A/N: I wanted to try my hand at horror. Except I won't do slasher-stuff, I laugh myself silly in those movies, over the asinine decisions made that end up with everyone deserving to scream and bleed for their own stupidity, and the supernatural crap doesn't even make sense, and you just want it over with. Nor will I do the Stephen King stuff, where the rug is pulled out from under, just when you think the villain's finally got comeuppance, and the world is worse off than when the story started.
So I suppose this is… supernatural. Maybe semi-horror, with less-than-happy endings, depending on your imagination for what-comes-next.
A trio of unrelated stories – ghosts, monsters, and evil-black-mist-of-destiny. Two modern a/u's, high-schoolish without being about school at all, and one very close to canon…
Hope you enjoy, while I'm writing original material. I'm doing them in halves, so six chapters altogether, approx. one every five days, that'll get us through NaNoWriMo.
From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
~ Scottish prayer
…..*….. …..*….. …..*…..
Ghouls and Ghosts
Gwen wasn't supposed to be here.
Every scuff of her battered canvas shoes raised dust, rattled dead yellow grass, because there wasn't so much as a sidewalk. Not way the hell out here in the country where there weren't any cars on the street anyway, as the minutes ticked by. And any that came, would drive slowly past her on the opposite side of the street – because there wouldn't be any cars coming the other way, either, no white or yellow lines because why d'ya need 'em? – and wave.
Every breath drew in sticky heat, thunderous loud in the absolute stillness she didn't think she'd ever get used to. Far in the distance, she could maybe hear cows, a dog barking. Maybe a couple kids in a wading pool a couple of blocks down.
She was supposed to be half a state away from here. Home, in the city. Working at Sonic as a waitress-on-skates, bribing her brother to let her crash on the sofa in his apartment when she wasn't getting along with their parents. Getting ready for senior year at her high school.
Gwen wasn't supposed to be here. If freakin' nowhere could be termed here. Farmville, USA. Blink and you miss it. Main Street actually called Main Street, and every block of it smelling like fertilizer.
Your grandma grew up here, her mother had reminded her, with a pleading sort of cheerfulness. Give it a chance.
The last house on the street was pink – no other word for it – and had a black-and-white cow penned in the yard. In the shade of the ditch opposite the pink house, she noticed a group of people from the corner of her eye – and that they'd noticed her first. And that they were probably her age, high school or just out of. One at least was smoking; one was a girl.
Gwen wasn't scared, and she wasn't shy. She was feeling a bit grouchy about being here – then it occurred to her, maybe they were, too. She lifted her head and gave the group a direct look.
The girl was goth. Black lipstick, eyeliner, fingernails. Black skinny jeans, black shirt that clung to her from ears to knuckles in spite of the heat, thick metal jewelry. Hair long, unnaturally black, unnaturally straight. She called out, "Hey."
"Hey," Gwen responded. Not eager, but not belligerent.
"You new here?"
Obviously. But it was enough of an opening for Gwen to wander across the road that crumbled to gravel and then dust as it climbed a long-sloping hill out of town.
Three boys loitered with the girl. The one smoking was inches shorter and looked a bit younger than the others; a studded belt was the only thing that held his grubby jeans on his hips, and he wore his dark hair in a ponytail. The second had his head shaved, shins bare below ragged khaki shorts, feet bare in rubber sports sandals, and his torn muscle shirt showed plenty of muscle. The third was pretty for a boy, dark hair and eyes, plain maroon t-shirt and jeans. He stood sideways to Gwen, braced for the goth girl to lean against his body; he gave Gwen an up-and-down hey-baby glance before whispering in the girl's ear.
She smirked but held Gwen's gaze. "Just moved in?"
"Yeah."
"What year are you?" The ponytailed boy casually exhaled his smoke around the question.
"Senior."
They all nodded, and for a moment no one said anything. Gwen felt awkward asking after names if they weren't offered, and wondered if she should surrender a neutral see-you-around and retreat, but the girl spoke again.
"So what are you into?" Half-bored, because it wasn't really cool to betray interest. "Music, sports, drama, art…" She flicked black fingernails at her companions as she spoke, starting with the ponytailed younger boy, ending with herself. "What's your thing?"
Gwen blurted her answer without thinking. "Ghosts."
That shocked them, she could tell. But it was the truth – she'd watched movies and shows, but she'd read a lot more. Stuff on-screen was for show and reaction, to make the audience jump and gasp and cringe and hide their eyes – and then look anyway. Reality, she gathered, was much more… elusive.
"Really?" the girl said, and Gwen shrugged. "You ever see a live ghost?"
"Live ghost," the ponytailed boy scoffed. "Oxymoron." The girl reached out and shoved him without looking; he accepted the mild abuse without offense.
"Not yet," Gwen said.
She had thought, maybe, when they'd decided to move into the house her grandmother had inherited – unknown to them til Gran died and there it was in the will – but the only thing haunting the tiny split-level in the middle of town was the smell of age, and dry-rot.
"Then," the girl continued, glancing at each of the boys with a smirk, "we've got to show you the Farmhouse."
"Farmhouse," Gwen said. A large dose of skepticism was healthier than not, in her hobby.
"You're not doing anything right now, are you?" the girl continued, assuming. "It's just up the road." She pushed away from the boy, who caught her hand and she allowed it, sauntering toward the gravel-becoming-dust.
Gwen shrugged and followed at the girl's other side, the two other boys falling in behind – but in a companionable, not sinister way. They scuffed past the last house on the street, squinting into the gradual yellow hills beyond, treeless and therefore shade-less, wheat or weeds, she didn't know.
"What's with the farmhouse, then?" she asked.
"It's haunted," the ponytailed boy informed her cheerfully from behind.
"Triple homicide," the goth girl said, like it was the town's juiciest rumor. "Eighty years ago."
"Ninety," the boy with muscles corrected softly, his eyes on the ground and his long stride the slowest of them all.
"Whatever." The girl flipped her unnaturally-black hair over her shoulder.
"Double-homicide-suicide," the muscular boy added, and she huffed impatiently.
"Whatever, I said. You want to tell it?" She continued without waiting for his response, "So this farmer goes to kill his wife, and their landlord shows up at the door – so he goes to kill him, too –"
"No, the landlord heard screaming, and broke in," the ponytailed boy interrupted eagerly.
"Heard screaming from half a mile away in his own living room?" Muscles scoffed.
"No, when he came to the door. So he broke in and came up the stairs to stop the guy and they fought and fell down the stairs…"
The goth girl flipped her hair again, scornfully. "Right down to the cellar, where they fell into the toolbox and – boom, dead? Oh – there it is."
Gwen lifted her head to squint at the lone farmhouse at least three blocks – she still thought in city-distances, though there was barely dirt track here – away, and studied the farmhouse with every step they took. Two-story, though the slanted roof made her wonder what the upstairs was like. Full front porch, the roof half-collapsed. Split-rail fence, giving it a generous yard, relatively-small barn a stone's throw to the rear.
"So three people died here?" Gwen ventured.
"Maybe four," the girl said, as though delighting in the macabre, which she probably did. "The baby was never found."
And that was the part that brought tears stinging to Gwen's eyes. To cover that, she asked, "Have you guys ever seen a ghost, here?"
"No, but Arthur has," the ponytailed boy said carelessly. "His family owns the land-"
"His family owns all the land," the goth girl interjected sarcastically.
"He's like the great-great-grandson of the murdered landlord," the ponytailed boy added.
The girl's boyfriend spoke for the first time. "That doesn't even make sense."
"Great-grandson," Muscles corrected at the same time.
"What are they – supposed to come out at night?" Gwen said, half-sarcastic herself. "Flashing lights and rattling chains and moaning?"
"Just a story." The girl shrugged, tugging her boyfriend into a casual half-hug. "We have this – stupid game. You've got to climb in through a window –" Gwen could see that a sheet of plywood with a giant painted red X was nailed over the door – "and steal something."
"Steal something?" Gwen raised her eyebrows – mockingly was cooler than disapprovingly.
"You can throw whatever it is back through the window again," the girl said.
And they all looked at her.
Oh, you've got to be kidding me. She looked at each of them, back at the house.
"Of course if you're scared," the boyfriend said softly, down into the goth girl's hair, and she smirked – at the joke, not Gwen, but still.
New kid. Of course the others would test her. Dare her, even if the story was made up on the spot, even if there was no game and they were lying to see what she'd do. And it was stupid and juvenile, but still true – if she chickened out, the story would be all over by the first day of school in the fall and her year would be miserable. If she did, they might talk about how gullible she was, to fall for it – but at least no one could deny her nerve and willingness.
"Fine," she said, pretending unconcern. I've done this sort of thing a dozen times, at my old school bravado. She glanced down at herself – jeans and canvas shoes, hot but protective, sleeveless cotton shirt but nothing to worry about, climbing around in a dusty old condemned farmhouse. "Sure. How do I get in?"
"You're gonna do it?" the ponytailed boy said, both surprised and excited.
For answer, Gwen bent to duck through the two rails forming the fence – moments before the others - and they all continued scuffing closer. It seemed to her that she could feel the place as much as she looked at it. It was looking back, as if something sentient did in fact linger.
And her curiosity truly woke. What if it was true? For years she'd read and researched and daydreamed and thrilled to think that someday she might sense the supernatural for herself…
The door and the windows on the lower level were boarded. The small octagonal window over the porch's roof had two crooked slats nailed across it, and a bit of torn faded material that was probably curtain, poked through broken glass.
Gwen stood at the bottom of the sagging trio of porch steps, and rubbed her bare arms up to the shoulder. She was getting a definite Go away vibe. Which was kind of exciting, in itself.
"There's a ladder on the other side." The goth girl pointed. "And a stick you can prop the window open with."
She stared at the house as if formulating a plan of attack. Her heart pounded and her palms and mouth had become confused – one too dry, the others too wet – but there was more than a bit of anticipation, if she was honest.
Gwen had only done something like this once before. At a bonfire party in the suburbs, they'd all been drinking and laughing, and someone had mentioned this old shack back in the woods and someone else said it was haunted, and dares flew. And one of the boys had started walking out there, and she and a few others had followed, hollering advice and encouragement and abuse. And he'd hollered back for a while – until he didn't – and his silence had been deliciously scary. They'd called, and joked to each other, should we go after him… But when he finally came back, he was walking swiftly and straight, with his head sharply down. And Gwen had privately feared, what they'd see when he lifted his face, thinking of possession – and he'd been right on them, and some starting to freak out, when he did look up. And grinned and laughed, like he'd played the joke on them. Although, she didn't know him well enough to decide for sure, what had happened that night.
But this was broad daylight.
She circled the house slowly, the other four still trailing her. Old-fashioned wooden siding, peeling paint, weeds grown up around the concrete foundation. She stumbled over a stone and realized it was the edging of a long-lost flowerbed. Someone had cared, and bothered, once. She glanced around the rear, and wasn't really surprised to see the canted door of an old-fashioned cellar entrance.
The sentience seemed to follow her on her circumnavigation, but it was hard to tell for sure, with her four companions. She found herself glancing up to the dormer window of the second floor.
Not barred to prevent so much as an inch of daylight, like the first floor.
And – maybe a glimmer of reflected sunlight. Or maybe the sleeve of someone's shirt or dress as they turned away from looking down on her. Or maybe, she read too many books.
But the books said, ghosts usually sought re-connection. Meaning. Understanding. The last step of this journey, the first step of the next. Someone to listen to them, before they could let go.
All she heard from this place was warning. Why not listen to that? Just retreat, leave it alone… but ghosts didn't belong. Good people went somewhere good, after death, and bad people went somewhere… they deserved. That was the way it worked, didn't it? No one was supposed to stay.
"That window?" she said needlessly.
There was a ladder lying in the forgotten flowerbed, wooden but missing no rungs. She hoped heavy meant sturdy. The muscular boy hand-walked the ladder upright, and the boyfriend steadied it; the ladder clunked against the siding.
"It's a bedroom or something," the goth girl said.
"And I'm not going to get arrested for trespassing?" Gwen said dryly, setting herself to climb. "And, if this thing falls apart and I break a leg, you're not going to leave me lying here?"
"I'll run for the sheriff in the donut shop," the ponytailed boy promised facetiously.
That was probably as good as she was going to get.
Gwen made her way up slowly, carefully testing each rung. Old and worn, but each held, and she reached the window without mishap. It had stuck a few inches open, a bit loose in its frame and slightly crooked as a result; there was a thick old piece of stick a bit longer than a ruler, lying in the sill.
She braced her elbows and pushed, gently but firmly, careful of the missing piece of broken glass, and the cracks in the rest of the pane. Curtains fluttered limply in the vague humid movement of the air; she could see plank flooring beneath the window, bare and dusty. Propping it open with the stick, she moved another rung higher, and leaned inside.
A bedroom, like the girl had said. Dusty brass spindles for head- and footboard, a knobby white blanket – dingy and stained - covered pillows and trailed fringe on the floor. A tall bureau stood in the far corner, and against the wall to Gwen's right, a dressing table with an old mirror – scratched and marred around the edges, cracked through and missing pieces. Pieces that were all over the floor. But nothing within reach that she could 'steal', and then heave through the window to return, after proving herself to the four others waiting on the ground.
Gwen watched the doorway – missing the door – feeling an instinct to call out, but not wanting to provoke ridicule from her new acquaintances. She squirmed awkwardly through the window and shuffle-crunched to find footing, hoping that the thin rubber soles of her shoes would hold up to the shards. Ghosts didn't actually lurk in odd places, according to the books she'd read, that was a Hollywood ploy. It wouldn't do any good to look under the bed or behind the bath-curtain – given there was a bath-curtain – unless the ghost was a child to play such tricks or hide from fear of her, or someone who'd died in the tub. Which wasn't the case, for this house.
No, the books claimed, spirits simply lingered, until they became aware of the presence of the living. Then, they might become visible, as if they absorbed some residual life from their living visitors, or a sense of self-awareness returned, sometimes strongly enough to retain their image, and sometimes even – the books hinted – to gain a semblance of tangible substance. Resulting in the strange sounds and unexplained movements people claimed to prove hauntings.
She rather thought it sounded like, the tree falling alone in the forest question. Was a ghost visible if there was no one there to see it.
But no one appeared. And the noise that made her jump was the rub of wood on wood, a long retreating sound.
Gwen whirled back to the window, as the muscular boy laid the ladder back into the overgrown flowerbed. Her throat closed, and she couldn't even give a protesting, Hey!
The girl was giggling, sauntering away. She shoved her hand in the back pocket of her boyfriend's jeans and he wiggled his fingers at Gwen in farewell. The muscular boy followed them without another look, but the ponytailed boy back-pedaled and cupped a hand around his mouth to shout back to her.
"There's a cellar door you can get out!" He gave her a double-thumbs-up for encouragement, then turned to catch up with his friends.
She heard their laughter rise on the stale motionless air, and sighed. At least her initiation-hazing-whatever hadn't involved kissing anyone or taking off clothes. This was, by comparison… this was…
Standing with her back to the wall by the window, she listening, breathing through her mouth, willing her body's physical responses to calm. To hear her unfriendly friends tell it, there were three possibilities. The murdered wife, the homicidal farmer, and the landlord who'd interrupted the deed, with fatal results. But it was far more likely she'd see nothing, and only freak herself out expecting it, jumping at everything.
Gwen glanced around the floor. Probably there was no real need for her to pilfer any small item to prove herself – those four had better have the decency to attest to her courage, after what they'd done – but she had no inclination to rush hysterically through the house to find that cellar door either. Most likely emerging out of breath and panicky, and the others would be waiting to laugh and label her for their classmates for the rest of the year. Ghost-girl is a scaredy-cat.
She had a streak of contrary stubbornness, she knew this. Today it meant she was going to stay. To explore, as long as she didn't actually freak out. To walk the talk.
So… Broken glass. Papers – pages from a book dog-eared in the corner, probably. Brush and comb – beads from several different necklaces, smashed and scattered. The dressing-stool, padded with fading, dusty red velvet, lay where it had been knocked on its side.
Gwen picked it up and pushed it into the knee-space of the table, knock-and-scrape loud in the stillness.
Movement.
She glanced up into the mirror. There on one of the broken pieces, her own face.
And there just next, separated by a thin crack in the glass, a piece that reflected the corner of the room behind her.
A man turned from the bureau, young and too thin for his bones, shaggy dark hair combed in a style eighty years old – confident and calm, and oblivious to Gwen. Collared work-shirt half-unbuttoned to show an undershirt, and he was interrupted in unfastening his cuffs, by a young woman also apparently ignorant of Gwen's presence.
Dark hair in styled waves to her shoulders – again a popular look eight decades old – her dress collared and buttoned down the front to a belt at the narrowest part of a waist Gwen was mentally collected enough to envy. She wore a saucy smile that provoked a wide grin from him, and her eyes sparkled as she slipped the young man's suspenders off his shoulders in an uninhibited way that spoke of possessive intimacy and caught Gwen's heart in her throat.
He abandoned the cuffs to cradle her face in his hands and bend down to kiss her.
Gwen forgot herself, and turned.
No one there. Of course not. She glanced back at the mirror, but it showed only reflected dust and decay. She shivered – but more at the idea, than any sense of malevolence or reason for fear – straightened, and moved to the doorway.
The room beyond was larger. The rest of the upstairs space, Gwen guessed, smaller square footage than the main floor because of the slope of the roof. Her eyes were drawn immediately to a crib on the far wall, white-painted wood and once-white bedding. A delicate rocking-chair was tipped and broken beside it, on the edge of a round braided rug on the floor, its colors obscured under dust and more broken glass.
A handful of toys that would pass no safety requirements, looking handmade. Carved wood and stuffed fabric. The high octagonal window on the wall to her left was surely the one over the porch and faced the stairway, across the length of the room.
That opening was noticeably darker than the rest of the room, and her only way out.
All was silent, in a way that soothed rather than heightening her nerves, and she lingered, suspecting that would change, when she went downstairs. Out of curiosity, she crossed to the crib, and tentatively risked a peek inside, hoping – no, it was empty. Sighing in relief, she looked around again, expecting a spirit to materialize.
Nothing yet.
She noticed that the papers on the floor, though leaves from a desiccated book, had been sketched over, some of them – all of them? She picked one up, feeling the grime of passed decades – a pencil drawing, and also decades old. Tilting it, she took three more steps toward the window, to see better.
It was recognizable as the young man she'd seen in the mirror-vision – ears and cheekbones, and if there was a grin on his face, it was directed downward to the bundle of cloth in the crook of his sketched elbow.
"I miss them," a voice whispered in her ear.
And even as she jumped and turned – though she saw nothing - a sudden and unnatural breeze whirled through the room, raising dust and fluttering pages, and ripping the one from her hand. It was possible that a gust had found the window Gwen had left open…
Except that all the pages flew helter-skelter to the braided rug, falling into a concentrated jumble in the returning stillness.
She grabbed her courage, and screwed it to the sticking point. Or something.
"My name is Gwen," she said into the air, "If someone is here, I'd like to talk. To listen. To… help."
Nothing.
… nothing.
To keep her eye on the whole room, as insurance against fright incurred by any sudden abnormalities, she moved along the wall, toward the bedroom door, toward the stairway opening. The attentive sentience was there, but it felt more like her brother looking over her shoulder to see what she was doing – annoying, but safe - than anything more oppressive.
Just shy of the bedroom, she found another page, stuck in a place where the floorboard didn't quite meet the trim at the bottom of the wall anymore. It was a rougher sketch than the other, which had been quite detailed – this one showed the skinny, bony farmer with his ears and his grin, hands in his pockets, standing behind a girl who was seated – juggling a baby too young to sit on his or her own, too young for obvious gender identification, in one elbow, and a large sketch pad propped on her opposite knee. She was giving the viewer – the mirror? – a lopsided, self-deprecating grin.
"Oh, I miss them."
This time, Gwen didn't look around. She kept her eyes on the page with an effort – they wanted to dart glances to the corners of the room – and said, "Who is this?"
Two words drifted to her, and she couldn't tell if it was aural or subconscious. Husband. Daughter.
She was allowed to keep the paper. "You loved them," she said aloud, wondering like fury, what had happened to turn the gawky young farmer who smiled so brilliantly at his young family, homicidal.
Movement caught the edge of her vision, tugging her head around. Glimpse of the girl from the bedroom mirror, leaning lovingly over the front side of the crib at a baby hidden by the padding. Gone even before Gwen had focused – another flash turned her head further to see the girl standing under the window, looking up at it as if wishing to look out of it.
And then she was gone. Surprisingly, Gwen felt calmer to know someone was there. It was true, and as long as she kept a level head, she'd have an experience of her own worth telling, someday.
"I'm Gwen," she tried again. "Is this your house? I'm really sorry to intrude…"
Nothing happened, as she waited.
What else was she supposed to do? Leap from the window and actually break a leg? Turn her back and dash down the stairs, hoping to find that cellar door and escape before anything else happened? But then, how could she look anyone in the eye and claim, my thing is ghosts, if she left now? Maybe if the phenomena seemed to have stopped for good…
And, it would serve the goth girl and her three guy friends, to wait to laugh at Gwen – to wait and wait and then maybe start to worry as Gwen and her friends had worried for that boy in the dark woods last year…
Just to cover her bases, Gwen passed the open bedroom doorway, glancing inside – empty – and made for the stairway.
It was eerily dim. And, not a straight shot down, only six or seven steps until there was a landing, a turn to six or seven more steps down, but out of sight. The feeling overwhelmed her that something lurked there, just out of sight and then –
The breeze blew again, hard against her front like a physical shove, moving her a step back from the stairs.
"No! Don't go down there!"
She backed another step, turning to face the room, but the pages rustled back into stillness, and there was no sign of the girl.
Gwen breathed, and waited, and that was all.
But she really didn't have any desire to quit the comfortably-lit attic for the unknown darkness below. She tried, "Will you talk to me? Tell me about your husband and your daughter? What was her name?"
A whisper that came from nowhere. "Julia…"
She smiled involuntarily. "I like that name – my gran's name was Julie."
Another pause.
And then, Gwen wasn't alone.
The girl she'd glimpsed in the mirror, short-sleeved dress, collar and buttons and belt, sat on one hip on the edge of the rug, shoes over socks tucked beside her, curly head tipped as she looked down at the papers. Her free hand hovered as if she wanted to sort through them, but didn't quite dare.
And Gwen could see the bars of the crib, through her. The effect was fascinating, rather than disgusting; the ghost did not leap up and sweep shrieking toward her, did not demonstrate rapid decomposition as it gargled grotesquely. Gwen thought incongruously of a scene in one of the movies she'd watched, the little girl playing on the floor in a white dress and veil – the mother snatching it off to show the face of a wrinkled old woman – saying in a girlish voice, I am your daughter…
But this girl only glanced up to meet Gwen's eyes, her expression the mix of surprise and welcome Gwen's own mother and grandmother might have shown to an unexpected visit from a new neighbor.
People really aren't as polite as they used to be, Gwen thought, marveling at the surreal.
The girl smiled – looked down at the drawings – then back up again, hopeful and expectant. She gestured to invite Gwen to join her… flickered… stayed.
Gwen ventured, one step at a time, to the opposite side of the rug. "What's your name?"
"I'm Freya."
The farmer's wife? They sure married young, back then. Gwen crossed her feet and sank to sitting carefully. The girl tipped her head to gaze at the topmost drawing on the stack with a fond-sad smile, and Gwen followed suit. "That's your husband?"
The girl mouthed a name Gwen didn't quite catch, but the smile didn't so much as waver.
Gwen thought, wasn't he supposed to have killed you? The books said, this was how it went. Discover the issue anchoring the spirit in the physical world – usually the circumstances of death – and resolve it, and the spirit will move on. But Gwen couldn't think of a tactful way to bring it up.
"And this is your daughter?" she said instead.
Talking to a spirit from eighty-ninety years ago. I see dead people, she thought sarcastically, and wondered if she had actually tried to jump, and hit her head or something, and this was just a crazy coma-dream. But… so real.
"She was so sweet and dear – except in the middle of the night when she was hungry." Freya gave Gwen an ironic I-claim-to-mind-but-I-don't-really, look, and flickered again. "She's away with a neighbor. She was…" The spirit's voice and eyes drifted, her figure like mist coalescing and swirling behind glass. "Sleeping through the night. My neighbor offered to take her… so Merlin and I could be alone…"
"Merlin?" Gwen said, thinking of the landlord and why a husband might have reason to kill his wife – in a jealous rage?
Freya gestured. Gwen began picking up the pages, other sketches over the printed words. Many of the baby, but more of the young farmer – was that Merlin, then? her husband? The drawings were light and full of cheer and hope, and Gwen couldn't help smiling. The artist had been so obviously in love.
"Did you do these after –" she choked, awkwardly, and re-phrased, "Did you do these recently?"
"I miss him," Freya breathed vaguely, her gaze wandering the room. "It's lonely here… there's nothing to draw with, anymore..."
Gwen wanted to say, what happened. She wanted to say, you know you're dead, right? But she hesitated, not wanting to hurt Freya's feelings, any more than she wanted to disrupt whatever fragile mental balance the older girl maintained. She could not imagine living in what amounted to solitary confinement for eighty-ninety years, without knowing why. Theory was, spirits often needed a sensitive human – which Gwen evidently was, she wasn't sure yet how she felt about that, excited or afraid – to reveal reality, ground them with logic and compassion, so they could let go.
"What happened to him?" Gwen ventured. This was not a man she could see hurting his wife or daughter, but… It was also a risk, talking about him – she had the idea that naming and discussion could draw a spirit, especially one already in proximity.
"I don't know," Freya whispered to herself. "I don't know, I don't know…" Her eyes were fixed on the dark stairway, an agony of uncertainty.
"What's down there?" Gwen asked. "The rest of your house? Will you show me?" She did have to leave, eventually, and that cellar door was her only hope. But she thought, it wouldn't be half as freaky, pretending that Freya was a new neighbor giving her a tour of the place. Although, when it came to the question of leaving Freya stuck here alone… Well. Cross that bridge, and all that.
"I don't go down there," Freya told Gwen, hugging herself, a big-eyed waif in white. "I don't ever leave these rooms –" she looked around, fearful and trapped – "I don't ever see them. I don't ever see them – what happened?"
Gwen was not so sure she knew.
And then a board creaked. Behind her, near the stair.
Her mind jeered, squeaky floorboard, how cliché – but her body reacted with a startled flinch and rocketing pulse – and as she turned, she glimpsed abject horror on Freya's face.
And then she saw him.
Stocky. Dark suit. Sparse, short gray hair, heavy jowls, scar dividing his right eye socket and brow.
Transparent.
The man crouched, reaching out one blunt-fingered hand in an attitude of inhuman greed, maniacal lust. The dark of the stairway stretched into the sunlit attic chamber behind him like an immense shadow that he dragged like Marley's chains, or that sucked to pull him back like a quagmire.
Freya screamed, without pause for breath, the sound instantly making everything ten times worse –
Gwen's heart stopped and she couldn't breathe, frozen in place though she was between them and he'd touch her first –
Flash.
Light or dark, stunned retinas couldn't decide –
The skinny young farmer appeared behind the old man, body arched as his arms raised a ghostly ax over his head – eyes that weren't eyes but pure soul without need for the window – grim as an avenging angel, desperate as a dying bodyguard.
"Merlin!" Freya shrieked.
Neither male ghost had a chance to react to the word – the farmer brought the ax down on the old man with all the strength in his body, cleaving the other apparition in two obvious halves like a bloodless melon.
And they both vanished.
(PS, This is only part 1- second half of this story to be posted in a few days!)