A Haunting at Marianwood

Excerpt:

A HAUNTING AT MARIANWOOD

Sister Miriam Patrice slid back from the kneeler. The quiet of the church soothed her as it wrapped its velvet cloak of serenity around her. She sat, hands folded,
once in prayer but now to stop the trembling. Glancing at the sunlight
streaming through the stained-glass windows casting a rainbow on the empty
pews, she drew in deep slow breaths. She looked at the watch pinned to her
tunic. Time to get back to work. She rose to leave the church, her place of
refuge, a place free from the distractions of the running the community and the
new retirement home the sisters established to help make ends meet.

The members of the Sisters of the Blessed Mother of God found their numbers
dwindling. New recruits, as Sister Miriam Patrice called them mimicking her
cousin Dash Hammond’s military jargon, were very rare. The teaching
congregation once had more than a hundred sisters. Vocations, callings to
either the religious or the educational side of the community, had fallen to less
than a handful each year.

As she walked down the aisle to the back of the church, she heard it again. Tap, tap, tap. She stopped to listen, making sure she wasn’t mistaken. That sound
sent shivers down her spine. Squaring her shoulders she walked to the doors
next to the church exit. One led up to the choir loft, the other down to the
cellar. In days past she had gone up the stairs; today she would go down.

Pulling the doorknob, Miriam Patrice met the resistance of a locked door. She pulled out her keys and unlocked it. She struggled with the door, suggesting to her
that no one had gone to the cellar in a while.

The stone steps were worn but sturdy. She moved cautiously into the darkness, one hand on the wall to steady her nervous knees, the other searching for the
handrail. Her hope was that the security guard forgot to close the door one day
and some critter, not two legged, was trapped down here and making the tap,
tap, tap sound. Logically she knew this was wrong, but the alternative could be
worse.

Decades ago they discovered one of the newer buildings constructed during a period of rapid expansion had been built on an underground spring. It wasn’t long before the building tilted, as did their finances. What a waste of time and money.
Fearful that what she would find was a tell-tale pooling or bubbling of water,
she moved forward slowly. She said a silent prayer that she would not stumble
into a puddle, a precursor of the inevitable unwelcome news.

Her trek seemed unnecessarily slow though reason told Miriam Patrice she should alert one of her sisters where she was just in case she lost her footing. But
her reasoning had not been the sharpest of late. She blamed her sleepless
nights, not because of an uneasy conscience but an overabundance of concern for
her congregation and its uncertain future, both financially and individually.

After spending a half an hour poking into the corners, searching for the origin of the sound, Miriam Patrice gave up. She needed a flashlight if she wanted to do
a proper search. Next time she would be prepared. Next time, she told herself,
she would be less skittish, more confident that she could deal with whatever
sprung up from the tap, tap, tap. After deciding this, she nodded to herself.
At least she didn’t hear a drip, drip, drip.

The sound had stopped so she returned to the church. As she locked the door behind her, the tap, tap, tap began again, louder this time. If she permitted herself, she would have said damn.

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