The new house was perfect. Sure, it needed a little bit of work, but it was exactly what my family needed. A cozy, double storey house with five bedrooms, three bathrooms and hardwood floors. The yard was a little dilapidated, but Melinda loves gardening and I knew that she'd make it beautiful.
Alissa and Melissa were always close, and they agreed to share a room for the first few weeks that we lived in the house.
That was good for me, because I had a ton of renovations to do on some of the bedrooms.

The worst of them was the bedroom on the first floor. It stunk of must and mold. The wallpaper was peeling off of the walls, revealing black mold. The wooden floors were practically just about to give in. There was a stack of paintings pushed up against the wall. I went through them, and to my dismay I found gory, gruesome, graphic paintings. Some of them were painted on small canvases, others on big canvases.
The most unsettling one of them all was one that depicted a woman with long, dark hair, sallow skin and dry lips. Bloody slits travelled the skin around her lips, forming some kind of sadistic smile. I turned around to leave the room and to get a trash bag for the purpose of disposing of the paintings. Standing before me was the girl in the paintings, glaring at me with her sallow skin and her slit mouth. Her dirty white shirt hanging over her boney body like a table cloth on a table. She looked angry. Possessive, almost. As if I had no business in touching her paintings, let alone trying to throw it away. She smiles at me after a long moment and disappears. It occurred to me after a long moment that she looks eerily similar to my daughters.

I took the paintings outside in a black refuse bag and put it in the trash. The villainess creature followed me all the way through the task. Glaring at me.

"You ever heard of The Haunting of Sierra?" Jonathan asked me during our coffee break at work a few days later. Jonathan is my assistant manager. He has made it perfectly clear to everyone that his name is not John, or Jonny, or Joe. It's Jonathan.

"I've been here for a week. What the fuck do I know?" I said before sipping my coffee. Melinda has forbidden me from swearing in front of the girls. When I'm not with the girls, I cuss like a sailor.

"A little over thirty years ago," Jonathan began as he sat himself down at the round table in the staff room, "this girl was kidnapped and tortured. Her captor painted pictures of the torture. No one knows what happened to the paintings and no one is even sure if her captor really painted them. Every once in a while, the paintings turn up." Jonathan blew on his coffee as he spoke.

My stomach seared and burnt.

"You ever seen one of those paintings?" I asked. I tried my best to seem disinterested.

"Yeah," Jonathan said, "I saw it in the newspaper this one time."

"What was the girl's name?" I asked, pushing my coffee to the side. I'm so nervous that one more sip would have given me explosive diarrhea.

"We don't say it in this town. If anyone says her name, she gets summoned." Jonathan said with a straight face.

"You're fucking with me, right?" I said. I tried to seem nonchalant.

"Nope." He shook his head.

"You're a grown man afraid of a ghost!" I laughed. Inside I was dying slowly.

"She's not just a ghost, she's evil." Jonathan said seriously.

The trouble began that very day, when I was called into Sierra Primary because one of my girls had painted an inappropriate picture. I had just assumed that she'd painted something sexual. Unfortunately, it was much worse. Alissa had painted a painting depicting that evil entity bleeding from the eyes. I didn't even know that Alissa could draw a straight line, never mind still doing something like this. Something sexual would have been better.

Melinda and I spoke about it in our bedroom late that night.

"I have to tell you something." I said.

Melinda put down her book and looked at me. Even after all these years, she still takes my breath away.

"I think there's a ghost in the house." I blurted out.

"I've seen her too. The one in the grubby white shirt, right?" Melinda asked nervously.

I nod my head.

"Her name is Sienna." Melinda said casually.

Jonathan was right.
Saying her name summons her.
She stood at the foot of our bed.
This time the skin around her mouth wasn't split and sliced.
Her mouth was sewn shut.
Her dark eyes glaring at us.

"Jesus!" Melinda screamed loudly.

Sienna shook her head no and moved over to a corner of the room.

The next morning, when I asked Melinda how she knew its name, she was confused.

"It never told me its name." She frowned.

"Then how did you know?" I asked.

"I don't remember." Melinda shrugged.

Sienna stood in the corner of our kitchen smiling at me.