ghost story

i dreamed last night that my family and i were staying at a friend's house for a week. i don't know this person in real life. they had an old brownstone somewhere in vancouver proper, and a little boy about the same age as liam (and who looked remarkably like him, too). their house was beautiful and huge, there were two guestrooms, one for leon and i and one for our kids. the first night we were there, leon and i were cuddled up in the huge, fluffy bed, just dozing off, when i heard my daughter scream in a blood-curdling way. leon and i leapt out of bed and ran down the hall to see what was the matter. she was saying that another, older girl had come in their room and tried to "hit" her and liam. liam confirmed this story and said that when laurel screamed, the girl had dropped the "big hammer" she'd been carrying and then both she and the weapon had just vanished. no, she didn't walk out of the room. they had simply disappeared.

the rest of the house had woken up and come to see what the fuss was at this point. we all walked around looking for the mysterious girl with the "big hammer" and couldn't find any trace of her. we tucked the kids back into their beds and the woman of the house took me aside and told me that they had had a daughter some years ago, but that she had died in an "accident". she was 8 when their son had been born, and died at the age of 12. a year after she died, her apparition had been appearing in different rooms all around the house, always angry and threatening, but never doing any harm to anyone except their son, who she tormented endlessly with threats of beating him to death with a huge, leather-covered mallet. i was immediately terrified and went back to the room leon and i were sharing to tell him the news. instead of sharing my fear, in typical leon style, he was fascinated and waited up all night to see if the girl would appear to us, but she didn't.

the next day, i was somehow left alone in the house with this family's young son, while everyone else went out to run errands. he was playing quietly in his upstair bedroom and i was reading on the couch in their livingroom. suddenly the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and i got a really creepy feeling in my stomach. i looked over to the stone fireplace they had and something about the large, flat, center stone at the base of the fireplace caught my attention...it wasn't sitting perfectly flat or in line with the other stones. i got up and went over to it slowly, still feeling this eerie sensation of being watched. i kept expecting the apparation of the girl to appear, but she didn't. i tested the stone and found it could be moved quite easily out of place. as i shifted it up and onto the other cemented stones i found it was a kind of dirt-filled cubby hole, and inside were sheets and sheets of yellowed paper and photographs. as i started to pull them out i saw they were very crude children's drawings, but not of pastoral scenes and crooked houses. instead they were very violent and gory pictures of a dark-haired girl being beaten to death by a smaller, sandy-haired little boy, who was holding what looked to be a huge, leather-covered mallet. my heart started racing in my chest as i looked at the rest of the drawings, all depicting the same scene in various stages of violence. first, she was hit across the face and red crayon marks showed blood flying from her mouth. in the next picture, she was on the ground, trying to cover her head, and the boy was standing over her with the mallet raised, a grimace of anger on his small face. in the next, the mallet hit her in the head again, this time against her ear, more blood flying from her nose and mouth. and in the final picture, the little boy stood with the mallet hanging limp from his hand, over the body of the clearly dead girl.

i rolled the drawings up, feeling sick to my stomach, and tried to press them back into the hole. there were black and white photographs mingled into the dirt there, too, and i reluctantly picked them out, one by one, blowing the soil off of them. each of them was a recent portrait of the boy that lived in the house, but he was not smiling in any of them. instead his eyes looked dead and flat and black, his face slack. he was wearing a dark turtleneck sweater and looking hollow-cheeked and staring right into the camera. i flipped through the photos quickly, feeling as though this boy could actually see me through the pictures and wanting very much to not be noticed by him. in the final picture, his face was no longer entirely expressionless. instead, while he was still staring directly into the camera, a small smile played at the corner of his lips. when i peered more closely at the background of the photo, i could see a smeary impression of the dead girl standing just off to the side, also staring into the camera as the photo was snapped.

that did it for me. my heart was racing and i felt like throwing up. i knew that the boy was ill, was very, very ill, and had killed his older sister in a violent and brutal way, and i knew that the parents had tried to hide this from everyone, and suddenly, i also knew that if i took the time and effort to move all of the stones away from the hearth in front of the fireplace, and dig through the soil there, i would find her corpse. suddenly i heard noises from the upstairs and realized the boy was coming down. in a panic, i tried to stuff all the drawings and photos down my shirt because i wanted to show them to leon, and i frantically swept the dirt i'd sprayed all over the hearth back into the hole and replaced the loose stone. i managed to jump up and get back to my seat on the couch before the little boy walked into the livingroom and stared at me. i had a huge lump in my throat and was barely controlling my breathing. i said hello to him and asked him what he was up to, trying to sound nonchalant. he didn't answer, he just looked at me, and then his eyes moved slowly over to the fireplace, and then back to me. i felt a little dirt was still crusted on my fingertips and tried to hide my hands behind my back. he left the room again without saying anything and i sighed and wondered what on earth i would do with this knowledge.

finally leon and the rest of them all came back from their shopping trip, loaded down with groceries and other items. i impatiently waited for my chance to talk with leon, to tell him what i'd discovered, but we didn't get a moment alone all day, until finally, after putting the kids to bed and retiring to our own room, i had his full attention. i pulled all the boy's drawings of his depiction of the murder of his sister and all the creepy black and white photographs out and told leon i was sure the little girl was buried in the fireplace somehow. he was immediately alarmed and intrigued and we tried to decide what to do next. as we were talking, our bedroom door swung open, and there the girl stood, a smeary apparition, not really glowing but standing out from her more solid surroundings in a way that was obviously supernatural. i was so terrified i couldn't even move. leon's jaw dropped open. her hair was long and dark and she was dressed in a peach-coloured nightgown made of what appeared to be very thin cloth. she looked to be about 11 or 12 years old. she was holding a mallet in her right hand but did not raise it. instead she lifted her left hand and pointed down the hallway, in the direction of the room our kids were sleeping in, and then vanished.

i freaked, certain she was going to go to their room and terrify/harm my kids again. i somehow got it into my head that because my son looked so much like her killer she was going to seek revenge on the wrong boy. leon and i sprung out of our bed, leaving all the crude drawings and creepy portraits of the boy behind on the covers, and as we dashed into the hallway we could see the door to our kids' room swinging open onto darkness. i started to call out my kids' names, trying to wake them, to warn them, but just as my voice rang into the hallway my son and daughter both screamed in terror. leon and ran as fast as we could into their room and flicked on the light, to find not the ghost-girl standing over them, but the other little boy, poised over their beds, not speaking, and holding a wooden baseball bat. leon tackled him immediately, sending him sprawling across the wood floor, while i ran to the bed and scooped my two kids up in my arms. the kids were sobbing, liam was saying, "i never liked him, i never liked him, but i didn't do anything to him, why does he want to hurt us?' and laurel was pressing her face into my neck. leon picked up the baseball bat in one hand and the silent boy in the other, and as he turned to march out of the room, the ghost-girl appeared in the mirror above the chest of drawers. she was crying and holding the mallet still. i pointed at the mirror and told leon we had to get out of here, take all the pictures and our suspicions to the police. he agreed, and that was when the door to the room swung shut, and we heard a key turn in the lock. we were trapped. and that was when i forced myself to wake up.