Camilla's House

The ad seemed too good to be true.

See some ghosts. There is a family of them at my house. They won’t hurt you, I promise. Ask for Camilla when you text. The phone number was local.

Ghosts weren’t supposed to be real, but I’d seen and felt enough inexplicable phenomena in my thirty years to know that was far from true. My grandmother once announced she was a bit of what she called “fey” and insisted that I’d inherited her gift after I told her about playing with a little girl in the backyard of her house when I was a kid. There was no living girl, she’d told me gravely, and there hadn’t been for decades. But she believed me when I said there was. Her name was Dottie, and we’d built castles together in the little turtle-shaped sandbox Nana kept in her yard for me.

My parents thought I was crazy, especially after I spoke to Nana at her funeral. She hadn’t cared for the floral arrangements.

So the ad piqued my interest. And as I texted Camilla to set up an appointment to see her ghosts, I thought maybe I would finally be able to prove their existence and my sanity.

A few days later, I found myself in front of a skinny old house, its painted brick peeling and discolored. Its neighbors were in worse shape, with their windows boarded up and doors splintering into pieces. I wasn’t familiar with this street; it was on the very edge of town, waiting for everything to be torn down and rebuilt into an enclave of McMansions. But until that happened, its streetlights were dark, the bulbs burned out or broken, cracks in the pavement filled with weeds. An abandoned car that looked like it had been parked here since the nineties rested in a driveway, its windshield smashed.

A chill coursed down my spine in a way that had nothing to do with the creepy neighborhood. I could already tell that Camilla was telling the truth about her ghosts. If anywhere in this town was going to be haunted, this would be it.

The address she’d texted to me was for a skinny house that was missing a few shingles on the roof. Its painted brick was peeling and discolored, the porch railing ready to collapse. A heart-shaped light glowed in the cracked front window, the only sign of life.

Steeling myself, I approached the house and knocked on the door. It fell open, revealing a slim, pale woman maybe a couple of years younger than me, her light-colored hair loose around her shoulders. She wore a dark blue dress that covered her from neck to ankles. “Derek?” she said by way of greeting.

I held out a hand. “You must be Camilla.”

She looked at it without offering hers in return, as if the gesture was confusing. Finally, she gently placed her palm in my hand, her skin cool as marble. “Thank you for placing that ad,” I said.

“I didn’t think anyone would respond to it,” she admitted. “I waited so long for a response.”

“Yeah, putting that out in a newspaper would weed out a lot of possible interest,” I pointed out. “My dad is the only person I know who still gets newspapers delivered.” Dimly, I was aware of a preternatural hum coming from inside the house, a sure sign of ghosts. My pulse picked up. I patted my jacket pocket to reassure myself that my phone was still there. I could hardly wait to take some video.

Camilla looked confused at my answer. “Perhaps that is why no one else responded.”

“You might have better luck posting it on Marketplace or something.” I regretted the words immediately. Camilla didn’t deserve the horde of weirdos who would descend on her house if she did that.

Her expression was that of confusion. “I should make posters of my haunted house to display in the marketplace? Which one?”

“No, not the marketplace. Marketplace. It’s where you can post things for sale or…”

Her pale brows knitted themselves together in confusion. “I thought this cellular telephone would be enough,” she said, removing it from her dress pocket.

Cellular telephone? Who said that? I thought about the abandoned car nearby and how it would’ve been manufactured the last time someone referred to a phone in such a way. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. Ghosts, am I right?”

That remark earned a blank look. “Yes?” She quickly composed herself, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Please come in.”

I stepped into the foyer. Its vinyl floor had been swept but was clearly wearing out, peeling up where it met the white-painted walls. There was a yellowy bulb hanging from the ceiling, the only source of light, which cast Camilla in a sickly glow. If I didn’t already know better, I would’ve assumed she was a ghost, too.

I couldn’t see any personal touches in the foyer. If the floor wasn’t mostly clean and there wasn’t a light in the window, I would have assumed the house was as empty as the others in this neighborhood.

“You must want to see the ghosts now,” Camilla said, stepping aside. The rest of the corridor was dark.

“Yes.”

She took a couple of short steps around me to lock the front door. Its bolt sliding home reminded me of a gunshot and for half a second, I wondered if I’d made a mistake coming here.

The buzzing noise intensified. From the opposite end of the dark hallway, I heard a woman’s voice singing a hymn.

No, I had not made a mistake coming here. I pulled my phone from my pocket and thumbed its camera on.

“Come with me,” Camilla said crisply, striding down the hallway.

I obeyed, my heart beating so hard against my ribs that I was sure she could hear it.

The room at the end of the hallway was lit with a few flickering candles placed on a windowsill. It looked like it had once been a formal dining room. A massive chandelier hung from the ceiling, missing lots of crystal droplets. It was suspended over a long table flanked on either side by rows of chairs, all covered with dusty white cloths. A hutch leaned against the opposite wall, showing off a collection of dishware. Waiting for a dinner party that would never happen, I thought.

The hum was growing louder, but I couldn’t see anything yet. Before I could ask Camilla where the ghosts were, she said softly, “They’ll be here in a moment.”

What was her accent? She sounded like an old-timey actress. Transatlantic, I think it’s called.

Cream-colored shapes came into view, coalescing into human-shaped figures. Three, four, five. A family, I realized. A woman wearing a long gray sundress began singing softly, the same hymn I’d heard earlier. She glanced at me, startled, then turned away, reaching for a little boy wearing blue shorts and a sailor shirt.

I held up my phone with shaking hands, taking video of the ghost family. “Who are they?” I whispered to Camilla.

She shrugged, her answer careless. “People who refuse to leave.”

There was a coldness to her voice that sent a chill down my spine. “I mean, do you know their names?”

“I don’t particularly care.”

“Why? This is incredible!” The little boy reached for the hand of a man—his father, I guessed. The man’s face was the best defined, his features clear. His eyes widened at the sight of me and he mouthed the words, “Get out.”

I shook my head and didn’t stop recording. My phone had captured everything.

I sneaked a quick glance at Camilla, who was watching the family with an amused smile on her face. She turned to me, her pale eyes nearly white in the candlelight.

Just a trick of the lighting. It had to be.

“Is this your house now?” I asked.

“In a sense.”

Weird reply, but she was a weird woman. “I thought this whole area was slated for redevelopment.”

“Then I will move again.”

I kept my phone’s camera function running, capturing images of the family before me, the people I assumed were parents and three small children. Only the little boy seemed to realize I was there. Two girls who looked to be twins played by themselves in the corner of the room near the hutch. “What happened to them?” I asked suddenly. “The kids are so young.”

“I don’t know,” Camilla replied. She sounded affronted at the question.

“Get out,” mouthed the father to me, the second time he’d done so. It was strange that he couldn’t speak when his wife hadn’t stopped singing. Some ghosts could speak. Others lost that ability after death. I didn’t know why and they never explained it when they noticed my ability.

“Danger,” the man added, waving his arms.

“Did you see that?” I asked Camilla.

 “I see them all the time.”

“When did you start seeing ghosts?”

“When I died, too.”

Of everything she could have said, I hadn’t expected that. My blood ran cold. “What?”

She took a step closer to me. Slowly, deliberately, she touched cool fingers to my face. Her features weren’t fully visible in the candlelight, but I could see her mouth, the elongated canines that stretched below her top lip.

“I did not know life until I was dead,” she said, pinning me with a stare. I couldn’t move, every muscle in my body frozen. My phone fell from my hand and dropped to the wooden floor with a dull thud. “And I am so lonely in death, Derek. These people will not deign to speak to me, let alone keep me company.”

Her jaw opened, revealing rows of razor-sharp fangs. Without waiting for me to try to form a response, she buried them in my throat.

The last thing I saw before I blacked out was the ghost family, their shadowy faces clustered above me, the father shaking his head.