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Victorian Dreams Pt. 01

By: Orexis



This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of people, places or events is purely coincidental and not the intent of the author. 

This is a copyrighted work. Any republication, or use in part or in whole without the authors written permission is a violation of copyright laws of the United States and other countries. 

© Copyright 2003, 2004, Charles F. Johnson

This work is lovingly dedicated to Mac who's disappointment when the plot took a negative turn in my first attempt inspired me to try again, resulting in this completed work.

Though we are no longer together, sweetheart, I dedicate this to you as you continue to inspire me.

My love is still committed and unconditional. I love you, Baby. 

* * * * * 

Haley Baxter was an intelligent young woman. At 22 she already had earned a bachelors and a Master's degree in architecture and Interior design, respectively. 

She was intending to pursue her Doctorate when she discovered an opportunity that couldn't be passed on, so she decided to put any further educational pursuits, on hold.

She had been driving through the rural Texas countryside, trying to get over her anger at not getting accepted for her Ph.D. for the fall semester, when she discovered a huge three-story Victorian home on five acres of land for sale. As she drove she thought back to the conversation she had had with Carla, her roommate, in the sparse two-bedroom apartment the young women shared.

"This is ridiculous." Haley ranted as she slammed the letter from the admissions office down on the kitchen table.

Carla picked it up and read through it quickly. The Letterhead and seal of the University of Texas prominent on the top of the engraved stationery, and rather officious sounding in its content, though obviously a modified form letter. 

"Haley, they didn't say you weren't accepted, just that you can't start in September because the class is full. They have invited you to reapply for the class beginning in January and have waived formal application and only ask that you send them a letter expressing a desire to pursue your doctorate starting in January." 

Carla's attempt at consoling her friend was ineffective.

"They give their reason as the postmark on my application was later than the others they had already accepted. Don't grades count for anything? I have a 3.66 from my bachelor pursuits and a perfect 4.0 on my Master's. I mean it isn't like I was late sending it in, I just didn't send it in as early as some of the other applicants."

"Haley, when they have a crop of applicant's that are equal in most respects, they have to use some other criteria to rank the applicants. My guess is the academic credentials of the other applicants were equal to yours. And you are already in the class starting in January if you just write the letter telling them you are interested."

"I understand that, Carla, but I can't afford to sit out a semester. My parent's trust for my education is already drying up and to pay living expenses for a semester while not enrolled will use it up, if I can even draw on it without going to school. Their will on the trust was pretty adamant about it being used for education expenses only." 

Haley felt her whole world was suddenly falling apart, as she called the trust attorney to clarify the conditions of her trust.

"No Miss Baxter, the trust won't be able to pay your living expenses while you await the start of your doctoral program. Your parent's direction on the use of the funds was specific and clear on this point. It pays all expenses including your room and board while you are pursuing your education. You aren't authorized to draw from it otherwise until age 30 then you can receive a disbursement of any balance left in the trust." The trust attorney advised. 

"But I am pursuing my education, I am just awaiting the start of the next phase of it to begin is all. I have already been accepted for the spring semester. What if I extended my Master's program and took a couple of extra courses this fall? "

"Miss Baxter, that would only satisfy the terms of the trust if you were required to take the courses to complete your Master's program requirements or as mandatory preparation for your doctoral pursuit, but you already have your Master's and have already been accepted for your Ph.D. in the spring, so we couldn't justify it without potentially committing fraud. We are probably stretching the terms a bit already, paying for your apartment and a grocery stipend rather than dormitory and meals through the University. If it weren't that you were actually saving money over the cost of dormitory room and board by having a roommate, we would probably be viewed as being in violation of the trust terms if it were ever challenged in court."

"So will I have to go through the application process all over again?"

"No if you send me the letter the University sent you, I can order the trust to hiatus payments until January and not order a cessation of the process. This way in January they will start all over again, and mid fall semester you can draw your tuition and fees when they are due."

"Well at least I don't have to go through that lengthy justification process again. I think if my parents were still living they would continue to pay my living expenses while I await the start of my doctoral program." Haley was clearly frustrated again.  

"Miss Baxter, your parents aren't here to authorize a deviation, and the only thing we have is the instructions they delineated before their death.. I'm sorry but the courts won't allow me to deviate from those. Besides, you are likely to exhaust the trust before you finish your matriculation as it is, it might be wise to take a more conservative approach to the trust. If the stock market recovers from its current doldrums your trust might start to grow again."

"Thank you Mr. Hobbs, I will send the letters so you can set it up as a hiatus rather than a cessation." Haley hung up the phone and was still fuming when Carla returned from her job as a waitress at IHOP. 

"Did you call the trust attorney, Haley?" she queried after removing her apron. 

"Yeah, but he just confirmed what I thought already. I am going to have to get a job, because the trust won't pay through the fall even though this wait to begin is required by the University." Haley's frustration surrounding the situation began rising again as she explained it to her roommate. 

"Well, Haley, you can just get a job through the fall then, and start using the trust again in the spring."

"Yeah I know Carla, but it still upsets me, I am going for a drive, I will see you later."

Chapter 2

Haley was driving through the beautiful Texas countryside when she topped out a rise in the roadway and saw the house there in front of her in a curve in the road.

The site was located on a scenic vista that overlooked a beautiful wooded valley in the Central Texas hill country. The beauty afforded by the panoramic view, made Haley feel it would make a perfect Bed and Breakfast once it was restored. The house was dilapidated and in bad need of restoration, but could be put back in good shape with diligence and effort, a little 'sweat equity' she reasoned. Haley wasn't afraid of the work the place would require.

Actually, she looked forward to putting some of her education to good use. She had no way of knowing the sweat equity that she would have to put into the place would include placing her soul on the betting table every time she played a hand.

The sign with the name of the realtor hanging on the fence was so weathered it was hard to read the information. Haley garnered what she could, then drove into the nearby town, and went through a phone book to try to determine what business was listed on the sign. When she called the realty company she thought matched the weathered wording on the sign, she was met with an almost cool reception.

"Heart of Texas Realty." A young male voice replied to the ringing of the phone.

"Hi, yes, my name is Haley Baxter, are you the agents for the house out on 388 about 5 miles east of Rockville?" Haley queried.

"Yes, we are." Was the reply.

"Can I arrange to get a tour of the property?" 

"I can't schedule that, but I can have the broker contact you if you are interested. She is the only one who handles that property and I am not at liberty to schedule her time."

"Do you know what the asking price is?"

"Miss Baxter that property has been on the market for nearly ten years and an offer has never been tendered on it. The price is being renegotiated at this time, and I will have to have the broker, Mrs. Abbot, call you." 

"Thank you, I can be reached at area code (204) 696-3654. Please have the broker call as soon as possible." The frustration of having received so little info was apparent in her voice.

"I'm sorry miss that I couldn't give you more info, I will see Mrs. Abbott gets the message as soon as she comes into the office." The young agent rung off the line. 

Haley immediately began two efforts. First was to find a job, and second was to research the place. She had to have a job anyway, but now in light of an apparent altering of her plans for the immediate future, it was much more significant. She decided she wouldn't put too much effort into the research on the house, figuring there must be something wrong if the property had been on the market so long without an offer ever being tendered. She would soon find out why. 

Chapter 3

Dressed smartly in a tailored suit, Haley entered the high rise and went to the tenth floor. She signed in to see Mrs. Cooper the Manager for Human Resources at Jacoby & Jacobs Architectural Design. They had eagerly agreed to interview her after hearing of her academic credentials when she inquired about the job in the classifieds. Haley had no trouble finding the job. Her education coupled with a demand for those in her chosen field made the first ad she responded to a spot on match. 

A smartly dressed lady with an Ichibod Crane-like scarecrow thin body approached her as she sat in the reception area of the human resources department with the completed application on a clipboard in her lap. 

"Miss Baxter?"

Haley stood and held out her hand to greet the approaching lady. 

"Yes, I'm Haley Baxter."

"I'm Cheryl Cooper, director of human resources, please step into my office. Would you care for some coffee or a water or anything?"

"No ma'am, I am fine, thank you."

The interview with Mrs. Cooper was generic and brief, and then she was taken to the office of Jason Jacoby, a partner in the firm and interviewed by him. His questions centered around the types of architecture she enjoyed, and though mildly technical, she got the impression he was more interested in seeming to make an effort, than in actually making one. When the interview concluded after only about 15 minutes of 'shooting the breeze' more than anything else, Haley thought she had said something wrong and had lost the job when Mr. Jacoby summoned his secretary to escort her back to the reception are of human resources. 

A few minutes later Mrs. Cooper came and led here back to her office. 

"Miss Baxter, Mr. Jacoby was impressed with your academic achievements, as well as, with your architectural interests. He feels you would be an asset to Jacoby and Jacobs, and has authorized me to offer you a position as architect."

Haley was surprised at the ease with which she had been hired as Mrs. Cooper slid an offer letter across the desk at her.

"Sign this and we can discuss your starting date."

Haley quickly glanced at the letter still a little stunned things had gone so well, and hastily picked up the pen Mrs. Cooper offered and signed the document, not really reading it. 

"Mr. Jacoby has authorized a starting salary of $38,000 per year with full benefits to begin immediately, with no waiting periods. He has also authorized a signing bonus of 50%."

Haley was aghast as Mrs. Cooper laid a check for $19,000 on the desk in front of her. The pay to the order line filled in with her neatly typed name. 

"Today is the 16th of June, you can start on Monday, July 7th. We see no need in starting immediately before the Independence Day holiday, so you can start the Monday after. The dress code is business casual so you can wear slacks if you like. No jeans, even designer jeans, except on Friday, which is casual day. We will need for you to attend an Orientation on one of the three Thursdays between now and then. Just notify my secretary of the day you would like to attend."

"Thank you Mrs. Cooper. The generosity of Jacoby & Jacobs is a bit overwhelming. " Haley stammered out her gratitude as she retrieved the bonus check and folding it carefully placed it in her small handbag. 

"I will attend the Orientation this Thursday." 

"Just advise my secretary as you are leaving.

As Haley left Mrs. Cooper's office she advised the secretary seated just outside the door of her plans to attend orientation the following Thursday. 

"Welcome to Jacoby & Jacobs Miss Baxter." The secretary acknowledged as she jotted Haley's name into a day planner with a label across the front that read Orientations.

Haley had not only garnered her a job at a prestigious architecture firm, but a nice starting salary in the upper 30's and a signing bonus of half that amount. 

She found the Orientation the following Thursday basically a waste of time. The benefits of the company were explained, and the dress code reiterated, both items covered already by Mrs. Cooper the day of the interview, so other than filling out the requisite W4 tax form and the I9 Immigration status form, it was a waste of a morning as far as Haley was concerned. Being young, retirement and medical benefits plan details didn't really interest her. 

She soon found herself bored sitting around the apartment while Carla worked. Her new job with Jacoby & Jacobs wouldn't start for another two weeks. So she decided the research on the house and property wouldn't hurt her if the house turned out to be ok after all and the requirements at restoration were why it hadn't ever had an offer tendered. She would just have a head start. 

Chapter 4

Haley performed her due diligence on the property in her excitement before talking with the realtor, even though she had told herself she wasn't going to spend much time on that aspect of her plans to purchase the house until after she toured the house and talked with the broker to find out why it had never had an offer tendered. The job had been necessary to see her through the coming summer and fall semester while she awaited the start of her doctoral program in the spring semester. 

She sat at the dining table in the small apartment her and Carla shared, the end of the following week and spoke of the results of her research.

"The local legends are the house is haunted, Carla. The original family all met unusual deaths, according to the newspaper accounts I was able to locate. The father, Christian Johansson, fell from the roof, a three story fall and broke his back on hitting the ground. If that wasn't enough, an ornament on the gables, a horned gargoyle, was apparently knocked loose and he fell on it, impaling himself." Haley recounted to her friend as they ate dinner.

"Why would anyone put a horned gargoyle on the roof?' Carla queried. 

"The family was Swedish and fairly new immigrants apparently and the gargoyles were brought from Europe. The newspaper accounts are that the family had worked in a gypsy circus before immigrating and the gargoyles were apparently memorabilia from that experience."

"Even still, why would you want them decorating the exterior of your home? I mean really horned gargoyles! Becoming impaled probably serves him right for putting such hideous things on his roof." Carla quipped, not nearly as unfeeling as it might have sounded. 

"Maybe he had come to his senses and was taking them down when he fell. They were European so how would we know why they were up there to begin with. I don't recall seeing them as still there now, so he must have fallen after they were removed. That is where it gets strange, too. " Haley remarked.

"How so?"

"He had been a tightrope walker in the circus and had worked high steel in New York City before coming west according to his daughter after the accident. The death certificate listed his death an accident, but the police reports called it a possible suicide, after the daughter protested he was no stranger to heights and wouldn't have fallen to his death. 

The newspaper account says he told her as he lay on the ground dying, that before he fell he felt someone push him." Haley continued.

"Both the daughter and the mother protested he would not have committed suicide, and since the police found no evidence of foul play and the house was empty at the time except for the mother and daughter in the kitchen, the coroner had no choice but to list it a suicide/accident."

"Weird. You said they all died of unusual circumstances, what happened to the mother and the daughter?" Carla queried, obviously interested now, in the events her friend was depicting. 

"The mother, Chirsty Johansson, drowned in the water well on the back of the house. The daughter, who was only 17 at the time, was allowed to stay in the house until what would be child Protective Services today came for her to place her in foster care until she turned 18. They found her burned to a crisp on the side of the house. She had apparently tried to burn the house down and had only succeeded in burning herself up. The can of coal oil she had tried to use was laying there too, and the house had black soot on the walls, from the attempt."

"Sounds like a basket of fruitcakes lived there." Carla replied, standing to take her dishes into the kitchen, returning with a dish of ice cream.

"You keep eating like that Carla and you are going to blow up like a blimp, girl." Haley commented at her friend returning with the dish overflowing with the chocolate ripple treat.

"At least I won't get impaled by horned gargoyles." Carla quipped humorously returning to the subject the two had been discussing. 

"The newspaper accounts say the local Indians advised the Johanssons the property was a burial ground for the marauding Comanche tribe led by Ten Bears, and that anyone who lived on it would face the wrath of the Indian spirits and Gods."

"Sounds reasonable and like they knew what they were talking about." Carla pondered. 

"It is so much hooey Carla. Spirits and ghosts are poppycock."

"Yeah well, how else to explain it?" Carla asked. 

"You don't believe in ghosts do you Carla?" 

"Not really, but they are a good 'scapegoat' explanation if you don't have another. If they all died, who owns the house now?" 

"A third cousin on the mother's side, a John Bjork. He is the one who has it on the market." 

"Why does he want to sell it, do you know?"

"No the broker hasn't called back yet, that is one of my questions for her."

"When do you think she will call you?"

"I don't know, she should have returned my call by now. I may need to call again or just give it up. I think the view from its promontory over the valley and the architecture of the home would make it an ideal bed and breakfast though. So I don't really want to give it up."

"Watch yourself Haley." Carla injected. 

"You know how you get tunnel vision at times and can't see the forest for the trees. The investment of both time and money in this project could prove damaging if you go off on a crusade to succeed and it doesn't materialize."

"I know Carla, I have thought of that, but I also know if it does succeed, I can set myself up for life." Haley quickly countered. 

Chapter 5

She hadn't heard from the broker, so she called the real estate office a few days later and the broker was in. When she queried why the broker hadn't returned her call, the ladies reply was polite, yet simple. 


Victorian Dreams Pt. 01



"Our office receives a lot of inquiries on the property, but after the inquirer starts looking into the property, they discover the local legends and, any time my agents or myself spend on the property was therefore, wasted. After ten years of spinning my wheels on the property, I am not prepared to waste a lot of time with its sale."

"The owner had considered tearing down the building and selling the land for its value, but the state historical society had gotten a court injunction preventing that move. Yet they won't do anything to restore the place or improve its salability."

"The owner, is clearly frustrated, so he has just dropped the asking price from $125,000 to $50,000, in an attempt to sell before the taxes came due again. This price makes the sell a loss to the owner even though he had inherited the property. Ten years of tax payments had become a drain, and the owner is even considering letting the property go for default on the taxes."

This fact alone would prove favorable to Haley, even if the other circumstances weren't available to help.

Haley felt her excitement level growing as the broker rambled on about how the property had become a resource drain to all those associated with it. She asked the broker for a tour of the property.

"I will meet you there and unlock the door, but I won't tour the building with you. Further you must sign a release holding my brokerage, the owner, and me harmless for any harm that might befall you while you are on the property."

Haley agreed to those terms and they set an appointment to meet at the property the next day at noon.

Haley arrived at 11:30 and took a brief walking tour of the property before the broker arrived. In the back was a water well. It was quaint and resembled a wishing well, and Haley already had plans in her mind to build a gazebo around it and label it a wishing well. 

The property was beautiful and potentially gorgeous with huge stately oak trees and panoramic views of the surrounding valleys with its prominence on the highest hilltop around. It needed a lot of gardening to realize its potential, though. The shrubs that surrounded the house, especially on the west side were so dense they could easily be labeled a bramble. 

Haley couldn't remember 'domesticated shrubs' ever getting so dense, yet the property certainly had prospect especially as a potential B n B.

The broker apologized for being late when it was nearly one before she arrived. 

"My car had mechanical difficulties, which isn't all that unusual when I am coming out here. It is almost as if the house doesn't want me to come here. In the ten years I have represented the property I have always driven new cars, never more than a year or two old. The only time I seem to have trouble with them was when I am coming to 'the house'!" 

She stressed the label as she spoke.

Her current car was a new Cadillac so that was the only reason she could give to explain why she seemed to always have car trouble when she was en route to 'the house'.

It was obvious to Haley the older woman had bought into the urban legends that surrounded the house and she figured that could work to her advantage. 

She signed the release and took the key to take her tour. The broker said she would wait in her car, very obviously afraid to get too near 'the house'.

The old massive door creaked on its hinges as Haley swung it open to reveal an entry foyer with two large arched doorways on either side and a large ornate staircase leading upstairs. 

The house smelled as one would expect with a musty odor of stale uncirculated air and yet there was another burnt smell that Haley couldn't identify. This dank, fetid, burnt odor predominated, but Haley felt certain a day or two of the windows and doors all open and a thorough cleaning would remove most of the offensive odors.

The room to the left as she walked in was a large sitting area, and the room on the right, a formal dining room. Off the dining area was a large plantation style kitchen. 

Behind the grand staircase was a small bedroom that Haley figured was likely servant's quarters. There was also an entry to a stairway that led down to a basement room, off the kitchen.

Haley followed the stairs downward. 

Her descent was halted when she encountered a door several steps down. Unusual to place a door in the middle of a staircase she thought, but more than that. The door wasn't locked, instead boards had been nailed to the frame of the door precluding it being opened. It all appeared rather hastily erected.

The girl retreated to the main floor again and looked around. Other than the smell and a healthy layer of dust the interior was in surprisingly good repair. 

This was not in keeping with the state of apparent disrepair of the exterior of the house. 

An added plus was all the furniture most of it original looking antique was still in place and seemed in good repair. Testing the fabric on one of the settees in the parlor room Haley discovered the fabric didn't seem rotted, as one would expect from an antique such as this.

She toured the upstairs and other than an unexplained chill on the third floor, found nothing out of the ordinary, except the odd burnt smell seemed stronger there. 

The second floor was mostly bedrooms or rooms that could be easily converted to bedrooms. The same was true of the third floor. 

This was fortuitous considering Haley's plan to convert the old house into a B 'n B. 

All the rooms seemed to contain original furnishings. On every floor the hardwood seemed to need only to be swept and mopped to be restored to its original brilliance and beauty. 

Her college-educated mind on interior design had her appraising the possibilities of a bustling B 'n B.

She exited the tour of the house with an offer in mind. The exterior needed a lot of work, the owner was desperate, and all this worked in her favor. 

The broker got out of her car and approached as Haley strode the massive front verandah as she concluded her tour, but stopped short of the steps, obviously not willing to get any closer to 'the house'. 

When Haley stepped from the last step and into the yard, the broker queried as to her inspection. 

"So what do you think?"

"I like the place and the only thing I couldn't look at was the basement." Was her reply.

"The owner sealed it when he visited and has left instructions it is to remain sealed until sold." The broker explained.

Haley seized on this deviation from what would normally be considered routine and made note of the anomaly.

"The sealed basement could indicate major structural damage or foundation instability. I must insist on inspecting the basement." Haley wasn't actually afraid of what the basement might reveal in the way of needed repairs, she was merely laying the foundation for her offer. 

"The owner left very specific instructions regarding the basement." was the Brokers reply.

"Are the furnishings included in the sale price?" she asked.

"The owners instructions are the house sells as is, all furnishings, any needed repairs, etc." was the broker's reply.

Haley firmed up the situation in her mind and made her offer pitch.

"The exterior will need a lot of restoration, the interior not as much, though some will be necessary." 

Haley intentionally made it sound worse than it actually was. 

"The basement is an unknown. So out of an abundance of caution I must assume the worse case and say that will require extensive repair, and perhaps require foundation repair."

"I understand your position on the basement, but I can't violate the wishes of the owner on leaving it sealed."

"I understand."

"My offer is $45,000." Haley held her breath and tried to keep the eagerness of her anticipation to a reply hidden, her poker face was difficult to maintain, but she managed to do so.

"The owner is asking $50,000. Even if you only fix up the exterior and use it as a historic sight that can only be viewed and photographed from the outside, it is a bargain." 

"If he were willing to put any effort into the house he could likely get a quarter of a million for it, from location alone. He is only asking $50,000 because he isn't willing to put the time and effort into the place, That is less than a third of its actual value, and only a fifth of its potential value in real estate terms alone, but I will take your offer to him and see what he says." 

The broker too, it appeared was trying to keep a poker face, but Haley read in her eyes a sense of relief the property might finally sell.

"All things considered, I am only willing to go $45,000, and I think that generous considering the state of repair of the place, and the fact the state historic society won't allow the house to be torn down so the land can be exploited for its real estate value. And we've already covered the potential of there being significant problems in the basement." 

The haggle was on and though Haley had never negotiated for the purchase of property, she handled the negotiation like a seasoned pro.

In the final analysis, the broker filled out an offer document for the offered amount of $45,000 and had Haley sign and post a $100 non-refundable deposit to seal the deal on the property.

Though a lot of what she was saying was just 'sauce for the goose' in the negotiation, Haley also considered a lot of other possibilities she didn't reveal to the Broker.

Chapter 6

"I'm not an antique dealer, Carla, but if the basement is really bad, I think selling the furnishings to an antique dealer could likely recoup my investment completely if not make me a little on top of that."

"Watch yourself Haley. You are probably right, but antiques are not your area, and I see the blinders coming out." Carla replied, not being negative as a lack of support for her friend's position, but only because her friend could get rather closed-minded about things when she got like this on a project.

Haley all but ignored her roommates negativity and continued with the thoughts she had amassed after the inspection and discussion with the broker earlier that day.

"If the basement turns out to reveal extensive foundation damage, making the building uninhabitable, the Texas historical society would have a hard time getting an injunction against the building's destruction to stick, I would think. Then I could either get their aid to accomplish any repair or tear the house down and exploit the property for its land value."

All in all in Haley's mind there was no way to lose on the deal.

What she couldn't know was the loss potential on the house was greater than could be explained with mere dollars and cents calculations and estimations.

The Broker called Haley the next afternoon. 

"The owner accepted your offer. I had to talk to him to get him to come off his $50,000 asking price. He was hung up on the asking price only being about a third of the value of the property on the tax rolls. I pointed out to him the sealed basement left open the possibility a new owner would have to do extensive repair work. I convinced him that unless he was willing to open the basement for inspection, he should take this offer as it was the only one ever tendered and the cost of extensive repair to the basement could easily exceed the $5000 disparity in the ask and offered prices."

The owner had become extremely amenable when the subject of the basement came up, and not only accepted the offer, but promised to work with the buyer if any difficulty were encountered acquiring financing.

This was fortuitous for try as she might, Haley could not get any one to fund the mortgage on the property.

Though Haley was offering a 1/3 down payment, using her signing bonus from the architectural firm for that purpose, and the property was easily worth three times the negotiated price, no lender was willing to loan money on the property.

Even lenders that recognized she was right out of college and normally accepted college credentials in lieu of a long credit history to extend credit. 

It seems the legend that existed with the house was fairly well known among mortgage lenders in the state.

No out-of-state lenders were willing to extend credit on a house nearly 100 years old, regardless its historical significance.

In the final analysis, the owner carried the paper on the house. Accepting the $15,000 down payment and a note that called for interest at prime and two more annual installments of $15,000 until the property was paid for. There was an incentive in the contract that said if both payments were made on time the interest would be waived, making it a zero interest loan.

"This mortgage paper the owner is offering is extremely generous Miss Baxter." The real estate attorney in the office of her trust attorney said after he read the document. 

"Interest at prime, interest relief for prompt payment of the installments, and no default terms or conditions. Once the contract is executed the owner was compelled to wait until you can pay regardless of how long that takes. This works in your favor if the idea of a B n B failed to generate $15,000 per year. You can even sell to pay off the original note. The only possibility of the owner reclaiming the property is in the case of default on taxes."

The attorney conceded the 'sell for relief' clause was probably of little value when you considered the court injunction against destruction of the house.

"As the owner of record until the house is paid for and the deed transferred to you the 'tax default' clause is likely in the contract to protect his credit rating from damage if you fall on extreme hard times. I advise you accept the generous contract."

Haley and the broker signed the contract the next day, and a copy was delivered to her signed by the owner two days later. 

That was a Friday and Haley decided to occupy the next day.

That was 6-weeks earlier.

Chapter 7

Haley had moved her things into the place the next day and had taken up residence in the servant's quarters on the first floor. She had thoroughly scrubbed the rooms on the ground floor and the house was beginning to take shape. 

Only a couple of things had occurred, that on careful review might be considered untoward, yet, even they could be explained away just as easily.

She had hired a landscape team to clean up the property. Of importance was the bramble that grew on the west side of the house. Haley reasoned in order to start renovation and restoration she must be able to get to the house to work. That wasn't possible with the overgrown ornamental shrubs on the west side. 

"They are Agarita, a native Texas shrub that requires little cultivation, yet I have never seen them flourish like these." The foreman of the landscape crew explained.

"They have probably not been tended in nearly 100 years." Haley replied.

"That is probably why their growth had turned jungle like, reverting to a native form rather than a cultivated variety." 

He found no literature to suggest even untended Agarita would grow so explosively, though. He researched to find the best way to prune the shrubs to preserve their landscape potential, yet bring the surly growth under control. 

In the final analysis, when he couldn't find any literature that represented Agarita growing so vigorously. 

A few days later he was explaining a proposed course of action to Haley.

"Agarita could grow to heights of up to 7 feet, yet some of these plants were approaching 12 feet in height. They don't normally grow very dense or compact, yet these are as thick as any bramble. I think we should take them back to ground level and then tend them as they recover."

"You are the expert. I would like to not have to redo the landscaping, if at all possible, but do what has to be done." Haley advised the foreman.

When the crew of workers, mostly Hispanic, waded into the mess and started pruning late one afternoon, they discovered a mass of thorny growth not normally associated with Agarita. 

They didn't start until late afternoon, and the unrelenting Texas sun on the west side of the house made it impossible to work in the mass for long. 

A slight improvement had been noted when they withdrew and packed up for the day saying they would tackle it again the next morning, while the house blocked the rays of the sun.

In the cool of the morning shade the crew started into the mass again. It almost appeared as if the mass had regenerated overnight and they hadn't touched it the previous afternoon. 

By noon they were making clear progress though, but the entire crew was bloodied and looked as if they had been in a minor skirmish. 

Only one of the Hispanic workers spoke any English, and then broken at best, and when Haley made comment about the bloodied condition of himself and his co-workers, she thought she understood him to say, it was as if the thorn bearing plants were attacking them as they cut through the mass.

"Es possession de El Diablo"

Haley understood very little Spanish, but being raised in Texas had learned a small amount of the almost native language and thought she understood him to say the shrubs were possessed by the devil.

The foreman was at a loss to explain the thorns on the Agarita.

"Perhaps it was another native species in a symbiotic relationship. Perhaps a shade loving variety that grew after the Agarita flourishing started to create a significant shady area. In return the naturally decomposition of the thorny mass fed the Agarita." 

This seemed possible to Haley, especially since the thorn bearing masses weren't visible from the exterior of the mass. 

By noon, most of the mass had been reduced to a pile of mulch, chewed up in the massive grinder the Mexican workers fed it into as they pruned the growth, seemingly into submission. 

By early afternoon, the west side looked almost presentable, and Haley had noted a set of windows at ground level.

Crawling through what remained of the shrubby growth, she peered in to get her first look at the barricaded basement.

The basement had not yet received her attention in her efforts to restore the house. It remained boarded, just as it had been the day she toured the place. 

She could discern nothing looking through the dingy windows, with years of dirty buildup both inside and out.

The next morning the west side mass had re-grown significantly, so Haley had the landscape foreman instruct the crew to dig them out completely. By mid morning the west side of the house was denuded of shrubs. 

Haley also noted none of the crew seemed to be the original men who had started on the property, with the exception of the foreman. 

When she asked, the foreman explained all the original crew had come down with a mysterious illness after working on the mass on the west side of the house.

Being a bit cynical of the itinerant, undocumented aliens from south of the border, his comment reflected a slight prejudice perhaps,

"Laziness and the fact the mass had been rather labor intensive to work in. These beaners aren't very reliable if they have to work too hard." 

Haley didn't appreciate the racial slur, but figured she couldn't change the foreman's attitude by scolding him. So she just gave him further instructions regarding the project.

"Instruct your crew to remove all the shrubs and though I don't want to have to redo the landscaping, I will go with a different variety when the restoration is concluded and I return to the landscaping." 

By days end the property looked in good shape except the house looked strange with no landscape shrubs to decorate it.

This cleared the way for Haley to begin restoration on the exterior. She started on the verandah and after nearly a week, had it looking almost pristine again. She decided working in the Central Texas heat though, was not to her liking so she would concentrate on the interior and save further exterior work for the cooler months that would come in the fall and early winter. 




Victorian Dreams Pt. 01



She reasoned she could do all the carpentry and prep work then and repaint when the weather had warmed enough in early spring before the rains started.

As she surveyed the exterior of the house preparing notes of what would have to be done to restore it, she worked her way around again to the west side.

This was the first time she had been on this side of the house since the landscape crew had left the property. 

The driveway to the house was on the east side and so Haley's coming and going never brought the west side into view. She was surprised to see the shrub growth had returned. 

Though not the bramble it had been before, there was no Agarita in the growth, just the native thorn bushes tightly woven in an almost human created symmetry, which was as dense as any briar patch. 

It was also only a fraction of the previous height, though. Now it formed tight almost trimmed appearing spiral brambles that only stood a couple of feet above the ground, almost as if it were laid down to cover the ground level windows.

Haley thought this rather strange, but reasoned a native plant ostensibly shade loving might create a tangle such as this to shade its own roots. 

She checked it several times over the coming weeks and it seemed not to get any larger, and bloomed in these late days of summer with large white blossoms that appeared to be like dogwood flowers with drips of red sap that resembled blood oozing from the centers.

The other untoward event was more easily explained and didn't really raise any concern in the young woman. She had opened the house up the first week she had stayed there, trying to get rid of the stench that was common to older homes that had been closed up for a long time. 

She opened the windows on all three floors and the top half of the Dutch doors that led from the kitchen out to the yard on the back of the house. 

The smell was quickly replaced with the fresh scent of summer in the Texas hill country. Late that afternoon when she had rushed to close the windows in advance of an approaching afternoon heat generated thunderstorm, she found nothing amiss on the second floor and quickly closed all the windows. The stench was gone, yet as she climbed the stairs to the third level, she noted the stench was still present and even appeared a little stronger. All the windows she had opened that morning were closed, as well.

She rationalized this as age of the windows and though they should have closed immediately upon opening she figured she would just need some dowel rods from the local hardware store to hold the windows open until she could adjust the tension on them.

Chapter 8

Now today, the sixth Saturday since her purchase of the house, she was ready to start the cleaning and repair of the upper floors. 

She had identified a bedroom on the third floor that would be hers. The view from the third story window was spectacular and the furniture almost childlike. She would start there and clean the third floor and work her way down, to the second level.

After her morning tea, Haley gathered her cleaning materials and ascended the stairs to the third level, still dressed in the T-shirt and panties she usually slept in. She went straight to the room she had designated as her own. She was going to place the cleaning items in the room, and then return to the ground floor to dress.

Returning to the room, dressed now in bib overalls she had purchased for her repair and restoration uniform, she first went to the night table beside the large canopy bed, and started removing the layer of dust and dirt that covered the fine piece of antique furniture. When she opened the drawer to clean inside, she discovered what appeared to be a diary. 

There was a title page that identified the owners. It said "The Home and Life in Texas of Christian, Chirsty and Clarice Johansson."

Opening it, she read the first few lines and it appeared to be the writings on the daughter of the original owners. 

That would explain the childlike appearance to the furnishings in the room. This had been the daughter's room. 

The words on the first few pages were captivating and Haley found herself glued to the book. After reading for several minutes, she decided the book gave a good history of the home and deserved her attention.

She took the journal downstairs and prepared herself another cup of tea. Retreating to the verandah, she read the words on the page as if it were a novel with a fetching plot.

The chronicle started immediately before her parents purchased the tract of land and continued to when she hatched a plan to burn the house to the ground. The house wasn't quite as old as she had first thought. 

Her parents had bought the land in 1909. They had gotten the land for a bargain price, because it was reported to be the burial grounds of the band of Comanche Indians that had raided Texas in the 1800's under the leadership of the notorious chief Ten Bears. 

Local Indians saw the land as sacred and warned of 'great sorrows' to whoever disturbed this piece of land.

Clarice parents, Christian and Chirsty Johansson were of hardy European immigrant stock only one generation in the US, and didn't take much stock in the Indian claims. They had no way of knowing of course, but this would prove to be their undoing.

The diary spoke of her father and mother agreeing on a German Architect to design and build the house. 

This was the part that really started to draw Haley's attention with her education in Architecture. 

Clarice wrote how the architect had insisted the builder tear down and start the foundation over, three different times, when it wasn't aligned on a perfect northeast to southwest axis he had originally drawn in the plans. 

The diary said the architect insisted the foundations west wall be precisely on a six degree to 186-degree radian. 

With her education in Architecture, Haley couldn't understand why he had insisted on such precise alignment, unless a fault line in the earth made the alignment necessary to assure foundation stability. 

That might explain why the basement was secured. 

It was damaged because of a poor alignment of the foundation and that explained why the owner had sealed it up. To hide structural damage to the foundation, and selling the house 'as is' would relieve him of any liability when the damage was revealed.

Haley made a mental note to check the basement later that day.

As she continued to read, the words took on an ominous tone. The architect had insisted on giving the Johansson's a gift by placing gargoyles imported from Europe on the points of the gable, with one facing east the other facing west, but Haley couldn't recall seeing any adornments of that nature on the house. 

She left the book lying on the table and went to look again. There were no gargoyles on the gables.

She went to refresh her cup of tea and decided to brew a pitcher of iced tea instead. Once she had prepared her beverage, she returned to the verandah and the diary of Clarice Johansson. 

As she read further, she found out why there were no statures of monsters adorning the roof edges.

The pages told of her parents starting to bicker with each other. Soon the bickering escalated to arguments then full-blown verbal fights. This was alarming to Clarice, as her parents had never raised their voices to one another or to her. Her parent's bedroom was on the second floor, and as the arguments escalated in frequency and intensity, Clarice wrote of her father moving out of their communal bedroom and into a separate room of his own.

"Father moved out of the room her shares with mother and across the hall to the guest room." 

Her words showed a certain amount of discomfort with the escalating discord in the family.

In her diary, Clarice confided she thought the separate beds wouldn't last long, for it appeared her mother wasn't sleeping well. Bags appeared under her eyes and her cheeks became sunken as if she wasn't sleeping at all. Then her mother started sleeping most of the day, allowing the upkeep of the house and her duties as the lady of the house to fall by the wayside.

Haley found the term 'duties as the Lady of the house' rather archaic and perhaps politically incorrect, but then reminded herself, the times in which the diary was authored were different then modern times, and societies attitudes, at the time, were certainly different. 

Though she didn't espouse the times of old, she found the different point of view interesting, though she wasn't ready to adopt the submissive almost second class position of the women of this earlier times. Her's was mere curiosity. 

Her father noted the lack of housekeeping and the arguments intensified again. Clarice tried to help the situation by taking on her mother's responsibilities. 

When her father became aware it was her effort and not that of her mother's assuming her perceived responsibilities, he thanked her for taking up the slack, but the arguments between her parents continued, unabated. 

They were daily now.

These were really starting to alarm Clarice.

"Their upsets are rather persistent now. It worries me to see them go at each other this way." Clarice confided in her journal.

Then one Saturday morning, her father and mother were arguing when Clarice entered the kitchen for breakfast. Her father was placing the blame for his wife's unusual behavior on the gargoyles. He said everything was fine until "those heathen blasphemies went up on the gables'.

"I am going up their now and take those hideous creatures off the roof."

"No you won't Christian. They were a gift to both of us and I won't allow it." 

Chirsty Johansson's open defiance of her husband was uncharacteristic for the times they lived in and testament to the growing rift between the two. 

Clarice wrote,

"I can't believe mother spoke to Father that way." They argued on the matter most of the morning. Then in a completely uncharacteristic fit of anger her father went to the roof with a sledgehammer."

He knocked the gargoyle off the east gable without difficulty, but when he went to the west side to do the same thing, he lost his balance and fell the thirty or so feet to the ground, tearing the gargoyle from its attachment and falling with it as he fell.

The gargoyle had failed to prevent his fall as he had hoped when he reached for it. When he landed, the horns that adorned the head of the creature had gored him through. He lived a few minutes, which was long enough for Clarice to reach his side.

Clarice had heard the loud thud, and the plaintive groan as he fit the ground outside the kitchen window. She ran to his side, though there was no help that could be provided.

One of the horns had penetrated his chest making breathing difficult and talking almost impossible. He did manage to mumble a few words before he died and Clarice captured these in her journal.

"I was pushed from the roof. Tell them I was pushed. I love you and your mother Clarice."

Blood gurgled in his mouth and throat as he talked and his words were virtually unintelligible. But Clarice understood his words well enough to understand him to say he had been pushed. The blood suddenly gushed forth from his mouth as he sputtered his last breath and died. 

When the sheriff's deputy arrived they ruled the death an accident in spite of Clarice assertions regarding what her father had said before he died. The deputy said he would find it difficult to rule it as anything else, considering her and her mother were in the kitchen at the time giving each other air tight alibis and a search of the house revealed no one else was around. The deputy tried to calm Clarice by telling her what her father had perceived as a push was likely just a gust of wind.

The fact her father had worked high steel in New York and had been a tightrope artist in the circus, led them to later amend their report to suicide.

Now the strange things really started to occur. Clarice wrote of things being rather quiet for the first couple of nights, but then she was awakened by noises late one night. 

The sky was devoid of moonlight, the new moon about to occur.

Haley set the book down and went to refresh her iced tea. When she came wandering back through the house enroute to the captivating diary on the verandah, she thought of the basement again. 

She set her glass on the table next to the diary and returned to the staircase that led to the subterranean door. She descended to where the staircase abruptly meet with the hastily built frame and door. 

Haley surveyed the door casement and decided what she would need to remove the covering lumber that precluded the door being opened. The boards didn't form the usual crisscross pattern one normally sees when a window or door is boarded up, but instead ran along the edges of the door where it interfaced with the door frame. The knob side of the door had a 1 X 6 that ran the entire height of the door. The opposite side had a piece that stretched between the hinges. Then two pieces ran along the top and bottom, overlapping the one piece that ran the height on the knob side.

Haley retreated to her small stash of tools in the utility room off the kitchen and obtained a claw hammer and a small crowbar.

Returning to the door, she easily removed the two cross pieces that ran along the top and bottom, and the piece that ran between the hinges, but try as she would, she couldn't remove the longest piece that ran along the knob side of the door. Leaving the tools on the step where she stood, she gave up on the attempt for the moment and returned to the verandah to continue the reading.

Clarice spoke of hearing noises and how she felt a sense of protectionism rise in her now that her father was dead. If he were alive, it would have been his responsibility to investigate and Clarice wouldn't have even reacted to the noises and things that go bump in the night. Instead she would have snuggled down a little deeper in her bed and gone back to sleep, knowing her father would deal with any problem, if there were one. 

Now, however, the noise brought her completely out of her slumbers and she arose from the bed.

As she passed through the second floor of the house on her way to the ground floor to investigate, she passed her mother's room and discovered the bed hadn't been slept in. Yet her mother had retired an hour or more before Clarice had.

Clarice wondered at this a moment, but then heard the noise again, and was shaken from her contemplation. She resumed her descent to the first floor of the house.

Giving no consideration to the fact she only had her gown and bloomers on, she headed out the door and onto the verandah. This far out in the country it wasn't likely she would be seen wandering around out doors like this. Besides, with the lack of a moon it was pitch-dark outdoors. 

Yet, a proper young lady wouldn't be outdoors dressed this way without a robe under normal circumstances, but the feelings of protectionism that had arisen in Clarice had her giving no thought to her state of dress, and placed these events in the category of not under normal circumstances.

As she stepped off the verandah and into the yard, she heard the noise again. It sounded almost as if someone were in pain. The noise seemed to be coming from the west side of the house, so Clarice turned right to move toward the sound. 

As she came up the west side of the house, she noted a light penetrating through the shrubs her father had put in. She recalled his comments when he came home with the smallish plants. 

'Agarita, native shrubs that won't require much water in years when there is a drought.' He had told her.

The sounds, clearly a moan, as if someone were in pain, seemed to originate in the shrubs. The fact the sound appeared a female voice in pain alarmed Clarice, because her mother was ostensibly missing.

Clarice squatted down and tried to peer into the darkness under the shrubbery and saw only light as the thickness of the shrubs precluded her even seeing the windows she knew existed beyond their covering. She stood and walked to either end of the row of small plants trying to find a place to get in between them and the building. The little shrubs were so thick though no ingress point was afforded to the girl. She returned to the point near where the light emanated from the plants and squatted again.

This time she crawled forward into the hedge the little shrubs created. She found the point where two of the plants were rooted and the 18-inch space was just wide enough for her to shimmy through. She crawled to the vantage point the windows provided. The sight there shocked the young girl.

Chapter 9

Two women, both appearing young, perhaps in their late teens, were chained to the brick wall of the basement, their attire diaphanous and all but transparent, revealing their womanly charms underneath. The garments were both red in color. 

These women were moaning and writhing as if in pain against the chains that held them to the wall. To Clarice, the women almost appeared vapor like and would drift in and out of existence.

On a nearby table, her mother lay, her white cotton gown pulled up around her waist, her legs securely tied to two of the legs on the table. This positioned her hips right at the edge of the table's top and splayed her legs, obscenely. Her mother's white cotton bloomers were in a tattered mass around one of her ankles, exposing her private parts, as Clarice referred to them in her writings. The top of her cotton gown was ripped open to the waist, exposing her mothers heaving breasts. 

What was really strange other than her mother in this obscene posture in this room that seemed only designed for torture and punishment, was her mother's arms were up running down her body and rested in mid air a few inches below her waist. Her fingers were clutching and grabbing at air as her hands rose and fell with a discernable rhythm. 

Her breasts were squashed flat against her chest, and as Clarice observed, on occasion a nipple would pull away from the flattened mass of breast tissue until it seemed the nipple would be ripped off, then flatten again on the woman's heaving chest.

The moans she had heard that sounded like someone in pain were apparently originating from her mother. Yet there seemed to be nothing that would be causing her mother pain. 

The young virgin girl had no way of knowing what she was actually seeing and hearing were lusty moans of pleasure. The cacophony of noise set up by the two chained women and her mother made it all but impossible to hear anything but a hum that resembled the plaintive cries of a person in pain.

Another woman, much older in appearance than the two chained women, wearing black clothing, in the diaphanous type fabric and style of the chained ladies, was standing by the table. Her long raven hair hung about her chest, back and shoulders in shimmering waves any woman would be proud to call her own. She was bathing her mother's face with a cool rag, talking to her mother. Her voice undiscernible, her talking only obvious because of the fact her lips were moving.

As Haley read the account laid out in Clarice journal, the naïveté of the young girl became apparent, for the picture she painted with her words were clearly of a woman in the throes of passion, though the lack of a male counterpart in the scenario the words described, was strange. 

The words seemed to indicate Clarice mother was gripping the flesh of her lover's ass as he thrust into her. Of course, Clarice a young virgin in a time of innocence would not have recognized the positioning or the gestures.

Clarice spoke of feeling strong hands grab her by the ankles and haul her out from under the shrubs. She spoke of her realization that her gown was dragged up her body revealing her bloomers and half her naked belly and the immediate embarrassment she felt in such an exposed position.




Victorian Dreams Pt. 01



Clear of the shrubs, it took a few minutes before her eyes adjusted to the darkness that surrounded her, again. As her eyes adjusted, she became aware of two things, the brilliance of the stars in the sky, and the outline of two rather strong looking men looming above her. 

She spoke saying the only thing that came to her embarrassed, startled mind, 

"You are trespassing. Get off our property."

She saw a movement and other stars joined those in the sky as a hand crashed on her cheekbone, 'cold cocking' the girl.

Chapter 10

When Clarice awoke, she was in the basement. She was on her knees, her arms held tightly in the grip of two hideous looking creatures. This served to both support her body and restrain her movements.

Her mother was still secured to the table, the two vapor-like women still secured to the wall. 

The raven-haired woman that had been bathing her mother's face was standing by her now. As the fog in her mind cleared from the blow she had received moments before, the cacophony from the women chained to the wall was clarified and she could hear their plaintive cries as they moaned over and over. 

"Take me Master. Use me for your pleasure."

Her mother's noises were moans. Clarice described them in such a way as to identify them, as clearly a product of passion and pleasure, and not like any moans of pain she had ever heard. 

Her arms were still suspended in midair, her hands still clutching and grabbing at the air above her splayed and bound legs.

The burly men who had drug her from the shrubs and then knocked her from consciousness and now, held her captive as they supported her kneeling form, were hideous creatures and not men at all. 

The appeared the cross between men and horses almost. Their bodies were muscular appearing, and covered with a heavy mat of hair. The hair on their heads hung in a disheveled, unkempt mass around their shoulders. Their chests were bare, but they wore tattered trousers, held in place by a rope belt. Their feet hooved, their hands like the talons of a large bird of prey. Their eyes were huge, easily encompassing the upper half of their faces. Their teeth were an ugly stained gnarled mass in the hideous looking mouths of the creature's faces. 

One had graying hair, so appeared the older of the two and he spoke.

"Master, we found this little one spying in the windows." 

The older one gestured toward the glass that lined the juncture of the floor above and the wall below, indicating the line of windows Clarice had just been peering through.

"I knew when Gregorio added those windows they would be a problem." 

A big booming voice that almost caused the walls to shudder and emanated from near where Clarice mother lay strapped obscenely to the table, spoke. 

Though Clarice turned to look in that direction, there was no one there except her mother secured helplessly to the tabletop. The woman who had been tending her mother spoke to Clarice. 

"The Master hates the sunlight. Light is the only substance that can purify and not become itself adulterated in the process. When Gregorio added the windows to this room design, the Master was displeased but it was too late." 

"Gregorio explained Man's building codes wouldn't allow the chamber without windows. But the Master still disapproves of the light."

Clarice recalled the architects name had been Gregory. That must be Gregorio.

Clarice couldn't understand why the raven-haired woman was seemingly taking her into her confidence, but wished she hadn't, for her breath smelled the foulest Clarice had ever smelled. 

It smelled of rotting flesh and all manner of fetid odor. When she spoke, a fine mist discharged from her mouth, like a breath fog on a cold day in winter.

She spoke to the ogre-like creatures that held her captive, 

"You have done well my children."

Chapter 11

As Haley continued to read of the accounts of these horrific sights, Clarice had so eloquently portrayed in her words, it became clear, to Haley at least, why the raven-haired woman had 'taken Clarice into her confidence'.

"When the Master comes for you and you accept his companionship, you too will grow to hate the light...." 

The woman's words were interrupted when the older 'ogre-looking' creature spoke.

"Master, may we use her for our pleasure?" 

The response was immediate and stern.

"NO! She must remain pure until she gives herself to me. I must have a virgin to procreate a son, to carry on when I am gone or to create havoc elsewhere in the world. Only a virgin can procreate with me a son and not a creature as yourself. She is not to be touched. Return her to the outside world. She must come to me of her own desire or be delivered to me by her mother. If you must sate the lust of your loins, use one of the concubine women."

The voice must have be referencing the women chained and suspended from the wall, for the one who had spoken turned a glance in their direction.

"Thank you Master, but the concubine women are never as satisfying as real flesh and blood women."

Clarice was struck again across the cheekbone and again stars filled the night sky in her mind. 

Chapter 12

When she awoke, Clarice was in her bed, and the sun shone brightly through her bedroom window. She would have thought the previous night a dream had it not been for the huge tender bruise on her cheekbone and the dirt ground into her gown and bloomers as she crawled among the shrubs and was dragged from their vantage point. She quickly washed and dressed herself.

As she descended the stair, she noted her mother was in her bed sleeping, so she made her way quietly to the kitchen. 

She made coffee for when her mother arose, and then went out to again peer at the shrubs where the view the night before had revealed the secrets in the basement below.

Clarice wrote how overnight the neatly trimmed shrub had become an overgrown tangle of briar-like thorn bushes, and she couldn't crawl through to look through the window. Each time she thought she found a spot to make ingress to the mass, thorns would fill the spot and lash out at her as if attacking to defend the portal beyond. The thorns were several inches long and wicked looking in their ability to inflict a severe wound to anyone attempting to enter the overgrown mass of vegetation.

Clarice gave up after a time and went back in the house. She wrote how she went to the basement stair and fearful at first descended into the darkness below. The sun meekly filtered through the bramble and only spotty light was available in the subterranean room or chamber as the woman with the horrible breath had called it the night before.

Chapter 13

As she entered the space, the events of the night before, faded and dream-like to this point began to flood back in all their detail in Clarice mind. The table her mother had been secured to, which had stood in the middle of the room in the night's activity was now against the wall. Drying fluids on the tabletop and abrasions where the buckles on the straps that had secured her mother's legs had rubbed as she writhed in her attempts to be free, were clearly visible. Chains hung from the walls, where Clarice had seen the concubine women the night before. A bright spot existed in the brick wall that formed one of the foundation retaining walls and a wall of the basement chamber, as if the brick were newly laid. 

When Clarice touched the mortar between the bricks, she found it to be wet as if it were in fact freshly mortared.

After a thorough inspection of the room, she turned to leave, and thought she saw a puff of smoke drift just out of view into one of the dark shadows that existed under the staircase that descended into the chamber. 

As she approached the stair that led back to the ground floor, she passed by the dark area this smoke puff had drifted into. She spoke of feeling a decided chill as she passed by and the distinct feeling she was being watched. She quickly exited the basement chamber and returned the kitchen.

Her mother was sitting at the table drinking the coffee Clarice had prepared earlier. Her appearance was of a person who hadn't slept in days, her disheveled appearance uncharacteristic of her prim and proper mother until recently. Her clothing, in disarray, hastily donned without consideration of coordination or fit. Her mother used to be carefully coiffed and dressed each day, Noting the bruise on her daughters face, she spoke.

"You must never go to the basement again, Clarice. You must never concern yourself with the goings on there."

"Yes mother, but I heard noises last night and it looked like you were being tortured. I hadn't formulated an idea on how to handle the situation when those hideous creatures discovered me and drug me down there. What was happening to you? Why were you tied to the table?"

Clarice had more questions than answers and the events of the night before consumed her with concern for her mother. Her mother's answer was quick and again adamant about Clarice presence in the scenario and really didn't provide many answers.

"I went to the room several weeks ago to investigate the noises, just as you did last night. I submitted to the evil there in a moment of weakness. I am forever trapped in the dark activity of the chamber. I can't help that now. Your father God rest his soul tried to help, but it is too late for anyone to rescue me. I am damned for all eternity. You though are still safe. But you open yourself to risk if you return to the room."

"The creatures there are extremely persuasive. The evil presence there is limited to that room as long as I live and then only in times of darkness, unless you set them free. If that happens, God-help the rest of the world, if even he can help. So promise me Clarice you will never go down there again. And you must exercise caution that you never put yourself in a position, like last night to be taken there either."

Clarice wrote of the chilling effect of her mother's words and also made mention this was the first time since her father's murder that her mother had made any sense in what she said. Most of the time it sounded as if she were speaking a foreign language. 

Clarice knew her mother spoke the Scandinavian dialect of the country of her grandparent's birth, she also knew from hearing her grandparents talk as a young girl and from that rare occasion her parents spoke to each other in the native tongue of their ancestors that wasn't the language her mother was using. 

Yet, today her mother's words were clear and in plain English and confirmed what Clarice had thought all along. Clarice had been thoroughly convinced her father's death was no accident or suicide, and this just seemed to confirm that conviction.

When Clarice, spent too much time thinking through the import, of her mother's words, her mother grew agitated.

"God Damn it Clarice, PROMISE!" 

Clarice had never heard her mother utter profanity or even a word that could be closely considered profane. Not to mention she had taken the Lord's name in vain. This elicited a quick response.

"Yes, Mother, I promise."

Her diatribe this morning continued along the same lines and held some coherency for several more minutes then lapsed back into the nonsensical commentary she so frequently pursued. At least to Clarice it seemed nonsense.

"Damned for all eternity to be used for sport only, those of us who have passed the days of innocence. The Master can only procreate with the pure. Anyone else is a toy for sportly pleasures only. The powers of darkness are strong and unyielding in their pursuit to subvert man to their dastardly deeds. The Master knows only evil, and seeks only the downfall of man into darkness for all eternity."

Clarice wrote she had no contaxt of understandin in regard to her mother's words. Her diatribe continued.

"He will stop at nothing, in gaining his evil purpose. Yet, one that is stronger than he fights against his evil purpose and intent. Yet, man in his fallible weakness serves easily as an unwitting accomplice to the evil intents of the Master. When the Master is unleashed on the world, only an angelic warrior can return him to the consignment of life in the dark and low places of the underworld. He appeals to man's more carnal nature and to the exposure of his dark beastly desires. Then through trickery, he convinces man if he serves him, he can have his decadence for all eternity. Man in his ignorance easily succumbs to the dark side of his nature, and the good Lord is helpless to intervene having decided to afford man free-moral agency at the time of creation." 

Then she lapsed back into the gibberish of before.

"In nomini domini souy sabwah felique id y odd infernos."

This made no sense to Clarice and she wrote these words in her diary only to record the seeming nonsense of her mother's ramblings. Haley however felt she had an idea what her mother was trying to tell the naive girl.

The sun was starting to set in the west and Haley cursed herself when she realized she had wasted an entire day reading the girl's diary. Yet, she found it difficult to put down.

Chapter 14

Haley had intended to have the upper room cleaned by today and to move to it as her bedroom, yet little had been accomplished. As she snuggled down in her bed in the ground floor bedroom to sleep another night, she promised herself she wouldn't waste Sunday as she had Saturday.

The next morning though as she sipped her morning tea, she felt drawn to the book and returned to the verandah, book in hand, to read further into the adventures it contained.

Clarice spoke of strange noises occurring almost every night now. Yet, she stood by her promise to her mother, not to investigate. She did descend to the ground floor one stormy night when the noises and the oppressive summer heat made sleep impossible. She stood on the verandah watching the thunderclouds unleashing their bolts of lightening off to the south. The storms were passing well south, and promised no rain and only the stifling heat and humidity were present. Fortunately the winds were starting to whip up rather vigorously around the house and that helped cool things standing on the spacious verandah. The storm clouds completely obscured the moon and the night was dark.

As Clarice stood cooling in the outflow winds of the thunderstorm 20-30 miles away, she wrote of seeing swift movements, blurs of motion, as if spectral zephyrs were trying to surround her. When these blurs appeared to be moving ever closer, she recalled the words her mother had said,


"... You though are still safe. But you open yourself to risk if you return to the room. The creatures there are extremely persuasive. The evil presence there is limited to that room as long as I live and then only in times of darkness, unless you set them free. If that happens, God-help the rest of the world, if even he can help. So promise me Clarice you will never go down there again. And you must exercise caution that you never put yourself in a position, like last night to be taken there either."

Clarice really didn't see a danger in standing on her own porch trying to escape the summer heat and the storms intensification of the oppressive humidity, but wisely retreated to her bedroom. The recollection of the hideous man beasts that had knocked her unconscious and taken her prisoner to the chamber was vivid in her mind. She clearly recalled the words of the unseen 'Master' saying, 

" She must come to me of her own desire or be delivered to me by her mother."

Yet Clarice was unsure of what powers existed and her mother's warnings and her promise to not revisit the chamber or place her self in harm's way over rode her curiosity and sense of well-being.

Then she wrote of seeing vapor-like apparitions in the night in her room. They only came on nights when clouds obscured the moon and as the light in her room grew brighter as the phase of the moon moved closer to full they stopped.

Though Clarice initially referred to them as apparitions in her diary, she discounted them now as an overactive imagination created by her curiosity into what her mother had said, yet not able to investigate without breaking her promise, and decidedly somewhat fearful of the potential dangers the chamber and even those the out-of-doors presented after night fall.

Yet, a week after the full moon, when the moon's cycle was in a waning phase again, and the size of the moon had been reduced to that little thumbnail sliver that marks the last quarter moon and the moon's entry into the last phase of its cycle, the vapor-like apparitions began to appear again.

Chapter 15

This time they were vocal though, so Clarice knew they were real and not imagined. She had a hard time getting a clear view of them. As she lay huddled under the bed covers at night watching the vapors slip around her room, if she tried to focus too intently on one, it would disappear. Then a movement in her peripheral vision would draw her attention to another part of the room.

These were real, because as the phase of the moon moved toward new and the series of moonlight absent nights that marked the advent of the new moon, her room no longer was bathed in moonlight and would take on a subdued glow of soft light when one of these nightly visitors appeared. The light was an offensive color, resembling a dirty yellow in hue.

They were murmuring constantly now, a mantra like chant that was eerily unnerving at times as Clarice nerves grew frayed from the lack of quality sleep. 

'The Master cometh' they would chant as they moved around the room.

The dark night of the new moon saw a visitor she was familiar with. The raven-haired lady that had tended her mother, while Clarice peered into the chamber window, joined the other vaporous apparitions who visited her in her room. 

The same vaporous apparition that had spoken in a confidential manner with her when she had been in the basement chamber, the dreadful night she had discovered the despicable goings on in the house. 

She stood beside her bed on that moonless night, speaking as if they were confidantes.

"You must go to the Master, my child. When you accept him as your Master, he will become visible to you. And then the pleasures he promises will be realized. If you are pure, he will honor you by having you bear his son, only if you are pure, though. Then your existence through all eternity will be assured. Go to him now, he awaits your presence in the chamber below."

Clarice noted even though the vapor-like mist of the woman's breath was still present the thoroughly disgusting fetid odor had been transformed to a pleasing almost spring-like smell of fields of blooming flowers.

Clarice wrote of trembling in her bed and how the woman's hypnotic words were very persuasive, but her promise to her mother not to return to the basement chamber kept popping in her head every time her mind would tell her to rise and go to the room as the sirens song of the raven-haired women began to have an almost hypnotic effect.

She lay there until the first shafts of light from the morning sun began to lighten her room. The raven-haired woman had continually retold her discourse of pleasures untold in the service of the Master. Each iteration through the almost lyrical litany taking on greater intensity as the morning grew nearer. The sun's light blooming on the horizon in the pre-dawn moments vanquished the raven-haired siren and the others and Clarice was able to get a few hours sleep before the suns journey into the heavens brought its beams in her window to illuminate her sleeping form.

She arose from her slumber and hurriedly dressed. As she approached the kitchen, she noted the smell of bacon cooking in her descent to the ground floor. 

Her mother was in the kitchen, scurrying about in her preparation of the morning meal, her appearance, rested and finely coiffed as in days of old. 




Victorian Dreams Pt. 01



Chapter 16

Clarice hugged her and gave her a kiss on the cheek as she did when she was younger before the troubles of the house started. Then she sat at the small table in the large kitchen. Her mother set a big plate of breakfast faire in front of the girl and refreshed her coffee and sat to watch her daughter eat.

"You were exceedingly strong last night Clarice. I am proud of you, but the pressure from the Master will increase as time goes by, you must either leave this place, never to return, or steel your resolve to never violate the orders I gave you in regard to the chamber below."

"Mother I couldn't leave you, and I have never violated an order you have given me."

"Then stay Clarice, but never underestimate the guile of the Master and his minions." Chirsty stroked her daughter's hand as she spoke this warning to the girl, the love evident in her touch.

"The Master will try harder and harder each night to get you to come to the chamber on your own. He can't take you unless you give yourself voluntarily, or..." Her mother's voice trailed off and Clarice queried about the 'or' condition.

"Or what Mother?" her mother just resumed her dialogue from where it had ended, without answering Clarice' question.

"Don't worry about the other thing, that won't happen. I promise it won't happen, so don't worry about it. The Master lures women to him. If they aren't pure, their virginity intact, their lot is different than a pure woman receives."

"If they aren't pure because of loose morals, they are doomed to an ugly eternity, one of only serving in the pleasures of the Master's minions. The minions are hideous creatures. The ones you saw the other night are attractive in comparison."

"If a woman comes to the Master to serve and she is un-pure because of marriage and she was pure on her wedding night her life is still doomed to service, but her's is a far better existence. She will serve, but none of the minions can have her. She is solely for the pleasure of the Master."

"Now that I am yoked to the Master, that is my lot. I was weak and fell victim to the seduction of power and eternal life the room promises. For all eternity, I will be used as an object for his pleasure, no standing or purpose other than to relieve the lust of his loins. Yet, I likely cannot conceive a child with him, and if I did it would only become a minion once it was born. I am told I would probably die in childbirth. Yet, if like you, a woman comes to him and is pure, she will become the sole property of the Master. She will conceive his child and bear him another evil offspring to corrupt the world. Some of these only exert their evil pressure on the world in the background, like those in the chamber below, but some are actively evil. The young pure woman who bears the Master a child, is deposited seemingly in the lap of luxury for all eternity, but the catch is it is a lonely existence and can only be realized after death."

Her mother paused a moment as if to examine and collect her thoughts, then continued.

"They don't tell you that once she has conceived his child she is no longer pure and no longer of use to him except as a concubine. So don't let the Master tempt you Clarice. The power and immortality gained in the surrender are not what they seem. Besides of what purpose are power and immortality if you are confined to the hours of darkness and only a spirit? The purity of light cannot be tolerated once you surrender and die a human death. Then the immortality comes and is a bleak existence of searching the night for others to deliver to the service of the Master. A life as an undead spirit with but two purposes only, to search for others to carry out the Master's evil intent, or service his lust or that of his minions. The light cleanses and when something is pure evil as all those in the service of the Master are, the lights cleansing effect is destructive to the point of annihilation."

Her mother's words sent shivers up Clarice' spine, but she held her tongue and listened.

"You aren't told of these limitations when you are seduced to his service. You are only told of the good points, in terms that make you desire the pleasures he offers, for all time."

Clarice thought the whole scenario sounded horrid, and was perhaps another of her mother's incoherent ramblings, yet it had somehow made sense, unlike the prior ramblings. 

Before, even when it was in plain English it made little sense, but that was even more rare than the ramblings that mostly sounded like a foreign language.

Her mother continued,

"The minions and the Master only have dominion over the dark times. They have unleashed their evil as the great plagues of the dark ages, and they also were the disruptors of the inquisitions and other great scourges of the common peoples we learned about in school. They can only be active in the night hours except during these times. So they are always trying to set up these inhuman acts man perpetrates on man. It is during these times, they are allowed free rein on the earth, and the Master cannot leave the chamber unless you succumb to him. His minions and concubines can leave, but they have limited power outside the chamber." 

"Beware the darkness, Clarice. They are always seeking ways to be released from the darkness so they can rain death and destruction on all mankind. It takes a pure virgin girl to both procreate a child other than a minion for the Master, and in certain instances, they can release the Master and his evil legions from the curse of the darkness."

"They have been exceedingly successful in recent years in their efforts to recruit to their evil ranks. The Master has procreated several children, and they are growing in strength and are coming to power as we speak. They are limited though until the Master himself can be released from the bonds of darkness, which restrict his every move. Now that he has his evil offspring positioned throughout the world, ready to bring death and devastation to all mankind, he needs one more virgin to perform the ritual where consummate purity is used to create consummate evil, then his hoards of evil servants and his offspring will be released on the world, and an orgy of death and destruction will bring forth terror on all mankind, until a warrior is found to return him in chains to the bonds of darkness he is yoked with now."

Chapter 18

To Haley the time frame these words were generated in seemed to indicate the devil's hoards were perhaps responsible for the two world wars that were about to be unleashed on to humanity by a few evil-intending men. The man's inhumanity to man aspect of it all seemed to point toward the holocaust, Adolph Hitler would perpetrate a couple of decades in the future, from the times of this writing. And of the terrible trench warfare and the mustard gas and other hideous events of World War I.

The words, 'Now that he has his evil offspring positioned throughout the world, ready to bring death and devastation to all mankind' immediately brought to mind the fact Hitler served as a corporal in the German Army in WWI and the resulting oppression of the German people after WWI in keeping with the Versailles Treaty, positioned Hitler to not only represent an Arian warrior to the German people, but a savoir of their way of life when he began to build the Wehrmacht, in clear violation of the armistice and the treaties that marked the end of the WWI and of course the holocaust on the Jewish peoples of Europe. These facts of history to Haley were events of the future as Clarice wrote in her diary and even WWI had not yet occurred. So these must be the scenarios Clarice mother was relating to the young girl were about to occur. 

Chapter 19

For the first time since she was a young child, Clarice dreaded the onset of evening and the promise of darkness it brought.

Her mother remained fairly coherent throughout the day, and Clarice enjoyed the spirit of her company again. Her mother insisted Clarice nap in the afternoon, to help her get through the coming night and not give in to the assertions of the concubines or minions, merely out of sleep depravation.

Clarice actually welcomed the peaceful sleep, as she hadn't slept well since her father's death with the heightened sense of vigilance, she had felt with his absence. She was able to nap without concern of her surroundings, for her mother, in a rare moment of coherence was on guard. Besides her mother had said the creatures of evil only had dominion over the night.

So she slept on the parlor settee. She slept as a child would, and as in days of old before all this misery beset her family, a sweet smile on her sleeping face, at least at first anyway.

Her sleep was plagued with dreams though, which bordered on nightmares as she saw hideous creatures dancing sprightly with young maidens, all heavily pregnant with child. Then she was startled awake from her dreams when one of the maidens suddenly delivered a hideous looking creature/child and died in the course of her labor, her young lithe body ripped asunder as the child issued forth from her loins.

As Clarice awakened, she noted the shafts of light from the sun had grown long and that evening and night was rapidly approaching. Her mother was in the kitchen again and took Haley to her room. She opened her jewel box and pointed to a jewel encrusted cross. She told Clarice it was a gift from her mother, and for Clarice to pick it up. She told her she wasn't allowed to touch it.

Clarice did as her mother instructed, and her mother told her to put it on and to never take it off. Clarice had difficulties latching the clasp on the ends of the chain, and asked her mother for assistance.

Chirsty Johansson got a fearful look on her face, but grasped her daughter by the shoulders and turned her so her back was to her and she could reach the clasp on the chain. As her mother latched the necklace in place around the girl's neck, Clarice thought she could distinctly smell the acrid stench of flesh burning.

When the necklace was latched and she turned to face her mother again, she noted the tips of her fingers were charred and burned as if she had stuck them directly into a fire pit. Her mother noting Clarice stare at her charred and burned fingers explained, 

"Once you are committed to serve the Master anything holy is anathema and those of us touched by the Master receive the curse of the fires of hell that God has promised to those who follow the ways of the Master. The wages of sin are death and hell's fire for all eternity."

Chapter 20

Haley continued to read throughout the day with rapt attention to the accounts the young woman had laid down so completely in her diary. The completeness and detail of the events had Haley thinking it could easily be discounted as the ramblings of a crazy person. 

As evening approached, she again cursed herself for having wasted another day in reading the tome of trial and suffering the former owner had written in such vivid detail.

That night Haley again slept in the ground floor room. She was awakened by the noises again, and this time though, she heard a loud crash, and rose to investigate. Her heart was racing as she moved toward the direction of the sound. It had appeared to originate from the staircase to the basement or 'chamber' as Clarice had taken to calling it in her diary.

With only the benefit of the little penlight she carried on her key ring, Haley began the descent on the stairs to the chamber room below. When she reached the door, she noted the board she had been unable to remove two days earlier had fallen from its attachment to the casement that surrounded the door.

Haley thought this rather strange, especially since she had tried for several minutes to remove the stubborn board with a crowbar and claw hammer. She shined the tiny beam of light on the door and saw it also hung open slightly, as if an invitation for her to proceed. Then she heard what appeared a plaintive moan from the other side of the door.

Her curiosity thoroughly aroused, Haley started to proceed into the room below, but a warning popped in her head based on what she had read that day.

Haley had given her virginity to her long-time boyfriend in the backseat of his car in high school. Based on the words Clarice had recorded in her diary, if she fell captive to the 'Master' which could possibly await beyond the door, her life would be one of suffering, serving the lustful needs of the Master's hideous minions.

Haley was no prude and enjoyed sex, but the prospect of being used by some hideous creature as a toy for his sexual satiation had no appeal to the woman, and she withdrew from the temptation the noises of the room played to her curiosity. She returned to her room and her bed, though she was unable to sleep for the balance of the night. The moans and other noises continued and though sorely tempted, she would not allow herself to again be beckoned to the door.

The next morning while her tea water was heating to boil, she again visited the doorway mid descent of the staircase. It remained ajar and the lumber still lay as it had the night before. The noises though were gone and the only discernable noise in the staircase was a lack of noise.

An almost tranquil silence pervaded the air. She thought to enter the room and investigate at that very moment, but the whistling of her teakettle brought her back to the reality of the danger that existed below. If what Clarice' diary had said, the room would be relatively safe in the daytime, but Haley wasn't sure.

It was a Monday, so she had to go to work. 

Chapter 21

On her drive in, she formulated a plan of sorts. At least the rudiments of the plan formed in her mind. She stopped on the way home from work at a Christian bookstore she had seen and bought several small crosses and one large crucifix. When she arrived at home, she placed the crucifix over the entrance to her sleeping quarters on the ground floor. Then she put one of the crosses around her neck and another on the waist chain she had worn for a number of years. It was a bit uncomfortable at first, but since the women who 'went to the Master' were for sexual purposes, if she became the 'object of allure' for the 'entities' that resided in the basement chamber, she wanted to be sure they encountered the cross should they investigate what was under her clothing. She wasn't sure it would do any good, but surely it could do no harm.

She also attached several crosses to the doorframe of the doorway that hung ajar still leading to the basement chamber.

Haley went on the Internet and looked for a bible program she could download. She had no printed Bibles, and very little religious indoctrination as a child, but thought to try to see what if anything the bible said about demons, demon possession, and exorcism, which might help the situation she was beginning to feel she was a part of. She had seem the movie 'The Exorcist' and the prospect of being possessed scared her, but in mulling over the ramblings in Clarice diary, it didn't appear any of the other women were 'possessed'.

As best she could determine, the women whom Clarice described as vapor-like apparitions, were concubine women who had come to the Master, impure, their virginity lost outside of marriage. The Raven-haired woman and Clarice' mother, also impure, but their virginities lost within the constraints of the marriage bond, a holy institution. The only difference was Clarice mother was still living while the raven-haired woman was dead.

And of course Clarice, a virgin, so therefore pure and coveted by the Master as a brood wife or a sacrifice in a ritual to relieve the evil from the bonds or darkness.

Clarice mother wasn't possessed, or at least that is what Haley thought from Clarice descriptions of her in the diary. Her incoherency and babbling, the product of sleep-depravation as best Haley could surmise. 

Sleep-depravation had been a topic of discussion in a psych class Haley had taken as an undergraduate and that appeared to be what Mrs. Johansson's symptoms and haggard appearance seemed to point to.

Chapter 22

That night as she sat on the verandah after eating a bite of supper, reading the engrossing accounts in Clarice' diary, she felt a sudden chill descend on her. She shivered and assumed the dew must have fallen. Though she was sitting on the Verandah, when the temperature and dew point reach the same mark, the air is suddenly saturated and the moisture-laden air releases some of its humidity. The result whether you are out in the open or not is a quick chilling of the air as the moisture is released, and evaporation can again occur.

The house had no porch light, so Haley was forced to read with a hurricane lantern on the porch. As she sat hunkered over the diary in the limited light, she didn't see the white vaporous being that had appeared over her head. 

That 'disembodied spirit' and not dew fall had been what produced the sudden chill in the evening air.

Though cautiously aware of the potentials the diary she was reading presented, and the other factors that were starting to occur, the noises and the board and door events, she still didn't totally discount she was reading the ramblings of a mentally deranged person. After all, had the newspaper reports she read while performing due diligence on the house not stated Clarice had allegedly tried to start an arson fire to burn the house down?

Goose flesh soon appeared on Haley's arms and she decided to call it a night. After she went to bed and was just starting to drift off to sleep, she started hearing noises. These had a somewhat haunting laugh to them rather than the usual plaintive moans she was used to hearing. They didn't seem quite as sinister as they had before. It made it easier to slip off to sleep for Haley.

A few hours into her sleep, though it only seemed moments, she was awakened by a presence in her room. Once the tendrils of sleep left her mind and the fogginess that precedes awakening began to clear, she noted a vapor of white light hovering in the corner of the room.

The presence made no sound and didn't move, just seemingly hovering in the corner.

Haley lay perfectly still as she tried to observe the entity. Finally emboldened when the spirit didn't make a move toward her, she spoke.

"What do you want?"

Though her words were spoken in a soft normal tone and volume, it seemed to reverberate from loudspeakers in the quiet room. At least in Haley's mind anyway.

The vapor immediately vanished. Haley watched for several minutes and it didn't reappear, so Haley discounted it as imagination. 

After a time, fatigue started to once again overtake her and she began to drift off to sleep again. The entity hadn't appeared threatening and was likely the product of her reading, which might be the ramblings of a mentally disturbed person, so Haley had no reason to be vigilante or concerned. Besides it could be a sleep induced delusion or a dream.

Though if she were dreaming right now it was the most vivid dream experience she had ever had. Her senses still managed to relax though, and sleep began to overtake her again.

Chapter 23

Just as she was about to drift off to sleep again, she felt a cool chill on her cheek as if a draft had suddenly started on one side of the room. She opened her eyes and looked in the direction of the draft, and the vapor now hovered next to her face. She might have been alarmed, except the vaporous entity appeared to be an innocent girl, with cascading long blond hair and an almost childlike face, more an angel in appearance than an evil spirit. She looked into the deep blue pools of the angelic eyes and saw only compassion and concern in their vapid depths. The spirit softly spoke.

"Beware the Master comes." The voice seemed that of a little girl and her facial expression changed as she spoke into a pained-like expression one would expect after biting into a lemon or other bitter fruit. As quick as it spoke, the vapor again vanished.




Victorian Dreams Pt. 02



This is part 2 of a multipart story, and it is recommended you go back and read Victorian Dreams Ch 01 to gain perspective. For those of you who have expressed interest in the story I thank you and offer this part for your enjoyment. 

This part as well as the prior part and any parts that fool are Copyright 2003, 2004 by Charles F. Johnson, and all rights are reserved under copyright laws of the United States and other countries. 

Chapter 33

Haley had never stolen anything in her life. It bothered her as she walked out of the church.

Why when she first resorted to thievery, had she chosen to steal religious items?

She made a mental note to return the item once it was of no further use to her.

She wasn’t sure if she was on the right track, but the thoughts that had almost overwhelmed her on a couple of occasions that day told her she probably was. 

Haley hoped Clarice would give her a visit and confirm things for her. She wished there was a way she could summon the angelic spirit.

Yet, when Clarice had told her she would watch over her the night before, she said she couldn’t watch over her all the time. It seemed apparent to Haley she was basically on her own, and she wasn’t about to become one of the common concubines, which was her lot if she were to succumb to the seduction or fall to the trickery of the evil arrayed against her.

Though not a conscious thought the steeling of her resolve Clarice had promised was starting to occur. It would strengthen as she went further into battle with these demonic interlopers in her home.

She thought to herself the minions who had the use of the common concubines must be feeling fortuitous these days, for the promiscuity that started in the 60s and 70s and to lesser degree, perhaps, continuing unto today had a lot of women ‘impure out of matrimony’ and therefore of only one purpose to the Master of darkness, to service the lust of his evil hoards.

When she arrived home, Haley took her treasures to her sleeping quarters. She set the bottles of Holy Water on the table beside the bed, and laid the cross embroidered cloth on the bed. When she went to bed in her usual attire of panties and T-shirt, she wrapped the cloth around her neck, kind of like a muffler. She said the 23rd Psalm prayer at bedtime as she had become accustomed to doing.

That night was clear, and the orb of the moon was nearly full in its brilliance, so she had no visitors, of either the evil or the good variety. As she sat drinking her morning tea, she again wished she would get another visit from Clarice. After her first cup of tea, she refreshed it and went to the verandah, with Clarice diary, and began reading again. She went back and reread various accounts of the visits the girl had received from the evil women bent on having her join them and become a servant of the Master, and of the night the ‘ogre’ creatures had found her looking in the chamber window. She hoped this would give her some idea of what to expect and that she might be better able to prepare to protect herself.

Chapter 34

Haley returned then to the place in the journal where she had left off and began reading of the accounts, further. Clarice wrote of more days where her mother seemed to be coherent and each time, she warned Clarice of the dangers of the basement chamber and had her reaffirm her promise never to go there.

Clarice reported these coherent days seemed to correlate with the nights the visitors to her room were particularly active. Her mother apparently wouldn’t have a sleepless night of activity if all the chamber dwellers except the Master were in her room. The Master had never come to her room, nor had the ogres since the night they returned her to her bed. This led Clarice to believe they must always be on patrol outdoors and that the Master was confined to the chamber, or simply didn’t appear every night. On these nights the concubines worked on Clarice, her mother was allowed a night of peaceful sleep. 

The Master must be absolutely ‘allergic’ to moon light, if he was confined to the chamber and neither he nor his minions were active when the full moon promised a bright night.

The phase of the moon seemed to present a timetable to Clarice as to when certain activities would occur. When the moon was full and for the week before she never seemed to have visitors, or at least if she did, they didn’t show themselves. Then during the waning phase when the moon was growing smaller in the night sky, they would visit almost nightly. She always got a visit on the new moon when there was no visible moon in the sky, and for the week after. Then when the first quarter moon occurred and the moon continued to wax and grow larger toward the advent of the full moon, the visits would become less frequent. These patterns were only altered if the weather produced a night when the clouds would obscure the moons glow. 

Clarice had tracked them carefully and they were well documented, so Haley began to feel fairly certain she could start to predict when she would have visitors.

It was just a passing thought to Haley, but she noted how this contrasted perfectly with the human concepts of the moons phases. Man seemed to have his worst activity when the moon was full, and other phases and points of lunation never seemed to bother man, though man did apparently follow the Farmer’s Almanac advice and planted on ‘the dark of the moon’ when it was a new moon. Fishing was also enhanced or inhibited when the phase of the moon was at a particular point, contrasting the activities of the servants of evil intent.

It seemed appropriate when taken in the context of evil doings. The nefarious characters of the underworld did their evil when the moon was lightless or almost that way, while man unwittingly did the devils deeds when the brightness of the moon prevented the evil entities from being active in the night.

It occurred to Haley that perhaps this was part of a grand design and the balance and equilibrium always sought in nature. The lectures of her Earth Sciences teacher and his stressing the balance nature always sought in life when she was a girl were fresh and vivid in her mind.

Clarice, in her writings, seemed to be growing bold in her abilities to cope with the evil that was ever-present and trying to lure her in to their bloated ranks. The young woman documented the fact she was glad she was a virgin, so the lusty pleasures they tried to seduce her with were unfamiliar and hard to fathom. Yet, that same virginity made her more vulnerable, first from naïveté then from the pressure the minions would bring to bear because she could serve as a brood wife for the Master, or as the energy to free the evil hoards in the ritual or ceremony that required a virgin sacrifice of some kind. Yet, apparently they had no way of knowing for certain she was a virgin, because the raven-haired lady always said ‘if you are pure’ and not ‘since you are pure’. Yet, in these more innocent times it was likely easy to assume the girl was a virgin. The upbringing of her parents in a time when sex and the reckless pursuit of personal hedonism were not as commonplace as they are today.

Clarice understanding was becoming rather detailed and the young woman had an uncanny sense of making sense of the seemingly nonsensical in her writings of the events taking place in her young life. 

If Haley had not talked with the angelic spirit of the girl, had her heal her wound with a gentle touch and had not been visited by the minions, she would have by now, probably, written it off in her mind as schizophrenia or other psychiatric illness. 

Hadn’t the websites she had researched on exorcism and demonic possession postulated this as the modern theory on possession. 

This level of detail was a symptom she had already recalled from her psych class, of schizophrenia and related mental disorders, and would have compelled that assessment.

As Haley read, the depiction in the diary suddenly took an ominous turn again. Clarice spoke of awakening one morning and finding her mother gone. Her bed had not been slept in and Clarice searched the entire house and property, and she was nowhere to be found. That is she searched all places but the basement chamber. Missing or not she would not violate her promise to her mother and enter there.

Chapter 35

All things considered, she didn’t think it wise to notify the authorities, either. First, she wasn’t yet 18 and would likely end up in an orphan’s home until she passed the age of majority. Second, how could she explain what had been going on around the house. Third, they probably already thought her wacky because of her assertions regarding her father’s death. Lastly, the brave girl couldn’t subject outsiders to the potential dangers of the chamber. 

Surely any search of the premises would not exclude the chamber unless she could control it. She realized control was something she would immediately lose once adults and especially adult authorities became involved.

She promised herself to not contact the authorities.

Clarice had taken on a newer much more intense mantle of protectionism similar to that she had felt after the death of her father and that was basis of the responsibility for the odyssey she now found herself compelled to pursue.

Now she felt compelled to protect all of mankind, and that meant she basically had to fight this evil alone, without outside intervention. That was the only way she could be assured no one fell victim to the wiles of the evil that resided in her basement each night.

Clarice wrote of the weighty feelings of obligation she felt in this regard and though boldly taking on this mantle that had been thrust upon her, she resented the loss of the quieter times and felt the last brief moments of her childhood had been stolen from her.

She almost reneged on her promise to herself, not to contact the authorities, when that night the onslaught of the minions was the most intense it had been. It was still only the three concubines, but their pressure and the sirens song of the raven-haired lady was intense. Clarice wrote the first rays of the sun’s light on the horizon, which dispatched them all to the chamber, was immensely welcome.

As Clarice pondered the events of the night before and the fact her mother was still missing, she decided to notify the town constable. After all, had they not searched the chamber for a perpetrator when her father had died, and not been harmed?

Yet, Clarice didn’t contact the authorities, for in the end, she thought the chambers evil must have grown stronger since her fathers death and subjecting the constable or his deputies to the potential hell of becoming captive to the legions of the evil Master that dwelled in her basement was just not something she was prepared to do. 

She again felt she was the only one who could fight this growing threat to the world. After all her mother had said, “They are always seeking ways to be released from the darkness so they can rain death and destruction on all mankind”. Though Clarice wasn’t certain what it took to ‘release then from the darkness’ she wasn’t prepared to unwittingly be party to that release.

Chapter 36

The constable and his deputies were all men and she didn’t know what would happen to men if the Master seduced them, or if they were even susceptible to the seduction. After all in the accounts of the first evil seduction it was Eve and not Adam that was seduced by the evil in the presence of the serpent. But then, that may have simply been because Eve presented the first opportunity and not that she was more susceptible. 

If events had been different then perhaps it would have been Adam that had altered the course of existence for all mankind. Surely the instigators of evil would not pass on even the slightest opportunity to subvert God’s intended good for man.

Rather than recruiting her father to the evil hoards, they had merely killed him, so perhaps men weren’t allowed, and the constable or his deputies might be killed, another thing Clarice wanted no responsibility for. But then Clarice surmised that perhaps contact by men was merely tolerated and the reason her father had been killed was due in part to his trying to remove the gargoyles and these somehow represented a source of strength to the evil.

The ‘ogres’ were male, obviously, having asked to use Clarice body for pleasure that night in the chamber, but if Clarice understood, they were the result of a pregnancy between the Master and an impure concubine, ostensibly the raven-haired lady. She had called them ‘her children’. Still the other contraindications to contacting authority still existed.

As Haley read these accounts she felt she knew just how Clarice felt, because it seemed every solution or resolution that was obtained provided more questions than answers. It must have been both frustrating and frightening to the young girl, all alone now in this big evil house, her father murdered by the evil here and now her mother missing, long enough now to be presumed dead.

Clarice finally indicated in her diary, she would give it a little more time. Then if she couldn’t locate her mother or her mother didn’t return, then she would revisit the idea of contacting the constable.

As it turned out that was a good way to pursue the situation. The new moon was approaching by Clarice calculations in her diary and the activity nightly in her room was intense. But it was like the loss of her mother to these doers of evil had steeled the girl in her resistance. It had gotten so easy for the girl to tune them out. Clarice was to the point she had to caution herself against falling asleep, for fear a misstep might occur when she was not yet fully awake.

Then the night of the new moon occurred and instead of the usual three visitors, Clarice had four. The common concubines were there in the corners of the room wearing their red see-through gowns and chanting their mantra “The Master cometh” 

The raven-haired lady was there too, standing beside her bed as usual beseeching Clarice to go to the Master in the Chamber below, for he waited to receive her into his service in return for untold pleasure, power, and immortality. 

The fourth visitor though was Chirsty Johansson. 

Clarice mother materialized at the foot of the bed where the raven-haired lady, usually made her appearance, but stood there and didn’t move around to the side as the raven-haired concubine did.

Like the raven-haired concubine, Clarice mother wore the black ‘uniform’ of a concubine reserved for the Master, indicating what Clarice had already known. 

The question unnecessary and inappropriate to ask, that her mother though no longer ‘pure’ yet, having lost her virginity within the confines of marriage.

Clarice almost didn’t recognize her mother when she first appeared. She looked much younger, like the mere act of dying had restored her youthful beauty, this probably a product of no longer requiring the sleep that was constantly robbed from her in the later days of her life.

What was surprising and alarming to the young girl was that this meant what she had feared, that her mother was in fact dead. The fact she could materialize was evidence enough, but the fact she wore the ‘uniform’ of a concubine was further evidence of the fact.

Her mother came just as the rosy glow of the rising sun started to tint the eastern sky outside of Clarice window. The others had been in her room assailing her with their diatribe and their chanting for hours already. As her mother appeared the others were starting to make their departure. 

Clarice started to exclaim joyously that her mother had returned, but several factors held her silent. First she seemed to have joined the ranks of those who tormented her almost nightly now, and second, she feared expressing emotion in the midst of the other entities present in the room might represent a vulnerability to them, or lastly, it might put her mother in an awkward position, so Clarice remained stoic and silent for the moment.

The common concubines had already started to dematerialize and the raven-haired lady cast a furtive, wary glance toward the window and the growing presence of the rising sun. She then started to move toward the foot of the bed where Clarice mother stood. 


Reaching the side of the woman, she embraced her, kissing he full on the lips as a man would kiss a woman, not as two women usually kiss. When she broke the embrace, she winked at Clarice giving her a knowing smile, or that she had a secret that was about to be revealed to Clarice, then poof she was gone. Now only Clarice and her mother remained in the room.

Chapter 37

Moving quickly to her daughter’s side she took her hand and stroked it lovingly as she had done in the kitchen just days earlier, Clarice tried to hug the woman, but only had a vapor to embrace and with a wistful tear asked,

“Are you dead mother?”

“Yes, my baby, I am dead. I brought this on myself though.” Chirsty seemed to be defending the other spirits as she uttered these words. Clarice broke into hysterical crying, the long night without sleep and now the confirmation of the fears her mother was dead.

Looking toward the east-facing window, Chirsty had a worried look on her face and continued. 

“I need for you to calm yourself and listen carefully to me, I don’t have much time.”

Chirsty Johansson stroked her daughter’s hair lovingly and gave the girl a moment to recompose herself and smiled at her before beginning to speak, again.

“If you remember I told you the only way the Master could have you is if you gave yourself to him, but I stopped short of telling you it could also be accomplished if I gave you to him. I told you when you asked not to worry because that wasn’t going to happen.”

“Yes mother, I remember, and those same conditions were stated the night I was taken prisoner to the chamber.” Clarice voiced her understanding.

“The Master started putting pressure on me to make you a gift as a token of my loyalty to him. I couldn’t do that to you and I couldn’t unleash the potential that presented on the world, so I threw myself in the well out back. I know you have been worried and I know I abandoned you in your darkest hour, but I knew I had failed in the temptations of the Master once and though I never even once conceived of ever giving you over to him, I was truly afraid I would fail to resist the temptations again." 

"I knew If I was dead my powers would be no greater than that of the others that come here, and I have grown so proud watching you fend off their advances, so I felt certain you could fend off mine if I were put in a position where I would be asked to try to lure you to his service. Besides I was concerned I might become pregnant and deliver another hideous minion into the world. Since the Master can only procreate with a living being, I thought it wiser I sacrifice myself and die.”

Clarice was quick to realize her mother’s sacrifice, but that didn’t lessen the impact of her loss.

Chirsty glanced toward the window at the approaching sunrise and continued her discourse.

“I waited until I could put together a plan to talk with you as I am now. When they wanted me to start joining in the coercion they are putting you up against, I was afraid I would be too much and you might give in if I was one of the ones trying to convince you to do so. So I proposed coming at dawn and talking to you after they had worn you down all night." 

"I convinced them this is when you would be the most vulnerable, and that I needed to be alone to talk to you as only a mother and daughter talk. So the Master agreed. They actually thought me brave to expose myself to the potential of the sun, but that is part of my plan. I will not try to get you to join the Master. I love you too much and the rest of the world to ask you to do that even if it meant you could somehow save me, and it doesn’t mean that.”




Victorian Dreams Pt. 02



“Nothing can save me now I have been lost since I gave myself to him in my moment of weakness, long ago. I have come to tell you to destroy this house and the evil that lives here. The best way would be to get sunlight into the chamber below, but that is too risky, so the next best way is to destroy the house by burning it." 

"Burn it to the ground Clarice." She was almost screaminmg at Clarice, as she spoke.

"You must be covert in your action and you must succeed the first time you try. Otherwise you will be destroyed, virgin or not.”

Clarice mother again looked to the east to see the sun is just about to rise and she stands. She runs her hand along the young face of her daughter, and says more.

“You are strong my child. I have seen your strength from the moment I held you in my arms at birth. I never knew what the strength was for, but now I know. You will defeat this menace to mankind, and you will survive. Please always try to remember I love you Clarice. Never underestimate them Clarice. They are cunning in their intent and execution of the evil they desire to unleash.”

“I know you love me mother. I have never doubted this for a moment. I have grown ever respectful of their evil wiles and the guise of their purposes. I will remain cautious as you wish.”

The tears were streaming down Clarice face as she spoke these words, but it is hard to say if she was prepared for what happened next.

Chapter 38

“I am sorry baby, but I must abandon you again. I must look to my soul now. In the end, perhaps we can be together again without you having to go to the Master this way.”

Chirsty walked over to the window and stood facing it as the sun’s first rays streamed over the horizon. Just as the light hit her, she spoke again.

“I love you, baby.” 

Then the vaporous form that had once been her mother burst briefly into flames and vanished from the room. The last thing Clarice heard was ‘I love you baby’ then a blood curdling scream as her mother’s vaporous form disappeared in the momentary burst of flame.

Clarice wept in her bed for hours. Though she had presumed her mother dead, the actual conformation of it was more than she had expected. Then the words her mother had said resonated in her mind. ‘You are strong my child’. Even with her mothers words echoing in her mind it still took her several more minutes to compose herself.

She rose, cleaned herself up and dressed, then went to the well and looked in. Just as her mother had said, her body was floating face down in the water 15-20 feet below the lip of the well.

By now the girl had regained the composure that so characterized her strength, and she began to formulate a story to tell the authorities if they should ask why her mother’s body had been in the well for several days without Clarice notifying the authorities she was missing or had fallen into the waters below.

Once she had put together a plausible story, she got into the family car, a Model A Ford, her dad had been so proud of when he drove it home to their flat in New York City, and drove to town to get the constable.

She told the constable her mother had apparently fallen in the well and drowned, and she needed someone to handle the situation. The Deputy that had investigated her father’s death recognized Clarice immediately, so the constable dispatched him to investigate. Not having radios and the like back in those days, he went by the coroner’s office and had a crew follow him out to the house. Clarice was waiting on the verandah when they pulled into the yard, and took them back to the well. 

One man was lowered into the water and tied rope around the body of Chirsty Johansson and they hoisted her out.

The crew from the coroner’s office examined the body and pronounced, estimating the time of death as several days earlier from the water logged condition of the body. When the deputy asked why Clarice had not reported her missing earlier, Clarice gave the story she had already concocted.

“Since the death of my father, Mom has been in a deep depression. It isn’t unusual for her to wander off into the woods to be alone and not return for a couple of days. In one of her lucid moments, she apologized to me for being ignored by her and told me not to report her missing unless she was gone for a week or more. She said that way I wouldn’t get entangled in the system and get shipped off to an orphan’s home until I turn 18 next year. Nor have to face the other problems that could arise from her disappearance. She said she needed this time to grieve my lost father. As a dutiful daughter I was compelled to follow her wishes. Besides, she has only been gone for 3 days.”

The story was just plausible enough the deputy bought it. Chirsty’s body had been in the well for longer than three days, but Clarice had listened carefully when the coroner’s assistant had said after about 3 days there was no way to tell how long the body had been in the water.

Clarice didn’t seem despondent or depressed on the loss of both her parents in such a short period of time, in fact an almost eerie calm seemed to have a grasp on the girl, yet the deputy had no choice but to set the wheels in motion for Clarice to go to an orphanage. 

Since she had stayed at the house for this period of time without adult supervision, and was 17 so less than a year away from majority he decided to let her stay alone at the house and contact the state agency that had jurisdiction on the matter then they would remove her from the house.

Besides the only place the Constable would have to house the girl would be in a jail cell, and the nice deputy couldn’t bring himself to subject her to such squalid conditions as the city jail. 

He asked her if she thought she would be all right alone at the house for a day or two until the Child Welfare people could get involved.

“Deputy, I have spent most of the last several weeks alone, whether my mother was here or gone, so I think a few more days won’t be a problem. Besides, I can have the opportunity to get some things in order and my things together.” The answer was factual all things considered yet Clarice thought it might sound a bit rude or flippant, so she quickly apologized.

“I’m sorry deputy, I didn’t mean to sound flip or rude. I am just under a bit of strain right now.”

“That is alright, Miss, I understand.”

The deputy ruled the death an accident, though he did consider suicide as a possibility based on what Clarice had said. Either way there were no suspicious circumstances to be investigated in his observation.

As soon as they left, Clarice set about the plan to burn the house down.

Chapter 39

The day was slipping into darkness, and Haley found herself again self-castigating for wasting another day. Though she had given up on cleaning up and moving to the third floor, she still had things she could be doing downstairs.

She thought the third floor was perhaps a bit too closely linked to the basement chamber for her comfort. Further, she felt her plans for a B n B needed to be on hold until she figured a way to rid the house of the evil. Like Clarice, she had taken on the responsibility of see the evil here was not allowed to reach the rest of the world. That night when she went to bed, she again prayed the 23rd Psalm, and clad in panties and T-shirt as usual, she looked rather comical as she put the alter cloth from the Catholic Church around her neck like a muffler. 

She went one step further and emptied one of the apothecary bottles of holy water into a cup at her bedside.

From the best that she could determine, the full moon had just passed, so the likelihood she would receive a visitor in the next week was remote, yet summer thunderclouds formed as the evening progressed and though the storm clouds were passing well south of the house, that didn’t preclude some might not obscure the moon.

Haley recalled the first night of visits had occurred when the phase of the moon wouldn’t have indicated a visit, but storm clouds obscuring the moon’s glow had brought them to her room.

The clouds did apparently obscure the moon, for along about 1 am the common concubines began to float around her room. Apparently their new tactic was to try to scare her into submission. 

They had apparently failed with coercion in Clarice case, and Haley was proving to not be any better a prospect, so the common concubines were whirling around the room like spectral zephyrs, plaintively moaning instead of chanting the mantra they were usually heard to utter.

This reminded Haley of the tactic the military had used when they went after Manuel Noriega in Panama, setting up loudspeakers and playing rock music and the chanting of monks unceasingly. It had worked for them, so this new tactic worried the woman and was a bit unnerving.

When one got too close to the bed for Haley’s comfort, she grabbed the cup of holy water and flung it at the spirit, again shouting ‘get the hence, Satan’.

Both zephyrs froze in place when this happened. The one that had been drenched by the holy water, started to bubble like she had been drenched in acid, and slowly dematerialized. The other dematerialized as soon as her sister concubine had gone.

Haley refilled the cup from another bottle of holy water.

A little later, the raven-haired lady materialized at the foot of Haley’s bed. Haley had drifted off to sleep but it was a guarded sleep, and was wide awake the instant the yellowish light appeared in her room, along with the characteristic burnt odor. 

The raven-haired lady drifted over beside Haley’s reclining form, to the place she always presented her litany from. She looked down at Haley with a scolding look on her face. Haley just stared back, a defiant look firmly affixed on her face. 

After several minutes of this ‘standoff of stares’ the raven-haired woman finally spoke.

“Usually we merely try to persuade someone like you of the advantages and the eternal rewards of coming into the service of the Master. But you have become overly aggressive. Your assault on my sister, cannot go unpunished, so I am here to punish you for your transgressions.”

As the concubine spoke, Haley felt herself levitating off the bed and a deep fear began to grip her. She began reciting the 23rd Psalm as she rose higher off the bed, the covering blankets slipping slowly from her body. When she started reciting the 23rd Psalm, the raven-haired Lady started to laugh hysterically, throwing her head back, and cackling like a witch in the middle of an incantation, not looking at Haley as the bed covers slipped off to reveal the makeshift muffler, of the alter vestment, the young woman wore.

When she recomposed herself and looked back in Haley’s direction, the religious garment was completely visible around the young woman’s neck and trailing down across her body and dangling between her legs as she hung horizontally suspended in mid air.

When the raven-haired lady saw the religious cloth, she gasped as if hit by an unseen fist in the solar plexus. She almost doubled over from the force of the unseen force that had assailed her standing form.

Haley dropped back to the bed and the raven-haired lady disappeared almost instantaneously.

Haley grew fearful as she lay there contemplating the events of the last couple of hours. Clarice had said the minions were of limited powers, yet they seemed to be growing stronger and getting aggressive themselves in their approach to Haley’s increased resistance.

Tears streamed down her face, more from exhaustion than fear. An adrenaline hangover was just starting to make its presence known, and Haley was justifiably scared. She had no way of knowing the extent of what might occur now that she had evoked the wrath of the evil beings that occupied her home.

As she lay there weeping and wondering to what extent they could assault her, the form of Clarice materialized.

She hovered over to the side of the bed and tenderly wiped away the tears from Haley’s face and spoke gently to the woman.

“Do not be unduly fearful. They cannot go beyond what they have done thus far. There powers are limited as I have said and they are at the limits of these powers. As long as you avoid the chamber and the Master, they can do you no harm. Their tactic now is to scare you into his service.”

Haley responded, “Well it’s working. They are scaring the weebies out of me.” Her response was perhaps an attempt to lighten an already frightening situation. Clarice had eased her fears somewhat, and this was just Haley’s way of recomposing herself. 

The injection of a certain amount of levity into the events seemed almost objectionable in retrospect to Haley, but it had served the purpose intended by steadying Haley’s frayed nerves

“Do not fear them further. Do not lose sight of the respect you must have for their wily ways, but do not fear them. You have done as I have told you and increased in the things that represent the Holy Father. You have used them effectively and they have protected you. Continue to rely on them for protection, for they will not fail you.”

Haley understood now that her understanding of the meaning of the cryptic phrase ‘things that represent the Holy Father’ had been accurate. She still sought confirmation, though. 

“So the understanding I have gained is correct then?” she asked the angelic girl who hovered over her. Haley’s head had cleared of the confusion that had accompanied the abject terror she had felt moments earlier. Now she sought to gain a better understanding in hopes that might allay her fears completely.

“Yes, your understanding of what will protect you is accurate. Now you must increase in that understanding and decide what this knowledge will do to help you defeat the evil, not just hold it at bay. For as long as the evil exists, you and anyone else who dwells here in the night are not safe, and each time they win a new servant to their hoards they grow stronger. If one of these should be a virgin, the wickedness of their strength will again be released on the world, with no protection from the purifying effect of the daylight.”

Haley considered the words Clarice had said ‘For as long as the evil exists, you and anyone else who dwells here in the night are not safe’. This confirmed Haley’s feelings of putting her plans for the B n B on hold.

“I will again remain vigilant for you throughout this night so you can rest. Sleep now my friend. Sleep.” Clarice hand tenderly stroked Haley’s hair like a mother tenderly caressing her child. Clarice had steadily become more motherly as her visits to Haley progressed. 

This was comforting to Haley, but she couldn’t understand why the two forces couldn’t do battle and leave the all but helpless humans out of it.

Haley felt the weariness slip up and overtake her as she nestled back down into the bed and the drained feeling of an adrenaline hangover overtook her. Just before she slipped off to sleep she thought to ask.

“Is there any way I can call you to come visit me?”

“I am here most of the time, and if the Master’s minions aren’t here just speak my name and I will become visible to you.”

“You are Clarice, right?”

“Yes, I am the spirit of the girl Clarice.”

“Thank you.” Haley murmured as a warm feeling stole over her and she drifted off to sleep Haley dreamed as the night slipped inexorably toward morning. In her dream she saw two creatures, both beasts in their own right, though one was definitely good while the other was so hideous it no doubt was a manifestation of evil. 

They did battle in her dream, neither clearly gaining advantage over the other in the end. What was clear was the destruction of the things around them as they battled for supremacy.

As the sun drifted through the window the next morning, Haley awoke refreshed. Her dream had served to answer her question as to why the two entities of good and evil couldn’t do war with each other and leave man out of it. So it was clear to Haley now she must become a warrior and assume the mantle of responsibility as Clarice had decades earlier. 

She must attempt to do what the younger girl had failed and not allow the rest of humanity be assailed by the evil that would come if the terror in her basement were allowed to slip the chains of darkness.

As she arose to greet the day, her mind started to work on the things Clarice had said to her the night before and how the holy water and the alter vestment had served her against the minions of evil. Her mind was working on a way to defeat them permanently and not just hold then at bay as Clarice had said. The thoughts weighed heavy on her mind and the mantle of responsibility she had assumed grew heavy as she pondered the facts known to her.

Haley decided it was time to go to the Chamber in the basement of the house. Surely if the Judeo-Christian religious trappings helped her in the bedroom, they would help her in the chamber. Besides was not the sunlight untenable to the minions and the Master. Had Clarice herself not visited safely in the daytime and the constables deputy when he had investigated Christian Johansson’s death. So Haley figured if she took adequate precautions, she could safely go to the chamber. Besides if she was to formulate a plan to defeat the evil there, she needed to ‘case the joint’.

She started by rereading Clarice account of her nighttime visit as a prisoner of the ogres and her visit the next day on her own. She made a list of the things she wanted to check out while she was there, because she only wanted to have to go one time. She decided she would go at 1 pm. The day was clear so the sun would be at its brightest and at 1 pm would have just crossed the crest of the house so it would be on the west side, shining in the basement windows.

She took one of her T-shirts and soaked it in holy water along with the alter vestment. She was almost out of Holy Water and made a mental note to get more.

At 12:30, she went to her room, and put on the overalls she wore when working on the house and the wet t-shirt soaked in Holy Water. Haley rarely wore a bra on the weekends and her breasts were outlined with prominence when she put the wet T-shirt on, and she blushed as she looked at herself in the mirror, for though it was a warm summer day, the coolness of the wet T-shirt had her nipples standing erect like pencil erasers against the shirts thin cotton fabric. As her blush diminished, she told herself she should have chosen a color other than white for her shirt, but then reminded herself that no one would see her, and that such childish thoughts were inappropriate considering the mission she was about to embark on, and that she needed to focus her mind on the dangers that could lie ahead.

After she made herself focus and concentrate on what she needed to do in the chamber, she wrapped the alter vestment around her shoulders like a stole and decided to secure it with a safety pin.

Chapter 40

She was dressed, crosses around her neck and waist, holy water soaked T-shirt and alter vestment on her upper body. She thought about it a moment and dipped her fingers into the holy water remaining in the basin and dripped holy water from her fingers onto the legs of her overalls so her lower body had some ‘protection’. She went over the mental list of things she wanted to check out and got the flashlight she had purchased from the tool chest in the room she used as a utility room. She was as ready as she was going to be she figured and it was 1 o’clock so she headed for the basement stair. She started to tremble as she began her descent toward danger. After a minute she stopped and scolded her self.

“Haley Louise Baxter, you have taken every precaution you can and if you are wrong there is nothing you can do about it but find out. You can’t fix things if you don’t know how, so get a grip girl.”




Victorian Dreams Pt. 02



As usual, her self-castigation calmed her down and she continued. When she reached the door it stood ajar as it had since the night the board had fallen free. She straightened the boards on the floor around the door, so if she needed to make a hasty retreat she wouldn’t trip over them. Then she continued her descent into the chamber, prepared, or so she thought to face the evil that might lurk there.

Reaching the bottom step, she stopped, and scanned the room with the flashlight. The burnt smell she had smelt the first day she toured the house and when the raven-haired woman appeared in her room was intensely strong here.

In one corner the gargoyles that had apparently adorned the gables stood in silent testament to the events chronicled in Clarice diary. One broken, apparently the one Christian Johansson had successfully removed with the sledgehammer, the other its horny adornments on its head tinged with a red color, no doubt the blood from the impalement Christian Johansson had received in the fall from the roof, after having been pushed when he tried to remove this adornment from the edifice of the roof on the house.

The table Chirsty Johansson had been shackled to in the accounts in Clarice’ diary was there against the wall, and like the other things in the room it was covered in dust and cobwebs, appearing to indicate it hadn’t been used recently.

It occurred to Haley perhaps the reason the pressure had seemingly been turned up on the persuasion techniques the concubines were using was the Master desired a flesh and blood woman rather than his raven-haired concubine.

Clarice had said in her accounts of being taken prisoner by the ogres to the chamber they had lamented “Thank you Master, but the concubine women are never as satisfying as real flesh and blood women.” It was perhaps the same way for the Master, so this might explain the pressure being increased.

Though the sun was now on the west side of the house, very little light penetrated the dirty windows on the west wall. She walked to the west wall and ran her finger through the accumulation of dirt and dust on the windows. Yet, the outsides of the windows were just as dirty as the insides, so her efforts produced no discernable effect.

She returned to the center of the room and got her bearings, based on Clarice’ diary accounts of the room. As Haley faced the windows, the chains the common concubines hung from must be behind her. That meant the spot where the brick and mortar appeared fresh to Clarice must be to her right. She went to the wall directly behind her and the shackles hung there menacingly and as described. She touched one of them and what appeared as caked blood came off in her hands. She brushed her hand on her overalls to get most of the material off, but then ran her hand across her wet T-shirt. Where her hand traced along the garment, a bloody red handprint smear appeared and started to bubble as if hydrogen peroxide had been poured on an open wound. The effect of the Holy Water on the evil residue on Haley’s hand she supposed.

She turned to her left now, and walked over to the wall, shining the flashlight on the brick there. Just as Clarice diary had noted, the brick appeared new and the mortar appeared still wet to the touch.

Haley’s hand still had a little bit of the Holy Water moisture from cleaning her hand on her shirt and when she traced her finger along the mortar line between the bricks, the trail her finger left began to smolder briefly. Another indicator this was an area touched by the hands of evil.

Haley had all of the ‘casing’ she had wanted to do accomplished and she hastily retreated from the room unscathed.

Back on the ground floor, she calmed herself, regained any lost composure, poured a glass of iced tea and went to the verandah.

The beginnings on an idea were starting to form in Haley’s mind, and she reviewed what she knew as she sat and sipped the tea, her T-shirt drying in the warm afternoon breeze. She had hung the alter vestment over a chair in her room to dry so she could drape herself with it at bedtime. She did a mental inventory of what she knew.

The brick was freshly mortared just as it had been nearly 100 years earlier in Clarice diary account of her visit to the room the day after she had been taken there forcibly. That must be some kind of portal she assumed that the Master and the minions used to come to earth from the underworld each night.

The minions were only a meager power in comparison to what the Master must be. Their reactions to the religious accoutrements must be minor in comparison to how it would be for the Master. Either that or the religious items wouldn’t faze him. She made a note to ask Clarice about that possibility.

She must figure out a way to get more sunlight into the room. This fact resonated in Haley’s mind. She retrieved the diary and reread where Chirsty Johansson had instructed her daughter to burn the house down and destroy the evil there. The words, “The best way would be to get sunlight into the chamber below, but that is too risky, so the next best way is to destroy the house by burning it.” seemed to take root and form a crucible of understanding for the woman. She didn’t know what made flooding the chamber with sunlight more risky than any other method, but she would certainly respect the words of warning from the woman and only use the sunlight as an adjunct to whatever plan she finally formulated. 

Besides, wouldn’t flooding the chamber with light by day only be effective during the daylight hours when the evil entities were in the underworld, anyway? 

Perhaps the cleansing effect of the sunlight would make the chamber untenable to the creatures when they returned at night. Haley understood Clarice observations that each answer only seemed to produce another half dozen questions.

These facts were rummaging around in her head as she pondered the possibilities the rest of the afternoon. The day remained cloudless, and still only a couple of days past the full moon, Haley didn’t figure she would get any visitors tonight, but she still prepared, just in case.

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At bedtime, the T-shirt she had worn down stairs was dry and the handprint smear that had bubbled up on the shirt where she had wiped her hand was gone completely, so she decided to wear that T-shirt to sleep in. The alter vestment was dry, so slipping out of the overalls leaving only her T-shirt and panties she again donned the vestment as if it were a muffler. She knelt and prayed her routine 23rd Psalm prayer. And went to bed. 

Around midnight she hadn’t yet fallen asleep and called for Clarice.

“Clarice are you here?”

Haley felt the familiar draft on her cheek as the spirit of the courageous young girl appeared to her.

“Yes, I am here.”

“I have been thinking on a plan to rid the house of the evil for good. Is it safe to discuss it here, or anywhere for that matter?” Haley was beginning to grasp the gravity of the situation and the abilities of the powers arrayed against her.

“No I think you would be wise to keep any plans you have to yourself. Though the minions can’t materialize here while I am here it doesn’t mean they aren’t lurking close by and could hear. And any attempt must succeed on the first try, or you place yourself in grave danger. The Masters servants will thwart any subsequent attempts as they learn of your tactics should a first attempt fail.”

“Would it be safe to ask questions?”

“Yes, as long as your questions weren’t so obvious they made your plan apparent. Again, though I must remind you I cannot answer a question, I can only confirm or refute something you already know and understand.”

“I understand and I do need for you to confirm a couple of things for me.”

“I will try.”

“When I threw the Holy Water on the common concubine and when the raven-haired concubine was exposed to the alter vestment, they reacted to the things that represent the Holy Father. Would the Master’s reaction be similar? I would think either he would be stronger so the effect would be minimized, or because he is the worst and the source of the evil, his reaction could be even more pronounced, and perhaps dangerously explosive.”

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“The Master is affected by the things that represent the Holy Father, as well. He has no greater strength against them, but to say he would react more intensely might be an overstatement, but yes, he is under the same influences to them any of his servants are.”

Haley continued her query, “Sunlight is fatal to all those who frequent the chamber?”

“Yes, unless their power is unleashed by a virgin girl in a special ritual, they cannot tolerate the light of day. You read what happened to my mother when she was touched by sunlight.”

“If sunlight were present and bathing a human person in the chamber, I assume they would be safe?”

“Yes, that would serve as an effective shield, for even the reflection of sunlight would have a negative effect on the Master and his servants of evil. This is why moon light bothers then, for it is a reflection of the suns light on the other side of the earth.”

“The area in the chamber that appears to have been bricked recently, is that a portal of some sort, where the Master and his servants depart each morning and return each night?”

“Yes, each night at sunset the bricks are removed and the Master and his people are set free to rain terror on the unprepared of this earth. Then each morning, they return to the underworld, leaving the appearance they have never been here, to the unsuspecting.”

“Is the portal just that one spot or does it appear anywhere in the earth.”

“That is not a question I can answer.”

It occurred to Haley it was an attempt to gain information, and not a confirmation, so that was why Clarice was restrained in her answer.

Haley’s plan was taking shape, but she wished she could confirm its efficacy without revealing too much. She would certainly feel safer that way. She recognized she would need to reword her query in such a way as to get an answer that was more a confirmation. She felt she was like a trial attorney, and had to word her questions in such a way as to not ‘lead the witness’.

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At the moment Haley felt certain she could proceed with a plan without having to seek concurrence from Clarice, especially since that concurrence would likely not be forthcoming.

The next day, Haley went to the hobby and crafts store and purchased several packages of plaster of Paris. When she returned home, she used the Holy water in the basin she had used to drench the shirt and Alter vestment the day before with the plaster powder and made a smooth heavily liquefied paste. She had to use tap water to get it as liquefied as she wanted it, but the presence of holy water was sufficient she hoped to serve the purpose. 

It was already after noon by the time Haley’s preparations were concluded, so she decided to proceed with her plan. She draped herself in the alter vestment and headed down to the chamber with the plaster preparation.

She had no brushes or putty knives to apply the plaster with, so she merely smeared it on the wall with her hands. Once she had applied most of the substance she spread it around to cover the portals freshly bricked area completely. 

Her assumption the small amount of Holy Water would do the trick was seemingly confirmed when the wall began to smolder as the Holy Fide paste was applied, coming in contact with the evil residue that was present there.

Haley finished the task in a matter of minutes and retreated from the danger the chamber presented. Now it was only a matter of waiting for night fall to see if the task had accomplished the goal of sealing the portal as a point of ingress for the Master and his evil.

She received no visitors for the next several days, either of the good variety or evil, and felt no need to call for Clarice in the night. Then late that week when heat storm clouds obscured the moon’s glow, she got the first indication her plan had failed.

The raven-haired lady appeared to her at the foot of her bed as she had before. Haley still wore the muffler of the alter vestment and the raven-haired concubine didn’t go to her side as before, but spoke to her from the foot of the bed.

“Your attempts to prevent the Master coming to earth have been foiled. Surely a foolish human like you can understand your powers and abilities in upsetting the Master’s plan to rule the world and provide it with the decadence it desires can’t be undone?”


Haley lay trembling, expecting the concubine would get physically aggressive as she had on her last visit. She had no Holy Water left to throw at the evil spirit and felt quite vulnerable at that moment.

She vowed to herself to never let her supply of protective measures run low again. As it turned out she didn’t need them this night. The raven-haired concubine spoke again and then left.

“The Master cometh and no feeble attempts by man or beast will prevent this inevitable truth.”

The raven-haired lady dematerialized and the hazy yellow-glow and terrible burnt odor that so typified her presence left the room. Haley lay scared for several minutes, expecting a return visit from the army of evil she was used to and then thought to summon Clarice to preclude their return.

“Clarice, I need to speak to you.”

Immediately the cool draft appeared on her cheek and the spirit of the girl once again hovered over Haley, her placid features and the deep blue pools of her eyes, focused just inches away from Haley’s fear contorted face, producing a calming effect for the human friend of the spirit girl. “I am here.”

“I tried to defeat the evil in the basement by not allowing them a point of ingress and I failed. Are my attempts thwarted?”

“Your attempts were successful, but as you have discovered, only temporary.”

“I assumed the things that represent the Holy Father, are good down through eternity, and not of limited endurance. As an example, the shirt I wore when I plastered the portal was drenched in Holy Water I assumed that even after it dried it would protect me until I washed it. I thought blocking the portal with things that represent the Holy Father would end the evil from being able to gain worldly access. It appears my assumptions were invalid.”

“No, you aren’t thwarted. That was a valid assumption to a point. The garment actually took several days to dry and for the Holy Water to be thoroughly dissipated from the fibers, though the shirt felt dry to you, in actuality residual moisture remained. Until all that moisture was gone, it was protective. After that point it no longer is of any protection from the evil in this house or else where in the world. That is what happened with your attempts to seal the portal before. As long as the plaster was wet with the Holy Water it succeeded in preventing that place from being used as a portal, but now that it is dry, the protection no longer exists.”

“If the area that is bricked in the chamber were somehow blocked with things that represent the Holy Father, that were enduring, it could no longer be used as a portal and no other portal could be created?”

“Yes that place could no longer be used as a portal, but another could be established next to it or anywhere along that north or east wall, as you have seen. Now I must go, I cannot give you any more confirmations. You seem to understand the situation, and what is necessary, now I must leave you to do what must be done, but again I caution you do not under estimate the powers of evil and their attempts to thwart you. Now that you have made one attempt and failed though successful temporarily, the minions and sources of evil will be even more vigilante against your efforts. Use what you have learned and continue in your efforts to defeat them and prevent their aims at the downfall of mankind.”

Apparently Clarice had stepped over a line with the last answer, and now wouldn’t be allowed to answer any more of Haley’s questions, for just as suddenly as she appeared, she disappeared. She hadn’t given Haley the usual caress of her cheek when she left this time either.

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Haley had difficulty falling to sleep as she pondered the possibilities of how to permanently evict her unwanted and unwelcome guests. She even tried to make light of the situation when she was pondering it too heavily, by saying, “After evicting these tenets, evicting any of my B ‘n B guests should be a piece of cake.”

Haley pondered how to mix the things she knew, sunlight to protect her, block the portal and all other available portal possibilities with enduring things that represent the Holy Father. After work the next day, she returned to the Catholic Church to refill the bottles of Holy Water, and encountered the priest she had seem the week before. She thought to avail of him of his knowledge.

“Father, may I ask you a question?”

The priest immediately recognized Haley by the sharp outfit she wore and the too-short skirt. 

“Yes my child.”

“Where does Holy Water come from?”

“It is regular water that has had a special prayer said over it.”

“Can you do large quantities?”

“It depends on what you consider large quantities. We typically do up to 5-gallons at a time if we are baptizing a baby or something, but usually it is a gallon or two at a time.”

“If I were to bring water to you would you bless it for me?”

“I guess I probably could, why do you ask my child?”

“I want to paint my house with water based paint and I want the water I use to mix it with to be Holy Water, kind of to bless my house and ward off potential evil spirits.” Haley was intentionally being vague. She didn’t need her only human ally thinking she was a few French-fries short of a Happy Meal. 

“Usually a blessing would be applied directly to the house, but I guess you could bless the house in that manner.”

“Would you bless the water for me father if I bring it to you.”

“Gladly my child.”

“Thank you father.”

Haley left the church, but the thought was going through her head she needed something more permanent than just water. As Clarice had said, though the water would take several days, and perhaps in the dark, dank basement even a couple of weeks to evaporate, then it would no longer serve as a barrier once it was thoroughly dry.

As Haley considered the possibilities, it occurred to her a manner that might work. Just as she had placed an arc of crosses around her basement door, if something like that could be conceived it might work. Though the crosses around the basement door and the crucifix above her room hadn’t stopped the evil from appearing there, they never just walked through the door. 

Haley felt certain if a plan that employed something that wouldn’t just evaporate away was devised an effective barrier could be positioned to prevent the evil access to the basement chamber from their daily retreat to the darkness of the underworld. Surely some way could be devised. Haley was an intelligent woman, so surely she could devise something.

At the same time, though a new plan would be similar, it had to have enough variation to prevent the danger that existed from her having failed in her first attempt.

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That night she returned to her computer and started a new a search of the Internet for information she might possibly use. On one of her search engine queries, she got a link to Ebay. 

She didn’t know how that applied but followed the link anyway. She knew Ebay was an Internet auction site and the query that had produced the link was on religious artifacts.

When she logged into the auction site, and followed the link further into the pages there, she found she was on a bid page for religious articles such as chalices and goblets. These were all up for sale from a person that had collected them on numerous trips to the Holy lands. They were reportedly used in the times of Christ, and one was even purported to have been used in the Last Supper. The Apostles Paul and John supposedly used several of them as they went about their ministries to spread the gospel of Christ after his death and resurrection.




Victorian Dreams Pt. 02



Haley doubted these assertions, for several reasons. 

First the items were solid gold and jewel encrusted, not in keeping with the impoverished status of Christ and his disciples as her recent superficial studies of the Bible had revealed. 

Second, if they were really of such significance historically and religiously surely an historic or religious organization or museum would have possession of them, such as the Vatican had possession of the Shroud of Turin. That cloth was said to be the burial robes of the crucified Christ, and was zealously protected. Surely goblets and the like from the Last Supper or from the travels and the ministries of the Apostles would receive equal protection from some religious or historical organization of museum.

Yet, Haley understood they did have Holy significance and might as a result serve her purpose. She immediately placed a bid for the items.

She was disappointed to later return to the web site and discover the bidding had reached 6 figures, well beyond her meager means. It appeared others had been fooled by the assertions of the seller the items were of Christ-touched significance.

A fortuitous event took place the next day as she was driving home. She passed an antique store she had seen many times and had sought to browse to perhaps complete the furnishings in her home as she prepared to open it as a B ‘n B. She was now beginning to think she might get her dream business open eventually as her confidence in her ability to evict the evil in the chamber in her home grew. Deep down inside she was reluctant to go home, as well.

At home she had to remain on guard all the time and she needed to relax. It had occurred to her she was pushing a bit hard in her attempt to derive a solution to the evil in her basement and that if she didn’t slow down and approach it a bit more methodically, she could end up making another mistake. 

Clarice had warned her the attempt needed to be successful on the first try. Though she had failed in the first attempt, she was getting a reprieve of sorts in that she was going to have a second chance to rid her home of its evil occupants, so she needed to get it right this time. She might not get a third chance.

Though this was not to be her first attempt, the plan she was devising was sufficiently different from the prior attempt perhaps the danger of her first failure would be mitigated.

With Clarice seemingly unable to give her further guidance after answering a question rather than confirming an assumption the last time they had talked, she felt again she was probably on her own, and so needed to slow down and take things slowly. So she decided to stop and browse this day as she passed the antique store. 

More to slow down the pressure of her planning than to prepare to finish furnishing her B ‘n B. She wouldn’t need to worry about finishing her home out until she was certain her unwanted guests had been permanently evicted.

Inside was typical of antique retail establishments. Multiple booths of dusty old stuff, some of it more junk than antique, but it was like they say ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’. 

Haley browsed for a long while, going from one antique dealer’s booth to another and as she came down one aisle and turned the corner to start up another, the corner booth caught her attention immediately. 

Chapter 46

There were enumerable religious artifacts ranging from crosses and crucifixes to chalices and goblets all apparently used in religious ceremonies. 

A sign said ‘circa 1860’. 

As she stood observing the items, the owner of the booth approached her.

“Interesting pieces aren’t they?”

“Yes, what is their origin?” Haley asked the question in an attempt to make it sound like she was a seasoned antique shopper.

“They were discovered when an old Puritan church was being torn down in New England. The church had been abandoned for decades and these items were in the basement. For safety reasons, the demolition crew didn’t enter the structure, but started to demolitish it from the outside." 

"Once the super-structure of the building had been removed they discovered the basement. These items were tucked away in a cupboard there. The rumor is the Church goes back to colonial times, but my research on the style of the items and etc, puts these as more likely Civil War era, so mid 1800’s. They are mostly pewter though they are gold plated, in some instances. When I purchased them, I wasn’t sure there would be a market for religious artifacts and I have found my fears were justified. I have had these for several years now, and they are just taking up space and are pretty labor intensive in the polishing and maintenance they require.”

Haley was rather astonished the dealer was being so candid about the items. She had yet to realize real antique dealers are usually forthcoming about condition and the collectible nature, etc. 

An idea was starting to percolate in Haley’s pretty little head, so she asked what he was asking for the lot. She wished her basements contents were friendly rather than what actually resided there. 

“Actually, anything is probably a loss considering what they cost and the upkeep I have put into them over the years, make me an offer.”

“Would you take $200 for the lot?”

The dealer seemed to ponder a moment before answering then he said.

“That is a big loss actually, but if you are willing to buy the lot, I will accept.”

They loaded the items into Haley’s SUV. It came to three small pasteboard boxes full.

She drove the rest of the way home the primitive idea she had starting to take shape in her mind. The next evening on her way home from work, she stopped at a machine shop. She asked the owner to grind the items down into a small fine particle dust.

He was a Hispanic man and likely a devout Catholic, and refused to destroy religious artifacts in that manner. He probably figured Haley was attempting some blasphemous or perhaps nefarious activity and it became apparent he wanted her out of his business rather quickly. 

She left disappointed, but got another idea on the way home.

She would get a small welding torch. The exothermic reaction when you supplied oxygen to the burning acetylene produces temperatures in excess of 5000 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Pewter would melt at around 750 degrees and gold at about 1950. She would reduce the items to a blob of metal and then have them ground to a fine dust. She would find a different machine shop from the one she had just visited and they wouldn’t know what the metal had been before it was reduced to blobs of melted metal.

She decided to give things a couple of more days before proceeding with her plan. She felt she needed to ponder it through a while longer and take a more slow methodical approach or risk the danger of having her plan fail again.

It was the week following the full moon and if the schedule proved accurate, she wouldn’t need to worry about a visit from the concubines for a few more days. She was also hoping her discovery of religious paraphernalia’s affect on them wound inhibit them as well.

Saturday morning she drove into town and purchased a small torch kit and two large cast iron kettles. She put the items into one of the kettles and started the torch to supplying the heat. 

There were numerous flare-ups at first, none severe, as paint, paper and other combustibles that adorned the items reached their flash points. Then the pewter got hot enough to start melting. Most of the items were gold plated, so they tried to hold their shape since the melting point of the gold had not yet been reached, but the layer of plating was thin, so many turned into indistinguishable blobs of gold as the pewter underneath liquefied and the malleable gold followed the shape of the collapsing form.

After several hours of torching the contents of the pot, a molten mass was all that remained. She had set the pot up so working with it was easy and tilted the pot pouring the metallic river of liquid into the other pot, which she had filled with cold water.

The water in the receiving pot quickly began to boil as the river of molten metal in the neighborhood of 2000 degrees hit its cooling presence. After she had poured about half the liquid metals into the water, she stopped and added more water to the receiving pot. Then she finished pouring the molten metal into the receiving pot.

She knew she would need to wait for the water to cool before she could work with the metal any further. So she got a glass of tea and Clarice diary to read more on the trials the girl had endured. She needed to have all available knowledge when she attempted what she was planning, and the diary was the best source considering Clarice spirit was probably incommunicado, now.

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As she started to read the words carefully chronicled in Clarice diary she picked up at her planning to try to destroy the house as her mother had implored her to do before she let the ray’s of the sun, dispatch her spirit to wherever spirits in her situation are sent to.

Clarice felt she must do things quickly, before the Child Welfare agency came for her. She wasn’t sure if she would be able to get back to the house if she was incarcerated in an orphans facility.

Incarceration was the only word that came to her mind as she wrote of her dilemma. She started outlining a plan in her diary, to burn the house to the ground. She figured to be successful she needed an accelerant. She thought to try to get some gasoline from the tank of the Model A, but wisely decided gasoline was too volatile.

Clarice wrote of driving to town and getting a gallon of coal oil. It was flammable, but not nearly as volatile as gasoline. When she arrived at the house, she fixed herself a bite to eat and sat and pondered on the activity she was planning. 

She would likely get in trouble for Arson, but as the sole heir of the house, if she didn’t file an insurance claim, hopefully it wouldn’t be too bad. She wasn’t even sure if there was insurance on the house. She hoped as the owner, she could dispose of the house in any manner she chose.

The diary ended at that point, and at first Haley was at a loss as to why. Later it occurred to her, when she had researched the history of the house, it had been noted that Clarice had burned to death in her attempt to destroy the house, so no further entries in the diary would have been possible.

Late that afternoon, after the water in the kettle had cooled. Haley poured the kettle’s contents through a makeshift wire strainer she had built. The metal was now in little teardrop-sized ingots, the gold plating and the pewter had separated out so there were two distinct colors as she strained the water off the mass. At first she thought to try to separate the tiny chucks of metal and to save the gold out and perhaps in saving it help to recoup some of her expense, then she realized the effort would probably be more labor intensive than the return would justify. In the end, she bagged all the metal into canvas bank bags she had obtained for the purpose.

That night as the hour grew late and Haley lay in bed, dressed in her religious armor and trying to drift off to sleep, she called for Clarice again.

“Are you here Clarice?”

When the spirit didn’t appear instantly as she had the nights before, Haley at first got a sense of loss of not being able to talk to the girl again, then a sense of foreboding, thinking perhaps it meant she was about to be visited by the evil spirits. Then she felt the familiar draft on her face.

“Clarice. I am so glad to see you. I didn’t think you were going to return.”

“I am here, but I have been reminded to watch how I respond to your questions.”

“Why can you not speak freely and openly?”

“It is a part on the power struggle that has existed through all eternity, that is all I can say.”

“My question is what happened when you tried to burn the house down.”

“Oh that, I was foolish. I underestimated the powers and the wiles of the evil ones.”

“In what ways?”

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“First, I wrote what I was attempting and they probably knew exactly what to expect. Then like your earlier excursions into the chamber in daylight to avoid contact, I thought burning the house in the afternoon would prevent them trying to thwart my attempt.”

Haley felt her heart skip a beat when she realized she had probably been in danger in the chamber on her two previous visits. She realized she must proceed as if there was no respite afforded by the daylight hours. She must consider the evil was present in one form or another at all times.

“I got the coal oil as I said in my diary. I felt to start the burn on the west side since that seems to be the closest point to the evil. I know now I would probably have succeeded had I started it anywhere else. I doused the west wall with the coal oil, from a bedroom window on the second floor. Then I went outside and tried to light a match. I tried several times to light a match and each time a gust of wind would blow them out. Finally I built a small torch, and put a few drops of coal oil on it, all that was left in the can, and lit it in the sheltered protection of the house so the wind couldn’t blow it out again.”

“Is that the burnt smell I detected when I came in the house that first day, and the smell when the concubines are present and the burnt smell in the chamber?” Clarice queried.

“No that is brimstone. When the evil ones return to the underworld each day, the smell of burning brimstone is absorbed in their vaporous being.”

Clarice continued in her explanation of failure in burning the house down. 

“I touched the burning torch to the coal oil running down the side of the house, and it lit. I stood there and watched as the flames crept up the side of the house. For the first time in a long time, I felt safe again. Then the vines that grow the thorns under the Agarita reached out and grabbed me around my waist and slammed me into the flames on the side of the house. My clothing caught on fire as the oiliness of the coal oil rubbed off onto my clothing. The vines hurled me to the ground and I rolled trying to put the flames out, but I couldn’t with the fuel oil being the source of the fires combustion. I was thinking, ‘I might die, but it was a worthwhile sacrifice for destroying the evil in the house.”

“As I lay there burning, just before the agony of the flames forced my mind to shutdown because the pain was too unbearable, I watched the house seemingly extinguish itself, and knowing I had been thwarted. Then I burned to death. But even then when I knew I was going to die, I thought I must do something to protect those who follow in this place.”

Haley was aghast at the tale told by the spirit of the young girl, and gained a new level of respect for the cunning of the adversaries in her basement, as well as, for Clarice personal courage.

“So when Olaf, my mother’s cousin, inherited the house and came to stay here, I appeared to him, but instead of comforting him and trying to get him to devise a way to destroy the evil here, I only scared him into erecting the doorway on the stair and vowing never to return. Again I failed.”

“Then you came. I saw strength in you when you discovered and started reading my journal, just as mother saw strength in me and so I thought I could help you do what I couldn’t and Olaf refused, to do. I tried to approach you slowly so as not to scare you as I had Olaf.”

“I don’t know what you are planning, and you should not tell me or write it down or make your preparations too obvious, but I think you are on track to succeed where I have failed. I only wish I could help you more”

Haley wished the same thing and told Clarice she was afraid her plan would fail. Clarice sought to allay her fears.

“If your plan was so far off you were endangering yourself, I would be allowed to tell you that, for though I don’t know your plan, there are those with me who do. Take heart in knowing they think you are going in the appropriate direction and proceed. Just be cautious as you go forward. Don’t do as I did and underestimate the power of your adversaries.”

“If some of those who are with you can see my plan, what prevents those who are evil or opposed from seeing it too?” Haley asked, her question a valid concern.

“Those with me can see the good intent in your heart not the idea in your head. The evil can only see material things that would represent your idea. Though they are aware of your acquisition of the things that represent the Holy Father, they cannot see your intents in the use of these items. Considering how you have used these items up to now, they are probably not overly concerned about you doing things to protect you, and in their arrogance probably haven’t conceived you are looking for a permanent solution to their evil intent, for down through time man has rarely succeeded in thwarting the evil they do, primarily because man is so easily corrupted.”

Haley thought to ask more, but Clarice headed her off. 

“Sleep now. Store your strength for the trials that await you. I will be here for you throughout the night so you can rest.”

Haley took note of the fact Clarice had stroked her hair again, and relaxed and prepared to sleep a restful sleep under the caring watchful presence of the friendly spirit.

She awoke the next morning invigorated and ready to pursue her preparations. As she sat sipping her morning tea, she pondered her plan in her mind. Once the morning got late enough businesses would be starting to open, she went to one of those huge chain hardware stores and spent an hour talking with the man in the paint department on the techniques, and the why’s how’s and wherefores of mixing paint. He was of some help, but she ended up with more questions than answers when all was said and done.

Next she went to the discount store and bought 3 cases of water, each with 6-1 gallon jugs per case. Then she went by the Catholic Church hoping to time her arrival after any masses they might be conducting had been concluded. 

She found the priest that had agreed to help her and he blessed the three cases of water, turning the liquid to Holy Water. The blessing was a rather short invocation, and this worried Haley. 

The 23rd Psalm and the Prayer of St Michael the Archangel were both of considerable length and when the priest’s invocation over the water was brief, Haley became skeptical of its efficacy. 

Chapter 49

On her way home she decided to test the water. If it was truly Holy Water and the thorny growth on the West side of the house was evilly inspired, then pouring some of the water on the growth should produce an effect she assumed.

When she arrived at home, she removed one gallon of water from each of the three cases, and poured some in a large cup. Walking out to the West side of the house, she got to within a few feet of where the bramble grew in a tight geometric spiral. 

She kept her distance, clearly respectful of the thorny mass after the story Clarice had related to her of the growth’s part in her burning to death. 

Standing about 5 feet from where the mass covered the basement window, she tossed the contents of the cup onto the thorny growth. The mass began to move as if it had come to life and Haley retreated to a safer distance.

Returning to the house, she refilled the cup from another of the gallons and retraced her steps to the point a few feet from the mass. She tossed it again. Again, the mass started to move and she retreated a few feet further back to safety. This time a low eerie wail could be heard as if the mass were crying out in pain. Haley went back into the house to complete her tests.

She refilled the cup from the third gallon, and returned to the shrub. The places where she had thrown the two other applications had shriveled to a mass of seemingly decomposing organic plant matter. Haley was still respectful of the other healthy growths on either side of where she had apparently successfully destroyed the evil vine, so kept her distance. 




Victorian Dreams Pt. 02



She thought to see if a third application would destroy the vine completely. When she tossed the third cup of water onto the mass though, she over did it a bit and most of the water landed on the window of the basement wall, instead. It immediately started to smolder as the evil residue on its surface reacted to the water that had been blessed by the priest.

If nothing else, Haley was convinced the water was sufficiently holy. She decided she needed more though. 

She went back to the discount store where she had purchased the water, but instead of buying more water, she bought 5 5-gallon water cans. Stopping at a gas station, she filled them with water from the hose provided for radiator and battery top offs. Then went to the church and had the priest again bless the water. He jokingly commented that her house was certainly going to be a holy place when she was finished. 

She simply replied, “I hope so.” 

Her seriousness took the priest a little by surprise, and he made no further comment on the matter, or attempts at levity.

When she returned home, she tried water from each of the 5 containers on the shrub, and as she had hoped, another application on the decomposing mass caused it to dissipate completely in a matter of minutes. Yet, as the center dissolved to nothingness, the remaining sides seemed to thicken and tighten in their swirl as if steeling themselves to be destroyed in a like manner.

When she was finished the mass had been ‘water-pruned’ back to completely reveal the basement window. Haley wondered if after the water evaporated from the soil and the evil that came in the night returned that night and saw the effect of her handy work, if the vine would be regenerated somehow and her attempts for naught. That night she went through her usual ritual at bedtime, and didn’t receive a visit from the concubines. She hoped her offensive had them off guard and reeling. After all, the best defense is a good offense. She recalled her father trying to teach her chess and telling her if your king is under attack try to take the offensive, to get the opponent to back off. She hoped her offensive in fact had them reeling, and not just looking for an opening for a new assault. 

Though she figured from her experiences thus far that was what they were probably doing.

The next morning after she had dressed for work, and the sun was fully up in the Eastern sky, she walked out to look at the west side of the house. The vines hadn’t grown back, but the window was now coated with a soot-like black substance from what Haley could determine from a safe distance. She moved in closer to get a better look, a healthy respect for the vines that remained, compelling her to keep a safe distance, but as she drew closer she noted footprints in the bare soil around the window.

These weren’t footprints made by men though, but more like hooves of an animal. The ‘ogre’ creatures in Clarice diary came to mind, immediately.

She thought to apply some more holy water to see if the sooty substance on the window would rinse off easily, but time was slipping by and she needed to start her commute.

After work, she took the sacks of pewter and gold to another machine shop. When the man at the shop inquired as to why she wanted to grind the hunks of metal to powder, she was prepared.

“I buy scrap metal and use it in crafts and jewelry I make at home to sell at flea markets and the like. I melt the metal, but it seems it is easier to work with if it is in a fine dust rather than these little blobs, which is as fine as I can make it. At times I paint the dust onto an item and just swiping across the face of the item with a butane torch is enough to get it to melt and attach without overheating the item I am trying to attach the flecks to or whatever.” This explanation was enough to convince the man of what Haley was asking for, and her took the canvas bags of scrap and said he would have it ground within a couple of days.

Chapter 50

She drove on home and her plan was starting to come together, so she was starting to feel good about things in general. She tallied what she had to work with in her plan. She would have the metal dust ground from religious paraphernalia. And she had 43 gallons less the few cups she had used, to test efficacy, of the Holy Water. The plus even though she had used some of the Holy Water, was she had cleared the thorny vines from in front of the window of the basement. She thought to ask Clarice if the metal dust had the same efficacy of the crosses and things it was ground from.

She needed to get more sunlight into the chamber. With the tangle of shrubs no longer blocking the rays of the sun, if she could just get the window clean, the room below should be flooded with ‘evil-fatal’ sunlight. Her final plan called for her to be in the chamber for several hours, so she felt the flood of sunlight was necessary to protect her. She had to figure a way to get more sunlight into the room. She would have to work from inside the room to accomplish this she felt, because the evil thorny vines were too much to go up against. They had after all been the agent of Clarice’ demise in her attempts to destroy the evil in the house.

They also appeared to be the only agent of evil that were unaffected by the sun’s light.

Haley felt certain if she tried to clean the window from the outside, the vines would intervene. And she would also need to reenter the room to unlatch the window to allow her to clean the interior surfaces from the outside.

It just seemed logical to Haley, the reality of the vines and the fact the chamber would have to be reentered any way made it the wisest choice to enter the room to clean the window. She had after all entered the room safely once before. Besides, if the vines stood guard during the day and the ogres apparently roamed around on guard at night and had not as yet been revealed to her, it held that some other danger, also not yet revealed, might possibly exist on the exterior of the house. After all the windows on the third floor had closed themselves the first week she had lived in the house.

Had the house not ‘pushed’ Christian Johansson when he tried to remove the gargoyles?

And Clarice had said the house had extinguished itself when her attempts to destroy it with fire had failed. All this to Haley would seem to indicate there were other forces available to the house when the evil beings were in hiding from the sun, during daylight hours. This served to remind her of her thoughts to never relax her guard around the house even in the daytime.

Chapter 51

Haley had come to realize a lot of things in the last several weeks. Things that hadn’t really seemed out of the ordinary, like the windows closing and the landscape workers taking ill, all now seemed clearly linked to the evil in the house.

She called the landscape company and talked with the foreman that had headed the team that had removed the shrubs from her property. Ostensibly her call was to discuss re-landscaping her property, but during their conversation she innocently worked the conversation around to the ill workers. The foreman said it was all very strange.

The doctors and other health care professionals were at a loss to explain the illness and the symptoms the men were suffering, and the cynical foreman had given up on the theory of laziness, when the illness persisted for weeks after they had left her property. The main symptom was fatigue, but there were others like respiratory difficulties, and blood disorders. No amount of treatment had caused a response from the illnesses, of a favorable variety. The doctors and other medical professionals were thinking it was something like legionnaire’s disease or something similar with the respiratory involvement, which had not yet been discovered and documented. 

Yet, it must be worse, because this had blood abnormalities associated with it. The Centers for Disease Control had come in to do their own investigation, but they too were at a loss to explain it all.

The CDC getting involved had afforded the itinerant workers the best available medical care at no cost to them, yet there was seemingly no medical cure to the problems they were experiencing.

The cynical foreman had changed his opinions on the matter completely, then a week or so ago, they had all recovered quite miraculously, which served to regenerate his cynical thoughts about the workers.

Haley quickly calculated this timing in her mind and it roughly corresponded to the dates when she had thrown the Holy Water on the thorny vine growth on the West side of the house. 

To her, all this corroborated her thoughts on there being other unseen, and as yet unrevealed, evil-induced dangers to the house. No doubt they all stemmed from the evil source, but yet, they didn’t seem to have the limitations as some of the minions did. Yes, the vines were ‘allergic’ to Holy Water, but the sun had no effect on them. In fact it appeared their purpose was to shield the sun from hitting the windows of the basement and retard its penetration into the chamber below and to protect the house in some way.

Haley told the foreman, she would contact him in the spring when her exterior work on the house was complete, to schedule the re-landscaping project. They ended the conversation on that note.

Haley was firmly convinced now she needed to plan a revisit to the chamber, to clean the window. The idea scared her, though not as much as the prospects of attack, the thorny evil vines, portended. At least in the daytime she appeared reasonably safe from the evil in the chamber, though she wasn’t naïve enough, at this point, to discount any fears on the matter or any potential evil possible from her presence in the chamber. She did take a little comfort in knowing she had accomplished going into the chamber by day once before. Further it would give her another chance to ‘case the joint’.

She giggled as the phrase went through her mind again. She sobered and thought to herself how evil begets evil.

Before she started fighting this evil force in the basement, she had led a safe sane crime free existence. Sure she had considered shoplifting candy as most children do, and had even thought to steal a coveted CD on one occasion, but better judgment and good upbringing prevailed and she had refrained from the activity. Now she had stolen the alter vestment, and was thinking in terms of criminal behavior as she thought of ‘casing the joint’ as criminals do before they perpetrate a crime.

Another idea that came to her was to get a cool mist humidifier and fill it with Holy Water and position it at the doorway on the staircase misting Holy Water into the Chamber. Then perhaps any spirit that might somehow appear in the daytime would be walking into a ‘mist of pain’.

Chapter 52

She liked the concept of a ‘mist of pain’. She started to plan the effort for the following Saturday, and figured her follow up effort to finalize the fate of the evil in her basement, would need to occur the following day. She based this on the fact her destruction of the Vines in front of the window had resulted in the window becoming coated in the black soot-like substance. She surmised that was probably because she had tossed the Holy Water on the dirty window, and the soot was the result of the evil residue on the window, which polluted the refractive clarity of the glass, burning when the Holy Water was applied

It might even be that her efforts on Saturday to get more light into the chamber would be rendered moot when she waited until the next day to finish her intended actions. Once the Master and his minions returned on Saturday night and discovered the window had been cleaned, they well could undo her efforts by applying another layer of the soot like coating to the window. This if they were responsible for the coating instead of it being a byproduct of the reaction of the evil substance on the glass with the application of Holy Water. She had seen an exothermic-like reaction when she first threw the water onto the exposed panes. This was similar to what she had seen when she traced the mortar with her finger damp with the Holy Water, and when she had thrown the water on the concubine. But it was the next day before the soot-like coating was evident from the dousing of the window.

So she had to conclude the cleaning of the window was only temporary, in fact it was likely her efforts to clean the window would be rendered moot by the next day. It seemed likely the coating would reoccur once the evil returned after sunset, Saturday night. If that were to occur, she would need to modify her plan to get everything concluded in a single day. All these considerations were going through her mind when she went to bed that night. As she lay down to sleep in her alter vestment muffler and T-shirt and panties, she had said her 23rd Psalm prayer, and refilled the cup at her bedside with Holy Water. In fact, she had filled a pitcher with holy water to refill the cup, should the need to launch multiple attacks during the night.

Chapter 53

It was a cloudless night but the New Moon was approaching, so it was a ripe occasion for her to receive visitors. Yet, none had appeared by midnight and so Haley thought to summon Clarice.

“Clarice are you there?”

Immediately the draft she felt on her left cheek when the spirit of the girl appeared was present and the soft glow of white light illuminated her room.

“Yes, I am here.”

“I have a question, can you answer it for me?”

“Yes, as long as it falls within the boundaries I have explained to you.”

“Ok, I understand.”

“Ask your question.”

“I assume once an item is holy, it remains Holy. By this I mean, if I took a cross or crucifix and melted or ground it down, the Holy properties would remain in the resultant metal, though its shape is no longer that of a holy symbol. Is this assumption correct?”

“Yes, once metal or even plastic, plaster or clay, is shaped into something representative of the Holy Father, it retains that Holiness for all time. Just as the Holy Water remains Holy Water once blessed though it leaves the church where it was blessed. There are limitations though. Just as putting a cup of Holy Water in a lake wouldn’t make the entire body of water Holy, the molecules of Holy water though mixed and diluted in the presence of the thousands of gallons of water in the lake, would retain their Holy enrichment.”

“Thank you, I have my plan complete now, and hopefully, soon this house will be rid of the evil that taints it.”

“Yes, those with me who know of your planning are pleased with the idea you are conceiving, they do however request I warn you again to not underestimate the powers arrayed against you.”

“Thank you, tell them thank you for me. I will be cautious.”

Clarice softly caressed Haley’s cheek again, and dematerialized from the room. Though the timing was right, the concubines and other evil entities that resided in her home didn’t appear, and Haley got a good night’s sleep.

Chapter 54

The next day after work, she went to the machine shop and retrieved her bags of metal dust. The five bags of metal blobs were now only four bags of fine metallic dust particles, but the result was as she had hoped it would be. When the man at the shop commented on the fact some of the metal was fine gold and the rest pewter, Haley was prepared and told him she was aware of that and the first thing she would do was to separate the metals using a method similar to panning where the heavier gold particles would settle to the bottom and the lighter pewter particles would slosh out with the water.

He was rather impressed with her technique, and told her so. She hoped to end the conversation by saying the scrap was cheaper than buying the metal in a purified state, but in the final analysis it probably cost her more in the amount of labor it took to get the metals in a useable form, but she enjoyed the effort and so that was half the reward. 

The attempt at terminating the conversation was successful, as the man produced an invoice for the grinding services and Haley paid and left.

She went to the discount store and bought 5 more water containers, filled them and had the priest bless them raising her compliment of Holy Water from 43 to 68 gallons. She also bought a cool mist humidifier at the discount store.

The next day was Saturday and time to put her plan in action. No visitors on Friday night let her get a good night sleep and she awoke refreshed and primed for action. She set up the cool mist humidifier at the doorway on the stairs leading to the chamber, and filled its large reservoir with Holy Water. As she drank her tea waiting for businesses to open, she thought to write a warning note to anyone who might follow her should she fail in her attempts and become a servant to the evil or die, or both. The note was brief. It said the house contained an evil presence and should be destroyed whatever the legal dealings were necessary to allow that to happen. She briefly summarized the deaths of Christian, Chirsty and Clarice Johansson, and added if someone was reading this she must be dead, too.

The facts she outlined should convince the authorities no matter what the value of the house from an historical standpoint, its presence was a danger to all mankind and needed to be wiped from the face of the earth. She told as much as she could with the knowledge she had, and sealed the, larger than expected, note in an envelope that she placed on the mantle above the fireplace in the sitting room. She hoped it would be found by anymore who discovered her body if her attempts of the next couple of days led to her death. As an after thought, she sprinkled Holy Water on the envelope to hopefully prevent the evil forces in the house from removing or reading the contents. By then it was approaching mid-morning, so Haley drove into town to the hardware store and purchased paint pigment, rolling pans, brushes, and rollers. When she returned it was going on noon, and she wanted to execute her prep-plan at 1 again.

She put a T-shirt in a basin, choosing a different color than white this time, along with the alter vestment and started both to soaking in Holy Water. 

She turned on the cool mist humidifier and felt a warm and fuzzy safe feeling steel over her as the cool mist began to be atomized from the device. She didn’t like the fact the mist spray was only about 6 inches from the device and didn’t even reach the door, but figured since hot air rises, the cool mist would settle and would soon be tumbling down the stair into the chamber below. She used a small piece of twine to tie the door open by affixing the twine to the doorknob, then swinging the door back on its hinges and tying the other end to the handrail that ran along the wall as part of the stairs descent. This way, the mist had no obstruction to tumbling down the stair, and it was a precaution she had thought of as she was leaving the chamber on one of her earlier visits.

She had no doubts the evil forces could break the twine or untie her efforts and close the door if they wanted, and this just prevented the door from swinging closed of its own weight and gravity and perhaps latching and locking her into the chamber.

Chapter 55

She felt hunger and fixed herself a sandwich, yet the trepidation she felt of returning to the chamber and the possible evil she might encounter there took her appetite, and after preparing the light lunch left it uneaten on the kitchen counter top.

Next she fixed a bucket of sudsy-water to clean the window with. She used sudsy ammonia mixed in Holy Water and a small amount of dish soap to prepare her cleaning fluid. An old rag was dropped in the bucket, then as an after thought she dropped a green scrub pad in the bucket in case a non-evil component such as decades old dirt should prove stubborn in its removal. She felt rather certain any evil-placed coating would dissolve on contact with the Holy Water. As an after thought she prepared a second bucket of the mixture without mixing it with Holy Water, in case the soot-like residue appeared and she needed a non-holy mixture to clean it with. She went to her room and wrung out the alter vestment and T-shirt. 




Victorian Dreams Pt. 03



This is the third in a three part presentation of a novel. You should go back and read Victorian Dreams Ch 01 and Pt 2 to gain context before reading this third piece.

This part, as well, as the two parts that preceed it are Copyright 2003, 2004 by Charles F. Johnson and all rights are reserved and protected under the Copyright laws of the United stats and other countries. 

Chapter 57

There was only one problem. Though their hooved feet and strong muscular legs made them speedy outside where they patrolled each night, on the stone floor of the basement, they had difficulty gaining traction and never did get up to speed before Haley reached the steps that led to the relative safety above.

As she ran up the steps two at a time, the ogres reached the bottom after she had only covered about half the distance to the door frame above, and a fourth of the way to the safety of the room the stair emptied into. One of the two ogres stepped onto the bottom step and launched himself up after the fleeing Haley. 

Grabbing her by the leg, he started to pull her back into the chamber below. His hand started to smolder as it landed on a part of the overalls, which had received the treatment of mist when Haley had stopped by the humidifier on the two passes by it enroute to the chamber. Releasing her leg, his hand slid to her foot, grabbing the tennis shoe the woman wore.

Fortunately for Haley these weren’t form fitting athletic shoes and only cheap canvas tennis-style shoes, she had purchased for tasks such as painting and cleaning, for her foot slipped easily out of the shoe. 

She regained her feet and continued to climb up the stairs. The ogre lost his balance slipped backwards as her foot came out of the shoe, and he fell to the bottom step.

He immediately regained his footing though and started up the stairs, his hooved feet managing to gain traction on the wooden steps better than the stone floor. 

Haley was just making the doorway when the ogre, covering the steps in mighty bounds started up after her. He reached her just as she entered the mist from the humidifier. 

He recoiled as the fine spray of holy water hit him, like a giant fist had slammed into his chest, and clattered down the steps to end up in a heap at the base of the stair knocking his sibling down as he fell backward.

Haley escaped into the kitchen, shaken and shocked by the close call she had just experienced. She sat in the kitchen trembling for a moment, and watching as the two ogre creatures attempted to climb the stairs several times only to be repulsed when they encountered the mist of the Holy Water. After several attempts, their efforts ceased.

Once Haley regained her composure, she went outdoors.

Though it was nearly dark she could see the window had already been closed, though in the dark it was hard to tell if her nearly catastrophic attempts to clean the window had produced any results.

The woman was almost calm after her harrowing events of a few moments before, and her mind was already at work on a way to circumvent this setback. Fortunately, she had already been considering the possibility her efforts today would be rendered moot with the over night delay her plan called for.

Returning to the house she went to her stash and got a small container of the metal dust created from the melted religious paraphernalia and walked boldly up to the window by the basement. She sprinkled the metal dust on the edges of the shrubs on either side of the gap created when she tested the holy water.

No discernable result was apparent immediately. 

Disappointed she returned to the house and started her preparations for the next day. She considered as she went the possibility her plan wasn’t valid. No reaction had been apparent when she had dusted the thorns with the ground up metal dust. So the efficacy of the dust might not exist. 

She had estimated she would need 4 gallons of paint to coat the north and east walls of the basement chamber, so she added a half bag of metal dust to each of the four, gallon cans of paint pigment base she had purchased, then filled each with holy water, making a gallon of paint in each pigment base can. 

She used her drill and a paint stirrer attachment to thoroughly mix the paint in each can and replaced the lids on the cans. She had two bags of holy metal dust remaining for the next phase of her plan.

She moved the paint and the brushes and rollers and roller pans to the top of the stairs that led to the basement chamber. She checked the humidifier, and discovered the level of holy water in the reservoir had gone down only slightly, even though the humidifier had been putting out a constant spray of fine mist for almost 10 hours. She topped off the reservoir as she intended to leave the humidifier operating throughout the night. 

She wasn’t certain if having been discovered in the basement by the evil entities if perhaps they might come for her now, seeing her presence there as a sign she had succumed to their wiles.

She didn’t think the concubines, as vaporous beings could manhandle her to the basement, but felt certain the ogres could as they had with Clarice. 

She had seen the mist of Holy Water repulse them already and so hoped if her presence had somehow set in motion a possibility she could now fall victim to the chambers horrors, she could somehow delay it by keeping the ogres at bay until she could complete her plan the next day.

Chapter 58

She peered into the chamber but could see no activity. Even the noise and the moans that were characteristically emanating from down below were strangely absent. The only noise was the sound as the humidifier disseminated its holy mist of water.

She had gone about her preparations in such a deliberate manner the scare of an hour or so earlier had completely left her mind. Now she was famished, not having had anything to eat since early that morning, and then only a toasted English muffin with a little jam. She stopped and ate the sandwich she had prepared at noon, but had been unable to eat. The bread was a little stale after having sat on the cabinet all afternoon, but the sandwich worked well to sate her hunger.

She went to her room and removed the alter vestment and placed it on a chair back to finish drying before bed. She went to the sitting room and as she sat on the antique armchair in the room, a let down occurred. The impact of the close encounter suddenly registered in her mind and she began to sob violently.

After a time she performed one of her rituals of self-castigation and got her crying under control, she was suddenly worn out and decided to go to bed.

Returning to her room, she removed the overalls, and replaced the vestment muffler style around her neck. Kneeling at her bedside, she spoke the 23rd Psalm prayer again and then snuggled down into the bed. 

She was wearing the holy water shirt and the vestment and the cup and pitcher of holy water stood ready by her bed. She fully expected to receive evil visitors that night, because the moon was just past new so the skies were dark, and because of the events of earlier that day, but the only visitor she received that night was Clarice.

Fatigue quickly overtook Haley and she was almost asleep when she felt the familiar draft on her cheek. She opened her eyes to see the vaporous image of the girl floating in the space beside her bed as usual. She smiled and Clarice spoke.

“You did good today, but you must be more careful.”

“I couldn’t foresee the unfortunate chain of events, but considering the outcome, it appears I had adequately prepared for it.”

“Yes, but a lot of it was luck and chance and more times than not those won’t work to your favor when you are dealing with an evil as you are here. Rest now for you will need all your strength tomorrow. I will stay by your side tonight so your sleep isn’t disturbed.”

Clarice caressed her face as she spoke the final words to her human friend, and Haley, comforted by her presence, drifted off, quickly, to an exhausted sleep.

She awoke as the sun’s rays bathed the room in warm light the following morning. As she sat drinking her morning tea, she reassembled her plan in her mind. She hadn’t planned it that way, but the day she would attempt to permanently thwart the evil in her basement, was Sunday.

Appropriate she thought as the fact registered in the young woman’s head. While she drank her first cup of tea, she turned the 4 cans of paint upside down to allow the metal particles, no doubt settled in the bottom a chance to re-suspend in the paint. 

When she finished her first cup of tea, she went to the tool storage and retrieved the paint stirrer attachment and her drill. She went to her room and placed an old T-shirt she wouldn’t mind getting paint spattered in the basin of holy water. She also placed the alter vestment in the basin and added additional holy water to thoroughly cover the two articles. 

She didn’t like the idea of possibly getting paint on the alter vestment, which she intended to return after this ordeal was over, but there was no way she was going to go into the basement chamber without the proven certain safety it provided.

She wasn’t certain, but she felt at least, if she encountered the evil they would have to convince her to remove the religious items she wore, the soaked shirt, the vestment and the crosses before they could potentially force her submission to their service.

She slipped off her T-shirt from the day before, and pulled the wet one from the basin, wrung the excess water from it, and slipped it on. The effect was the same as it had been the prior times, but again, it didn’t have the embarrassing effect it had the first time when her breasts were brought to prominence by the cling of the wet, thin fabric, and the cold reaction of her nipples. 

She slipped the vestment on next and pinned it in place, then slipped on her overalls, in hopes the bib on the overalls would protect the vestment from some of the paint spatter.

She returned to the kitchen and filled a spray bottle with holy water. She retrieved her hammer from the toolbox, and went to the yard. When she got the west side, she immediately noted where the metal dust had been sprinkled on the shrubs had killed them back further. 

She felt emboldened now as she walked up to the basement window, and started beating it with the hammer. After the glass shattered, she continued to beat on the window destroying the casement along with the glass, as well. Creeping along the ground, the thorny vine moved toward the woman’s ankles from both ends of the damaged growth.

Haley felt the vine wrap around her right ankle, and a shot of fear went through her. She felt her preparations would work, but now she had to see, as she felt nothing was entirely certain. She reached for the spray bottle of holy water hanging from the hammer loop on the leg of the overalls, and started applying the sacred spray to the vine around her ankle. It quickly recoiled from the mist of burning liquid its thorns cutting her ankle deeply as it quickly unwrapped from around her leg in retreat. The wail of the day she tested the water on the vine began again. The vine that had started at her feet from the other direction stopped its advance.

Haley again started raining hammer blows on the remnants of the window casing, seeking to destroy the window completely. As soon as she started to strike the house again, the vine that had stopped advancing toward her stated moving in her direction again. 

Haley saw the movement of the vine in her peripheral vision and turned the spray bottle on the approaching evil plant. The spray stopped it again, and satisfied her efforts on the window were satisfactory considering the danger that existed by her continued presence, she retreated from the spot by the window.

At a safe distance from the thorny vine to stop, Haley turned to survey the damage she had managed to inflict on the window and that the vine had managed to inflict on her ankle. The glass was gone, the casement all but destroyed, from her vantage point, she could see the light of the sun falling on the far wall in the room below. 

Mission accomplished.

Chapter 59

Her ankle flesh was ripped deeply, the bone all but revealed in a couple of places. It was bleeding though not an untoward amount, so Haley proceeded with her plan, just pulling her sock up to cover the ankle wound.

Returning to the house, she quickly removed the lids from the cans of paint and stirred them with the electric drill. Then she ferried the paint to the basement in two trips. The first trip revealed the room bathed in sunlight, though the morning sun was on the other side of the house. The place on the wall where the sunlight struck the strongest was just below the shackles where the common concubines hung each night. The wall smoldered as the rays of sunlight struck the evil residue the wall was coated in. 

After ferrying the second load of paint and the painting supplies, Haley walked around the room, spraying down the walls she intended to paint with the holy water. The north and east walls both smoldered briefly at the application of the water, but when she sprayed the west wall, nothing happened. Haley quickly concluded the north and east walls were where evil ingress portals could be achieved, and not on the west wall. 

The south wall was under the staircase, so not of concern to Haley. She hoped she wouldn’t come to regret not checking that wall, but to get in behind the stair would not have been an easy task, so she was content her original plan to only paint the east and north walls was sufficient. 

Besides the next phase of her plan, should eliminate any threat from the south wall.

Returning to the ground floor, she refilled the spray bottle and the humidifier, and then went to the basement again.

She stirred the first can of paint with a stir stick and poured some into the roller pan. Filling the roller with paint, she began to roll it on to the wall. As she rolled she continually recited the Prayer of St. Michael she had memorized that night on the Internet.

‘Most glorious Prince of the Heavenly Armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. Come to the assistance of men whom God has created to His likeness and whom He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. I venerate thee as my guardian and protector; to thee, the Lord has entrusted the souls of the redeemed to be led into heaven. We pray therefore to the God of Peace to crush Satan beneath our feet, that he may no longer retain men captive and do injury to thy children. We Offer our prayers to the Most High, that without delay they may draw His mercy down upon us; take hold of the dragon, the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, bind him and cast him into the bottomless pit ... that he may no longer seduce the nations. Amen’ 

She had added the ‘Amen’ just as she did with her 23rd Psalm prayer repeating the prayer over and over as she went about her work. 

Chapter 60

It took several hours, but Haley painted and prayed as if possessed. Once she had concluded painting both walls, she went back and touched up the places where the actual portal existed and where the common concubines hung chained to the wall. Both places had bubbled up after they were painted. The spray down with Holy water had apparently prepared the other surfaces adequately, because nowhere else did the 'holified' paint react to contact with the walls. As Haley finished touching up the two places, she was running out of paint.

She left the basement chamber and returned to the main floor of the house and noted the time. It was 1:45 and it would be 3 before the next phase of her plan would execute, if all went well.

Haley was decidedly calm, figuring her plan was likely going to work fine. The chamber first off was bathed in sunlight and the walls were coated with paint made from Holy Water and containing the particles of metal from the ground up religious paraphernalia. 

She felt as if the house had taken on a festive air. She prepared herself a light lunch and made a pitcher of iced tea. The portals would be blocked only temporarily by the holy water, but even when the paint dried, the metal dust particles ground from the religious articles should continue to serve as an effective barrier. 

At least that was what Haley hoped would happen, 

but there was another step to her plan, and that would be concluded in just a little while. For now though, the sunlight, Holy Water based paint, and metal flakes would certainly hold back the tide of evil that might attempt to reenter the basement chamber. It would seem no ingress portals existed any longer. 

Haley was however a lot wiser than when this all started and she had no doubt there could exist other avenues of ingress for the evil.

In her Bible studies she had noted the number 6 had significance in Revelations in relation to the devils existence, and had heard news accounts when she was younger about ‘666’ being the devils number. 

So she surmissed the fact the basement west wall was on a perfect 6 degree to 186 degree axis was for a reason and that was why the architect had been so adamant about the laying of the foundation and had required the builder restart it numerous times. 

That coupled with the European gargoyles and no doubt the Comanche burial ground, all combined to make the house attractive as an entry portal for the Master and his minions, and as a base of operations as they sought to unleash their evil on the unwitting human mortals of the earth.

After eating the lunch, she went back to the basement to see the result of her work. The walls were almost dry to the touch and as she ran her hand along the wall, she could feel the rough texture created by the metal dust.

She thought to test the paint job, and it seemed dry enough to do so. She used the spray bottle of holy water and sprayed all over the walls and no where did she get reaction from the application of the water, indicating to her in her mind the evil threat was probably eliminated, yet her plan wasn’t complete yet. She went to the verandah and took the time to doctor and bandage her ankle where the thorny evil vine had attacked her earlier. 

Though the wound was fresh, it already appeared to be infected. The vine-induced illness of the Mexican landscape crew came to Haley’s mind. 

Removing the sock that covered the wound caused it to start bleeding again. She thought to wash it with Holy Water, but rejected that idea for fear of a severe exothermic-like reaction to any evil residue the thorny vine might have left behind.

Though she didn’t like the prospect, just as Clarice had thought her sacrifice would have been worth it if she lost her life in her pursuit of burning the house, if her leg got infected and ended up scarred or even if it ended up having to be amputated it would be worth it if her attempts today were successful.

Chapter 61

At 3 pm precisely the trucks arrived. 

Two cement mixers pulled in and as she sat on the verandah, the alter vestment put away, her shirt all but dry. The first driver asked where she wanted the concrete delivered.

She limped as she came off the verandah to greet and give direction to the drivers of the trucks. Her ankle had started to swell where the thorny vine had cut into her flesh. The bandage had already soaked through once with blood and had been replaced with a fresh bandage. Haley was a little concerned about the wound, considering the facts she knew about the Hispanic workers health issues after their encounter with the vine and its attack on them. The bloodied condition of the workers that morning weeks earlier when they had removed the original vine from the property was vivid in her mind.




Victorian Dreams Pt. 03



She pointed to the west side of the house as she came off the porch. When the man backed his truck up, and then got out, she thanked him for being so punctual.

She had gotten rather abrupt with the man at the cement yard when he had charged her premium for delivery on Sunday, and had told him under no uncertain terms he better be punctual. 

She queried the driver regarding the viscosity of the mix. He told her he had never delivered a load as viscous as this. He said that wasn’t a problem, it would still dry, but he had never seen a project that required concrete this loose.

Haley told him it was to seal the basement so she needed it soupy to find all the corners. She also gave each of the drivers 3 of the 5-gallon jugs of holy water and a bag of the metal dust and asked them to mix them in with he contents of their mixers.

She then had each of the trucks back up to the window and empty their load of concrete into the basement. As the liquid concrete flowed down the chute and into the window, she watched the room fill. As the loosely viscous concrete sought the corners and filled every space in the room, she sighed a sigh if relief and thought that perhaps finally she would be able to see her plans for the completion of her B n B reach fruition.

As the concrete reached the gargoyles standing in the corner, they burst into flames when the concrete contacted them and Haley felt certain of the Holy characteristics of the concrete. It was strange to see something as non-volatile as clay or ceramic or whatever similar substance had been used to create the hideous little statues spontaneously burst into flame and burn so readily in the corner. 

The concrete flowed so quickly into the chamber the statues were covered quickly, so even the fact they were burning at no point placed the house in jeopardy of catching on fire.

The next morning on her way to work, she dropped the alter vestment at the cleaners to have it cleaned. 

When she got home, she went to the west side of the house and checking on the progress of the drying, found the concrete had almost completely hardened to a solid mass. Yet she could still feel heat coming from the surface as she reached through the window to test the concrete. 

What was really surprising but an extremely pleasant surprise was the thorny vine was completely gone. In its stead a full mat of Bluebonnets and Indian Paint Brush covered the beds where the thorny mass had grown. This wasn’t too strange as the Bluebonnet is the state flower of Texas, and grew wild all over the state. 

Usually the bright blue flowers were accompanied by the yellow and red Indian Paint Brush, also wild and native flowers. 

What was uncharacteristic was the plant was a short day bloomer and only had a brief period where it bloomed and flourished and that was in the spring, in late April and early May. Yet, it was September. Yes the days and more importantly the nights were approximately the same length as they would be in the spring, but the heat this time of year in Texas was just starting to abate from the relentless high temperatures of summer and usually after the bloom in the spring you never saw these two species again until the next spring.

Chapter 62

That night Haley received visitors again. Five in total, four she recognized, but the fifth had to be introduced to her. The first to appear was Clarice. The familiar cold draft on her left cheek brought her out of that floating state you feel right before sleep overtakes you.

Haley opened her eyes to see the deep blue pools of Clarice eyes looking into her own. The look on the girl spirits face was different, somehow happier. As she came awake, she noted three spirits standing at the foot of the bed, as well. 

The two common concubines and the raven-haired lady were standing there.

Usually the common concubines would be in the corner of the room when the raven-haired concubine appeared and only come to the foot of the bed after she had moved to Haley’s side. It was as if their ‘station’ in the scheme of things was lowlier than that of the Master’s concubine and they were held to a more servile position in the room. But this time all three stood at the end of the bed as if ‘station’ or caste or whatever it was had changed.

Though they wore the same style of diaphanous clothing as before, the color of all three women’s garments was now white like Clarice’.

They stood at the foot of the bed making no attempt to come any closer to Haley. Perhaps they thought she might recognize them, as she had, but not recognize the uniform change, which she had. 

She felt no fear at all. Only the magnificence of being in the company of so many benevolent spirits apparently with no possibility of being visited by evil, spirit or otherwise.

Besides had not Clarice said the servants and minions of the Master couldn’t visit while she was in the room. All these thoughts raced through her head, as the spirits hovered at the foot of the bed, casting off enough pure white light to appear it was daylight, instead of the minimal light that normal prevailed less than a week after the new moon.

Then Haley noticed another spirit, hovering just behind and beside Clarice. The lack of recognition on her part to this fifth being caused Clarice to speak.

“Dear friend, this is my mother.” Clarice spoke, her arm embracing the spirit that floated beside her.

“Your selflessness and you diligence to destroy the evil here, has given her back to me. It has earned you a special place in The Holy Father’s presence, as well. These others were also freed with your success.” Clarice gestured to the three at the foot of the bed.

“Now they too can take their rightful place in heaven with the Holy Father and his Son.”

“When you destroyed the evil in this house, you broke the bonds of servitude the master had over these women. Their weakness has been recognized and their transgressions forgiven, by a God who knows no ill intent toward any of his true believers.”

Haley finally spoke, a touch of irony in her voice.

“How can they be called ‘true believers’ if they served the Master of consummate evil?” Clarice response was simple.

“In order to believe and follow absolute evil, you must first believe there is absolute good. The Holy Father and his Son understand the wiles of the Master are treacherous and powerful. They love all his children, and want all to have a place with them in heaven. They are incapable of bearing ill will. He will punish those who don’t believe though, as what purpose would it serve to have those around him that don’t believe in his divine greatness?”

While Clarice explained, the concubines slowly drifted to the side of the bed. An explanation having been tendered to the woman, they probably felt she would feel no threat if they moved closer. Standing next to her, the Raven-haired lady took her hand and stroked it gently, then spoke once Clarice had finished.

“You freed us from the bonds of service to the evil Master. For that we are all three grateful. When you find your place in heaven after your time here on earth is done, we will all be united again and we must certainly celebrate the great good you have done.”

The common concubines almost in unison offered their appreciation to Haley.

“Thank you Miss.”

Haley blushed at the accolades she was receiving. Thinking to say something to make light of her efforts, and to point out her principal purpose, at least in the beginning, was to merely secure her investment in the house. But understanding the only way to graciously accept a complement or apology, she simply replied, “You are so welcome.”

The concubines slowly dissipated out of existence, at least in the room anyway. At almost the same instant the concubines disappeared, the spirit of Chirsty Johansson appeared at her side where they had hovered the instant before. She took Haley’s hand as the raven-haired lady had, and held it tenderly in her own. Haley noted warmth to her touch she hadn’t experienced with the others.

“Thank you for restoring my soul and allowing me to be with my precious daughter again.” Haley felt the drops of moisture on her arm as the spirits tears dripped from her face.

Clarice spoke again.

“You have earned a place in the Holy Father’s kingdom equal in stature to that of the Apostles and the other sainted ones. You have prevented a Great evil from being unleashed on all mankind. Your service to the Father and the Son and the protection you have provided his children is great in his eyes and your reward shall be eternal. But not like the eternity promised by the evil Master. The Father’s eternity is real and one worth being proud of and worthy of the greatness you have achieved. You are Seraphim in God’s eyes now. You need no longer to fear the evil. From this day forth, evil will tremble in your presence. You have been designated by the Holy Father as a warrior equal to or greater than the great warriors of his Kingdom, like Michael the Archangel. You need fear nothing, my friend.”

Clarice had a huge endearing smile on her face, as she bent and kissed Haley on the cheek.

“Will I ever see you again?” Haley asked the spirit of the girl.

“I am here as always if you need me.” The spirit said as her and her mother slowly faded away. The room was suddenly dark, and Haley just as quickly felt completely alone.

Also occurring in her mind was she knew nothing of the concubines existence before they had become minions of evil for the Prince of darkness. What had their lives been like? The lives of Christian, Chirsty and Clarice Johansson had been fairly well documented in Clarice Diary and in the gaps she had filled in, in the discussions the two had participated in. 

Yet, Haley had no idea regarding the other three women. Had they been robbed of rich lives and consigned to lives devoid of ‘normal’ happiness after falling victim to the seduction of the Master or some of his evil hoard? Had their destiny been slated toward significant discovery that would have benefited all mankind?

Haley could see where a young scientist poised to discover a cure for cancer or an ambitious young leader positioned to prevent a war might become the target of evil, for these results, favored by all mankind, would run contrary to the plans of the evil lord. It seemed to fit his agenda, to not only bring evil and ill will to all mankind, but to stand in the way of discoveries that might serve to benefit man.

The accounts of his evil deeds spoken of in the Bible and less credibly in the fiction and lore that came down through time giving testament to his sole purpose of preventing man the comfort he sought and the goodness the Father and his Son promised to those who followed his teachings of goodness of character and obedience to the basic tenets of living life following the right path and doing the right thing for all of his fellow men.

It was comforting to know despite their transgressions, if falling to the temptation and the wiles of the devil could be considered merely a part of the fallibility of man, and not a transgression, that the Father and his Son were willing, out of an abundance of unconditional love, to accept them back into good graces and the promise of eternal salvation. At that moment she felt a new appreciation for those who felt it their calling to spread the word of God to those who would listen with an open heart.

Having fought with the devil, Haley couldn’t help but wonder what the lives of these unfortunate women had been like before they fell into the evil Masters trap of lies and deception.

She lay in her bed for hours, not sleeping, not afraid, and yet feeling somehow incomplete. Then something miraculous occurred.

Chapter 63

Across the room from where she lay, an image appeared. This image was of two men, looking ancient and wise, one sitting on a great throne, the other sitting at his feet. Cherubs, laughing and giggling and having a merry time, surrounded them. Some tumbled and rolled around on the floor, while others hovered on gossamer wings, on the sides and above the seated men. The older one seated on the throng spoke, his voice seemed to shake the very earth itself.

“Go in peace my child, I am with you always.”

Haley felt a warmth steal over her and sleep came.

Haley awoke the next morning, feeling as if the world had been whitewashed pure and clean. When she arose from her bed, she noted the limp was gone and there appeared to be no infection in the wound created by the evil vine. When she removed the bandage, there wasn’t even a hint there had been a nasty wound there the day before. There wasn’t even a scar, yet the wound had been almost to the bone in a couple of places and had bled profusely, soaking first her sock, then one bandage and almost soaking its replacement.

She went to work, and everyone commented on her freshness of spirit. At lunch she went to the dry cleaners and picked up the alter vestment.

After work, she went by the Catholic Church to return it to the priest she had befriended during the ordeal she had just passed through. When she explained to him she had stolen the garment and why, and started apologizing profusely, he stopped her and in an almost reverent tone spoke.

“My child, I knew you had taken the item the day you took it. The night before your first visit here, I had a dream, and in that dream an angel of the Lord appeared to me and told me not to seek its return. I was reminded of the story where the angel appeared to Joseph in a dream telling him not to divorce Mary for being with child, for the child she carried was of the Lord.”

“The angel told me a Holy Warrior had been born and had use of the item. The angel advised me to support you in whatever way you needed, and said you were sent to me by God because of my deep faith. I was complemented by the message. It is yours to keep and I thank you for coming to me when you sought the Grace of Our Lord, the Holy Father and his Son our Savior.”

Haley was again astounded at the reverence in which her meager fight for Good over Evil had elevated her to. This characteristic humble nature seemed to complement the humble nature God looked for in his warriors. It was the same humble attitude exhibited by Father Andrew.

She stayed and talked with Father Andrew for a couple of hours that night and visited with him from time to time in the days and months that followed. They became good friends, and she learned a great deal from him regarding religion, though she had no intention of pursuing a faith-based lifestyle.

In fact, she was rather disappointed with Judeo-Christian beliefs and the fact they stumbled forward in a kind of blind optimism, choosing to ignore the fact the evil that counter-pointed the good of God and Jesus existed. This was a regular topic of discussion between Father Andrew and herself.

Father Andrew was really at a loss to explain why things appeared this way. He stated the Catholic Church had rites and masses that were designed to rid demonic possessions, and similar occurrences, and even had priests who specialized in administering these rites.

The only explanation he could give as to why followers weren’t routinely given instruction on how to rid their surroundings of demonic presence was it required a precise approach and the danger associated with an attempt was too great to subject lay believers to. 

Moreover, he felt the Lord would rather have people coming to him for the rewards of eternity in heaven rather than to avoid the potential of eternity in the kind of satanic hell that was the other side of that coin.

Chapter 64

Haley had continued to study the Bible after her harrowing experiences with the evil bent on its downfall. This to better prepare her should another occurrence present itself that required she do battle with the forces of evil. She was supposedly a ‘holy warrior’ now, so she needed to arm herself should another call come. She felt the ‘rose-colored glasses’ approach of the church was a selfish approach. or immature at the very least, because the bible clearly stated and graphically depicted the results of not being found faithful in the end.

Father Andrew didn’t whole-heartedly agree but he didn’t disagree either, having pursued an independent study of Biblical doctrine. Yet, he explained he was constrained from deviating from the doctrinal teachings of the church, time tested through Centuries.

When she arrived home that night, she placed the alter vestment, in its protective dry cleaning bag in the top of her closet in the ground floor bedroom of the house.

The evil vanquished, Haley set about the restoration of the house. She never moved to Clarice old room, finding comfort in the ground floor room that had been witness to the battles she had just won.

When the concrete in the basement dried, Haley went to look at the result of her handy work. The level of the concrete was about two feet below the level of the floor above, so she could crawl around and move in the space that remained. She wished it had filled completely. But the extremely loose concrete that had been used to fill the basement would not have easily been contained with the window gone.

She was disappointed but not alarmed to discover the space behind the stair had not filled completely with concrete. The liquefied mixture had streamed into the area at first, but once the floor around the stair had started to fill, the flow had been stemmed somewhat.

This left a gap under the stairs. She wasn’t overly concerned about it, but would rather to have had it completely blocking all the walls in the chamber. The stairs were on the south wall, and the north and east walls were the ones that had apparently been used as the portals. Yet the point where the south wall met the east wall, directly under the stair, wasn’t filled in with the Holy mixture she had concocted.

In the corner where the north and west walls came together and the Gargoyles had stood a depression existed in the level of the dried concrete. 

Haley rightly figured this was because the statures hadn’t completely disintegrated until after the concrete had been poured and started to set. Then when the space below became empty, the depression occurred. It wasn’t filled with adjacent flow as it had set hard enough it didn’t flow into the newly formed space left when the concrete with the aid of gravity settled into the newly formed space created as the statures were reduced to dust. The only thing that bothered her was this left a rather large space on the north wall, where her understanding left her feeling a new portal could be established.

Not to mention the fact the north and east walls had two-foot gaps from the top of the layer of concrete and the floor above that made up the ceiling of the room.

Haley used the entry to the stair as a storage room, building a floor, level with the adjacent floor and shelving along the walls that were used to mark the descent path into the chamber below. When she was finished you couldn’t even tell it was once anything other than the storage room she had created.

The similar treatment was performed on the window space in the west wall of the house. She covered it, and other than looking newer than the adjacent walls, it looked as if a window had never existed there. The flowers that had spontaneously grown on that side of the house covered the space effectively, as well. So you had to get on your hands and knees next to the house to see the non-weathered appearance of the repairs contrasting with the appearance of the adjacent foundation walls.

She finished restoration of the house and it opened as a B n B the next spring. The actual restoration work the house had required had diminished from her original estimates. It was almost as if the evil had run the house down to prevent interest in it and now that the evil was gone the house was restored almost to its pristine beauty. Haley thought it remarkable the difference in her notes she had made to what would be required and what had actually been necessary to restore the house.




Victorian Dreams Pt. 03



Another interesting fact was the west wall of the house required other repairs than had originally been indicated in her notes. It wasn’t significant, but the attempts by Clarice to burn the house, somehow masked when the evil was in possession of the house had been revealed, once the evil was vanquished. Her notes showed no need to repair burnt places on the west wall, but the signs of a brief touch with fire were now apparent and Haley had to scrape and sand burnt boards before applying a fresh coat of paint.

As a B ‘n B it was immediately successful. Besides the pristine beauty of the Victorian styling, and the panoramic view afforded on the hilltop overlooking the valley below, the west side of the house continued to bloom in the Bluebonnets and Indian Paint Brush.

Photographers and artists that waited each year for the advent of spring and that ever so brief explosion of color on the Texas landscape when these two species normally bloom, kept the house booked with a waiting list to paint or photograph the explosion of flowers on the west side of the house.

Chapter 65

Haley hadn’t had to have the other sides landscaped. The flowers that had appeared spontaneously on the west side soon spread to the other three sides, so it seemed appropriate she call her B n B ‘Bluebonnet House’. She had the small area of woods on the west side pushed back to create a meadow for the beautiful blue flowers to flourish in. Driving by on the state highway that fronted the property, even in the dead of winter, it was like you had passed into a time warp and the clock had been moved back to some spring in an earlier era of time. A mantle of freshness always cloaked the place.

She had built her gazebo around the well Chirsty Johansson had drown herself in rather than deliver her virgin daughter to the evil Master, and called it a wishing well. Some said they had sipped the sweet waters from the well, and their illnesses had been healed. Soon it became a Mecca for those who were ailing and sick.

When dealing with some of these folks, she thought of the research she had done on demonic possessions and how modern Christian-thought considered them symptoms of mental disease rather than actual evil-influenced phenomena. Evil induced or psychiatric, Haley didn’t care, she just felt good seeing her guests come in troubled because of this or that, and suddenly feeling alive after a visit to the well. There was nothing unethical she felt about them chunking a quarter into the well and making a wish. The disheartened look on their face replaced with a smile and hope after doing so. 

First she figured, a quarter was well worth the result. She realized the healing powers of the human mind, and that if someone feels positive on an outcome, that outcome is usually likely to be achieved. Lastly, she never intended to ‘harvest’ the quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies the walls bottom held. She felt the dreams were attached to those coins and they must stay forever in the waters that would supposedly deliver those dreams to fruition.

The success of the B n B had been so tremendous, Haley paid the note off the first year it was open.

Haley came to enjoy the company of her guests. 

She had always been a ‘people person’ but never really a ‘social butterfly’. Now though, she loved sitting on the massive front verandah, sipping iced tea with her guests and ‘swapping’ stories about important events in each others lives. She never could bring herself to tell the story of the battles she had undertaken to make Bluebonnet House a reality.

Even when asked how she managed to keep Bluebonnets and Indian Paint Brush in bloom year-round. She sloughed off any queries by just telling a portion of the true story. 

She would tell her guests, she had painted the house with Holy Water based paint, and the only thing she could figure is the Lord was pleased. 

These sessions of the front verandah were commonplace, lasting well into evening in the summer months when the sun refused to set until nearly 10 at night. So it wasn’t unusual that Haley was sitting there when she next got the sign her battles with the forces of evil were not yet concluded.

Chapter 66

It was one summer afternoon a couple of years later, Haley sat on the massive verandah sipping iced tea with some of her guests when a young boy came up from the yard, carrying a dead puppy in his arms and crying. The small dog was drenched in blood, and when Haley enquired about the puppy, the boy replied,

“We were playing in the yard and I lost sight of him in the tall flowers by the house. Then I heard him yelp. When I went to find him, he was laying in the flowers wrapped in these stickers.”

The puppy was wound tightly in what Haley immediately recognized as the ‘thorny vine of evil presence’ the boy had identified as stickers.

She went to the side of the house to investigate and discovered a resurgence of growth along the west wall of the house that resembled the tight symmetrical spiral of the bramble that had existed when the evil had been in residence before, intertwined deep within the growth of flowers that had lived there since her success in ridding the house of its evil. She noted the flowers that contained the bramble were appearing weak and instead of the luscious blue of the Bluebonnet were pale and faded in comparison to the others in the meadow.

She instructed her manager to make signs saying the west side of the house was off limits and to alert all the guests the house would be closing for renovation that weekend and everyone must be checked out by noon on Sunday. Then to call all those who held reservations and alert them their reservations had been cancelled because of structural defects discovered in the house, which would require repair before the house would be safe for occupancy again. 

He looked at her in astonishment, he knew of no structural defects, and as general manager he had his finger on the pulse of everything that went on in the house. Seeing the determination in her eyes, he didn’t question the instructions he had been given, or press the point in any way. The structural defects and the fact the house wouldn’t be safe for occupancy weren’t too far from an accurate description in reality, so Haley wasn’t really lying.

Haley went to her closet and retrieved the alter vestment from the shelf where she had placed it all those years ago. She removed the dry cleaning bag and draped the vestment over the same chair she had used to hang it from to dry after soaking it in Holy Water, and began to prepare to once again to do battle with the forces of evil.

That night she wore the familiar garment to bed as a muffler as she had before, not leaving anything to chance in her understanding of the powers that appeared to have returned to her home.

In the wee hours she once again felt the familiar chill on her left cheek that signaled a visit from the spirit friend Clarice. She opened her eyes and the girl spirit hovered in her customary place just above her bed.

“Hello, dear friend.” Haley exclaimed as she saw her friends face and the deep blue pools of the girl’s eyes.

“My friend, I am sorry to have to say it is time once again for you to do battle with the Master and his evil.”

The End