The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
The Bone Harvest
by Kathleen McCluskey
The house in Wraith Hollow was built with local timber – oak that “bled” when it was cut. The carpenters said that the sap ran as red as rust and clung to their hands like syrup. They laughed about it then, wiping their palms on their trousers. Never noticing how their palms slightly blistered after or how their dreams were filled with whispers from the rafters.
By the winter of 1823, the house belonged to Dr. Edward Vale, a surgeon who fancied himself a man of progress. He performed his experiments in the basement, a vault of polished stone and wooden beams as thick as a man’s torso. The villagers called him “the resurrectionist,” for he paid coin for cadavers and sometimes for the newly dead. He claimed he was studying “the architecture of the human frame.”
But there were sounds from the house that anatomy couldn’t explain.
A low pulsing, like a heartbeat beneath the floorboards. The servants complained that the walls sweated at night, that the wallpaper was hanging like strips of shedding skin. They said that the wood itself creaked, not from age but from hunger.
When Edward’s apprentice, Jonah, arrived one stormy evening, the air was slick with warmth. “It’s the damp,” Edward said. He showed Jonah to the laboratory. Tables lined with preserved limbs, jars of cloudy brine and a half dissected torso whose ribs had been split open like a cage.
But the real marvel, the doctor insisted, was the house itself.
He pressed Jonah’s hand to the support beam. Beneath the grain, something moved. A faint vibration. Rhythmic. Alive.
“I have found a way,” he whispered, his eyes wide and wild, “to bridge the divide between wood and bone. It’s to let them grow together. Imagine structures that live, breathe and repair themselves. No decay. No rot. No end.”
Jonah felt the pulse quicken beneath his hand.
That night, he awoke to whispering. The boards beneath his bed rose and fell as though the house was breathing. When he stepped onto the floor, it was warm, almost moist. He followed the noise to the cellar.
There, Edward stood shirtless before the wall, his back arching as if drawn forward by unseen threads. The boards behind him had split open and from within, slick cords reached out. Red, sinewy like glistening veins. They slithered over his back, fusing with his flesh. Jonah saw them bury beneath his skin, the wood drinking him in.
Edward turned, his eyes bloodshot and radiant. “It needs marrow,” he croaked. “It craves living structure.”
Jonah fled up the stairs, but the steps softened beneath him, groaning like a wounded animal. He sank to his knees as the bannister’s wood rippled, forming pale knuckles and fingers that grabbed his wrist. The walls exhaled.
He screamed as the first splinter slid under his skin. It was not sharp, but supple, weaving its way through his veins, tasting its way toward his bones. His legs twisted, joints snapping backward, reforming into the curve of a stair rail. His ribs flared, bending outward like roots seeking soil. His breath came in ragged gasps but even that was stolen. His air was drawn out by the house’s steady, satisfied pulse.
By dawn the house was still again.
When the villagers came looking for Edward and his apprentice, they found only an immaculate parlor. The walls gleamed like they were freshly varnished and the wood had taken on an uncanny hue, somewhere between mahogany and flesh. In the light, if one stared long enough, one might see a faint motion beneath the surface. A pulse, slow and patient.
The house stood for decades. It did not rot. It did not fade. It simply grew.
When the wind passed through the hollow, the rafters whispered. Not like creaking timber but like voices pressed through gritted teeth, murmuring behind the walls.
Some said if you listened long enough you could hear the house’s heartbeat. Others said it wasn’t the house’s beat at all but the hearts of those stuck inside it.
Still beating.
Still building.
Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
More from Kathleen McCluskey:
The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror
Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.
Spreading the Writer's Word 