Blackmoor House

Blackmoor House

I stood inside a cold, square, windowless room – my arms numb, muscles spent. A fug of shattered brick dust hung in the air. Its red particles floated through my torch beam as I swept it about the chamber.

A wood table sat at room center, the objects atop it concealed beneath a shroud. Atop that, a thick layer of dust blanketed everything. One hard blow kicked up a cloud of talcum-fine gray. Coughing, I waved it away and removed the cloth. There lay a Ouija board, its black letters faded, scuffed with age. A wood planchet, teardrop-shaped, sat at one corner, its sharp point aimed at NO.

Just outside the room, on the hardwood floor, lay my sledgehammer. With it, I’d broken through a door-shaped patch of red brick amidst a larger wall of dark brown. Until this morning, all of it lay hidden beneath plaster. Plaster someone had smoothed flat across wood boards over a century ago. In the midst of restoring Blackmoor House, this was my strangest discovery yet.

“What the hell is this room?” I voiced to myself.

“Wow, someone’s made a mess,” said a woman behind me.

I jumped in surprise, then turned, momentarily annoyed, to my wife Donna. She stood beside the pile of bricks, hands on her hips, a smirk on her face.

“Someone sealed off this room a long time ago,” I said. “And check it out, I found an old Ouija board.”

I trained the beam on its faded surface.

“Must be from the 1800’s, or thereabouts,” Donna said. “Hey, we should try it out!”

“A Ouija board? Seriously?”

She’d never been one for occult practices, but there was a first time for everything. Donna was usually practical, down to earth, while I tended to be the flighty one.

“Yeah! Let’s clean the room up, bring in wood chairs from the storage room, and light a candle. It’ll be spooky fun!”

By her expression, I could tell she was serious, so I motioned to the table and say “Be my guest.”

While she cleaned the room and swept up the brick dust, I went outside to unwind.

The wind had kicked up since this morning. The sea was now a gray tumult beneath brooding clouds. Blackmoor House loomed behind me – massive, weather beaten, its charcoal-colored stone hewn from the earth over four hundred years ago – while just ten feet away the grassy ground ended abruptly, above a sheer cliff that plunged a hundred feet to wave-battered boulders and cold Atlantic surf.

I’m not part of the Blackmoor family. This house had stood abandoned on my Uncle Stephan’s land until he died two months ago and willed all of it to me. I’d seen neither his land nor this house until Donna and I met with the attorney, acquired the keys, and drove out here for a look-see.

We fell instantly in love with the place. Right from the start, restoring the house became our life’s passion, and, we now referred to ourselves as Lord and Lady Wallander of Blackmoor House.

Our biggest challenge was getting help from the nearby town of Wellbrook, to restore water and electric service. Evidently, this house and the Blackmoors, themselves, had a reputation among the townsfolk. One clouded, no doubt, by groundless superstition. Several workmen made the sign of the cross when arriving each morning at the property. We’d tried to pry specifics from them, but they’d remained tight-lipped. Only later did we learn that many called Blackmoor House haunted. Some went further, calling it cursed.

When we weren’t renovating, we were sitting in the home’s library, scouring through anything and everything we could find about the Blackmoor’s family history. That history ended abruptly 43 years ago, in 1910, not long after the tragic disappearance of the family’s youngest daughter, Abby. After searching in vain for months, they’d packed up their clothes, jewelry, and other valuables, and fled, apparently overnight. They'd abandoned everything else, never to return.

---

Donna sat across the table. Several of our fingers rested lightly on the planchet’s edges. Flames on the candelabrum’s five candles wavered gently, while, outside the house, winds howled in from the sea. Donna’s eyes glinted in the sparing light as she thought up our first question.

“Is this house haunted, as the people from Wellbrook claim?”

We waited, but the planchet never moved. Just then, we jumped to a bang from somewhere out in the corridor. I rushed out as the noise repeated. Seems a shutter had come loose and was banging against the house. When I pried open the affected window, wind blasted through, laden with salty mist blown off the sea.

Once I re-secured the shutter, I slammed shut the window and dried the water from my face with the tail of my shirt. Donna stood beside me, helping me dry off.

“You okay?” she said, looking me over to make sure I had no cuts or bruises.

I nodded, my eyes still stinging from the windblown mist.

“Perhaps that was Blackmoor House answering your question,” I said.

Donna became unnerved, almost frightened, so I put my arm around her and pulled her close.

“Sorry, I was only joking. It’s okay. We’re okay.”

Soon we were back at the table, our fingertips poised on the planchet. She repeated the question, and we waited patiently. I felt a sudden chill, and Donna commented on the drop in temperature a few seconds later. Then the planchet began to move – slowly at first, in short jerks – and then more smoothly, until it landed on YES.

“That was probably just the power of –“ I began.

“Shhh!” Donna said, as she shot me a forbidding glance. I began to worry she was taking all of this too seriously.

After moving the planchet back to board center, Donna said, “Are you the ghost of Abby Blackmoor?” This time it moved more quickly, as though animated by its own force. Amazing, the tricks our minds can play on us.

YES.

My own breath began appearing as vapor before me. How was this possible? The room was deep in the home’s interior, yet it had grown sharply colder here than just outside the doorway. A palpable tension formed, and I realized that both Donna and I were trembling. It wasn’t the colder air – it was some emotional effect, brought on by the eerie sensation that we weren’t alone. If felt like someone – a presence – had joined us inside the cramped, candlelit room.

A question suddenly formed in my mind. Something that felt put there, by someone else, while Donna moved the planchet back to board center.

“Were you murdered in this house, Abby? Is that why you disappeared?” I said.

Donna sucked in a breath, her eyes wide. Then it happened. The planchet flew from beneath our fingers. It skidded forward, crossing YES in a heartbeat, then went off the table and clattered to the floor near the wall.

---

An hour later, after we’d recomposed ourselves, we sat again at the Ouija board.

“Wait,” Donna said, lowering her face toward the planchet. “I think it’s moving on its own!”

She leaned back, and I moved my chair to her side of the table. We held each other and gazed in stunned horror as the feather-light wooden device began to creep about the center of the board. It seemed be adrift, not spelling anything.

“It’s like Abby wants us to ask more questions,” Donna said. “Like she’s impatient to start providing answers!”

“Alright, then,” I said with a whisper. “Abby, who murdered you?”

For the next minute, the planchet swerved, slid, and paused at each letter. Eventually, before coming to a full stop, I had jotted down the letters “FATHRGABREELKILDMENIFE”.

Both of us go to work then, separating words and doing our best to fix the misspellings.

“Father Gabriel killed you with a knife?” Donna said.

The planchet slid immediately to YES, and my blood ran cold…

---

It was two in the morning. Donna and I huddled together on the parlor sofa, glasses of scotch in hand. A fire crackled in the hearth, while several candles burned on the coffee table. The power had failed hours ago. No doubt, high winds had knocked down trees onto the electric lines. Outside, the storm still howled, and rain hammered the windows.

The story Abby had spelled out for us, in fits and starts, was both tragic and terrifying. Father Gabriel, the village priest, had killed Abby, while her parents were away from home one evening. Wellbrook’s police, no doubt a paltry force at the time, hadn’t found anything, and the Blackmoors had fled, believing she had merely vanished, leaving Abby’s spirit here, all alone.

And because Abby had assumed a ghostly form immediately after her slaying, she must have watched as the priest concealed his own bloody cassock, along with the knife, inside a compartment in the home’s old priest hole. A place that, until now, we had no idea existed.

Donna’s expression was grave as she turned to me, tears still drying on her cheeks.

“We have to find the evidence. In that priest hole,” she said.

“We can try, but the police will never restart the investigation. After they cleared the parents of her disappearance, the case has probably been cold ever since.”

“But we must do this. For Abby’s sake. So she might find some sense of peace. She deserves to be heard, and her killer exposed.”

I took a gulp of scotch, my throat burning, and realized Donna was right.

“But what was Gabriel’s motive, do you think?” I said.

“Think about it – she was a little girl when it happened. I’m sure the old priest didn’t explain himself. Or, if he did, Abby wouldn’t have understood, really, why he came to kill her. Motives like that are more adult, I think, than Abby could have comprehended at that age.”

Given Donna’s past experience as a third year primary school teacher, I believed her without question. She knew a lot about child psychology.

Not long after, we went to bed. After the trauma of learning Abby’s fate through the Ouija board, we had polished off most of a bottle of a whiskey. In the end, we passed out, not fell asleep.

---

I awoke next morning to the whistle of wind through our drafty bedroom window. After starting a fire in the bedroom hearth, I left Donna, still asleep, and went down to the kitchen where I scrounged up toast, butter, marmalade, and a chunk of cheddar. Up in our room, I hung the kettle over the fire, then went back down to fetch the tray of food.

Donna was sitting up in bed, awake, by the time I returned with food. We ate our breakfast with mugs of hot, very strong tea. After that came aspirin to combat our hangover headaches, and we were ready to search for the priest hole by eleven o’clock.

We went to the library. Our goal – find a secret latch, atop one of the bookshelves, that would open a lock and expose the hidden entrance. For the first time ever, the library felt foreboding. It was hard to imagine there was a hidden compartment here. One that held bloody clothes and a murder weapon.

Abby had said the latch was somewhere in the right corner of the room. I wheeled the ladder there, climbed up, and began feeling around for any kind of button, lever, or latch that might trigger a lock.

After a frustrating hour, I’d searched the tops of all the shelves in that part of the room, to no avail. Donna suggested it might be hidden at the back of one of the lower shelves, perhaps behind books. I began handing down heavy, leatherbound volumes, clearing one shelf after another. The fifth and fourth shelves yielded nothing, but, as I removed books from the near side of the third shelf, I saw it – a brown metal lever about four inches long, protruding from the rear panel of the shelf. Without a word, I pulled it.

Donna jumped to a loud click. I stepped down off the ladder and followed her gaze to a bookshelf over twenty feet away, on the opposite side of the hearth. To our amazement, a section of shelving drifted open, swinging further into the room on old hinges that creaked with age and rust.

I led the way into the cramped passage, the torch aimed ahead to light our way. Just then, the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up. The air grew sharply colder, as it had near the Ouija board, and Donna gripped my shoulders from behind me to hold on.

"We need to ready ourselves for what's inside here," I said. "Remember, Abby vanished by the time her parents returned. What if she's in here, too? Maybe that priest brought more than that knife and cassock into his priest hole."

Donna's face went pale at the possibility, but we knew we had to go on. After a few more steps, Donna stopped me.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “This doesn’t feel right, Mike."

"What do you mean? What are you sensing?"

"Darkness. Evil. I think we should just get out of here.”

I made a right angle turn and saw a larger chamber, up ahead, perhaps ten feet away.

"There's a room ahead!"

“Mike, please, let’s get out of here!” Donna said. “Can’t you feel it? That presence? My skin is crawling!”

As I poked my head into the chamber and glanced about, I saw him. A dust shrouded skeleton slouched in an armed, wooden chair. A black priest’s cassock hung loosely on the corpse’s frame. His Roman collar was still in place.

Most terrifying of all was that hilt, of a large knife jutting from the center of his chest.

“Oh my God!” I said. “Did he kill himself after Abby?”

Donna screamed when she, too, saw the body. That’s when I noticed child’s toys, scattered about the chamber floor. A set of jacks glinted on the floor, a small red ball beside them. Then it happened - the ball rose in to the air a couple feet, and, as it dropped toward the floor, an unseen hand grasped several of the jacks and pulled them away.

“No... No!" Donna shouted.

"What's going on?" I said, my heart pounding as I tried to make sense of everything.

"This was Abby's secret play room!" Donna said. She went into full-blown panic mode and began struggling to breathe.

Then came a laugh – high pitched, mischievous, like that of a young girl – echoing through the library room outside the priest hole. The last thing I saw, after my torch winked out, was that massive bookshelf door swinging shut, blotting out more and more light.

It slammed shut with a boom, plunging us into darkness. Then the click of a metal latch as Abby engaged the lock...