Grayson Manor Haunting

by Cheryl Bradshaw

  Addison scrambled to the side of her friend. “Natalie, wake up!” Natalie’s eyes didn’t open. Her brother stared down at his sister in a daze, not believing what had happened. “Get your parents!” Addison screamed. “Now!” But he didn’t move. He just stood there. Addison ran inside the house. Her parents were sitting around the table playing cards together. “Hurry, come quick! Natalie fell. She won’t wake up.” But Natalie’s mom just smiled at her husband and played the eight of hearts. “You have to do something!” Addison screamed. No one moved. No one looked at her. It was as if they didn’t care.

  Why aren’t they listening to me?!

  A few seconds later, Natalie’s brother ran through the door. “Mom! Dad! Come quick. Natalie fell off the swing!”

  Both parents shot up in unison. Natalie’s mother’s chair flipped on its side, slamming against the tile on the floor in the process. As mother, father, and son raced toward Natalie, Addison followed. Her mother screamed, her father dialed 9-1-1, and her brother leaned against the tree and cried. Then everything went black.

  ***

  Addison woke to find several parents hovering over her.

  “Are you all right, sweetheart?” one of the men said.

  “I think so,” Addison replied. “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure. We think you passed out. Are you feeling okay?”

  “I—I think so. Where’s Natalie?”

  “She’s in the house,” the man said. “It’s just about time to open presents. Why don’t you come inside and we’ll get you some water?”

  “So, she’s okay?”

  “Natalie?”

  Addison nodded.

  “Of course she is,” the man said.

  “She didn’t get hurt when she fell off the swing?”

  “What swing?”

  Addison pointed to it and only then noticed something strange—it had been tied to the side of the tree.

  “No one’s been on that swing at all today,” the man said.

  “But I saw her,” Addison insisted. “She fell and hit her head on a stone by the pond.”

  The parents looked at each other in disbelief. The man held out his hand and Addison took it. Nothing else was said as they walked back into the house.

  “Have you been on the swing today?” Addison said as soon as she saw Natalie.

  “No.”

  “Good. Stay off of it,” Addison said.

  Natalie wrinkled her nose and frowned. “Why?”

  “Because you—well—you could get hurt. The rope it was made out of—it isn’t as strong as you think.”

  Natalie tossed her head back and laughed. “You’re so silly, Addison. Wanna help me open my presents?”

  Addison wanted to grab Natalie’s arm. She wanted to tell her what she saw. But she didn’t want to be laughed at again, so she fabricated a slight smile as she followed Natalie into the living room and tried her best to blend in with all of the other kids.

  The adults were all huddled together in the corner talking when the girls walked in. One of the women in the group pinched the arm of the man standing next to her and simultaneously they looked over. All eyes were fixed on Addison, their grins a mere facade. Addison smiled back even though she knew what they were thinking: That friend of Natalie’s has something wrong with her. Something very wrong.

  ***

  Four months later, Natalie wasn’t just hurt when she crashed to the ground while her stunned brother looked on. She was killed, in the exact same way Addison had seen in her vision. When Addison wasn’t at school, she stayed in her bedroom for hours at a time, curled up in a ball on her bed, weeping. No one, not even her own mother, had believed her story. Her mother just hugged her, saying everything was going to be all right and she needn’t worry. But nothing was all right, and it never would be. Natalie was dead and Addison heaped a great deal of the blame onto herself, always thinking there was something she might have done to prevent the inevitable from happening.

  Over the next year, Addison received another vision, and then another. Most of the time the person was someone unfamiliar, someone she’d never seen before. While walking outside the city mall with her mother one day, she’d found a penny on the sidewalk. As soon as she smoothed a finger across its metallic surface, she saw a man peeking through a restaurant window. He was shivering, his arms covering his face, shielding him from the cold. He had no coat and no place to go. He just stood there, staring at the soft glow of the fire inside the place as if wishing he could be sitting beside it. Several weeks later, she saw his face again. This time it was on the news. The reporter said the man had been a transient, poor and homeless. The reporter also said the man was dead, his body found covered in newspaper on a bench at the local park. He’d been trying to keep warm, but it was an especially cold winter that year.

  Addison thought about talking to her parents again, but she couldn’t; she was too afraid. Instead, she became withdrawn, rarely speaking and lacking the interests other children had at her age. Her parents assumed she hadn’t been able to get over Natalie’s death and decided the answer to their problems was taking Addison to see a therapist named Doctor Arnold W. Beatty III. He counseled her mother not to “enable” Addison in any way. Translation: convince Addison that what she saw at Natalie’s house wasn’t real, even though in the end, the inevitable had happened. Though he had no explanation as to why Addison said she saw what she did, he was a firm believer that no one except God Himself could predict another individual’s destiny. It just wasn’t possible, and all the “quacks” who thought it was were just that—crazy people. The doctor had cautioned her parents that if they couldn’t help her snap out of it, eventually she’d be ridiculed and made fun of at school for her unsocial, awkward behavior.

  Addison despised Doctor Beatty, who she called “Doctor Death” because to her, he appeared old and decrepit. She also despised the constant stream of questions he asked, so after her third appointment, she did something she’d been taught never to do—she lied. She admitted to her mother and father that the day of the party she had made everything up. When she saw the tree swing in the yard, she imagined what would happen if someone ever fell from it. Her mother was satisfied enough to allow Addison to stop seeing Doctor Death and eventually Addison’s visions faded so much, she herself stopped believing. Once that happened, the visions stopped coming. By the time she was eighteen, the memories of her early childhood were so vague, she wondered if they had ever been real at all.

  Now, sitting in the room staring at the dress puddled inside the dress box, every memory she’d ever had rushed back to her like the gust of wind that swept Dorothy all the way to Oz. And the worst part of all? She hardly knew what to do about it.

  CHAPTER 9

  “You get the answers you were looking for?” Luke said, leaning against the doorway.

  Addison was sitting on the ground, her legs crossed over one another, contemplating what had just happened. “Someone died here.”

  “What?”

  Addison glanced upward, catching a brief glimpse of the effect her words had on Luke’s face. “I’m sorry—I don’t know what I’m talking about. I was thinking of something else when you walked in, and I just blurted out the first thing that came to mind.”

  He eyed her suspiciously. “You looked like you knew exactly what you were saying when you said it. What’s that then?” he said, pointing at the dress.

  She set the lid on top of the box. “It’s nothing.”

  “Doesn’t look like nothing.”

  “I found it in a box at the bottom of the trunk.” She pushed the lid to the side, just enough to allow a small piece of the fabric to dangle over the edge. “It’s just some old party dress.”

  “What’s all over it?” Luke asked.

  “A design of some kind, I guess.”

  Addison tried covering the dress without touching it, but Luke knelt down, pushing the lid to the side, and pointing. “That doesn’t look like any design I’ve
ever seen.”

  “What does it look like to you?”

  “Honestly? Dried blood,” Luke said.

  “Maybe. Or something was spilled on it. It could be a lot of different things.”

  “Like what?”

  Nothing came to mind.

  “Who would go to the trouble of boxing up a dress without cleaning it first?” He tugged at the edge of his chin. “Is that why you said someone had died here?”

  “I told you—I don’t know why I said that.”

  Luke stood. “If you don’t want to tell me, fine. But don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  He slid a hand down his face and groaned. “I’m done for tonight. See you tomorrow.”

  He’d made it out the door and almost to his truck before Addison caught up with him. “Wait.”

  He kept walking.

  “Would you wait just a minute?!” she yelled. “Please?”

  He stopped, but didn’t turn around. “Why?”

  “You’re right. I wasn’t honest with you before, but believe me, it’s better this way.”

  “How do you know?”

  “If I shared certain things with you, you’d never see me the same way again. You’d think…I was crazy.”

  He shrugged. “You seem normal to me.”

  “Right now I do.”

  “All right. Tell me something…see what happens.”

  “And risk you leaving and not coming back?”

  Luke faced her. “It’s not going to happen, Addison. We’ve become friends over the past few weeks, haven’t we?”

  “I’d consider us friends, yes.”

  He sighed. “Then don’t be afraid to let me into your life. I’m completely open. You can ask me anything, and I’ll always give you a straight answer. You can tell me anything, and I won’t judge you.”

  Even standing there, listening to his words, she didn’t believe a person like him actually existed. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Sure it is,” he said. “There’s no need to be shy, not around me.”

  Shy? Is that how he sees me?

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  He dug his hands into his pockets. “It just seems like you’ve built a wall around yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. Just one brick—that’s all I’m asking,” he said, holding a finger in the air. “Tell me one thing you thought you couldn’t ever tell anyone.”

  The Great Wall of Addison was created at a time in her life when trust should have been forming, not row upon row of bricks. But seeing things others didn’t want to accept had taught her the value of keeping things to herself. As she aged, so did the need to separate herself from everyone else. Her introverted, untrusting nature came with a price, often at the expense of her relationships with men. None of them had ever lasted longer than six months, and usually, it was even less. They tried to get close, but she resisted, never trusting them enough to let herself go—not completely. She firmly believed that if she ever showed her true self, they’d laugh, and then they’d leave.

  Luke was giving her the chance to do something different. She desperately wanted to keep the promise she’d made to herself to become a new, improved Addison, the one she’d always wanted to be. She just wasn’t sure who that was yet. She looked at Luke, contemplating the next course of action and whether what she was about to say would haunt her forever. All he wanted was a single brick, but he was about to get a good bit of the wall. “Do you believe in spirits?”

  CHAPTER 10

  “You mean ghosts?” Luke asked.

  “They’re the same thing, aren’t they?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You said you wanted a brick.”

  He looked at her like he didn’t understand how the two were related and then walked over to the porch. “I shouldn’t have pushed you just now. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine—really,” she said.

  “Here I am asking you to do what I haven’t even done myself. I want to share something with you, if you don’t mind. Can we sit?”

  He sat down, and Addison joined him.

  “When I was twelve years old, my grandfather died,” Luke said.

  “Were you close?”

  “Very. He used to pick me up on the weekends and take me to the renovation jobs he was working on.”

  “Is that why you went into the business—because of him?”

  He nodded. “No matter what went wrong, my grandfather never complained. He just looked at me and said it would all work out. It drove me crazy at first. I thought he never took anything seriously. Then I watched things happen around him—a client would complain about the way something was done, or how much time he was taking to complete the job. It didn’t faze him. He just went about his day, smiling and looking forward to the next day and the next one after that.”

  “Sounds like a smart man.”

  “He was—but he was so much more,” Luke said. “When I was with him, I always felt special, like I was his favorite, and maybe I was. Now I get the feeling my cousins felt the same way too. My grandpa could have had one hundred grandchildren; it didn’t matter. He had a way of making you feel like you were the only person who mattered.”

  The closest thing Addison had like that in her own life was her father, though the bond didn’t seem as tight as the one Luke had just mentioned. “It must have been hard when you lost him.”

  “I wasn’t prepared when it happened,” he said. “I don’t think anyone is, no matter the circumstances. I knew he was getting old; I just always thought I’d have more time.”

  Addison frowned. “I felt the same way about my mom.”

  “On the day of the funeral, I remember standing with my parents in a long line, waiting to pay our last respects. The closer we got to the casket, the more I didn’t want to be anywhere near it. There were seven or eight people in front of us, but I could see my grandfather’s head from where I was standing. It had been propped up high enough on the pillow that I could see him lying there. His eyes were closed, and his hands were placed one over the other in the middle of his body. He looked like he was dreaming, not dead. I wanted to shake him and wake him up—make him come back to me.”

  Addison winced. “Funerals were hard for me as a kid too.”

  “When we got closer to his casket, my mother turned to me and said, ‘When it’s our turn you can give him a kiss goodbye if you want.’ I was a scared kid—I’d never even been around a dead person before. A kiss goodbye? I had this mental picture of me leaning in, my lips puckered, and when I was an inch or so from his cheek, his eyes would suddenly burst open, but instead of the soft blue I remembered, they’d be a whitish-grey color. And I’d realize the man staring back at me wasn’t my grandfather anymore. I stood there going over and over it in my mind until my mom looked at me and said, ‘Are you all right?’ I broke from the line and bolted for the door.”

  “You left?” Addison asked.

  “Before I got to the door my mother yelled my name. I turned and saw her step toward me, but my dad reached out and wound his fingers around her arm, reeling her back. He said, ‘Let him go.’ I thrust the church doors open and ran as fast as I could for as long as I could until I was so far away, I couldn’t see the church anymore. I never turned back, I just kept on running. I made it a few blocks before my legs felt like they’d been dipped in cement blocks, and I couldn’t run anymore. I collapsed on the grass in someone’s front yard. I didn’t know whose it was, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be alive anymore. Not without him.”

  Addison rested a hand on Luke’s knee. “What an awful thing to go through.”

  Although Luke smiled, she noticed a sting of sadness in his eyes. They both remained stationary, neither moving, until Luke cleared his throat, producing a sound like he was trying to get rid of the knot in it.

  “That night my parents tried to think of something they cou
ld do to cheer me up,” he said. “I heard my mom tell my dad that she thought they should have a talk with me to help me ‘process my feelings.’ My dad said he had a much better idea.”

  “What did they come up with?”

  “Ice cream,” he said.

  “Not bad.”

  “My stomach was so sour, I knew I’d never be able to eat it, but they were worried about me so I went along with it anyway. It made my mom relax a little. She probably thought I was feeling better about the whole thing.”

  “So what happened?” Addison asked.

  “It was dark outside when we left the house. I was sitting in the middle of the back-seat of the car. My parents were in the front, laughing about silly things my grandpa had done or said. It was their attempt to loosen the mood. They probably thought it would help me in some way. It didn’t. I sat there, feeling guilty for running out of the church and never saying goodbye. I wondered if my grandfather was out there somewhere, looking down on me, disappointed in the way I’d acted. He’d meant so much to me in life, and I couldn’t even tell him that in the end.”

  “I’m sure he knew. I don’t know where people end up after this life, but I’d like to believe they know how we feel.”