Posthaste Manor

By Jolie Toomajan and Carson Winter

NEVER TRUST A HOUSE WITH A NAME

 

Everyone has a story about Posthaste Manor. 

 

None of the stories end well, but that doesn't stop the hopeful from hoping and the desperate from trying.

 

This composite novel stands as both history and eulogy of one very haunted house, as recounted by artists, real estate agents, and beloved family pets; by the debauched, the dead and the dying, and anyone looking for one last chance.

 

Raise a glass in celebration. Just don't linger within its walls for long.

 

Cover art by Trevor Henderson.

Interior illustrations by Alex Woodroe.

 

About the Authors:

 

Jolie Toomajan is a PhD candidate, writer, editor, and all-around ghoul. Her dissertation in progress is focused on the women who wrote for Weird Tales and her work has appeared in Upon a Thrice Time, Death in the Mouth, and Black Static, among others. She is editor of Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: An Anthology of Hysteria Fiction. Despite all of this, she would investigate a clown hanging out in a sewer grate.

Carson Winter is an award-winning author, punker, and raw nerve. His fiction has been featured in Apex, Vastarien, and Tales to Terrify. "The Guts of Myth" was published in Volume One of Dread Stone Press' Split Scream series. His novella, Soft Targets, is out now from Tenebrous Press. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

 

"Un-builds a mosaic narrative from the exquisitely deconstructed corpse of Gothic fiction. Toomajan and Winter kick our expectations out like delinquents smashing windows, then remodel the old bones of the haunted house story to entrap the reader in a joyfully wicked architectural beast."

• Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands and Convulsive

"Disturbing, yet often tender, thanks to imagery that stuns and creeps and never forgets that a haunted house needs humans inside of it. A refreshing and evil spin on a classic trope by two fierce talents."

• Michael Wehunt, author of The Inconsolables

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tenebrous Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781959790952

Book preview

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SECTION I.: THIS HOUSE IS A FURIOUS BODY

Mouth Open

Chapter 1: Meeting the Neighbors as an Exercise in Acute Trauma

Chapter 1: Rat Husbandry is an Exciting, Rewarding Hobby

Chapter 2: Home Renovation of the Damned—Or, Why Taking a Mental Health Day Sometimes Leads to Magic

Chapter 2: The Heart Will Lead You Like a Fool

Chapter 3: Two Masks

Chapter 3: Weakness Digs a Home in Your Bones

Chapter 4: We All Need Someone to Tell Us a Story

Chapter 4: Removes Dirt! And Impurities!

Chapter 5: Make Good Decisions

Chapter 5: How Did This Happen

Chapter 6: What Happens When Nerds Play with Shit They Shouldn’t

Chapter 6: An Exodus Is What You Make of It

Mouth Closed

SECTION II.: A HOUSE WITH A NAME

The End of Posthaste Manor

Howl

Rats and Dogs on the Planet Nowhere

The Absolutely True and Correct Account of the Honorable Mlle. Cassandra von Archambault, Affectionately and Begrudgingly Known to Her Friends and Family as Echo

Everyone’s Just Screaming, All the Time

Conscious Uncoupling

Real Estate

Credit in the Straight World

New Neighbor

Mrs. Mutilate’s Husbands

CONTENT WARNINGS

SECTION I.

THIS HOUSE IS A FURIOUS BODY

MOUTH OPEN

NOBODY CARED WHEN Otho Marcus Baxter made the announcement.

I’m moving, he said. Across the country. To places unknown. I’m doing what I always said I would.

His friends, themselves scattered across the country, offered their acknowledgements.

Nice.

Very cool.

Good luck out there.

I bought a house, he said.

Well done.

Great.

Have fun.

They said all the things they should have, except none of them asked, Which house?

He was the last to leave the college town in which he grew up, the last standing in a sea of strip malls and parking lots and happy hours. There was no one left to say goodbye, no one to congratulate him on the new job or the big money. He made his phone calls, trying to make his enthusiasm contagious.

Posthaste, he said. It’s Posthaste.

There were pauses, questions.

Really?

That’s the one you’re always talking about, right?

Isn’t that in Pennsylvania?

Yes, yes. I’m leaving this weekend. Packing it all up. Headed east.

This giddy excitement, this nervous energy, kept him company for the whole drive.

When he arrived, the feeling hadn’t faded. He thought it might, eventually. That it’d all come crashing down. But it didn’t.

He stood before the house in stricken awe. He imagined white rays of light shining out from around him, like in a comic book or manga—Otho was proud to say he was the only one in his friend group to know about manga. In the shadow of Posthaste Manor, he stood taller, straighter.

He shook his head, it looked—

***

—like the house was Adira Naphtali’s only real option. As the saddest kind of orphan—one with living parents who said things like What did you do to make John angry?—many escape routes stood just out of her reach. When she tried the cops in desperation, they said things like, Even if he isn’t on the lease, we can’t just put a man out of his home, and "We can’t arrest him for saying he’s going to kill someone, and He can break his things all he wants, and your things are a civil matter." Then they left her in the house with him.

But Adira had been slowly building credit using a credit card that was the same blue as her bank debit card so he wouldn’t notice the change, and she finally had something much more effective than cops—a credit score starting with seven. Demesne. And the mortgage was only double her credit card limit because rumors about this place went back a hundred years. Dozens of YouTube videos came up for Posthaste Manor, everything from amateur ghost hunting and urban exploration channels to PBS’s Haunted Pennsylvania. Adira saved the playlist and listened to it on her phone while she planned, rolling the details of each horrific incident over in her mind and tucking them away. Little silver bullets for her personal werewolf.

Adira hadn’t seen any of the promised abominations on her realtor-guided tour. A disgusting mossy fountain obscured the view of the steps, hairy tufts of grass and dandelions burst through the stonework driveway, and the doors buckled when she leaned on them. The rich lived here once, and their mere presence Midas-touched the property, transforming it into a restoration project. If Posthaste hadn’t been a mansion, just a regular house where regular people lived, it would be called a—

***

—Tragedy—that’s what it is. His mother shook her head, bit her lip, and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. The adults all said the same thing.

The casket went where all caskets go. The pallbearers lowered him effortlessly, as if he weighed nothing at all.

It’s alright, son. It’s okay. There, there.

The boy said, No, no. It’s not okay. This isn’t okay!

Pearly tears rolled down his cheeks.

Everyone watching the casket disappear into the earth looked like a bunch of vampires—dressed head-to-toe in black, leering at a corpse. He felt sick.

He tried to act like his father suggested—like this was okay. So, he blinked away his tears and choked each burgeoning sob with a breath from his nose and a constricted throat. For the rest of the service, he just tried to keep his—

***

—head down, Adira took the porch steps two at a time and unlocked the front door, squinting into the dusty foyer. She waited for a blast of cold or the smell of garbage, but the hall sat silent. Frankly, Adira couldn’t imagine anything the house could even do to her that hadn’t already been done. She had already been woken out of a dead sleep by sudden screaming. She had already swatted a flying coffee cup from the air, cleaned up broken glass and sour milk. She had already scrubbed mystery stain after mystery stain, pulled a shard of glass out of her foot, and washed her own blood off her hands—

***

—screaming.

Someone was outside, and they were yelling. Otho withdrew into himself. He hugged his arms around his meager frame. I’m not going out there. It’s too late for that. I can’t—

He’d only been in the new house for a night and already that cold loneliness crept into him, making him its home. With loneliness came dread, anxiety, and fear. Sitting alone on the floor, unpacking boxes in a house much too large for him, ignoring the screaming, he wondered if he had made the right decision.

He opened a new box and pretended to stare deep into his collection of knick-knacks and crinkled diplomas. He pretended to notice nothing else in his life but this one box of shit that contained everything from his dorm room desk. But he couldn’t do that for too long, because of the screaming. So, he stood up and went to the window.

Outside, there was a woman, lit by the orange glow of streetlights. She reared her head back and let out a primal scream. Otho could not tell what she looked like, or how she was dressed, but her posture eased his mind.

She’s celebrating, he thought.

That’s all right, he said aloud.

In the walls of the house, he was sure he heard his voice echo. He’d barely had a chance to explore yet and already he felt as if this journey had reached its end.

I bought the house, he said. I did it.

The house didn’t answer, but as he unpacked another box, he pretended it was listening.

Outside, the screaming—

***

—men took the boxes into the house like a trail of ants. Efficiently. Also kindly, nodding and giving her small, polite smiles. Adira hoped it wasn’t pity, but at this point she’d take what she could get.

A man in a blue cap hurried past her with the single piece of furniture she still owned, an ottoman. She was embarrassed by exactly how much of her life John erased and replaced, somehow without her notice. When she moved in with him, she had a bedroom set, a television, a sofa, a dining set and chairs. When something broke—or more likely when he picked it up and slammed it against a wall, or took a hammer to it, or stomped and jumped on it while screaming at her—he would pick and pay for the replacement, complaining that she’d have him living in a cross between a doll house and a brothel with her taste. She didn’t even have pillows anymore.

She kept to the front yard while the men worked, sipping a milky chai as she surveyed her domain. There were no neighbors in the entire division. Even proximity to Posthaste was considered a terrible idea since the 90s. Well, before the 90s, too. Dusty, empty windows overlooked sagging verandas that led to doorways she could break open at will. Adira had plans to break into them immediately, admire their architecture, imagine the photographs that used to live in the clean squares on tobacco-stained walls, steal the antique doorknobs. She hoped the life from her would leech into Posthaste, forcing the moss to recede from the stonework, the fountain to again sprout clean water, and then spread to the five empty houses Adira could see from the porch, the standing and the not-so-standing, and then beyond her sight into the larger neighborhood. Sagging porch columns would right themselves, and clean plastic blinds would materialize over the vacant windows as tricycles and gardening gloves appeared in the driveways. She conjured warm nuclear families led by men who didn’t punch holes in the drywall over being asked—

***

—Hey man, are you going to visit? Otho waited, a forced smile painted on his lips. Mike?

Yeah, yeah, I’m here. Sorry. Clara was just— He laughed. Hey, I’m on the phone. It’s Otho. Sorry, man. Yeah, we’ll definitely have to come by at some point. Even though it’s like way the fuck over there. But sure yeah, Clara has family on the east coast, so maybe. At some point.

Otho laid down on the bed. You really gotta see this place, man. It’s just like the stories.

You see any ghosts yet?

No, no. Nothing yet. But it’s cool, right? You ever think one of us would live in it?

I haven’t thought about it in years, honestly.

Yeah, no, of course. But, I mean, when I saw that it was up for sale— There was a loud crash. Otho pulled the receiver from his ear. Everything okay?

Yeah, yeah, said Mike. It’s fine. It’s just . . . Sorry, man. I gotta go. Have fun at the new place.

Yeah, you too, said Otho, but before he could finish, the dial tone sang a steady plaintive song.

The house was much too large for just Otho Marcus Baxter. And alone on his bed, in the blackness of an early autumn night, Posthaste Manor stretched around him endlessly—

***

—panting. Adira drifted down the stairs, rounded the fountain, and gasped. A German Shepherd sat just outside the open gate. His hair, a sooty black and the dying red of fall leaves, was brushed smooth and shiny like a woman on a box of hair dye. Adira squatted and offered a languid hand in his direction, keeping her gaze on the pavement. Though the house was pretty good insurance—John’s terror of the place would combat his anger at losing her when it was her decision and not his—a dog wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Here, boy!

The dog raised its head and leveled a gaze both amused and annoyed, more like a cat. She pressed a smile between her lips and ducked her head further.

I have steaks and no one to feed . . .

A disinterested sneeze.

What about an abundance of love with no target? I have that, too.

He sauntered away, confident as a bear, and Adira mentally added bowls and kibble to the list of things lacking in her life. If he came back, he was probably dumped. Nobody lived on this hill and nobody—

***

—seemed to go outside. The air was crisp, and the dying sun was pink and black against dark clouds. It smelled like rain. Otho walked down the street with hands in his pockets, inviting connection.

I live in that house over there, you know, the only house on this block with a name. Posthaste. He wondered if that’d get a laugh, a warm smile. Leaves blew in swirling tornadoes. He remembered delighting in those when he and Mike were kids. They loved them because they could stand around and wiggle their fingers mysteriously, like they were mind-controlling the wind. Psychic guessing games, tarot cards, horror movies, urban legends, stacks of video tapes, and the occasional drive-in movie—it was the language of Otho’s youth.

Everyone on the block was eating dinner, he was sure. They didn’t have time to meet the new neighbor right now, but maybe in the coming week, they’d come by and introduce themselves. Maybe they’d have questions for the man who bought The House with a Name.

Anxiety wriggled its way into his legs. Maybe maybe maybe. He turned around, counting the cracks in the sidewalk, all the way back to—

***

—when the last box was deposited and the payment sent, Adira didn’t even bother to lock the door.

CHAPTER 1:

Meeting the Neighbors as an Exercise in Acute Trauma

OTHO DID NOT light the candles, but he did arrange them carefully on the living room floor in accordance with his memories. Three steps to the left of North, four steps Southwest, six full circles and then walk in a zig-zag—right left, then left right, three zigs to each zag.

He hadn’t expected them to form any shape that he knew, so he wasn’t disappointed when they didn’t. There was no pentagram, only a constellation of tea lights. Otho rubbed his head and scratched at a patch of beard on his cheek. The