by Alex Severin
The whispers were about grown up things, things he didn't know about, but knew enough that he shouldn't be listening to it.
He wanted to leave but he couldn't move, couldn't prise himself from the spot, couldn't even scream when he realized there was a man standing in the shadows under a tree, just a few feet away from him. He'd been there the whole time, watching him while he watched the shadows in the window and listened to the whispers in the dark.
The man lunged forward and grabbed him by the arm, forced a palm over his mouth.
“You shouldn't be here, boy. This is no place for you. This is a bad place, a bad place for everybody.”
George's breath caught in his throat and he couldn't breathe for what seemed like forever. He felt dizzy, his fear paralyzing his muscles. The man's breath stank of cheap whisky and vomit; the stench made George heave as tears rolled down his cheeks.
Something caught George's eye and he looked away from the man. There were faces at the windows, many faces, white, almost luminous. They smiled at him but they were not pretty faces, they were twisted, ugly, leering faces, faces that made him feel ill, made him want to turn and run. The faces had mad eyes, slavering mouths, lazy tongues that hung from wet lips. They called out to him, told him to come inside and play with them.
George found his voice and screamed, broke free of the old man and ran home as fast as his legs would carry him, not stopping once for breath.
When he reached the cottage, faster than he had reached The Blair earlier, he bent over, hands on his knees as his body heaved and struggled for air. He was shaking, teeth chattering in his head. The vision of the insane faces at the window would not leave him.
He crept back into the cottage and spent a sleepless night, tossing and turning, hiding under the covers and jumping at every minute noise of the night outside his window.
That was the beginning of George Dalziel's life-long relationship with The Blair.
He was an old man but not frail or fragile, but his eyes, Victoria saw, were haunted. She wondered what else those eyes had seen, what they had witnessed.
"Why d'you want to know about that place, lassie?"
"I've just bought it, Mr. Dalziel. I saw it from the road and fell in love with it," Victoria explained.
He raised his eyebrows at her.
"You're not the first to come under her spell. You'll not be the last either."
She told him she wanted to know anything and everything he knew about the house, not to leave anything out at all. She needed to know.
The two of them sat for hours, Victoria on the edge of her seat, soaking up all the tales the old man told.
George told her the story of the Patterson family, the first owners, and builders, of The Blair; the story took some of the shine from her eyes - he made it sound real, plausible. Coming from him the story seemed less like an old scary tale or an embellished legend. Nine deaths. An entire family had lived and died there, all of them painfully. The house stood empty for almost thirty years after the Patterson deaths.
Next, The Blair was a seminary for junior and apprentice priests. The grounds were littered with the bones of young boys, used and abused and discarded by the debauched Priests who were their teachers, men of God who took the innocence and the lives of children in their care.
The next use for The Blair was as an orphanage. It was shut down amid a scandal identical to the one that ended her days as a seminary. And when George and his family moved into the cottage near by, The Blair was an insane asylum run by an internationally renowned doctor. The asylum went the same way as it had in each previous incarnation. It was closed when it was discovered the respected doctor had been conducting inhumane experiments on his dependent and vulnerable patients.
The Blair, ever since her life began, had become a place where dead innocents slept. Unquiet.
"She's cursed," George said, matter-of-factly.
"I don't believe in curses, Mr. Dalziel. That's superstitions and nonsense."
"You don't have to believe me, lassie. You'll find out soon enough. As I said, you'll never spend a night there..." he paused for a few seconds and looked her straight in the eye, fear shining in his dark irises. "...at least not a peaceful one."
Victoria stood up thinking that was the end of their conversation, thinking that was all George was going to say.
"Sit yourself down. I'm not finished yet. There's more to tell. Things you need to know."
He explained that she did not have to believe anything that he told her and she could think of him as a silly old fool if she wished. But he felt obligated to tell her.
"It was thirty years ago that The Blair chose her last owner. She does that, you know - chooses her victims." George studied Victoria as he spoke. Her face registered no emotion, but the inner corner of her right eye twitched slightly, something that happened whenever she was nervous or stressed or agitated. That was the only outward sign that she was not relaxed.
"It was a Hotel last, yes?" She asked him.
"Been talking to that Wilson character, have you?" He smiled knowingly. "No, she's never been a Hotel."
George had been a detective in the Grampian Police and since the incident had happened in the area he lived, he was sent to investigate a death at The Blair.
The owner at the time was Margaret Middleton, who was new to the area. She kept herself to herself and didn't venture out very often. The locals considered her strange.
"The thing is, I knew her. She was a good friend of mine, had been for years. We went to university together. After, I joined the police force and she became a solicitor. And she wasn't strange before she moved into that place." George's face suddenly looked much older as he remembered the details of his friend's case.
"It was her death I had to investigate."
His lips tightened into a thin, tense line. Victoria reached out and laid her palm over his hand. He tried to smile at her, appreciative of the comforting gesture and patted the back of her hand.
"What happened to her?" Victoria asked in a small, soft voice.
"She was murdered. In that house."
George told her the story of his friend, Margaret Middleton.
She was a feisty, fiercely independent young woman. There had been a craze while they were at university for séances and tarot card readings; Margaret poured vast amounts of scorn on anybody who took part in what she considered nonsense. She had been scathing and skeptical about anything and everything which was not firmly planted in the realms of logic and reality.
George hadn't seen her for weeks before she died. She had only been in the house for two months when she decided not to speak to him any more. She began to change from the day she moved into The Blair. Suddenly, their Friday lunch dates in Aberdeen were canceled - something they had been doing together for years.
She wouldn't talk to him on the phone and instead would make some excuse about why she could not stop to chat. And, of course, George had never set foot inside The Blair - until the day he was called upon to investigate her death.
When he crossed the threshold of The Blair for the first time, he was shaking. The terror of that night so many years ago came flooding back to him. He had never forgotten the eerie sight of the luminous leering faces peering out from the darkened windows. At this moment he felt as if all those faces surrounded him, as if they mocked and laughed at him. His mouth was dry, palms slick with sweat, and his breath was forced though fear-constricted airways.
His legs almost gave way when he entered the sitting room and saw Margaret's naked, battered body lying there in the middle of the floor.
She'd been beaten so badly there were perfect fist imprints on her flesh, bite marks that showed each and every crooked tooth in somebody's upper and lower jaw.
The skin on her right cheek had been savagely torn into and ripped open. George turned away, his stomach heaving at the sight of his friend's pure white cheekbone showing from beneath her ruined flesh. His friend. His friend for years. Beaten t
o death in her own home in his quiet little village.
Nothing like this had ever happened here before. Nothing. Except in that house. Whenever anything out of the ordinary happened here, it was always this place at the heart of it. It seemed to be a living thing. It seemed to breathe malevolence into the air around it. Victoria could see that the old man was weary now, drained after reliving such a horrific day in his life.
She put her hand on his shoulder and thanked him for his time and told him she would like to come back and see him again soon.
The look he gave her was difficult to interpret but it scared her. She didn't really want to think about what it meant.
~
Victoria spent thousands on the house making the bottom floor habitable. Three months down the road and she was ready to spend her first night in The Blair.
But she was not sleeping soundly; she was aware of every old-house-noise the place made, noises above her and below her, noises around her. Sometimes, the sounds seemed to come out of the very air around her.
She tossed and turned, fell into a shallow sleep.
Then she felt something touch her.
Someone touch her.
She felt hands on her, big, rough, callused hands sliding their way up her body, beneath her shirt, dirty hands with ragged nails touching her clean skin.
And then there were more hands; still in her half-asleep state she arched her back and pressed her body to their touch, pleasure invading her slumber.
And sounds; she was waking from her unquiet fugue.
Sounds filled the air around her, sounds that seemed to come from drooling mouths running with saliva - slurping, sucking, gargling noises rang in her ears.
"Victoria," a voice said. The voice sounded strange, as if the words had been said while the speaker licked their lips; the words were slightly muffled, distorted, as if the tongue was too large for the mouth and it protruded too far and impaired the speech.
She opened her eyes and screamed.
There was a man on top of her now; he was huge and leered at her. She could feel the hard stab of his cock pushing into her through the sheer fabric of her pajama bottoms.
He licked her face with a slimy, stinking tongue. Victoria turned her face away from him as she struggled to free herself. Her gut knotted and she dry-heaved; the stench from his mouth was like decayed meat and his huge teeth were half-rotted and covered in a thick layer of rancid yellow plaque.
And there were others, all as dirty and disgusting as he was, all pushing and shoving at each other to get near Victoria.
All of them wanted to play with her.
And they did.
All night.
~
George walked slowly along the road that led to The Blair. He needed to get there but he did not want to arrive. Victoria reminded him so much of Margaret. But they were so very alike that he knew Victoria wouldn't listen to him either.
There was an ache in his gut - fear, dread, inevitability. He was almost wishing that she would be dead when he got there - the alternative, nobody could live through and resume a normal life.
He had known it was them. He knew they murdered Margaret - those faces he had seen at the window that night so many years ago. And it wasn't the only time he had seen them. Down the years there were older faces, new faces, new generations of them, each generation more demented than the previous one - the insane breeding with the insane and producing something that should have never been.
George had tried to tell his superiors about them when he was still in the force. They thought he was mad, driven over the edge by the shock of Margaret's death. They would not entertain the notion that anybody could have been left behind when the asylum closed.
But they had.
George knew they had.
He'd seen them.
He had been seeing them all his life. He had been taunted by them all his life. Haunted by them.
It was dark when he finally reached The Blair. His heart thundered in his chest, not from exertion but from pure fear. Here he was again, standing in front of that house, as terrified as he had been as a seven year old boy.
He stood there until he saw what he knew he would see.
But this time, there was just one eerie grin, one caricature of a face with a drooling mouth and insane eyes peering out at him from the darkened windows, beckoning him to cross the threshold of The Blair.
###
ALEX SEVERIN BIO
I was born and raised in the Scottish Highlands, but transplanted to the Wild, Wild West of the USA in 2005.
I write short stories, novels, screenplays, and love to write about things that both repel and fascinate.
I've tried my hand at custom written erotica - and quite successfully too, but decided it was time for a career change after the clown porn story. Don't ask.
CONNECT WITH ME -
FACEBOOK -
www.facebook.com/SeverinVampireErotica
TWITTER -
www.twitter.com/AlexSeverin
BLOG -
www.Vampire-Erotica-Stories.blogspot.com
COVER CREDITS -
Cover design by Alex Severin
Original Cover Image - goth1 by geoX at sxc.hu
