Hartwood House

By Sharz Weeks

Hartwood House follows the story of Henri Beaumont who, through a series of dreams and visions of a man's death, realizes he has psychic powers. As his powers, and his obsession of solving the mystery surrounding the man's death, progress, he starts to realize that this gift may actually be a curse threatening to tear him apart from the inside o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Self-Published
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9798218394943

Book preview

One

Blue and red lights flashed through night’s still darkness. They assaulted the once peaceful habitat as a man in a uniform blocked the area with a yellow tape. The body of a large, black panther lay near the center of the enclosure, almost as still as the air in the pen, only a trace of life left in its slow, rhythmic breathing.

A nearby radio sprung to life, slicing through the silence. Nearly incoherent to everyone except the officer, who was accustomed to interpreting the codes and phrases that sounded muffled to the untrained ear. He digested the reports from dispatch as he paced the perimeter. Technicians scoured every inch of the scene, stifling the yawns that seemed to domino from one technician to the next. The officer looked mournfully at the lifeless body of a person at his feet. Gray sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt, torn to ribbons. Face shredded to a point where the person was completely unrecognizable. A medical bracelet around his wrist. An untied sneaker lying nearby.

Shame, the officer said as a sleepy detective approached holding a gas station coffee cup.

Mmhmm.

The zookeeper, also half asleep and clutching a to-go coffee mug like it was her only life preserver, stood nearby as the resident veterinarian checked the unconscious creature’s vitals. A monkey screamed somewhere nearby. The commotion of the police activity so late at night started to stir the rest of the zoo back to life. The nearby cages were alive with activity, both human and animal.

The detective sighed and squatted down next to the destroyed body, eying the bloodstained bracelet on the wrist. He had been briefed before arriving, but he was still half-asleep as he rocketed down the freeway listening to dispatch’s descriptions of the situation: no identification, cell phone, no personal items were on his body. Clearly the cops didn’t notice the wristband that said exactly who this was, whose life was ended so abruptly. So traumatically.

He’d have to notify the family. It was the worst part of his job, especially when it came to violent deaths. He would do it in the morning, before they could get too far into their day. But for now, he’d seen all he needed. He wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep tonight.

*     *     *     *

Henri jolted awake, sitting upright, gasping for breath, looking around his dark bedroom. He listened carefully, but the sound of his heartbeat hammered in his ears. He had been screaming in his dream just before he awoke. His voice felt hoarse, as if he had been screaming in real life, but he couldn’t be sure. He was in that weird state of confusion that often comes with delirium and drowsiness after being awakened suddenly, but it felt different, dream induced. Lingering. If he had been screaming, he was sure his parents, whose bedroom was down the hall, would have heard and would have come to see what was wrong. At least, that’s what he hoped. There was no telling what they would actually do. It was possible they too were so deep in their own sleep that they didn’t hear. Or maybe they were sitting awake in bed, half asleep and still dreamy, wondering if the screams they heard were part of their dreams.

It was a strange feeling: the uncertainty of the audibility of his cries for help. His heart raced and he held his breath, listening to the silence press in around his ears. He felt like he could hear the residual reverberations of his scream on the walls, which he was now almost sure hadn’t just been confined to his dream. But then again, the barely audible snores coming from his father down the hall indicated that he was still asleep, which made Henri second guess himself again.

He peeled the sheets off his skin and slid his legs out of his bed. The sheets were drenched in the same cold sweat that covered his entire body. Though he was soaked, the layer of moisture covering his skin did not cool him, not even with the help of the draft of air that was slowly pushing the curtains away from the slightly open window.

And then there was the dream itself. The cause of his screaming. It felt so real, but what was it about again? Something dark moving through the night. An attack. Terror. Searing pain. That’s what he could remember. But what else? Why was it so realistic? And why couldn’t he remember more? The details were slipping from him into the darkness, like attempting to hold sand with open hands.

He crossed the room to his window and threw the curtains open. He slid his fingers into the two-inch crack between the window and the sill and thrust the window up, letting the cool autumn night air hit his exposed, drenched torso. The full moon slid behind a cloud, sending the street below in an almost absolute darkness. The streetlights were out, something the city did in this neighborhood after midnight at the request of the neighborhood association to save on energy costs. It was a practice many more neighborhoods adopted after the startling success of this seemingly dangerous measure. That meant there was not much to look at, but it appeared that his screams, if they were real, didn’t make it to the street below, to one of the other partially open windows in the houses around the neighborhood.

He definitively decided that he had in fact been screaming in his sleep, on account of his incredibly dry and sore throat. He needed water. He had the option of using the sink in his ensuite bathroom. There was even a cup on the counter for this very purpose, yet he hated the taste of the water from the taps in his house. It was a common complaint throughout this sector of the city. His other option was to go downstairs and use the filter that was attached to the tap in the sink. So, he opened the door to his bedroom and peered out into the even darker hallway.

His parents’ room down the hall remained dark and undisturbed. Only the distinct sounds of his father’s snoring that his mother had learned long ago to live with emanated from the bedroom, confirming that they were still asleep. Henri crept down the hall to the stairs and began the descent into the foyer below.

He knew the third step from the bottom landing creaked underneath pressure. Up until a few years ago, he had been able to avoid putting enough pressure on the stair to sneak down effectively without worry. Now, though, he was forced to skip the step. It wasn’t that he was overweight. He was average for his age. It had just become hard for a growing teenager to not put that much weight on a creaky step. Now that he was twenty, it certainly wasn’t getting any easier. But when he needed to, he always remembered to skip it.

So, he skipped the step altogether and crossed the foyer into the living room. There, he expertly maneuvered around the large leather couches and armchairs, in between the piano and recliner and into the kitchen beyond. It wasn’t that the living room was crowded. In fact, there was plenty of room, and navigation of this room during normal waking hours was beyond subconsciousness. It was much more difficult to avoid knocking over one of his mother’s priceless artifacts or damaging his father’s antique furniture that was worth more than your life in the dark. The fact that the full moon was now completely obscured by the clouds didn’t help.

He opened a cabinet and fetched a clear glass from the top shelf. He lifted the lever on the tap, turned the filter so the water would run through it, and filled the glass. As he took a deep gulp, the clouds shifted, allowing the moonlight to blast through the open window and onto Henri. Just as the light hit him, he emptied the glass, arching his back. Pain seared over the middle of his back, and he choked on the water. Sputtering the liquid down his front, he set his glass down and steadied himself, waiting for the pain to dissipate.

It seared, then ached, then slowly faded. And it baffled him. It wasn’t a muscular or joint sort of pain. It felt like he had been scratched and the stretching of the skin made the wounds open again. He reached around and touched his lower back with his hand. He tried to reach higher until he finally got to where the pain was. He felt the rough skin and a liquid he had a sinking suspicion wasn’t sweat. He brought his hand back around and examined his fingers. The moonlight reflected off the red covering his fingertips. He abandoned his empty glass and the puddle of water on the floor and rushed to the downstairs bathroom next to the living room.

He flicked the light on and was nearly blinded. If he hadn’t been fully awake before this, he definitely was now. He opened his right eye just a bit, squinting so he could let the light come in slowly and allow his eye to adjust. Then, he opened the other eye and did the same. He looked at his reflection in the mirror and gasped.

He was ghostly pale. His dark brown hair clashed with the grayish tint of his skin. His blue eyes seemed brighter, almost sky blue, against the colorless canvas of his face. Even his lips, which were a bit larger than a normal person’s and usually had a decent amount of color in them, were pale. He turned around and tried to get a glimpse of his back in the mirror. And there, he saw three long marks. Claw marks.

He turned around and stared at his reflection again. He was leaning on the sink, trying to figure out what would have caused the marks on his back. He didn’t think he had anything in his bedroom that was that sharp…maybe he cut himself on the corner of his nightstand? That was unlikely since he didn’t think his nightstand really even had corners. He was pretty sure they were round. He honestly never spent much time looking at the nightstand, or any piece of the old bedroom set for that matter.

He looked around for something to dab at the cuts to soak up the blood that had begun dripping down the small of his back. His only option in the scarcely stocked bathroom was a pair of towels: one white, and the other blue. He knew his blood would stain either towel, so he grabbed the white one. He would be able to bleach it and hopefully get the stain out without his mother noticing. He acted quickly, because he could feel the blood trickling dangerously close to the waistband of his shorts. He didn’t want it to drip onto the white shag rug that stupidly covered a large portion of the bathroom.

Musing over the fact that it was absolutely moronic to have white carpet in a bathroom, or anywhere for that matter, Henri wiped his back with the towel. He cleaned up the blood that was dripping but couldn’t reach the middle of his back where the scratches were. So, he wrapped the towel around him and leaned up against the wall.

After a minute or so, he felt as though he had gotten most of the blood off and the wounds seemed to be sealing once again. He inspected the towel to see what the damage was. In the middle was a splotch of dark red stained into the pure white Henri’s mother valued so deeply. He decided it would be too conspicuous to put the towel in the washing machine right away, so he balled it up and threw it into the sink. He stopped the drain and filled it with cold water. He poured some hydrogen peroxide on the bloodstain as the water began to soak into the towel. The stain started to dissipate, but he knew a heavy dose of bleach in the washing machine was going to be necessary to restore it to the immaculate piece of ridiculousness his mother cherished. If it could be restored at all.

As the towel soaked, he fetched the first aid kit that lived in the medicine cabinet above the sink. The cabinet itself was rather scarce, containing only extra bottles of liquid hand soap and some basic first aid supplies – the peroxide, Band-Aids, gauze, some antibiotic ointment, and an ankle wrap. Normal people would have extra things, like spare toothpaste and toothbrushes for guests, rubbing alcohol, and a small variety of medicines for guests like aspirin and stomach-soothing liquid. But Henri’s parents weren’t normal people. They were sure that if they kept any of that extra stuff in the guest bathroom, it would go missing. They often said that they didn’t trust the maid yet couldn’t produce concrete reasons when pressed.

He began treating his wound the best he could. He couldn’t reach the entirety of the scratch, so he applied hydrogen peroxide and antibiotic cream to as much of it as he could reach, then put some gauze over it and wrapped bandages around his torso to keep the gauze over his wounds. He had taken several first aid classes throughout his teens, and they were finally paying off.

When he was done, he turned his attention to the puddle of pink liquid in the sink. The stain had dissipated, but it was not completely gone. He drained the sink and rinsed the towel before wringing it out to get it as dry as possible. He didn’t need a trail of pink drops following him to his bedroom. It was still very wet, but he decided to take it with him. He didn’t want his parents finding it before he could get it to the washing machine in the morning. So, he spent a few minutes attempting to dry it more before leaving the bathroom as clean and tidy as possible.

It was a good idea for him to take the towel, he thought as he walked up the stairs, carefully skipping the creaky step. He would likely need it to prevent any further bloodstains to his sheets. In fact, he thought as he carefully opened the door to his bedroom, his bed was probably covered in blood as it was. He had cut his back at some point during the night and the wound had partially healed. There was no way there wasn’t blood in his bed.

Sure enough, Henri saw as he pulled his comforter away from the sheets, there was a sizable patch of brownish red staining the beige Egyptian cotton fitted sheet. He pulled the sheet off of his memory foam mattress and found that the blood had seeped through and had saturated the mattress cover. He unzipped the cover and inspected the foam. Bloody. Stained, just as he feared. He sighed and paced around his room. He didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t an overwhelming amount of blood, but it was enough to make him not want to sleep in the bed anymore.

Resolving to have a thorough, private conversation the next morning with the maid when she came to the house, Henri pulled a shirt over his head, carefully placing it over his bandages, and stripped his bed of every bloodstained sheet there was. He was hoping the maid would be able to get the blood out of the mattress. If not, he’d just have to ask his parents for a new one. In the meantime, he placed the damp towel on the now mostly dried bloodstain and curled up on the side of the bed that had not been tainted.

But what could have caused those marks while he was asleep? Had someone been in his house, in his room? Had he been attacked while he was asleep? Did he sleepwalk? The questions kept inundating his mind.

Two

Alisa, the maid at number 25 Wesley Place, arrived at precisely six-thirty in the morning. She was never late. In fact, she strove to arrive early, but on this day, she had gotten held up. Alisa watched the news every day; while she got ready for work and after she got home. Or, at least, she turned the television on and had the news playing in the background while she rushed around ironing her uniform or brushing her teeth or her graying, black hair. On this particular morning, however, she had stopped in the living room with her toothbrush hanging from her mouth, staring at the television after seeing the headline under the newscaster.

Local man found dead - mauled by panther.

This was not the sort of thing that anyone would expect to happen in this town. Though it was a moderately-sized town, this sort of thing never happened. Tragedies were confined to the larger city two hours south of their little town of Fairhaven, and this one was as strange as she’d ever seen. Yet here she was, watching a news story detailing how a young man, barely in his early twenties, had escaped a local mental hospital and had gone into a panther’s cage late the previous night where he was then mauled to death. The newscasters showed the scene, then a close-up of the wound. Three long slices into the flesh left muscle and bone exposed. The man’s face had been completely torn apart to the point where identification was completely out of the question. It was a good thing he was wearing a hospital bracelet with his name on it.

Alisa had tutted after the story ended as she went back to preparing herself for her workday. She had a little sympathy, and in her mind, chastised the local mental hospital. Didn’t they have security up at that place? She remembered seeing it up on the hill and knew for a fact that there was a fence around the facility. How careless of them, not having security in place to keep a mental patient in the safety of those walls.

Though, something had made her pause. They hadn’t released the name, but Alisa felt like she knew the person who had been attacked. It seemed to her that he was some distant acquaintance, maybe a kid of a friend or one of her kids’ friends. But she couldn’t quite place her finger on it.

It was this troubling sense of foreboding that caused her to arrive at the Beaumont residence at exactly six-thirty. She had a house key, so she let herself in through the rear entrance, disabled the alarm, and slipped into the maid’s room, which was at the back of the house, right next to the kitchen and the stairs to the basement where the laundry station was. When this old house was originally built in the mid-nineteenth century, this room was reserved for the maid and butler. This is where they would live. Now, though this well-known and long-established family had hired Alisa as a maid, there were laws that protected her from being taken advantage of like those who had come before her. Many people felt those laws weren’t good enough. She was one of them, but mostly as a general principle.

But she thought as she started to fill up a mop bucket with soapy water, she actually liked working for this family. They paid much more than other families in this exceedingly wealthy neighborhood. As a result, this was the only job Alisa needed to support her modest lifestyle. She was a widow, and her kids were all adults and had moved away. She was on her own, but deep down, she was an introvert. She kept to herself and being a maid for the Beaumont family allowed her to do her work in peace and make a decent salary of it as well.

In fact, this family was much better than some of the others. Oftentimes, the agency the maids worked for would hold staff appreciation luncheons where the maids would congregate and berate their employers in a safe, comforting environment. They complained of everything, yet the only thing Alisa had to complain about was that the family she worked for didn’t even attempt to think about doing a chore that was a ‘maid’s duty.’ It never crossed their mind, but Alisa just supposed that was why she was getting paid. Other than that, the husband and wife were relatively kind to her on the rare occasions they interacted with her, though they regularly made no attempt to see her for the person she was. She was staff. They left her alone. And she was okay with that.

And then there was their son. He was quite the opposite of his parents. He insisted on cleaning up after himself, for one, and even offered to help with the dishes a few times after lunch. Alisa had graciously declined the help, though she would have liked it. She often thought that if she had worked for a different family, she might take the kid up on his offer. But her job was so easy and laidback, she didn’t even need to consider his help. In all honesty, the Beaumonts weren’t around often. Their work kept them busy.

He’s such a sweet boy, she thought as she wrung out a rag and walked it upstairs from the basement with a small bucket of water. Well, actually, she amended in her head as she began cleaning the surfaces in the kitchen, he wasn’t really a boy anymore. He was around twenty with several years of college under his belt already. But what was his name? She had only ever heard it once or twice. His parents rarely ever spoke to him, or about him, let alone said his name. In fact, she noted as she scrubbed particularly hard on a burnt piece of something on the glass-top stovetop left over from last night’s dinner, the boy’s parents didn’t use his name even when addressing him. But what was it? Harry? Howard? Harvey? Something with an H.

Good morning, Alisa, said a voice from behind her. Someone was moving through the kitchen to the refrigerator. Alisa’s head shot up. Had she been suspiciously paused over this piece of burnt food on the stovetop? She relaxed, however, when she saw it was the boy.

Good morning, she replied. Though she hadn’t lived in New Mexico for many years, her particular dialect reminiscent of the northern part of the state was still saturated with the defining characteristics left over from her previous life. How are you today?

Great, said Henri. Listen, I have a favor to ask you. Alisa leaned in closer as Henri’s voice dropped. I had kind of an accident last night. I cut my back. Not sure how, but I sorta got blood all over my bed. Is there anything you can do about it?

Did it get into your mattress? Alisa whispered.

Yeah, quite a bit.

The sheets won’t be a problem. I’ll treat the stains and throw them in the wash. I’ll see what I can do about the mattress.

You’re the best, Henri smiled. I’ll give you some extra money or whatever as compensation.

Oh, you don’t have to do that. It’s my job. Some days are more…soiled than others. It all balances out in the end. For most families, that is.

She and Henri shared a chuckle. They had always been on the same wavelength since she had started cleaning their house ten years ago, even though she had trouble remembering his name (something she was sure never to give away, especially to Henri). They seemed to understand one another on a subconscious level.

Henri excused himself from the kitchen. He walked upstairs to finish getting ready for the day. He worked at a used bookstore downtown. He didn’t really have a uniform, but he liked to look nice. It was part of his upbringing. He was always to look presentable anywhere he would go. You never know into whom you’ll run his mother used to always say. At this point, it was habit, and he was just starting to explore sartorial defiance.

It was Friday. He didn’t have classes on Friday, so he usually opened the bookstore at eight and worked until one. He liked to get to work early. It was a sign of his dedication and, again, his upbringing. You should always arrive early to any engagement that has a set time, his mother would say. If you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. He was sure he’d heard this phrase somewhere else. His mother was not the most creative person, so she surely wouldn’t have invented it on her own. In fact, she had a knack of taking credit for other peoples’ work but wouldn’t let anyone know. Her career, reputation, and wealth relied on it. Henri suspected that was one of the reasons she was so successful as a self-help author. She knew exactly what people wanted to hear, whether or not it was original or even true.

He put on a pair of khakis and a button-down top with white and blue vertical stripes. He rolled up the sleeves to give it a more casual look, but he still tucked it in. He smoothed out his hair, trying to get it under control. He had forgotten to comb it out after his shower that morning, so it had dried in a weird mess of slight curls and knots.

Henri looked at his watch. It was now nearly seven. He usually left just after seven, so he still had some time. With one last look at his bloodstained bed, he shook his head and left his room, closing the door behind him.

He pulled his Jeep Grand Cherokee out of the