The Haunting of Gillespie House (13 page)

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Gillespie House.

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About Crawlspace

I wanted to share a short story,
Crawlspace
, which has special significance for this novella. If it weren’t for
Crawlspace
,
Gillespie House
would never have existed.

Short stories come with a unique challenge. Because they have a limited length—7,500 words, according to many publishing houses, before a short story technically becomes a novelette—good ideas often have to be scrapped to keep the story’s length manageable.

While I was planning
Crawlspace
, I kept thinking of new scenes and themes, even though I knew I couldn’t include them.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a graveyard behind the house,
I’d think.
Or a maze of hidden passageways inside the walls. Or a scene where the protagonist explores her home at night. Or, or, or…

I tried to pare the story down to just the basics, but the excess ideas wouldn’t go away. They kept building on each other, and building, and building, until they were too big to ignore. I raised a white flag and rewrote
Crawlspace
into what’s now
Gillespie House
.

It took nearly two months to plan
Gillespie House
, and, during that time, the story evolved dramatically. It changed so much, in fact, that once I’d finished
Gillespie House
, I was able to go back and write
Crawlspace
as a short story, the way it was originally intended to be.

You’ll notice a lot of similarities between the stories. The initial cause of suspense—the scratching in the walls—is the biggest recurring theme. But I hope you’ll enjoy seeing how vastly different the stories became, despite starting in the same place.

Again, thank you for taking the time to experience these stories with me. You’re the reason I write, dear reader.

Much love,

Darcy

It was our first day in the new house. My parents were downstairs, fighting over how much to unpack. Dad was a borderline hoarder, but at least he was an efficient one. He believed that leaving most of our belongings in boxes would make it easier for next time we moved. We had at least a dozen cartons that were sealed nine years ago, when I was still too young to appreciate the insanity of his logic.

Mum also had hoarderish tendencies, but she preferred to have her clutter on display, decorating the house like her personal thrift shop. I was the polar opposite—anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary for our comfort or survival could be thrown out. I didn’t even have much furniture, just a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and a chair. My small book collection sat atop my desk, but they were the only decorations I owned. Compared to downstairs—which Mum continued to fill with trinkets, vases, miniatures, and paintings—my room was spartan. I liked it that way.

The lack of furniture meant there was nothing to cover the door in the wall, though. It sat in the area between my bed and my desk. It was barely noticeable unless I was looking for it, but once I’d seen it, the door was hard to ignore.

It’s probably empty
, I repeatedly told myself as I made the bed and hung my clothes–five shirts and three pairs of pants–in the wardrobe.
It’s not like there’s some great big secret hidden in there.

My unpacking took less than ten minutes. I could have gone downstairs when I finished, but I knew I would get roped into helping Dad squirrel away boxes marked “Don’t Open,” or mum would ask me to help arrange dozens of her miniature horses and squirrels along the mantelpiece. I’d already done more than my share to help pack them, and the four-hour drive had exhausted me.
If they want clutter in their house, they’ll have to deal with the consequences
, I decided and flopped onto the bed.

My window had a view of the large oak tree that grew beside the house, and I watched its fluttering leaves brush against the glass, mesmerised, until I drifted off.

I woke to the sound of tapping. The sunlight was hitting my face, so I rolled over to block it out and mumbled, “I’m coming. Hold on.” When the noise didn’t stop, I sat up and rubbed my palms into my eyes.

It wasn’t Mum knocking at my door, as my half-asleep brain had assumed. I glanced towards the window, where the motion of the tree leaves had lulled me to sleep. The wind had died down, and the boughs were still.

I mussed my hair out of my face as I looked about the room. The tapping was quiet but, like a dripping tap, impossible to ignore.

“Hello?” I called.

Mum answered me from downstairs. “Dinner’s almost ready! Come help me find the cutlery.”

As the sound of her voice died away, silence rushed in to fill the space. The tapping had stopped, at least.

It was probably the tree, after all.

“Do you want to know what I found out today?” Dad asked.

Our real dinner table was crowded with half-unpacked cartons, so we sat our paper plates on a large packing box while we ate. Neither of my parents seemed to appreciate the irony.

“What?” I asked, scooping up pasta with a plastic spoon.

Dad swelled with excitement. “Apparently, this place used to be an orphanage during the Depression. They had up to sixty children here at a time.”

Mum paused, her fork halfway to her mouth. “How did you find that out?”

“Oh, well, I was setting up the office. The computer turned itself on–you know,” Dad blustered.

I smothered a grin. I hadn’t been the only one slacking off that afternoon.

“The real estate agent said it was built by a lord.” Mum put down her fork and smoothed her cotton dress. I was sure she’d been born in the wrong decade. Necessity had forced her to work a part-time job most of her life, but she would have been much happier as a housewife. She even wore dresses and styled her hair as if she were living in the forties. Dad thought she was adorable.

“It was,” Dad said, leaning forward. His enthusiasm was contagious, and both Mum and I mimicked his movement to hear him better. “When he died, he left it to a local church, and they converted it into an orphanage. It stayed that way until the eighties, when it was sold and renovated.”

“Orphanage, huh?” I asked, glancing about the pokey kitchen. “It’s not really built for it.”

“Well, when you’re desperate, you make do with what you’ve got,” Dad said. “There were a lot of homeless children back then, more than any of the orphanages could keep up with, so they crammed the homes to capacity and had the children work–sewing clothes or running errands or whatnot–to help pay for food.”

The house was big, much bigger than our last place had been, but it still seemed far too small for sixty children.
Though, I guess, for a parentless child during the Great Depression, you’d call yourself lucky if you had a roof over your head and enough food to keep yourself from starving.

Mum looked uncomfortable. She’d left her fork in her half-eaten meal and was rubbing at her arms. “I’m not sure I really like that.”

“What’s not to like?” Dad asked. He had shovelled so much pasta into his mouth that I could hardly understand him. “We get to be a part of the town’s history!”

Mum seemed to be seeing the house in a new light. Her eyes darted over the stone walls and arched doorway, and her eyebrows had lowered into a frown. “I just hate to think about all those children… they must have been so lonely…”

Dad’s whole body shook as he laughed. “Lonely? When there were sixty of them? I don’t think so.”

Mum pretended not to hear him. “That must be why the price was so low. It was even cheaper than that house half its size in Cutty Street, remember?”

“Their loss,” Dad said, spearing more pasta onto his fork with a satisfied grin.

The tapping woke me in the middle of the night. I lay in bed and watched the opposite wall, where moonlight filtered through the tree outside my window and left dancing, splotchy shapes on the blue wallpaper.

The noise seemed to bore into my skull and knock directly on my brain. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing it to be quiet so I could fall asleep again.

tk tk tk tk tk tk tk tk…

I groaned, rolled over, and pulled my pillow over my ears. It muffled the sound but didn’t extinguish it.

tk tk tk tk tk…

If anything, the noise grew louder and more insistent, like a fly that was getting closer and closer to my head. I glared at the shadows cast on the wall, watching as they twitched and swirled, mimicking the infernal tree’s movements. Maybe I could convince Dad to cut it down…

tk tk tk tk tk tk tk tk tk tk…

“Shut up!” I yelled, unable to tolerate the tapping anymore. I sat up in bed, feeling flushed, frustrated, and a little ashamed for yelling at a tree.

My room was quiet.

I held my breath, waiting for the noise to resume, but I heard nothing except beautiful, sweet silence. “Huh,” I muttered and carefully lay back down. The shadows continued to sway over the wall opposite, but I didn’t mind them as long as the noise had stopped. As I closed my eyes and let tiredness claim me, I wondered at how incredible it was that the tree had quietened at the exact moment I’d told it to.

Mum used a hot tray of muffins to bribe me into helping her unpack the next morning, and I spent the first half of the day unwrapping, dusting off, and arranging her miniature collection. She fussed behind me, moving the animals and ball gown-wearing ceramic women into new arrangements, quirking her head to the side constantly to admire her work.

Finding out she lived in an old orphanage seemed to have shaken her; she was putting even more effort into turning this house into her domain than she had at our last place. She’d rescued her set of doilies and crocheted tablecloths from one of Dad’s “Don’t Open” boxes and flung them around the sitting room until it looked like a winter wonderland. Even more boggling, she’d brought out some of the Christmas decorations, including our fake wreath, holiday-themed trinkets, and bowls of plastic apples.

“Christmas in May?” I asked sceptically as I poked at one of the glittery apples.

Mum shrugged while she rearranged the miniatures on the fireplace mantel. “I think they look nice. Don’t you want our house to be pretty?”

I didn’t tell her, but I thought it was bordering on garish. I escaped back to my near-empty room, a pair of hedge clippers clutched in one hand.

Once I’d had a chance to think about it, I’d realised there was a simple way to stop the tapping noise without having to cut down the entire tree. I opened the window, pulled out the screen, and began snipping off all of the branches that touched or came near to the glass.