Victorian Dreams Pt. 01

She reasoned she could do all the carpentry and prep work then and repaint when the weather had warmed enough in early spring before the rains started.

As she surveyed the exterior of the house preparing notes of what would have to be done to restore it, she worked her way around again to the west side.

This was the first time she had been on this side of the house since the landscape crew had left the property.

The driveway to the house was on the east side and so Haley's coming and going never brought the west side into view. She was surprised to see the shrub growth had returned.

Though not the bramble it had been before, there was no Agarita in the growth, just the native thorn bushes tightly woven in an almost human created symmetry, which was as dense as any briar patch.

It was also only a fraction of the previous height, though. Now it formed tight almost trimmed appearing spiral brambles that only stood a couple of feet above the ground, almost as if it were laid down to cover the ground level windows.

Haley thought this rather strange, but reasoned a native plant ostensibly shade loving might create a tangle such as this to shade its own roots.

She checked it several times over the coming weeks and it seemed not to get any larger, and bloomed in these late days of summer with large white blossoms that appeared to be like dogwood flowers with drips of red sap that resembled blood oozing from the centers.

The other untoward event was more easily explained and didn't really raise any concern in the young woman. She had opened the house up the first week she had stayed there, trying to get rid of the stench that was common to older homes that had been closed up for a long time.

She opened the windows on all three floors and the top half of the Dutch doors that led from the kitchen out to the yard on the back of the house.

The smell was quickly replaced with the fresh scent of summer in the Texas hill country. Late that afternoon when she had rushed to close the windows in advance of an approaching afternoon heat generated thunderstorm, she found nothing amiss on the second floor and quickly closed all the windows. The stench was gone, yet as she climbed the stairs to the third level, she noted the stench was still present and even appeared a little stronger. All the windows she had opened that morning were closed, as well.

She rationalized this as age of the windows and though they should have closed immediately upon opening she figured she would just need some dowel rods from the local hardware store to hold the windows open until she could adjust the tension on them.

Chapter 8

Now today, the sixth Saturday since her purchase of the house, she was ready to start the cleaning and repair of the upper floors.

She had identified a bedroom on the third floor that would be hers. The view from the third story window was spectacular and the furniture almost childlike. She would start there and clean the third floor and work her way down, to the second level.

After her morning tea, Haley gathered her cleaning materials and ascended the stairs to the third level, still dressed in the T-shirt and panties she usually slept in. She went straight to the room she had designated as her own. She was going to place the cleaning items in the room, and then return to the ground floor to dress.

Returning to the room, dressed now in bib overalls she had purchased for her repair and restoration uniform, she first went to the night table beside the large canopy bed, and started removing the layer of dust and dirt that covered the fine piece of antique furniture. When she opened the drawer to clean inside, she discovered what appeared to be a diary.

There was a title page that identified the owners. It said "The Home and Life in Texas of Christian, Chirsty and Clarice Johansson."

Opening it, she read the first few lines and it appeared to be the writings on the daughter of the original owners.

That would explain the childlike appearance to the furnishings in the room. This had been the daughter's room.

The words on the first few pages were captivating and Haley found herself glued to the book. After reading for several minutes, she decided the book gave a good history of the home and deserved her attention.

She took the journal downstairs and prepared herself another cup of tea. Retreating to the verandah, she read the words on the page as if it were a novel with a fetching plot.

The chronicle started immediately before her parents purchased the tract of land and continued to when she hatched a plan to burn the house to the ground. The house wasn't quite as old as she had first thought.

Her parents had bought the land in 1909. They had gotten the land for a bargain price, because it was reported to be the burial grounds of the band of Comanche Indians that had raided Texas in the 1800's under the leadership of the notorious chief Ten Bears.

Local Indians saw the land as sacred and warned of 'great sorrows' to whoever disturbed this piece of land.

Clarice parents, Christian and Chirsty Johansson were of hardy European immigrant stock only one generation in the US, and didn't take much stock in the Indian claims. They had no way of knowing of course, but this would prove to be their undoing.

The diary spoke of her father and mother agreeing on a German Architect to design and build the house.

This was the part that really started to draw Haley's attention with her education in Architecture.

Clarice wrote how the architect had insisted the builder tear down and start the foundation over, three different times, when it wasn't aligned on a perfect northeast to southwest axis he had originally drawn in the plans.

The diary said the architect insisted the foundations west wall be precisely on a six degree to 186-degree radian.

With her education in Architecture, Haley couldn't understand why he had insisted on such precise alignment, unless a fault line in the earth made the alignment necessary to assure foundation stability.

That might explain why the basement was secured.

It was damaged because of a poor alignment of the foundation and that explained why the owner had sealed it up. To hide structural damage to the foundation, and selling the house 'as is' would relieve him of any liability when the damage was revealed.

Haley made a mental note to check the basement later that day.

As she continued to read, the words took on an ominous tone. The architect had insisted on giving the Johansson's a gift by placing gargoyles imported from Europe on the points of the gable, with one facing east the other facing west, but Haley couldn't recall seeing any adornments of that nature on the house.

She left the book lying on the table and went to look again. There were no gargoyles on the gables.

She went to refresh her cup of tea and decided to brew a pitcher of iced tea instead. Once she had prepared her beverage, she returned to the verandah and the diary of Clarice Johansson.

As she read further, she found out why there were no statures of monsters adorning the roof edges.

The pages told of her parents starting to bicker with each other. Soon the bickering escalated to arguments then full-blown verbal fights. This was alarming to Clarice, as her parents had never raised their voices to one another or to her. Her parent's bedroom was on the second floor, and as the arguments escalated in frequency and intensity, Clarice wrote of her father moving out of their communal bedroom and into a separate room of his own.

"Father moved out of the room her shares with mother and across the hall to the guest room."

Her words showed a certain amount of discomfort with the escalating discord in the family.

In her diary, Clarice confided she thought the separate beds wouldn't last long, for it appeared her mother wasn't sleeping well. Bags appeared under her eyes and her cheeks became sunken as if she wasn't sleeping at all. Then her mother started sleeping most of the day, allowing the upkeep of the house and her duties as the lady of the house to fall by the wayside.

Haley found the term 'duties as the Lady of the house' rather archaic and perhaps politically incorrect, but then reminded herself, the times in which the diary was authored were different then modern times, and societies attitudes, at the time, were certainly different.

Though she didn't espouse the times of old, she found the different point of view interesting, though she wasn't ready to adopt the submissive almost second class position of the women of this earlier times. Her's was mere curiosity.

Her father noted the lack of housekeeping and the arguments intensified again. Clarice tried to help the situation by taking on her mother's responsibilities.

When her father became aware it was her effort and not that of her mother's assuming her perceived responsibilities, he thanked her for taking up the slack, but the arguments between her parents continued, unabated.

They were daily now.

These were really starting to alarm Clarice.

"Their upsets are rather persistent now. It worries me to see them go at each other this way." Clarice confided in her journal.

Then one Saturday morning, her father and mother were arguing when Clarice entered the kitchen for breakfast. Her father was placing the blame for his wife's unusual behavior on the gargoyles. He said everything was fine until "those heathen blasphemies went up on the gables'.

"I am going up their now and take those hideous creatures off the roof."

"No you won't Christian. They were a gift to both of us and I won't allow it."

Chirsty Johansson's open defiance of her husband was uncharacteristic for the times they lived in and testament to the growing rift between the two.

Clarice wrote,

"I can't believe mother spoke to Father that way." They argued on the matter most of the morning. Then in a completely uncharacteristic fit of anger her father went to the roof with a sledgehammer."

He knocked the gargoyle off the east gable without difficulty, but when he went to the west side to do the same thing, he lost his balance and fell the thirty or so feet to the ground, tearing the gargoyle from its attachment and falling with it as he fell.

The gargoyle had failed to prevent his fall as he had hoped when he reached for it. When he landed, the horns that adorned the head of the creature had gored him through. He lived a few minutes, which was long enough for Clarice to reach his side.

Clarice had heard the loud thud, and the plaintive groan as he fit the ground outside the kitchen window. She ran to his side, though there was no help that could be provided.

One of the horns had penetrated his chest making breathing difficult and talking almost impossible. He did manage to mumble a few words before he died and Clarice captured these in her journal.

"I was pushed from the roof. Tell them I was pushed. I love you and your mother Clarice."

Blood gurgled in his mouth and throat as he talked and his words were virtually unintelligible. But Clarice understood his words well enough to understand him to say he had been pushed. The blood suddenly gushed forth from his mouth as he sputtered his last breath and died.

When the sheriff's deputy arrived they ruled the death an accident in spite of Clarice assertions regarding what her father had said before he died. The deputy said he would find it difficult to rule it as anything else, considering her and her mother were in the kitchen at the time giving each other air tight alibis and a search of the house revealed no one else was around. The deputy tried to calm Clarice by telling her what her father had perceived as a push was likely just a gust of wind.

The fact her father had worked high steel in New York and had been a tightrope artist in the circus, led them to later amend their report to suicide.

Now the strange things really started to occur. Clarice wrote of things being rather quiet for the first couple of nights, but then she was awakened by noises late one night.

The sky was devoid of moonlight, the new moon about to occur.

Haley set the book down and went to refresh her iced tea. When she came wandering back through the house enroute to the captivating diary on the verandah, she thought of the basement again.

She set her glass on the table next to the diary and returned to the staircase that led to the subterranean door. She descended to where the staircase abruptly meet with the hastily built frame and door.

Haley surveyed the door casement and decided what she would need to remove the covering lumber that precluded the door being opened. The boards didn't form the usual crisscross pattern one normally sees when a window or door is boarded up, but instead ran along the edges of the door where it interfaced with the door frame. The knob side of the door had a 1 X 6 that ran the entire height of the door. The opposite side had a piece that stretched between the hinges. Then two pieces ran along the top and bottom, overlapping the one piece that ran the height on the knob side.

Haley retreated to her small stash of tools in the utility room off the kitchen and obtained a claw hammer and a small crowbar.

Returning to the door, she easily removed the two cross pieces that ran along the top and bottom, and the piece that ran between the hinges, but try as she would, she couldn't remove the longest piece that ran along the knob side of the door. Leaving the tools on the step where she stood, she gave up on the attempt for the moment and returned to the verandah to continue the reading.

Clarice spoke of hearing noises and how she felt a sense of protectionism rise in her now that her father was dead. If he were alive, it would have been his responsibility to investigate and Clarice wouldn't have even reacted to the noises and things that go bump in the night. Instead she would have snuggled down a little deeper in her bed and gone back to sleep, knowing her father would deal with any problem, if there were one.

Now, however, the noise brought her completely out of her slumbers and she arose from the bed.

As she passed through the second floor of the house on her way to the ground floor to investigate, she passed her mother's room and discovered the bed hadn't been slept in. Yet her mother had retired an hour or more before Clarice had.

Clarice wondered at this a moment, but then heard the noise again, and was shaken from her contemplation. She resumed her descent to the first floor of the house.

Giving no consideration to the fact she only had her gown and bloomers on, she headed out the door and onto the verandah. This far out in the country it wasn't likely she would be seen wandering around out doors like this. Besides, with the lack of a moon it was pitch-dark outdoors.

Yet, a proper young lady wouldn't be outdoors dressed this way without a robe under normal circumstances, but the feelings of protectionism that had arisen in Clarice had her giving no thought to her state of dress, and placed these events in the category of not under normal circumstances.

As she stepped off the verandah and into the yard, she heard the noise again. It sounded almost as if someone were in pain. The noise seemed to be coming from the west side of the house, so Clarice turned right to move toward the sound.

As she came up the west side of the house, she noted a light penetrating through the shrubs her father had put in. She recalled his comments when he came home with the smallish plants.

'Agarita, native shrubs that won't require much water in years when there is a drought.' He had told her.

The sounds, clearly a moan, as if someone were in pain, seemed to originate in the shrubs. The fact the sound appeared a female voice in pain alarmed Clarice, because her mother was ostensibly missing.

Clarice squatted down and tried to peer into the darkness under the shrubbery and saw only light as the thickness of the shrubs precluded her even seeing the windows she knew existed beyond their covering. She stood and walked to either end of the row of small plants trying to find a place to get in between them and the building. The little shrubs were so thick though no ingress point was afforded to the girl. She returned to the point near where the light emanated from the plants and squatted again.

This time she crawled forward into the hedge the little shrubs created. She found the point where two of the plants were rooted and the 18-inch space was just wide enough for her to shimmy through. She crawled to the vantage point the windows provided. The sight there shocked the young girl.

Chapter 9

Two women, both appearing young, perhaps in their late teens, were chained to the brick wall of the basement, their attire diaphanous and all but transparent, revealing their womanly charms underneath. The garments were both red in color.

These women were moaning and writhing as if in pain against the chains that held them to the wall. To Clarice, the women almost appeared vapor like and would drift in and out of existence.

On a nearby table, her mother lay, her white cotton gown pulled up around her waist, her legs securely tied to two of the legs on the table. This positioned her hips right at the edge of the table's top and splayed her legs, obscenely. Her mother's white cotton bloomers were in a tattered mass around one of her ankles, exposing her private parts, as Clarice referred to them in her writings. The top of her cotton gown was ripped open to the waist, exposing her mothers heaving breasts.

What was really strange other than her mother in this obscene posture in this room that seemed only designed for torture and punishment, was her mother's arms were up running down her body and rested in mid air a few inches below her waist. Her fingers were clutching and grabbing at air as her hands rose and fell with a discernable rhythm.

Her breasts were squashed flat against her chest, and as Clarice observed, on occasion a nipple would pull away from the flattened mass of breast tissue until it seemed the nipple would be ripped off, then flatten again on the woman's heaving chest.

The moans she had heard that sounded like someone in pain were apparently originating from her mother. Yet there seemed to be nothing that would be causing her mother pain.

The young virgin girl had no way of knowing what she was actually seeing and hearing were lusty moans of pleasure. The cacophony of noise set up by the two chained women and her mother made it all but impossible to hear anything but a hum that resembled the plaintive cries of a person in pain.

Another woman, much older in appearance than the two chained women, wearing black clothing, in the diaphanous type fabric and style of the chained ladies, was standing by the table. Her long raven hair hung about her chest, back and shoulders in shimmering waves any woman would be proud to call her own. She was bathing her mother's face with a cool rag, talking to her mother. Her voice undiscernible, her talking only obvious because of the fact her lips were moving.

As Haley read the account laid out in Clarice journal, the naïveté of the young girl became apparent, for the picture she painted with her words were clearly of a woman in the throes of passion, though the lack of a male counterpart in the scenario the words described, was strange.

The words seemed to indicate Clarice mother was gripping the flesh of her lover's ass as he thrust into her. Of course, Clarice a young virgin in a time of innocence would not have recognized the positioning or the gestures.

Clarice spoke of feeling strong hands grab her by the ankles and haul her out from under the shrubs. She spoke of her realization that her gown was dragged up her body revealing her bloomers and half her naked belly and the immediate embarrassment she felt in such an exposed position.