Kreative X-Pressions Publications

Chapter 1

Meeting Monster Manor

I sat slumped in the back seat of our club van as we sped along Interstate 95 headed towards our new home. My eyelids were droopy from the long ride and my backside was numb from sitting in one position for so long. Ophie, my cute little eight-year-old sister, was stretched out on the seat with her head in my lap. She had dropped off to sleep soon after it got dark. I had been sleeping on and off and I'd been getting these weird headaches. This dark image kept flashing in and out in front of my closed eyes… an image of a big, dark object, as big as a house, and I had yet to figure out what it was. My grandma had told me I was born with some psychic powers and, as I got older, they would develop more and more. She said it happened in every other generation of the Webster family. If these weird, sometimes scary images were any indication of what I had to look forward to, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted it to develop or not. I did have a keen interest in paranormal things, though, and I'd read a lot of books on the subject. But in spite of my curiosity, I hoped I'd never see a ghost or hear noises in my head. Right now my eyelids were at half-mast and I was just about to surrender to ol' Morpheus, the nocturnal god of sleep, when a streetlight lit up a sign that read “Entering Jackson.” Knowing our journey was almost over jostled me alert and I gently slid my aching legs from under Ophie's head. After driving for hours without a single break, it took me a few minutes to stretch my cramped legs to restore their circulation. In the front seat Mom was busy checking her map again and telling Dad what exit to look for. With Mom doing the navigating it allowed Dad to focus more on the driving. As I sat there watching the streetlights whiz by, I began to wonder what our new home would be like. All any of us could get out of Dad was that we would be pleasantly surprised. When Ophie asked me what that meant all I could do was shrug my shoulders. For reasons known only to Mom and Dad, they were keeping our new house totally secretive. The most I had been able to do was go to the big library in Chicago and do some geographic research on Jackson. I learned it was a small town with a population of about 25,000 people, lots smaller than Chicago where I was born and lived for my sixteen years on this planet. Neither Ophie nor I had wanted to move and leave all our friends behind, but Mom assured us we'd make a lot of new ones in Jackson and that we'd be living in a much safer neighborhood there. We had trouble accepting the fact that we had to move, but it wasn't until we saw our new car blown up right in front of our house one night that we realized how dangerous it was being the family of a Chicago police detective. Mom had nagged Dad for years about leaving Chicago and her nagging had finally paid off one day when my Dad, Detective-Sergeant Andrew Webster, finally consented to move. Maybe it was destiny, but two weeks after sending out a bunch of resumes, he received a response from the police department in Jackson. Although he'd have to take a cut in pay with his new job, it would only be temporary until the town council could approve a salary schedule for the new “detective” position he'd be filling on their police force.

Mom sighed with relief as Dad slowed down to exit the interstate onto Jackson's Main Street. It had been a long tiresome drive and everyone wanted to get into our new home and begin settling in. There were five traffic lights on Main Street. At the fourth one Dad turned left onto a street called ‘The Boulevard.’ After stopping at six different stop signs he turned right on Maple Avenue. A sign beneath the street sign told us it was a dead-end street. I felt a little tense because dead-end streets in Chicago were usually dangerous places to live. Dad slowed to a crawl and we inched our way down a quiet, tree-lined, residential street to a cul-de-sac where Dad pulled our car into a gravel driveway and stopped. Sitting there, right in front of us, was an old, broken-down two-story house with the windows all boarded up and some of the shutters hanging on for dear life by one hinge. It sure looked spooky from where I was sitting. If the house had been built with a mouth it would've been pleading for someone to shoot it and put it out of its misery! An involuntary shudder came over me. ‘Couldthis be our new home’, I wondered? ‘Please, God… say it isn’t so!’

I looked again at Ophie. She was still sound asleep. As Mom opened her door and got out she looked at me and answered my silent question, 'shall I wake her?' with, “No, don’t wake her just yet, Angie. Let her sleep until we unpack. She's soooo tired, poor thing.”

‘Yeah,’ I thought, ‘if you only knew how grown up and smart your little baby daughter really was.’ Although I loved Ophie very much, I couldn’t help but resent her sometimes for the preferential treatment Mom and Dad seemed to give her. But then, the doctors told Mom she couldn’t have any more babies so I could understand why they treated her like they did… she was the baby of the family and always would be.

Ophie stirred and sighed as I slid past her and opened the van's sliding door. I couldn't believe my eyes at the house we were parked in front of. It looked like the Frankenstein monster with a roof. After a minute of staring with wide-eyed horror, I managed to blurt some words out. “Am I having a nightmare or what?” I asked. “This can't possibly be our new home, can it, Dad? It looks more like a ‘monster manor’ or something.” I looked at Dad with raised eyebrows, my fingers crossing behind my back. “It really can't, can it, Dad?” I added, timidly.

“No, silly,” Dad answered, hopping out of the car and taking two suitcases from the carrier on top of the van. “That empty old house has been condemned and it’s scheduled for demolition. Our house is that beautiful, big, white colonial style next door. I looked over the fence at the house next door and gasped in amazement. Now that was more like it! It had a big lawn, a picnic table and lots of trees. And was that a swimming pool and a tennis court in the back yard? And a big, red barn, too! Wow!

“Oh, it’s so totally awesome!” I yelled, heedless of the hour or the neighbors. “A real, live tennis court. Now I know what you meant when you said we'd be pleasantly surprised. Awesome! Totally, unbelievably awesome!” Then I looked again at ‘monster manor’ beside which I was standing. A gigantic question leapt from my mouth as I struggled to pull my suitcase out of the back seat without waking Ophie. “So how come if we live over there, we pulled into this driveway?”

“Because we’re having our driveway resurfaced,” Mom explained. She went through the opening in the fence where a gate used to be and followed Dad across the big lawn to our front porch. I eyeballed the weird, spooky-looking house I was standing next to. A chill ran up my spine, did a somersault and slid back down to my waist. I looked at Ophie, still snoring away in the back seat. Still feeling queasy I yelled after Mom. “What’ll I do about Ophie?”

“Let her sleep for another minute or so, Angie. I'll come back for her in a second. She'll be just fine.”

I looked at the old, spooky-looking house again and felt myself busting out in a bad case of giant goose bumps. It seemed like my 'chill-factor' had exploded off the scale. I tried to tell myself it was merely my hyper-active imagination working overtime again, but there was something about this house besides its just looking evil. That same chill factor made me think twice about leaving little Ophie there alone. I put my suitcase down on the gravel driveway and slid the van door open. I looked at her lying there in a peaceful slumber. I hated to wake her because she always woke up in a grumpy mood, but, in spite of Mom telling me to let her sleep a bit longer, something deep down inside me said, 'Do it!' I put my hand on her shoulder and shook her gently. “Ophie.” No response, so I shook her again, trying to be as gentle as I could, under the circumstances. “C'mon, Ophie… wake up!”

She stirred, opened one eye, gave me a look that killed and closed it again. “Leave me alone,” she mumbled, sleepily. She started to turn over to go back to sleep. I looked across at our house and saw Mom following Dad through the front door. The inside lights went on, followed by a porch light. I turned back to Ophie. “Ophie, c'mon, wake up, please…we're here!” I shook her a little harder, at the same time stealing another glance behind me at the creepy-looking old house, wishing we had arrived during daylight hours so it wouldn't look quite so scary. I shook Ophie again. She began to stir, then finally opened her eyes and sat up. “Where are we? Where's Mommy?” she asked, rubbing her eyes with her little fists, her voice still husky with sleep.

“Mom's in our new house, Ophie. C'mon… don't you want to see it? It's real big… lots bigger than our house in Chicago!”

I took her by the hand and helped her down. Still half-asleep she looked at the broken-down house. “Is this it?” she asked, making a face. “It's ugly!”

“No, you silly goose,” I laughed. “That's what I thought, too. Our house is over there, behind you.” I pointed. “Check out the big lawn, and the tennis court, and the picnic area…. and the big, front porch! It's even got a barn and a big swimming pool! Great, huh?”

She was unimpressed. “I'm hungry,” she mumbled. I shrugged one of my ‘whats-the-use’ shrugs and grabbed a suitcase. When Ophie was hungry, she had a bad case of ‘attention-deficit-disorder’ for anything that didn’t look or smell like food. I grinned in surrender as she took off across the lawn to our front door. Mom was just coming back out. A surprised look crossed her face. “Why Ophie,” she said. “You're awake!” Mom looked at me with a look that said, ‘I thought I asked you to let her sleep a bit longer?’ I just shrugged my shoulders. “Sorry, Mom, I wasn’t sure how long you and Dad would be gone.”

“Yeah, and I'm real hungry, Mommy…” Ophie said, answering Mom’s question. “and, like… I’ll go nuts if I don’t eat something soon.”

‘Yeah,’ I thought. ‘Like… what else is new?’

Ophie looked back down the road towards the center of town. “Isn’t there a McDonald’s around here somewhere?” she asked.

Mom looked tired as she stifled a yawn. “I didn’t see any on the way through town, Ophie, so you'll just have to be satisfied with an apple for now. I'll cook you a big breakfast in the morning, just as soon as I've unpacked all the food, okay?”

“Okay, Mommy.” She climbed up the porch stairs and went inside to look for the bag of apples. Mom came back over to the van and together we carried everything inside. As soon as I went through the front door of our new house the weird old house next door took a back seat in my memory. “Now this is more like it,” I said to Mom as I wandered from room to room switching on the lights and checking everything out. I was totally awestruck by how big everything was. “I thought you said you were born and brought up in a little tar-paper shack, Dad?” I asked. “This sure doesn’t look like any shack to me!”

“I was born and raised in a shack, Angie. You weren’t even born yet when my folks first bought this one.”

“But you said your father was just a house painter, Dad. How could he afford to buy a house like this?”

“He had an accident on his job, Angie. The scaffold he was standing on broke and he fell almost thirty feet onto a concrete floor. Broke nearly every bone in his body. Couldn’t work anymore after that. Some lawyer talked him into suing the company. The case never went to trial because the company settled… made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. With the settlement money he not only bought this house but had a monthly income for life.”

“How come you never told us about this before, Dad?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was so busy with my own work I guess the subject just never came up. Besides, my father and I had our differences. It wasn’t until I lost my Mom that Dad and I finally came to terms with each other.”

Mom was standing there listening all this time. Finally she spoke up. “Don’t you remember your Dad making that trip here to Jackson a few years ago, Angie?”

I looked at her. “Yeah, I remember now… for his father’s funeral.”

“Well, you probably didn’t understand, but your grandfather was going to lose the house unless some back taxes were paid on it. It took everything we had in the bank to pay it off.”

“How come your father didn’t pay the taxes himself?” I asked, Dad. “You said he got a lifetime income.”

“He did,” Dad answered “…just like clockwork, until my Mom died. When she passed away, my Dad went to pieces and began drinking. The taxes just piled up after that.”

“Ohhhh… that’s sad,” I said.

“Well, that’s all in the past now, isn’t it?” he said, smiling. “And we can’t live in the past, can we? Let’s just appreciate what we have now, okay?” He gave me a peck on the cheek and then went out the door. In a few minutes he came back in carrying his golf clubs in one hand and his fishing tackle box in the other. “I’m looking forward to using these,” he said, “but this old house needs some work first.”

“Are you going to do all the work yourself, Dad?” I asked.

“Yes, he is,” Mom answered for him. “Because he promised me his new job would be a normal job like most people have… forty hours a week!” She looked at Dad and winked. “Right, Andy?”

Dad looked at her and grinned without saying anything. I wondered what was going through his mind. As a police detective in a brand new job, he may not have much of a choice.

Being in our new home was exciting and any thoughts Ophie and me had about sleeping were quickly forgotten as we rushed from room to room exploring while Mom and Dad went about the business of unpacking their suitcases. “How awesome!” Ophie, now fully awake, kept repeating over and over. Finally she came over and stood in front of Dad and looked up at him. “Did your father really give you this house, Daddy?” she asked with a serious face.

Dad stopped what he was doing and laughed as he bent down and picked Ophie up in his arms. “Yup,” he replied. “He sure did.”

“Well, where is he now, Daddy?” she asked. “Did he go to Heaven?”

“I believe he did, Ophie… but he’s right here in my heart too… just as you are.” He set her back down. Ophie smiled at him and took off to rummage some more through the house.

I must've thanked Mom and Dad a dozen times for the tennis court and swimming pool. I just couldn't believe my eyes! Although the pool yet had to be filled, the tennis court looked ready and waiting and I could hardly wait to check out the tennis racquets and find someone to play with.

I joined Ophie in eating an apple after which we took to doing some more exploring… this time upstairs. I just loved our twin semi-circular stairways bordering both sides of the entrance hall inside our front door. Both sets of stairs led upstairs to a common balcony behind which was a long hallway leading down through the bedroom area. The house had four bedrooms and two big bathrooms, all upstairs, plus a lavatory down stairs near the laundry room. This meant that Ophie and I would have our own bedrooms across the hall from each other. Mom and Dad had the master bedroom and bath at the end of the hallway which left the fourth bedroom next to me still vacant.

While Ophie was using the bath I began unpacking my clothes. The newness of the house was already wearing off and my eyelids were drooping big time and my bed began looking more tempting by the minute, even without being made up. My mind drifted back to my closest friend, Jackie, still back in Chicago. “Will the fourth bedroom be for guests, Mom?” I asked, remembering that Jackie had promised to come visit me after we were settled in. As I waited for her answer I slipped out of my jeans and shirt and put on my summer pajamas. Because the house had been shut up for so long, it was terribly hot, stuffy and humid inside and my lungs were gasping for some fresh air. I hoped Dad would turn on the air conditioning to cool off the house before we went to bed. Not wanting to wait to find out I unlocked my bedroom window and began opening it. Just then the toilet flushed and I heard the patter of Ophie's little feet running down the wide carpeted hallway towards Mom's room. I groaned as I realized that Ophie was all slept out and had found renewed energy. Did that mean I'd be spending a sleepless night listening to her yakity-yak and answering her silly questions? I hoped not. I thought of Dad's prescription sleeping pills and wondered how many it'd take to put Ophie away for the night so I could get some sleep. It was just a fleeting thought, of course. I'd never do anything like that… or would I?

It was late August and the temperature inside the house must have been hovering in the low nineties, mostly because it’d been closed up for so long. Unable to stand it any more I finished opening my window. A nice, fresh country breeze rippled past me ruffling the pretty lace curtains and my hair. I closed my eyes and said “Ahhhh.” When I opened them again I realized my window looked directly across to the broken down old house next door, about a hundred yards away. “Ohhh,” I groaned again. “Just my luck to have such a beautiful southern exposure,” I said aloud. I closed my eyes again, knowing I wasn't missing a thing by doing so. I took a few more deep breaths, enjoying the fresh, outside air. Then, as I drew back from the window I opened my eyes again. Suddenly my mouth dropped open like the Carlsbad Caverns. From one of the cellar windows of the eerie looking house next door, which I had named ‘monster manor’, I saw a light go on. It was a tiny crack of light but it stood out like a candle in a dark room. “Uh, oh!” I whispered to myself. “Where’d that come from?” Suddenly I heard footsteps and Ophie came running into my room in her pajamas. “What’cha lookin’ at?” she said as she plunged both elbows between the curtains. I grabbed her just in time to keep her from cannon-balling through the open window. “Ophie!” I yelled, pulling her back. “That window is wide open! You’ve got to learn to be more careful!” Within minutes her eyes were filled with tears at my scolding. Mom came running into my room holding an armload of fresh sheets and pillow cases. “What’s the matter?” she cried.

I explained what happened as Ophie sobbed into Mom’s shoulder. By the time she’d stopped sobbing she’d fallen asleep. I breathed a quick sigh of relief. Sometimes it was hard for me to accept the fact that Ophie was eight years old considering how Mom and Dad treated her like someone still in kindergarten.

“Ophie’s had too much excitement for one day,” Mom said, as she handed me the bedclothes she’d been holding. She picked Ophie up in her arms and carried her into her room. Ophie was not only a smart little girl, she was also very petite for her age. I watched as she put Ophie to bed, then I kissed Mom good night. I threw a sheet across my bed, figuring I’d make it up right in the morning. I laid across the bed and turned off the bedside lamp. I could hear Ophie snoring even with my door closed as she drifted away into her land of pink and white dreams. Mom’s and Dad’s voices echoed down the hallway from their bedroom. “G’night, Angela!” Then their doors closed and it was pitch black in the hall. With all the lights out I could see ‘monster manor’ next door silhouetted against the full moon which sat low in the western sky. I wondered what it looked like inside. I also wondered who, or what, was behind that lighted cellar window? Was it just a poor, homeless man seeking shelter for the night? Was it some mad scientist creating a modern version of Frankenstein? Was it some pedophile or pervert hiding away, ready to spring on some poor, helpless victim? I couldn’t even imagine having one of those living next door! For a quick moment I thought of telling Dad what I saw, then I thought better of it. He was tired like the rest of us so my little discovery would just have to wait until morning. I tried to clear my mind about the spooky old house but my imagination was racing in spite of my drooping eyelids. Should I even bother telling Mom and Dad in the morning? Just my telling them would probably reinforce their conviction that I had an overactive imagination. Well, maybe I did, but if I wanted to be a writer someday, was that so terribly bad?

A sudden loud, piercing screech broke the stillness of the night and I almost jumped out of my skin. “What was that?” I said, sitting up in bed, my eyes wide with fright. An iceberg crept up my spine as the screeching sound came again, this time even louder. Then another noise, a different one that sounded like some weird, wild, high-pitched, out-of-this-world laughter. I was about to call for Dad when I heard a different kind of sound, like someone or something howling and yowling. My curiosity took priority over my knocking knees and oversized goose bumps as I sprang to my feet and peeked out the window, almost afraid of what I was about to see. The screeching sounds came again and this time I turned my head in the direction of the sound. There, crouched on the fence facing each other, were two big cats! Well, at least I knew where some of the noises came from. Partially relieved I went back to bed, hoping the cats would find someplace else to settle their differences. But still I wondered about the inhuman-like laughter and where it came from? I mean, like… it couldn’t have come from the cats. Wishing I had some ear plugs, I pulled the sheets over my head and huddled there in fear, half expecting the ghostly-like laughing sounds to echo in through my open window with long, ghostly arms that would grab me around the neck and strangle me. I considered closing the window, but no way was I getting out of bed again! As I lay there alternately shivering and sweating goose-bumps, I wondered again whether or not all the stories I’d heard and read about ghosts were real. I just hoped my psychic abilities wouldn’t go developing on me until I was more ready for them. I sure wasn’t ready now! I lay there, waiting for more cat screeching or maniacal laughter but none came. My eyes grew heavy and my thoughts gradually ebbed away as I slipped away in sweet surrender to Morpheus, the ancient God of dreams, wondering if he might give me some answers.