THE PROMISE
Roy Dorman
Halloween Day, 1970
Bobby Dawson’s
friends, Willy and Amy, waited on the sidewalk per the plan.
They’d be the
distraction. They’d talk and laugh loudly and try to attract Mrs. Brady’s
attention to that corner of the fence.
The three
twelve-year olds had had some false starts over the years, but this time they
thought they were ready. A number of
times they’d seen Mrs. Brady, and she’d seen them, but they’d always just waved
and smiled when she’d beckoned them to come in.
“I love
beautiful little children,” she would say and then cackle. That always
creeped out the three friends.
Bobby walked up to
the padlocked gate and looked over it toward the front door. The gate was about
thirty feet from that
front door. The gate and the picket
fence that surrounded the property were in good shape. Just as the old mansion
was in good condition
for its age.
He easily hoisted
himself over the gate and onto the walk on the other side of it.
Now, the front
door. He stood on the porch a few feet
from the door and stared at the knob on the door.
“Do it, Doofus!”
yelled
Willy.
Bobby jumped at the
sound of Willy’s voice, causing Both Willy and Amy to break out into gales of
laughter. He’d been concentrating on the
door knob so hard he hadn’t realized almost a minute had passed.
“Shut up,” he
mouthed at the two.
He then walked up to
the door and tried the knob. It turned
easily and he slowly pushed the old oak door in. The hinges hadn’t been
oiled recently and
gave a low spooky squeal as he moved inside.
He slid an old
umbrella stand over to prop open the door for a quick retreat if need be.
He surveyed the long
hallway that led deeper into the first floor of the old house. There were pictures
of very old people on the
walls. Bobby knew they were old from
both the stern expressions on their faces and the old-fashioned clothes they
wore.
At the end of the
hall, there was a small wooden stand with an empty vase on it. The vase was
perfect for what he needed to
show that he’d been inside.
He was almost to the
end of the hall when one of the doors along the hallway opened, and old Mrs.
Brady, said to be a witch by those in town who knew about those things, reached
out and grabbed him by the wrist.
“Gotcha! Whatcha doin’ in here, boy?” she said in a
menacing voice.
Bobby tried to pull
his wrist from her grip, but she was strong for an old woman.
“Nothin’,”
he
croaked, his mouth having gone completely dry.
“Let me go!”
A dark stain appeared
on the crotch of Bobby’s jeans.
“Is that boy-piss
I
smell?” whined Mrs. Brady, giving Bobby a nasty smile.
“Let me go!”
Bobby
said again as he struggled with the old witch.
“If I let ya go, do
ya promise to come back some day? I’d
keep ya for myself right now if yer two little friends hadn’t seen ya come in
here.”
“I’ll come back. I promise,” said Bobby, ready to agree to
anything. “Just let me go, please.”
With a long dirty
fingernail, Mrs. Brady scratched a three-inch long line on Bobby’s forearm,
barely breaking the skin.
“There’s a
reminder. So ya don’t forget. I
get lonely.
Come back to me or I’ll come for you.
I sorta like your face. You and I
could be special friends.”
She then let Bobby
go and he ran for the door. He knocked
over the umbrella stand on his way out and then fell down the porch steps,
landing in a heap.
Mrs. Brady was
cackling loud enough for Willy and Amy to hear her. They took off running before
Bobby even got
back to the front gate.
Bobby had never been
so scared in his life. Nor so angry.
The scared feeling
would fade, but the anger, like the scratch on his arm, stayed with him for a
long time.
***
The Day Before Bob
Dawson’s
Retirement, October
28, 2025
“Hello? Hello? Earth
to Short-timer Bob.”
“Oh, hey, Ed. Sorry, I was just thinking about getting out
of town tomorrow,” said Bob.
“Well, it is your
last day, so I guess you can daydream about your retirement if you want to.”
Bob nodded, but
actually had mixed feelings as to daydreaming about retirement plans.
He had a promise
he’d never kept, and thinking about it made him nervous. And angry.
Always angry.
***
Walking up the
street toward Mrs. Brady’s house, Bob felt an odd calm. He’d left
this New England town of New
Salemville to go to college in the Midwest forty years ago, and had only
returned then for family visits on school holidays. After college, with both
of his parents dead
by way of a tragic car accident, and him having been an only child, he’d had no
reason to return.
Well, there was one
reason for him to return, but he’d avoided thinking too much about that while
working as an investment banker in Chicago.
Though he’d had
close friends as a kid like with Willy and Amy, he’d had no interest in making
friends either at work or outside of work.
He’d had few women friends and had never dated anyone long enough to
take it to that next level.
“Married to yer job
is what ya are,” some of his colleagues would say jokingly. The joke wore
on Bob over the years. He hated it.
Now, standing in
front of that house, he wondered what in the hell he was doing here. Had he
really come back to fulfill a promise
he’d made to an old lady as a kid?
The property had
aged. The gate and the picket fence both
needed paint and the fence also sagged in quite a few places, almost falling onto
the lawn.
The house had been
vandalized. Windows had had rocks thrown
through them and “WITCH” had been spray painted a number of times on the
weathered slate siding.
Bob hoped by
entering the house and fulfilling the promise he would give himself some sort
of closure. Maybe have some happiness for
the rest of his life.
The gate was no
longer locked and Bob pushed it open and headed up the walk.
“Don’t come
in,”
pleaded a voice that seemed to come from inside his head. “Please.
Just go away.”
Bob paused at the
porch steps and listened.
“Must be crackin’
up,” he said to himself.
He walked up onto
the porch and this time didn’t hesitate at the front door. Turning the
knob, he opened the door and
stepped inside.
“Go back,
Bobby. She’ll keep you like she keeps
us.”
Bob thought the
voice sounded like Amy, but dismissed the thought as being ridiculous.
“That was more than
forty years ago. Amy and Willy are
probably both retired somewhere.”
Bob looked down the
hallway and saw it was exactly like it had been that day a long time ago. He
didn’t bother with the umbrella stand and
just walked down the hall toward that little table with the vase on it. Would
Mrs. Brady’s boney hand with its sharp
dirty nails reach out now and grab him?
“Impossible,”
he
muttered. “She’s long dead.”
But then, two
ghostly apparitions formed between him and the little stand.
They looked a little
older than the last time he’d seen them, that would have been at high school
graduation, but Bob had no doubts about their being Willy and Amy.
“It may not be too
late if you turn and run fast — ” Amy blurted out.
“You did come
back!” cried Mrs. Brady, stepping out from that same doorway she had years ago.
“How wonderful!”
Bob thought he must
be hallucinating, but the looks on the now teary-eyed Willy and Amy convinced
him he should run for the door.
Before he could do
so, Mrs. Brady reached into a pocket in her dress and drew out some powder that
she blew into Bob’s face.
Bob gasped, whirled
to run, and then fell to the floor as blackness descended upon him.
***
Bob awoke, but
didn’t open his eyes. Where was he?
He was in a soft bed that had sheets that
smelled like flowers. Not fresh flowers,
but flowers that had maybe been used at a funeral and then later tossed into a
dumpster. There was another strong odor
that he also equated with death.
Something like rotten meat.
“Oh, good. You’re awake.
Did you sleep well?”
Bob flinched at the
sound of that voice. He then realized
with horror that he was naked under the sheets and that Mrs. Brady was also
under those same sheets!
She brought her face
within inches of his and smiled. Her
face was younger, probably as she’d looked when she was in her early
thirties. It was wrinkle- free…., and
beautiful.
But then he looked
into her eyes. They were not
beautiful. They looked to be hundreds of
years old; the blue was faded and washed out. What should be the white surrounding
the iris was a too-bright yellow, streaked with red.
She moved closer to
Bob. Her body felt young under the
sheets. But when she pulled a hand out
from under, Bob saw the hand was as old as her eyes. Long bony fingers with
sharp nails.
He threw back the
sheets and made to get out of that horrid bed.
He almost passed out when he saw the scratch marks on his thighs. And
on his arms and stomach.
“You and I were at
it all night,” said Mrs. Brady, chuckling seductively. “You were
insatiable. It must have been pent up from the waiting
all those years. But now we can have
each other whenever we choose to.
Forever.”
Bob saw Willy and
Amy standing in the corner with their heads down.
There were scratches
on their arms and legs.
Then Bob heard
voices coming from downstairs.
“The Coroner said
it
looks like another heart attack victim.”
“Yeah,
probably. Why do people, especially old
people, feel the need to explore abandoned houses?”
“Beats me. Seems like some kind of death wish.”
“Come on. Let’s load ‘em up and get the hell outta here.”
Bob walked over to
the window that overlooked the street in front of the house. He watched as the
EMTs wheeled the gurney
with his body on it to their van.
Forever? Could he do what he did last night
forever? But what had he done
last night? Was Mrs. Brady, or the ghost
of Mrs. Brady, just messing with his head?
He prayed that was the case.
Forever with her was
just too long to think about.
***
Six days and six
long nights passed. Or maybe it was six
weeks. Bob had no way of keeping track
of the time. And maybe that was a good
thing.
Mrs. Brady wasn’t
always around and that gave Bob time to talk with Willy and Amy.
They had to do
something. They had to get out from
under this curse. Anything.
“What about
suicide?” Bob asked one night when Mrs.
Brady was in the basement doing whatever witches do at night in dark
spider-webbed covered basements.
“We’re already
dead,” said Amy. “Believe us when we say
we’ve thought about that, but couldn’t figure a way to do away with our…
spirits, or whatever.”
“And we tried to
think of ways to kill her,” said Willy. “But
came up against the same brick wall;
she’s already dead too.”
“Let me think about
this some more,” said Bob.
***
The next time Mrs.
Brady left them to themselves, Bob took Will and Amy into the kitchen.
“We’re dead
and
she’s dead, but this house isn’t dead,” he said. “If
we could take away this house, she
wouldn’t have any way of confining us.”
“How do we ‘take
away’ the house?” asked Amy.
“I thought about
that,” said Bob. “It’s probably more
than a hundred years old and dry as parchment.
If we could get a fire started, it would go up in minutes.”
“How do we start a
fire?” asked Amy.
“Let’s think
about
that some more,” said Willy, nodding to Amy.
“I think Bob may be on to something.”
***
“There’s an
old
reading magnifying glass in the downstairs study,” said Amy, a week later. “And
there’s a window with southern exposure
in that room. If we could somehow get some paper, like old newspapers, and then
prop up the magnifying glass at just the right angle for the sun to — ”
“That’s brilliant,
Amy!” said Bob. “Our spirit selves can’t
lift anything with much weight to it, but we should be able to manage
newspapers and a magnifying glass.”
Let’s practice our
lifting
with the newspapers and the magnifying glass a few times,” said Willy. “We’ll
probably only get one chance to do
this, and we don’t want to screw it up.”
“But what happens
to
us if we manage to burn down her house?” asked Amy.
“I have no idea,”
said Bob. “But I think anything’s better
than being her sex puppets, don’t you?”
Willy and Amy
shuddered in unison and nodded vigorously.
***
Mrs. Brady became
especially violent in her sexual relations with the three because she sensed
they were keeping something from her.
The thought that they were conspiring behind her back, and just
generally looking guilty as hell all of the time, infuriated her no end.
“What are you up
to?” she demanded every night. “If you
think you can get the better of me, you’re mistaken. I’ve come up
against better than you three
over the years and always have come out on top.”
Bob, Willy, and Amy
just hung their heads and stayed silent during these interrogations.
***
“The next late
afternoon that she’s occupied with her spells in the basement we’ll have to do
it,” said Bob. “She may figure out a way
to get us to talk and then we’re up the ol’ creek.”
“We can stack some
newspapers on the table and on the floor beneath the table,” said Amy. “Leaving
a trail of them to those velvet
curtains in the study should get things going.”
***
There were sunny
afternoons when the old witch didn’t go into the basement and cloudy days when
she did.
Then came the
perfect storm. The day was sunny and
bright and she went muttering to herself into her basement lair.
The three
co-conspirators headed for the study.
They spread dry newspapers around as planned and went to work with the
positioning of the magnifying glass. The sun shone through the glass and the
three aimed it so a tight beam ended in a bright dot on the newspapers.
After only a couple
of seconds there was a tendril of smoke and then a flame burst forth. The flame
devoured the first pages and Bob
and Amy pushed the flaming mass to the floor.
Those on the floor caught immediately and spread toward the curtains.
A howling came from
the basement as the house communicated with Mrs. Brady that it was
burning. The flames climbed the wall and
ran across the woodwork at the ceiling.
The dry construction fed the fire and it ate voraciously.
“Let’s see if
we can
leave through the front door now that both Mrs. Brady and the house are
occupied,” said Willy.
The heat was becoming
intense. The three ran as fast as
spirits could run and arrived there just as the heat from the fire blew out the
front picture window.
“Drift out through
the window,” yelled Bob.
***
Standing in some
rosebushes under an old elm across the street, they watched the old mansion
burn. They could hear fire trucks in the
distance, but they knew the trucks would be too late. The house was completely
engulfed in flames.
“Why doesn’t
she
come out?” Willy asked.
“Look up at the
bedroom window,” said Amy.
“She’s going
down
with the house,” Bob said as he saw her looking down at them, her hair aflame.
He thought it odd that though she had a look
of hatred in her eyes, she had what seemed to be a satisfied smile on her face
as she stared at him.
“We’ve done what many may have tried to do
and failed. What should we do now?” asked
Willy.
“We could look for
an abandoned house and haunt it ourselves,” ventured Amy.
Bob and Willy stared
at her.
“It was just a
thought,” Amy said, shrugging. “We could
spend some time by ourselves, healing our scars.”
All three had many
scars to heal. Scars that would take a
lot of time to heal if they ever did.
“Okay, then. Let’s go house hunting,” said Willy.
“And then house
haunting,” Bob said, smirking.
But Bob had failed
to notice the brief glances that had been darting back and forth between Amy
and Willy behind his back. Those two had
been under the spell of old Mrs. Brady for too long. They had been corrupted. Now that they were free of her, they could take
up where she left off.
And for Bob, forever
was soon to begin again.
THE END
