Dark secrets lurked…in the House at Canterbury.

The House at Canterbury

© 2014 Fortune Kent

When Anne Medford arrived in Canterbury she was happy and excited for the chance at a new life. Eager to start her new teaching position, she was also glad for the chance to restore the house she’d inherited from her father. But the house is more than it seems, and before long its sinister nature is wreaking havoc on her new life and her new love for Jeremy Blackstock.

When Anne finally discovers the secrets the mysterious Jeremy is hiding from her, it is far too late—for she has already unleashed the horror long buried in the house at Canterbury…

Enjoy the following excerpt for The House at Canterbury:

I suffer a recurring dream in which I am lost in a house of many rooms.

I walk along hushed corridors, climb spiral stairs to towers with windows boarded in a strange geometry, descend to cellars pungent with the fumes of coal stored to fuel fires in black furnaces.

Scents from the past torment me: burning leaves, rotted planks in summerhouse sanctuaries, the tang of clothes laid on radiators to dry, wisps of forgotten yesterdays. Voices murmur from behind the walls, enticing me to rooms bereft of windows. Clocks tick on mantels above empty fireplaces. The whispers beckon, but always from beyond.

I face a choice of doors. Only a seeming choice, for my hand moves as though predestined. My fingers grip the knob, my heart pounds expectantly, as I envision candlelight in an opulent suite where a lover waits, impatient for me to join him. The door opens on a barren hall. Ahead I see a cul-de-sac and more choices already foreordained. Behind me the door thuds shut with the finality of death.

Sounds rise from all the corridors not taken. Men and women laugh, weep. “Anne, Anne,” they call. I run, but my feet move with a maddening slowness. The voices reverberate, echo in my mind. The music of a dance band swells in a familiar melody and I hum the tune—yet the words elude me. The music ends with a spatter of applause. I reach for the cathedral-shaped radio, twist the dial and the announcer’s voice recedes, clicks off.

As I hover between sleep and waking, the babble returns. From all about I hear moans of passion, cries of pain. A scream slices into my consciousness, a wail of frustration, rage and fear. The scream is mine…

I woke up trembling in the early morning stillness of my room. The luminous dial read one twenty-five. I lay on my stomach with my toes over the edge of the mattress while I drew deep breaths and tried to make my mind blank. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, I counted. To no avail.

Why couldn’t I will myself to sleep? “You’re an excellent subject,” the hypnotist had told me. I had returned a second night and watched him hypnotize another woman as he had me. “When you hear ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’” he said, “you will give your husband a passionate kiss, the most passionate kiss you have ever given him in your life…“

I turned onto my side. Phantoms crept into my mind with their messages of apprehension. Was he home? Across the room the flat outline of his bed answered no. I swung my feet to the floor and buttoned my robe as I shivered in the chill night of September in California.

I groped along the hall, for I had not yet mastered the geography of our condominium. The silent switch lighted an apartment with all the personality of a problem in trigonometry. I enjoyed trig problems—found them logical, precise, sterile. I liked the apartment.

The stereo? No, I decided—music led only one way, to the past. When sleep wouldn’t come I worked crossword puzzles, read poetry, or skimmed improbable novels. A dust jacket heralding a turbulent saga of three generations always tempted me—perhaps because I was an only child, or because generations would not follow me. We had no children.

I opened a book of poems and felt the pricks of smiles catch in my skin like little hooks. Sylvia Plath—one of the first myths of the Women’s Movement, a martyr found with her head in a gas oven. Refrigerators, sinks, toilet bowls and cooking stoves. The symbols of our discontent.

I laid the book two inches from the top of the coffee table, two inches from the side. Now I was wide awake. Twenty minutes before two. I felt taut, my anxiety mixed with resentment and fear. Did I hear his car? Did a door slam? I hurried through the kitchen and looked into the garage. No bulk of an automobile, nothing.

Back in the living room I avoided the stereo on my way to the window. I pulled the cord and the drapes slid open to frame the lights of the city far below. An alien city on an alien shore. A sere land so unlike the green of the Hudson Valley, where year after year, the seasons repeated the rhythm of life and death.

Ten minutes before two. “Hell,” I said aloud. I turned on the stereo and stared at the record revolving on the turntable. What was the condescending phrase? “Oldies but goodies.” Why can’t they at least give us “and goodies” instead of insisting on the “but”?

“Seven,” the male vocalist sang. “We leave at seven,” he said, “for a sentimental journey.” One of the songs from the last year of the war. After I danced a few steps, the thick carpet discouraged me. My dream, almost forgotten, came back like an echo no less painful for being familiar. The rooms in the dream were the rooms of the house in Canterbury, the voices those of Jeremy, his father, Don, all the others—and the fear was the fear I had known then.

I lay on the couch and shut my eyes and, as though the music triggered an hypnotic suggestion, I again saw the village of Canterbury with the trees arched over the streets, the school with row on row of windows, the clock in the classroom edging back before snapping forward, the two houses (mine and the Blackstock place), the river beyond the trees, the mountain in the distance.

The face of the mountain dropped precipitously from the summit to the river. Halfway down, the highway had been cut into the cliff like a notch carved into the stock of an outlaw’s rifle.

Three were dead, not one. Where were the other two notches?

I twisted on the couch. The past can’t wound me anymore, I thought. I bunched the pillow beneath my head. Almost thirty years ago and I remembered as if it were only yesterday. Where had everything begun to go awry? Was there a signal I had missed?

“Don’t go to Canterbury,” Karl had said. “You’ll be alone, hundreds of miles away. Don’t go.”

“I have to,” I told him. “Father gave me the house,” I added, as if that fact explained all.

The paperboy. Was he the first warning? Or was there something even earlier, back home, before I went to Canterbury? The umbrellas slick in the rain, the smell of dark wet earth, the long line of black cars parked at the bottom of the hill.

I had been close to my father and now he was dead. Yes, death at the beginning and later, in Canterbury, death, unnatural death, at the ending…