FICTION BY TAYLOR HAGOOD

Taylor Hagood is a writer currently based in south Florida. His horror stories have appeared in Black Petals Horror/Science Fiction Magazine, Necrology Shorts, and are forthcoming in Yellow Mama and Ghostlight: The Magazine of Terror.

L E T T E R C H E S T
by Taylor Hagood

She told me about how she had searched for just this kind of house, scouring property after property, prodding to find out possibilities that no realtor wanted to acknowledge.

Many offers fell through after inspection. She insisted that the inspectors use EMF meters and gladly paid them extra for it. The inspectors and realtors got plenty of good laughs over her, but she did not care.

Finally, a positive EMF reading came. The inspector wrote a perfectly logical explanation for it in the report. Encouraged, she hired a spiritual medium that investigated and advised her to buy the house.

Listening to her, my mind wandered to what the closing must have been like. I imagined the sellers’ agent cutting glances to the buyer’s agent while the title company’s representative wondered why his jokes failed to lighten the mood. I imagined her—Mrs. Imogene Daugherty—with her eyes cast down on those pages, signing quietly in rote motions that contrasted with the spidery loops of her antiquated penmanship.

She kept those eyes downcast as she spoke to me in her solarium. We had met at the community center where I was teaching lifelong learning classes in watercolor painting on Saturdays. She showed a flair for art; an ability to produce fresh images that took full advantage of the whiteness of the paper. Not everyone can think their way from light to dark as well as she could.

After being in my classes for a month, she asked me to tea. I headed to her house the next afternoon. It was a Tudor Revival built in the 1920s with multiple gables, half-timbering, and sections of stone. Six inches of snow had fallen the day before, caking the house to set off its charms. The roads were cleared by afternoon, so I had no trouble driving over to that ancient neighborhood.

The interior of the house matched the charm of the exterior. I was surprised, however, to see the furniture, floors, and colors brought up-to-date. Given Ms. Daugherty’s age, I originally assumed she had spent her life in the house. A real-life Miss Havisham. But she had not.

“I moved here three years ago,” she said and then looked at me. We sat around a small table with a tiered stand full of sandwiches. I was just putting a cucumber and cream cheese sandwich in my mouth when she gave me “that look.” It was too late or anyway too awkward to take the sandwich back out of my mouth. So I went through with it and felt myself redden as I chewed under her searching gaze.

The gaze and the silence with it lasted long enough for me to finish chewing, swallow, and wonder what exactly to say or do next. If her eyes had not been so searching, I would have thought she had gone catatonic. I delayed longer with a sip of tea.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I just…I like you very much, Carissa. Ever since you came to the community center, I felt there was something nice about you. Something…empathetic. Would you say you’re empathetic?”

“Well,” I said after reflecting for a moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought of that word about myself before. I like to think I’m sensitive.”

“Yes, sensitive! That is the better word,” she said, her blue eyes crinkling in warmth.

The exchange made me feel good. My hopes of being a great artist or even just a professional artist had died in college. I quickly realized that the quaint drawings and paintings of horses that had wowed my family and friends since the time I was little carried no weight in the real art world. I found out I was supposed to produce abstractions that spoke to the large political and social concerns of life. But I had no big ideas and embraced no social causes. I just enjoyed transforming a blank space into an image.

I wanted to keep myself connected to that simple act of creation, so I became a high school art teacher. I should have known there would be little connection to creativity doing that. Mostly I spent my time trying to keep the students’ hands off each other or stopping them from destroying the room and the supplies in it.

Now, though, this woman saw the thing in me I prided myself on. She was quickly becoming like an aunt to me.

“Because you’re sensitive, you’re different,” she said leaning toward me a little. “Would you say you’re different?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

She leaned back and said, “Well…that you see life differently from other people. That you can sense things and appreciate things that others can’t. An artist sees and feels differently.”

I nodded. Yes, I would agree with that about artists.

“I am very sensitive,” she went on. “And I can’t talk about that to just anybody. It’s like this house, the way I got it. Why I did.”

Then she told about the search and how this house became the one.

“You mean,” I said, feeling a little funny, “you got the house because it’s…”

She nodded. I could not quite say the word because it disappointed me to think that this woman I so wanted to respect and to whom I was feeling so grateful for understanding me should be eccentric. I wanted her just to be kindly because then my being eccentric would not seem so freakish. Now it seemed more so.

Part of me did not want to go back for tea a second time, but I did.

*****

It was the next Sunday when it happened.

It came so unexpectedly I could not process it at first. Ms. Daugherty stopped talking midstream and set herself in a prim pose with her hands together in her lap. I did not understand, but I followed her gaze to the teapot. It hung in midair, trembling slightly.

I had never felt the cliché of icy terror coming over me before, but in that moment, I realized it was a real thing. The fear worked its chilled fingers through the hair on the top of my head down through my chest and into my arms. The hairs on my arms prickled, rigid in their follicles.

As we both watched, the pot lowered unsteadily to about half an inch above the table. Then it dropped exactly as if someone let it go.

“What was that?” I gasped.

I stared at the teapot and then at Ms. Daugherty. Her eyes glowed with excitement. After a moment, she turned her gaze to me and lifted her eyebrows. She did not have to say a word to convey her excitement. It was an honest, pure joy; not an I-told-you-so.

Looking at her expression and the glow of her eyes, my mind seemed to suspend, as though language and whatever meaning it could make went out of commission. All sensation seemed to have fled my body. Then, the smell of that tea-time food wafted back into my nose. But different now, transformed into something rotten mixed with a whiff of earth.

As my mind swung back into functioning again, I grew aware of space around me filling up. Energy poured into it until it felt fully occupied. I could not define it. Something in my brain told me it was human but not in recognizable human form. The best way I can describe it is like the circulatory system had been frayed and scrambled so that a nose relocated to where an elbow should be, a foot appeared in place of a neck, and so on. Something like a Picasso portrait

Picasso, I thought, the very kind of art I hate and cannot do.

“You feel it, don’t you?” Ms. Daugherty’s voice cut through my thoughts and vision. “You sense it.”

“Yes.”

I felt the presence recede, then return, then snap back again like a rubber band. Without turning my head, I moved my eyes around. I do not know what I thought I would see. Another invisible snap came, then another, and another, increasing in speed and power, escalating until it felt frantic. And frustrated.

I cut my eyes back to Ms. Daugherty. Hers continued to glow, staring to my right. Confused, I tried to understand what she was doing.

“I’m not doing it,” she said, as though reading my thoughts.

That chill streaking through me again. I knew she told the truth. I could not explain why, but I knew. It occurred to me that maybe that floating teapot had been some kind of trick; that I could lift it and find an invisible thread attached to it for Ms. Daugherty to manipulate. But I dismissed the thought. Something else lifted that teapot. And that something else now danced in terrible anger all around me. Its anger cut through my mind like a razor and slammed me with darkness.

“Yes,” Ms. Daugherty said in a near-hiss that jolted me—still an older lady’s nice voice, but with an edge. Her eyes stared bright and intent at the empty space beside me. She talked not to me but to that space. “Concentrate. You can do it. I am here. Do not give up. Try harder. Try. Try.”

The energy, the movement, the anger, Ms. Daugherty’s voice, all overwhelmed me. I seemed to seep out of myself a little. And I realized I was freezing.

Then came the noise—a kind of sonic boom. Distant somehow, so not loud. But its impact pummeled inside my chest.

The presence vanished, at least from my consciousness. I sat there shivering.

Ms. Daugherty sucked her teeth and muttered something that sounded like, “Very good.” Her eyes dimmed from their glow down to their natural appearance. She reached over and picked up the teapot—the very same one—and poured the brown contents into my cup. I did look to see if some kind of thread trailed out of it, but I knew better. My sensitivity told me.

“You are indeed sensitive, dear,” Ms. Daugherty said, again apparently reading my mind. “You will be all right in a minute or two. I’m so glad you’re here. It is so important.”

I had no idea what she meant. I also did not know how to ask. Maybe I feared the answer.

My terror slowly subsided, replaced by a strange sense of comfort. Here we sat: two sensitive eccentrics, and something else.

*****

I kept going back for Sunday tea time. More inexplicable things happened and with increasing frequency. A teacup would lift into the air shakily. Something in another room would fall with a crash. Sometimes I would feel a light brush against my arm or face, the caress of an invisible hand.

That icy feeling always came over me. But I soon got used to these occurrences. They came to feel almost natural. In fact, there developed a kind of harmony in the household. Ms. Daugherty encouraged the happenings, something like a coach. And I eventually came to realize that my presence had something to do with her schooling—that she enlisted me in a process.

Then came the Sunday afternoon when Ms. Daugherty insisted on giving me a key to the house.

“Please, Carissa, I want you to have it. I have no children of my own, and my nephews and nieces have nothing to do with me. They don’t understand, but you do.”

Seeing my discomfort, she went on, “You never know what might happen. I might get locked out one day or something.”

It was the “or something” that disturbed me.

About a year after I first went to her house, I made my usual Sunday visit. In class the day before, Ms. Daugherty had accidently turned over her glass of water. The spill ruined her painting. She laughed lightly about it and sat quietly, beaming on everyone else. She had never looked happier or more alive.

When she did not come to the door in her usual smiling way on Sunday, I knew right away something was wrong. My heart started pounding. I fished the key out of my purse and opened the lock. Entering, I called Ms. Daugherty’s name. Instead of a reply I got a subtle but forceful push from something invisible—an energy that felt insistent, like when a dog tries to communicate by nosing up to you and looking into your eyes urgently.

I called her name again as I headed for the solarium. There on the floor lay Ms. Daugherty.

Her eyes were open with the proud glow I saw in them when that teapot first lifted in the air. Her smile looked as bright as it had the day before in class. A silver butterknife jutted from her chest, and coagulated blood streamed into a pool on the oak floor.

My first instinct was to call 911, but I realized it was too late to help Ms. Daugherty. I figured I would call in a minute. In the meantime, something inside me—perhaps my “sensitivity,”—made me want to look around before I invited strangers to enter this highly unusual house.

Again I felt that push, this time as if a cat had rubbed against me. Then I heard a single peck. Not loud, but deliberate. Following that came a soft sound I recognized: an unsteady drawing of pencil lead over paper.

I looked around the solarium and saw a pencil working in shaking movements manipulated by an invisible hand on a small notepad on the corner table. With my own eyes I watched the pencil write in childlike, block letters: “L E T T E R C H E S T.”

Seeing the letters emerge across the paper seized my mind and body in that unease I had felt so many times. More than ever before, though, I felt unprotected. Whatever wrote that could just as easily drive the pencil into my heart. Any sane person would leave immediately. But I could not move anymore than a person in a nightmare can outrun some faceless pursuer.

When the pencil finished the “T” it dropped onto the table and rolled off. It bounced on the floor twice, then rolled to a stop. I watched the pencil for more movement and realized I was holding my breath.

I moved my eyes back to the pad. I felt no force now, but the room did not feel unoccupied. A new fear seized me. I imagined Ms. Daugherty standing up just beyond my peripheral vision; knife jutting from her chest, staggering toward me with her arms outstretched; reaching for me.

I forced myself to look. She was not standing nor had she moved. She lay there as before, eyes still open, smile frozen in place. And why on earth would I imagine this always kind lady would want ill will upon me?

I finally let my breath out, then caught it right back up as if that would protect me. It occurred to me that the price of being sensitive had become inflated along with everything from cereal to gas prices. I almost laughed at the thought and then marveled that I could think of laughing at such a moment.

Then a feeling of obligation welled up within me, and with it a sense of new dread. I turned my eyes back to that notepad and what was written on it. What did “L E T T E R C H E S T” mean?

At first, the letters separated out into “Let ter chest,” which for some reason rearranged in my mind into “let her rest.” I spoke those words aloud as if they were a question. Did I understand correctly? No response came.

I looked back at the pad and this time “C H E S T” leapt out. Yes, the knife stuck in her chest, I could see that. I was supposed to leave it there, I asked? Again, no response.

By this time, I gave myself up to the surreal situation I was in. I seemed to have adjusted to it. I realized my breathing had returned to normal. This was my life now.

I looked at the letters again and this time they made “Letter Chest.” I asked the room if I had it right this time. A nudge came—again, best described as the soft rub of a cat.

Ok, letter chest. What did that mean? I looked back at Ms. Daugherty lying on the floor smiling as though this whole thing were a game and it was perfectly natural to have a butterknife sticking in her. I looked to see if there was a letter on her chest. Could it be that I was supposed to make something of the scarlet ribbon of blood, an elongated “I” instead of an “A”?

The soft touch came again and with it another pecking sound of the pencil’s tip hitting the notepad. I looked back and saw that the invisible hand had picked the pencil back up and now scrawled the letters “I N” on it.

“The knife is in the chest, I know,” I said, surprised at how irritated I sounded.

Then came the slam upstairs—violent, loud. I jumped and felt my knees weaken. I barely managed to stay standing. I felt the entire house might rain down on me.

I calmed myself, and the words reformed in my mind. Letter in chest: there is a letter in a chest. Something had slammed a drawer upstairs.

I left the solarium slowly and made my way up the staircase. I do not know how I did it. Fear almost rendered me immobile. My hands shook as I clung to the banister.

I had never been upstairs before. I stopped and looked at the large landing with doors leading into bedrooms. They yawned open. I had no idea which one to go into. But then my eye caught the shadowy shape of a chest of drawers in the room to my right. The top drawer hung open.

Again, I have no idea how I managed to walk into the room and look in the drawer. I could not imagine my fear getting worse. But when I saw an envelope inside with the words “For Carissa” written in Ms. Daugherty’s handwriting I thought I would faint.

I had to sit down on the floor several minutes. Spots formed in my eyes, and I nearly vomited. Finally, I got the strength to stand back up and take the envelope out. I sat back down on the floor to open it.

Ms. Daugherty wrote the letter to me, undated. It foretold that this day would come. And it told me who lived here with her.

As I read, I envisioned Ms. Daugherty promising her ill mother she would never put her on hospice. “Your sisters and their kids just want the money and will want me dead quick,” her mother told her constantly.

But her mother’s pain worsened more and more. Ms. Daugherty’s sisters did pressure her, and she resisted for a long time. But it got to be too much. She gave in. Her mother died the next day.

A month later, an article torn raggedly from a newspaper appeared in the mailbox of the home Ms. Daugherty had always lived in. It told of a family who fought against the odds for their mother, resisting even the doctors’ insistence on life-ending palliative care. At the bleakest moment, she pulled through and lived several more years and died in her sleep.

Ms. Daugherty knew her mother had somehow gotten the article into that mailbox. At first, she thought her mother’s spirit remained in the house. But she could not feel her presence. So she researched her situation and discovered that spirits could go to places other than where they had lived and died.

When she finally found her mother’s new home, Ms. Daugherty bought it, moved in, and witnessed her mother’s feeble attempts to interact with the living world. Ms. Daugherty did not know what to do at first. But in time she learned how to encourage and support. Her already strong sensitivity sharpened, helping her help her mother and leading her to me, the daughter she never had.

Meanwhile, she awaited what she called her “just punishment.”

But I must not be afraid or sad when this day came, she assured me in her looping handwriting. Because Mother would take care of everything.

When I finished reading, I sat processing everything. Then, as if I had taken long enough, that catlike touch pushed me out of the room and out of the house, letter in hand.

I finally called 911.

The next day, reports emerged of Ms. Daugherty’s death. Fingerprints on the butterknife indicated her oldest nephew. Police found Ms. Daugherty’s safe empty. They discovered cash and a small fortune in gold coins in the nephew’s apartment.

The police did a thorough investigation of me since I was the beneficiary on all of Ms. Daugherty’s accounts. They found no evidence of foul play of any kind on my part.

Ms. Daugherty left me her house and everything else in her will. I am sitting in the solarium right now watching big fluffy snowflakes drift down to the lawn. Soon the manicured grass will grow powdery, then pure white. When I finish typing this sentence, I will pour myself a cup of tea. I will enjoy it. Then I will start a new painting and maybe after that a painting class.