By Ed Staskus

   Emma almost jumped out of her bobby pins when the voice behind them said, “Who has broken into my castle?” Oliver, however, kept his nerve. He turned around and said to the eight-foot tall man spirit,  “Can I see your deed to this place?”

   The man spirit looked like a butler from an old movie. He was wearing a black suit with a white dress shirt, black bow tie, and a waistcoat. He had a long face and a nose that was as sharp as a hatchet. 

   “I don’t have a deed,” he said.

   “Then it’s not really your castle, is it?”

   “Well, no, but I live here.”

   “We heard the castle is haunted.”

   “You heard correctly, young man. There are ghosts and phantoms in every room.”

    “Are they mean?”

   “Not all of them, but you would be playing with fire if you thought otherwise.”

   “Can you show us around?”

   “No, I can’t. I have to return to my quarters.”

   “Are they upstairs? Maybe we could follow you.”

   “No, my quarters are in the carriage house in the back.” He pointed through a window. “There is an underground tunnel that runs from the basement, under the rose garden, and to my quarters.”

   Oliver and Emma looked through the window. There wasn’t a rose garden or a carriage house in the backyard. When they turned back to the butler, he wasn’t there anymore. There was a pile of sand where he had been standing.

   “Where did he go?”

   “Maybe he went down to the basement.”

   “Let’s go look.”

   The basement was dark and musty. It had a smell they didn’t recognize. They didn’t know liquor had been made in the basement during Prohibition. A whiskey still was still in a hidden room of the basement, behind a sealed panel in the wall. They saw a trapdoor in the floor.

   “Maybe he went down there,” Emma said.

   When they pulled the trapdoor open, it went nowhere. There wasn’t a tunnel, or anything, just loose-packed dirt. It was a dead-end. Worms were slithering in the dirt.

   “Oh, gross,” Emma said. 

   “I like glow worms the best,” Oliver said.

   “I like gummy worms the best,” Emma said.

   They went back upstairs. There was a large oil painting in the living room above the fireplace. The painting was of Hannes Tiedemann, his wife Louise, and their children, Dora and August. Every time Oliver looked at it out of the corner of his eye he thought they were moving their heads and looking at him. He stopped looking out of the corner of his eye. They stopped looking at him.

   There were built-in bookcases on both sides of the fireplace. The shelves were packed with books.  All the books were moldy except for one. The book looked new. It’s title was “The World Without Us.”

   “Let’s go upstairs,” Oliver said.

   The stairs were wide and the handrails were dark brown wood. They felt damp and sticky. There was a small round table on the landing halfway up. There was a recently lit cigar in an ash tray on the table. Smoke like a garden snake curled up to the ceiling.

   “That smells terrible,” Emma said.

   “It smells like old armpits,” Oliver said, stubbing the cigar out.

   When they got to the top of the stairs a wall of fog materialized in front of them. It was a green and yellow fog. Emma took a step into it. She began to lose her way. Oliver pulled her back.

   “I thought I was going to pass out,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

   There were four bedrooms on the second floor. There was a collection of small colored glass bottles full of liquids on a side table in the first of the bedrooms. The bottles were labeled. One said, “This Will Make You Larger.” Another one said, “This Will Make You Smaller.” 

   “It’s like Alice in Wonderland,” Oliver said.

   Only one bottle was made of clear glass. It said, “This Will Make You Disappear.”

   “I could use that on some bullies I know,” Emma said. She reached for the bottle. Just as she was about to put it in her pocket it disappeared. A voice whispered in her ear. “That’s not for you.”

   In another bedroom the outside shutters were loose. They banged against the window frame when the wind blew. When Oliver opened the window and reached for the shutters to secure them, they shut and locked themselves. As soon as he walked away they unlocked themselves and started flapping in the wind again.

   “Things have got a mind of their own in this house,” he said.

   The next bedroom had spiderwebs in every corner. There was fossilized cordwood laid in the fireplace grate. There was a bed and there was a sofa, too, big enough to sleep in. Rotting curtains rustled even though the windows were closed and the air in the room was fetid. There was a diary on the bedside table.

   “Let’s take a look at this book,” Emma said. “Maybe it will tell us something about this house.”

   When they opened the book, however, as they flipped the pages they crumbled into yellow fragments. A shred of a page whispered, “Whoever reads my journal, beware of the creature below.” The yellow fragments sprinkled themselves all over the floor. When Oliver and Emma turned to leave, the fragments gathered themselves and  transformed into an arm that reached for their legs. The fingers were long as carrots. They ran out of the room.

   When they opened the door of the last bedroom it was inky black inside, even though the curtains were pulled back and they could see through the window that it was sunny and bright outside.

   “Let’s not go in this room,” Emma said.

   “This house is creepy but it isn’t really any more creepy than that abandoned amusement park in Chippewa Lake dad stopped at last year,” Oliver said. “The one where he said they filmed the movie ‘Closed for the Season.’ The Ferris wheel, remember how it was all rusty, and the Fun House, some of the old walls were still there, painted in Day-Glo green, it was kind of sad.”

   “It was closed forever,” Emma said.

   “That’s a long time,” Oliver said.

   They took the stairs to the top floor ballroom. It was put in by Hannes Tiedemann to cheer up his wife, Louise, after the tragedies the family suffered. He thought she might dance her sorrows away. The ballroom was large, stretching the length of the house. When it was added to the house so were turrets and gargoyles. It was what made the house look like a castle.

   The ballroom was empty. They walked the length of it, their footsteps echoing behind them. The echo was behind time, always a few seconds behind their footsteps. When they turned around to go back the way they had come the echo was gone. There was a specter blocking their way. It was a skeleton wearing a black hooded cloak and carrying a scythe. It was the Grim Reaper.

   “Well, well,” the Grim Reaper said. “What have we got here, Hansel and Gretel?”

Previous: Breaking Into Franklin Castle

Next: Busting Out of Franklin Castle

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Muscle from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication