The Haunting Within

by Michelle Burley

  There on the large screen was an elegant looking woman dressed in a navy blue and white polka-dot dress with her pale blonde hair pulled back in a very drastically tight bun. She had a slight frame and wore petite glasses. She was strangely pretty, strange because she wasn’t what people would call a beauty, but there was certainly something about her. She had thin lips and a small, sharp nose. Her complexion was flawless; she had beautiful fair skin with no freckles or blemishes. Her eyes were the shape of almonds, just like Lisa’s and her mums. As she stared at the screen Lisa felt a striking familiarity about something she couldn’t quite put her finger on it until she looked away for a second and then looked back at the screen. Suddenly she knew what felt so familiar to her! She couldn’t believe she didn’t realise it at first, it was as clear as day! The woman on the screen was the spitting image of her mum. It must be Lisa’s grandmother. The woman was holding a tiny baby that Lisa hadn’t noticed at first, so transfixed on the stunning face before her. Her first thought was that it was her mum, but when she looked closely, the teddy bear in the crib held a name plate that said Robert.

  Lisa understood the baby must have been her grandmother’s. Her mum had a brother. But how come mum never spoke of him and where is he now? None of it made any sense. The film kept rolling, showing different stages of Robert’s life, his Christening, his first steps, his first Christmas. Her mum wasn’t in any of the scenes. Robert must be her older brother. Another thing Lisa didn’t understand was that her mum said her father was horrible to her as a child but she saw no evidence of this as she watched the film. It was the exact opposite in fact; her grandfather was filmed playing with Robert and reading to him. How could he love his son so dearly and hate his daughter so much? Lisa grew more and more angry watching the film. What was it that could have made her grandfather despise her mum? She was just a child. She didn’t deserve to be treated the way he treated her.

  With enraging thoughts swirling through her mind, Lisa sat, stock still on the chair, staring at, but not seeing the screen. The film ended and the tape was flapping round and round on the machine making a repetitive clapping noise. Feeling confused and upset Lisa hung her head and saw the book from under the floor was on her knee. How did it get there? Had she brought it in with her? She couldn’t remember. Opening it to the first page she saw the same scrawl she had seen in the files on the shelves.

  My little boy is gone! What am I to do? I do not know how to carry on. My Emily, my beautiful Emily has lost herself completely. She will not talk to me. She will not eat. I have no idea how to help her, how to ease her pain. I feel utterly useless. How can he be gone? How can there be a God if He lets things such as this happen? All these years I have worked, trying to help people who are in emotional or mental anguish. Now I am in the same situation and I know no-one can help me. I am broken. My heart is ripped apart. I feel like somebody else. I am hurting incredibly and I do not know how to handle it. I know I will never be happy again. Never!

  Shocked at these raw, emotional words written in a heartbroken hand Lisa turned through the pages without reading. The book fell open on a photograph. It was of a tiny baby in a beautiful gown. The baby looked like it was sleeping peacefully until Lisa took in the flower laid on its chest. She closed the book and wept.

  31

  Downstairs Aiden was just beginning to come round from his fall. Slowly, still reeling from a sore head, things started coming back to him; everything started rushing back to him. He rose to his feet and on shaky legs walked into the dining room and headed straight for the drinks cabinet. Pouring a large vodka he didn’t care if anyone saw him. He was still feeling frightened, but his dread was partially quenched and it disappeared a little more with every sip of the warming vodka he drank. With the horror he had just been through he thought himself justified to have a drink and calm his nerves. He knew he should make a move to find his mum but he just couldn’t bring himself to look for her. He didn’t want to go anywhere except home - but he knew they would not be going home until they found their mum and even then they had a night to spend in this creepy place. Sighing, he knocked back the remainders of the clear pungent liquid with a grimace and a small belch that seemed to regurgitate some of the foul drink. He swallowed hard so as not to vomit at the bitter taste and with renewed confidence that came solely from the alcohol, he walked out into the hall. He was feeling a little light headed which was alright with him so long as he didn’t feel the terror and fear he had felt before. The vodka had taken care of that. It has also taken care of the cold that had gripped him from within. Now his belly felt warm and he had a pleasant sensation of his muscles relaxing. His nerves were still tingling from the adrenalin coursing through his veins, but the full terror he had felt only a few moments before had subsided enough for him to try and rationalise what happened. He just knew there had to be a reasonable explanation. Thinking about it now, he began to feel his legs starting to tremble under his weight and he wasn’t sure if they had the strength to hold him up. Leaning against the wall he gulped in a series of huge breaths. He just wanted to find his mum and have the three of them sat in the car driving home. His mum would be singing along to the radio - badly - like always, and he and Lisa would be teasing each other - like always. The wishful thinking made him smile. They still acted like kids when it came to car rides. He knew it was immature to tease his sister about a spot that had erupted on her face, or about the time when she was little and he made her cry because he had chased her with a spider, or about anything and everything really, but it was just too damn funny not to. There was the playful argument before every journey about who got to sit in the front seat. He wasn’t bothered if he did or not of course, and he knew Lisa wasn’t either. It had just become tradition now to have a bit of banter about it. Funny though how before they set off for here there was no teasing. They both just climbed in and resigned themselves to the journey.

  He walked past the grandfather clock which was still ticking away, completely unaffected by the whole sorry affair they were in and he turned at the door to the lounge. He stood at the doorway and peered inside the room. Disappointment flooded him when he saw nothing. He retraced his steps back into the dining-room and poured himself another large vodka. He nursed it in his hands as he walked through the narrow corridor with tapestries which smelled like dust, hanging from the walls and made his way into the kitchen; she wasn’t in there either. Course she wasn’t. That would be too bloody easy wouldn’t it? He was starting to feel resentful that his mum was acting this way. If anyone was going to act irresponsibly then it should be him. He was the youngest after all. The baby of the family which he hated himself for thinking because he always tried to act like the man of the house. His mum knew how this house made them feel, yet the time they - he - really needed her she decided to have an ‘episode’. Yeah it was alright for some eh. Being able to deny what was going on. It wasn’t fair. More than anything he wanted to scream and shout and demand they go home but he couldn’t. He had to stay strong. He never realised he felt so bitter about being the man of the family. It had been thrust upon him. He guessed it was something he just grew up knowing he had to be without ever really thinking about what it meant. Why should he have to play that role? He was seventeen for god’s sake! He should be out doing what teenage boys his age do. His mates would be out playing footy now or maybe chilling at Macdonalds. With a disappointed shake of his head and a disgusted smirk he went back through to the dining room where he drank the rest of the liquor and slammed the glass on the table a little harder than he had intended. He remembered there was another room across from the dining room which he had passed before but had no intention of entering. He didn’t know what was in there and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to. He felt suddenly and irrationally envious that his grandfather sat here with all this money, not spending a penny of it, when they had to scrimp and save for anything they wanted. It wasn’t fair! They weren’t exactly poor, but they had to watch what they spent and their mum had
worked hard all their lives when she would’ve much preferred to have been at home with them.

  Aiden eyed the innocuous door, staring hard at it as though he would develop x-ray vision and be able to see what waited on the other side without having to open it. No such luck. He took a couple of steps over to the door that led from the hall. All at once it came like a rush of a tidal wave sweeping over his entire body. He had to steady himself with his hands on his bent knees. His head was reeling from the swiftness that the vodka had had on his senses. This he thought, is why mum never lets me drink. The irony wasn’t lost on him. The fact that his mum was dead set on him not drinking, yet it was because of her he had to have a drink. If only she hadn’t gone missing in this creepy dump of a house, he would never have had to go outside.

  32

  After a minute or two of psyching himself up he reached for the door knob and pushed it open. The room he was confronted with was vast. The floor was bare stone and there were rows and rows of wooden seats in the middle, like pews, all facing what looked like a stage with a long wooden table in the centre and a small wooden box with a chair in it that looked like a pulpit. It came to Aiden’s waist as he neared it and he gathered that it must be from the old courthouse their mum had been telling them about.

  He thought it was all quite cool but it made him wonder why his grandfather didn’t turn it into something else. He came to the conclusion that he maybe wanted to preserve as much of the history of the house as he could, and why not? It certainly wasn’t every day you came across a house that once was a courthouse. Looking around the room he saw a door at the very back. Crossing over to it he could hear a muffled voice. He put his hand on the door knob ready to enter when he heard his mum’s voice from inside. She sounded far away. He held his breath and pressed his ear to the door to get a better listen. She was crying and through her tears she was talking to someone. Aiden didn’t want to open the door, didn’t want to see who it was she was talking to and he didn’t much care to discover what the room behind the door held, but he did anyway. He had to.

  Slowly, he pulled open the door just enough to peer through the gap. It was so dark he could barely see into the dense black hole ahead but he could just make out stairs descending down in front of him. They were made completely of grey stone and looked wide enough to fit at least three people on them at once, side by side. Either side of the stairs gave way to cobbled stone walls, the cement in between was so old it was cracked and flaking away to leave tiny piles of dust on the steps below. Standing at the top of the stairs Aiden contemplated his next move. Was he absolutely sure he heard his mum down there? Because if not he didn’t want to go any further there and risk breaking his leg by falling down the pitch black stairs. Besides, he had no idea where the old stone steps led to. As he was asking himself if he had heard her for sure, a small muffled cry floated up on the darkness toward him. Deciding he must go down there he gingerly stepped onto the first stair, holding onto the wall as he did so because there was nothing near him that resembled a banister. With his trainers making a soft, pleasant shuffling sound on the dusty cement of the steps he slowly made his way lower and lower into the bowels of the manor house towards the crying. After taking about ten steps he could see a faint light at the bottom which glowed and flickered and grew and shrunk making shadows at the bottom of the stairs seem to dance, like they were waiting as patiently as they could for him to get to them, to have him in their reach so they could… So they could what? He had a major case of the jitters and scalded himself silently for being such a wimp. They were just shadows, they couldn’t hurt him. They did look demonic though. Jittering in and out of substance like a dream where you couldn’t quite focus on one thing. They seemed to taunt him, to mock him into going lower if he dared, to close the distance and to look upon them and see what they were, see what it was that was hiding behind a façade. Jesus Christ, how stupid was he being?! Frightened now of fucking candlelight and shadows. What a dick. He knew he was being irrational but even so his heart felt like it would burst through his chest at any second. Taking a couple of deep breaths he continued down, running his hand along one side of the wall for support and feeling more dry cement crumbling out of place and onto the floor.

  At the bottom he had to decide, left, right or straight ahead? He strained his ears in the dark and listened. All he could hear was his heart pounding out a rhythm in his veins. Left it was. He turned a sharp corner and came to a stand-still inside a room, lit only by a few burning lanterns spread out around the walls. They were the lights which caused the shadows to move so slyly and eerily. He glanced around, unable to believe his eyes. He was in the dungeons! No shitting way! Proper dungeons like the ones he had seen on a school trip once. Only there were no mannequins here, no dummies dressed in old fashioned clothes, chained and manacled to the walls, and somehow, that made it even worse. He had reached the very heart of the house which made sense because the house was as black and scary as its heart. Everything was bare and the stench was almost overbearing. He imagined it was the smell of stale sweat of a thousand condemned men rotting in this hell waiting to die. The bare cement walls were adorned with shackles and contraptions of torture, the instruments of punishment hanging in full view for everyone who entered the dreadful room to see, like they were something to be proud of. Most of them Aiden didn’t even know what they had been used for but they looked incredibly frightening. How must it have been for those poor people to be down here? He back-tracked quickly and found himself at the bottom of the stairs again. Left was a bad idea.

  Taking the passageway straight ahead of him he quickened his pace, wanting to be free of this horrible place. The further he went the more normal it seemed down here now. The wider the passageway became the more it looked like a cellar. The stone walls arched up to the ceiling giving support to the floors above. Things were stored in many dusty boxes and there were numerous tables and chairs stacked against the walls. He walked through a room with a huge generator in it, long disused by the look of it. Beyond that was another room being used to store other things including a rack full of bottles of wine that were so thick with dust their labels were illegible. All through the cellar overheard lights dangled from the ceiling and all were turned on. Bare bulbs illuminated brick work and spider webs. In the corner of the room there was several wire bed frames stacked upright against the wall. Next to them was an old wheelchair sitting motionless and forlorn in the gloom. It was an eerie sight. Hurriedly rushing past the chair Aiden came to a smaller room. In the centre of the floor was a large grate that looked like a long drain that ran the length of the room. As he followed it with his eyes he saw a figure kneeling on the floor about half-way up. Noticing immediately it was his mum, he quickly started towards her, calling out to her. She was on her knees in a prayer-like position and she was oblivious to him standing there watching her.

  “I’m so sorry Father! Please don’t punish me; I’ve been a good girl! I have! I promise!” racking sobs escaped her.

  Aiden looked around her to see who she was talking to, but saw no-one. She was rocking back and forth on her knees saying “sorry” over and over again to thin air. He walked closer to her and saw that her nose was running from all the crying she had done. As he was just about to reach out to her she threw herself backwards onto the floor and banged her head with a sickening thump. She was screaming now, waving her arms about, pleading, begging for “him” to stop. Aiden rushed forwards and grabbed hold of her arms in a strong vice-like grip.

  “It’s me mum. It’s Aiden. It’s alright, everything’s okay” he told her gently hoping to calm her thrashing but it didn’t help. His tipsiness had all but gone at the sight he was facing.

  She broke free of his grasp and much to his horror, started head-butting the cement floor and punching herself in the face and scratching at her arms and legs. He tried his hardest to stop her but she was totally out of control. She was grabbing clumps of her hair and literally ripping them out of her scalp. Aiden cou
ld hear the strands being torn from her head by her own hands. He turned to prevent himself from vomiting on the dusty grey floor. All the time his she was inflicting these injuries on herself she was screaming at her “father” to stop.