The Squatter by Jonathan Dunne

Author:Jonathan Dunne [Dunne, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-30T07:00:00+00:00

Around 6pm that Tuesday evening, as the first of the moths began to flutter around the cracked porch light, an overpowering sense of happiness filled Molly Greene. She wasn’t sure why, but she was beginning to understand a pattern. Thinking back through the few evenings she’d been here, this warm sense of being at one with herself consumed her, almost like a catharsis, and always around 6 in the evening.

Cora and Mina were busy doing their homework upstairs while Emma was handing out paperwork to her imaginary classmates sitting in the playroom. My, how she loved school, which was a blessing for Molly. She naturally took to it which was one headache less.

Molly noticed she was running low on food. Her ex-chef had taught her how to use spices in her cuisine. She’d come to love those from the Mediterranean and she was out of thyme and had zero oregano. She turned to the chalkboard to add spices to the growing shopping list when she stopped dead, chalk held to the board. Her face screwed up at the chalk drawing on the board. She had been walking by it all day and hadn’t noticed it, which begged the question: when had it been drawn? One thing she knew, it wasn’t there when they left for school this morning.

The accomplished chalk drawing of the farmhouse displayed (and this is where Molly did a double take) five, yes, five people building a snowman. Her skin prickled with the acceptance that Emma hadn’t been drawing that picture of Louie while they had all watched her do it. She had been under the influence of whatever was in the house. Molly refused to use the word, but her child had been possessed and there was no other way to say it. To think four-year-old Emma had been under the influence of the spirit who lingered in these walls was frankly terrifying. Molly recalled how her daughter hadn’t been herself at that moment, the way she looked over her shoulder at them…through them. This spirit, this lone walker, had possessed her child. That was crossing the line.

In a raised voice, Molly Greene announced, ‘Okay, I am asking you to leave my children out of this.’ Molly wasn’t sure how to speak to the presence. She didn’t want to go in all Hollywood gung ho, holding a bible and a cross. This thing in the house was once a child, died as a child, and still thought it was a child, she reminded herself. ‘Please leave my children alone. In time…my own time…I will introduce you to my three daughters. But not now. They have a new life to be dealing with. Call it a hunch, but I’m thinking you might be too much for them to take on board right now. As the old saying goes: you can look, but you can’t touch.’ She hung back on her next words for quite some time. ‘I will be your mother if that’s what you want. I

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.