The Makings of Reedside Manor

Reedside manor loomed large and empty at the end of the lane. Detached from the rest of the town and surrounded by vast expanses of fields on every side, it could have very easily been picked out of a Gothic novel and willed into life by an avid reader. There it had stood for centuries, in all its ominous glory and many agreed it was the stuff of ghost stories, a place where nightmares might take root. 

There was only one problem with Reedside manor - for all its pomp and character, it was, in reality, surprisingly unexceptional in substance. No murders had ever taken place in the house, no ghostly figures stalked the hallways at nighttime and no strange creatures lurked in the depths of the adjacent grounds. In fact, one could very easily spend the night there alone and wake up the next morning feeling nothing but rested after a perfect night's sleep. No, Reedside manor had always been an ordinary house. 

This however did not deter the local community from regarding it with a certain suspicion, all the same. Its most recent tenant - one S.R. Holeway had passed away peacefully in her sleep just a few months earlier and although the manor had been inherited by her son who planned to sell it as quickly as he could, she did have one last dying wish to be fulfilled. You see, Ms. Holeway had been a widow for the last decade of her life and she occupied these lonely years, not by taking up a prudent hobby like gardening or improving her culinary skills, but by opting to get her thrills in quite a peculiar way for a lady of her age and status. 

From dawn to dusk, Sara Holeway chose to fill her time reading books, watching movies, even having heated debates on the internet about everything from vampires, to aliens to werewolves and witch doctors to the living dead in every shape and size it presented itself. You name it, she knew about it. This might strike some as a rather eclectic hobby for a well-to-do woman in her 70s but she did not care much for the opinions of others and had resided herself to being (for the most part) affectionately referred to as the town loony who lived in the big, old scary manor at the end of the lane. Consequentially, the decor of the house had evolved over the years to include more and more paraphernalia designed to give one goosebumps. It was almost as if the old broad was trying her utmost to make up for the averageness of the manor by filling its rooms and halls with those things it should aspire to. 

Perhaps this obsession with otherworldly phenomena stemmed from the extensive travels of her youth - her husband being a renowned surgeon, the Holeway family had become accustomed to traveling to remote parts of the world: the depths of the Amazon, the war trenches in Vietnam and even the Australian outback. And in each place they relocated to, Ms Holeway would go out of her way to learn about the eccentricities of each culture and people, their customs and traditions and along with all this, their beliefs about things which were considered not of this world.

It was therefore no surprise that Ms. Holeway’s favourite holiday should be Halloween. Every year, in the last week of October, she would enlist help from family and friends to do up Reedside manor is a fashion that befitted it on this momentous occasion. ‘Haunted house’ did not quite do it justice as in the last years leading up to Ms. Holeway’s death, she had even gone so far as to hire decorating agencies, to make the scares even more realistic. Cobwebs covered the entryways, skeletons lurked in the shadows, questionable substances covered every surface of the place illuminated by candlelight as actors dressed as zombies and other ghastly creatures hid in every corner to frighten trick or treaters, who big and small alike, had come to look forward to this yearly spectacle. 

So, Ms Holeway had requested that this yearly Halloween tradition be upheld for one last time after death, so far as prudency allowed it, which is why this year should be no different. 

***************************************

Her three only grandchildren were used to the old woman’s eccentricities and also secretly enjoyed their second home holding the status of local celebrity. Although now teenagers, Zac, Isabel and Brody were considered as quirky as their grandma, each in their own way. 

And now, with their parents busy with other, more important business, they were charged with the task of clearing out the last of their grandmother’s belongings and more importantly, overseeing the Reedside manor Halloween special.   

“Get that out of my face! You’re so disgusting,”

Zac dangled a musty voodoo doll up his sister’s nose and sniggered at her displeasure as she swotted his hand away.

“We’ve only got a few hours before the decorating company arrives to start setting up and we’ve still got a shit tonne of boxes to go through. Stop dicking around and be useful for once”

Meanwhile, their younger brother Brody, all too accustomed to the twins’ dynamic, sat quietly in a corner of the attic, perusing the content’s of what seemed like the umpteenth cardboard box they had gone through that morning. The more sensitive of the three, Brody had been closer to his grandma than his siblings, and it was customary for the two of them to spend long summer days together in the manor, having scary movie marathons or playing mystery board games. 

“Brody, what d’you reckon our poison of choice should be tonight? Beer or something a little stronger? I invited a bunch of people round so it’s gonna be lit!” 

But as was usually the case, Brody was more interested in relics from the past, than ordinary teenage concerns. “Look at this old picture of Grams and Grandpa. It says it was taken in South America”

A black and white image of a young couple laughing together against a backdrop of beautiful grassy mountains struck him as hauntingly beautiful, especially when compared to the regular family portraits they were used to seeing around the house. The other two poured over the faded photograph with mild interest, when suddenly:

“Hey, what’s that stuck to the back of it?”

Turning it around in his fingers, Brody realised there was indeed a small velvet drawstring bag attached to the yellowing photo with duct tape. Zac leaned forward and ripped it off, pouring the contents into his palm in one fell swoop. Out popped a sealed plastic bag with what looked like a handful of dried and discoloured plants. 

“Wow, Grandma was wilder than we thought!”

“Are those what I think they are?”

“No way, they couldn’t be-”

“Magic mushrooms! All the way from South America!”

The three of them looked from one to the other, their baffled expressions mirroring the words they were at a loss to speak. 

“You know what this means, right?” Zac’s face morphed from bewilderment into a slow, sly grin. 

“We’re not taking them, Zac’” Isabel’s voice shook slightly even though her tone was firm. 

“But we have to! As a tribute to Grams. She’d want us to.”

“She probably just forgot about them. They’ve been there for years - we might get poisoned or something.”

“Nah, mushrooms don’t go off, they’re natural.”

“That doesn’t mean anything! God, you’re such an idiot sometimes,”

“Vote goes to Brody. He does turn 15 tomorrow, after all”

Apart from being the third wheel, over the years, Brody had also become the deciding vote - the mediator each of the twins tried to recruit to their side in cases of a dispute. Although he was usually partial to his sister’s level-headedness, Brody would also side with Zac from time to time, to even things out and restore balance to their trio. 

“Let’s do it,” the words tumbled out of his mouth before he was even aware of them being there. 

Isabel tried staring him down, a technique that usually worked well on her little brother. “Come on, Brody you can’t be serious. What about Mom and Dad?”

“They haven’t come up to manor for Halloween in years. And anyway, they’re both busy with work stuff tonight, I checked their schedules.” 

Zac was practically jumping up and down with glee at the prospect. 

“Tomorrow, when the trick-or-treaters start showing up, we’ll go up to the front balcony of Gram's master bedroom. We’ll have the perfect view from there when the trip kicks in,” 

*********************************

And sure enough, as the sun went down on October 31st, the house underwent its impressive annual transformation. A menacing laugh boomed out from the speakers set up around the grounds and a spooky soundtrack filled the atmosphere, werewolves, monsters and other members of the undead stomped the grounds and for one night, Reedside manor finally seemed to live up to everyone’s expectations of it. 

Having delegated the task of handing out Halloween candy to some of the actors, a vampire, a witch and a zombie took their places on the front balcony of the house, like royals observing their kingdom from above. 

“Bottoms up, sibs.” Zac doled out the shrivelled up contents of the drawstring bag to his brother and sister and handed over two glasses of beer to wash them down with. 

“I’m still not sure about this,” but Isabel took her brother’s offerings anyway. 

“Ready for this, Brody?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,”

The trio ingested in unison and took a seat on the outdoor sofa, watching the crowds below drawing up to the house, waiting for their friends to arrive and wondering out loud if they would really feel any effects from the drugs at all.

Whatever happened a few hours later after the shrooms kicked in, no one could say for sure. The twins would only remember the screams, a vague fracas and the sirens of a police car arriving on the scene in the early hours of the morning. 

When they finally came off their high, they would each give statements at the station, Zac tongue tied for once and Isabel frantic, tearful and incoherent. They would not be able to say why or when the security cameras had been unwired and whose blood it was that dripped off the walls in the foyer or what the scrawled message it spelt out meant:

“The Real Monsters are In Your Mind”

And when they were shown the body of their dead brother still in his zombie costume, lying on the front lawn all askew on the morning of his 15th birthday, his face contorted in a pained and terrified expression, like he had seen a ghost, neither would be able to erase the image from their minds for the rest of their years. 

Friends and acquaintances who had been present on the night would tell conflicting stories, none of them quite matching up. Some would say they thought it had all been part of the manor's yearly performance, a final homage to Sara Holeway’s morbid fascination with all things eerie. And when the story became part of the town’s lore, facts would get twisted and speculations about the family’s mental health would be hashed out.   

Reedside manor had always been quite an ordinary house, but the forces of fate conspired to change that once and for all.