The Complex

Mrs. Harriet Beaufort was not sure when she started hearing them. The muffled voices that seemed to come from nowhere. The odd sounds that were unlike any bird or bell she had ever heard. The footsteps and banging that were sometimes right against her great room wall and sometimes so far away that she had to strain to hear them. But she knew it had been for quite some time, at least since her dear Edgar had passed. 

When it had first begun to happen, she’d been sure it was the war returned to her doorstep. Those awful soldiers in their gray uniforms, setting fire to what they saw to keep the more-awful soldiers in their blue uniforms from getting their hands on it. Somehow, surely by the sacrifice of her dearly departed Edgar, her home had been the only one to survive the fires. But it hadn’t been without great cost, of course. And, when the noises had begun, the wife of the late Mr. Edgar Beaufort had been sure that her dear husband had taken her sanity to heaven with him. 

    It was squirrels, she reasoned at first. Squirrels who had escaped the fires had taken refuge in her attic. But the attic only went so far, and she could hear the sounds even when she paced the grounds looking for where squirrels could have gotten in. Then, perhaps, a family of birds. If it weren’t squirrels, then surely it was birds, hidden somewhere in the eaves. Woodpeckers drilling into the wood. Hundreds of them. But it was no bird she knew that made sounds like what kept her awake at night, and there were no holes to be found left by pecking beaks. She had half a mind to call for someone in town, but the idea of a man in her home without her beloved Edgar there was far too much for her delicate sensibilities. 

    Then there was the sound of people. Men with their women. Conversations in the walls. Those, at first, had terrified Mrs. Beaufort. The soldiers returned, hiding in her home. Or the soldiers she’d been warned about, come to take what her lovely Edgar had left. She’d thought of leaving the house, but travel wasn’t something she could do on her own. Oh, how she wished her dear Edgar had still been there at her side. Then they could leave together. Or maybe he’d have held her hand, told her she was simply being silly, and she could have slept easier at night without the thought of men in her home without her husband there.

But when she began hearing the sounds of children, when there were certainly no children to be found, she thought she ought to make an exception. A priest, after all, was not the same as a handyman or a soldier. A priest was a man of God, and certainly whatever was in her home and making the noises that mimicked humans and rang unholy bells was something that the Lord was needed to take care of. And she thought very hard about calling for the priest, about heading into town, but every time she tried in her best skirts and bonnet she was overcome with fear. She had never been to town without her darling Edgar. And so, she resolved to share her home with the demon in her walls.

It had been several months at that point, if not longer, when she began to see them. Figures in odd clothes passing through her walls. The first time it had happened, she’d fainted cold on the floor with a scream. When her eyes had opened she’d taken her favorite kitchen knife and scoured her house, trying to have even half of her dear husband’s bravery. But there was neither hide nor hair of demons, no footprints left behind from the strange hooded figures with their long skinny legs and their horrible pointed white toes like a horse’s hoof flat on the ground. She slowly became used to her madness, accepting it as her fate for not following her darling Edgar into death. The figures walking in and out of her walls like whispers, floating through the air and disappearing into her high ceilings were soon nothing more than the mosquitoes that came with the summer. Commonplace. Normal. And though they sometimes, on exceedingly rare occasion, seemed to look at her, she could never make out a face, human or otherwise. But she knew what she saw weren’t humans. Not when their hands sometimes ended in rectangles instead of fingers, when they had terrible dangling ears hardly the width of her embroidery floss that would connect into flaps on their bodies, when some of the words they said were little more than nonsensical sounds or screaming into their horrible hands. 

But then one day, a voice said her beloved husband’s name. 

And Mrs. Harriet Beaufort nearly passed out cold again. 

“Edgar Beaufort?” The voice, a man’s voice, clearly called again. 

“Who are you?” Mrs. Beaufort said back, a shake in her voice and her skirt balled in her trembling fingers. “Who are you, and what business have you with my husband?”

“Edgar Beaufort, are you here with us?”

She crossed her home immediately to the front door, throwing it wide. But there was no one on her porch.  “What business do you have with my husband, you monster? Don’t you know he died in the war?” The door shut a little harder than she meant it.

Immediately the first voice was joined with a second. “Holy crap, dude, did you hear that?”

“Holy shit. Oh my God.”

“How dare you take the Lord’s name in vain, you demon!” Mrs. Beaufort’s voice raised.

“Ask it again, man, ask it again.”

“Edgar Beaufort, if you can hear us, please say your name.”

“This is Mrs. Edgar Beaufort, and you have been trespassing in my home for-”

“Edgar Beaufort, did you die here?” 

Not only had the demon interrupted her, but it’d had the gall to ask so crassly about her darling’s death. “How dare you!” She gathered her skirt, stamping a foot. 

“How old were you when you died?”

Mrs. Harriet Beaufort, a proper Carolinian woman through and through, was absolutely beside herself. “I beg your pardon? The nerve of you, asking a lady-”

“Why are you in this apartment building?”

“I’m not a part of building anything!” She answered, flabbergasted. “Is that what you horrific things are doing? Building something here? A portal to hell? Not in this house, you’re not! Oh, no, oh no no no,” and she began to stamp off, to retrieve her favorite knife from the kitchen. “

“Yo, G, did you hear that?”

“Yeah, man, play it back, play it back…”

She whipped around, screaming, “I’m through playing any games with you, Mr. Huger, is that your name? Who do you answer to? The devil? You’ll be answering to Mrs. Edgar Beaufort, you mark my words!” As she turned, her elbow caught a vase on an endtable, but she paid no mind to the shouts that followed from her walls. No, she was getting that knife, and she’d be giving these whatever-they-were a piece of her mind. And as she held her knife in her hands, she waited. Waited for another rude question. But there wasn’t one. She waited and waited, shouting into the empty halls when the demons wouldn’t answer her as the hours dragged on. Oh how she wished her dear Edgar were still there. She wished she hadn’t lost sight of him in the fire. She wished she’d been more flammable, that the flames that licked at her skirt had taken her with her husband instead of left her behind to rot so. 

She took her favorite knife to her walls, carving her beloved’s name so she could see it everywhere she turned. She would find whatever the demons were a part of building if she had to tear her home apart with her own delicate sensibilities. Every wall a figure walked through, she began to mark. Every spot they disappeared, she ripped the floorboards up to find them. Every sound she heard was written in ink directly onto walls once she’d run out of paper. She would find them. She would find those demons. And once she did, and she finally had the courage to leave home and fetch the priest, she would leave her house to them and join her darling Edgar.

And, unknown to Mrs. Harriet Beaufort, a landlord was making an incredibly lucrative deal with an overnight ghost tour to make use of the empty rooms left behind when the supposed Mr. Beaufort began writing his name into whatever seemed to be the old burned down walls that once had stood where the complex did.