The Haunting of Gillespie House (7 page)

“No!” I spat, jerking upright. Pain seared across my temple again, and I pressed my palm to it, waiting for it to ease. Confused and disoriented, I took a moment to realise I was still in my makeshift bed in the living room. I groaned, pulled myself to my feet, and wrapped the blanket about my body.

I must have been asleep for hours; night had coated the house in darkness, and I groped for the light switch. I stumbled out of the living room, where the wooden floor was cool on my bare feet, and into the hallway.

I had to let the girl out. She was trapped, frightened, and surrounded by the rats and insects, and her father planned to leave her there all night. I could help her, though. I
had
to help her.

The door was so well concealed that I nearly ran past it. It was so different in my dreams; the wooden entry had been tall and dark then, filled with power and importance.

I opened the door and looked into the black stairwell. “Genevieve?”

Idiot,
I thought as my voice echoed back at me from the void.
It was a dream. Genevieve isn’t real.

It had
felt
real, though, so much more real than anything else that had happened to me that day, so I hurried into the kitchen and retrieved the candlestick from the table, lit its blood-red candle, and returned to the unholy basement.

The room was almost exactly the way I’d left it at the end of my dream. Only the cloth thrown over the iron skull and the empty floor were different. No Genevieve.

“Of course,” I muttered, more than a little angry at myself for being so impulsive.
It was only a dream. Genevieve is probably your brain trying to send you a subconscious message to stop reading horror, or something.

Even so, I found it hard to convince myself that Genevieve didn’t need my help. I turned, preparing to climb the stairs again, and glanced upwards. The cracks in the ceiling were filled in with plaster.

One hand on the bannister and my right foot on the first stair, I was rooted to the spot. That little detail—the plastered ceiling—had been in my dream. Jonathan had filled in every last gap so that no light could find its way into his homage to darkness. But how could that be in a dream if I’d never noticed it before?

My mouth opened a fraction, and I frowned, trying to reconcile the knowledge. Maybe I’d subconsciously noticed the ceiling, and my brain had slipped it into the nightmare. And yet, it wasn’t something I would have noticed unless I was looking for it.
Then why…?

The door snapped closed.

I jumped and stared at the place that had once been my escape. A gust of wind followed the door’s motion and caught my dressing gown, chilling me. My candle’s flame died with a quiet hiss.

I swore then started running.
Am I trapped? Does the door lock itself?

Pain shot into my foot from where I stubbed my toe, but I didn’t slow down. I imagined myself as Genevieve, trapped in the lightless, heatless basement, fighting off overly bold rats and clicking insects, waiting for a rescue that would come months too late.

Terror made it hard to think as I reached the landing and felt blindly for the door—which had no handle.

“Damn, damn, damn,” I panted, exhaling the word with every breath. I scrabbled around the edge of the door, my fingernails trying to find purchase, ignoring the stings of splinters. I thought I heard a skittering sound behind me.

Genevieve’s face rose in my mind—her wide, terrified eyes pleaded with her father as he left her in the room, dread painted across her face as she watched her family climb the stairs. I felt her eyes on me, observing me, her companion in her cruel jail.

“No.” I backed up until I felt the wall behind me. Then I started running, angling my shoulder at the door, and hit it as hard as I could.

I burst through it, splinters of wood shooting into the hallway in my wake. My knees gave out, and I collapsed to the ground, panting and clutching at an anxiety-induced stitch. For a moment, I didn’t move. I knelt there on the wooden floor, savouring the sight of the poorly lit hallway and rooms, feeling the burn on my shoulder.
Guess that’ll be another bruise.

When I turned back to the door, I saw I hadn’t broken it completely, as I’d assumed. I’d merely cracked the wood around the crude lock.

“Jeeze,” I muttered, gaining my feet and dusting off my dressing gown. I felt wobbly, and my headache was back, throbbing at my skull. The room had made me jittery and anxious, and I didn’t like the way the black stairwell was left exposed, so I shoved the door closed then backed away from it. “You’re sick, Jonathan Gillespie.”

It felt good to be able to say it, to express that hatred and revulsion that his family had been incapable of verbalising. I stumbled to the kitchen
, his kitchen,
and put the kettle on. I glanced down and saw I still had the candlestick clutched in my hand, thought the candle had broken in half during my escape. I dropped it on the table.

A glance at the clock showed it was a little after midnight. I didn’t feel tired, so I jogged up the stairs to fetch my laptop, and I had it plugged in at the dining table before the kettle had finished boiling.

I typed Jonathan Gillespie’s name into a search engine. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was disappointed, all the same. The first page of search results brought up nothing but social media profiles, an article about a Canadian lawyer, and a steamy romance novella whose hero was unfortunate enough to share Jonathan’s name.

I didn’t hold much hope for it, but I clicked through to the second page. The first few results were more of the same, but the fourth link took me to a blog run by someone named Steve Gillespie. The blog seemed to be full of discussions on outback poetry, classic movies, and half-baked philosophical thoughts. Judging by his profile picture, Steve was well into the latter part of his life, and the blog hadn’t been updated in nearly five years. I did a search for Jonathan, and found a post called “
Some Ramblings for Posterity
” that seemed to be talking about the same Jonathan who had once owned the house.

Steve’s writing style was slow and confusing, and he took frequent detours to wax lyrical about his childhood. I skimmed the massive post, trying to pick out the parts that seemed relevant and reading between the lines when Steve wasn’t clear.

Steve was apparently Jonathan’s grandson. While he’d never met Jonathan, his mother had told him enough stories to fill in the details. He described growing up in a beautiful house, but it wasn’t until he mentioned a graveyard hidden in the woods out the back that I realised he was probably talking about the very building I was staying in.

According to Steve’s mother, Jonathan Gillespie had once been a cult leader in the North Coast. He’d amassed a following of nearly a hundred, though a reasonable number of those were his multiple wives and many children. When his followers had tried to rebel against him in 1871, they had fallen to a “great calamity”.

“What sort of calamity?” I scrolled on, but Steve either didn’t know or didn’t think it important enough to elaborate on. Instead, he speared off into a cute side story about the pet dog he’d owned that would fetch his shoes, but only in mismatched pairs.

I kept reading, and soon the story picked up again. After the “calamity”, Jonathan and his remaining family—three wives, his sister and her husband, his two brothers, and their many children—had packed up and left. He’d led them over the mountains, where he’d lost a number of the children to the harsh conditions, and eventually arrived at an unoccupied stretch of land a few hours’ walk from a small town.

There, his family spent months building a house to Jonathan’s exact specifications. Steve noted that Jonathan Gillespie had been incredibly particular about how the house was built, but didn’t say why.

“C’mon, Steve,” I begged, scrolling past another anecdote about the time he’d misheard his mother and purchased a bunch of flowers instead of the bag of flour he’d been sent to the store for. “C’mon, don’t leave me hanging like this.”

Steve claimed Jonathan had ruled his family with an iron fist, which, if my dreams had been even slightly accurate, was true. Each day, they would “commune” for an hour. While Steve didn’t elaborate on what this communing was, I guessed it was the bizarre scene I’d witnessed in the basement.

There was a mention of Jonathan watching from his window, which had the best view in the house, while his family worked the gardens. Steve then finished his story by saying Jonathan had gotten his just deserves for his cruelty; he’d been the first to fall to the mysterious illness that had
“wiped out nearly all of the Gillespies and Tonkins
.” I remembered the smattering of gravestones with the name Tonkins. They probably belonged to Gillespie’s sister, her husband, and their children.

Obviously, at least some of the Gillespies had survived—otherwise, Steve wouldn’t have existed to tell his story—but the frustrating narrator hadn’t said how many.

I thought of Mr Gillespie, obviously a great-grandchild or great-great-grandchild of Jonathan. I wondered how much he knew about his family history. I was tempted to call and ask, but I’d never spoken much with Mr Gillespie beyond hello and goodbye. Mrs Gillespie had organised all the arrangements for my stay, and even if she knew anything about her husband’s ancestors, I doubted she was willing to talk about it.

I spent another forty minutes looking through other search results in case Jonathan had another descendant who was a little more coherent about his history, but I gave up when I reached page twenty-seven, which was full of gibberish results.

The clock read two thirty in the morning, but I was still too energised to sleep. I made another cup of tea and fished leftovers out of the fridge for a midnight snack while I processed what I knew. The Gillespie house had been built nearly two hundred years before by a cult leader. He’d created it to serve a specific purpose, which I had yet to discover. Steve Gillespie had implied that his grandfather had somehow been involved in the deaths of his followers and a number of his family before moving, but I couldn’t guess to what degree Jonathan had caused those deaths.

Steve’s brief mention about Jonathan watching his family through his window had given me pause. While he hadn’t elaborated on where it was in the house, my thoughts were instantly drawn to the bay window of the locked room on the second floor. Because it jutted out of the wall, it had the best view in the house. On the other hand, it only overlooked the gully that led to the forest, whereas the gardens were behind the property, out of view of even the bay window.

Except…

I thought of the raised beds behind the building. They were old and definitely dead, sure, but they were nowhere near as old as the house was.

What if the garden was originally around the side of the house, where there’s more sunlight?
That would put the garden right under the bay window. I pictured Jonathan standing in the gap between the curtains, his cold grey eyes watching his wives and children toiling in the dirt below… a pair of clippers gripped in his fist, perhaps, ready to punish anyone who showed signs of disobedience.

I snapped my laptop closed and picked up my cup of tea, eager for the comfort of the warm drink. The rain was still coming down, tapping along the windows and thundering over the roof.

Sometime between falling asleep on the couch and forcing my way out of the basement, I’d come to cautiously accept my dreams as more than complete fiction. They had a sense of realness and coherency that my regular dreams never even got close to, and they were showing me things that were being confirmed by reality.

What scared me most was that I didn’t know where the dreams were coming from.
Is it the house?
I’d thought on more than one occasion that it had felt alive.
Or is it something residing
in
the house?

And why me?
Did I have some latent psychic ability I’d never known about? Were there ghosts within those walls trying to communicate with me? I’d never really given much thought to spirits or the afterlife, but after what I’d been through over the last three days, I was finding it hard not to believe in them.

I thought about Genevieve, with her thick jaw and sallow skin, and remembered the terror that had flashed over her face when she’d been locked in the basement.
He did let her out, didn’t he?