This Old House (A Ghost Story)

This Old House (Closed For NothingButTruth)

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Hudson House had stood abandoned for nearly thirty years, ever since the murders. Some said that the house had always been haunted, and had driven the Andersons mad. Others said that the trouble had started years before, in 1855, when Abigail Anderson slept with the very married Reverend Thomas Church, and then announce to the town that she was having his child. The family had been a bad lot since, with the sins of the mother being visited upon her children. For nearly a hundred and fifty years now, they had been the town pariahs, know as thieves, loose women and imbibers.

The town had been ready to tear the house down for nearly twenty years now, but they had not been able to clear the legal hurdles. Like an ugly grey toadstool, it had squatted in the center of Last Hope, New Hampshire. Its paint had peeled year after year, revealing different layers of paint, and giving in the appearance of camouflage in greyscale. The lower windows had been boarded up haphazardly, seemingly by a blind carpenter. The upper windows were broken out, from years of schoolboys daringly throwing rocks at them, front the sidewalks.

Laura Anderson-Harrison stood outside the front gate, staring at the familial eyesore. Its front porch roof sagged at the edges and the broken railing looked like diseased teeth. The twin boarded up windows helped the illusion that the front of the house was the face of a deranged madman. Even the stone path, leading to her feet, felt to her like a dead tongue, reaching out to get a taste of the living.

Laura stood silhouetted against the setting sun. Her dress, bought on clearance at Kmart, was black, and extended down just above her knees. Her slender stems meet with narrow hips and a tiny waist, made even more so by the dark dress. Above her small breasts rose a graceful white neck topped with a small oval face. The face had dark dramatic eyes, made even more so by its white pallor. Long, dirty blond hair hung free about her shoulders.

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The broken gate lay a few yards away, so there was nothing between her and the stone walkway, except for the past. For twenty minutes she just stood and stared. Finally, she took one step forward, onto the walkway. She was the first peron, Anderson or not, to do to walk onto the property for almost ten years, ever since Rick West dared his brother Steven to do so, causing his brother to put his foot through the front steps, sending him to the hospital with a torn up ankle.

Daniella Crissman stood peering through the boarded up window of the old Hudson House. She saw the blonde woman standing there at the foot of the walk, staring up at the house, her face a mask of… Well, something. It was hard to tell what, exactly.

For some time now, she had adopted this place as her own. No one in town wanted anything to do with the place, which made it perfect for Daniella. She had things that she needed to learn about, needed to study, Lost Hope being the kind of town that it was, she preferred to do it privately. The titles of the books she studied would have raised a few eyebrows, at the very least. “Grimoire Sympathia,” “White Stains and the Nameless Novel,” “The Holy Books of Thelema,” all of these, had they come through the local Post Office, would have become general knowledge by the end of the day of their arrival.

Last Hope was one of “those” towns on the New Hampshire coast. If you were born and raised here, then everyone in town knew every bit of your business, seemingly before you knew it yourself. When Daniella had gone online to find and order these books, she had decided to have them sent to “General Delivery” to another town fifteen miles away, where she wasn’t known. Since she lived with other people in the same household, she didn’t dare to leave them in her room.

The Hudson House had seemingly been the perfect solution. It was easily accessed through its overgrown back yard, and it had interior rooms that were windowless, allowing her the freedom to use candles or more recently, a small lantern, to study by. It had been working perfectly, but now, she was feeeling a stab of worry.

Who was this woman staring up at the house, and what did she want? She was looking at the house with more than idle curiosity, the way that the summer tourist population looked at it. Daniella stayed back in the shadows, but kept the woman in sight. Something about her was vaguely familiar.

Well, no time to worry about it right now. The woman had stepped onto the walk, so she thought it best to get out now. It was time for her to go to work, anyway. Daniella was the afternoon clerk/cashier at the town’s general store. It was a cliché job for a small town resident, but she didn’t mind. It was a fairly decent job, it was year-round, and it paid enough to let her live quietly, if not luxuriously.

She also enjoyed it because of the disapproval that some of the older residents of the town displayed when they looked at her. She had a rather round face, her black hair fell below her shoulders, and she was actually quite attractive. She was built solidly, with strong hips and full breasts - what many would call “built for breeding.” The stodgy old townsfolk seemed to disapprove of her usually heavy eye makeup and her black fingernails. They also disapproved of the fact that she almost always wore nothing but black clothing.


She hid everything in her little stash spot, then quickly made her way out the back door of the house, and took the almost completely hidden path over to the next street, then headed off to work. Her mind was spinning with questions about the blonde woman, and just who she might be.

Daniella stood waiting for traffic to clear so she could cross the street. She wasn’t looking forward to going to work. It wasn’t her job that bothered her, that was tolerable and at times even fun during the tourist season. What she hated was her boss, Steve West. Insufferable prick, she thought, as she stepped off the curb to cross to the store. Not only was he a hard ass, he made her skin crawl every time that he looked at her. Eventually, she was going to lose it with him, she just knew it. That old cliché line popped into her head every time she had to talk to him: “Hey, asshole! My eyes are up here!” She could almost literally feel him peeling her clothes off every time he looked at her. She shuddered, took a deep breath, and opened the door, stepping into the store.

Steve looked up at the sound of the bell over the door. Daniella saw – and felt – his eyes crawl slowly up her body as she stepped towards the back room to grab her smock and punch in. When she reached the back room, she shuddered again. God, I fucking hate that guy, she thought. She punched in, put on her smock, and went out front again to receive her list of orders for the day.

“Hi, Steve,” she said. “Busy today?”

Steve spit tobacco juice into a soup can, and then wiped his lip with the back of his hand. God, that is so disgusting, she thought.

“Busy? Yeah, right. If you consider maybe five townies all day busy, then I guess maybe.”

“Anything need doing right off? Or do you want me to take the register for a while so you can grab a break.” As if your lazy ass needs a break, she thought.

Steve eyed her for a moment, considering. Should he make another play at getting her to go out with him? It was tempting, but he decided not to. She’d just shoot him down again, and then he’d be pissed off, and the day would just get worse from there.

“Yeah, go ahead and take the register,” he said. "I’ll run out and grab some lunch. I should be back in about a half hour.”

Lunch, my ass, thought Daniella. The only lunch Steve was likely to go grab was a fistful of beer at the bar down the street.

“And you stay busy,” Steve said. “If it stays this slow, get some cleaning done.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniella said, with just enough sarcasm to let it show, but not enough for him to take issue with.

Steve took off his smock and stuck it under the counter, then headed to the front door.

“Remember,” he said, “busy, busy, busy.” He walked out the door, slamming it behind him. Sure enough, Daniella saw him head straight in the direction of The Pour House, the local pub. She raised her middle finger at his disappearing back.

Daniella was still intensely curious about the woman she had seen at the Hudson House. There had been something about her, something she couldn’t put a finger on. Who was she, and why was she so interested in the old place? Suddenly, she grinned.

Well, Steve did say to clean, she thought. She grabbed a broom, and then stepped outside to slowly sweep the long front porch and steps.

Once outside, she looked up at the old house, but the front was deserted. Either the woman had left, which was likely, or she was inside, which made Daniella a little nervous. She didn’t want her books being found, or the notes that she had taken. She was building quite a little library of the occult, and she didn’t want it discovered. Christ, in this town, she wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up being burned at the stake for having those books.

She continued to sweep, slowly, and to rearrange the items outside on display. And she waited patiently to see the woman again. The odds were that she’d make her way down to this area at some point. Daniella wanted to satisfy her curiosity.

She was nothing if not patient.

Daniella watched the door swing open, and the small woman step through. The bell jingled as the door closed, and the woman stood there for a moment, looking uncertain. “She looks terrified,” Daniella thought. “No one has skin that white.” She watched the woman pick up a basket and begin to browse through the aisles, seemingly choosing items at random.

Perhaps it was just the years of habit and conditioning, living in a small town, but Daniella stared at the woman openly. She couldn’t shake that familiar feeling about her. When the woman had finally chosen everything she wanted, she came to the counter. Daniella couldn’t help noticing that her hands trembled as she placed the items on the counter.

“That’s $23.56,” she said as she began to bag the groceries for the rather odd woman. She had the fleeting thought that she was glad Steve was still across the street drinking. He’d have been coming on to this woman in five seconds flat, and probably scared the hell out of her.

Groceries bagged, the woman continued to linger, looking somewhat furtively out the front plate glass windows. As though she was reluctant to leave, she stood there for a few minutes while Daniella looked at her.

“The tourists are all gone now, aren’t they,” the woman asked, finally breaking the silence.

“Oh, yes,” Daniella replied. “Cold weather will be setting in, and the water is already too cold to go swimming. Not that it’s ever warm enough to enjoy swimming, anyway. The North Atlantic is always cold.”

“Yes, it is that,” said the woman.

As she gazed at her, it began to slowly dawn on Daniella. The woman’s features began to focus for her, and she envisioned a younger version of her.

“Oh, my God,” Daniella said quietly. “Laura? Laura Anderson?”

The woman’s head snapped around, and she stared intently at Daniella with narrowed eyes. Long moments passed.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

Daniella smiled. “Laura, it’s Daniella Crissman. I was a year ahead of you in school.”

Laura relaxed visibly, and gave a half-hearted smile. “Daniella! My God, you look wonderful! How are you?”

Daniella laughed. “Well, I’m still in this crap heap of a town. Otherwise, I’m pretty good. I gained some weight, probably too much, and my skin cleared up, so all in all, I can’t complain.”

Laura grinned at that. “I know what you mean. I had to get out, or this place would have killed me.”

Daniella suddenly remembered some of the rumors about Steve.

“Laura, I’m not trying to rush you off,’ she said. "I’d love to talk to you for a while. You were always nice to me, and not many people were back then. But listen, Steve West is the assistant manager here now, and I’m not sure when he’ll be back. Right now he’s over at the Pour House drinking his lunch.”

Laura paled. She immediately started to head for the door.

“Laura, wait,” said Daniella. She scribbled down her phone number on a scrap of paper, and came around the counter. She stuffed it into one the two bags Laura was carrying.

“My number. Call me, please? I’d like to catch up with you, if you’d like.”

“Okay,” Laura smiled, “I’ll do that. Oh, and by the way, it’s now Laura Anderson-Harrison. It’s a long story. I’ll catch you up with it.” She walked to the door, opened it, then turned and smiled. “It was good to see you, Daniella. You were always nice to me, too. That made you pretty unique around here.”

With that, Laura walked out the door. Daniella stood smiling for a moment. Then she wondered why Laura was back in this Godforsaken town. Who would come back here, if they ever managed to get away from it?

Then she saw that Steve was about to walk through the door. He had stopped though, staring in the direction that Laura had just gone. Hoping that he hadn’t seen her face, she went back behind the counter, grabbed a feather duster, and started cleaning. A moment later, she heard the door close. She looked up to feel that familiar crawling of her skin as his eyes raped her.

“Was that a tourist that was just in here?” he asked.

“I guess,” she said. “Sure wasn’t a townie.” She went right on dusting.

Steve mentally kicked himself. The one decent looking bitch to come in all day, and he’d missed her. And she was a tourist. He might have had a shot at getting laid with a tourist. Most of the locals wouldn’t come near him anymore, the dykes. Didn’t know a good piece of meat when they saw it.

He thought for a minute, and then decided that maybe he’d take a trip down a few towns. Get someplace where the bitches didn’t know him, and where he had a better shot at scoring some pussy. He’d have to drive for a while, though. That was the problem. Then he grinned.

“Hey, listen, I’m really beat,” he said. “You mind if I take off for the day?”

Daniella thought he probably just wanted to head back to the Pour House, and keep drinking. He already reeked of stale beer. Daniella would love to get him out of her hair, but she couldn’t resist making him work for it.

“You’re going to leave me here alone?”

“Well, it’s not like we’re swamped with customers,” he said.

“Well, what if I get robbed or something?”

Steve snorted loudly. “When was the time there was a robbery in this town?”

Daniella sighed. “Yeah, fine. No problem, go ahead and take off. I’ll be fine.”

“Thanks, Daniella,” he said. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“How?” she asked.

Steve leered at her. “I’m sure we can think of something,” he said.

“Oh, please,” said Daniella, rolling her eyes, “don’t even go there.”

Steve’s eyes narrowed and he glared at her, and then stomped off to the back room to punch out. On his way, he muttered, “Fucking dyke,” just loud enough for her to hear him. She rolled her eyes again.

When Steve had left, Daniella went behind the counter and perched on the high stool there. She could relax now. She did her job, unlike Steve, and since she worked six days out of seven every week, the store was always clean. She could relax, and just be here to help the occasional customer.

She thought back to her brief encounter with Laura. Daniella had not thought about her in years, since she had disappeared from the town. For a brief time, she had been the subject of much speculation, but like any town gossip, without the subject being present to talk about, to glare at; Laura had faded from the town’s collective memory. Seeing her today had been surreal for Daniella.

Growing up, Daniella had always been the target of torment from bullies. Bullies, in this case, defined as anyone who was part of one of the socially accepted groups in school. It almost sounds cliché, but as a young girl, Daniella had born a striking resemblance to Wednesday Addams. When you factored in the added “defects” of being terribly underweight, and the fact that she had a horrible complexion starting at the age of eleven, her life had been miserable.

Her parents had tried to make things easier for her, but their concern and intervention had only made things worse for her. By the time she was fourteen, she had stopped telling them anything about the hell that school was, or that the reason she stayed in her room and read every day during the summer was to avoid the other kids. Eventually, they left her to herself.

As bad as she had thought things were, though, Daniella had always felt a deep sympathy, almost a kinship for Laura Anderson. If the other kids treated Daniella like a soccer ball, something to be kicked around, they had treated Laura as though she were a slug. Something to be stepped on, squashed, and ground into the dirt. She had often wanted to reach out to the younger girl, but she didn’t quite know how. Her life had left her socially inept; she wouldn’t come into her own until she had graduated from high school. It was then that she put on some weight, filled out, and got her skin cleared up.

For Laura, it wasn’t just the other kids who tormented her. The Andersons were reviled by the entire town, and in true small town New England fashion, it didn’t matter how old you were. If you were an Anderson, you were treated like filth. The sins of the parents, so to speak.

So, while she could never quite figure out how to extend a hand of friendship to Laura, Daniella tried to make it known to the other girl that she didn’t look at her the way that the rest of the town did. She smiled at her when she saw her, and if they happened to be close to one another in class, or at a school assembly, Daniella would talk to the other girl. It was just small talk, but friendly. Laura would smile in return, but still, she kept Daniella at arm’s length.

Again, Daniella found herself wondering why Laura had returned to Last Hope. The woman had to know that when people found out who she was, there would be nasty reactions from the locals. Out sight, out of mind; but dare to come back into view, and you risked rekindling all of the old animosities, this time with a vengeance.

Tomorrow, Daniella was going to have to go back to Hudson House, and remove her books, candles, her lantern, and anything else she might have there. She couldn’t risk Laura finding and perhaps destroying them. Even though she worried about keeping the books at home for one of her roommates to find, she worried more about them being destroyed or thrown away.

Looking at the clock, Daniella was surprised to find that it was almost time to close up for the day. She got up, and went out on the porch, bringing the items there inside. She closed and locked the door, counted the register, did the paperwork to close for the day, and put everything away. She went to the back room, punched out, then walked back through the store, flipping the sign in the door to read, “Closed,” and locked up.

Daniella headed down the street to go home, her mind still turning over the encounter with Laura. She wondered why it was weighing so heavily on her mind.

When Daniella got home, she was relieved to find her roommates were settled quietly in front of the television. The other two women looked up when she entered the room, smiled and murmured their greetings, and then turned right back to the television. Daniella both cursed and gave thanks for satellite television. It meant that she had to deal with an endless stream of so-called “reality shows” that her two roommates loved to watch, but it also kept them occupied and out of her hair.

Daniella’s father had died shortly after she graduated from high school; her mother had followed less than a year later. The only thing that they had left her was this house. Any insurance money had gone to cover the cost of funeral expenses, and to pay off the few remaining bills that they had left her with. She had been forced to take in two roommates to help with the bills here, even though the house was paid for. Taxes and upkeep ate through her small salary, the income from have two tenants helped a lot.

The two young women she shared her house with were typical college girls. Just the latest in a rather steady stream of roommates, they attended the local community college in the next town south of Last Hope. While they seemed respectful of Daniella’s space, she knew that when she wasn’t home one or both of them had gone through the house, snooping into things. Daniella would find that things had been moved, or doors that she knew she had left closed had been opened. She’d asked them about it, but they denied having any knowledge of the incidents, and there really was no way she could prove it.

Making her way upstairs, Daniella grabbed some comfortable clothes, and then made her way to the bathroom for a shower. When she was finished, she wrapped her hair in a towel, put on her hospital scrubs, and then went back into her room. Flopping back on her bed, her thoughts quickly returned to her encounter with Laura Anderson.

“What on earth is she doing back here?” Daniella wondered. “What was she doing at the old Hudson House? “ Of course, Daniella knew that Laura’s family owned the old place, but she also remembered that no one from her family had gone near it for decades. The whole town knew the old stories and legends, but Daniella really wasn’t sure just how much truth there was to them. The house was supposed to be haunted, too, but Daniella had never had any indication of that, and she’d spent more time there than probably anyone had in years.

For that matter, if anyone was going to be inclined to see any ghostly presence there, it would be Daniella. She wasn’t a skeptic when it came to the supernatural; quite the opposite was true. Her fascination with the occult and the supernatural was far more than just a hobby. Daniella knew enough to understand that even though she had much to learn, there was a great deal of power available to someone who was willing to take the time to learn. Living in this backwater town, Daniella had more than enough time to devote to her studies.

Suddenly, Daniella sat bolt upright on the bed. “Shit!” she whispered. She had never asked Laura where she was staying. What if she was going to spend the night at the Hudson House? Daniella closed her eyes, and tried to think back to the moment when Laura had left the store that afternoon. Which way had she turned? She couldn’t remember, but she remembered the direction that Steve had been looking when he approached the front door. He had been looking in the direction of Hudson House.

“Damn it!” thought Daniella. “I need to go look. If she’s there, she’ll have a light on.”

Quickly, she got up and changed into jeans and a sweater, then pulled on a pair of sneakers. She went downstairs, and into the kitchen, grabbing a flashlight from a drawer. At the curious look from her roommates, Daniella said, “I think I forgot to lock the back door at the store.” They turned immediately back to the television.

Using the flashlight only in short bursts, Daniella made her way to Hudson House, using the route that took her to the back of the house. As she broke through the hedges into the back yard, she saw the light inside. It wasn’t bright, because the windows had all been boarded over, but it was definitely there. And from the look of it, it was the camping lantern that Daniella had brought there.

Daniella turned off the light and stood frozen in place, wondering what she was going to do next.