Willowcreek; Within The Roots

Part Six ─ What Really Happened At The Blue House

Explaining why she'd been hiding under the bed only had her met with an odd stare from her dad and Evie felt like hiding under there again, but with embarrassment this time. He'd fixed the door that thankfully wasn't too damaged and he'd told her not to block it with a chair again. The doors didn't have locks, how else was she supposed to keep the men out of her room? Well, at least Ludo was here.

She wasn't sure how or when they'd managed it, but she didn't have a clue that her uncle had driven all the way home and back to bring the dog to her. It had broken her heart having to leave him behind.

"There's no men in the house, Evie, it's just us after nine," Sean explicitly stated, not giving her room to explain what she'd heard. The distinct voices, the accents, the stark difference between wind howling and a man reprimanding another man, there was absolutely no way that what she'd heard was the wind. Unless the wind in Connecticut came with the ability to have conversations. "It can be scary, I know. The first few nights are hard to adjust to, but you'll get used to the wind," he insisted but she didn't believe him.

Wind didn't talk. Wind didn't try to open doors or mess with doorknobs. It was not the wind!

Telling Charlie had been worse. Evie had been desperate to speak to him, had been trying for days, only for him to laugh when she finally got through to him. He didn't chalk it up to wind, though. He reminded her of the stuff she'd been reading on the drive to the manor house. Stories about ghosts and paranormal sightings. "You heard a couple of ghosts, little sister," he confirmed with a laugh.

He believed that stuff?

Evie wasn't sure where she sat with the whole ghost thing. Maybe they were real, maybe they weren't, but of all the supposedly haunted projects her dad had worked on, she hadn't been told a single story of either him or Eamon ever seeing a ghost.

"I'm not too surprised," he went on as she scratched behind Ludo's ear, "you sort of attracted them all the time when you were a kid," he added, making her stop what she was doing and pay full attention.

"What are you talking about?" Evie had no idea what he meant.

"Guess it's also not a surprise that you don't remember," sighed her brother. She must have been on speaker because she could hear something that sounded like pencil lead scratching against paper. He was probably doing homework. After a beat and no elaboration, Evie cleared her throat to remind him she was waiting and he went on.

According to Charlie, it must have been about ten years since they'd all stayed at a renovation and it was all because of Evie. Well, their mother had made the call but it was because of something that had happened to her that swayed the decision.

As she already knew, a lot of their projects had ghost stories attached, but one in particular happened to have an awful truth behind it.
Charlie set the scene, a coastal house in Maine. When they'd first arrived, the house was in such a mess, he had compared it to the haunted mansion they'd visited the previous halloween. There was something extra creepy about the little swing set in the backyard and the woods right behind the house that had given him chills, especially at night because he insisted that even on nights when it was still, the swings would move by themselves.

"I was about nine then, so you must have been about five? Yeah, that sounds right, you were probably five," he recounted and that triggered something in Evie. It gave her little goosebumps. She remembered being five when... "You would play out in the backyard every day. It was always nice out and Mom was fine with it because she could see you from the kitchen window. But like, one day, you just vanished. Mom freaked, because you'd been on the swings one second, and then the next, you were nowhere to be found."