A siren wailed in the distance. Flashing red and blue lights approached quickly down the long dirt road. Good, someone had already responded to the call. The sheriff and deputy rounded their vehicle to greet the officer.
The police car barreled into the driveway and kept coming toward them at high speed.
“Shit, move!” Keagan dove out of the car’s path and rolled across wet grass. He looked back to see the squad car crush Pete against the sheriff’s car with a deafening crash. The two vehicles slid several feet and smashed into a tree.
“Oh, Christ!” Keagan rushed to the tangled police cars.
From the chest down, Pete Stubbs was pinned between the grill and side door. His face was bloody and full of glass, his eyes wide and lifeless.
Keagan felt an overwhelming rush of grief and anger. He hurried around to the driver’s side to see what goddamned idiot had failed to hit the brakes. He opened the driver’s door and Big Mike fell halfway out. His eyes were missing.
The sheriff backed away from the car, stunned. As the rain poured down in heavy cords, he tried to make sense of what the hell just happened. And then he remembered Abigail had been riding in back. He opened the back door of Big Mike’s car and found the seat empty. On the opposite side, the passenger door hung open.
Keagan looked up in time to see the girl run into the house. “Fuck!” He pulled out his pistol and ran to the front door. “Abigail, come back out here!” He entered the foyer, swishing his beam, pistol cocked and ready to shoot the girl if she attacked. How she killed Big Mike and all these people Keagan couldn’t fathom. The girl was maybe ninety pounds wet. “Abigail, turn yourself in. It’s the best way out of this.”
He glanced back outside. Where were his reinforcements?
From down the hall, the girl started singing in a strange language. “Dheannain sùgradh an àm dùsgaidh…’N àm na siùil a bhith ’gam pasgadh…”
Keagan followed her voice until he reached a wide stairway at the center of the house. She continued to croon loudly from above, “Di-Luain an dèidh Di-dòmhnaich… Dh’fhalbh sinn le Seonaid a Aircaibh…”
He raised his flashlight beam up the muddy stairs. Abigail was standing on the second floor railing.
“Freeze!” Keagan aimed his pistol.
She smiled as she sang and put a noose around her neck. The girl leaped. Keagan stepped back as she fell toward him. Halfway down, the rope snapped her neck. Her body swung like a pendulum.
Keagan fell back against the wall. He’d seen plenty of dead bodies, but never had he watched someone die.
Abigail Blackwood kept spinning in a circle, her eyes and tongue bulging out. He grabbed her ankle and stopped her motion. Feeling numb, Keagan walked back to the front door and stood at the threshold. Outside, the storm continued to flash and rumble over the pine forest. The driveway was empty except for the two police cars where Big Mike and Pete remained dead.
“Christ, what a night.” Keagan heard a new sound coming from inside the house. He stepped back into the hall. Somewhere in the darkness someone was crying. Was Abigail still alive? He walked back to her hanging body. Her blank eyes stared down at him. Her face was already turning blue. He grabbed her dangling arm and checked her pulse. Definitely dead.
The sobbing started up again.
His pistol aimed at the impenetrable blackness, the sheriff followed the hall until he was back inside the kitchen. The crying seemed to be coming from the pantry. He opened it and found a small corridor that ended at a partially open door. The floor and walls were covered in dirt, broken roots and smears of blood.
The cry was much louder now. A child’s voice.
Keagan opened the door. A set of blood-stained steps led down into a cellar. His claustrophobia kicked in, constricting his breath. He hated cellars. Go back outside, his inner voice urged. Let someone else go down there.
No, he was the sheriff of this county, he reminded himself, and a child was crying for help.
Keagan tried the light switch, but the power was dead. “Shit!” He descended the stairs until his boots sank in moist black soil. He rounded the staircase to find a cavernous darkness of unknown depth. The one wall he could see was lined with shelves stored with jars of fruit preserves and pickled pigs’ feet. He followed the sobs that sounded like a boy’s cry. The stink of death was heavy in the air, burning Keagan’s nostrils. As he got twenty feet under the house, the crying stopped. “Where are you, son?” He spun in a circle and his light caught movement. “There you are.” He spotlighted a red-faced boy sucking his thumb.
Keagan recognized Otis Blevins. The six-year-old was the only retarded boy in Buck Horn. “Everything’s going to be okay, Otis. I’m going to get you out of here.” As the sheriff walked toward him, the flashlight illuminated something behind the boy that made Keagan freeze. Jutting up from the soil, impaled on sticks, were a dozen decapitated heads. The missing members of the coven.
Otis’s eyes got wide and he backed into the maze of the killer’s trophies.
A loud cracking noise echoed behind Keagan. He whirled with the flashlight and gasped, “Oh, Jesus…” when he saw the Blevins House killer.
An hour later, the police reinforcements finally made their way down to the cellar. They rescued little Otis Blevins. The boy cried for his mama as they took him upstairs. The half-dozen cops who searched the cellar couldn’t believe what was down here. Among a bizarre collection of witches’ heads, they found Sheriff Keagan’s head mounted on a stick.
To unravel the mystery of the Blevins Coven Massacre, read the terrifying novella, The Witching House.
The Witching House
© 2013 Brian Moreland
“The Witching House starts with fear, moves into terror and ends with a horrific explosion of sensory delights.”
—Maynard Sims, author of Stronghold and The Eighth Witch
"Witchcraft, sacrifices, an abandoned house and a thing that has hungered for decades set the stage for this must-read expedition to The Witching House. The best advice anyone could offer a visitor is: Don’t go in the attic, don’t go in the bedrooms, but don’t, under any circumstances, go in the basement. You won’t come out the same...if you come out at all."
—John Everson, author of NightWhere and Violet Eyes
Some houses should be left alone.
In 1972, twenty-five people were brutally murdered in one of the bloodiest massacres in Texas history. The mystery of who committed the killings remains unsolved.
Forty years later, Sarah Donovan is dating an exciting man, Dean Stratton. Sarah’s scared of just about everything—heights, tight places, the dark—but today she must confront all her fears, as she joins Dean and another couple on an exploring adventure. The old abandoned Blevins House, the scene of the gruesome massacre, is rumored to be haunted.
The two couples are about to discover the mysterious house has been waiting all these years, craving fresh prey. And down in the cellar they will encounter a monstrous creature that hungers for more than just human flesh.
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Witching House:
The house that ate people stood within a coven of pine trees like an ancient god being worshipped. The high branches touched its shingled roof with reverence. Towering three stories, the rock house was far from being a flawless god. The moss-covered stones that cobbled its walls were pocked from years of rot and abandon. Fungus and creeper vines had spread across its facade, leafy tentacles invading cracks where boards covered the windows. The glass within their frames had long ago shattered.
The Old Blevins House, as it came to be called, was set miles deep within the East Texas forest and rumored to be haunted. The stone dwelling became a backwoods legend spoken over campfires and around beers at the roadhouse in Buck Horn, referring to it as “that house in the woods”. If anyone foolishly talked about ghosts or witchery, they were sure to spit the ground and cross themselves. Deer hunters wouldn’t dare hunt these parts. The deer wouldn’t come here either.
At age forty-seven, Otis now lived on a pig farm ten miles away but still looked after the stone house. On this dewy morning, he checked the front door to make sure it was still locked. The padlock was badly rusted. He made a mental note to stop by the hardware store and buy a new one. As the caretaker walked the perimeter, he noticed that some of the symbols painted on the clapboards had smeared after last night’s storm. He shook his head. East Texas got too much rain this time of year.
Otis pulled a paintbrush out of a mason jar of hog’s blood and repainted a symbol of a triangle with stick-figure arms and legs. He heard scratching from the opposite side of the clapboards—something angry clawed at him from within the house. Whistling, Otis walked around the corner. The scraping nails followed him as he painted the same symbol on every boarded window. The scrapes turned to pounding. The house was in a foul mood this morning. Or maybe just hungry. The caretaker ignored the incessant knocks against the wood and performed the tasks that the house had given him.
When he was done, Otis returned to his truck. In the back, a large hog was pacing in a cage, making all sorts of grunting noises.
“Easy there, girl.” Otis opened the cage and snapped a leash on Bessie’s collar. The sow hopped off the truck and snorted against Otis’s leg. He patted her pink head and then walked her to the back of the house where a long chain lay coiled on the ground. He was mighty upset that it was Bessie’s turn. Otis loved this pig. The house reminded him that he had alternatives, if he was willing.
The caretaker hooked the chain to the sow’s collar and backed away. Tearing up, Otis sat in an old rocker and chewed a wad of tobacco as he waited. Not long after, the chain began to uncoil and went taut. The pig squealed and struggled to run as she was dragged into a dark hole near the house.
Otis left after that. He hated the sounds the house made when it fed.
About the Author
Brian Moreland writes novels and short stories of horror and supernatural suspense. His first three books, Dead of Winter Shadows in the Mist, and The Witching House are now available. His third novel, The Devil’s Woods, will release in December 2013. Brian lives in Dallas, Texas where he is diligently writing his next horror novel.
Visit: www.brianmoreland.com
Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianMoreland
Facebook: www.facebook.com/HorrorAuthorBrianMoreland
Brian’s Horror Fiction blog: brianmoreland.blogspot.com
Look for these titles by Brian Moreland
Now Available:
Dead of Winter
Shadows in the Mist
The Witching House
Coming Soon:
The Devil’s Wood
The Girl from the Blood Coven
Brian Moreland
Who—or what—killed them all?
In this short story prelude to The Witching House, the year is 1972. Sheriff Travis Keagan is enjoying a beer at the local roadhouse when a blood-soaked girl enters the bar. Terrified and trembling, Abigail Blackwood claims her entire family was massacred at the nearby hippy commune in the woods. But when Sheriff Keagan and his deputies investigate the Blevins House, they discover there’s more to Abigail’s story than she’s told them. Much more.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
The Girl from the Blood Coven
Copyright © 2013 by Brian Moreland
ISBN: 978-1-61921-866-6
Edited by Don D’Auria
Cover by Scott Carpenter
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: July 2013
www.samhainpublishing.com
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