Chillingworth Mews: A supernatural horror novel

by Anton Palmer

  The toolbox was at her feet, tipped up on its side from where Steve had hurled it against the wall the previous evening, lying half open. An array of razor-sharp edges and lethal-looking points spilled out invitingly.

  BLOOD!

  The voice went virtually unnoticed as she snatched up a screwdriver and, with a howl, thrust it between the woman’s shoulder blades, the tool sinking into flesh almost to the handle.

  To Sam’s surprise, it was Steve who screamed in response, kicking the sales woman’s head away, a fountain of blood spurting from a ragged stump between his legs.

  The woman fell to the floor, her eyes wide as she gasped for breath. Dark red fluid dribbled from her lips as the dismembered organ lodged in her throat disgorged the blood that seconds ago had been throbbing in its veins. Within a few seconds, it had shrivelled enough that she was able to choke it down, air once more filling her lungs, whistling through the hole in her back. Sam pounced on her, stabbing the screwdriver repeatedly into her chest, perforating her breasts over and over, puncturing both lungs in several places before finally stabbing her through the heart, a fountain of pumping blood spurting into the air.

  As the sales agent slipped away, her blood pooling around her on the polished floorboards, Sam turned her attention to her wayward husband.

  Steve had crawled up to the far end of the bed, his back pressed tight against the wooden headboard. His hands were clasped tightly around a white pillow between his thighs, dark blood soaking right through it.

  MORE BLOOD!

  The voice reverberated around the gore soaked bedroom, Sam’s frenzied rage suddenly increasing as the booming imperative flushed her mind of all thoughts and emotions - other than the desire to kill.

  She hurled herself onto the bed, the screwdriver thrusting into Steve’s neck. Her husband’s hands flew up from the pillow between his legs to protect his throat. As his life spilled in dark rivers between his fingers, Sam plunged the tool into his right eye, the orb bursting under the assault, the sharp point of the screwdriver smashing through the orbital bones before driving into brain. As she withdrew the implement she twisted it slightly, pulling the eyeball from its socket and flicking it across the room, blood and brain matter seeping from the empty hollow. Sam stabbed again at Steve’s neck and throat, eventually piercing his corotid artery, a cascade of blood spraying over the cracked wall behind the bed.

  As her husband’s lifeless body slid down the headboard, redundant blood still pumping from the gash in his neck, Sam’s mind began to clear. She looked around the bedroom, screaming when her gaze found the body of the sales woman - as if seeing the corpse for the first time. Memories of the frenzied past few minutes suddenly flooded back – images of blood-spraying slaughter playing out on the retina of her mind’s eye like a bad movie on a grainy screen.

  Oh, fuck! What the hell had she done?

  She tried to run from the bedroom, her legs like jellied lead, the door slamming shut before her. She leapt at the handle, pulling and twisting, her efforts shaking the wooden frame.

  The door stayed closed.

  A loud ‘crack’ behind her jerked her body around and she watched in horror as lumps of plaster flew from the wall, a snake of grey electrical flex bursting from a cloud of pink dust, writhing through the air towards her. The cabled quickly coiled itself around her throat, pulling her back towards the wall from whence it came, secondary and tertiary cables erupting from the plaster at her back, winding tightly around her torso and hips to hold her in place.

  28

  Lisa kicked off her shoes and flopped onto the bed.

  Glancing at the digital clock on her bedside table she saw the time was 9:36 AM. She had just come off a night shift at the hospital, and, while experience had taught her that hitting the hay immediatley would play havoc with her body-clock, she was just too damned tired to worry about it.

  The emotional stress of the past few days had given her sleepless nights and appetite deprived days, the bags she had so recently acquired beneath her eyes adding a decade to her looks. She had booked time off work in the hope that she would be home when – if - Roger walked back through her door, but a sickness bug had been sweeping through the wards, affecting both patients and staff alike and she had been ‘asked’ to come in.

  She wondered if it was worth ringing the police station to see if they had any news, but, as she lay on top of the quilt, still dressed in her uniform, she felt her eyes growing heavy and quickly succumbed to sleep.

  *

  After a leisurly shower, Roger dressed in a clean set of clothes from his motel room’s flimsy wardrobe and headed toward town.

  He recalled spotting a sign for a library on his trip to the supermarket the day before and was keen to learn more about the history of Chillingworth House. After all, he’d tortured and killed a man in the name of the entity that inhabited the building’s bricks and mortar, which, combined with his fiery experience at the pub, had more than piqued his curioisity.

  Turning left out of the Deanery’s carpark and walking towards the town, Roger paused as he approached Chillingworth Mews. The building was on the opposite side of the road, a steady stream of late commuters and through traffic the only thing between them. As he stood and studied the architecture he suddenly gasped, a tug at his guts squeezing the wind out of him.

  For a second he thought ‘the dead’ were giving him a new mission, but this pain in his bowels was softer – an invitation rather than an order – and he realised it was Chillingworth Mews that was calling him.

  Spotting a gap in the traffic, Roger dashed across to the opposite pavement, quickly walking towards the new apartment block. He stopped at the entrance, looking at the array of buzzers and mail-boxes, as a soft ‘thunk’ invited him to enter and he gingerly pushed at the door, mildily surprised, but for some intuitive reason not shocked, as it opened easily under the gentle pressure applied.

  Roger stepped through into the communal hallway and looked around. The space seemed familiar to him, despite the fact that he had never even seen the building before yesterday, let alone set foot inside it. The smell, the sounds of his footsteps on the varnished floorboards, the pictures on the wall, the staircase – all felt known to him; more than that – all felt part of him. He sensed his destination and ascended the stairs, turning at the top towards the apartment with its front door slightly open.

  His bowels rippled with the force of the building’s extended invitation, but also with a mix of excited fear. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the sensations but he was reminded of playing hide and seek as a young child. As a kid, Roger loved to go upstairs and hide – particularly during the winter evenings when the house was dark – his father slowly creeping up the stairs, groaning and growling like some kind of monster. Roger would be secreted inside a wardrobe or under a bed, the anticipation of being found by ‘the monster’ almost causing him to wet himself with excitement. More often than not, he would jump out from his hiding place before his father had even got close to him, the butterflies in his belly and bladder too overwhelming for comfort. He had that feeling once more as he carefully pushed the door and stepped through.

  The apartment was silent. As he stood still, listening for any slight sounds of life, the smell hit his nostrils. His experiences over the last few days left him in no doubt as to what the pungent odour was – blood.

  He took a deep sniff of the air – the coppery scent seemed to be coming from the partly opened door to his left. Roger cautiously stepped through into the dining room. The door on the left led to the kitchen and was open, the room beyond looking clean and fresh. To his right, a closed door set his bowels squirming once again and he knew this door would lead to his reason for being here. As he wrapped his fingers around the handle the door flew open, the force dragging him forwards, stumbling into the bedroom.

  Before he had even had a chance to take in the scene in front of him, Roger felt the confusion of butterflies in his belly turn to ice, their frozen met
aphorical bodies lying heavy in his gut. The chill in his core quickly crept through his entire body, the warm embers of the earlier invitation now cold and black, some instinct deep inside telling him he’d been tricked.

  On the floor before him lay the body of the sales woman, puncture wounds clearly visible on her blood stained chest. On the bed slumped the naked body of a man, similar wounds afflicting his neck, a gore soaked pillow between his limp thighs, the wall behind him criss-crossed with cracks.

  Something’s wrong here…

  Not wrong in the sense that the room had two dead bodies in it…something else…

  Blood! Where was all the blood?

  The apartment had reeked of it when he had entered and the wounds in the bodies indicated that several pints should be sloshing around somewhere. Ok, the body on the bed may have bled out into the sheets and mattress, but the woman on the floor should have been lying in a pool of the stuff, but, apart from the drying stains on her blouse, there was nothing.

  As he pondered the conundrum his eye was suddenly drawn to movement on the opposite side of the bedroom. A woman, her clothes spattered with red, was pinned to the wall by…

  Was that electrical flex?

  Her eyes widened as they made contact with his, desperation evident in her face.

  “Help me, pl-“

  Her cry was cut short as the cable around her throat contracted, choking off her words, her blue eyes bulging in their sockets as the grey flex continued to tighten for a few seconds more before slowly slackening back off, the woman gasping loudly for breath.

  Roger stood rooted to the spot, his brain unable to fathom what he should do first.

  Rescue the pinned woman?

  Check the bodies for any signs of life?

  Go and get help?

  He opted for the third choice, turning towards the exit. Before he could even put one foot in front of the other, the door slammed into place, cutting of his escape. A cracking sound above his head forced him to look up. The light fitting swung wildly for a second then crashed to the floor, the electrical cable it had been suspended from ripping across the artexed ceiling before diving toward him, wrapping itself around his neck like a noose. The cable continued tearing across the ceiling, clouds of white painted dust falling in its wake as it lifted Roger to his tip-toes, throttling the breath, along with any fight from his body before slamming him back against the wall. The light switch in the wall beside him fell to the floor as the cables it was wired to broke free, bursting from the exposed metal socket. The flex danced in front of Roger’s face as the grey outer casing peeled back like an over-ripe banana, the nest of coloured wires within fanning out across his cheeks before burrowing into his skin. He could feel them crawling through his flesh like parasites, inching their way towards his eyes. He screamed as their sharp points dug into the corners of his eyeballs, worming their way behind the orbs, following the optic nerves, multiple metallic fingers probing deep into his brain.

  The second the copper filaments were inside his head he felt the life-force that inhabited Chillingworth Mews and Chillingworth House before it.

  He saw blood.

  Felt its heat.

  Heard the screams…

  And now Roger knew for certain he had been tricked - Chillingworth wasn’t the victim – it was the perpetrator. A force of pure evil that fed upon torment; and suffering; and blood; and death. An entity whose thoughts were now his thoughts; whose memories were now his memories – and whose plans were now evident in his own mind. Imprisoned for so many years within a body of bricks and mortar, of wood and plaster – it wanted to be free.

  To be flesh again.

  To enjoy the agonies of others first hand rather than vicariously through the violence of those under its influence. It wanted to kill and torture and rape. To feed on the hot blood spilled and feast on the screams released.

  Roger fought to keep its sickness from his mind but the battle was useless; they were as one – a symbiotic melding of brick and bone. As if to ram that point home, the cable around his throat tightened, lifting his head so that he was looking directly at the terrified woman pinned to the opposite wall and in an instant, he knew the agonising fate that awaited her.

  The woman screamed as she felt the flex around her body begin to squirm, the grey plastic casing peeling back, the wires within tearing at her clothes. Buttons popped, fabric was shredded and within seconds she was naked apart from her shoes.

  Roger watched as the network of wires spread out across her body, enveloping her breasts, squeezing the firm flesh. She cried out in pain as the copper points pierced her nipples, rivulets of blood flowing from her punctured teats. As the wires spread further, the multi-coloured worms crawled through the triangle of light-brown hair between her legs, teasing apart her labia, several of the thin cables twisting around each other to form a rudimentary phallus before plunging inside her.

  The woman screwed her eyes shut tight at the violation but not before her gaze had alighted upon the obvious bulge straining at the crotch of Roger’s jogging pants, disgust at his excitement written all over her face.

  Roger burned with shame at his arousal despite the fact that he knew it wasn’t really his. Chillingworth was sharing its depraved lust with him, his body reacting as if the perversions being perpertrated were of his own volition. As if sensing his disgrace, the entity within Chillingworth Mews probed deeper into his head, some of the wires tracking along his brain stem into his spinal cord.

  Roger could now feel the woman’s body as if his own fingers were touching her – the firmness of her breasts and the heat deep inside her. His erection throbbed painfully against the restraints of his underwear, more cables erupting from the wall at his back, snaking up his legs, tearing the clothing from his lower body and releasing his penis. The wires twisted themselves into several loops, sliding over his shaft, slowly stroking his arousal to greater heights.

  In spite of himself, Roger began to thrust into the sleeve of wires, the woman opposite opening her eyes as the copper phallus in her vagina moved in time with his motions. She looked him in the eyes, a hint of pity in her blue orbs as if she now understood that his predicament was akin to hers. Roger turned his gaze away – he knew that his situation was nothing like hers, an image flashing into his head of her next violation.

  The radiator on the wall opposite him suddenly bucked and twisted, the water pipe that fed it tearing free with a grinding sound that set his teeth on edge. The pipe curled away from the wall, bending and shaping itself until it jutted between the woman’s thighs, dribbles of water dripping like pre-cum from its ragged, exposed end.

  The sleeve around Roger’s penis suddenly constricted, forcing blood into his glans, the head of his cock bulging purple. Other wires wrapped themselves around his scrotum, squeezing his balls.

  TRADE!

  Roger thought the booming voice was just in his head, certainly, the woman showed no sign of having heard it.

  BE ME! TRADE!

  Again the words filled his skull and Roger knew what they meant – he and the building were now one but Chillingworth wanted them to separate – with Roger taking the entity’s place in its prison of brick and mortar and Chillingworth using Roger’s body as a means of escape - to be finally be free of its bonds; free to embark on the journey of depraved perversions it had spent a hundred years dreaming about.

  “No! No trade - never!”

  Roger screamed the words, the copper nooses around his genitals constricting further around his engorged shaft at his response, blood vessels on the verge of burting open. The coils around his testicles also squeezed tighter, crushing his balls together, excrutiating pain burning in his loins.

  “Never!”

  Roger screamed his response again, certain that the force trapped within the building would not be willing to risk damaging his genitals any further – he had seen Chillingworth’s desires and knew that a healthy body was paramount to its plans.

  As if in acknowl
edment of Roger’s summation of the situation, the coils of copper around his penis and scrotum relaxed, the sleeve over his shaft starting up its rythmic stroking once again. As Roger’s arousal grew, his thrusts into the sleeve that was masturbating his length increased in fervour and he suddenly felt the woman’s moist heat envelop him.

  The woman screamed as the water pipe stabbed into her vagina, thrusting deeper, harder and faster in time with Roger’s own motions. Blood seeped from her opening as the jagged end of the pipe gouged chunks from her delicate walls.

  Roger felt the heat of her blood on him, and, in some part of his violated brain, the part that was more Chillingworth than Davies, it felt good…his throbbing cock swelling further with pleasure.

  TRADE!

  “No trade!”

  MORE BLOOD…

  The stroking motions of the sleeve wrapped around his swollen shaft increased, bringing him close to orgasm. As his seminal vessels filled with fluid ready for release, he heard the central heating boiler flare into life. Roger glanced at the woman opposite, tears streaming down her face as the water pipe plundered her sex. She showed no sign of hearing the boiler fire-up, or if she had heard it, no sign of realising its significance.

  Roger, unable to resist the urging of his loins, thrust harder and faster into the stroking sleeve, the water pipe responding in kind, tearing up the woman’s insides until finally, he reached the point of no return - his orgasm explosive, thick gouts of semen spurting from his penis.

  The woman let out an agonised scream as the freshly heated water ejaculated from the end of the pipe, squirting streams of scalding liquid deep inside her. Steam billowed from her opening as the boiling water stripped the tissue from her vaginal passage, globs of bloody flesh slipping from between her thighs as the pipe continued thrusting harder and deeper, finally erupting from her abdomen, steaming crimson geysers spraying from her ruptured belly.