The Manor

Mark Edward Hall

My Leona

Mark Edward Hall

Bug Shot

Mark Edward Hall

The Rain After A Dry Season

Mark Edward Hall

Excerpt from,
The Haunting of Sam Cabot!

In the weeks that followed, Linda’s and my relationship deteriorated to the point of collapse. The mask would not go away. If anything it grew larger inside of me, and it continued to haunt my dreams. In my heart I understood that it was only a mask, a harmless collage of paper and glue. There was a part of me, however—the part that was about ten levels below visceral—that knew it was a symbol for something far greater, something that I could not fathom or reason. In those dreams I began to draw a correlation between the mask, the killer-well in the back yard, and the fiery engine in our basement that now, as winter drew near, seemed to run almost all the time, filling our house with a sick and prickly kind of heat that felt very much like fever. And as this correlation began to crystallize I became more and more determined that there was a secret here, a riddle of some kind that needed to be unraveled, even as my very sanity was unraveling. I should have taken my family and left that place the day I set eyes on it, but even then it was too late, and now, the part that needed to unravel the mystery was more persuasive. I had become a prisoner of Farnham House and its terrible secret, and in doing so I had unwittingly doomed my family.

In those bleak days, Linda did her best to steer clear of me. Thinking back on it now I realize what a horrifyingly lonely time it must have been for her. We were like strangers in some strange and twisted time-wrinkle that neither of us had the courage or the sense to escape. In a way Linda went through her own kind of metamorphosis. She was stronger than I ever gave her credit for, assuming the posture of cool matriarch of the new and increasingly ugly Cabot household, tiptoeing around on eggshells so as not to disturb this strange, ugly Frankenstein monster who sat day and night hunched over his word processor. I did not sleep much in those days. When I wasn’t writing dark passages I was in the basement stroking that vile metal monster while it repeated its instructions to me over and over again in its alien language. It went on like this, a seeming endless silence, the only thing breaking the monotony, the sound of the Hulk muttering in the basement as it radiated an oily, repugnant heat that permeated our souls like plague and did little to take the chill out of the November winds that howled mournfully around the eves of Farnham house.

Sometime later, I’m not sure exactly how long it was—for most of it was filled with fever and delusions—I awoke one night haunted by a new dream. The bed-sheets were soaked where I had lain tossing feverishly, my face was covered with a pillow and my body was shaking with sobs. My tongue was injured and my mouth tasted of blood. I must have cried out because Linda stirred.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, trying to sound normal. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”
Linda rolled over and did as she was told.
I got up, wringing wet in my bedclothes, went into the bathroom and rinsed my injured mouth with salt-water. The mirror showed an emaciated nearly unrecognizable man with hollowed cheeks and sunken, dark-rimmed eyes. I was unable to stop trembling as that terrible reflection stared back at me. What had I become in the months since coming to this house? Had my family succumbed as well? Would I be able to recognize it if it was so?

I went downstairs to my favorite living room chair and sat in the dark waiting for the panic to subside while reflecting on the dream. The grim reaper had been there, hooded, and malevolent, shoveling earth into an open grave. But it wasn’t just a grave. It was the old water-well in the back yard, the one that had swallowed and partially eaten an almost-certainly forgotten young man named Devlin. In the well Linda and Sean lay on their backs side by side, vacant eyes staring up into a star-studded night-sky while earth rained down upon them, clogging their mouths and noses and filling their blank eye sockets. Through some sort of dream-magic the well appeared wide enough to hold both prone bodies. I was, it seemed, at least through the initial part of the dream, merely a mute and impartial witness to the horror that was unfolding before me, unable to do or say anything to prevent the inevitable. My legs refused to carry me the few steps to where the reaper stood shoveling soil over my loved one’s bodies.

Then the dream changed and I could see that the reaper was no longer shoveling soil, now he was scooping coal into the Hulk’s fiery maw where beyond, Linda and Sean lay placid on a bed of glowing coals. It was to be their crematorium; I understood this on that subterranean plateau I’ve already discussed at length in this story, that pure and basic animal sense that has nothing whatsoever to do with intellect. I stood and watched as flames licked around them, melting their flesh like wax.

“Used to be a coal furnace,” the reaper said, throwing a shovel-full of the dusty black stuff into the Hulk’s maw. These were the exact words Carlisle had uttered on our first day at Farnham house, and not surprisingly the reaper sounded very much like Carlisle. But he didn’t look like Carlisle. As he shoveled, his cowl began to recede and I could see part of the creature that occupied it. It was the mask, of course, its blank, idiot eyes, its eternally implacable grin, its horned-studded skull. The sum of its parts, although nearly comical, were somehow alive and piss-down-your-leg terrifying. It was laughing at me in my terror, in my total inability to react. I tried to speak but my mouth only made futile sucking sounds like a carp desperate for oxygen. And as the cowl slipped further, I began to see that the face was no longer a mask; it had become a living nightmare with expression and nuance, and suddenly it seemed to float there in space, separate from anything around it, starkly illuminated by the Hulk’s terrible death-light. The lips were very still but as I stared at them they seemed to smile without making the slightest movement.

I tried to move; I needed to get away from that terrible disembodied face but knew that it would not be allowed. Instead I was drawn to it as an insect is drawn to the sudden electrocution of light. I found myself with my hand outstretched, trying to touch that loathsome face. The thing made no attempt to brush my hand away; instead it floated closer in encouragement even as my entire hand up to the wrist vanished into that awful visage. The feeling was both warm and icy, a prickly feeling, like frostbite. Then a singing arose. A thin ethereal melody like nothing I had ever before heard. Perhaps it was a product of my own mind, or perhaps a conduit between my mind and the insanity it had succumbed to. I cannot say for sure. I remember moving mutely forward as the singing filled my senses and the phantom absorbed me, digesting me until there was nothing left of the Sam Cabot I had once known. A sudden and overwhelming panic gripped me as I writhed desperately in terror, trying to break free of the hideous bonds that now entrapped me. But it was too late. I was trapped, and I was suffocating, falling down a spiral without end.

“Will you offer your wife and your only son as a sacrifice?” the reaper asked.
I jolted violently and felt pain in my mouth and wetness at my crotch. Dear God, it was me talking, not the reaper. Somehow I knew this to be true. The words were coming from my own mouth! I’d seen them in the grave, I’d seen them burning in that terrible furnace, yet I refused to articulate the meaning of it all. I turned, still trapped helplessly in that body and tried to run. It was like walking on the moon, moving underwater; my body was hot with fever, prickling with needles, my mind screaming in panic, screaming for release. And then, with a final, unearthly scream, I came awake with a terrible wrenching jolt, as if I had just been expelled from the womb of Satan. I was in the living-room chair, my body caught in the throws of violent convulsions, blood running down my chin. My tongue was wounded, bitten half off, my nightclothes were wet at the crotch as the unmistakable smell of shit wafted up from where I had soiled myself. I had fallen asleep as I’d contemplated the dream, only to be drawn back into its terrible embrace. I knew then what I had known and tried to deny since coming to Farnham House. Something had found me, something had targeted me, perhaps had even drawn me here, and I was not strong enough to resist its terrible persuasions. My wife! My son! I knew what had to be done! I had to do it or go mad. I had to do it or die.

After cleaning myself up I went back upstairs and sat in a chair near my bed. I kept looking at Linda, the way her hair fell against the pillow, spreading out beneath her like a silk cape, the way her face shimmered in the dim light from the window, so beautiful, so . . . innocent. I had never felt so helpless, so hopeless, so filled with despair. I got up and went to Sean’s room, looked in on him, watched him sleep for a long time, afraid to touch him, afraid of what burned inside of me. I paced the floor for what seemed hours trying to puzzle out the nightmare, trying to find something in it that would give me a way out. But it was no good. Its intentions were clear. I had to succumb to the demons that had now fully invaded me. I had to or else. I stood in the hallway, doubled over with grief, wracked with convulsive sobs, my fists balled into helpless knots. Just before dawn I went back down stairs, took the twelve gauge shotgun off the rack in the study, loaded it with ammo and stood at the foot of the stairwell for a long moment looking up, my finger twitching spastically as it caressed the trigger.

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