March 20, 2024

Scattered Hauntings
by Simina Lungu

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Found in a journal left behind in an old basement. We could not determine who it belonged to, when it was written, or if the stories were indeed nothing but fiction.
 
                                                                           1.
 
No one had entered the village church for fifty years. But the organ kept playing every winter night.
 
I heard it too, when I was there. I was sure it was only one of those legends meant to give tourists a bit of a scare. In fact, I actually wanted to go inside the church myself to prove there was nothing there. I couldn’t, of course. The church had been boarded up after a fire. It was not safe.
 
“How convenient,” I could not help thinking.
 
One night, I snuck into the churchyard. I could not get inside the building, but I could look through the windows. If there was someone sneaking in to play the organ, I would find them and expose them.
 
The thing crawled from a hole in the ground. It walked on two legs, like a human being, but its skin was grey, and its face had a long snout. Its hands were long and ended in sharp claws. But it could play the organ. I stood and stared, unable to move, as that hellish thing started playing and others of its kind appeared in the yard and danced on the freshly fallen snow.
 
I woke up in my room, although I don’t know how I got there. They told me it was not true, what I had seen. They told me I had been found unconscious in front of the church and I must have been attacked by robbers. But I knew they were lying. And I knew the thing playing the organ had been real.
 
I know it is real because, after it finished playing and its dancing kin had retreated back underground, the thing from the church had looked right at me. And I still see its smirk every time I close my eyes.
 
I haven’t been able to sleep since then.
 
                                                                           2.
 
When I was a child, there was this old house at the end of our lane. No one dared to enter it.
 
The yard was teeming with weeds and other overgrown plants. When you got close, the muddy smell of untamed marshland overwhelmed you. There was always a wind blowing, moving the plants this way and that, causing them to be locked in an eternal dance. If you sat by the gate and listened carefully, you could hear a distant whistle, not that of a bird, but definitely not human either. It came from inside the house, drifting out the broken windows and over the untamed garden.
 
The house was not deserted. There was a young woman living there, together with her son. The boy did not play with us, nor did we see him too often outside his yard. We would sometimes spot his mother leaving the house in the evening, but none of us knew where she went. 
 
I heard a lot of people say they were ghosts. I knew they were not, though. One night I saw the both of them crawling up the street, or, at least, their faces were the same. Their bodies were half-bird, half-lizard. They made the same whistling sound that you could hear coming from their house on hot afternoons.
 
As I’ve said, I knew they weren’t ghosts. Because I knew they weren’t human.

 
                                                                           3.
 
Isabelle’s husband went into the woods one night and never came back. That was twenty years ago.
 
Back then, Isabelle had been twenty and married only for six months. The Isabelle I met had lost her glow, the years of anxious waiting putting wrinkles on her face and dyeing her hair almost completely grey. She was hard as steel in most things, but she would never go anywhere near the woods where her husband had vanished.
 
“What do you think happened to him?” I asked her one evening.
 
“I don’t need to think,” Isabelle told me. “I know. I saw him, ten years ago.”
 
“He is alive then?” I asked surprised.
 
Her eyes glittered.
 
“You could say that. But he is a tree now.”
 
She told me that night that, ten years after her husband went missing, she ventured into the wood. She walked for a long time, following the path her husband must have followed. And then suddenly she saw it: a proud walnut tree, no more than ten years old. Its branches started swaying this way and that when she approached it, although there was no wind.
 
“There is a forest demon hiding in the shadow,” she added. “It lures people and it turns them into trees. They’re alive. They’ll stay alive for as long as the tree does. A tree’s life is long. I know my husband will outlive me.”
 
Since then, every time I pass a tree, I wonder if it really is a tree. Or maybe it had once been something else, and now is forced to watch the world go by and change, waiting for some storm to fell it.
 
                                                                            4.
 
One night, I woke up to the sound of scratching on my window.
 
I lived on the fourth floor. There were no trees around my building. Nothing could have climbed up the window to scratch it. 
 
At first, I did not dare to open my eyes. I did not want to see what was waiting for me on the other side of the window, what had come for me, to take me into some underworld of shadows and flames. 
 
But then, I decided to be defiant. Or maybe I was just feeling too much terror to be reasonable. We feel more fear of the unknown than of what we can see in front of our eyes. I had to look, I told myself. Because nothing that was out there could be worse than what my imagination was conjuring up for me.
 
So I opened my eyes, and I saw the thing that had come for me. It was my own ghost, come from the future. It gestured to me to open the window.
 
“Come to me,” it said. “I will tell you how you die.”
 
                                                                           5
 
I was travelling alone one night, and my car broke down near a swamp. That was when I saw the lights.
 
They were flickering in the distance, friendly and enticing, like a story that ends with a warm fire and a door to shut away the night. I thought they were shining only for me, calling for me and urging me to join them somewhere safe, away from the cold.
 
I took a step forward. Then I felt a hand on my arm restraining me.
 
“Do not go there,” a voice told me.
 
I turned around but there was no one there, and when I turned back to the swamp the lights were gone. Eventually I found someone to help me with my car and drove off. I did not think too much about the lights and the voice, deciding that I must have been half asleep and imagined both.
 
Several days later I was told about a creature living in that swamp, how it lured travellers and drowned them beneath the muddy waters, how so many people had disappeared on that stretch of road, never to return. And I knew I could have been one of them, but something had stopped me. Something had prevented me from going.
 
I would often wonder what the thing that stopped me was and why it had rescued me. Was it to save my life – or was it to spare me for something much more terrible?
 
                                                                           ***
 
It seems that whoever wrote this journal began a final story. However, the last pages are torn, so I only have the beginning:
 
“They say there is something in their basement. I heard it too. The quick patter of feet and the whisper of soft laughter. One day, I will go down the steps and look inside. They tell me it is too dangerous, but it is much better to find out what the thing is and keep it there, instead of waiting for it to get out.”


​                                                                           💀💀💀
 

Simina Lungu is a speculative fiction writer currently residing in Timisoara, Romania. She has several short stories published in places such as Night Picnic, CommuterLit, or Dark Fire Fiction. Her writings explore primordial fears as well as the need for human connections. Those who wish to know more about her can check out her website: https://corasimina.wixsite.com/siminalungu-writer or come hang out on her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/simina.lungu.writer

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