Copyright © 2020 Michael Penning
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
THE SUICIDE LAKE
First edition. October, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-7771812-3-9 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-7771812-2-2 (paperback)
www.michaelpenning.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Epilogue
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About the Author
For my wife,
the bravest woman in my life.
Chapter 1
Abigail Jacobs had only moments to spare before the man across the room shot the young boy. How many seconds remained before he pulled the trigger? Ten? Five? Even fewer?
“Lower your pistol, Mr. Tunstall,” she cautioned. “I assure you it will do no good.”
Robert Tunstall didn’t lower the pistol. Instead, he cocked the hammer and squeezed the trigger.
Abigail shouted and lunged for the flintlock even as the eight-inch iron barrel erupted with a blinding flash and a deafening roar.
The lead bullet rocketed harmlessly through the boy’s forehead like a stone hurled through smoke. The peculiar child remained unscathed as he glared at Tunstall from the center of the fire-lit parlor.
“He... he’s a ghost!” Tunstall exclaimed with a note of unhinged panic. Dressed in threadbare wool breeches and a shabby hemp tunic, the boy couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. But what arrested Tunstall’s attention—what filled his stomach with dread—were the boy’s eyes. They were dull and lifeless in a way that made Tunstall think of battlefields and funeral parlors.
“Oh, Mr. Tunstall...” Abigail sighed. “I had sincerely hoped you wouldn’t provoke it.”
“Provoke it?” Tunstall’s brown eyes were round and huge with fright as he waved his discharged pistol. “Provoke it to what?”
“Violence.”
In a flash, the boy grabbed Tunstall by his exposed forearm. A freezing bolt of pain shot up to his shoulder and he let out a shriek. Sinking to one knee, he dropped the flintlock to the floor with a clatter. Another scream rose in his throat but died abruptly when the apparition hauled him from his feet and hurled him across the room. Tunstall slammed into the parlor wall, shattering the gilded frame of an oil landscape and destroying a chestnut side-table as he crashed back down to the floor.
The boy’s spirit swung around, his small eyes simmering with black malevolence. A low, animal snarl rumbled in his chest and evanescent wisps of mist trailed after him as he floated across the parlor.
Abigail dashed to Tunstall while he groaned and rolled to his knees. “Stay behind me!” she commanded.
The boy stretched out his skinny arms and reached for her, intent on snaring her in his freezing grip.
“Get away from it!” Tunstall cried, clutching desperately at Abigail’s sleeve to drag her away.
Abigail shrugged him off. With no time left to spare, she swung her fist up and thrust a small iron amulet at the advancing spirit. The boy slid to an abrupt halt at the sudden appearance of the rune-shaped charm. Like a snake unhinging its jaw to consume a larger prey, his mouth twisted and dropped open to an impossible size. An ear-piercing wail burst from his gaping maw, carried on a blast of hot wind that smelled of a moldy grave. The floorboards trembled with the ferocity of the ghost’s fury. Cracks appeared in the plaster walls.
Abigail remained firm, wielding the talisman and repelling the shrieking spirit. She felt a rush of exhilaration as the boy’s figure began to come apart before her eyes, his ghostly body dissolving into swirling tendrils of white mist. The vaporous mass hung in the air for a moment, coiling and writhing like a serpent ready to strike. Abigail punched the talisman at it and the churning mist recoiled as if wounded before it surged across the parlor and shot up the darkened staircase.
An eerie silence descended. Nothing moved.
Abigail became conscious of the pounding of the blood in her veins as she hung the iron charm around her neck and let it dangle around the collar of her Spencer jacket. Her breathing came fast and hard in the uneasy stillness and she could feel her muscles vibrating with an exquisite rush of adrenaline.
“How...? How can it be possible?” Tunstall stammered. The bristling, salt-and-pepper tufts of his sideburns puffed in and out on his cheeks and a line of sweat trickled from beneath his mass of waxed hair. His shirttail had come loose from his pantaloons and his sleeves were bunched to his elbows, exposing a skeletal handprint the ghost had left emblazoned like a tattoo on his forearm.
Abigail willed herself to maintain her patience. A man’s first encounter with the undead was always harrowing, but most of her clients didn’t have a loaded flintlock on hand when it happened. The situation had spiraled out of control so quickly—the pistol appearing in Tunstall’s hand so unexpectedly—that Abigail cursed herself for having let it come to this. If she didn’t find some way of getting the man to regain his wits and calm himself, the consequences could be catastrophic for them both.
“The boy is here because we summoned him, Mr. Tunstall,” Abigail said, her voice as smooth as honey. “You must believe me when I say there is nothing to be afraid of. This is why you engaged my services as a paranaturalist.”
“But he—he couldn’t be real! It can’t be possible!” Tunstall protested.
“Please be silent,” Abigail snapped. Her cool blue eyes remained fixed on the staircase where the sinister mist had retreated. She had bought them some time before the ghost returned, but not much. “’Tis possible because your house is indeed haunted, just as you suspected,” she explained. “Have you ever heard of Venable’s Home for Wayward Children, Mr. Tunstall?”
Tunstall’s legs wobbled as he staggered to a wingback and sunk in
to the chair’s plush cushion to examine his injured forearm. “Venable’s? No, I... I can’t say that I have.”
Abigail frowned. “That is unfortunate, considering you have been living in it these past seven months. Sixty years ago, this house was an orphanage owned and operated by Mr. Phineas Venable and his wife Winifred. When Phineas died of cholera, Winifred found herself the legal caregiver for a house full of willful orphans. Apparently the saintly burden was too much for her to bear. On a cold January night, Winifred set fire to the orphanage with all of the children locked inside. This house—your house—was built on the foundation of the ruined orphanage.”
“How dreadful.” Tunstall’s gaze wandered around the parlor as if something horrible was about to spring from the shadows at any moment. “Exactly how many children perished here?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen! There are seventeen of those... those monsters haunting my home? Dear God!”
Just then, there was a dull thump followed by a low moan from somewhere upstairs.
Abigail swung around. “Is there someone else in the house?”
The color drained from Tunstall’s face. “I instructed my wife to remain in our bedchamber...”
Abigail’s heart lurched. “I gave you explicit instructions to ensure the house was empty!”
“Well I didn’t bloody well expect to be raising the dead!”
“What exactly did you expect, Mr. Tunstall?”
“I don’t know! Perhaps some kind of séance?”
Abigail snatched the pistol from where it had fallen on the floor, turned her back on Tunstall, and hurried to a low chestnut table at the center of the room. There, something large and round lay concealed within a burlap sack. Abigail cast the sack aside and uncovered an unlit jack-o’-lantern.
Tunstall gave it a dumb look. “A pumpkin?”
Abigail threw him an irritated glance as she withdrew the melted stub of a tallow candle and went to the fireplace to light the wick. “A trap for the ghosts of the children haunting your home. Their last earthly memory was of the scorching pain and blinding light of flames. They are quite literally afraid of the light of the afterlife and so they remain here. With this, I intend to show them there is nothing to be frightened of.”
The orange glow of the flames rising on the hearth turned Abigail’s blond hair to molten amber as she placed the candle at the bottom of the hollow pumpkin and waited for the grinning visage of the jack-o’-lantern to come to life. “We must get your wife down here with us and we must do it immediately. Without my protection, she is all too vulnerable.”
Tunstall hustled after her as she marched across the room toward the staircase. “Vulnerable to what?” he demanded.
“Possession.”
“Possession! What do you—”
Tunstall’s voice failed him as he skidded to a halt and gazed up the stairs into the gloom.
Eleanor Tunstall stood on the second floor landing.
She was draped in a shapeless cotton nightgown and appeared as little more than a silhouette looming in the darkness. Her hair was loose and her head hung to one side at an awkward angle, like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
Tunstall peered up at his wife’s shadowy form. “Eleanor!” he whispered, beckoning her with a wave of his hand. “Eleanor, please come down here.”
The shape didn’t move.
A sickening feeling took root in Abigail’s gut. She was already too late.
“Eleanor, darling...” Tunstall implored.
Eleanor’s jaw suddenly dropped open and remained hanging wide as a voice slithered out from within. It wasn’t Eleanor’s voice; it was that of a very young girl intoning the singsong cadence of a nursery rhyme.
“What are little boys made of? What are little boys made of? Snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails; such are little boys made of...”
Abigail took a cautious step back from the foot of the stairs and laid a hand on Tunstall’s arm. “We must protect the jack-o’-lantern at all costs,” she whispered. “The candlewick is charmed; only I may extinguish it. But if the phantoms are somehow able to destroy the pumpkin...”
Abigail didn’t see the need to tell him that if the pumpkin were destroyed, the ghosts of the dead children would tear them both limb from limb.
“What are little girls made of? What are little girls made of?” the chilling voice inside Eleanor chanted on. “Sugar and spice and all things nice; such are little girls made of...”
Without warning, the thing that was Eleanor Tunstall came hurtling down the staircase. Her bare feet thundered on the wooden planks and she let loose a bloodcurdling scream as she lunged for her husband’s throat. Her fingernails dug deep into Tunstall’s flesh as they both toppled to the floor.
Abigail grabbed at the talisman slung around her neck but Eleanor whirled on her and whipped out a clawed hand, ripping away the charm and sending it spinning into a dark corner. With Tunstall pinned beneath her, the possessed woman hissed and stuck her tongue out at Abigail like a grotesque parody of a child. In a flash, she sprang to her feet and launched herself, catching Abigail around the knees and sending them both pitching to the floor. Eleanor’s mouth hung loose and wide as she clung to Abigail’s ankles. A thick line of drool dripped from her lower lip while the child’s voice inside her giggled and howled.
Abigail lost her grip on Tunstall’s pistol as she fought to scramble away. Wild with fright, Tunstall wobbled to his feet and went for it. His eyes boggled and rolled in his head as he raised the barrel and cocked the hammer.
“No!” Abigail cried. “You’ll kill your wife!”
But Tunstall was too terrified to hear.
Abigail swung around and punched Eleanor just as the pistol roared.
Tunstall’s shot missed his reeling wife by inches and slammed into the parlor table, blasting off one of its thick wooden corners with a spray of chips and splinters. For one sickening moment, Abigail saw the jack-o’-lantern teeter onto its side and roll toward the shattered edge of the table. Without thinking, she dove across the floor. Her hand shot out just in time to get beneath the pumpkin and cushion its impact. Still illuminated by the charmed candle within, it bounced safely off her palm and tumbled away.
Eleanor pounced, slobbering and giggling and clawing at Abigail all at once. Abigail struggled to get free as she stretched for the jack-o’-lantern, straining to reach it. Her outstretched fingertips brushed against its waxy surface but it remained maddeningly out of reach.
Somewhere behind her, Tunstall was reloading his pistol. His next shot wouldn’t miss; he would murder his own wife.
Summoning all of her strength, Abigail tore her leg from Eleanor’s grip and pistoned it back. The kick caught Eleanor hard in the face and connected with a loud crack! The howling, laughing thing inside Eleanor barely reacted as the woman’s jaw dislocated from her skull.
Still, there was just enough of a flinch to give Abigail the moment she needed.
Ripping herself free of Eleanor’s grasp, she lunged across the floor and scooped up the grinning jack-o’-lantern. “Look!” she cried, holding the pumpkin high. “The light is harmless! You’ve nothing to fear!”
Eleanor came to an instant halt. Time seemed to stand still as she knelt swaying on the floor, gazing at the flickering light as if spellbound.
“Come to it,” Abigail coaxed breathlessly. “Follow the light. Let it guide you from this house and its terrible memories...”
Eleanor didn’t move.
Abigail’s heart sank and went cold. It wasn’t going to work. She had made a terrible, terrible, mistake.
But just then, a thick white mist began to pour from Eleanor’s sightless eyes. Released from the ghost’s influence, the woman collapsed in a heap and Tunstall rushed to her.
Abigail ignored the man’s sobs as the mist slithered through the air toward the pumpkin perched on her palm. The candle within flared unnaturally as the mist crawled through the jack-o’-lantern’s eyes and
mouth. A brilliant orange flame leaped from the pumpkin’s lid.
Abigail winced and shielded her eyes.
Then it was over.
When Abigail opened her eyes, she found herself surrounded by a gathering of ghostly children of all ages and sizes. “Come...” she whispered. “This light will not harm you.”
One by one, each child turned to mist and went into the jack-o’-lantern with a blinding burst of flame. When the last of the children had finally vanished, Abigail rose to her feet. Reaching into the jack-o’-lantern, she murmured a strange, sibilant word and calmly snuffed the candle with her fingertips. She then turned to where Robert Tunstall sat cradling his unconscious wife in his arms.
“Now with regards to my fee, Mr. Tunstall...”
Chapter 2
Joseph Lowell was daydreaming again. Abigail could see the boy staring out the window from his desk as she went on with her lecture. Of the dozen boys she taught at Boston’s St. George’s Academy, ten-year-old Joseph’s mind was the most prone to wandering. Where it was at this particular moment was anyone’s guess. Perhaps his attention had been caught by the angle of the sun glinting off the late-September splendor of the maples beyond the window. Abigail thought better of that; Joseph was more likely imagining himself battling pirates somewhere on the southern coasts. Abigail often thought a child’s imagination to be a wonderful thing—as long as they were kept from knowing that the scariest things they could imagine actually existed.
Leaving her spot at the head of the classroom, Abigail continued her lesson while casually meandering among the rows of desks. “The ninth circle of hell is where the traitorous were frozen in a lake of ice named Cocytus. Dante tells us that this lowest and final circle is composed of four concentric rounds of traitors, each more grievous than the last. The outermost ring is reserved for traitors to kindred, who are encased in ice up to their chins.”
Abigail’s sudden proximity at Joseph’s side brought the boy’s attention back from wherever it had escaped to. It was a trick Abigail often used with daydreaming boys and one she employed almost on a weekly basis with Joseph. She saw no use in embarrassing the child in front of his friends. She lingered at his shoulder, pretending to gaze out the window while Joseph now sat straight as a ramrod next to her.
The Suicide Lake (Book of Shadows 2) Page 1
