The Haunting of Gillespie House (8 page)

Thunder crashed. I pulled the blanket around myself more tightly and drained the last of my tea.

Something was
wrong
in the house, and I had the feeling it all stemmed from the locked room on the second floor. I stood up to put my cup in the sink and nearly dropped it as a door slammed above my head.

“Damnit!” I snapped reflexively, pressing my free hand to my heart. No wonder Mrs Gillespie needed marriage counselling if her husband refused to fix that abominable door.

I put down my cup and adjusted the blanket around my shoulders. It was late—or rather, early—and I was letting my imagination run away on me. I probably just needed a few hours’ sleep, and maybe a couple of painkillers for my aching ribs and throbbing head, and I would be fine.

The floorboards above my head groaned. I hesitated, listening to them, trying to remind myself that it was just the house breathing…

Except it wasn’t. They weren’t random creaks; they were footsteps in the hallway above me.

It was a good thing I’d put down my mug; otherwise, I would have dropped it. Panic flared through me while my brain tried to reason against it.
There can’t be anyone there. You would have heard them come in.

The footsteps kept moving, starting to the left and travelling directly over my head.

There’s no one there. The house breathes; that’s all.

They’d changed direction and were heading down the hallway, towards the back of the house.

You’re safe. You’re safe. You’re safe.
I ran for the stairwell, clutching the blanket in one hand and the candlestick in the other. The stairs tended to creak, so I kept my feet light and stayed to the edge of the steps, minimising the noise the best I could.

The landing was empty and dark. I glanced up the stairs behind me, the one that went to the third floor of the building, but there was no noise coming from there, so I faced the hallway in front of me and began advancing down it.

The doors were all still open from when I’d searched them the night before. I glanced into each room as I passed but saw no sign of an intruder. I eventually reached my own room and looked inside. It was exactly the way I’d left it. My pile of novels, which I’d barely made a dent in, still sat on the table. My cupboard door was open from when I’d gotten my dressing gown, and the bed looked bare without the blanket that I was currently clutching around my shoulders.

Then the scratching started again. I held still, listening hard, and realised it was coming from the wall behind my bed. I moved close and pressed my ear against the cool wallpaper.

The more I listened, the less I was convinced that rats were the cause.

I pulled back and jogged into the hallway again, my heart thundering in my ears, trying to drown out the dreadful scratching sound. The noise was coming from the room next to mine—the room with the locked door.
The room that belonged to Jonathan Gillespie.

Even though I knew what the result would be, I couldn’t stop myself from trying to turn the handle. Still locked.

Why?

I ran down the stairs, hardly thinking about what I was doing, and dropped the candlestick in the hallway before pelting out the door and into the rain. It was achingly cold and soaked through the blanket before I’d even rounded the corner. Visibility was poor, and I couldn’t hear much over the roar of the drops assaulting the house and the muddy, slushy ground, but I kept marching down the side of the house until I stood below the bay window. I pulled out my phone, grateful that it was waterproof, and turned on the flashlight function. The room was a long way above me, but the phone’s light was just enough to let me make out the window.

The curtains fluttered in the breeze for a second before falling still. Dread pooled in my chest like molten lead as the implication hit me.
There is no breeze… not in the hallway, not outside
. The rain was heavy, but the wind had settled, letting the drops fall directly down. I watched the window with a dry mouth.
Is someone living in there?

Impossible. I’d been in the house for three days. Even if someone had food and water in the room, they couldn’t go to the bathroom without my knowing.
Right?

The dreams… what if there was a spirit in the house, trying to show me something or teach me something? Or what if Jonathan Gillespie’s ghost was still trying to rule over the home that had once been his?

I needed to open the door—to see what was in the only locked room in the house.
How, though?

I could call Mrs Gillespie to ask where the key was… and, most likely, endure her scorn before being told that I shouldn’t pry where I wasn’t wanted. Or I could force my way in. I’d already broken the basement’s door; Mrs Gillespie wasn’t likely to get
that
much angrier if I broke a second one.

That settled it. I jogged towards the sheds at the back of the house, shoved open the spider-infested door and shone my phone’s light at the clutter on the ground and shelves. Sure enough, in the corner, among shovels, pruners, and tree saws, was a rusty crowbar. I kicked the clutter out of my way and grabbed the bar, shook it to detach it from the cobwebs, then ran back into the rain.

This is crazy
. I skittered through the front door, dropped my soaked blanket on the ground, and took the stairs two at a time.
But sometimes crazy circumstances warrant crazy actions.

I didn’t stop moving until I reached the locked door, where I stumbled to a halt, bent over, and braced my hands on my knees to drag in a few rough breaths. A stitch had developed in my left side, and my throat was dry from the stress and the running.

I listened hard, but everything was still and silent again. Even the scratching sounds had stopped; all I could hear was rain drumming on the roof. I knelt, pressed my cheek against the wooden floor, and shined the light from my phone under the door.

Just as I had on my first day in the house, I could see faint outlines of objects I couldn’t make out, but there was no sign of motion and no hint of what might have been inside.

“We’re really doing this, huh?” I picked up the crowbar and fit its angled edge between the door and the doorframe. For a second, I hesitated, wondering if I should leave the task until morning and maybe call Mrs Gillespie to see what her excuse was, but the tension had built so strongly in my chest that I thought I would explode if I didn’t get an answer right then. “I guess we are.”

I heaved on the crowbar. The wood creaked, then I was rewarded with a faint cracking noise. I pushed harder, the stitch stabbed at me again, and my headache flared. Then the wood gave out under the pressure with a splitting crack, and the door finally swung open.

I stood in the doorway, blinking and gasping, trying to orient myself and make sense of what I was seeing.

Plenty of scenarios had flashed through my mind in the days and moments before I’d opened the door, but none of them came even remotely close to reality.

My optimistic side had hoped for an empty storage room, like the one to its left; locked, maybe, because the window didn’t close properly and the Gillespies were trying to stop the breeze.

My pessimistic side had pictured an evil lair filled with replicas of the wrought-iron symbol in the basement or corpses stacked along the walls while the room’s occupant laughed at my foolishness for walking into his trap.

What I saw was worlds away from either idea.

I turned the light on as I walked through the doorway and gazed about the room. To my left was a small bed—too small for an adult—with a pink floral comforter. A child’s rocking chair sat beside it, a stuffed bear posed in its cushioned seat. To the right was a wardrobe set into the wall, much like the one in my room, except this one had posters of horses taped to it. A deluxe dollhouse—so big and complex that a younger version of myself would have cried from jealousy—was propped below the bay window.

I hadn’t been able to see from the outside, but the window’s curtains were actually pink with frilled edges. The windowsill was painted white, matching the other accents in the room that set off the pastel-peach walls.

A stack of boxes, all open, sat in the middle of the room. I caught glimpses of a diary, a photobook, and a collection of picture frames inside.

“Wow…” I remembered that this was supposed to have been Jonathan Gillespie’s room, and I broke into laughter.

It was such a relief, so much sweeter and less menacing than what I’d feared, that I let myself fall to the ground and racked in gasping breaths between bouts of chuckling. After a few minutes, I calmed down—and looked at the room with fresh eyes.

I’d found out its terrible secret, which wasn’t that terrible to begin with, but that didn’t explain why it had been locked. I scooted over to the box holding picture frames and pulled out a few.

They showed Mr and Mrs Gillespie, looking a little younger, posed with a girl with shoulder-length straw-coloured hair. She had a huge gap-toothed smile, and I guessed she wasn’t older than six or seven.

I pulled out more photos, and they were all variations of the same. The Gillespies with their daughter at an amusement park. Mrs Gillespie pushing the toddler on a swing. A Christmas photo that was marked from five years previously.

If this was the Gillespies’ daughter, where was she now?

The Christmas photo looked like the most recent. The child was holding up a miniature toy horse, beaming at the camera while Mrs Gillespie sat on the ground just behind, wearing longer hair and holding a glass of wine. The date set it at five years before, but the girl couldn’t have been older than seven.
That would make her a young teenager now.

Where is she? Boarding school?
Mr and Mrs Gillespie seemed the sort of people who might send their daughter to one. I knew I was pushing the limits of what was appropriate, but I was too curious to stop. The second box held stacks of newspaper clippings, and I pulled out a handful. The headline on the top sheet—from January five years ago, not long after the Christmas photo—made my heart drop:
LOCAL GIRL MISSING.

I skimmed it quickly. The Gillespies’s child, Hanna, had been reported missing on the morning of January the eighteenth. It was a suspected kidnapping, and the police were asking for information.

More of the story unfolded through the clippings—there were at least thirty of them, stacked in chronological order. Police had searched the house and found no signs of a forced entry, and all the footprints in the damp ground had matched the Gillespie family’s shoes. However, a set of footprints belonging to Hanna had led towards the forest, though no one was sure how old they were.

Nearly a hundred police officers and volunteers had spent three days scouring the woods. No signs of Hanna were found, and the search was eventually scaled back then called off completely. Mrs Gillespie believed her daughter had been kidnapped, rather than lost. She made repeated requests for information in the media. Two weeks after her daughter had disappeared, she offered five hundred thousand dollars to anyone with information that led to her daughter’s discovery. Despite hundreds of leads, Hanna wasn’t found.

The last clipping was from four months before the Gillespies left me in charge of their home. It was the four-year anniversary of Hanna’s disappearance, but Mrs Gillespie still hadn’t given up. The reward was still on offer, she said. She implored the police to pull the file out of storage and reassess it, and she pleaded with the public to come forward with information. The article quoted her as saying she couldn’t rest until her child had been found. A photo was included, showing what Hanna might look like at age eleven.

I carefully put the clippings back in the box in the same order I’d found them, then I looked around the room again. My stomach turned leaden as I realised what it was: a shrine to the Gillespies’ lost child. Of course the door had been locked; the room was private, special. They hadn’t wanted intruders poking through their missing daughter’s possessions… which was exactly what I’d done. I stood up, feeling ashamed and a little sick. The room held the Gillespies’ private grief, probably the reason their marriage was failing, and a virtual stranger had beaten down the door and riffled through their daughter’s memorabilia. I intended to back out of the room, close the door and never open it again, but something stopped me.

Did the Gillespies know the room had once belonged to Jonathan Gillespie?
Surely not.
They would have chosen the room for their daughter because of the beautiful bay window that overlooked the gully. They couldn’t have known their child’s room had once housed such an evil man…
no, not a man—a monster.

I looked back at the photo frames, at Hanna’s infectiously free smile, and my skin crawled. She’d been a descendant of Jonathan Gillespie, a cult leader who believed there was power in darkness and death, and she’d lived in his room.

The police seemed to think Hanna had woken up early on the morning of her disappearance, gone for a walk, and become lost in the woods. But I had a horrible, sinking idea that Jonathan had somehow been involved.

“That’s crazy,” I told myself, my eyes darting about the peach-and-white room. “He’s been dead for nearly two hundred years. You’ve lost your marbles, Elle.”

And yet, I couldn’t summon the willpower to leave. Instead, I knelt back in front of the second box, which held a collection of Hanna’s toys. A leather-bound book was hidden just below a pack of horse stickers.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” I said as I gently extracted the diary. “This is so, so wrong.”

The police had probably already been through the room five times over, I reasoned as I opened the diary to the first pages. As much as I felt as though I was violating the Gillespie’s privacy, I certainly wasn’t the first person to do so.

The diary was filled with a child’s scrawl. Hanna had been a reasonable speller, but she hadn’t bothered trying to keep the words within the faint lines scored on the paper. Her sentences rolled across the surface in whichever direction they decided to go. It made reading difficult, but I got the gist of the first entry: she’d been given the diary as a present when they moved into their new house.

New house… this house?

She wrote about choosing the room with the big window and lining her toy horses on the sill so they could look outside while she slept.

I flipped through the pages, picking up on bits of trivia while I looked for anything that could correlate with my suspicions. A few months after moving in, Mr Gillespie had hired contractors to build garden beds out the back. Hanna had helped him plant seeds and had watered them every morning. A few entries after that, she’d stumbled on the cemetery, but her parents wouldn’t let her go in. Her parents had plans to repaint the entire house and buy more comfortable furniture—but it looked as though Hanna’s room was the only one that had been spruced up.

Then I saw something that made me pause. Hanna had written about “little voices” talking to her through the walls. She thought they were fairies that were hiding from her. According to Hanna, they didn’t speak English, but they would sometimes reply when she spoke to them.

I turned the page, eager for more information, and found it was empty. I flipped farther, searching for more of the winding scrawl, but there was nothing else in the diary. Frustrated, I turned back to the last page and checked the date: January 16th, just two days before she was reported missing.

It felt as if a bucket of cold water had been poured over my head. Guilt for looking through the lost girl’s possessions drew over me, and I reverently put the diary back in the box then scooted backwards until I could rest my shoulders against the wall.

I didn’t like the idea of voices talking to the girl. Had she told her parents? Had Mrs Gillespie replied, just as she’d told me, that it was “only the house breathing”?

As I struggled with the new knowledge and fought to put the puzzle pieces together, I barely noticed as my eyelids, weighted down by missed sleep, fell closed.