Your weekly irregular dose of fabulous1 fiction
Week #34 - Sarah Jane Eleniak
Thursday, 11 Sep 2008 21:25
I can't believe we're well into September and that I've written thirty-four stories! And nanowrimo is just around the corner...
Sorry for the rushed ending on this one. It was starting to take me too long to get it wrapped up.
Thirty-five should up this weekend.
Sarah Jane Eleniak
Leonard woke up, rolled over and looked at his alarm clock. Why was he awake at 2:00am? He'd moved into the house a week ago and was still getting used to all of its quirks and sounds. It was an old house, built in the 1920s, its floors and walls full of creaks. After the first night in the house, he'd had to buy a ladder and trim the branches of the tree in his backyard; he'd been kept up half the night by the branches scraping against the house. He lay in bed and listened for what had woken him this time, and at first didn't hear anything out of the ordinary. The typical light traffic for this time of night, a distant siren, one of the neighbourhood cats looking for love or a fight.
When he'd nearly drifted back to sleep he heard a thump. He sat up in bed. It wasn't a vague, door-slamming-three-doors-down kind of sound, it was a thump in his house. There was another thump, and then another. Leonard was pretty sure things were being knocked off shelves downstairs in his living room.
He lay in bed thinking about what the thumps might be, the likelihood of various scenarios. An earthquake? And earthquake knocked things off shelves but this was Manitoba, and the house wasn't shaking? A cat knocked things off shelves, but he didn't own a cat. It could be someone breaking in and looking for valuables. Would he turn violent when he realized there was nothing worth stealing? Leonard, however, wasn't prepared to accept the possibility of it being a burglar. If it was a burglar, then his mother was right all the time she harangued him about installing an alarm system.
He wasn't prepared to accept that his mother was right about the alarm system so he got out of bed and pulled on his overcoat.
What he found in his living room was that a dozen books had fallen off his Ikea bookshelf. Two novels by Chuck Palahniuk, On The Road by Jack Kerouac, his high school yearbook, A Short History of Canada and a few others.
Leonard walked all over the main floor of his house, turning on all the lights, checking the front and back doors — both were still locked — and peeking into the basement. He wasn't prepared to go down in the middle of the night. Instead, he wedged one of his kitchen chairs under the doorknob like he'd seen done on television dozens of times. If someone had broken into the house, locked the door behind themselves, knocked books off his shelves and then hidden in the cellar, they could wait there until morning.
By the light of morning, after breakfast and a couple cups of coffee, Leonard was brave enough to investigate the basement. Half of it was semi-finished, just drywall covering insulation and the other half was bare concrete where the furnace and cold storage was. He hadn't yet spent much time in his basement, aside from when he carried down a few boxes to get them out of his way while he unpacked.
There was a rough wooden shelf in the cold storage, a plank of unpainted wood nailed to a couple of studs. The shelf was covered in dusty sealing jars. He brushed a couple of them clean; they were empty, forgotten junk left behind by the previous owners. Or maybe even the owners before them.
The last place to check in the basement was a crawl space that Leonard had never opened. When he toured the house, the previous owner told him he himself had never opened it, and that he figured it was a short, dirt-walled tunnel. The remnants of the root cellar the house used to have because a full basement was dug out.
Standing before the door, he found his heart rate had picked up a bit. But what was he worried about? No one would have broke into his house and then hid in his crawl. Deep breaths.
It took four good tugs to get the door open and after he stopped sneezing from the dust, Leonard shone his flashlight into the crawl space. Nothing but dirt walls and more dust.
While he stood around, looking for any other nooks where a burglar might hide, he heard a crash from the unfinished part of the basement. A bunch of the glass sealing jars had tumbled from their shelf and shattered. He looked around the basement again, briefly panicking until he convinced himself that the basement was still empty and that no one could have been downstairs and run up to the main floor without him seeing them.
He spent the rest of the day at home, feeling uncomfortable in his own house, but also too nervous to go anywhere.
"It's a ghost, dude. Simple as that," Marty took a sip of his beer, put the place back down on its coaster and continued. "What else could it possibly be? The jars might have been rats, but what about that other stuff."
Leonard was out for beers after work with Marty and Susanna and had been telling them about the strange goings-on in his house.
"Tell us again about the mop," said Susanna. She wore the same frown of concern she adopted when one someone on her team was trying to explain why their project was behind schedule.
"And the pail," added Marty.
"The mop and pail were housewarming gifts from my mom. Plastic pail, wood handled mop. There was nothing special about them at all. My mom bought them at Wal-Mart."
Susanna folded her hands on her lap. Her beer was mostly untouched.
"And you were sure they were in your closet?" she asked.
"The second time, definitely. I put them back in the closest beside my bathroom."
"But you didn't lock the door?"
"Well, there was no lock on it. But the next garbage pickup day they were out at the curb again. I was only able to grab them before the garbage men came because I had to go to work early that day. I definitely hadn't put them out the night before."
"It's a ghost, case closed," said Marty. "I know a guy, if you can't get rid of it yourself."
Susanna cocked her head slightly and picked up her glass of beer. She tilted it a little to the left and then to the right and watched the wave she'd created slosh back and forth. "If there was a ghost, in should have been listed on your mortgage documentation. If the previous owners knew about it, a haunting should have been listed as an encumbrance on the title."
"Well, strictly speaking, the ghost only has to be listed if it was a homeowner and listed on the deed when it died," Marty responded. "If like, your ghost was a guest who took a tumble down the stairs, they wouldn't have to list him."
Susanna nodded. "I'd forgotten about that."
"But what has the ghost against jars and a mop and pail?"
"Who knows?" said Susanna, "Ghosts are crazy, almost by definition."
"What are you going to do about it?" asked Marty.
"I dunno. Maybe we can come to an agreement. Not get in each others' way. My aunt and uncle in England lived happily for years with a ghost."
"But that's a British ghost," responded Marty. "They're completely different than over here."
That evening, Leonard was pouring himself a glass of wine in his kitchen when the pile of laundry he just folded drifted past towards the back door. He watched, too surprised to say anything, the deadbolt on the backdoor click open, the door swing open and his clean laundry fly out into his backyard. Through the kitchen window, he could see some of this underwear caught in the branches of the apple tree in his yard.
He drank the glass of wine in one gulp.
"Okay, this is getting just a bit ridiculous," he announced to the kitchen. "We're going to have to learn to get along. I don't know what I did to piss you off, but I'll have you know that my mortgage is locked in for five years at a very respectable rate. I'm not going anywhere."
The fridge flew open and a carton of eggs flew across the room and smashed against the wall. Leonard remembered that he'd been meaning to throw those eggs out for a couple of weeks now.
The next day at work he started calling around for someone to get rid of the ghost. The local Catholic exorcist dealt only with demon possession cases and it took Leonard three days to clean up after the shaman's failed attempt at driving out the ghost.
After some prodding from Marty and Susanna, he called up the guy Marty knew.
Gordon showed up at Leonard's house sporting overalls, a Def Leopard t-shirt and truly spectacular plumber's crack.
"I did a bit of research on your ghost. Your house was built in the 40s." They were standing on the sidewalk in front, where Gordon had parked his van. "By the way, have you had your pipes inspected? They still used lead a lot back then."
"Are ghosts attracted to lead pipes or something?"
Gordon gave him a confused look. "What? No. Just something to look out for in these older homes. I do renos on the side, too."
Leonard nodded.
"So far as I can tell, there's been no violent deaths in the house."
"Oh, that's a little a strange, isn't it?"
"Why? There aren't that many murders in Winnipeg."
"No, I mean it's a little strange that there will be a ghost, but no violent death."
Gordon scratched his beer gut and replied, "It's a little unusual. But I think I know who your ghost is. Sarah Jane Eleniak. You're really just the third homeowner. The couple you bought it from are still alive."
"That's right."
"From 1947, when it was built, until the early 90s when the Nielsens bought it, it was owned by the Eleniaks. They had," he rubbed his chin, "eight children. Mr. Eleniak died in 1986."
"But not a violent death?"
"Heart disease. What's really interesting is that Mrs. Eleniak died in her nursing home just one week before you took possession of your house."
"You think it's Mrs. Eleniak?"
"Damn straight."
"But if she died in a nursing home, should she be haunting there?"
"Not if she was more attached to your house. Let's get started."
Earl turned the beak of his baseball cap around to the back and yanked open the sliding door on the side of his van. He grabbed a toolbox and a portable CD player.
"Alright, let's do this."
"What's the CD player for?"
"Music. Ghosts don't like music. I figure, era she grew up in, the Rolling Stones will have her chains in a twist."
Leonard and Earl stood near the pentagram Earl had drawn in chalk on the kitchen floor, staring at the thin line of smoke that rose from a point dead in the centre. Get off of My Cloud was blaring out of the CD player.
Earl took off his baseball cap and smoothed his sweaty hair. "I can cut you a deal on patching your drywall. Ghosts don't usually kick up such a fuss."
"That'd be great. Do you want a beer?"
"Hell yes."
Leonard got them both a beer from the fridge. They drank in silence for a while and then Leonard said, "I feel a bit bad about the whole thing."
"About the ghost? Man, ghosts are just dead people who won't get out of the way of the living."
Before they'd finally driven her out, the ghost of Sarah Jane Eleniak had pleaded her case. For fifty years she'd lived in that house with her husband. They had eight children. When the children grew up, the dumped the grandkids on Sarah Jane to look after while they worked.
"All she really wanted was a few decades of peace and quiet before moving on. Some time to herself." Leonard shook his head.
"Do you know what a ghost would do to your property values?"
"I guess so."
"C'mon," Earl put his empty bottle on the counter. "Lemme take a look at that drywall."
4 responses to "Week #34 - Sarah Jane Eleniak "
Beast wrote:
Friday, 12 Sep 2008 01:14
I kinda feel for the ghost too. Especially after the all the renos we've done lately, I'm pretty attached to my house now.Debs wrote:
Friday, 12 Sep 2008 06:48
I like how having a ghost seems routine. Cute!Erinn the Bold wrote:
Saturday, 13 Sep 2008 17:36
I as well was pleased by the normal-ness of ghost-having. I also enjoyed Gordon.Astrid wrote:
Wednesday, 27 May 2009 14:56
For whatever reason, I just love ghost stories. And, yes, the casual acceptance of ghosts is great, including the observation: "that's a British ghost... They're completely different than over here."
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