When they reached the room, Jess turned on a flashlight she'd stuffed into her pocket and stood before the threshold. The others watched over her shoulder, and Tyler glanced at the bathroom next to them where he thought he'd seen Jess. He shuddered and looked away.
They cautiously entered the strange room as Jess waved the flashlight beam around. Terror hung heavy on her heart as the surreal claustrophobia she'd experienced here reared its ugly head again. But she tried to stuff it down and move on.
The room was still empty just like the last time they saw it, save for the strange ritualistic setup in the middle, and Ashley flicked on her flashlight too to give them more light. This room more than any other in the house was especially cold, but Jess attributed it to the wide span of windows taking up the whole back wall.
She pointed her flashlight at the chalk circle on the floor, the white light highlighting it and the dark red splotches in the middle. She looked at the candles, then lifted the light to the windows. She walked around the candles to get a better look and she pressed her face to the glass, peering out into the wilderness behind the house. Jess searched around, uselessly hoping that she would see a flash of Buddy, but she couldn't see any movement at all, save for the gentle swaying of the trees in the wind.
The moon hung up in the sky, huge and shining. The lunar eclipse hadn't started yet, and it was still glowing white, but it made her realize something.
Jess took a step back and turned her flashlight on the circle in the middle of the room again. "I think my uncle was trying to summon the spirits of the house here," she said. "And I think it went wrong."
"How do you know your uncle did this and not the old owners?" Tyler asked. "Wasn't the old guy a complete loon?"
"He was," Jess said, "but look at the windows! I haven't seen any other room in the house with this many, and you can see the moon clearly right through it. She looked at Ashley. "Turn off your flashlight."
Ashley looked at her friend apprehensively. "Why?"
"Just do it," she said, flicking off her own.
Ashley followed suit, leaving the only light in the room coming from the moon through the windows. But despite having no other light, it was bright enough for them to see each other, and certainly brighter than any other room in the house was when they reentered it after dark. It was the perfect place in the house to get the full brunt of the moonlight pouring in.
Jess turned her flashlight back on and Ashley quickly did the same. "My uncle was trying to do something with the blood moon." She pulled out the notebook tucked under her arm and flipped through it to the page she'd seen before. "He gave the times," she said. "He knew exactly when it would happen, and he prepared this room for it. He says 'summon' and 'communicate'... 'coalesce'... And he keeps saying 'invite' over and over again. Then 'become one'." She closed the book and looked at her friends. "I think he was trying to bring the ghosts of the family who died here back into the house. To give them power or something."
"Your uncle was a nut," Tyler said, shaking his head.
"But look at this blood," Jess replied, pointing her flashlight on the floor. There's quite a bit in the middle of the circle, and look, there's more over here." She shifted the light outside the chalk toward the back of the room, taking a step away from it to get a full view. She bent down. "I didn't notice this one before, but it almost looks like a handprint."
"What?" Tyler said. He bent down and scrunched his eyes, trying to confirm what Jess was saying.
"It's faded, and it's not a flat handprint, but doesn't it look like the edge of one?" Jess asked. She pressed her own hand to the floor to compare, and the shape appeared to match. She moved the light farther back, finding similar prints, with an opposing line of them a body's width away.
Jess was shocked. "It looks like he was kneeling in the circle, then he backed up suddenly, like he was trying to crawl away from something in front of him." She moved the flashlight over to the wall near the closet and found another bloody handprint, this one full and pressed evenly into the wood of the closet's molding. She held her hand up to her mouth. "My God, I didn't see this before. It looks like he turned around and grabbed the wall here to get back up to his feet."
She walked out of the room back into the hallway and Tyler and Ashley followed, both of them more immersed in the intrigue than scared. They traced the hallway back toward the front of the house as Jess swung the flashlight around, inspecting their surroundings for more clues.
"Look, here!" Jess cried.
Tyler and Ashley closed in on a stretch of wall between rooms, not saying anything at first.
"They're small, but they're there!" Jess said, getting excited. She pushed the flashlight closer to the wall and pointed at what she was talking about with her finger so her friends would understand. There were tiny dark red droplets on the wall. In any other case, they could be dismissed as something else, but it was strange how in the middle of an empty section of peeling wallpaper, there were odd red flecks dried into it in a pattern that appeared as if they were sprayed on.
"I don't get it," Tyler said.
"He didn't touch this wall, but there's still blood there," Jess explained. "It looks like it was flung there, like he was running and some flew off his hands."
"Or he sneezed," Tyler said dryly.
Jess shined the flashlight on the floor and bent down. "There's more drops over here. I think someone was chasing him."
"How do you know that was from your uncle?" Tyler asked. "How do you know that blood's not from this Dover guy killing his family?"
Jess stopped in a huff. She realized he was right, but she didn't want to turn away from her theory now; it was too much of a good one. But more than that, she had this intrinsic feeling that told her she was right. She had to be.
"I just do," she said.
She continued along the hallway and Tyler stared at her back as she went, then he sighed and grudgingly followed her and her theory.
Jess stopped at the corner in the hallway and turned to her left, shining the flashlight through the last bit of hallway at the stairs leading down to the foyer. She could see the far wall between the bars of the railing, and the light fell on the bloody, smeared handprint.
"And then he went down the stairs and outside..." she said quietly. She remembered the rest.
"So what now?" Ashley asked. "Do you think someone was actually here besides your uncle?" Her voice shook on the question as she shivered in the flickering orange light.
"I don't know," Jess admitted. "My uncle wasn't alone that night, and he didn't kill himself. I just don't know if that other person was human... or supernatural."
Tyler scoffed and rolled his eyes. "There's no such thing as—"
A cold gust of wind swept through the hallway from behind them, seemingly out of nowhere. It started near the occult room they were just in and swept all the way down to the other end where they stood. The three of them heard the gust and turned around, watching as it blew out the candles along the hallway one by one.
Tyler shivered and Jess looked at him.
"You were saying?"
Knives Out
They decided to keep to the first floor for the rest of the night, feeling it would be safer. Ashley had been terrified by their unnatural encounters and repeatedly voiced that they should leave the house, but Jess refused to abandon Buddy. Tyler flat out refused to talk about what they had seen at all, ignoring the girls if the topic came up. The three of them were tired and thoroughly spooked, but Jess wasn't ready to give up on finding answers. They'd headed through one of the hallways on the ground floor to the library, Jess determined to find something of value to complete the puzzle of what happened to her uncle.
She pulled another book off the shelf, looked at it, and then shoved it back in frustration. Her eyes scanned all the shelves in the small library, really no bigger than the office they already searched, and she was frustrated to see that the only books on the shelves seemed to be encyclopedias, old literar
y works, or annotated dissertations on said literary works.
Tyler and Ashley lingered around the edges of the room. They looked around, both of them uneasy, and Tyler had been especially quiet since coming down from the second floor. Jess could tell that his normally calm exterior had begun to crack. When he walked, there was a slight weakness in his legs that made his knees wobble, and Jess feared that soon he wouldn't be able to keep his steely front up anymore and he would be no more resistant to the oddities of this house than she was.
Jess was ready to give up as she slammed another book back down. She turned and headed for the exit, but then her eyes settled on something strange pinched between two encyclopedia volumes on a high shelf. "What's that?" she asked, stretching up on her toes.
"What?" Ashley asked, struggling to see what she spotted.
Jess stretched up, trying to reach it, but she was too short. Tyler picked up on this and he walked over and grabbed the thin book from the top shelf, glancing at it for a moment with screwed up eyes before handing it over to Jess.
"What is it?" he asked.
It appeared to be a thin and worn book, and Jess carefully peeled the pages apart as some of them were stuck together, probably from water damage, she guessed. But when she opened it, she saw that it was a scrapbook, with yellowed newspaper articles crookedly pasted onto each page.
Her eyes widened. "This is talking about what happened to the Dovers," she said, reading the articles.
"What?" Tyler asked. "How would that be here?"
"I don't know," Jess said. She absentmindedly walked into the hallway as she flipped through the pages, heading for the living room. When she got there, she sat down on the sofa and held the book closely to her eyes, staring at each page intensely.
There were all manner of articles from different newspapers around the area, detailing the grisly murders that occurred in Bloodmoon House.
"It says here that five bodies were found murdered here by the police," Jess said, translating the articles to her friends who sat down around her. She traced her finger along each yellowed article, trying to gather any relevant details. "'Vernon Dover'... 'wealthy business tycoon'... 'unexpected suspect of grisly murders'... 'committed suicide as the police closed in'..."
She flipped the page.
"...'report suggests that he killed his family one by one, roughly a day apart'..."
Tyler nodded. "I knew it! That's what I heard."
"Wait," Ashley said, confused. "How many people did it say he killed?"
Jess flipped back to the previous page. "Five," she said, reading it three times to make sure.
"Didn't he only have three kids?" Ashley asked.
"Plus the wife," Tyler said.
"That's only four victims."
"And himself," Tyler added.
Jess shook her head. She reread the article. "Five victims, not including himself." She skimmed ahead in the book until she found more information, dragging her finger across the words. "It says he had five children, three sons and two daughters, but it says the youngest daughter survived."
Tyler almost choked on his own saliva. "Wait, he had five kids?"
Jess nodded. "Why?"
"That... that picture in the kitchen..." he stammered, "...if he had three sons and two daughters, wouldn't there be that many stick figures on the wall? Or if he didn't kill one of his daughters, wouldn't there at least be three sons and one daughter on the wall?"
"What are you getting at?" Ashley asked, panic rising in her chest.
Tyler considered her for a moment, then he shook his head, fear painted across his face. "Nothing... never mind."
But Jess knew exactly what he was getting at; if that painting in the kitchen didn't depict Vernon's family, then it seemed likely that it depicted the three of them after all. But a million questions flew through her head at this revelation, and she couldn't hope to sort out any of them.
"Who put this book in the library?" Ashley asked, her voice becoming frantic. "It would have to be someone who did it after the murders."
"Your uncle," Tyler said, looking at Jess.
Jess shook her head. "I don't think my uncle had been here before that night."
Tyler thought about this. "But... if he never came here before that night, how did he set up all the candles in that room? Did he bring a box of candles with him when he left you in the car that night?"
"No..." Jess said. He had a point, and suddenly everything she thought she was putting together about what happened in this house immediately began to unravel. She looked back down at the scrapbook, considering it again with a wary eye. Had her uncle been here before? Did he make this scrapbook? She knew he had a fascination with the Dovers and their house, but somehow it seemed a step too far to her to entertain the idea that he was that obsessed with them.
She flipped through the scrapbook, skimming through more articles talking about the murders. She stopped on one.
"This one says how they were killed," Jess said.
"How?" Ashley asked, her curiosity momentarily overtaking her fear.
"It says he chained his wife up in a room on the second floor and she was starved to death."
"Oh my God," Ashley said, feeling sick. "Like... actual shackles?"
"It says the police heard rattling chains upstairs when they entered the house, and they found her and took her to the hospital, but she died from malnutrition." Jess's eyes scanned over another piece of information, and she put her hand to her mouth, feeling sick herself. "I don't want to say this one."
"What is it?" Ashley urged.
"It says he slashed two of his sons' throats with a straight razor, and he... cut out his eldest son's heart."
Ashley turned a shade of yellow and Jess started to close the book, quite certain that she couldn't read any more of it, but one last detail caught her eye before she did so.
She gasped. "It also says that he killed his oldest daughter by drowning her." Jess looked at Tyler, but he didn't have enough information to understand what she was getting at. "It says they found her body in a bathtub upstairs."
Tyler looked as white as a ghost. He was stunned into silence and blankly stared at Jess.
Jess looked back at the article. "There's a picture of her here." She pulled the scrapbook closer to her face. "She looks a lot like... me."
"Let me see that," Ashley said, pulling the book from her. "Oh my gosh, she does!"
They both looked up at Tyler, and he looked like he was going to be sick to his stomach. He turned his head away from them, not wanting to face them or talk about this anymore.
The panic and fear in each of them increased dramatically since Jess had started reading about the family, and all three of them began to feel like their safety was seriously in jeopardy.
The grandfather clock in the dining room chimed suddenly, breaking the silence and making all of them jump. They each silently counted the chimes and knew that it was eleven o'clock. The blood moon would be starting in less than an hour.
"I don't think we should be here anymore," Ashley said.
Jess was finding herself inclined to agree, but she said "Hold on..." She flipped ahead through the book and found many more articles with dates much more recent than the murders, but before the blood moon incident. Some were from as little as a year before the night of the last blood moon, and Jess began to tremble with the question of who had really put the scrapbook together? The obvious answer was that it was her uncle, but she had a niggling feeling in the pit of her stomach that told her something else was going on. Had there really been someone else here that night with Roy? Someone else that she hadn't known about? She recalled the pamphlet in the box of her uncle's effects from the Vermont Supernatural Society, and she began to consider if her uncle made some unsavory contacts from a place like that.
She thought she had been chilled by that thought enough, but when she started reading the more recent articles, she was positively rattled.
Some of them were mundane
pieces about the history of the house and murmurs around the town of how it was haunted, probably just to fill space on a slow news day, but other articles detailed missing people around the area.
"I never heard about this," Jess said.
"What?" Ashley asked.
"It says that at least fifty people have gone missing in the counties near this house in the last fifteen years. And this article's from thirteen years ago."
"I remember hearing something about that on the news a couple years ago!" Ashley said breathlessly. "They were saying how some area outside of Montpelier had an unusually high rate of disappearances."
Jess stared down at the book in silence. She was stunned from what she was reading, and all the nuggets of information swirled around in her head, her brain working in overdrive to try to fit them together into a coherent picture. Ashley did the same, and Tyler just blankly stared off into the distance, looking pale.
Silence came over the house and hung heavy on them like a thick blanket. Their heavy heartbeats thumped in their chests and raspy breath escaped their mouths as their chests shallowly rose and fell.
The sound of wood being ripped apart shattered the silence and echoed through the house, followed by an incredibly loud clattering of heavy items hitting the floor.
The three of them jumped straight off the couch, suddenly taken out of their dazes. It sounded like it came from somewhere toward the dining room, and the three of them stared timidly past the foyer.
"What was that?" Ashley whispered, terrified.
Tyler stood up and clutched the rifle in his hands, pointing it toward the dining room, which seemed to be empty from their vantage point.
Jess's heart hammered in her chest. It felt like her lungs were shrinking and she was finding it harder and harder to breathe. She was scared out of her mind, and the last thing she wanted to do was go investigate.
The Haunting of Bloodmoon House Page 14
