Chapter 1 – Chap 1

The house at 9 Woodland Close sat on the high side of the road. Narrow and two-storey, its twin windows upstairs glowed like a pair of large yellow eyes in the dark. I stared up at the house, and it looked back down at me.

My wife Clara and I had argued relentlessly about the purchase of this house. Clara had wanted to buy a brand-new house in one of the developing estates that had popped up on a grassy stretch of land alongside the highway, spreading abruptly like a carcinoma. You know the kind of house I mean; generic layout, white tiles and grey carpet, the smell of new paint still stinging your nose. I wanted to buy a house with character, a decades-old fixer-upper. Something we could bring back to life together. We compromised, and neither of us got what we wanted. Instead, we bought a nearly brand-new house in an established neighborhood, a strange little townhouse on a subdivided block. The cost was astronomical compared to the working-class suburb we had previously lived in, but the moment my lovely Clara set eyes on that Woodland Close address, I knew it was a done deal. It was the worst house in the best street in town, a far cry from our old neighborhood where not one, but two of our pet dogs had mysteriously disappeared.

I had lived in this house for two weeks, and for eight days of those two weeks I had been dealing with its alleged haunting, and my wife’s subsequent unraveling. After the real estate agents, mortgage brokers, pest inspectors and builders are all dealt with, you would think the purchase of a nearly new house would be done and dusted. Well, you’d be wrong. Clara had one last request.

“A ghost hunter?”, I queried, frowning. Clara, you can’t be serious, I wanted to say.

“It’s not as crazy as it sounds. One of the girls from Mother’s Group told me about her”, Clara said. “She’ll come in and sage the house, make sure it has positive energy. No weird stuff”.

I rolled my eyes internally. “Whatever you want, sweetheart”, I told her. I suspected this request had to do with her experience at our previous house. Clara was at home all day with the baby and often claimed strange happenings; this tap turned on by itself, that bowl smashed when she was out of the room. I privately thought that her sightings were a paranoia borne of the isolation of new motherhood and broached the subject of therapy, but the look she gave me when I suggested this made me determined to never bring it up again.

I, myself, never witnessed a single thing. Well, maybe one or two odd things. But I don’t believe in ghosts.

In any case, Gigi the ghost hunter had come. A small woman with a dowager’s hump and cobweb hair, peering about impertinently through silver-rimmed spectacles, looking every part the backwater town, tarot card-reading con-artist I had assumed her to be. Clara was overjoyed at the old woman’s presence; she had lost weight recently, making her look gaunt and faintly childish. The effect was macabre as her face split into a grin, as though she thought Gigi would save her. From what, I’m not sure.

Gigi had surveyed the house with wide blue eyes that almost glowed, catlike and calculating. Clara took her on a tour while I pretended to answer a work call and departed to smoke a cigarette on the front porch. They were back in the kitchen in minutes. Like I said, it’s a small house.

Of course, Gigi had wasted no time in telling us our small house was haunted.

“There are many spirits present here. Two hundred and seventy-eight points worth, in fact”, she said, sliding a pamphlet across our dining table while Clara served her coffee. I noticed her hands tremble when Gigi spoke.

I studied the pamphlet, which inexplicably had some kind of bizarre score card for different types of entities. Ghosts: 1 point, Fae spirits: 2, Demons: 3.

Do I get a prize if I say Bingo? I wanted to ask. “What is this?”, I snapped. “Doesn’t that number seem a bit high? This house is fine”. I looked up at Clara. “It’s fine, right hon?”.

Clara didn’t look me in the eyes. “John, I think we should listen to Gigi”, she said, chewing on her lip.

Gigi studied me closely. “Two hundred and seventy-eight is high. That is the most haunted I have ever heard of”.

Well, it turns out, it’s the most haunted anyone has ever heard of. We’ve become an Internet sensation: The Haunting of 9 Woodland Close. People drive by our house and take photographs. I know this, because Clara found them on forums on one of her sleepless nights. We’ve even had a couple of people brave enough to knock on our door and ask to have a look around.

I have a half-mind to buy a shotgun.

I sighed heavily and exited my car, walking to the front door. I knew Clara would be upset if I stayed in the car much longer. She hated to be alone and had been growing increasingly frantic over the past several days, purple half-moons forming beneath her eyes. I wanted to shake that stupid old woman for putting these fears into my lovely wife’s head. Gigi was coming over tonight to cleanse the house. Cleanse my wallet, more like. This was the third session in as many days, and each was costing us dearly, but if it put Clara at ease, I was willing to do it.

When Gigi arrived, I offered her a bourbon. I, myself, was onto my third.

Clara, her dark hair hanging greasy and clumped, was talking animatedly to Gigi about the myriad odd happenings around the house. I tuned out, not wanting to hear for the fourth time, Clara’s recollection of how she had woken up on our lounge clutching a bread knife.

“Clara, love, do you know where I left my sweater?”, Gigi asked kindly. “I think I left it in your study the last time I was here”.

“Oh”. Clara looked deflated at the subject change, her eyes dark like black holes. “Sure, Gigi. I’ll go check”.

Gigi watched my wife intently as she mounted the stairs, her slender, pale legs disappearing into the darkness above. The old woman turned to me, her eyes wide.

“John, have you ever noticed anything strange in the houses you have lived in with Clara?”, she asked sharply.

I frowned. “Uh, no. We’ve only lived in one other house together. Clara’s childhood home that she inherited, but we sold it to buy this place. She thought that one was haunted too”. I chuckled.

Gigi’s eyes darted to the stairs, then back at me. She stood and walked to the front door, pausing with her fingertips resting on the handle.

“Where the hell are you going?”, I asked. “You just got here”.

“I didn’t want to come back here, but I had an obligation to warn you”, she said. “I thought there were entities in your house. I was wrong”.

“Let me guess. There’s something else wrong with the house. Possessed by the spirit of Hitler himself, perhaps? But for a price, you can fix it, right?”. I shook my head, disgusted. “Just stop the dramatics and tell me how much”.

Gigi gave one more furtive glance to the stairs. Her voice was low.

“It’s not the house. It’s your wife”.

I froze, my glass halfway to my lips. “What are you talking about?”.

“Your wife. The spirits are all attached to your wife”, Gigi hissed. “You will never be safe with her. She’s getting worse. Take the baby. Leave tonight”. She opened the door and slipped out, disappearing into the darkness.

I stared at her retreating figure, mouth agape. This was a joke, right? A person couldn’t be haunted, could they?

“Gigi, wait!”, I called out, rising to my feet. Despite myself, I felt the hair on my arms stand on end and shivered involuntarily.

The stairs behind me began to creak as my lovely wife descended.

I stood in the dining room, my mind clouded with bourbon and fear.

She had just left me here. That old bitch. Far be it from me to tell a ghost hunter how to do their job, but scuttling off into the night like a beetle after blowing my life up in my face did not seem entirely professional to me. But what do I know? I’m an IT consultant, not a red-light district clairvoyant.

“John? Where’s Gigi?”.

I turned, slowly. I had to think of something quick.

Clara stood at the base of the stairs with the baby clasped to her chest. My daughter’s small, angelic head fit perfectly into the curve of my wife’s neck. The baby’s plump body, her pink cheeks and soft honeyed curls, provided a stark contrast to the creature that held her, sallow and pale. Clara’s hair hung lank, unwashed, in great tendrils. She reminded me of Medusa, and I fought the sudden, absurd urge to giggle hysterically.

It was the sort of laugh you might let out at a funeral if you lacked the ability to cry.

Had I really not noticed before how awful my wife looked? When had this begun? My beautiful wife, blue-eyed and pleasantly soft, luscious and pale, reminiscent of Liz Taylor but with a penchant for loose linen dresses. She was no more. I didn’t recognize this woman.

How could I not have noticed?

“Addie woke up”, she said. She surveyed me, reptilian, each eye marked by hollows that looked as though they had been pressed into the soft clay of her flesh, deep indentations that were dark as a bruise, as though the devil himself had tried to carve her eyes right out of their sockets with his thumbs.

I swallowed, hard. I’m not a gambling man, but I knew that the stakes were high, the outcome dependent on how I answered. “She had to go. Her daughter called. Some kind of family emergency”. My eyes drifted to my near-empty glass. I could have used another.

“So quickly? Without saying goodbye?”. Clara still hadn’t moved, holding Addie just a little tighter than I would have liked. Her pale hands were like ghostly spiders, pressed firm into the soft material of my baby’s red cloth bodysuit. Addie stirred, one dimpled little hand rubbing her eye, but she did not wake.

Clara spoke again, her words hissing through the room like an arrow. “What did you do, John?”. The accusation landed. She took a step towards me, light as a feather. “I know that you don’t like Gigi. I know what you think of me, that I’m fickle and ignorant, a stupid housewife being conned”. Her lower lip trembled, her eyes boring into me, as blank and dull as old dimes. “You’re wrong. You make her come back, John”.

“I didn’t do a goddamned thing”, I told her. “She’ll come back. Like I said, she had some sort of family emergency”.

I’ve never struggled to lie, so why did my words fall so flat now?

“I NEEDED HER!”, Clara screamed. Her hands twitched, rigid claws. Her eyes darted about the room, wheeling about in her skull like balls on a pool table, the whites flashing like a neon sign. Help.

Addie began to cry.

“Clara, give me the baby”, I said, alarm pulsing through my chest. I held my arms out, stepping forward, trying to make my voice soft. “Baby, I’ll talk to Gigi. We’ll sort this out. Just let me hold Addie”.

“NO!”, she screamed, clutching tightly. “SHE’S MY BABY!”. She turned and bolted up the stairs, whip-fast. I stared after her. Clara never ran up the stairs. Never. She had told me on our first day here that she had a terrible fear of dropping Adeline on the stairs, of watching our little girl fall through the air while she watched helplessly as our baby’s brains spilled out across the gleaming floorboards.

I had laughed at her, then. Laughed, for god’s sake. My morbid wife, true crime lover, imagination as tame as poison ivy. “Easy there, Michael Jackson”, I had said. “That’s never going to happen, and may I remind you, you’re the one who wanted the house with stairs?”.

Jesus.

I sprinted after her, but she was already locked in the bedroom. I could hear sobbing and a horrible grating noise, something large being dragged across the floor.

I banged on the door. “Clara, talk to me. What’s going on?”.

“Go away”, she sobbed. “Just go away, John”. Adeline began to wail, the noise rising eerily in tandem with my wife’s desperate weeping. There were more strange noises, and not just from the bedroom, but from down stairs too. I glanced feverishly down the stairs, towards the sour yellow light of the kitchen where I could hear clanging, could see the shadows of movement. It sounded as though every pot in the house was being thrown to the ground.

One crisis at a time, I decided, turning back to the bedroom door. My heart thudded like a sledgehammer as I pounded my fists against the wood, my daughter’s cry piercing through me like a knife. “Clara! Open the door”.

Adeline’s wail rose to a scream. Then, it stopped. My heart dropped like a stone.

I kicked the door, hard. Once, twice. It burst open and I caught myself from falling as I stared around, wildly. There was no sign of Clara or the baby. The window was wide open, a black rectangle void bracketed by our curtains blowing softly in the icy wind. Clara had dragged our dressing table in front of the window to stand on and climb on, I suppose, although how she did so, I don’t know. That thing weighs a ton.

I walked to the window, intending to peer out, but I was distracted by something on the floor next to the dresser. Addie, laying on her back, curls akimbo, the dummy that plugged her mouth pulsating like a metronome as she stared up dumbly at me, tears still drying on her flushed cheeks.

I scooped her up and held her to my chest, feeling her rabbit-heart beating against my own, quick as a moth’s wing. I placed her gently on the bed and climbed onto the dresser, leaning out the window. The screen had been pushed out with such force that part of the metal frame was warped.

“Clara?”, I shouted. I stared out over the roof into the trees that stood tall and proud behind our home. One of the reasons that this neighborhood is so desired is the nature reserve that spans behind it, by day tranquil and private, by night, a little creepy. I squinted into the darkness and could just make out a pale figure standing at the edge of the trees, luminous in the half-moon’s light.

“Clara!”, I shouted again.

She turned and ran into the trees. I climbed down from the dresser and slid the glass pane of the window closed. The fly screen could wait, I decided, as I sat on the bed next to Addie, who had miraculously, inexplicably drifted to sleep.

I’ve been left with two options to consider. Either my wife is suffering some kind of psychotic breakdown, or she’s a woman plagued by a barrage of demons and ghouls. She’s out there now, in the darkness, and I’m here, bracing myself to go downstairs.

I’m not a gambling man, but either way, the odds are good that I’m in trouble.