Hallowed Be Thy Name

PROLOGUE

I murdered my mother.

Her ghost now haunts the House on North Lane. It is called the House on North Lane because it is the only one on the street—a tall, timbered structure hidden beneath an overgrowth of grass and vines, a single shattered window its only breath of life.

Armed with bare, razor-edged branches, a skeletal tree guards the entrance, long limbs outstretched as if to ward off intruders—or to keep something in.

A young boy lay buried within the walls, time eating away at the flesh that had once enveloped his bones. Abandoned, forgotten—the House shielding his cries from a saviour that would never come. Or so the story goes. That story, anyway.

The children in town speak of another. Of a witch entangled with the Devil, condemned to the House for all eternity. Her thin, pale form stood by the window every night, hands clasped together in prayer as she begged for a salvation that would never come.

My personal favourite? A clawed monster, imprisoned by God, powerless to leave due to its hunger for revenge. It howled in the night, thrashing against the door, mourning a salvation that would never come.

There are many stories about the House on North Lane, but the one I am about to tell is not one the children whisper around a campfire on a cold night. It is about Augustus Saint. And I am just a man. A man who murdered his mother, a man now entrapped in the House on North Lane.

The first night of my imprisonment was quiet. And it was cold, the evidence of every exhaled breath a white mist drifting through the darkness. Goosebumps crawled along my arms, hairs upright, standing to attention like obedient soldiers preparing for battle.

An icy breath caressed the back of my neck, sending numbing shivers straight down my spine as I crouched to retrieve a long, blood-stained crucifix abandoned on the empty floor.

The second night bore me no mercy. Nausea enveloped me in its arms, the air thinning to the point it was like breathing in through a straw. I scrubbed blood, ash and dust off the wooden floorboards, vision blurring and replaced with a static screen.

Footsteps echoed on the floor above me, the only sound other than my laboured breathing and thundering heart.

I ventured up the old, winding staircase, a flickering candle in my hand to fend off the darkness.

The empty hallway glared back at me as a rat scurried from one crack in the wall to another.

There was no one there. At least no one I could see.

But I felt her. Taunting me. Waiting for the right moment to exact her revenge.

By the one hundredth night, I’d grown accustomed to the creaking floorboards and the whispering walls, the heavy breathing and the dancing shadows.

The House and I were in an endless waltz.

It despised me, and yet it had no intention of letting me leave, twirling me around with no respite. My sin entrapped me here, as did hers.

I want nothing more than to leave this prison, to escape this wicked nightmare, but there are phantom hands wrapped around my throat, imprisoning me here among the many stories of the House on North Lane.