The Haunting of Ashburn House (2 page)

Adrienne couldn’t guess how long she spent staring at the house, frozen as though in a trance, before Wolfgang’s angry yowl shook her out of her stupor.

The dream—
no, memory,
she corrected herself—shocked her. She must have been young; she became too heavy for her mother to carry at around six years old.

What were we doing here?

She opened her bag to search for the key the solicitor had sent. At the same time, her mind struggled to reconcile the memory with reality. Her mother had told her they had no living relatives. When she’d received the solicitor’s letter, Adrienne had assumed her mother hadn’t known about their great-aunt Edith. Clearly, she had not only known about her but also had met her.

Why was she crying?

That was one of the most unnerving parts of the memory. Her mother had been a stoic, calm woman with little patience for emotions. Adrienne couldn’t even remember seeing her cry after her husband, Adrienne’s father, passed away.

She found herself staring at the jumble of pens, lip balm, notepads, and receipts in her bag, and it took her a minute to remember why she’d opened it.
The key, that’s right.
She found the heavy metal tool in an envelope hidden under a pack of tissues and pulled it out.

Was that really blood sprayed over her chin?

Adrienne looked back at the house as prickles ran over her arms. It had only been six or seven drops, but she was struggling to find any reasonable explanation for the red liquid.

What exactly happened in this house?

Despite the large patch of empty ground surrounding it, the house had been built tall rather than wide. One side had a half-octagonal extension, creating bay windows on all three levels. The roof was sharply peaked and tiled with dark slate. A porch extended from one side of the bay window to the end of the building, with the front door set deep in the shadows.

Wolfgang cried again, and the noise pushed Adrienne into action. She puffed as she hefted the carrier and staggered up the porch’s steps with it. The wooden boards groaned under her weight, and small trails of dust fell from the overhang as the boards flexed. Judging by the sun’s low position, they only had a couple of hours until nightfall, and she wanted to settle him as early as she could.

As much as she wanted to know what had transpired between Edith and her mother all of those years ago, she had to accept that she would likely never know. Her only memory centred on the last moments of the encounter when her mother had raced her out of the house and down the front steps. Both of the other present parties were deceased. Unless Edith Ashburn had kept a diary, the mystery would be lost to the corrosive effects of time.

It might have been an argument
. Adrienne lowered Wolfgang to the porch and tore open the envelope containing her key.
It wasn’t like Mum to hold a grudge, so she must have really hated Edith to tell me we had no relatives.

The key slid into its hole below the doorhandle. The metal, stiff and rusted, screeched as she turned it, then a second later a quiet click told her the door was unlocked.

Perhaps Edith felt bad about what happened, whatever it was. She must have cared at least a little to leave her house to me.

She pressed her fingers to the wood and pushed. The door swept inwards, its hinges grinding as it stirred up small eddies of dust in the failing sunlight. Adrienne squinted to see into the hallway. Although the house had plentiful windows, they were all dimmed by decades of built-up dirt and grease, and the hallway was shrouded in thick, lingering shadows.

Adrienne cleared her throat, tucked the key into her pocket, picked up Wolfgang’s carrier, and stepped over the threshold.

The air felt different inside Ashburn. It was heavier and drier and permeated with a musty odour that Adrienne struggled to identify.
Habitation,
her mind whispered.
This is a house that hasn’t seen a new soul in half a century. The walls are saturated with her; the floorboards are worn down from her feet; the very air continues to carry her presence after her death.

Adrienne tilted forward to peer inside Wolfgang’s carrier and grinned at him. “That’s not morbid at all, huh?”

Her laughter bounced along the hallway, climbed the steep stairwell at its end, and echoed through the upper rooms. The farther it travelled, the hollower the sound became, and she quickly closed her mouth. For a second, the building was returned to its natural state of silence, then Wolfgang released a low, rumbling growl.

A small, discoloured light switch was set into the wall next to the door, and Adrienne flipped it. She hadn’t expected it to do anything, but a light hanging from the hallway’s ceiling buzzed into life. It gave off a muted yellow glow, scarcely better than the anaemic light streaming through the windows, but Adrienne smiled at the sight of it. Ashburn had electricity after all; she’d been worried after seeing how remote the building was.

The hallway was narrow and travelled the length of the house. A threadbare carpet ran down its centre, and an odd collection of side tables, lamps, and umbrella holders as well as a tall grandfather clock clustered along the sides. Discoloured wallpaper dotted with tiny grey flourishes and red roses clung to the walls.

Adrienne drew the door closed behind her. Its whine was raw and loud in her ears, and she made a mental note to find out if Edith had owned any oil.

She moved forward slowly, absorbing details of her new home as she did. The furniture looked antique but well used. The carpet was a rich wine colour but had tan patches where the fabric had been rubbed off its base. Every surface looked slightly grimy, but there was surprisingly little dust; Adrienne suspected Edith had wiped the surfaces regularly but never washed them.

The first door was to her right, and she nudged it open. Inside was a spacious, tastefully decorated sitting room. Thanks to the large bay windows set into its front, the room was lighter than the hallway, and despite the fireplace, coffee table, and set of clean chairs with plush seats, it gave the impression of being infrequently used.

She left the door open but moved on. The nearest entrance to her left led into the kitchen and dinner table. At the room’s back were an oven, an aged stove, benches, and sink. The wall next to it had two identical display units filled with china plates and glasses, all with a matching pink-and-red-rose design. When she moved into the room, she saw that two pale lines had been rubbed into the wooden floor at the table’s head, corresponding to where the chair would have been scraped each night as its occupant sat down and rose.

She wanted to explore further, but Wolfgang’s weight was making her arms ache. She needed a room with a few nooks that an anxious cat could hide in but no exits that he could escape through. She returned to the hallway and tried the next door to the right, opposite the stairwell.

The door opened into a lounge room. Unlike the corner space, though, this was very clearly used. Both the chair and couch’s cushions were indented, and ash still filled the fireplace’s base. A bookcase overloaded with old volumes ran up one wall, and an eclectic mix of shelves and cupboards—along with a piano—sat against the rest of the walls.

This’ll do for Wolf.
She nudged the door closed behind them, lowered him to the round wine-red rug in the centre of the floor, and unlocked the carrier’s door. He turned his baleful green eyes on her but refused to leave the safety of the cage.

“Sorry, buddy.” She sighed and offered her hand for him to smell before scratching behind his ears. He gave a languid blink in response to the attention but refused to tilt his head the way he normally did. “I know you don’t like this, but trust me, it beats being homeless.”

A low, discontented grumble answered her.

Adrienne gave her cat a tight-lipped smile then rose and went to collect their cases. As little as Wolfgang realised it, she hadn’t been joking. The last four years of Pat’s life had been a stream of specialist appointments, stints in hospital, and experimental treatments for the autoimmune disease that had ultimately claimed her. When her mother’s health deteriorated too far for her to be alone during the day, Adrienne had left her job to stay with her and picked up whatever freelance writing work she could find online. She was proud to say they’d managed okay right up until the final hospital stay.

Pat had always tried her hardest to give Adrienne a stable home. She’d worked two jobs when she’d been healthy enough, but the appointments and treatments hadn’t been without cost. By the time she passed, her house had been mortgaged twice and their savings had been converted into debts.

The weeks following the funeral had been a whirlwind of stress and financial problems digging through the grief. Pat’s house, car, and furniture were sold to pay her outstanding debts. Adrienne had temporarily moved into a friend’s apartment, but it was clear it couldn’t be a permanent solution; the two-room space was far too small for four people, an irritable cat, and the friend’s aggressive dog.

Adrienne had spent her free time looking for a new place to live, but the search had been demoralising. Her freelance work would only support a cheap apartment, and none of the places she’d viewed were welcoming towards cats.

The friend had suggested she give Wolfgang away. She might as well have asked Adrienne to cut off her own arm; she loved her fluffy monster too much to surrender him to a stranger. The letter telling her she’d inherited Ashburn had been, in Adrienne’s opinion, a bona fide miracle.

Adrienne picked both cases off the grass and carried them back to Ashburn. The sun was close to the treetops, and its red glow spread across the horizon. Long shadows followed her back into the musty hallway, and the angry bird chatter swelled as the fowl prepared to nest.

She’d tried to keep her absence brief, but by the time she backed through the lounge room doors and turned towards the cat carrier, Wolfgang had already disappeared. She shut the door so that he couldn’t escape and peered into the shadows that gathered around the room’s corners as she opened the heavier of the cases.

“Hey, buddy,” she called as she set out his litter box, poured a bag of chalky wood pulp into it, and laid his bowls beside the door. “Are you hungry? Hmm?”

She rattled the food tin, but the grey beast remained scarce. Adrienne sighed, poured the food into one of the bowls, then picked up the second to fill with water. As she let herself out of the lounge room, the light caught across scratches in the opposite wall’s paper. Adrienne frowned at them.
They almost look like words.

She took a step closer and inhaled. Someone had carved through the wallpaper to expose the wood underneath. They were hard to see at an angle, but the words became clear when looked at head-on:

NO MIRRORS

Adrienne glanced along the hallway reflexively. It was cluttered with furniture but didn’t include any mirrors. She hadn’t found it unusual before, but the words felt disquieting, almost menacing. She shook her head and crossed to the kitchen.

The sink was a huge, old-fashioned installation, and the handle screamed when she turned it. Pipes rattled above her head, and Adrienne gazed at the ceiling and imagined she could see the wooden boards shudder. Icy-cold water spewed out of the tap, ricocheted off the bowl, and sprayed over her.

Adrienne shrieked a series of very unladylike phrases as she fought to turn the tap off. Then, drenched and grumbling, she carried the water back to the lounge room.

“You’d better be grateful for this,” she said as she placed the bowl next to Wolfgang’s food.

The room was silent, but she thought she saw a flicker of motion behind the piano. She knelt and leaned forward to see behind it. Wolfgang huddled in the gap between the piano and bookcase, and his huge green eyes fixed on her.

“You okay down there, buddy? Not too dusty for you?”

He gave her a single reproachful blink then returned to staring at the opposite wall.

The sun was dipping behind the trees, and the cooling air collaborated with her wet shirt and jeans to make Adrienne shiver, so she opened the second case and sifted through the few possessions she’d brought to Ashburn.

Packing had been depressing. Most of what she’d owned had been given away when she moved into her friend’s apartment, and even less was practical to fit inside a taxi and cart across the state. One of the cases had been dedicated to Wolfgang’s needs; the second held Adrienne’s world—three changes of clothes, a towel, toiletries, the book she was reading, clean sheets, and her laptop. Her throat tightened as she stared at them. Her entire twenty-two years of life had boiled down to these items.

“It’s a fresh start,” she said to Wolfgang and tried to smile. “And I don’t need much, anyway. Just you for company, somewhere for us to stay, and enough money that we won’t starve. And look, thanks to Great-Aunt Edith, we now have all three. We’ll be fine.”

The great grey cat blinked at her, and suddenly, Adrienne wished he would come out of hiding so that she could hug him.

“We’ll be fine,” she repeated, her voice sounding small and lonely in her own ears as she pulled the towel out and dabbed at her wet clothes.

Adrienne changed into fresh clothes and laid the wet shirt and jeans over the back of the fireside chair to dry. Wolfgang watched her go back and forth but refused to move from his cubbyhole even when she put his food bowl directly in front of it.

Despite the dry clothes, Adrienne found herself shivering and looked towards the blackened grate. She’d never lived in a house with a fireplace, but she’d been enamoured with the idea. A stack of dry wood sat in the bracket, a bucket of kindling sat nearby, and a folded newspaper and matchbox rested on the mantel.

Why not?
She took the newspaper and checked the date. It was nearly three months old, which meant Edith would have bought it shortly before her death. Adrienne took a few of the pages, scrunched them into loose balls, placed them in the sooty grate, and set some of the kindling on top.

Once the newspaper caught, the flame easily spread to the twigs, and soon she was feeding it some of the larger logs. By the time the fire was large enough to be stable, she’d stopped shivering and was pleased to see that the flames lit the room better than the single light in the ceiling.

She gazed about the space, admiring how the golden glow reflected off the polished wooden chairs and bookshelves. The fire created long, dancing shadows that grew up the walls and tangled on the ceiling, and the crackles helped drown out the noise of the groaning trees and chattering birds outside the window.

A grandfather clock somewhere deep in the house chimed. She counted five long, metallic clangs and made a face. She hadn’t realised how late it had grown. She’d skipped lunch, and when she paid attention to her body, she realised she was starving.

Her initial plan had been to spend her remaining money on groceries shortly after arriving at Ashburn, but that had been foiled thanks to the house’s unexpectedly remote location.
Looks like we’ll be scavenging tonight.

She wasn’t keen to explore the house with the sun so close to setting, but the longer she delayed, the worse it would become, so she left the lounge room, closed the door behind her, and crossed to the kitchen.

The room looked shockingly different when the sun was too low to come through the window. Even with the light on, the shadows built up in layers around the table, stove, and bench. She stopped at the head of the table, where long marks had been scraped into the wooden floor, and squinted at the wooden tabletop. There were scratches dug into the dark wood just above where a dinner plate might have sat.

Surely not…

Adrienne leaned closer and inhaled. As in the hallway, words had been cut into the shiny wooden top—possibly with a kitchen knife—and faced the head of the table so that whoever sat there couldn’t fail to read them.

IS IT FRIDAY

LIGHT THE CANDLE

She chewed the inside of her cheek and tilted her head to one side. Little bits of dirt had become embedded in the scratches’ indents, telling her the marks had been there for months if not years.

How bizarre. Was Edith all right? She must have been very old when she passed away. Maybe she had some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s, and it made her do strange things.

Adrienne turned away from the table, but she couldn’t scrub the image from her mind: Edith, well into her nineties by that point, wandering through Ashburn’s narrow hallways in a confused daze, a steak knife clutched in one hand, cutting disturbed messages into the walls and tables…

No, don’t think like that. She probably had someone staying with her. Or a friendly neighbour, at the very least, to keep an eye on her.
Adrienne frowned and turned towards the fridge.
I hope.

She opened the fridge door and gagged. The shelves were full of cardboard boxes, but their contents had long since rotted. She could still identify shrivelled carrots and a strangely dried-out cauliflower, but the other vegetables had turned into brown sludge. A bottle of rancid milk sat between a rectangle of mould-coated cheese and a punnet of what had once been strawberries. The only edible items she could see were three unlabelled jam jars.
And jam on its own does not a dinner make.

Adrienne wrinkled her nose and closed the door before the rotting odours could spread too far.
The house has been empty for nearly three months; of course the fresh food would have perished.

She looked for a pantry and found it nestled in the room’s corner. The doors creaked as they opened, and Adrienne felt her heart sink at the meagre range inside. While the fridge had been full of fresh produce, Edith clearly hadn’t been a fan of long-life goods. She saw flour, baking powder, teabags, sugar, and salt on one shelf, a half-used bag of pasta—no sauce—on the second, and two tins of sardines on the third.

Okay. Could be worse.
Adrienne sucked on her teeth, took one of the sardine tins, and began opening drawers as she looked for cutlery.
It’s not a feast, but at least we won’t starve. We’ll just have to figure out how to get to town tomorrow.

She opened the drawer below the china and inhaled at the sight of heavy and clearly expensive silver.
This set must be a family heirloom. She kept it in good condition; it’s not even tarnished.

The china plates displayed above the cutlery caught her eye, but she didn’t take any down. It felt wrong to put something as mundane as tinned fish on the expensive rose-design dishes. She took a fork and closed the drawer.

An electric kettle sat on the bench beside the fridge, and behind it was an old-fashioned metal whistling kettle. She reached for the electric appliance first then hesitated, shrugged, and took up the metal pot instead. She made sure there weren’t any spiders inside—just dust, she was relieved to see—then washed it out, half filled it with water, and fetched one of the teabags from the pantry.

Once again, Adrienne experienced reluctance to use any of the fine china in the display cabinets, but she couldn’t find any other mugs, so eventually, she opened the glass doors and took one of the teacups. It felt incredibly fragile, and she held it carefully as she carried it, the kettle, the fish, and the fork back to the lounge room.

The fire had grown in her absence, and that wasn’t the only change. Wolfgang’s food bowl was empty, and the huge grey tabby sat on the rug in front of the fire, his paws tucked neatly under his body. He turned and blinked at Adrienne when she entered then returned to gazing at the flames.

“Should’ve known,” she said, grinning, and set the precious teacup onto the small round table beside the chair. “I was starting to worry I’d traumatised you by carting you all the way up here, but you’ve already made yourself at home, huh?”

One ear twitched in her direction, but otherwise, she might as well have not existed.

A metal rod ran across the space above the fire. Adrienne found a pair of thick, blackened gloves sitting next to the wood and used one to hang her kettle on the rod so that the flames licked around its base. She then sat back in the wooden chair, took up her tin of sardines, and peeled back the lid.

It was one of the most surreal experiences of her life. She sat in a stranger’s chair—one that had likely been inhabited by the same person every evening for fifty years before Adrienne came along—and used a silver fork that was heavy and ornate enough to belong in Buckingham Palace to eat a tin of budget fish.

A soft, fluffy paw landed on her knee, and Adrienne looked down to meet Wolfgang’s round green eyes. All indifference had melted away, and his expression was a perfect blend of plaintive and adoring.

“Oh, come on!” she cried in mock indignation. “You already ate!”

His mouth opened in a silent meow, and his fluffy tail twitched.

“You’ll get fat.” She pulled out a piece of the fish. “No, sorry, that’s wrong. You’ll get fat
ter
.”

He scarfed down the morsel she offered him then licked around his mouth as he waited for more. She sighed and gave a fond smile as she shared the remainder of her fish with him. By the time they’d emptied the tin and Wolfgang settled down to lick the oil off its sides, the kettle was whistling.

She dropped the teabag into her cup, donned the gloves again, and pulled the steaming kettle off the fire. She poured the water with excruciating care, half-afraid that the heat alone would be enough to shatter the delicate floral beaker, and sighed in relief as she placed the pot on the mantel without any disasters.

For a minute, she considered getting the second tin of fish from the pantry—half of her dinner had ended up in the huge grey beast who had now returned to ignoring her—but she decided against it. She didn’t know how long it would take her to get to town, or
how
she would get to town for that matter, and felt it would be wiser to ration out the food until she had a system worked out.

It took—what, twenty minutes to drive from the town’s centre to here? That was at a slow speed, though. So maybe allow one or two hours to walk to town. Then the same amount of time to walk back. Uphill. While carrying shopping bags.
She wrinkled her nose and blew steam off the top of the teacup.
Looks like I might meet my New Year’s resolution to get fit after all.

Edith Ashburn must have had a way to get to the shops. There hadn’t been any vehicles parked at the front of the property, but she could explore around the back the following morning when the sun rose.

If Edith had owned a car, there was a good chance it had been given to someone else on her death or sold if she hadn’t owned it outright. If that was the case, Adrienne would have to figure out a solution for herself. She could buy a bike, but good bikes were expensive, and she had less than twenty dollars in her purse and nothing in her bank account. That would improve a little when her freelance-article-writing accounts were paid, but two clients were overdue on their bills and hadn’t replied to her emails in more than a week.

Wolfgang finished with the tin. He flopped onto his side and stretched so that his belly was facing the flames, and she thought she caught a faint rumble of contentment.

It must be nice to be a cat. No bills to pay. No difficult clients. No having to figure out how to say, “Send me my damn money!” in a pleasant way because if you’re rude they won’t hire you again and you can’t afford to lose any work.

She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. The fire’s heat felt amazing on her legs, and she took a second to realign her priorities. She had a house. It was old and smelt funny and was a long way from town, but holy heck, she had her own house. As long as the Wi-Fi worked well enough that she was able to submit her freelance articles on time, she could end up being very happy there. She thought she could grow fond of the town, too, and maybe even make some friends.

“And if no one wants to be my friend, I’ll just get another cat,” she said to Wolfgang. His front paws were making slow paddling motions and he kneaded the air. “I’ll get a
dozen
cats and give them all cutesy names like Muffin or Flopsy and become the crazy cat lady who lives on the hill. How do you like the sound of that?”

There was no response, not that she’d expected one, but at least the grey beast looked content. Adrienne smiled and chewed at the corner of her thumb as she watched the last minutes of daylight fade. Without having to pay rent, her freelance work should be more than enough to support her. She would just have to get through the first few lean weeks as jobs were processed and accounts fell due, then she could start rebuilding her savings to give Wolfgang and her some security.

A growl startled her. Wolfgang no longer lay on his side but had rolled onto his front and half risen. His ears flattened, and the fur on his tail, already fluffy, puffed out.

“Wolf?” Adrienne placed her cup on the side table and leaned forward. The cat’s eyes were saucer round and their pupils so large that almost none of the green irises remained visible. He faced the window closest to the fireplace, and his whiskers quivered as he exhaled a quiet hiss.