Revenge of ghosts or a bloody detective

When Uncle Mason came for the summer with his daughters, Agata was over the moon with happiness. Of course! Two whole girlfriends. One is twelve, the other is ten years old. Agatha was then just between them; in age — she was eleven.

Her parents, successful surgeons, lived in a private house in Germany. Uncle Mason was one of them. But unlike the rest of the guests, he preferred not to have smart conversations over a glass of beer, but to play with the girls.

“He was up to something all the time,” my friend told me, “One day he offered to imagine that one of our trio was dying, and we had to save her. I was delighted, “How interesting! Now they will teach me how to do artificial respiration!”

And Uncle Mason “taught”. At first, under the guise of providing first aid, he began to feel Agatha’s chest (by the age of eleven she managed to be slightly identified), and then he put his tongue in the girl’s mouth.

This is just one of the episodes. As Agatha told me, during the game, the hands of Agatha’s kind uncle kept turning up under her skirt or in her bosom.

Worse, this family friend behaved the same way with his daughters. I won’t go into details — take my word for it; they are nauseating.

Agatha, in those distant eighties, was a naive child. She didn’t immediately understand what was wrong. I just started avoiding unpleasant guests. At the same time, I noted to myself that his daughters were behaving strangely. Then they will burst into tears for no reason. Then they will fight. Then they will start to climb up to everyone with kisses. Well, you know, a crippled psyche.

And then one day, after another stormy scene, the two girls ran away to the lake. It was a fifteen-minute walk from the house. They ran away and made ends meet. An hour no, two no, it’s already dark in the yard — and they still won’t appear.

Uncle Mason, along with Agatha’s parents, went to look for them. They returned an hour and a half later. Pale, depressed. Agatha’s mom is hysterical. Her father could barely stand on his feet.

The girls were found. We saw them sitting on a tree near the water. Neither moved. When they got closer, they found that the sisters were dead. Imagine a picture: two motionless figures on the branches of an old tree. From afar, it seems that the children are just hiding in a tree. Now they will jump off and run towards the adults. And no. Strangled.

Naturally, the investigation began. While it was going on, Uncle Mason was told not to go anywhere. Agatha remembers how every day he became more and more depressed. He constantly dropped forks at the table, started crying every now and then, seldom leaving his room. Everyone sympathized with him. Except Agatha. For some reason it seemed to her that he was pretending.

On the third day after the tragedy, my friend had a dream. It’s like there’s a woman standing at the gate of their house. She’s so bright and smiling. Asks “Is Mr. Mason in? Agatha had already gone to open the door, but suddenly she was so scared that she woke up in an instant.

The next night the dream was repeated. Again the woman at the gate begged to let her in, and again something prevented Agatha from fulfilling the request.

On the third night, the dream changed. Now there were two girls standing behind the woman-Uncle Mason’s dead daughters.

“Let me in,” the older one says. “You know everything. You have to help us.” And the woman is silent. He just smiles and pats them on the head. Agatha resolutely pulled back the bolt, opened the doors, and the guests entered. That was the end of the dream.

Agatha woke up from the noise downstairs. He goes down, and there are police officers. We came to pick up Uncle Mason. As my friend later realized, at the autopsy, it turned out that the dead children were repeatedly raped. Naturally, the father immediately became the main suspect. Only Uncle Mason wasn’t in the room. Gone. Things, documents, money — everything is in place, but there is no one. They searched for him for a long time, but all to no avail. The man disappeared, as if he had sunk into the water.

The end of this story appeared only many years later. Agatha came to Germany to visit her parents. She sat down with her mother to sort out old photos, and suddenly she sees a vaguely familiar face on one of them in the company of medical students. It was the same woman who in a dream asked to be let into the house “Who is this?” A friend asks mom. “This is Sarah, Uncle Mason’s wife… Do you remember that terrible story?”

Of course, Agatha remembered. How can you forget that?

“What happened to her?”; “She died of blood cancer when her daughters were just babies. Maybe it’s for the best. I didn’t find out about this nightmare…” We talked and forgot. And at night Agatha had a dream again. It’s like she’s walking along the shore of that very lake. There are no people around. There is no sun in the sky, although it is light.

Suddenly he sees a child’s figure ahead. The girl is waist-deep in the grass. The baby’s dress is light with yellow flowers; her hair is braided in a neat basket. This was one of the strangled sisters. But which one exactly? Agatha didn’t remember… They merged into one image for her.

“Hey,” the girl calls, “Come here, I’ll show you something.” Agatha was scared, as in childhood. My legs felt heavy, my chest felt like an invisible hoop, and my throat was dry. And yet my friend took a couple of steps towards the deceased. She looks, she has knelt, and is stroking something in the grass. You won’t see it…

In the morning, Agatha puzzled over a strange dream, but waved her hand. In the evening she had a plane to Paris, and a week later her mother called her from Germany.

“Do you remember what we talked about before we left? So Mason, the pervert, was found. He’s been buried in the ground all these years, lying next to our house. Neighbors found a shoe in the grass — it was sticking out of the ground. There is justice in this world!” Most of all, Agatha was struck by one detail — the examination found that Uncle Mason was buried alive. He suffocated in the ground. Moreover, he was lying shallowly — he could easily get out. But something prevented him from doing it.

Uncle Mason’s killer (or maybe the killers) were never found. Maybe because they have been dead for a long time?