A Good Old Fashioned Ghost Story

The House on Bascom Avenue didn’t look haunted. Not by any stretch of the term. It was just another cookie cutter suburban home among its ilk, a drab and uninspiring two story home that was one of many built to dam the flood of people that had been moving to Noxbridge in the past few years. When we stared at the thing during the day, it was just a modern gray townhouse, built for maximizing space at the cost of being nestled into the centre of other homes. You couldn’t pick the thing out if you had wanted too. We weren’t there during the day though. Not when Jason, in his infinite dickdom, demanded a good old fashioned ghost story for Halloween.

The House, as it was, was vacant since it’s first owners, a reasonably wealthy family of immigrants from India, had been found dead. No one had really wanted the place. Jason gave us all the gory details, us being me, his girlfriend Jackie, and her friend Carly. As a sidebar, I did not like Carly back then; she was tolerated because Jason and Jackie were an item and Carly wouldn’t let her go alone with him, which I can’t blame her for given how Jason acted, the pervert, but I didn’t see any need to drag me into it. She ended up stabbing me with a screwdriver last week because we got into it about Jackie, so I’ve got no desire to be nice about what I say. Not about any of them really. Let me explain.

Jason had a fascination with the supernatural, the occult, and general horribly shit, so that family getting killed was like catnip for him. He somehow learned all the gory details about the case, like how the mother of the family had her skull split in half, or how the father of the husband was strung up from the ceiling with a garden hose. About the daughters boyfriend, who was left dangling off the second floor railing without a head. When he started talking about what that man did to his daughter, a girl who had taken to Canadas way of living to well for his liking, I had enough.

“Jason, could you shut the fuck up?” I told him.

“What?” He says to me, like I’m being the asshole. “We’re already here, we might as well know what we’re getting into.” He has Jackie pulled in tight to him, and she just agreed with him like she always did, making sure to call me a ‘faggot’ as well, just for good measure. Carly didn’t say much of anything, and when I looked to her I saw that she staring up at The House. It was somehow bigger looking at night, it architecture warped by shadows cast by streetlights to either side of it, dim streetlights that glowed a deep orange and gave the grey brick a grim colouration that was accentuated by the pitch black sky that looked so huge above the town. It was itself without any lights, as you may have expected, and it stood out from the rest with a large board of plywood over a second floor window, which you might not have expected. That plywood gave the impression, in that thick darkness, of an evil eye, blank and staring, watching the four delinquents on Halloween night about to make a terrible, terrible mistake.

Jason did not hesitate to do so, only breaking his stride under the weight of Jackie stopping, trying to tell him to wait, but he shushed her and kept going alone. She followed swiftly after. Me and Carly just stood there watching them. “You guys coming?” Jackie called out to us Thinking about it.” Carly called back. That was enough to pacify Jackie, who started after Jason again. Soon it was just the two of us. We shared a glance, one that spoke volumes to me about how much she wasn’t having this, about how she would’ve been comfortable with me dragging her away by her ankles, as she frequently claimed I wanted to do, if it meant she didn’t have to go inside of The House. She did though. She walked with heavy steps in boots that clunked against the asphalt. I stayed back and searched around me, trying to find a sign of life in this neighbourhood. I saw cars in driveways and the occasional light on in a window, but no people. I looked further out and tried to find the rest of the town, tried to find the high school that I knew was visible from here from previous excursions. It was a wall of darkness that met me, and I found myself with little justifiable cause to leave, so I turned back to The House and followed the others, now long gone, back inside. I didn’t actually have any idea what to expect, no real knowledge of haunting or spirits or demons or whatever the fuck could have been in that house.

I know now. Dear god do I know now.

The inside of The House was even darker than the outside, and, since there hadn’t been any cause for doing so since The Bahl Family Massacre, we all knew there wouldn’t be any power, so that’s why Jason elected to bring a flashlight. As did Jackie and Carly. I did not, because I was an idiot I guess. Their light did well enough though, I could see the inside of the house, the stairwell by the bathroom that was itself by the front door and the hallway leading into the living room I could see in an outline. Jason led the way again and we all followed him, me groping at the wall closest to me largely just for the comfort of having a solid object against me. We all walked slower than Jason, listening to the creak of laminated floorboards that betrayed the homes unsettled construction since it was left alone, when I felt the wall next to me open into a gaping maw of darkness. I stumbled forward and felt something jam into my side.

I screamed, and it wasn’t a very dignified one either. It was one that said ‘look at me I’m getting murdered!’ The others did look at me, but I wasn’t getting murdered. I’d simply found where the kitchenette opens into, and that jabbing sensation in my side? The countertop. Jason got a good laugh out of that, while Jackie and Carly admonished me for giving them collective heart attacks. You can probably see why I’m not really gushing about our time together at this point, so I’ll just get to the point now. There hadn’t been any actual plan for when we actually got inside, Jason admitted himself that he didn’t even expect the door to be unlocked, so we just spent some time in the living room talking about shows and movies and Me and Jason brought up penises for the sole purpose of annoying the girls, and that may have worked a little too well considering Jackie got up and starting marching away from us.

“Where you going?” Jason asked.

“Away from you.” She said, not even looking back.

I thought the night was over then, she’d leave the house, Jason would chase after her as he always did to apologize, and Me and Carly would have an excuse to ditch the whole experience and go our separate ways again. A perfect wet fart ending for an event we could embellish to our hearts content. Jackie did not go out of the front door. When she was out of sight, all we could hear were her New Balance shoes smacking into the floor, followed by the occasional groan of settling wood. The tempo of her steps was consistent, quick but not so quick. When it got to the furthest point, Jason finally got up so he could run after her, but something changed. The tempo changed. Instead of a steady stream of footsteps, they stopped abruptly. It gave Jason pause, and it gave me pause as well since I was also getting up off the couch. It remained silent for a time that, while not exceptionally long, felt that way. It was as if a silent and invisible hand had taken our hearts in its hardy grip. A heavy air filled the room. Then footsteps. They went up the stairs, and they were fast. Faster than any I’ve heard the or since. It was just one set too, I could tell. They sounded as if something was stomping fast against every step on the way up and they moved so damn fast. Jason broke into a sprint, calling Jackie’s name.

She was gone. The front door was wide open.

What happened next was Jason going as fast he could, skidding to a stop in front of the stairs to the second floor, and ascending them as rapidly as he could. His footfalls sounded nothing like what I had assumed were Jackie’s footsteps sounded like. I hadn’t followed him, I made the excuse of waiting up for Carly, who walked with a limp and couldn’t run if she wanted too. The real reason was that I was afraid. Afraid of what I would see up there. The second floor was where the patriarch of the Bahl family had killed everyone else in the house.

Me and Carly moved without swiftness, in dead silence. No sound from upstairs since Jason had gone up it. My mind was filling with images of him embracing Jackie, hugging her close with a tenderness that maybe he had in him all along. I thought that maybe she had locked herself in a room and he was trying to convince her to open the door. My mind flooded with worse images as well. Things I don’t care much to describe in any detail. The two of us just kept walking. The floorboards had stopped creaking under our weight by the time we got to the door and opened our ears to a strange wet sound to our right. I was just going to keep doing, but I stopped when I heard Carly gasp behind me. I turned to her, than to where she was looking, and I felt sick.

A pair of bare legs, the legs of a man or boy on the cusp of being a man, dangled and swayed near imperceptibly above the first landing of the stairs, where the second floor railing would be, visible up to the crotch. Dripping down in little rivers was dark red blood, splattering onto the hard stairs. They were the legs of a white person. I grabbed Carly by the wrist and yanked her out of that house with me, nearly flinging her face first onto the pavement without meaning too. The door slammed shut behind us.

The House was quiet after that, so I started backing out further to get a look at the whole thing, Carly took to just sitting on the ground, breathing hard and heavy and staring at the front door. The obvious conclusion to draw would be that Jason and Jackie were fucking with us, giving us our obliged ‘one good scare’ for Halloween, and that they would be outside in no time to laugh about it. I can tell you they did not do that. They never would do that, I knew it as soon as I saw the second floor.

Something I didn’t mention before was what had happened to the Bahl daughter, and I still have no intention of giving you details on that. You need to know that she died quietly, but she didn’t die quickly or painlessly. Her father made sure of that, the rotten son of a bitch. Her bedroom was where he hurt her, and where the plywood had been placed after he broke it in an escape attempt. The massacre was eventually discovered because one of the neighbours had noticed that the light in that room had been left on for two days straight.

Tonight, the plywood was gone. It was replaced by unbroken glass.

The light was on.