The Haunting of Deadwood House
The Haunting of Deadwood House
Eddie York
Text © Copyright 2019
Cover © Copyright 2019
This book is entirely fictional. Names, characters, locations, and all contents are a product of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced without the express permission of the author.
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
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About the Author
Prologue
The bag in Rebecca’s hand squirmed whenever she looked down at it, as if the thing inside knew what she was planning.
It was ten minutes to midnight. She’d been awake for thirty-six hours.
The wind that had been howling all day showed no signs of easing as she trudged through the muddy field. Her nightdress billowed around her, exposing her legs to the icy cold of the night.
She was horrified by the way the bag kept moving. In the few moments when the wind died she could hear it crying inside. The sound tugged at her heartstrings.
Could she kill her baby?
She had no idea but she had to try.
She forced herself on, refusing to look at the town lights behind her. A quarter of an hour earlier she’d been back there, laid in bed, trying not to vomit as she watched it squirm and writhe from between her legs onto the blood soaked sheets.
“The ambulance is on its way.” Sarah had said to her, cooing over the disgusting thing as she picked it up. “Just hang on in there a little longer.” She kissed it and it left a brown-green smear on her lips.
“Not that you need an ambulance,” James added with a warm smile. “All over bar the shouting now and what a beautiful baby he is. The perfect child. Just what this town was praying for. Well done, Rebecca.”
“Could I have a moment alone with him?” she’d asked.
“Of course.”
She remembered the sickening revulsion that washed over her when Sarah pressed it to her chest. The creature was wet and sticky, smelling strongly of waterlogged earth as it dug its nails into her.
She knew what she had to do. Ted had already told her. She hadn’t believed him at the time but the proof was right there in her arms.
She was going to take it back to Deadwood House and kill it before it was too late.
Sarah and James stepped outside the room for a moment, leaving her to bond. Either that or they were confident such a difficult birth would mean she was incapable of running.
As soon as the door closed she swung her legs out of bed, gasping at how much it hurt. She sat upright and held her breath for a moment, listening to their quiet voices talking outside the bedroom.
She looked at the thing she’d made. It writhed in her arms, dribbling that hideous thick green saliva down its jutting out chin.
It blinked, flexing its newfound muscles, trying to stand up on her chest, stinking breath wafting up at her as it grunted with the effort. Soon it would be able to walk. She couldn’t let that happen. It had to be killed before it could escape her.
She left it on wriggling on the bloody sheets, kneeling to reach under the bed, her thighs sticky, the thing crawling toward her, trying again to stand.
She found the old feed bag Ted had given her to use. As she pulled the bag out, a curling finger with too many knuckles stroked her hair from the edge of the bed. She had to fight to resist screaming as she jerked away from that touch.
She stood up, cramming the thing into the bag, closing the top, gripping it in her fist, ignoring the weak cries coming from within. She had to get it back to Deadwood House before they heard it calling out to them for help.
Ted had made it clear. Try and kill it anywhere else and it wouldn’t work. Part of it was still lurking inside Deadwood House, waiting to be reunited. Body and mind. Spirit and soul. Baby and demon. She had to kill both parts. She couldn’t do that anywhere but Deadwood House.
She thought she might have to break the window but it swung open easily enough when she tried it. They must have forgotten to lock it in their rush to get her into bed when the labor began.
Maybe they thought she wouldn’t even try to run, that she was happy to have given birth to an abomination, that the poison they’d dripped in her ears had worked, that she was proud of what she’d produced.
With the bag slung over her shoulder, she edged out of the window and down the drainpipe to the muddy ground below,. Twice she thought she was going to fall but then she thought about what would happen if she did.
They’d find her winded and half-dead on the ground. They’d open the bag and take it back inside and love it, raise it, unleash it on the world. The thought gave her strength. She had to keep going.
The house they’d confined her in was at the edge of town. The rear garden opened out onto recently plowed fields and that was the direction she ran, wincing with every step, pain lancing through her.
Was she still bleeding? Something had torn down there but was it something vital? Would she die before she could get to Deadwood House?
The lights of the town faded into the distance behind her. She became lost in the complete darkness of a pitch black night. Were they looking for her yet? Had they realized she was gone? She expected to hear her name shouted at any moment.
If she could make it to the treeline before that happened she would be safe. From inside the bag, a mewing sound tugged at her heartstrings. Could she do it? Could she kill her defenceless child?
The mewing grew deeper, turning into a rumbling growl. It wasn’t her child. It was something else entirely.
It wouldn’t remain defenseless for long either. Already those sharp nails would be hardening into talons. She could picture it changing in there, just like Ted had predicted.
“Too many fingers,” he said, waving his hands in front of her face while all her friends laughed. “All of them growing, sinews and muscles knotting together. Teeth lengthening until it can tear you in two in one bite. You can’t let that happen.”
Ted knew she was pregnant before she did. How was that even possible?
Far behind her voices called out.
“Rebecca!” That was James. He sounded scared, not angry.
“Where are you?” Sarah was furious. “Come back!”
They knew she was gone.
Its mewing grew louder as if it was calling for help. That was impossible, of course. It couldn’t possibly know how to do that yet. It was less than an hour old.
She picked up speed, bare feet sinking deeper into the mud. Each step was harder than the last. The bag shifted in her hand and she almost dropped it.
What if it got out? Could it run yet? Could she find it again in the dark if it escaped and tried to get to safety? Did it know what she intended?
If only she’d listened to Ted. He tried to tell her. He tried to tell them all. Stay away from Deadwood House. But how could she possibly have known? The story was too ridiculous to believe.
Nothing was lurking in the house, no demons, no evil spirits, just an old man who didn’t
mind when they turned up and took over for their parties.
Deadwood House was just a place out of town where they could all go and get wasted without anyone calling the police on them.
All the while Reg sat there in a drunken stupor in the corner of the lounge, absurdly grateful for the cheap lager they’d given him, not seeing them rifling through his liquor cabinet and occasionally his wallet. She got drunker and drunker. They all did.
She never even knew who took her virginity. No one ever admitted going into the bedroom with her. They all told her she’d just passed out and they’d lost track of her.
Now she thought maybe none of them had done it. Had it come out from under the floorboards and crawled inside her while she lay unconscious on the bed? Oozed out of the walls and taken shape within her, growing like a coal-black tumor while she knew nothing about it.
All she knew for sure was Ted had been right. The proof was in the bag.
She gripped it tighter, ignoring the rustling sounds as the thing fought desperately to get free. Why hadn’t she listened to Ted instead of her friends? Why hadn’t she stayed away from Deadwood House?
She could have been safe at home, not thrown onto the streets for getting pregnant, or taken in by Sarah and James and their insane beliefs that the thing inside her would help them have their own children, would make a deal with them.
She reached the edge of the field. An old fence marked the boundary, topped by a length of barbed wire. She climbed over, feeling but not caring about the barbs digging into her skin. Already her body was growing too numb for her to care about much.
Her strength was fading but she forced herself on. She had brought it into the world. She had to right that wrong. After that, it didn’t matter what happened to her. Sarah and James could believe what they wanted. One look in its eyes and she knew what it was. Pure evil.
It could not be bargained with. As soon as it was able, it would rend flesh and saw through bone and it would not make deals with anyone. She could see that even if they could not. Those red eyes with no pupils that looked like burning coals.
On the far side of the fence, she vanished into the treeline. Branches scraped at her bare arms as she pushed her way deeper. She forced herself on, the sounds of her shouted name fading away behind her.
Could she do this? She knew she had to but she still couldn’t think how to physically carry it out. After all, it was her child. What did it say about her if she could kill her own child?
No, she told herself. It is not your child. Don’t think of it that way. What child would ever look like that? What child would scratch and bite as it was born, gouging bloody marks into your thighs that will not heal.
Pain continued to gnaw at her insides. Her legs felt sticky. She guessed she was still bleeding.
The birth had not been an easy one. Toward the end it had felt like she was dying. Perhaps it would have been better if she had died. Then she wouldn’t have had to see it wriggling on the bed, lying in a pool of thick black fluid that smelled like rotten eggs and earth.
Could she strangle it? How, when it didn’t even have a neck? Drop it from the roof? Would that do it? Or would it just stand up and laugh at her puny efforts.
No, she thought. Remember what Ted said. It must be returned to the earth. Perhaps he meant that literally.
She had no idea how long she trudged through the forest. All she knew was that by the time she emerged into the overgrown garden of Deadwood House, she was staggering, barely able to stand anymore, her limbs dragging, her eyelids half closed. The night had become like a dream, hazy and unreal.
Ahead of her was the house, barely visible in the darkness. It was in the midst of renovation. There were piles of sand, breezeblocks, a cement mixer by the kitchen door.
She heard a noise behind her. Turning, she glimpsed a flash of light somewhere among the trees. Then it was gone. They were getting closer.
“We just want to help you,” a voice yelled, the sound faint.
The mewing began again when she pushed open the door into the cottage. Inside, the kitchen had been ripped out. Reg had died in there six months earlier. It had been some time before his body was found and the smell endured, soaked into the floorboards. The stench excited the thing in the bag, it moaned and squirmed faster than before.
It’s hungry.
How did she know that? She felt like crying. A mother’s intuition?
She sank to her knees, unable to move any further. She wanted so badly to cry but no tears would come. The numbness was spreading.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The pregnancy test had been negative. Three tests, all negative. Then the bump began to grow. That was when she knew Ted was right. She was doomed. The whole town was doomed.
It wants to live.
When she began to show there was no keeping the pregnancy from her parents any longer. They threw her out, told her she’d ruined her life, that they wanted nothing to do with her, wouldn’t believe she didn’t know who the father was. Told her no child of theirs would do something like that.
Slut.
She’d spent that first night of purgatory in the church, looking up at the medieval frescoes of heaven and hell, wondering which side she would end up in, praying for help from someone, anyone.
The next morning a middle-aged couple came in at first light to clean and found her asleep on the back pew. “We’ve been looking for you,” the man said. “We hear you’re in trouble and we want to help.”
They took her in. Sarah and James. Such nice people. James the accountant and Sarah the website designer, both of them working from their huge detached house right on the edge of town.
Every morning Rebecca woke up to views of fields with the forest beyond, Deadwood House hidden somewhere deep inside. The site of her downfall. Her ruin.
It never occurred to her to wonder why they were so nice to her, a total stranger, not only a stranger but a pregnant teenage runaway? They never even asked who the father was.
She couldn’t have told them if they had asked. All she remembered was waking up to the sound of her friends cooking Reg’s bacon, ransacking his kitchen cupboards for anything else they could steal.
She’d walked home with them when they finally went, her head throbbing worse than any hangover, ashamed to admit she had no idea where her panties had gone.
She never did find out. Her parents had sobbed when she’d come home that afternoon, asked her why she was always doing this to them, why couldn’t she stay home like a good girl, why did she keep sneaking out behind their backs?
She looked down at the bag on the kitchen floor beside her, watching it with morbid fascination as the fabric rippled and shifted in too many places at once.
They grow up fast.
Rustling, scrabbling sounds filled the air. It was fighting to get out.
Her hands sagged to the floor. Murder was a sin. She would go to hell. But that thing was evil. Would killing it be a sin?
Noises behind her. They were again calling her name.
What to do? Kill it and damn herself or let it live and damn them all?
Sarah and James. The happy couple. They wanted a family so badly. They were jealous of her pregnancy, they told her that. Would help her raise her child.
They were mad to think she would want to keep an abomination like that. Sarah rocking it and talking to her about nursing it had made bile rise in her throat.
What would it turn into? Already it was strong enough to move the bag, wriggling across toward the door. She dragged it back and clamped her knee on the edge of the rough fabric, holding it still. The smell of death was so strong it stuck to the back of her throat.
The floorboards were loose where Reg had died, dark, soaked with his body fluids. She yanked one of the boards upward, tossing it aside. There was no solid foundation underneath the house, only mud. She scraped at the dirt with her hands until her fingernails were torn and ragged.
Voices shouting her again. How long did
she have?
Was the hole deep enough yet?
Please let it be deep enough. Forgive me, God, for they have sinned. They lied to me, told me it would be a child to love. I cannot let it live.
She grabbed hold of the bag. It was too heavy to lift. Was she weakening or was it growing bigger? The bag had started to look like an overfilled water balloon about to burst.
She dragged the bag closer to the hole, grunting with the effort. The mewing-growling sound grew louder. The thing knew what she was planning to do and it was trying desperately to escape before she did it.
You’re my mother. Love me.
She shoved the bag into the hole. As it fell a rip appeared in the side. A long pale gray finger emerged, the end a curling yellow claw that seemed to beckon to her.
Come to me.
The claw sawed at the edge of the fabric until the hole grew wider. She caught sight of a red eye with no pupil. The eye stared out at her from the interior of the bag, blazing furious rage at her audacity.
How dare you try to kill me, mother, the eye seemed to say. How dare you?
Doors upstairs began to bang, opening and closing, the noise getting louder as if they might break off the hinges at any moment. The lightbulb above her head turned on, glowing brighter and brighter until it popped, broken glass spraying outward.
She ignored the house, shoving soil back into the hole as quickly as she could. The finger withdrew as a sod of dirt thudded into the side of the bag.
The mewing turned into a howl and then a hiss, the sound growing muffled as she pushed more dirt back into the hole.
The bag slowly vanished from view. Just as she thought it was done, a finger burst upward through the soil, joined by another a second later, hair the color of rusty nails sprouting from the knuckles.