Mirror of Shadows (3 page)

*****

Though Dead Oaks Hollow was a small town of 300-plus residents, the property it encompassed was quite big. The outskirts were rural and many of the roads suggested by the GPS were dirt and unmaintained. The pouring rain made the journey even more challenging. “First thing I need to do is get an all-wheel drive car or SUV. Geez,” she said to herself.

Most of the roads she travelled were wooded on both sides—some areas more densely than others—and she wondered if there were any neighbors around as she hadn’t seen a house in a while.

She was gaining some altitude with several steep inclines, and with every turn the roads seemed to narrow. Many of the muddy routes looked more like hiking trails than actual roads. She lovingly called the GPS, ‘Betty’ since it talked to her and was kind enough to give her directions, but Betty didn’t always give her the best route to her destination and Ella was starting to wonder if this was one of those times. She checked the GPS several times to see if the little red blinking dot had veered from its course, but according to the device, she was going the right way.

The fog was heavy and made the drive trickier and bit spooky. It, too, made everything devoid of color, giving the surroundings a gray tinge and dulling the shadows. She passed a row of five gnarly oak trees that looked like they had been dead for eons. Their branches snaked out from their trunks in every which way and fallen branches littered their bases. One of the trees had half-fallen long ago, making it look like it was crawling towards the makeshift mud road she was driving.
Creepy
, Ella thought.

The fog made them look menacing and alive and she wondered if these were the five dead oak trees after which the town had been named.

“Turn left in two hundred feet,” Betty said.

“Are you sure about that, Betty? That doesn’t even look like a hiking trail,” Ella said, not really expecting Betty to respond.

She made the left anyway, following Betty’s instructions. There was a fence post near what could have been construed as a very small road, but the fence itself was long since gone. She travelled at a crawl up the foggy forested road as the wipers worked at high speed trying to keep up with the torrential rain. A clearing in the trees to the right gave her a quick glance at a lake. As she continued, she thought this seemed to be the start of a theme. She deduced that she must be traveling the perimeter of ‘Cauldron Lake’ mentioned on the map.

She followed the road as it made a large sweep to the left and then another to the right.

“You have reached your destination,” said Betty.

“I have? But I don’t see anything,” Ella said to her GPS friend. That is when Ella realized that the road had changed from dirt and mud to a crushed rock. The mud-clad tires collected the tiny rocks and threw them every which way in the fender wells and undercarriage, making a horrendous sound. Slowly, she finished the sweep to the right and found a huge clearing studded with several ancient oak trees and a large mansion. Moss and ivy had engulfed the North side of the house like a disease. The most prominent features of the house were its gabled tower, enabling one to see far out on the lake and the grounds, and its wrap-around porch. The house was white, or at least it had been once. Marlin had not lied; it needed paint, BADLY. Its peeling facade, its green disease, and its leaning porch made it look foreboding and scary, but no doubt in its prime it must had been a magnificent architectural piece. It had many gables, including two very prominent ones resembling eyes on a strange human face.

She sat there in the car, wipers smacking the sides of the windshield, and took in all of it.
So this is where Grandma grew up
, she thought. She tried to picture it in all its glory with a young girl playing with a doll on the large expanse of what was surely grass at one time but now was knee high with weeds.
I’ll bet it was beautiful here
. She smiled at thinking about her grandmother as a little girl swinging from one of the great oaks and humming some old nursery rhyme.

Ella turned the engine off and reached in the back for her duffle bag. She slipped on her shoes, and then grabbed a hoodie from the bag and put it on over her robe and zipped the bag up. With the duffle in hand, she grabbed the keys from the envelope and her purse and made a mad dash for the porch. As she ran she noted that all the downstairs windows had been boarded up, presumably to keep squatters and kids out of the house.

Wiping her face with the sleeve of her wet jacket, she rummaged through the keys, and soon found a likely candidate for a perfect fit in the keyhole. In it went and turned easily, catching only once before stopping. She twisted the knob and the door squeaked open into blackness. A musty smell of dampness was overwhelming but she forged on and found a light switch, which of course did not work. Looking around in the darkness she found a candle on a nearby table. She set her bags down and dug around in her purse for a lighter. She didn’t smoke, but her roommate at school had and she’d left her lighters everywhere. Ella knew she must have one in her purse and as she suspected, her hand grasped one and she proceeded to light the candle.

Chapter 4

The candle didn’t give Ella much light, but it was enough to maneuver around without tripping over anything. It was eerie exploring by candlelight in a residence unfamiliar to her. Floorboards creaked, shadows moved with the candlelight, and the rain poured on. Most of the furniture was covered in sheets giving the illusion of many short, odd-shaped ghosts scattered around the rooms.

It was better near the boarded up windows where light tried desperately to seep in at the edges but with little success. She heard a thump that made her turn quickly towards the sound, but she couldn’t see anything. She moved ahead slowly, making her way around what she could only assume was a covered chair, when something rubbed her leg. Her heart skipped a beat and a yelp of a scream leapt from her lips as she saw the silhouette of a small cat running away.

She sighed with relief and spoke out loud, “Get a hold of yourself, Ella. It’s just a lonely kitten looking for a pet. Sorry, kitty,” she called after the frightened cat. “I’ll be better when the lights are on and then I can find you something to eat.”

She thought she heard a little meow of acknowledgement, but she shrugged it off as a ridiculous notion. She had now explored most of the first floor and decided to head back towards the door. She could change into something other than her wet pajamas and hopefully find a hammer and/or crowbar to pry the wood off the windows and get a better look at things.

As she walked down a long hallway she thought about the house and how she felt about it, whether she liked it or not. She hadn’t decided one way or another really, except that it was huge for just one person. Regardless of how she felt about her new home, she really had no choice in the matter; after all, she had nowhere else to go. This thought rattled around in her mind as she walked down a long hall noting a large, ornate mirror hanging on the wall. As she passed by it, she thought she saw something other than herself moving in the mirror. She turned towards the mirror with a jerk, seeing her own reflection in the candlelight but there was something else too.

Was it a black mist? A play on the candlelight? Or a shadow? Yes, she thought, a shadow moving from the edges towards the center. Her heart was pounding hard in her ears and her own breathing became deafening to her as she slowly raised the candle towards the shadow in the mirror.

The shadow reacted and jumped away from the light and so did Ella. She dropped the candle in her haste and sprinted towards the open front door just around the corner. Thankfully, the candle extinguished itself on its downward descent to the floor. Looking over her shoulder, not sure what she was expecting to see, she ran straight into a man who was now standing just outside the front door. She would have bounced off of him at full speed if he hadn’t grabbed her arms.

A scream escaped her when the man’s steel grip held her in place in front of him. Her brain couldn’t connect any coherent thoughts together and she ended up simply standing there in shock, as white as a ghost. The man holding her broke the long silence. His voice was calming and peaceful and her brain started functioning again as the adrenaline started to subside.

“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Then why are you holding me so tight?” she asked.

“I was keeping you from falling and hurting yourself,” he said matter-of-factly and then he loosened his grip and released her. She took two steps back from him into the house. The darkness from inside the house and the gray light outside silhouetted the man, making him look somehow angelic and she didn’t like that at all when he’d just scared the heck out of her.

“Who are you and why are you here?”

He seemed a little put off by her tone, but he answered directly and decisively, “I’m the handyman. Mr. Howard told me that you could use a hand up here, but…”

“But what?”

“You seem a little high strung to me. I don’t think…”

“I’m not high strung, I just thought I saw something in the … and it moved … and I ran … and then there you were out of nowhere, grabbing me.”

“I told you. I kept you from falling. I wasn’t ‘grabbing’ you,” he corrected her.

She rubbed her arms where she was sure she would have bruises from the strong grip he had held on her and she said under her breath, “Sure felt like grabbing.”

“I think I’ll go,” he said, turning away from her and making a loud clomping sound with his workman boots as he made his way down the first two steps.

“Please, don’t go, or at least could you help me get the boards off the windows and the electricity on before you go? I’ll pay you for it. I just, well, it’s a little creepy in here without any lights,” she said shrugging her shoulders and looking around warily, her arms crossed. She was sure she looked rather pathetic in her pajamas, converse sneakers, her robe sticking out from under her hoodie, with everything soaking wet.

“Fine, but maybe you should get out of those wet clothes,” he said a little too sarcastically for her taste and she found herself giving him a forced smile. She didn’t want to go back in. She didn’t have the candle anymore and she wasn’t about to close the door banishing the only light around.

She could hear his boots clomp down the rest of the stairs and then meet the mud with squishes. Ella cautiously looked around her in the dark and grabbed a shirt and jeans from her duffle bag on the floor. She quickly stripped the hoodie, robe, and pajama shirt up and over her head in one swift movement and tossed them aside. She cautiously looked around, crossing her arms over her naked breasts, and squatted down in search of a bra from the bag. In record time she had it and a dry, warm shirt on.

Every little noise had her jumping. She listened hard in towards the darkness within, and her eyes darted around suspiciously as she used one foot to un-shoe one foot, then she did the same thing to the other foot. She’d dropped her pajama bottoms to her knees and stepped out of them, slipping on some jeans and stepping into a dry pair of shoes. Her raincoat was in the car in a box, so she just pulled on another sweatshirt to keep her warm and quickly stepped outside the door onto the porch.

She explored the porch, finding that it wrapped around the front and sides of the house, but did not continue to the back. When she made it back to the front of the house she lingered at the door, nervously moving back and forth and crossing her arms in front of her. The movement kept her warm but she was starting to wonder where the handyman had gotten off to. She noticed what she could only assume was his truck parked behind her car in the driveway.

She was feeling uneasy pacing there, when she heard a floorboard creak from within the house behind her. She spun quickly towards the front door to find the handyman within, framed by the darkness behind him. This too made him look somehow angelic, and that was really starting to make her mad. Sure, he was handsome, but why was he always sneaking up on her?

“See…high strung,” he said deadly serious as if this was a horrible thing. He had a pry bar in one hand and a hammer in the other.

“Well, you…uhh…are…uhh…very sneaky,” she said defiantly.

He raised an eyebrow at her comment but did not smile or show much emotion at all, as he headed for the first window and started working.

She crept up slowly to him and asked timidly, “Can I help?”

This seemed to shock him. Maybe he thought she was a bratty little rich girl that didn’t like to get her hands dirty, or maybe just seeing her not jumping and screaming at every noise gave him a different view of her. Either way, he seemed pleased. He handed her the hammer and they both started prying boards and plywood off each of the first floor windows.

*****

Working together they progressed quickly, making their way around one side of the house with barely a word, but fluidly maneuvering together as if anticipating what the other needed to finish their task. When they finished with the last window, they headed back towards the front door to start on the other side.