The Darkwood Mysteries (11): The Hound at the Door

By Steve Merrifield

Emily Darkwood is already resisting Victorian society's expectations of her as a woman of the upper classes, when she receives a strange and life-changing inheritance in the wake of her missing parents. A stone of amber that draws her into mysteries, supernatural, cosmic, and criminal. Armed with this guide stone, her wits, revolver, sword-stick umbrella, and faithful servant-companion, the streetwise, scrappy, and young Jack Hobbs, she determines to challenge the mysteries and threats she encounters in her search to understand the power of the stone, its connection to her parents, and their fates. Yet dark forces conspire against her, and her drive for answers and her fight against the darkness of the world risks her friends, family, her fought for studies in medicine and surgery, and herself.

In The Hound at the Door (novella), why are attendees of a séance beinghunted by a phantom hound? Whatever the reason, the stalking ends in their disappearance. Darkwood investigates--by becoming an attendee herself...

The Darkwood Mysteries is a non-linear series of short-stories, novellas, and novels which can be enjoyed as standalone tales of horror and adventure, or together as part of a deeper mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Merrifield
• Release date: Dec 17, 2021

Steve Merrifield

Steve Merrifield is a writer of mystery and horror fiction. He takes his inspiration for writing from the work of James Herbert, Shaun Hutson and Clive Barker, and credits Gothic horror episodes of 70s ‘Doctor Who’ and cult TV such as ‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, and ‘Twin Peaks’; and classic horror movies as feed for his imagination.While most of his novels have been dark contemporary stories, his interest in Victorian history led to his historical crime and horror series ‘The Darkwood Mysteries’.Steve isn’t limited to dark fiction, and his work in social care, his training and experience in counselling, and his love for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has seen him write his self-help title, ‘Get Over It’. Steve plans to broaden his writing genres further through other genres.He lives in the UK with his husband and their two cats. Being a self-confessed geek, he regularly indulges his inner child through modern board games, miniature painting, revisiting shows from his childhood, and enjoys modern anime, sci-fi, life’s mysteries, fantasy and supernatural horror.Steve regularly shares updates on his projects and posts on his personal interests here on his blog, as well as on Facebook and Twitter.

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The Darkwood Mysteries: The Hound at the Door

by Steve Merrifield

copyright 2021 Steve Merrifield

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For Faye

The Darkwood Mysteries

These are the chronicles of the pursuits of Emily Darkwood—my employer, teacher, and friend; a young woman who refused to allow Victorian society to dictate her life, determined to become a physician and surgeon, and live a life of her own making. Inheritance gave her means and opportunity, and with it came her most cherished possession: an amber stone that once belonged to her mother. A gem with the curious power to draw its owner and dark happenings together. Through the stone, Darkwood courageously shone her light upon the mysteries gathered to her—both criminal and supernatural—in her search for answers to the fates of her missing parents. With resolve, wits, and revolver, she became a fighter of the wicked and the monstrous lurking within the shadows.

Jack Hobbs, her ever faithful servant-companion and your narrator, humbly presents…

The Hound at the Door

Here follows an extract from the diary of Mrs Faye Hogan-Gulliver:

"I hear it again. From behind the closed door of my study, the clip of claws on floorboards. The heavy paws of some animal. There is a hound at my door.

"I am certain of it. I am as sure of this now as I was when I first heard it in that darkened séance room. I was not alone in recognising the sign of this beast, for we all heard its unsettling step that night.

"Even our hostess, Madam Reuben, who we thought accustomed to such manifestations as a spiritualistic medium, was affected by its prowling. When we left that darkened room, and she closed the door upon it, I saw the confidence in her realm shaken. She attempted to reassure us as to the cause of our disturbance, but her manner worked against her with her eyes scattered about us as though in wary search of a threat, and she glanced regularly to that door, closed upon that stalking thing. She was frightened. And she—our guide to the spiritual continuation of us! What confidence can I have in the spirit world being benign when she was so frightened by the experience also?

"Our loose party of hopeful mourners has parted, and we were acquaintances in that séance room only. I have no one around me who might share the same haunting fear that what stalked us that night stalks beyond the séance room it found us in.

"My dearest Matthew was unconvinced of our experience and considered it hysteria or trickery, or both. He had been there and heard nothing! I told Matthew of my suspicion that the presence of the creature has followed me from the séance room, but he dismissed any sounds that night and since as the scamper of rats in the wainscoting. His reason is sound even if his mind is closed. He disputed the value of our visit to Madam Reuben in the first place. Which I daren't blame him for, as I once shared his rationality.

"To think that my reasoned wisdom, moulded through the pursuit of knowledge, cast through factual studies, and tempered with balanced argument—an aspect of my being I cherish so—is laid low by grief and the want and desperation of hope.

"No. Matthew has been more accepting than I expected any man of mine to be through his encouragement of my intellectual studies; I daren't push my superstitious fears upon him. Yet he has repeatedly recognised my unease since that evening and questions it. I can't expose my persistent fear and suspicion, or insist he believe as I do, for he might share my concern for my faculties and have me bound for Bedlam.

"The idea of being taken away to the madhouse, removed from my home and life, is my fear. Yet, I think, madness and incarceration is the lesser fate the beast intends to deliver upon me. Against all reason, I fear this hound, has risen from the damned depths to take my soul as punishment for my heathen pursuit of one last conversation with our dear lost love; our little Edward.

"My Edward, oh I did not wish to disturb your soul, but wanted, no; I needed to explain to you how much I miss you. I need you to know how desperately I mourn your passing. Especially as you left me in the night after I had sent you to your bed on such bad words at your insistence of staying up later than your curfew. How trivial your trespass now seems with you gone! How criminal my treatment of you then! When I consider the shortness of your time on this earth and in our lives, I should have overlooked any and all infractions. I dread you went to bed that night fretting and questioning our love for you. If I could but grasp the hand of the clock and use all my living strength to turn time back, I would, and use my final breaths to tell you the depth of my feeling for you, and wish you the longest life.

"This is foolish talk. I failed in my attempt to reach you and plead for forgiveness, and I have doomed us to eternal division. For you, my boy, can only be in Heaven, and this beast can surely only be from the depths of the earth: that great wound of perpetual pain in the flesh of this world that we live upon. A fiery place and fate for which I am surely destined. 'Heaven' and 'Hell' are such concepts I would never have considered, but with a phantom hound stalking me, reason has flown from me!

"I am not here to document my grief and torment, but my situation in rational study—as a woman of science.

"If Matthew will doubt me, then no reasonable person will believe my fears. It has not been enough to direct Matthew to the patter and scratch of the hound at the door, for the creature is intent on the experience of it being subjective, for only I can hear it. So, I determine I must gain some tangible evidence of my predicament before I am dragged to the madhouse or to Hell—if they are separate realms.

"I can hear it now, pacing back and forth outside the door of my little study at the top of the house. The sound of its waiting presence only broke when Matthew visited me to plead for me to retire with him from my seclusion this evening. He entered, and the footfalls stopped. He left crestfallen at my declination and the stalking began anew. That silence from the hall between was both a blessed peace and a cursed mockery. It taunts me, unheard and unseen by others, and able to come and go in the night and the dark as it pleases. It is truly my personal demon intent upon me.

"It is here for me now, but I resolve