BLOOD IS SPILT: There is an incident as Jon and George inspect the renovation works in Kilphaun Hall's north wing. Has the house begun to reveal itself?
TELEGRAM: Elizabeth makes a decision and acts on it.
If you enjoy slow burn, gothic, 1920's creepy historical fiction, then THIS HOUSE WILL DEVOUR YOU is for you. Set in Ireland and England in 1925, it features love, madness, murder and dead gods.
If you like THWDY, tell people about us! It will help us grow!
BLOOD IS SPILT: There is an incident as Jon and George inspect the renovation works in Kilphaun Hall's north wing. Has the house begun to reveal itself?
TELEGRAM: Elizabeth makes a decision and acts on it.
If you enjoy slow burn, gothic, 1920's creepy historical fiction, then THIS HOUSE WILL DEVOUR YOU is for you. Set in Ireland and England in 1925, it features love, madness, murder and dead gods.
If you like THWDY, tell people about us! It will help us grow!
THIS HOUSE WILL DEVOUR YOU Season One
A Podcast concerning love, madness, mystery, murder and dead gods in 1920's Ireland and England
THWDY Episode 1.04
'Blood is Spilt'
Kilphaun Hall
14th November 1925
My dearest Elizabeth,
Thank you for your concerns in your last letter. Do not worry, I am in in fine health, undeterred by the shadow of this uncanny house or of the outmoded gunmen who haunt the valley. That is a strange coincidence though that this Roland chap is an archaeologist, his interests so aligned to yours and your father’s. And from your lack of description of a wife and family, is he renting the whole place on his own?
I’m not aware of this sun ray treatment he has mentioned. Please do be careful. I know what you are like when you are in the grip of one of your sudden enthusiasms.
In a sympathetic occurrence, I too have met an archeologist. Well, strictly speaking, an historian. George and I took the horses out for an early stroll this morning. The chestnut has grown used to me and is a most elegant ride. The weather was in a rare good mood with the low sun shining warmly on us despite the winter chill in the air. We were up in the narrow lanes above the valley, the Knockmealdown’s to the north and the sea in the distance to the south.
A young gentleman stepped off the road to let us pass and we stopped to say hullo. It turns out he is a vagabond historian, a sort of inverse wandering minstrel, more interested in hearing stories than telling them. His name is Alex Harrison, over from Oxford University and a well spoken young man.
“I’m mapping the remains of the ancients in this county, and collecting folk tales associated with them, for my thesis, before they all disappear through progress’ he said, though I see little evidence of that in the area.
I think the greater danger comes from the daily march to the boats taking emigrants to Britain and the United States. Even here in Kilphaun village, there are empty houses, all boarded up, and sad and lonely looking.
George perked up at this and asked, “We found one of those ancient monuments the other day in a remote part of the estate. Nobody seems to know anything of it, or won’t say if they do. Sounds like it’d be right up your street, Mr Harrison.”
The historian demurred - his funds were up and he was in fact preparing to set sail for home. Well George was having none of that, “ I insist then that you come stay at the Hall, we’ve more than enough room and I think you’ll find the company agreeable. I am very keen to know what mysteries lie within the bounds of my estate.”
He didn’t take much convincing. I imagine the lodgings a young academic can find around here are limited. We agreed that a car would be sent for him in the evening and rode on. I am quite agreeable with this turn of events. It will be good to have an Oxford man to talk to. I know we have Mr Simmons but there’s only so much gardening I can take and George is not the bookish type.
Something else I definitely want to ask Mr Harrison about are these triskelions. It was soon after I first saw the pattern of the gardens that I realised the triple spiral motif is discreetly everywhere in the house. It is carved into the lintels of doors and windows and at regular spacings under the eaves. Inside the house it is more random, some appear part of the design, say engraved into a stone mantelpiece but others take one by surprise - crude carvings for example in exposed beams in the servants stairwell. George dislikes them for the evident superstition they are. The formal ones are part of the house’s fabric and will stay, but he has encouraged the workmen to get rid of the more obvious ‘rustic’ ones.
What they mean I do not know, but they remind me of the witches marks you sometimes see on old buildings in England. Though from what I remember of the ones you showed me that time on the Norfolk broads, those apotropaics look more like flowers than spirals. Whoever built the house was obsessed with them anyway, unhealthily so if you ask me. That kind of obsession can lead a man into dangerous places, one tiny step at a time.
I have written before that the south wing and centre of the house are mostly ship-shape and watertight while the north wing is still in a state of major disrepair. If you stand in the great front lawn amid its emerging spiral maze and face the house, the symmetrical wings, one ruined and one in good repair, are in opposition, confronting each other as if in a challenge between past and future.
After we had returned and seen to the horses, I accompanied George on an inspection of the works. One enters Kilphaun Hall through a grand front door to be greeted by the wide, tall entrance hall that is a most unusual feature. The hall extends the height of the house and the stairs wrap around it. There is a large skylight high in the centre of the ceiling that, at this time of year, lets in a dim light.
The door from the hall into the north wing is kept locked to keep workmen’s boots off the new floors and rugs, so we entered through a pair of veranda doors at the rear of the north wing. The front of the house was still bathed in late sunshine but the low winter sun is already setting by the time it comes round to this side and the air was chill and dank.
Floors here were variously being taken up or put down by workmen and the electricians were running their wires everywhere. All rooms are to be lit electrically, replacing the old gas mantles. There is something indescribably sad about a house reduced to its components, like a wounded animal with its innards exposed. Despite the bustle of the workers, this part of the house had a melancholic air. Great diseased blooms of damp spread across the walls and long strips of wall paper like peeling skin hung mournfully. Missing plaster on the walls displayed the underlying pale lathes like boney ribs. The ubiquitous damp cold was the sort that seeps quietly and deeply into your very core.
The design of the north wing is rather peculiar, hosting, to my surprise, a large reception room that spans most of the length of the ground floor, with a monumental stone fireplace in the north wall as its centre piece. The massive hearthstone is crudely finished but the mantelpiece is, unsurprisingly, heavily inscribed with elegant triskelions. George tells me the mantelpiece is carved from Kilkenny marble and a most striking rock it is too.
Beams of sunlight came in at a narrow angle through the western windows and caught the dust raised by the works while the eastern windows were dark and may as well have looked out onto a different world. A trio of workers were over by the fireplace, one awkwardly high on a ladder doing something to exposed wiring.
Some floorboards were missing near them and I took the opportunity to hunker down on my knees and examine the grubby hidden spaces now exposed. Sure enough it did not take me long to find a triskelion crudely carved in a joist. I ran my finger along the curves, tracing out the spirals and feeling the roughness of the wood underneath my finger. At that same moment, the elaborate chandelier set high in the ceiling blazed bright to fill the room with sudden light and the darkness fled from the floor space I was examining. Modernity chasing out the old shadows that linger still. A fanciful notion I know (I could see the foreman over by the light switch) but this house lends itself to them, to the idea that it is watching you.
I stood up and dusted my knees off. The chandelier was emitting a low sizzling noise and I could smell a faint note of burning. The lights were flickering, no, they were pulsing like a heart beat. For a moment everything stopped.
The chandelier bloomed impossibly bright and then extinguished, leaving my eyes dazzled with strange afterimages. There was a sudden frightened cry and I half saw and half sensed something heavy come flying into me and throwing us both to the ground in a tangle. In confusion I shoved my attacker away, hard. As my eyes cleared, I realised that it was the electrician from the ladder, a middle aged balding fellow who was trying to disentangle himself, rather than attack me. Well, I was quite shaken, especially after my recent adventures with the search squad. He sat up groggily and in the dim light I noticed blood in his hair and more on the hearthstone where he must have hit it. My left hand stung with a pin-prick from which blood beaded slowly. Being at near eye level with the hearthstone I could see it was countersunk. The workmen must have removed whatever decorative panel once covered it but had missed some of the retaining nails at the edges.
“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” a voice shouted.
George of course, red with anger.
“I’m sorry sir,” said the electrician turning to me, half in shadow, “someone pushed me.”
“No they bloody didn’t,” roared George, “I saw you jump.”
One of the men still holding the ladder intervened, “Now sir, James Foley is a good man and there is no need to be accusing him. He’s just confused from that bash on the head he took.”
I helped Foley up. He actually thanked me for breaking his fall. The chandelier pulsed and buzzed with flickering light, throwing strange shadows, and then abruptly came back on full, bathing us in a strong blaze. Foley had a glazed look to him and I said to his colleague to get him home and get the wound seen to. George was harrumphing in the background but said no more.
That left one man still holding the ladder and looking ready to bolt.
“Were you not keeping the ladder secure?” I asked.
“We were as secure as houses, I swear.”
He crossed himself.
“Jim just flew off that ladder. Like he’d been pushed hard.”
George said in a loud voice, “The man obviously electrocuted himself. Everyone back to work and please be careful. ”
He grabbed me by the arm, “C’mon old boy. Let’s retreat to the games room and leave them to it. We’re only distracting them.”
He poured us both a glass of claret while I cleaned my hand with my kerchief. Don’t worry! It was only a small stab wound on the palm of my hand and had already stopped bleeding. I’d asked the maid to see if there was any formaldehyde in the house to clean it out. I have no desire to get Lockjaw from a rusty nail.
George was still fuming and preoccupied.
“Spill it man,” I said, “What’s got you so wound up?”
He flopped into an armchair and savagely attacked the fire with a poker.
“Hell, Jon, you’re as bad as them with your fixation on those creepy carvings.”
Having beaten the fire into submission, he slumped back in his chair and ran his hand through his sandy hair, his cheeks still flushed, whether from the heat or anger I couldn’t tell.
“This isn’t the first time this has supposedly happened,” George said, “A maid claimed she’d been pushed and nearly fallen down the stairs in the north wing. When I heard, I of course said tell me what blaggard did that and I’ll run them off. She’s says there was no one there but somebody still pushed her. I assumed she was covering for her clumsiness and told her to stop making up stories and that’d be the end of it.
“The works are behind schedule as it is, Jon. The last thing I need is that lot either refusing to work because they’ve decided the place is haunted or more likely, them trying it with on with that guff to get a bit of compensation. You saw that chap just now. There was no one near him to push. Complete codswallop. Got careless and zapped himself.”
George’s good mood of earlier was gone and he stared morosely into the fire. It was the first he had mentioned to me of delays and problems with the renovations. Has he mentioned this to you or your mother? I retreated to the top floor room I’ve appropriated as my den, to smoke my pipe in peace. The dark was drawing in around the house. The light that spilled from its windows seemed listless and trapped by the mist that seeped from the ground and not to travel as far as it should. From my high vantage point I should have been able to see the friendly lights of other houses but today all was a dim encroaching, isolating darkness, shadowing even the triskelions that are slowly reemerging from the ruins of the garden under Mr Simmons’ supervision.
The day’s events had left me unsettled and enervated. I admit also to dreading sleep somewhat as my dreams become more violent with each passing night and I wake lathered in sweat. The thought that this house is somehow strange, does not right now seem so far fetched to me. If there are matters of pertinent interest in your father’s papers, I would gladly know of them. There has been no more sign either of the missing boy or hounds and most have given up hope of them being found alive. They have just disappeared.
I had expected to be asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Instead I found myself thinking on the disappearance of the two dogs. In my minds eye I pictured that dank spinney again, rain dripping from the bare branches of the thin trees, our shouts the only other sound. It was as if the land had gobbled them up because they dared enter that stand of trees and the valley behind. And then rising into my mind was the mound, except it throbbed with some eldritch heartbeat that was twinned with an aching pulse in my injured hand. It watched me with an intent that was malicious. It had seen me. I opened my eyes at that point. It did not feel like I was waking up but I must have been. I can not help but wonder if that lost boy did also stumble over the mound. If he has friends, it might be a question for them.
I slept again then and woke later in the night my heart pounding. I had dreamed of consuming fire and I imagined that I could smell beside me the sulphur of a just struck match.
That thought brought back to mind the strange afterimage I had seen when I was dazzled by the chandelier. Instead of the shapeless blob of negative light one would expect, it had seemed to be in the form of a crooked man, of all things, and moving. He had been standing behind the electrician, Mr Foley, as if whispering in his ear, when he finally faded from my eyesight.
I wish you were here, Elizabeth. Know that I am thinking of you. George has a telephone installed but it does not work most of the time. I tried calling you on the contraption but instead of the operator, all I got was an eerie ghostly moaning on the wire. A man is due down from Dublin next week to try and trace the fault.
Let me know if you find anything of interest in your father’s papers and of course it would be perfect if it was you who carried them to me! I hope to see you soon,
All my love,
Jon Ross
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'Telegram'
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16 NOVEMBER 1925
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JON ROSS KILPHAUN HALL WATERFORD
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HAVE GONE TO LONDON FOR TREATMENT (STOP) STAYING COUSIN CELIA (STOP) WILL WRITE SOON (STOP) LOVE ELIZABETH
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