Short Story; The House With Yellow Trim
and part two...
Part 1
…exposition…
I have been back to Blackridge since then, my family still lives there and I visit every Christmas though I have built my own life far away. I’ve even driven past the house with sunny trim and sad windows though I will never go back inside. A new family lives there now; I’ve seen their children playing in the yard. It gives me a bittersweet feeling to see someone live life happily in that house. I am glad that they are well and safe but that happiness, that freedom, was bought with my family’s blood and tears. I buried so many dreams in that house, Julliard, playing concert violin for the New York Philharmonic though I have long since made my peace with that. I’ve never been one for dwelling on the past but that house was the beginning of it all, the start of the life I now lead and so, I think, it bears remembering.
The press of school and life eventually drove the memory of that moment of unreasonable blind terror out of my mind. Little things continued to happen around the house but nothing I connected then to any larger problem. It was simple things, like keys going missing or a coming home to a light on that you were certain you had turned off, certainly nothing that would make me think back to that icy slip of fear. There was a tense energy in the air at the time, but it had nothing to do with the house and everything to do with the Baby Surprise. My mother was nearing the end of her eighth month and we all were doing all we could to ensure that everything would go smoothly. Healthy or not a late forties pregnancy was not without risk no matter what steps you took. Worry and hormones had my parents’ tempers on a short fuse and Joey and I spent our time trying to be invisible. He spent most of his time playing video games in his room or camped out at a friend’s house to avoid being underfoot. I myself had restricted my violin practice sessions to school after my mother had yelled for fifteen minutes straight about not being able to think through all the racket before promptly bursting into tears.
It wouldn’t be until a few days before homecoming that something would happen again to make me take notice that not all was right with the house with the yellow trim. It was well into the witching hour when I was abruptly pulled from a sound sleep. I sat up in bed breathing hard as if I had just run a marathon. My room was dark and my curtains drawn so the only light source was the greenish glow of my digital clock on the bedside table. I looked around, trying to figure out what had woken me when my door creaked open. I froze; the memory of that terrible moment of fear slammed back into the forefront of my thoughts. Framed in the doorway was shadowy figure in the vague shape of a human but the darkness made it impossible to distinguish any features. I was once again assaulted by the terrible sensation of something staring at me. All the hair on the back of my neck stood on end and goose bumps broke out up and down my arms. I panted heavily trying to force air into my fear stalled lungs and I heard an echoing rasp of breath from the shadow in the doorway. I did the only sensible thing. I screamed.
All at once the sensations vanished, like a bubble had been pricked, as lights clicked on across the landing and down the hall. My father came stumbling into the room first, a baseball bat clutched in his hand.
“Sam? What is it? What’s wrong?” He asked looking around wildly for the source of my fear, as he fumbled along the wall for the light switch.
“There was someone, something in the doorway. It was looking at me Dad, it was just staring at me,” I babbled in between sobs. I clutched my blankets tight up to my chin, shivering and crying.
My father headed out of the room, presumably to search the house for the supposed intruder. I could hear my mother and brother calling out questions to him about what was going on but I was too scared to move. Something had been staring at me. It had opened the door and looked in at me. I sat there in the middle of my bed trying to calm my breathing. After a few minutes my father came back in, my mother and Joey in tow. I looked up at him.
“Did you see anyone? Did you find him?” I asked.
My father smoothed down his mustache. “Sam, honey I looked through the whole house. All the doors and windows are locked. Are you sure you didn’t just have a nightmare?”
“No,” I denied firmly. “It wasn’t a nightmare. I woke up and he was just standing there, staring at me!” I gestured at the door.
“Sweetheart,” my mother interjected. “You just had a nightmare. There is no one in the house.”
“God, still afraid of the dark?” Joey snorted. “You don’t have to wake everyone else up just because you are fraidy-cat.”
“Oh shut up, Joey,” I snapped.
“Alright,” my father held up a hand to forestall the impending argument. “The house is empty and locked up tight, let’s just everybody go back to bed.”
My family returned to their rooms, grumbling and yawning but I had no desire to go back to sleep. It wasn’t a nightmare, of that I was certain, but as to what it could be I had no answers. I slipped out of bed and walked over to my desk. I brought my laptop out of hibernation and pulled up my internet browser. I stared at the screen for long moments. I wasn’t sure what to do, afraid to name my suspicions even to myself. Finally I drew a deep breath and typed one word into the search engine: hauntings.
I arrived early at school the next day, even more so then normal, and headed straight for the music room. Much to my surprise Tavy was already there, sitting in the dim light cast by the front florescent lights which were the only ones on, and idly strumming a guitar. He was dressed in a rather subdued manner for him wearing dark red pinstriped trousers and waistcoat with the sleeves of his button-up rolled up past his elbows and a black fedora cocked jauntily on his head. He looked up as I came in and set aside his guitar.
“Oh, morning Tavy,” I greeted him, a little startled. What was he doing skulking around in the dark at a quarter ‘til seven in the morning?
He watched me carefully for a few moments, looking more serious then I had ever seen him. Then he seemed to come to some conclusion and he flashed me his usual mischievous smile. “Good morning, Sammy my dear. What brings you to school so early?”
“Violin practice,” I replied slumping in the chair next to him. It was sort of the truth but I was trying very hard not to think of the real reason I was out of the house so early. “What about you?”
He shrugged. “Nowhere else to be.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I replied. It was unlike Tavy to volunteer information about his life like that.
“Come now Sammy, if I had a life outside of this school don’t you think you would have seen me in town by now?” He pressed.
I frowned, unsure of where this conversation was going. Tavy had to pick today of all days to suddenly be forthcoming. “What are you saying Tavy?”
“Nothing,” he replied with cheerful calm. “Everything. It all depends on how you look at it.”
I groaned mentally; it was going to be one of those days with him. Every now and then, with no discernable pattern, Tavy would start talking utter nonsense. Every word that fell out of his mouth was a riddle or just plain fruit loops, and I was far too tired and troubled to want to puzzle it out.
“Look, Tavy I’ve had a long night. Can you maybe talk sense for a bit?” I asked plaintively.
“Sense is entirely relevant to the grid you are looking through at the moment,” Tavy replied. “I take it the ghosts at 523 kept you up last night?”
“Tavy, I’m not really in…wait, what did you just say?” Tavy’s words finally registered in my brain. I snapped my head up to stare at him.
He was munching happily on one of his damn yellow apples and watching me calmly through serious green eyes. He swallowed and smiled brightly at me.
“I asked if the ghosts in your house were keeping you up at night,” he repeated.
I could only stare at him in open mouth shock. I was accustomed to Tavy seeming to have exclusive knowledge of all the comings and goings at Castor-Winston and even occasionally in Blackridge proper, but it was one thing to hear him relay his uncanny knowledge of others and another thing to hear him tell you something about you. It was something that I had barely admitted to myself let alone shared with other people. I opened and closed my mouth several times before I found my voice.
“Why would you say that?” I hedged carefully.
“Well I know they’d bother me, but I’m not the one living there I suppose,” Tavy answered with a half-shrug.
“Why…what makes you think there are ghosts in my house?” I asked again. I was completely dumbfounded that he seemed to already know what I’d only just started to suspect.
“Because there are,” he replied, as calmly as if we were discussing our trig homework. “Four or five I would guess. Probably five, everything tends to happen in fives.”
“I thought that was threes?”
“Only if you’re Catholic.”
I shook my head, realizing we were getting off topic. “The point is Tavy, how do you know my house is haunted?”
“I consulted my pineal gland, and then I did some background research on the house just before you moved,” he said, taking another bite out of his apple.
“I don’t understand,” I said, starting to get upset and extremely unnerved. This wasn’t like Tavy at all.
Tavy smiled at me. “That’s quite alright, ‘there is no tyranny in the State of Confusion’ after all, but I can explain if you’d prefer.” He glanced up at the clock. “Although not right now as I am needed elsewhere and I’m running late.” He rose to his feet, moving his guitar around so that it hung from its sling along his back and grabbed his lime green shoulder bag.
“Wait, then when? You can’t just say shit like that then walk away,” I protested, following him as he made his way to the door.
He turned back to face me and pressed a new apple into the hand that I’d stretched out to grab a fist full of his waistcoat. I clutched the fruit reflexively. “Tonight, afterschool, we’ll go bowling. I can explain then.”
“Bowling,” I echoed incredulously. I was beyond confused. I’d never seen Tavy off of school grounds and I never expected him to invite me to a bowling alley of all places to have to give me an explanation.
Tavy nodded seriously. “It might take a while to explain and school isn’t really the best place for that,” he said as if that was supposed to make sense to me. “Grand revelations should always happen in bowling allies.” He gave me a wink and a jaunty salute and disappeared out the door, leaving me alone in the dim music room with more questions then I’d had when I came in.
I sat down again in the nearest chair and tried to make sense of what had just happened. Ghosts in my house, I’d already had a strong suspicion about that but that didn’t mean that I was certain. Tavy knowing was troubling. How had he known? Was he spying on me? Was it him that had been in the house last night and the ghost thing just something I’d imagined? I couldn’t see any other explanation making any sense, even if Tavy being a creepy stalker seemed somehow wrong to me.
When the bell for first period rang and Tavy once again slipped into the music room I caught his eyes, which had slid into a fathomless black, and gave him a pointed look. He better have a damn good explanation for tonight, because otherwise I might be in a lot of trouble. By lunch time I was completely preoccupied with Tavy and the potential haunting of my house, and Mac and Cricket had picked up on my mood.
“Alright, what’s up with you?” Mac said after the third time I’d zoned out in the middle of the conversation.
“Nothing,” I lied. My first reaction certainly wasn’t to just spill all my concerns right out. Normally I’d tell them everything, Mac and Cricket had always been the people I’d gone to when something was troubling me, but you can’t just go around saying you think your house is haunted. Things like that get you labeled as crazy.
“Bullshit,” Mac replied. The problem with hiding things from your best friends was that they usually knew when you were lying.
“It’s just…you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said after a moment. Both Mac and Cricket were watching me with concerned expressions and I felt guilty about concealing things from them.
“Try us,” Cricket encouraged.
I bit my lip in a nervous gesture. “I think my house is haunted,” I said softly.
“What?” Cricket raised her eyebrows in surprise but Mac just looked thoughtful.
“Huh,” Mac nodded to herself. “That actually explains a lot.”
I frowned a little. “Explains what?”
She shrugged, flicking her bangs back out of her eyes. “Little things; random cold spots, my keys being moved around all the time, the weirdo nightmares that I kept having. It’s why I’ve mostly been staying at Cricket’s.”
It was one of the most relieving things, to hear Mac say she’d noticed something off too. After my parents’ quick dismissal of what I had seen last night as my imagination, I’d been afraid that I was just going crazy. Some people might find it more comforting to think they are going crazy then being haunted, but for me, the validation that it wasn’t all in my head was about the best news I had heard all day. I decided then to keep what Tavy had said to me to myself, at least until he had a chance to explain. I wasn’t about to start accusing him of something until I’d heard what he had to say. Maybe I would have been less inclined to hear him out if I wasn’t used to the fact that Tavy seemed to have the low down on just about everything, but after three years of knowing him it was less troubling than it probably would have been coming from anyone else. I spent the rest of lunch relating what had happed to me to Mac and Cricket. Both of agreed to help me do some research on the subject and the history of the house, though I had a feeling that Tavy may be my best help there. Provided of course that he had been telling the truth.
Starlite Lanes was one of only three 24 hour business in Blackridge. One was the grocery store on Main Street, one was the Coffee house about three blocks from school and then there was the bowling alley. While Mike’s Coffee House was the late night hang out of all the students at Castor-Winston, the bowling alley was the turf belonging to the local public high school Mountain View High. Blackridge was a small town, but the class lines were distinct. Like me, the kids who attended Castor-Winston were usually the children of the wealthy. There were a few who had gotten in on a scholarship of sorts but that was usually because one of the parents on the school board had given the nod so to speak, like Cricket’s mother had done for Mac. The thing was that, kids from Mountain View didn’t set foot in the Coffee House and kids from Castor-Winston didn’t go to Starlite. It just wasn’t done. I was breaking at least a dozen of the unwritten rules of the town just by setting foot in the parking lot. I had changed out of my uniform and was wearing a pair of well worn jeans and a loose flannel shirt over my favorite black tank-top. I was trying to look as unnoticeable as possible and hoped no one would realize that I was a Panther and not a Thunderhawk. I had no idea why Tavy would want to meet here of all places unless he wanted to make sure no one at school saw us talking but that was way too covert spy-novel to make any sense.
I slipped in through the door trying to make myself as small as possible. The interior was dimly lit and the smell of alcohol and feet was overpowering. I could make out a few faces that I knew from elementary and middle school but they weren’t looking at me so I wouldn’t be recognized just yet. I found Tavy standing behind the shoe-rental counter. He was wearing his favorite plaid pants, this time with lime green suspenders dangling loose and an orange t-shirt with the word ‘fnord’ typed on it. He waved cheerfully at me when he caught my eye. To say I was startled would be an understatement. It never occurred to me that Tavy would have a job; I’d always wondered what he did outside of school but I’d never really pictured something like this. I walked over to him and leaned against the counter.
“You work here?” I asked.
Tavy shrugged. “Sort of; a friend of a friend owns it and I help out sometimes. I don’t officially work here but then not much of what I do is official anyways so it works out.”
“You said you’d explain what you meant by my house being haunted,” I reminded him.
Tavy nodded and motioned for one of his co-workers to take over. He led me over to one of the tables behind situated behind the far lane. I sat down and leaned back, waiting for his explanation.
“As you know, Blackridge was founded in the early nineteen hundreds. It was one of many mining towns in Arizona, though, it got a later start then many of the more famous ones like Jerome or Bisbee. Jonathan Blackhorse owned the mining rights to the Blackridge copper mine and was pretty much the father of the town.”
“Tavy, I did pay attention in history class; what does this have to do with my house?” I asked a touch impatiently; I knew all of this already.
He held up a hand. “Just bare with me. Jonathan Blackhorse had four children: three boys and a daughter named Emily. Emily married Alexander Friedman in the spring of 1941. They had one child, another girl they named Alexis. Alexis was born only six months after the wedding, which of course in those days would have been a huge subject for gossip. When Alexis was 19 she married a soldier by the name of George Whittler and they moved out of Blackridge to Phoenix. In the fall of 1953 George died and Alexis moved back home to Blackridge where she built a house on what was at that time Wisteria Lane. Four years later she would remarry and move to Flagstaff.
“The house was then bought by a young gentleman named Hans Dornburg. Hans worked as a dayshift manger at the cannery that Jonathan’s youngest son Harold had started about twenty years ago. The copper trade had dwindled with the end of the war and the mine was close to tapped out so the cannery was probably the only thing that kept the town from drying up completely like so many did. Hans married Elizabeth Cartwright that same year and she gave birth to a son named Nicolas. Nicolas inherited the house in after his father’s death though he would later move away and leave the house to his cousin, Walter James.”
The clatter of bowling pins and a shout broke the flow of the story and I turned my head to see who had gotten the strike. I noticed that I was receiving some curious glances and a I turned my face back to avoid recognition from the two girls whose lane we were behind. Tavy looked at me to make sure I was still following. I didn’t really see where this was going but I had promised to listen.
He took a deep breath and continued. “Now this is where it gets interesting. Walter wasn’t a very nice soul. He had a fondness for young girls about 14-17 years of age. A lethal fondness. When the police finally arrested him he’d raped and killed twelve girls. The bodies of eight of the girls were found buried in a nearby park but his first four victims, Holly Meyer, Susan James, Eliza Reynolds and Mary Kittson, were never found. It is assumed he buried them somewhere on his property, but police in those days didn’t have the man power or technology to tear apart the entire house looking for them, especially since Walter was already guaranteed the death sentence for the other eight.”
I don’t know how long I just stared at Tavy, trying to process what he had just told me. “So you’re saying that I have the ghost of a dead serial killer in my house?” I said at last.
Tavy shrugged, “Maybe him, his victims almost certainly.”
I was just about to reply when a woman walked over to our table. She was tall with deep black hair and sharp, laughing green eyes. I couldn’t tell exactly how old she was, older then I was certainly though her face showed no signs of age. I glanced at Tavy and I was startled to see his eyes had grown almost comically wide.
“Who’s your friend, Tavy?” She asked in a velvet voice that was probably the envy of every woman she’d ever met.
“Samantha,” I replied, offering my hand politely to shake.
“Eris,” the woman replied. She shook my hand, her skin almost fever-warm to the touch. She placed two fingers in the hollow of my throat and tapped gently. “Be well, Samantha.” She smiled briefly at a still gob smacked Tavy and walked off.
My hand flew to my neck where she had touched me and I was startled to feel the sensation of skin-warmed metal. Around my neck on a fine gold chain was a strange sort of yin yang emblem in gold and silver. On the silver side there was a golden apple in place of the traditional circle and on the gold side there was a silver pentagon. As far as I could tell there was no clasp on the chain though it was long enough to just slip over my head if I wanted.
Tavy chuckled in that sort of wry surprised manner people used when something happened that they didn’t expect but thought in hindsight they should have seen coming. “I knew She had taken an interest in you, but I didn’t actually expect Her to show up.”
“Who was that? Tavy, what the hell just happened?” I was looking around the bowling alley trying to catch sight of the woman again but I couldn’t seem to find her.
He shook his head. “Eris, well the Romans called Her Discordia but She usually goes with the Greek introduction.”
I gave him a hard look, my classical mythology memories kicking in. “Are you trying to tell me that was a goddess?” I asked skeptically.
“Of course not. You barely believe in ghosts at this point, I daren’t bring gods into the discussion. Let’s just say she’s an old friend and benefactor of mine who wanted to give you a gift.” He gestured at my necklace. “I’d keep it on if I was you, it’ll protect you a bit from the ghosts, among other things.”
I wasn’t sure what to think about him at that point, though years later I would realize how much worse things could have been for me had he not opened the door first instead of letting me get shoved through on my own. I regarded him from across the table, trying to make everything I had just heard fit into some recognizable pattern. It was one thing to have a new house filled with strange occurrences and inexplicable fears revealed to be supernatural, but to have it shown to you by someone so familiar made it seem all the more impossible and frightening. I was still deliberately shying away from the implications of the back haired woman and her strange charm, but I was beginning to accept that my house was haunted. I was also beginning to accept that Tavy was anything but an ordinary seventeen year old boy. I studied my friend carefully, my eyes tracing the once-familiar angles of his face before locking onto those ever-shifting eyes.
“What are you?” I asked bluntly.
Tavy flashed me a wry grin. “That’s another one I don’t think you are ready for just yet. Concentrate on the ghosts for now; you can worry about me later when your head isn’t about ready to explode.”
I decided that was sound advice since I could already feel the headache descending and dropped the subject. I was relatively okay with ghosts, since almost every family had a ghost story or two it was not completely out of my frame of reference, Tavy and Eris was something I wasn’t ready to speculate on.
Part 3
Part 1
…exposition…
I have been back to Blackridge since then, my family still lives there and I visit every Christmas though I have built my own life far away. I’ve even driven past the house with sunny trim and sad windows though I will never go back inside. A new family lives there now; I’ve seen their children playing in the yard. It gives me a bittersweet feeling to see someone live life happily in that house. I am glad that they are well and safe but that happiness, that freedom, was bought with my family’s blood and tears. I buried so many dreams in that house, Julliard, playing concert violin for the New York Philharmonic though I have long since made my peace with that. I’ve never been one for dwelling on the past but that house was the beginning of it all, the start of the life I now lead and so, I think, it bears remembering.
The press of school and life eventually drove the memory of that moment of unreasonable blind terror out of my mind. Little things continued to happen around the house but nothing I connected then to any larger problem. It was simple things, like keys going missing or a coming home to a light on that you were certain you had turned off, certainly nothing that would make me think back to that icy slip of fear. There was a tense energy in the air at the time, but it had nothing to do with the house and everything to do with the Baby Surprise. My mother was nearing the end of her eighth month and we all were doing all we could to ensure that everything would go smoothly. Healthy or not a late forties pregnancy was not without risk no matter what steps you took. Worry and hormones had my parents’ tempers on a short fuse and Joey and I spent our time trying to be invisible. He spent most of his time playing video games in his room or camped out at a friend’s house to avoid being underfoot. I myself had restricted my violin practice sessions to school after my mother had yelled for fifteen minutes straight about not being able to think through all the racket before promptly bursting into tears.
It wouldn’t be until a few days before homecoming that something would happen again to make me take notice that not all was right with the house with the yellow trim. It was well into the witching hour when I was abruptly pulled from a sound sleep. I sat up in bed breathing hard as if I had just run a marathon. My room was dark and my curtains drawn so the only light source was the greenish glow of my digital clock on the bedside table. I looked around, trying to figure out what had woken me when my door creaked open. I froze; the memory of that terrible moment of fear slammed back into the forefront of my thoughts. Framed in the doorway was shadowy figure in the vague shape of a human but the darkness made it impossible to distinguish any features. I was once again assaulted by the terrible sensation of something staring at me. All the hair on the back of my neck stood on end and goose bumps broke out up and down my arms. I panted heavily trying to force air into my fear stalled lungs and I heard an echoing rasp of breath from the shadow in the doorway. I did the only sensible thing. I screamed.
All at once the sensations vanished, like a bubble had been pricked, as lights clicked on across the landing and down the hall. My father came stumbling into the room first, a baseball bat clutched in his hand.
“Sam? What is it? What’s wrong?” He asked looking around wildly for the source of my fear, as he fumbled along the wall for the light switch.
“There was someone, something in the doorway. It was looking at me Dad, it was just staring at me,” I babbled in between sobs. I clutched my blankets tight up to my chin, shivering and crying.
My father headed out of the room, presumably to search the house for the supposed intruder. I could hear my mother and brother calling out questions to him about what was going on but I was too scared to move. Something had been staring at me. It had opened the door and looked in at me. I sat there in the middle of my bed trying to calm my breathing. After a few minutes my father came back in, my mother and Joey in tow. I looked up at him.
“Did you see anyone? Did you find him?” I asked.
My father smoothed down his mustache. “Sam, honey I looked through the whole house. All the doors and windows are locked. Are you sure you didn’t just have a nightmare?”
“No,” I denied firmly. “It wasn’t a nightmare. I woke up and he was just standing there, staring at me!” I gestured at the door.
“Sweetheart,” my mother interjected. “You just had a nightmare. There is no one in the house.”
“God, still afraid of the dark?” Joey snorted. “You don’t have to wake everyone else up just because you are fraidy-cat.”
“Oh shut up, Joey,” I snapped.
“Alright,” my father held up a hand to forestall the impending argument. “The house is empty and locked up tight, let’s just everybody go back to bed.”
My family returned to their rooms, grumbling and yawning but I had no desire to go back to sleep. It wasn’t a nightmare, of that I was certain, but as to what it could be I had no answers. I slipped out of bed and walked over to my desk. I brought my laptop out of hibernation and pulled up my internet browser. I stared at the screen for long moments. I wasn’t sure what to do, afraid to name my suspicions even to myself. Finally I drew a deep breath and typed one word into the search engine: hauntings.
I arrived early at school the next day, even more so then normal, and headed straight for the music room. Much to my surprise Tavy was already there, sitting in the dim light cast by the front florescent lights which were the only ones on, and idly strumming a guitar. He was dressed in a rather subdued manner for him wearing dark red pinstriped trousers and waistcoat with the sleeves of his button-up rolled up past his elbows and a black fedora cocked jauntily on his head. He looked up as I came in and set aside his guitar.
“Oh, morning Tavy,” I greeted him, a little startled. What was he doing skulking around in the dark at a quarter ‘til seven in the morning?
He watched me carefully for a few moments, looking more serious then I had ever seen him. Then he seemed to come to some conclusion and he flashed me his usual mischievous smile. “Good morning, Sammy my dear. What brings you to school so early?”
“Violin practice,” I replied slumping in the chair next to him. It was sort of the truth but I was trying very hard not to think of the real reason I was out of the house so early. “What about you?”
He shrugged. “Nowhere else to be.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I replied. It was unlike Tavy to volunteer information about his life like that.
“Come now Sammy, if I had a life outside of this school don’t you think you would have seen me in town by now?” He pressed.
I frowned, unsure of where this conversation was going. Tavy had to pick today of all days to suddenly be forthcoming. “What are you saying Tavy?”
“Nothing,” he replied with cheerful calm. “Everything. It all depends on how you look at it.”
I groaned mentally; it was going to be one of those days with him. Every now and then, with no discernable pattern, Tavy would start talking utter nonsense. Every word that fell out of his mouth was a riddle or just plain fruit loops, and I was far too tired and troubled to want to puzzle it out.
“Look, Tavy I’ve had a long night. Can you maybe talk sense for a bit?” I asked plaintively.
“Sense is entirely relevant to the grid you are looking through at the moment,” Tavy replied. “I take it the ghosts at 523 kept you up last night?”
“Tavy, I’m not really in…wait, what did you just say?” Tavy’s words finally registered in my brain. I snapped my head up to stare at him.
He was munching happily on one of his damn yellow apples and watching me calmly through serious green eyes. He swallowed and smiled brightly at me.
“I asked if the ghosts in your house were keeping you up at night,” he repeated.
I could only stare at him in open mouth shock. I was accustomed to Tavy seeming to have exclusive knowledge of all the comings and goings at Castor-Winston and even occasionally in Blackridge proper, but it was one thing to hear him relay his uncanny knowledge of others and another thing to hear him tell you something about you. It was something that I had barely admitted to myself let alone shared with other people. I opened and closed my mouth several times before I found my voice.
“Why would you say that?” I hedged carefully.
“Well I know they’d bother me, but I’m not the one living there I suppose,” Tavy answered with a half-shrug.
“Why…what makes you think there are ghosts in my house?” I asked again. I was completely dumbfounded that he seemed to already know what I’d only just started to suspect.
“Because there are,” he replied, as calmly as if we were discussing our trig homework. “Four or five I would guess. Probably five, everything tends to happen in fives.”
“I thought that was threes?”
“Only if you’re Catholic.”
I shook my head, realizing we were getting off topic. “The point is Tavy, how do you know my house is haunted?”
“I consulted my pineal gland, and then I did some background research on the house just before you moved,” he said, taking another bite out of his apple.
“I don’t understand,” I said, starting to get upset and extremely unnerved. This wasn’t like Tavy at all.
Tavy smiled at me. “That’s quite alright, ‘there is no tyranny in the State of Confusion’ after all, but I can explain if you’d prefer.” He glanced up at the clock. “Although not right now as I am needed elsewhere and I’m running late.” He rose to his feet, moving his guitar around so that it hung from its sling along his back and grabbed his lime green shoulder bag.
“Wait, then when? You can’t just say shit like that then walk away,” I protested, following him as he made his way to the door.
He turned back to face me and pressed a new apple into the hand that I’d stretched out to grab a fist full of his waistcoat. I clutched the fruit reflexively. “Tonight, afterschool, we’ll go bowling. I can explain then.”
“Bowling,” I echoed incredulously. I was beyond confused. I’d never seen Tavy off of school grounds and I never expected him to invite me to a bowling alley of all places to have to give me an explanation.
Tavy nodded seriously. “It might take a while to explain and school isn’t really the best place for that,” he said as if that was supposed to make sense to me. “Grand revelations should always happen in bowling allies.” He gave me a wink and a jaunty salute and disappeared out the door, leaving me alone in the dim music room with more questions then I’d had when I came in.
I sat down again in the nearest chair and tried to make sense of what had just happened. Ghosts in my house, I’d already had a strong suspicion about that but that didn’t mean that I was certain. Tavy knowing was troubling. How had he known? Was he spying on me? Was it him that had been in the house last night and the ghost thing just something I’d imagined? I couldn’t see any other explanation making any sense, even if Tavy being a creepy stalker seemed somehow wrong to me.
When the bell for first period rang and Tavy once again slipped into the music room I caught his eyes, which had slid into a fathomless black, and gave him a pointed look. He better have a damn good explanation for tonight, because otherwise I might be in a lot of trouble. By lunch time I was completely preoccupied with Tavy and the potential haunting of my house, and Mac and Cricket had picked up on my mood.
“Alright, what’s up with you?” Mac said after the third time I’d zoned out in the middle of the conversation.
“Nothing,” I lied. My first reaction certainly wasn’t to just spill all my concerns right out. Normally I’d tell them everything, Mac and Cricket had always been the people I’d gone to when something was troubling me, but you can’t just go around saying you think your house is haunted. Things like that get you labeled as crazy.
“Bullshit,” Mac replied. The problem with hiding things from your best friends was that they usually knew when you were lying.
“It’s just…you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said after a moment. Both Mac and Cricket were watching me with concerned expressions and I felt guilty about concealing things from them.
“Try us,” Cricket encouraged.
I bit my lip in a nervous gesture. “I think my house is haunted,” I said softly.
“What?” Cricket raised her eyebrows in surprise but Mac just looked thoughtful.
“Huh,” Mac nodded to herself. “That actually explains a lot.”
I frowned a little. “Explains what?”
She shrugged, flicking her bangs back out of her eyes. “Little things; random cold spots, my keys being moved around all the time, the weirdo nightmares that I kept having. It’s why I’ve mostly been staying at Cricket’s.”
It was one of the most relieving things, to hear Mac say she’d noticed something off too. After my parents’ quick dismissal of what I had seen last night as my imagination, I’d been afraid that I was just going crazy. Some people might find it more comforting to think they are going crazy then being haunted, but for me, the validation that it wasn’t all in my head was about the best news I had heard all day. I decided then to keep what Tavy had said to me to myself, at least until he had a chance to explain. I wasn’t about to start accusing him of something until I’d heard what he had to say. Maybe I would have been less inclined to hear him out if I wasn’t used to the fact that Tavy seemed to have the low down on just about everything, but after three years of knowing him it was less troubling than it probably would have been coming from anyone else. I spent the rest of lunch relating what had happed to me to Mac and Cricket. Both of agreed to help me do some research on the subject and the history of the house, though I had a feeling that Tavy may be my best help there. Provided of course that he had been telling the truth.
Starlite Lanes was one of only three 24 hour business in Blackridge. One was the grocery store on Main Street, one was the Coffee house about three blocks from school and then there was the bowling alley. While Mike’s Coffee House was the late night hang out of all the students at Castor-Winston, the bowling alley was the turf belonging to the local public high school Mountain View High. Blackridge was a small town, but the class lines were distinct. Like me, the kids who attended Castor-Winston were usually the children of the wealthy. There were a few who had gotten in on a scholarship of sorts but that was usually because one of the parents on the school board had given the nod so to speak, like Cricket’s mother had done for Mac. The thing was that, kids from Mountain View didn’t set foot in the Coffee House and kids from Castor-Winston didn’t go to Starlite. It just wasn’t done. I was breaking at least a dozen of the unwritten rules of the town just by setting foot in the parking lot. I had changed out of my uniform and was wearing a pair of well worn jeans and a loose flannel shirt over my favorite black tank-top. I was trying to look as unnoticeable as possible and hoped no one would realize that I was a Panther and not a Thunderhawk. I had no idea why Tavy would want to meet here of all places unless he wanted to make sure no one at school saw us talking but that was way too covert spy-novel to make any sense.
I slipped in through the door trying to make myself as small as possible. The interior was dimly lit and the smell of alcohol and feet was overpowering. I could make out a few faces that I knew from elementary and middle school but they weren’t looking at me so I wouldn’t be recognized just yet. I found Tavy standing behind the shoe-rental counter. He was wearing his favorite plaid pants, this time with lime green suspenders dangling loose and an orange t-shirt with the word ‘fnord’ typed on it. He waved cheerfully at me when he caught my eye. To say I was startled would be an understatement. It never occurred to me that Tavy would have a job; I’d always wondered what he did outside of school but I’d never really pictured something like this. I walked over to him and leaned against the counter.
“You work here?” I asked.
Tavy shrugged. “Sort of; a friend of a friend owns it and I help out sometimes. I don’t officially work here but then not much of what I do is official anyways so it works out.”
“You said you’d explain what you meant by my house being haunted,” I reminded him.
Tavy nodded and motioned for one of his co-workers to take over. He led me over to one of the tables behind situated behind the far lane. I sat down and leaned back, waiting for his explanation.
“As you know, Blackridge was founded in the early nineteen hundreds. It was one of many mining towns in Arizona, though, it got a later start then many of the more famous ones like Jerome or Bisbee. Jonathan Blackhorse owned the mining rights to the Blackridge copper mine and was pretty much the father of the town.”
“Tavy, I did pay attention in history class; what does this have to do with my house?” I asked a touch impatiently; I knew all of this already.
He held up a hand. “Just bare with me. Jonathan Blackhorse had four children: three boys and a daughter named Emily. Emily married Alexander Friedman in the spring of 1941. They had one child, another girl they named Alexis. Alexis was born only six months after the wedding, which of course in those days would have been a huge subject for gossip. When Alexis was 19 she married a soldier by the name of George Whittler and they moved out of Blackridge to Phoenix. In the fall of 1953 George died and Alexis moved back home to Blackridge where she built a house on what was at that time Wisteria Lane. Four years later she would remarry and move to Flagstaff.
“The house was then bought by a young gentleman named Hans Dornburg. Hans worked as a dayshift manger at the cannery that Jonathan’s youngest son Harold had started about twenty years ago. The copper trade had dwindled with the end of the war and the mine was close to tapped out so the cannery was probably the only thing that kept the town from drying up completely like so many did. Hans married Elizabeth Cartwright that same year and she gave birth to a son named Nicolas. Nicolas inherited the house in after his father’s death though he would later move away and leave the house to his cousin, Walter James.”
The clatter of bowling pins and a shout broke the flow of the story and I turned my head to see who had gotten the strike. I noticed that I was receiving some curious glances and a I turned my face back to avoid recognition from the two girls whose lane we were behind. Tavy looked at me to make sure I was still following. I didn’t really see where this was going but I had promised to listen.
He took a deep breath and continued. “Now this is where it gets interesting. Walter wasn’t a very nice soul. He had a fondness for young girls about 14-17 years of age. A lethal fondness. When the police finally arrested him he’d raped and killed twelve girls. The bodies of eight of the girls were found buried in a nearby park but his first four victims, Holly Meyer, Susan James, Eliza Reynolds and Mary Kittson, were never found. It is assumed he buried them somewhere on his property, but police in those days didn’t have the man power or technology to tear apart the entire house looking for them, especially since Walter was already guaranteed the death sentence for the other eight.”
I don’t know how long I just stared at Tavy, trying to process what he had just told me. “So you’re saying that I have the ghost of a dead serial killer in my house?” I said at last.
Tavy shrugged, “Maybe him, his victims almost certainly.”
I was just about to reply when a woman walked over to our table. She was tall with deep black hair and sharp, laughing green eyes. I couldn’t tell exactly how old she was, older then I was certainly though her face showed no signs of age. I glanced at Tavy and I was startled to see his eyes had grown almost comically wide.
“Who’s your friend, Tavy?” She asked in a velvet voice that was probably the envy of every woman she’d ever met.
“Samantha,” I replied, offering my hand politely to shake.
“Eris,” the woman replied. She shook my hand, her skin almost fever-warm to the touch. She placed two fingers in the hollow of my throat and tapped gently. “Be well, Samantha.” She smiled briefly at a still gob smacked Tavy and walked off.
My hand flew to my neck where she had touched me and I was startled to feel the sensation of skin-warmed metal. Around my neck on a fine gold chain was a strange sort of yin yang emblem in gold and silver. On the silver side there was a golden apple in place of the traditional circle and on the gold side there was a silver pentagon. As far as I could tell there was no clasp on the chain though it was long enough to just slip over my head if I wanted.
Tavy chuckled in that sort of wry surprised manner people used when something happened that they didn’t expect but thought in hindsight they should have seen coming. “I knew She had taken an interest in you, but I didn’t actually expect Her to show up.”
“Who was that? Tavy, what the hell just happened?” I was looking around the bowling alley trying to catch sight of the woman again but I couldn’t seem to find her.
He shook his head. “Eris, well the Romans called Her Discordia but She usually goes with the Greek introduction.”
I gave him a hard look, my classical mythology memories kicking in. “Are you trying to tell me that was a goddess?” I asked skeptically.
“Of course not. You barely believe in ghosts at this point, I daren’t bring gods into the discussion. Let’s just say she’s an old friend and benefactor of mine who wanted to give you a gift.” He gestured at my necklace. “I’d keep it on if I was you, it’ll protect you a bit from the ghosts, among other things.”
I wasn’t sure what to think about him at that point, though years later I would realize how much worse things could have been for me had he not opened the door first instead of letting me get shoved through on my own. I regarded him from across the table, trying to make everything I had just heard fit into some recognizable pattern. It was one thing to have a new house filled with strange occurrences and inexplicable fears revealed to be supernatural, but to have it shown to you by someone so familiar made it seem all the more impossible and frightening. I was still deliberately shying away from the implications of the back haired woman and her strange charm, but I was beginning to accept that my house was haunted. I was also beginning to accept that Tavy was anything but an ordinary seventeen year old boy. I studied my friend carefully, my eyes tracing the once-familiar angles of his face before locking onto those ever-shifting eyes.
“What are you?” I asked bluntly.
Tavy flashed me a wry grin. “That’s another one I don’t think you are ready for just yet. Concentrate on the ghosts for now; you can worry about me later when your head isn’t about ready to explode.”
I decided that was sound advice since I could already feel the headache descending and dropped the subject. I was relatively okay with ghosts, since almost every family had a ghost story or two it was not completely out of my frame of reference, Tavy and Eris was something I wasn’t ready to speculate on.
Part 3