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
