‘Evil Face’ by Elisa Hill

"Not good to dwell on it,” she thought.
Then she gathered up the children and made her way home, trying to keep her mind on them and the busy road. That afternoon her friend, Debbie, was visiting with her two boys and she had plenty to do to prepare for their arrival.
Later, she sat down with Debbie having a drink and prepared for a good night out. But her mind kept straying back to the photograph. Debbie sensed that Sally was troubled and asked her what the matter was.
"Tell you later," Sally said.
Her friend pressed her and, as they were alone in the house because all the children had been taken out to the playground by her husband, she decided to confide in her friend.
“Well Debbie, I’ve never told you about any of this before and I’m not sure if you’ll believe me but …..” She passed the photograph to her. "See anything strange?"
"What do you mean? It’s a photo of you and kids in the front room."
Sally sighed, nobody else could ever see it. She couldn't understand it - it seemed to jump out at her! Maybe to others it was just not as significant .To her it was the physical proof of instances that had been happening since almost the very day she had moved in. Was it this house? Was there something evil manipulating them, causing arguments, unpleasant feelings, scaring the children and feeding off the fear generated?
Her neighbour had said she had had a dream about the house. It was a dream about a druid sacrifice being performed on what was then a green hillside- right where her front room is now. She thought, “Do places hold memories,? Can the very earth have a memory? Or is it, as some people say, that we have an ancestral memory which lives through our very D.N.A. Was that triggered when she moved in here?”
She had been the first of the family to view the house and had felt a strong immediate connection, whereas her husband had not been so keen. She had really wanted to move here from the minute she entered and had pushed her husband into choosing it.
Why had she done that? It really was not like her. She was usually very easy going. Sally had surprised herself! She wondered had there been something here manipulating her even then, in that short half hour. Had the house itself chosen her and her family?”
"Now you are just getting ridiculous," she said out loud, forgetting herself. Debbie looked puzzled.
"Sorry, Deb, thinking out loud!"
"First sign of madness you know, talking to yourself,” Debbie replied.
"Look at the photograph again, Debbie. I always see an evil little face in the corner of the room. I moved the tv into that corner last week and since then the tv turns over channels on its own! And a few times this week ornaments have just flown across the room from the top of the tv! Another time, Emma was coming through the back gate when an apple was thrown at her from an empty garden. Worst of all though – a man just out of prison, let himself in and went straight upstairs to the bathroom where a voice told him to go away. We were astonished. He told us he would never come into the house again and ran out of the front door.”
The day afterwards when the house was quiet, the kids were at school and her husband was at work, Sally felt differently about things. She laughed to herself. "Maybe it’s not all bad, no one’s ever been hurt by anything.
And a few years later Sally quietly "lost" the ghost picture. People were becoming too interested in it and she was getting irritated at finding gangs of terrified, wide-eyed, white-faced schoolmates of her children around the house on ghost tours. Cheeky devils - they even charged a fee after having had the photograph scanned and enlarged at school.