Saugus.net

Halloween Ghost Story Contest -- 2003
High School Winners

First Place



Our first place High School winner is Marblehead High School senior Hillary W. Steinbrook. With this victory, Ms. Steinbrook has become the first person to ever win this contest five times, most recently last year.




Appearances Can Be Deceiving

by
Hillary W. Steinbrook

Sorrel Field made his earthly entrance with the umbilical cord wound tightly around his neck, a sign to some who had witnessed his birth that he never intended to inhabit the world of the breathing for long. Many years later, Mr. Field managed to forge an intense, if illicit, relationship with Corinne Blackwell while in the process of drawing up the will of her wealthy, conscientious husband. The sparse, greasy hair combed over the shiny dome of Sorrel’s head was dust-mite gray. Reeking from an undeterminable mixture of mothballs and hard liquor, attorney Field had toes like kiwis – brown, bulbous, and furry. Brown and bulbous could describe most of this man’s body, from his large, misshapen nose to his rotund beer belly, straining the mismatched buttons and protruding from his filthy shirts. The sweat-covered areas as large as dinner plates under the arm pit regions served the purposes of a misanthropic man who preferred to keep a safe distance from others. He had been a star law student, spending his time alone studying late into the night while his classmates frittered away their time socializing.

I was the first person to discover Mr. Field’s corpse, swinging slowly from a rafter. At that time, I was the housekeeper at his estate, which was set back from the road and surrounded by dense forest. Now, as I look back on the years that I spent working there, I shudder to think that my fate could have – and probably would have – been similar to that of the original head of the house, had someone – or something – not gotten to Field first. I never uncovered anything suspicious in the Field household when I was cleaning, even though I searched through drawers that I was organizing, bookshelves that I was dusting, and even boxes that I claimed to simply be moving out of the way. Except, there was one afternoon, a few months back, when I came upon a journal that Mr. Field had kept throughout the years of his marriage. I quickly skimmed through the tattered, yellowed pages upon which his sprawling, messy handwriting had recorded the workings of that warped mind.

When I first became employed as the housekeeper, I should have followed my instincts and not gone back to work the second day. The mansion had been jointly owned by Corinne and her devoted husband, Dr. Stuart Fletcher, before Stuart’s untimely death. Sorrel Field moved into this grandiose house in one of Salem’s old neighborhoods just after his marriage to Corinne, a slender woman with piercing green eyes and russet hair. An ornate chandelier dominated the capacious foyer, ostentatious candelabras graced the polished dining room table, and trompe l’oeil wallpaper in the dark kitchen combined to set the tone. At first, when I was still not familiar with the house, I walked into a fake stairway that was realistically painted on the wall. However, I soon learned how the house was laid out, and noticed that if I pressed a certain handle on the china cabinet, the wall behind it would open up to reveal a passageway. This hidden tunnel lead directly to the long pathway that wound through a wooded area separating the house from the road.

From the dilapidated notebook, I learned about the circumstances surrounding the death of Corinne’s first husband…

The party, a costume ball for Halloween, was thrown on the crisp, wind-swept evening of October 31st, at the mansion of Dr. and Mrs. Stuart Bennett Fletcher. The guests, co-workers of busy Dr. Fletcher, were heavy drinkers, and there were two bars open in the house that night. As Dr. Fletcher became intoxicated, Corinne caught the gaze of a dashing waiter who was passing hors d’oeuvres. The avaricious young hunk knew that he had to be sure that Dr. Fletcher ate many slices of party rye bread spread with pate – they had been conspiring for weeks. Corinne had reason to be rid of Stuart, by any means necessary – Dr. Fletcher had bequeathed his entire fortune in his will to his beautiful, young wife. It was no coincidence that this waiter, rewarded amply right after the party, disappeared to Europe. Dr. Fletcher’s autopsy revealed that the cause of death of the well-regarded physician was ergot poisoning [author’s note: ergot is a fungus that grows on rye plants if the weather conditions allow and can lead to seizures and hallucinations if ingested]. Corinne appeared to mourn for an appropriate amount of time, and then the pregnant widow felt free to marry Field, the father of her unborn child. Mr. Field was not bothered in the least by the fact that Corinne urged him to use her late husband’s towels, since both of the men had the same initials, SBF. Originally, SBF stood for Stuart Bennett Fletcher; now the letters represented Sorrel Broadmere Field.

Corinne had never bothered to wonder why the waiter had chosen to kill his victim using rye bread. Was it more than a coincidence that her first husband had died from that which had plagued the young girls of Salem during the famous witch trials about three hundred years before?

A year passed, documented by intermittent entries in the journal telling of Field’s legal work for some of Salem’s well-heeled socialites, an elaborate dinner party that the couple attended at the home of an eccentric neighbor, and the festivities surrounding the birth of their daughter, Heather. Field made note of the comments Corinne had made regarding a strange birthmark that was located on Heather’s side, shaped like a skull with two flesh-toned patches where the eyes seemed to be peering out at Heather’s guilt-ridden mother. Field dismissed his wife’s worries as inconsequential. However, on the backs of several diary pages there were odd messages jotted hastily, and obscure references were made to the deceased Dr. Fletcher. As the entries neared those written in October, the language suggested that the writer had become increasingly agitated. Finally, the journal came to an abrupt halt on the night of October 31st, 1974, the one-year anniversary of the death of Dr. Fletcher. But I would not have needed any more entries to tell me what happened…

Mr. and Mrs. Field had planned to go out to a Halloween dinner party at the home of Corinne’s friend. As it turned out, Mr. Field phoned to say that he was detained at his legal office. Unwilling to risk that her elaborate costume would wrinkle and her carefully applied makeup smear, Corinne went along to the party without him and assumed that her husband would meet her when he was finished with business. I had gone home for the day, but, realizing that I had forgotten to take my pillbox from the old Salem mansion, I returned there to retrieve it. The wind howled and my hair whipped across my face as I made my way up the back stairs. Dark, ominous clouds covered the sky, and large raindrops began to spatter on the ground as I hurried to open the heavy wooden door for use by the domestics. I turned the rusty key and stepped inside the empty residence. As I entered the dimly lit kitchen, I heard the crunching of footsteps on the gravel walkway outside. I frantically yanked at the handle on the china cabinet and nearly flew behind the large piece of furniture as it swung away from the wall, assuming that the approaching person was a burglar. I hurriedly pulled it back towards the wall as I heard the footsteps come nearer, and, breathing heavily, I waited for the intruder to leave. I remained in the doorway of the passageway for at least an hour, and then, deciding that it was safe, I crept back out into the kitchen. Nothing appeared to have been taken or even moved, despite the fact that the Fields owned sterling silver flatware, fine china dinnerware, and crystal glasses. Puzzled, I walked through the hallway and up the stairs to Corinne’s bedroom, where she kept her beautiful, expensive jewelry – none of the pieces had been touched. The rubies, emeralds, and sapphires still glistened in the light from the flashlight that I was holding in my shaking hand. Continuing my search, I crossed over to Mr. Field’s private bathroom, and stopped in my tracks – all of the monogrammed towels were missing! Why had a set of white, terry-cloth towels been stolen from Mr. Field’s bathroom when nothing of value had been removed?

Suddenly, I heard a piercing blast from a horn, followed by an odd silence and then a thump from the late doctor’s study. Nervously, I climbed the stairs, peered through the doorway, and gasped. Swinging from an exposed beam was Sorrel Field, his neck held tightly in a noose, and stuffed in his mouth as a gag was a white, initialed hand-towel: SBF. Drops of blood spelled out the word "Fletcher" on the towel. As I watched in horror, a ledger notebook fell from a shelf onto the heavy, mahogany desk. The pages blew open to a sheet which bore Dr. Fletcher’s large, scrawling signature. Had the wind blown the book open, or was it the ghost of that tormented soul?







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