Haunted House Dread

by Carrie Bates

  “This wasn’t just their dead,” Camille said, moving to sit next to him. “This was their criminals. They were violent.” She put a hand on her husband’s forearm, and she shifted to wrap his fingers around hers. “They were insane,” she whispered, and both of them recalled the crazed look on the man who had clung to their ceiling only days before.

  Brad sighed. “There’s really only one thing we can do,” he said, standing. Then he grinned down at Camille. “Luckily…we had a break in the market.” Camille stared up at him, her mouth open. “We got it all back, babe. Everything we lost, and quite a bit more.”

  Chapter Nine

  Brad and Camille stood at the edge of the lawn, looking up at the mansion. Camille’s eyes followed the gorgeous curves and swoops of the woodwork. Brad was eyeing the branches of the oak that he could see over the top of the house, and the lilac bushes that were already beginning to bloom – despite there being two inches of snow still on the ground.

  They had paid a moving company to pack everything up for them in one day, not willing to step foot in the house again. Camille would miss the huge office downstairs and the beautiful patio she’d been able to step onto. She hoped they could find somewhere similar, once they got the accounts straightened out and could put a new bid in somewhere.

  They were taking a big loss on the house. The town had agreed to buy it from the couple and use it as a historical site. It would be used, the mayor assured them, as a local museum. They had more than enough history to display down in the basement of the library. It would all be dug out. And, he told them sheepishly, they’d even convinced some local tribesmen to come in and cleanse the area.

  The man seemed embarrassed by the admission, but Brad sighed in relief. “If anything will get rid of the bad luck and the violence, it’s that,” he remarked to Camille as they left the town hall.

  “I’m tempted to take a cutting,” Camille said after following her husband’s eyes to where he was staring at the lilacs. He looked at her quickly.

  “Don’t. I’ll buy you a few bushes, I promise, wherever we end up.”

  She laughed and placed a hand on her stomach. There was nothing there yet, but she had plans for their future…for a family in a new home. “Don’t worry. They’re beautiful, but I don’t think I could stand the scent of them anymore.”

  The couple would be moving temporarily to an apartment in the heart of the city, where they could work comfortably until they found a new home, hopefully a little closer to work. Neither one of them had really been satisfied with the home office setting. It had been fun while it lasted, but Brad preferred to be less distracted by baked goods, and Camille wanted a shorter commute to the office. She didn’t plan on working for too long, as the doctor had warned her to take it easy on their second try.

  “You ready?” Brad asked, turning his gaze away from the side yard. Camille took one last look at the house. It had been so close to everything they’d dreamed of, even if she didn’t know she’d been dreaming of it. But now, she had more direction in her life.

  “I am,” she said, smiling up at her husband. He grinned back and took her hand, turning toward the SUV and the road that led to the city.

  The End

  The Haunting of Bertha House

  ©2018 by Carrie Bates

  All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, events or locales is completely coincidental.

  Prologue

  June 23, 1827, Bertha House, Roswell

  The mansion shadowed the other houses like an ancient tree in a forest of saplings. The house was a gorgeous pink-bricked work of art on the corner of Belmont Avenue. One would think upon spotting the structure that a wealthy family inhabited the mansion. The building was certainly large enough to house more than one. This, however, was not the case. The handsome building held but one resident: Henrietta Bertha.

  Ms. Bertha was often the talk of the town, and not because of her benevolence toward the community. She was a walking enigma. Rumor had it, she used to be a doctor until her knees gave out, forcing her into retirement. This prestigious practice, although uncommon for a woman to hold, would explain her affluence. Many a woman in the town secretly admired old Ms. Bertha for her independence as a woman. Henrietta had never been known to have had a husband, though, the dark-minded children liked to joke that she’d killed off multiple husbands in the past, stealing their wealth. However Ms. Bertha earned her status, no one would know. Ms. Bertha seldom left her house. When she did, she was aloof. Her face was stern and unsmiling. She limped when she walked and she had brows that appeared permanently angered. Few dared approach her. Those bold enough to attempt conversation were ignored. There was, however, someone Ms. Bertha couldn’t ignore, the police.

  It was a muggy afternoon in Roswell. Constable Conrad could scarcely distinguish the sweat from the tears that were dripping down a local woman’s face. The woman’s name was Bira Bentley, a sweet, young mother of two. Unfortunately, her youngest son had recently gone missing. Mr. Conrad had the unpleasant task of taking her statement. He hated missing children’s cases. Nine times out of ten, the children wound up dead. Lately, more and more children were being reported missing. Conrad feared the worst.

  “When was the last time you recall seeing your son, Mrs. Bentley?” Conrad asked, gently. The two of them sat across from each other at the Roswell Police Station. Mrs. Bentley dabbed her dewy face with a handkerchief and took a shaky drink from her glass of water.

  “Just this morning,” she sobbed. “He was having his toast at the table. Gus took him out back to play. He said they were picking flowers and poor Will wandered off. The two of us have been calling for him all day!”

  “What would you say the approximate time was when Will disappeared?” Conrad asked.

  Mrs. Bentley appeared annoyed. “Why does the exact time matter?!” she spat. “My boy is missing! What if he was kidnapped?!”

  Mr. Conrad positioned his quill neatly beside his bit of parchment and folded his fingers calmly in front of him. After years of experience, he found that the best way to handle emotional situations was to be as cool and collected as possible.

  “Mrs. Bentley, I understand you’re upset,” he began. “My officers and I are going to do everything in our power to find your boy. What I need you to do for me right now is to answer a few questions. The answers to these questions will help us in our investigation, you see.”

  Mrs. Bentley sighed and wiped a sheen of perspiration from her forehead. “Very well,” she said, in a small voice. “I believe Will disappeared around 10 this morning.”

  “Very good.” Mr. Conrad scrawled the information down. “Where are you located, Mrs. Bentley,” he continued.

  “Belmont Avenue, near the Bertha House,” Mrs. Bentley answered.

  Conrad hesitated before recording the information. “Again?!” he thought in bewilderment. Within the last month, a total of five children had gone missing from that area. It couldn’t be a coincidence that they were all disappearing in proximity to the dubious Ms. Bertha, could it? “C’mon, Conrad!” The Constable shook his head. “Old, frail Ms. Bertha… a child snatcher?!” Surely a brittle old woman wouldn’t have the strength to kidnap a spry young lad. Even so, Conrad couldn’t rule Ms. Bertha out as a suspect.

  Before sending Mrs. Bentley on her way, Constable Conrad recorded her address and informed her he’d be sending out a search team later that evening to inspect the thicket behind their house for Will.

  It was just after dinner when Conrad had his search team organized. The sun was still shining bright in the sky, casting an intense heat over the land. Conrad’s men were mounted atop their horses―the poor beasts snorting and sweating―prepared to search the thicket well into the n
ight. As the team stomped their way over and under every dip and divot in the earth, Conrad decided to pay Ms. Bertha a visit.

  ***

  The stable was a mere façade. Henrietta had a horse and buggy at one point in her life, however, she rarely went anywhere not within walking distance. Now, she used the stable for a different purpose. Henrietta was, in fact, trained in the medical arts. However, over the years her treatment methods had grown more and more experimental. Her ultimate goal was to find the cure for mortality. She believed the answer was within the bodies of children. For this reason, she captured them.

  The reason she selected children over adults was simple, children were foolish and gullible. Henrietta lured them to her lovely home by baking her famous peach cobbler and placing it in places the local children often played. Children never questioned the mysterious appearance of the dessert. Instead, they gobbled it down like a bunch of barbarians, succumbing to the effects of the laudanum Henrietta used to spike the pie. Once unconscious, Henrietta would drag them by their feet to her stable and use them as lab rats for her medical experiments.

  Thankfully, the walls of the stable were thick and muffling. The screams of the children could not be heard by nosy neighbors. The structural design of the stable proved a great benefit for Henrietta. She’d heard the local officers mucking about in the thicket behind her property and certainly didn’t want for them to hear the cries of the missing children. One officer even had the nerve to knock on her front door. Henrietta snuck out the back of her house, pretending to be unavailable for questioning. She hobbled over to the stable while the officer knocked and called in futility.

  Lately, Henrietta had been studying a protein found in human nails and hair, keratin. She believed that if consumed, the keratin content in nails and hair could extend―perhaps even indefinitely―a person’s life. Henrietta had been consuming the nails and hair of children for months and was already noticing a decline in the number of wrinkles inhabiting her face.

  The children were piled at the back of the stable on bales of hay, their heads shaved like freshly shorn sheep. Henrietta kept the children drugged by bringing them food and drink laced with laudanum. The laudanum kept them on the brink of lucidity and acted as a pain killer. The less the children could feel, the less they would scream. Only one boy remained with his nails and hair intact. The remainder of the bunch had blood encrusted finger tips, their fingers devoid of nails. Many of them were dead―a result of a laudanum overdose. Once Henrietta had their hair and fingernails, she had no use for the children. She’d inject their last meals with a deadly dosage of the laudanum, putting them to sleep forever. She’d then sack them in burlap, burying their sad little corpses in her backyard.

  “Where am I?” the boy stirred groggily atop the hay bale. He had the loveliest golden locks of any of the children Henrietta had kidnapped. She couldn’t wait to consume his youthful curls.

  “Not to worry, Dear,” Henrietta said in a motherly voice. “You’ve just got a bit of a fever. I’m a doctor. I’ve brought you some food that will make you feel better.”

  “I want my mommy!” the boy whined. He sat up and unhinged his jaw in preparation to scream. As his lips parted, Henrietta shoveled a spoonful of laudanum laced mashed potatoes into his mouth. The boy gagged in shock. Before he had a chance to spit the mash from his mouth, the laudanum took effect. His eyelids fluttered, and he flopped limply to one side. It was then that Henrietta got to work.

  Like a manic barber, she snipped his hair, eagerly collecting the bits in a basket. After snipping his scalp raw, she took her freshly sharpened scalpel and scored the cuticles of the boy’s nails. Henrietta found it most satisfying when the nails peeled from the finger tips in one whole piece. Her hands sticky with blood, she tossed the nails into the basket, along with the hair. The boy was so well drugged he didn’t so much as flinch during the procedure. Streams of blood spilled from his fingertips, staining the hay a sickly scarlet. Spoils in hand, Henrietta stealthily made her way back to her house. The officer at her door had long since abandoned the notion of questioning her. Henrietta doubted he’d bother to return. The town both admired and feared her. No one dared mess with the inscrutable Ms. Bertha.

  Soon, the search party would give up hope and call it a night, just as they had done for all the other missing children.

  “It’s going to be a quiet Christmas this year,” Henrietta thought in bemusement.

  Sweat poured down her face as she toiled over a cauldron of boiling water. She added in the hair and nails, dicing them into smaller fragments to make them easier to eat. She also added some vegetables she’d harvested from her garden. The onion and garlic would add flavor to the otherwise bland broth.

  As she sat herself at her luxurious dining set, a bowl of repulsive sludge steaming in her best china, she could already feel the energy of youth flowing through her veins simply from inhaling the vapors of the stew. The first few times she’d concocted the stew, she’d had a tremendously difficult time choking down the clumps of hair. But, after the months she’d spent perfecting the recipe, she scarcely gagged on the keratin rich strands.

  Revitalized and bursting with childlike energy, Henrietta began preparing for her midnight burial. As the dark crawled over the sun, the search party waned, eventually ceasing their search altogether. It was at this time that Henrietta made her move. Her bottle of laudanum in one hand, she skipped over to the stable. The boy she’d taken from that morning was still sound asleep, peacefully unaware of his current mutilated state.

  “Enjoy the afterlife, my silly little rat,” Henrietta cooed. She forced the bottle to the boy’s slack lips, dosing him with a lethal amount. “You’ve all been a remarkable contribution to science!” she declared, cackling jubilantly. She then rounded up the bodies, encasing each one in a large burlap sack. Once the bodies were bagged, she dragged each one to her backyard and buried them with a numbered stone.

  “Looks like you’re number forty-three,” Henrietta huffed. Even in the middle of the night, it was still stiflingly hot in Georgia. She scored the number onto the smooth-surfaced stone and planted it on top of the boy’s grave. This way Henrietta could keep track of her patients and make notes about each of the children’s effects on her aging process.

  Ms. Bertha may have gone to bed that night feeling young and accomplished, but as the days passed, she grew profoundly ill. Unbeknownst to her, the startling quantity of hair she’d consumed was compiling in her colon, hampering her digestion. The hair based blockage, known as a trichobezoar, eventually ruptured Ms. Bertha’s intestine, resulting in her death.

  Under the merciless heat of the Georgia summer, Ms. Bertha’s putrefied body did not go unnoticed. The putrid smell hung like a nauseating smog in the air. Eventually, Constable Conrad returned to Ms. Bertha’s house, the source of the smell, only to find her garish goo gushing over her poster bed, writhing with maggots.

  The children of Roswell were safe from the hideous experiments of Ms. Bertha. Unfortunately, the souls of the victimized children shrieked in torment, destroying anyone who dared set foot in the Bertha house.

  May 7, 2018, Bertha House, Roswell

  Chapter One

  The interior of the house was almost too vast for Kristine’s comfort. She liked her spaces small and precise. The larger the room, the more she would have to furnish; the more she would have to furnish, the higher her stress levels rose. Having more, was certainly not better for Kristine. For this reason, she planned on restoring the house back to its former 19th century glory and turning it for a profit. She would live in the house for the time being―a notion that meddled with her mental state―however, Kristine knew the discomfort she’d experience would be minor in comparison to the financial reward she’d receive.

  Kristine stepped into the parlor of the house. Her footsteps echoed in the emptiness. The high ceiling and faded wallpaper made her feel sick with unease. The amount of space was excessive; the pattern on the walls was excruciating. Kristin
e stopped in the center of the room. She closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath. As she paused to collect herself, she heard a fluttering of footsteps behind her. Upon instinct, she spun around, catching a glimpse of what she thought was a blonde-headed boy. She inspected the doorway and discovered a clump of blonde hair, floating about on the draft. Kristine shivered. She didn’t want to know why a tuft of blonde hair was lying on the floor. The least disturbing conclusion she could come up with was that it was left over from a little girl’s doll, though the hair looked awfully real to belong to a doll.

  Dolls reminded Kristine of her mother. She’d collected china-faced dolls resembling real children. Her collection had frightened Kristine tremendously. But, after her father had passed away early last year, somewhat unexpectedly from lung cancer, the dolls had kept her mother company. Her mother passed away later that spring. She’d never been in the best of shape in her old age and had been shocked that her husband had died before her. Kristine, being the only child, inherited her parents’ wealth. Like her parents, Kristine had an affinity toward business. She got into the real estate industry at a young age and had been quite successful in updating and flipping old, potentially valuable houses. It was amazing how much more a house could be worth after a simple fresh coat of paint.

  Kristine’s modern and chic condo was only an hour’s ride from the Roswell mansion. She could simply drive back to it and commute to the mansion every day until it was fully updated. Kristine, however, hated driving and didn’t particularly like the idea of fighting morning traffic every day. No, she would stick to her original plan of staying over in the house until it was ready to be placed on the market for a new, heightened value. The illusion of the child scampering into the parlor had been just that, an illusion. Kristine was an anxious person, but it was her fear that allowed her to accomplish so much. The pressure was on to make proper use of her parents’ wealth. Kristine knew her parents would have wanted her to grow their fortune.