The Spirit of Ravenshom House

Chapter 3: The Warnings of Fear

The tiny diamond on her ring finger beamed at her as she sat in her cubicle finalising a design logo for a company that manufactured parachutes. For reasons unexplainable they wanted a monkey in their logo and she had been rattling her brain as to how to inculcate parachutes and monkeys in a logo icon that wouldn't make it look like a poster call for a travelling zoo. After making do with an idea that she thought people might take seriously she packed up to leave. She hadn't realised night had fallen and dreaded the two hour journey back home.

It was dark when she reached. Somewhere in the blue night an owl hooted, gloomy and paralyzing. The silence afterwards was calm, too calm to be comfortable. She stepped in kicking off her heels and found Ravenshom house's interiors completely made over.

Under the tiny glass chandelier of grandeur the furniture was no more hidden under pale dusty sheets but instead organized methodically across the vast drawing room. Boxes which had crowded the entryway when she had left had been disappeared and she could see many of its contents spread across the house as she moved through the hall. Surpassing the now stocked kitchen she found paintings on the wall, Jerry's mother's passion projects which tipped her in wonder.

Reaching her bedroom she tutted seeing the bookshelf with her science fiction books and Jerry's theological ones, clearly separated. The centre composed a gigantic four poster bed with carved side tables. The left side had Jerry's square framed glasses and the right side had her night lotion and earbuds. It also carried the present book she was reading, her smiley star bookmark peeking out of it.

Her heart went out for Jerry. The man could pay attention. She had gotten lucky with him and she didn't know how.

Walking into the room though she felt uneasy. She didn't know why Jerry had kept her things on the right side when she had always preferred the left. She had always slept on the left in her old place. Everything else in the room resembled their old apartment. The bookshelf on the right wall across from their wardrobe. The tiny dressing table adjacent to it garlanded with her childhood decorative lights. The age-old couch on the other corner that was usually draped with whatever clothing they had lately worn, now however empty and forlorn.

Scanning the room she didn't realize the shadow behind her. A hand emerged clasping her by the stomach and she screamed, her legs giving out beneath her. "It's me," Jerry said letting her go immediately. His hands went up in surrender while Daphne backed away, her heart beating behind her ears.

Jerry coursed around her, "Sorry my love," he said kissing her wavering shoulder. "I was just saying hi."

Daphne had been jumpy and anxious since a time she could remember. Her mother used to say she had fear bottled inside her, ticking like a clock that would never stop and she was right. For Daphne fear had been a constant companion, a companion she could never seem to shed. Daphne would disagree later. Maybe not fear exactly, but the warnings of fear.

Her mind always pirouetted around, doubting even the slightest things. Her body reacted to anything sudden like the drop of a bomb. And the constant incomprehensible nightmares hadn't done her any service in the matter.

Jerry however seemed to accept it without a second thought. Her jumpiness and fear were things only he seemed to understand without needing a reason or cause. He could always find a way to comfort her, a holding hand waiting for her patiently in a passing crowd.

He took hold of her wrist and gently led her away to the other side of the house. The room was already lit when he let her in. The table that lay in the middle was her working desk that had been pushed into the corner of their old apartment barely fitting there. It was flanked on either side by waist high vases of plastic autumn flowers. Her vision board had been replaced by the right wall, part velvet cushion and part dark concrete. The pictures and notes on her vision board had been neatly transferred onto it and the black board already had a to-do list written on it to be filled. The other side had an easel propped up calling to her. Seeing her eye the white easel board Jerry whispered, "It was my mother's. She would want you to use it rather than dust away in the attic."

Daphne couldn't believe it. Her own office in her own house. She had never really thought about it but now standing in it she felt light-headed, overzealous. "This is amazing," she said clapping her hands together. "Did you sit down even for a second?" She moved behind the desk peering at the vast window that took up most of the wall. "And how on earth did you do it all alone."

Jerry laughed, "I couldn't sit. I thought the faster things settled the faster the house could be ours. And I had Jason come over to help."

Daphne raised an eyebrow and Jerry grinned showing his front row teeth, "No, he wasn't wearing a dress."

"Shame," Daphne replied.

She walked out. Jerry didn't. He pushed her back earning a scowl from her. His hands played at the buttons of her blouse and he bit his lower lip. "You know, we haven't christened the house." He pulled away the blouse before Daphne could even get her hands out and he had her pinned beneath him. "I thought we could start with your office."

She eyed him down, a smile playing on her lips, "Only if you promise to christen every room in the place." A shadow passed over his face, too fast to decipher.

"Someone came from the office horny."

Daphne countered biting down on his lip, pulling his shirt over his head. The skirt came off, both pulling at it desperately and they fell to the corner with a loud thump.

She didn't think she had it in her after a long day but her body was screaming the opposite. It tore at him with want and need, stripping him off in mere seconds. Minutes, and they were inside each other. Pressing and pushing, daring and taunting each other. Limbs and skin tangling, moans and grunts escaping they were expended after the deed and barely had the will to move away lying on top of each other in Daphne's new favorite room in the house, for reasons indecorous.

After wolfing down the pizza Daphne had brought home from work they were both in bed, snuggled and comfy, Jerry on his side and Daphne on her wrong one.

She didn't know why it bothered her that much. She wasn't a very meticulous person, couldn't think of an instance where she ever had been particular about something as silly as sides of the bed. And yet she was restless. Soon enough her nightmares arrived to give her company.

She was awake in her bed, rolled to the side, facing the window. A lone tree stood tall and skeletal in the lone periphery. There wasn't any wind and yet the tree was moving. The trunk, dark and unruly seemed to bulge from the root and upward. She opened her eyes wider and realized it wasn't the tree at all. 

A shape of a solitary figure emerged from within the tree, silent and paralytic. A person, an apparition, a dream. The bracing phantom stirred, shrouded in a ghastly white from head to toe. The environs around it seemed to move along with it as if dancing, enthused to a tune no one could hear.

Daphne couldn't tell how, but knew it was a she. Her hands and legs, submerged beneath loose layers of milky drapes were indistinguishable. Her features blurry invoked a fear inside her that couldn't be shaken or enlightened. Her face was a mystery enclosed and unrecognizable, a darkness wrapped in tussocks of bleached fire.

Thewhite she wore grew beyond her feet as she moved away from the tree. It was asif what she wore had a life of its own, twisting and turning, like tentaclescaressing its surroundings.

The figure floated towards the window, draggingly slow as the horror inside Daphne grew, inching up her throat. She glided silent and firm, her face an albino mask of unknown. The white against the dark night was almost blinding, appalling.

Daphne looked to discover that the latches of the window weren't shut and her hands began to tremble. The white figure was reaching towards her, pleading an expressionless scream and Daphne was stricken, unable to move.

The figure outstretched its hands, pale wisps growing towards the glazed glass. The window didn't budge. But the latch clicked and the sound rang in her ears, jolting her up. She came to her senses and realized she hadn't been asleep. She had been awake all this while and the mirage vanished into the thick night, right before her very awake eyes.