The Hauntings

Aisling Walsh

They did not believe in ghosts but they were scared of them. On weekend visitations they would sleep three-in-a-bed in the guest room of the rented cottage. The older two would fight over who got to share the double bed with the little one and who had to roll over onto the fold-out camp bed. A single bed lay at the far end of the room, but they were ever annoyed enough with each other to banish anyone to that lonely corner. The unfortunate occupant would have to squeeze their eyes shut against the tentacle like shadows from garden trees creeping around the corners of the white walls and across the bedspread. 

They never told their father, snoring loudly from his room at the other end of the house, any of this. He was still delighting in the novelties of country life and called them “townies” whenever they hinted at the inconveniences of a cottage that was too cold, too small and too much in the middle of nowhere. He must have suspected their shared terror, however, because the camp bed had appeared in their room without them ever asking. They had learned by then not to demand anything from their father, but to content themselves with such unpredictable tokens of paternal consideration. 

The oldest, and the only, girl found herself relegated to the camp bed more often than not. Sometimes she lost the fight, on other occasions she acted the bigger sister, sacrificing her own comfort, so her little brothers might enjoy the security offered by the proximity of another warm body. She would lie a foot beneath her brothers curled into a ball, almost smothered by blankets, leaving just enough of a crack so she could breathe fresh air through her nose. Sleep was elusive in this house that was not theirs, and never would be. It was the fourth home her father had made without them in the four years since he had left their mother. The stale sweat and pipe smoke of the elderly farmer, who had most certainly died there, still clung to the slatted ceiling, the threadbare carpets and the terrycloth bedspreads. His little effigies of Mary, head bowed and palms pressed in prayer, adorned the mantlepiece in each room and his faded reprints of Jesus with his exposed, beating heart remained hanging from the walls. Their eyes followed her movements through the cottage by day and spied on her, unblinking, throughout the night. 

Struggling towards sleep, she would ignore the increasing pressure of her swollen bladder so that she could put off the lonely trek through the living room and kitchen to the bathroom, that was little better than an outhouse, until morning. The cottage, despite its middle-of-nowhereness and far removed from the suburban glare of orange street lamps, never really got dark. When the urge to pee was simply too much, she would creep out the door and around the dark shapes of the old farmer’s furniture keeping her eyes to the ground. She would sit in the dark, her tiptoes skirting the icy linoleum, and run back to bed without flushing or washing her hands. The low groans of the rusted pipes through the silence sounded as if the house itself was objecting to her nightly excursions. Back in the camp-bed she would bury herself completely in the covers and squeeze her eyes shut hoping whoever, or whatever, was out had not stirred from her movements. She learned avoid having tea and juice with her supper and so could last the night without the bathroom dash. 

Back at her mother’s house, conjured imaginings of long-dead men walking through walls and the restless souls of children trapped in limbo grabbing at her bare toes often kept her from sleeping. On those nights, waking breathless and drenched in sweat, she would find her way to her mother’s bed, sliding into the space left vacant by her father. Her mother would turn over groaning at the click of the door, but she never objected to the uninvited guest. Sleep would overcome the girl almost as soon as she drew the covers up to her shoulder. 

In the weeks between visitations, she would tell herself that it was all in her imagination and there was nothing to be scared of in the cottage. She was old enough to feel embarrassed by fantastical imaginings about a dead farmer and his dead relatives wanting to scare three children back to suburbs. Their father complained regularly about their multiple failures in adapting to country life. They refused to drink or bathe in the freezing, tea-stained, bog water that spewed from the groaning taps. They got bored with the lack of entertainment from a fuzzy TV set which, on a good day, could only pick up one of the two terrestrial stations on its bent pair of rabbit ears. There were no other children to play with, no corner shop to go to for a 10-penny-bag of sweets and some Monster Munch, the garden was too overgrown for football and all their board games were at home. 

The only thing she really liked about country life were the fires. At home they had a gas fire that came on with the flick of a switch and was used so rarely it did little more than gather dust. She felt like a proper country kid when her father sent her out with a bucket to collect turf from the mountain of irregularly cut sods stacked in the garden shed. After many nights observing, her father eventually let her set the sods in the grate and stuff the cracks with twisted lengths of newspaper pages. She could light the fire only after he had inspected her work and under his supervision. She would stand back with her hands on her hips watching with satisfaction as flames engulfed her carefully constructed pyramid and the sods began to smoke. It took hours, and many more sods, before the blaze chased the chill out of the house. In the mornings, waiting for her father to emerge and prepare breakfast, she would sit wrapped in a blanket on one of the giant living room armchairs and munch her way through half a packet of chocolate digestives. Sometimes she would read, other times she would just watch her breath evaporate on the icy air, a game her friends used to play on the school yard in January pretending they were secret smokers, like her father. She did not mind being out there alone in the mornings, whoever it was she imagined roamed the house at night seemed to disappear just before dawn.

They only lasted a year in the cottage, enough time to get used to the three-in-a-bed sleeping arrangements, the freezing, brown bog water and the idea that the ghosts were figments of their imaginations, before their father moved on again. On one of the first weekend visits to the new, and improved, cottage, the girl caught the gentle tinkle of young woman’s laugh just as she was on the edge of sleep. The laugh sounded human but it nonetheless made her stomach lurch. Checking her brothers were asleep she slid out of bed, clicked the door open, crept down the hall in her nightdress and stocking feet and crouched outside the living room. Her father’s voice rose and fell with the uneven inflections he developed after a few beers. He was talking to someone, explaining something. The girl pressed her ear to the door and could just make out his murmurs as he recounted how, in the previous cottage, the paintings would fly off the walls, windows rattled on windless nights and guests had been shaken awake in their beds and interrogated. 

The woman laughed. “You’re just trying to scare me.”

“No, I’m serious,” said her father. “The kids were terrified. They insisted on sleeping in the same bed even though the oldest is nearly thirteen, for Christ’s sake.”

He snorted and popped the cap on another beer.

“Is that why you moved?”

“God no! The rent is cheaper here and their mother’s bleeding me dry.”

The girl froze at these words, a chill spreading through her body. Her hands felt clammy and a knot formed in her stomach that had nothing to do with possible spirits stalking the halls of this house or the last. Giggles and a muffed cry, followed by an irritated shush, brought her back to the present. She retired her ear and retreated on tiptoes to the room where her brothers snored in their bunks. She crawled into her single bed and pondered the revelation that her father, for once, might not be lying. The ghosts had been real but, perhaps, it was the living who should be feared. 

* * *

“You just have to learn to live with them,” he said, rising from the table. 

The clatter of his cup in the sink punctuated his refusal to discuss the possibility of a cleansing. He left her alone in the kitchen nursing her coffee, now cold, asking herself if living with the dead was something she could learn? She had managed it once, as a child. In her father’s house, however, the specters had only existed in her imagination until after the fact. In her lover’s house she, and many others, had shared their tales of encounters with the spirits who roamed the house by day and by night. Over beers they would try to outdo each other with anecdotes about the corners thick with foreboding, the disembodied screams outside bedroom doors, alarms that sounded in the night for no reason at all, light bulbs blowing with an uncanny frequency and dreams invaded by phantoms that were not a product of their subconsciousness. She had thought they were joking at first, just trying to scare her, but after a couple of months in the house she had experienced sufficient spine-prickling incidents to convince her that not all the occupants of the house were made of flesh. 

Still, her lover insisted that the whole city was haunted, each house an open wound, each street the site of multiple tragedies. Would she take it on herself to exorcise them too? Death was a macabre joke around those parts. It was not unusual to hear the dry pop of gunshots echo through dark and empty streets, nor to find the footpaths splashed with fresh blood in the morning. People learned to live with death and the marks it left. The implication being, that her western sensibilities might be two delicate for the gritty reality of life in the barrio.  

She said nothing more and became determined to overcome the fear that had lingered since childhood. On the nights when she slept in his bed neither her over-active imagination nor lurking spirits would bother her. With him snoring softly beside her she could drift into an easy slumber without smothering herself under the blankets as she had when she was a child. She could nip into his ensuite if she needed the toilet. But on those few nights when she found herself alone in his cavernous house, full of winding passageways and dark corners, her sleep became a tormented struggle. She had to leave the lamp on, cajole her three cats into prowling her bedroom rather than the neighbor’s roofs, and hold her pee in until the morning so she did not have to venture along the shadowy corridor to the communal bathroom. 

Further entreaties to allow an Ajq’Ij in to move the spirits along were refused. It was his house, she was just another lodger, and according to him, nothing needed to be cleansed, exorcised or moved along. Her anxiety at being left alone began to determine her daily routine and her sleep became ever more disturbed by fearful imaginings. She decided to take things into her own hands. On the next full moon, when her friends were due to gather for their monthly fire ceremony, she volunteered to be the host. Her lover rolled his eyes at their feminine charlatanry, but otherwise left the women who had answered her call in peace. They sat crossed legged around the clay comal as they built a fire from candles, puros, pom and copal, and decorated the ground with petals, pine needles, herbs and other offerings. Their shadows danced around the walls of the terrace as the women poured maize, sesame, and cacao onto the flames, relishing the pop of sizzling seeds. Cleansing rosemary, basil and rue herbs followed, filling the terrace with a dense perfumed smoke. As host, she gave her thanks to the house which had become her refuge in this often hostile city, a place where she had found friendship and love. She asked for peace for all its residents, both the living and the dead. 

Cracking open a bottle of mezcal, they drank and shared tragic and ridiculous intimacies until their cackles could be heard the length of the street. She stood guard over the fire as the flames shrank to embers and her friends began to depart. With the ashes still glowing she gathered the stalks of rue herb circling the comal into a little bunch and secured it with string. The abuelas of this territory knew rue to be a plant imbued with the power to expel everything from unwanted spirits to unwanted pregnancies. She breathed in the pungent scent and dipped the grey-green, slightly singed, leaves into a jicara of water infused with the energy of the moon and the fire, and began her own, albeit amateur, cleansing ritual. 

She fought against self-consciousness as she circled the terrace shaking the water soaked rue into every corner and tried not to feel a fraud as she accompanied each flick of her wrist with whispered blessings for peace and harmony. She flicked extra water down the steps where, only months after moving into the house, she had been visited by the man with the blazing white eyes. The malice of his gaze had pierced through the walls of her room and penetrated her dreams. She had woken from a thump on her chest, lurching from the pillow and gasping for air. She had lain frozen in the dark for hours, her eyes squeezed shut, convinced the man with the blazing eyes had breached the threshold and was standing at the foot of the bed watching her through the dark. Those eyes had haunted her sleep for months afterwards. 

Reaching the bathroom she took a deep breath and concentrated extra hard on extending her peaceful intentions to the troubled soul of the boy who, fifty years previously, had hung himself from the shower to escape his father’s violence. She splashed her rue herb over the kitchen, living room, halls and patio. Finally she opened the front door and used the last of the water in the jicara to bless the doorstep where, eight years previously, her lover’s father had been shot. He had died before the ambulance arrived and was not mourned by the family son he had long-since abandoned. She left the rue herb hanging upside down from the weeping fig in the patio to dry and burned it on the fire at the next full moon. The spell was thus cast. 

Months passed without incidence. She adopted new rituals to appease the dead, greeting the spirits of the house when she came home and lighting a candle every day in the corner outside the bathroom. Perhaps it was simply her imagination, but she had begun to feel more welcome in the house and she was sleeping a little easier on the nights when she found herself alone in her own bed. 

One such night, she was woken from the depths of sleep by clinking and the sound of feet on the stairs. She could see a light from the hall, crept to her door and pulled it open a crack. She did not find the disembodied man with the blazing white eyes, but his son, her lover, in the flesh, skulking down the corridor with a pack of his friends. 

He turned on her, with black eyes and a frothing mouth, screaming, “I’ve had enough of you, enough. Leave me alone. Leave, get out of here. Go away, tomorrow. Go!”

Confronted with this ferocious exorcism, she stood frozen, saying nothing. His friends had shuffled off with their heads down, pretending not to notice the explosion. He followed to where they were huddled in the garage waiting and left slamming the door behind him. She locked her door and crawled back to bed, lying rigid under the blankets. Alone, in the darkness, she finally understand what her lover had meant when he had said there was more to fear from the living than the dead.