The Haunting of Quenby Mansion Omnibus: A Haunted House Mystery

by J. S. Donovan

  “I’m not interested in whatever you’re doing,” Zoey said snarkily. As an only child, making her demands known was never difficult.

  Completely silent, the man’s hands tightened and loosened their grip on the steering wheel as if he were using a stress ball. Goose bumps rose on Zoey’s skin. She took a step back from the car and flipped open the phone within her hoodie pocket. She wasn’t going to threaten to call the police. She was going to call them now.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said. His soft but stoic voice lent to a handsome face, though Zoey still could not see it. As she subtly dialed 9 on her number pad, Zoey opened her mouth to ask “why?” but the glint of the abnormally long and skinny barrel shut her up with its quiet pint sound.

  A sharp pinch hit her throat. Her hands touched the long-feathered dart protruding from her flesh.

  The ground came up and punched her jaw.

  Her limbs disobeyed her.

  The world twisted, becoming ever so dark.

  Zoey dreamed of falling into a pit. Her parents were watching her from high above. Their expressions were judgmental and their frowns heavy. Zoey’s tongue was thick in her mouth, preventing her from speaking. She felt weak.

  The teenager awoke in a sprawling hay field with an electric lantern on the ground a few feet away. In the light, black beetles and ants scurried under stomped hay. Zoey pulled her wrists. They were tied to the arms of an old wooden chair whose right front leg was a little shorter than the rest.

  She jerked in her binding and looked out at the endless field. Eyes watering, Zoey screamed. “Somebody! Help me!”

  The night sucked up her cry.

  The wind screamed back.

  Grass crunched behind Zoey.

  Zoey trembled. He’s behind me. Her breathing became disjointed. Her heart pounded.

  “I’ve killed a lot of people,” the man admitted, almost with pity. “Poison. Knives. I haven’t found a method that I like. That’s weird, is it?”

  “Untie me,” Zoey said through her teeth. She had to clench her jaw. It was the only way to keep it from chattering. “Do it.”

  “I can’t, Zoey. God knows I’ve tried for many years.”

  How does he know my name? Zoey felt dizzy. “Who are you?”

  He bent down and whispered his name into her studded ear. Zoey trembled. It didn’t make any sense. Why him? Why was any of this happening? The man grabbed the crown of her head and held it in place. Zoey attempted to shake out of his grip, but he was stronger than he sounded. As she struggled, Zoey noticed a large building in the distance. In her peripherals, she saw the man lift something sharp and pointed.

  “Hold still. You really don’t want me to miss,” he said.

  Zoey clenched her eyes shut, telling herself to wake up from this nightmare, but with each passing moment, fear built and the man lined up the sharpened stake for the kill.

  12

  Bed of Bones

  In the black of night, rain fell on the quaint town of Adders, Georgia. Homestyle restaurants, Baptist churches, and ancient barns were silhouetted in the inky blackness. Far beyond the rolling pastures and barbed wire fences resided a single-lane red brick road fit for a horse-drawn wagon. Towering, moss-covered oaks flanked its side. Tattered lichen dripped from the trees’ high and sprawling branches that arched over the road and touched each other's skeletal fingers. At the end of the wet brick road stood Quenby House: a symmetrical 19th century masterpiece.

  Bowling green grass blanketed the front yard while large trees bordered the massive seventeen room, three-story estate, emphasizing the home’s importance. From the distance, the mansion was monumental. Up close, it was breathtaking. Drooping white flowers spotted the vines that climbed the mansion’s chipped white walls and its grand colonnades--one set across the house’s face, and a second like it but rising out of the second-story balcony. Above that, arched windows jutted out of the wide truncated roof.

  Muddled noise and flashing lights escaped the mansion’s many windows.

  The window nearest the front door spilled shattered glass across the red carpeted foyer--a massive hall with a parallel curving staircase that ended at the opposite ends of the interior balcony. Bordered by gold leaf frames, authentic early 19th-century oil paintings of the mansion and its surrounding lands decorated the high walls.

  Every light, even those on the massive multiple-tier chandelier, flashed rapidly. Annoying arcade jingles screamed from the billiard room packed with hoarded 1980s gaming paraphernalia. The distorted sound rattled the window and shook the walls, crescendoing louder and louder as the stutter of every light quickened.

  In the cluttered basement, past the mountain of sheet-covered furniture and dust-dressed Antebellum relics stood an unassuming brick wall. Droplets of dried blood crusted in its coarse ridges where fiddle-maker Terrence Carr had mindlessly clawed at it weeks ago.

  If one pressed their ear against the cold brick, they would hear faint scratching on the other side, but not the voices. Those were reserved for someone else.

  Wearing cyan boy shirts and a low-cut black t-shirt, thirty-three-year-old blonde and slender Evelyn Carr sat on a bed of bones. Chalky femurs, ribs, and human skulls pooled over her toned legs and dug at her flesh. Just like the tears running down Evelyn’s pale cheeks, beads of wax leaked down lit and dying candlesticks that systematically lined the four doorless and windowless brick walls.

  Evelyn’s only warmth in the frigid room came from her husband’s hand. Lost in fear, Terrence squeezed so tight that pain crippled Evelyn’s palm and fingers. She was too terrified to resist.

  Band-Aids wrapped the tips of Terrence Carr’s fingers. His skin was dark, his head was bald, and his face was well-structured and kind with a little black beard on his chin. He wore pajamas decorated with little string instruments. Foggy breaths escaped his ajar mouth. Like hungry snakes, red veins squiggled toward his dark irises.

  Under the hole of the secret ceiling chute, the married couple sat in the cratered floor where the dry human remains seemingly sucked them in deeper into the nearly two-hundred-year-old plantation house.

  Six individuals stood around them.

  An old man in a sweater vest and white slacks. His thin hair was combed to the side and his eyes were flat black. Thick blood leaked from his lower lip and down his shaven, sagging chin.

  Next to him was a gorgeous woman wearing a glossy jade dress to accentuate her hourglass figure. Like her dress, her eyes were green and sultry. Her hair was thick, luscious and velvet red. Crimson seeped into her full bosom from the slash across her skinny throat.

  Naked and with a horizontal opening across his belly, a fat man with an oblong head stood next to the woman in green. His face was neutral.

  By him and wearing a 90s football jacket, a seventeen-year-old male with devilishly handsome features and dimpled chin seemed in perfect form apart from the wet nub where his throwing hand once resided.

  Then there was the goth girl. Fifteen, raven black eyeliner to match her black hair and black lipstick. There was a hole in the back of her head.

  Lastly, seven-year-old Mary Sullivan with sandy blonde hair and freckles spotted under her blue eyes and across the bridge of her nose. Her killer--a man in a featureless white cotton mask--was upstairs, looking for a chance to put a bullet in Evelyn and Terrence’s skulls.

  In her tiny voice, Mary repeated her plea. “Help us.”

  The other five mimicked her words. “Help us. Help us. Help us.”

  Their cries echoed off the cold walls of the fully enclosed chamber and into Evelyn’s mind, drowning out all sounds and thought, seemingly taking root in her skull.

  Evelyn searched for the right words, but she could barely control her breathing. Her heart pounded until it cramped in her chest. Goose bumps grew across her body. Dust from the ceiling rained down upon Evelyn’s messy golden hair as Mary’s killer stomped around upstairs. The masked man was one step away from finding the trapdoor that ended in this candlelit pit.<
br />
  Suddenly, as quick as the mangled strangers had appeared, they vanished. All that remained was their plea resounding off the walls and the corners of the doorless and windowless square room.

  Evelyn and Terrence sat in the cold quiet, lost in the sound of their ragged breaths and racing hearts. The world had returned to normal, but under the surface, Evelyn’s foundation was shattered. The divide between life and death blurred along with reality and fiction. In a stir of confusion and fear, a million questions raced through her mind. No one could answer them.

  Terrence let go of Evelyn’s hand. He stood, taking a moment to steady himself. Pain thumped in Evelyn’s hand, but that seemed to be the least of her problems.

  “Are they…” Terrence’s voice faded.

  “I don’t know,” Evelyn answered his unspoken question. For all she knew, the ghastly strangers were hiding just out of sight. They could return any second and shred Evelyn apart, and she’d have no way of stopping it. As a generally self-sufficient woman, being stripped of control left Evelyn feeling as exposed and naked as the bloody fat man that branded her thoughts.

  Terrence’s body trembled. He craned his head up to the circular holes cut into the ceiling. The chute in the middle led to Maxwell Quenby’s hidden office: the place where he wrote his last will and testament to Evelyn before vanishing a decade ago. Evelyn never knew her father. Their only connection was the key to this accursed estate. She recalled his crinkled note.

  To Evelyn, my daughter. My heir. I failed you in life. I will not make excuses or justify my actions. I will leave you with the only thing I have to give: my estate. Enclosed within this note is the key to our family home. May it give you more peace than it did me. Your father, Max.

  Terrence stretched out his shaking hand to Evelyn. It took her a moment to process before she accepted his gesture and allowed him to pull her to her feet. Evelyn turned back to the bones and saw the world twist. She steadied herself on her husband.

  “We need to get out of here,” Evelyn declared.

  “Funny,” Terrence said weakly. “I was thinking the same exact thing.”

  13

  Family

  Leaning on each other, Terrence and Evelyn shambled out of the bone pit and onto the wood floor. The icy kiss from the dusty surface made their toes curl. Terrence looked at the wax candles in sconces on the wall and shivered. Their spontaneous ignition wasn’t even on the top ten list of abnormal events that transpired tonight or any night in Quenby House.

  They approached the nearest brick wall. Terrence put his ear on the surface and knocked. He tried his knuckles at different locations while Evelyn kept watch. There was a chance that the killer still lurked upstairs. Evelyn clenched the rib bone that had been digging into her thigh. Its point wasn’t sharp but with enough force and jammed in the right place, it could be deadly. Evelyn attempted to forget the fact that it originated from one of the six people that had loomed over her. The rib’s dry texture and odd density did a horrible job of hiding that fact. The idea made Evelyn queasy.

  Terrence pulled away from the wall. “It’s hollow. We just need a way to bust through.”

  They needed a sledgehammer. Evelyn wasn’t crossing her fingers. The room was a pile of bones away from being empty. A morbid thought came to mind as she looked at the bones and the wall, but the skeletal remains were too old and brittle to MacGyver anything.

  Evelyn sniffled. The cold was getting to her. They needed to get out of this room or risk getting sick. Or worse, starve. Terrence traced the walls with his hand. He pressed on random bricks, disappointed by the lack of result. In any other place Evelyn would’ve laughed at him, but her father’s mansion was full of secrets. Like the hidden wall in the hall of ancestral portraits that had been axed apart by the masked killer.

  If there was a way to the ceiling, Evelyn would try it. But even on Terrence’s shoulders, Evelyn feared that she wouldn’t be able to hoist herself into the corpse chute. She wondered if any of the bodies down here were tossed before they died. Alone, cold, bleeding and surrounded by death, it was hard to imagine a worse fate. As a pessimist, Evelyn could probably think of one, but she’d rather not.

  Terrence, an optimist at heart, “pressed” every brick he came across, but to no avail. Evelyn turned her sights on the bones, gulped, and knelt beside them. She brushed aside skulls, vertebrae, and knuckle bones. In the near darkness of the room, it reminded her of a Halloween party game where the participants are blindfolded, feeling different objects and trying to guess their not-so-sinister reality. In this case, the reality was pretty glum. Terrence twisted back to her at one point, opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it. He mumbled something and went back to “pressing” bricks.

  Pushing aside the bones quickly became a frustrating process as they kept falling back on her hands every time. Instead, Evelyn set them aside, unintentionally categorizing the skeletal remains. Skulls in one spot, arms in the other, etc. She blamed it on her methodical investigative skills.

  Soon Evelyn got the pile organized. She looked at the dip. It was nothing but a structural weakness in the hardwood. She plopped to her bottom and hugged her knees close to her chest. She looked up the ceiling chute, feeling the paranoia cripple her. Get your head on straight, she commanded herself. It didn’t work. She watched Terrence press away, seeing his movements becoming rushed and frustrated.

  Taking in the surroundings, Evelyn put her P.I. skills to the test. She found putting herself in the missing person’s shoes helped her retrace their path. In this case, she thought about the killer who designed the place. Firstly, she’d assume that the room was a body dump, not a torture chamber. Still, the killer would want to account for any potential escapees. The victim would be beyond desperate and try every nook and cranny for an escape. Assuming that the candles were not lit, the victim would be fumbling blindly. The smart placement for a switch would be in a high place. Somewhere out of reach but not inconvenient. If the killer was six feet, the switch wouldn’t be higher than eight feet to toggle. Evelyn scanned the room. The candle sconces matched the height. Tell me you’re more creative than that. She got up and started feeling the various candlesticks, wondering if Terrence would make some innuendo-esque comment.

  “You sure this is your first time?” Terrence joked as he felt up the wall.

  “Ha. Ha.” Evelyn replied dryly. Wearing a small smile, she turned back to the task at hand. If they weren’t laughing, they’d be crying.

  After five stiff candlesticks, what little hope Evelyn had fleeted. She pinched the bridge of her slightly swollen nose. It was 3 a.m. when the killer broke into her home. It was probably 4ish now, but after her trek to Stephen Doyle’s house hours before, exhaustion hit Evelyn like a steam train. The only thing keeping her on two feet was the threat against her life.

  Evelyn tried another candlestick, wishing the killer wasn’t that creative. On her way to the candlestick, she noticed a brick jutting a little farther out than the rest on that wall. Holding her breath, she pressed it. Nothing. Irked, Evelyn hammered her fist against it. “Stupid--”

  Cha-Chunk

  Something rattled in the wall. Evelyn stumbled back, bracing herself. No rolling boulders. That was a relief.

  After a moment of stillness, Evelyn outstretched her skinny arm and pushed against the wall. The five-foot section of the wall opened, meeting resistance on the dirt floor. Evelyn pulled a candle off its stand and held it out like a torch. The amber glow lapped against the packed dirt and periodic vertical wooden posts holding up the damp, mine-like tunnel. A tear of hot wax slithered down Evelyn’s fingers as she stared into the abyss. Terrence joined her in her scouting.

  “It was the first brick you pressed, wasn’t it?” Terrence asked.

  With pursed lips, Evelyn nodded.

  Deadpanned, Terrence replied, “Neat.”

  Grabbing a candle of his own, Terrence walked with Evelyn through the corridor. The ground dipped and widened at random intervals, but th
e path stayed straight. Insects, worms, and other deep-earth creatures wiggled away from the candlelight. By the time Evelyn and Terrence reached the old wooden crop cart and sketchy ladder beyond it, their hands were stiff with hardened wax dripping stalactites from the bottom of their fists.

  At the center of the decrepit crop cart was a faded maroon stain. Body cart. Evelyn wondered if the killer stripped the victims before or after trotting them down here. After all, there were only dry bones in the basement. No articles of clothing.

  Seeing Terrence’s tension, Evelyn allowed him to climb the ladder first. The aged rungs groaned under his weight. He pushed hard against the trapdoor. It didn’t budge. Locked from the other side. Terrence got off the twelve-rung ladder.

  He planted his dirty bare foot on one of the long cart’s handle and pulled the wooden pole to him. Forehead vein bulging, he yanked back as hard as he could. There was a snapping noise underfoot and then the handle broke away. Terrence sucked air, handed the broken handle to Evelyn, and lifted his foot. Grimacing, he extracted a long splinter burrowing into the front layers of his sole. Hopping on one foot, he returned to the ladder and used the rounded tip of the broken handle to ram against the wooden slats of the trapdoor. Setting her dwindled candle aside, Evelyn grabbed ahold of the bottom end handle and helped punch the trapdoor. The rusted hinges loosed. Evelyn and Terrence proceeded to hit it a few more times until the rusty hinges gave way and the trapdoor fell towards them. Evelyn and Terrence ducked out of the way, avoiding an unnecessary headache.

  Taking a breath, Terrence climbed up. After a moment, he gestured for Evelyn to follow. As she climbed, cool wind chilled her skin. She glanced about the shed before fully exiting the portal. Old gardening equipment and rusty tools were scattered about. A scrunched-up rug had been used to cover the trapdoor. Though windows were covered with old towels, small slivers of light escaped through moth holes. Terrence opened the shed door, allowing both of them into the back yard.