Suckers - Jack Kilborn [20]
“Anyway,” Roger continued, “his family lived in the house for another year, but every once in a while they would hear weird noises. Only at night, never during the day. Creaking footsteps on the staircase. Whispering. And none of them could explain it, but the whole family felt like Jarvis was still there, watching them. Always watching.”
The girls had fallen silent. “About six months after Jarvis died, the oldest daughter couldn’t take it anymore, so she ran away and was never seen again. At least…not alive. They did find her body. She’d drowned in a small pond, which at its very center wasn’t even deep enough to come up to her waist. And she’d left her shoes by the edge. There was no note inside, but one can only wonder if Jarvis was somehow responsible for his daughter’s death.”
Dead silence. The temptation to shout “BOO!” was overwhelming, but I didn’t want to ruin Roger’s show.
“One night, exactly one year after Jarvis killed himself, his wife heard the soft footsteps. They were coming up the stairs. Like she always did, she pulled the blankets up over her head and waited for them to go away. They were getting closer…closer…until she heard them in her very room.”
Roger’s flashlight began to flicker, so he tapped it against his palm until the beam was steady again. “They stopped. She could feel something watching her. And then she heard the whisper, ‘Dorothy…Dorothy…I still love you…’“
“Like in The Wizard of Oz?” asked Becky, one of Theresa’s more annoying friends.
“No, not like in The Wizard of Oz,” said Roger without missing a beat, “It was Dorothy Taywood, who lay on her bed, blankets above her head, listening to the ghostly voice whisper her name. The voice that sounded just like her dead husband. The whispering stopped, and finally she worked up the courage to peek over the blankets, just…a…bit…”
Roger looked at each girl in the circle in turn. “And there, standing at the foot of her bed, was her husband.”
“Were his guts hanging out?” Becky inquired.
“They might have been. I wasn’t there. But she squeezed her eyes shut because she was so terrified, and when she opened them again, he was gone. She immediately woke up her kids, at least those who were still alive, and they spent the rest of the night in a hotel. They never came back to the Taywood house.
“It took them a while to sell it, but finally another family moved in. They heard the same footsteps in the middle of the night. Once they even thought they heard screaming. And there were other things, too. Books would vanish and mysteriously reappear. They called the newspaper, and a couple of reporters from the Chamber Chronicle spent a week in the house, but nothing happened during that time…at least, that’s what they said. The rumors, and I believe them, are that they were just too frightened to print the truth.”
I continued to withstand the “BOO!” urge, which required almost superhuman strength at this point.
“Shortly after that, in the middle of the night, the father woke up…and there was the ghost of Jarvis, standing right there in the doorway. But instead of hiding under the blankets, the father got up and went after it. He ran down the stairs, but there was no sign of the ghost…it had vanished. Vanished into the netherworld. They moved out the next day.
“They sold the Taywood house to a man who lived by himself. Six months later, he disappeared. They don’t know what happened to him. They never found a note, they never found a body…but they did find his shoes, lying on the staircase. And since then, nobody has lived there. The house is empty…vacant, except for the ghost of Jarvis Taywood…silent except for his footsteps on the stairs…except for certain nights, dark nights, when the neighbors swear they can hear whispering…and screaming…”
“BOO!” I shouted.
Several of the girls shot me dirty looks. Theresa put her finger to her lips and shushed me. Ashamed, I stared at the floor and was silent.
“So remember, girls, never go near the Taywood house. Jarvis