Haunter: Ghost-for-Hire (Chapter 01)

Chapter One

The house on Shilbert Lane is priced too good to be true. It’s old, a little rundown, and mossy tufts hang from the gutters and porch railings. Paint peels off like dead skin and the door hinges scream like a banshee. But as much as Jeremy Clive searched during due diligence, the only questionable issue about this long-abandoned house was that some husband murdered his wife in the nineteenth century. The woman’s spirit had since lingered in malice. In other words, superstition cheapened the property. It’s “haunted.” To the practical and agnostic, it's a perfect opportunity for flipping. Jeremy Clive stumbled upon a great investment.

Living in the dirt bag town of Yulesdale, Minnesota, Jeremy Clive is a high school football player turned ESPN couch potato the size of a bulldozer. He still eats with the same rigor his active teenage self did, but his lack of exercise has rendered those massive muscles to flub and fat. He has a career change every five to six years ranging from AutoZone clerk to Big-o-Tires serviceman. This house is the perfect change he needs. Real estate investments. He makes the move and packs up his equally hefty wife of seventeen years—platonically married, neither quite had the capacity for self-control in high school and religious parents blocked the abortion. Yup, coming along are his two bratty children, also stuffed up on soda, chips, and fast-food.

After a seventeen-hour drive with two moving trucks, an SUV, and an oversized pick-up truck—obviously a type of compensation—they arrived at the property. The driveway is a five hundred foot cracked and disfigured asphalt lane split by willow roots and shrubs. The house is a dim, vacant wreck. Inside the floorboards creak and the original color is lost to dust. The two children take a moment to glance up from the glow of their screens and give exasperated teenage sighs. Jeremy Clive, however, sets up shop and puts his wife to more cleaning work than she has done since becoming a teenage mother out of her depth.

And that’s when the weird stuff happens. They flick the lights on as dusk falls and work well into the night. The weak yellow glow warmly leaks from the windows into a weedy yard. Then the lights go off. A room here, a room there. Jeremy Clive checks the breakers and finds nothing popped. Floorboards creak in unexplored rooms, and dusty mirrors have lines traced reading ‘Get out’. But they attribute it to faulty wiring, old walls and floors, and perhaps someone tried a silly joke. They clean it and move on. A door slams in the upper rooms, loud and violent, rattles the walls and dirt showers to the ground. They race upstairs to find an old nursery room. A crib rocks gently, provoked from an unknown source, and Jeremy Clive’s wife almost has the nerve to believe the haunted history. Then they discover an open window and a brisk breeze.

Days pass. The anomalies continue. Each one gets explained away to the age of the house or the abounding weather. As the house becomes habitable the anomalies disappear. The creaking vanishes with polished and furnished floors. Carpets are replaced. Walls are repaired and repainted. Lights glow with a white-hot LEDs. The yard is cleared and a group of landscapers plant flower beds and trim the trees and shrubs. Months later, a housewarming party comes and goes with a small incident where the power went out and a door slammed above. Again, the wife, who miraculously lost a bit of weight, teases the idea of a haunt. But the party resumes with the hints of weeping coming from the old nursery–now a storage room. Again, a drunk was just using the sink to relieve herself.

So, time goes on and the house is clean, pristine with a property value predicted to skyrocket. In a few years’ time the equity will pay off and the Clive family will have stumbled across golden real-estate profits.

Or, at least, that’s what they believe.

#

First, work on the kids. Get the kids when they’re comfortable and unsuspecting. Tuesday night, sheets of rain lash the house and ominous thunder rumbles. The house creaks with an age that can’t be renovated away. The teenager lays under her sheets looking up… well, something she shouldn’t be… in the warm darkness, illuminated by her phone, she hears a whisper leak through the cracks, dripping into the room like rainwater.

At first, she’s confused, but as the sound grows more distinct, she realizes it’s more than just the sound of the rain’s assault. A baby is crying. Chills shiver down her spine at the paranormal echo. She raises her head above the sheets as a flash of silent lightning casts purple shadows across her room. Did the shadows tease a personage in the doorway? The open doorway. At first, her panic is of being caught and she locks her screen and plunges back under her sheets while the house settles into its creaks and moans.

Heartbeat thumping in the teen girl’s chest—faster than she’d felt since childhood—she gets up to shut the door checking against her memories, swearing she had closed it. Thunder, distant and quiet, resonates beyond the walls. She had closed the door, but such a memory is lost to her.

And as she stares down the long, dark hall. Shadows twist. She takes deep breaths and reminds herself they live in the middle of nowhere where the crime rate is all but zero—unlike the town of Mirian several miles north.

But she remembers the murder two centuries ago.

Lightning, closer this time, lights the room and the hallway beyond. Shadows flicker, distort, and a musty air like moldy drains fills her nose. Her eyes strain. The door to the storage room, the one that once had the old crib, the old nursery, is wide open. Was there a flutter? Did something move?

“Mom? Dad?” she calls to the empty hall.

Boom! The thunder cracks and the whole house trembles and a fresh onslaught of rain pours across the roof. The teenager yelps. Again, the house returns to its mournful hum except for an oscillating creaking coming from the old nursery.

“Mom? Dad?” she calls again. This time, heart near cardiac arrest, she quakes forward telling herself it’s only the storm. It’s always just the storm. It always has been.

Her bare feet step in cold, black puddles of water. Her stupid brother, she guesses, walked from the bathroom without toweling off. Yet, on late nights like this, there were always puddles of water and her brother always argued he toweled off thoroughly. Little droplets. The moldy smell. Was there a leak? She never heard dripping.

The oscillating creak continues. What is it? She crosses the hall. She turns her cellphone light on, and the white LED spills across the tangible shadows.

Creak, creak, creak, the floorboards weep as she steps on their soggy joints. Under her feet a whisper of a shadow passes. “What the…” she stammers, frozen in the doorway.

The crib, the very same one they had tossed away on the first day, lay in the room rocking back and forth. She steps in reaching forward to touch the crib. Hands tremble. Another close lightning flashes white, purple, and neon blue, casting shadows. A mirror off to the side of the crib. A ghastly woman stands, eyes wide, green skinned and sunken eyes. Teeth rotted, soul nothing but malice she screams at the teenager, fingernails scratching at the glass.

BOOM! The thunder cracks the air overhead not a second after the flash. The rafters of the house shake, dust and old horrors rain down. The mirror buckles forward and falls to the ground shattering and scattering glass in all directions.

The teen screams. Oh, does she scream. Eyes wide, she stumbles from the room, feet crunching over shattered glass. Her phone tumbles, hits the ground, and the screen sprouts spider web fractures.

Lights on. Brother, Mother, and Jeremy Clive all bound out of their rooms to find their daughter, bloodied feet and eyes bulging, curled up in the corner of her room. Tears flow down her face and it takes them minutes and minutes to get everything from her. When they check the storage room the mirror and its glass are indeed a mess, but there’s no cradle to be seen. No open window or gust can explain the crash.

“The… the… baby crib,” the girl weeps as her mother tries to pluck out glass and sterilize the wounds. “The… the baby crib was there again. A lady, a dead lady in the mirror.”

“What are you talking about? There is no crib, just the damn mirror you knocked over!” Jeremy Clive rationalizes. But the words, “No baby crib” sends his daughter into a flurry of tears.

Brother, sneering, perks up and jibes with a mock baby tone, “You got scared little baby sister?”

Mrs. Clive, also unnerved, flashes a deadly glare. “Go get her something to drink.”

Scowling, the rotund boy leaves the room. “I’ll go get her a drink,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“You do that,” Mrs. Clive says, panting from exertion.

So, the boy goes down the stairs and tries to flick the lights on, but the stairway light is unresponsive. No flicker, not even a buzz of electricity. “Dad! The light’s out again,” he says. Suspicions creep into his mind. His sister's delirium. The broken glass. He gulps but decides he isn’t a coward.

Jeremy Clive curses and also tries the stairwell switch in vain. “Stupid house. The electricians probably did it wrong again.” His daughter’s light and their room lights all still work, though he could swear they all connect to the same fuse.

Lightning flashes fill the room and thunderous booms shake the house’s eaves and jolt their bones.

The lights go out.

The daughter flings herself into a frenzy. Mrs. Clive holds her down putting more physical effort into her daughter than she’s done in years. Probably enough to make Jeremy Clive a bit jealous–considering their complacent marriage.

By now the boy is downstairs and stands in darkness. The thunder still echoes. He uses his cellphone light and pans across the room, barely bright enough to illuminate the kitchen. A shadow shifts in the corner and his heart jumps into his throat. He nearly screams but remembers how brave he wants to be. Another shift of the shadow and he yelps, but it’s simply the shadows beyond the windows, a tree swaying in the storm warped by the onslaught of rain.

And then all hell breaks loose. The lights return, nearly blinding the boy’s adjusted vision, the daughter lapses into a new bout of tears, and Mrs. Clive and Jeremy Clive both gasp in astonishment. The boy, scream caught in his throat, stammers backward as the same woman his sister described in the mirror crawls through the back door. Bulging, swollen, black pond water slops onto the floor from the tangled mass that was her hair. She garbles and gasps with yellow teeth and brackish fluids leak from behind blue, swollen lips. And the kid’s PJs darken and drip.

Soiled and in tears the screams finally break free. The boy rushes up the stairs in a flurry of overweight thumps. He reaches his parents, double chin jiggling, and cries, “The, the, the ghost!”

Jeremy Clive is beside himself with fury. The house, actually haunted? No, this is ridiculous, a prank from his distant neighbors. A trick of the night. All a dream.

But alas, he stomps downstairs with a baseball bat in hand and he arrives to a kitchen vacant of ghosts. Only the foul-smelling pond water pooled black on the newly laid vinyl flooring remains. Veins extend from his forehead. Religious-less and for lack of superstition, unlike his wife, he tries to feign explanation for what his mind cannot rationalize. He stands dumbfounded while an unseen ghost passes beneath his feet and between the trusses and wires and insulation. It races upstairs to the easier victims. Along the way, within the walls and spaces beneath the dusty steps, this spirit passes remnants of bones—from thumb shards to skull fragments to rib splinters. The husband, those centuries ago, was thorough to say the least.

Again, the lights go out.

The whole family, including Jeremy Clive, scream as the ghost of a drowned and sliced up woman appears dripping in the black hallway. Her eyes are now malevolent, and glow dull in the ambient light. Dripping, sliding, and stumbling along the hall, she leaves brackish handprints along the wall. She limps, a broken femur, bone white, gleams in the intermittent light.

The daughter, brother, and Mrs. Clive scream. Oh, do they scream. Jeremy Clive races up the stairs panting harder than his football days. He stops with his heart nearly caving into cardiac arrest. There she is, stained white evening dress, cyan-blue lips and pale pond-soaked cheeks—just as the property listing warned; The Murdered Maiden of Shilbert Lane. More lightning flashes and the house plunges into black. The thunder rumbles overhead. A disquieted silence settles, and the lights return, dim. The ghost is gone but a whisper flits through the house, an echo that remains after the thunder and screams.

“Leave, and never come back.”

They leave. They scramble to their SUV and skid off into the thunderstorm to huddle together through the night in a nearby motel.

#

And that, my reader, is what I like to call a bow-wrapped resolution. My service completed, the house once again stands abandoned. Jeremy Clive and his soiled, soaked family never to return. Furniture left abandoned, same with the fresh paint job, and the freshly refurbished yard.

Turns out, that old scam warning–if it’s too good to be true it probably is–also applies to old colonial era American housing in the deep south. Best think twice before flipping the old kudzu vine-consumed wreck.

After the house fell into definitive silence, morning light yet to touch upon the old but refurbished house, the maiden of Shilbert Lane stands on the porch. She overlooks the algae-crusted fountain and the cracked uneven parking lane. She sighs a little, almost content—if the dead ever are content.

A job well done for me.

One more ghost slides up next to her. Medium height, the essence of what used to be dirty blonde hair and twinkling hazel eyes and as handsome as a superstar. He glowed with victory and, well… alright that’s me, the ghost that actually did all the work.

She stares down the empty lane, eyes lonely. Black tailgate fumes of the diesel still hang and mix in the foggy air. “Will they come back?” she asks, worried. I’m worried she actually misses the stupid oafs.

“Probably not. If they do, it’d be to collect their personal items. But most consider it a lost cause,” I assure her.

“They won’t bring one of them exorcists, will they?”

“Might, but in this day and age, most people don’t believe in God, so they’ll nurse the PTSD with alcohol and maybe some therapy.”

“Will it bankrupt them?” she asks. Not hopeful, but with pity.

“What? Oh, maybe, unless he’s some rich investor or something. I wouldn’t pay any mind.”

“You really did a great service for me Mr. Haunter. I really do appreciate it.”

I nod and tip an imaginary hat towards her. You know, gentlemen like.

“You really are as good as they say. I’m lucky to have secured your services. They say you’re one of the best Ghost-for-Hire's out there,” she says.

“I’d argue the best, but you know, I’m biased,” I smile, and she does too. You know, for being an 1800’s girl brutally murdered by drowning and evisceration, and despite the sadness in her eyes, she’s quite pretty. How she couldn’t maintain the haunt herself, I can only guess, but a timid ghost is a timid ghost.

“Well, you should be left to your domain for another couple decades or so. Can’t make any promises, you never know what people will put up with. If you get any more infestation problems, just come find me. It was a pleasure to help a lovely maiden such as yourself.” I beam.

She flashes a weak smile and looks towards the dense bayou beyond her property. “Heaven forbid they come here.”

“Heaven forbids a lot of things, but unfortunately this isn’t one of them, but that’s why you’ve got us Ghost-for-Hire’s,” I say.

And with that I vanish to leave the Murdered Maiden of Shilbert Lane to her mourning, but not before I impart words of wisdom about haunting. I’m sure the the house will fall back into abandoned disrepair, and I reckon another dozen or so years will pass before another soul tries something as stupid as Jeremy Clive.