942 Edmund Rd.
By
Michael B. Schwartz
Things were going to change. What and when Katelyn didn’t know. But she felt like it would be soon.
Sometimes she wished she was the top realtor in the company; larger income, newer car, a better apartment, and maybe even a better boyfriend. Katelyn liked Neil but there was something not quite right about the relationship. Maybe it just isn’t meant to be. Maybe she was meant to be alone.
Katelyn sat on the couch with her camera in her lap, a cup of coffee on the table, and had been scrolling through the pictures she had recently taken of the new house listing. A sigh escaped her as boredom began to overtake her. Entryway, living room, kitchen, master bedroom, two identical bedrooms, basement, backyard. How exciting, her mind cried out in sarcasm.
She’s been doing this job for ten years and it’s beginning to feel like the same story day in and day out. She can pretty much guess when a potential buyer is serious or not about a showing. The enjoyment of the hunt has died in her soul.
She was going to begin creating a file of the house listing with the pictures included but felt her phone vibrate next to her. She reached over and saw that it was a message from Grace Murtaugh and became immediately intrigued. Under normal circumstances, Grace would either call Katelyn or else wait until she was in the building.
Katelyn looked down and saw that it was a short message that simply read, “Katie, I think I have the house for you.”
Intriguing, she thought. Not just any old house...but the house? The sale that could very well put her past the living check-by-check status.
She decided on a short reply of “Thank you!! I’ll swing by the office in an hour.”
“A plantation house in the suburbs?”
Grace smiled from behind her desk as she sat patiently while Katelyn read the file of the large three-story house. “It sits on eight acres and the past owners refused to sell to developers and so it sat empty for the last twenty years.”
Katelyn sat down and looked Grace in the eye. “I don’t want to sound rude, I’m grateful for this opportunity, but why me? Chip is the top seller for three months straight.”
Grace folded her hands, laid them on the desk, and leaned forward. “You have the spark, Katie,” she said and then, “Chip is over the hill. He’s plateaued. And this is the perfect time for you to bite back.”
In this field, there is no time for thinking things over. Either you take the house or you don’t. There’s always someone ready to take it if you pass on it. And besides, when she saw the selling price and thinking of the commission she'd get, there’s no way she was going to pass it up. “Alright,” she said and slid the folder back to her. “I really appreciate you giving me this opportunity.”
Grace stood up and extended her right hand as Katelyn stood as well and took the proffered hand. “Make me proud,” she said with a smile.
It was already four-thirty in the evening by the time Katelyn left Grace’s office and so she had decided on heading back home and familiarize herself with the house information tonight and head out there first thing in the morning to take her usual pictures.
The apartment building had a large parking garage beneath the first floor, which was mainly the manager’s offices and maintenance rooms. She parked her car in her designated spot, grabbed the blue folder laying in the passenger seat, and opened her door. Immediately the pungent smell of gas, oil, and antifreeze hit her nose. She may like the garage; she didn’t like the captured odors that go with it.
Katelyn entered the garage service elevator and pressed the number 5 and glanced down at the folder as she ascended up. She thought about putting her black bag down and opening the folder while waiting for her ride to end but knew that by the time she even glanced at the contents of the folder she’d be at her floor. She scanned the file over in Grace’s office but didn’t really read it thoroughly.
Another five minutes and she was unlocking her door. The evening sun was still beating through her curtain-drawn living room window and she smiled as she saw Peeta stretch her long black and white paws.
“Boy, don’t I know it,” Katelyn said while moving into the living room and petting the cat on his head. She rubbed his ear for a few seconds, listening to his purring, and realized that she was still holding the folder.
“No time like the present,” she said to the cat and went over to the couch, tossing it down, and then headed to the kitchen. She opened the fridge and pulled out a can of diet soda and went back to the living room.
Katelyn sat down on one end, propping her elbow upon the arm and placed the folder on it in front of her arm and opened it with a “Let’s see how valuable this gem is supposed to be.”
And then her eyes looked at the listing price and was thankful that she hadn’t taken a sip of her drink, otherwise she would have probably spat some out. A plantation house with acreage and a ton of living space and a backyard any kid would love with a playground included.
And all they were asking was two hundred, fifty thousand dollars?
Either it needed some major renovating or else the owners just wanted to get rid of the place. She scanned near the top of the first page and saw the house was built in 1835. So maybe there was a lot of work that had to go into it before it was in livable condition.
Well, she thought, I’ll find out in the morning.
Late that night her dreams were making it difficult to maintain a night of restful sleep. They weren’t exactly nightmares since nothing about the dreams was terrifying her. She found herself standing in a large open field, the wind blowing her blonde hair in her face. She didn’t need to look down to see that she was still wearing the white nightgown she had fallen asleep in.
In the distance, she thought she saw several shapes, silhouetted by the moon. They looked like human shapes but they were too far away to be certain. Katelyn realized that her body wanted to move closer to the shapes, to settle her curiosity, but her somewhat conscious mind warned her not to. Instead of moving forward, she forced herself to turn around and walk in the opposite direction. And then she stopped herself in mid-turn as she saw more similar shapes.
She turned all the way around and saw that she was surrounded by these mysterious dark shapes. Should she call out to them? Are they even human?
“What do you want?” she found herself calling out. She wasn’t afraid of them - they were still too far away.
And like low rumbling thunder, a voice boomed as if they all called back to her in unison. “Leave.”
Katelyn opened her eyes and realized she was still in bed and saw that light was coming in through her blinds. The last thing she remembered from her dream was the thundering voice telling her to leave. She reached over and picked up her phone and saw that it was seven-thirty in the morning. She had enough time to start a pot of coffee, grab a shower, and be at the new house by ten.
She got out of bed and made her trek through the apartment. Once she prepared the coffee and added water and turned the coffee maker on, she turned around and grabbed the box of cat food and shook some out into the bowl on the floor. In an instant, Peeta came running into the kitchen and began eating.
Katelyn reached down and stroked his back which arced the second it felt her hand. “Gotta get ready,” she said to Peeta who didn’t bother to acknowledge her anymore now that he was eating.
She went to the bathroom and reached into the tub and turned on the shower. Just as soon as she shed her nightgown and let it drop to the floor, she turned around and just for a second her heart stopped as she thought she saw a dark shape standing by the closed bathroom door.
But just as soon as her peripheral vision saw it, it vanished when she turned fully around. It was the same kind of shape she saw in her dream last night.
She waited a few minutes, letting the water warm up and to make sure the shape wasn’t going to return anytime soon. Especially as she was in the shower. Once she saw the vanity mirror begin to steam up, she stepped into the inviting warm water.
Twenty-five minutes later she was sitting on the couch with a towel around her body and a towel wrapped around her hair. She had a cup of coffee sitting on the coffee table while she was putting in the new listing address of 942 Edmund Road into the GPS on her phone. And after another half-hour, she walked out of her apartment after getting dressed, blow-drying her hair, and putting on the minimal amount of make-up she usually wears when looking at a house the first time.
Under normal circumstances, she usually doesn’t mind the elevator ride down to the garage, but ever since seeing those strange shapes in her dream last night and the one shape she thought she saw in her bathroom this morning made her a little uneasy about taking the elevator today. Sure she could take the stairs, but five flights of stairs is a little too much exercise this early in the morning.
There had been a couple of times when she was forced to use the stairs - like everyone else. And under those circumstances, the elevator was being worked on or maintained. It was a minor inconvenience (especially when you went shopping that day), but it was a rarity when it did happen.
Katelyn pulled out of the garage several minutes later into the chilly October morning. She turned right onto the busy street and proceeded to the outskirts of town where she came upon a wide dirt road she had never seen before since she hadn't ventured this far out of the city unless she jumped onto the highway. Several times she had to look at her phone to make sure she was heading in the right direction.
“Looks like a freaking Stephen King novel out here,” she said to herself while scanning the empty countryside. There was nothing out here except open fields. She passed a dead or dying tree every once in a while but other than that, nothing.
Once again she looked down at her phone and the GPS said she was almost to her destination. She moved her eyes back to the road in front of her and sure enough, perhaps a mile up the road, she saw the outline of a large plantation house. And nothing on either side or across the road in terms of neighbors. It was out here, completely secluded.
A couple of minutes later she pulled her Jeep into the gravel driveway. It was a long trek to the house but when she finally got to the front of the house, she was taken by its beauty almost at once. Yes, the paint was peeling and chipping from years of neglect, but it seemed to be solid from the outside.
She grabbed her bag and exited the Jeep. Once she pulled the strap up on her shoulder, she opened the back door and pulled out the camera bag and draped it over her other shoulder and kicked the door closed. Katelyn walked up to the front porch and gently placed both bags down on the steps; she wasn’t sure how much corrosion there was or if anything had been subjected to termite damage.
Once at the front door she pulled out the key that was included in the folder and unlocked the door. She heard it unlock but instead, she turned around to get a good look at the enormous front yard. The grass needed tending to and the bushes surrounding the porch would probably need to be pulled. Everything else would be up to potential buyers.
Katelyn turned back around to the house and pushed open the front door. It creaked open, revealing an enormous entryway. She went back to the porch and retrieved her bags and pulled out her camera first and turned it on. Without taking a step she took several pictures of the entryway alone.
Just from what she could see so far there was a huge staircase probably made of cherry wood banister off to the right, a large greeting room to her left. And an open floor plan that led to other mysteries of the house.
She walked first into the greeting room and immediately looked up and saw, several feet away from the chandelier, two holes in the ceiling. She wasn’t sure what that was so she took a picture of that as well. Then Katelyn walked to the front window in this room and looked out - the same view from when she was standing on the porch. She decided there was no need to take a picture from this window.
Satisfied with the pictures from the greeting room, Katelyn moved into what could be called a large hall and saw a small door under the stairs. She opened it, saw nothing but a small storage closet, and took a quick picture and then moved on. She found a living room next with a dining room just off the living room and a large kitchen on the opposite side of the hall in the back of the house.
She took several pictures in each room. The living room faced the side of the house and the dining room was positioned in the back corner so there were windows that faced the side and back yard. The kitchen (which would definitely need a major upgrade) faced the other side and back yard.
Katelyn never liked taking pictures of basements, so when she found the door in the kitchen that led down, she made a quick trip down, took several pictures, and then hurried back up to the daylight.
And then she made her way into the backyard where she found the playground. It was in somewhat decent shape. There was a swing set with two swings, one of which had a chain broken so the seat was just dangling. There was a large old metal slide that looked to be in decent shape (typical rust spots from exposure). A large sandbox was off to the left of the slide with a tarp covering the sand. She walked over to it, reached down and pulled the tarp away revealing a very nice sandbox - like it hadn’t been used in twenty years, just protected from the weather.
Katelyn took pictures of everything out here, paying closer attention to the sandbox since it looked like the one thing out here that was in good shape.
She was debating whether or not to venture out to the border of the property and decided against it. Instead, she walked several yards past the playground and began taking random pictures of the land.
If potential buyers wanted to venture out that way, she could always take the Jeep with them, but for now, the pictures will have to do.
Instead of walking back through the house, Katelyn went around the side and decided on closing and locking the front door from the outside. This also gave her the chance to see the side yard as well as the house. Yes, she mused, this house definitely needs a lot of work. But for the amount of house and land, the price really is a steal.
Once she reached the front porch she placed her camera back into its bag and put it on the floor behind the driver's seat in the Jeep. She wasn’t worried about it getting stolen way out here in the middle of nowhere so she didn’t bother locking the doors of the Jeep. Instead, she headed back through the front door and found her other bag, the one that held her purse and folder, picked it up and headed back to the front door.
Before closing and locking it for the day, she took a long look into the mouth of the ancient home. The stories this old place could tell, she thought in wonderment.
She finally closed the door and made sure it was locked and then headed back to the Jeep. Later tonight she would go through the pictures and decide which ones to add to the portfolio during open houses.
During the long trek back to her apartment she had gotten hungry for lunch and had decided on stopping at a fast-food restaurant for a burger and fries. She found a nearby bench and decided on eating outside since it was a nice October afternoon. While eating she brought out the blue folder again and began looking through it. There were a couple of questions that were running through her mind that afternoon. And she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know the answers. If the answers were bad, would it jeopardize her risk of a sale?
Why was the property abandoned for more than twenty years? What was the history of the house if they solely wanted to keep it in the family? And, it’s understandable not wanting to sell to a developer, but why wait so long to put it up on the market?
Maybe she would ask Grace these questions later this afternoon, but right now she wanted to get back home and go through the photos she had taken. That alone would take most of the rest of the day.
She got back in the Jeep and drove the rest of the way back home, parked in the garage, took the seemingly long ride up the elevator, and finally got back into her apartment where Peeta was waiting for her by the front door. Katelyn grinned and bent down to pet the cat and when Peeta sniffed her hand, the cat gave her a small hiss and ran off in the other direction.
Maybe he smelled something I brought home with me from that old place, she thought. It was the only logical explanation; since he has never hissed at her before.
Katelyn just shrugged it off and made her way to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of water out of the fridge and went back to the living room and sat down on the couch. She found the remote control and turned the television on and began flipping through the channels until she found an old black and white classic Dracula.
After settling in with a movie and water, she picked up her camera bag and laid it down on the couch next to her. She reached in and pulled out the camera and turned it on. She was annoyed that the battery was low so she had to pull the memory card out of the camera and place it into her laptop. She didn’t mind really, it was just the idea of having to get back up after getting into a comfortable position. She knew she’d like to see photos on a bigger screen anyway.
Katelyn returned to the couch a couple of minutes later and made sure the laptop was plugged in just in case it too had a low battery. She inserted the memory card from the camera into the side of the laptop and waited a few seconds until she saw the camera file light up and she clicked on it.
She looked up at the television for a second and then glanced back at the first several photos. Nothing great, just the front yard she had taken from the porch. She wasn’t sure how many photos she had taken out there, so she just let her finger hit the next button without paying too much attention to what she was skipping over.
And then something strange caught her eye as she happened to look down at the photo of the large staircase. A white oval was hovering about midway down the stairs. Odd, she thought. She just decided to note the sun coming in through the front door behind her which could easily have made a glare on the picture. That’s okay, I’ll just take another shot with the door closed next time.
But the photo glitches didn’t stop there. In the greeting room where she had taken the photo of the two holes in the ceiling, now it looked like a ghostly noose was hanging from one of the holes.
She furrowed her eyebrows in confusion as she looked at the photo. And the white oval apparitions didn’t seem to stop with the stairs. She noticed more throughout the house: living room, kitchen, in one of the bathrooms, and two of the bedrooms. In fact, when she came to the master bedroom, it wasn’t a white oval but a large black shadow hovering over by the walk-in closet.
“What the hell is going on,” she asked out loud, not expecting a reply from Peeta, who lay asleep on the window ledge.
She wasn’t planning to but Katelyn had decided on going back in the evening just to make sure these white ovals weren’t a product of poor lighting.
She sighed and closed the laptop, rubbed her eyes, and looked down at her phone to see what time it was. And the strange things kept going she thought when she saw that it was already six-thirty in the evening. She meant to get dinner and then be back on the road around five but had to settle for something quick to eat. She wasn’t in a hurry to unravel the mysteries of the photos, she just wanted to be able to put the house up and get it sold.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Katelyn went to the kitchen, fed the cat, and found a container of Chinese food she had for dinner last night. Not what she wanted, but she needed something quick.
By seven-thirty she was back on the road, heading out to 942 Edmund Road again. This time she planned on using both her regular camera and the one on her phone. One way or another she was going to get decent photos of the house.
Now that she had a better idea of where she was going, the drive out to the old plantation house took less time than it had this morning. She could see the moon in the sky. Katelyn really didn’t want to take the pictures in the dark. She wasn’t afraid of the dark or of something or someone wanting to do her harm. She just didn't know the house too well.
By tomorrow the house will be officially put on the market and soon she won’t have to worry about this place anymore. She can go back to selling condos and three-bedroom ranches.
Another ten minutes later and she arrived back at the plantation house. She stared up at the structure through the headlights and the place looked like a casket, dead and foreboding. She shivered and had to force herself to open her door just to get out of the Jeep.
She got out and grabbed her camera and took a couple of photos just of the front of the house. Then she walked up onto the porch and slid the key into the lock and hesitated. The feeling of foreboding seemed to increase as she turned the key to unlock the door. Her mind told her not to go in but that other part, the part that told her she was being an immature idiot, told her to go in and reap the rewards of a house well sold.
With one sigh she pushed the front door open and almost immediately began taking the same photos as before but this time taking turns between her camera and phone. By the time she got to the dining room, she detected a peculiar odor she had not noticed earlier today. It was almost an earthy smell.
Once she took the photos of the kitchen she passed the window that overlooked the backyard and its playground with the broken swing. With the moon overhead now she could see that everything was still and silent.
Katelyn crossed the house and made her way up the stairs, making sure she ran her hand along the rail just in case. It wasn’t too dark in here but she didn’t want to run the risk of tripping and maybe dropping her camera in the process. And since it was a three hundred dollar investment, that was one risk she really didn’t want to take.
She had taken the photos of the bedrooms and made her way to the master bedroom which overlooked the backyard. She took her pictures and turned to leave the room but something caught her eye as she passed the large window.
She stopped and looked out at the trees which were as still as they had been since she had gotten here. But now the swing was swaying back and forth. Not the regular one, but the broken swing that was barely hanging on by one chain. In fact, the broken chain didn’t seem to stop the actual seat from sitting in a horizontal position, as if it had never broken.
Normally she would just brush this off as being caused by the wind but she knew very well there was absolutely no wind or breeze outside. She even double checked the trees in the distance.
Katelyn grabbed her phone and instead of taking a photo, she hit the record button. She needed evidence of the things she had seen this evening. A part of her told her to forget it and just sell the old house. And there was also that part of her that wanted to unsolve the mystery. Obviously there was more going on here than she thought - ghosts? She wasn’t one to get spooked by ghost stories.
She stopped recording a few minutes later and decided that it was past time to leave. Maybe when she gets back home, she’ll look at the photos and watch the video. But she had mentally already decided to wait until tomorrow. If she were to get any sleep tonight, looking at the photos taken in the darkness would not help in the least.
Once she got back to her apartment she put the camera bag and her purse down on the couch and went straight to her bedroom. She pulled out a long shirt from the dresser that she wore for sleeping in and shed her shirt and jeans.
When she laid down, Katelyn thought it would take hours to fall asleep while her mind went over and over what she had seen both in the earlier photos and of the mysterious swing in motion. But no sooner had her head hit her pillow, she fell asleep. As if something else had wanted her to sleep.
“You need to leave.”
Katelyn found herself in the same field from the previous dream. The dark shapes were still all around her but now they seemed to be closer this time. These shapes had become human shapes. And they spoke to her in one voice.
“Leave the house to us,” they said. Still, she could not make out any physical properties of these shapes yet. But the voice was distinctly male.
“Why do you want me to leave it?” Katelyn found herself asking. “It’s not like I’m going to be living there.”
There was a long pause as if the shapes were deciding how much to tell her. Finally, after what she thought was a sigh, the voice said, “If you were to sell the house and the property, it could fall into the wrong hands and release everything we have been laboriously trying to keep trapped.”
Contractors, she thought. Now she understood why the owners of the past didn’t want to sell to contractors. They were afraid of letting something out of the house.
Her eyes opened and she realized at that moment that she was going to research the previous owners and whatever happened to them. If something was being trapped inside the house, whether it be good or bad, she had to settle her curiosity. There were plenty of ways to find what she was looking for but it would take time.
She wasn’t sure what she was going to tell Grace when asked why it was taking so long to put it on the market. Katelyn would have to come up with something soon. Maybe she’s waiting for potential clients who knew of the house ahead of the rest and just wanted the opportunity to look at it first. That way, she can make up any date she wants.
It shouldn’t take her that long to dig up the information she wanted. Or, she hoped it wouldn’t take too long.
Her first stop that morning was at the library to see if she could use their database on old local newspapers dating as far back as 1835. They were able to supply some and they helped her get situated in the media room. In a matter of minutes, the librarian was able to help Katelyn find the newspapers she was looking for via the library's digital media site on the computer.
Katelyn thanked her and as she left Katelyn went to work. She looked for anything that had to do with 942 Edmund Road and possibly closest neighbors. She would have to get a list of title owners, she knew, if she were to research the property more accurately. Working in reality, it shouldn’t be too difficult to pull some strings to get that info quicker.
All she’d have to do is send an email to Joe in the title division and sweet talk her way into getting the names. Joe has asked her out on a date so many times, she’s lost track. Maybe she’ll grant him that date for this favor.
She was about to abort this end of the hunt after an hour and a half, but when she was going to turn off the computer, a small headline caught her eye. Missing Children Found Dead on Edmund Road.
She read the short article and found that there wasn’t much in the article. Because of their ages, the children could not be named. Four skeletal remains had been found on the property behind 942. So they weren’t exactly found on the property in question. But this was the 1800’s, property borders could have been completely different than what they are now.
She made a note of the headline, what was in the content, and the date. In fact, she couldn’t find anything else about the missing children. It was as if they suddenly appeared out of the blue and were found dead. Or, there were skeletons found - skeletons of children.
She went back to her car and sat there for a few minutes thinking about the skeletons. Coincidence? Perhaps.
She pulled her phone out of her purse, found Joe’s number from her contact list and pressed the number. After a few rings, she heard Joe answer the phone with a “This is Joe, how may I help you?”
“Joe,” she began. “This is Katelyn Jones at Blink Reality.”
As if she really needed to add her last name or company, she thought with a grin. He’s not a bad guy, really, just not someone she could become serious with. Maybe she’s thinking way too much into it; maybe all he wants is that one date for a fun time. Maybe he just wanted to be friends.
“Katelyn, hi,” she could see him smiling from his cubicle. “What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering if you could do me a favor?”
There was no hesitation when he said, “Yeah, anything. What do you need?”
“Well I’m getting ready to put a very old house on the market and I was wondering, for my own curiosity, if you could get me a list of all previous owners?” She tried her best flirting voice and hoped it would work.
There was a brief moment of hesitation and then he finally said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you,” she said with a smile. “Did you want to meet somewhere after work, maybe a coffee date or something?”
“Let’s see what I can do for you first,” he said and she could sense the grin. “What’s the address?”
She gave him the address and the construction date and almost laughed when he had commented that it was, indeed, an old house.
“I’ll see what I can do. Give me a day and I’ll get back with you,” he said and she thanked him and turned off the phone.
Katelyn went back to her apartment in an attempt to plan out where to go next, however, when she got there the couch looked inviting. Maybe just a short nap, she thought to herself and sat down first, then laid her body on the couch.
With all the bizarre things going on lately, laying down in the middle of the day felt very good. And just when her eyes became relaxed and her breathing became steady, she heard her phone ring. She almost fell off the couch and had to grab the coffee table before she hit her head on it.
She reached across the table and saw that she had just missed the call. But then she saw that it was Neil. At first, she was about to return his call right away, and then she saw that he had left a voicemail. She was relieved when she saw that One Unheard Message alert. Katelyn didn’t really want to talk to him now; there was a lot going on right now and she didn’t know just how to explain the half of them.
She dialed voicemail and listened to what he had to say.
“Hey, Katie, it’s me,” his voice said, paused and sighed. “Look, I really wanted to talk to you in person about this, but you’re never home anymore. It’s your job, I understand that,” he paused again. “Um, there’s no easy way to say this so here it goes: I feel we need to go our separate ways. Don’t hate me too long, and know I’m sorry. I wish you nothing but the best. Goodbye.” And then she heard the beep of the message ending.
Well, her mind contemplated, that wasn’t so hard. She didn’t think they had that special chemistry. And now she knows he thought the same thing. As the old saying goes, it’s just water under the bridge. She definitely won’t lose any sleep over it.
In fact, she lay back down and almost as soon as her head hit the small pillow she was asleep.
“You’re about to let them out.”
Katelyn turned around and saw the shape standing next to her window. Luckily she remained in her own place rather than that damned old house. And it was only the one shape instead of the many.
“Look,” she began and stood up off the couch. “Whatever you think is going on, it’s been over for a very long time. No one’s lived there in over twenty years and,”
The shape turned around so fast it was almost like a blur. And when it heard this it cut her off before she could say anything further. “No one’s lived there for twenty years and it will remain empty. The longer it sits unoccupied, the longer I can keep them trapped.”
She gave up trying to level with the shape so she tried a different approach. “Who are you?”
There was a long pause from the shape as if it were mentally debating what more it can reveal to her. Finally, she heard the shape sigh and before her eyes, the shape came into complete focus.
Katelyn stared at the pale man that stood in front of her. He was definitely not of this world, so to speak. At one time he may have been a very attractive man in his thirties with shoulder-length black hair, black trimmed beard, and dark eyes that you could drown in if you stared into them for too long.
But now, he stood before her pale, hair black but stringy, unkempt beard and eyes of the dead, white and dull.
He stared at her awhile, thinking. In fact, it looked like he was lost as to what to tell her. When he lost his inner battle he turned around and stared out the window, ignoring the cat sleeping on the sill.
“I,” he paused with a confused look on his face. “I can’t remember who I am.” Then he turned to look at her. “All I know is what I must do and that is to keep people out of the house and keep them locked in.”
Now it was her turn to sigh. “I guess there is no compromise between us, then?”
“Unless you want hell on earth, no.”
Katelyn stared at the man for a while and then finally nodded. “I can’t promise you anything,” she said at last. “Unless the house is deemed condemned, I’ll have no choice but to sell it.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again and his yellow eyes bore into her soul. “Come back tonight and you shall know the truth,” he said and then vanished from the room.
Knowing she was still asleep, she made her way over to the window and looked out into the bright afternoon. She wasn’t planning on going back to the house tonight; at least not until she got some answers about the previous owners and what really happened there to make it such a damnable place.
And then her eyes opened and she found herself still laying on the couch. She remembered the dream as if it had happened in the conscious world. The man wanted her to return to the house tonight. Yet he could not remember his own name.
“Fine,” she said out loud and sat up. “We’ll play it your way.”
To pass the time, Katelyn went over her file about the house again and went back through the pictures she had taken. When she got to the image of the ghost noose in the front greeting room, she got chills going down her arms. There was something foreboding about seeing the ghostly image of a noose dangling near the center of the room. And she couldn’t even guess how many white ovals shapes she had snapped pictures of throughout the house. The one she was drawn to was the first one she saw, hovering on the staircase in the front of the house.
She took out her phone and found the video she had taken of the swing that had mysteriously begun moving when there was no breeze to move it. She studied the video closer and saw that the chain was being pulled as if someone were actually on the swing, pushing themselves.
Other than the swing, there wasn’t anything else strange going on outside the house. “And why should there be?” she asked herself. “It’s like the man said, he was trying to trap whatever it was inside.”
And he wants her to go back tonight?
She looked at her phone and saw that she had wasted enough time. She got up, grabbed her purse and headed out into the evening world.
Katelyn reached the house in twenty minutes and within that twenty minutes, the moon had risen, casting an ominous glow over the large house. She parked the car and sat there staring at the house. She sat in anticipation, but what she was anticipating she wasn’t sure. Maybe she expected to see the man greeting her from the front door. She was mistaken when she saw that he was nowhere to be seen.
After a few minutes, she got out of the car and walked up to the porch, looking up at the front door from the bottom step, dreading what lay trapped behind the door.
As she approached the door she half-expected it to slowly creak open of its own free will, and it was a little disappointing when she found that it was still locked as she had done earlier. Disappointing only because she wanted this unplanned trip out here to have meaning and not just a trip from a realtor.
Katelyn unlocked the door and went inside. Outside the air felt cool in the October evening, but here inside the sealed-up house, it was beginning to feel like a tomb. It was almost impossible to breathe. She placed a hand on her chest and felt that her heart was pounding hard and she tried to calm herself; she didn’t want to dig in her bag for her inhaler if she didn’t have to. And she realized she was only just in the foyer of the house. There were so many more rooms to walk through.
“Katelyn Jones, do you still wish to know what it is we keep trapped in here and why?”
She looked around and could not find the source of the voice. It sounded like the man who had visited her in her dreams but she couldn’t be too sure. She was, after all, asleep. She turned and looked up the stairs and called, “If you think it’ll change my mind, then yes, I want to know.”
Katelyn waited for the voice to provide the answers it had promised, and as she waited she began walking around the house. She jumped at the sudden sound of a loud thump that came from down the hallway, near the kitchen. She turned around (she had been almost inside the large greeting room in the front of the house) and looked into the darkened hall.
She wanted to scream, wanted to hide. She saw a tall pale man with sunken facial features dragging what looked like a dead body down the hallway. He was dressed in a black suit with a black tie to match. Either he did not see Katelyn or he did not care because he continued dragging the woman until they were in the greeting room. Using his tall frame, the man lifted the woman up and wrapped her neck in the noose and let her body go. He watched her lifeless body dangling for a few minutes and then like a ghost, he vanished from the room.
“She wasn’t dead yet.”
Katelyn jumped again and turned around. Now she was looking at the stranger that had visited her in her dream. “She wasn’t dead before he hung her?” she had to ask.
“No,” he answered. “She was knocked unconscious and hung to her death. Her name was Emily. She was but one of the maids who worked here. It was rumored she had seduced the young master but no one realized they were in love.”
“Who was the man?”
“Not yet,” he said. “There’s more for you to know.”
Before she could ask what he meant she heard a door slam in what sounded like the kitchen. She tried to force herself not to, but she found herself sprinting down the hallway and slid to a halt at the doorway of the kitchen.
Once again, Katelyn watched the tall man emerge from the cellar and he nudged the door closed behind him. She saw that he carried two sacks over each shoulder. She didn’t even want to imagine what horrors were inside the brown sacks. Without a word, she followed him as he went out the back door and he walked just a little past the swing set. She saw there had been a large hole dug with the old shovel still sticking up in the dirt.
The man tossed the sacks into the earth and began shoveling the dirt back into the hole without so much as a care in the world. In fact, she saw that there was not a single bead of sweat on his brow.
“The maid’s children,” said the familiar stranger from behind her again. “It was discovered they were the master’s children as well. The master’s father would have nothing of this. He made sure there was no proof.”
“That’s horrible,” she finally said and he nodded.
“I do not disagree. But you must understand they were a wealthy and powerful family. They were very influential to the mayor,” he explained.
“This man in black, he was the master’s father then?”
The man shook his head. “No, he has been buried long before these atrocities began,” he said and saw the confused look. “Do you believe in curses and demons, Miss Jones?”
“I,” she was having a hard time answering this simple question. Did she really believe in them?
“They do exist, in fact, no matter what you truly believe,” he said. “They take many forms but they exist.”
Katelyn looked out and saw the man in black had vanished again and the swing, now broken, had been swinging like it had that night when she took the video. “Where does he go when he vanishes?”
“We keep him in a vortex in the house,” he answered. “He keeps repeating his atrocious acts, but he can never leave.”
She began walking around the house again and stopped when she got to the bottom of the staircase and she looked up. “I’ve seen all these white shapes,” she tried to form the question she had been wanting to ask since first seeing the man in black.
“Yes,” he said and then, “they are all his victims throughout time.”
She spun around fast and glared at him. “Where the hell are we?”
The man turned and began walking up the steps, seemingly ignoring her question. He was about halfway up the steps before she called to him, repeating her question. He stopped and looked down at the step he was standing on. “Do you really want me to answer that, Miss Jones?”
Katelyn paused at the first step, looked up, and sighed. “Yes,” she said at last. There was a small part of her that was warning her of something, but she shoved it aside.
He too sighed and began climbing the steps again. “Very well,” he said at last. “Follow me and I shall tell you everything we have been trying to keep secret.”
She climbed the stairs and found he was standing in the master bedroom looking out the window, where she had taken the video of the swing. Katelyn crossed the room and sat down on the large bed and remained quiet as she waited for him to tell his story. Whether she wanted to hear it or not, she was about to anyway.
“It began with General Tigh, who had this house built. He was a very proud man with a wife and two children, boy and girl. The children grew to become young adults here. When his son Charles had his secret affair with the maid, little did he know that his father had been dabbling in the occult. Several years later the maid gives birth to twins. No one was the wiser but Charles knew and he tried to hide them in the house - it was a large house, surely his father wouldn’t find them.”
He sat down on the bed next to her and sighed while looking down. “Yet, his father found them,” he explained. “In his rage, the General summoned a demon of Vengeance and had it kill the maid and her children. In his folly, the General didn’t know how to call the demon off. He had what he wanted, yet it kept killing their friends and eventually it killed the General and his wife - she is the white presence on the stairs.”
Katelyn looked at him in his dark eyes. “What happened to Charles and his sister?”
“Amanda came home one evening to find the atrocities and was killed right over there by the closet,” he said and looked by the closet door. “And Charles, he sacrificed himself with a vow to lock the demon inside these walls for eternity. Throughout time, he was able to gain help from other spirits, but he was the one whose vow was made in his blood.”
And then it dawned on her and a chill ran down her neck. “You’re Charles,” she said and he gave her a small nod.
“And now you know why you mustn’t sell this place,” he said as he stood up.
“You know, in this day and age, there’s plenty of people who could help you get rid of this demon for good.”
“No,” he replied with a look of urgency. “I’ve done the research before I died. The only one who can call it back to hell is the one who had summoned it in the first place. And he’s,”
“Dead,” she finished the thought.
“I’m sorry, Miss Jones, but there is no way I can allow you to sell this house. The demon will be set free into your world with an insatiable hunger for death.” Charles walked over to the window and looked out into the night sky.
Katelyn looked down on the bed and saw that she had placed her bag down next to her automatically like it was just an extension of her arm. It was the blue folder that caught her eye and she pulled it out and opened it and began rereading the first page. And it was right there, screaming at her. The first three names of owners and only one had died in the house - General Tigh. Amanda Tigh-Green had willed the estate to her son David. And since the house had stayed in the family, she could fairly assume that no outsider had ever owned the house or land. And then it hit her.
No one but General Tigh had died in the house.
Katelyn almost jumped up and glared at Charles with an accusing eye. “You said everyone died here; you, your mother, father, and sister.” He nodded his head, never looking at her. “There’s no proof that anyone but your father died here.”
“None that would be reported,” he said. “Back in the mid-1800s, you rarely read news stories about slaughters in a rich man’s house. Especially when they were caused by the supernatural.”
Katelyn walked over to where he had said Amanda was killed, by the closet, and she felt deathly cold all of a sudden. Like being in ice-cold water, she struggled to catch her breath as she looked at Charles with panic in her eyes. “Your,” she tried. “Your sister didn’t die here.”
Before he could answer the question, the closet door opened and she turned around and tried to scream but the tall man in the black suit and black tie reached out with his ghostly-white hand and wrapped it around her neck.
“Amanda died in a center for old people. Other than having no immediate family, she lived a happy life with children, grandchildren, and so on,” said Charles with guilt in his eyes. “And you’re right, it wasn’t Amanda that died there. It was you.”
For two weeks he kept calling her number. Joe tried her at the office and was told that she hadn’t come into work. And finally, he called the police. They found her Jeep at 942 Edmund Rd. a day after Joe called the police and at this time they are treating the case as a missing person.
He kept his promise he made to her; he did his end of the research of the house and found that it had stayed in the family. But even families have dark secrets. And sometimes those dark secrets can not be buried forever.