PART I
PROLOGUE
I murdered my mother.
Her ghost now haunts the House on North Lane. It is called the House on North Lane because it is the only one on the street—a tall, timbered structure hidden beneath an overgrowth of grass and vines, a single shattered window its only breath of life.
Armed with bare, razor-edged branches, a skeletal tree guards the entrance, long limbs outstretched as if to ward off intruders—or to keep something in.
A young boy lay buried within the walls, time eating away at the flesh that had once enveloped his bones. Abandoned, forgotten—the House shielding his cries from a saviour that would never come. Or so the story goes.Thatstory, anyway.
The children in town speak of another. Of a witch entangled with the Devil, condemned to the House for all eternity. Her thin, pale form stood by the window every night, hands clasped together in prayer as she begged for a salvation that would never come.
My personal favourite? A clawed monster, imprisoned by God, powerless to leave due to its hunger for revenge. It howled in the night, thrashing against the door, mourning a salvation that would never come.
There are many stories about the House on North Lane, but the one I am about to tell is not one the children whisper around a campfire on a cold night. It is about Augustus Saint. And I am just a man. A man who murdered his mother, a man now entrapped in the House on North Lane.
The first night of my imprisonment was quiet. And it was cold, the evidence of every exhaled breath a white mist drifting through the darkness. Goosebumps crawled along my arms, hairs upright, standing to attention like obedient soldiers preparing for battle.
An icy breath caressed the back of my neck, sending numbing shivers straight down my spine as I crouched to retrieve a long, blood-stained crucifix abandoned on the empty floor.
The second night bore me no mercy. Nausea enveloped me in its arms, the air thinning to the point it was like breathing in through a straw. I scrubbed blood, ash and dust off the wooden floorboards, vision blurring and replaced with a static screen.
Footsteps echoed on the floor above me, the only sound other than my laboured breathing and thundering heart. I ventured up the old, winding staircase, a flickering candle in my hand to fend off the darkness. The empty hallway glared back at me as a rat scurried from one crack in the wall to another. There was no one there. At least no one I could see. But I felt her. Taunting me. Waiting for the right moment to exact her revenge.
By the one hundredth night, I’d grown accustomed to the creaking floorboards and the whispering walls, the heavy breathing and the dancing shadows. The House and I were in an endless waltz. It despised me, and yet it had no intention ofletting me leave, twirling me around with no respite. My sin entrapped me here, as did hers.
I want nothing more than to leave this prison, to escape this wicked nightmare, but there are phantom hands wrapped around my throat, imprisoning me here among the many stories of the House on North Lane.
CHAPTER ONE
By now, you are probably wondering why I did it. Or, perhaps, you are just here for the ghost story. Either way, I shall start from the beginning.
It all started with a mirror. A long mirror, taller and wider than I had been when it greeted me at four years old, locked out on the front porch of the House on North Lane.
With my back pressed against the door, knees secured to my chest, I watched the mirror drift closer until it paused in front of me, hovering above the ground as though it were a ghost unable to touch the Earth.
I had been banished outside for not finishing my supper, throat still aching from the meat that had been forced down with rough fingers and sharp words. The screaming, the crying, the begging—it earned me a night spent in darkness, with only a pair of black shorts and a thin grey singlet ruffled around the neckline from where I had been yanked to my feet.
“If you’re going to behave like the Devil,” my mother hissed, throwing my thrashing body out into the cold autumn night,knees meeting the wooden deck with a sickening crunch, “then you will be treated like the Devil.”
The mirror’s thick, golden frame was arched like the entrance of an old church, decorated with angels sharing baskets of fruit, one reaching for a single apple dangling from a thin tree branch. Scenes of merriment and delight were juxtaposed with golden feathers that fell from angel wings, their bodies descending to an Earth they would never reach.
My reflection peered back at me with red-rimmed eyes, a mess of untamed brown curls, and a swollen cheek. Dry tears stained my pale skin, cracked lips spattered with blood. I turned my head, but the mirror followed.
“Go away,” I whispered.
The mirror stayed.
I opened my mouth to confront it again, prepared to raise my voice, if necessary, but words evaded me as pools of darkness corrupted the mirror.
The reflection that once shared my hazel eyes now stared back at me with black ones, darkness eating away at the white circling the iris. Slowly, they sank into my skull, leaving nothing but blood pouring from my empty eye sockets.
The Devil, I thought to myself, he’s got me.
Children were inherently evil. They were born with the original sin—a sin shared by all of humanity when Adam and Eve devoured the forbidden fruit, disobeying God’s command.
I had been baptised, cleansed of this sin, but my mother had always said I had the Devil inside of me. And she was right.
