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Chained in Memories

Cynthia Mortimer

    My husband and I reached an age when our priorities changed. Our house in the country tended to annoy us when our voices echoed and the quiet was no longer peaceful, but tedious. Our daughter was grown and living in the city. Charlie, my husband, was diagnosed with prostate cancer. At “stage two” the prognosis was optimistic, but living away from hospitals and our only daughter no longer appealed to us.
    Our new city house came with a lovely fenced in private yard, an in-ground swimming pool, an office for Charlie, and room for my artist’s corner. Our master bedroom finally came with the large bathroom I’d always dreamed of. Best of all, though, was the den in the finished basement. The woodwork in the downstairs den was hand-carved and fantastic. The crown moldings cradled the ceiling so perfectly they added dimension to an area that is often claustrophobic. Paneling halfway up the walls in solid pine glittered in its finished gloss coat. Matching beam work framed not only the room, but also the wall to wall, ceiling to floor built in home library.
    Charlie also fell in love with this room, finally finding the perfect home for his flat screen television and surround sound. I just wanted to bask in its beauty. We stole the house at $50,000 under its market value without ever stopping to question our good luck.
    One would have thought, at our age, we would know better.
    Our new world changed the day I met a new, or should I say, old, tenant. I like to think I have an open, yet reasonable mind. Up until we moved into our new house I had experienced strange things in my life I could not always explain, but embraced the idea that I didn’t know everything. I didn’t inherently believe in ghosts. Yet there she stood, curly cue pigtails and traditional night gown, staring at me like I was the ghost in the house.
    “Who are you?” She demanded of me. I couldn’t help glancing at the ratty teddy bear she grasped in her arms. Noticing the teddy bear meant noticing the diamond ring this little girl wore on her third left finger. The child stood perhaps three feet high and was missing a lower left canine tooth. Freckles stood out on her pale cheeks like a child’s dot to dot game.
    “Who are you,” she repeated. “What are you doing in my mother’s house?”
    “I live here,” I told her.
    “You can see me?”
    “Of course. Were you not talking to me?”
    She cocked her head at me, like a bird trying to decide whether or not to trust the hand that fed it. She shrugged her bony shoulders and disappeared.
    She quite literally disappeared. I blinked my eyes and by the time I opened them she vanished.
    Most people would immediately assume they were seeing things, but I’m a psychiatrist. I know signs of crazy. If I were crazy, I’d be the first one to let me know. I did, however, want to find out more about this house’s previous tenants.
    The next day, I went online to search the history of the house. I should have done this before we bought it, but who really thinks to ask the realtor things like, “So, is this house haunted?”
    I searched for deaths of children in this house or any nearby houses, but found nothing. I searched generic deaths at my address and came up with useless, unrelated information. I decided to go “old school” and called the city records. She pulled the records on my address. She did come up with a death in my house – an elderly woman died in her sleep at this address in 1923. Somehow, I doubted she was my ghost.
    That night, I dreamed.
    In my dream I saw a wisp of white chained to a wall. The wall, gray and nondescript, kept the insubstantial wisp captive, but I could not see why. Somehow, I knew it was within my power to free this wisp.
    “Don’t,” whispered my own voice. “Don’t. You don’t know what it is.”
    It was so sad and pathetic. I could hear the keening wails of a tortured soul. How could I do nothing when it was within my power to help?
    “Don’t. There may be a reason why it is here.”
    I turned to walk away. My better judgment was right. Just because I could free it, didn’t necessarily mean I should.
    “Don’t.”
    I’d lost. Against myself and my own better judgment, I’d lost. I reached down and pulled free the spirit. She immediately morphed into the untrusting little girl I’d seen in my basement.
    She looked at me uncertainly; just as she had the moment I told her I could hear her. Then she was gone.
    I woke in the middle of the night with the most unsettled feeling I could ever remember experiencing. My breath trapped in my lungs and my legs seemed paralyzed. I needed a drink of water so badly my throat burned, but I suddenly feared the shadows of my own home. I lay in bed, silently still and afraid of the things that went bump in the night, not knowing why a harmless dream had left me so petrified.
    The next morning I laughed at my own paranoia. It was not like me to be frightened of my own imagination. After all, what were dreams but manifestations of imaginative ideas? This is what I told myself, at least. This worked very well until I saw my ghost sitting at the bar table downstairs.
    “Oh!” I dropped the basket of laundry I’d carried downstairs. Dirty socks and other unmentionables scattered at my feet, but the girl didn’t startle at all.
    “Who are you?” she demanded in her little girl voice.
    “I – I’m Maryann.”
    “You see me?” her cold eyes stared into my soul, out of place with the innocent shape of her angelic face.
    “Y-yes, I can see you.”
    “Where are they?”
    “Who? You’re parents?”
    Her head jerked in an upward angle, focusing on something only her dead eyes could see. Her expression softened, and something akin to fear skittered over her face before her was able to compose her features.
    “They’re dead.” Again, it was not a question. I shivered at the cold realism in which she spoke.
    “Who are you?” My voice came out barely more than a whisper.
    She stared at me for a small eternity. She twisted the diamond on her left ring finger absentmindedly. The intangible diamond caught a ghostly glare.
    “Emma,” she said. Then she was gone.
    I stood in my cold basement, composing myself and steadying my heart and breathing rates. A part of me considered the possibility that my ghost was a manifestation of my brain, attempting to cope with a stressful situation. We had just moved and Charlie had just faced death, but other than that I could think of no stressful situations, and I thought we handled those experiences well, considering.
    Busy work is the best way to avoid an unpleasant situation, so I collected my laundry and cleaned my house. By the time I finished I was exhausted and my counters gleamed.
    I’d avoided it long enough. I pulled out my laptop and Googled my home address with the name Emma. I found no noticeable links, but something did catch my attention. In 1891 a major train collision in my new hometown had claimed the lives of 75 people. I couldn’t pin down how this connected to Emma, but at least now I had a place to start.
    As I did not particularly feel like finding the fatality list of those 75 victims, I decided I’d ask Emma about a train crash the next time I saw her. That is, if she were real.
    Tired as I was, I barely made it through dinner that night with my husband. I skipped my usual evening run on our elliptical and went straight to bed that night. As I lay down, waiting for sleep to take me, I couldn’t help wonder what took the light from Emma’s eyes. She was dead, inside and out, and she did not mind if I knew it.
    The dreams returned that night. I dreamed I stood in my nightgown, barefoot outside the rail station uptown. The station had no color. Shades and shadows composed the scene. I felt the cold concrete on my feet. I caught a shiver and heard the distant train whistle.
    “Don’t,” came my familiar whisper.
    “Don’t what? I haven’t done anything.”
    “You have, you will. You are setting her free.”
    “How is that a bad thing?”
    “Don’t,” it whispered.
    The train pulled forward, steam billowed around me and the sounds of screeching and buckling metal filled my ears. Momentarily, the steam and smoke from the train obscured my vision. When my vision cleared disaster sprawled before me.
    Twisted and gnarled metal turned blackened and jagged, littered the rails before more. Bodies lay sprawled about me, dead, dying and dismembered. Though a part of me knew this was a product of my imagination I remained sickened and awed by the destruction I witnessed.
    “Those poor people,” I whispered.
    “You won’t find her, you know.” A new voice, masculine and rough, came from behind me. I turned to face the engineer of this passenger train. I could tell by his uniform and the red hot poker sticking out of his right eye. He did not survive this crash, yet he remained among the other tortured souls to bear a message to me.
    “Who?”
    “You know who. You will not find her here. She was not one of us, but we know of her kind. She does not share our Purgatory; she has her own Hell. Leave her be, she is beyond your help.”
    “That will be your downfall.”
    Smoke from the crash thickened around me, obliterating my view of the disturbing engineer and all his moaning companions. I floated into blissful nothingness.
    The next morning I could not find enough coffee to help me recover from my poor night’s sleep. Charlie sat at our breakfast nook with me while I attempted to recover my dignity and sanity in my morning caffeine hit. It wasn’t working; I still felt like death warmed over.
    “Hon, are you sleeping okay?” he asked me the next morning. “The past few nights you’ve been tossing and moaning in your sleep. Something bothering you?”
    Now, I’ve been married twenty five years, but even after all my years of marriage I just didn’t have it in me to tell my husband that I was not only seeing ghosts, but carrying on conversations with them as well – both in my dreams and during my waking hours. So I did what every woman who has ever been married does. I blamed hormones.
    “Bad dreams. That’s all. To be honest, babe, I’m probably starting menopause.”
    “Ack! Weird woman crap! You know I hate it when you talk about that!”
    “Your sympathy is overwhelming.”
    Charlie laughed. “I’m sorry your female stuff is getting old and no longer functioning at its normal capacity. This, my dear, is why you have girlfriends. Call up the girls and go out for a bit, you’ll feel better.” With a peck on the cheek and a slap to my rear my under-empathetic husband flew out the door to his tool shed to bury himself in wood shavings and power tools.
    Alone in my castle, I continued to feel uneasy. I meandered down to my den, my favorite room in the house, with the intention of turning on a nice cardio workout DVD to burn some of my nervous energy.
    Shortly into my workout, my heart started racing, my head spun, and my vision blurred. At first I thought I was having a heart attack or a stroke. Then I saw her. Her cold eyes watched me, not offering any aid or showing any concern. She just watched me. My breath froze in my lungs and I struggled to breathe. Then my vision blurred to the point of blindness and I passed out for the first time in my life.
    When I came to she continued to stand over me.
    “What do you want from me?” I croaked.
    “You see me,” she spoke with no emotion. My eyes flitted to the diamond ring so out of place on her little girl hands. Her hand twitched at my attention.
    “Were you in the train crash?”
    She looked at me with those cold eyes. “You can see me! Try harder!” I felt her anger, cold and burning. I choked on its burn before I realized I was really choking. I gasped and clawed at my neck, fighting to release her hold. I could not understand why she was doing this to me, but somehow she was taking the air from my lungs. What had I done wrong? I only wanted to help.
    Dots burst before my eyes as I continued to struggle for the breath that wouldn’t come. I fell to my knees, fearing I had been wrong my entire life – maybe a ghost really could hurt me. I looked up again at the dead child, my eyes pleading with her cold ones for mercy or understanding. Through my tears I saw her as she was.
    No longer did a sweet girl in nightclothes stand before me. A grown woman, her neck black with bruises stared at me with hateful cold eyes. The diamond that had glittered on an innocent finger burned like a beacon. No child would have ever worn a diamond, why had not I realized that? Now it was too late. I was going to die at the hands of a ghost I couldn’t understand.
    A force not unlike gravity pulled my neck toward my ceiling, my fingers still clawing at my neck as smaller and smaller amounts of air leaked in through my nose and mouth. I was going to die in my basement, with only those cold eyes to send me into the next world.
    The worst part? I’d failed. All my years helping people come to terms with their pain or suffering in their lives and in death I would fail. My end was truly tragic.
    As the last of my breath leaked from my lips I head a crash and an all familiar swear. My non-traditional knight had come to my rescue. Earth’s real gravitational force crashed me back toward my plush carpet. Without thinking Charlie pulled me up into his arms and swung me straight to the garage, speeding his way to the emergency room. Halfway there my breathing returned to normal.
    “Charlie, Charlie, slow down, I’m okay. Really, I’m okay I can breathe now.”
    “You scared the Hell out of me just now, don’t tell me you’re okay! Your lips were purple! I didn’t know they really went purple!”
    The image made me think of Emma in her adult form. The purplish black circles under her eyes matched the dead tone of her lips. I knew that lips could turn purple if deprived of oxygen. I also thought I knew how my ghost died.
    Charlie insisted on the ER, wherein the doctors decided I had an anxiety attack and suggest rest and relaxation. My time strapped to the echocardiogram machine offered an opportunity to think of a new way to search out my ghost’s past.
    Once cleared to use my cell phone I pulled out my smart phone, grateful for the modern technology.
    I went to Google search, but this time I omitted my own home from the search, wondering if its involvement was incidental. I searched Emma’s name, her manner of death and my town alone. This time my search produced results.
    November 12, 1943, Emily Sprouse killed her husband and then hung herself. The story read that Mr. Charles Sprouse had been abusive. The whole town knew about the abuse, but in those times tradition dictated that they turn the other cheek because he also happened to be a police officer. Emily’s autopsy showed she had been pregnant when she died.
    Only now did I truly see her. Faced with bringing a child into this world of violence she found the only escape she could conceive. The violence of both her life and her death followed her into her own personal Hell.
    Once home, Charlie insisted I rest – upstairs, while he watched over me like a hawk. For days he absolutely forbade that anyone go in our basement. I let him coddle me and watch over me for those few days. When I thought he’d gotten it out of his system I cooked him his favorite meal – chicken kiev, asparagus, and scalloped potatoes.
    “Charlie,” I attempted to negotiate with my overprotective husband. “We can’t avoid the basement forever, dear. How would the laundry get done?”
    “Laundromats.”
    “Be serious.”
    “I am serious, we can’t go down there.”
    “Because there’s a ghost? Come on, you know how ridiculous that sounds.”
    “How can you be so calm about this? I saw you dangling in midair, choking to death, and now you want to go back down there?”
    “I watched you battle for your life for the past year as well, Charlie. Be reasonable, we cannot be afraid of our own home! I have to face her. I have to make peace with her.”
    Charlie brooded in silence for a few moments. “We could sell.”
    “No, we can’t. Not in this market, and there was a reason why we bought this place in the first place. You love this house as much as I do. This isn’t a house – it’s our home.”
    “You’re not going down there alone.”
    “I am.”
    “Not.”
    “One hour.”
    “Fifteen minutes.”
    “Thirty.”
    “Deal. But I am coming down there at exactly thirty minutes.” He sighed deeply. “Mary, I just don’t like this. You’re certain you know what you’re doing?”
    “Babe, I’ve been doing this my whole life. The stakes are only slightly different because she’s – you know, already dead and all, but the concept is the same. She needs help. She went through something horrible and now needs to deal with it in order to move past it”
    “You know this is insane, right?”
    “No one knows insane better than me, Baby. I don’t like it either. I just know that I have to do it.”
    “I can’t survive if anything happens to you. You know that, right?”
    “Same goes.”
    That evening, after Charlie had settled down with the evening news, I slipped downstairs to face Emma. Charlie’s program lasted thirty minutes and he would be true to his word, so I knew my clock was ticking.
    No sooner had I stepped off that final step into my beautiful finished basement had the air turned frigid. The air was so cold it hurt to breathe. The tiny hairs inside my nostrils felt as if they had been instantly turned to ice.
    “I see you, Emma,” I said to the empty room. “Do you prefer Emma, or Emily?” Impossibly, the room turned even colder. My joints in my fingers ached with the pain of the temperature drop. I flexed my hands and hid them under my armpits in an attempt to steal my own body heat. “Stop trying to scare me, Emma. I want to help you. You were right, I do see you. I know what you went through. I know what happened to you.”
    “You don’t know anything!” she roared out of the shadows, taking my breath away with her anger.
    “I only want to help.”
    I expected her to tell me a story. I wanted this tortured spirit to bear her soul to me. Her brief conversations to date should have prepared me for her lack of verbal expressionism, but I don’t think anything could have possibly equipped me for what happened next.
    An unexpectedly solid hand snapped up faster than I could blink and wrapped vice-like claws around my neck. She stared at me with icicle eyes, translucent and unseeing.
    “You cannot understand,” she rasped.
    Under her grip my neck burned like ice. My cozy den transformed around me. My vision blurred, and through it I could see one image – Charlie. He knelt in my basement, all dimples and smiles, with an intricate and delicate diamond ring in his hand.
    “Well?” he said, with a dashing smile, “What’d’ya say?”
    I felt and heard myself laugh, but a voice inside kept telling me something was wrong. Charlie does not do dashing smiles. And he didn’t propose here. He proposed at a Yankee/Red Sox game in Boston.
    “Of course I’ll marry you.”
    He wrapped me in his arms and swept me in a circle as I wept with joy.
    A flurry of color and my mind stole me to a tropical island, with palm trees and sand as far as I could see.
    “I could stay here forever,” I could hear my own voice, but it didn’t sound like me. It was too low, and the accent is off. I tried to shake the fog of confusion.
    “Where ever you are is where I want to be. Should we buy a shanty and live off the land?” Charlie joked and tickled my ribs. I laughed and then we kissed until play turned to passion.
    The sun faded, and so did the joy. The man I had loved and kissed passionately on the beach was replaced by a brooding man who drank too much and argued more. What started out as angry words soon turned to slaps, pinches, punches, and eventually broken bones. Scenes from multiple emergency rooms in multiple towns flashed through my memories like a shuffling deck of cards. Each broken bone, bloodied nose and black eye left a callous on my soul.
    I tried to leave once. He dragged me back and beat me to the point of unconsciousness.
    That night he raped me for the first time. With a vicious yank of my hair he whispered, “You are mine.” He proved it by taking me against my will. The man who promised to love me forever turned me into a tool to use at his whim.
    Life continued to fall apart. He continued to abuse me. If I tried to fight I learned it always hurt worse. So I endured, as was my duty as a wife.
    People knew. It’s not easy to cover that many injuries. No one offered me any kind of advice or shelter. I’d get an occasional pat on the back. Other women claimed that if I tried harder to please him he wouldn’t get so angry. People found it difficult to think poorly of a local cop.
    Wait. That wasn’t right. Charlie wasn’t a police officer. He was a... a... something, but not police. The fog seized my mind once more.
    Another flurry of images played in my mind. I was punched in the gut the first time I told him I was pregnant. After that I miscarried three times. My body wasted away.
    When I knew I was pregnant for the fifth time I didn’t tell him. After five years of marriage I had no love for my husband. I was dead – a walking corpse, now carrying a poisoned seed.
    My weeks progressed. At first I cared little for the thing within my womb. It would soon die just like the others. Then came the day I felt the strange flutter of a small baby moving within its mother’s womb. Only then did the implications of the child come to me. I began having nightmares. I dreamed of Charlie harming the child, and then I dreamed of the child harming me. I did not know which scenario I feared more. I had thought myself incapable of fear after the years spent with Charlie, but now that I had carried a child long enough to feel it, I faced new and more terrible fears.
    Being so horribly underweight, the evidence of my pregnancy showed sooner than anticipated. For the first time in a long time I fought back when he came at me.
    “Whose bastard are you carrying?”
    “What are you talking about? It’s yours!”
    “Bullshit! If the bastard were mine you would have told me sooner. A man has a right to know who his wife’s been whoring with!”
    “No one! I didn’t tell you because I was scared I’d miscarry again.”
    “Oh, I’m to blame for your inability to breed, is that it? The one thing nature gave to women and not men and you can’t even do that.”
    Disgusted, he dealt with the argument the only way he knew how. He backhanded me across my face.
    He only hit my face that day. Always before, he hit me in more inconspicuous places. That night he wanted me not only afraid but also ashamed. I would not be able to go out in public for days, if not weeks. He did not hit me in the stomach. He knew the child was his.
     “I’ve decided you are going to keep this kid,” he said one day. “You’re going to keep having kids until I say you’re done. Just remember, though, the kids will be mine – just like you. Fatherhood has... potential.”
    That night I couldn’t sleep for fear. By now I knew my husband. I knew him to be conniving, charming, and dangerous. What would he do with a child? Children? How would he raise them - hard or manipulating?
    Days were spent in indecision and fear. I never slept and constantly fretted over the strange looks from the monster who wore my husband’s mask.
    Eventually I realized what would happen if I brought a child into this world. Charlie would find a way to use it to control me. What if it was a boy who grew up like his father? What if it was a girl who grew up like me? The tragedy of it all struck me so profoundly. I made my decision with a bitter heart.
    I waited until he passed out. His hand was still on my stomach when he drifted. In any other couple, the gesture would have been sweet, but in this man I knew the gesture was possessive, not loving. The man who wore Charlie’s face snored softly as I crept to the kitchen for the sharpest knife I could find.
    I stabbed him. Over and over again, I stabbed him. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t let him hurt me, my baby or anyone else ever again. I stabbed him, mad with pain, mad with grief, I stabbed him. He deserved each puncture in his soft sweet skin. Blood sprayed all over my face and hands. I laughed as it splashed and ruined my nightgown. I couldn’t help but think, “I’ve stained my gown, Charlie will be so angry when he wakes up.” That made the giggles start all over again.
    I giggled and sobbed alternatively. I watched the blood seep out of him. I wept for the boy I married and laughed at the monster he became. I knew what I had done. I went from victim to monster in one instant. A life for a life. That’s what the Bible said. So I fashioned a makeshift noose out of Charlie’s best tie. It was silk, a bold red he’d gotten for Christmas before we were married. I hung myself in our closet, my own laughter echoing in my head.
    My ghost stood before me, her cold eyes uncaring.
    I gasped for air, trying to readjust to my own life. In a few minutes I’d lived nearly a lifetime of someone else’s experiences. I reflected the two images of Charlie’s face now. The husband I knew and the monster she’d shown me. I knew that monster had been her husband, not mine, but I’d counseled at enough battered shelters to know an abuser could be anyone. “That was disorienting,” I announced.
    “You see me,” she stated simply in her fashion.
    “I do, I see you. I’m sorry.”
    My time was up, I knew Charlie was coming. I also knew I was likely dealing with the devil, as it were. I had to show her not everything was as she saw it.
    “I see you, do you see me?”
    Her head cocked to one side. She looked at me, but I could tell she did not see beyond her own pain. Who could blame her?
    “I have seen your pain and felt your pain. Can you see beyond it? Not every relationship endures the same hardships and pain as yours. Many see love where others see pain. Your pain is gone. You ended it, yet you still endure it. What do you see now?”
    She blinked, not quite knowing, hearing, or seeing our conversation.
    I heard Charlie’s steps coming down into the basement. My window closing, I tried to reach her again. “Emily, my Charlie is coming down the stairs. Look. Look at Charlie; he has never abused me or our child. We raised a beautiful girl into a successful and independent woman. Our life was not yours. Let go of your pain and see the good in people.”
    I prayed my ploy worked. If I gambled wrong, Charlie’s life hung in the balance.
    He stepped into the room gingerly. He heard me as he came down, so he knew what I was doing. Even though I knew my visions had been a glimpse of another’s life, seeing Charlie jolted me. I saw him covered in blood, the knife in my head and my own insane giggles echoing in my memory.
    I closed my eyes and willed away the images. Not my Charlie, I told myself.
    “Mary? You okay down here?”
    Emily stared at him blindly. For an instant the air turned bitter cold and I worried that I had misjudged the situation. Charlie sensed it too and hurried over to me, wrapping his arms around me in protection, as if he could save me from the dead. That singular act of selflessness saved us. Emily’s husband would have never offered himself for her. He used her and abused her; he did not love her. She saw my Charlie willing to risk himself to protect me and the fog vanished from her eyes.
    “I see you,” she stated. She stared at us and at her own ghostly bloody hands. A single tear rolled down her face.
    The room flashed with the light of a dozen stars. Charlie and I shielded our eyes with our hands and turned into each other to escape the glare. When the light cleared, Charlie and I were alone. Emma was gone somewhere beyond her pain and chains.



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