John Manning - The Killing Room

Howard recoiled from the idea of touching Beatrice’s body, of having to clean up her blood. “Can’t we simply tell the sheriff that she went away? Does he need to know she died?”

“Too many questions will be asked if we don’t report her death,” Desmond explained. “We can get away with saying that Clem took off, but the other servants would know Beatrice would never go with him. We can say Clem was distraught because of her death, and if suspicions arise that he killed her, so be it. But we cannot make the claim ourselves, because I do not want the sheriff here on the estate nosing around in an investigation.”

Howard was now certain that his father knew he had committed the crime. He was protecting him by keeping the authorities away.

“The sheriff has always done what I have told him,” the elder Mr. Young said. “He appreciates the donations I make to his office four times a year. He wouldn’t want to jeopardize that.”

Margaret was crying. “But what of the baby?”

“We will say that we gave the baby to a good home,” Desmond explained. “Beatrice has no family who will come wanting to claim him. So we say that we found a good home for the child in Boston. No one will question what I say.”

So they got to work. The brothers carried the corpses of Clem and Malcolm out the back entrance, burying them in unmarked graves in the private family cemetery. It was left to Howard, as his father intended, to take down Beatrice’s body from the wall, and to carry it out to the barn. He did this stoically, without any feeling or conscious thought. It was simply a chore to be completed. Never once did he look down at her face.

But when he returned to the room and began the grisly task of mopping up her blood, he suddenly broke down. He turned to his sister Margaret, standing in the doorway, and gestured pitifully. Beatrice’s blood was literally on his hands.

“What have I done?” he cried. “Oh, what have I done?”

Her eyes widened as she realized the truth.

“I was frightened,” Howard said. “Mad with fear and desperation. How is it possible that I could do something so terrible?”

“I’d advise you to say no more, Howard,” his sister said icily. “No more. Never again. After tonight, none of this exists.”

The sheriff came an hour later. As Desmond had predicted, he accepted the story that she had fallen. The official report of her death said she had died of an accident. Nothing more was recorded. Desmond even saw to it that no death certificate was ever signed. After all, Beatrice Swan was just a servant girl.

But Margaret’s assertion that the night would put an end to the horror was wrong. No one slept that night. At the breakfast table the next morning the family was solemn. The day passed without anything being spoken. But that night, as they fell into exhausted, restless sleep, the horrors that had taken place twenty-four hours earlier came roaring back to vivid, terrible life.

Howard sat bolt upright in his bed, sweat dripping from his face. And without even needing to wonder, he knew why his father was banging on his door in the middle of the night.

“You had the dream, too,” Howard said, getting out of bed and letting his father into his room.

“She will have revenge on us,” Desmond said.

“Yes,” Howard said, trembling. “That is what she said in the dream.”

Beatrice was not gone. She had vowed she would not leave. And so she had come back, appearing in a dream shared by both Howard and his father, a dream that told them their own chance to avoid her full wrath was to sacrifice one of their own every ten years. The exact particulars of the dream were vague and inchoate, fading as both men awoke. But the terms remained clear. A lottery was to be held the next night consisting of every blood family member aged sixteen and over. Whoever was chosen would spend a night in the room where Beatrice, Clem, and Malcolm had died. If this was not done, the entire family would be killed.

“That is absurd,” Douglas proclaimed when his father announced the plan.

Samuel echoed his brother’s disbelief. “You’re both just unnerved by the horror of it all,” he said.

Desmond slammed his fist down on the table. “Then tell me how both of us could have had the same exact dream! The lottery must be held!”

“Well, I want no part of it,” Douglas said.

“Neither do I,” Samuel agreed.

Margaret stood up. “We had best heed the dream. There is more here than we know.”

Her eyes shot accusation at Howard. He simply looked down at the floor.

And so the lottery was held that night. The brothers went along grudgingly, not really believing in the need for it, or in their father’s crazy dream. But no one could overrule a direct command from Desmond. When sixteen-year-old Jacob’s name was chosen, his father decreed he would enter the room in his place. Howard protested that they shouldn’t tamper with the results of the lottery. But Desmond simply could not bear the thought of sending his son into that room.

Witnessing such a display of paternal solicitude, Howard felt a deep, burning shame for what he had done to his own son.

My own son, he thought to himself, the full dismay of the night before hitting him. I killed my own son.

Desmond kissed his wife and made his way down to the basement. Once more, sleep eluded the family. Howard fretted. He was downstairs at daybreak. He and Douglas opened the door. There was the family patriarch, his body spread out on the floor, arms and legs extended in an X. All except one part of his body: his head, which lay on the other side of the room. The pitchfork that they thought had been replaced in the barn was stuck through his neck and into the floor, standing straight above him like an exclamation point. Clem walked the earth once more, doing Beatrice’s bidding. Once again, the floor of the room was covered in blood.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Douglas’s wife was screaming from upstairs. Rushing back, they discovered Douglas’s infant daughter Cynthia dead in her crib, her neck broken just like baby Malcolm’s. Down the hall, more horror awaited. Throwing open the doors to his brothers’ rooms, Howard found thirteen-year-old Timothy and sixteen-year-old Jacob smothered in their beds. Letting out a long wail, he fell to his knees.

He knew then that his curse was never to be selected in the lottery. Instead, he would live out his days watching his family die, one by one. And he knew he deserved such a fate. Rocking back and forth on the floor, keening like a madman, he knew he deserved all of this and much worse.

For the next eighty years, much worse was to come.

“It never stopped,” the old man said through his tears. “The horror just continued. All of us were ruined. My mother took her own life a few years later. My sister turned into a bitter recluse. One by one, the rest of my brothers died in that room, and then their sons, too. And I watched it all.”

Carolyn looked down at Howard Young with a mixture of revulsion and pity. But for Douglas, there was nothing but contempt in his voice.

“You killed her! You killed your own son!” he shouted. “And all for what?”

The old man looked up at him pathetically. “She gave me what I thought I wanted. She removed my brothers for me. Beatrice ensured that it would be me who became master of this house.”

Douglas turned away in utter disgust.

It was Jeanette’s turn to speak. “Uncle Howard, your actions that night…they cost my father and my brothers their lives. And consigned me to forty years of a silent, terrible prison.”

The old man just sat there sobbing, his frail frame convulsing.