The Haunting of Sam Cabot (A Supernatural Thriller)

by Hall, Mark Edward

  He said the house’s current water supply was an Artesian well which had been drilled sometime in the sixties. From that source, the water was sweet and delicious. I could attest to that. So, there was nothing more to do but take the health department’s advice. I built a sturdy oak platform and covered the well for what I hoped would be the last time.

  *

  I managed to hide my feelings about everything; the well, the Hulk, Carlisle and the strangeness and mystery that seemed to surround him. At least I hid my feelings from Linda. Or so I thought. John, not so much. Although he was friendly with Carlisle, he was suspicious of the man. I could tell. And he sensed that I was troubled as well. And although I didn’t talk about it, he somehow knew what I was doing out in the back field. John was very observant, even a bit clairvoyant, I thought. He seemed to pick up on things most people didn’t. The day I finished capping the well he drew the story out of me, and although he didn’t judge me, he did suggest I confront Carlisle with what I’d seen.

  “I don’t know, John. I already asked him why he never mentioned the well. He got angry and said he’d forgotten it was there.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “What choice did I have?”

  “Think about it, Sam. That man has been on this property in one way or another since the day he was born. He knows everything there is to know about this place. He knew the well was there. And he probably knows other things.”

  I gazed suspiciously at John. “What things?”

  “Men keep secrets for their own reasons,” John said. “Downright lying is a bit more complex and telling.” There’s always reasons a man lies. Why don’t you just go ask him why he wasn’t honest about the well?”

  I was a little uncomfortable doing it but I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with our entire situation, so I decided to take John’s advice. Later that afternoon I went reluctantly into the basement and stood inspecting the Hulk while Carlisle worked. At first he didn’t say anything, just ignored me, but he knew I was there. Finally he stopped work and turned to face me.

  “You want to talk about the well, don’t you, Sam.” It wasn’t a question. More a statement of fact.

  I wasn’t surprised he knew what I was thinking. It seemed he knew everything that was said and done on his property. Funny, there it was again, the feeling that the house and property weren’t really ours, that it still belonged to Carlisle in some twisted way and we were just living there, paying him a monthly fee so that we could fix it up for him. The thought made me a little sick in my stomach.

  “I suppose I am,” I said, answering Carlisle’s question.

  Carlisle laid down his tool and turned to face me. “John put you up to it?”

  “No,” I lied and I could see that Carlisle knew I was lying. But I would never voluntarily implicate John in anything when it came to Carlisle. My distrust of the man was increasing daily.

  “What’s on your mind then?” Carlisle asked. His tone was curt, impatient, as though he was talking to an imbecile.

  I felt my face redden as I struggled to maintain control over my emotions. “I saw something in the well,” I blurted out finally. “I don’t know what it was, but it was alive and . . . I don’t know . . . unnatural.”

  Carlisle took a step toward me, thrusting his face close to mine. “Let there be no confusion about this,” he said. His tone was low, firm. “What you think you saw does not exist. It was only an illusion. Are we clear on that?”

  “No,” I said, “we’re not clear. “What I saw was real and it frightened the living shit out of me.”

  “Sam,” Carlisle said in a patronizing tone that further infuriated me. “Don’t think I haven’t looked into your past. I know about the army and the mental breakdown. I know that sometimes folks with similar problems see and hear things that aren’t real.”

  The surge of blood to my head was making me dizzy and sick. I had to sort out my thoughts one at a time in order to make sense of them. “You looked into my past?”

  “Didn’t you think I would?” Carlisle said, his voice the same measured monotone I’d gotten used to since making his acquaintance. “I know more than you think I do. I know about your parents dying in a car crash when you were twelve years old and how you had a little trouble . . . adjusting.”

  “You had no right—”

  “Now you listen carefully, Sam. I was kind enough to trust you by taking a mortgage on my house. I had to make sure you were the kind of folks who wouldn’t just leave me hanging.”

  Carlisle touched me lightly, stiff fingers against my breastbone, the weight of his authority nearly stopping my heart. I licked my lips, the clear image of what I’d seen in the well that day blurred around the edges as if melting from the outside in. Suddenly my tongue was numb with cold uncertainty. Had I actually seen something in the well? Now I was totally confused, like I’d become confused about the incidents in the aftermath of the helicopter crash that had spared my life. Carlisle’s gaze was unrelenting, freezing me in place with its cool authority. I felt a sudden tingle of fear.

  “I—I’m sorry,” I said, suddenly unsure why I was apologizing. “I just don’t know what to make of everything. Things have happened in my life . . . .” I stopped short of a full explanation, certain now that Carlisle knew everything about me.

  Carlisle became less threatening then, and in that moment he and I both knew he had won. He stood back, his eyes softening.

  “I understand,” he said. “You thought you were doing the right thing.”

  “I only want what’s best for my family.”

  Carlisle sighed and nodded in understanding. “Of course you do. In the end that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it? Listen to me, Sam; there is nothing here to be afraid of. There is nothing here that will harm your family. I want you to be assured of that. I want you to depend on it. Am I making myself clear?”

  I stood like a statue, my brain buzzing. I was now unsure why I had come in here in the first place. I stood back and looked at the Hulk—really looked at it, and everything else was forgotten. What I saw electrified me like nothing else in my life ever had. It was like seeing a work of art. But I suppose that description pales in the face of what I actually saw and felt. I knew it was a machine, but it was a machine that had somehow transcended the mechanical and had rocketed itself into the stratosphere of high art. My knees weakened and my legs almost collapsed. Carlisle was looking at me as if in invitation, his face flush with anticipation. I went in closer to the Hulk and reached my trembling hand out to touch it. On contact, something like a jolt of electricity shot through me and my body convulsed. In that moment I was utterly convinced that the Hulk was neither machine nor work of high art; in that moment I was utterly certain that the Hulk was somehow alive.

  Over the course of the next several days the memory of that day would fade from me like a dream, until it was just a fragment of something unpleasant at the center of my psyche.

  Chapter 7

  The roofing contractors postponed at least three times and I was getting ready to call someone else when, lo and behold, they finally showed up in our yard.

  I was very grateful. I wanted to have the work done before we moved in. They were a three-man team, a father and two sons, and they were fast and efficient. It took the three of them only four days to completely strip and re-shingle the entire roof, and this included all five of the gables. I was extremely satisfied with their work and told them so. Afterward, they picked up all of the old junk and carted it away to the dump in a large open trailer.

  Other than my strange infatuation with the Hulk and the incident with the well, things had been going along quite smoothly. Linda and Sean seemed happy. I was relatively happy myself. My strange infatuation with the Hulk was something that belonged to me and me alone. It hadn’t grown to the point of obsession yet, although I could feel in my heart that the potential was clearly there. And so what if it did? I reasoned in a perfectly rational voice. I would deal w
ith that when the time came. Throughout history, men have dealt with strange obsessions—some a lot more twisted than mine—and had managed to get by nicely in the face of them. At least that’s how I rationalized it. I never mentioned it to Linda though. I’m not sure she would have understood, or even cared. It was, after all, just a heating system, not another woman. There was no reason for her to be jealous.

  As I said, things were going along well, maybe too well. But the tide was about to turn. You see, it was from the roofer, Greg Farrington that I first began to hear the truth about Farnham house.

  The people we encountered in our travels locally to shops, stores and lumber yards had been strangely silent—perhaps even evasive—when it came to Farnham House. So I was shocked—to put it mildly—when Farrington brought it up. Perhaps everyone thought we already knew about the house’s reputation and didn’t care. We didn’t know, but I wish we had. I like to believe it would have made a difference. I’m not so sure now that it would have. In any event, I’d like to have the chance to go back there and do everything over again. Things might have worked out differently and the nightmare that followed might never have occurred.

  I didn’t have a clue until Farrington approached me on that day. It seemed like a casual excuse for conversation and I’m not sure he meant anything malicious by it.

  Farrington was a man in his mid-forties, balding, slightly thick through the middle with a quiet, almost boorish demeanor.

  I was out in the front yard when he came over and began to talk. I stood there leaning on my rake as he informed me, in no uncertain terms, that Farnham House did indeed have a reputation.

  It was his final day of work on our house. Most everything was packed and ready to go. His two sons had taken the truck and trailer and had hauled the final load of old shingles to the landfill. There were still several ladders leaning against the house and stanchions up on the roof. He explained that when the boys returned they would take the rest of the stuff down and be on their way. He had a few minutes to kill and he thought I might like to hear the story of Farnham House. With a self-conscious little smile, he apologized for not having said anything before, but explained that he and his boys had needed the work and he hadn’t wanted to do or say anything that might have jeopardized that.

  I was instantly angry at the man, not for the confession, but for the deception, for the cagey, underhanded way he was going about it. I bit back my anger, however. Now that the cat was out of the bag I found myself wanting very badly to hear what this man had to say.

  “Thing is,” Farrington said. “I’ve lived around here all my life and you’re the first folks I know of to take any real interest in this old place. Locals figured it would fall down long before anyone else would . . . you know . . . take a chance on it.”

  “A chance?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “What do you mean by that?”

  Farrington hesitated. I believe he was having second thoughts about his little confession. Of course by that time I wanted to grab him by the throat and choke the story out of him. It was, after all, he who had started the whole business to begin with. Farrington hesitated still. My anger, which I had managed to conceal quite successfully up until that moment, suddenly turned to irritation and boiled over.

  “Mr. Farrington, if you have something to say I wish you would please get on with it. As you can see, I’m a busy man.”

  Farrington suddenly seemed like someone who was very sorry he’d gotten out of bed that morning. His eyes, which had wandered in his moment of embarrassment, reluctantly drew back to mine. A cloud cut off a slice of the sun and a light breeze picked up, causing the elm leaves above our heads to gossip. “Well, most of it’s just talk, you know,” the contractor said in a mildly hesitant voice followed by a nervous little smile.

  “Talk?” I said.

  “Yes, sir. Stories of things that happened here years ago.”

  “What things?”

  “There was a fire back in the nineteenth century, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The old man told me about that.”

  “Bet he didn’t mention anything about people dying in that fire.”

  My jaw dropped and I just stood staring open mouthed at Farrington. I was again reminded of what I’d seen—or thought I’d seen, and since dismissed—on that first day here. It was as if the house’s facade had melted away and people from some long ago past were inside consumed in flames and writhing like burning insects. “Funny, I asked Carlisle that question and he said he didn’t know for sure but there were rumors.”

  “Well,” Farrington said, “I suppose that was the right answer considering there was never any proof people died here.”

  “Why the rumors then?”

  “You know how people are. Mysterious old house with an equally mysterious reputation. People like that sort of thing. I don’t think anyone knows for sure what happened here that night. The story goes something like this; for some reason someone locked a bunch of people inside and set the place afire. Completely destroyed one whole section of the inn, but the rest of the place survived. By the time the townsfolk heard about it the fire was out and the mess had been cleaned up. Supposedly the owner had so much political influence the fire was never properly investigated.”

  “So you’re saying it was murder.”

  “If the story is true.”

  “Was the owner ever implicated?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Who was he?”

  Farrington looked narrowly at me. “A direct descendent of the original owner, William Farnham.”

  “Really,” I said. It was not a question.

  “Really.”

  “That’s an interesting story.”

  “Yes it is, and because of it a lot of folks in these parts believe this place is haunted.”

  “Half the houses in the goddamned country are haunted,” I exploded, unsure if I was angry at Farrington for trying to frighten me with a story that could not be substantiated or at Carlisle for not being totally honest with us. “If you choose to believe that kind of bullshit,” I added. “I, for one, don’t.”

  “That ain’t all,” Farrington said. “Other things have happened here over the years. Things that are a lot truer.”

  “Such as?”

  “Two teenage boys were found murdered in the basement, Mr. Cabot,” Farrington said, exhaling the sentence like a pent-up breath. He pointed toward the open cellar door where somewhere within Carlisle was working some sort of magic on a machine that might or might not be a heating system. “That ain’t no rumor, nor is it superstition. I believe that’s probably the heart of the house’s reputation. At least in this modern era.”

  I stood in stunned silence, unable to speak. When I did finally manage to find my tongue, I said, “Holy shit!”

  “Exactly,” Farrington replied.

  “You mean to tell me that people were murdered in our house and this is the first I’ve heard of it?”

  “Guess it must have slipped the old man’s mind,” Farrington said with more than a touch of irony in his voice.

  “That son-of-a-bitch,” I said shocked.

  Farrington shrugged, as if to say, well then, there you have it.

  “When did it happen?” I asked him. My mind was conjuring visions of sometime in the near past.

  “Actually, it’s been a while. About seventy years now I think. But that doesn’t make it not true and it don’t stop folks from being afraid of this place. It was Halloween night 1944. It was assumed that the boys—both of them locals—broke in. That’s the only thing the authorities could come up with, although as far as I know they never found a likely point of entry. There wasn’t anybody living here at the time. People have lived here only sporadically over the past hundred and fifty years or so, since the fire. The ones that did, rented, but never stayed long. It’s been years and years since the place has been occupied. Anyway, there was quite an investigation, but no one ever found out who killed those boys, or why. The
authorities figured they probably surprised a squatter. Maybe an escaped con or something. Coincidentally, in that same autumn of 1944 records show that two men escaped from the Maine State Prison in Thomaston. The escape took place one week before the murders. Those two men were never found. The case is still technically open, but I believe it’s been years since anybody has looked into it.

  “There’s those around here who think something . . . supernatural killed those kids, when you consider all the stories and rumors and the fire and all. Personally I don’t believe in any of that superstitious mumbo jumbo.”

  “So, you don’t believe in haunted houses?”

  “No . . . of course not.” Farrington tapped his head. “I think ghosts and haunted houses and all that related crap all reside right here in the ole noggin. People psyche themselves out. They hear stories and get spooked, and well . . . I think that’s the real reason no one’s ever stayed here for very long.”

  I nodded and remained thoughtful for a long moment. “How did Carlisle come by the place?” I asked.

  “Inherited it from his old man. It’s the family home. He grew up here. Carlisle was . . . oh let’s see . . . he must have been around eighteen, nineteen at the time of the killings, off in the Merchant Marine then. Second World War. His old man took sick while he was away, a stroke or something, and had to be put in a nursing home. Rumor goes that Carlisle got word that the old man had died, and in them days it’d take weeks for someone to get home from overseas. In the meantime, the house sat empty, and for whatever reason those two boys broke in and got themselves murdered. The old man’s housekeeper, a woman by the name of Hattie Dowd, found them in the basement just three days after the old man died. She continued to come out and keep the place cleaned up even after he’d had the stroke, you see. And she kept coming back after he’d died, too, supposedly to clean. Rumor goes that there was something more between the two of them than just employer, employee relationship. Anyway, doesn’t matter. They say the bodies of those two boys were butchered. I mean really butchered. Dismembered. Their parts were stacked up like cordwood in front of that old furnace like some sort of offering. Must have been something terrible to see. The old lady that found them went totally crazy. Story goes she ran screaming from the house and made it a mile or so down the road before someone came along and picked her up. She was babbling on about blood and body parts, so the driver takes her to the cops. They listened to her story and came out here to investigate. Sure enough, those two boys were just like she said they were, all stacked up pretty as you please in front of that furnace door that looks like a hungry mouth. Old Hattie Dowd was never the same after that. Lost all her marbles and had to be committed to the state mental institution.”