The Crypt Volume One

The Dare: part one

By Bernadette Hale

In deepest Monmouthshire loomed a dark, dank, cobwebby old place called Elech Mansion. It sat at the bottom of a hill, the ruins of an eerie castle reaching into the sky like a thorny crown above it.

No-one knew when or why Elech Mansion had turned bad. It just had.

Attached to the back of the rotting grey house was the Flower Box. A tall room with a glass ceiling and glass walls, it let in plenty of light - nourishing sun by day, mystical moon by night.

Once it had been well tended. The Flower Box used to sing with bees, butterflies and other insects buzzing and fluttering in through its welcoming, open doors. It earned its name with colourful rows of roses, carnations, lilies and marigolds potted and displayed along benches and worktops, or bedded and fussed over in indoor troughs.

Now it festered like the rest of the mansion. The roses were dead, a film of brown gunk covering their shrivelled petals and congealing in the bottom of vases. The air was heavy and rank. A nauseating smell of decay infused what little scraps of fabric were left - a faded tapestry here, a pink chaise longue there.

In the middle of the room waited a winding metal staircase. It snaked up slowly to a skinny walkway. There was a legend about that staircase and what it looked out onto: a lake, at the far edge of the gardens, so black and so still it was rumoured to be bottomless.

Legend tells that if you walk to the top of the staircase and speak a specific incantation while staring at the lake, you will raise something evil: a ghoul come to eat your flesh and your soul.

As with most legends, no-one knows its origins. But that doesn't mean it's not real; that it should be ignored. Or worse, tested. Over the course of a century, not long after the last live-in owners of Elech Mansion had fled town, legend become a joke, then a parenting tool for opportunistic locals who used it to scare children into behaving.

All that changed one sharp wintry night in February 2007, when two twelve year old boys were there on a dare, sent by bigger boys at school.

"Raise the ghoul and live to tell the tale, and you can be one of the lads," promised their would be leader. The gang they wanted to join ruled the town's school, and promises of bikes, footballs and skateboards to borrow lured them in.

This is the story of what happened to those boys that fateful winter's night...

Scuttling like beetles across the overgrown lawn, Tommy and Charlie ignored the eerie sight bending down upon them from the hill: the thorny castle, backdropped by a full moon, was covered in mist that fell like water over its stone remains, down the hill, and across the grass towards them.

"Come on, Charlie. Hurry!" Tommy broke into a jog. He led the way as mist coiled around his ankles, spreading itself fast ahead of him like a giant white blanket.

"I don't like this place. It gives me the creeps." As they passed the black front door, Charlie glanced at the knocker and saw the devil. There sat his face, carved from bronze with pointed eyebrows and little horns.

The boys rounded the back of Elech Mansion and found a side door to the Flower Box. It was locked.

"Just smash it. Stick a brick through it." Tommy's chattering teeth worked through a layer of enamel as he stood, freezing, watching his friend hurl a piece of slate.

It smashed a hole in the door just big enough for Charlie to slip his hand through and grasp the handle. "Sick! It stinks," he complained, glass crunching beneath his boots as he stepped inside.

"Yeah, man, smells like rotten eggs." Tommy shone a torch over the black and white tiled floor, the long benches, and the endless vases and troughs acting like mausoleums to the dead flowers.