by Sèphera Girón
Nicole jerked awake, the morning sun burning her eyes as she sat up. Someone had been there, right there beside the bed; looming over her.
But no one was there now.
She pushed long dark strands of sweat-soaked hair back from her face and took a deep breath, aware of how fast her heart was still pounding. It hadn’t stopped pounding erratically since she had entered the tiny old house the previous afternoon. She stared at the portrait of Andrew Borden hanging on the wall on the other side of the room as she breathed in the thick, dense New England air.
“You again,” she said sternly and flopped back onto the pillows, staring at the ceiling.
Ghosts, just ghosts. She knew almost all of them now.
And despite the secrets they shared, she still didn’t know the truth about the one ghost she had yet to meet.
Lizzie Borden.
For the past six years, Nicole had been drawn to the Lizzie Borden house. She had joined up with a ghost-hunting group in Toronto and the team had actually spent the weekend travelling to Salem and then to the haunted bed and breakfast in Fall River. Nicole also frequently visited the Borden graveyard and Maplecroft, the home where Lizzie moved to after the trials.
Nicole’s first night at Lizzie’s had been terrifying. Unexplainable noises and shadows, touches and whispers, brief wafting smells of rotten meat, rancid urine and coppery blood. When she sat on a couch, the sensation of a cat brushing by her legs kept causing her to look down yet there were no living cats to be seen. She hadn’t slept all night as the team investigated the floors with their K2 meters and cameras, recording voices that weren’t there and pictures that would later turn up orbs and smoky blurs.
She had returned several times since, sometimes with a group, sometimes on her own.
She rarely slept, of course. Fear and excitement kept her adrenaline racing all night as she attempted communication with the spirits rumored to be haunting the murder house.
Over the years, she had mostly encountered Andrew Borden, the stern frugal father who had been rumored to take far too much of an interest in his adult daughters and not enough in his second wife. His indignation at being axed in the head a century ago was still thick in the air most nights, his essence terrifyingly aggressive, his presence keenly felt should anyone attempt to speak ill of him.
Nicole always chose his bedroom as her own when she slept over. She knew who he was and what he was. She wasn’t so sure about some of the other house ghosts.
For instance, on the third floor, there was a room where children played. Children who had been drowned by their mother in the well next door. The sound of a ball rolling across the wooden floors could be heard all night long as well as ethereal snatches of children’s laughter.
There were the wandering ghosts of vagrants and a few of the clients that the Bordens had “dressed” in their makeshift morgue basement in the late 1800s, caught in the portals and timeslips that the house allegedly possessed. They were spotted on the stairs, skulking in bathrooms, slipping around corners before Nicole could fully see them, their voices murmuring on tape recorders punctuated with mournful screams of angst and pain, their images reduced to glowing circles or murky mists in photographs.
A more recent addition to the roaming cast of spirits over the decades was the handyman Michael, who had worked many years for the bed and breakfast and then died in a mysterious fire shortly after he retired, sometime in the 2000s.
But no matter how she inspected the orbs in pictures, listened to the wailings on the recordings, sat with her psychic energy tuned up high to “feel” whoever might be present, there was never a sense that the Lady of the Hour, the High Priestess of Ax Murderers, was in the meekest wisp of wind that blew doors shut in the stifling August heat.
She wasn’t here.
Nicole got up from Andrew Borden’s bed and stretched. Glancing at her cell phone, she saw that she had slept an amazing hour and a half, and yet had mountains of time before the first breakfast service was to begin. Still clothed in her “What Would Lizzie Do?” tank top and jean shorts, she walked through the doorway to Lizzie’s room. The usual mishmash of emotions that were not her own swirled around her, so dense and urgent that she could almost see them, but not quite.
She left Lizzie’s room and went into what was known as the John Morse room which was already musty and musky as the morning heat slowly engulfed the space. John Morse had stayed in this room when he came to visit. Nicole stood in Abby’s murder spot between the dresser and the bed, facing the wall. She planted her feet firmly into the rug, although the original murder rug had been removed and a vintage rug installed. However, there were rumors that the blood from Abby’s smashed skull could still be seen in the floorboards beneath the rug.
Nicole closed her eyes, imaging the axe coming down on her head, the sudden shock, the realization that her skull is broken and her brains are leaking out as the axe comes down again and again…
Did Abby see who held the axe? Was Abby ever able to catch a glimpse of the coward who bashed in her head while she made beds in the oppressive August heat? And why was she making the bed when she had little Bridgette Sullivan to do her work? Or was she helping out the Irish maid by making the beds herself? They had already had a huge row about Bridgette washing the windows in the sticky heat after suffering food poisoning from the rotten mutton the family had been forced by thrifty dad to eat for days in a row.
Nicole left Abby’s murder room. Hushed whispers from the other half a dozen sleepless ghost hunters echoed through the little house. She made her way carefully down the front stairs. There had been several incidents over the last century of people being pushed by unseen hands and she wasn’t eager to join the list.
She walked through the front hallway, avoiding the front parlour and continued into the living room.
Nicole sat on the murder couch. Of course, it wasn’t the real murder couch, just a replica, but the vibrations from that day of horror still coursed through her bones. The couch was where Andrew Borden had been axed in the head, likely while he slept, while rotten mutton gurgled in his belly. She stared across the small room at the wooden rocking chair by the window. She had taken pictures of the chair over the years and there were always strange orbs surrounding it.
Gently, the chair began to rock.
She shook her head, deciding it was the vibrations from the other ghost hunters creeping around the house with their dvrs and K2 meters.
The clock on the mantle whirred and stuttered. It had always tick-tocked irregularly and today was no different. It had the annoying habit of chiming way too many times an hour, which always startled whoever was in this room.
She closed her eyes and thought of Mr. Borden. Where had he gone that day? Who had his enemies really been? Were the whispers of deviance between father and daughter part of the catalyst for the gruesome spectacle that unfolded over a century ago?
She imaged the man from the portrait, stern with an unfixing stare, doing his “business rounds” as they called them. Walking around to the tellers, checking books, counting money, his stomach still roiling from the spate of food poisoning that had stricken the family the previous day. No doubt the oppressive summer heat had sent him home to his couch, where he sat in deep thought until the hatchet hit his head.
Was he sleeping when the axe fell? Was he thinking? Did anyone say anything to him before the blade hit the bone? She asked questions of the spirits, eagerly waiting for the answers. Her arms and legs felt weighed down with some unseen oppressive force. Her stomach rumbled, the hair on her arms stood on end.
Sweat dripped down her forehead, her body sinking, sinking into the couch as she visualized the events that might have happened that day.
Her head ached then shards of pain shot through her body. Shock and disbelief were a faint ebbing in the distant mists but soon they spun into focus in her mind’s eye. There was a sickening crunch as her skull splintered into pieces with the blows. No time to turn her neck, no time to see as an unseen person grunted with every swing of the axe. Over and over the instrument fell, brains leaking out, an unseeing eyeball split in two.
She lay on the couch, intact in a sleep paralysis state, her body frozen as she waited for yet another blow that didn’t come.
Her body twitched and she sat up, eyes still shut as she stretched her arms out in front of her and jiggled each of her fingers; visions and paralysis gone.
Nicole opened her eyes in time to see a whirl of grey and black mist rise from the couch and float towards the kitchen. The mist hovered at the frame of the kitchen door for a moment, almost as if hesitant, and then proceeded. Nicole stood up to follow it but it was gone. Vanished into nothingness.
In the kitchen, Kim and Jenny were comparing pictures on their digital cameras. Nicole nuzzled into their twosome to inspect the evidence. The staff was busy preparing the traditional “morning of the murders” breakfast so the girls had to squeeze nearly into the bathroom to stay out of the way.
“Did you see anything come in here just now?” Nicole asked as she looked at the viewfinder of the camera. It wasn’t the kitchen, just orbs clustering outside of the house in the darkness of the night before.
“No,” said Kim, shaking her head. “You mean just now?”
“Damn, was hoping you caught it on camera,” Nicole said. “It was the grey mist that floats from the couch to the kitchen. It was even on one of those ghost hunting shows.”
“You saw it?” All three turned to look at the door frame, Jenny holding her camera up as if it would still be hanging there, waiting for its Kodak moment.
“Just now. I lay on the murder couch and thought about the murder and then when I sat up, a grey mist floated up and into the kitchen.”
“How cool is that?” Kim said. Jenny nodded. “So much cool stuff happens here. Even after all these years.”
“Have you ever seen Lizzie? I thought you channelled her at a séance once.”
“I’ve felt her or the essence of something of her, I’m sure of it,” Kim said. “I asked with the tarot cards and all that, but I’m never sure if it’s her or something playing with me, imitating her.”
“I know what you mean,” said Jenny. “I’ve never been sure I’ve connected with Lizzie in the eight times I’ve slept here. Everyone else, I sure have. I have stories about everyone but her.”
“I wonder why that is?” Nicole mused. She pulled her attention from the doorframe and focused on the basement door. She sighed deeply. “I guess we’d better check the downstairs,” she said. “You guys in?”
“Why not? I never tire of the basement creepiness,” Kim said with a grin.
The ladies all pulled out their flashlights and turned on the light to the basement. Piles of boxes and other items were all over the cellar. The storage area for the bed and breakfast ranged from supplies to office files to laundered linens. The flickering light added a spook-house thrill to the dank dingy basement.
“It’s going again,” Jenny said looking up at the light bulb. “I’ve changed it six times since we got here last night.”
“You’d think they’d fix the wiring,” Kim said.
“What? And ruin a perfectly good haunted house?” laughed Jenny. “No way.”
“The owner told me last night that she’s had the electrician in three times since January and over a dozen times since she bought the place. No one has an answer about this light.”
“Lizzie,” Kim said with a smirk. “She’s here in the blood room.”
They walked over to one corner of the basement that was its own room. There was a hole in the wall where a large washing bucket had been placed, a re-enactment of times gone by. Nicole wandered along the racks of the bed and breakfast linens, all folded away.
She touched them, her eyes shut; the linens are filthy piles of soiled rags. The stench of blood and urine stung her nostrils as she envisioned a tired, sweaty Lizzie hand-scrubbing each and every rag.
“She had to wash them,” Jenny said, her voice sounding distant in Nicole’s ears. “Her father made her take a job and she handled the ladies’ monthly rags. So gross.”
“I’m still not sure I believe that part of the story,” Kim scoffed. “I never have. I thought this room was bloody from the corpses they used to dress when this was a funeral home.”
“That’s a fairytale too. The only corpses dressed here were upstairs on the dining room table; Mr. and Mrs. Borden.”
“The truth is so lost in a hundred years of bullshit. Who knows anything anymore,” Jenny sighed. “I personally believe she washed the period rags and that’s where she hid the axe.”
“I do believe the axe was hidden in laundry or something. For sure. And she burned that dress, remember?”
Nicole’s head swam, her nose plugged with the acrid smell of ammonia and rotting blood, the mustiness of the basement, the idea of the bloody axe with pieces of dad still stuck on it, tucked away in one of the filthy piles.
No DNA back then. Blood was blood.
The air grew thick and she opened her eyes. She watched Jenny and Kim stare at each other then at Nicole.
“Did you feel that?” Jenny asked with wide eyes. “Something touched me.”
“Something is squeezing me,” Kim said. “Like I’m a rag doll in King Kong’s hand. Let’s go.” Jenny and Kim hurried back up the creaking stairs while the light bulb sputtered and sparked.
Nicole went to a pile of laundry, holding her little maglight with one hand while picking through the bloody linens with the other. At last she found it and held it in her hand.
The head of the axe. The splintered handle fell to the floor. Bits of hair still clung to the sharp blade and Nicole fought the urge to vomit.
She closed her eyes and when she opened them, she was standing in the lobby at Maplecroft. She knew it was Maplecroft and hurried back to the front door to peer out the broken window to check. Yes, the bushes were overgrown and the “for sale” sign still hung out front.
In her hand Nicole held the axe. The intact axe, bloody with clumps of hair stuck to it, blood smeared down the handle. She stared at the glass on the floor below the broken window. She shook her head, trying to remember how she came to be here. She didn’t remember driving or more importantly, parking. She didn’t remember leaving the bed and breakfast and running down the street. The fact that she was dripping with sweat and with blood streaked across her clothes and legs along with newly forming bruises didn’t give her any clues as to what had happened. She had been in the basement at the Borden home and now she was here. At Maplecroft. The home Lizzie and her sister Emma purchased after the trial. The home where Lizzie lived until she died, entertaining theatre folk and carrying on torrid love affairs with pretty little actresses.
Maplecroft had been abandoned the past few years while the current owners tried to sell it in the recession in the sleepy little town where time had stood still.
A door slammed from the upstairs level followed by a crash like the sound of a vase smashing to the floor.
“Lizzie? Anyone? Who is here?” Nicole quickly ran up the stairs, gripping her flashlight in one hand, carrying the axe in her other. She paused at the top of the stairs and looked down the hallway at several doors.
She walked down the hallway, her heart pounding. A door slammed shut as she walked by it. Another creaked a little bit open and she glanced inside to the empty bedroom. She continued on until she reached the last room. The door was closed.
It sounded like there were voices whispering behind the door. Nicole jiggled the handle.
She opened the door. Immediately she recognized that this would be Lizzie’s room. The style was similar to what was Lizzie’s room at the bed and breakfast.
A woman wearing an old-fashioned black dress stood staring out the window, her back to Nicole.
“Lizzie?” Nicole asked. “Did you do it? Did you?”
The figure vanished without so much as a flinch.
Nicole left the room. She returned to the top of the stairs. The sense of the house had changed.
As Nicole went back down the stairs, her ears rang with the sounds of laughter and the scratchy, tinny tone of a phonograph record playing a happy tune like “Buttons and Bows” or some other old-fashioned song. Now that she was standing here, really seeing the place, she was stunned. She had expected an abandoned dust-ridden cloth-draped home but instead found a lively spectacle of working lights and old fashioned but obviously used furniture.
She stood staring down the hallway to where the grand ballroom must be. As she was about to walk towards the ballroom and the voices and the music, she was startled to see Lizzie Borden herself standing in front of her. Lizzie, not as the stern matronly manly figure with a round face and glassy eyes, but a middle aged Lizzie with overly dramatic make-up, a short pin curled hair-do and a bright red form-fitting dress. Her figure was alluring, round and hourglass with the ample paddings particular to her era. Her bright red lips pouted at Nicole.
“Welcome to my party,” she said in a low, sultry voice. Nicole stared at her, speechless despite the thousand of questions she needed to ask.
Lizzie hurried her towards an immense walk-in closet full of dresses and shoes. “Quickly, choose something fun and naughty.”
Dancing and spinning, snatches of faces in the blurs, being passed from man to man, the scratchy record repeating over and over. Nicole laughed as she danced, sweat dripping from her face as the old-fashioned black and grey dress pinched her unbearably, the old shoes slipping on the wooden floor, her ankles aching, her toes cramped.
Lizzie laughed and took her hand, pulling her from the dance floor.
“You’re fitting right in,” Lizzie smiled. Nicole swallowed and nodded; thirsty, exhilarated, thrilled to finally meet Lizzie but exhausted from the oppressive heat.
“It’s time to meet my distinguished guests,” Lizzie boasted as she led Nicole to a receiving line of characters that looked like they had been lifted from the pages of different eras in a history book.
Nicole gasped as she shook hands with Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Elizabeth Bathory, Vlad Tepes, and so many others who had performed despicable deeds in their lives. She briefly experienced a sense of déjà vu, a moment taken from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and “the master’s parties.”
No sooner had Nicole shaken hands with the last of the special guests, she was stricken to the ground, her head hacked again and again with an axe by Lizzie Borden herself. Nicole’s blood splashed Lizzie’s dress, the stains barely noticeable as they were absorbed the instant they hit the fabric. Nicole screamed and reached up to stop the blows, but it was pointless. The party guests, the hoards, descended on Nicole, slurping up her fresh blood, squabbling and shoving each other as they tore at her body for the meat. Distinguished guests reduced to ravenous animals with gnashing teeth and clawing hands.
Nicole ran down the winding stone streets of Fall River. She returned to the bed and breakfast. Relieved she saw the three ghost hunter trucks still in the driveway. She hurried inside the house and found Kim lying on the murder couch.
“You’ll never guess…” Nicole said, panting as she tried to catch her breath. She shook her friend who was lying in the Andrew Borden pose. Then she saw the blood pool on the floor, leaking brains, tufts of hair all around.
Nicole stood up and screamed. She realized she still held the axe and threw it at the rocking chair that rocked rapidly.
“Help!” she screamed. Her voice echoed eerie. Then, the house was weirdly quiet. Wasn’t it time for breakfast? But the table wasn’t set, there were no cooks, no voices from the other guests. But the trucks and cars were in the driveway. They hadn’t hit the road yet.
What time was it anyway?
The clock was still tick-tocking its staccato beat, whirring and humming. The gears grinding, how old was that clock? Was it the original clock?
Nicole wiped sweat and blood from her forehead.
The clock chimed at her.
The rocking chair rocked.
The body on the couch was still dead.
“Nicole,” a voice said from behind her. Nicole turned to see Lizzie standing before her. A frumpy Lizzie as in the famous portraits. Hair pulled back, eyes glazed and unhappy, her mouth set in frown. She wore a shapeless dress and an apron spattered with blood. In her hand, she held the bloody axe.
“What’s going on?” Nicole asked; she was cornered and could only move forwards towards the dining room.
“That’s right,” Lizzie said as she led Nicole into the dining room. “Come sit down and have your breakfast.”
Nicole reached to pull out the chair nearest to her, nodding at her ghost hunter pals already seated around the table. She screamed.
Her friends, the other six ghost hunters, were propped in their chairs, their faces dripping with blood from their bashed in skulls.
Lizzie placed a steaming bowl of stew in front of Nicole.
“Stop your screaming,” she said sternly. Nicole stared at Lizzie, her screams turning to burbling sobs. She gulped and sniffed as Lizzie sat down in front of her own bowl of stew.
“Eat your mutton,” Lizzie commanded, and lowered her head to slurp at her own raised spoonful. “Do you want to be part of the family or not?”
Nicole stopped sobbing and lowered her gaze to her stew. The odor of rotten meat mixed with the musky smell of New England in the summer heat made her stomach roll.
“Eat it,” Lizzie said again.
Nicole’s lips quivered. Lizzie stood up, her hand reaching for the nearby axe. Nicole quickly reached for her spoon and scooped it into stew. Lizzie sat back down and continued to eat and stare at Nicole. Nicole took a tentative taste, barely licking the stringy meat and nearly vomited from the putrid smell and taste.
“Eat your mutton,” a strong male voice boomed. Nicole looked over to see Andrew Borden now sitting at the head of the table, Abby by his side. Both still suffered the bloody wounds of their deaths. Bridgette, Emma, John Morse and Michael the handyman sat around the table too. The ghost hunters were gone.
“Eat your mutton,” Lizzie coaxed. “And I will share with you the secrets about Lizzie Borden.”
Nicole stared at Andrew Borden. He now looked like the portrait that hung in the bedroom. A stern, glowering man who stared at her with the intensity of a shark’s black eyes.
Nicole glanced at Abby, a mirror of the glum woman she’d seen in the portraits. What a miserable family they were. And what were the real secrets?
She wondered what Emma knew?
What would Lizzie tell her? What would Lizzie do?
Nicole ate the mutton.
* * *
Sèphera Girón is about halfway to her expiration date and still has loads to say. The author of a dozen published books, she’s also penned hundreds of short stories, blogs, articles and horoscopes.