The Haunting of Bloodmoon House

by Jeff DeGordick

  The blood moon shone down on him and the house from above, and he stared up at it briefly before his nerves got the better of him. He approached the house and slowly walked up its groaning steps, walking across the porch to the front door.

  Before he could grab the handle, the door creaked open on its own, beckoning him in.

  Tyler gulped, then he entered the house.

  Family Tree

  "I don't understand."

  Roy leaned against the workbench. "When I was a young boy, I found out my sister and I were adopted. I always had this fascination with this house, and I could never understand why." There was a look in his eye like he was going over a wistful memory. "When I looked into my background, I found out why.

  "I found out that my birth mother gave your mom and I away when we were young. We were both very small at the time, so neither one of us remembered her, but it turns out this mysterious woman had changed her name and fled, trying to get as far away from here as possible and leave her old life behind."

  Jess's eyes searched her uncle's face, trying to find the hidden meaning he was hinting at.

  He smiled. "As it turns out, that woman's birth name was Elaina Dover. When the massacre happened in this house eighty years ago, she was just a little six-year-old girl."

  Jess's eyes widened. Vernon Dover's daughter. The only one who had survived that night all those years ago.

  "She was sent to foster care herself, now orphaned, and when she grew up and had children, she realized her mistake and decided it was better if she had as little contact with others as possible. So she gave your mother and I up. But she was our mother, and that would make her your grandmother by birth. If circumstances were different, things would have turned out differently. But Vernon..." Roy looked up toward the ceiling.

  Jess could see that same odd look in his eyes: fear.

  "What about Vernon?" Jess asked. "What does he want with you?"

  Roy continued. "I came to this house the first time when I was a teenager, and he got his hooks into me then." His voice was quiet, as if he was afraid of speaking the words too loudly. "Vernon—my grandfather—showed himself to me, and he demanded that I work for him. I was young and foolis— Uh... I was young and obedient, and I did what he wanted of me. Then the others began to show themselves to me and made similar demands."

  "The rest of the family?" Jess asked. "Why?"

  Roy's eyes shifted around. "After being violently murdered in this house, and Vernon taking his own life, their spirits were ripped from their bodies and imprisoned here. Hatred takes a hold of everyone's heart eventually, and he corrupted them like all the others. They wanted me to make sacrifices over the years, both of myself and... others."

  Jess thought about the mass grave behind the house and shuddered.

  She felt nervous, like the more of the truth she uncovered, the closer she would become to her own demise. She swallowed. "What are you trying to do?"

  "The energies are strong tonight and the barrier between our world and theirs is thinning. With the energies of someone with their own blood being released tonight, that will dissolve the barrier and allow them to come into our world."

  "Our world?"

  Roy nodded. "The blood of one more family member is what they need, and then they can be free."

  "Why me?" Jess asked. "Why don't you give yourself up if you want it so badly?"

  A delirious and sinister smile crept over his face. "They wouldn't require that of me," he said. "I've been good to them. Very good. I even brought Mom to Grandpa."

  Jess was shocked. "Your own mother?"

  "I tracked her down eventually," he said. "She couldn't hide for long. Now she's with them."

  "You're sick!" Jess shouted. Revulsion coursed through her veins and she felt sick to her stomach all over again. "What about my mom?" she asked timidly.

  "All that's needed is one more sacrifice. And the energies are much stronger from a virgin." He cast a cocked eye at her. "You haven't done anything with that boy yet, have you?"

  Jess turned her head away as she felt her face flush. She thought about Tyler and silently pleaded for him to save her. The warmness that they shared together, the tender and shy back and forth, warmed her heart in the cold basement, and she realized in that moment that she would do anything to feel his touch again, to see his eyes staring into hers.

  Roy turned back to the workbench and began flipping through the book again. Jess watched him as he did, and soon he began muttering unintelligible phrases under his breath. He slipped his hand into a pocket in his cloak and withdrew a piece of chalk. He drew a circle on the surface of the wooden workbench, then he placed his hand flat in the middle of it while he used his other hand to flip through the book.

  "What are you doing?" Jess asked.

  He ignored her as he muttered his incantations. His hand rose from the circle, then he pressed his forefinger into the middle of it and dragged it around inside. He flipped the pages, referencing more instructions while he chanted, and when he finished, he fell silent and turned back to Jess.

  "I'm summoning your friends back into the house," he said.

  "What do you mean?" Jess asked, confused.

  Roy smirked. "Do you really think the three of you decided to come up to this house of your own volition, on the blood moon of all nights?"

  The revelation hit her like a sack of bricks. Jess's whole body went cold and she realized that they were dealing with forces far beyond her comprehension. And as she regarded her uncle, she realized what she was truly looking at: the man in front of her was the product of years of dedicated study into the occult and matters that she had never believed even existed. But the evidence was right in front of her now, and it was so far beyond her grasp that it chilled her very soul.

  Roy raised his arm and the sleeve of his cloak fell back to reveal a watch on his wrist. "The apex of the blood moon is almost here," he said. "As soon as your friends arrive, it will be time." He turned back to the book, not chanting this time, but just studying it, and Jess feared what he was preparing for.

  Her neck was so tired that she couldn't even hold it up anymore, and she let it slide down as she used what little strength was left in her legs to hold herself up and reduce the strain on her arms. Her arms were completely cold now, having lost almost all feeling from hanging up for so long. She quietly began to sob as her uncle kept his attention turned away from her, and she remained like that for a long time.

  Then finally, she heard footsteps somewhere above them and a door slam shut.

  Her uncle looked up from the book at the ceiling. "That must be your friend, Tyler," he said with a smile. Jess opened her mouth to scream for him, but Roy wheeled around suddenly and brandished the knife at her throat. "You make so much as a sound, and I'll cut the life out of you right here," he snarled.

  Jess's mouth hung open, but she stayed silent, fear locking her vocal cords.

  Roy opened a drawer in the tool cabinet and pulled out a revolver. He took that and the knife and then he disappeared into the hallway. His footsteps clapped along the cement and faded up the stairs.

  As Jess hung there, fearing for her life, she realized that she was even more fearful for Tyler's life. Suddenly, she understood the even stronger emotion fueling her fear. It was perhaps the purest, most powerful human emotion one could feel for another.

  She softly bit her lip as her stomach worked into knots in the awful silence.

  Escape

  The buzzing sound of the light bulb bored into her ears, and if she stood still, if she stopped struggling against the restraints and trying to escape, she would hear the noise worm its way into her skull in the silence. She couldn't let that happen; it was a constant reminder that she had to fight to get out of there, to help Tyler before something terrible happened to him.

  But as much as she struggled, Jess just couldn't find a way to free herself, and the crushing reality that her situation was truly hopeless weighed heavily on her shoulders.
/>
  She looked up at the chain and shook her arms violently. The chain whipped and rattled, but there didn't seem to be any way to free herself or slip her wrists through the shackle binding them together.

  Slow footsteps stretched across the floor above her. She couldn't tell what was going on up there, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know. If Tyler was in the house, that meant he had survived the crash, and her heart lightened at that, but he wouldn't expect her uncle to be lurking around in the shadows for him.

  Jess gave another tug on her shackles, but it was fruitless. She jumped on the spot and tried to use her body weight to pull the chain out of the ceiling, but when the chain became taut, all she did was loosen her arms in their sockets, causing terrible pain to rip through her shoulders and upper back.

  Jess gasped and began crying. The swirl of pain and agony she went through, coupled with the tremendously negative and heavy sense of foreboding, were too much for her to bear, and she broke down. She sobbed profusely, lamenting at her hopeless situation. All the memories of when she was a little six-year-old girl came back to her. Coming back to this house to face her fears and unexpectedly coming face-to-face with her uncle again did nothing to free her from her burden of fear; she was still just as crippled by the cursed fright as she always had been, and that's the way it always would be.

  As her uncle said, the blood moon was here, and when he was finished rounding up her friends, doing God knew what to them, he would be back for her with that knife.

  She trembled. Jess tried to imagine how horrible the feeling of a knife plunging through her skin and into her organs would be—how painful it would be—but the thought only served to give her a panic attack. Her eyes squeezed up as her mouth was pressed into a long, straight line, the corners of it curving down slightly. Her face was contorted into a mess of terrible anguish, knowing that her death was coming soon. She didn't want to die, but she knew she was helpless to stop it.

  She hung there like a slab of meat as she sulked, her tears dripping onto the floor. Her clothes were still wet and her body temperature lowered as she inadvertently shivered. She saw those memories running through her mind of her sitting in the passenger seat of her uncle's car... the horrors she had witnessed all those years ago. And now, somehow her uncle had returned. Her whole life had been ruled by him, from that moment twelve years ago to the present day. Each and every year, he had an iron grip on her destiny, and now he had decided to snuff it out. It was unfair. It was so unfair that it was enough to make her angry.

  Jess lifted her head suddenly. She opened her eyes and the stark basement came back into focus. She stared blankly at the wall in front of her, starting to ignore the pain coursing through her body.

  It was unfair. But so what?

  Jess suddenly realized that that fear had taken hold of her, planting roots deep into her when she was that little six-year-old girl. But she wasn't six years old anymore.

  In fact, she had no concept of time and didn't know if it was past midnight yet, but if it was, then she was now eighteen years old. She finished high school and she was preparing to go to university soon and transition into adult life. In that moment, hanging there at her lowest point, she came to the revelation that she was only truly helpless if she decided to be.

  That time was over. She was done being a victim. It was time to take back her life, even if she had to wrest it from her uncle's wretched hands.

  Jess looked up at the chain with a more sagacious eye. She stepped to the side so she could get a better look at it, and she spotted the entire mechanism that was holding her prisoner: there was a hook screwed into the ceiling, and attached to her shackle was an ordinary length of chain that latched onto the hook at the other end. She eyed it carefully, and she determined that if she could lift her end of the chain high enough, she would be able to simply slip it right off the hook.

  A new sense of determination filled her and immediately erased the anguish. A potent vitality returned to her body, easing her pain and giving her a second wind. It was so uncharacteristic of her, but she liked the feeling.

  She searched around the small room, realizing that she would have to climb on top of something to get enough height to be able to remove the chain from the hook. Her eyes fell on the couch at the back of the room, peeking out from under a large white sheet that covered a grouping of furniture in the corner. She shuffled over to it and found that she could reach it with her feet. It was awkward to do with her arms extended over her head, but she managed to spin around and step onto it. Her torso was bent forward to accommodate the short length of the chain pulling her toward the center of the room, but she steadied her balance and then gazed at the hook.

  But it was facing away from her. She could only get free if she lifted the chain from the other side of the room where the workbench was. She had to get on there.

  Jess crossed the cold floor as far as the chain would allow, then she lifted her foot and stretched it high in the air for the edge of the workbench. It seemed to be at least four feet tall, and it would be difficult to pull herself up onto it. When she propped her foot on the edge, she tried to use what little strength was left in her leg to pull herself up. But with the awkwardness of her arms tugged behind her, she lost her balance and spun around, swinging through the air and scraping her shoes against the floor as she swung by.

  She grunted and ignored the ripping pain shooting through her arms from the stunt. She put herself back together, then she tried again, but the workbench was just too high and the angle was too awkward for her to do it.

  The determination she'd found ebbed away as hopelessness set back in. It was a gentle reminder that she wasn't free of it, like it was stroking the back of her shoulders and whispering sinister things to her, taunting her. The sting of tears returned to her face, and she was dangerously close to letting the entire front she'd built up be shattered.

  There was a scuffle upstairs. Heavy footsteps unevenly moved around the floor in quick succession. Then there was a gunshot.

  "Tyler!" Jess gasped.

  She had no way at all of knowing what was going on above her, and she couldn't bear the thought of something happening to him. She had to get free, no matter what.

  Think, Jess, think!

  Her gaze swept around the room, and her eyes fell on the office chair sitting by the couch. She quickly walked over to it and placed a foot on the seat. Carefully twirling herself around under the chain and keeping a little weight on the chair, she wheeled it over to the workbench. When the back of the chair was propped up against it, she very carefully stepped onto the shaky seat, making sure her weight transitioned slowly and evenly so that the chair's wheels wouldn't spin out under her. She twisted around and faced the hook in the middle of the ceiling, bending forward at the waist. It was another large step behind her to get onto the workbench, but she did it carefully. Her heels caught the edge of the workbench and she just managed to stand on top without being whipped forward off of it.

  The chain was taut, and it afforded her very little movement in trying to get free. But when Jess was ready, she flicked her arms up and a little wave worked its way through the chain from her shackle to the hook. The last link of the chain jumped off the hook, but then fell back onto it.

  "Come on..." she muttered.

  She steadied herself again, then she gave the chain another jerk. She watched as the wave traveled, like the tiny movement was her own personal savior.

  The wave reached the hook, the last link of the chain jumped up. It seemed to suspend in the air for an interminable amount of time as she stared expectantly at it with bated breath.

  And then the link landed on the curved back of the hook, slipping off and coming free. The chain swung through the air and collided with the edge of the workbench by her feet, ringing out a little clink!

  It was sweet music to her ears, and Jess's arms immediately fell down with a horrible mixture of pain and pins and needles swimming through them. But she was too delighted t
o care. She carefully made her way back down to the floor and searched around for the key to undo her shackle. The only thing on the workbench was the strange book that her uncle had been perusing, so she moved over to the tool cabinet and started pulling open drawers, stealing glances toward the ceiling and listening for any sounds that could tell her what was going on up there. Her heart raced like mad, and she was worried sick about Tyler. She didn't know if he was still alive, and the thought turned her stomach rotten.

  Jess worked her way through the cabinet, drawer by drawer, mostly finding rusty old tools and garbage. She pulled open a drawer near the bottom and saw glinting silver. Her arms lunged for it and she pulled the ring of two keys out, her numb fingers having a hard time grasping onto it. But she held it with all her might, plunking her arms onto the workbench's surface as she twisted her wrist and tried to insert one of the silver keys into the lock. She struggled, desperately trying to jam it in, but it wouldn't cooperate. She fumbled, working her fingers around the other one, then she lined it up and pushed it into the hole. The key slipped in, then she said a prayer and twisted it.

  It turned, and her shackle came undone.

  "Oh thank God!" she said, pulling her wrists free.

  Jess was about to run off for the hallway leading out of the small basement room when she paused. Glancing over her shoulder, she spotted her uncle's cryptic book sitting on the workbench. She didn't understand its magnitude, but she had a distinct feeling that if her uncle found it missing, it would put a major kink into his plans.

  So she grabbed the book, rolled it up and stuffed it into her pocket, then she fled down the hallway without wasting another moment, rounding a corner and heading up a dark set of stairs.

  She didn't know what she would find when she got to the top, but she was determined to save Tyler, even if she had to give up her very life.