The Haunting of Ashburn House (7 page)

As Adrienne reread the note, her shock began to morph into an overpowering, almost painful emotion. She pressed a hand over her mouth and blinked at the wetness in her eyes.

She’d grown to believe Edith had left her Ashburn on a whim or to keep the house from falling into the possession of someone she didn’t like. Adrienne had thought that Edith hadn’t cared about her beyond dropping her name into her will. But the note proved otherwise.

It meant the decision to give Adrienne the house had been deliberate and premeditated. More than that, Edith had anticipated Adrienne’s sleeping dilemma and had prepared a bedroom for her—a room she must have dusted and aired frequently over many years to ensure it would be ready for Adrienne’s eventual arrival.

The cold, hostile visage in her mind morphed once more. The severe face shifted to something softer and gentler, and the glittering eyes became warm. Her imaginary Edith smiled, and Adrienne wiped her tears away as she smiled back.

I don’t care what the townspeople say about her. Edith was kind. She cared about me. And I love her for it.

She rubbed her thumbs over the short note. Even the fact that it had been signed “Aunt Edith” felt significant. She hoped she wasn’t reading too much into it by imagining that Edith had wanted to be a surrogate grandmother to her as much as Adrienne had wanted to have one.

“Thank you,” she whispered and propped the note upright on the bureau in place of where the mirror would normally stand. She wanted to remember this kindness.

The window above the bed was large and cleaner than most of the other panes. She crossed to the glass and looked out to see the dark woods that grew near the house. Ashburn had been built at the top of a hill, and the woods sloped downwards for a distance before they rose into the mountain beyond to tower high above the house. Subdued nature sounds filtered through the glass, and Adrienne undid the latch and cracked open the window to let some fresh air in.

Her heart felt full. The sleeping situation had been resolved better than she could have ever hoped. Edith’s generosity and forethought meant she not only had a bed but blankets and furniture to go with it.

A sudden desire to see the rest of the house rushed through her. She had a small hope that Edith might have left her more messages. She hadn’t seen any loose sheets of paper downstairs or in the other rooms on the second floor, but there might still be something in the highest level of the house—the attic.

She gave her room a final, grateful look before slipping back into the hallway. The stairs rose immediately to her right, but only fifteen steps were visible before they followed the house’s corner and turned out of sight. Once again, there didn’t seem to be any light switches, but the sun had only just begun to set, and Adrienne thought she could make the trip without needing the lamp.

She jogged up the stairs, one hand pressed to the wallpaper to keep herself stable, and tried not to pay attention to how the house groaned as though her footfalls were almost too much for it to bear. It was a solid building. There weren’t any signs of rot or strained supports; the wood was just old and liked to complain.

She turned the corner and found her path flooded with shadows as the natural light from below struggled to refract up the stairwell. She could barely make out a door above her, and it was unlike any other door she’d seen in the house.

Most of Ashburn’s fixtures fit their environment: classic, tasteful—though dated—and usually made of deep-mahogany wood paired with light fabrics and rose patterns.

The door she stood in front of had been stained until it was nearly black. It was oversized, taking up the entire width and breadth of the hallway, and Edith had scrawled a new message into its front.

The scratches were more erratic, bordering on frantic, and Adrienne had to climb until she was only a few steps away to make out the words in the gloom.

LIGHT THE CANDLE

YOUR FAMILY

IS STILL

DEAD

She licked her lips, reached for the weighty bronze doorknob, and turned it.

The room seemed to exhale as she opened the door, and a cold breeze buffeted her hair away from her face. The surreal sensation returned. Save for a faint red glow, the room was dark.

Did the sun set so quickly?

The expedition no longer felt exciting. Part of her wanted to run down the stairs, back to where logic and light and warm feelings lived, but she remained rooted to the highest step. Déjà vu crashed over her. The space, although dim enough to blind her, felt familiar; something about the scent, the weight of the air, and the feel of the wood underneath her feet called her back to a moment in her childhood. She tried to fix on the memory, but it slipped away from her as she attempted to catch it.

She blinked, and the moment was gone. It was just the attic, the final unseen room in the house and the most notorious. The townsfolk had seen a light shining there every Friday, acting as a beacon for unknown reasons.

Adrienne stepped over the threshold, hoping her heartbeat wasn’t as loud as it felt. Her palms were sweaty, and she clenched them as she blinked at the red-tinted room.

The attic was large, not quite as big as the house’s footprint but certainly more spacious than any of the rooms below. Adrienne looked towards the nearest wall and found the reason for the low light. The sun hadn’t set after all but had been blocked out by black curtains nailed over the windows. They didn’t completely block out the sunset but muted it and darkened it so that a surreal red tinge was thrown across the room’s contents.

Adrienne crossed to the nearest window. The cloth had been fixed at its top, but nothing secured the base. She flipped it up, coughing as dust swirled around her face, and managed to catch the lower edge of the curtain on the nails. Brilliant, sharp light cut through the gloom, and she stepped back to see the space.

Close to three dozen crates were stacked around the perimeter. Near the middle of the room was a strange, shiny, chest-high shape, and beyond that, in the exact centre, was a table.

Adrienne’s breaths were shallow as she approached the table. Two items waited on its age-stained crochet cloth: a framed photograph and a box of matches.

She turned to get a closer look at the shape between the chair and the table. It was bubbly and odd, like a sculpture gone awry, and had a vicious metal spike sticking out of its top. Adrienne bent closer to squint at it and exhaled a long “Ooh” as she realised what it was: a candleholder.

The stand rose a little higher than the table, the exposed spike waiting for a candle to be impaled on it. What had confused her was a pale, shiny substance flowing from the spike to the floor. When she was close enough to see the individual frozen globules, she realised it was old, melted wax—not from one candle but from hundreds of them; a lifetime of candles all allowed to melt over their holder until the wax stalactites and stalagmites met and it formed a solid mass.

She was looking at the result of Ipson’s best-known legend.

IS IT FRIDAY

LIGHT THE CANDLE

Edith had nailed black drapes over the windows to hide her flame, but they hadn’t been enough to mask the glow at night. If the curtains had been thin enough to let the sunset in, they were thin enough to let candlelight out.

Adrienne turned back to the table and bent forward, hands on knees, to see the photo more clearly. It was immediately recognisable; she was looking at the same girl who had been recreated repeatedly in the portraits lining the hallway below. The picture showed the girl walking through a garden that towered over her, one hand extended towards a bloom. Her body was angled away from the camera, but her head had turned to see it, and the round eyes and barely parted lips suggested the photo was a surprise.

She was a pretty child. Adrienne smiled at the photo of her great-aunt. The picture was grainy black and white, as was normal for photos from the turn of the century, but it seemed to capture her personality well. Her thick, dark hair cascaded down her back until it brushed her waist, and she wore a pretty striped dress with a plush bow tied around its middle. Her wide eyes and round face hinted at a mix of innocence and mischief, and Adrienne thought she looked like a lively child.

The photo must have been cherished. The frame was ornate and well made and looked heavy.
Pictures taken back then were expensive, weren’t they? Edith’s family must have been wealthy to risk a candid shot.

She stood again and scanned the room. The light was failing quickly, dipping her into near black, but she still wanted to understand the crates stacked about the room. She crossed to the nearest one and found the lid had already been cracked off. She lifted it, hoping she wouldn’t collect too many splinters from the rough wood, and squinted inside.

Candles. Dozens of them. Thick and round, they’d been packed amongst wood shavings for protection. Adrienne pulled one out and turned it in her hand. It was unlabelled but looked expensive and was weighty enough to feel like a brick in her hand. She turned back to the candleholder and thought the shades of wax matched.

She carefully placed the candle back in its box and scanned the room. There were dozens of crates, all identical to the one she’d just opened. She crossed to another box and nudged its lid off, just in case, and wasn’t surprised to find more candles.

There must be thousands of them. A lifetime of candles. No, more—generations worth of candles. What an odd investment. Even odder that she burnt one every week, and only one—and with no apparent purpose except to illuminate her own photo.

Shivers ran up Adrienne’s back. Something had been creeping up on her, but she hadn’t even known it was happening until she held her breath and realised how perfectly, completely silent the world felt.

It’s like last night.
She approached the window slowly, cautiously, her breath held. The sun was seconds away from setting, and the moon and a thousand pinpricks of starlight illuminated the woods outside her house.

She rested her fingertips on the sill and bent closer. Her breath created a small puff of condensation on the glass as she examined the world below. The window faced the town, and house lights created a glowing map of the settlement. The walk had only taken her fifteen minutes, but the village seemed an insurmountable distance from her vantage point.

She tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. The silence was pressing against her, squeezing her, making her feel feverish. The world was waiting for something, and every second that passed built the tension to overwhelming heights.

Then it happened. Whatever had been building up released, like opening a floodgate, and the silence was shattered as a flurry of birds poured out of the treetops, their screams and beating wings a cacophony. Mixed amongst the shrieks was a screeching that only lasted a second before cutting off abruptly. Adrienne squeezed her eyes closed and waited for the sounds to fade.

Just like last night. What is it? Do the townspeople feel it? Will they know what I’m talking about if I ask them, or will they think I’m crazy?

The flutters and bird calls died away, and the woods were returned to peaceful rest. Adrienne stayed at the window and watched the trees and the town for a long time. The glass did a poor job of insulating against the outside air, and she was shivering when she turned back to the room.

It was too dark to see anything except faint outlines in the moonlight. She briefly considered taking one of the candles to guide her climb downstairs but chose to risk a blind descent.

She still wasn’t sure what the attic’s purpose had been, but she didn’t want to light a single one of its candles.

The wooden boards were gone, clawed through, and her scabbed fingers dug into rich, tightly packed dirt. Her mouth was open, but there was no air left to drag into her starved lungs. The soil was crushing her, suffocating her, filling every crevice around her. It got under her eyelids and filled her mouth and made each twitch of her fingertips a battle. But she kept digging, scratching, clawing, fighting for every inch she gained. She could be patient. The dirt would not last forever.

— § —

A loud beating noise pulled Adrienne out of her dream. She started upright and inhaled. She’d been holding her breath as she slept, and a wave of dizziness made her grimace as she waited for the room to steady itself.

What happened?
Images of digging through heavy soil flashed through her mind, and she shook her head in an attempt to flick the memory out of it.

She was in the bedroom Edith had prepared for her. The travel case sat in the wardrobe, and the laptop was already set up on the desk. It had been a battle to carry the case up the stairs the night before, holding the lantern in one hand and muttering choice swear words as she navigated the bend.

The events in the attic had unsettled her, and she’d wanted to keep Wolfgang with her that night, but her fluffy monster seemed determined to roam during the witching hours and had refused to be picked up.

The beating noise came again, and Adrienne realised someone was knocking at the front door. She scrambled out of bed and tugged some jeans and a jacket over her pyjamas.
Jeez, I must’ve overslept. What time is it?

A glance at the window made her blink in surprise.
Okay, so I didn’t oversleep. Maybe this town just wakes up super early.

The sun had risen but not by much. Wispy, smoggy clouds dimmed what should have been a brilliant sunrise into a faint, apathetic glow. When she leaned close to the glass, Adrienne could see heavy mist gathered about the yard and drifting between the trees’ trunks. Amid that was the silvery glint of a familiar sedan.
Jayne?

The knocks came again, this time beating louder and maintained for longer. Adrienne dashed out of the room, through the hallway of portraits, and jogged down the stairs. “Coming! I’m coming!”

When I told her to drop by anytime, I didn’t expect her to take it so literally. Maybe she wants to have breakfast.

Adrienne was breathless by the time she reached the door. Her hair was a disaster, she knew, but there wasn’t much she could do for it except run her fingers through it and flip it over her shoulder. She opened the door and grinned at the lady waiting on the porch. “Hey, good morning!”

Her smile faltered. Jayne stood back, out of reach, and had her arms folded across her torso. Her face looked sickly and flat without any makeup, and her glossy hair was mussed from having fingers dragged through it too many times. Her expression held none of the warmth she’d shown the day before but a cold mixture of aggression and fear as she eyed Adrienne. “Is Marion here?”

“Huh? No—uh—” Shock robbed Adrienne of coherency. Underneath the glare, Jayne’s eyelids were red and puffy, and dark shadows under them suggested she’d missed sleep. Adrienne took a step closer and extended a hand towards her friend, but Jayne flinched backwards, and her expression hardened. Something glinted in the hand she’d tucked under her other arm.
A knife?

Adrienne licked her lips. She was still foggy from sleep, but warning bells were starting to ring. “Why did you ask if Marion was here? Has something happened?”

Jayne neither answered the questions nor took her eyes off Adrienne. The silence stretched until it was almost uncomfortable, then she spoke, her tone level and slow, as though she’d chosen the words carefully. “Did Marion come here last night? Have you seen her since yesterday morning?”

“No.” The sense of wrongness was growing into hot anxiety. “Not since you dropped her off at work yesterday. Jayne, what’s happened?”

The other woman was silent for another moment, then the hard, hostile expression cracked. She dropped her arms, and her face scrunched up as she fought against tears. “She’s missing—she said she was going to visit here after work—never came home—”

“What?” Adrienne stepped onto the porch, and this time Jayne didn’t flinch away. A glimmer of silver flashed as Jayne pocketed the knife, then the other woman pressed her palms into her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Addy—I just—I don’t know what to think—I don’t know what to do—”

“Okay. It’s okay.” Adrienne fought to keep her own fear out of her voice as she put her arm around Jayne’s shoulders and patted at her back. “Did she say why she was coming here?”

“Yeah.” A drop hung from the end of Jayne’s nose, but she didn’t wipe it. “She felt bad that you didn’t have food and was going to bring you some stuff. Jams she’d made and tinned vegetables and things.”

Adrienne scanned the misty yard as she tried to think. The early-morning bird chatter felt subdued to match the muted sun, and the frosty air was burning at her lungs. “Do you know what time she came here?”

“Around seven last night. Not long after her shift finished.”

“Have you spoken to her parents?” Adrienne cleared her throat as she realised how little she knew about the veterinary student. “Sorry, uh, does she have parents?”

Jayne raised her head and rubbed the wet circles away from her eyes. She looked ghastly. “Yeah. I didn’t know she was missing until they called me at two in the morning. They thought she must have been with me. I’ve phoned Sarah and Beth and her boss, but no one’s seen her since she left work. This isn’t like her—she’s one of the most reliable people I know.”

Crap.
“Have you called the police?”

Jayne shook her head.

“You need to call them. Now. I, uh, I don’t have a phone. Do you?”

“Yeah.” Jayne was already pulling a mobile out of her pocket. She looked at the screen and swore. “No signal. Hang on, one bar—let me try—”

Adrienne pulled the front door closed so that Wolfgang couldn’t escape and followed Jayne into the yard as the other woman searched for reception. Frost crunched under her sneakers, and the fog dotted her skin with tiny droplets as she waded through it. The air was intensely cold, and even with the extra layer of pyjamas under her clothes, she began to shake.

Jayne looped across the yard, phone held above her head, as the single bar appeared and disappeared. They were moving towards the front of the driveway. Jayne’s car faced the exit, and the driver’s door stood open, waiting for its owner to dive inside to make a quick escape.

She brought a knife and was prepared to bolt. What, did she think I murdered Marion or something?
Adrienne twisted to see the house’s outline, dark and bleak, stretched high above them, and swallowed.
Maybe she did. A stranger moves into the creepy house at the edge of town. Your friend goes to visit and never comes back. It’s like the start of a B-grade horror movie.

Adrienne turned back to the driveway and stopped. A pair of tyre tracks led from the dirt drive to the edge of the forest. They were barely visible in the fog, but Adrienne didn’t think they’d been there before.

A horrible, panicky premonition struck her. “Jayne? What time does the sun set around here?”

“Huh?” Jayne had stopped beside her car and was still squinting at her phone. “A bit after seven, I think. Why?”

Marion left work at seven. Sunset comes a little after that. And just after sunset, I watched the birds burst out of the trees and heard a strange screeching noise…

Adrienne ran towards the forest, following the tyre tracks, her heart thundering in her throat and nausea rising in her stomach. Mist billowed around branches that had been snapped in half and trunks that had been scraped. Adrienne followed the path of destruction downhill for close to twenty metres, scrambling and slipping through the fallen leaves, before she saw the faint outline of a compact blue car submerged in the fog.