The Haunting Of Bechdel Mansion (15 page)

Chapter Eleven

Encounters

When asking questions of the house, Mary
didn’t know who she was supposed to be communicating with. She
wasn’t a paranormal expert by any means. She knew, however, that
she had a gift. A gift she kept hidden away since childhood.
Visions of things not of this world were a big part of it. But she
had long suppressed her abilities based her sheer inability to
control it.

The house, however, was bringing it out of
her whether she wanted it to or not. There was the girl and there
was her diary. She had the Redwood travel logs and all the
newspaper headline copies. There was the crying baby. The man’s
voice. The upside down cross on the door. The raccoon or family of
raccoons living in the walls. And then, that Monday morning, a
grandfather clock she had never seen before.

She walked through the dining room, past a
modest, four-seater table and approached the kitchen, feeling a
strange sense of something lurking in the darkness. Fearless, she
continued on, ready to face whatever the house had in store for
her. She flipped the kitchen light switch as the fluorescent lights
above flickered on. She stood just outside the kitchen scanning its
freshly painted walls, hanging dish towels, and clean counter tops.
There was nobody there and nothing out of the ordinary beyond some
dirty plates sink. They must have been from Curtis.

She was going to find the truth behind the
mansion with whatever tools she had at her disposal. The books, the
diary, and copied newspaper articles were all sitting on the desk
in her office and she was ready to dive in. All she needed first
was a bagel and a cup of coffee.

A few rooms down from the kitchen, Mary sat
in the desk of her study with a sketch pad and drawing pencils at
her disposal. She sipped from her Cincinnati coffee mug and typed
away on her laptop, responding to a deluge of work emails
accumulated over the past few days. She had two week deadline to
make on the rough sketches to present to the publisher, and she
hadn’t drawn a single thing.

A stack of library books rested on the
corner of her desk, just within reach. The diary was secured in her
desk drawer, next to her Smith & Wesson .38 caliber pistol, a
weapon she always kept near from years of living in the city.
Classical music played from her laptop as she went into full work
mode. It made her feel good to be somewhat settled in and returning
from a lengthy hiatus. Her cell phone was in view with its screen
reflecting the sunlight that beamed in the room from the open
window behind Mary. She could feel a light breeze and felt in
relative peace with the rustling of trees and chirping of birds
from outside.

With the clock episode behind her, she felt
ready to begin her first drawing for the week, which she had put
off for a while. She needed to sketch the simple outline of a
family at home. The boy, Tommy, is being told by his mother at the
dinner table to never talk to strangers. It was simple enough
scene, and Mary swiveled her chair around to the arched table
behind her, taking a sharp drawing pencil and began to sketch over
a thick sheet of drawing paper.

Her movements came naturally as before her
long break from illustrating. She didn’t even have to look at any
photos. She closed her eyes, envisioning the family: the father,
mother, daughter, and three boys. She sketched away as her hand
seemed to take a life of its own, scratching against the paper and
quick, measured lines, forming a lines each family member. The
music guided her along, her mind entering a familiar trance mode
where she seemed to be operating on auto-pilot.

After a few moments of hasty scribbling, she
opened her eyes and lowered her pencil, shocked by what she had
drawn. There on the paper below was a rough sketch of a family, but
not the one she had intended to draw. The nicely dressed mother,
father, and children lay on their backs, riddled with gunshot holes
and in thick pools of blood. She had drawn X’s over their eyes.
Their tiny mouths were agape in horror. She backed her chair away,
stunned and horrified by the drawing as her pencil fell to the
ground.

She spun around, pulling the top drawer open
and grabbed the small, crinkled diary hidden inside. She placed it
on her desk, pushing her keyboard to the side and stared down at
its faded leather-bound exterior. She had read nearly half of the
diary so far, and found herself surprised that it had taken days
for her to return to it. But that was the question in itself. Did
she have any control over anything? Were the forces within the
house returning her to another passage?

She opened a word document on her computer
in haste, revealing her typed transcript of the legible pages in
the diary. She flipped the book open somewhere in the middle on a
page she had marked. With one hand holding the diary open and the
other on her keyboard, her eyes scanned the page as she typed
furiously and with purpose.

I don’t know what’s happening. I’m scared. I
heard Mother and Father quietly discussing death threats. For weeks
we’ve received dozens of unmarked letters and unrecognizable
handwriting. They won’t even let me go into town anymore. Or to
school. Or to the park. Or even in the woods behind our house. I
have a private tutor now. Her name is Mrs. Dempsey. She’s fifty two
years old and very stern. I asked Mother last night who would want
to hurt us. She told me not to worry about it. But am I worried
about it. How can I not?

Mary flipped to the next page without
hesitation and continued tying.

Mother fired Mrs. Dempsey today after an
argument. What it was, she wouldn’t tell me. This is the fifth
person they’ve fired in the past week. Our gardener, butler,
mechanic, and swim coach. All of them gone. Now I feel lonelier
than ever.

Mary paused looking up. “Swim coach?” she
said. Did the mansion once have a pool? There was nothing in the
backyard but solid ground with plenty of trees and underbrush along
the way. She looked back down and continued reading as the girl’s
next words nearly stopped Mary’s heart.

Pastor Phil visited the house tonight. He’s
about the only person Mother talks to anymore. He too expressed
concern for our safety but said that God would protect us as long
as we had faith in Him and each other. My parents were never really
religious people. Though lately, that’s all changed.

She closed the diary and set it to the side
as she reached for the copied newspaper articles in a near state of
delirium. She flipped through the copies, frantic, eyes darting
along the wording of each black and write article. In several
different articles, the history of the Bechdel mansion carried the
same generic outset. The estate was at least a hundred years old
and had been a part of the Bechdel family for generations.

One article caught her eye as she discovered
by the turn of the twentieth century, the Bechdel family tree
extended to the size of an entire town. Redwood, it was reported,
originated as town for and by the Bechdels. She couldn’t believe
her eyes. By 1975, however, the Bechdel bloodline had been
completely wiped out.

In a frenzied quest for information, she
placed the articles to the side and grabbed the nearest travelogue
book. Her mind didn’t waver from the task at hand. She gave no
notice of time passing or attention to her phone or how many emails
piled in her inbox. She was completely focused on the task before
her, like an obsession that had consumed her sensibilities down to
the deepest core.

She opened the first book,
A Brief History of Redwood
. It was a
short book, maybe sixty pages long, and there were plenty of old
photographs on the page which showed the progression of the town
from a backwoods settlement to a full-fledged town. She flipped
through the pages, letting her instincts guide her as she came
across a small newspaper clipping, stuck between two pages.
Curious, she took the clipping out and unfolded it, reading the
headline with dread.

Ukrainian Heir Flees Redwood Mansion after
Series of Unexplained Events

The article continued, In the summer
of June, 1992, the rural town of Redwood welcomed one of its most
prestigious newcomers, wealthy business heir Boris Sokolov, and his
large family. Since moving to the town, Sokolov made several
boastful and promising gestures to invest and expand into Redwood,
helping to create what he called, a town of the
late-20
^th
century. But two
weeks later, Sokolov, the self-proclaimed “savior of Redwood,” fled
his new home, the infamous Bechdel estate, without a word, taking
his family back to the Ukraine where they were never seen or heard
of again.

The article went on, but Mary stopped there,
in complete disbelief that she was just discovering the revealing
information. She went back to the books, devouring the pages and
taking in each and everything she could about the town in its
history. Her fingers stopped between pages of another book,
detailing Redwood municipal history and Dover County which
surrounded it. There was another newspaper clipping, folded like
before.

This time she found an article about the
latest family to have lived in the mansion, going back only to
2006. The family moved after the father, Eugene Garland, a wealthy
Manhattan land developer, died in his sleep, three weeks after
moving in. Mary couldn’t believe it. She continued reading the
article, immersed in its details of the mystery surrounding
Garland’s death, when her eyes became heavy beyond control and she
began drifted away into a slumber that did not seem her own.

A startling vision came over her, real and
lifelike. She could see the foyer of the mansion decked out
elegantly with white curtains, glowing candles and elaborate white
leather furniture. There were servers in tuxedos holding trays with
finger foods and champagne glasses. At a distance she could see men
and women in fancy suits and dresses as jazz music played from a
nearby record player.

The vision ascended up the winding
staircase, watching the party from above as three masked men
stormed into the house, brandishing rifles and shotguns and
shouting at the dinner guests, terrifying and rounding them up into
a huddle. Moments later, the party guests and everyone else were
blasted away, riddled with bullets as gunfire tore them to pieces
and sent clumps of flesh onto the ground in an orgy of blood.

The vision took Mary up the stairs and into
the first bedroom on the right, a child’s room, the room of a young
girl. She was seeing the mansion through someone’s eyes, perhaps
the author of the diary. She came to a window overlooking the
darkened courtyard as abrupt banging came over her bedroom door.
She climbed from the window and jumped into the moist grass below,
running off in a panic, gasping for air along the way. She ran into
a man.

Mary could see his face as he pointed the
barrel of his rifle into her sight: lean cheekbones, stubble, a
scar on his right cheek, and a thick head of straight, reddish hair
that went down past his ears. A blast and white flash of light
followed, when suddenly Mary woke up.

The grandfather clock jarred her out of her
deep sleep, bells tolling in sync that woke her to a darkened
office. Her head rose up from the desk with a newspaper clipping
stuck to her cheek. She felt an uncomfortable crick in her neck
and, for a moment, didn’t know where she was.

Suddenly, she spun her chair around,
gasping. The passage of time was unreal. She backed up and stared
at her desk, long and hard. Books were strewn open all along its
surface with newspaper articles lying everywhere. It looked like a
madman had rummaged through everything in fervent frenzy.

“
No…” Mary said in disbelief. Her
blank laptop screen had long went into sleep mode. She looked at
her cell phone and saw that it was a little after 8:00 p.m.
“Impossible…” She had found herself saying that word a lot as of
late.

In dazed confusion, she turned back around,
looking out the window to the dark sky and distant chirping of
crickets from the blackened forest. How could twelve hours have
just passed without her even knowing? Fear crept into her heart
when she realized that she had read every book and every copied
article on the desk. She had ingested the material before her like
some kind of ravenous animal. If only she could remember half of
what she had apparently read.

She swiped her phone screen and saw some
miss calls from her mother, agent, and from Curtis. Shaking, she
called Curtis first as his number went straight to voicemail. She
still found herself in a state of disbelief. As long as she was in
that house, nothing much made sense.

“
Just checking in with you. I’d
thought you’d be home now. Call me back,” she said into the
phone.

She hung up, curious as to his whereabouts
and then rose from her chair, legs stiff and sore. Had she really
been sitting there unabated for twelve hours? The empty plate on
her desk with crumbs of an eaten bagel indicated as much along with
her growling stomach. She walked past the desk lamp and out of the
room, limping along the way, toward the kitchen to make some
dinner.

She turned on the hall light and continued
with the grandfather clock suddenly back in her mind. She flipped
the kitchen lights on, carrying her empty plate and head to the
sink, when the fluorescent lights above flickered and then went out
in unison. She stood in the darkness, astonished and frustrated, as
a faint glow from a single light above the sink retained
visibility.

She looked up at the non-functioning lights
above and sighed. The electrician was supposed to come and fix them
already. Perhaps he did and she never answered the door. The
thought alone was unsettling. She had never gotten around to the
door either and was sure Curtis would throw a fit about the red
paint still there.