Hauntings

For years, I have been alone with my thoughts, writing them in a diary for no one else to see. I’ve written down my entire plan to kill Henry Wancaster, but I don’t dare show a soul. They wouldn’t understand, they didn’t see him, they’re not me. They never saw what he did to me, what he said to me, the way he tormented me in school and constantly humiliated me. 

They didn’t know, they couldn’t. I’d been working on my plan for three long, isolating years, but, today, I found out he died in a horrible car accident. Needless to say, this revelation completely ruined my plans. I wanted to slip some poison into his evening tea while visiting as his childhood friend, but now I couldn’t and I’d lost every semblance of control that a man could ever have. 

***

I am sitting under an oak tree now, near the garden, wondering exactly what will become of me. My diary is open, the lock and key on the ground next to me, and I’m looking over it as tears stream run down my face. No one is here, no one will ever come here because it’s my secret place. The place I go to when my demons dance circles around me and the devil won’t leave me alone. The place I used to go to with her, long ago, before high school happened and she decided to date the most popular boy in the world.

I would never forgive Henry Wancaster for taking her, the most precious thing in my life. He was a heartless man, a cruel human being. I look over the various forms of poison I’d considered giving him and I sighed. 

He was gone...He would never bother me again...but I still wished I could have exacted my revenge and controlled his fate. 

I adjust my glasses and look at the river, meandering relentlessly through this place. I think about going back home for my fishing rod, but I am in too much of a state for that right now. 

No. That won’t do. Instead, I am going to cross out my plans, rip out the pages, and burn them. I don’t want anyone accusing me of premeditated murder just in case the village fool, Mr. Muckerson, were to suddenly and mysteriously pass away on a dreary night. 

I sit down and continue thinking about whether I actually would have done it, and I decide I probably wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have been able to bring myself to do it, but the idea of the whole ordeal was somehow comforting in my mind: Arriving after the idiot came home from church, telling him I forgave him for continuously humiliating me just because I was adopted, and then slipping a bit of poison into his tea when he wasn’t looking before returning back home.

No one would have been the wiser regarding what had occurred that night. The whole neighborhood would be in a frenzy for the loss of the most popular man in their wicked, little world, but not me, I would just be alone. 

Sometimes, late in the evenings when I came back after the moon had risen to its peak, my mother would ask me if I wanted to make friends and urge me to leave the house more often, yet, it was never a desire of mine. There were two things I enjoyed in this life: Reading about murder and writing about it. The authors were inordinately meticulous about the villains’ plans and I personally found them rather inspirational. I wouldn’t really do anything, of course, but it was fun to think about. 

One Christmas, my father, who misunderstood my intrigue with the literary macabre, offered me a small handgun, but I refused it: I didn’t want to succumb to my impulses prematurely. I feared I may use it on him in a fit of anger, so it has remained in the cupboard, locked away for no one to see for many years now, and I haven’t mentioned it once. I also wouldn’t want to trigger my father’s memory. I figured he’d forgotten about it, I hoped he had at least. 

The great thing about being alone is one never gets humiliated, brokenhearted, shamed, or abandoned. One simply is and one simply does, and that is really all there is to it. My mother is terrified that I struggle with depression, but I don’t think that’s the case, it’s only a mild condition of cynicism, I think. 

I wonder if I’ll decide to go to the man’s funeral or think better of it. I am far more sophisticated and capable than that heartless imbecile. I wouldn’t want his ghost to think I ever cared much about him. He was a scoundrel, relentlessly mocking me and stealing my lover from me! I am getting upset just thinking about it. 

I see a mist gathering over the mountains in the distance and I wonder exactly what it is. I now decide there’s no need to burn my diary, I’ll simply throw it in the river. I’m an environmentalist, but, only when other people are watching, and, on this particular evening, there is absolutely no one in sight. I furrow my brows and the mist comes closer, it looks almost like a figure now. 

As it arrives near me, I see the apparition of Henry Wancaster. 

What a complete and utter wanker. 

I roll my eyes. 

“I will haunt you from my grave!” he says. 

“I see that, yes, I don’t find you scary at all. This is all a bunch of codswallop!” 

“I know you were going to kill me. What would your mother think of that? Mr. Christian boy who has no friends and never will at this rate.” 

“I don’t want any friends.” I snap, “Will you just leave me alone, please? I didn’t do it, okay?” 

“No you didn’t, but you were going to, and I, my friend, will always have Isabella. Not because I love her, or because I care about her at all, but because I know you want her.” 

I groan. 

“We’re not friends and I can’t believe you did that to me! I hate you! She deserves more!” 

My voice is getting louder now, tinted with rage, but I see him leaving now, waving goodbye before the guilt and accountability sets in, perhaps before he feels even the slightest bit of remorse for what he’s done to me. 

“What has Henry Wancaster done to me?” You may ask.

“Why am I so upset?” 

Well, he choked my great aunt Anna to death before her time. He stole Isabella, the love of my life minutes before our first kiss. He said his father, the principle, would expel her on the grounds of sexual harassment if she didn’t date him that very minute.He then told everyone I was adopted and laughed at me about it every day for months on end, which turned into years.

I hate him with every bone in my body, and I strongly believe he’s better off dead. I’ve never met a bloke as cruel in all of my years on the planet. Now, I’m barely twenty-five and I’m already seeing ghosts. Perhaps it’s because I’m alone too much, or maybe it’s because they are, no one can be certain. 

I still can’t believe he killed my great aunt Anna! I saw her ghost too, sometimes, but only when I went to the graveyard, I figured that was her resting place. 

I suppose I’m not really alone when I’m talking to ghosts, to spirits of the deceased, but, I find I prefer their company to that of other humans, except for Henry Wancaster’s, of course, I’d rather never see him again in any form. My great aunt in spirit is quite loving, quite nurturing, and very encouraging, she always tells me she’s proud of me. I don’t see her but once a year, yet, each visit is one that I will cherish forever. 

However, I’m not going to the graveyard tonight. I’m still working through my feelings about wishing to commit the murder I had so meticulously planned and then seeing the man’s ghost taunt me from beyond. I wonder if it is just a figment of my imagination although I fear it is not. Nothing ever is these days, no thoughts are solely imagined without being triggered by some existential reality. 

Henry Wancaster is dead. He’s dead and it wasn’t my doing. He’d made a point of taunting me and then disappearing, the way he always used to when we were in school together. 

I look at the river, my diary is somewhere in the depths of the water, soggy and wet, never to be found again, unless its remnants wash up on the bank in years to come, and I’d like to keep it that way. 

“HENRY!” I shout suddenly, “HENRY!” 

The air is completely silent, the apparition is now gone. 

“HENRY! COME BACK HERE! ISABELLA ISN’T DEAD, IS SHE? HOW COULD YOU DO THAT?” 

It suddenly dawns on me. 

The love of my life Isabella had been in the car with him when it crashed. She was dead too. 

I hung my head and looked at the ground as I walked back to my mother’s house — I can’t hold onto a job and I am a drunk, but, that is beside the point — I know Isabella is gone forever. I begin to think to myself, she is never coming back! Not unless she haunts me like the rest of them. 

Everything leaves my mind except the fantasy I’ve had for many years of her touching my skin, whispering sweet nothings in my ear, and kissing my chin. 

Maybe I’ll take a trip to the graveyard after all, I think to myself, she might be there. 

I get into my father’s Chevrolet, and drive to the place where the tombstones line up like fallen soldiers who’ve been fighting a war even they don’t understand. I begin to search the place wildly. 

Did they find her body? Is there a new tombstone? Did I miss her funeral? Surely, someone would have told me, right? Someone on this earth must have known about my feelings for this woman. 

I see her name, Isabella Dunkenson, etched on to a tombstone. I see an apparition: her black hat, her pointy shoes, her purple hair (I’d always loved her courage. Some men weren’t drawn to it, but I always had been.) She looks the same as she always had, except I could no longer touch her. 

“Isabella,” I reach out my hand.

“Isabella...I love you!”

“I love you too,” she whispers back, too close for comfort. 

As I was driving home in my father’s Chevrolet, thinking about the events of the day, I saw a deer run across the road. I slammed on the brakes as the old vehicle screeched to a halt. I swear that, in its eyes, I could see a twinkle, and I wondered to myself why this creature decided to cross this section of the road on this particular night at this particular time. Yet, deers continue to cross the road: the entire family, and another three families, until, finally, I could drive home. 

I go to bed and my mother gives me a cup of chamomile tea which I drink and then wish her goodnight. She kisses me on the forehead, says she loves me and I say I love her too.  My eyes become heavy as a vision of the beautiful Isabella appears in my mind.

She looks the same as she did at the graveyard. She is kissing me passionately, and, for a moment, I think she is bringing me to the cottage where her and I will live forever in harmony. But, then Henry Wancaster suddenly appears and puts his fingers around her throat, sucking all of the life out of her until she is cold to the touch. I open my eyes and scream into the night, my entire body shakes. 

“ISABELLA! MY ISABELLA!”

“She will never be yours, I made sure of that!” Henry taunts, “I crashed the car on purpose.”