by Don Sloan
It was early Wednesday afternoon at Nathan’s house.
“Nathan, can you bring me a towel, please?”
The question, soaked in innocence, carried with it a stimulation Nathan had often felt but seldom acted upon. “Sure,” he replied nonchalantly, but his feet stumbled as he moved to the hall closet where linens and towels were kept. He reached a long arm in through the bathroom door, letting great coils of steam escape.
“I can’t quite reach it. Can’t you bring it in?” Sarah’s voice became teasing and openly free of innocence.
“You’ll be able to reach it just fine when you get out of the tub. I’ll just leave it hooked on the doorknob.”
“Goodness, what a fine sense of chivalry!” Sarah chided with a petulant tone in her voice. “I’m going to have to find a knight with fewer scruples if I’m ever going to have any fun.”
Nathan blushed up to the roots of his brown hair. “This isn’t the time or place for fun,” he said through the door. “Maybe you can block out the past 62 hours, but I, for one, am going to stay on my toes.”
“What an uncomfortable position,” Sarah said with a laugh, and opened the door suddenly, swathed only in the towel he had brought. “I have nothing to fear, then, with my knight on guard. What’s for dinner?”
Nathan thought he would burst with sexual energy. How the hell do these things happen when there are life-and-death issues being played out? he wondered. The human body really is an amazing machine to be able to compartmentalize abject fear into one section of the brain and hold it at bay while the reproductive organs kick into high gear.
“You’ll be the main course if you don’t get some clothes on in a hurry,” Nathan said huskily. “I’m not as strong self-willed as you think.”
“Glad to hear that,” Sarah said as she swooped by into the bedroom. She let the towel fall casually to the floor and began stepping into her panties. By an incredible act of self-control, Nathan was able to stand there and wonder at this woman’s beauty and ability to tantalize him. But only for an instant.
“God, you are so beautiful,” he said at last, and crossed the room to her. She dropped the sweater she had picked up and the two of them fell headlong onto the bed, consumed in spite of their circumstances by a more basic desire. Slowly, they made love while the sun traveled across the sky, far above the canopy of gathering storm clouds, and they discovered each other’s needs and wants intuitively, with no words ever spoken, and no motion or action out of rhythm. It was as though they had known each other for years, and had made love thousands of times before, but each time discovering new things about each other, like a blues musician who plays a well-known song but imbues it each time with a new riff, a new chord change at the right time, a new intonation—always something to keep the song fresh and natural and a thing of beauty.
At last Nathan spoke. “Sarah?”
“Mm-hm?”
“What would you think about doing some additional research on our houses—you know, check on other owners through the deed records and see if we can come up with a clue about what’s happening. I dunno—maybe there is some leftover ghost that’s still haunting these places.”
“Come on—do you really believe in ghosts?”
“After what’s been happening to us, don’t you?”
“Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to check.”
“Great! Let’s head over to the county deeds office with what’s left of the afternoon.”
And this they did—but not before making love again—twice more.
They also decided to visit the local library.
This proved to be a long, weary search through local history and genealogy records. Nathan had probed his own house’s history first, checking deed records and matching them to death records and newspaper accounts to try and determine a pattern of some kind. Then, they did the same with Sarah’s house and the house on the corner. It proved to be a very inconclusive journey, though not without tantalizing hints.
Nathan’s house had been constructed originally in 1884 by a local contractor named Benjamin Storey. The deed and permit records showed that the original owner’s name was Douglas Steele, of Philadelphia, PA, and that he had lived in it for 20 years, at which time Nathan’s great-grandfather had bought it. Alfred Benjamin Forrest bought the house in 1904 as a gift to his new wife and they used it as a summer home until his death in 1944―a death put down officially by the county coroner at the time as simple heart failure.
Nathan explained to Sarah that during this time a whole new generation of Forrests had grown up at the shore, arriving each summer like migrating seabirds from points up and down the East Coast, to spend time in Cape May with the elder Forrest, a man as generous as he was rich. In the year 1941, however, there was a lapse in the family reunions while the war in Europe pushed into high gear. Nathan’s grandfather Jonathan―one of three brothers and two sisters―fought as a Marine while his brothers commanded naval destroyers in the Pacific. Late in the war, Jonathan was deployed along with thirty thousand other Marines to the tiny Pacific atoll of Okinawa, to hold it until relieved. This they did, but not before Jonathan, a second lieutenant twice decorated, was stricken and killed by a Japanese sniper bullet in the Spring of 1945, barely six months before they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus ending the terrible world conflict that had cost millions of lives at the mere charismatic whim of two world leaders and a handful of coat-tail dictators.
In that same year, Nathan’s great-grandfather Alfred had also died. And so it was that, by one of those unfortunate coincidences occasioned by fate now and then, Lt. Jonathan Forrest arrived at his father’s funeral, but not as one of those gathered in black at the house in Cape May to mourn the passing of the aristocratic patriarch of the Forrest family. Jonathan arrived in Cape May in a flag-draped casket and shared the funeral service with Alfred―a small service conducted in the family parlor, where both men were laid out in caskets on sawhorses.
The house descended in that same year to Edward Forrest, Jonathan’s eldest son who, at age six, was much too young to understand that he was now the owner of a large, well-appointed home on the Jersey shoreline. His grief at the passing of both his grandfather and father at the same time was intense, and the boy subsequently avoided any of the family gatherings at the shore for many years.
On one of the only two times he did go, he claimed that his grandfather and father had both come to visit him in the dead of night in his bedroom, his grandfather in the natty suit in which he had been buried and his father as a war-decorated soldier with half his chest missing. The boy was 10 at the time, and the house full of guests was awakened by his terrified shrieks.
Edward did not go back to the shore until the age of 47, when, after a long series of hospitalizations for depression and schizophrenia, he killed himself with a single gunshot to the roof of his mouth, standing in the house’s parlor. The year was 1985, and Nathan was five years old when he came to the funeral. He never forgot it.
The body of his uncle Edward lay in state in the family parlor in a closed casket, and, as tradition dictated, Nathan took his turn along with several of his cousins in sitting up with the body. Midway through the dreary vigil, Nathan thought he saw a mist rise through the sealed coffin lid, a mere wisp as it were, that solidified over the next ten minutes as a floating cloud. Nathan cried out, but his cousins saw nothing, and tried to comfort him in his fright. Eventually, Nathan’s father, Jeremy, came to the boy and led him away, crying, convinced that he had seen his uncle passing into the next life, writhing and twisting, and seemingly in great agony at the transition.
Nathan was recovered from this experience by the following summer, however, and gathered with his cousins once more at the shore of the house, which had passed to his Aunt Millie. And so it was to her house that he came to play in the surf and to take piano lessons from the aging spinster. Millie took a special interest in the boy, who seemed to have both a creative and a practical side to him―even
ly balanced, she would sometimes say to him―and taught him a love for the house that he carried with him into adulthood and, eventually, when his aunt died without survivors very early in January, 2014, to his ownership of the house itself on Beach Avenue.
She had lived in a nursing home in Cape May and not at the house on the shore for four years before her death, so it was with more than a little trepidation that Nathan had made this mid-winter trip as its new owner. He had never forgotten the strange evening he had spent sitting up with the body of his uncle, but he had not let it detract from his enjoyment of the house, and he had never mentioned the incident again to anyone outside his family. Indeed, after all these years, he had begun to convince himself that he had not witnessed the apparition at all―that it was merely the natural consequence of years of surfside bonfires and ghost stories.
Now, as he sat back in the hard library chair, he was not so sure.
Sarah’s search was little more productive. She saw that the house had been built by Edmund Joseph Claymore, Sr., and that the house had passed upon his death that year to his wife, and then to his daughter Moira, when the wife died in 1892. Moira was nineteen years old.
Sarah laughed. “She was my great aunt and apparently quite a character. Lived to be almost 80 years old. She wouldn’t let any of the family near the house while she was alive. When she died in 1952, the house was inherited by my grandfather John Claymore—he was Aunt Moira’s nephew, but not any special favorite of hers. The truth is, Aunt Moira’s house was more or less condemned by the town of Cape May for being in severe disrepair and he got the house by default in probate proceedings when she died.”
“So she didn’t have any children?”
“Aunt Moira was thought to be a lesbian, which was one of the kinder things said about her in the family. My father said she just seemed kind of odd. He said she had this way of, like, staring off into space as though her body was there but the rest of her wasn’t.”
Nathan rose from the hard back chair in which he had been sitting. “You can fill me in on the rest of Moira’s alleged lifestyle and any other tidbits about your family on the way back to your house.”
“Surely you don’t mean we’re going back to my house?”
“Well, what’s the worst that can happen? Transportation to another time and place? Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt, as they say.” Nathan grinned.
“I’m serious, Nathan. I don’t want to go back there just yet. There’s more you ought to know.”
“OK, what else?” Nathan said.
“Well, for starters, Aunt Moira was reputedly a witch.”
“A what?”
“A witch, but not in the nice Bewitched way. See, family history has it that Aunt Moira witnessed the murder of my great grandfather Edmund Sr., and that she swore an evil oath on that day to get revenge.”
“Wow. And did she?”
“Well, no one knows for sure. As far as I know, she took the real story of what happened to the grave with her. Kept the house like a pig sty until my grandfather inherited it. She was quite the pack rat, apparently. He lived in Cincinnati, where most of the rest of my family still lives, and he hardly ever set foot in the place. They think New Jersey is a foreign country.”
“Well—never mind, just kidding. Go on.”
“Anyway, he kept the place up since the town was going to take it over if he didn’t, but like I said, nobody ever got to be inside it again on a regular basis until my uncle Joseph got hold of it.”
“Your grandfather died and left it to your uncle Joseph?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t really take care of it, either. He was a dancer on Broadway in New York. He would just come down here with a bunch of his boyfriends and party until the local police shut them down every night.”
“Boy, and I thought my family was a little off the straight and narrow. No offense, but those dry deed records didn’t say anything about witches or gay uncles.”
Sarah laughed again, and it was a pleasure for Nathan to hear. He enjoyed everything about this amazing woman, and he didn’t want the moment to end.
“Well, it gets boring pretty quickly now. Uncle Joseph died in 1989 at the age of 40 and the house passed to my father, Edmund III. He was an architect and put a lot of money into restoring the old place. It wasn’t until he and my mother got hold of it that any of the rest of the family really even knew anything about it or its history. My parents were killed in an automobile crash three years ago and the house passed into my name.”
“You started coming to the shore as a child, then?”
“Yes. And we would pass these stories among ourselves late at night, when my cousins and girlfriends from South Philly would be here with us.” She looked again at Nathan with big, imploring eyes. “Do we really have to go back to my house?”
“Sarah, we’ve got to do it sooner or later.”
“Let’s go in the morning. Meanwhile, we can stop by the store and get some groceries. I’ll fix dinner for the two of us.”
“That does sound like a better plan. What shall we get for dessert?”
She gave him a mischievous grin. “I’ll give you three guesses. Come on, let’s go.”
Chapter 5
but now the stories aren’t quite so easy to hear, are they, darling?
no, they’re not. We’re nearing the end, aren’t we?
my dear, you talk as though you need some new gossip. How delicious! These stories are getting quite old. The people have almost stopped coming to the shore. Maybe they’re afraid.
do we need the people, darling?
well, without them we’d have nothing to talk about, would we?
there are so many for sale signs in our front yards.
are there? I hadn’t noticed that. Good. New people, new blood.
my dear, you are horrid—
Sarah’s dream that night in Nathan’s bed transported her to an icy windowsill outside a dormer, somewhere along Beach Avenue. It was night and yet the room inside was bright, lit with gaslight from a wall fixture. Along one wall a fire blazed in a small hearth. And along the opposite wall, three children hung by their hands, manacled and stretched thin, their wrists protruding inches above their sleeves. Their heads —two young boys and one young girl—hung lifeless to one side, slumped forward on their pitiful little bodies.
Sarah gasped at what she saw, ignoring the freezing wind that whipped around her body. She still only wore the long sweater and underwear she had slipped on after making love to Nathan. She struggled to open the window, trying to raise it, to see if there was something she might do for these children, when something caught her eye.
Moving from another corner of the room was a crouching man, bird-like in his movements, almost hopping as he turned his head from side to side. He looked straight at Sarah and smiled—a cruel gash in an empty face with white, snake-like skin. He moved his lips and Sarah heard his voice through the closed window.
“Come in, missy—there’s no need to be out there in the cold.”
And suddenly Sarah was inside, lying on a bed, with this vile man standing over her. She tried to scream but no words would come out—not even incoherent shrieks. She moved crablike up the bed until she was flattened against the wall, but the man made no move to attack her. He just kept looking at her and turning his head like a dreadful robin, examining her first with one eye and then the next. He was dressed in a natty black suit, with a starched white shirt and black bow tie, and trousers that were too short for him. Skinny ankles shone out above the tops of old-fashioned low-topped boots. And he held a stout wooden cane in his bony hand.
“Who are you?” Sarah finally managed to say.
The man said nothing, but smiled again, a horrible smile below a pair of very wide-set eyes—more like a snake’s pitiless orbs than those of a man.
“Who are you and why are you doing these things to us?” Sarah was not quite so scared now. She didn’t even know if she was awake or asleep, but she meant to have s
ome answers.
The man continued only to smile, but he reached out his lank arm in the direction of the children hanging on the wall.
“What? You want me to ask them, you miserable bastard?” Sarah shouted.
And the man began to laugh and Sarah began to fade.
“Don’t pull a dissolve on me, you cowardly creep!” Sarah said, trying to jump off the bed to get at the man, but suddenly nothing but white mist surrounded her, swirling up her thighs, cold as death’s own special touch. The room disappeared quickly, and all around her was the wet, cottony mist, as though she had stepped into a snow globe. It was terribly quiet—and then she heard the sound of children laughing.
The sound was jarring and not from very far away. The mists began to clear, as though a machine was sucking it out through special vents in the floorboards of the room. It remained exactly as she had seen it earlier—except now the children were very much alive and playing in front of the fireplace. They took no notice of Sarah, who stood like a statue by the end of one of the twin beds.
“Come on, Billy!” cried the girl. “You’ll never win the game if you cheat!”
“Who says I’m cheating?” Billy retorted. He was the biggest of the three, a boy of about six. All were clad in rough cloth and all were barefoot, despite the weather outside. Up here in the dormer room it was quite cozy, with the fire built up and blazing merrily.
“I’m going down to tell Mum if you don’t stop,” said the youngest boy petulantly.
“All right, then,” Billy agreed. “But the game will take longer. Your turn, Jacob.” And he handed the pair of dice to the younger boy.
There was a soft knock at the door and the children all looked up, surprised.
Sarah put a hand to her mouth in a reflexive motion. The door opened and a curly-haired woman about thirty years of age popped her head through the door.
“Hullo, Mum!” cried the three children in unison. Sarah relaxed as the woman swept into the room, her soft linen skirt and apron brushing the floor as she entered.
“We’ve just been telling Billy not to cheat!”