Gabby's Haunted House 2 Read online

  “Then how did you know that my cat disappeared? And why are you trying to throw me off by linking his disappearance to these stupid ghost stories of yours? And before you speak, I just want to ask you to pick the words that come out of your mouth with utmost care.”

  Gabby wasn’t the type of person to threaten people, especially the people she had just met. But needless to say, Keith was taking this very lightly, and someone had to remind him that Gabby wasn’t the type of woman to joke around. And to make the situation worse, Henry was missing. The latter made her a little jumpy and could snap at any time if she isn’t treated with care.

  “I don’t have anything to gain by taking your cat Gabby. You seem like a very nice person who makes very tasty cookies for their neighbors. I am just a concerned friend. That is why I am telling you all of this. The last thing I want is to see you go through what other people who previously occupied the house went through. Now, go home, I think your cat is waiting for you in there.”

  Gabby wanted to say something, but she couldn’t. from the look of things, she was still shaking from the encounter. But for some reason, she decided to get back to the house to look for Henry. And as she was walking towards the house, Gabby made a silent vow to make Keith’s life a living hell if at all she went back to the house, and Henry was nowhere to be seen.

  After walking for a couple of yards, Gabby stopped and looked over her shoulder. And to her horror, Keith was nowhere to be seen. It felt as though he had just disappeared into thin air. Shocked, Gabby turned and threw her glance everywhere. But still, there was no sign of Keith.

  Maybe he had walked towards the trees right after their encounter. The trees looked to have been very far off for him to get to them only after a couple of minutes. But then again, that was the only logical explanation that she could give at that moment. The cold seemed to have increased, and so did the spookiness.

  And Gabby thought that the best thing she could have done at the moment was to get into the house and bolt all of her doors. Why didn’t she just take time and carry out the research on the background of the estate before moving into your house? That was the point where she remembered what her mother always used to tell her, look before you leap.

  ***

  Gabby was glad to have reached the door of her new house. She hadn’t stayed more than a month in that neighborhood, and she was already starting to feel as though something wasn’t right with the neighborhood.

  She took off her jacket and hung it up by the door and rushed towards the fireplace with the intention of getting a little bit warm. And as she tiptoed towards the fireplace, she heard one of those voices that she had missed so much, and she stopped and melted.

  “Meow!”

  Gabby turned all of a sudden and there he was, sitting on the couch looking at her with a blank expression. Gabby changed her direction and rushed to the couch, scooped him up and hugged him as tightly as she possibly could. It was just too good to be true. Gabby was a hardcore, well-trained police officer, but moments such as these made her weak in the knees to the point of tears.

  And as she hugged her pet as tightly as she possibly could, she made a silent promised that she was never going to let him out of her sight ever again. Henry was the only relation she had, and she couldn’t even imagine how life would be without him by her side.

  Chapter 2

  -Background check-

  The incidents of the previous night clearly shook gabby Macklemore to the core. She tried to get some sleep, but that didn’t happen at all. As a matter of fact, the only thing that happened to her was that she couldn’t stop shaking for the entire night. She sweated and jumped to a bold upright position every time she heard something unusual in any part of the house.

  Even at one point in the night, Gabby made sure that she had taken the gun and place it on the table next to her bed, taking the pin off so that she could use it as fast as humanly possible. The thought of Keith, her very weird neighbor, kept on disturbing her. Yes, the sudden disappearance of this man wasn’t normal.

  And in as much as Gabby was trying to flood her head with lots of explanations, she still found it very difficult to accept that a man – especially a man with a poor physique as Keith’s – could get to run and cover roughly over one hundred yards in ten seconds.

  Maybe she didn’t see him quite clearly. Or maybe it was too dark and Keith was wearing dark clothes. Yes, that must have been it! It was pitch dark, and Keith was clearly wearing very dark clothes. And so when she was walking away, there was no way in hell that she could have spotted him no matter how hard she tried to.

  But that explanation still seemed a little off since, despite her age, Gabby had a perfect 20/20 vision. There was no way she couldn’t have spotted Keith if she wanted to. Was he a ghost? Was he trying to spook her into leaving a house that she was occupying because his spirit was still lingering in there?

  Gabby closed her swollen eyes in an attempt to stop the thoughts from rushing into her head. Anytime she lacked sleep, her eyes always swell and gave her headaches. Her heart just couldn’t stop thumping away in her chest cavity, and her breathing became labored. If she knew she was going to have sleepless nights by simply moving into this antique of a place, Gabby would have kept off.

  She took a glance at her clock; it was about 3:15 AM and still there wasn’t a shred of sleep in her eyes. It was just too bad for her. And to some point, she thought it wasn’t a good idea for her to be thinking way too much about the events that happened the previous day. But it wasn’t as though Gabby had any control over whatever the heck was going on in her head. It was beyond her.

  And so she decided to go out of the bed and into the living room. Gabby always found it relaxing to sit tight in the living room since it always helped her to open up her mind and get to thinking. It was an amazing thing and probably the only sane thing she could have done at the moment instead of staying in bed and entertaining the bad thoughts that her mind was generating.

  It was spooky walking through the dark house that is rumored to have been haunted. But at that point, it was a much better option than staying at one place and just waiting for gruesome nightmares to end up spoiling her evening. She wasn’t going to let that happen to her at all.

  Gabby came out of the bed and stared back from where she had been sleeping; there was a pool of sweat in the bed sheets. The only time that she always got to that position was when she had panicked. And at that moment, she wasn’t sure if she had made the right move to move into that house. Everything seemed off.

  And then it occurred to her that it would be a very good thing to use that time to carry out a background check on her new home. And if she was going to find out that something was off, then she was going to give her lawyer a call and straighten things out.

  Was she starting to become a believer of supernatural stuff? At that moment, everything was very hard to tell. And that was why she didn’t want to talk about the damn subject at the moment.

  Thankfully, she had her Wi-Fi fixed a couple of days back. So she made sure that she had her laptop close to her where she could watch the developments of cases that had the attention of the entire globe as well as get updated on the newest Netflix, and you know, get to poke some of her old, high school friends on Facebook. Gabby wasn’t sure that people still did that, but the bottom line was that she didn’t give a damn about it.

  Gabby felt that it was about time that she put her policing skills to good use and getting to the bottom of this issue without further ado. She needed to find why this house was feared by people.

  The first thing that she had tried to do was invite each and every one of her neighbors. But only a handful turned up. They sent the very few with presents and made sure that they sent their very best of regards. But even at that moment, Gabby didn’t seem to take it as seriously as she did at that moment.

  It must have meant something and needless to say, she needed to get to the bottom of everything. It was just too good information
to be ignored and for a moment there, Gabby almost considered kicking herself in the head for being so ignorant and not reading the signs.

  Once her laptop was on, the next thing that she opted to do was making sure that she had made everything possible by searching for the address of her new home and waited anxiously. As expected, all sorts of searches showed up on her google search and Gabby sighed before narrowing the search with the inclusion of the specific country and clicked on the “Enter” button.

  About ten results came over on her screen, and she couldn’t help but stare. The first story was a blog wrote about a decade ago, and it was very interesting at first sight. And at that point, Gabby clicked on the link and started reading the blog post.

  It read:

  “This very old house on the outskirts of New York has been shunned by many because of the legend that it holds. For decades, the new owners of the house started acting strange and either disappeared into thin air or to make matters worse, got possessed.

  “At night, the ghosts of the people who were locked and tortured in this place woke up in the evil hour and start floating all over the house. It is said that an escapade in that haunted house at night isn’t for the faint-hearted. Most people who had the balls to live there and lived to tell the tale were either clinically insane or; they just didn’t have memories of their time there.

  “And to make matters even worse, it seemed as though this was some joke until someone died in there. These were incidences that occurred back in the seventies. And the body had never been recovered.”

  “The police used sniffer dogs to try and find the body and conducted a search that lasted two days. But nothing was found. This disappearance remains a mystery to this day.”

  That particular opening statement was the kind that would make new owners shit their pants. But still, Gabby thought that they would have done much more than writing ghost stories about the house to shake her to the core. She was made of pure still; she kept on reminding and reassuring herself in her thoughts.

  That was creepy. So Gabby decided to click on the second link about the same house, and yet another creepy story popped up.

  It read:

  “For years, the owner of this creepy looking house that was built in the thirties wasn’t known. And for that reason, most people who had the intention of purchasing the house ended up changing their minds after a short while.

  “It is for this reason that the value of the house was kept very low compared to the houses of the ilk that could fetch to the tune of ten times its value. Only daring buyers, who at first thwarted the idea ended up buying the property. But a couple of months or years down the line, they either disappeared or ended up selling the property to unsuspecting buyers at a throwaway price in a bid to regain some of their money right before bolting.

  “It is, therefore, a great thing for any potential buyer to avoid this house by all means necessary unless you are willing to lock horns with some angry supernatural beings…”

  Gabby didn’t want to read the other remaining posts. She just had enough already. All this ghostly bullshit was starting to get to her already. And the last thing she needed was to get all worked up.

  And with that, Gabby went ahead and closed the laptop and lay on the bed, her eyes closed and her legs spread. What had she gotten herself into this time round? And as if that wasn’t all, she started believing in supernatural beings and getting all superstitious. It wasn’t the person that she was. And for a moment, she was getting all jumpy and scared.

  Was she starting to lose her mind just like one of the blog post had suggested? If that was the case, then it wasn’t a good idea. It was funny and scary at the same time how the stories that were almost ten years old were rhyming with the version that Keith had been telling her. And that was how she decided to call him and ask him for any details that he may have had about that place.

  And as Gabby was reaching out for her phone, she realized that they didn’t have the pleasure of exchanging phone numbers with Keith. For some reason, Keith just seemed to be the kind of guys that a girl should never risk giving them their mobile phone number. And now Gabby was on the brink of almost regretting not doing so.

  Her mind turned to the possibility of calling James and telling him what was up. James and Gabby had that kind of relationship that allowed her to call him whenever she pleased. His wife wouldn’t start asking questions because she was not only a friend of Gabby’s but also understood that policing work included being called at very odd hours.

  But even though she felt as though she had the right to interrupt her former partner’s dreams, she still thought that it wouldn’t be such a good idea simply because she didn’t have enough evidence to come up with a case. And getting to disturb her partner at that moment without evidence wouldn’t be such a nice thing to do, even if he would understand.

  And as Gabby lay on her back and stared blankly at the whitewashed ceiling, she couldn’t help but think about what her next cause of action was going to be. The background information suggested that the place was sinister. And to some extent, she believed it to be so.

  It was about time Gabby found out what the neighbors knew about this place that was starting to freak her out.

  Chapter 3:

  -Meeting with Martha Reese-

  With the facts at hand, it seemed as though it would have been a good idea for Gabby to pay a visit to some of the neighbors and ask a couple of questions. Thankfully, most of her neighbors seemed like a bunch of very nice people, and she figured that this would be such an amazing thing to do. And also apart from being in a position to learn much more about this house, she would get a chance to understand the background of the house.

  Besides, Gabby had learned over the years as a police officer that it is very important for you always to follow the instinct and not just limit your research to some mere online research. Always get as many facts as humanly possible. And it was only then that you would have a sit-down and use the information to come up with a clear course of action to follow.

  Paying attention to the detail was what put Gabby at the top of the food chain as a police officer who was an amazing thing at the end of the day. And nothing was going to stop her from using the same skills that she had learned to solve her personal problems that were giving her sleepless night.

  She thought for a moment that if she were going to be meticulous enough to solve this one, then she could finally get to the bottom of the reason her beloved cat was behaving so oddly of late. Gabby had read somewhere that cats will always tell you what was up by simply changing their behavior since they cannot communicate with you.

  And from that point, it would be totally up to you to figure out whatever the heck was happening because, you know, humans have got a bigger brain that cats.

  Though it seemed a little off, Gabby was starting to think that maybe Keith, her very queer neighbor had a point after all. And after she had already gathered enough intel on this house, Gabby thought it would be a nice thing for her to have a sit down with Keith, maybe offer him some cookies and sweet tea in his house in a bid to try and see things from his point of view.

  But before that could ever happen, Gabby wanted to hear the opinion of the other neighbors. That would give him an angle from which to approach this matter effectively. Gabby loved her new home, and there was nothing she couldn’t do in a bid to make things better not only for her but also for Henry.

  ***

  Her very first stop was at her adjoining neighbor. Her name was Martha Reese. Martha was among the very few brave hearted individuals whom despite knowing the kind of history that spooky place held, still managed to show up. And for that, Gabby thought that it would be a very nice thing for her to stop by and ask a couple of questions.

  Her plan was to show up with one of those amazingly tasty cookies. And as soon as she got there, the next thing would be to ensure that she tried asking Martha Reese all about the house. But because her intention wasn’t throwing the sw
eet old lady off, Gabby planned on just coming clean with her and telling her jokingly about the rumors she had heard out there.

  And that was what she did and needless to say, it went on perfectly. As expected, Martha was very warm and welcomed her into her well-kept apartment.

  One glance at that house and Gabby felt embarrassed about hers. For a seventy-year-old woman, her house was just too darn clean, way cleaner than Gabby’s. She was very shocked, but Gabby didn’t want to show it. But Martha knew that she was.

  “Well, are you going to stand out there or are you going to come in? I have some coffee that I know you will love it.”

  “Of course I will. Coffee so happens to be my favorite you know!”

  Martha smiled from ear to ear right before gesturing for Gabby to come in. She was a sweet should and Gabby could sense her already. Gabby didn’t plan on staying for long since she had some police work to do. But she figured that she would stay for as long as it took her to find the truth.