Quarter to Midnight: Fifteen Horror Short Stories

by Darcy Coates

  “Hmm,” I said noncommittally. Dad’s work had a bad habit of jumping him across the country at short notice; this was the fifth house we’d stayed at in the last three years. That degree of unpredictability meant making friends was nearly impossible, so I’d just stopped trying. I wasn’t holding out much hope that our most recent move would be very different.

  I helped Mum wash up while Dad retreated to his office, ostensibly to catch up on work, even though we could clearly hear him calling out answers to his favourite trivia gameshow. It was well past dark when Mum finally took up one of the small gift baskets she’d put together and led me out the front door.

  “Which house will we start with?” she asked as we paused on the porch, looking at the twilight-shrouded rows of buildings that surrounded our house. “I’ll let you pick, honey.”

  “That one.” I pointed to the brick house on the other side of the road, where the elderly couple lived.

  The woman answered the door before Mum had even finished knocking. I had the feeling she’d been watching us through one of the white-curtained windows. Her watery blue eyes skipped between my mother and me with a mixture of confusion and curiosity. “Hello?”

  “Hello!” Mum gushed, showing her the gift basket. “We’re new here. We moved into the house just across the street, and we wanted to say hi.”

  The woman, who introduced herself as Ellen Holt in between Mum’s enthusiastic rambling, invited us inside. The house was smaller than ours, with peeling wallpaper, and it smelt like dust and dead mice. Ellen led us into the living room, where she introduced us to her husband, Albert, and asked if we would stay for a cup of tea.

  “I’d love to.” Mum placed the gift basket on the cluttered coffee table and settled into one of the lounge chairs. “Honey, why don’t you help Mrs. Holt with the tea? Albert, I couldn’t help but admire the beautiful vintage car in the driveway. Is that yours?”

  I had to hand it to her—Mum was a genius at breaking ice. Albert, a thin man with hair just as white as his wife’s, seemed to light up at the mention of his Beetle and launched into a lengthy dialogue on it. Mum, who knew next to nothing about cars, smiled and nodded to encourage him.

  Ellen led me into the kitchen. I leaned against the counter awkwardly while she filled the kettle, and she shot me a quick smile as her husband’s monologue floated through the doorway. “Sorry, Albert loves to talk about his cars.”

  I chuckled, stared at my folded hands for a moment, then asked, “So, uh, how long have you lived here?”

  “Oh, we bought the house when we got married, so… nearly fifty years, I suppose.” Ellen pushed her glasses up her nose. “Where did you move from?”

  “The city. But we hadn’t been living there for long. Work keeps asking Dad to relocate, so…”

  “Ah,” Ellen said, picking a small jug out of the cupboard. Its inside was coated in dust, but she didn’t seem to notice as she poured milk into it. “Do you think you’ll be staying here long?”

  “No idea.” I watched Ellen place four teacups on a floral tray. A cat entered the room, fixed me with its amber eyes for a moment, then rubbed itself against my legs. “I’d like to settle down somewhere, but it’s more likely that we’ll need to pack up again in six months or so.”

  “That’s not so bad,” Ellen said, almost too quietly for me to hear.

  “Sorry?”

  The older woman paused and seemed to be on the verge of saying something more. Her cat gave a plaintive mewl as it left my legs and began rubbing its head over Ellen’s shoes. “I… don’t want to alarm you,” she said at last, clearly picking her words cautiously, “because there’s nothing really to be alarmed about. But…”

  “Yes?”

  “But you should be careful in that house.”

  She fished a tin of cat food out from one of the cupboards and peeled its metal lid open. The cat redoubled its attentions.

  I glanced from Ellen to the living room, where Mum was still pretending to be enthralled in Albert’s history of the restorative work he’d done on the Beetle. “Why? Is there something wrong with it?”

  “It’s… a bit of a strange house.” Ellen tipped the cat food into a bowl and bent to place it on the ground. When she straightened again, she fixed me with a searching stare. “I lived here when it was still an orphanage, see? Albert and I used to give sweets and oranges to the children, sometimes, when they passed our house. I heard some strange stories about things happening there.”

  I leaned forward. “Such as?”

  “Well, a boy came up to me one morning while I was weeding the garden and said matter-of-factly, ‘Henry isn’t in the house anymore.’ It sounded like he’d just realised it for himself. When I asked what he meant, he said, ‘I haven’t seen Henry for a month. He didn’t get adopted, and he didn’t die. I don’t think the Sisters have noticed yet.’ The lunch bell rang, and he ran off before I could ask any more questions.”

  The kettle finished boiling with a click, but neither of us paid it any attention.

  “I waited for him to come and visit me again, but he never did. In fact, I didn’t see him leave the house at all after that. I don’t know if I should have told someone, but I was young back then and didn’t want to look nosy. Albert thought the boy had probably found a nice family to take him in.”

  The cat had finished wolfing down its meal and gave my leg a final rub before leaving for the living room. Ellen kept speaking as she held an empty teapot and stared into the distance. It was as though she’d forgotten I was there, but I was too enthralled to interrupt her.

  “Then they converted it back into a home–fresh paint and new doors and all of that–and the owners began renting it out. No one seemed to stay for long, though, a year or two at the most. And it was vacant for long stretches in between, too. And then, about eight years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to find police cars lining the street. A family’s child had gone missing. I watched from the window, and all I could think was, I should have told someone about the missing orphans, then maybe this one wouldn’t have gone, too.”

  She broke off suddenly, as though she realised she’d said too much, and turned back to me with a shaky smile. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yak your ear off. It’s not something you should worry about, anyway… just an old biddy’s imagination getting too excited…”

  Ellen fumbled to fill the pot, pouring in hot water but forgetting about the teabag. I followed her mutely back to the living room and let my thoughts consume me as Mum made enough small talk to cover for both of us.

  Henry isn’t in the house anymore…

  When we got home, I went straight to bed and lay on my back, watching the moonlight’s patterns on the wall opposite.

  Mum’s anxiety about the house having once been an orphanage suddenly seemed much more rational. With sixty children crammed into a house during a time of hardship and suffering, it was beyond wishful thinking to imagine there hadn’t been deaths.

  I tried to picture what it must have been like while Ellen’s story echoed in my head. I haven’t seen Henry for a month…

  If a child–a quiet, unobtrusive, and shy child–suddenly disappeared out of a hectic house with a constantly changing list of occupants, how long would it take before someone noticed?

  Was Henry the only child to disappear? What if others had gone missing, but were never remembered?

  I tossed in my bed, trying to calm my mind enough to sleep. The air felt thick, and I was having trouble breathing properly. Downstairs, Mum’s mantelpiece clock chimed one in the morning. I threw off my blankets.

  I needed to know more about the house and the people who’d lived in it. My family only had one computer, and it was downstairs, in Dad’s office, so I pulled my jacket on over my pyjamas and crept out of my room.

  The house felt eerily empty and quiet at night. I knew my parents were sleeping in one of the rooms down the hallway, but it was easy to imagine I was the last person on earth as I took the stairs two
at a time and turned in to Dad’s office.

  It was a comfy, cluttered room, and he’d set it up almost identically to the way it had been in our old house. The TV sat in one corner with a lounge opposite, and a desk and computer stood against the other wall. The main difference was the stack of boxes pressed into the space beside the lounge. Dad was probably still trying to find a place for them.

  I turned the computer and slid into the chair. As soon as the browser loaded, I typed our address into the search bar. The first few results were old real estate listings, but the third link belonged to a historical site. I opened it and started reading.

  It must have been the same page Dad had found. It talked about how the house had been constructed in 1891 by a lord who’d owned a good part of the village. When he’d died, he’d gifted it to the local church, which had set up an orphanage under the care of nuns from a nearby convent. When the Great Depression hit, the nuns, who had a policy of helping anyone who came to them, took in far more children than the house had been equipped to hold. There were photos, and I scrolled through them slowly.

  Some showed gaggles of scrawny children and teens playing in the yard. Another was of a young girl with thick brown curls, beaming so widely that it looked as if her face might split in half, holding hands with her two new adoptive parents. Another showed how mattresses were stacked in piles during the day, so that the rooms would be usable, then unpacked at night to fill every available space. Even so, it looked as though three or four children had shared each bed, lined up like sardines in a tin.

  A blurry photo depicted a nun spooning soup out of a pot that was heated over an open fire outside. So that’s how they coped with the tiny kitchen.

  The final picture showed a different bedroom. The children weren’t cramped four to a bed, but each had a mattress of their own. The room looked familiar, but not until I noticed a small shadowy bump in one wall–the secret door–did I realise it was my own room. I scrolled down to read the caption.

  Children sick with scarlet fever in the infirmary. As many as one hundred children died at Hallowgate during its time as an orphanage.

  “Infirmary?”

  I recoiled from the computer as though it had burned me. Looked at the photo again, I saw that the children in the picture were clearly sick. A nun bent over one of the beds, ladling something–water, probably–into a boy’s mouth.

  I’d seen enough. I powered down the computer, turned off the lights, and slowly climbed the stairs.

  It would be easy to move to a different room, I thought as I stood in my doorway and watched the shadows play over the place where dozens of children had struggled, and failed, to stay alive. It’s not like I have to stay here. I only took it because it’s closest to the stairs.

  I wondered how angry Mum would be if I disturbed her by deconstructing my room and moving it in the middle of the night. Probably very.

  C’mon, it’s not a big deal. You’ve slept here before. You can change rooms tomorrow.

  I sighed, stepped over the threshold, and closed the door behind myself.

  tk tk tk tk tk tk

  “Are you kidding me?” I gasped. I was sure I’d cut all of the branches that were close enough to hit my window. I stormed towards the tree’s silhouette, pulled open the glass, and looked out.

  None of the boughs were even near touching the window. In fact, the air was still, and the tree’s leaves weren’t moving except for an occasional quiver.

  What’s the noise, then?

  I closed my eyes and focussed on pinpointing the infernal tapping. It wasn’t coming from outside my room, after all, but from behind me. I turned slowly until I was facing the outline of the tiny square door hidden behind the wallpaper.

  I felt as if I were in a trance as I walked towards the door. The rhythmic tapping seemed to be growing louder, closer. I knelt on the carpet so that my face was even with the door, and stretched out a hand to touch the surface.

  My fingertips tingled where I felt the tapping lightly vibrate the wall. Like a beating heart, I thought, as the intensity of the taps increased again. I drew my fingers back then brought my index knuckle forward to rap on the wall three times.

  The noise stopped instantly. I held my breath, listening as hard as I could, then I heard three very distinct raps mimicking mine.

  I scrambled away from the wall, my heart hammering as I tried to make sense of it.

  “Hello?” I called, but my only reply was silence.

  A single thought echoed in my head, drowning out logic as it consumed me: I need to get the door open. Whatever’s inside there has to be let out.

  I bolted from my room and raced down the stairs. My footsteps thundered on the wood as I abandoned all attempts to stay quiet. I found a small paring knife in the kitchen drawer and clutched it in my fist as I raced back up to my room.

  By the time I knelt in front of my door again, I was panting, and a light sheen of sweat was sticking my pyjamas to my skin. I put my head near the wall and called softly several times. There was still no answer, so I pressed the blade into where the wallpaper curved to cross over the edge of the door and began cutting.

  The paper was thicker than I’d expected, and it took me several minutes to sever the wallpaper around the entire square. When I was done, I dropped the knife and dug my fingernails into the narrow gap I’d made. I pulled until my fingers ached, but the door stayed fixed in place.

  Of course. There’s a keyhole. It’s probably locked.

  I took up the knife again and carefully removed the paper from the bump on the inside of the frame. Behind it was a small bronze keyhole… and I thought I knew where I could find the key that fit it.

  On the day my parents had signed the lease for the house, the real estate agent showed us a jar of keys. She’d said no one was really sure which door each key belonged to or which ones were no longer needed because the locks had been changed, but she left it with us in case we ever needed one of them.

  As I went down the stairs for the third time that night, I tried to remember where the jar was. I checked in Dad’s study first, then in the laundry, and I finally found the old jam jar perched in a cupboard above the fridge. Its collection jingled when I shook it, and I unscrewed it on my way back to my room. I knelt in front of the door, tipped the two-dozen keys onto the floor, and spread them out.

  They were all very old. Some were rusted, a couple were bent, and one looked partially melted. It only took a minute to find the key I needed, though. It was smaller than the others, and the bright bronze matched the keyhole. I picked it out of the pile and held it up to the light. It had a delicate, ornate carved design and was small enough that I could have covered it with one finger.

  I pushed it into the keyhole. The lock was stiff after years of disuse, but I twisted it as hard as I dared. It unlocked with a gentle click.

  The door swung open on its own when I removed the key, finally granting me access to the area beyond. My heart thundering, my palms sweaty, I bent forward to look inside. It was exactly what I’d expected, after all: an empty space that went on for several meters before ending in a solid wall.

  I rolled back onto my heels and exhaled, uncertain if I felt more relieved or disappointed. If there was no one and nothing behind the door, then the tapping must have been coming from somewhere else–maybe a pipe in the wall that wasn’t secured properly or something in the rooms below that echoed into the tiny compartment my door guarded. Either way, I would change my room the next morning and not have to worry about it after that.

  I’d half-closed the door when something on the room’s back wall caught my attention. It looked like white writing on the dark-grey stone. I squinted at it but couldn’t make out what it said.

  “Jeeze,” I muttered. I hesitated on the edge of the frame for a beat, then crouched down and started wriggling my torso through the opening. If I’m going to go to the trouble of opening the damn door, I may as well explore whatever mysteries it offers, no matter how mundane.


  It was a narrow crawlspace. I could reach my hands out to the side a little, but the ceiling was so low that I had to shuffle along on all fours with my stomach only just above the ground. At least it was a short passageway. I reached the end and lowered my chest farther so that I could raise my head and read the writing.

  With my body blocking most of the light from the bedroom, I had to shuffle my mass about as much as I could to get illumination.

  “Lots… lets…”

  The markings were crude, as though they’d been made by a child blinded by the dark, but once I figured out the main words, I was able to piece together the rest. I read it carefully, making sure I had it right.

  “Let’s… play… hide… and… seek.”

  The door behind me slammed closed.

  I was engulfed in perfect darkness. It was the blackness of nightmares, when you feel like you’re drowning hundreds of miles under the ocean’s surface, and no matter how hard you kick you can’t see so much as a hint of light. I screamed and jerked, and my head hit the ceiling with a crack. Sharp pain flashed across my skull. I hunched down, pressing my forehead to the icy-cold ground until the worst of the sting subsided.

  My ears were ringing–whether from the slamming door or when I’d hit my head, I wasn’t sure–and I felt dizzy. I reached a hand towards the wall to the left but couldn’t feel it.

  That gives me enough room to turn around, at least.

  I shuffled in a little circle, trying to get myself facing the door without getting jammed in the narrow confines of the passageway, but not even my feet bumped the walls as I made my turn. I began crawling forward, occasionally touching the ceiling above my head to make sure I was leaving enough room. Then I stretched my hand forward to feel for the door.

  One minute… two minutes…

  Panic started to build in my chest as I moved farther and farther into the blackness without finding the exit. It didn’t take me this long to get inside, did it? I kept reaching my hand forward, expecting to feel solid wood but grasping only air. My limbs started trembling from having to carry my body’s weight at such an awkward angle. My chest was grazing the floor, and every time I moved forward, my back bumped the ceiling.