Killing The Ghost

Well, it was worth it, that is what Julia thought as she stared at the house ahead of her. It looked kind of creepy with the overgrown lawn and the windows that looked like they hadn’t been washed in a while. She remembered what had made her come to this side of town, away from her always safe and beautiful neighbourhood. Julia had received a call from an unknown number earlier today, telling her to come to this address to find all the answers she had been looking for. The caller hadn’t given her a name or any other information to go with it, but she could still remember the authority behind the voice, and she shivered with fear just remembering the threat. The incident was not that strange to her anymore, at least not considering how her life had been turned upside down these past few weeks. It had all started about a month ago when she had received a call from the city hospital telling her that her father had been in an accident and was in critical condition. Julia had not known where her father would be since he had been travelling around for many months. Hearing about the accident, she had rushed to the hospital, still hungover from the party she had attended the previous evening, and the receptionist at the hospital had looked at her like she was crazy. Julia hadn’t even gotten the chance to shower when she received the call, so she had rushed to the hospital without even fixing the bird’s nest on her head. Good thing the doctor thought she had been so distraught about her father’s accident that she forgot to take care of herself; if only he knew what Julia had been up to. Julia felt like she had come a long way from that bratty little girl to the responsible woman she was right now, but it had only been a matter of weeks. The moment the reports came back about her father being in a coma and showing no signs of ever waking up, Julia knew she had to stop being irresponsible and start taking care of his most treasured company. Julia’s dad had always been a workaholic and had been insistent on Julia taking over from him when he retired, but he could never have seen that day coming since she had never been interested. Looking back to the moment she decided to learn more about what her father had been doing, she felt proud of what she had accomplished. Even though she had messed up once or twice, she had still been able to recover with the help of her dad’s most trusted assistant, who showed her the day-to-day running of the business, making use of what she had learned in college. Before that, she had always thought she was never going to benefit from her education. Turns out she had been wrong all along. +++++++++++++++ Julia moved forward, headed to the door, and hesitated for a while, doubting whether she had made the right decision to come to this place. But she was already here, so she might as well get it over with. She knocked on the door and, when no one answered, she walked around to the back, where she found a dog wagging its tail. When it saw her, it was like the dog already knew her. At least that was a good sign, rather than being chased by the dog. Looking at the door, she found it open, and Julia pushed it a little. A flock of birds erupted as soon as she entered the house. It was like they had been living there for a while, based on the droppings all over the place. The stench coming from the house was awful enough to wake the dead, and for a moment, Julia stood there wondering if she could stand to look at what was emitting the smell. Moving forward, she stood facing what used to be a kitchen — at least that’s what it looked like based on the island and the oven and fridge lining the wall. Bringing a hand to cover her nose, she turned to where the smell was coming from and headed to what used to be someone’s bedroom. There, lying on the bed, was a decomposing corpse. Julia was too scared to even scream; she had never seen a dead body before. Based on the dress, she concluded that it was a female and wondered why someone would call her to a place like this only to witness a dead body. +++++++++ After calling the police, Julia stood aside, still unable to utter a word about the whole incident. The dog she had seen before had acted ferociously towards the vets, and Julia had had to calm him down by petting him. Since then, the dog had stuck to her side, never leaving her. It looked like the dog was only docile towards her, and she was thankful for that. The police had tried asking her questions about what had happened, and Julia didn’t even know where to start, so they had given her a few minutes to calm down. She had been sitting on the pavement, watching the police carry the decomposed body in a body bag. Julia wondered who the woman was and why she had been called to this house. Once they had taken the body to the mortuary for further study, she was able to sit down with one of the officers and tell him what had happened, from the moment she received the phone call telling her to come to the address up to the moment she called them to report the body. According to the police, the woman, whose name she came to know as Mary, lived alone with her dog, had no friends or family, and had never been married. Mary lived far from her neighbours, and even so, she never interacted with any of them, so no one knew her that well. The house had been in her family for generations, having been built in the early 19th century. Julia looked back at the house and wondered how Mary could have let such a beautiful house go. She hadn’t even bothered renovating it, and based on what Julia had seen inside, the furniture had been rundown and old-looking. The mystery was: if Mary lived alone and never had any relatives or family, who was the man who had contacted Julia, and could he be Mary’s killer? That’s what kept haunting Julia. How was he connected to the dead woman, the caller, and all that had been happening since the morning of Friday the thirteenth of last month, the day her father’s plane crashed? Many things had happened since then, and Julia was beginning to feel like she was going crazy. She hadn’t told anyone about the strange things happening around the house, not even her father’s assistant, whom she was starting to feel close to. First, it had been small things like the house being unlocked when Julia was sure she had locked it before going out. Then there were things moving from one place to another around the house. Julia thought it was just her imagination playing tricks on her, but the incidents had been too many to pass off. As she listened to her secretary drone on and on about the current project they were working on, her mind could still picture the state of the body she had witnessed yesterday. The police had left with a promise to keep her informed on the progress of the case, but she doubted they would. Julia had immediately driven home and showered, trying to get the smell of decomposition out of her body, but she could still smell it. It was stuck in her memory, and she didn’t know what to do to get rid of it. At night, she had lain awake, unable to get any sleep at all, and when morning arrived, she couldn’t wait to get out of the house, go to the office, and work to get her mind off the incident. Even then, it hadn’t been easy; the memory kept replaying in her mind, and she felt like she wouldn’t be able to move on until she found out what really happened and what Mary’s connection was to her father’s accident, or was it really an accident? Somebody was out there trying to make her life miserable, and she was going to find out who it was and get to the root of all this once and for all. But first, she had to find out as much as she could about Mary, and she didn’t think the police were going to divulge that information to her. From the time she had started working for her father, Julia knew she could never trust anyone, not even her closest friends, and this had cemented that fact in her mind. She didn’t know who was after her and her family. First, she wanted to start with her dad’s accident, since that was where all things went downhill. She wanted to review the police report about the accident. Julia hadn’t taken it seriously the first time, but now she knew all her answers would come from what happened that night.