by Cat Knight
Two young girls were walking up towards the house. Claire’s skin prickled with the danger. She raised a fist to bang on the glass, to yell and tell them to turn around but in the second it took her to do that she knew what she was looking at. Very slowly, she lowered her hand. It was almost funny, how terrified her younger self looked. At the time, she had fancied herself so very brave, but even from this distance she could make out the pale face and the barely concealed trembling. Sarah, right behind her, looked much the same.
She closed her eyes and rested her head against the glass.
She wanted to run down and tell them to turn, wanted to smash this window and yell for them to run and never look back, but she knew that there would be no use.
“Go back,” she whispered, despite herself.
She opened her eyes to see her younger self spin, looking around for the source of the voice. After a moment, eleven-year-old Claire convinced herself there was nothing and kept walking.
“Please,” Claire said. To whom she didn’t know.
The young Claire turned again.
And did not see what was just feet behind her. What in that moment made the older Claire’s heart stop in her chest.
The figure wore a long, stained, ragged dress. Maybe it had been white once, but now it was mostly filth. Its face was skeletal; what skin remained was drawn tight over the bones, exposing rotten teeth in a horrible leer only slightly obscured by the stringy, dangling hair. It walked slowly, moving along at an almost leisurely pace, one foot after another.
The two girls could not see the figure, were not aware of its meandering pursuit. Had it been there, fifteen years ago? Had it been following her ever since?
The feeling began in the base of Claire’s feet, a tingling prickling sensation that wound its way through every nerve causing shudders up over her shoulders up over her neck to the hairline at the base of her head. Claire turned.
And there the ragged she thing stood.
Claire didn’t scream or run, despite the wave of panic that threatened to knock her over. She faced down the figure and felt her fists clench.
“Why?” she said. “Why us?”
The figure didn’t reply. The grin stayed the same.
“We were kids,” Claire said. “Just kids on a dare. Why did you have to punish us?”
Still, the figure neither moved nor spoke. Loathe to look away for the fear, Claire forced herself to look away. She returned her gaze to the two girls approaching the house.
They had reached the porch now, disappearing from her sight. She turned back to the skeletal woman. “If you want to hurt me, go ahead,” Claire said, turning back to the woman who stood behind her. “I won’t pretend I’m not scared. But you might as well know that I’m not leaving here without Sarah.”
From the hall below, she heard the door open. Heard voices. If she walked back the way she had come, would she be face to face with herself? Was that what it was she couldn’t remember?
The corpse seemed to read her thoughts, and somehow stood even more firmly in Claire’s path.
Claire looked into those empty eye sockets, her voice threatened to die in her throat, but she forced it out.
“Where. Is. Sarah?”
There was no response. Below the footsteps of the two eleven-year-olds trod their way tentatively up the stairs. Claire could hear her own voice now, whispering to Sarah, trying to hide her fear as they drew closer. And as she heard them reach the top of the stairs, from below came a terrible, piercing, agonised scream. As it did the skeletal figure vanished and Claire was alone, alone as she heard her younger self ask “What was that?” the terror now obvious.
“It was a scream,” Sarah said. “Someone is in trouble!”
“We have to leave,” younger Claire said. “We have to get out of here, this was a mistake Sarah, this was– “
“Someone is hurt!” The thudding footsteps, receded now, as the eleven-year-old girls went back down the stairs.
Claire ran to them rushing back down the hallway, past the picture frames, trying to reach the stairs and stop young Claire and Sarah before they ever reached what waited at the source of the scream. It was her chance, she could stop it now, before it started and turn it all around. Claire couldn’t stop to think what might happen to her life right now, it only mattered that she reach them. Each stride forward, Claire thought should take her closer but the hall kept stretching ahead of her, longer and longer it seemed until she realised that she was running along a new hall towards a single door. She slowed, confused. She could no longer hear herself or Sarah. This door was not where she had come from.
A voice sounded in her head, intimately familiar, her own.
The only way out is through.
Claire strode forward and pushed open the door.
It was a bedroom; huge and old fashioned. The dresser was cluttered in cobwebbed hairbrushes and makeup utensils. The wardrobes were open and full of moth eaten clothes.
But in the centre of the room stood a towering four poster bed. and lying on it…
It was the skeletal woman, but she wasn’t alone. She clutched to her another body, dressed in the remains of a suit.
A suit stained with dark brown, long dried blood, all stemming from the knife driven into his chest.
Claire looked at them for several seconds, but there was no movement. These were just bodies. Nothing else. She bowed her head. “You killed them,” she said. Terrible understanding had finally slid into place.
“You killed them and you let your hate and anger and guilt consume this house. And people knew. Everyone knew not to come here. But we were stupid enough to try, and when I left I took you with me. I let you out to do to our village what you did to this house. To slowly contaminate it until everybody started to feel what you felt.”
She turned away. She couldn’t look at the bodies anymore.
It was time to find Sarah and be gone from this place.
She walked back through the door and down the hall. In minutes, she arrived at the point where several corridors converged and found the one that led back to the stairs. Nothing shifted as she went. Nothing changed. She walked until she found the gap where the double doors had been, then, moving carefully, walked back on to the stairs.
Then she heard them.
“Sarah, I think they were right. I think this place really is haunted.”
“That was a scream Claire. Someone through here needs help.”
“But if–“
“What if it’s not a haunted house? What if someone else came here and is in trouble?”
Claire moved quickly and quietly down the stairs towards the voices. Once at the bottom she stepped around to the door opposite the one she had gone through before. Her younger self and Sarah stood there, still arguing. Claire looked on, her heart wretched with longing to avert the next moments that would surely come.
“Let’s just go home,” young Claire pleaded. “Let’s go home and forget we ever came here.”
“Do it,” present day Claire said. “Turn around and walk away.”
Young Claire glanced over her shoulder, eyes wide as she looked for the source of the voice. She looked straight through her older self.
“Run,” Claire said. “Listen to me, you have to run.”
“Sarah…” the younger Claire said, eyes still searching. “I think… I think we should go. Something…”
“We have to at least check.” Sarah reached for the door handle.
“Don’t!” Older and younger Claire screamed at the same time as Sarah opened the door. Through it was only blackness and then, with a sound like the last moment of water draining out of a sink, Sarah was gone. The door slammed shut.
Eleven-year old Claire, screaming, grabbed it and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge.
She slammed her fist against it, again and again, calling Sarah’s name, calling until her throat was hoarse and her breathing was ragged and she fell to her knees, begging Sarah to return.
She knew, somehow, that that would not be the case now. She knew as clearly as she knew that if she turned and walked through the front door of the house it would open for her and she could leave this place, again with no memory of what had happened inside. She could leave and nobody would be any the wiser. Nobody else had been lost this time. She could vanish and put it all behind her, knowing that the house could not be bested. Or she could walk through that door, face whatever was on the other side, and know that she would probably never come out.
She walked over and opened the door.
Chapter Eight
Something had changed. No. Not something. Everything.
She felt different. Before walking through the door, she had been tired, in pain from bruises and scratches, out of breath from her run upstairs. Now she felt… fresh. New. And yet somehow less. She had more energy but it would expend quicker. Her strength wasn’t the same and yet… yet why did this feel so familiar? It was strange and yet she was sure she knew exactly how this felt because she had been like this before.
Then she looked down at her hands. Small. Much smaller than her own. Her arms were skinny and her body was entirely different. But she recognised it because it was her own. Or at least it had been fifteen years ago.
She looked around the room. In contrast to the rest of the house, this was different.
Well lit, although where the light was coming from she couldn’t be sure. It was adorned with huge, colourful paintings, and the floor was scattered with toys.
At the far end was a dollhouse, an exact replica of this house, similar to the one she had found earlier but this was resplendent, in its prime, not decrepit nor dripping with blood.
And crouching in front of it…
“Hello Claire.” Sarah turned to her with a smile.
“Sarah,” Claire said.
“I thought you would have been right behind me,” Sarah said, as casually as if they were discussing the weather. “But you took so long.”
“Fifteen years,” Claire said.
“Wow,” Sarah said. “That’s a very long time.”
“Yes, it is,” Claire said. “Have you been here the whole time?”
Sarah nodded. “It didn’t feel so long to me. Or maybe it did. It’s hard to tell here.” She picked up a little doll, opened the house and placed it in one of the rooms before looking around for another.
“You’re still so young,” Claire said.
“So are you,” Sarah replied. “You haven’t aged a day.”
“I guess not,” Claire replied, remembering how she looked at that moment. “What happened, Sarah? You went through the door, you disappeared and… and then what?”
Sarah paused midway to picking up another toy. She frowned. It was the look of somebody remembering something they would prefer not to.
“I was lost,” she said. “For a while. I was in a bad place. And then she found me.”
“Who?” Claire said, despite knowing the answer.
“Mother.” Sarah’s face split into a wide grin. “She took me in, gave me this room. And she has taken care of me ever since. She stopped all the people who tried to take me away from her. She kept me safe. She let me see what was going on. Some of it, anyway. And whatever she could, she gave me. It has been just wonderful.”
Claire shivered at that. She looked away, trying to think. “You know who she is, you know what she did — right?”
“Who is that?” Sarah’s voice was light and airy, but there was an unmistakeable edge to it. “What did she do?”
“She murdered her children,” Claire said.
“I am her child.”
“No.” Claire could hear desperation in her voice now. “No, you’re not Sarah. You have parents, parents who loved you and mourned you.” Sarah looked at her without expression.
“Sarah, whoever this… this woman was, it’s her fault this happened. She trapped you here. She killed everyone who came to save you. And she poisoned our village.”
“No, she didn’t,” Sarah said.
“Yes, she did!” Claire cried. “You haven’t seen it Sarah. It’s falling apart at the seams. The plants don’t grow, the businesses are all dying, the whole place is in disrepair and nobody can bring themselves to either fix it or to just… leave.
When we came here we let her out and she’s been destroying our home ever since.”
“No, she hasn’t,” Sarah said.
“She has!” Claire’s frustration was spilling over now. “You haven’t seen it.”
“Yes, I have,” Sarah said, still so calm. “I’ve seen all of it. I’m the one who did it.”
For a moment silence hung over the room. Claire stared at Sarah, mouth hanging open, trying to make sense of what she had just heard. And then, slowly, her eyes moved to one of the pictures on the wall, hanging right over the dollhouse
It was a framed map. Except it had been scribbled all over in jagged, angry spikes of black pencil.
“It was you,” Claire said.
“Mother doesn’t care about the village,” Sarah said. ‘They never did anything to her.”
“What did they do to you?” Claire demanded.
“Nothing,” Sarah said. “It’s not about what they did to me. It’s about what they did to you.”
Claire looked again at the serene, smiling young girl who had once been her best friend; so gentle and kind, sacrificing herself all because she heard a scream and was sure someone needed help.
Sarah - so loved, the best friend anyone could ever ask for, who had spent years destroying the village that demonised her best friend.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Claire said.
“You’d have done the same for me,” Sarah said, turning back to the dollhouse. “I saw it, Claire. All of it. I saw my parents screaming at you when your family went for dinner at the pub. I saw them yelling until the manager had to ask you to leave. I saw you sitting by yourself at school. I saw them trip you in the halls and steal your lunch. I saw them burn your books and laugh at you and call you murderer. I saw people looking away whenever they saw you in the street.
I saw the teacher who tried to have you expelled for failing a maths test. I saw all of their hate and spite and anger and I couldn’t take it.
Not when you did nothing wrong. They hurt you for no reason. So I hurt them.”
A wave of empathy passed through Claire. “They hurt me because they didn’t know any better. They hurt me because they were hurting. It wasn’t their fault.”
“Wasn’t it?” Sarah was not looking at her; focusing on arranging the dolls in the house. “They were the adults. They were the ones who were supposed to guide us and show us the right path. Kids are allowed to not know any better. Adults have to.”
“But they don’t,’ Claire said. ‘They make mistakes, Sarah. They mess up too. Nothing really changes except you have responsibilities.”
“You thought you had a responsibility to come here?”
“Of course I did,” Claire said. “I want to bring you home.”
“But she is home,” a voice from behind them said.
Chapter Nine -
She was no longer skeletal. Not in this room. She was smiling and beautiful, her hair thick and long, her face full, her dress pure white. She stood in the doorway and beamed at Sarah as Claire backed away.
<
br /> “She’s happy here,” the woman said. “Aren’t you Sarah?”
“I am, Mother,” Sarah said.
“She doesn’t know any better,” Claire said. “You’ve kept her captive for years.”
“I gave her a home,” the woman said. “I took care of her. That is what a mother does.”
“You’re right,” Claire said. “A mother takes care of her children. She doesn’t kill them then try to find a substitute.”
The woman froze. Her smile seemed to falter. For the first time she looked at Claire and for just a moment her face was that horrible, wasted skeleton again. But in seconds her full features and sweet smile were back.
“And what would you know, Claire Anderson?” the woman said. “All those lovers who came and went.All those late nights, drinking alone. All the nightmares at the hate and…” her eyes flickered to Claire’s wrist. “And the other things.”
“I know because I lived through it all and faced it,” Claire said. “I’m still facing it.
I do every day. Because I never once tried to pretend it didn’t happen, or replace it with some twisted fantasy.”
The woman seemed rooted to the spot. Claire took a step forward.
“You killed them,” Claire said. “You needed help and nobody gave it to you. Nobody knew how.”
“Enough,” the woman whispered.
“The only way out is through,” Claire said. “You want to know how I did it?” She looked back at Sarah. “After years, I forgave myself.
And I knew that meant I had to come here and end it. To do that I had to forgive the village as well. I had to forgive them for how they treated me and then I needed do the right thing. To come back for Sarah.”
She looked back at the woman.
“You can’t hurt me,” Claire said. “Because I don’t hate you. I understand you. And since you can’t do it yourself, since no-one left alive will ever do it for you, I’m going to. I forgive you.”
The woman’s eyes had gone wide. Her mouth gaped.
Claire turned fully back to Sarah.
“You need to forgive them,” Claire said. “All of them. Because it wasn’t your punishment to give.”