Foster's

Culverton House .4

1905

The house stood empty for almost 40 years.

And in that time it's reputation grew.

The distant relatives of the Andersons boarded up the house, but strange things kept happening.

Animals, things and sometimes even people would go into the maze and not come back out.

The field of wheat should have been but it grew as if it were tended. Then, one day out of nowhere, round the time it would have been good for harvest, the stalks of wheat would just disappear. Over night.

Neighbours were pointing fingers on who was harvesting out of the Culverton's fields, but no one ever admitted to it and no one was ever caught on that property.

Children would dare others to go to the house. They'd start with telling them to just go up to the door, then to knock on it, then to spend at least a full ten minutes standing on the porch, and when the boards started to rot away from the windows, they'd dare each other to find a way inside.

The kids would swear they heard things, like boards creaking like people were walking the house, or whispers on the wind. They swore they saw curtains moving and shadows in the hallways, faces in the windows. They would all scream and run away, swearing that whatever in the house had tried to get them.

Voices could be heard.

Sometimes they'd call out from the maze, luring people in.

Sometimes it would come from the house as whispers or low groans that would waft through the air on windy days. Neighbours and passers-by would swear it was words of warning, telling everyone to stay away.

Being around the property would raise the hairs on one's neck.

The Anderson relatives had tried to sell the house to someone in town, or any one of the towns that surrounded the small town of Fort Talesas, but no one would bite and since the stories had spread from town to town, no one in a fifty mile radius would touch it.

So the house passed from hand to hand with in the Anderson family. The family suffering tragedy after tragedy, as if the mere act of owning the house had cursed the whole line.

It took 40 years to ruin the family, 40 years to bankrupt them, and then the state got the house.

Well, the state wasn't going to chase around prospective buyers, so they just auctioned it off.

They managed to sell the house to a company, Davis Construction, they were developers and they had a vision for the Culverton land.

Bulldoze it to the ground and set up a gated community there. Or an apartment building. They'd see what the committee would approve.

But first they'd have to send down a construction team to take everything down.

The house, the barn, the maze and field. All of it was to be leveled.

The day the machines drove up to the house the neighbours all held their breath. There were viewing parties being planned. They'd invite all their friends over, the whole town if they could to watch that house finally fall.

To celebrate good triumphing as the evil was wiped off the face of the earth.

The house was to go last.

That was so the team could stay in the house while they took everything else down.

The problem was they didn't start right away.

This was a team of twenty rowdy boys and their boss wasn't with them. The first two days in town they didn't work, they partied. They drank and ran around town, they chased women, they were... well... they were being boys.

They finally went to work on their third day in town. They started with the field as it was the easiest to deal with. They took down the fence and took down the crops.

At the end of the day the boys were exhausted. It wasn't supposed to be hard work but it was like the field had fought them on it. The soil had been like mud, it had sucked all the posts in, making it almost impossible to get them out. The wheat had grown roots so deep that pulling it out took twice as much effort. That was even after they burned the field.

That was the night it started.

The voices.

They said they could hear someone crying, a wailing that had jolted all of them out of the drunken sleep they had fallen in. It was a woman. She was calling for help, lost in the maze. Two of the men had gone in to find her, both had ropes wrapped around their waists.

Only one came out.

And he was not okay.

Oh he wasn't physically damaged, nor was he raving insane but he was clearly not okay. He had once been the biggest, strongest and bravest of them all, it was why he went in in the first place. After the maze, he withdrew into himself, became nervous, shaky. When asked what happened he'd just say that he saw things.

Wouldn't tell anyone what, though.

They never did find the second man, or the woman they heard crying in the maze.

After that they decided they were just going to set fire to everything. Burn it all to the ground.

They would do it in the morning. Give everyone a chance to recuperate before they'd set it all on fire.

But in the morning none of the men rose.

The neighbours all wondered why. Unlike the other times, they didn't wait to see if they'd come out later in the day. They went over to investigate.

All of them were dead.

Twisted in these agonal positions, faces a splotchy puffy red.

The Sherriff was called in right away and with him came the coroner.

The bodies were taken out in a morbid relay of sorts as they only had one the one car back then. It took all day.

The coroner had to work straight through the next two days, trying to get all the autopsies does while the town was in a panic. Riots were brewing, demanding something be done about the devil house. They wanted it burned. They wanted priests, a whole flock of them, or the pope himself, to come down to that house and bless the land.

It should have placated them, finding out what happened, but it didn't. It didn't because it simply raised more questions.

All fifteen men had been poisoned.

They blamed the lead in the pipes but the townsfolk didn't believe that.

Something in that house had poisoned them, had put something in their water probably to stop them from destroying anything else.

If the house was that determined to protect itself, how would any of them ever be safe?

But with the last round of deaths, Culverton House was once again boarded up. And it stood, smugly in place, taunting its neighbours with its presence and it's whispering maze and moving shadows and curtains.

By next summer wheat had grown back in the field, and a new fence was put up, though all swore that it none had a hand in the field returning.

And the townsfolk started to have the town priests bless their own properties so none of the evil would spill over the border.