The Haunting of Winchester Mansion Omnibus

by Clarke, Alexandria

  There had to be something I could do to satisfy Flipping Out’s followers without compromising my freshly discovered emotional integrity. I opened the page to create a new post, staring at the blank text box. Finally, I began to type.

  Dear Flippers,

  It’s Bailey here. Today I present to you something a little different from my usual blog: a confession. But before we get to that, I feel the need to fill you in on a few things that have happened over the past couple of days. First off, I lost my cell phone. As in, it fell off the cliff face and into the water. I suppose that’s one of the hazards of living so close to the edge of the world. Eventually, something goes over. The good news is that without my phone, I feel strangely free of modern technology. The bad news is that I lost all of the progress pictures of the Winchester house that I had yet to post on the blog. Sorry about that. I promise to make up for it. Second, you may be wondering how the Black Bay summer festival went. I have to report that it did not go as expected and (because I lost my phone) I was unable to take pictures of the festivities for you. Once again, my deepest apologies.

  Okay, Bailey, get to the point.

  You may be wondering what exactly it is I have to confess. Here it is: I’m not happy. Hard to believe, right? Especially since this blog is full of pleasant anecdotes and cheerful content? It’s true. I’m not happy, and I haven’t been for as long as Flipping Out has existed. Again, I apologize. I crafted a story to tell you. Social media is like that. You show your followers only the good parts of your life, and you hide the rest for your own private contemplation. My story is what you’ve read so far. Bodhi and I travel the States in search of our next great adventure as the inseparable house-flipping duo. What you don’t know is everything that happened to lead up to Flipping Out’s conception. The following information is hard for me to share with you, and it may be hard for some of you to read. Nevertheless, I feel like the time has come to finally be honest with you all. I think it will help me to move on. Here it goes.

  Roughly five years ago, right before we decided to flip houses for profit, Bodhi and I lost our daughter. Her name was Kali. She was three years old at the time, and she was the light of my life. Honestly, before Kali, I wasn’t particularly fond of children, and I certainly did not plan on having any myself. Bodhi was of the same mindset. As all of you know, we traveled extensively before we started our own business, and children aren’t conducive to such a nomadic lifestyle. Nevertheless, things happen, and we found ourselves with a baby that we didn’t know what to do with.

  I know what you’re thinking. It sounds like Bodhi and I resented our daughter. I’ll admit, I had no idea how Kali was going to affect us. I was scared to death when I found out I was pregnant. A slew of anxieties hid behind every corner. Could I raise a child to be adventurous yet cautious? Sensitive yet strong? Hardworking yet laid back? And more to the point, could I seamlessly weave a child into the intricate tapestry that was me and Bodhi? I spent nine months reading every parenting book on the shelf, but each page terrified me more than the last. Kali’s appearance was nigh, and I felt no better prepared than when those two pink lines popped up on my at-home pregnancy test.

  Fast forward to the day Kali was born. She had a full head of hair, and my God, was she the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was like something inside me clicked into place. Maybe it was maternal instinct. Maybe it was love at first sight. Whatever the feeling, I knew that I belonged wholly to the little girl in my arms, and no amount of wanderlust would make me wish she didn’t exist. Don’t get me wrong; I was panicking internally. I truly did not know if I was capable of keeping that tiny nugget safe, but when her baby fingers wrapped around my own for the first time, I knew that I would go down trying.

  Go down, I did. I’m crying writing this, but I need to get it out. Kali died on my watch. Sure, there were extenuating circumstances, but it boils down to one quick moment of poor judgement on my part. For five years, I have blamed myself for that. Most likely, I won’t dash that feeling anytime soon, but I’m trying. God, I’m trying.

  You may be asking yourself why I’m telling all of this to you now. Why bog down all of this quality positive house flipping content with such a melancholy secret from what feels like a past life? Here’s why. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right fooling you all into thinking that mine and Bodhi’s life together was perfect. It wasn’t right pretending that we existed in perfect harmony and that our biggest concern was a sinkhole beneath a house in Fort Lauderdale. It wasn’t right taking photos of Bodhi while he worked and posting them to Flipping Out when I specifically knew that the reason he put in such an insane amount of effort was to stop himself from thinking of Kali. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair. For that, I owe all of you and my husband the deepest and sincerest of apologies. I’m sorry. Plain and simple.

  So! Where do we go from here? Truthfully, I don’t know. I love this blog. I love documenting the work we do. To me, every project is an accomplishment, and Flipping Out is a real life record of how far we’ve come since we first decided to make this our career. Even so, something’s gotta give, flippers. I’m not sure what, but be on the lookout for some changes. Don’t worry. I know how obsessed you all are with the Winchester house. Believe me, I am too. I’ll continue to post updates as much as possible.

  I’ll wrap this up with a thank you to all of you. Without our followers, Flipping Out would be just another URL in the vast and endless space we call the Internet. I cannot even begin to tell you how much I love and cherish your support. Please stick with me. We’ll leap over these upcoming hurdles together.

  All my best,

  Bailey

  I wiped my wet cheeks with the hem of my T-shirt. The cursor lingered over the Publish button on the web page, but I couldn’t bring myself to click it just yet. There was a disadvantage to sharing something like this on the Internet. For everyone to see. It was equal to releasing a part of yourself for the rest of the world to have access to, and that was not an action I considered lightly. For all I knew, publishing such a post would send Flipping Out to a premature death. My followers didn’t tune in for a cry fest. They did it to learn about flipping houses and to live vicariously through me and Bodhi. Would a post like this put followers off? Was it stupid to publish something in direct opposition of the blog’s usual tone?

  “You should publish it,” a voice said behind me.

  I jumped, overturning the cup of fresh orange juice beside my chair. As the liquid stained the old decking, I turned around to face Patrick. “Seriously, you have got to stop doing that.”

  He leaned against the ruined door frame of the master bedroom and flashed me his signature quarterback smile. “Sorry about that. Sometimes I forget.”

  I glanced down at the men hard at work below. “They can’t see you from down there, can they?”

  He stood on his tiptoes to peer toward the ground. “I’ll stay here, just in case. You should publish it.”

  I skimmed through the personal letter with a frown. “I’m not sure.”

  “I think you’ll be surprised by how many people will appreciate your honesty and love you for your flaws anyway,” Patrick said.

  “What are you, my shrink?” But something in Patrick’s tone lent me the courage to click the Publish button. With a dramatic whoosh, the page refreshed itself, and the letter was available for all to read.

  “There it goes.”

  “You won’t regret it,” Patrick assured me.

  I scooted my patio chair away from the edge of the balcony so that I could speak with Patrick without the workers noticing. As I settled in again, he handed me a fresh glass of chilled orange juice.

  I stared at it. “How’d you do that?”

  “Perks of the job.”

  “Har har.” I rotated the glass. It was the one Patrick had pilfered from Lido’s Restaurant when he had still been alive. The Lido’s logo was printed across the glass in frosty lettering. A sudden realization hit me. “It was you.”
>
  “Pardon?”

  I looked up at Patrick, squinting in the sunlight to see him properly. “It was you. I told Milo that drinking ice water helps calm me down. That same night, there was a Lido’s glass on the bedside table. I always thought it was Caroline because of the plumerias, but it was you, wasn’t it?”

  Patrick sank, sitting on the floor beside my patio chair and resting his elbows on his knees. “Yeah, that was me.”

  “And the night Caroline destroyed her bedroom? That shadow in the master bedroom?”

  “That was me too.”

  I gestured to the jagged hole in the side of the house where a pair of exquisite French doors had recently been ripped from place in a supernatural attempt to flee my notice. Ever since, we kept the opening covered with black tarp unless we wanted to sit on the balcony. “This is your fault?” I demanded, flapping the tarp dramatically. “You tore a hole in the house?”

  Patrick bowed his head sheepishly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just—remember how I said you remind me of my mom?”

  “Yes.”

  He fiddled with his fingers, picking at a hangnail on his thumb. “My mom was amazing. She did so much for this town. She did so much for me and Caroline. I don’t think I knew how well she was raising us until she was gone.” He paused, his eyes shining as he looked across the water. “I miss her. I miss my dad too, of course, but my mom had this warmth to her. She could put anyone at ease. If I was ever upset, she always knew exactly what to do or say to make me feel better. Honestly, it wasn’t until I met Alex that I realized most kids don’t have that.”

  Patrick sniffed. He avoided my gaze and tried to pull a loose nail from the aged wood of the upper deck. My heart swelled. I’d forgotten that Patrick was seventeen. At that age, you thought you were invincible, a year away from the illusion of independence. At the same time, you needed someone to pave the road for you.

  “Anyway,” Patrick continued. “My mom had depression. She handled it rather well. It’s why she did so much work in the town. She said that holding herself accountable for that kind of stuff helped her get up in the morning when she didn’t want to.” Having pried the nail from the wood, he rubbed the rust from the metal. “Every once in a while, she had a bad day. She wouldn’t get up or eat breakfast. She would just lie in bed in this room all day long with the curtains shut. There was nothing we could do to make her feel better. We all just rode out the bad days with each other.”

  Patrick dug the tip of the nail into the tip of his index finger. It punctured the skin, and a droplet of blood welled to the surface. Instinctively, I set down my orange juice to confiscate the nail from his grasp.

  “Don’t do that,” I said gently, rolling the nail across the deck beyond his reach.

  “It’s fine,” Patrick replied as he held up his finger. He wiped the blood away. Underneath, there was no sign of the puncture wound. “See?”

  “It’s the concept though,” I rebutted.

  He smiled softly. “That’s why I left you things and tried to help you. The warmth that my mom had? You have it as well. When I figured out you were sad too, I wanted you to know that someone was there with you. Not to talk or argue or try to help. Just someone to be there.”

  If a teenaged boy had to haunt my house, I was glad it was Patrick Winchester. Like he said himself, his mother had raised him well. If Kali had made it to seventeen, I would’ve hoped she turned out as kind and caring as Patrick.

  I smoothed Patrick’s hair back. It felt natural. Intuitive. All this talk about mothering was having an effect on me. “Your mother loves you, Pat. Even now.”

  He rested his forehead on his knees. I rubbed his back in comforting circles.

  “And I know you didn’t murder the French doors on purpose,” I added, trying to lighten the mood. “Unlike Caroline, you don’t seem to obtain pleasure from wreaking havoc. At least you’ve never possessed either one of us.”

  My change of subject had the opposite effect than I’d hoped. Patrick’s jaw clenched. “She’s not supposed to do that.”

  A cloud shifted, and the sun beat down on the balcony, warming my skin. My foot was sweating underneath the cast. Ugh.

  “I’d have to agree,” I told Patrick. “But is that because they make you sign some kind of morality clause when you become a ghost? Or is there another reason?”

  Patrick covered his eyes to look up at me. “Yesterday, you asked me why I look human while Caroline can’t so much as blink.”

  “And you told me that Caroline didn’t want me to know the answer to that question.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “What do you want to tell me?”

  Patrick blew out a breath. “I think you need to know. The more you know, the better prepared you are to take on this fiasco.”

  I swung my feet off the patio chair to face Patrick head on. “I’m listening.”

  He stretched out his legs and leaned back on his palms, tipping his face up to the sun and closing his eyes. “Let me preface this information by telling you that I’m not exactly up to date with every aspect of afterlife mechanics. Caroline and I figured this crap out the hard way. There’s no manual or guide book.”

  “Fair enough. Continue.”

  “When we first realized we were stuck here, Caroline soon discovered that we could leech energy from living humans,” Patrick explained. “It helped us feel somewhat alive again and to maintain a quasi-physical presence. However, it also had an effect on the people that we fed off of.”

  The resulting look of horror on my face must’ve been more conspicuous that I imagined because Patrick sat up to pat my hand.

  “No one died,” he assured me hurriedly. “It drained them. They would get sick, and it would take them a few days to recover. For a while, everyone thought some kind of bug was going around town. Because of that, I stopped doing it. I couldn’t stand watching people suffer because I wanted to feel something again. Caroline, on the other hand, made an unfortunate habit out of it.”

  “What happened then?” I asked, unsure if I wanted the answer.

  “You already know,” Patrick replied. “We found out that what you took had to be given back eventually. That’s why Caroline faded so much faster than me. She couldn’t help herself. Anytime she had access to a human, she stole from them. Her highs started getting shorter and shorter, and before we knew it, she was no more than a shadow.”

  “That’s why you looked ill,” I realized, thinking back to the weeks prior. I remembered Milo’s gaunt appearance and testy temperament. “You disappeared for a while, and when you came back, you looked like you had the flu.”

  Patrick nodded. “I knew I had to look as human as possible for when you and Bodhi arrived here, so I found a hiker in the woods. It lasted long enough to get you to trust me, but if I was going to keep up the ruse, I needed someone else to suck energy from. I wasn’t willing to do that, especially not to you or Bodhi.”

  “And what about that time you tried to strangle yourself?” I asked. The memory was still fresh in my mind. “Or when you were bleeding out?”

  “I was getting desperate,” Patrick admitted. “At that point, I was running out of steam. Both times, I was trying to show you how I was killed. Ethan hit me over the head before he hung me. That’s why I was bleeding so badly.”

  “Right,” I said, swallowing a surge of nausea. “I knew that.”

  We were quiet for a moment, listening to the bustle of the construction work on the ground below. Bodhi’s voice floated up to the balcony as he asked someone for a bottle of water. Another thought occurred to me.

  “Patrick?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you need to absorb energy from a living person in order to look alive, who did you suck dry this time around?”

  Patrick’s blue irises crystallized, hardening as he looked me in the eye.

  “Ethan Powell.”

  27

  Talk of the Town

  That evening, I returned from town
with an amalgamation of items from the prepared foods section of the local market. The kitchen at the Winchester house was finished at last, but Bodhi and I were far too exhausted to make use of it. The few guys that hadn’t been working on the deck outside installed the new appliances. The stainless steel refrigerator, dishwasher, and oven really tied our industrial theme together. The color contrasts between the exposed brick accent wall, the new cabinets, and the appliances were fresh and clean. As I lifted the bags of groceries onto the polished countertops, I let out a satisfied sigh. The kitchen looked great, as did the living and dining areas. It was always such a rush to see my original design sketches come to life.

  The construction crew had gone home. Bodhi was outside. He sat cross-legged on a completed portion of the deck facing the water. His hands rested lightly on his knees. From the even flow of his breath, I could tell that he was meditating. The breeze blew his hair around in a spasmodic dance though he remained serene and motionless. It used to be something he did every day, but Bodhi’s ability to sit still had waned in the last few years. I watched from the glass doors. Meditation was never something I could get the hang of, no matter how often Bodhi asked me to practice with him. For some reason, clearing my mind was a challenge I’d yet to overcome. Even Doctor Marx had suggested something similar in one of my sessions with her, but no matter what I did, thoughts raced through my brain at top speed without any regard to my personal emotions. I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt Bodhi, even to tell him that dinner was available. He deserved time to himself, so I turned away from the glass door.