A Mind With Another’s Mind Of Its Own

“Mind (noun): the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.” [The New Oxford Dictionary of English]

__________

“UH, I gave you a twenty,” said Gord, holding out the change that he just received.

“No,” calmly replied the cashier, “you gave me a five.”

“No, I gave you a twenty.”

“No, you only gave me a five.”

“No … ,” Gord began but was cutoff.

“Actually, you did give him a five,” another customer in line intervened.

Bewildered, Gord looked at the man and queried him: “Are you sure I gave him a five?”

“Yeah, I saw you give it to him.”

Stunned, Gord looked down at the currency in his open wallet. But that’s not possible, he thought. I know for a fact that I gave him a twenty.

He distinctly visually recollected handing over a twenty-dollar bill. He crystal clearly remembered looking at the twenty in his wallet while contemplating giving a five; however, he decided that he could use the small denomination currency, thus pulling out the twenty and handing it over.

Noticing the sincere total bewilderment displayed upon Gord’s face, the cashier asked, “Are you alright?”

Gord left the store with an unshakable, worrisome conviction that either he was slowly losing his sense of reality or that he’d just been ripped off. But Gord was intelligent enough to recognize the error in even considering the concept of having been cheated out of fifteen dollars; for, due to the store’s basic shift-changing methodology (which he’d witnessed before), no cashier had any plausible means through which to pocket, for example, fifteen dollars out from his or her cash register.

It then occurred to Gord—who wouldn’t have left while truly believing that he’d been taken for fifteen dollars—that matters could’ve turned sour, physically and legally, especially considering the atypically very small body frame of the young adult cashier, had that guy in line not witnessed the transaction and spoke up.

Upon arriving at his apartment and being in private, Gord briefly wept. Apparently, the sole realistic explanation was, in a manner of speaking, his mind erroneously told his eyes what they were seeing or not seeing, thus his own eyes were being overruled and fooled by his flawed brain and therefore his mind.

            What the fuck is wrong with me?! he mentally cried out.

During the restless night to follow, Gord recalled similar perturbing incidents, one of which involved a ‘missing’ flash drive. After 30 minutes of futile search and hence considering it

lost, it reappeared out from nowhere. ‘Seeing should not necessarily mean believing,’ Gord cynically thought to himself, and ‘not seeing shouldn’t preclude believing.’

Then, two months later, Gord was looking all around his telephone stand, upon which for many years consistently lay a blue pen.

He made a concentrated though futile effort to find it: He lifted the entire phone three times to take in a very good look of the telephone stand surface followed closely by a thorough look on the carpeting around the stand, though the pen was nowhere to be found.

Confirming that it all was not just him somehow overlooking its actual presence, Gord went to his bedroom to retrieve another pen. But upon returning to the living room, where he instinctually took another glance, there lay the ‘missing’ blue pen—right next to the telephone, as blatant as an inanimate object could be.

Exceptionally worried about the gradual accumulation of mind-malfunctioning incidents, for there were also a few such experiences that went unmentioned, Gord considered what plausibly may have cerebrally compromised him to such an extensively alarming degree.

He thought about, as one of two main suspects, the heavy dose of anesthesia he received prior to the invasive open-heart surgery that he underwent about a half-year earlier to have his congenitally malformed aortic valve replaced—anesthesia being a substance that can leave a surgery patient with permanent cerebral dysfunctions.

Why didn’t they tell me that before I went under the knife? Ah, I would’ve went for it, anyway; what else would I do—it was life or death? Thinking such led him to recall a character in the horror movie Pet Sematary (based on Stephen King’s book of the same title), who tearfully told his neighbour, “sometimes, dead is better.”

Gord then considered an alternative and even more plausible theory than that involving anesthesia, a possibility involving a terrible vice he permanently quit only a few months earlier: Are these perturbing occurrences the result of possible brain damage due to all of that heavy pill popping? Or perhaps a combination of the pill popping and the anesthesia?

As for the pill popping, it was at least as plausible of an explanation as the anesthesia-culprit theory. During the previous ten years, Gord occasionally abused various opiate painkillers, though he especially seriously abused non-opiate medications and sedatives, the most notable being off-the-shelf, extra-strength sleeping-aid pills. Although he not once intended to overdose, nor even considered the possibility, it amazed him how not once did he even in the least feel compelled nor any need to go to the local hospital’s emergency ward.

Sure, I managed to readily absorb so much of the potential-overdose drug potency that I didn’t even once require my stomach be pumped out; but, really, at what cost did I survive? Damn! Gord cursed. I was lucky enough to be born with a healthy brain; then I go fuck it up real good!

Apparently, self-forgiveness and the water-under-the-bridge perspective were a no-go with him, especially when he considered how easily that (or so he believed) he could’ve avoided the whole gratuitous vice matter if only he’d respected himself more. Now I can’t even be sure of what my own fucking eyes are seeing!

Gord also contemplated a third and final theory, albeit with very little plausibility: Could it be the mind manipulation of a host haunting or possession by a malevolent or even diabolical spirit?

When Gord decided to relate all that he disturbingly experienced to his sole sibling, his older (by three years) sister Marie, she considerately avoided patronizing him by not downplaying his worries. ‘Brain tumor,’ however, was her unnerving theory as to the most likely culprit afflicting Gord, but she dared not exacerbate his anxiety. Instead, she arranged a string of appointments that were necessary to procure referrals in order to have Gord’s brain thoroughly examined via image-scan, and she did so without unnecessarily informing him of every stomach-turning step of the way.

Gord also began sharing with Marie other disturbing occurrences that he was experiencing. He also noted for her how “things in life have been particularly crazy for me since I was discharged from the hospital after my surgery.”

He told her about his repeated dreams in which he’d always lose his gold chain necklace and crucifix. Never able to locate it before the dream’s end, Gord felt teased, even mocked, by some derelict consciousness that would closely surround him; it allowed him to get close to finding the jewelry yet then throw him way off the trail at the last moment. He then experienced worse dreams, in which the same gold necklace and crucifix would get snapped right off of his neck by some invisible force.

About seven weeks after the nightmares began, Gord awoke one morning to find that the necklace was nowhere to be found. He always left it on his dresser before climbing into bed, as he was certain that he did the night prior (although it seemed that “certain” was not at all necessarily “for certain”). During spare time on the following three days, he spent hours futilely searching for it.

Were his eyes yet again erroneously informing his flawed brain, or vice versa, as to what was or was not before him. Regardless, Gord felt strongly that he wouldn’t see that necklace and crucifix again.

As it were, eventually those nightmares became but mild preludes to truly very bad nightmares.

Around a quarter past two early one morning, when Gord awoke from his typically disturbed REM sleep while positioned on his right side, he was quickly overwhelmed by a nauseating sense of a malevolent presence immediately behind him. Gord was certain that some nasty presence was attracted to him; even worse, he sensed its intent to get even closer. I’m not just dreaming this! he confirmed. No, this is for real!

Terrified, Gord felt the presence wrap itself around his entire body, all of which had the complete wrapping of his blanket, as he continued pretending to be asleep and therefor unaware of the malevolent presence.

Feeling that he isn’t fooling the entity with his faked sleep, Gord attempted and miserably failed at a prayer-through-thought resistance—a theological concept with which he was raised as a Catholic but had not believed while growing up would actually work: In the name of …, the holy words began flowing in his mind, but he couldn’t continue his rebuke of the presence past the word “of.”

In the name of … I rebuke you in the holy name of … In the blessed name of …

Gord couldn’t even express the main holy words mentally, for what it was worth, let alone express them out loud—the latter which he was plainly too petrified to dare, lest the thing get pissed off and blatantly show its clichéd ugly self.

Only a minute later, the extra-dimensional finally got physical. Gord could feel something solid, like two fingers tapping one after the other, gradually making their way along his blanket-covered body’s left side (which, of course, was turned upwards).

Is there any way this can all be just one of those more normal horrific night-terrors things or something likewise?! he mentally screamed out, rhetorically. One that’s not at all real?!

Even as the physical contact gradually ceased, Gord remained still, stiff, maintaining his (already presumed failed) faked sleep and total obliviousness to any malevolent presence. Yet after about an hour of apparent entity-non-presence, Gord managed to adequately relax in order to slowly fall asleep again.

Not that surprising, upon awaking the next morning (around nine), some aspect of his troubled psyche stubbornly clung to some possibility that he was actually half asleep and half dreaming the ordeal. Meanwhile, another though greater aspect of his burdened mind persistently grasped to a large possibility that the unforgettable terror was not at all but a product of semi-sleep and partial dreamscape.

Sitting in his recliner chair as he replayed the worst nightmare that he experienced ever, Gord considered a concept that could hit two very problematic birds with the same stone: What if the two negative phenomena—i.e. the short-circuiting between his retinas and brain, and the presence of some entity—are of the same source?

            What if the entity is somehow causing my visual sensory flaw?

“Good thinking, Gordon,” said the ‘voice’ from deep within his mind. “But then again, how do you know that I’m not just of your own mind—say, a mind with a mind of its own? Or that I’m just a part of your psyche that’s telling you there’s something else in here besides your own consciousness, hmmm?”

Gord ‘heard’ that mental voice, or thought, or whatever, more distinctly than any such thing he experienced throughout his entire life. Am I going nuts?!

“Perhaps … ,” it derisively replied. “Then perhaps I’m going nuts along with you … you think?” It then chuckled.

“Go fuck yourself!” Gord blurted out before realizing what he just orally did. Oh, man—I must be going nuts! He knew that no matter what was behind the apparent madness within him, either way it all was a very bad sign. Oh, God, what should I do?

“‘Oh God’ has nothing to do with anything,” reverberated through Gord’s mind. “I should know.”

            Yeah, you seem to know everything, don’t you … Hey, I know; I’ll test it … me … whatever.

            Okay, smartass, Gord intensely thought, so as to ensure that his thoughts would definitely be ‘heard’ if some derelict consciousness really did exist in his head. Tell me something that I could not possibly know—I mean, not at all possibly know.

Gord then clearly remembered the $50 note that went permanently missing about a week after he was discharged from hospital.

“Uhh, good one,” it said. “Try looking in between the folded clothing in the dresser … No, not the one in your room; look in the old one in the corner of your tiny dining room. There—amongst your new, unworn sweaters; try looking at the very back, left corner of the bottom drawer.”

            Oh, man! Gord hastily leapt to find out if the unbelievable would be proven to actually be quite believable. He yanked the drawer completely out of its oak dresser-rail encasing and anxiously grabbed every piece of clothing, throwing them all out behind him as rapidly as he could.

“I knew it! Nada!” he gleefully blared, as though his mind having a mind of its own, relating untrue ‘secret information’ was the much better way to go.

“Oh, no, no, Gordon. Look inside the still slightly folded sleeve of that ugly, green one furthest behind you,” it smugly ridiculed him. Turning his head and face toward the grass-green sweater with one sleeve somehow still somewhat folded, Gord’s psyche rang with, “Yeah, that one! It’s there; go look!”

Gord’s heart sank, for he so strongly felt that it was going to be right—that the $50 would in fact be there. He looked, and it was.

For a couple minutes, he sat there cross-legged on the carpeted floor, stunned and motionless, with the $50 in his hand. Slowly getting back up onto his feet and feeling burdened with worry, Gord stuffed the fifty into his pocket.

            How in hell did you know the fifty’s exact location?

“I observe everything you do—every second, minute, hour, day after day; more so, I observe almost everything entirely from deep within your mind … As for how long I’ve been around you, that’s something I’m sure you’ll soon figure out for yourself.”

            Was it all your doing that scared the shit out of me while in bed the other night? And if so—why? Gord mentally queried.

“I did, and because I could. And because I figured that, judging from your religious trinket necklace and very apparent rearing, you’d try to cast a godly spell to exorcize me ‘back to hell’ … Really, where do you people get this notion that anything unseen and nasty must be demonic and not just some mighty-pissed-off human ghost who survived bodily death?”

            I don’t know what else you do with your spirit form, Gord replied, but your maliciousness is demonic enough for me … But Gord received naught following that last poke at the mean-spirited entity, at least for the time being.

About two weeks later, however, it returned to its invasion of Gord’s psyche.

During some of Gord’s most vivid dreams ever, the entity revealed undesirable aspects of his life and death; more specifically, though, how he died of heart failure just hours before he was to finally receive an aortic valve transplant, after his scheduled surgery was delayed a full day, all of which thus cost him his life: “It was the surgeon’s last-second decision to delay my procedure, supposedly for a more urgent case—an old, Asian immigrant, who couldn’t even speak or understand English!”

His lingering, spiteful spirit cursed (though, likely to his disappointment, without any effect) every health worker involved with the very most costly delay possible to him involved with his scheduled heart surgery.

Soon, the entity included within the dreams more-revealing specifics about his life.

Calling himself Jonathon, he was so exceptionally bitter during so much of his life, “one of bleak hardship,” that his spirit, without a hint of regret, declared that he was and still is an ardent atheist. Although, Jonathon was not at all the compassionate secular-humanist sort, but rather one who felt only contempt towards collective humanity: “You all can go to hell! And if there is in fact a God, a Christ, or what-have-you, he, it or they can also go to hell!”

But eventually came the time that Gord sought more than just the imagery in his dreams; he really wanted hardcopy proof.

“I looked at some files in the hospital’s library, Marie, and he was there,” Gord emphasized, excitedly wide-eyed. “It read …,” he began while looking down at the folded sheet of paper onto which he wrote, quoting the library records, word for word. “It read, ‘July 10, 2006 … congenitally malformed aortic valve transplant heart patient Jonathon Worsky, aged 52, expired pre-op. Surgery scheduled for 6 a.m. but pushed back for one day due to priority emergency heart patient’.”

Though she gave much credence to what he was telling her—there was too much strange phenomena occurring to simply dismiss it all—she nonetheless insisted that her brother get his brain extensively checked, “to be on the safe side,” extensive tests and image scans which she was able to arrange only by utilizing her spare time while off work and tireless effort.

“Really,” she responded, taking the paper from his hand and perusing its written content.

He then fervently went on that the information supported his theory of how the angry entity may have come to be.

“By the way, Gord, do both of us a favour and don’t immediately tell the neurologist about the ghost, entity, ‘Jonathon whatever-his-last-name,’ anything about … you know. You can tell him about all that sometime later, so that the doctor can sharply focus on your visual-related problems. That’s the main reason I worked hard to get you that appointment—remember, for Tuesday at one o’clock.”

“But what if the visual stuff is directly related to …?” he attempted to legitimately point out but was cut off.

“Like I said, Gord, just wait a little while, please.”

Regardless of the past-twelve-year absence of their single-parent mother, who lost her fight against brain cancer, Gord still had a mother-role-model in his big sister; and with some family history of mental illness, Gord, with urging from Marie, agreed to be tested for schizophrenia or any other psychiatric disorder that causes hallucinations. To their great relief, every test result was solidly in the negative.

Lastly, and most important of all the testing, Gord underwent a Positron Emission Topography scan, i.e. PET scan. (It wasn’t considered to be of an urgent necessity in Gord’s case, a conclusion that cost him a bundle because he could access such a PET scan only in Seattle; PET-scan units are accessible in Canada only in rare cases of urgent medical necessity or important research.) The findings of the PET scan of his brain, according to neurologist Dr. Radis Dronovich, were not of a cut-and-dry ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ finding nature, but rather they were “inconclusive.”

What was revealed involved an abundance of irregularity in the part of his brain that processes his visual perception of the immediate environment surrounding him.

Gord anxiously looked over the three PET-scan image hardcopy prints, then he glanced at his sister sitting next to him.

Wearing a bewildered facial expression, the doctor continued explaining: “Through colour variances of PET-scan images, your scan clearly indicates a significant amount of anomalous neural activity in that specific region of your brain. In fact, I’ve never seen or even heard of such PET-scan-image findings. It’s as though … It’s almost as though there are two independent sources of consciousness functioning in that very region. But, of course, there has to be an acceptable, reasonable explanation; I will definitely discuss your scan images with other reputable …”

“Are you saying that I have a split personality or some other mental disorder?” Gord anxiously interrupted the doctor, with desperation in his voice.

“No—and that’s just it: If it was a matter of a split or multiple personality disorder (nonetheless serious as that definitely would be), the pieces of the puzzle, so to speak, would at least fit together.”

“What do you mean, ‘pieces of the puzzle’?” Gord again anxiously interrupted.

The doctor pondered for a moment before deciding to just come out and say what was baffling him so.

“According to the varied-colour PET-scan images of your segmented brain activity, the other ‘consciousness,’ or what it appears as, could not be a product of your own brain functions or, more accurately, dysfunctions; rather, it looks to be that of an … of an external source or sentience. However, like I said,” the doctor quickly began his next sentence to avoid being cut off yet again by a panicky Gord, “I’ll discuss the …”

“Oh, God, I feel nauseous,” he nevertheless interrupted, holding his hands to his belly. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Marie placed her hand on his. “Maybe you should go to the …”

“No, I think I’ll be okay,” he assured his sister.

Furthermore, the doctor rather reluctantly continued, the area of Gord’s brain at issue has neural connections with almost all other regions of the brain—though most notably the part which specifically deals with the sense of sight and the cerebral connection between the eye retina, the optic nerve and the brain’s visual-image information processing centre.

“Fully understanding what the PET scans are displaying,” concluded Dr. Dronovich, “would considerably enable us to explain most, if not all, of the brain-function abnormalities you’re experiencing.”

Marie drove her brother home, with neither uttering a word. With the car parked outside his apartment complex residence, Gord suggested, “Do you want to order Chinese, tonight, instead of pasta and sauce, again?”

“Sure—why not.” Although not openly saying so, she was feeling quite concerned over his excessively bizarre cerebral condition, perhaps even more worried than Gord himself.

They locked the car doors and went inside.

Sitting herself down on the couch, Marie clicked the TV remote control and began channel surfing for something not too boring. Gord, however, went straight to his bedroom and began rummaging around for a couple minutes, then blurted out, “Where the fuck did I put them!”

“What?” She turned her head to look down the short, narrow hallway (or “stubby,” as she often mocked it), then got up. “Where’s what?”

“My damn keys,” he replied, as she stood in the doorway. “I just put them down a few minutes ago. I’m sure that I placed them down on the dresser as usual, but they’re nowhere to be found.”

Marie, pretty sure of what her brother was presuming, tried reassuring him: “Gord, just because you’ve misplaced them doesn’t necessarily mean that …”

“Actually,” he cut in, “I am beginning to think that, yet once again, it was not I who ‘misplaced them’.”

Then, having briefly scanned the room, his sister spotted the set of keys laying on his dresser: “Look,” she said, procuring Gord’s glance at her, then at the dresser top.

“What? Look at what?”

“That,” she repeated, maintaining her stare at the keys. “Right there.”

“Once more—what and where?!” he asserted agitatedly, having again looked at Marie and then the dresser.

  “Right there!” she insisted, pointing hard as she became frightened by Gord’s serious visual disability. “You’re looking right at them. You can’t see them?”

Gord was about to frustratingly answer in the negative, when his eyes blinked and the keys appeared out of nowhere—all four of them (including two superfluous keys to a long-gone Cadillac), ringed together and hanging from his lucky rabbit’s foot keychain.

“Now I can see them, Marie.”

After staring, stunned, at the keys for but a moment, Gord heard laughing break out within his mind, a sinister bellow like that of a madman.

Looking wide-eyed at Marie, Gord decided that he had nothing to lose by attempting to audibly, firmly declare the holy words; and he did his utmost to start and finish stating them all, but the words clumped together uselessly like they were stuck inside the throat of a sink’s clogged drainage pipe.

Just as with the Jonathon entity getting physical on that terrifying night while cowering under his blanket, Gord didn’t have it within him to successfully utilize those holy words this time, either.

“Look! Look!” Marie urged her brother yet again as she pointed at the keys. “They’re moving!”

The keys slowly dragged along the dresser as the two, astonished siblings (especially Marie) gawked slack-jawed. Then the keys, without any pre-indication, flung from the dresser and directly into Gord’s nose.

“Aw—ooww!” was his reaction to the jagged metallic sting, before rubbing the back of his hand over his nose. The two looked down where the keys lay motionless on the floor.

And that was it. The brick upon the top of all the other bricks that were already breaking the camel’s back, thus breaking it altogether: “I’m moving the hell out of here!”

“You can stay at my place until you can find a decent, local place of your own,” Marie immediately offered

“Thanks anyway; sis; I’ll just move in with Josh. He told me I’m more than welcome to live at his place, split the rent and the rest, etcetera.”

Gord’s head then went a bit numb when the thought was shoved into his psyche that Jonathon might not be at all ready to leave him just yet, let alone permanently.

            Well, then, you’re really going to enjoy Joshua, Gord sarcastically, mentally made clear. Josh is a practicing Christian, who’s not shy about his strong belief in and passion for Christ, God the father, the holy spirit—you know, the whole trinity thing. He prays and reads The Bible out loud and has lots of Christian symbolism in almost every room. Shall I think some more …?

Gord’s thought message to the entity was indeed provocative as it obviously was meant to be.

“Go fuck yourself, Gordon?” was Jonathon’s bitter response.

The entity always mocked the notion that he was of demonic origin—in fact, Jonathon basically denied that such diabolical spirits, not to mention the good guys God and Christ, even exist; nevertheless, he found the atmosphere in that emptied apartment unit a little too uncomfortable in which for him to remain after Gord had sprinkled the place extensively with holy water that he acquired from the local church.

Once the two adversaries had permanently parted ways, the Jonathon entity’s ‘voice,’ etcetera, also permanently ceased.

Just eight days after moving in with Josh, Gord happened upon his necklace and crucifix, in the sleeve of one of his neatly folded sweaters.^■

(Frank G Sterle Jr, originally written in 2011)

The Pardonsfield Pit

(written in 2013)

“Pardon (noun): the action of forgiving or being forgiven for an error or offense … A remission of the legal consequence of an offense or conviction … ” —The New Oxford Dictionary of English

“I tell you—we’ll burn in Hell, we will, for our part in this crime against God’s great creation!”

“Shut your pie hole, and do what you were well paid to do! Really, now; whining over a lot of foul papists! Really, now!”

“I tell you, we’ll burn for sure … For sure!”

And there were other such men of conscience, although they were but a small minority amongst the two dozen men from the New England township of Pardonsfield. But they felt at least the same amount of fear of God’s wrath as they did guilt, and they weren’t forced to spend the following six nights digging a large pit into increasingly rigid, early November 1767 ground. In fact they rather hastily willingly accepted the five-times the usual pay for such labor during such hours and cold time of year. Once it was wide and deep enough, they began filling the pit with the bodily remains of the “undesirables”—some still putrid flesh while others naught but dry skeletons.

The undesirables were torn from their true graves, their supposed ‘final resting place,’ and then callously dumped into the big hole, located just inside of the town’s westernmost boundary. The pit’s location was adjacent to the very small piece of Pardonsfield consisting of the tiny homes of the poorest, unhealthiest segment of the township’s populace.

The human remains were from Pardonsfield Cemetery (the only cemetery within the township’s official boundaries), callously removed and “relocated” because their close proximity there was unwanted by the majority citizenry. They were the contents of the graves of mostly impoverished, sickly, Catholic Irish and Eastern European immigrants who’d sought better lives in the New World, thousands of miles away from their birthplace, for themselves and their descendants.

What they instead received at their new home, however, was mostly hardship and often untimely, difficult death due to various rampant illnesses.

Perhaps needless to mention, all of the graves of non-undesirables were left to rest in peace.

Pardonsfield’s governing council consisted of five elected wealthy, motivated men (one of whom received the four others’ approval to act as council chairman) of good standing—at least amongst the dominant desirable citizens of the township.

A recent council meeting saw the first forwarded motion unanimously passed, resulting in the township immediately initiating the development of a much needed hospital or “sanitarium” to treat the often overwhelming number of tuberculosis or “consumption” sufferers.

The large structure’s foundation, it was then mentioned, would require that it reach fifteen feet below ground level.

Council Chairman Charles Renfield hastily coldheartedly forwarded a motion that one-third of the structure should be built upon the precise portion of the graveyard collectively occupied by the remains of undesirables. With the exception of the sole nay vote by the emphatically-opposed Councilman Richard Jitens, the council callously passed the motion.

With lightening striking the same spot twice, Renfield forwarded a second motion that again was opposed by Jitens though nevertheless passed, that the headstones crowning the undesirables’ graves be removed and stored for re-sale immediately upon the names and dates engraved on them being chiseled away.

In a third and final four-to-one council vote, it was also decided, according to anonymously worded council meeting minutes, “that the said occupants’ remains be exhumed and relocated to a location yet to be confirmed and then made fully public in the near future.”

But the council majority’s votes and decisions regarding the pit plan remained secret—even with the persistent holdout presence of Councilor Jitens. He reluctantly remained quiet about the council’s immoral pit-plan actions, lest the very small number of living Catholics eventually make their great offense public and thus be conveniently permanently silenced.

However, regardless of being an extremely malicious act, Jitens was aware that it would unlikely meet any resistance worthy of the council majority’s concern. Since pretty much all of those who were related to the grave-robbed-and-relocated papist undesirables were deceased papist undesirables themselves—mass deaths due almost entirely to the great consumption outbreak of twelve years prior—there conveniently was to be no public outrage of any sort.

“But God in Heaven will not overlook such a brazenly sacrilegious act, even if your church elders do,” boldly stated Councilor Jitens, a member of the local Presbyterian denomination, to his fellow councilmen. “It’s plain damn-well wrong!”

Chairman Renfield abrasively commenced his rebuttal by snapping back, “What do you know about ‘God in Heaven’ and what He does or does not condone?! What we do know is that He condemns idolater papists; not us for cleansing our cemetery of such foulness!”

Furthermore, added Renfield, it wasn’t just a matter of cleansing the graveyard of papist undesirables, “who do not even speak our language, at least not properly. But the sanitarium simply has to be built.”

Jitens remained silent as Renfield continued: “What we also know is that a large part of the cemetery land—a third, to be more accurate—is required for the sanitarium, which is already behind schedule. Therefore, the one-third portion sacrificed might as well be the specific third voted for by us; that’s why we’re acquiring the other two-thirds portion from the large MacDormid land just outside of that specific one-third cemetery portion for which we already voted four-to-one in favor of developing.”

His three in-favor fellow councilmen looked at one another, nodding in noble agreement, with pompous frowns on their lips and white brows raised.

As a whole, the council felt compelled to act as a useful tool for the wealthiest citizens in achieving their monetary goals. They even insisted that the council, in the case of the papists’ remains, vote on and pass legislation making Pardonsfield Cemetery officially off-limits as a final resting place for deceased undesirables.

Of course the men with wealth and influence wholeheartedly agreed with the council majority regarding their four-to-one vote decision as to the most convenient and desirable location for the construction of the new sanitarium.

The pit had originally been planned for a location on territory that had still belonged to local aboriginal peoples, but they were most outraged by what would actually end up filling the large pit. They were greatly offended by just the concept of the white settlers desecrating their dead folks’ graves, regardless of race, as well as where the disturbed human remains would forever be.

When the initially political confrontation turned deadly physical as hired township men forcefully began digging on the native land, seven diggers were brutally killed. They were thus honoured for “their sacrifice” and respectfully buried in the majority desirable portion of Pardonsfield Cemetery, with each of all seven plots marked with a magnificent statuesque stone.

A half-dozen years later, however, the pit of human remains would soon include those of a recently deceased reverend of the Protestant faith, who in life had been an overly boisterous fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone preacher. Once well respected, Reverend Michael McPeters was beaten to death by the husband (Sean Murray) of a woman (Sarah) with whom the preacher had been practicing adulterous relations. When Mr. Murray proved to the townsfolk that the affair did indeed occur, the church’s flock was so shocked and outraged that they demanded the township council outlaw the very mention in public of the disgraced name of the fallen reverend. For all of his continuous loud quoting of scripture “to my flock, which is righteously free of Satan’s papists,” his former faithful followers felt bitter over his hypocrisy and deceit.

The presence of the zealous preacher’s ghost angered the soured spirits of the pit. They sought retribution against all those who had enabled or even conveniently turned a blind eye away from the outrageous violation of their graves and plunder of their stone markers. To them the reverend was amongst the very worst of offenders, as a supposed Earthly representative of God Almighty.

Upon its production in full, many of the new sanitarium’s attendants immediately began experiencing frightening supernatural phenomena. Notably, every Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the translucent spirits of the preacher and his in-life-and-death followers could be seen in some extra-dimensional state of ‘church service’ within the sanitarium’s integrated house of worship.

It would take hours to calm the nerves of extremely upset observers, some of whom claimed witness to the sanitarium being frequently infested with lost souls who’d blindly follow the preacher’s ghost anywhere (including purgatory, if only they believed in such).

“The reverend was amongst the very few who’d learned of the council majority’s vile intention pretty much from its very inception, yet he was forever completely silent about the awful scheme,” Reverend Patrick O’Connar of Pardonsfield’s sole Presbyterian church told a half dozen of his parishioners as they all attended a local fair, though two and a half centuries later. “As far as he was concerned, the Roman Catholics’ souls were damned anyway, and he seemed perfectly at ease with himself.”

Some of the ghosts devoutly following the corrupted reverend’s spirit even turned physically vindictive. They attacked Sarah Murray—whom they solely blamed for the preacher’s moral decay and violent death—pinning her up flat against her ceiling thus scaring her nearly to death. Then, while Sarah was away, the same angry spirits ensured that husband Sean became trapped within their burning home.

Sarah buried her husband in the newly desirable Pardonsfield Cemetery, purchasing one of the many stolen headstones to mark his resting place. However, some weeks later the stone’s undesirable non-corporeal original occupier retaliated against Sarah. Not long after she’d told close friends about her nightmare in which a specter touched her chest, she was stricken with consumption yet still denied death until after suffering many physically-wasting months of misery.

Following her unattended unceremonious funeral, a Pardonsfield council majority decided to have her emaciated corpse dumped into the pit in order to make a potent example of her adulterous relations with the reverend, who himself had received such punishment for his role in the shameful affair.

Again frightening translucent manifestations greatly upset sanitarium attendants.

Considered to be the most disturbing of all apparitions reported there were those of grotesque likeness to—and poetically accompanied by the certain putrid odor of—human flesh and bone, certainly belonging to so many undesirables rejected port mortem by their living desirable Pardonsfield counterparts.

Said to be of the most benign specters witnessed would appear in the sanitarium’s largest room, in which consumption patients would either mend or inevitably perish. The ghost of a recognized deceased Irish nun, who had succumbed to influenza decades earlier only to be later added to the pit, would rush from one astonished patient to another, her lips hurriedly moving but not making a sound. While alive, Sister Maggie tended to the very sick, especially during serious illness outbreaks, at a convent located about a mile outside of the township. It had been converted into a makeshift Catholic church when the actual church, situated less than fifty feet from the convent, flash-fire burned to the ground only an hour after an All Souls Day mass service almost thirty-five years prior.

Then there were those of the most bizarre—manifestations of three dozen spirits lying motionless in neat uniform rows as though each was returned to his or her own individual grave plot. They all were reported to be floating about two feet off of the sanitarium’s icy cold, expansive basement floor.

When it was eventually shutdown and redeveloped (1926) into Pardonsfield’s first city hall, it was inexplicably plagued by electrical and plumbing problems, with every attempt at rectifying any of the problems being unsuccessful. Less than a year before the elected council and mayor unanimously voted in favor of closing down the relatively new city hall structure in 1943, almost all archived records pertaining to Pardonsfield and its past were destroyed on the same night by both fire and flooding.

Although, quite conspicuously the sole and virtually untouched surviving archival record was that regarding the township’s earliest (majority-vote) council’s blatantly discriminatory and ugly conduct in creating and maintaining Pardonsfield’s pit.

In the spring of 2007, specific ethnic and religious segments of the U.S. organized to strategically vote into power officials willing to open up the centuries-old though still embarrassing matter, even if only as a symbolic gesture.

Immediately following confirmation through delicate excavation that the pit was a shameful ugly fact came an attempt at reconciliation by way of official acts: A formal apology was made by Pardonsfield’s municipal government just before the ceremonious sanctification of the pit site, having been officially designated its own fully guarded graveyard status. Furthermore, the municipality provided funding for a large memorial marker in acknowledgement of the great wrong committed against the Pardonsfield pit victims.

Just a few months after that, the newly designated graveyard was granted permanent special protection as a location of historical significance and reminder of an immense injustice, regardless of what historical context in which it was committed.

Although few in number, to the present day there are additional testaments of apparitions seen but not heard at the site of the formerly unmarked infamous Pardonsfield pit. They’re said to be specters of the zealously ranting preacher at what appears to be his ghostly flock.

“I’ve heard some people say that it’s as though his followers in life will revere the man for eternity,” noted Rev. O’Connar in finality. “The same people also feel that the preacher much appears oblivious to his non-corporeal existence. So it’s said.”^■

(Frank Sterle Jr.)

KitchenWareWorld

(written September 19, 2011)

“HOW it went missing, nobody knows—it seemed to simply vanish. Though some say that a police officer took it home as a grim memento.”

After Jimmy (Likkenson) made this revelation, he added, “And that’s supposedly why ‘the curse remains’—because the knife that killed them has to be thrown down into the well, holy water mixed within it, to rid the grounds of McCurry’s foul spirit and free the ‘trapped souls’ of his victims.”

Total silence then fell upon the four, young college students, who were just coming into view of the old, abandoned factory.

“I guess that’s it,” said Melanie (Smart), who nervously, reluctantly agreed to spend the early October evening at the non-functional plant. “So they made spoons, forks, knives and stuff like that?”

“Yeah, and a few other kitchenware items,” replied Ezekial (Bowman). “Most of the machinery is still in there, but they’re pretty much all seized up, from lack of use for so long. That’s one reason they’re demolishing it tomorrow, before developing a small memorial park.”

The factory, KitchenWareWorld, had closed down permanently in late 1957, right after declaring bankruptcy; it had four floors and a basement: Its ground floor was elevated by two feet to allow for the structure’s basement’s horizontally narrow though long windows, just slightly below the ceiling, thus giving the basement access to much needed daylight should there be a power outage. Though utilized as factory goods storage space, a protruding, stone cemented well orifice was situated at the basement’s southwest corner. The well, just over 109 metres deep when measured with sonar, was repeatedly scheduled to be dismantled, drained then filled with cement; however, the job was continuously delayed, until it was finally decided to leave it be altogether. Initially, the well held clean water, but by 1970 the well’s base water entrance and exit were clogged firmly shut—first with dense dirt from the farm yard which had stood in place of the factory grounds until 1953, and then with factory refuse dumped during the many years of an absence of water polluting laws; thus, the very same well content, liquids and all, occupied the deep pit ever since. Then finally, in early 2006, after a young girl fell into the well and drowned, the city’s council and mayor voted unanimously in favour of demolishing the factory and recycling its contents.

“They like to say that the ‘poor economy’ closed it down,” said Candace (Florance), sarcastically, “though only the fools and tourists don’t know, or simply don’t believe, that it was because of the killings.”

“Where’s the guy, now; I mean, where’s he buried?” Melanie queried, again with nerves on edge.

“At the asylum cemetery … ,” Ezekial answered before adding, “by way of suicide. The townsfolk didn’t want him in the regular cemetery, and his own relatives wanted nothing to do with his remains. His grave is amongst the unmarked stones, so his bones won’t be disturbed by twisted Satanists and other souvenir orientated people, if you know what I mean because … ”

“Does anyone here know the names of his victims?” Candace interrupted, without intended inconsideration.

“Uh, yeah … ,” Ezekial spoke up, again: “Rebecca Timms, Robert Stevens, Sandra MacDonald and, uh, Nick Johnson.”

“You’ve read up on this a bit, huh,” she noted.

According to all accounts and the killer’s own open confession to police, Andrew

McCurry—a.k.a. Madman McCurry or the Lanky Lunatic—was one of the managers at KitchenWareWorld who’d totally lost his composure when he’d lost his grasp on reality after being informed by the CEOs at headquarters that he’d “very soon be laid off for budgetary reasons.” Following the grisly killings, corporate financial matters significantly worsened, with the horrific deaths being a formidable liability, especially in the field of advertising and retail. McCurry, with less than three years left before he could retire at 65, decided that some factory staffers hated him—though he had no realistic idea of their identities, because his stern hand managed all of the “labourers below me in rank”—and a few had “even conspired, and succeeded, to get me fired!” Thus, as his final act as a manager there, McCurry selected four employees (all in their early twenties) and told each to stay an extra (overtime paid) two hour period following their morning shift, at 11:30 a.m., to assist him with “a task.” That day at the factory, there was to be a “Dead Period” for two and a half hours, from noon until 2:30 p.m., during which building electrical adjustments were to be made involving the main power juncture box just outside of the factory (and McCurry, unlike the four staffers, knew that power to the factory’s two, large elevators would thus be cut off). When the morning shift ended and the whistle blew, all of the factory’s morning shift staff, except for the four, began to leave. McCurry was aware that it took half an hour for the morning and afternoon shift employees to exchange places but that the latter employees, on that day, would not begin showing up until 2:30 p.m.; and McCurry discreetly remained behind as the four, all stationed on the second and third floors, were individually told that he or she “need not worry about the electrical work being done—the bosses are just being overly precautious” and to “keep working till I come get you, O.K. I won’t be too long.” Conveniently for McCurry, the factory machines the four operated were noisy and also required them to wear ear protection gear. When the opportunity came, McCurry (who married at twenty-nine but divorced at forty-two, with no children) firmly rigged the fourth floor’s stairwell doors to lock-in onto that floor anyone who’d enter. Then, taking in a deep breath, he went to each of the four employees and told him or her (of which the other three were oblivious) to come to his fourth floor office. There, he closed the door (which he’d long ago found could only be locked from the outside of the office) behind the staff member, and, rather than tell the employee what he’d like him or her to do for the extra hour, he then began to pace around his office, erratically. He worked himself into a frenzy, ranting about his “evil” bosses; he also went on about how some of his employee underlings really hated him and a few even conspired “to have me canned!” And that’s when matters would turn, for the employee, into a horrific nightmare: McCurry suddenly went quiet, opened his desk drawer and pulled out a large, black handled, KitchenWareWorld knife—the largest the factory produced—and chased the screaming employee out of his office and (eventually, at least) to the locked shut stairwell doors. The only exception to McCurry’s detailed plan was the first of his victims, Rebecca Timms, who fled to the stairwell doors and found one door barely ajar (due to McCurry’s incompetence), allowing her to run down to the basement and eventually hide behind the well. But it all was to no avail: McCurry was close enough behind and came across her lost shoe just a dozen feet from the well, behind which came her audible whimpering. “I then killed her and dragged her back up the stairs, to my office.” The remaining targeted employees, attentively at work, could not hear their colleague’s desperate screams from up above, then below, and therefore did not act upon them. It was on public record that he callously admitted, at police headquarters, to laying “a curse on each of them, just before I stabbed them, no more than ten minutes of each other—‘may your soul be trapped in your horror for eternity,’ I told them.”

Police got McCurry when they were called in by an electrician working on a connector wire site situated just below a fourth floor window who’d noticed McCurry calmly looking down upon the four, neatly aligned corpses lying face down. McCurry was charged, tried and convicted of the four first-degree murders after having reluctantly pleaded guilty at his court appointed lawyer’s behest (though he was spared the death penalty, for having been found “criminally insane”).

After only three weeks of incarceration, though, he escaped from the asylum one night, fled back to KitchenWareWorld and easily broke his way into his former office, after first breaking into the basement and its hazardous chemicals storage room. Sitting in the office desk’s chair, he pulled out a bottle of scotch whiskey he’d been saving for retirement day, carefully poured into it a package of powder form cyanide and drank as much as he could before falling over and giving up the ghost.

In the spring of 1983, in an attempt to cleanse the abandoned factory of McCurry’s corrupted spirit, as well as free the four victims’ trapped spirits, a young though confident priest dropped his blessing kit, consisting of a crucifix, three one-litre bottles of holy water and one

small bottle of blessed red wine, and ran off after an unseen “force—like some cold stench blasting into me—shoved me back, very hard, three times.”

Two and a half years later, five otherwise bored teens found the dusty kit, took it with them down into the basement, to the well, and there they smoked marijuana; then, one teen drank the wine and carelessly poured the blessed water down into the well, into its mixture of mostly unhealthy elements.

“The doors are just over there,” said Jimmy, pointing.

“They’re locked,” Ezekial moaned, jerking on the two entrance door handles until his second attempt, with greater effort, popped one open.

“Okay,” said Jimmy, pressing the light button on his Swatch. “Let’s say we meet back here at … eleven. Alright?”

“I say we all stay together,” Melanie strongly though meekly suggested, then added in an unconvincing tone. “It could be dangerous.”

“Nah,” blurted Candace, brazenly, “we’ll cover more ground if we spread out.”

Each went his or her way (though Melanie was the last to budge) with a large flashlight in hand.

Jimmy readily found his way to and up the stairwell, skipping the second floor and climbing right up onto the third floor. There, flashing his light around the machinery, he took only three steps to his right before finding himself standing next to the aged shift card puncher; with it were about three dozen metal pockets, in which almost all of the former employees’ shift cards still sat, collecting dust.

            Wow, he marveled. Why are they still here? Hey, maybe the victims’ cards are still here.

With his illuminating flashlight, he visually scrolled down each row of cards, hoping to locate at least one of the victims’ cards. They’d sell for a bundle—no problem! However, his prospects of finding such dimmed in his mind as he approached the very last of the cards. Nada … Damn!

But then, wham!—scored, and on the very last card: There it is! “Robert Stevens, Unit #308.” Come to poppa!

Brushing off the card’s thin film of dust, Jimmy felt inexplicably strange. And it was in an instant that the world completely changed for him: Jimmy found himself in an unmanned

though humming factory, well lit by a midday sun, whereas he and his college mates had entered the premises at just past a darkening 8 p.m. In this new ‘reality,’ Jimmy was in what must have been one of the factory’s few offices; and, soon enough, he was confronted by a graying, tall, lanky man, looking to be in his late fifties or early sixties. The man had just stepped in behind Jimmy, shut the door, walked past him, stood behind a varnished oak wood desk and glared at him.

            What the … What is this?! Where am I?! Jimmy thought loudly in his mind’s ear, while quite stunned and bewildered. And where’s that bright light coming from? He looked through the office’s side window, to one of the fourth floor’s large, southward windows, through which the lowering autumn sun’s light shone; he then looked back to the man, who just began to ramble on about something. And who in the hell is he?! It took a few moments before Jimmy could adequately focus on, and thus fully listen to, what the rather wiry man was saying.

“ … was you who helped con my bosses into firing me—you, Robert, and your cohorts hate me, and … ”

The man’s rant drifted off as Jimmy tilted his head to one side, looked past the man’s aging head and into the office wall’s small mirror. In it, Jimmy saw, of course, no one but the reflection of his own deeply puzzled facial expression. Who’s he calling “Bob”?

Jimmy then looked down at the cotton cloth nametag sewn onto the man’s white dress shirt’s left breast … This all has to be a joke—it has to be!!

“Bob? … Bob?! … What are you … ?! Robert Stevens!! Look at my face when I’m addressing you!!”

But Jimmy had soon enough bleakly realized who the man was and who the man thought Jimmy was.

“You’re … ,” Jimmy choked out, barely, “you’re McCurry—Andrew McCurry.”

“Yeah?” the frustrated Lanky Lunatic responded, “your brilliant point being … ?”

“Hey, McCurry—I mean, Mr. McCurry—I’m really not the guy you’re … ”

“Oh, bullshit!” McCurry blasted back, instantly, while opening his desk’s drawer and pulling out a huge kitchen knife, with a shiny, foot-long blade. “I’ve really had enough!”

“Oh, God!!” Jimmy yelped, spinning around and slamming face first into the office door’s window, leaving it severely cracked. “Oh, shit!!”

“You’re not getting away, Bob!”

“But I’m not Bob, damn it!!” Jimmy squealed, grabbing and turning the doorknob, slamming the door open as hard as he could before bolting out. He ran between sparkling clean, operational machinery units, all the while looking around for any way out. Spotting the elevator doors at the floor’s east end, he immediately went to them, futilely repeatedly and forcefully pressing the elevator retrieval button. When about ten seconds had lapsed and no elevator car, light or sound came about, Jimmy realized he was in real trouble, and he was experiencing terror like nothing ever before. God, oh, God! Please let this just be a nightmare!!

“Sorry, Bob—no way out!” came the yell from the knife wielding Madman McCurry, only 50 feet behind Jimmy. “No way out!”

            Where the hell is everybody?!  Jimmy looked all around at the large, lifeless floor. It’s all fucking empty! There’s just the damn machines!! He then wondered about the other three floors, not to mention the basement, though it usually was unmanned, anyway. And where’s that buzzing coming from? Are there workers there?

Eventually, though, he cut through the scramble within his mind to remember: The stairs, the stairs! The stairs have to be working! That’s how I got here in the first place!

He spun around to look all along the walling. Now, where the hell were they? … There! Again, he bolted, this time towards the floor’s mid-west-side wall, as directly as possible.

“There’s nowhere to run away to, Bobby—you little, fucking rat!” McCurry yelled with apparent glee, taking a short cut to his intended victim, in between the machinery.

When Jimmy, dodging the machine units, arrived at the stairwell doors and pushed the handles, repeatedly in vain, all hope was lost. They’re locked shut! They’re locked solid fucking shut!! he screamed within his mind’s ear, instinctually continuing to pull and push the doors’ handles, to no end. It slowly yet assuredly sank into Jimmy’s beleaguered mind that he was indeed not dreaming but rather, somehow, in a different reality—a different world.

He could then hear, from behind, the slowing running, then shuffle, of the crazed man’s shoes on the floor; the sound was very soon followed by the sharp, cold pierce of McCurry’s knife into Jimmy’s upper back and into his rapidly beating heart.

Slowly falling to the floor, Jimmy’s grip on the door handle loosened, and the life flowed from his body. All the while, he, taking his very last breaths, could hear his tormentor’s whispery victory slur. “There you go, you lousy rat. There you go—though with a final word: May your soul … ”

IT was approaching 9:15 p.m., and Candace had just made her way up onto the fourth floor. Now, where’s his office? she thought, directing her flashlight onto parts of the floor, with its litter of various machine parts. Walking along next to the wall, approaching a small room with its windows covered by what appeared to be tar paper, all that really caught her attention was a large entanglement of some aged, discoloured, discarded clothing laying on the floor, in a corner where the wall met that of the small room. She flashed her light beam throughout the pile of clothing (kicking aside some old, 1950s style jeans, brown dress shirts and knee high skirts) and noticed a slightly torn, white blouse with some nylon stockings wrapped around it. Kicking apart the three pieces of clothing, she decided to pick up the blouse, which was stained with a blotch of what appeared to be dried blood surrounding a two-inch tear in the back.

And then a sudden burst of sunlight fully illuminated the entire floor. She found herself in some office space with a neatly organized desk before her. A door slammed shut behind her, a strange looking man drifted past her from behind and stopped behind the desk to stand there, staring at Candace with a menacing expression. She looked down where the torn blouse had been firmly in her hands, but all was gone.

“Ms. MacDonald,” he addressed her, “do you know why you’re here, right this moment?”

What, what’s going on? Candace was absolutely stunned, while somewhat squinting from the totally unexpected, bright daylight. Where am I?! Who are you?!

“Well?” he asserted. “Talk to me, Sandra!”

            What? Who’s Sandra? … and Ms. MacDonald? her thoughts raced. Then, looking down at his shirt’s nametag—What the fu … ?!

Pulling open his desk drawer and retrieving the deadly, bloodied object intensely frightened Candace into grimly muttering, “Oh, Christ—no! … ”

SLIGHTLY lifting his left arm, Ezekial flashed some light onto his old style wristwatch and saw that it was 10:34 p.m. Being close to the center of a (to him) boring second floor, standing

next to many conveyor belts stretching through various machinery, he wondered where in the large, dead factory his college mates were and what might they have discovered. Probably nothing, he thought, just before illuminating what must have been employee lockers. Hmmm.

Ezekial walked over to the beginning of one of sixteen lines of what were basically identical to high school lockers. He went through a few dozen of them—all containing naught but men’s, brown dress shirts and light orange overcoat uniforms (with empty pockets)—before reaching locker number 213. There was nothing unusual about the overcoat within it, except … What is that? Ezekial, lighting up the locker’s entire interior with his flashlight, noticed a cut, a good six inches long on the coat’s left sleeve; and surrounding the sleeve’s entire cut was something rather brown. Could it? … Could it be blood?

Placing his flashlight into his right hand, he grabbed onto the sleeve’s cuff to get a better look … when everything suddenly lit up with bright daylight.

Ezekial (a backslidden Christian, though his parents were faithful Presbyterians), who believed in the existence of God and His counterpart, the devil, was (as were Jimmy and Candace) stunned at the sudden, supernatural contradiction in both time and space. Where am I? Where’s that light coming from? And who’s that guy?! Ezekial thought, just before reading the full name on McCurry’s shirt’s nametag.

“So, Nick Johnson … you hate me so much you want me canned before I can retire with my goddamned hard earned pension, huh?!”

            Who’s Nick!? Ezekial instinctually looked down at his own clothing, for he felt somewhat constricted by his apparel, and noticed that he was wearing something that looked like what he had, just moments before, been examining.

“Don’t say anything if you don’t want to,” sighed McCurry, “but I just wanted to let you know that you failed.”

It was while Madman McCurry was pulling out his bloodied knife that Ezekial could hear within his mind’s ear all of what he’d heard and learned about the knife/well legend. It was enough to engage him to not run for his life but to fight for his life by blatantly challenging history and forcing the knife from the controlling, bony hands of a very twisted and enraged man.

            Now, how in the hell do I get to that damned well?! sped Ezekial’s mind, his adrenalin flowing fast after having briskly knocked McCurry to his office floor with a very powerful left hook to his jaw, while Ezekial maintained his tight grip on the bloodied knife in his right hand. He, however, did not manage to come out on top of things without first receiving a formidable slice to his mid, left arm after McCurry successfully swung his knife. Even so, Ezekial wouldn’t get revenge upon McCurry—the law and God can do that—who seemed to be unconscious.

Ezekial turned, opened the office door with his very shaky hand and just began his race to the basement when he noticed it: To his immediate right rested the horrific results of the fate of his two college mates (he suddenly realized that he actually saw them as good friends). Although they both lay dead, facedown, he could still tell that it was the two, very young adults.

Jimmy had fairly fresh blood staining a straight tear in the upper back of the brown dress-shirt he was wearing (I thought he was wearing a white T-shirt when we got here last … ). Candace lay wearing a knee high skirt (though she came, in the real world, wearing slacks) and a white bra, with most of its rear straps dark red with blood that had come from the gash almost right in between her small shoulder blades. What did that freak do with her shirt?!

Ezekial, regaining his composure, turned and ran past all of the machinery, towards the stairwell doors, pushing and pulling the door handles once he arrived. Fuck! The asshole must’ve locked them shut! Finding the elevators inoperable, he unsuccessfully searched for anything with which to break open one of the stairwell doors’ very small, wire meshed windows. No choice, he resigned, and walked back towards McCurry’s office, slowing down as he approached, to quietly peer into the office from behind some factory machinery.

            He’s still out cold! Ezekial noticed, relieved, before further searching for some sort of very solid metal object. There! That’ll do! he decided, grabbing onto the rubber wrapped handle of a large, steel mallet.

It took him no more than a dozen seconds to fully smash his way through a door window, reach for the handle on the other side and pop it open; and the determined, encouraged, young college student raced down the stairwell to the basement. There, Ezekial scanned the contents until, There it is! While running to the well, he thought about what should I do? Where should I go once I drop it in?

Everything, however, was answered once he reached the well, looked down into its mouth, into the pitch blackness, held the bloodied, KitchenWareWorld production line utensil over the center of the well’s orifice and dropped it in …

Instantly, as though nothing so mindboggling ever had occurred, Ezekial, looking up and through the basement’s windows, found the world once again surrounded by night, the well before him and some source of bright light from the well’s opposite side. From there, amongst the otherwise dead silence, he could hear quiet whimpering. He slowly walked around the well’s circular wall, peered, and it’s Mel! he exclaimed within his weary mind’s ear, extremely relieved to see a squatting, cowering, trembling Melanie. She actually escaped!

“Mel?” he queried quietly, noticing, with the help of the illumination from her flashlight, that no bloodstain marked her clothing.

“Oh, Zeek—thank God, it’s you!” she burst.

“Are you hurt at all, Mel?”

“I don’t think so … All I did was bend over and pick up the, the … ,” she muttered, then began to cry, “ … the shoe, and I was really there, right in his, his office, in the daytime; and he, he—McCurry, himself!—kept calling me Rebecca and Ms. Timms before pulling out a huge, huge knife and, and … ”

“I know, Mel,” Ezekial whispered, slowly wrapping his arms around her until she calmed considerably, “I was really there, too. And he called me Nick Johnson.”

He slowly helped Melanie up, onto her feet, making sure that she stable and could stand on her own.

Although no one but the soured spirit of the mass murderer himself knew it, the well was the only location within the entire factory around which McCurry’s ghost was quite uncomfortable. Besides, the evil entity’s consciousness figured, why would she actually try to hide behind a simple, five foot tall, stone cemented well wall rather than leave the building, altogether?

Ezekial and Melanie ran as though their lives still depended upon it, while not seeming to care that the knife had gone where legend had dictated it must go. Although that extra dimensional world had instantly dissipated back to contemporary reality—in which the factory was old, abandoned and, finally, free of Andrew McCurry’s befouled spiritual presence—they sprinted till they made it out and down the road. They agreed to not relate their horrible ordeal to anyone, lest they’d stand accused of trying to fool the townsfolk.

As for the other two, their remains (probably) lay in some other dimension, some other reality or world, to not ever be recovered in this temporal plane. Hopefully, however, their eternal souls had found infinite peace the very instant that the knife touched the holy water tainted liquid contents of the well.

The next day, Melanie and Ezekial attended the memorial at the old factory just before it was to be demolished. They had expected, as was planned, that Mayor Rex Rodrigez was going to make the memorial speech; however, to their utter amazement, former factory workers and failed Madman McCurry targets Rebecca Timms and Nick Johnson—the latter whom bore a quite noticeable six inch scar on his mid, left arm, which had its sleeve rolled up—gave the speech, both tearful and looking seventy-ish. They stood side by side as each offered words of condolence for McCurry’s two, long ago deceased victims, their families and for the little girl who had drowned in the well.^■

(Frank Sterle Jr.)

The Brockesville High Haunting

“Ghost (noun): appearing or manifesting but not actually existing … A faint trace of something … A spirit or soul … ”

—The New Oxford Dictionary of English

(written in 2010)

“WHY are you here? … What do you want from us? … Where are you from? … Are you of human origin? … In God’s name, I demand that you identify yourself and your nature! …”

But Cindy had already sensed what was creating the havoc at Brockesville High School, and her strong-willed personality compelled her to make an attempt at extracting from the entity its true diabolical nature and specific intent there.

“Maybe you should leave it be, Dee, or maybe try that less abrasive EVP thing,” advised her mother, standing in the doorway to her room. “Maybe you’ll just manage to piss it off, honey.”

Cindy preferred her mom’s shortened version of her name—Dee—because it omitted the ‘sin’ in ‘Cin-dy’; therefore it enabled her to ignore to a greater extent the many mean-spirited schoolmates who profanely verbalized their fear of her unorthodox insight into the unseen realm.

Not interested in artificial contact by means of ‘electronic voice phenomena’ nor intimidated by malicious spirits, Cindy maintained her consciousness simultaneously in both the physical world and that of the extra-dimensional.

“By the power of almighty God, you must reveal your identity and what you want with the people at Brockesville High!”

There was only silence in the room for the following few moments before she, still sitting cross-legged, looked up into her mother’s worried eyes and explained, “It hesitated for a while, but it finally told me what it is and its name. Also, it revealed what it plans for the school.”

“It’s nice that you’re happy with your spiritual accomplishments, Dee, but you really need to think more about your health, to fully consider your heart’s condition.”

Cindy, however, considered the condition of her heart to be well enough. Besides, she sensed that the spirit wouldn’t cause her serious harm. Plus, over time she’d found that she was not prone to any form of possession, be it a spirit of human or diabolical nature. Perhaps out of naiveté, she felt a sense of invulnerability.

The diabolical spirit or “diabolic” (Cindy’s reference) called itself Elevant and claimed to be the sole demon connected to the school. It also revealed that it occasionally followed Cindy home then invaded her dreams. In some nightmares, such as the one she endured the night prior, it vividly visualized for her all of the untimely and violent death that occurred at the school because of its insidious influence over decades.

“It really considers all of that enormous suffering it caused as just an average day’s work,” Cindy vented in frustration.

She shortly later accessed both the local library and high school archives in search of little known, if at all, Brockesville High history, specific information and events that her own psychic sensitivities failed to expose.

Taking only twenty minutes of archival perusal, she quickly learned that during the late 1940s and early 1950s a vicious outbreak of influenza within the Brockesville area filled the local hospital dangerously over capacity mostly with gravely ill teenagers. Therefore, the high school, which was closed to prevent greater transmittance of infection, was utilized as space to sanitarily house and care for the surplus number of seriously sick. The final death toll from the outbreak included seven of the flu-stricken teens who’d perished at the school’s makeshift hospital. It wasn’t until two years later that the long-since-disinfected school hastily reopened to house many of the town’s rapidly growing high-school-aged demographic.

But it would be five decades after its reopening that the truly horrific story commenced at Brockesville High.

Loner student pair Tim Williams and Allan McCallester, both seventeen and weary of the relentless bullying served them by three peers in particular—Patrick Grevenson, Joel Steiner and Daryl Reese.

Openly and persistently, the two misfits were taunted, being openly called “losers,” “faggots” and, especially intimidating to the pair, “dead men” almost every time the bullies would physically as well as psychologically bump into them while walking the school’s hallways.

So, with the final straws having broken their backs, Tim and Allan thoroughly expressed their burdensome frustration one foggy Fall morning via AK-47 assault rifles. They fully opened up on their entire classroom of thirty-one students, including their three aforementioned school-punk peers.

“You pricks are about to go to Hell. Say hello to Hitler for me!” crowed one of the two gunners, Grevenson told police investigators in the hospital eight days after his awakening from a coma. He nervously noted how the two wore gratified grins as they fired over a hundred rounds of armor-piercing bullets. Ironically, though, the two gunners failed to kill off Grevenson, coincidentally the worst of their high-school tormentors, who was the sole survivor of the massacre (albeit having been hit twice in the torso). The pair feeling satisfied that they’d sufficiently expressed their unforgettable displeasure with the school, each put a fatal bullet through his own heart with the same .45-caliber handgun.

But Cindy felt assured that the pair would imminently in death accomplish in entirety what they’d failed to do during their last moments of life—‘finish off’ Patrick, the last of the lot who’d barely escaped his comeuppance.

While accompanied by another schoolmate late one afternoon, he was completing an assignment in the very same classroom in which the mass shooting had taken place, Patrick was said to have frantically shrieked out something about seeing the apparitions of all the bloodied, bullet-ridden students who’d been massacred.

Horrified, he desperately yet futilely tried to evade the frightening specters by way of the classroom door.

“I saw him barely able to pull the door open six inches but then being hindered by something that seemed to force the door back closed,” said the lone-witness schoolmate that same day to police with a bewildered expression.

“Although … I can’t explain it, but I could swear there was nothing on the other side of the door, at least nothing visible through the door window.”

Finally unable to further tolerate the ghastly vision, Patrick, by then completely out of mind, leapt right through a classroom windowpane, four floors up. He was killed almost immediately upon impact, his body covered in cuts and shards of broken glass.

Cindy told her mother the following day of having on two occasions witnessed Patrick’s translucent spirit accompanied by those of his two bully buddies.

“They’re still sticking together, like peas in a pod, as they—completely unseen, of course—bump shoulders with living students they deem deserving of their harassment. You know, Mom, I can sense from them that they’re actually completely oblivious to their non-corporeal existence.”

As for the massacre, when flowers were left in memoriam by the sealed door of the classroom shooting site, their pedals totally withered within seconds to witnesses’ sickened astonishment. Then immediately following the shocking sight came an inexplicable intolerable putrid odor.

Cindy knew that it was the deed of the demon, Elevant.

Shamefully, many students who were averagely bullied would pass their troubles onto the most helplessly bullied amongst the entire student body. Meanwhile Elevant, although having fully enjoyed the plentiful suffering caused by such collective pass-it-along abuse, felt only contempt for all bullies as well as their prey.

The bullies also induced against themselves the most contempt from the other human spirits.

“They are the real cowards—‘they’ being those who pass down their turmoil onto the weakest students. We should show them what’s real high school misery!” Cindy told her mother that she sensed from Elevant and the human souls.

She also knew that it furthermore had been maliciously manipulating the typically malleable minds of the bodily students that were being weakened by the bullies’ abuse; thus she counselled the weakened ones to completely shun the way of the gun or any form of violence—to not choose the brutally lost way of Tim and Allan.

Upon arriving at the school the same morning as she had learned so much about Elevant, Cindy was told by her schoolmate and sole friend, Justine, all about some fascinating paranormal events that had occurred in the gymnasium.

She informed Cindy that two fellow students had reportedly heard what sounded like dozens of simultaneous “whispers” emanating from the large storage space for sports equipment beneath the stage, there.

What made it all exceptionally creepy was that the ghostly event had occurred precisely where the young influenza victims’ portable bunk beds were stored immediately upon being thoroughly disinfected five decades prior. They included many beds that had been used by sick teens who had succumbed to their unrelenting illness. Before being eventually forgotten, it was initially thought during the early 1950s that the beds might also be of future use, with due note that nothing was to be wasted during the Korean War.

Also noteworthy was that in November of 2005, about a year before those disembodied whispers were encountered, the school’s janitor was in the process of attempting to remove the decrepit beds for disposal when “I was stunned dumbfounded by a large lot of murmuring, all at the same time. Then it all got louder and louder and louder! That’s when I’d had enough and left.”

Irregardless, when told by the school’s principal, who wasn’t without empathy towards the janitor’s understandable anxiety, that the bunk beds still required disposal the janitor quite reluctantly went back at it. The janitor later reported for the written record that, “At first they simply would not budge; but when I finally managed to yank two of the beds out a foot or so they were instantly forced back in with a strong jerk—and twice as hard, at that!”

When some fellow school staff tried to give him a much-needed hand at pulling out the beds from the storage space once and for all, again they were forcefully yanked back in by the same unseen forces that finally loudly squeaked out a collective “No! They all stay here!”

It wasn’t even a week later that a student working alone in the school’s machine shop was stunned so incapacitated by a horrific distorted apparition that he inadvertently cut off his thumb with an electronic saw.

Meanwhile, desks in many classrooms aggressively moved about, by all accounts, on their own accord. In a classroom attended by only two girls, one was pinned by her shoulders against the chalkboard by an unseen force; and when she screamed out in terror it let out an equally loud shriek.

Then there was the paranormal lunchroom food-fight: One boy almost lost an eye to a flying eating utensil, one of very many, all apparently propelled by themselves. Resultantly a female student then ran screaming to the girls washroom where she had later reported to some teachers that multiple ghostly hands molested her until she finally bolted out of the washroom, screaming even louder: “It was like something straight out of one of those cliché Hollywood B-movies, you know, with the lame meaningless shower scene and all,” she’d told other students soon afterwards while trembling uncontrollably.

Cindy sensed that the very aggressive paranormal activity originated from a trio of “especially corrupted human entities definitely attracted to the energy aftershock from the very difficult deaths during the school’s intensely unpleasant history,” she stated confidently. “But they’re exceptionally attracted to the extremely embittered, angry energy lingering there since the Tim and Allan atrocity.”

On some occasions the raucous like that of a multitude of musical instruments could be heard playing in the totally unattended music classrooms. It would almost always repeatedly play to the tune of the once-popular Tequila, for hours on end, and wouldn’t cease that day until some students or staff dared to enter the classroom and demand (on unsurprisingly shaky terms) for it all to immediately stop.

Perhaps most notable was the borderline-nervous-breakdown gym teacher who’d resigned his post after thirty-three years at Brockesville High because of the weekly occurrence (every Wednesday) of multiple phantom basketball slaps against the gymnasium floor. They always disturbingly sounded at the same 8 – 9 a.m. hour, which was in fact the precise class timeslot during which six members of the school basketball team were murdered by the maddened duo Tim and Allan.

Soon enough, the school was pasted with its own gossip-prone label, as that of “the Brockesville High haunting.” And of course the further the news would have to travel, all the less serious it would be taken. Cindy herself noted with some frustration how, unfortunately, this haunting like most wouldn’t be acknowledged for they consisted of seemingly-typical spectral appearances and non-severe attacks, plus only relatively small numbers of witnesses had come forward officially with their harrowing experiences.

Cindy also knew that there was considerable non-sentient residual haunts at the school, mostly as a result of the large quantity of extremely negative emotions remaining ingrained in the physical environment following the horrific mass shooting.

And while Elevant misleadingly paraded itself as a human entity, Cindy alone could distinguish between it and the truly human spirits, with most of the latter existing in “a state of unawareness.”

Even with all of the Earthly and other-worldly suffering that took place 24/7 and the accompanying unclean spirits, Cindy maintained her belief in a good Creator who “cares very much about Creation.” While always acknowledging how typically predictable her spiritual convictions sounded she’d then emphasize her belief that the souls destined for the white-lighted tunnel would go there immediately upon their bodily death. The souls that didn’t cross over right away were destined to remain within an extra-dimensional form of the Earthly plane, though usually in some manner connected to the location of their death, “until they’re ready for the other side.” The remainder, Cindy also believed, go the way of the Godless realm, “and likely learn upon arriving there that it is indeed where they truly belong.”

It would soon enough happen, however, that Cindy personally experienced the other side upon her untimely death due to a congenitally malformed aortic valve, a condition much exacerbated by the additional stress of dealing with extremely active paranormal activity.

But on the positive side of matters there the terribly tragic, traumatic Tim and Allan massacre directly expeditiously brought about into being school-based programs on a national scale to dramatically reduce or preferably outright eliminate schoolyard bullying and similar domino-effect destructive behavior.

To the present day, Cindy’s ghost is said by some to be occasionally observed on the high school’s grounds. According to her mother, “I believe that Dee is more than welcome to enter Paradise, when she desires and decides to go; but apparently she feels like staying another while, for whatever reason.”^■

(Frank Sterle Jr.)

Something In This House: A Ghost Story

(written in Autumn 1992)

“IT really is a beautiful house; nowhere near a mansion, but elegant nonetheless,” Vera reassured her husband, turning her head to him.

Though Steven focused his attention on the road ahead, his wife noticed how the bright, late-morning, November sunlight was cutting through the crisp, cold air outside and piercing the driver’s side window. The sunlight landing on Steven somewhat illuminated his earlobe-length, chestnut hair, leaving Vera to relish how nice he’d look with a moustache of the same color. She also noticed the sunlight flickering off of the thick, 24K-gold chain and Christ-bearing crucifix around his neck; she also felt that such pure gold would look far better on a black T-shirt instead of the white one he was wearing, with his worn Levi’s denim jeans.

“Why hasn’t your sister sold it to somebody else, by now?” Steven asked, anxiousness in his voice. “Plus why so cheap? And even so much more cheaper to us?”

“I already told you,” she firmly yet patiently replied, “Mom and Dad made Alley promise that she’d somehow keep the house in the family.”

Neither said anything more after that, until they reached Charlottetown.

Although Vera didn’t mind leaving Toronto, Steven did. His psychiatrist told him to either get away from the stressful urban setting or eventually be admitted to a hospital psyche-ward. He’d studied for and earned an advanced degree in structural engineering, and now it seemed that he didn’t have the nerves to cope with the stress-load of designing, mostly, large bridges—i.e. with many lives depending on his competence—throughout Canada and the United States. (He did, however, feel good and particular pride in having played a large role in the construction of the longest bridge in the Western hemisphere: the thirteen kilometer Confederation Bridge, which he’d likely be crossing fairly often while living in the ‘Garden Province.’) He felt even worse knowing that Vera had sold her small seamstress business to have more time for her on-the-edge husband.

Regardless, both intended to try to make the best of their big move from Ontario to Prince Edward Island.

“Make a left here, on Hemlock,” she instructed, while pointing. “There it is—#476—the one with the old oak in the backyard. The place hasn’t changed a bit.”

Getting out of the car, Vera walked towards the front door while gazing at the three-leveled structure (including the attic floor but not the basement). Despite its considerable age, the house’s recent white coat of paint gave it a respectable appearance, somewhat like a brand new three-piece suit and snazzy tie on an old man. Perhaps most noticeable was the double-door, front entrance being preceded by a small portico.

Her hand shading her eyes from the sunlight, Vera was hypnotically-like fixated on the house, penetrating its walls with her memories.

“C’mon, Steve; let’s go in!” she enthused, spinning around to lead him in by the hand. “Steve?”

Vera looked to her right and left, then made a full rotation: “Steve?” she called out, making her way towards one end of the house, then the other. “Where are you?”

Becoming a bit impatient, she peeked around the corner, where she found him squatting and staring down into the house’s basement, past the opened root-cellar shutter doors.

“Steve? Didn’t you hear me call? … Steve!?” Vera insisted on receiving a reply from hubby, though before looking up to the house’s two attic dormer windows. It was as though she’d been mentally beckoned to acknowledge a presence beyond from those windows. Staring into them, a blank expression on her face, she thought how those windows, each sectioned into quarters by perpendicular wood strips, looked to her like angry eyes; and the root cellar entrance, through which Steven was still looking down, looked like an angry mouth. She recalled how twenty-eight years earlier (especially around Halloween), she, a little five-year-old, and her sister Alley would pretend that the house was indeed possessed by an aggressive spirit, which expressed its displeasure through those angry eyes and mouth.

Inhaling deeply, Steven looked up to his seemingly entranced wife. “Look at these doors,” he said, breaking Vera from her hypnotic gaze at the windows. “They must be at least a couple hundred years old.”

Vera, ignoring the old shutter doors themselves, peered down the stairway leading into stark darkness. As she gazed, her straight, chest-length, thick, blond hair—indeed so shiny clean and smooth that one could tell she meticulously grooms it—slipped onto her light-brown brows, somewhat covering her baby-blue eyes. Pulling her hair back, she said, “It’s so bright out here, you can’t see a single thing down there.” Shutting the root-cellar doors, she asked Steven, “How did you unlock them? Weren’t they locked?”

“Ahhh, no, they were unlocked.”

“Alley must’ve left them unlocked—I can’t believe it!” Vera incredulously assumed, without hesitation. “Figures; she never did give a damn about my security … Whatever; let’s get inside.”

They went back around to the front of the house, to its main entrance door, where Vera futilely searched her purse for the house key she was sure Alley gave her before they’d left Toronto.

“Where’s that damn key?” she muttered with frustration. “I know I didn’t leave it behind at Alley’s.” And Steven standing right behind her, though not saying anything, seemed to only agitate her somewhat over the matter.

“I can’t find the damn key Alley gave us!” she snapped, pulling her hand from her purse, shrugging her shoulders in angered bewilderment. “I must’ve gotten it from her.”

“Calm down, hon. We’ll get a locksmith over,” he reassured her as he, perhaps out of instinct to ensure that it was in fact locked, grasped the doorknob and turned it. “Hey, look—it’s unlocked.”

Vera stood there rather stunned. “I don’t believe it,” she said, exasperated, looking at her husband, “That bitch! How could she be so careless and inconsiderate?!”

“Well, we might as well go inside,” Steven suggested, pushing open the door.

Inside, the house was left waiting for them indeed the way promised by Alley. All of the furnishings were covered with plain-white, cotton sheets; and everything expected was there: the carpeting, beds, cleaned bathrooms, electricity and water works. Directly ahead from where they stood, across the living room, was the kitchen entrance, an opening in the shape of a stereotypical gravestone. The kitchen had checkered, light-orange and dark-brown linoleum floor tiles, on which stood the General Electric appliances, all eggshell white. However, the walls, which had the same orange color of the floor tiles, were bare of any paintings, pictures, portraits or ornaments, etcetera. Adjacent to the kitchen entrance by about two meters was a plain, solid-wood door to the stairwell leading to the completely-below-ground-level basement. And adjacent to that door was the beginning of the rather-extensive hallway, which itself led towards one side of the house but then made a ninety degree left turn towards the rear of the residence, ending near a sliding-glass, back door. On the other side of the kitchen entrance, again by about two metres, was the ground floor’s sole washroom, with all of its contents (including the walls) of a uniformly, bright peach pink colour. The hallway, like the rest of the house (except the kitchen and attic), was covered with crimson-red carpeting; and its walling, from which hung an old family portrait, was painted beige.

The living-room was unremarkable, with its all-maple furniture consisting of a leg-less coffee table (with a beverage-cup ring stain at one end), a dominating compartment at its mid-section, a long black-leather couch which appeared quite comfortable, two lamp tables (basically looking much like the coffee table though holding atypically plain-looking lamps), one at either end of the couch, and a twenty-four inch Electrohome color television set. The living-room walls were an off-white color with another though more recent family portrait (the subjects of which were all about five years older than they were in the first portrait) hanging a meter above the TV set; a large sliding-glass door faced the street, its curtains, not surprising, crimson red quite like the residence’s dominating carpeting color.

Opposite of the basement stairwell door, at the hallway’s entrance near the kitchen entrance, was the stairwell leading up to the second floor—a stairwell followed up on both sides by the fancy, Cherry-wood railings. The second floor’s three sole bedrooms and one bathroom, to fulfill the wishes of Vera’s mother (while alive), were all painted sky blue. Just past the third and final bedroom, at the end of the hall, was the stairwell (albeit relatively short) to the attic, and except for its two dormer windows and the cardboard boxes brimming with old things and outgrown clothes, everything sat Oak-wooden and vacant.

Vera wasted no time in going through the house, ASAP, to pull off all of the covers from whatever they were covering and opening every closed set of curtains. The curtains opened, bright daylight burst into each room, illuminating all of the disturbed films of dust. Man, look at that dust! she thought, deciding that the house’s every orifice should be opened for much-needed ventilation, though she settled for a couple windows.

On her way to the kitchen to check on the appliances, Vera recalled her sister telling her that the refrigerator would be freshly stocked the day before they were to arrive. It was all so convenient—until she opened the refrigerator door and was greeted by a blast of foul, rotting odor. All perishable foods inside (the meat, vegetables and fruit) were of the ghoulish, gray-green color of mould. It’s as though they’ve been sitting in a dead fridge for months, she noted to herself. “My God! How!? … Oh, shit!”

Pulling suitcases from the car, Steven mentally experienced an irresistible compulsion to gaze up at the second-floor bedroom window. His chestnut-brown eyes stared through the window as though he might see his wife up there looking back down at him. “Hmmm … ,” he hummed before getting back to business, grabbing the last suitcase. Locking the car doors, his arms full, he made his way back to the house; and that’s when everything in his head began to spin.

Instantly dropping the suitcases, he closed his eyes for a moment then slowly opened them. Rather than subsiding as he’d hoped, the spinning decided to suddenly

move to his stomach, which he covered with his arms. It was like there was a rodent down in there, racing along the walls of his stomach, causing the organ to rapidly rotate. He was sure he would vomit.

“Steve?” The sudden sound of his wife’s gentle voice seemed to release his whirling gut. Steven inhaled deeply, then picked up the suitcases lying all around him on the gravel driveway.

“I must’ve gotten up too quickly,” he mumbled to himself, making his way back to the house.

Closing the door after him and leaving the suitcases on the living room floor, Steven’s attention was attracted to the sudden activation of the television set. He stared at the set with mystified eyes as the stations changed, one by one, about a second between changes.

There must be a crossing of remote signals with one of the neighbors who are watching TV, he thought, dismissively. That thought, however, was just before he noticed that the TV-set channel knob was turning by itself. And this isn’t even a remote-controlled set, he realized. “What in the hell is going on?” he quietly demanded, just prior to being startled by a tap on the basement stairwell door behind him.

“Steve?” came the muffled voice from the other side of the door.

“Oh; it’s Vera,” he said, with considerable relief, and opened the door for her.

“What’re you watching, Steve? Babewatch?” Vera snickered, knowing full well that her husband did not in the least like her suggesting that he watched such carnal programming (“I was only checking out the boat they’re driving,” he would claim when caught watching Baywatch).

“No, I’m not watching ‘Babewatch’,” he snapped, sarcastically. “The TV’s going crazy. Look,” he said, turning his head to the television set.

“What? What’s wrong with it?” she asked, peering around Steven’s five-foot-eleven-inch frame, and at the set. “It’s not even on.”

Steven was quite perplexed and very much looked it. “A second ago, it was … ,” he explained, but paused, “ … it was changing channels by itself. I’m telling you.”

Vera was too enthralled by being back, after so many years, in her childhood residence to worry about the crossed wires, or whatever, of a television set. She turned around and looked down at the knob of the basement stairwell door. “Oh, yeah; that’s right—it locks from this side,” she realized. “We’ve got to change the doorknob or something.”

Steven was still left mesmerized by the mystery of the changing channels but nevertheless turned his attention away from the set and onto his wife. “What were you doing down there, anyway?” he questioned her.

“I went to see if there’s any unspoiled food in the deep freeze, but the lid’s jammed.” She shrugged her shoulders, before realizing that she still hadn’t informed her husband of the rotten food. “We were left with a fridge full of moldy food, you know.”

“What do you mean, ‘full of moldy food’?” Steven asked. “All of it? What, isn’t the fridge working?”

“Yup,” Vera returned, shaking her head, “and I called the power company; they said this area hasn’t had an outage in over six months.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to go to the store, then; though I’m not at all hungry,” he reluctantly volunteered, recalling the recent urge to throw up onto the driveway. “But I still want to try and pry open the deep freeze … ” He then smiled and interlocked his fingers onto the back of his head: “Actually, I think I’ll take a nap first; do you mind?”

“Not at all,” his wife replied, sympathetically. “You do look tired.”

As Steven hauled the suitcases upstairs and helped himself to one of the beds, Vera emptied the spoiled food from the refrigerator into a Glad garbage bag and dumped it into the waste can outside.

Although he slept well the night before, Steven was sleepy and felt that he needed a daytime nap, as though he was four years old rather than his thirty-four years. He didn’t even think about exploring what may be for him and Vera the rooms of a house in which they would live for quite some time. Right now all I need is a bed, he thought, turning into the closest bedroom. It was only one-thirty in the afternoon, but he nonetheless needed some decent shut-eye.

Unlike Steven, though, Vera was hungry; and, not feeling like making the trip into town to the grocery store, she decided to whip up a batch of pancakes from the Aunt Jemima dry mix she’d found in the cupboard. The mix, and the adjacent preservative-filled pancake syrup, didn’t appear to be too old for human consumption.

As Vera poured the mix into a bowl—“at least Alley didn’t screw me up in the dish department,” she mumbled—an uncontrollable stream of memories and thoughts flooded her mind. She went into such deep memory and thought that all she could see were the images in her mind’s eye—a mental plane on which she was simultaneously conscious and lost in a trance.

Vera found herself standing before a heart-shaped mirror in the bathroom of what appeared to her to be a hotel honeymoon suite. She donned nothing but a purple, thigh-length nightie (the one her new husband had just bought for her), and she was slowly brushing her just-washed hair. In the mirror, she could see, through the open bathroom doorway, Steven standing by the double bed and releasing a few drops of Old Spice onto his hands; he rubbed his palms over his bare, muscular stomach and neck before running his fingers through his hair. Turning to his fresh bride, he smiled at her reflected face, pulling and snapping the elastic waist band on the front of his poppy-red boxer shorts (the ones his new wife had just bought for him). She smiled back at him as he tiptoed up behind her, pretending that she couldn’t see him. She looked back at her own reflection as she made one last brush stroke. She then looked back at the man—for he now was some stranger she’d never seen before—who wrapped his brawny, tanned arms around her neck and passionately kissed her neck, while sliding his hands onto her breasts. His arms and hands were chilly, which somewhat puzzled Vera, for she didn’t feel the environment’s temperature to be any less than comfortable. He looked up into her reflected face, his dark brown eyes piercing her eyes, and he gave her a mischievous grin. His hair was thick, intensely feathered and as dark as his heavy moustache. Who is he? Vera thought; however, her feelings toward him were the same feelings she felt for Steven and, hence, felt no reason to resist. In fact, she was quite turned on. The coldness of his hands caused goose pimples to erect on her skin, yet Vera—for some reason, she hadn’t a clue as to why—did not at all mind, but in fact rather liked it. The coldness seemed to her to make her feel ever more alive. His hands then slid down the front of her nightie as she closed her eyes and titled her head to one side to allow her lover’s face as much room as possible. With his hands on the front of Vera’s bare thighs, he slowly ran his hands up under her nightie and up onto her firm belly; he began sliding his hands onto her waist, then back onto her belly, making ever so sure that he caressed her smooth skin without tickling her.

“Mmmm,” she moaned with pleasure, as his hands slowly moved up onto her breasts, pressing her nipples.

The image of their lovemaking in the heart-shaped mirror grew fainter, with the effect of some sort of worsening tunnel vision. The kitchen counter suddenly appeared to her, but she still felt the hands.

“Steven—come on, I’m busy.” But the hands continued. “Steven, I’m not into it right now,” she blurted and broke free of the engulfing arms and hands. However, the groping was instantly replaced by what felt to her like an abrupt rush of blood up into her head; and she supported herself by leaning onto the counter while taking deep breaths.

“Steven?” she asked, between breaths, gradually regaining her composure. “Steven, where are you? … Steven, you’re acting like a clown, you know.”

Finally able to stand on her own, Vera turned and started towards the living room. Just when she was walking through the tombstone-shaped kitchen entrance, she quite clearly heard heavy footsteps racing up the stairs and into the bedroom, in which Steven was napping, followed by the door shutting. Looking up the stairwell, Vera grinned; she dismissed the entire event as an erotic daydream resulting from a very spontaneous urge for sex and her husband’s great timing. “Stevie, you prankster,” she said, and went back into the kitchen to her pancake mix.

STEVEN awoke into darkness. He thought about the nightmare he had just endured and rubbed the back of his hand on his lower back. It felt sore, as though he had been poked. Although he couldn’t really understand why, he felt rushes of fear, like alternating hot and cold flushes, surging through his entire body. “That is weird,” he mumbled. And why can’t I remember even coming in here? Man, I must’ve been really sleepy.

Again, Steven thought about his bad dream—one unlike anything he’d had before: In it, he was laying on an inflatable mattress floating about what seemed to him to be a mile up in the air. As he lay there, something—it was like a bony finger, he recalled hypothesizing while in his dream—was jabbing him up into his lower back; something which must have been inside the mattress, he thought. He recalled freaking out in the dream at the very idea of there being something alive in the inflatable mattress.

Steven began to feel quite on edge; and he also felt like he was starting to dislike the house. “Get a hold of yourself, Steve,” he demanded of himself, turning on his watch’s night light to check the time, then getting up out of bed. It was ten-nineteen at night. “And get that freezer opened so you might not have to go to the store.”

Opening the bedroom door and starting down the stairs, he could hear the sound of stations changing on the television set. The channels are turning again, he mentally alerted himself.

“Oh, shit, not again,” Steven groaned, loud enough for Vera to hear him.

“Steve? Is that you?”

“Vera?” he returned, very much relieved. He continued down the stairs, and he bit by bit could see his wife kneeling on the carpet with her hand on the TV set’s knob; her head was slightly turned facing Steven.

“So, did you have a good snooze? Or are your hands still tired?” she asked, insinuatingly, with grinning lips.

“What do you mean ‘tired’ hands?” he returned, rubbing his still-sore back. But ignoring her query, he inquired, “Did you try the deep freeze again?”

“No; I thought you were going to,” Vera innocently replied. “The flashlight is on the kitchen table.”

With reluctance, Steven made his way below with flashlight in hand (he never did like going down a flight of stairs into a basement, especially a basement so new to him). He could hear the light buzzing of the freezer’s motor and moved the light beam towards the noise until the light connected with the cream-colored, cubical appliance. He hesitantly made his way towards the machine.

It was then that his heart stopped. The icy thing that ran up along his forehead and into his hair was not what Steven was at all expecting. His arms went out of his immediate control and spastically thrashed at the light bulb and the on/off chain, both hanging from the ceiling, breaking the bulb in the process. With pieces of bulb glass raining down on him, Steven instinctively shielded his head with his arms. For a couple of seconds, he didn’t know what the hell had happened.

Back in control of his senses, he stepped up to the freezer and pulled up on the lid’s handle. It wouldn’t budge, and yet there was no keyhole or apparent locking mechanism.

Then came a mental voice in his mind saying that the problem may be located behind the deep freeze. He illuminated the sides of the freezer and moved himself around to one side where he could feel the rear of the lid. Stretching his fingers, he could decipher that there was about twelve inches between the freezer and the brick wall behind it. The root cellar must be on the other side, he figured. He moved into a position in which he could shine the light behind the freezer to get some sort of clue as to what might possibly be holding down the lid—the little bit of effort couldn’t really hurt, he thought.

“What the Hell’s that?”

The dimmer outer edges of the ring of light caught the object wedged between the wall and freezer. Shifting the flashlight to his left hand, he reached down, grabbed the book-shaped object and pulled it out from its hiding spot. “It’s a photo album,” he said, shining light on it.

Steven was too curious to bother dusting off the album’s vinyl surface. He opened it and held the light to it. The first page held four photographs: one was of a baby; two were of Vera’s younger sister, Alley, in her mid teens; and the fourth photo, taken at about the same time as the previous two pictures, was of Alley and Vera. Vera being only one year older, they could have passed as childhood friends. Steven anxiously flipped a clump of pages, which led him near the album’s end; there, he found another photo of Alley (again in her mid teens) standing outside the house, adjacent to the front door. Also on the page, below the photo, was a yellowed newspaper clipping which read:

CHARLOTTETOWN, October 14, 1967—The bodies of two men and a woman, all appearing to be in their late twenties, were discovered yesterday morning inside a residence at the north end of town. The deaths have been classified as a double homicide and suicide or, according to police Constable Jeff O’Hagal, “possibly a homicide and double suicide”. The two deceased males, each of whom had a gunshot wound on the right side of his head, were known to be good friends.

            The bodies were discovered by a neighbor who had heard gun shots in the early morning hours. The neighbor, who wishes to remain anonymous, minutes later went next door where he found the female laying in the open doorway of the residence’s rear entrance, bleeding from a bullet wound to the back of her head. Police, who were immediately called to the scene at 476 Hemlock Drive, believe she was trying to flee the scene when she was shot.

“Oh, Jesus, that’s right here,” murmured Steven. “This must’ve happened just a couple years before Vera’s family moved in.”

Upon entering the basement of the residence, the story went on, police discovered the two deceased males, one of which tightly held a handgun. Police found identification on the bodies but would not release their names until the notification of next of kin. The residence is owned by the currently vacationing parents of one of the deceased males.

            Police did however disclose that the female was a local Sunday school teacher whose husband had reported her missing the night before; and the two males were known to authorities and some area residents as having been involved in occult activity. “They [dead men] often referred to themselves as ‘Beelzebub’s Boys’,” said O’Hagal.

Steven stood there quite stunned. Nonetheless, he immediately felt compelled to turn the page, where he found another yellowed newspaper clipping:

CHARLOTTETOWN, October 18, 1967—Police investigators have discovered that finger prints gathered at the scene of a grisly Island murder in June, 1965, match those of the two men found shot dead along with a woman last week at 476 Hemlock Drive. “They’re definitely a match,” said police Constable Jeff O’Hagal.

            The two deceased males have been identified as life-long Charlottetown residents Billy Snarden and Lorne Pettersberg, aged 27 and 29, respectively; the deceased female, a city resident who appears to have been raped before her murder, has been identified as 26-year-old Susan McPhelson.

            The June, 1965, murder of drifter Thomas Parks, whose carcass was discovered in downtown St. Peters with its skin completely removed, had until now been unsolved.

“That bitch,” Steven grumbled. “No wonder she has this place so cheap on the market.”

He snapped the album shut, with intent to whirl around and run to and up the stairs. But he was violently foiled: Steven found himself falling hard onto the cement floor and gasping for breath; it felt to him like a fist had smashed into the mid section of his back. The flashlight was history, and he knew it, for it was launched out from Steven’s grip and into some dark corner of the basement, its small bulb shattered.

“Oh, God,” he groaned in pain, desperately gasping for air. Gradually, he collected himself up onto his hands and knees, but only to receive a swift kick up into his gut. It took a good thirty seconds for Steven to get back up on his feet and twice turn around. “Where the hell are you, you son of a bitch?!” he screamed into mostly darkness. His left arm was embracing his battered abdomen as he held up his clenched right fist. “Where the Hell are you?!”

The only light leaking into the basement’s darkness was that coming down the stairwell from the living room.

But no one was there. He looked up at the stairwell door and decided to make a run for it. He thought he was going to make it; however, when he reached the top of the stairs and the open doorway, it was as though he’d run hard head first into an invisible wall.

IT was at the bottom of the stairwell that Steven regained consciousness. He gave his head a slight shake and noticed that daylight from the now overcast sky was illuminating the light-brown curtains covering the two basement windows. Looking at his watch, he saw it was nine-fourteen in the morning.

The creep must be long gone, Steven concluded. However, it was ever so much occurring to him that perhaps nobody—at least not in physical form—was there.

It was during that thought that Steven suddenly felt a deep cold all around him, accompanied by a very foul odor, which reminded him of those rotten-egg-like farts that reek up the entire room when released. With the chill and stink, which were getting even worse, came two shoves to Steven’s chest—not hard enough to knock him down but enough to (he would later say) knock a little dose of reality into him.

Having observed that the shoves originated out of nothingness, Steven decided that’s it, I’m getting the Hell out of this house.

He looked up the stairwell and went for it, thinking that if he very soon did not get out of that basement he might not live to greet noon. He made it up the stairs, through the doorway and into the living room. Surprised that he wasn’t intercepted by whatever had attacked him, Steven turned around to look down the stairs to see if he was followed by anything receivable by the eye’s retina. Nothing. Except for that coldness and stench, which had become even more intense.

Then came the convincing sign of what he had most feared: On its own accord the basement stairwell door slammed shut with such great force that the house shook as though hit by an earth tremor.

“Why did you slam the door?” came the inquisitive voice from behind him. Vera, who had just awoke from the couch, stood there with an innocent and bewildered facial expression. “What’s the matter? Were you down there all night?”

“Vera, we have to get out of here—out of this house!” Steven insisted, still breathing heavily. “There’s something very wrong with this place. My God, this can’t be happening.” He now seemed to be addressing only himself.

“What do you mean, get out of here?” she asked, incredulously, “we just got here.”

“Vera, let’s go!” he frantically ordered her. “I’ll explain in the car.” He gripped her arm and started gently pulling her towards the front door.

“Steven, what’s with you? Let go!” she shouted, yanking her arm out from his grip.

“Vera, come … ,” he began to say but was interrupted by thumping—then becoming loud banging—within the hallway wall. The banging, a couple seconds apart, moved down the hall and around the bend, a ninety-degree right turn towards the back door. There, near the back door, a last thunderous slam inside the wall reverberated throughout the entire house.

The two looked into each other’s wide-open eyes. Steven, with his wife right behind him, crept down the hallway. He flicked on the hall light and clenched his slightly raised fists. Reaching the bend, he poked his head forward to peek around the corner.

Nothing was there (visible, anyhow); except for the back door, which held a twenty-square-inch window and led out to a small patio. Steven was just turning his head to look at Vera when the gold chain around his neck instantaneously, and firmly, tightened. Whatever had Steven’s necklace strangling his throat also pushed him back against the wall and held him there.

“Vera,” he gasped, trying desperately but unsuccessfully to slide his fingers between the constricting gold chain and his choked neck. The small amount of air he managed to inhale through his nose revealed that familiar cold, foul stench. “Vera, help me.”

Steven was beginning to feel the consequences of a brain almost completely deprived of oxygen. A cynical voice in his dying mind reminded him that he wouldn’t be in this deadly mess had he not been so materialistic and vain in his insistence on acquiring a thick and very strong gold chain to go with the gold Christ-bearing crucifix; and, added the cynical—the evil—mental voice, was it not bitterly ironic that this symbol of Jesus Christ the Savior, rather than ‘saving’ him, was going to kill him.

Starting to black out, Steven, realizing that this was his very last chance at sustaining his life, allocated all of his remaining strength in finally getting his fingers underneath the constricted gold chain and lunged his upper body forward.

The gold chain snapped, and he was left on his hands and knees. His neck gradually allowed more and more air into his lungs. Following a head rush, his vision and cerebral capacity slowly normalized.

“Vera?” He turned his head to look at his wife. “Why didn’t you … ,” Steven said before drifting off.

His eyes met the broken gold chain and crucifix lying on the carpeted floor, and he slowly reached out his shaky hand to retrieve the gold. But he was beaten to it. The broken trinket appeared to throw itself up, on about a forty-five degree angle, into the air and around the hallway bend.

“What the … ,” he muttered in utter disbelief. He saw it but still couldn’t really comprehend what was happening—his human instinct wanted to deny anything that was unnatural. And what to him was almost as unnatural as a self-propelling inanimate object was the sight of his stone-faced wife appearing from around the bend. Both of her arms hung at her sides, but one of her hands held his broken jewelry. Then her blank stare at Steven, who could once again sense that cold stench, became bold, yet quite unwarranted, rage.

“Why are you playing these head games with me, Steve?!” Vera demanded. “Either you settle down in this damned house or leave!”

Steven was astonished by what he was hearing. Can’t she see that something very wrong is happening here? he thought.

“There’s something in this house,” he told Vera. “I’m going to leave, but I am not going to leave you here.”

“I want you to leave, now,” she replied bluntly. “You never did want to live here. This is where I’m going to live forever.”

“What’s got into you, Vera? Why are you talking like this?”

“Leave, now, Steve.”

“I’m not leaving you behind,” he insisted, gripping her arm.

“Let go!” she yelled, pulling her arm free. “Now get the hell out!”

Though completely stunned, Steven realized that his wife, in her current state of mind, was not about to leave the house willingly, and he wasn’t about to physically force her. He knew that he had to leave, immediately, on his feet, or else he would be leaving in a body bag. And maybe when she comes back to her senses, he thought, she’ll see the proverbial light and then want to leave.

“If you don’t come back to me,” he solemnly promised, “I will come back for you, hon.”

Steven turned, and, before he could reach for the doorknob, something twisted the knob and slammed the door open, barely missing him as he jumped back. The force of the door slamming open drove a pocket of cold outdoors air accompanied by that rotting stench into his face.

He marched through the doorway and onto the patio. There he saw what he always had thought was only seen in movies like Poltergeist. And he finally saw what had been viciously assaulting him almost to death.

The four entities—and Steven was sure they were indeed ghosts—stood (or, more accurately, floated) on the lawn only about two meters from the Oak tree. Although they were translucent—like holograms which were devoid of color and seemed to fade into nothingness just below the knees—Steven could discern that two of them were male; both stared at Steven and were approximately his own build and height. The third entity was female, and the fourth was but a complete blur. One of the male spirits was standing to the fore, and he beheld a facial expression—and only their faces could be made out—which a living, decent human being could only describe as malevolent and sinister. The second, adjacent male entity stood about three feet to the left and two feet behind the first entity (as though he was somehow subservient to the first); the look on his face was one of somewhat subdued contempt and malice. The female spirit, which stood at a height of around five foot six and about three feet behind the second male ghost (they could not be called men), had a pitifully sad expression that stared down at the grass.

My God. Could these be … ? Steven asked himself, could these be the three people that … ? He then looked at the fourth entity. But who—what—is that?

It was then that the female and two male spirits drifted, one behind the other, over the lawn toward the house. Gradually, each sunk into the ground as he or she approached the side of the house; and, one by one, each was absorbed into the wall and down into the basement where, some three decades earlier, each left the physical world for eternity.

“Holy shit,” Steven whispered. He then looked back at the remaining entity, which had until then been faceless. The spirit drifted towards Steven and revealed its nature. Its face, becoming clearer, was one from a hairless and frightening being: its eyes were small, black and completely circular like coat buttons; its nose and mouth appeared to be somewhat humanoid but were definitely non-human, and the lips on what must have been its mouth were very thin and expressed unconditional malice.

The entity—a demon? Steven thought—moved forward up to the two stairs of the patio, only a couple meters from Steven. There, it simultaneously screamed and groaned—Steven was sure it was communicating its hatred of him—before bolting away at high speed, following the path of the three human spirits down into the basement.

For some seconds, Steven stood there feeling a mixture of utter astonishment and enlightenment. He then looked at his car and went for it. Starting the engine, he put it into reverse and floored the pedal, leaving behind a trail of airborne gravel dust.

On the highway out of Charlottetown, Steven recalled how he first met Vera, courted her—loving every second spent with her—and then married her, until death would them part. He clearly remembered all of the great times they had together. But then he chastised himself for recalling such great times as though they’d be the very last.

            If you don’t come back to me, then I’ll come back for you, he insisted of himself. You can count on it.^■

Frank Sterle Jr

Something In This House [Part 2]: A Closure

(written in Autumn 1994)

“VERA? … Vera?”

The house was gradually darkening following the sunset, and Steven’s eyes were adjusting to it.

“Vera?” he persisted, taking each step through the hallway with intervals of a few seconds. On one side of him was the doorway to his room, and about two meters after that on the opposite side of the hallway was Vera’s room. How did I get here? he asked himself. I don’t even remember coming back to this hellhole.

Slowly passing by the first doorway, a tangle of disembodied voices bombarded him from inside his room. To Steven, the voices did not seem to be saying anything, though he did receive an impression of displeasure from them.

“Vera?” he called, his next step placing him at the doorway of Vera’s room, “where are you?”

Steven gradually turned his head to look in to the room.

“Vera, wh … ,” he began to call again, but was abruptly interrupted by thunderous banging on the walls from within Vera’s room. He felt a rush of terror surge through his body. Nevertheless, he forced himself, though slowly, to go into that room and face the evil inside. The slams from within the walls were from a source fully aware of not only Steven’s presence but also of the object of his attention. For the banging stopped at the very second that his eyes met the horrendous sight. Before him, hanging from a thick noose, was his beloved wife. Her lifeless body was robed in a nightgown, which reached down to the ankles of her bare feet. On the floor below her was a wooden chair lying on its side.

“Oh, Jesus,” Steven moaned to himself in agony, beholding the lifeless body of his best friend and lover. He looked at her face and her half-closed eyes. “Oh, Vera, what’ve you done. Oh, God!”

He put his hands to his face as he began to bitterly weep. The fear that had dominated him had suddenly turned into sadness and then anger; the combination of the emotions left him trembling.

“You bastards!” he yelled out to the entities. “You sons of bitches!”

Almost immediately, Steven got a response. Vera’s corpse, as though being pulled by an invisible force to one side by her feet, swung away from Steven before coming back at him twice as fast. Standing there stunned and frozen—why can’t I move?—Steven received a swift blow to his face by his dead wife’s feet, a blow which drove him backwards with a great force.

Before his back could slam against the wall, he woke up, letting out a loud yell into the darkness of his hotel room. He sat up in his bed and slid his fingers through his sweat-damped hair. He was fully awake, and everything came back to him: arriving at and being driven from the house by spirits intent on not having him reside there; and, worst of all, having to leave his beloved Vera at that place.

            Why would she want to stay there? he queried himself. Didn’t she see them? Couldn’t she see what was going on? It was as though her brain was in some sort of suspended animation or something.

Steven straightway got up and felt the wall for the light switch in the early morning darkness of a little after four. The room illuminated, he sat on the foot-end of the bed in his usual sweatpants and T-shirt sleepwear. He needed immediate answers as to his wife’s inexplicably bizarre behavior, and thought about the photo album. He felt confidence in his original assumption upon finding it in the house’s basement that it must have belonged to Alley. Vera would never have kept from me such a history of her own home, he figured, grabbing his wallet from the night table to retrieve Alley’s law-firm business card. He turned it over to where she’d penned her private number, and picked up the phone receiver. He could feel his heart increasingly race as he dialed and listened to it ring three times.

“Hello,” came the sleepy voice at the other end.

“Hello?” Steven replied, “Alley?”

“Yeah; who’s this?”

“It’s Steve, your brother-in-law.”

“Oh, hi,” she said somewhat surprised. “Is everything all right?”

“Sorry about waking you up, Alley, but it couldn’t wait.”

“What is it?”

Steven hesitated for a second, wondering how in the world he was going to explain what had happened and how his sister-in-law would react to his explanation. “What is it? It’s that house, Alley, that’s what it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well … well there’s something there,” he began his task of telling a well-educated lawyer that the house in which she grew up is haunted by ghosts. “Something not right … something evil.”  There then was silence. “Hello? Alley?”

“I’m here, Steve,” she answered.

“I know this’ll sounds nuts, but I’m … ,” he began, before she politely cut him off.

“Actually, it doesn’t sound nuts at all,” she said. “I just figured that if it happened, it would’ve taken a while longer for things to happen and for you guys to notice.”

There was dead air, again.

“So you knew about … about them—the haunting,” said Steven, rather angrily. “And that was your photo album behind the deepfreeze. Why the hell didn’t you tell us? That was really … ”

“Wait a sec; my photo album? I didn’t have a photo album,” she returned. “I don’t have one—and never did.”

“What? It isn’t yours?”

“Nope. Besides my father, Vera was the only one in the family that had one; and Dad’s is here at my place.”

“My God. I can’t believe she would keep that house’s violent history from me. Her demeanor said ‘everything’s normal here’.”

“Violent history?”

“Yeah, a murder-suicide happened there!”

“A murder-suicide?!” Alley said, astonished. “What happened?”

“I take it Vera never told you, either,” Steven replied. “Two men—Satanists, in fact—shot dead a woman, who was a Sunday-school teacher, before they shot themselves. I think the woman’s body was found near the back door; the two guys were found dead in the basement.”

“Holy shit!”

“Yeah. And then the police learned that the two had skinned alive some drifter a couple years before. Like these guys were really evil.”

Alley’s brief response was preceded by three seconds of silence. “God!”

“Man, I still can’t believe Vera would keep all this from us for so long,” said Steven, “and I can’t believe she’s still willing to stay there regardless of that place’s background.”

“You know what, Steve?” Alley said, “I really don’t think it matters at all to

Vera how haunted the house is.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that Vera doesn’t fear ghosts; it’s hard to know if she even believes in them.”

Dead silence again. It then occurred to Steven that he could not recall a time when Vera and he had discussed the topic of ghosts and demons. “Why would she be like that?” he asked, “and why would she be so seemingly blind to what was practically right on top of her?”

“Her strange behavior very likely has something to do with the haunting,” Alley replied, and added, “and whatever is in the house is attracted to her.”

“What … What do you mean?”

“Just what I said—attracted to her. When we were little girls, I once awoke to the sound of groaning, but nobody was there. And when I looked across the room to Vera in her bed, she was actually levitating off of her mattress. I called out to her, but she seemed to be out cold.”

“She was floating in mid air and wouldn’t wake up?!”

“Yeah; she only came out of it when it let her back down,” Alley returned. “It was as though it got right inside her head, like it had mental control over her.”

“Wow, I’d never have believed it.”

“And the attraction went as far as being sexual. There was another time, when Vera was sixteen, that we were watching TV; and I was on the couch as she lay on the carpet. She rolled onto her back, and her face went completely blank—she just stared up at the ceiling. Then she slowly lifted up into the air, head first, until she just hung there, vertically. Then her nightgown slid up until its rim was to her chin, and her underwear slid down.”

“Oh Jesus!” said a stunned Steven.

“I could see her slightly move as it groped her.”

“Did it … ?” Steven attempted asking.

“I know what you’re thinking, and as far as I could tell, it didn’t penetrate her … as far as I could tell, anyway.”

“Actually,” Steven informed his sister-in-law, “from what I’ve seen, ‘it’ is actually ‘them’—there were four of them: two men, or they were men when they lived, and a woman who looked quite sad; the fourth was … well … I don’t think it ever was human.”

“You mean a demon of some sort?”

“Whatever it was, I could smell and feel its presence: a cold stench—a horrible, rotting-egg-like stench—would encircle me whenever something would move by itself.”

“You know what? I remember that, too,” said Alley. “At first I wasn’t sure Vera wasn’t just passing a wind that was catching a ride with a cold breeze through the house. But after a while I read up on typical hauntings and put two and two together … What else happened to you guys while you were there?”

“Nothing seemed to happen to Vera—at least that’s what she’d say if she were here right now; but she stayed behind, with the perception I was off the wall and screwing with her mind, that nothing at all was wrong. You know, it was just like with you two as girls, Alley—she seemed to be on another planet.”

Steven then put his thoughts to the beginning of his ordeal. “I remember when we got there, I was quite abnormally drawn to the storm shutters leading to the basement; which were unlocked, mind you. Vera assumed quite confidently that you had left them unlocked.”

“But I didn’t leave them unlocked; I locked everything up after myself the day I left the place,” Alley denied. “I know I didn’t leave them unlocked, because I’m a compulsive checker—I must’ve checked all the doors three times, for Christ sake!”

“Well the storm shutters and the front door were unlocked when we got there. And Vera was sure that she’d gotten the key from you.”

“I did give it to her—I had a copy of it made the day before. Maybe she dropped it on her way back to your car,” Alley said, adding cynically, “she’s like that. I’m surprised that she didn’t blame me for the missing key. When we were young, she thought that everything wrong was my fault. You know, Vera was convinced that Mom and Dad favored me, because I was the youngest; but the fact is, she was the favored one, and she was absolutely blind to that fact. And she hated me! You know what? I used to notice a coinciding of that unusual ‘cold stench’ with her displays of absolute hatred and contempt for me. Sure, she and I had many good times, but they seemed too few to me.”

“Hmm,” was Steven’s reply. He hadn’t known the other side of the proverbial coin of his wife’s and sister-in-law’s relationship.

“Anyways continue, Steve. Sorry for going on like that.”

“Not at all … Everything was okay until I took the luggage out from the car. I took one step, and my head started spinning. I thought I was going to puke, but then it stopped,” Steven began. “And when I walked into the living room, the TV set was on, and the channel knob and channels were turning by themselves; but when Vera came up from the basement, the turning stopped. And that night, I had the weirdest dream. In it I was way up in the air on some sort of mattress, with something bony poking me in the back, up through the mattress. Something was inside the mattress. And when I woke up, my back was sore!”

“What else happened?”

“Vera told me the freezer lid was jammed, so I went to check it out. Then that proverbial something-in-my-head told me to check around the box; and behind it on the floor, I found your—I mean Vera’s—photo album. I opened it and found the old newspaper clippings about the murder-suicide.”

Alley asked Steven to continue recounting his experience: “So is that when you left the house?” she asked, “after finding the photo album?”

“When I tried to run up the stairs to show Vera, I was viciously attacked; I was actually knocked out for some hours. And when I came to, I ran up the stairs, and the door slammed shut by itself behind me.”

“What did she say?”

“She asked me why I had slammed the door. When I told her we had to leave—that something was definitely wrong with that house—and took her by the arm, she got really angry with me. She simply didn’t want to leave. But then again, she didn’t get clobbered like I did, and she saw nothing wrong.”

“Then what happened?”

“There was intense banging along the hallway wall to the back door. Then they just about strangled me to death with my own gold chain.”

“Good God! Didn’t Vera help you?”

“No, she stayed around the corner out of view; but I don’t think she would’ve done anything to help me anyway,” added Steven. “And get this: my broken necklace flew up and around the hallway bend by itself. Finally, she came around the corner, with a blank stare and the necklace in her hand. When I asked why she didn’t come to help me and told her we had to leave, she got really pissed off at me; she asked me why I was playing head games with her. And that cold stench was there, too … ”

“ … Just like when Vera got viciously mad at me,” interrupted Alley, “that cold air and foul odor.”

“Yeah,” Steven returned, in an enlightened tone of voice. “Anyway, I tried to take her by the arm, but she absolutely refused to leave. She was convinced that it was all just me; she said that I never did like that house, that she was going to live there forever and that I should get the hell out.”

“That sounds like Vera,” said Alley.

“But that’s just it, Alley—that was not the Vera I married and lived with all these years. It was someone else, like she was possessed or something … Then I told her I’d be back for her, and that’s when I saw them, by the tree.”

“What did they do—just stand there?”

“At first. Then one by one the three human spirits floated down diagonally into the ground before disappearing into the basement’s outer wall. But the one that looked malicious, evil—actually its face was hideous—floated right up to me and screamed like nothing I’d ever heard before; that sound simply could not have come from anything human.”

“Then what?”

“Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to convince her to come, I drove off and came here, to this hotel.”

“Wow,” said Alley. “You know that if I hadn’t experienced what I had as a girl, I would not believe what you just told me, and I wouldn’t believe what I told you.”

“Yeah,” he absent-mindedly said. He was thinking about his wife mentally trapped in that house, and those thoughts rapidly became too much. “I can’t stand it—I simply have to get her out of there right now!”

“Do you want me to go with you? I have three days off; I could be out there in a couple of hours if I … ”

“No,” Steven cut her off, immediately deciding that, “it’s better if I go alone … less risk that way. Plus I want to go get her now.”

“But I could at least wait in the car and get help if you’re in there too long.”

“No, you can do that from your place. If I don’t call you back by two hours from now, call the cops, okay?”

“Yeah,” Alley replied, admitting to herself that she was actually relieved to not be accompanying her brother-in-law. “Be very careful.”

STEVEN’s thoughts, though free of caffeine, raced all the way to the house. He kept thinking about what he’d say to Vera to talk her into leaving that evil place—to convince her, once and for all, of what are spiritually occupying the residence which she grew up in and very much admires. If she absolutely refused to leave there just one day ago, why would she give in now? he asked himself. That’s assuming that she’s even still alive in that hellhole!

“Don’t even think it, Stevie,” he instantly corrected himself out loud. “She’s fine. And if they didn’t hurt her all those years, why now?”

The morning sun had just finished fully exposing itself as Steven turned onto Hemlock Avenue. He slowed the car down to a crawl turning into the driveway, shutting off the engine while still slightly rolling. He cringed as the gravel and tires ground together. The house looked dead from the outside. He left the keys in the ignition—I’m not going to be shuffling for them as I have to bolt out of here—and quietly opened the car door; he got out (with great effort not to grind the gravel beneath his sneakers) and gently closed the door. Slowly heading towards the front door, all the while looking up at the attic windows, he couldn’t brush off the sensation that he was being watched by something up there. A cliché, or what, he mentally snickered to himself, climbing the front-door stairway’s three steps.

The door was unlocked, though that fact didn’t surprise him. Steven wrapped his hand around the doorknob, preparing himself for whatever was inside. He opened the door and looked around the physically unoccupied living room. The early sunlight reached through the open doorway and across to the hallway. He looked past it all and into the kitchen, which was illuminated because its windows’ Venetian blinds were not released. It, too, was free of Vera’s presence. The pendulum on the clock on the kitchen wall was the only sound disturbing what would’ve been dead silence. But to Steven, the pendulum’s mellow rhythmic swinging seemed to be gradually getting louder, perhaps because he sensed other, ghostly movement in the house; he felt that the solitary sound of the pendulum was deceptive.

“Vera?” he called, his wide eyes scanning the environment. “Vera, where are you?”

Steven stepped inside, leaving the door ajar after him. Taking four more steps, toward the kitchen entrance, he looked around. He increased his visual scope to include the top of the stairway leading to the second floor. “Vera?”

At that point in his adrenaline rush, a vehicle speeding by outside would have startled him; so when the basement-stairway door before him and the front door behind him simultaneously slammed open and shut on that breezeless morning, he nearly blacked out from the shock. “Christ,” he gasped with his heart racing and legs trembling. “Oh, man.”

Then followed the cold stench. “Oh, no,” he mumbled, preparing himself for a brutal assault. But rather than simply go down as a victim, Steven mustered up the mental strength to yell at the entities: “I want my wife back, you dead stench-filled piece of shit!” His trembling fingers clenched into fists. “I’m taking her away from here!”

There was no response. Steven had prepared his average-sized body frame for a physical attack, but there was none. His fists gradually released back into trembling fingers, and his shaky hands dropped to his sides. He looked around for a sign of the entities—the proverbial swinging chandelier, if not something else—but there was nothing.

His heart rate approaching normal, he took a few more steps into the living room and toward the kitchen. “Vera, answer me, for Christ sake,” he called out, walking into the kitchen. “Vera!”

Then he heard it. Thumps from below came up the basement stairwell. Steven’s heart began racing again, and his adrenaline flowed. Somehow he knew that whatever was climbing those stairs was not his wife; he knew it, if not from intuition, then from the way it climbed the stairs—it simply did not sound like Vera.

He froze as the footsteps reached the closed door at the top of the stairwell; holding his breath, he couldn’t help but anticipate that the door was about to violently slam open. It didn’t.

Whatever had climbed the stairs apparently was not going to make the first move. Steven realized that he could either just stand there and wait for something to happen or else take the initiative and confront it.

Going for the same door which he had only a day earlier raced through and had slammed shut immediately afterwards, Steven tried to prepare himself for the malevolent force he expected to be awaiting him on the other side. He wrapped his trembling hand around the doorknob and slowly turned it.

When the door knob broke free from his grip and the door swung open independently of physical contact, he went numb and stood there, slack-jawed, staring down the empty stairway as a cold stench engulfed him. He could smell and feel the cold stench—the supernatural—leave him and flee up the second-floor stairway behind him. Quickly following that were two consecutive gushes of cold stench, swirling around him before slamming the door shut and also surging up the stairs toward the bedrooms. Steven turned his attention up in that direction, his face meeting the thunderous reverberation of the slamming upstairs-bedroom door—Vera’s bedroom door.

The ensuing silence didn’t fool him; and he knew that although the spirits were at that part of the house, he nonetheless had to go there, for that was where he was sure he’d find his wife.

Steven turned the rest of his body to the stairway and began his ascension. With each step, he planned his response to a physical assault by the entities. What can I do? he asked himself, rhetorically. I can’t even see it coming. Reaching the top of the stairs, then the closed door to Vera’s room, he attempted to brace himself physically and mentally for what was within.

He grasped the doorknob, turned it quickly and pushed it open with some evident authority. With only the foot of Vera’s bed in sight, Steven could see the bottom half of his wife’s pink nightgown and a protruding pair of pale-white feet. He took a few more steps, allowing him a greater view of Vera.

What Steven then saw was the end of his wife’s life and in an emotional sense the end of his own life. There she lay in her bloodstained bed, her arms and their cut wrists straight at her side with a large kitchen knife in her right hand. And perhaps such wounds not being enough to allow her life to completely drain from her body, a gash had also been made across her neck, severing her jugular.

Nausea overwhelmed Steven, and he felt as though he was about to faint; however, he was determined not to let himself lose consciousness at that time and place.

Walking slowly over to the bed’s footboard, he looked down at his dead wife’s face, her half-closed eyes still seeming to be looking back at him. He easily noticed her well-groomed, straight, blond hair; she had obviously very recently washed it (he could smell the delicious fragrance of her favorite scented shampoo) and brushed it thoroughly just before taking her life, making herself as presentable as possible without a professional beautician’s hand, all for whomever would find and remove her corpse.

“Why did you do it?” Steven cried, knowing that she hadn’t been depressed for the many years during which he’d known her. “They got inside your head, didn’t they … Those rotten bastards!!”

His initial fear replaced by utter despair, tears streaming down his cheeks, Steven then walked over to Vera’s side and lifted her limp body up into his arms. “I won’t leave you here—with them,” he mumbled before letting out a burst of heavy sob.

Looking around the room, he asserted, “I won’t leave her again!”

He left the room and descended the stairway without incident, although beginning to notice that he wasn’t at all fearful anymore of the spirits’ malicious potential. But with his wife—both lover and best friend—was dead, and, to his lamenting mind, what worse harm could conceivably come to him; they already did the most damage to his life which he felt was possible. And he felt no doubt that they’d indeed been the cause of Vera’s suicide, that they had screwed with her mind until she destroyed herself.

But stepping down from the last stair, Steven, for a brief moment, questioned whether the entities had really managed to destroy Vera, since before him stood a translucent image of Vera or her figure, though her deceased body hung from his arms. The energy that was her precious life force, her consciousness or soul, stood not even four meters away. Her spirit stared at him with a blank, emotionless expression on her ashen face. The rest of her, although not blurred, was indistinguishable but rather a grayish-white form that was neither naked nor clothed.

“Vera?” Steven gasped. “Vera? Is that really you?”

He glanced down at her corporeal form then back up to where he’d just seen her ghost, but she was gone, as was his fleeting glimmer of hope.

Then, considering what Vera’s spiritual presence would mean, he realized that he preferred the concept that the image of Vera’s ghost was naught but his aggrieved mind grasping for figurative straws. Because if it truly was her soul, he would really not be able to take Vera from there; she would remain there for as long as she felt such a strong attraction to that house, perhaps even much longer. Even worse, he would have to leave her consciousness behind in the company of them—the foul beings that had viciously attacked him and then drove Vera to kill herself.

Steven, gently placing Vera’s body onto the front passenger seat, intensely felt that there was but one positive thing he could do about his wife’s death, other than give her a beautiful funeral: He could capture the strongest essence of Vera in one particularly special memory and cherish it, as cliché-like as it sounded in his mind’s ear. A memory of a very special time: when they walked down the church aisle, hand in hand, to be wed—till death did them part.^■

Frank Sterle Jr