“Wilton Manor–the most haunted place in Europe!” proclaimed the signs.  James queued for half an hour through the sun-drenched, verdant grounds.  Someone had set up fake gargoyles on the old stone balustrades and hung rusty chains from the oak tree, but nothing could make the pleasant country house look spooky in this sunlight.

The queue moved sluggishly.  People up near the entrance were reading sheets of paper.  “It’s all part of the act,” the balding middle-aged man in front of James said sagely to his bored-looking wife.  “If they make you sign a waiver you’ll go in half-expecting to die of fright.”  The wife nodded absently, holding a hand up to shield her eyes from the sun.

James signed the waiver after a cursory scan, and then joined the group that was forming around a pretty, dark-haired tour guide.  When enough people had gathered she led them through into main hall.  James saw his first ghost seconds later.  It wobbled towards them out of the dimness, moaning wordlessly, a figure of nebulous white light.  Only a few parts were clearly visible–its anguished, young female face, and its forearms where suicide wounds stood out darkly.  The middle-aged man gasped in shock; his wife tittered nervously.

“That’s Jennie,” said the tour guide, stepping neatly aside to let the group have a clear view.  “She killed herself in 1934, aged seventeen.  We think she was in a secret lesbian relationship and killed herself soon after it was discovered.”

Jennie floated in front of the group, waving her arms.  It seemed like she was trying to form words, but the only sound she made was an eerie wail.  Some of the more composed tourists snapped at her with their camera phones.  The guide ushered them all up some stairs and onto a landing, where a ghostly man with his eyes gouged out was stumbling around in an endless circle.

Why are there so many ghosts here?” James asked the guide.

“The manor is on a confluence of psychic energy,” she said.  “Everyone who dies here forms a ghost.”

“Even so, it seems like an unusual number of gruesome deaths.”  They had moved on into a bedroom where an indistinct figure was swinging from a light fixture, a ghostly rope around its neck.

“That’s something we’re trying to work out,” said the guide.  “We think that the same psychic energy that helps ghosts form also makes people more disposed to violent and suicidal thoughts.  In fact, our research team is in the south wing at the moment, conducting psychic studies.  Now if you’ll all come this way, please…”

James fell to the back of the party, listening to the shrieks and wails that rang out from elsewhere in the building.  After a minute he found himself alone on a landing.  In the next room the guide was describing the tragic murder of a 19th-century gentleman.  At the far end of the landing a sign caught James’s eye: “South wing.  Research in progress.”

James walked down the landing.  The door was slightly ajar, and beyond it James could see a bespectacled man working at a laptop.  James hadn’t thought he had made a sound, but the man looked up.  “Hello?  The tour isn’t meant to come through here.”

“I wanted to see what psychic research looked like,” said James.  “I’m sorry–I’ll go back to the tour.”

“No, it’s all right.”  The researcher shut the laptop and glanced at someone else in the room.  Another man, previously out of sight, opened the door; he had a clipboard under his arm, and a head of unkempt orange hair.  Both of them wore slightly grubby white coats.  “Come on in,” said the first man.

The room’s antique furniture was covered in plastic sheets, and standing against the wall was an arcane conglomeration of sensor equipment.  “This is one of the few rooms in the house without a ghost,” the bespectacled man said.  “We’re scanning its underlying psychic energy.”  He peered past James into the empty hallway.  “You’re here on your own, are you?”

“Um…yes,” said James.

The scientist nodded.  “If you’ll come here, I think this may interest you.”  He opened a drawer of the bedside cabinet as James moved closer.  “Now, as I said, this is one of the few rooms in the house without a ghost.  Harold, lock the door, would you?”  He drew out a gleaming knife from the drawer.  “I think what we need is another stab victim.”

The door opened and the pretty, dark-haired tour guide ushered another group into the room. At this point, they gasped or smiled as James appeared in the air by the bedside cabinet.  His body was misty but he could feel the aching stab wounds in his chest.

This young man was killed in 1884,” the tour guide said.  “The crime was never solved, but we do know that he was having an affair with the wife of the house’s owner, whom we saw back in the green bedroom…”

James floated up and down in front of the party.  He waved his arms and tried to shout a warning, but the only sound he could make was an eerie wail.

©2009 John Ayliff

The hardest part was closing her eyes.

Lying in her bed, eyes traveling about the room that had for twelve years seemed so familiar and safe to her, she was unready. The pale orange of the night-light on the wall near her bedside table was not enough to protect her from what awaited behind the unyielding canvas of her eyelids. Where once the rustling of leaves outside her window and the odd creaking of the house settling had given the room a sense of life and normalcy, now there was only silence, stark and oppressive.

She had always imagined deafness would be something like hearing underwater, the noises of the world muted and metallic and meaningless. The truth of it, the silence so total and consuming, was far more than she’d been prepared for.

But worst of all, worse than the deafness and the sense of isolation and unfamiliarity that it brought, was what she knew what awaited her when she closed her eyes.

She had not been born deaf, was not so fortunate as to have grown up in a world completely devoid of sound. Hers was the tragedy of being torn away from the comfortable and familiar and thrown into a world that was lonesome, threatening and hollow. She had known hearing once, but had been deprived of it by a trauma that she knew would haunt her to her grave.

Her parents had told her to stay away from the shed that she’d found deep in the woods that backed up to their house, but in their wisdom, had neglected to tell her why. And as any adolescent girl knows, if your parents tell you to stay away from something, odds are they’ve hidden something amazing there. So, one afternoon when the skies were overcast and her parents were in town shopping, she decided to break a rule.

Getting past the lock was a simple matter; it was rusty and crude, and she’d had the foresight to bring a hammer from the garage. She braced herself as the lock tumbled broken to the ground at her feet. The heady sensation of doing something wrong and getting away with it swept up through her, and she couldn’t deny herself a small smile of accomplishment. Soon she’d find it, the thing her parents had expressly tried to keep her from finding. Her brain was already ablaze with possibilities as she pushed open the door.

The shed was unlit, and she was instantly assailed by a rancid smell that turned her about and made her gag. It was a putrid cocktail, something like a combination of trash, human waste, and long-spoiled dead animal. She felt along the wall beside the door with a distasteful sneer contorting her face. Finding no light switch, she quickly remembered that most basements and sheds were lit by a single overhead bulb near the center of the room. She held her hands out before her and proceeded to walk slowly forward.

Her foot made contact with something glass that tinked loudly as she struck it, clattering along the floor as it rolled into the darkness. She stood stock-still as she became aware of another sound nearby; there was rustling somewhere in front and to the left of her. She reached a hand up slowly, grasping in the oblivion for the chain she’d been searching for. Her speculation proved correct as her fingers graced the chain, wrapping about it and pulling it slowly down. The light clicked on and set the room alight, her pupils contracting quickly to adjust to the sudden searing brightness. Her vision returned slowly and her eyes settled on the source of the noise, her heart sinking at the sound of a wet, muffled growl.

A figure that might have once been human was hunched in the corner of the shed over something resembling a body. Blood covered its mouth, running from its lips down its chin and falling to the floor in thick congealed globs. Its hands were covered in rank, sticky viscera. And it was looking at her, its sunken eyes fixed on her own with predatory menace.

Her every nerve was electrified with the frozen pins-and-needles sensation of total dread. It rose slowly, rearing up like a threatened tarantula, staggering her and pushing her back a step. Its mouth opened, teeth glistening in the yellow incandescence, sallow lips forming into the shape of a scream, and just before she heard its shriek a single thought ran through her head.

She recalled a moment from her childhood that had before been buried beneath the merciful topsoil of time. She stood beside her mother’s hospital bed, watching tears roll down her face. She asked about the new baby brother her mommy had promised her, and between stifled sobs her mother explained that he was in heaven now, but that he’d always be with them.

Then it screamed.

The noise ripped through the stagnant air of the shed, reverberating off of the walls and shaking the ruddy windows in their frames. It penetrated her eardrums, ran like lightning through her nervous system and ricocheted painfully inside her skull. She could still hear it as she turned and took flight through the woods. She heard it as she tripped and fell, heard it as her head collided with the fallen sapling, heard it still as blackness consumed her and she fell away into hazy unconsciousness.

She heard it as she opened her eyes.

Her heart was beating quickly and cold sweat matted her hair to her brow. The orange light of her bedroom returned to her as she realized that she’d drifted off. The experience had replayed itself in her mind the way it did every time she closed her eyes and tried to sleep.
Even now her ears still rang from the sound, the only sound she could hear, would ever hear for the rest of her life.

And she’d hear it every time she closed her eyes.

© 2009 Michael J. Suhar

Michael is an aspiring writer whose first love is horror. His favorite stories, and the stories he aims to write, are those about the terror of isolation, the fear of confusion and disorientation, the horror of being alone in the dark. He also loves werewolves and zombies, and would love to meet one of either some day.