A Ghost Story - Screams Of Ghastly Horror

by Jason Ryan Qualls
(Elkhart, Indiana, USA)

Screams Of Ghastly Horror
Lexis hesitated before stepping out into the dark yard of the old house. The black skeletons of bare-limed trees loomed against the charcoal sky. A cold November wind blew dead leaves in circles at her feet. Lexis found an old-fashioned wicker bench and sat down, facing her new home.

Everything fell silent, eerily quiet. Her family had moved into the house that day. It was a large, rambling Victorian, set on a hill several miles away from the town she had been living in.

Lexis's friends had told her strange stories about the house. It had sat vacant for years before her parents had bought it one day on an impulse. The old wicker bench creaked as Lexis turned around to look behind her. Nothing was there. She knew she should go inside to bed. But something was holding her back from facing the bedroom where her furniture and belongings had been put. Her mother had insisted that the room was charming. But Lexis had felt uneasy in it. A heaviness had hung in the air, a strange gloom that was suffocating.

"Lexis," her father called from the doorway. Are you out there?" Lexis got up from the bench and walked toward the door. Her parents didn't understand how she felt. They didn't know the dread the house stirred in her.

"Time for bed," her father said when she walked into the hallway. "I hope we don't keep you awake. There's lots of unpacking we have to do yet tonight."

"Good night, Lexis," her mother said absentmindedly as she worked over a packing crate. "Sleep tight."

Lexis started up the wide staircase to the second floor. She wished she didn't have to go up by herself. But her parents had gone back to their work, of unpacking, forgetting about her. Lexis walked into the large bedroom with its three windows and high ceilings. Her old furniture seemed lost in the room; she felt lost, too. She quickly put on her nightgown and then went out into the hall to the bathroom. On her way back she passed the door that went up to the third floor attic. It was slightly ajar. The sight made her heart pound faster. She had just passed it a few minutes ago. She was sure it hadn't been open then.

With trembling hands Lexis grasped the old doorknob and pushed it tightly shut. Then she hurried into her room and closed the door behind her. She tossed and turned for almost an hour. Finally her parents came up the staircase to go to bed. They peeked in the room to check on her, but Lexis pretended to be asleep. She couldn't tell them she was frightened. She didn't want to admit it to herself. The house became even more silent. She lay in the bed staring out her windows at the moonlit branches. Still, sleep would not come.

Suddenly a sound made her nerves jump. It was a dull, scraping noise over her head. Lexis looked up toward the ceiling. She saw nothing but the murky shadows of night. It came again . . . a sound of rough scuffing across the wood floor of the attic above. Lexis shrank back into her covers. She tried to think of all the things it might be. A squirrel inside the house, searching for shelter.

Something being blown by the breeze through a window left accidentally open. Then there was another sound. A more steady and deliberate sound. The sound of footsteps. Lexis closed her eyes and shook her head to clear it. She opened her eyes again. It wasn't a dream. She was wide-awake. And the sound was still there. The footsteps echoed down through the ceiling and filled the room. Lexis felt fear creep into her body and paralyze her. She lay in bed wondering if she was going mad. But the footsteps were too real. They had crossed to one side of the ceiling now. Lexis suddenly heard a difference in them.

The footsteps were moving down, down the stairway from the attic. She screamed out with all the terror trapped in her body. Her parents stayed with Lexis until she finally fell into an exhausted sleep. They assured her it was a nightmare caused by anxiety about moving into the new house. Lexis didn't believe them. She knew she had heard the footsteps.

The next day there was no school. Lexis went through the motions of helping her parents settle into the house. In late afternoon her father asked her to go up into the attic with him. Lexis followed him up the stairs, a lump growing in her throat. The attic was still crowded with the belongings of the elderly couple who had lived and died in the house. Boxes and old trunks were piled under layers of dust. Broken furniture huddled in the eaves. Lexis had seen the attic before, but she had never walked around in it. Her father pulled away a large trunk that blocked one of the small windows at the end of the room.

When he was finished, Lexis walked over to look out at the view. She stumbled over something on the floor. Looking down, she saw that it was a pair of men's shoes, worn and dirty. The brown leather was cracked and torn in several places. The shoes had taken on the shape of the feet that had once worn them. Lexis shrank back from them. Then she ran past her father, down the stairs from the attic, and into her room. She fell onto her bed and buried her head in the pillow. Her father came in to ask what was the matter.

Lexis couldn't tell him how she'd felt when she'd seen the shoes. He would think she was mad. That night her parents tucked Lexis into bed and kissed her good night. She pretended to be calm and unafraid. But when they shut the door, strange thoughts flooded into her mind. They tortured her until she finally fell asleep on her tear soaked pillow.

She awoke with a start, confused for a minute about where she was. She remembered . . . her new room, the new house. Then she heard the sound that had awakened her--the sound of footsteps. They were moving across the ceiling above her. The footfalls were heavy and deliberate. The steps reached the head of the attic staircase. Lexis opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. She lay still, listening with absolute horror as the footsteps moved down, one at a time, toward her. Now she heard them in the hallway outside.

This time her scream echoed through the house. Her parents still didn't believe her. They calmed her with assurances that it was all a nightmare. They promised to take her to a doctor as soon as they could get an appointment. Lexis finally fell asleep, clutching her father's hand. Again, the next day, her father forced her to go with him up to the attic. He tried to convince her that no ghosts or strange spirits could be there. He held her arm as she climbed the stairs with him. When they reached the top, Lexis walked toward the window. Her eyes settled on the spot where she had seen the pair of shoes the day before.

They were gone. "Where are they?" she asked her father. He looked at her in confusion. Lexis drew back, toward the stairs. Her feet stumbled over something. Looking down, she saw the pair of shoes. They were sitting nearer the staircase. Her father promised she wouldn't have to go back up to the attic again. He would take her to see a doctor soon, a doctor who knew how to help her. Lexis nodded at everything he said. But she knew the footsteps would come to find her again.

Her parents took turns sitting with her that night. Her father was still there by her bedside when she fell asleep. When she awoke, she felt like a swimmer struggling up out of a sea of nightmares that were drowning her. She gasped for air and opened her eyes. The chair beside her bed was empty. She was all alone. And the footsteps had already reached the stairs. They moved with an eerie, steady pace, always coming toward her, always growing louder. Lexis heard them stop at the bottom of the staircase. She held her breath for so long that she grew dizzy. Then the footsteps started down the hallway toward her room. She'd known they would.

There was no moon that night. The room was draped in a darkness so black that Lexis could not see the windows or the door. She could only wait for the sound of one footfall after another, coming closer and closer. The door did not make a sound. But suddenly Lexis knew the footsteps were in her room. They fell, heavy and determined, against the bare floorboards. Fear choked back the scream welling up inside her. Now the footsteps were at the end of the bed. In only a few minutes they would be. . . .

Lexis's scream echoed in her mind like a nightmare. Before it ended, both her father and mother were in the room. Her mother tried to flick on the bedroom light, but for some reason it did not come on. They ran to her. But already the footsteps had stopped. Lexis stared wildly in the darkness, as spiders of ghastly horror crawled up her body. Her parents rushed to her bedside. All together they stared at a pair of brown, worn shoes. That were worn by a man's corpse, that had a rope around his neck and was hanging from the ceiling. The only sound was the creaking of the rope as the bedroom corpse swayed back and forth. The hanging corpse had a wicked smile on his cold, dead face.