The Haunting House |
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The House
by R.A. GordonNot many people in today's world believe in ghosts. I never did either, which is the reason I was so willing to help Frank out with his fieldwork. Frank was a friend of mine from way back - we had gone through our undergraduate studies together, both majoring in anthropology. I had gone down the traditional route of cargo cults and fishing economies, whereas Frank had always followed a deep-seated interest in the occult. Unlike many people I knew who had shared his interest, he had actually stuck with it. Thus, when he invited me to visit him on his most recent expedition I felt both an intense interest and a rather prominent sense of skepticism. He sounded incredibly excited on the phone, a mixture of child-like exuberance and academic enthusiasm that was unparralleled. So I was greatly surprised when I arrived at the address given to me, it seemed as if nobody had entered the house in a very long time. This certainly did not seem like the opulent mansion that Frank had described to me over the phone; indeed, it seemed like this house had been abandoned for many years.
The place was a three story Victorian mansion; windows that looked like deep-set eyes peering over the town below it, awnings that were menacingly dilapidated, and the whole place had the musty smell that is associated with anything old. I approached the front door, noticing the many graffiti tags that the neighborhood teens had placed over the years. My knocks on the front door yielded no response, and neither did my calls directed towards the upper stories. I walked around the decking that surrounded the ground floor of the house, attempting to look into each of the windows in vain as they were so dusty and it was so dark inside that I had no hope of seeing anything. The backyard of the house was just as stereotypically rundown as the front; the grass overgrown and overrun with weeds, with many a wayward tennis ball from the adjacent public courts lying around, and three small gravestones sitting solemnly against the back fence. My curiosity took over and I walked down to them, surely they weren't real graves I was thinking. The headstones were weathered and the carvings barely legible; from what I could make out though these seemed like pets graves. The names on them were Sandy, Cairo, and Boots - each was only dated once, obviously signifying the date of death rather then birth. Interestingly, they were dated almost exactly 11 years apart - all of them were in August of 79, 80, and 91 respectively. I was crouching down to get a closer look at the badly damaged eulogies when I was startled by a loud crashing sound coming from inside the house. Jumping upright, I turned and quickly strode up to the back door of the house. Again my knocks saw no response, and the door didn't budge even with a fair amount of effort. I surveyed the outside of the house looking for a way in, when I noticed that one of the trees in the backyard had a branch that extended very close to the second story balcony that ran along the back of the house. Driven by a growing sense of concern about my friend's well being, I deftly scampered up the tree and jumped off onto the second story. The balcony was filled with a few dozen dead pot plants, and the windows were all smashed inwards leaving shards of glass littering the inside of the house. I approached one of the larger windows and peered inside.
"Frank, are you in there?" I called out, not really knowing what to expect at this stage. Again there was no response - just the low sound of wind rushing through the open windows and spiraling around inside before returning to the world outside. I reached through the broken window and unlatched it, being careful not to catch myself on any of the razor sharp shards of glass that remained in the frame. My feet came down with a loud crunch as I stepped on the floor. I looked around to get my bearings and was now even more surprised at the state of the house. This was nothing like Frank had described it; I was expecting rich red carpets and beautiful chandeliers, not a shell of a house covered in broken glass. The room I had entered had no real distinguishing features, there was no furniture to be seen and the dilapidated look of the outside of the house was exacerbated here. No wallpaper, no carpet, no light fittings of any kind, just broken glass scattered across the entire floor of an empty room. A growing sense of uneasiness started to creep in, what was going on here?
I continued exploring the house, going from room to room on the second floor. Each one was like a mirror image of the last, but with a few subtle differences that pointed to the many uses this house had obviously seen over the years. A mattress lay on the floor in one room; the middle of it had been burnt out and remained charred. There was quite a lot of graffiti scattered around too; most of it simple tags like the ones I had seen downstairs that were obviously the work of adventurous teens trying to outdo each other. A few of the pieces were more disturbing though. One of the rooms contained a vast mural along one of its walls that depicted a grotesque face, contorted almost beyond recognition, against a backdrop of hundreds of hands - the whole thing had the effect of making you feel like they were reaching out towards you, grasping outwards desperately. From that room I found the central staircase that ran up and down the middle of the house. I looked up towards the third floor; there were no signs of any movement, as the dust on the stairs had not been disturbed. Added to that the staircase looked as if it may collapse beneath me with but one wrong step on its rotting boards. I went around the side to the stairs leading downwards and started slowly walking down them, checking each step with half of my weight before stepping down to the next one. I heard the noise when I was halfway down; it was coming from above me. A whispering sound, not a sinister one, but those of children trying to talk whilst watching their parents entertain guests downstairs. As soon as I turned around to look up the stairs it stopped. Thinking it was just my mind warping the natural sound of the wind I continued down. The whispering started again, this time I could definitely hear what sounded like a child's muffled laugh coming through intermittently. A shiver raced through my body and my eyes started to water with a growing sense of fear. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned around slowly to look back up them. There was nothing there. I breathed a sigh of relief and chided myself for being so superstitious, I turned back to start exploring the ground floor of the house for the source of that crash I had heard.
My heart froze. Standing in front of me, no more then two meters away, was a small girl dressed in a white dress that stretched from the top of her neck down to her toes. She was staring at me, her mouth open wide - but she wasn't moving. Not one part of her showed any sign of life, even her dress did not sway in the breeze I could feel on the back of my neck. I reacted on pure fear and bolted up the stairs, my mind not wanting to have to deal with the repercussions of such cognitive dissonance. Tears started streaming down my face, my heart felt like it was going to explode. I ran around the upstairs landing and headed straight for the room that I had entered the house through. I was stopped dead in my tracks by the next sight - when I entered the room with the burnt out mattress I ran straight through another small child; this time a boy, his face badly lacerated, his clothes charred as if they had been burnt whilst he was still wearing them. I jumped to the side in an attempt to dodge the small figure and fell hard onto the glass-covered floor. I could feel the pain of dozens of thin cuts, but nothing could stop my determined effort to escape from this insanity. I leapt up again instantly and continued to run through the house in a state of confused panic. Somehow I ended up at the downward staircase again - at the bottom of the stairs I could still see the girl, the same expression on her face, the same glassy eyed stare that penetrated my soul. As she slowly raised her arm rigidly to point directly at me I could hear myself screaming. I ran around the landing to the stairs leading upwards - climbing two at a time whilst watching my feet so that I didn't fall through the rotten areas. I raised my eyes and saw yet another small face looking down at me from the top. Another young girl, who seemed to be lying on her stomach at the top of the stairs; her head peaking over the edge of the top step with a look of childish glee on her face, her face beaming in a wild smile that was motionless. I felt the ground beneath give way as I tried to take in this final ghastly image, the panic rushing through me like never before. I must have been in a state of shock at that stage because I did not feel my head hit the stairs multiple times, my arm break as I tumbled downwards, nor my leg snapping under the weight of my body as I landed at the bottom.
Not many people in today's world believe in ghosts, and I never did either. At this stage though, that social consensus didn't mean anything. I could feel the consciousness ebbing away as I lay on my side, unable to move my head or avert my eyes from looking up the stairs towards the girl. Her face hadn't changed; it was still motionless as if stuck in a moment that it could never get out of. The look of happiness that was spread across her face burnt itself into my final moments of consciousness. I did not see my life flash before my eyes nor have any other thoughts enter those dying breaths. There was nothing but a slow fade to black and the image of a motionless child looking down at me with glee.
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