Victorian Dreams Pt. 02

She thought to see if a third application would destroy the vine completely. When she tossed the third cup of water onto the mass though, she over did it a bit and most of the water landed on the window of the basement wall, instead. It immediately started to smolder as the evil residue on its surface reacted to the water that had been blessed by the priest.

If nothing else, Haley was convinced the water was sufficiently holy. She decided she needed more though.

She went back to the discount store where she had purchased the water, but instead of buying more water, she bought 5 5-gallon water cans. Stopping at a gas station, she filled them with water from the hose provided for radiator and battery top offs. Then went to the church and had the priest again bless the water. He jokingly commented that her house was certainly going to be a holy place when she was finished.

She simply replied, “I hope so.”

Her seriousness took the priest a little by surprise, and he made no further comment on the matter, or attempts at levity.

When she returned home, she tried water from each of the 5 containers on the shrub, and as she had hoped, another application on the decomposing mass caused it to dissipate completely in a matter of minutes. Yet, as the center dissolved to nothingness, the remaining sides seemed to thicken and tighten in their swirl as if steeling themselves to be destroyed in a like manner.

When she was finished the mass had been ‘water-pruned’ back to completely reveal the basement window. Haley wondered if after the water evaporated from the soil and the evil that came in the night returned that night and saw the effect of her handy work, if the vine would be regenerated somehow and her attempts for naught. That night she went through her usual ritual at bedtime, and didn’t receive a visit from the concubines. She hoped her offensive had them off guard and reeling. After all, the best defense is a good offense. She recalled her father trying to teach her chess and telling her if your king is under attack try to take the offensive, to get the opponent to back off. She hoped her offensive in fact had them reeling, and not just looking for an opening for a new assault.

Though she figured from her experiences thus far that was what they were probably doing.

The next morning after she had dressed for work, and the sun was fully up in the Eastern sky, she walked out to look at the west side of the house. The vines hadn’t grown back, but the window was now coated with a soot-like black substance from what Haley could determine from a safe distance. She moved in closer to get a better look, a healthy respect for the vines that remained, compelling her to keep a safe distance, but as she drew closer she noted footprints in the bare soil around the window.

These weren’t footprints made by men though, but more like hooves of an animal. The ‘ogre’ creatures in Clarice diary came to mind, immediately.

She thought to apply some more holy water to see if the sooty substance on the window would rinse off easily, but time was slipping by and she needed to start her commute.

After work, she took the sacks of pewter and gold to another machine shop. When the man at the shop inquired as to why she wanted to grind the hunks of metal to powder, she was prepared.

“I buy scrap metal and use it in crafts and jewelry I make at home to sell at flea markets and the like. I melt the metal, but it seems it is easier to work with if it is in a fine dust rather than these little blobs, which is as fine as I can make it. At times I paint the dust onto an item and just swiping across the face of the item with a butane torch is enough to get it to melt and attach without overheating the item I am trying to attach the flecks to or whatever.” This explanation was enough to convince the man of what Haley was asking for, and her took the canvas bags of scrap and said he would have it ground within a couple of days.

Chapter 50

She drove on home and her plan was starting to come together, so she was starting to feel good about things in general. She tallied what she had to work with in her plan. She would have the metal dust ground from religious paraphernalia. And she had 43 gallons less the few cups she had used, to test efficacy, of the Holy Water. The plus even though she had used some of the Holy Water, was she had cleared the thorny vines from in front of the window of the basement. She thought to ask Clarice if the metal dust had the same efficacy of the crosses and things it was ground from.

She needed to get more sunlight into the chamber. With the tangle of shrubs no longer blocking the rays of the sun, if she could just get the window clean, the room below should be flooded with ‘evil-fatal’ sunlight. Her final plan called for her to be in the chamber for several hours, so she felt the flood of sunlight was necessary to protect her. She had to figure a way to get more sunlight into the room. She would have to work from inside the room to accomplish this she felt, because the evil thorny vines were too much to go up against. They had after all been the agent of Clarice’ demise in her attempts to destroy the evil in the house.

They also appeared to be the only agent of evil that were unaffected by the sun’s light.

Haley felt certain if she tried to clean the window from the outside, the vines would intervene. And she would also need to reenter the room to unlatch the window to allow her to clean the interior surfaces from the outside.

It just seemed logical to Haley, the reality of the vines and the fact the chamber would have to be reentered any way made it the wisest choice to enter the room to clean the window. She had after all entered the room safely once before. Besides, if the vines stood guard during the day and the ogres apparently roamed around on guard at night and had not as yet been revealed to her, it held that some other danger, also not yet revealed, might possibly exist on the exterior of the house. After all the windows on the third floor had closed themselves the first week she had lived in the house.

Had the house not ‘pushed’ Christian Johansson when he tried to remove the gargoyles?

And Clarice had said the house had extinguished itself when her attempts to destroy it with fire had failed. All this to Haley would seem to indicate there were other forces available to the house when the evil beings were in hiding from the sun, during daylight hours. This served to remind her of her thoughts to never relax her guard around the house even in the daytime.

Chapter 51

Haley had come to realize a lot of things in the last several weeks. Things that hadn’t really seemed out of the ordinary, like the windows closing and the landscape workers taking ill, all now seemed clearly linked to the evil in the house.

She called the landscape company and talked with the foreman that had headed the team that had removed the shrubs from her property. Ostensibly her call was to discuss re-landscaping her property, but during their conversation she innocently worked the conversation around to the ill workers. The foreman said it was all very strange.

The doctors and other health care professionals were at a loss to explain the illness and the symptoms the men were suffering, and the cynical foreman had given up on the theory of laziness, when the illness persisted for weeks after they had left her property. The main symptom was fatigue, but there were others like respiratory difficulties, and blood disorders. No amount of treatment had caused a response from the illnesses, of a favorable variety. The doctors and other medical professionals were thinking it was something like legionnaire’s disease or something similar with the respiratory involvement, which had not yet been discovered and documented.

Yet, it must be worse, because this had blood abnormalities associated with it. The Centers for Disease Control had come in to do their own investigation, but they too were at a loss to explain it all.

The CDC getting involved had afforded the itinerant workers the best available medical care at no cost to them, yet there was seemingly no medical cure to the problems they were experiencing.

The cynical foreman had changed his opinions on the matter completely, then a week or so ago, they had all recovered quite miraculously, which served to regenerate his cynical thoughts about the workers.

Haley quickly calculated this timing in her mind and it roughly corresponded to the dates when she had thrown the Holy Water on the thorny vine growth on the West side of the house.

To her, all this corroborated her thoughts on there being other unseen, and as yet unrevealed, evil-induced dangers to the house. No doubt they all stemmed from the evil source, but yet, they didn’t seem to have the limitations as some of the minions did. Yes, the vines were ‘allergic’ to Holy Water, but the sun had no effect on them. In fact it appeared their purpose was to shield the sun from hitting the windows of the basement and retard its penetration into the chamber below and to protect the house in some way.

Haley told the foreman, she would contact him in the spring when her exterior work on the house was complete, to schedule the re-landscaping project. They ended the conversation on that note.

Haley was firmly convinced now she needed to plan a revisit to the chamber, to clean the window. The idea scared her, though not as much as the prospects of attack, the thorny evil vines, portended. At least in the daytime she appeared reasonably safe from the evil in the chamber, though she wasn’t naïve enough, at this point, to discount any fears on the matter or any potential evil possible from her presence in the chamber. She did take a little comfort in knowing she had accomplished going into the chamber by day once before. Further it would give her another chance to ‘case the joint’.

She giggled as the phrase went through her mind again. She sobered and thought to herself how evil begets evil.

Before she started fighting this evil force in the basement, she had led a safe sane crime free existence. Sure she had considered shoplifting candy as most children do, and had even thought to steal a coveted CD on one occasion, but better judgment and good upbringing prevailed and she had refrained from the activity. Now she had stolen the alter vestment, and was thinking in terms of criminal behavior as she thought of ‘casing the joint’ as criminals do before they perpetrate a crime.

Another idea that came to her was to get a cool mist humidifier and fill it with Holy Water and position it at the doorway on the staircase misting Holy Water into the Chamber. Then perhaps any spirit that might somehow appear in the daytime would be walking into a ‘mist of pain’.

Chapter 52

She liked the concept of a ‘mist of pain’. She started to plan the effort for the following Saturday, and figured her follow up effort to finalize the fate of the evil in her basement, would need to occur the following day. She based this on the fact her destruction of the Vines in front of the window had resulted in the window becoming coated in the black soot-like substance. She surmised that was probably because she had tossed the Holy Water on the dirty window, and the soot was the result of the evil residue on the window, which polluted the refractive clarity of the glass, burning when the Holy Water was applied

It might even be that her efforts on Saturday to get more light into the chamber would be rendered moot when she waited until the next day to finish her intended actions. Once the Master and his minions returned on Saturday night and discovered the window had been cleaned, they well could undo her efforts by applying another layer of the soot like coating to the window. This if they were responsible for the coating instead of it being a byproduct of the reaction of the evil substance on the glass with the application of Holy Water. She had seen an exothermic-like reaction when she first threw the water onto the exposed panes. This was similar to what she had seen when she traced the mortar with her finger damp with the Holy Water, and when she had thrown the water on the concubine. But it was the next day before the soot-like coating was evident from the dousing of the window.

So she had to conclude the cleaning of the window was only temporary, in fact it was likely her efforts to clean the window would be rendered moot by the next day. It seemed likely the coating would reoccur once the evil returned after sunset, Saturday night. If that were to occur, she would need to modify her plan to get everything concluded in a single day. All these considerations were going through her mind when she went to bed that night. As she lay down to sleep in her alter vestment muffler and T-shirt and panties, she had said her 23rd Psalm prayer, and refilled the cup at her bedside with Holy Water. In fact, she had filled a pitcher with holy water to refill the cup, should the need to launch multiple attacks during the night.

Chapter 53

It was a cloudless night but the New Moon was approaching, so it was a ripe occasion for her to receive visitors. Yet, none had appeared by midnight and so Haley thought to summon Clarice.

“Clarice are you there?”

Immediately the draft she felt on her left cheek when the spirit of the girl appeared was present and the soft glow of white light illuminated her room.

“Yes, I am here.”

“I have a question, can you answer it for me?”

“Yes, as long as it falls within the boundaries I have explained to you.”

“Ok, I understand.”

“Ask your question.”

“I assume once an item is holy, it remains Holy. By this I mean, if I took a cross or crucifix and melted or ground it down, the Holy properties would remain in the resultant metal, though its shape is no longer that of a holy symbol. Is this assumption correct?”

“Yes, once metal or even plastic, plaster or clay, is shaped into something representative of the Holy Father, it retains that Holiness for all time. Just as the Holy Water remains Holy Water once blessed though it leaves the church where it was blessed. There are limitations though. Just as putting a cup of Holy Water in a lake wouldn’t make the entire body of water Holy, the molecules of Holy water though mixed and diluted in the presence of the thousands of gallons of water in the lake, would retain their Holy enrichment.”

“Thank you, I have my plan complete now, and hopefully, soon this house will be rid of the evil that taints it.”

“Yes, those with me who know of your planning are pleased with the idea you are conceiving, they do however request I warn you again to not underestimate the powers arrayed against you.”

“Thank you, tell them thank you for me. I will be cautious.”

Clarice softly caressed Haley’s cheek again, and dematerialized from the room. Though the timing was right, the concubines and other evil entities that resided in her home didn’t appear, and Haley got a good night’s sleep.

Chapter 54

The next day after work, she went to the machine shop and retrieved her bags of metal dust. The five bags of metal blobs were now only four bags of fine metallic dust particles, but the result was as she had hoped it would be. When the man at the shop commented on the fact some of the metal was fine gold and the rest pewter, Haley was prepared and told him she was aware of that and the first thing she would do was to separate the metals using a method similar to panning where the heavier gold particles would settle to the bottom and the lighter pewter particles would slosh out with the water.

He was rather impressed with her technique, and told her so. She hoped to end the conversation by saying the scrap was cheaper than buying the metal in a purified state, but in the final analysis it probably cost her more in the amount of labor it took to get the metals in a useable form, but she enjoyed the effort and so that was half the reward.

The attempt at terminating the conversation was successful, as the man produced an invoice for the grinding services and Haley paid and left.

She went to the discount store and bought 5 more water containers, filled them and had the priest bless them raising her compliment of Holy Water from 43 to 68 gallons. She also bought a cool mist humidifier at the discount store.

The next day was Saturday and time to put her plan in action. No visitors on Friday night let her get a good night sleep and she awoke refreshed and primed for action. She set up the cool mist humidifier at the doorway on the stairs leading to the chamber, and filled its large reservoir with Holy Water. As she drank her tea waiting for businesses to open, she thought to write a warning note to anyone who might follow her should she fail in her attempts and become a servant to the evil or die, or both. The note was brief. It said the house contained an evil presence and should be destroyed whatever the legal dealings were necessary to allow that to happen. She briefly summarized the deaths of Christian, Chirsty and Clarice Johansson, and added if someone was reading this she must be dead, too.

The facts she outlined should convince the authorities no matter what the value of the house from an historical standpoint, its presence was a danger to all mankind and needed to be wiped from the face of the earth. She told as much as she could with the knowledge she had, and sealed the, larger than expected, note in an envelope that she placed on the mantle above the fireplace in the sitting room. She hoped it would be found by anymore who discovered her body if her attempts of the next couple of days led to her death. As an after thought, she sprinkled Holy Water on the envelope to hopefully prevent the evil forces in the house from removing or reading the contents. By then it was approaching mid-morning, so Haley drove into town to the hardware store and purchased paint pigment, rolling pans, brushes, and rollers. When she returned it was going on noon, and she wanted to execute her prep-plan at 1 again.

She put a T-shirt in a basin, choosing a different color than white this time, along with the alter vestment and started both to soaking in Holy Water.

She turned on the cool mist humidifier and felt a warm and fuzzy safe feeling steel over her as the cool mist began to be atomized from the device. She didn’t like the fact the mist spray was only about 6 inches from the device and didn’t even reach the door, but figured since hot air rises, the cool mist would settle and would soon be tumbling down the stair into the chamber below. She used a small piece of twine to tie the door open by affixing the twine to the doorknob, then swinging the door back on its hinges and tying the other end to the handrail that ran along the wall as part of the stairs descent. This way, the mist had no obstruction to tumbling down the stair, and it was a precaution she had thought of as she was leaving the chamber on one of her earlier visits.

She had no doubts the evil forces could break the twine or untie her efforts and close the door if they wanted, and this just prevented the door from swinging closed of its own weight and gravity and perhaps latching and locking her into the chamber.

Chapter 55

She felt hunger and fixed herself a sandwich, yet the trepidation she felt of returning to the chamber and the possible evil she might encounter there took her appetite, and after preparing the light lunch left it uneaten on the kitchen counter top.

Next she fixed a bucket of sudsy-water to clean the window with. She used sudsy ammonia mixed in Holy Water and a small amount of dish soap to prepare her cleaning fluid. An old rag was dropped in the bucket, then as an after thought she dropped a green scrub pad in the bucket in case a non-evil component such as decades old dirt should prove stubborn in its removal. She felt rather certain any evil-placed coating would dissolve on contact with the Holy Water. As an after thought she prepared a second bucket of the mixture without mixing it with Holy Water, in case the soot-like residue appeared and she needed a non-holy mixture to clean it with. She went to her room and wrung out the alter vestment and T-shirt.