Find Me : Novella Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Books By E.J Bennett

  About the author

  You can follow E.J Bennett on Facebook at

  Find Me

  Novella

  By E.J Bennett

  Copyright © 2017 by E.J Bennett

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher/author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is completely fictional and the places, situations and characters are made up from the author's imagination. Any similarities with any person living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  I barely noticed the weeds scraping the underside of my car as I looked through the trees. Getting glimpses of the spooky house that plagued my dreams from childhood memories. It looked even worse than it did when it was still kept reasonably well. A shiver ran though me. This was daft. I should have told Dad to go to hell when he told me to sort the house out for sale, but our relationship was at an all-time low, so I just kept quiet.

  Since my mother died of cancer seven years ago, he'd tried to be a single parent, but frankly, he wasn't very good at it. He was a disciplinarian, so life had been a set of instructions, and some affection. I had never realized how different things were, until I realized I almost hated my own father and I rejected his affections with anger. Mother was my parent right up until she died, and Dad was devastated. So was I, but he just seemed to go to pieces. He told me what to do all the time and got impatient if I didn't do it fast enough. That was probably not the best approach to a daughter right at puberty. Difficult became irrational very fast for both of us and he realized he had never really been a parent to me before. He was just there and Mom ran the home. I was in the home category, so Dad left me entirely to my mother and enjoyed being father, when he had the time. Maybe time has evaporated because we had little time or patience for one another. It was disappointing more than anything bad really, but we both seemed to understand that we just did not get on. For good or bad, we agreed not to agree and try not to yell at one another too often. Shame, he wasn't bad, but girls were aliens to him, but he admitted it and tried to make up for it.

  The proof of that glowered at me from the gloom of the surrounding trees. He hated his mother's house, so he had neatly used my defensive position to cop out of having to go there himself. If he knew anything about eighteen year old girls that was the very last place he would have sent me. I had no backup and knew nobody there. As I drove into the clearing, it was like looking at hell from a sunny park. He had put off doing anything about the house for ten years until he got a court order to do something or they were going to bash it down. I could see why. Hell was reclaiming it.

  The forest undergrowth was creeping all over it, blinding the evil looking eyes reflecting the sun on the trees with the darkness of a tomb behind them. The three gables on the front had arched windows in them on the second floor. The protrusion of the center entrance looked like a flared nose under a frown with the two smaller gable windows glaring down at you with hostility. The creepers had grown over the stairs up to the first floor making it look like a sneering mouth. If my father wanted to sell it, he better be prepared to spend money on it because the fascia boards and window sills were rotting off, looking like scraggy brows and malevolent eyes. The gutters drooped from the weight of the leaves and the streaks of stain and mold made the old house look like a wrecked ship.

  Grandma had inherited the house from her father, my Great Grandfather, after Dad had left home, so he only stayed there for holidays if he couldn't get out of it. His relationship with his grandfather was hostile anyway, so his mother was pleased when he didn't go as well. The great grandmother was a mouse, completely dominated by her husband. Dad said he was a manipulative, evil bastard and he refused to be in the same room as him. I thought there was quite a bit of the grandfather in Dad, but I would never dare to say so. I didn't hate my father, but I didn't have a lot of love for him either. Everything had to be done his way or the world went to shit. It made no difference because he was my only parent, so we sort of got on.

  I had to pull the creepers away from the door to even get to it, and it seemed to hiss black dust at me in anger. I turned around several times because the strange feeling I was being watched in that isolated place was strong. It was probably the horrid spiders that were having a field day making me screech when they ran – mostly at me!

  I looked at the big, solid, black door when it was clear, and my spine crept. There was a tarnished brass cross on it. Was it keeping something out or keeping something in? Who the hell put a meter high cross on their door? It wasn't even a knocker, because that was in the middle, and the cross was on the opening side. On the third attempt, the large key ground open, and it sounded like sand in the lock. I took it out and checked it would lock it again, or I was not going in. The door creaked open with annoyance, and I was faced with another two glazed doors with religious pictures in the stained glass, but they were covered in mold, so I couldn't see what they were, but the people had halos. The place stank of mildew and mold when I pushed the glass doors open and locked the front door, and bolted it.

  The house had never been cheerful, but in its present state, it was straight grim. The mildew and mold had picked out the high points of the ceiling moldings and spread over the flat parts like cancer tentacles. The wallpaper was curling up and the flowers that had been on it had been eaten by something that was more toxic than the ink. Their ghost was picked out in greyer mildew. Webs floated in the disturbed air and the huge damned things scuttled for safety. That feeling of being watched was stronger. The entrance hall was wide and went along way back to a dark staircase that doubled back over the kitchen doorway. The dark grey carpet strip up the middle was clamped in place by brass rods that had turned a blueish-black. The hall table that had been shone with wax every week had dry laminate peeling up in spikes like a hostile porcupine. Either side of the entrance were two glazed doors, but the shutters inside were closed, so they were pitch black.

  A floorboard creaked upstairs and I backed to the doors, clutching my bag to my chest. "Hello?!" I called, and my voice seemed to be absorbed by the thick gloom. I shuddered and unlocked the door in case I had to run, but I left the bolts because they at least moved easily. The kitchen seemed like a good place to start. Dad had said the electricity and water had been turned on again. I switched the lights on and not a thing happened. After ten years, I was not surprised. I needed a weapon, and then I needed to find the fuses. I was five steps to the kitchen door when the lights came on. I froze, listening. That feeling of being watched was chilling my blood in the dead chill of the air.

  I pushed the kitchen swing door open and it sounded like a starving Zombie. Then something right in front of me jumped and I almost had a heart attack. I screamed so loudly that dust seemed to fill the beams of pale light. A bucket rocked back and forth until it found a happy place to lie in wait for the next victim of its terror champagne. I had to push the groaning door open again because it had almost crashed into me when it swung back with force. The switch inside the doorway was brass, and it looked damp. I bashed it on with my bag, and three of the four lights glowed to life, reluctantly. One went tink and died. I put the metal bucket back behind the door because it was a good warning.

  I didn't want to go
in any further because most of the stink of the house came from there. Grandma Rose had died six months after mother, and I had not wanted to go to the funeral. Everyone called me Mia, but Dad called me Amelia. He said, "Amelia darling, I have nobody to leave you with, so you have to go with me. There is nothing we can do about it, so pack a bag. My mother has been in hospital for two years and with your mother being so ill, I never went up to see her. They stupidly let her go home and she died within a week. The gardener found her unconscious in the lounge and called for help. You know the young man that pottered about there. Gabriel or something."

  I laughed. "Dad, there is nothing angelic about Adrian! Everything he says is a boast and he'd bore God to death."

  Dad had waved a hand vaguely, "Well, the young man got her to hospital and she died later that day. I'll have to pay him off because the house will have to be sold when the estate is wound up."

  The estate had taken five years to sort out because it had never been finalized when she inherited it because her ex-husband, Dads father, had tried to get a lump of it. He had left Rose and Dad when Dad was about seven, and they had never seen him again, which nether seemed to think was a bad thing. However difficult my relationship with my father was, I could never wish him away. After the funeral, Adrian had returned to the house with them and I'd stayed in the car while they turned everything off and locked the old house up from the top to bottom. They had not thought of clearing the perishables out of the kitchen.

  I had to use the toilet and opened the door just inside the laundry room. That was the other half of the stench. The taps were all dry. I flushed and the water that came out was like blood, and it made no difference to the stink in the small cubical. I got bleach and started to clean, because I was not sitting on that seat with spiders all over the place. By the time I'd almost gassed myself with bleach and flushed the toilet three times, it looked reasonable. It got bleached and brushed when I was finished and left to soak. That meant everything was open to the sewer, or septic tank, but after so long, I wondered why the stink was still so bad.

  Chapter 2

  With a large knife from the kitchen, I went to open what shutters and windows I could, to air the house. The first window in the lounge had me confused until I saw the window pole hanging behind the fragile curtains. I hooked the top catch as I remembered Grandma Rose doing, and pulled. Nothing happened, until I released the bottom bolts too. It tilted open a foot, which was all it went because there was a metal thing that stopped it going any further. Apart from scaring the spiders and annoying the creeper, not a lot happened. I shrugged and decided that when all the windows were open, air would get in. The house was bigger then I remembered, because children were not allowed into the formal side. Frankly, children wouldn't want to go there. The kitchen side was comfortable maroon leather chairs and brown carpets, dark woods and paintings of farms and rivers. The formal three rooms were the reverse of the informal side in every way. The furniture was art deco, chunky and stern. The brown and beige was almost industrial and the angles like machines. The portraits were of the previous Burns family, of which my father was not, because Rose was the last of the Burns. I was therefore Amelia Bourne, two words a child had no chance of pronouncing properly, so I became Mia Boon at school. Apparently it was not only children it confused, because Dad had fought his father in court when he tried to claim half his inheritance, and Burns and Bourne had confused the court as well, thinking he was entitled to inherit.

  Every now and then, the house gave a restless creak, and every time I froze, waiting for another footstep. I opened what I could and went upstairs to see what could be opened there too. It was like walking up into a cold, damp cave. I opened every room trying to remember who had stayed where. I only knew the room I'd been in at the back next to another reeking bathroom. I was going to need a hell of a lot more bleach.

  One door refused to open. It was not locked, but it slammed back closed with force. The damned house was going to give me an early death from fright! It had felt as though someone had deliberately pushed it closed. I tried again and it did the same thing, but the carpet was rocked under it. I left it and went to the next room, which was obviously my father's when he had to be there. It was typical of him – austere, neat and nothing out of place left there. In fact, he'd left nothing there at all, never intending to return. The room next to mine was where they had stayed as a married couple. I could not remember ever going in there. I must have, but there was a blank in my memory. I tried to remember what my parent's room looked like in the home I still lived in, and got as much of a blank. I never went there either. Mom had been moved to the spare bedroom when she got ill, and I knew that room well, but not the marital room.

  On the other side, the three rooms were after the guest room and bathroom, and it was as though the people had just walked out and the dust had settled. Rose's room was in pale pinks and green, austere and neat, but almost military neat. Her mother's room was feminine with frills and skirts on the bed. The dressing table had curtains around the B shaped thing.

  The final room was grim. That room had never been opened from the day the old man had died in that room. He'd suffocated while he slept. That was all I knew. The whole room was nicotine stained and the rank stink of it was still clinging to everything. The furniture was all oddly placed so you could not see the person using it from the door. The high-backed chairs were winged and wide, facing the window that looked into the darkest part of the forest. The lamps were heavily shaded with stained parchment and ebony wood stands that looked more like weapons than functional furniture. His dressing room and study at the back had never been cleared of his clothing. There was still a pipe in an ashtray that still had a coal in it. Not a single window in that room would budge, so I left it.

  Chapter 3

  The reason I was in that house irked me. It was almost blackmail by my father, but it also got me out of the way to prevent me making more trouble. I was, or rather, had been studying law in Washington. I had wanted to take law from two years before I finished school, and I had made my father proud when I achieved top grades in my final year. It was one of the few times when he really showed his enthusiasm. He was also a lawyer, and he was going for the bench as a judge. He was almost assured of it as well. I have no idea why he was doing that, because he made a lot more money as an advocate arbitrator in the construction industry. He was even more proud when I got myself into law school without his influence. He would have helped, but I had already done it.

  I just knew there was going to be trouble with one of the lecturers, Martin Dingle. He resented me for being the daughter of Donovan Bourne, the rich, influential and very successful advocate. He seemed unable to process the fact that I had got there on my own and it was my choice to take law, not my father's. He told me straight he was going to bring me down to size and my father could not help me. He was a fat, unsuccessful attorney that earned more as a tutor than he managed with his inept attitude in a courtroom. He did not appreciate me telling him it was him that had got his position through his father, not me, and he didn't deserve it. His hatred was close to openly nasty, but it was his spite that kept me very wary of him.

  Dingle didn't dare openly fail me, but the result at the end of term from his subject was dismal, and I knew I did not deserve his low grades. I spoke to Dad about Dingle, and he told me it was inevitable to get spite from his position form little people, but I had to rise above it. When I was deliberately marked down, Dad told me to ask for a remark. I asked, and it came back with a merit, which sent Dingle into a temper from hell! He was suspended for two weeks, and came back with an even worse attitude. I ignored him and stayed out of his way, sitting at the back of his classes and refusing to answer any of his snide questions. The other students stood up for me and told him to back off or they'd take it to the Dean.

  He was a nasty man by nature and a creep of a man by looks and stature. He was a greasy fat dumpy troll of about forty five and his hair was thinning and gre
y. His nose was a bumpy blob in the middle of his sour round face and his jowls sagged, taking his mouth down into a shark-mouth. His eyes were small, black beads in his face and his frown was ingrained. His stomach started at his neck over his miserable chest and hung like an envelope over his trouser belt that had to be too tight or they would fall off his under-developed ass and shapeless thighs. He was called Stinky because he seldom bathed and his breath was nauseating.

  For some illogical and perverse reason, he started to make out that I was interested in him. I have curly naturally auburn hair over my shoulders that I straighten by choice, because it is thick and too full if I don't. Without any additional fat and naturally full breasts, I have a figure that attracts attention. I probably don't deserve it because I do nothing to make it that way, but I have it. My face is porcelain smooth and with makeup, I know I am beautiful, but I don't wear a lot of it because I cannot be bothered to hide my face and put on a mannequin's paint. I wear lipstick and maybe some eyeshadow. Big effort is a bit of blush on my cheeks and some eyeliner to make my lashes more prominent, but they are dark anyway. There is not a chance this side of insanity that I'd be attracted to that toad.

  I realized I was the only one in the lecture hall and turned to get out as fast as possible, but the toad walked in and leered at me. "Time to show the high and mighty what a real man can give you!" he said with a grin that looked like a psycho inmate, and I knew I was in trouble.

  I backed to the front and came up against his table. I looked back and his papers with his scrawled writing were there with a pair of scissors on top. I reached back and palmed them so he did not see. "Then I understand why you are such a failure, Stinky, because you don't even know the law! You dare try a thing on me and it will be called rape."