Ghost of O'Leary House

Chapter Fifteen

Grandma returned to her bedroom, closing the door, and locking it behind her. David didn’t know what to make of it, as he only had known the woman for about a day. Walking down the hall, David listened to the house creak and groan with every step, coming to life around him with every footfall. He felt as if he had eyes watching him from every direction, eyes that were old and judging. Carrying the bag of herbs and the scale beneath his arm, David went to his room, slowly opening the door.

The lights were dim, as if the light bulbs in the ceiling fan were slowly going out. As he stepped into the room and closed the door, he spun as he heard a faint murmuring coming from the corner of the room. Looking, he saw nothing; but the whispering continued around the room, coming from the vast shadows cast by the flickering lights. “Sam” sat on the bed, flipped open to the diagram with a simple sentence scrawled at the top of the page.

Remove the rug from the floor, cut your hand, and begin drawing.

“Sam, I’m not sure I want to do this anymore… I already know Grandma was a witch. I got her to confess in the kitchen just now,” David said, shuddering as he felt a heavy weight sink down on his shoulders.

What’s been started cannot be stopped, Sam wrote, the loopy script especially erratic. Do what we agreed, and all will be well. Turn away now... and it will begin.

“What will begin?” David asked.

Your end.

“I don’t know… I really don’t think I can trust you. Grandma seemed wary of me doing this, going so far as to say that this was a mistake.”

You have no choice boy, what has begun must be finished. Now begin before I must guide your hand. Sam wrote, the writing erratic and scratchy.

David dropped the bag of herbs to the floor and placed the scale on the dresser. “You know what? I think I’ll wait. I think you need me, not the other way around.”

Before Sam could respond, David grabbed the book and slammed it shut, blood oozing out from between the pages as he held the covers closed. The book desperately fought to open itself once more, and the weight on David’s shoulders grew heavier, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t about to sink down to whatever had made his grandmother so sad. She may have made a mistake, but he wouldn’t repeat it.

Reaching down to the floor to grab his jeans, he pulled the belt from the loops and, while struggling with the book as it fought to open itself, looped the leather around it before buckling it closed.

“There,” David said picking up the struggling book, “no more from you while I’m here.”

The book fought, jumping about on the bed like an excited flea, forcing David to grab the tome and lift it up into the air, where it fought with him for control. David could feel the icy tendrils of Sam’s thoughts creeping over his own, and quickly dropped the book to the ground, staring at it in a mixture of shock and awe.

“What are you?” David asked aloud, staring at the wriggling book, the belt stretching to hold the covers closed.

Grabbing the book off the floor, he quickly shoved it under the mattress of his bed, where it was pinned down by the weight of the thick down padding. Turning, David gathered the herbs and the scale and brought them over to an empty dresser drawer, stowing them away so that he wouldn’t have to worry about returning them to Grandma for the time being. While she’d seemed reluctant at first, she’d also seemed resigned about David’s fate.

David may be a teenager, but he wasn’t about to let some old books get the better of him. Sitting down at his desk, he opened his Biology textbook and began his long task of working on his homework, now smiling as he heard the book shake the bed every few minutes, its strength waning as it slowly tired itself out.

After an hour of memorizing basic chemical foundations of protozoa, David decided enough was enough and pushed the paperwork covered in notes away, before leaning back and sighing as he heard a series of satisfying pops and cracks from his spine from being hunched over for so long. Moving away from the desk, he scooped up the knife from the floor where it’d fallen and slid it back into its sheathe, buckling the leather strap over the handle before setting it down on the smooth surface of his dresser, stuffing it beneath his folded up clothes for tomorrow.

Settling down onto his father’s old bed, David suddenly realized how tired he was. Between his sneaking around upstairs to find out more about the old woman and finding the guys in the garden, he’d really been busy this evening. Not to mention his driving around the back roads of his grandmother’s property just to see people his own age.

Lying down in the bed and kicking off his slippers, David pulled the covers up and over himself before reaching over and pulling on the drawstring to kill the light in the small room. No old woman or strange figures emerged from the darkness to terrorize David, like he imagined they would. Instead, he could drift off to sleep with relative ease, his mind drawing a blank when it came to dreams, resulting in a heavy and restful sleep. David woke in the middle of the night, listening to the house groan and creak as something shuffled about upstairs.

He ignored it, deciding that Grandma had been right in telling him to stay away from the upstairs. Images of the four-poster bed which seemed to pulsate and breathe in and out as if it were a lung came unbidden to his mind, making David ponder what would have happened if he’d pulled back the curtains, what he would have found.

The rest of his night was filled with dreams full of things that lurked in the darkness of the upstairs, crawling about on all fours, and descending long enough to taunt David into coming back up, enticing him with promises of untold riches.

His dreams were hardly blissful from that point onward.