The thing that appeared before her was unspeakable. It was unlike anything she had ever imagined and as it rose above the table, swirling with tenebrous malevolence, her mind teetered on its pedestal of reason and skepticism. Smoke-black tentacles of some vile nightmare substance swept across the room toward her and her nostrils filled with the acrid stench of blistering flesh and death. Two points of venomous light peered at her. They seared into her mind, flashing with sinister greed.
Maggie James coughed out oily smoke, then fainted and knew no more.
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The ‘Old Hargrave Place’ as locals called it, ought to have been the most sought-after mansion in all of Whitby. It was the only mansion that still stood for most of the last 290 years, though subsequent owners had added on and renovated it causing it to be a pleasant mixture of all of the major architectural styles since the Georgian era.
Each floor was not quite on the same level as the others, stairs rose and descended through the house to the tower or the dank cellar, to the balconies and widow's walk that overlooked the small town, as did almost fifty windows. The floors creaked and the radiators screeched. Hargrave had a lot of personality. Especially since it stood empty most of the time. Many of the last several generations of owners had claimed that the house was haunted. Most of them came by degrees to be convinced that it was haunted by the original owner, Hephziba Greaves.
Greaves was something of a celebrity in Whitby and had driven the tourism trade ever since witches and witchcraft had become popular again on social media. There were tours past the house, ghost walks that revisited the pre-revolutionary period, with appropriately dressed tour actors and a jump scare at the end, and all the town restaurants had some sort of meal or sandwich named after her. She had drawn a lot of attention in her own time, too. Hargrave had been Hephziba’s home and from there she had served the people of Whitby Village poultices and compresses, cures and potions until the local cleric, a zealot and sadist called Elder Gethsemane Smythe took it upon himself to have Hephziba Greaves tortured and burned for a witch in 1733.
The records of the trial were extant. Smythe had gone to Hephziba Greaves for a toothache and had come away still in pain. The pain worsened overnight until by dawn, he was in a fever. A neighbor had pulled the tooth and at length, Smythe was on the mend, but he became convinced that Hephziba had put a curse ‘of Satan and Hell’ on him. After a trial in which she was bound hand and foot with iron-forged manacles and gagged and so could not answer in her defense, Smythe sentenced her to torture to get her confession of collaborating with the devil and then had her burned at the town square. She had been either 18 or possibly 23. Records differ.
Her home passed to her brother, Goodman Thomas Greaves and when he died childless and forlorn, the town drew the lot and the house and sold it at an auction. By the time of the Revolution, several families had used Hargrave as a starting point, but none stayed long. No family had ever lasted more than nine months in Hargrave, despite renovations and fix-ups. For nearly three decades, it had been rented out by an owner who lived in Jacob’s Mill, but even the tenants didn’t stay long.
The last owners, the Olsons out of Paulbury had quit the place just before mid-July, claiming unbearable smells from the cellar and a tendency for their possessions to move or go missing. After the first two weeks, their dog refused to come inside and ran off several times. For most of the summer, the Olson family had suffered headaches, bad dreams, lost or broken items, strange burns that occurred in their sleep and, finally, intense hallucinations in which they dreamed that they were being burned alive. The youngest daughter had suffered complications of smoke inhalation though there was never any residue of smoke found in the house. The Olsons put the house up for sale and went back to Paulbury.
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Maggie James of James Realty, took the Hargrave account, not only because everyone else in Whitby and the surrounding towns was tired of it but because she had a reputation with ‘haunted’ houses in the area. Many of them had auspicious reputations, too. She had sold the Portman “Poltergeist Palace” mansion to Kirk Lundergard five years ago, despite the house supposedly being one of the most ‘spiritually active’ homes in the nation. Kirk loved it and had yearly ghost parties where extremely extravagant ghost-hunting games were a regular part of the attraction. Almost all of its ‘poltergeist’ activity could be chalked up to an old house with creaky floors and a very outdated coal furnace that had more octaves than an opera singer.
She had also sold Thorne House, the infamous dwelling of Abigail and Sebastion Thorne who had been celebrity serial killers in the 1970s and who made the news for filling their home with all kinds of depraved art. She had overseen the cleanup and sold it to the Fernandez family, who had lived there now for three years and with no complaint.
Hargrave’s reputation was nothing by comparison, Maggie thought. Haunted houses were old and sometimes full of bad memories, but mainly they were quirky fixer-uppers that upset people with sensitive and overactive imaginations. Maggie James had neither.
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Despite her reputation as a closer, Maggie James had to rethink her approach with Hargrave after six weeks on the market. She might have been wrong about selling it ‘as is’. No one locally wanted to even look at the house. People who had come from Carston or Jacob's Mill or Paulbury to look at the Hargrave place were immediately put off by it. There was a sense of tension in the house, almost a feeling of unwelcome, they said. After two months on the market, Maggie James decided to buy it herself.
The house, she thought, needed someone to come in and love it and give it a good once-over. Nothing superior could be appreciated unless it was staged just right. She had invested in homes before and then flipped them. She could certainly afford to fix and flip Hargrave. She couldn't spend the time necessary unless she was there, so after the paperwork was completed she moved in to start the cosmetic overhaul.
That had been in mid-October. Whitby was settling into golden days and the leaves were beginning to change. It was sweater weather and in anticipation of the coming holidays, Maggie decided she would forgo Halloween and its fascination (especially in Whitby) with Hephziba Greaves and witches, and start making the house up for Thanksgiving by emphasizing harvest themes. Lots of burnt ochres and browns, multi-colored pumpkins, corn stalks, hay bales and a friendly, inviting and generous vibe rather than a scary one was what was needed. Inside and out Maggie spent a lot of money (which she would recoup with a 6% commission when she eventually resold Hargrave) to make the place look and feel better.
Initially, too, she had been very happy with the updates. Each of the rooms was painted and themed and in pristine condition. She lived in the older back part of the house, less modern and bright and far more utilitarian, but she appreciated the plain kitchen and servant's quarters-feel of the main floor rooms.
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The first few nights had been quiet, except for the creaking of the old house and the screeching radiators. Yes, a door had slammed upstairs, and Maggie had jumped, but then she had remembered leaving windows open to get some cross-ventilation going and to clear out the wet paint odor in the place. There had been other sounds though, and a moment where she felt as though she was being watched while she was taking a shower though no one was anywhere around. She chalked it all up to the nerves of staying in a new place and the rumors she had heard. So much for not having an overactive imagination, she thought, chiding herself for her silly reactions.
By the end of the first week after the painting and staging had been completed, Maggie was having serious doubts about the house. Three separate times, she distinctly felt someone lightly pinch her arm or her thigh, though no one was there.
One night over the weekend, she had gone out to meet with some other realtor friends for dinner and had walked back to Hargrave from downtown because she had enjoyed too much wine. Once in her nightgown, she had brought a tall glass of ice water to the nightstand in her back bedroom. As she scrolled her phone and finished up the group chat with her friends, she watched in disbelief as, reaching for the glass of water, the glass rose off the nightstand and dripped condensation on her sheets,.The glass tipped upward and splashed ice-cold water across Maggie and drenched her bed. The glass floated there for just a moment and then smashed into bits on the headboard just above her head.
Maggie went down and tried to sleep on the couch, after turning on all the lights.
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Early the next week, and after a prolonged cleanup of glass shards and using her hairdryer to dry her mattress, Maggie had decided to schedule an open house. In the lead-up to the event, she considered that the stress of buying Hargrave and staging it had overextended her finances and her psychological health. She was obviously having a prolonged anxiety attack. Maybe she had been more drunk than she realized and she had heard that hallucinations could occur like that. Her brain corrected the illogical rationalizing. The shattered drinking glass and wet mattress and bedclothes posed troubling corroboration of what had actually happened that night. All she knew was that she wanted out of Hargrave. The only way out, as her father used to say, was through. Once she had the house sold, she would be able to get out of Hargrave, and maybe out of Whitby.
In preparation for that eventuality, Maggie had set up the house to be exquisite for those who might wish to come in during the open house. More than any other part of the house, the massive dining room was decked to an impressive degree. As they came in the front door, just to their left, they would see the massive and beautifully designed dining room, set up as if at any moment, Grandmother would be bringing in the turkey and stuffing.
A runner of dusky autumn orange draped the center of the table, lengthwise, punctuated by large, silver candelabra with honeycomb candles. A large platter with a matching gravy boat and carving utensils was precisely displayed in the center. Along a sideboard, chafing dishes and tureens of expensive make were buffed to high gloss. Each plate had a gold charger and the flatware was gold-colored. There were glasses for water and wine. Each place setting had every possible utensil and was topped by a goose-folded orange napkin that matched the autumn-colored themes. As a final flourish, Maggie James had woven lengths of bittersweet with golden red berries all around the centerpieces.
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The doors of Hargrave were set to open at noon. After three hours of waiting and no one showing, Maggie had put vanilla extract on foil in the oven to liven the welcoming house smell. She lit the gas logs, put on soft jazz music and called Denny at the tourism development board offices to remind him that Hargrave was open and for sale.
Still, no one showed.
By six p.m. Maggie had begun to get downright discouraged. She was preparing to dismantle everything and pack it all up, open a bottle of wine and have a long bath when the lights flickered. Outside in the twilight, thunder rumbled in the distance and the wind swept swirls of leaves before it.
“Damn you, Hephziba Greaves,” Maggie James said aloud.
In the next moment, a feeling of slick fear rose in her chest. Turning to gaze into the dining room, she saw the lights flicker and increase in brightness. In the glare, she watched as the table shook and juttered as if an earthquake had hit Whitby. Decorative plates and chargers shimmying off the edge of the table went crashing to shards on the oakwood floors. The honeycomb candles flashed to light and burned like searing torches. The table broke open and spilled apart in opposite directions and the floor beneath it caved in. Below the jagged wooden floorboards was a stone altar dripping with gore lit by the blazing fixture. Chained to the altar was a woman writhing in agony and screaming though no sound came to Maggie's ears. Unseen hands slashed and cut and pierced the woman's flesh as she fought her iron bonds. Maggie, feeling nausea rising at the gruesome display, pitched forward onto her knees at the edge of the hole in the floor and wretched. Glowing cherry-red iron pokers were pressed to the woman’s chest, thighs and buttocks. She was convulsed by the excruciating torture, quaking and rolling away from the attacks. Each time she shook, the house rumbled and tossed.
The scene suddenly changed. The woman, cut and burned and slashed, bent with exhaustion was affixed to a ring high on a tall stone obelisk. All about her feet were piles of wood that had been doused with oil. An unseen hand thrust a flaming torch into the bundles. The wood smoldered and smoke billowed upward into the house.
The woman’s feet and legs began to char and blacken as the flames devoured her lower extremities. At first, she had coughed but now she was screaming and fighting the chains that kept her in this nightmarish pandemonium of pain and asphyxiation.
The stench of burning skin filled the house in plumes of onyx smoke and Maggie wretched and coughed, trying but unable to move away from the horror below, her eyes streaming with tears.
As it filled the room, the smoke formed the shape of a massive woman's head in the dining room. The floor was whole and the table was unmoved, but the smoke-black hair of the head reached out to her like writhing tentacles. Blackness filled Maggie James's lungs and obscured her mind. She knew no more.
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When she woke, her hands automatically went to her face. Her hair fell in silken locks about her shoulders. Her skin was smooth, not charred or lacerated. Her legs were firm and whole. A slow sigh of relief escaped her lungs and there was no smoke or fire there.
The memory was fresh. They had come to her home, convinced that she was a witch and taken her to the center of town, performed a sham trial, stripped her bare for all the village to see and tortured her before burning her at the obelisk. In her last few moments, when the fire had seared her nerve endings, she made a silent vow for vengeance to the old gods. As the flames devoured her, part of her living mind went into the smoke, so powerful was her need for revenge.
For centuries, she had terrified the residents of the old Hargrave place, once just a tiny house, now a mansion, feeding on their fear of her until she was strong enough. Her power had grown until now.
She opened her eyes.
The home place had grown, yes, but she was unmoved. Her heart had but one motivation. She would now seek her revenge on those who had ended her life.
As she stood and balanced on her new legs, she looked about. A mirror was hanging from a wall just at the head of the feast room. She went to it.
The woman in the mirror was not someone she recognized, but it was all the same to her. Her own face had been seared off by hungry flames. She would get used to this face.
She wandered to the front door, and as she did, a chill wind brought her the slow echo of a coming storm. She began to remove the garments that impeded her movement.
Hephziba smiled in her new face. Out there somewhere was Elder Smythe or perhaps his offspring. She giggled as the last of the garments came off and she was free again. It was a unique and pleasant feeling to not have her lips split and slough away as she grinned.
She stood there, outlined in the light from the front door and gazed out at Whitby Village. Soon, they would know her wrath. She laughed and it was a higher, more musical sound than her own laugh had been. A person walking by the house looked over and waved to her.
“Hi, Maggie!” they said, before gasping and looking away in horrified embarrassment.
Maggie is gone, Hephziba thought. I have returned. Flames danced in her eyes as she cackled. Lightning lit the night.
“I have returned,” Hephziba Greaves said and shook with furious laughter. "Vengeance will be mine."
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