The Haunting of Bloodmoon House

by Jeff DeGordick

  The Haunting of Bloodmoon House

  Jeff DeGordick

  Contents

  Foreword

  1. The Start of It All

  2. New Beginnings

  3. Grim Report

  4. Frightful Memories

  5. A Bump in the Night

  6. Keepsakes

  7. Bullets and Bargains

  8. Checklist

  9. Supply Run

  10. Bloodmoon House

  11. Portraits

  12. Vigil

  13. Moving In

  14. Card Trick

  15. Claustrophobia

  16. Steamy Invitation

  17. Accusations

  18. Unleashed

  19. Into the Darkened Maw

  20. Cold Shoulder

  21. Crime Scene

  22. Knives Out

  23. Buried

  24. Getaway

  25. The Creeping Shadow

  26. Unmasked

  27. Search Party

  28. Family Tree

  29. Escape

  30. Some Kind of White Knight

  31. Birthday Wish

  32. Marco Polo

  33. House Guest

  34. Blood Sacrifice

  35. Splitting Up

  36. Rise of the Dead

  37. Whispers and Ciphers

  38. Master of the House

  39. Aftermath

  40. A New Leaf

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2017 by Jeff DeGordick

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover images copyright © Shutterstock

  Created with Vellum

  Foreword

  Click here to sign up to my email list and get a FREE copy of Before the Blood Moon, a companion story to this novel.

  Visit my website to check out all my other books:

  www.jeffdegordick.com

  Or say hello on my Facebook and Twitter page:

  www.facebook.com/jeffdegordickauthor

  www.twitter.com/jeffdegordick

  The Start of It All

  The crowd of bodies swept and hurried in front of her, and people in scary masks and ghoulish face paint leered at her, sending her heart rate into a frenzy. She stumbled around, her little six-year-old frame being pushed to and fro in every direction by the rumbling crowd. Bright and dazzling lights flashed in a multitude of colors, equally dazzling and terrifying her. But the noise was the most disorienting thing of all: horns and bells and sirens and whistles echoed through the night, joined by the cacophonous voices of the boisterous gathering. Men and women, teens and babies, and toddlers just like her, moved from one attraction to another. Some tried their luck knocking down wooden milk bottles with a baseball; others fared better lobbing tennis balls into peach baskets. Rings were tossed, popcorn was spilled, and oversized hammers were swung, all to the cheers of the crowd.

  But this little girl wasn't having the joyful time that everyone else was. She was crying and she was lost.

  As the scurrying people bumped and jostled her, tears were shed and rolled down her rosy cheeks. Her lower lip quivered as her wide and wet eyes looked up and searched the crowd of passersby. Occasionally an adult would give her a concerned look before moving on, and some of the other children wondered why she seemed so upset but then returned their attention to the tilt-a-whirl they were about to ride.

  Her little mouth opened, an inaudible whine emitting from her throat. She tried to call out for someone, but she couldn't form the words. Then a big, meaty hand grabbed her tiny wrist and yanked her through the bodies. It clamped down so hard that it hurt, and the rough jerk it gave her painfully pulled at the ligaments in her shoulder. Her feet stumbled along the grass as she was dragged through the crowd by what appeared to her as a huge and lumbering man, though he wasn't any bigger than the average man of the crowd.

  The little girl's heart raced more, and she tried to swallow, her throat dry. When they finally made it through the bulk of the human mass and reached the edge of the fairgrounds toward the parking lot, the man dragging her took a quick look around, then his eyes settled on his tan Oldsmobile nestled in the dark corner of the lot.

  "Don't wander off like that," the man told her. "Any old person could scoop you up and nobody would know."

  She stared up at her uncle with troubled eyes. His words did nothing to comfort her.

  He finished off the last sip in his red Solo cup and tossed it onto the grass. He brought the back of his free hand up to his mouth and wiped his lips, and then he roughly tugged on his niece's arm again and pulled her toward the car. The wind was chilly and crisp; a perfect October night. The darkness had blanketed the fair and provided the perfect contrast to all of the vibrant colors flashing into its black abyss, but they were leaving all that behind tonight.

  "But... but we just got here," the little girl protested. "I didn't get to go on a ride yet." She wanted to plead her case more, but as she watched her uncle's bushy eyebrows furrow above his ugly and bulbous nose as he looked on toward his car, she felt the rest of her words bunch up in her throat.

  He ushered her into the passenger seat without another word from her and then he stumbled around the hood to the driver's side and got in. He clumsily jabbed the key into the ignition and turned it. The long and blocky Oldsmobile rumbled into life. Her uncle threw it into reverse and backed the tires up to the start of a shady hill, then he cranked it into drive and peeled out of the parking lot.

  The rubber found the asphalt and he sped down the road. He breathed heavily with his mouth open and the little girl could smell the strong and sour scent wafting out of it.

  As the car drifted toward the wrong side of the road before he corrected it, his niece said "Uncle Roy..." She repeated herself, softer this time, like if she said it above a whisper he would turn and snap her head off.

  Roy leaned over in his seat and fumbled with the glove compartment in front of her, opening it and pulling out a bottle of vodka. He pressed the compartment closed and dragged the bottle across his niece's leg and the console before hoisting it up into his lap. He let go of the steering wheel and unscrewed the cap, tugging the half-empty bottle up to his lips and letting the stinging liquid slide down his throat.

  The Oldsmobile became as ungraceful as he was as it barreled down the road, his foot getting heavier.

  "Where are we going?" his niece asked at last.

  Roy took another swig and choked it down. He belched and turned his eyes on her. They were starting to swim, but yet there was an unnerving intensity in them. A wide and crooked smile hung on his lips. "Tonight's a special night," he said, his words just on the edge of slurring. He paused, waiting for her to ask why it was special, but she only sat neatly in her seat with her hands folded in her lap, her nervous fingers working at each other. So he continued: "Do you know why tonight's a special night?"

  She shook her head.

  "Well Jessica, tonight is the night of the big lunar eclipse. We haven't had one of these visible to us for seventeen years. But it's not just any eclipse... it's a total eclipse. Do you know what they call a total lunar eclipse?"

  She shook her head again, scared.

  Her uncle's smile widened, one corner of it drooping as he began to lose feeling in it. "It's called a blood
moon," he said with glee. "They say when a blood moon happens, the energies on Earth become very powerful, and the unseen world gets stronger, especially in places where the spirits are already strong." He paused and stared down the solid yellow line on the road that was now running right under the middle of the car. He turned back to Jessica. "And I'm going to take you to just the place to look at the moon tonight. Do you know where that is?"

  Jessica just stared at him. Everything that was going on completely overwhelmed her six-year-old mind, and she had never before experienced such fear. She just wanted to go home, but she didn't know how to express it.

  "We're going up to the old Dover Estate," her uncle Roy continued. "Have you ever heard of it? It's a big old spooky house hidden up in the hills. Built almost ninety years ago by the Dovers. Some people say it's the most haunted house in America."

  Roy spun the steering wheel suddenly, hardly hitting the brakes at all as the car careened around a corner and into a wooded driveway. Jessica twisted and tilted in her seat, and she gripped the fabric with tight little fists to keep from flying out of it. Her heart was beating as fast as a mouse's. The headlights dashed through the narrow driveway between the tall pines as the car sped up the long, twisting path, slowly climbing the hill toward the house.

  "Mr. Dover went a little crazy one day," Roy said. "They say he was a mad hatter." He leaned over and grinned at his niece. "Too much mercury in the brain!"

  He swerved the wheel again and the car followed suit, loosely taking a tight bend in the gravel path. The front-left corner of the Oldsmobile plowed through a grouping of bushes before Roy corrected it.

  "He killed his whole family, one by one. A wife, three sons and two daughters, one of them about as old as you. He slashed them! Drowned them! Cut them! And he squeezed the life out of them!" Roy gripped his niece's leg with a strong and meaty hand, squeezing it.

  Jessica began crying. When the shock of her uncle's unusual and crazed tirade wore off, she stuttered "B-But mommy and daddy said you were taking me to the fair." She closed her eyes as more tears squeezed out of them. Roy drove on, staring at the path ahead with a crazed grin as his hand gently loosened and pulled away from Jessica's reddened leg.

  "Your daddy didn't want me taking you out at all," he admitted bitterly. "He never liked me much. But your mommy said I could. And I'm taking you somewhere a whole lot more fun than the fair..."

  After another few wild twists and turns, the car screeched to a halt, the tires scraping against the loose gravel. Jessica opened her eyes. Her tears blurred her vision and she wiped them away with her fingers. Standing tall and ominous in front of them was a two-story mansion sprawled out in the middle of a clearing in the woods. Darkened windows stared down at her with damaged shutters on either side slapping against the house in the breeze. Two long pillars held up a balcony on the second floor hanging over the front entrance, and a long set of stairs stretched up from the ground to the porch sitting before the front door, which was shrouded in shadow. The air felt colder than usual, even with the car's heat on. And even though the house had been abandoned for a long time, there was something palpable about it that made it feel alive; a presence that Jessica didn't understand.

  Roy took another swig from the vodka bottle and set it down on his lap. He threw the Oldsmobile into park and stared at the house in the brightness of the headlights. "Some say the Dovers' ghos' still wander the halls of the house. Some say they want vengeance. Some say they jus' want ta be leh free." He slurred the last few words and he took another drink. His head bowed and he paused like he was composing himself. When he glanced back up at the house, there was something in his eyes that looked like nervousness.

  "I wanna go home," Jessica spoke up at last.

  Roy ignored her, his gaze not breaking from the house. "The house's stood abandoned for the las' sissty years. But tonight's a speshul night. Look!" He pointed up at the sky and Jessica timidly bent forward in her seat and gazed up into the darkness.

  A large roving cloud slowly drifted through the dark expanse, and when it was clear, the moon came out from behind it, not the bright and usual white that Jessica had seen earlier in the night, but a darker and brooding red, like rust.

  "The blood moon," Roy announced.

  "I-I wanna go home," Jessica repeated, a little louder this time.

  Roy pushed open the driver-side door and clumsily shifted his weight, staggering out of the car and onto his feet.

  "I want to go home!" Jessica cried, terrified. "I want to go home!"

  Roy slammed the door shut and stood before the huge house. He took it all in one last time, and then he stumbled on for the entrance, his drunken body cutting through the headlights and creating strange shadows against the house's façade. He laboriously worked his way up the front steps, vodka bottle still in hand, then he disappeared into the shroud of darkness hanging over the front door.

  Jessica watched in horror as she heard the long and labored creak of wood. And then she was left alone.

  How long she was there waiting in the car by herself, she couldn't tell. Seconds seemed to turn into hours, and the clearing she was in appeared to close in on her when she wasn't looking, slowly but surely taking an inch here and an inch there, like a malicious spirit creeping up on her to choke the life out of her. Despite the cutting glow of the headlights, the darkness was absolute. Only the eerie red moon cast its pale light on the trees and the gravel around her. It gave everything an evil tinge, and Jessica waited, transfixed, completely at its mercy.

  The car's engine idled and heat still came through the vents. If it weren't for that, Jessica might have been scared to death. She watched the front doors where her uncle disappeared, never taking her eyes away from it. His words had put frightening images into her mind. Her eyes bore through the darkness of the entrance and she saw inside to the interior: hallways, rooms and stairs, all populated by the roaming and lunatic spirits of the brutally murdered. And her uncle was in the middle of it. These were frightening things that she shouldn't have had any concept of—ideas she hadn't even been exposed to yet—but they were there in her mind's eye, vivid and horrifying.

  Her eyes drifted up to the grimy windows on the second floor. There was a soft orange light in one of them, growing brighter. As it came near to the window, she saw that it looked like a candle. It drifted by until it disappeared, then the glow briefly reappeared in another window before fading into the darkness again.

  She shifted her tiny weight on the car seat and bunched her fists up tighter on the fabric until her fingers went white. The wretched beast of night smothered her. A stiff, cold breeze picked up and whisked through the trees, making them shake and sway. Needles and leaves of pines and aspens drifted in the night and cut through the white headlights. The whole scene turned into a harmonious symphony, all highlighted by the reddish, frightening moon. The dull light seem to crawl through the vents of the car and drift up Jessica's nostrils, choking the breath out of her lungs from the inside. Her breathing became rapid and she came close to hyperventilating.

  Then something banged on the back of the car.

  Jessica jumped up in her seat and spun around. She gripped the shoulders of it and timidly peered past the headrest.

  It was hard to see in the darkness, but the startling noise was only a heavy branch that had been plucked from a swaying tree and fell onto the trunk of the car. When Jessica saw what it was, her heart settled a little and she slowly twisted back around in her seat and sat down.

  Her uncle stood in front of the car, blood pouring out of his mouth.

  Jessica screamed.

  The high beams of the Oldsmobile starkly lit him and he looked as pale as a ghost. His bushy eyebrows were furrowed and there was something like great pain and fear stitched into his sweaty, panicked face. He still held the now-nearly empty vodka bottle in his shaking hand. He opened his mouth to say something, but a low and unintelligible string of words was all that could be heard over the rumble of the engine
as more blood poured out of his mouth and stained his gray jacket.

  Roy stumbled backward, then his weight shifted and he staggered forward. His legs looked weak, and combined with his drunkenness, he had a hard time standing at all. His weight gave out from under him and he lurched forward, stretching his hands out to break his fall on the hood of the car. The vodka bottle in his hand smashed against the metal, and the shattered glass sprayed and swam down the tiny currents of vodka sliding off the front edge of the hood.

  Jessica screamed again, absolute terror clutching her heart. Roy turned suddenly and stumbled off toward the woods at the side of the house. Jessica screamed and pleaded for him to come back, but he kept walking until the blackness hugging the trees swallowed him up. She settled down and waited.

  There was silence for a long time.

  She held her breath.

  Far in the deep, dark woods, screams of sheer terror and horrific pain rang out like a siren.

  Jessica screamed again. She screamed so hard that her lungs went raw. She climbed over the console to the steering wheel and mashed on the horn with all of her might. She slapped it and hammered it with her tiny fists, shoving her meager bodyweight against it repeatedly as she screamed and screamed into the night.

  New Beginnings

  The gentle motion of the water churned under her, pulling her along the surface on her pool float. She closed her eyes and let her pale skin bask in the comforting warmth of the sun. The nature all around her cooed to her and made her entire body relax. She could drift on like this for days, she thought. It was perhaps the first true moment of bliss she'd ever experienced.

  "Cannonball!"

  She opened her eyes just in time to witness the serenity of the pool be ripped apart. Water splashed all over her body, her face, and in her eyes, stinging them.