The Haunting of Beacon Hill Read online

  Clicking his pen a few times, the doctor made some tentative marks on his notepad. “She said she found you in the kitchen, is that right?”

  She winced without meaning to.

  “And that you'd tried to hide in the cabinet under the sink?” The doctor glanced up at her—noted her discomfort—and then looked back down. “She told me you used a steak knife.”

  She instinctively grabbed up the edges of her blanket. It was imperative at that moment that she have something to hold onto—something to wring in her hands. As she did so, a light pain flared up in both her wrists, only igniting the specter of memory further. “Actually,” she said in a hollow voice, barely her own, “it was a paring knife.”

  The old doctor's brows arched for an instant. “Paring knife,” he noted with a tap of his pen. “Anyhow, she mentioned that you'd been acting very... well, her word was 'standoffish'... prior to your attempt. We don't have to talk about it now, but I'd very much like to hear about the night preceding all of this. Were you planning to harm yourself? Why?” He adjusted his glasses. “Boy troubles, problems with a friend?”

  She had to turn and stare out the sunlit window to keep herself from hyperventilating. If she closed her eyes and focused too hard on the darkness behind her lids she was prone to fixate on the shape of that dim, old house on Beacon Hill. She'd recall its yawning entrance, its pitch-black depths. And then... there was the house's sole tenant...

  “I went out with some friends,” she began, licking her lips compulsively.

  The doctor nodded. “What friends?”

  “Leslie and Joey, from school.”

  Jotting these details furiously, the physician invited her to go on with a prolonged, “Mmhmmm?”

  “We went... we went somewhere we weren't supposed to go.” Ophelia hesitated, teeth grit. “We went to an abandoned house—the house on Beacon Hill.” Her heart started up violently. Talking about her visit to the house made it more real. It wasn't simply an abstraction anymore—it had weight behind it. A fresh panic gnawed at her nerves. “It's a very old house... Leslie was the one who brought it up, said we should go. She thought it might be fun to poke around. I thought so, too. That is, until we got there...”

  The doctor didn't much react to this. If he knew the place, he said nothing. Instead, he waited for her to go on.

  “We went inside, all three of us...” She took to licking her lips again, and she could taste their growing rawness. “I didn't want to, but Joey insisted. And Leslie went with him. They dragged me in and we wandered in the dark.”

  “And what happened in this house?”

  Ophelia fixed her gaze through the window at the world below. “We heard something—someone. And then we got separated.” She shook her head. “Well, they ran away, the two of them. And I got lost. I tried to follow them, but they left me. I had to walk through the dark to find a way out. I did, eventually, but before I left I saw...”

  “Yes?” The doctor waited, pen poised to write.

  Her courage ebbed away and she found herself incapable of uttering the name on her tongue. Instead, she leaned against the wall and asked a question of her own. “Do... do you believe in ghosts, doctor?”

  “Ghosts?” The physician tapped at his chin. “I don't know. It's a wide, wide world, however. Who's to say? The important thing is whether or not you believe in ghosts, Ophelia. Do you? Is that what you saw in the house—a ghost?”

  The girl weighed the question carefully, drawing her knees up to her chest. She tugged down the hem of her hospital gown and cradled herself in her arms. “I didn't used to,” she said finally. “But she made me believe. And more than believe...”

  “Who did?” asked the doctor, referencing his notes. “Leslie? Your mother?”

  Ophelia shook her head. Her eyes were drawn to the door, where a powdery black shadow had suddenly sprung up. She watched it pass across the far wall, watched it settle on the floor just behind the doctor's chair where it lingered like a housefly in wait. The silhouette telegraphed a silent liveliness, grew bolder in color, and finally gave way to its maker.

  Nurse Karen rolled her cart into the room with a grating whine. “Howdy, miss Ophelia,” she said, staring down at a binder. Before she even looked up to the patient, or to the doctor sitting mere feet from the cart, she counted out a number of pills in a plastic cup and then made a series of tally marks on a printed form.

  The doctor stood, made his way to the door. “We'll continue this chat later, all right?” Nodding at the nurse, he removed his glasses, pocketed his pen and stuck the notepad under his arm, sidestepping into the hall.

  Karen brought over the afternoon's meds, setting them down alongside a fresh cup of ice water. “How are things today?”

  Thankful for the pills—for their dulling effect on both her mood and memory—she reached out and took the cup, giving it a shake and sizing up the contents.

  The pills didn't rattle like they usually did, though.

  They squirmed.

  The plastic cup contained a trio of white maggots, plump and energetic, each striving in their own direction to spring out of the vessel. Her grip on the thing loosened; the cup fell out of her grasp and landed on the bed, the contents making a mad dash across the bed linens as she snapped to attention with a yelp.

  Karen intervened with a chuckle. “Oops, ya dropped 'em.” Gathering up the pills, she siphoned them back into the cup and then held out the ice water. “Just three for now. These should keep you nice and relaxed.”

  This time, the cup did contain only pills; two circular white ones and a bluish gel cap. Snatching them up, she popped them into her mouth and took a swig of ice water. “T-Thanks,” she managed, rolling onto her side and pulling the blankets up to her shoulder.

  “Sure thing. Let me know if you need anything else.” The noisy cart was wheeled out of the room and continued its ruckus down the hall.

  You just need to sleep. Stay close to the light, close your eyes and try to sleep. She won't be able to get you that way. Letting a long-held breath out slowly, Ophelia shut her eyes and buried her face in the lumpy, sterile pillow.

  It was hard to sleep in the hospital. The meds went some distance in making it easier, but the stiff mattress, the scratchy bedclothes and the constant chatter outside her door made it difficult to relax. Added to the list of discomforts was the itching of her wrists as the wounds she'd inflicted began to heal. She wanted desperately to peel away the bandages and give the mending skin a good scratch—just hard enough to stop the itching. It was all she could do to ignore it, to focus on other things until the sensation faded.

  But right then, she couldn't seem to ignore it. For some reason, it persisted, waxed harder than ever before. Ophelia gripped at her right wrist, squeezed the wounded flesh as tightly as she could to try and quiet the itch. Her left hand was locked so tightly around her wrist that the thump of her pulse could be felt through the sleeve of gauze. The pump and toil of her knitting vessels registered clearly against her palm.

  The longer she regarded this stirring in her wrist, the less sure she became that it was her pulse, however.

  Ophelia sat up in bed and raised her arm out in front of her, looking over the bandaged portion. She stared at it a long while in the brilliant sunlight, counted the furtive shifts of the bandage and wondered if they were truly keeping time with her heart rate.

  Here, the bandage creased in a strange way as though something had just moved beneath it; there, the tape seemed to loosen for the wriggling of something barely contained. The whitish gauze began to roil vigorously. The itch intensified into something more maddening—the sensation that something was presently sandwiched between her flesh and the bandage and trying desperately to break free. She scratched angrily at the gauze, but succeeded only in whipping the things writhing beneath into a frenzy.

  There are no maggots under the bandages. There are no maggots. You're imagining it. She just wants you to hurt yourself again.

  She repeated the
mantra again and again, but still she longed to rip the dressings off and expose her slashed wrists. Even if she had, she knew it wouldn't be enough; that was what ultimately stayed her hand. If she removed the bandages, she'd come to feel that same stirring beneath the stitches, would feel compelled to rip her itching wrists open anew to ensure the invaders hadn't taken hold there. Rolling over, she put the blankets over top of her head and focused on her breathing.

  For the moment, the pills in her stomach would help keep her from dwelling on Mother Maggot.

  But only for the moment.

  “Doctor, how is she? Did she say anything?” Rosie stood to meet him as he marched past the nurse's station.

  The psychiatrist smiled warmly, offered his hand to shake and motioned to a seating area just outside the station. Leafing through his notes, he plopped down into an empty plush chair and toyed with the top button of his jacket. “I did speak to her for awhile today, but I'm afraid she wasn't feeling very talkative.”

  “I see...” Rosie sank into the chair opposite his, hands clasped at her waist.

  “But she did say something interesting.” The doctor referenced his notes and stirred the air with a single finger. “She went to some house in the area. 'Beacon Hill', she said. Do you know it?”

  “Beacon Hill?” she echoed. “Yes, I know of it. I mean, I've never been to the house myself, but...” Rosie's eyes narrowed in incredulity. “What does that have to do with this? She went to that house? If so, she didn't say anything to me about it. What was she doing there? Did something happen?”

  The doctor crossed his arms, cocked his head to the side. “Well, she wasn't particularly forthcoming in that department, but she did say something I thought strange. She mentioned ghosts—asked me if I believed in them. I'm speculating, but I think that your daughter may have seen—or imagined—something in that house.”

  Rosie sat on this information a moment, chuckling confusedly. “Sorry, you think my daughter tried to kill herself because she saw a ghost in an old house?”

  “No,” the doctor was quick to reply, “I think that she saw or experienced something in that house that affected her negatively and that the suicide attempt was her way of dealing with it. You mentioned to me that she'd been acting strangely prior to the injury—that she'd locked herself in her room. It's clear that something had distressed her greatly, and that her suicidal ideation was a direct reaction to upsetting stimulus. The question is: What happened in the house to make her feel this way?”

  “I have no idea.” The night before her suicide attempt, Ophelia had gone out with Joey and Leslie; that much Rosie had known. This was the first she'd heard of their poking around the old haunt on Beacon Hill, though. Why had they gone to such a place? What had they hoped to find there? Kids their age sometimes did stupid things simply for the thrill of it, but Ophelia and her friends had hardly struck Rosie as the thrill-seeking type. She looked across the bustling nurse's station with a mind toward returning to her daughter's room.

  The doctor took his leave and Rosie set off down the hall. A few patients—the stabler ones—ambled around the commons area in their blue psych ward garb, playing checkers or leafing through magazines. Her daughter, though, was kept deeper in, in a wing located behind a sturdy locked door called the Crisis Management unit. Those with suicidal thoughts were confined to the Crisis Management unit for up to seventy-two hours after admission; others, such as those in the midst of severe psychotic episodes, seldom left it unless cleared by a physician.

  The kindly secretary at the desk buzzed Rosie into the locked unit. When the door had closed softly behind her, she marched down the hall and singled out room 334. Arriving outside it, she didn't enter at once, instead taking a moment to peer into the room through the two-by-two window in the door.

  The lights were off. The window on the far side of the room, beside the bed, sat aglow for the presence of the sun but all else was consumed by a murky dimness. Rosie found her daughter sitting up in bed, staring across the room with an uncommonly vacant expression. Her black hair—so recently cut—hung in tangled coils about her ashen face. Her brown eyes, usually so active and smiling, were blank now and her chapped lips wriggled as if she were murmuring. A glistening thread of drool coursed down her chin as she sat and mumbled.

  Rosie shuddered. The girl on the bed was her daughter, of course, but in some sense she was unfamiliar. She'd carried and raised this child, but now Ophelia's postures, her gaze, seemed unexpectedly foreign. The drugs were at least partially to blame for that, but thinking back to the house—to finding her in the kitchen, attempting to squeeze herself into one of the cabinets—Rosie had to admit that the changes had begun to manifest before the girl had even been dosed.

  The moment Rosie set her hand on the door, Ophelia's head whipped around to face her. She startled at the suddenness of it—then nursed a secret shame for having reacted in such a way toward her own daughter. Still, a vague unease persisted as she hesitated at the threshold.

  Ophelia's blank eyes were fixed on the door now, and her lips ceased their twitching. With spittle still dampening her chin, her mouth twisted into a strange smile—a smile that contained nothing of the usual warmth. Where the love and liveliness had always dwelt in her expression there lived only vast emptiness now; emptiness and, perhaps, cruelty.

  Rosie entered the room and leaned into the door to shut it. “Hey, sweetheart.”

  The girl's breathing was loud and ragged. She didn't respond except to swallow loudly—like she was struggling to choke down the dry, recirculated air. Then, from deep in her gut, there issued a small laugh—a few caustic chuckles.

  “The doctor was just in, huh?” Rosie strode into the room, burying her sweaty hands in her pockets because she couldn't think of anything else to do with them. “How're you feeling?”

  The bone-white stand-in for her daughter rocked with another chuckle, black hair tumbling across her brow till only dark pinpoints for eyes pierced the tangled veil. Ophelia spoke then in a shaky whisper, her tongue rasping against her peeling lips. “It's too late.”

  Rosie sat down carefully at the end of the bed. “W-What do you mean, sweetheart?” She panned about the room, offering the most convincing smile she could. “They're taking good care of you here. Before you know it, you'll be able to come home. We just have to... get you through this, first.” Tears stung the corners of her eyes but by this time she'd had no little practice in blinking them back.

  The girl only chuckled again, cocking her head to the side. Her pallid face fell to the left and she stared at her mother, curiously owl-like. “It's too late,” she repeated, more viciously this time. Stirring her arms around in the sheets, she pulled them out from under the covers to reveal a pool of freshly-spilt blood. The bandages on both wrists had been torn off and the stitches pulled out, leaving the wounds puckering as the girl strained to hold out a closed fist.

  “O-Ophelia!” Rosie slipped from the edge of the bed, almost to the floor. Scrambling for support she knocked the bedside table over. A plastic pitcher of ice water spilled across the bed. “W-What have you done?”

  Ophelia leaned forward, still offering her bloodied fist. She shook it, as if to hint at something in her hand. Grinning wolfishly, her vacant eyes finally found some focus as she muttered, “I told you, it's too late. She's already in me, mama.”

  The girl's fingers curled back tremblingly, one at a time, till her blood-soaked palm was exposed to the open air.

  And on that palm, amidst the crimson clots, there danced a fat maggot.

  6

  Sadie's fork scraped against her plate. She tried to scoop up a bite of mac and cheese but found she'd lost her appetite. “I'm sorry to hear that,” was all she could think to say as Rosie dabbed at her eyes with a napkin across the table.

  After a miserable shift, Sadie and August had merely wanted a decent meal. For his part, August had gotten precisely that; he'd staked out a little table of his own and was chowing down on fried chicken
without a care in the world. Sadie would have done the same had she not opted to invite Rosie along to the restaurant. After the woman—this old family friend—had turned up at the library out of nowhere, desperate to talk, Sadie had tried doing the kind thing and had asked her to follow the two of them to Colonel Cluck's down the road.

  Rather than savoring her food though, she'd spent the bulk of the meal with her eyes low, listening to Rosie recount her daughter's recent struggles at the local hospital. Talk of slashed wrists and maggots hardly roused one's appetite, and when the waitress came by mid-way through the meal to ask how everything was, Sadie had sent her plate back and asked for a black coffee instead.

  “So, you see why I thought to reach out to you,” concluded Rosie, blowing her nose and then chancing a sip of sweet tea.

  Sadie nodded, but truthfully she couldn't see what she had to do with any of this. “That's awful. I'm very sorry,” was all she thought to say. Every word that'd come out of her mouth since their meeting that evening had been an apology of some sort. What else could be said? She had no advice to offer, wasn't a shrink.

  “Anyhow, I decided to look you up, see if you were still in town. That's why I dropped by the library tonight. I was wondering if maybe you'd be able to talk to her.” Rosie toyed with the straw in her glass.

  “You want me to talk to her?” Sadie shrugged. “Why?”

  “Because you know what it's like,” began Rosie, nodding earnestly. “You—when you first moved in with your grandparents—had an eye for that kind of thing, I remember. You were a remarkable girl.”

  Sadie took a pull from her mug. The hot coffee hit her empty stomach and despite its warmth she shivered. “Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about,” was what she replied, though it was a lie; she knew all too well what Rosie was driving at.

  “You had an eye for ghosts, I mean.” Rosie leaned forward, patted the back of Sadie's hand. “Unlike most people, you were just... tuned in.”