Soulful

An old house hidden among ancient trees and rustic landscape would have the mind think, what goes on behind the walls and closed doors? Who has lived there and who lives there now? What stories can be told of its past? They say a house has a soul. Is there one soul or many?

This house in particular has no soul, but it can and does feed on fear and sins. The stories that can be told of this 1800s mansion could be that of an impossible nightmare, triggering a heart to race and a body to sweat, to tell oneself “it was only a dream” when the body wakes.

However, inside these walls the nightmares are entirely real and when the next family moves in, the nightmare is inherited.

At this moment, if one were to drive by and wonder, the answer is that Casey and Justin have only two things on their mind: survival and escape.

Gripping her younger brother’s hand, Casey blindly leads Justin to anywhere that feels a bit safer than where they are right now. The darkened hallways and stairwells only swell the terror in her heart.

There were seven of them. Her father drowned in their backyard pool. Their younger sisters died in their sleep. Her mother, in emotional agony, threw herself from the window. Then, just moments ago, their elder brother, Aidan, had disappeared.

Still holding onto hope, Casey embraces the leadership role as she and Justin search for safety and their escape from whatever kind of Hell this house is.

Casey’s hand fumbles its way to a doorknob inside one of the too many stairwells. A chill spreads like a virus up her spine and into her head. Like a winter storm inside her body, her breath is taken and frost accumulates behind her eyes to obscure her vision. As she feels her mind beginning to freeze, she knew a decision must be made now.

Heart pounding, Casey forces open the door and pushes Justin in first to secure his safety. He falls forward with wide eyes and turns in anticipation for whatever might follow them in. Casey, though, couldn’t follow. The biting cold that had filled her lungs now feel like shards of ice, threatening every muscle in her throat, chest and along her spine. Justin’s terrified eyes meet Casey’s.

It’s funny. If a dream feels real enough, the dreamer forgets she’s in a dream at all. She may be running, but if her feet move it’s never quickly enough. The dreamer’s heart is racing, like the rising action of a thrilling story. When he does catch up, it doesn’t matter if the chaser grabs, calls out, kills, scares… the dreamer will wake.

What if she lets the inevitable happen? She’d wake to her family all with her, perhaps at the pool soaking up the sun? At the dinner table laughing about something Aidan did? Maybe this is just a nightmare. A nightmare that feels a month long.

A scream vibrates through her frozen ear drums. It sounds like Mom, sobbing over her dead children. But the voice changes on the next cry, becoming Aidan’s. “CASEY, please! Please, close the door! Casey!” It’s Justin. She can feel its terror.

The role of protector was thrust upon Casey, not Mom, the moment she pulled Dad out of the pool. Justin is only thirteen. Casey is seventeen. They’ve been through too much. Too much.

The frost behind her eyes thaws a bit, perhaps from warm tears and panicked heartbeats. She slams the door shut and it’s followed by a hard, quivering punch from outside. The knob crusts over with ice.

Justin is silent, standing breathless behind her. She can feel his terror subsiding and warmth slowly returns to her body.

Casey stares at the frozen door, accepting it as their shield now. She closes her eyes, lifts her hands to press on her tense shoulders, and an agonizing cry, unrecognizable, comes from her own mouth, forcing her to her knees.

The sorrow and depression and hopelessness had been sitting in her soul for too long, dropping deeper and deeper the longer she ignored it. She relived pulling her father’s bloodless body from the pool. Her mom just sat there, pale-faced, screaming internally while Casey pressed and pounded on her father’s still chest. While her tears dripped onto his colorless lips, she willed herself to be a Phoenix so the tears might bring him back. They didn’t.

Every emotion she buried away from her father’s death resurfaced when two weeks later she found her little sisters in that same motionless, colorless state. She screamed and sobbed until Aidan, Justin and her mother raced into the room. It was all in slow motion. Justin held Casey while Mom and Aidan tried to wake the girls, shouting, performing CPR, Aidan calling 9-1-1.

Her mom jumped from the window a week after, three days ago, but by then Casey had run out of tears to cry. Until now. She feels Justin’s arms around her as they were when they found their sisters. He holds her for as long as takes.

After a few shuddering breaths, Casey manages a few words. “Let’s get out of here.”

“But Aidan.” Justin wipes away a few of his escaped tears as he helps Casey to her feet.

“I know. We’ll have to hope we find him on the way out.” She looks at Justin, showing reluctance.

Justin had a hard time when Aidan left for high school and joined their baseball team, leaving Justin with the local club team that saw the two as infield legends. Justin stepped up though and he and his friend quickly became the next legends of the league. Then their family moved, and now Aidan is lost.

Casey takes Justin’s hand, about to say “we’ll find him,” but before the words leave her mouth, a low screeching sound comes from the back of the room. She instinctively throws Justin behind her and spots a shadow moving inside a closet. Justin’s nails dug into her forearm, but she could sense he was preparing to fight, ears perked and eyes scanning the room for weapons. Casey’s eyes were fixed on the shadow.

Justin finds a bat laying on the floor and Casey feels a bead of sweat run down her temple. She wipes it away, imagining the shadow as so many different things: hoping for Aidan, dreading a nightmarish monster…. She had not, however, imagined a young girl.

Peeking out from inside the closet, the girl revealed her very pale skin and long silvery-white hair, gazing innocently from piercingly blue eyes. She appeared very thin, like she’d been eating just enough to make it through the week.

“Who are you?” Casey breathes out, still alert but a bit more relaxed.

“Are you the only two left?” She says so softly that Casey responds with “what?”

“Mine is gone too,” she says.

“What is gone?” Justin had stepped out beside Casey after the girl’s reveal.

“My family. It’s just me.”

“What happened?” Casey’s heart is racing and her hands begin to sweat.

“What happened to yours?”

“You mean this has happened before?” Justin asks.

“It happens every time. He doesn’t leave any behind.”

“He?” Casey holds her breath.

“My brother called him a poltergeist. But he looks human to me.”

“You’ve seen him before?”

“Yes, but he hasn’t seen me. I use the tunnels inside the walls.”

“Tunnels.”

“Have you seen my brother?” Justin spits out, holding his breath, too.

“Not in the tunnels. Come.” She crawls back inside the closet to show them the door of which she had come out. It matches the door to the room- wooden with iron bars securing it to the hinge with a simple iron knob. There is just enough room between the door and the inside wall to step down a ladder to whatever lay beneath.

Casey’s logic is screaming “are you crazy?! This is straight out of some horror flick; the demon turns out to be the young girl that no one saw coming. Seriously, you’re going to just follow her into the tunnels inside the walls?”

Casey and Justin exchange glances. Are they really going to do this? What other option is there?

“Damn it,” Casey says under her breath, and takes the first step. The girl follows, and then Justin, closing the door behind him.

Everything is pitch black until the girl lights a torch, reminding Casey of how medieval times lit up basement prisons. Casey saw this more as comical, accepting her march into death’s arms. She should be freaking out, but instead she follows.

“What’s your name?” Casey asks after a few minutes. She hears her words roll into the tunnels.

The girl says nothing.

Maybe ten minutes later she stops at another door and turns.

“Do you want to run? It won’t be easy. If anyone understands, I do.”

This time, Casey says nothing. The girl opens the door and a wave of air carrying dread, blood and lingering screams from outside hits the three of them like a wall. Casey blinks as the torch’s fire becomes smoke and squints out into the night.

In front of her is Aidan. At first, he appeared to be floating, but she soon sees that his body is lain across the spiked fence that surrounds the house. Looking for only a second, she turns and begins to hyperventilate, pacing along the outside of the house. Oh, Aidan. What happened? What is happening? Who is this? Is this girl right- could they really be dealing with a poltergeist? Can it be killed, or should they run? Would he follow?

As if reading her mind, the girl says “he can’t leave the property line. Neither can the dead.”

“What would you have us do then? Hide in the tunnels like you’ve been doing this whole time? How long have you been here, anyway? And what is your name?”

“A bit over a year. I can’t do this alone.”

“Well that’s just great…,” Casey sinks to her knees again. She pulls at her hair, grits her teeth and wills her mind to go blank and reboot. Her parents’ car is up front. They’d need to run. What other choice is there?

She sighs and looks up at the girl.

“Are you coming?” Casey could see a small smile show at the corner of the girl’s lips.

The wind chased Casey, Justin and “tunnel girl,” screaming in their ears. Windows shattered as they passed. They covered their necks. Trees were thrown on their path. They jumped. Bricks flew at their heads. They ducked. The car waited for them with Dad’s spare key in the tire-well.

If one were to ask Casey every detail of those five minutes, she couldn’t do it. The cuts on her body, bruises up and down her arms and legs, leaves and twigs tangled in her hair… “what else do you need to know,” she would ask.

They only spoke of it once at Casey’s favorite 24/7 diner outside of town. That face in the wind that followed them to the property line was angry, betrayed, and purple-faced from the fight it just gave to keep them there.

The eyes, though. The eyes will haunt her as long as she lives. She could see her mom, her dad, Aidan, her sisters and too many more souls in those eyes, all crying to be let go. The mournful deaths of each life the poltergeist had taken was trapped in those eyes. Casey felt it. They almost made her stay so she could join them. Maybe then she’d be able to hug her mom once more.

She almost stayed, she recalled after the visit to the diner. They had just left the property line when she met eyes with the girl in the backseat.

“Samantha,” she had said.

Maybe there’s more to life.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” Casey whispers to the wind.