at Ashburn, but that had been foiled thanks to the house’s unexpectedly remote location. Looks like we’ll be scavenging tonight.

  She wasn’t keen to explore the house with the sun so close to setting, but the longer she delayed, the worse it would become, so she left the lounge room, closed the door behind her, and crossed to the kitchen.

  The room looked shockingly different when the sun was too low to come through the window. Even with the light on, the shadows built up in layers around the table, stove, and bench. She stopped at the head of the table, where long marks had been scraped into the wooden floor, and squinted at the wooden tabletop. There were scratches dug into the dark wood just above where a dinner plate might have sat.

  Surely not…

  Adrienne leaned closer and inhaled. As in the hallway, words had been cut into the shiny wooden top—possibly with a kitchen knife—and faced the head of the table so that whoever sat there couldn’t fail to read them.

  IS IT FRIDAY

  LIGHT THE CANDLE

  She chewed the inside of her cheek and tilted her head to one side. Little bits of dirt had become embedded in the scratches’ indents, telling her the marks had been there for months if not years.

  How bizarre. Was Edith all right? She must have been very old when she passed away. Maybe she had some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s, and it made her do strange things.

  Adrienne turned away from the table, but she couldn’t scrub the image from her mind: Edith, well into her nineties by that point, wandering through Ashburn’s narrow hallways in a confused daze, a steak knife clutched in one hand, cutting disturbed messages into the walls and tables…

  No, don’t think like that. She probably had someone staying with her. Or a friendly neighbour, at the very least, to keep an eye on her. Adrienne frowned and turned towards the fridge. I hope.

  She opened the fridge door and gagged. The shelves were full of cardboard boxes, but their contents had long since rotted. She could still identify shrivelled carrots and a strangely dried-out cauliflower, but the other vegetables had turned into brown sludge. A bottle of rancid milk sat between a rectangle of mould-coated cheese and a punnet of what had once been strawberries. The only edible items she could see were three unlabelled jam jars. And jam on its own does not a dinner make.

  Adrienne wrinkled her nose and closed the door before the rotting odours could spread too far. The house has been empty for nearly three months; of course the fresh food would have perished.

  She looked for a pantry and found it nestled in the room’s corner. The doors creaked as they opened, and Adrienne felt her heart sink at the meagre range inside. While the fridge had been full of fresh produce, Edith clearly hadn’t been a fan of long-life goods. She saw flour, baking powder, teabags, sugar, and salt on one shelf, a half-used bag of pasta—no sauce—on the second, and two tins of sardines on the third.

  Okay. Could be worse. Adrienne sucked on her teeth, took one of the sardine tins, and began opening drawers as she looked for cutlery. It’s not a feast, but at least we won’t starve. We’ll just have to figure out how to get to town tomorrow.

  She opened the drawer below the china and inhaled at the sight of heavy and clearly expensive silver. This set must be a family heirloom. She kept it in good condition; it’s not even tarnished.

  The china plates displayed above the cutlery caught her eye, but she didn’t take any down. It felt wrong to put something as mundane as tinned fish on the expensive rose-design dishes. She took a fork and closed the drawer.

  An electric kettle sat on the bench beside the fridge, and behind it was an old-fashioned metal whistling kettle. She reached for the electric appliance first then hesitated, shrugged, and took up the metal pot instead. She made sure there weren’t any spiders inside—just dust, she was relieved to see—then washed it out, half filled it with water, and fetched one of the teabags from the pantry.

  Once ag
ain, Adrienne experienced reluctance to use any of the fine china in the display cabinets, but she couldn’t find any other mugs, so eventually, she opened the glass doors and took one of the teacups. It felt incredibly fragile, and she held it carefully as she carried it, the kettle, the fish, and the fork back to the lounge room.

  The fire had grown in her absence, and that wasn’t the only change. Wolfgang’s food bowl was empty, and the huge grey tabby sat on the rug in front of the fire, his paws tucked neatly under his body. He turned and blinked at Adrienne when she entered then returned to gazing at the flames.

  “Should’ve known,” she said, grinning, and set the precious teacup onto the small round table beside the chair. “I was starting to worry I’d traumatised you by carting you all the way up here, but you’ve already made yourself at home, huh?”

  One ear twitched in her direction, but otherwise, she might as well have not existed.

  A metal rod ran across the space above the fire. Adrienne found a pair of thick, blackened gloves sitting next to the wood and used one to hang her kettle on the rod so that the flames licked around its base. She then sat back in the wooden chair, took up her tin of sardines, and peeled back the lid.

  It was one of the most surreal experiences of her life. She sat in a stranger’s chair—one that had likely been inhabited by the same person every evening for fifty years before Adrienne came along—and used a silver fork that was heavy and ornate enough to belong in Buckingham Palace to eat a tin of budget fish.

  A soft, fluffy paw landed on her knee, and Adrienne looked down to meet Wolfgang’s round green eyes. All indifference had melted away, and his expression was a perfect blend of plaintive and adoring.

  “Oh, come on!” she cried in mock indignation. “You already ate!”

  His mouth opened in a silent meow, and his fluffy tail twitched.