House of Malice

THIRTEEN

Mandy cried herself to sleep that night, pulling the bedclothes tightly around her for comfort. She didn’t want to be going mad, yet she felt as if her mind was being torn apart. She didn’t want to be alone, yet now Todd had left her and she might never see him again.

The moonlight glowed softly through the drawn curtains, growing now dimmer, now brighter as clouds drifted across its face. The cottage seemed alive with a thousand tiny creaks and taps.

Finally asleep with her face pressed to the tear-dampened pillow, Mandy’s breathing was slow and steady. It wasn’t until the depths of the night that she half-awoke, stiff from lying for hours in the same position, and stirred in the bed. As she moved her leg, her bare foot touched something. The sensation of flesh on flesh woke her with a start. She raised her head from the pillow and twisted round.

‘Todd!’ she whispered.

He’d come back to her! She drowsily recalled that he’d had the spare key. He must have slipped into bed quietly without wanting wake her. His reassuring presence was right there beside her, the dim moonlight that filtered through the curtain faintly outlining his shape under the covers close by, the strong lines of his back and shoulder. She could hear the softness of his breath.

‘Oh, Todd, I’m so happy you came back,’ she murmured, gently stroking his shoulder. A rush of tender feeling overcame her and she propped herself up on her left elbow to put her right arm around him, pulling herself close to him.

‘I’m so sorry for what happened,’ she whispered. I don’t know what’s got into me. I promise, it won’t go on. You mean too much to me. I don’t want to lose you.’

He stirred.

‘You said you loved me,’ she whispered. ‘I love you too, Todd.’ She caressed his shoulder, his arm, his chest. Pushed herself up so that she could kiss him. Her lips reached for his. It felt so good to be close to him again.

The clouds rolled clear of the moon, so that its light shone more brightly through the curtain.

And Mandy looked down at the thing in the bed with her. A rotted corpse. Green-black skin and rancid worm-eaten flesh peeling from the bone. The leprous eyelids peeled open and the thing’s eyes glinted evilly as they looked into hers. Its lipless teeth parted in a grin, the stench of grave-filth and decomposing meat and things that squirmed and feasted on corruption filling her nostrils. She screamed and recoiled, struggling in blind horror to get away, but cadaverous arms encircled her body and held her in a tight clinch. Tighter, tighter, until she could no longer scream, no longer breathe. Its rasping voice cackled in her ear.

Mandyyyyy…

‘Christ, Mandy. You sound terrible.’

‘I had an awful dream last night, Chester. Awful.’

It was morning, and his phone call had interrupted her in the middle of the third, or maybe the fourth, mug of coffee she needed to stay awake. She hadn’t stayed in bed after the nightmare, and exhaustion hung over her like a pall.

‘No kidding,’ said Chester, whose only dreams were of foxy ladies and red Ferraris. ‘Anyway, listen, have you gone online this morning? Checked your ebook sales at all?’

‘No,’ she said miserably.

‘Then I suggest you get off your ass and check, girl. I’ve been glued to ’em since yesterday. You hit the Kindle rankings low, at thirty thousand. To be expected, right? I mean, Jessica Lomax being a complete unknown and all. But then you started to climb, and fast. By nine in the evening you’d hit the Top Hundred. By midnight you were in the Top Fifty. Now you’re—’

‘What time is it?’ she groaned.

‘Listen to me,’ he hissed. ‘You’re at number seven. Out of over a million titles. Seven. And the reviews are coming in fast. People are loving it! You’ve sold more in eighteen hours than your last paperback did in a whole eighteen months.’

Despite herself, despite the sickly hangover from the horrible nightmare and the row with Todd, she came away from Chester’s phone call feeling a frisson of excitement. As the news sank in, she tried to phone Victoria to tell her, but her friend’s mobile was switched off. After that she called Todd’s number and left him a short but heartfelt message to say she was terribly sorry and asking him to please, please call her back.

She’d turned on the computer and was about to check the incredible sales ratings herself when she heard the faint ping of an email hitting her inbox.

Not just one email. There were five of them, which for her was extremely unusual. She blinked as she started reading.

Mandy had never heard of any Lucinda Darke, but then she was a stranger to the whole genre. She quickly forgot about the comparisons, closed the email program and went into the Amazon website. Chester’s phone announcement was already out of date — Orgasm of Blood was number two in the Kindle chart.

Mandy blinked once again. Number Two! And as Chester had said, the positive reviews were piling up. One drew her eye.

There was that Lucinda Darke again, Mandy thought.

Reading on, she noticed that among the positive comments from readers, a number of highly critical one-star reviews were creeping in. As a writer, she knew that those were often the handiwork of internet trolls, jealous wannabes, bitter failed authors or friends of the competition.

But these were different.

Book Crazy Jo’s review had garnered fifteen comments from other readers. ‘Couldn’t agree more!’; ‘Absolutely right!’; ‘Plagiarism at its worst’; ‘I deleted it off my Kindle for the same reason’. And on, and on.

‘I’ve never even heard of Lucinda Darke!’ Mandy yelled at the screen. She ran a search for the author’s books on Amazon. There were no Lucinda Darke ebooks, only paperbacks and a few hardback editions. Five titles in all: Nightmare House, The Hidden Room, The Guillotine, Abattoir Dreams and Putrid. All had been published between 2003 and 2005 by a publisher called Incubus Press. Checking out the company name on Google, Mandy discovered that it had been a small press specialising only in horror, based in Sussex, founded 1979 and closed down in 2008.

Ping. Another email had arrived. Feeling flustered and agitated, Mandy broke off from her Google search.

Short and to the point, the message was from an anonymous Hotmail account and read simply:

‘I’ve had enough of this shit,’ Mandy muttered. She might be slowly losing her mind, but she was no plagiarist. Something had to be done about the situation, but first she had to check out these Lucinda Darke books to determine what these allegations were based on.

It was already after eleven. Mandy piled Buster in the Kia and headed into Fairwood. The village library was only open two days a week and had limited stock: none of the Darke titles were listed there. On further investigation, though, the kindly man behind the desk was able to find out that the public library in Burford had three of the books.

Burford was the largest town in the area, twelve miles away. What the hell, Mandy thought, and sped out of Fairwood with grim determination.

It was forty minutes later when she walked into Burford library. Heading straight for the fiction section she found Putrid, Abattoir Dreams and The Guillotine under D for Darke. She slid the yellowed paperbacks off the shelf and took them to a secluded reading table for a closer look.

The covers were as morbid and lurid as anything she could imagine, and worse. Skimming through the pages she soon saw that the horror element in Lucinda Darke’s writing was powerful and compulsive, drawing the reader in with suspenseful skill while turning their stomachs with grotesque scenes of torture, mutilation, necrophilia, cannibalism and ritual child sacrifice.

What also struck her was the writer’s particularly distinctive voice. There was something strangely familiar about it: the authorly quirks, the mannerisms, the favourite expressions and turns of phrase.

As if… as if she’d read this writer’s work before.

As if she’d known it. Known it for years, only under another name.

It slowly began to dawn on Mandy what she was seeing here on these yellowed, well-thumbed pages.

Could it be possible? The very thought chilled her. She had to know, and the only way to do that was to read more. Clutching the books under her arm, she went to the main desk and asked the lady librarian if any more titles by this author were in stock. The librarian disappeared for a moment, then returned holding a large-format hardback, explaining it had been returned earlier in the day and not yet found its way back to the shelves.

The book was Lucinda Dark’s Nightmare House. Mandy carried it back to her table and tore into it with an uneasy mixture of revulsion and eagerness. Halfway down page eighteen, she came to a passage that made her shiver. She went back and read it carefully a second time to make sure she hadn’t imagined it.

It was a description of a house. More correctly, of a cottage. One with a thatched roof. An old oak front door with a cast-iron lion’s head for a lock. Inside, a carved fireplace that featured a heraldic beast of some kind, gargoyle-like in its fierceness.

There was no mistaking Summer Cottage, right there on the page. Except that from the pen of Lucinda Darke it was horrifyingly sinister, evoking a tone of malevolence that Mandy could hardly bear to take in. Her mouth became dry as she read on, unable to take her eyes from the faded print.

Mandy’s hands had begun to shake so badly that the pages were fluttering. She slammed the book shut. ‘No,’ she groaned, hanging her head. ‘It can’t be. It’s a coincidence.’ All her strength seemed to have drained away. The book flopped open in her limp hand, and she saw the author’s signature on the title page.

Lucinda Darke. The curve of the ‘a’ and the ‘r’. The upturned flick of the ‘l’ and the tail of the ‘e’.

No mistake.

She’d seen that handwriting before. Coveted it. Idolised it.

It was the handwriting of Ellen Grace.

She was barely conscious of checking the pile of books out of the library and walking back to the car, just as she’d been barely conscious of time passing while she’d been inside. Darkness was falling again, and the mist that had seemed to haunt the village of Fairwood the day before had now descended over Burford. The windows of the Kia were steamed up with condensation from the dog’s breath. Mandy slumped behind the wheel, laid the books beside her in their carrier bag on the passenger seat and drove away feeling numb.

She understood now. Knew it deep inside.

Lucinda Darke. Ellen Grace. One and the same.

The horror novels had all been written between 2002 and 2005: the same years Ellen had spent at Summer Cottage. Everyone thought she’d only written one book during her time there. The truth was very different. Ellen Grace had been busy. Busy prolifically churning out thousands of pages of gruesome, morbid horror, not because she wanted to, not out of choice.

But because her writer’s imagination had unwittingly, irresistibly, become the channel for something unspeakable that she couldn’t control or understand, any more than Mandy had been able to.

A force that had possessed her. Taken over her mind with nightmarish visions. Sapped her vitality, robbed her of her sanity, turned her into a withered recluse.

Something terrible existed at Summer Cottage.

And now it had a new victim.