Layla
“Have you ever lost your mind entirely before, Curtis?”
Curtis, who is currently fighting to get a chainsaw back in working order, looks up at me with a pinched expression. “I don’t believe so, Miss Layla. But you look like you’re fixin’ to lose yours, I reckon.”
Well, he’s not wrong. I run my hand over my face, then through my hair, peering at the old handyman from my perch on the back porch. The overcast day is a welcome relief from the heat, and the choked tree line in the distance looks remarkably innocent compared to last night during the storm.
“You need sleep,” he says in a fatherly tone that forces my gaze back to his face. “You look like you’ve been dragged to hell, and even hell didn’t want ya and sent you packin’.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” I tease, rolling my eyes. “You’re a real southern gentleman, Curtis.”
He waves me off with one of his huge, calloused hands. Curtis is average height and portly, but his strength is truly incredible. His stained white shirt is coated in sweat while he yanks and fumbles with the chainsaw, mumbling curses under his breath.
I find his company comforting in a way I can’t explain.
“Are there… big animals out here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like…” I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees as I look past him toward the trees in the distance. “Like, something big enough to make a lot of noise.”
“Well, yes,” he sighs, giving up on the chainsaw for the moment. “Why are you asking me this, Miss Layla?”
I roll my lower lip between my teeth and internally debate my options. Last night fucking sucked, plain and simple. I’m having a hard time deciding what was real, and what I made up in my fear fueled mind, in all honesty. The dream I had is one thing, but thinking I saw someone standing in the tree line still has me on edge.
Bailey hadn’t arrived until almost 10:00 in the morning because of a downed tree in the road. I’d stayed up, going through almost every room in the entire house, all the way up to the fourth floor, where a decaying ladder dropped from the darkened entrance to the attic. I hadn’t gone up there, of course. Who would? Most of the doors in the upper levels of the house were locked tight. I hadn’t been sure what I’d been looking for, but I didn’t find anything at all to ease my anxiety about the events of the night.
I’d even walked out here, to the backyard, and scoured the tree line for hours looking for something, anything, to prove that I’d actually seen someone standing out here in the rain.
I hadn’t even found footprints. If there was evidence to be found, it had been washed away by the rain.
But the knife on my bed…
“We have raccoons out here that are a real problem,” Curtis says with marked disdain. “They get into the house from time to time and cause a racket. Had some in the attic a year past. The smell–”
“What do they smell like?” I ask stupidly, my mind immediately lurching toward the memory of the musky, leathery scent I’d encountered during my nights alone in the house.
“Like trash, Miss Layla.”
“Oh,” I whisper to myself, closing my eyes for a moment.
When I open them again, Curtis is staring at me.
“You think I’m crazy.” I give him a soft smile. “Don’t you?”
“I think you’re tired and letting this old house get to you.” He walks up to the porch and leans on the railing, looking me in the eyes. “The old night nurse didn’t sleep for weeks on end. Even during the day, she stayed up, wandering around and talking about hearing noises.”
“What kind of noises?”
“Just old house noises, Miss Layla. The same noises you hear.”
“What made her quit?”
“She never really quit; she just stopped coming. She was a young woman like yourself and stayed in the house like you, but one day she was just gone. She left everything behind and sped off in her car like she was being chased by something.”
“That’s awful!”
“Well, I’m just being honest with ya. You’re a nurse, Miss Layla. You know the importance of sleep and what the lack of it can do to someone’s mind.” He let out a sigh, furrowing his brows at me. “You should get off the property from time to time, too. You haven’t left since you got here two weeks ago.”
“There’s not much I need to be doing–”
“Well, you should find something, anything. Hell, come to church with Bailey on Sundays, our congregation would love to have ya.”
“I’m not a church goin’ girl,” I say, mimicking his thick accent.
He frowns at me playfully. “Ah, well, neither was my wife, but now she teaches Sunday School. There’s plenty of young men looking for a wife there too. It might be nice to have someone taking you on dates during the weekends.”
A sharp clattering sound comes from high above our heads. Curtis glances up, squinting into the sun now peeking through the fast-moving clouds still heavy with rain.
Prickles of adrenaline ripple through my fingertips as I look up at the ceiling of the covered porch. “What was that?”
“Bailey must’ve dropped something is all.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I do,” he says, meeting my eyes with a firm look that takes me slightly aback. “I believe there’s nothin’ sinister about this place. In fact–” he leans forward, crossing his arms, “I believe the only ghosts that inhabit old places like this are there because of ungodly people who’ve done unspeakable things.”
“Doesn’t this place have somewhat of a… sordid history?”
He frowns, narrowing his eyes at me. “You should be sleeping.”
“Tell me what you know about this place. Please?” I bat my eyelashes at him.
He purses his lips, cocking his head to the side.
“You’ve been working here for decades from what Bailey said, surely you know something.”
“I know a few things.”
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“None of it is rooted in fact, miss. I don’t like spreading lies.”
“Please!” I say again, with more force this time.
If Curtis can see the desperation behind my eyes, he doesn’t show it. He just sighs, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “I don’t believe in ghosts, I want that to be clear, you understand?”
“I understand.”
He nods but looks conflicted. “This place used to be a plantation, you know. A real travesty, but those were the times unfortunately. The Gregorys were the first in this area to free their slaves, and that was years before the Civil War. They were hated for it, and it got violent.” He sighs, shaking his head. “This house was actually built after the first house burned down… arson, of course. A few family members died in that fire, which is all public record.”
Public record piques my interest.
He notices, adding. “All of this is available at the local library.”
I nod, giving him a look that begs for him to go on. Another heavy sigh, and then he continues, “What’s not in the public records is… a rumor that started somewhere around the turn of the century. A woman named Georgina Gregory, the young wife of Randolph Gregory, who owned the place in the early 1900s, was said to have been a witch with certain… tastes.” He grimaces. “Randolph Gregory was a very old man, having been born in the original house and the one who built this one.” He waves at the house. “He died under what is rumored to be suspicious circumstances, killed by a possible lover of the young Mrs. Gregory.”
“Oh,” I say, totally enraptured by what’s becoming some incredibly juicy family drama. “Then what happened?”
“Well, their eldest son, Edward, became the man of the house. He went off to fight in World War I while his mother and two younger brothers remained here. However, when he was off at war, Georgina and the two younger boys perished in a fire in one of the outbuildings.”
My stomach curls as he continues. “Edward Gregory came back to the states but didn’t marry until the 1930s, and his wife gave him six children.”
“Edward Gregory sounds familiar,” I whisper, trying to link my family lines back to him. He must be my great-great-great-grandfather, or something.
“His son Andrew became the heir after his untimely, rather young, death. The rest of the Gregory children spread out. There were three girls born in the ‘40s, and two other boys, beside Andrew. Herbert and Roger.”
“Roger is my grandfather,” I tell him, and he nods, like he knows this. “So… Andrew is Aunt Penny’s father?”
“Yes ma’am.”
I resist the urge to wring my hands in anticipation for whatever he’s going to say next, but he gets a distant look in his eyes. “Ms. Penny was his only child for a long time. He and his wife desperately wanted more, and… well, the story goes, Andrew Gregory sought the help of…. Well, it’s a rumor.”
“Tell me!”
“Witches from around these parts…. I don’t believe in them, just so we’re clear, but the troubling thing is that Mr. Gregory started acting real strange, more aggressive, more reclusive, shut himself and his family up in this house for years. Mrs. Gregory was a frail little thing, much like Ms. Penny is now, and shouldn’t have been trying to have any more babies. Ms. Penny got sent to a Catholic boarding school in New Orleans and was away from most of what happened, I believe. I was just a kid then, you know. Lapping up these rumors like a cat with cream.”
“You probably heard a rendition of the rumors I’ve heard from my own family,” I interrupt, starting to lose patience as the hair on the back of my neck starts to stand on end. Again, I feel like I’m being watched, like someone is standing behind me.
“Then you’ll know Mrs. Gregory went insane and died in an asylum.”
“Yes–”
“Andrew Gregory, according to the rumor mill, went to a witch doctor, took poor Mrs. Gregory with him. I don’t know what they did to that poor woman, but she was never the same. They did have a son, but he died shortly after he was born. That baby was born too early, and real sick, and in those times there wasn’t much that could be done for an early baby like that. All the stories I was told, however, were real awful, miss. I have a hard time even saying it out loud, but….” He sucks in a breath, fixing me with a look that makes the gooseflesh ripple over my arms. “They say Mr. Gregory wasn’t the child’s father, that the father was some kind of demon, and Mrs. Gregory begged him to kill the baby, to take it out to the swamp and drown him. I don’t know if that’s actually what happened, but there was no funeral for that child. No christening neither. Nobody saw him, not even Ms. Penny.”
I find it hard to swallow.
He continues. “Afterward, Mr. Gregory was found dead in the cigar room upstairs, and Mrs. Gregory had her psychotic break. Poor Ms. Penny was only sixteen when her mother died, and she left school to come here. She’s been alone ever since. Never married, never went back into town.”
“And you said this house isn’t haunted,” I choke out. “How many people have died here?”
“Who can say? This is an old place, Miss Layla. But, I’ll tell ya, I’ve been working here for forty years now, and I ain't never once seen a ghost. Never felt like there was one around, neither. And I’ll tell ya, I’ve been to some real haunted places in my time, especially up in New Orleans. Now there’s a place with ghosts, I’ll say.”
“Well–”
“Well, nothing,” he says, giving me another fatherly look of disapproval. “I told you what I know, and now it’s time for you to get to bed, young lady.”
I pout but obey him nonetheless. He goes back to trying to fix his chainsaw while I seemingly float through the house, so tired I barely register my movements until I find myself in my room, staring down at my bed.
How am I supposed to sleep now, knowing what I know about this family? My family, in fact.
Somehow, I manage. I fall face first into bed and wake up four hours later. The sun is still high in the sky, but the clock on the wall reads 4:44. My alarm goes off like clockwork at 4:45, and I roll out of bed to start another shift alone in this creepy house.
By the time I walk downstairs, Bailey is hiking her purse over her shoulder in the front foyer. “Oh, there you are! I didn’t want to wake you up, but….” She steps forward as I reach the foyer. “Look, my cousin is taking me to New Orleans two weeks from now for a weekend trip in the big city. I’d like you to come, Layla. I think you need to get out of the house for a bit. Vera’s got everything covered for us on the weekend anyway.”
“Sure,” I tell her, still half asleep.
Bailey beams. “Great. It’s a plan, then. I made some fresh coffee if you want some. It’s piping hot.”
“Thanks, Bailey.”
She gives me her typical kind smile and leaves. I watch her rusted car bounce out of the driveway before turning to the kitchen, following the scent of freshly brewed coffee.
But when I enter the kitchen, I’m not alone.
I scream, absolutely startled, as the stranger turns around, his green eyes meeting mine.