The House
If you’ve ever shouted. “Don’t go in there.” at the TV when watching a 1970s horror movie, then this story is for you.
wrote a scathing review of the horror novel The Ruins. I thought it would be fun to write a comic book style story.
Four twenty somethings decide to explore a creepy house — what can possibly go wrong? As with a lot of my stories, it’s not what you’d expect
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Cheryl stumbled as her foot tangled in a root, the weight of her backpack almost dragging her into the bushes.
“Why are we scrambling through this wood?” She yelled at Brad who was marching ahead ten paces in front of her.
A bramble snagged her T-shirt pulling it tight. Another scratched at the skin of her thigh below her shorts.
Ow, fuck, what’s that?” Cheryl screeched.
Brad turned to look back at her. “Watch out Cheryl, a spooky old man is trying to grab at your tits,” he laughed.
“What?” Panic flashed across Cheryl’s face.
“It’s just a thorn.” Brad stepped forward and unhooked the spike from Cheryl’s T-shirt. His hands cupped her breasts and his thumb and forefinger pinched at her nipples through the thin material. “Mind you, they are nice tits.”
Cheryl pushed past him. “Not the time, Brad.”
She glanced over her shoulder. Brad was still standing looking back down the path. Twenty feet or so behind them Alice and Mark seemed to be having much the same conversation. Alice was struggling against several strands of brambles that looked like an octopus had reached out and grabbed her. Her white T-shirt was pulled up to reveal tanned skin above her figure-hugging shorts.
“Brad,” Cheryl said.
He jumped almost imperceptibly at the sound of her voice and turned to walk behind her.
“Look, that old man said that there’s a spooky house somewhere in these woods and we’re going to find it.”
“Yeah, he also said it was haunted and to keep away.” Cheryl walked on still looking down at her feet.
Brad stepped in front of her and shifted the weight of his backpack, his face alight with boyish enthusiasm. “But he also let slip that there’s something valuable there.” He grinned. “And don’t tell me you really believe in all that ghost crap.”
“If the ghost stuff is crap then the treasure stuff is probably crap as well,” Cheryl said
“Yeah, but it will be fun,” Brad said. “You know like all those ghost hunting TV guys. If we can get something weird on camera. It could be a sensation on YouTube. A million likes here we come.”
“Those guys make it all up,” Cheryl said.
“Then so will we. A few loud bumps, you and Alice screaming. It’ll be great.
“Why do Alice and I have to do the screaming?”
“Because you’re girls.”
“Maybe we should run around with our tits out?”
Brad looked into the distance. “Now there’s an idea,” he said.
Cheryl ignored him “Yeah, well you screamed when you caught your finger in the door.”
“That was different”
Cheryl raised her eyebrows and looked back at Alice. When she turned back Brad was once again disappearing down the trail.
He stopped, his tall, lanky frame stretching up to look over the bushes. “Look, I told you there was a house,” he shouted, pointing between the trees and hopping up and down like a four-year-old outside a sweet shop.
Cheryl walked past him until she could see the dark grey shape between the trees.
They pushed through the last of the undergrowth. The house was surrounded by a high wall. One of the iron gates across the entrance still hung on its hinges but the other’s had rusted and it sagged open. Beyond it, the large, two-story building squatted like a decaying giant. Empty windows gazed out at the brambles and undergrowth that surrounded it. Only the path to the open door was clear of tangled plants.
“Well it certainly looks creepy,” Alice said as she and Mark caught them up. She pulled on the straps of her pack. “Jesus, Brad, did we have to bring so much stuff, this pack is heavy.
“We need the tents and the food to stay overnight, the rest of what you have got loaded in there is probably girl stuff,” Brad said.
“Yeah, and your beer and Tequila,” Alice grumbled.
“Come on, let’s go and have a look around,” Brad said.
Cheryl looked up, the sky was turning a darker blue as the sun went down. “Don’t you think we ought to set up camp first?” She said.
“Plenty of time for that and we’ve got the torches,” Brad said walking through the gates.
The front door to the house hung at an angle with one of its hinges rusted and broken. Brad stepped past it and disappeared inside.
The sky was darkening quickly as the sun dropped and the light from Brad’s torch danced inside the house as the other three stood hesitantly on the doorstep.
“Fuck me,” they heard him say and they pushed through the door.
The light they had assumed was his torch was coming from a landing halfway up a wide staircase.
Brad was standing at the bottom, he had dropped his pack on the floor and was staring at the apparition on the landing, his mouth open like a gaping fish.
A tall, slim woman stood there as if spot lit in a 1940s movie star pose. Her body was the perfect hourglass shape and her long blonde hair flowed around her face like waves of silk. Her diaphanous dress, which barely seemed to conceal the perfect hemispheres of her breasts, misted and swirled around her revealing tantalizing glimpses of cherry-pink nipples.
“Wow, what a babe,” Brad stuttered without taking his eyes off her.
“Is… is she a ghost?” Alice said.
Cheryl looked across at Mark. He had the same open mouthed stare as Brad. For a moment Cheryl had the impression that his eyes had popped out on stalks like a cartoon figure. “Well somebody ought to get this on film,” she said pulling out her phone.”
The woman looked at them and smiled. Slowly she began to descend the staircase. The dress started to flow from her as if it were hooked on a pin at the top of the stairs. Slowly it revealed her breasts and then slid away from her waist.
She paused halfway down just as the misty material was circling around her hips, fading and reforming to give tantalizing glimpses of her smooth pubis.
“Oh fuck,” Brad muttered. “If you are going to see a ghost this is what you want to see.”
“Fuck, definitely, I would,” Mark said.
Alice punched him on the shoulder but he barely seemed to notice. “Hey, girlfriend here,” she said. “And besides, she’s a ghost.”
“Welcome to my house,” the woman said. She looked at Alice and then at Cheryl “No harm will come to you,” she took another step down and the dress seemed to slip another few inches down her thighs as she turned her gaze to Brad and Mark. “Save what you may do to yourselves.”
“You’re real?” Brad said, lifting his hand as if to reach out and touch her. He froze with it in mid-air.
“I am. My name is Lorelei. You may touch me if you wish.” She stepped closer to Brad.
Brad reached out hesitantly until his fingertips brushed against the skin of Lorelei’s breast. Slowly they circled the nipple.
“Brad!” Cheryl shouted.
“She’s real,” Brad said, taking no notice of Cheryl.
“Can I?” Mark stepped forward.
“Mark,” Alice squawked, “you can’t go groping some strange… woman,” her voice rose, “especially in front of me.”
Mark paid no attention to her and reached out and cupped Lorelei’s other breast in his hand. His thumb and forefinger closed around her nipple. “Wow, you are…” his voice tailed off, “stunning.”
“You said that about me last night.” Alice grabbed at his shoulder but he shook her off.
“Kiss them, suckle at them,” Lorelei lifted her hands to their heads.
The boys obediently bent forward.
“Whoa, hang on,” Cheryl said.
Mark was already sucking on the teat, his head bobbing and enthusiastically circling.
Cheryl saw his hand slip down across Lorelei’s perfectly flat stomach and his fingers begin to tease her slit open.
Lorelei lifted her chin and closed her eyes for a moment. She half smiled, an expression that suggested she had not felt such pleasure for a long time. Mark dropped to his knees and now his tongue followed his fingers into Lorelei.
She opened her eyes and focused her piercing gaze on Cheryl and Alice. A self-satisfied smile on her lips. “I promised you that no harm would come to you.” She threw back her head and opened her mouth and a short gasp escaped from her mouth. For a moment it looked like a fine curl of smoke. She looked back at the girls. “And that any hurt would be self-inflicted. Now, they are merely showing you their true selves.”
“If that’s their true selves you can keep them.” Alice spat.
“We’re done with them,” Cheryl added.
“Thank you. That is what I wanted to hear.”
The misty dress swirled around the three figures and they faded into nothingness.
How will the events in The House effect Cheryl and Alice’s future?
They're Back
A short interlude that harks back to an event twenty years ago that occurred in The House and leads to a frightening conclusion in The House of Demons
The House of Demons
The last part of this trilogy is published for paid subscribers. Twenty years after entering The House, Brad and Mark are looking for vengeance.
Supernatural Collection
Vengeful spirits, fallen angels and ravenous succubae. Sometimes these stories veer into the realms of horror, sometimes they are intensely erotic.
I KNEW this was a Succubus story as soon as the too-good-to-be-true "real ghost" woman with the '40s silver screen goddess looks showed up! The name "Lorelei" only backed it up--the tragic, beautiful suicide who dove off a cliff into the Rhine, condemned for eternity to be a Siren, luring men to their deaths. This was a fun little piece, and I liked the sly "Ruins" references you worked in--the hike through the bushes (though there were no sentient, evil, cannibalistic, toxic vines served by a tribe of Mayans), the totally moronic twentysomethings, with their obsession about posting something online (and yes, those two dopey guys deserved to be dragged to hell, where I'm sure their dance card will be filled by all manner of diverse entities). Glad we got two "final girls" out of this one.
Good, relaxing, tongue-in-cheek break after the deep, dark themes explored in "Painted Stripes." Seriously, I love the whole Gothic horror thing, going back to Ann Radcliffe and Matthew "Monk" Lewis, and Poe and Hawthorne on this side of the pond. The creepy castles, abandoned churches, dungeons, damsels, corrupt clerics engaged in midnight devil worship, aristocrats doing all kinds of twisted, bloody deeds behind medieval stone walls--great atmosphere pieces all. Same applies to anything with an "ancient horror" theme, though that usually didn't appear until the age of cinema (and those were usually gothic stories tinkered with and finessed a bit to fit with Egyptian or Pre-Colombian themes of some sort). "The Ruins" was a dreadful literary foray into this realm, and, as I wrote in my review, was so terrible on all fronts that you wanted every one of the principals dead--the evil, sentient, cannibalistic vines were the true heroes of the whole thing--there weren't even any "Ruins" to speak of, despite the title, and the setting in a Yucatan jungle!
Good one, here, Simone! Perhaps we'll see the return of your Sensual, Satanic Succubi of Sinful Seduction making a return in the near future, perhaps teamed up with Lecherous Luciferian Incubi...