Willowcreek; Within The Roots

Part Five ─ And So It Begins

Willowcreek at night was like something out of a paranormal movie. Bumps here. Bangs there. Creaks and howls all around. 

Her dad's business thrived on old houses that were falling apart, Evie knew that, but the first night in this particular house made her imagine things that even she knew were ridiculous. Her imagination had always been wild and she could make even the most boring of places interesting. 

That first night, things creaked in the house. Houses like Willowcreek had voices, they made sounds, they creaked and moaned and she told herself to ignore it. She'd get used to it eventually, it wasn't anything different from the traffic in Baltimore. Although, not hearing the familiar sound of the traffic made it a little difficult to get to sleep. The house's noises aside, it was dead silent. The rain and wind just made it eerier. 

But around one or two in the morning, she heard two voices having a heated conversation and she deemed that abnormal; other than herself, it was just her dad and her uncle staying overnight. She'd just turned over and pressed her pillow to her ears to make the voices stop.

When she brought it up at breakfast, Sean brushed it off. "We were up rather late last night," he explained to her, "we're staying on the other end of the wing. Voices travel. You just heard us." 

That made sense. She knew that it was only the three of them living in the house overnight, so it had to be them and if she thought about it hard enough,replayed the muffled argument, it sounded like them, too.

And Evie accepted it for the day. But she heard them again the second night, too. They were amidst another heated conversation, a little clearer, and this time, one of them slammed a door, making her jump in her bed just as she almost dozed off. 

The following morning, Sean explained it away, telling her the wind had just caught on a door. Just the wind made sense, because it had been raining and blowing a gale outside since that first night in the house. Evie accepted it, again, but a little voice inside her head told her it wasn't as simple as that. The voices had been clearer and neither sounded like her dad or her uncle. She spent too long the day following thinking about it, that every little noise made her jump. 

As she started to wind down for her third night in Willowcreek Manor, Evie waited for her dad to say goodnight before she took out her laptop, allowing that familiar indigo hue from the screen to light up the wall behind her. The pale paint job turned a pretty pinkish violet color. Inspiration had hit her that evening and she'd waited long enough to get it down. 

She spent a couple of hours typing, working on yet another story that she'd no doubt stop midway through again. But being out in the middle of nowhere might be what she needed to make sure she finished it. She didn't have friends to distract her, she didn't have clubs she would avoid, and she doubted her dad was going to let her get a job. She'd have all the time in the world to complete it. 

Getting to the end of her main character experiencing her first haunting, Evie started to slump in her seated position. Tiredness weighed heavy on her eyes as she rubbed them. 

Laying down on her side, she scrolled to the top of her document. She was going to read through it before calling it a night. However, she could barely keep her eyes open and she fell asleep with the document casting a pale white glow over her face and the headboard behind her. 

The sound of seagulls and sloshing water filled Evie's head as she ran around the backyard of a small coastal house, barefoot and wild, like she used to do as a child. She was happy, she was giggling, she was...slipping on grass and falling forward. Her chest hit the ground, knocking the wind right out of her. But before she was able to cry, someone scooped her up into the air and she let out a squeal before laughing hard. It was her dad. He was tickling her stomach. The two laughed at her fall, her dad placing down on her feet to check her over, her laughter trickling down to a giggle that echoed in her head. She had a pretty decent sized grass stain on the front of her shirt now, but that was all. "You need to be more careful, Bunny," his voice sounded in her ears. Even though he was right in front of her, he sounded like he was far away, almost tinny. Evie looked up at him, giggling still and grinning widely as her hands rubbed her chest and her head bobbed in a nod.