The Doorway Read online



  The Doorway

  By

  Lyn Murphy

  ******

  Published by

  ©2011 Lyn Murphy

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this story are the product of the author’s imagination. The psychiatric condition known as Schizotypical Personality Disorder is a genuine condition and the references are from a site called HealthGuideInfo.com.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Chapter One

  I love to sit here by the window when I’m working.

  I’ll admit the garden outside may never win an award in a Home and Garden magazine. It’s just a haphazard collection of flower beds, sporting a mixture of all sorts of things that I’ve planted on a whim. There are lavender bushes and flowering ground covers; ornamental chilli bushes and a whole assortment of flowers and miniature shrubs that I either don’t know, or can’t remember, the names of. But it’s pretty and delicately fragrant and I love it.

  There’s the wooden gazebo and a fish pond complete with a water feature, multi coloured goldfish and even some bright pink water lilies.

  I’ve put in a bird bath and a platform on which I can leave little treats for the birds. Each time I take a break from whatever manuscript I happen to be proofreading at the time, I can look out there and remember that the world can still be a very beautiful place.

  But today, when I look up, I see with annoyance that I have a visitor.

  Is it the little girl I saw yesterday as she, and the woman I assume to be her mother, stood observing the removalists unload furniture and cart it into the house across from mine. She appears to be about ten years of age, a skinny little thing with a tangle of long, pale blonde hair that frizzes out around her head like a golden aura.

  She is walking purposefully down the meandering pathway of paving stones, heading towards the gazebo at the side of my house. With an indignant cry, I am heading outside confront her.

  Now my yard is completely enclosed. There is a high wooden fence to the rear and tall, slightly Gothic-looking metal railings at the front. Both gates, the one for foot traffic and the one across the driveway, are kept closed and latched. This should send a clear message - my yard is not a public thoroughfare. And yet this little miss doesn’t even have the good grace to be furtive about her trespass.

  I burst out into the yard and stop short. It has taken me no more than a few seconds to make it from the dining room to my current spot at the corner of the house. The child should be right there in front of me, just a few feet away. But she isn’t. She is nowhere to be seen.

  Perhaps she heard me coming and hid? The gazebo is semi enclosed to waist height with wooden lattice work. There is a seat inside, attached to the circular walls, and I’m thinking, if the girl lay down on the seat, it is possible I wouldn’t be able to see her in the shadow.

  So I check, but she isn’t there.

  Mystified, I complete a slow and careful circuit of my yard. I even extend my search to the rear of the house, where there is nothing but a square of lawn underneath my clothes line, and the still securely padlocked door into the garage, which affixes to the far wall of the house.

  So I am now completely at a loss for an explanation. There is nothing – no plant or shrub or item of garden furniture that seems tall or wide enough to supply an adequate hiding place for a child of her size.

  I also note are no trample marks or other disturbances to the soil along the rear fence line. Besides, I think the fence is too high and too sheer for a little girl to scale with ease, and certainly not without making a hell of a racket.

  Yet I have to conclude that she has managed to elude me. I see her in my mind’s eyes, crouching in her place of concealment and trying to suppress a fit of the giggles. Then again, I could be ascribing to this child a level of deviousness that she doesn’t really possess. She might not have realised I was at home. When she heard me bursting out of the house in pursuit of her, she probably just ran for her life, back to the safety of home.

  Still, I will fix her wagon for her, just in case she decides to return and give it another go. Tomorrow I will buy two sturdy padlocks for my gates.

  Chapter Two

  I find it very hard to concentrate.

  I catch myself listening for every sound, watching for every movement from beyond the window; wondering if that child will have the audacity to come back again, and determined to catch her if she does. It is important to let her know that she is not welcome to visit whenever she pleases. What if she trips and hurts herself? The next thing I know her mother will be taking out a lawsuit against me.

  The Publishing House normally sends me romance novels to proofread; all those simmering glances and racing pulses. While romantic fiction is not my chosen genre, it is very predicable and doesn’t require too much in the way of mental gymnastics for me to grasp the plot. This time, however, they have sent me a ghost story – the sort of thing that will probably give me nightmares.

  I’ve always been prone to have an overactive imagination. I’ve long understood that it’s important for me to avoid over stimulating that imagination by sticking to the more realistic rather than the fantastic. Even as a child at school, when the other children chose to regale each other with stories of things-that-go-bump-in-the-night, I made a hasty exit. My parents frowned on being woken in the night by my childish screams and insistence on the bogey man residing in my wardrobe.

  This is the typical, overused plot featuring a haunted house, complete with its own resident ghost. Sarah, the main character, is an artist. She has just suffered an emotional trauma after the loss of her fiancé on eve of their wedding. On the advice of her Dr, she has rented a large old country mansion on a hilltop, with magnificent views out across the countryside from her upstairs balcony. Sarah is going to lose herself in her work, or at least that is the plan.

  She doesn’t count on her new home being haunted by some strange child in a flowing white gown who keeps flitting about in the rooms and corridors and scaring the daylights out of the poor woman.

  Now I am presuming that I know where this story is heading. The child will have met a sticky end at the hand of someone devious enough to have escaped detection for his crimes – until now that is. This child will no doubt reveal clues to Sarah, who will proceed to investigate further and eventually the murderer will be unearthed and brought to justice.

  Despite the hackneyed subject matter, I find myself drawn into the scary world that this author creates for me. I also find that I am endowing the ghost child with the face and figure of my own elusive visitor. With her pale, almost ethereal looks, that little girl from across the road would be perfect to play the ghost child if ever this book becomes a movie.

  My stomach begins to growl and a glance at the wall clock informs me that I have completely missed lunch, and almost worked right through dinner as well. Time to take a break, I decide, before I start to experience one of those hypoglycaemic attacks that seem to plague me, regardless of the fact that I am not officially a diabetic. I can already feel the beginnings of a headache.

  I don’t like to cook and I certainly don’t like all of the cleaning up involved after meal preparation. I eat mostly fruit and vegetables, with eggs and nuts as my main source of protein. Most of the time I will resort to grabbing whatever is the most easily accessible in my fridge – an apple, some grapes, maybe even a tub of yoghurt if I have remembered to pick some up when I shop.

  My one vice is coffee. I drink it strong and black, delivered to me by my State
of the Art Coffee Machine which gleams from its pride of place on my kitchen bench.

  Said coffee machine is now grumbling its way through the heating cycle while I gaze out of the window into the garden. There are weeds poking their ugly heads up among my flowers, I notice. I really should go out there later today and get rid of them. But I really am an occasional gardener at best.

  I tend to have great spurts of enthusiasm for being out there in my gardening gear, spending whole afternoons pulling weeds and aerating the soil with my little trowel. Then it will be months before I venture out again.

  But then I see it. The scenery shifts a little, almost as if my garden is actually painted on a large canvas stirred by a gentle breeze. And my eyes focus upon the little blonde girl sprinting towards my front gate.

  It takes me a moment to react. Where on earth did she come from? I’ve been standing here, looking out the window for the last couple of minutes and I certainly didn’t see her. She just sort of popped into sight like a cork.

  By the time I manage to stir my limbs to action, I am just in time to hear the gate clang shut behind her and to see her darting homewards. My mouth is open to call after her, but it simply isn’t my style to stand here and vent my displeasure across the street for everyone to hear.

  Nor it is my style to barge over there to force a confrontation with the girl’s mother. This type of behaviour is the stuff out of which neighbourhood disputes are born.

  Yes, I will need to address the issue at some point. But I need to be sensible about it. I need to take the time to think of how I will go about it; what will I say when the opportunity finally presents?

  I spot her peeping at me from the shadowy entrance to her house; blonde hair catching the late afternoon sunlight and glinting back at me.

  Chapter Three

  Sunday mornings are my ‘spoil me’ time. I like to make pancakes and coffee and stay in my pyjamas until I’ve read the morning paper.

  I really need my ‘spoil me’ time today as I didn’t sleep at all well.

  I realize it hasn’t helped that I’ve spent so much time with Sarah and her ghost-child visitor. But it’s also because I’m still stewing about that about little Blondie from across the road.

  The more I think about it, the more it bothers me. So where did she get to when she first came into my yard? How did she manage to escape my notice? And when did she come back again? How long was she actually out there and what on earth was she doing?

  In fact I felt so spooked by all of these thoughts scooting around in my mind that I closed my blinds quite early yesterday. I don’t usually do that; in fact I prefer to keep them open unless I have the lights on. I don’t want to provide the neighbours with a clear view into my house after all.

  But last night it was just too much of a temptation to keep peering out there, wondering if she had come back again. And, even more unnerving was the thought that she could just as well be peering back at me.

  So I closed the blinds and they are still closed. I am determined to stop obsessing about that girl. I’m just going to read my paper, drink my coffee, and then I’ll go to the shops to get the padlocks.

  I see there was a fatal accident not far from here last night. It was the usual story; another selfish individual who doesn’t believe that the drink driving laws should apply to him. And now three small children are without their parents while this man has escaped with barely a scratch.

  I’m interrupted by the unmistakable sound of the latch on the front gate. I peep through a crack in the blinds and the anger rises white hot in me. She’s come back again!

  The chair goes flying backwards, crashing to the floor, and I launch myself at the front door, fumbling with the lock, bursting out into the yard and around the corner of the house.

  This time she hasn’t eluded me. She halts as I round the corner of the house, half turned towards me, eyes wide and apprehensive.

  I slow to a walk, smiling triumphantly.

  ‘You and I need to have a little talk,’ I tell her.

  The smooth leather soles of my house slippers lose traction with the dew- damp surface of the paving stones. For the smallest moment my attention is diverted to keeping my balance.

  When I look up, she is gone.

  The shock seems to drain all the strength from my legs and I sag to my knees. What the heck is going on here? How can some one just disappear like that? It isn’t possible.

  The voice of reason shrieks at me above the clamour of my confusion.

  Get up you silly woman. What will they think if they see you like this; out here on your knees in your pyjamas?

  How will you explain yourself? Can’t you just see the way they will look at you when you start babbling about some child who keeps disappearing into thin air?

  They will have you back in that hospital before you can say ‘Jack Robinson’.

  Chapter Four

  It’s called ‘Grounding myself in reality’ – the process of concentrating hard on the mechanics of what I am doing; like showering and dressing, rather than allowing my mind to gallop off, unfettered, along dangerous paths. This is just one of the many tools in my arsenal of coping, taught to me by my therapist, Dr Jayne Morris.

  I’ve been doing so well too; she has been pleased with my progress. Why is this happening so suddenly?

  It was understandable after Jake; the episodes I suffered and the resulting behaviour I exhibited.

  How does one accept the sudden death of a child, especially when that child is really all one has left in the world?

  Jake’s father, Tom, left me and went back to his wife. I was crushed by the breakdown of our relationship, but I was coping. But Jake was only three years of age; still a baby really. I, and the drunk driver who hit us, were physically unharmed and yet dear little Jake, all strapped into his safety standards compliant car seat, was dead.

  They dragged me away from his graveside, expecting that I would be okay with the idea of leaving him there in that cold, dark hole in the ground. Couldn’t they hear him crying out in fear?

  It took weeks of sedatives and hospital treatment, but eventually I accepted the truth. Jake was really gone. And when I understood that, I wanted to go too. I tried to go too. The Care worker sent to check on me at home each day found me bleeding out in the bath tub

  But it is over two years since Jake died. It is more than twelve months since they released me from psychiatric care. The scars on my wrists have faded although the scars on my heart never will.

  Seeing Jake again, hearing Jake again would mean I was having some kind of relapse. But what is this then?

  'Blind Freddie could see the parallel here,' Tom would have told me. A story about a ghost-child? A naughty little girl who does not understand my intense desire for privacy? And here I am reacting all over the place; believing I am seeing things that can’t possibly be happening. Hell, for all I know maybe Blondie-from-across-the-road doesn’t even exist and I have just gone completely round the twist.

  I take a second pill for the day. I know these things are potent. I understand that taking more than my prescribed dose will leave me feeling foggy and unfocussed. I might even end up needing to take a nap and sleep it off. But, right now, the important thing is to settle myself down; to calm my racing pulse and remove the feeling that I might just suffocate to death because there is no air in the room. And the pills, combined with my relaxation exercises will do that for me

  I shouldn’t drive when I’ve taken extra pills. I know that. So I walk down to town to the hardware store. I buy the padlocks and bring them home. And it’s while I am fixing the second one to the smaller of my two gates that I hear some one hailing me from across the street.

  It’s the woman I’ve assumed to be Blondie’s mother, a short, stocky bottle-blonde with the deeply lined face of a heavy smoker. She is wearing too tight jeans and a too small top which shows off rolls of bare flesh around her midriff as she bounces and jiggles her way across the street tow
ards me.

  ‘Um.. Hi,’ she says, as she reaches me. ‘I’m Brenda? From across the road?’ And she points in the general direction of her house. The voice is harsh and gravelly and I have to force myself not to wrinkle my nose at the smell of her; a combination of body odour and stale cigarette smoke

  ‘You haven’t seen my daughter, have you? Name’s Lily? She’s about this tall’ she shows me how tall with a hand set level with her shoulder ‘Blonde girl? Skinny?’

  So Blondie is real and her name is Lily, and that, at least, is a relief.

  ‘Yes.’ I say her. ‘I have seen her. She’s been coming into my yard actually – hence the new locks on the gates,’ I gesture to the locks pointedly, and I see her expression change. She’s gone from friendly to slightly indignant. But that’s okay. At least she knows how I feel now

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Well I’m sorry if she’s been a bother. I’ll make sure I have a word to her – when I find the little cow that is. You don’t know where she’s gone now, do you? Always wandering off, she is. Ever since she was a little tacker. I’d turn my back for two seconds and – pouf – she’s gone’ She gestures with her hands to show me how quickly the child could escape, although she’s preaching to the choir here. I’ve seen that for myself first hand.

  ‘I have no idea where she went,’ I tell her honestly and Brenda heaves a theatrical sigh.

  ‘Oh well. Better keep looking. If you see her, tell her to get her little butt home and stay there until I get back, okay?’

  Now this Brenda person doesn’t strike me as the overly maternal type. I seem to see her as the sort to be more generous with the slaps than the cuddles. So, with the locks on my gates, and Brenda on the warpath, I find myself feeling so much better.

  I spend the rest of my day with Sarah and her ghost girl, honing in on the clues that will bring a murderer to justice.

  Chapter Five

  I spot Lily at the bus stop next morning. She is wearing the green-and-white check uniform of one of the two local primary schools; her tangle of curls tamed in a pony tail.