room and saw where I had slept. The first shoe was still there. I moved around the bed to look between it and the window to see that her jeans were still there, only in the daylight from the window, I could see that they were badly chewed up and had been used as a nest for some mice. I looked over at her dresser, the only place that I hadn’t looked last night. It was littered with the things one would expect to find on a woman’s dresser. Beautiful old silver antique boxes, earring stands, photo frames – the usual. Beneath one of the silver boxes was an envelope. A plain envelope, it had no writing on the front yet it had contents. I moved the box and took the envelope; I took out and unfolded what was a professional document. From Milledgeville Sanatorium for the insane; it was a release form with several signatures signed by several Doctors. It was dated June 12th of this year – it had Elena’s name on it. I sat down on the bed somewhat stunned. Picturing her in my mind as one does to find justification in the new facts…she never really acted strange – at least I didn’t remember, or maybe I was just too taken with her to pay any attention, I shook my head and looked out of the window in disbelief. I saw the haze of the ocean again in the distance and remembered what I had seen or thought I had seen of the small boat with the two people. I sat confused and stared down at the floor. I was wet and my shoes were filled with sand as well as my trousers. I got up to go outside – to find Leonard Melton, out of the front door and across the swamped boards over the marsh to the path, down to where he had his bee houses. Except that there were no bee houses.
When I came up to the spot where I had been only yesterday before the storm had hit, I saw broken wood where bee boxes might have been and these were overgrown with weeds. I sat down on a stump – dumbfounded to these discoveries, trying to deal with the realization that there was no Leonard Melton. Did this mean that the whole time I had stood here alone before the storm, and I had sat alone in the room with no hurricane lantern giving off shadows around the room? He had never spoke to me or even acknowledged me. In this realization I remembered once more that someone had told me that this place was haunted. Had I been alone this whole time – in a house that had been empty? But for how long, what had happened to Leonard Melton? And what about Elena, how could she not be real….as many times as we had made love, or laughed together? How should I feel now – after reading the release paper from the asylum, how can I deal with this? And where is Elena? She had written me the letter!
I had been through many emotions since I arrived at Cutter’s Point and now I wasn’t sure of what I could feel at this point. I was at a loss. This place….why had she brought me here – she had sent for me saying that there was trouble, in her mind, that something had gone wrong. I remembered this as chills ran up my spine, and again, I felt as if someone were watching me which moved me to go back to the house and sit on her bed to try and figure out what I should do now. This time I sat on the side of the bed that faced the window. The clouds had cleared off and the blue of the sky was magnificent to see after two days of serious weather. The normal ocean breeze had picked up and I watched the return of the shore birds. I had no desire to search anymore for signs of her…I just sat there. I looked around me in the room and felt defeated. Back to the window I quickly saw between the trees down to the beach, a figure……Elena! I jumped up and ran down the stairs, out the front door and down to the beach. In a few moments I was almost a hundred feet away from her and saw that she was wearing a long white thin gown with her hair blowing wildly in the wind in front of her face. She was facing the ocean, her feet bare as she stood in the rushing surf.
I was that close to her when I tripped in a hole in the sand and almost fell. When I looked up again…..she was gone. I stood there out of breath and looked around….nothing!. Above me and over to my left a pack of seagulls were circling the small beached boat that I had leaned on earlier. I felt that something was different and went over to it, this time out of instinct walking to the other side. Almost underneath the boat, half buried in the sand was a body, still wet, wearing the white gown, the black hair matted over her face, it was Elena, she was dead. I slumped down beside her – too worn out emotionally by all of this and just put my head in my hands. I was so tired. She was face down, one leg pulled up backwards and her ankle was twisted in a rope. She had obviously drowned. Tied to one of her wrists was a cord that ran down to her waist which was tied to a coke bottle that had a cork in it. Inside that bottle was some paper. I untied the bottle and with some effort extracted the cork and was able to pull the paper out. It was a letter, a couple of wet pages:
“To whoever reads this:
Almost a year ago now, I drugged my father and took him out for a burial at sea – revenge for mother. After that I tried to live in that house but it would never give me peace. He haunted me…..father, him and the house both – the house hates me. They said at the hospital that I had been reported mentally unstable since childhood, I spent three years there, and they don’t know that I drowned my father.
I called Wishfield here hoping he could save me, I - (at this point the letter was ruined by the salt water, here and in other spots.) …it was too cruel for him to know this so I had to - those voices, that house…forgive me.
Burn the place – the house...do it before you leave and never come back.
Please forgive me
Elena.
After I read this, I sat there and just stared at her, a horrible sadness overtook me. I reached down and brushed the hair and sand from her face. I leaned down and placed a kiss to her cold temple with the lonely realization that I had been too late to save her.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, and laid my head against hers and wept once more.
After a few moments, the weakness of my emotions passed enough to let me get up and pull Elena out from under the boat. Untying her foot from the rope, I pulled her out and sat beside her in the sand. I had to leave this place yet the only way off was by the ocean, the small boat had a large hole and the woods behind afforded no road or path to the mainland. I had to find a way to get someone to know I was here – I had to signal them. I got up to go to the house, there had to be something I could use. In the back of the house stood a small shed with hundreds of tools, outboard motor parts, tin cans and boxes full of old junk. After several minutes of searching, in one of the boxes on a shelf I found a flare gun and two flares. I turned and ran towards the beach then stopped to turn around and look at the house. I remembered what Elena had said in her letter and moved to vindicate her sacrifice and relinquish the hold the house had on her… to save her poor soul.
Up to the small rotting steps, to the sagging screen door at the back of the house, I went in, flare gun loaded. I went into the room where I had sat with the hurricane lamp – aimed the gun at the chair where Leonard’s ghost had sat across from me and fired into it. The loud bang rattled the old panes of glass in the windows as the flare hissed and sparked in the material of the old high-backed chair. It burned quickly and flames licked their way up and caught the dry wallpaper and the wood of the house. I stood to watch only for a moment and left the place to burn.
I ran back to the beach and sat back down beside Elena’s body. It was getting late and the light was fading. I aimed the gun up to the sky and sent the last flare off with another loud bang. It soared straight up, far into the sky…..it was bright - a hopeful flare for someone to see and take us from this wretched place.
I awoke lying with my face in the sand. It was morning, the night had passed without me knowing. Both the boat and Elena’s body were gone. I stood up and in a moment of panic I ran in circles looking for signs that they had been here – to take me out of this nightmare. Yet there were no signs of anyone being here at all, no signs of a rescue boat in the sand, there were no signs whatsoever of the washed up boat that I had fallen asleep by. The sun was abnormally bright in my eyes and the wind was wild as it whirled the sand about me. With a horrible sense of isolation I walked the deserted stretch of beach down to the path that led to the
house. I wanted to see what was left of the place, maybe find some timbers to start a signal fire and try again for attention. After reaching the clearing beyond the trees I looked to see that it was still there……still there! The house had not burned. And even more shocking to see at that moment was Leonard Melton walking out of the front door, down the front steps of the porch and across the boarded marsh path, bucket and smoker in hand.
I stood there for a minute, just long enough to watch his head disappear behind the palmettoes and then I followed….down that sandy path again. I found as before that he was standing and attending to his bees and I sat once more on the tree stump where I had sat yesterday. And again, behind us, up over to my left were the heavy black storm clouds. There were no words from me – it seemed that it was impossible to speak. I just watched him as before, put the last latch on the bee box and pick up his things and head down the path, once more – me to follow. I lost him on the trial just before the marsh and stood looking at the house, that place