Haunted Secrets: Tales of the Anderson House Vol. 4

Fear Itself

The man’s entrails were spread over and around his torso like the tendrils of a bizarre deep-sea organism. Dora stared in fascination at the spectacle. It brought back memories of the good old days, when she and her sisters had run a boarding house. Then, she looked away from the gloriously spilled guts to the man’s face.

She recognized him, and he knew her. She saw recognition in his eyes.

“You… evil…!” he croaked, blood dribbling from his mouth as he strove to produce the words.

“You can’t be here,” Dora said. “You’re dead and buried. Years ago. Nearly a hundred years, maybe. I forget.”

She looked around for Daphne and Daisy, but they were in the library, making fun of Thaddeus. She looked back at the disemboweled man. He had gone.

That was strange.

She glanced at the faded carpet in the second-floor hallway and saw no hint of blood or other fluids. Which made sense, if the man had been a ghost.

But how could the ghost of a man they had killed so long ago suddenly appear today? That was puzzling. In fact, it was disconcerting. Dora was seldom afraid, but this weird vision came close to scaring her. She decided to tell her sisters what she had seen. Thaddeus was in the library, too, but Dora disregarded the boy. He was reading anyway, and probably too absorbed in the antics of Tom Swift to pay attention to grown-up ghost talk.

“That’s strange,” Daisy said after Dora had finished. “I’ve never seen anything like that. I mean, obviously, I think about the people we killed.”

“Me, too,” Daphne chipped in. “When I’m just staring out at the street, I sometimes think of that hobo we asked to paint the outhouse.”

The girls giggled. The hobo’s corpse had ended up in the septic tank, minus a few bits and pieces. They had taken nearly a month to torture that one to death, as they reasoned nobody would report him missing. Why hadn’t Dora seen him, or one of the others? There had been so many.

“Yes,” Daisy said archly, “but he was sweet on you, wasn’t he? Brought you flowers, wanted to take you out to dinner at that fancy restaurant. After we killed him, didn’t we find he’d bought a cheap ring? What an idiot.”

Of course! Now Dora remembered. Again, it gave her an unaccustomed sense of unease. The man, what had his name been? Jack? John? No, Joe, that was it! Joe Something. He’d worked at a mill or something like that. He’d had to seek cheap lodgings because the workers had been put on part-time hours.

“Yes,” she said. “He was an idiot. But how could his ghost be here all of a sudden?”