jones573
gen, you viper
There are three county highways that lead in and out of Claremont- A town big enough to have distinct buildings for the high school and the junior high, but not so big that the local coffee shop that shares a storefront with the hardware store has been driven out of business by a Starbucks.
One of the roads joins up with the interstate after awhile, and passes through the nearest city. It can be a forty minute drive, but the folks who work in the city bear it daily, and most families go down once a month, for shopping or museums or some such excursion.
The second road follows the flow of the river, and takes travelers through several smaller towns and past the factory, where balefuls of cardboard arrive daily to be recycled. It too forks off into private drives and town roads, and eventually meets up with a larger highway once it crosses the river.
The third road leads into the sloping acres of farmland that extend beyond Claremont - dotted by randomly placed plots of overgrown wilderness that Katie Grigg’s great-great grandfather had either forgotten or refused to sell- until the neat rows of soybeans and feed corn are cut off by the steep slope of what is colloquially known as the ‘Hill’, though it is more reminiscent of a bluff in terms of its severity. The side that faces Claremont is steep and sharp, and only disappears from a rearview mirror due to a change in direction or a lack of light, and not because of distance.
The third road branches where it meets the Hill, one road going up and two others turning right and left to meander along the base of the Hill until either the road ends – in the case of the left turn- or until it circles all the way around and finally connects with the city, a good 40 minutes after you’d have arrived if you’d taken the first road out of Claremont and gotten on the interstate.
The road that continued up the Hill was paved for fifty feet or so- Enough for a driver to pull over and turn around after they’d realized they’d made a wrong turn. After that, it was dirt, and the winding route was lit by reflective signs along the guardrail instead of street lamps.
A third of the way up the Hill was a cleared lot of some kind, big enough to park several cars and start a bonfire going with some friends, which high school kids and students home from college often did. The woods around the lot were sparse enough to encourage larger sorts of parties though, where kids were inclined to do much stupider things than break curfew and make out on a rotting log. The Claremont Sheriff’s office had taken to posting an officer at the bottom of the Hill on prom night and graduation, and after big games.
Past the lot, the road gave up most pretense of being a road, and might charitably be called a path instead. It was large enough for only one vehicle to pass through, and had only one destination: The Griggs House.
Katie Griggs was a peculiar woman. Old as a bat, and twice as crazy, though some folks around town had kinder words for it. They could remember when she had been young and beautiful, her dark hair flying behind her when she and her partner drove into town in their convertible, and always indulging the kids clamoring to admire the chrome details.
(Her ‘roommate’, Katie had always introduced her as, and folks in Claremont had allowed her the fiction, figuring she felt safer with it. Of course, there were those who looked down their nose, but they were already prone to disliking an educated young woman who refused to marry and insisted she would handle the family investments on her own, so there was not much sympathy to be lost.)
For several glorious years before the accident, the Griggs House had been open on Halloween for the sort of party the whole town was invited to. Katie Griggs had spearheaded the campaign for the new library building, and provided most of the funding herself. When the state had wanted to build the then-new highway to the city, Katie had sold the turned-out farmers her own land at the foot of the Hill, for a fraction of what it was worth.
There was a feeling of safety, to look up from Claremont to see the Griggs House looking out over the town from its perch on the Hill, the newly installed electric lights of the old mansion visible now that the forest overgrowth had been trimmed away.
The Griggs House still looked over Claremont, but not in that tangible, inspiring way it had for those brief years after Katie inherited the house and before the accident. It was simply awful, what had happened. Those poor women. Poor Katie.
People still called on her then, for a year or so. To gawk, yes, but to bring casseroles and well-wishes, and try to convince Katie that at this point, a hospital would be the better option for her partner. It would be kinder for both of them.
They stopped coming, eventually.
But the strangers who visited the Griggs House continued to arrive in Claremont, with more or less the same regularity as they had when Katie had been happy. More or less the same regularity as they had before Katie had owned the house, older residents might recall, and the same as they had before her father had owned it before her, even older residents might remember.
She may not have bought ice creams for children or entered her own attempts at pie in the harvest contest, but Katie Griggs did not abandon her post. When someone came to town with that look about them- that they were looking for something, or running from something- there was an unspoken rule about Claremont: Direct them up the Hill, and Katie Griggs would handle whatever came after.
_____
As the decades passed, the Griggs House disappeared from view behind fast growing trees once more, and the rumors grew almost as quickly as the thick branches.
A second grader saw her at the grocery store once, and promptly informed his classmates that she was a witch, and had been buying ingredients to flavor child-stew. A logical conclusion was reached that her occasional visitors were demon-spawn, returning to their source after having done their vile work out in the world- Though for awhile there was a competing theory that the Griggs family had been mobsters, and she was still operating the family business remotely and having others carry out her orders. As far as non-supernatural speculation went, this was easily the most repeated, because as Katie Griggs aged, it became less and less likely that she lived a double life as a secret agent, and the ‘elaborate-tax-scheme’ idea had really never made much sense in the first place.
By far the most prevailing rumor was that she was a witch, though what sort of witch depended on who you asked and what story they had most recently heard. Every generic horror tale that might be told late at night by the halo of a flashlight had been amended to somehow connect to the Griggs House. Details about the Griggs House and its inhabitants had been distorted and exaggerated.
The grand parlor was sealed off, because of a fire seventy years ago- The fire had been set by a brokenhearted girl who’d found her handsome suitor was courting her sister as well, and she had damned the whole party to burn for eternity in her jealous rage. The ghosts still danced there, no music but the crackle of the fire as it consumed them.
The grand parlor was sealed off, because that was where Katie Griggs had stored the bells after they’d been removed from the now empty bell tower, and every day she worked to destroy the metallic instruments that had driven her and her ancestors mad. Close enough to the House, they said, on a moonlit night, the bells might still be heard ringing.
The grand parlor was sealed off, because that was where Katie Griggs kept the bodies.
The Griggs House had been built on land that was sacred to native people, and the family had been cursed for it- Or, the Griggs House had been built on land that was sacred to the Celtic druids who had fled their homeland and rebuilt their lives on the Hill, and the family had been cursed for it. Or, the Griggs family had come to the Americas already cursed, because of angering the ancient gods, or insulting a witch, or stealing from a church.
The stories were almost certainly not true, but they were popular, and their results obvious: Every year, usually in October but sometime over summer and other times of the year, old Katie Griggs made several calls to the Clermont Sheriff to report trespassers.
Kids would park directly in front of the gate, to try and take photos of the curtained windows through the thick trees. Some would climb over the fence and sneak around the grounds, looking for something they could use to prove to their friends that they had fulfilled the dare. Some would even try to break into the house directly.
Most never made it that far, though. Within fifty feet of the gate, they simply turned back. Not because of the anxious feeling of being watched, or because they thought they saw something just out of the corner of their eye, or because they heard the faint sounds of someone screaming- No one ever admitted those things.
They justified it as kindness- She was an old, lonely woman. It was fun to tell stories, sure. But the possibility of waking up a woman older than their grandparents and giving her a heart attack of panic to find someone prowling about her windows, just to prove that they could? That was cruel.
Most turned back. But enough didn’t, for the Claremont Sheriff to assume he knew what he was getting into when he drove up the Hill, the cold February night Katie Griggs’ body was discovered.
___
The call hadn’t come from the Griggs House line, and the caller had said very little. “Griggs house. Back stairs. Come quickly.”
It was probably one of the damn kids who’d made the call- He could see it now. They’d pulled themselves up onto the back porch, and one of them had slipped on the ice and sprained their ankle, being too stupid to realize that Katie Griggs, in her very advanced age, was unlikely to shovel or salt.
She was probably offering them tea and stale cookies while they waited for him to arrive, and showing them pictures of the dozens of cats she had owned throughout the years, and bragging about her great nephew who went to school out of state and brought her groceries once a month, and was going to graduate from some very prestigious program that she was very proud about.
He hoped they felt very guilty.
There were no lights on in the Griggs House when he pulled up and fumbled with the spare key he had to unlock the gate, and none to illuminate the back porch when he brought his truck through the path around back.
He trudged through the snow drifts that had accumulated on the porch stairs with his flashlight and tried the door.
It was locked. He knocked twice. There was a soft sound of the padlock being undone from the other side. When he tried the door again, it swung open. Katie Griggs was there, on the floor at the bottom of the staircase.
The coroner would later confirm it, but the Claremont Sheriff suspected she had been dead for at least a week by then.
He briefly considered that the 911 call still might have been made by some trouble-making kids, who broken in and panicked when they found the body, and fled the scene since then.
He did his due diligence and searched the first floor for signs of forced entry, but there were none. Just as there had been no other tracks in the blanket of snow around the house except his own feet and tires.
He wrapped her frail body in a blanket he found on a worn couch, and carried her out of the Griggs House. On the porch he hesitated, deciding if he could free his hands enough to close the door behind him, or if he should put her down in the truck and then return.
The door swung slowly shut while he stood there, and the deadbolt returned to locked position.
He was going to have to fudge so many details on this report, he thought, as he drove back down the Hill with Katie Griggs laid stiffly in the backseat.
___
The funeral was well-attended, by townspeople and visitors alike. Not everyone came in good faith, of course, but they were polite enough to keep their gossip and speculation outside the walls of the church.
The reading of the will was what most people in Claremont were most interested in, but only those with invitations were allowed to attend.
She must have been more well off than everyone had suspected- Katie Griggs left considerable amounts to a variety of people and institutions, including the local library and the owner of the hardware store, and a family of well-dressed strangers who had sat in the very last pew at the funeral and never spoke to anyone the whole time, not even each other.
“The rest of it, all and everything that has yet been unspecified,” the lawyer had announced, nearing the end. “I leave to Matthew Griggs the Fourth, for him to deal with as he is best able, for he is the one most able, and for that I am sorry.”
It was very strange wording, everyone thought. The nephew (or great nephew, or even great-great, no one was quite sure) did not look the way one might expect someone who had just inherited a great fortune might- Pleased at the windfall, mournful of his relative, or some combination of the two. He looked… Resigned.
Claremont held its breath, waiting to see what Matthew Griggs the Fourth would do with his inheritance, if he would sell the irregular plots of farmland to the agriculture conglomerates his aunt had ignored for so long. If he would demolish the Griggs House, and terrace the Hill with luxury condos.
He didn’t. He moved in.
He came into town once a week or so, for groceries and supplies from the hardware store. Sometimes he was accompanied by a tall dark skinned woman who said little and hardly looked up from her phone, but mostly he was alone. He checked out stacks and stacks of books from the library that had so little to do with each other that he might as well be walking through the aisle and grabbing every titles at random.
The snow melted off the roof of the Griggs House in patches, and the bare trees of the Hill began to show green. Unknown vehicles began to take the road up the Hill, but few were nice enough for there to be serious worries of collusion with corporate interest or real estate tycoons. Late spring rains came in earnest, and the river rose the way it always did as summer neared. On prom night, the officer stationed at the bottom of the Hill only turned away a handful of partiers. Slowly, Claremont remembered how to breathe.
In early July, a sharp-toothed woman with wet hair and unnerving beauty came into the coffee shop that shared its door with the hardware store and stared at the menu board for a long time with flat, dark eyes that made the barista uncomfortable.
Once the barista had warmed up the muffin the woman had selected, she brought it over and said hesitantly, “They’ll be doing fireworks, later in the week.”
“Oh?,” the woman said, questioningly.
“Best place to watch is from the park, these days,” the barista told her. “But way back when they first built the estate, people used to go up to the Griggs House for the show.”
“Oh,” the woman said again, but without the note of question this time.
“It’s hidden behind the trees now,” the barista explained. “But the House is still there. Sometimes people think it isn’t, because you can’t see it, and because the road isn’t paved after the first quarter mile up the Hill. But it is.”
The sharp-toothed woman thanked the barista, and when the barista returned with her change, the bell on the shared door was ringing to indicate the stranger was already on her way, headed in the direction of the Hill and biting into her muffin as though it were an apple.
Early July turned into late July, which turned into August, and life in Claremont went on. From up on the Hill, the Griggs House- and its residents- continued to watch.
One of the roads joins up with the interstate after awhile, and passes through the nearest city. It can be a forty minute drive, but the folks who work in the city bear it daily, and most families go down once a month, for shopping or museums or some such excursion.
The second road follows the flow of the river, and takes travelers through several smaller towns and past the factory, where balefuls of cardboard arrive daily to be recycled. It too forks off into private drives and town roads, and eventually meets up with a larger highway once it crosses the river.
The third road leads into the sloping acres of farmland that extend beyond Claremont - dotted by randomly placed plots of overgrown wilderness that Katie Grigg’s great-great grandfather had either forgotten or refused to sell- until the neat rows of soybeans and feed corn are cut off by the steep slope of what is colloquially known as the ‘Hill’, though it is more reminiscent of a bluff in terms of its severity. The side that faces Claremont is steep and sharp, and only disappears from a rearview mirror due to a change in direction or a lack of light, and not because of distance.
The third road branches where it meets the Hill, one road going up and two others turning right and left to meander along the base of the Hill until either the road ends – in the case of the left turn- or until it circles all the way around and finally connects with the city, a good 40 minutes after you’d have arrived if you’d taken the first road out of Claremont and gotten on the interstate.
The road that continued up the Hill was paved for fifty feet or so- Enough for a driver to pull over and turn around after they’d realized they’d made a wrong turn. After that, it was dirt, and the winding route was lit by reflective signs along the guardrail instead of street lamps.
A third of the way up the Hill was a cleared lot of some kind, big enough to park several cars and start a bonfire going with some friends, which high school kids and students home from college often did. The woods around the lot were sparse enough to encourage larger sorts of parties though, where kids were inclined to do much stupider things than break curfew and make out on a rotting log. The Claremont Sheriff’s office had taken to posting an officer at the bottom of the Hill on prom night and graduation, and after big games.
Past the lot, the road gave up most pretense of being a road, and might charitably be called a path instead. It was large enough for only one vehicle to pass through, and had only one destination: The Griggs House.
Katie Griggs was a peculiar woman. Old as a bat, and twice as crazy, though some folks around town had kinder words for it. They could remember when she had been young and beautiful, her dark hair flying behind her when she and her partner drove into town in their convertible, and always indulging the kids clamoring to admire the chrome details.
(Her ‘roommate’, Katie had always introduced her as, and folks in Claremont had allowed her the fiction, figuring she felt safer with it. Of course, there were those who looked down their nose, but they were already prone to disliking an educated young woman who refused to marry and insisted she would handle the family investments on her own, so there was not much sympathy to be lost.)
For several glorious years before the accident, the Griggs House had been open on Halloween for the sort of party the whole town was invited to. Katie Griggs had spearheaded the campaign for the new library building, and provided most of the funding herself. When the state had wanted to build the then-new highway to the city, Katie had sold the turned-out farmers her own land at the foot of the Hill, for a fraction of what it was worth.
There was a feeling of safety, to look up from Claremont to see the Griggs House looking out over the town from its perch on the Hill, the newly installed electric lights of the old mansion visible now that the forest overgrowth had been trimmed away.
The Griggs House still looked over Claremont, but not in that tangible, inspiring way it had for those brief years after Katie inherited the house and before the accident. It was simply awful, what had happened. Those poor women. Poor Katie.
People still called on her then, for a year or so. To gawk, yes, but to bring casseroles and well-wishes, and try to convince Katie that at this point, a hospital would be the better option for her partner. It would be kinder for both of them.
They stopped coming, eventually.
But the strangers who visited the Griggs House continued to arrive in Claremont, with more or less the same regularity as they had when Katie had been happy. More or less the same regularity as they had before Katie had owned the house, older residents might recall, and the same as they had before her father had owned it before her, even older residents might remember.
She may not have bought ice creams for children or entered her own attempts at pie in the harvest contest, but Katie Griggs did not abandon her post. When someone came to town with that look about them- that they were looking for something, or running from something- there was an unspoken rule about Claremont: Direct them up the Hill, and Katie Griggs would handle whatever came after.
_____
As the decades passed, the Griggs House disappeared from view behind fast growing trees once more, and the rumors grew almost as quickly as the thick branches.
A second grader saw her at the grocery store once, and promptly informed his classmates that she was a witch, and had been buying ingredients to flavor child-stew. A logical conclusion was reached that her occasional visitors were demon-spawn, returning to their source after having done their vile work out in the world- Though for awhile there was a competing theory that the Griggs family had been mobsters, and she was still operating the family business remotely and having others carry out her orders. As far as non-supernatural speculation went, this was easily the most repeated, because as Katie Griggs aged, it became less and less likely that she lived a double life as a secret agent, and the ‘elaborate-tax-scheme’ idea had really never made much sense in the first place.
By far the most prevailing rumor was that she was a witch, though what sort of witch depended on who you asked and what story they had most recently heard. Every generic horror tale that might be told late at night by the halo of a flashlight had been amended to somehow connect to the Griggs House. Details about the Griggs House and its inhabitants had been distorted and exaggerated.
The grand parlor was sealed off, because of a fire seventy years ago- The fire had been set by a brokenhearted girl who’d found her handsome suitor was courting her sister as well, and she had damned the whole party to burn for eternity in her jealous rage. The ghosts still danced there, no music but the crackle of the fire as it consumed them.
The grand parlor was sealed off, because that was where Katie Griggs had stored the bells after they’d been removed from the now empty bell tower, and every day she worked to destroy the metallic instruments that had driven her and her ancestors mad. Close enough to the House, they said, on a moonlit night, the bells might still be heard ringing.
The grand parlor was sealed off, because that was where Katie Griggs kept the bodies.
The Griggs House had been built on land that was sacred to native people, and the family had been cursed for it- Or, the Griggs House had been built on land that was sacred to the Celtic druids who had fled their homeland and rebuilt their lives on the Hill, and the family had been cursed for it. Or, the Griggs family had come to the Americas already cursed, because of angering the ancient gods, or insulting a witch, or stealing from a church.
The stories were almost certainly not true, but they were popular, and their results obvious: Every year, usually in October but sometime over summer and other times of the year, old Katie Griggs made several calls to the Clermont Sheriff to report trespassers.
Kids would park directly in front of the gate, to try and take photos of the curtained windows through the thick trees. Some would climb over the fence and sneak around the grounds, looking for something they could use to prove to their friends that they had fulfilled the dare. Some would even try to break into the house directly.
Most never made it that far, though. Within fifty feet of the gate, they simply turned back. Not because of the anxious feeling of being watched, or because they thought they saw something just out of the corner of their eye, or because they heard the faint sounds of someone screaming- No one ever admitted those things.
They justified it as kindness- She was an old, lonely woman. It was fun to tell stories, sure. But the possibility of waking up a woman older than their grandparents and giving her a heart attack of panic to find someone prowling about her windows, just to prove that they could? That was cruel.
Most turned back. But enough didn’t, for the Claremont Sheriff to assume he knew what he was getting into when he drove up the Hill, the cold February night Katie Griggs’ body was discovered.
___
The call hadn’t come from the Griggs House line, and the caller had said very little. “Griggs house. Back stairs. Come quickly.”
It was probably one of the damn kids who’d made the call- He could see it now. They’d pulled themselves up onto the back porch, and one of them had slipped on the ice and sprained their ankle, being too stupid to realize that Katie Griggs, in her very advanced age, was unlikely to shovel or salt.
She was probably offering them tea and stale cookies while they waited for him to arrive, and showing them pictures of the dozens of cats she had owned throughout the years, and bragging about her great nephew who went to school out of state and brought her groceries once a month, and was going to graduate from some very prestigious program that she was very proud about.
He hoped they felt very guilty.
There were no lights on in the Griggs House when he pulled up and fumbled with the spare key he had to unlock the gate, and none to illuminate the back porch when he brought his truck through the path around back.
He trudged through the snow drifts that had accumulated on the porch stairs with his flashlight and tried the door.
It was locked. He knocked twice. There was a soft sound of the padlock being undone from the other side. When he tried the door again, it swung open. Katie Griggs was there, on the floor at the bottom of the staircase.
The coroner would later confirm it, but the Claremont Sheriff suspected she had been dead for at least a week by then.
He briefly considered that the 911 call still might have been made by some trouble-making kids, who broken in and panicked when they found the body, and fled the scene since then.
He did his due diligence and searched the first floor for signs of forced entry, but there were none. Just as there had been no other tracks in the blanket of snow around the house except his own feet and tires.
He wrapped her frail body in a blanket he found on a worn couch, and carried her out of the Griggs House. On the porch he hesitated, deciding if he could free his hands enough to close the door behind him, or if he should put her down in the truck and then return.
The door swung slowly shut while he stood there, and the deadbolt returned to locked position.
He was going to have to fudge so many details on this report, he thought, as he drove back down the Hill with Katie Griggs laid stiffly in the backseat.
___
The funeral was well-attended, by townspeople and visitors alike. Not everyone came in good faith, of course, but they were polite enough to keep their gossip and speculation outside the walls of the church.
The reading of the will was what most people in Claremont were most interested in, but only those with invitations were allowed to attend.
She must have been more well off than everyone had suspected- Katie Griggs left considerable amounts to a variety of people and institutions, including the local library and the owner of the hardware store, and a family of well-dressed strangers who had sat in the very last pew at the funeral and never spoke to anyone the whole time, not even each other.
“The rest of it, all and everything that has yet been unspecified,” the lawyer had announced, nearing the end. “I leave to Matthew Griggs the Fourth, for him to deal with as he is best able, for he is the one most able, and for that I am sorry.”
It was very strange wording, everyone thought. The nephew (or great nephew, or even great-great, no one was quite sure) did not look the way one might expect someone who had just inherited a great fortune might- Pleased at the windfall, mournful of his relative, or some combination of the two. He looked… Resigned.
Claremont held its breath, waiting to see what Matthew Griggs the Fourth would do with his inheritance, if he would sell the irregular plots of farmland to the agriculture conglomerates his aunt had ignored for so long. If he would demolish the Griggs House, and terrace the Hill with luxury condos.
He didn’t. He moved in.
He came into town once a week or so, for groceries and supplies from the hardware store. Sometimes he was accompanied by a tall dark skinned woman who said little and hardly looked up from her phone, but mostly he was alone. He checked out stacks and stacks of books from the library that had so little to do with each other that he might as well be walking through the aisle and grabbing every titles at random.
The snow melted off the roof of the Griggs House in patches, and the bare trees of the Hill began to show green. Unknown vehicles began to take the road up the Hill, but few were nice enough for there to be serious worries of collusion with corporate interest or real estate tycoons. Late spring rains came in earnest, and the river rose the way it always did as summer neared. On prom night, the officer stationed at the bottom of the Hill only turned away a handful of partiers. Slowly, Claremont remembered how to breathe.
In early July, a sharp-toothed woman with wet hair and unnerving beauty came into the coffee shop that shared its door with the hardware store and stared at the menu board for a long time with flat, dark eyes that made the barista uncomfortable.
Once the barista had warmed up the muffin the woman had selected, she brought it over and said hesitantly, “They’ll be doing fireworks, later in the week.”
“Oh?,” the woman said, questioningly.
“Best place to watch is from the park, these days,” the barista told her. “But way back when they first built the estate, people used to go up to the Griggs House for the show.”
“Oh,” the woman said again, but without the note of question this time.
“It’s hidden behind the trees now,” the barista explained. “But the House is still there. Sometimes people think it isn’t, because you can’t see it, and because the road isn’t paved after the first quarter mile up the Hill. But it is.”
The sharp-toothed woman thanked the barista, and when the barista returned with her change, the bell on the shared door was ringing to indicate the stranger was already on her way, headed in the direction of the Hill and biting into her muffin as though it were an apple.
Early July turned into late July, which turned into August, and life in Claremont went on. From up on the Hill, the Griggs House- and its residents- continued to watch.
so there’s only so much discussion that can happen, and ‘look through old records from prior Griggs’ isn’t the most exciting plot wise… Maybe they want to get revenge on the descendants of those involved, or even befriend the descendants? (I’m imagining the event having been some sort of ‘the vampire was hurt by someone’ or ‘the vampire hurt someone’, which is limiting my brainstorm, I’ll admit)
