Halloween 2022
This mini collection of short stories was released for Halloween. Enjoy!
I
There’s a story about Crawley Cemetery. People say that the ground there knows when someone is going to die, and it opens up a new grave on the morning of their death, waiting for their body to be laid inside.
Most people think it’s just a scary story to tell little children, but not you. You have to walk through Crawley Cemetery every day on your way to work and you’ve seen the holes. They’re endlessly deep pits, the earth still raw and damp. And, every time you’ve walked past one of those open graves, someone in your town has passed away later that afternoon.
There’s a new grave there this morning. You don’t see it until you’re halfway through the walk. Mist trails around it, disguising the rough, flaking edges.
It doesn’t have a gravestone yet. Those don’t go up until the body’s interred. But it’s prepared and waiting, which means this is going to be someone’s last day on earth, even if they don’t know it yet.
You hope it’s not your neighbour. Her cough has been getting bad lately. Or your co-worker—he got that phonecall last week and had to take a day off work.
It might be a good idea to show a bit of extra kindness to everyone you pass today, just in case.
You’re still staring back at the open grave as you step out of the cemetery and onto the road. You don’t even hear the truck’s screaming tyres until it’s right on top of you.
II
The little house at the end of Jayna’s street never turned off its lights. Whether it was two in the afternoon and sunny out, or four in the morning when everyone else was asleep, every room was constantly lit up.
Jayna’s friends told her to leave them alone. The house’s owners were probably eccentric, but they weren’t hurting anyone. Their electricity bill was their own problem.
Still, every time Jayna looked out her window and saw the house, her curiosity grew a bit stronger. Who lived there? How did they sleep when the lights were so bright? A car was parked in the driveway and their lawn was kept mown, so why did she never see them?
The curiosity built and built until she couldn’t stand it any longer. There wasn’t any harm in introducing herself, Jayna decided. She made up a story about needing to borrow something and approached the house.
Its lights radiated around her as she climbed the driveway. She raised a hand to knock at the door, but it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t even closed. The wood drifted inwards when she tapped on it.
Jayna hesitated, then pushed the door fully open. She called a greeting and waited, but only silence answered her.
The house felt uncomfortably bright. Not only were the ceiling lights on, but multiple lamps in each room, flooding any corners that might have allowed for shadow. Jayna thought she could actually feel the hum of electricity saturating the air.
There were a few blotches of darkness, though.
Stains, slightly taller than Jayna, bled out of the paint. There was one beside her, right next to the front door, and she could see another two further down the hallway and a fourth in the living room.
Jayna blinked. The stains looked almost humanoid. She could make out the shape of a head and the curve of two shoulders. Streaks of staining zig-zagged down towards the floor, splitting into arms and legs.
The dark patches could have been mistaken for a painting of a person… if that person’s limbs had all been broken in multiple places, giving it too many joints.
Jayna called out again. The house remained silent. Despite the mown lawn outside, the place gave her the feeling that it had been abandoned years ago.
There was a light switch beside the door. Jayna’s fingers twitched. She shouldn’t touch someone else’s property, but the more she saw of it, the more curious she felt. Had the lights been left on by accident? Did the switches even work?
She reached out and flicked one of the tiny levers, just to see.
The lights went off. All of them. For the first time in memory, the hallway was dark.
The enormous figure born of shadows finally stretched and reached out from where it had been pinned to the wall.
Stiff joints crackled as they unravelled. A wide, empty jaw yawned open. Its companions surged out of their resting places through the house, staggering into the hallways on unsteady legs.
Jayna didn’t even have time to scream. The figure’s freezing, broken arms wrapped around her, and she had just enough presence to understand that the lights had been left on for a reason.
III
“Has that house always been there?”
That was the question we asked about the two-story brick building along Boxwood Lane.
It looked as though it had been there a long time. Rose bushes grew against the walls and the paint on the windowsills was peeling. We thought it might be abandoned; tiles were missing from the roof and water stains darkened the bricks under where a gutter had broken.
But there were a few strange things about it.
First, no one could remember seeing it there, at the outskirts of town, before.
Second, it seemed to have a lot of doors. At least six I could count on the three sides visible from the road, and possibly more around the back.
Third, all of the doors were open. Some hung wide; others were open barely a crack. It had an inbuilt carport and the rollers were half up. Even the windows—rectangular, painted white to contrast against the red bricks, large enough for a person to climb through—were left ajar.
Sebastian was the first one to mention the house. He was the odd kid in my class; a little too intense, and a little too interested in catching beetles and pinning them inside framed boxes. When he started asking, “Does anyone know that house on Boxwood Lane? Has it always been there?” we thought it was just a new angle to his oddities.
But then other classmates started mentioning it. They said things like, “I’ve never seen it before,” and, “It must have been there, right? We just didn’t notice it,” and, “My parents told me to stay away from it.”
And so I went along Boxwood Lane, too, and I stopped in front of the only house down that stretch of road, and stared up at the cracking paint and the door that tilted on its hinges and the dirty bricks and the overgrown shrubs clinging to it.
It looked like it must have been there since long before I was born. And yet, I would have sworn on my life that I’d never seen it before.
We began to call it the Mystery House. It was outside my route to school, but not by much. I started a habit of looping around to it each day on my way home. Sometimes I just biked past and watched it for the few seconds it stayed in view. Sometimes I stopped and stared.
Most houses in my town seemed to repel curiosity. Windows that faced the main roads had curtains over them so that you couldn’t see inside. Garages stayed closed, doors were always locked.
The Mystery House was an opposite of that. Each door seemed to invite me inside with glimpses of items beyond: photographs hung in the hallway, just slightly too far away to make out the faces inside them. A game was set up on a table visible through one of the windows. Open boxes were stacked in the garage, their contents just barely out of sight from the road.
“It’s obviously been here for ages,” Angus said. He was coming home with me to play games on my new console. We’d taken the looping route past the house again, and this time we’d stopped to look at it.
“There’s no path to the door,” I said. The Mystery House stood in a field of tall grass. Even though it had a carport, there was no driveway. Not even a dirt trail leading to the open entryway.
“Because it’s abandoned,” Angus said. “No one uses the paths so the grass grew over it. Mystery solved.”
He wanted to leave so I didn’t argue. But, as we climbed back onto our bikes, I couldn’t stop a question from bubbling into my mind: if the house was abandoned, why were the lights left on?
Weeks passed, and people still talked about the house. Lines were cut through my friends: those who were convinced it had always been there and had just gone unnoticed, and those who said they’d walked down Boxwood Lane twice a week for years and it had never been there before.
I didn’t know who to believe, but the mystery gnawed at me like an insect bite that wouldn’t stop itching.
And then, one afternoon, something snapped in us. During lunch, a group from my class decided they were going to look inside the house.
The thought was infectiously exciting. The doors were all open and no one seemed to live there. Why not peek inside? We could find out who the stack of mail in the entryway was addressed to, look inside the open wardrobe at the end of the hall, see what the half-played game on the table was. We might get some kind of answers.
I didn’t feel any misgivings until the house came into view.
The long grass shifted in the wind. One of the loose shutters creaked. I climbed off my bike but didn’t drop it into the grass like the others had.
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I said.
“What?” Angus was already stepping off the road. A group of eight other children—some friends, some stragglers who had overheard us talking about it—were already leading the way towards the Mystery House.
The sun was getting low. It made the shadows stretch out long and grow distorted. The house’s lights were still on, its many doors and windows still open, but I suddenly wasn’t sure that it was actually abandoned.
“Someone owns it,” I said, hoping they wouldn’t hear the fear in my voice. “We’ll get in trouble.”
“You can stand lookout, if you want,” Judy said. She jogged after the others. None of them were listening to me.
They were too excited to see inside the house.
Most of them stopped by the windows first. They rose up on to their toes and cupped their hands around their faces as they looked inside. I could hear quiet chatter, but not what they were saying.
Despite all of my misgivings, I took a step nearer.
Three of them approached the front door. One at a time, they stepped over the welcome mat and into the lit hallway.
Others approached different doors, trying to find their way to the parts of the house they were most curious about. Judy turned into a living room that was crammed with bookshelves full of colourful books. Perry climbed the stairs towards the second floor. Angus ducked under the open garage roller and pulled back the flaps on the nearest box.
Eager chatter rose from different parts of the house. They were excited about what they’d found. I kept moving forward, approaching the open front door, but stopped before stepping over the threshold.
The house’s insides didn’t seem right. It was hard to describe it, but it almost felt like peering into a dollhouse. All the pieces for a home were there—the wallpaper, the rugs, the dinner tables and chairs—but none of it was really real. It was like looking into a very good imitation of a house.
A gust of air slowly rolled out of the hallway and across me. It felt strangely cool and damp. The hairs on the back of my neck rose as my heart began beating painfully fast. I backed away again, and didn’t stop backing away until I reached the street.
I could see my friends through the windows: darting up and down the stairs to reach different rooms, rushing past the lit windows. Angus was working his way deeper into the garage, tipping over boxes that were full of strange baubles and trinkets I couldn’t name.
And then, the house shifted.
It was very slight. Like a shudder running through the building. I would have thought it was an earthquake, except the ground under my feet didn’t shift.
I looked up at the building, and in that second, I could have sworn it was looking back at me.
It happened in a heartbeat. Every door and every window snapped shut with enough force to shake the air. Even the garage roller doors rushed down to meet the ground. The lights inside the house all vanished, and the windows turned as dark and as empty as a mirror. I could no longer see my friends. But I could hear them.
At first there were screams, and then doorknobs rattling, and then fists slamming against unyielding glass.
And then the house shifted again. It shivered, and then it rose up. The brick foundation slid out of the raw earth. The rose bushes and shrubs I’d thought were growing against the walls were attached to them, and rained clumps of dirt as they were carried into the air.
I staggered backwards and tripped over one of the bikes. I barely felt the ground as I landed. The screams were growing louder, no longer coming from shock but from pure terror.
Eight spindly legs extended from beneath the home. They were thin and glossy dark, like a beetle’s, and stretched as they shook themselves out. Clawed tips planted themselves in the ground, sinking into the dirt.
The screams rose in pitch, louder and louder. And then, all at once, they cut off.
Perfect, terrible silence came from the house.
I watched in sickened horror as drops of dark liquid began to ooze from under each of the multitude of doors and windowsills. Fresh blood, shockingly dark, trickled down, dripping over the roots hanging beneath the house’s foundation and falling onto the earth below.
The house’s spindly legs stretched out, lifting the building higher, before beginning to carry it away towards the hills. Where it had once sat was a rectangle of dark earth in an overgrown field.
All I could do was sit hunched and shaking as I watched the Mystery House walk away to digest my friends.
It wasn’t hard to guess where it was going.
To settle down and set its trap at the edge of some other unfortunate town.