Forgotten Valentine, Michael Whitehouse [reading women TXT] 📗

of shock. Then it moved again. Suddenly the door began to shake violently as if being punched and kicked by the body lying behind it. The head turned upwards as the cracking of rigamortis from the neck struggled against each sharp and vicious movement. A putrid gurgling sound gasped out, enraged from deep within its bloated throat.

I closed my eyes. I was sure it was not real. The banging stopped, and the house fell once again into silence.

I let out a sigh of relief and opened my eyes. What I saw I can barely describe now. The face had moved upwards from behind the door to be level with mine. The door shook and rattled under the strain as its venomous attacker tried to claw and batter its way through. Finally, the face pushed and squeezed through the gap in the door, revealing its repulsively loathsome features in their entirety.

Dead, swollen with clotted blood, gasping relentlessly for air, all the time staring straight at me through hate filled eyes with lips pulled back over teeth gritted together, grinding against one another in wretched hatred.

I do not remember much of what took place after that, perhaps I am glad to. I know I escaped, and I know that I ran home confused, crying, and babbling like a madman. I also know one more thing, while the memory has been pushed so deep inside that I can barely recognise it, I know whatever was in that room slipped through the gap in that doorway; slipped through and grabbed me. How I escaped I do not know.

The truth was more horrifying than I could have imagined. Lisa's father had lost his job a couple of weeks earlier and as bills mounted combined with the pressures of looking after his only child, he snapped. When the police entered the house they found poor, sweet Lisa's body in the cellar. Her wrists were tied to a radiator. She had been strangled to death. After killing his daughter, Lisa's father had then went upstairs and hanged himself in her room. After a few days of hanging there, the cord he used to choke the life from himself seemed to have snapped. The police found his body slumped behind the bedroom door. The door was open.

As time eroded the memory, the explanation of these events altered greatly. Through my years of study at school and then University, I read of psychological pressures and how trauma could bring about vivid hallucinations. I had convinced myself that I had found Lisa's father dead and that the shock had produced the rest of the experience. No matter how real it felt, the idea that a corpse twisted by rage and hate, perhaps even by the love I felt for his daughter, could somehow come back to life and attack the living, just did not fit in with my scientific and atheistic understanding of the world.

I dismissed the entire experience, but one thing had still managed to haunt me until I managed to hide it from myself. The police reported that Lisa had been tied up for a couple of days before she was killed.

The date of her death was recorded as the 15th of February.

She had been in that cellar, tied up, frightened yet alive when I had come by to give her her Valentine's gift. People talk about hauntings and spirits, but the memory of that contorted face rising up through the doorway was nothing compared to the knowledge that had I went into her house that day, that maybe, just maybe I could have saved her. Yes I was a child, but I could have done something!

I grew up, but I never felt that love again, that feeling of connection with another human being. I developed an unhealthy attachment to my own company and found myself more interested in burying my head in textbooks than perhaps meeting others, or even falling in love. The friends that I did have were never that close to me, nor did they ever truly understand who I was.

Seeing Lisa's grave had brought it all flooding back to me. Those stolen moments, that thing in the house, her death. The funny thing is that of all those memories, both traumatic and precious, the one thought which would not leave me was of the Valentine's gift I never gave. While I still hoped that the dead thing in Lisa's house was of my own imagination and that the world was still very much material, lacking in the spiritual, I still felt the need to rectify this.

I had kept the card all those years, in many ways it was both my most cherished and loathed possession. Cherished for the memories which it drew up from within me, and loathed for the same reason. On the morning of the 14th I walked through the cobbled streets of Edinburgh towards Lisa's resting place, on the way I stopped at a little newsagents and picked up a box of chocolates.

On my first visit I had wandered there by accident, vaguely negotiating each street in a daze, but this time I was focussed and resolute. Sentiment is a curious thing and it had encouraged me to keep, not only the card, but also the ribbon I made for the chocolates. When I entered the graveyard I gazed up towards that lonely hill where she lay. I felt hesitant. Not because I did not want to leave the gifts by her graveside, but more so because I did not know the extent to which the feelings of remorse, sadness, and bitter nostalgia would overcome me again. Nevertheless, I took a moment and then made my way up over the whitened path, up towards the hill, up towards her.

There I stood. The sun was still relatively low in the sky and it cast long, contorted and exaggerated shadows over everything. After standing there for what seemed like an age, I pulled out the ribbon, tied it carefully around the box and then placed the chocolates and the card against the cold headstone.

I don't know if I said anything. At the time I probably didn't as I was still convinced that she wasn't there to hear me; that once your loved ones pass away, they are gone forever; that death is the end. I do know that I cried. I cried like I hadn't since I was a child. I fell to my knees and buried my head in my hands. I was inconsolable.

Those moments of utter sadness, utter despair at the cruelness of life and what it had done to beautiful Lisa were the last I had as a true sceptic, for as I knelt there the wind blew gently through the graveyard; gently caressing those stone markers of loss and those who attended them.

I had heard and read about people having a religious or spiritual experience, and while I cannot truly accept others' testimonies, I can say that what I felt at that moment was profound; an achingly beautiful feeling of companionship and love. I looked around. No one was there, but I felt that someone was. I tried to shake the feeling off as my mind simply playing tricks on me, but no matter how much I tried to stick to that interpretation of events, I simply could not do it. That feeling shared a twin emotion. I had only once ever felt that way before; when Lisa hugged me the last time I saw her. As the sensation washed over me, I realised that I had truly been searching for that same feeling again, but never found it until that moment.

I stood up, wiped my eyes and touched the gravestone as if to say goodbye. I walked to the graveyard entrance with a smile which stretched from ear to ear, something anyone who knows me will tell you is extremely unusual. When I reached the gate I glanced once more at that hill, which for me was no longer a site of loneliness, but one of love and friendship.

The second and last time I can say I have ever seen a ghost was at that moment, for standing up on the hill beside Lisa's grave was the blurry image of a young girl in a pink social dancing dress. I did not run to the grave, because I knew I did not have to. She waved slowly at me and then disappeared behind her gravestone.

I walked home. I felt full, joyful, and exuberant. It is almost impossible to describe that experience by the graveside, perhaps completeness will do for now, but even that cannot convey it.

Friends wonder what happened to me around that time. The truth is that I found something I did not know was missing. Some reading this may think that I found my faith, but it was not that at all. What I found that day was companionship and acceptance from the only person I had ever truly loved. I knew from that day onwards that the world was a far more mysterious and wonderful place than I could ever have possibly imagined. I knew that I would never fear being alone, for when I go wandering through the streets of Edinburgh and find myself on a quiet stretch of road, I smile to myself knowing that if I listen carefully I can hear the footsteps of Lisa, that girl I loved so dearly when I was a child, walking with me wherever I go.

The End
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Text: Michael Whitehouse
Publication Date: 04-25-2013

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