The Secrets of Eseme Bellows

This is a rather long story so I have decided to break it up into several chapters. This story ties into my earlier work "The Three Rites of Eugenie Hastings" which will provide backstory for a few characters and events but is not essential to follow the plot. I hope you enjoy it, please vote and comment, as I appreciate any feedback I can get.

***

As long as I can remember I have been drawn to secrets.

As long as I can remember I have known the worth of them, and it was never any wonder that I have become what I am...I was always a detective of some sort, and the world was always a vast and endless mystery. Sometimes dark and sometimes wondrous, but always calling, always drawing me deeper into itself.

When I was young there was stand of trees behind the park down the street, and every day it seemed my mother and I would visit that park. I was supposed to by sliding or kicking my legs upon the swing, I was supposed to be running, laughing playing, all the things which are expected of a little girl. But somehow each and every day I would up standing quietly by myself and looking back into darkness of those trees. Knowing there was something within them, never knowing quite what it was.

My mother of course saw this oddity of my nature, and made sure to warn me constantly not to stray from the park. Never to step into the darkness beyond, lost to sight and gone among the silent elms...she told me that the woods were no place for little girls, that nothing of worth ever lay in the shadows.

And even as a little girl, I knew that she was lying. That out there in the dark another world was surly waiting. I did know then what lay out there in those trees, but I knew that it was calling me, always calling.

And it is a call that has never ceased.

Now I have grown up, grown older, and I have come to understand the world my mother warned me against, and I have brushed against the secrets in all the shadows. I have learned their depths, and I have learned the rules which define such things.

To never speak of that which is secret, never reveal to the world how much you might know. Keep your hands up and your eyes forward. Protect yourself above all else. And that magic and wonder are always fleeting, that they are born only to fade again and in an instant. They are something to be chased, but the cost of such things is always blood, the smallest piece of yourself left as sacrifice for in the bargain.

But I am only rambling now, wandering back to the beginning now that I fear I have at last reached the very end...no, fear is not the right word. I have known fear, and things far worse, states of being that have no name at all. I have known the deepest horror, and I have known it intimately, carried it within me across all the years I have had upon this earth. I am not afraid now at the end. You cannot be afraid when you know what is coming next.

I even know that this is not the end...it is simply the closing out of a single chapter as the others slowly begin to descend upon me. No different than the blood which marked the end of childhood, no different than the blood I spilled to learn of lust and love and all the secrets of my body. The blood is just the sign of change, it is the price of secret things.

My name is Rebecca Marsh, and I have always been a detective in one sense or another. Tonight I am bleeding in a small motel, a darkened room alongside the highway just west of Wichita. And I can feel that the time has come, that there will never be another chance to speak what I have known, all the secrets I have so long kept. The ones which I have loved and the one's which have held me so long in silent terror.

My name is Rebecca Marsh and I wish at last to speak of Eseme Bellows, now before the darkness falls.

Tonight is the last chance. Tonight I am bleeding secrets...

***

In the Spring of 1962 I stepped into a haunted house outside of Vermillion South Dakota.

It is hard to describe it any other way, as ridiculous as it sounds. But that is how it began.

I did not know that it was haunted, nobody had ever told me. I doubt that anyone ever knew. To most people it was probably just another abandoned farmhouse along the long and empty highway west, even something picturesque, some lonely reminder of days gone by, framed against the fields and the sound of the wide Missouri River flowing in the near distance. The white paint was only just beginning to peel from along its walls. The glass of the windows was still intact and the wind had not yet claimed the shingles of the roof. Passing by, someone might have thought that the place was still occupied, that within those walls a family lived and laughed. That they were peeking from the windows, that they were hiding in the long grass.

I was twenty three years old and I was heading west to California, another searcher on the trail of the American dream. I had left my New England family and my New England home for the stirring wonder that was California, my head full of dreams of romance and freedom and a world about to dawn.

I wouldn't have called myself a hippie, the word was not yet in vogue in '62, the movement not yet strong enough to define. I was simply young and idealistic, and full of hope for the life that I was just beginning. Kennedy was still alive and he was going to usher in a glorious future, there was a war to stop in Vietnam and a whole world to turn upside down. I had a few hundred dollars that I'd saved from waiting tables all through college, I had everything I owned in an old Pontiac and a couple of scuffed suitcases and I thought it was all that I would ever need.

I didn't count on haunted houses. They were not something that I had ever had a plan for.

That day in April I was only stopping to stretch my legs. It was mid-afternoon and I'd been driving since dawn, and there was no car parked by the old farmhouse, the grass had grown waist high and pressed right up to the windows. It seemed like a quiet place, an empty one, and nobody would mind if a young lady stopped for a few moments and took a break from the road. The highway before me and the highway behind was empty, not a car but my own moving between the two horizons. Nobody would ever even have known.

So I pulled into the grass before that place, stepped out into the sunshine and the cool breeze that came up from the river. I lit a cigarette, I was still smoking back then, and I looked around that empty landscape and of grass and sky and felt at once lost in the grandeur of creation and more significant than any person should ever have the right to feel. Like I was the only living being on the whole of the western plains, and like it had all been set down there precisely for me, a vast world for me to wander.

And in a single instant I was disabused of that notion and nearly leapt back into my car when I heard a soft noise from within the farmhouse.

My first thought was that I had made a mistake, that I was smoking a cigarette in full view of a house full of occupants, that the place was not empty at all, just less tidy than most people would keep it. My hand was already on the Pontiac door, I was ready to make an embarrassed and red faced escape, well and truly returned to my place.

Why didn't I leave? I've asked myself often, ever since that day. What was it that stopped me?

Even now I have no answer, none has ever been offered to me.

But with my hand upon the door and my heart beating wildly I did not flee from the scene of my surprised embarrassment. Instead I hovered there, and slowly turned my gaze back towards the house, silent once again like there had never been a noise at all. And it occurred to me that maybe there hadn't, maybe it had just been in my head, or maybe it was just the noise of an empty house, the walls settling, the breeze knocking something to the floor.

For a moment I stood there and listened to the silence, and the longer I did so the more sure I was that I was alone. It had been nothing, I was just jumpy when I had no reason to be jumpy. I couldn't even tell myself exactly what it was that I had heard, even when the sound came again I was not able to place it, and the second time it did not scare me, did not make me want to run. I have always been curious, always loved secrets. Maybe that is why I stayed there all those years ago, it was as simple as waiting those brief seconds for my fear to have time to turn to wonder.

When the sound came again it was because I was seeking it, because I wanted to hear it, and even though I could not understand what made it, there was no more thought of flight. Instead, the second time the noise came I left my place beside the Pontiac crammed full with my possessions, and I moved through the long and cling grass towards the house before me, intent upon even the smallest of discoveries.

In the back of my mind I could hear my mother's voice as I always head, telling me to go slow, telling my to be careful, that the world was full of dangerous things and a young woman on her own could not go wherever she liked. And I ignored her in my mind as I always had in life, the rules and mores of another time and strictures that did not apply to me. I was curious about the sound and so I would follow it, and no matter what my mother said.

Such a simple thing, so small and so innocent. The sound I followed towards that house was not even a striking one, no note of foreboding within. Just a soft thump like a single foot falling upon a floor, as soft and distant as the Black Hills on the far horizon. Unsteady and soft from within those walls, there and gone. As I drew near to the grimy windows that would allow me a view of the interior, I could not even make out the sound above the rustle of my own movement through the grass, and it may have ceased altogether as I drew near the pane.

I peered in through the much stained window, and the house peered out, and for a time we simply listened to one another and to the crows that drifted across the sky and the soft whisper of the river somewhere south. Looking in I beheld only a sunlit and empty room. No furniture to mark habitation, no pictures hanging on the pale yellow walls. No sign within that field of vision of what might have produced the noise which drew me, and which I heard again as I stood watching, gazing into that stillness beneath which the sound hid.

So close to the house the sound was more pronounced, not just a thump but a slow rustle along within it, the sound of something moving but not very far. And so irregular that I told myself it could not be an effect of a draft through the stillness, no, the sound was surely something living, something hiding within that empty place. Even believing that the noise was made by something living did not fill me with sinister expectations. Instead I imagined a mouse at work in the corner of an empty room, or a bird building a nest in the window of an unseen kitchen.

It was not the sound at all which moved me towards the front door. It was simply the feeling that I was alone out there, all alone. There was no one and nothing to stop me, and why not try the door, why not walk for myself those empty rooms? There was no one that would ever know, nobody that would ever care.

The things we do when we are young and still trying to learn the boundaries of this world...nobody had ever told me about haunted houses, nobody had ever warned me that such places did exist, that they were out there and they were waiting I went to the door for the same reason I had gone to the trees those years before, because a part of me had simply wanted to know a secret for myself, to stray to the places and the situations of life of which I had been warned but which had never been explained.

And as it had been in the woods behind the park, the door has been open when I tested it and I entered the empty house with the same sense of wonder as I had gone to the losing of my virginity. The door was open and I stepped away in every case from the world which I had known and deeper into the mystery that lay behind it's surface.

I stood for a time in the coolness of that house, taking in the narrow hall and the wide room which I had first gazed into, trying to imagine the people that had left it behind. There was nothing left of them it seemed, not a stick of furniture not some child's toy gathering dust in the forgotten corners. When they had gone they had gone completely and left nothing of themselves in the passing, nothing but the house itself, the old rooms which had once been home, the narrow stairs which they had climbed towards sleep and dreams unknown.

That is where I would have gone, up those stairs and into the small and yellow rooms where once strangers had slept and kept their secrets. I would have climbed upwards into their most intimate domains and sought them out, would have done but for the sound which came again, and louder then, and longer then. Not from above, not from those little rooms which I imagined waiting for me beyond the narrow stairs, but from what seemed to me to be below. The sound more insistent, a series of bumps, a rustle of movement as something beneath the floorboards drew my attention away from the stairs which led up and into the search for those which led down.

Nor did the sound stop as it had before, but seemed to grow more instant with every step which I took across the creaking floorboards, until I was certain that it was the sound of my steps which provoked the noise, that something below my feet was trying to communicate with me, out of confusion or out of fear. I pictured a cat or a fox down in the basement, used to the dark and confused by the sudden intrusion of my steps, seeking a return to it's long held silence. Yet even believing fully that it was no more than that, I still went on, towards the back of the house where I was sure I would find the steps that lead down. Because it was my nature. Because I was one that had to know.

I found the door to the cellar in the empty kitchen, and just as the door to the house, it was unlocked. I turned the knob and slowly pulled it open, stood there atop the stairs looking down into the dark. The noise below had grown frantic, and suddenly I knew that whatever made those sounds was too large to be a cat, too large even to be a stray dog. I looked at the walls atop the steps but there was no switch for lights, the house had probably been built before electricity was common on the plains, long before anyone had dreamed of well lit cellars beneath the ground. Down below all was black, and the noise rasping out within it.

My mother was screaming in my head, and by then my father's wisdom had joined with hers, but I didn't listen to the memories of their advice, listened only to the noise coming up to call to me.

I went downward into cold black silence, the sounds that had drawn me ceasing with the first fall of my foot upon the stair. I called out but nothing moved or made reply, and on the last step I paused, my hands raised against an unseen blow, as I waited for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dark.

I did not really see her all at once. Better to say that she emerged before me though she did not move an inch. At first she was simply a shape, a darker point in all the blackness, and then she was an object set down and forgotten upon the floor. But in the emptiness she was all that occupied the space, and my eyes remained upon the form until I saw that it was moving, that it was trembling, and in the blink of an eye she was a woman contorted upon the floor.

I could make out the masses of her dark hair that framed a oval face, but her body was twisted at odd angles, something wrong with it and I could not imagine why the woman held so still...I was afraid in that moment, but not nearly as afraid as I should have been. It had all happened too slowly, too steadily to provoke a panic within me. More than afraid, i was confused by the unexpectedness of it all, a woman in the dark cellar of an empty house, no more than seven feet away from me yet holding so unnaturally still and not a word of greeting or a demand to know what I was doing there or even who I was.

I knew from the first that something was wrong, yet I couldn't stop myself. I reached into the pocket of my jeans and brought out the book of matches I used to light my cigarettes. Struck a single flame against the dark and we both screamed before the light burnt out.

Then I ran.

I was up the stairs in a flash, tripping in my haste to bound through the kitchen and down the hall, falling hard enough to scrape my knee upon the floor boards before I scrambled to my feet again and rushed out the door and into the sunlight. I was at the Pontiac in the blink of an eye, and then I was behind the wheel, locking the doors behind me as I fumbled for the key in the ignition and turned the engine over.

I made it a hundred yards down the highway before I glanced back in the rear view mirror and saw the empty road behind me. No pale figure screaming in my wake, no wide and wild eyes boring down. Still I did not stop, or even slow down. I drove west down the highway, the engine screaming beneath me as I gave the old Pontiac every bit of gas I could.

It was probably twenty minutes or more before I skidded to a stop by the side of the empty road, my fingers still shaking as they clutched white around the wheel. The adrenaline of my flight was wearing off, I needed to catch my breath and will my body to stop it's shaking before I could drive on. Maybe my mind needed a break as well, needed a moment unencumbered to put itself together and to work out what it had just seen.

In my mind I walked myself through it once again, the instant in which the match was struck and the blaze of light had fallen upon her, trying to work out just what it was that I had seen.

A woman on her back on the dirt floor of an empty cellar, her body all at angles. I saw her legs bent back behind her head, her arms thrust up into the air above her. I saw a pale face with only darkness where the eyes should be, and a mouth torn wide in a feral grin...I heard my scream and I heard hers and then the light had died and I had run.

I shuddered again at the memory, the grotesque appearance of her naked form and it was the thought of her nudity which slowed my breathing, which forced my heart to slow it's racing and my mind to begin to work once more. Because I had not realized until that moment that the woman in the cellar had been naked, I had seen only the flash of her unnatural grin and the darkness instead of eyes, only seen the strangeness of her position.

I had seen more than my eyes had realized, and parked by the side of the road I willed myself to see it clearly.

The woman had been naked, but not wholly naked. Her skin had been pale in the match light, and she had worn no clothes, yet there had been something... had she been covered in tattoos? In my mind's eye I saw her white skin shimmering beneath blue markings, which the more I focused upon them came to believe had been words, words that had been written in blue upon her skin, and not of India ink but writ in paint, upon her skin but not within it.

And having placed the painted words in blue upon the image in my mind, I began to see other details in relation to those words. Her skin had been so pale, all but her hands thrust into the air above her head, and those had been the darkest red or even purple. Stretched there at the limit of the body's reach, the fingers had been limp , and the wrist of either hand bent forward at the wrist. As though something was holding them up.

And with that thought it all came clear, and that is why I started the Pontiac once again and turned it around.

Because the hands were purple. Something had been holding them up.

I could not explain the blue writing that I was sure had covered the body, but the rest was falling into place. Those purple hands because something was cutting off their circulation, held upright because they were bound that way, suspended from above by some slim line that the match light had burned too quickly to make out. The legs were thrown back behind her and held there because she could not move them, because they too must have been tied. The feral grin was a grimace of pain and of terror, her scream bursting out at the sound of mine, bursting forth from around something which gagged the woman and had kept her silent at my call. Her eyes dark because I had not seen them, because they had been covered with black cloth.