Intruder - Judy Colella (fb2 epub reader txt) 📗

1

“No, you may not stay. This is my house now, and quite frankly, I’m getting tired of arguing with you about it.”

        “It isn’t fair. I’ve been here for eighty-nine years, and have nowhere else to go!”

        “Well, that’s a load of crap if ever I heard one.”

        “Your generation is so rude!”

        I rolled my eyes. I’d been arguing with the creature for nearly an hour and was ready to go take a nap. For obvious reasons, the man who’d sold me the house hadn’t bothered to mention that the place was haunted, but I should have at least been suspicious. I mean, $20,000.00? For a six-bedroom, five-bath, three-story Victorian home on six acres of prime land? The housing market wasn’t that bad, so yeah, I should have guessed.

        Something tells me I did have a suspicion or two, though, because that same something kept me from bragging about how little I’d paid for the house. Everyone assumed I had spent my entire inheritance on it, and I’d been bombarded with questions from friends and family alike about how in the world I was going to pay for its upkeep now that I clearly had no money left, or because what I did have would get devoured by massive mortgage payments.

        Ha. After paying for it in cash, I still had tons and tons of money and a gorgeous old house, too.

        I also had an irritating spirit squatting in its interior, one that had supposedly been quite the bad-ass in its day, or so he told me, and which was now refusing to vacate. Let me go back for a moment.

        Three days ago, I finished moving in. There wasn’t a whole lot to move, really, since I was coming from a tiny apartment with closet-sized rooms. But that was okay – now that I was filthy rich (for me, anyway), I could take my time furnishing this new place one room at a time, filling it with all the lovely things I’d always wanted.

        That night, as I curled up, happy and peaceful, on my mattress (I’d tossed the old bedroom set, planning to go shopping the next day for a new one) I began drifting into a blissful state of repose. Began. The actual repose part never happened because something cold swept through the room and groaned loudly right into my ear.

        I’m not a jittery person, and have been known to calmly ignore birds flying at my windshield and keep driving without so much as a twitch. I’ve never enjoyed Halloween “haunted” houses because the sudden hand grasping my ankle from the darkness was a boring expectation that caused me to simply stop in my tracks until it let go, so I wouldn’t lose my balance and fall. I even had a cat once that took some kind of perverse pleasure in jumping off high places onto my head when I’d pass by, unsuspecting. Rather like the Green Hornet’s Kato. Did that faze me? Nope. I’d just pry the overheated kitty out of my hair, place her gently on the floor, and keep going.

        So when I got groaned at by this – this thing in my house, I sat up and glared around at the darkness, thinking, “Really? Dude!”

        At first there was nothing, but then another blast of cold air caused me to climb off the mattress so I could wrap myself more tightly in my quilt. “Who are you?” I demanded. “I was trying to sleep, for Pete’s sake!”

        Another groan.

        I remember wondering if maybe the whatever-it-was had spent a lot of time in Hollywood. “Okay. Fine. If that’s all you have to say for yourself, I’m going back to bed. Go away.”

        “Wait!” It had sounded more like a whisper than a command.

        “For what?”

        “Listen to me! This is my home! Get out!”

        “Sorry. I bought it and now it’s mine. You get out.” And with that, I had lain down again, cocooned in my quilt which I pulled up over my head, and gone to sleep.

        The next morning, I was awakened by the sound of cookware being tossed about in the kitchen. Since I only owned one pot and two pans, the racket wasn’t very impressive. Irritating, though. I got dressed, grabbed my Bible from a box under the window, and stormed downstairs.

        The kitchen would have been a mess if I’d had anything in it besides the pathetic collection of cooking vessels, some paper plates and one set of flatware service. Oh, and a sleeve of Styrofoam cups. As it was, the lone pot was teetering on the edge of one of the counters, one of the pans was on the floor, the other pan plastered against one of the walls, the cups were tipped over, and the paper plates were flying about like Frisbees.

        “How childish!” I said, ducking to avoid one plate and catching another as it flew past. “Who are you – the ghost of Pee Wee Herman? Oh, wait, no. He’s not dead yet.” I flung the plate back in the direction from which it had come.

        Suddenly, the plates dropped to the floor, the pan on the wall slid down and clattered onto the counter, and something began shimmering in front of me. A moment later, it almost solidified into what looked like a man in a pair of light brown trousers held up by suspenders over a bloodied T-shirt. He had a mustache but was otherwise hairless.

        “Why aren’t you terrified, woman?” he demanded, glaring at me from under some pretty sparse eyebrows.

        “Of what? Something that can’t even change its clothes?”

        That seemed to surprise the creature, and he took a step back, gaping. Then he stood straighter, clenched his fists at his sides and said, “I’ll have you know I murdered eighteen women just like you!”

        “Just like me, eh? So they were all divorced, were they?”

        “Well, no, not all – ”

        “And they all worked selling toys at the local Flea Market over the objection of their mothers and fathers?”

        “What?”

        “And every one of them was an only child who inherited an obscene amount of money from her parents’ estate because her parents died in a car accident before they had time to cut her out of their will for getting divorced and working at a Flea Market?”

        “Well, no, but – ”

        “Then they were not just like me!”

        He frowned at me for a second. “You know, if I were alive, I’d have a headache. You’re obnoxious.”

        “No, I’m aggravated, and you’re making illogical assumptions. Who are you?”

        “In life, I was – ”

        “Don’t you dare say ‘Jacob Marley’.”

        “I wasn’t going to, you infuriating young woman!”

        “Good. So… you were saying?”

       “Yes. In life, I was Malcolm Thomas Cavell.” He raised one of those skimpy brows at me, waiting, I believe, for me to look impressed.

        I wasn’t. “Never heard of you.”

        The translucent man sighed. “Before your time, then, I suppose.”

        “Hey, that reminds me – why do all the bad guys have three names? I mean, yeah, most of us have middle names, too, but we’re rarely referred to that way.”

        “You’ve lost me, I’m afraid.”

        “Pretty polite for a mass-murderer, aren’t you. And now that you’ve succeeded in waking me up, I’m going to make coffee. Get out.”

        He made a grotesque face but didn’t move.

        “Are you pouting?”

        No reply.

        I shook my head and walked through him to the counter where I grabbed the pot and brought it to the sink to fill it with water. Placing the Bible on the small counter section beside the stove, I turned the burner up to its highest setting and opened the cabinet above to reach down the jar of instant coffee.

        “What’s that?” His tone had been casual.

        “What’s what?”

        “That.”

        “This? A pot.”

        “No, the other thing.

        “Instant coffee? That reminds me,” I added in a mutter, “I have to go buy a decent coffee-maker one of these days.”

        “No, no, the other thing.”

        “I spy, with my little eye… what in blazes are you talking about? You know what – how’s this: stop talking and disappear. Go to… Curacao, or… St. Croix, maybe. I don’t care. Just get out of my house.” I’d been thinking of a place much further south, to be perfectly honest, but didn’t feel like cussing that early in the morning.

        He didn’t answer, and a moment later I realized I was alone. Blissfully, happily alone.

        Sad to say, my solitude didn’t last. Three days later and an hour ago, the blasted thing showed up when I was stepping out of the shower. While throwing my back-brush at him had been ineffective, it felt appropriate. He had at least had the decency not to goggle at me.

        Now, having finally realized why I’d never heard of Malcolm T. Cavell – eighty-nine years ago, my mother was in diapers – I told him he had no idea what my generation was like.

        “Maybe not, but you’re certainly rude!”

        “What?! You come barreling into my bathroom when I’m undressed and you have the gall to say I’m rude? Ha!” I finished dressing, picked up my Bible from the night stand and waved it at him. “Listen, dude, you are not going to get me to leave!”

        “Ah. And what’s that you’re holding?”

        “Never saw one of these before?”

        “I have, but…”

        “Then why’d you ask?”

        “I asked the other day, too, when we were in the kitchen, but you seemed too stupid to realize what I was referring to.”

        “Not stupid, tired. Needing coffee. How long did you live here before you killed all those women?” It had occurred to me that there might be eighteen more of these spirit-things in this house waiting for the right moment to pop out at me and insist that I leave.

        “I didn’t.”

        “Er, what were you doing here, then?”

        He sighed. “You may as well sit down. It’s a rather long story.”

        I didn’t have time for this. “Why don’t you leave instead. I can go look it up at the library.”

        “I’m not leaving.”

        After thinking about this for a bit, I decided to hear him out. Why not? I was going to get him to leave one way or another, so I might as well get an interesting story for my trouble. I perched on the side of my new bed. “You are. Leaving, that is. But please feel free to tell me what happened before you go.”

        He mumbled something that sounded like, “Blasted women!” before going to the chair beside my nightstand and doing a pretty good imitation of sitting. Then he stared off into the distance, shook his head a few times, and finally began what turned out to be quite a tale.

2

“All right. Tell me if I understood all that correctly.” I had scooted back onto the bed while he was talking, making myself comfortable. A nice cup of coffee would