Kathryn Dahne - Curse of the Nun

She wasn’t really sure what to say. She had about five hundred questions she wanted to ask him. How’d he known about the nun? And why the hell would he want to be on this side of the door?

He looked up and offered her a sheepish smile in response.

“I’ll live. You?” he asked.

There was no way Anna could answer that question accurately.

“I’m fine,” she said instead.

“How long have you been stuck?” He asked.

Like that was a normal question. Who was this guy?

“About an hour.”

“You’ve met Sister Catherine then?”

Anna assumed that was the name of the nun.

“She’s a real bitch for woman of God,” Anna muttered darkly.

A loud thud sounded upstairs. They both turned to look up at the ceiling.

“Busted pipe?”

“Apparently,” Anna replied with a snort.

The young man smiled gently at her.

“I wish it were that simple.”

Anna couldn’t stand it anymore. “What’s going on?”

“The nun,” he said, as if it were obvious. “She wants to kill you.”

“No shit,” Anna said dryly.

“Her name is Sister Catherine. She’s—”

His explanation was suddenly cut off as something tried to drag him towards the stairs. Anna clung tight to his arms, throwing her weight backwards to fight against the force that pulled against him.

The nun reappeared at the top of the stairs. Her face contorted into a rictus of rage as she rushed down the steps at them.

“The garage!” he shouted.

Anna wanted to argue. The garage was on the other side of the house, but he seemed to know more about what was going on than she did. She decided to trust his judgement in lieu of a better option.

Together they sprinted around the stairs and through the living room. The couch slid across the floor at them, forcing them to leap over it to avoid it knocking their legs out from under them.

He grabbed her hand and half-dragged her into the kitchen. They were both forced to skid to a halt before the barricade of tables and chairs in front of them. Stretched across the spaces between the center island and the countertops, the dining room furniture had been woven into an intricate hedge, blocking the way into the garage.

A small part of Anna’s brain was still trying to find some sort of logic in what was happening. How could all the furniture move like that? Moreover, how hadn’t she heard it?

A warning shiver ran down her spine. Anna whipped her head to look.

Sister Catherine was right behind them.

“Look out!”

The cabinets flung themselves open, causing Anna to flinch back. The young man tugged on her hand and pointed hastily at the island. With little other option, Anna followed his mad scramble over the countertop, bypassing the barricade of furniture. They dashed down the short hallway and into the garage, panting hard.

Anna slammed the door shut behind them. She grabbed for anything in reach, piling it against the door. The young man slid to the floor, shrugging off the backpack he’d been wearing.

“That won’t help,” he informed her.

“It’s all we’ve got!” Anna protested, even if she had to admit he was probably right.

“We’ve got our strength and you are wasting yours.”

Reluctantly, Anna turned away to join him on the floor.

“KK,” he offered, extending a hand.

She shook it.

“Anna. I take it you aren’t really the maintenance guy?”

He gave her a wry look. “Actually, I am. I do all of Donna’s houses. That’s how I met Catherine. She’s tried to kill me every time I’ve attempted to fix that pipe.”

“And you keep coming back ?” Anna asked, incredulous.

Anna couldn’t even begin to fathom how someone would ever want to come back to the house. She was never setting foot in it again when she got out.

KK shrugged. “No one believed me. So I took up ghost hunting to prove her existence.”

Anna let that sink in for a few moments. The thought that she had lived so long in the same house as the nightmarish entity in the first place was almost more than Anna could bare. How could she have not known? KK seemed to be very familiar with the ghost, but Anna had never once come across something out of the ordinary until yesterday. It didn’t add up.

Donna’s rental house was not exactly what came to mind when Anna thought of haunted houses, either. She had always pictured them like the ones from movies: large, gothic structures in gray stone, covered in ivy, the furniture dust-covered with clinging cobwebs in corners that the sun hadn’t touched in a hundred years. That was a haunted house. Not a two-story family home in the suburbs. Still, there had been all those disappearances.

As for KK’s ghost hunting, she had always pictured that more for bored kids that liked to break into old abandoned factories and scare themselves, not handymen stumbling onto it during their day job.

“Any luck?” She asked.

Proof didn’t sound bad, if only to assure herself she wasn’t just going crazy. She thought again of her clone dying on the bathroom floor. Or something worse than crazy.

“Not yet, but today looks promising?” KK laughed.

Anna snorted. Of course not.

“I just want to get out,” she said.

“That’s the easy part!”

Anna side-eyed him. She hadn’t found it particularly easy by any stretch.

KK pulled out a photo and handed it to her. Anna recognized it as the one from the box in the spare room. She could see some semblance of the woman in the photo in the specter trying to kill them, but death had not done any favors to Sister Catherine’s appearance. The nun in the photo was youthful, and though her eyes were haunted and her mouth pulled down in a frown, her features were still beautiful.

“Sister Margaret Catherine,” KK began. “She’s a ghost now, obviously. She thinks she’s in purgatory. A hundred years ago this place was a convent. Holy Land. She’s convinced she needs to protect it to prove herself to God and earn her way into heaven. If she thinks you are a threat, she’ll try to drive you away… or kill you.”

Anna could understand the need to feel like you’ve actually earned the good things, but it was less easy to sympathize with the murder part. The word “STAY” flashed into her mind. What did that mean for her then? It didn’t really seem like Catherine wanted to drive her away. Would she kill Anna to keep her?

Anna rubbed at her neck. “I think she is taking the kill route.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

They both chuckled a little. It was a weird thing to joke about, but the other option was crying and Anna just didn’t have the energy for that at the moment. She handed the photo back to KK.

“It’s a textbook haunting, really,” He explained. “Tortured soul can’t rest in peace and gets stuck on earth after an untimely death.”

Anna was pretty sure she’d never run across a textbook on hauntings in her life. That would have been a way more interesting class than any she had taken.

If this was really happening, then she had a hundred different questions. Why had there been no sign of Sister Catherine until now? Why did she want her to stay so badly? Couldn’t she just have left a note on the fridge—“Hey girl, don’t leave me, you’re the light of my afterlife! Stay forever or I’ll mindfuck and murder you, much love, Sister Cath.”

There was a sudden pressing question burning in Anna’s mind.

“How’d she die?” Anna asked.

KK passed over another photo, his expression suddenly grim. Anna looked down at it and felt ill.

Oh. That’s how.

“Oh my God…” Anna whispered hoarsely.

Silence stretched out between them as Anna handed the photo back to KK. She had known, on some level, that the sad nun from the first photo had not found the peace she had been looking for in the convent. As KK had pointed out, peaceful souls did not become murderous ghosts. The newfound knowledge of what happened burned at Anna.