I’m Trapped in a Castle of Horrors
50:37 Share

Hey guys, get ready for the ultimate scare this Halloween season. From number one best-selling author Tony Martirano comes The Curse of Frost Lake Manor, a terrifying tale perfect for the spooky season. As Halloween approaches, immerse yourself in the haunting story of Kevin, an ambitious executive sent to oversee the restoration of Frost Lake Manor, an eerie estate with a dark and twisted past. But what starts as a career-making opportunity

quickly spirals into a living nightmare as Kevin uncovers the horrifying secrets buried within the manor's cursed walls. Haunted by malevolent spirits and pursued by supernatural forces beyond his control, Kevin is trapped in a fight for survival. Tony Martirano, celebrated for his pulse-pounding horror novels, delivers a story guaranteed to send shivers down your spine.

The Curse of Frost Lake Manor is an exclusive Halloween special premiering on the Dr. No Sleep podcast on October 23rd at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. This tale of supernatural terror is just what you need to get into the Halloween spirit. So make sure to click that follow button and turn notifications on. You don't want to miss the scare of the season. Only on Dr. No Sleep.

"Don't let go!" I shouted over my shoulder at Cassie as I worked my way through the roiling crowd. My poor daughter looked terrified as I dragged her along, but there was no way I was going to let her out of my sight in a strange city around a bunch of desperate men. I had only caught a glimpse of the vehicle as it pulled up on the outskirts of the Hooverville shantytown, but that glimpse was enough to tell me that the owner was rich.

It was a blood-red Duesenberg Model J, and it made the newest Ford automobile, the Model 48, look like a child's matchbox car. Before I could reach in and grab Cassie out of her meager shack, word had spread over the whole camp, and a stampede of half-starved men were racing toward the vehicle. Now, as I pulled Cassie along, I finally caught sight of the driver, and I had to remind myself that as long as the job paid enough to feed my daughter, I would take it.

provided I was lucky enough to get it. Which didn't seem likely. The driver, a gangly, hard-featured man of at least 60, looked not long for this world. His eyes immediately struck me as unnaturally dim, despite the heavy cloud cover that seemed to reflect the mood of a country in turmoil. They were so dim, I couldn't tell what color they were, even when I got up closer to him.

The gaunt driver stood on the Dusenberg's running board to look out over the crowd while men jostled and shoved and shouted to get his attention. He stood and waited while those nearest raced to the bottom by telling him how little pay they would work for, no matter the job. Just a hot meal! I'll do it for a sandwich! A cup of soup, sir! A small cup of soup! I'll work for a coffee in the shower!

As these dire shouts filled the air, the sense of hopelessness I'd been battling since Black Monday seemed to take hold of my bones, trying to squeeze every last drop of faith from them. If it hadn't been for Cassie, I might have turned around then and there to find a pit of despair to crawl into. But Cassie was there, and she was still alive, and it was my job to keep her that way. So I pressed on, gripping her hand tightly as I shouldered through the men.

The gaunt man scanned the crowd with seeming disinterest. His eyes grazed me and moved on without so much as a hitch. But then something happened, and his eyes whipped back to me, or near me. I soon realized he was looking over my shoulder, his angle allowing him to see Cassie. He raised one thin hand and pointed a bony finger my way. "You," he said, "is that your daughter?"

I nodded, bringing Cassie forward and placing protective hands on her shoulders. "Yes, sir," he studied me closely, and then did the same with my daughter. "Okay, get in. I'll bring you both back when the job's done." The crowd had momentarily silenced to see what the verdict was, but now the surrounding men erupted in jeers and pleas. The gaunt man ignored them all, getting back into his vehicle.

With a miniscule yet determined smile, I moved forward as much of the crowd began to disperse. "Daddy," Cassie said, "I don't want to go with the skeleton man." Given the man's appearance, I thought it was an apt description. I had seen half-starved people who looked healthier than the man now waiting for us in his Duesenberg. "Aren't you hungry?" I asked her. "Yes," she said, "but I don't want to go with him."

"We have to, Cass. It's the only way we'll eat today. Don't you want to eat?" Cassie said nothing else, but I could tell she wasn't happy. I asked if I needed to bring any tools, but the man said he had everything I would need. He urged me to ride in the back of the vehicle with my daughter. We climbed in and settled on the plush bench seat in the back. He drove away from the shanty town heading away from the city.

"I'm Elijah Brown," I said, not offering to shake his hand because he was driving. "Nice to meet you," he said. He didn't give me a name. I didn't want to do anything to jeopardize this job, so I didn't push him on it. I felt that the only thing to do was sit back and be quiet. I held Cassie's hand while the man drove us into the wilderness. Past struggling farms and foreclosed homes that dotted the countryside.

the rolling hills were soon replaced by small, tree-covered mountains. As the trip stretched on, moving steadily past the hour mark, I ventured to ask whether we were close. "Almost there," he said. After a few more turns on a twisty mountain road, there came into view a large manor, the likes of which I had never seen in America. It was a castle, like something in a newspaper about European royalty.

I marveled at the massive stone structure, and soon enough, we passed through an archway and into a courtyard. The man stopped the vehicle but did not get out. I peered at the back of his head and fancied I could see the bone of his skull through his pale skin. "Should we get out?" I asked. The man didn't answer. He stayed perfectly still. I wondered if he'd fallen asleep or perhaps suffered from some kind of medical emergency.

As I reached forward to touch him, my door was yanked open by a figure that seemed to have come from nowhere. Before I could react, bony hands were grasping my face, obscuring my vision as they pulled me with significant power out of the vehicle. Cassie screamed as I fought to get up, but my attacker struck me in the back of the head with some hard object. I fell face first to the gravel, feeling as though something terrible was going to happen to my daughter.

"Get up!" I told myself. "Get up and protect your daughter like you couldn't your wife!" I felt a rush of energy pour into my limbs. I pushed myself to all fours and got my head up. But my attacker was far too quick, and he hit me in the back of the head again. This time, consciousness fled from me. As I fell to my face amid the gravel, I was sure Cassie was dead.

and the realization tore at me even more than the hooks the skeleton man slid into my flesh whenever he wanted to have a little fun with me. I had no idea how much time had passed by. Days, surely. Maybe weeks. There was no way to tell time in the dungeon-like room where he kept me. It was where I had awoken after being knocked out in the castle's courtyard. I was surprised to be alive. But as time passed and torture became a part of my everyday life,

I had a sneaking suspicion that maybe I wasn't alive. Maybe I was dead and in hell. My punishment for failing to protect my wife and daughter, the stock market crash, and the severe dust storms had taken everything from us, destroying our crops and making it impossible for us to pay the mortgage on our house. Eventually, we'd been foreclosed on and forced to leave western Kansas in search of any kind of work at all.

Along the way, we'd been mugged by a group of men in burlap masks. My wife had fought back and been stabbed several times in the abdomen while I stood by with Cassie in my arms and watched. Now, as I looked around my prison, I knew that something just as bad had happened to Cassie. The walls were made of rough stone, like something built in the 18th century. There were no windows and only one heavy door.

Otherwise, the only portal to the outside world was a drain in the middle of the sloped floor. I was never able to make it near the drain to look down into its inky depths, nor was I ever able to make it to the door to try my hand at escape. I was chained to the wall by my left leg and left arm, and each chain was so short they allowed me minimal movement. A wooden bucket served as my bathroom.

but the chains that held me in place made using it a precarious task. The skeleton man brought food once a day, and it was never more than bread, water, and a small bowl of beans. He never said anything to me, and it was always dark when he came, whether that was to torture me or to give me food so I could go on living to be tortured.

The one light bulb in the middle of the room, directly above the drain, burned beneath a half-globe metal cage until he was ready to come in. Then the bulb would turn off, plunging me into the damp darkness that seemed only natural for a place of such despair. After that first car ride, I only ever saw my captor by the light that spilled through the open doorway behind him when he came in. He was an old man, and Cassie had been right to call him the Skeleton Man.

He resembled a skeleton with a thin layer of nearly translucent skin pulled over it. The tendons on the back of his gaunt hands danced like puppet strings whenever he worked with his fingers. His eyes were so sunken into their pit-like sockets that I only ever caught the barest glint of light reflected in the recessed orbs. It was never enough to tell the true color of his eyes, so I came to think of them as only black, as black as the pits that held them.

He always wore a dusty black suit with a black tie and a white undershirt, reminding me of an undertaker's attire. Maybe, in a sense, that's what he was. He was certainly going to usher me into the next life, whenever he decided that his little torture sessions were done. There hung a contraption over me in the dungeon that was little more than a six-foot metal cross affixed to the ceiling with chains.

Hanging from the underside of the cross, which faced me on the floor, were thick metal grommets that were themselves fixed to the cross with pieces of stout rope about six inches in length. The way he kept me chained to the wall made it impossible for me to stand up or even sit up properly without my limbs being forced into an awkward and painful position.

I could only lay there if I wanted to be comfortable. And even then, I only had cold, damp concrete to lay on. He lent me no clothes to keep warm, and only kept me dressed in a pair of ragged shorts so he could easily access my exposed skin. When the man came in for torture, he came with a series of steel hooks attached to long wire ropes. He would jab these hooks through my skin and feed the lines through the grommets hanging from the cross above.

Then, using his considerable strength, he would yank on the hooks, raising various parts of my body from the floor until my skin tore, and the hooks broke through. The first several times he came in, I tried to fight him, but he bested me easily, and he always made the torture session that much worse for my insolence. It shouldn't have been possible for him to be so strong, not in such a haggard state.

but he was. He was more powerful than me by a large margin. This was yet another factor that made me believe I was in hell. There had to be something beyond the bounds of reality at work here. When I finally managed to escape, if one could call it that, I had been in the dungeon for long enough to lose track of time, and I had been malnourished and tortured long enough to lose a good portion of my sanity.

Which was why I thought it a cruel trick when I awoke at some mysterious hour to find all my limbs free and the door to the dungeon standing open. I merely raised my head and peered at the door for a few long moments, knowing that as soon as I moved, the skeleton man would appear and shut the door for another torture session. The effort of holding my head up soon became cumbersome, so I lowered it back down and closed my eyes.

trying to ignore the constant rumble from my stomach that had been my only true companion since my internment here. I was so deeply lost in my despair that when I heard the sobbing of a little girl from up the stairs, tears broke free from my eyes at the cruelty of my own imagination. The girl sounded like Cassie, just like her, but I had become so darkly accustomed to the thought that my little girl was dead.

I told myself it had to be a figment of my mind's internal powers. Of course, I had seen no evidence of her death, and I hadn't been told of her demise by the skeleton man, who never spoke to me. Perhaps I wished her dead so she wouldn't have to endure the torture thus far inflicted upon me by the madman. Perhaps the thought of her dead was easier to bear than the thought of her locked up in some stone room, suffering through days of sadistic cruelty.

Yet the sobbing continued, and as it did, an ember of hope I thought had been completely extinguished came to life. I resisted the urge to feed that ember with any sort of fuel, any further hope in the form of imaginings of my daughter's innocent smile, or the smell of her hair, or the features she had inherited from her mother.

Again, the thought of her in a cell identical to my own made me want to retch and thrash until I broke my own neck so I wouldn't have to think of her suffering any longer. As I kept my eyes shut and whipped my head back and forth, I heard over my fit the sound of little feet pattering toward me. I opened my eyes to observe a little girl maybe just a year or two older than Cassie. She hurried toward me in her simple gray dress.

looking so very gaunt and pitiful that I thought for a moment I saw some resemblance between her and the skeleton man. I was sure that this girl was a trick of my imagination. Perhaps a hallucination brought about by some drug slipped into my food or my broken mind conjuring things that weren't there. But as she knelt beside me and placed a very real hand on my arm, I knew she was as real as the walls that had kept me prisoner.

"The first chance you get, you must end her life, and then your own," she said, speaking in an excited whisper and staring at me with pale, unblinking eyes that were deeply sunken into her haggard face. I shook my head, unable to make sense of her words. "He'll trick you," she said. "It's all a trick. The only way out is to kill yourself before the tricks are done."

Finally, after opening and closing my mouth several times like a dying fish, I managed to speak. "Why would such a girl beg a man to kill himself? What has he done to you? It's the only way!" she said. She then looked up at the ceiling, as though it held the long-awaited answer to some elusive question. She stood and backed away from me, looking frightened.

"Your daughter is up there," she said, pointing through the door. "Remember, it's the only way." She turned and ran through the open door. With significant effort, I got to my knees, my muscles stiff and wretched from their misuse and abuse. I was covered and barely healed, festering wounds from the torture sessions. The places where the hooks had ripped through my skin radiated pain with each movement. I heard the sobbing that had been going on for some time.

Since before the little girl came down, as I neared the door and the staircase beyond, I grew sure that it was Cassie making the pitiful noises. I cleared my parched throat and called out, "CASSIE!" The sobbing stopped for a moment. It seemed my heart stopped too. Then I heard my daughter's voice call out to me, "Daddy?" That ember of hope sprouted a flame and I lurched to my feet.

but my muscles would not hold me, and I spilled to the hard floor. The slap of my palms echoed off the stone walls. Even on all fours, my limbs shook madly as I crawled toward the open door and up the stone steps. "I'm coming!" I said, halfway up the steps. "Daddy!" Cassie called. The stairway was lined on both sides with stone walls, much like the ones in the dungeon.

It curved to the right, so I didn't see my daughter until I was nearly to the top. She stood there in the gloom, hugging herself tightly. She wore a dress I had never seen before, and her face was drawn, but otherwise she looked unharmed. "Gussie!" I said, standing on my knees and pulling her into a hug. "Daddy, why did you leave me?" she asked, not hugging me back.

"I'm sorry," I said, breath hitching and voice cracking. "I'm so sorry." She started crying, and so did I. We seemed to disappear into a timeless pit of sorrow before I came to my senses. "We need to get out of here," I said, looking over her shoulder. All I could see was a dark hallway with stone walls and a tile floor. "Did you see a way out?" I asked, holding her at arm's length.

She shook her head, tears still streaming down her pale face. "What about the little girl?" I asked. "Where did she go?" Cassie looked puzzled. "What little girl?" Given the layout of the stairwell and the hallway, I didn't think it likely the girl had gone by unnoticed, but I deemed it unimportant. "Where did you come from?" I asked. "Where have you been?" "He kept me in a room!" Cassie sobbed. "He was mean to me!"

I felt a burgeoning sickness in my stomach, replacing the insatiable hunger. "How? What did he do to you? He wouldn't let me see you, and he wouldn't let me out of the room. He only fed me twice a day. I'm hungry, Daddy." "Was it the skeleton man?" I asked. She nodded, wiping her tears away. "Okay," I said. "We need to get out of here, so the skeleton man won't be mean to us anymore."

"But I need you to promise me something, okay?" Cassie nodded. She seemed to be coming around. "Promise me that you'll do whatever I tell you to do, even if that means running away from me. If I tell you to run, you run, okay?" Cassie nodded. "Okay, good," I said. "Let's see if Daddy's legs want to work." Someone had gone to great pains to shut off all possible escape routes in the castle.

That was the conclusion I'd come to after exploring a few rooms and finding no windows that opened onto the outside world. As we searched for an escape, Cassie gripping my hand and me gripping the wall for support, we found recesses that had once held windows but which now held nothing but walls of brick and mortar. Once again, my thoughts drifted to the possibility of being in hell. If that was the case, Cassie wasn't really here.

And this was all just a way to inflict a different kind of torture on me by giving me hope and then ripping it away again when we couldn't get out of the place. But I was determined not to give up. I would take any second with Cassie. Even if she was some demon's trick, the rooms were all empty. Except for the occasional dimly burning light in the ceiling. There were empty bookshelves and cavernous rooms with bricked up windows. Still, I couldn't dismiss the feeling that we weren't alone.

Every room we entered felt as if it had just been vacated by some sinister force playing a macabre children's game. Cassie gripped my hand harder with each room we explored. She constantly trembled and whipped her head in all directions. I told her it was going to be okay, but I knew she didn't believe me. My reassurances were as hollow as the rooms we searched. Finally, at the opposite end of the floor from which we started, we came upon a thick wooden door.

As I reached for it, Cassie shrieked and tried to pull away from me. Upon looking at my daughter, I saw that she was turned back, peering down the dark hallway behind us. I followed her terrified gaze and saw an old woman rushing toward us. A near ten feet away, her eyes and mouth were over-large with terror, and her blood-stained white nightgown fluttered with the speed of her movement. Her bone-thin fingers reached for us at the ends of her outstretched arms.

Her open mouth stretched in a silent scream, until her jaw was so wide as to be impossible. But from inside her mouth, I saw movement. The diamond glint of two eyes appeared at the back of her throat as a black creature shoved its way out of her esophagus. Terror hastening me, I yanked open the heavy door and dragged Cassie through, slamming the portal just a moment before the ghostly woman reached it.

A thunderous bang came from the other side of the door, but there was a latch on this side, which I engaged. I pulled Cassie, still screaming, up the curving stone steps to another wooden door, which I pushed open. While the floor below had been unfurnished, we found this floor to be nicely appointed, although in a style that I imagined had gone out of fashion in all but the darkest recesses of Eastern Europe and the ancient castles that stood constantly in shadow therein.

Seeing that we weren't being followed, I placed a hand over Cassie's mouth to cease her screaming. Then I crouched and looked in her eyes. "I need you to be quiet. We find a way out of here. If we make noise, the skeleton man might hear us, okay?" Cassie breathed rapidly through her nostrils, moistening my finger underneath. Her green eyes were turbulent with fear. Still, she nodded, and I removed my hand from her face.

We continued on, searching for some way out. Rugs lined the floor, and there was wood paneling along the walls. Lamps burned on side tables, fighting against the gloom that pervaded the place. Portraits hung on walls, but when I looked at them, they seemed to shift and change from one nightmarish scene to another, forcing me to blink and look away. I pulled Cassie into the first room we came to.

It was a sitting room with bookshelves full of books. There were stuffed animal heads on the walls and a fireplace in which a roaring fire burned. There was a couch facing the fireplace and a winged back chair set on either side of the couch, angled toward the hearth. I could tell that someone was sitting in the chair nearest us, but I could only see the top few inches of the person's head. It looked to be a man, given the hairstyle, but more than this I couldn't tell.

I was certain it wasn't the skeleton man, because he had no hair, although I didn't think it out of the question that he donned a wig as part of whatever sick game he was playing with us. Seeing that man sitting there in a chair by the fire brought forth in me a bestial rage I had never previously experienced. I grabbed a bust of some stranger off the nearby table and hefted it in my right hand, nearly dropping it because of my weakened state.

I let go of Cassie and caught the thing before allowing it to hit the floor, which would have given me away. Cassie gripped my arm and looked up at me, shaking her head and pleading with her eyes. I bent down and whispered, "Stay here. Do not move. I will get us out of here if it kills me." I rushed over toward the occupied wingback chair, my arms shaking with the effort of holding up the stone replica of some stranger's head.

deciding that I better not hit him straight away unless he refused to help me. I tracked quickly around so I could look the man in the eye as I threatened him. As soon as I brought him into view, seeing that he was about my age and a normal looking man, he lurched up from his seat and wrapped his arms around me. Awkwardly and without much force, I brought the bust down onto the top of the shorter man's skull. In my weakened state, I lost my grip on the statue and it fell to the floor behind the man.

He fastened his hands behind my back and looked up at me, seemingly unmindful of the gash in his scalp I'd created when hitting him with the bust. I looked down into his eyes, expecting him to say something, but he only held me tight and returned my gaze. Something moved on the top of his head, capturing my attention. I thought it was blood at first, but as I looked at the wound, I realized something terrible was happening to the man.

A slimy, thick-legged centipede widened the gash in his skin as it freed itself from his skull. In the dim light cast by the fire and the few lamps, its dark maroon body appeared almost black. It stretched out, impossibly long, inching toward me down the man's forehead. The man opened his mouth, his chin hitting my breastbone. Struggling to get free of his grasp, I couldn't help but look down at his face.

Terror seized my heart, and I screamed at the heinous scene before me. Nameless insects of a kind not fit to crawl in even the darkest depths of this world emerged from the man's mouth and nostrils. Demented spiders and deformed millipedes worked out of the orifices and crawled over me. Some looked as if they were made of human flesh, with hairy, segmented legs of odd numbers sprouting from their melted bodies. Countless of these small creatures flowed out of the man,

His eyes bulged and then popped, splattering my face with warm goop as still more of the wretched creatures emerged. As they crawled up my neck, I shut my eyes and mouth, praying they wouldn't enter me. But they did. Cassie began to scream as I felt the first one crawl into my left nostril. I whipped about in the man's grasp as much as I could in my pitiful state. Panic and disgust took my attention, while Cassie's screaming was only a secondary concern.

I felt the creatures tear at my lips, trying to get inside. They prodded at my eyes, stinging and biting, digging. Finally, I felt the man's grip on me loosen, but only because something far worse was happening. Instead of the body of a single man pressing against me, I felt a sudden change. And there were thousands of creatures scurrying all over me from where my attacker had just been. He'd transformed. His body bursted.

I flailed my limbs, raking my fingers down my face to get the insects off. I threw myself to the floor and rolled, trying to crush them. Still, Cassie screamed from nearby, and I could do nothing to help her. I coughed and hacked and vomited them out as I crawled along the floor, feeling some small relief that I was only covered in dozens instead of hundreds or thousands of creatures.

When I finally felt it safe enough, I opened my eyes, caught my bearings, and looked toward where Cassie had last been. She was gone, but I could still hear her screaming from nearby. I lurched to my feet and ran out into the hallway, at once seeing my daughter some ten yards away. She was being pulled backward down the hall by her hair and the grip of a bone-white, sharp-limbed creature that scurried along the ceiling.

hanging by her hair, feet well off the floor. Cassie continued to scream as she was pulled along, reaching out for me with her little arms. I ran after her, following the creature around a corner to a wide circular staircase, where the creature dropped her before disappearing like a puff of smoke. Scooping my crying daughter up into my arms was all I could do. I cradled her to my chest and rocked her back and forth as she bawled. I could feel the injuries from the insects on my face.

Blood trickled down into my daughter's hair. "Now!" A familiar voice said from behind me. "Do it now! It's your last chance!" I turned to see that little girl who had visited me in the dungeon standing nearby. She pointed to the railing I sat beside. She was trying to get me to murder my daughter and then kill myself. I looked through the ornate metal railings at the drop-off, thinking it strange that we hadn't seen this staircase on the floor below.

We must have been in a different wing. The drop was certainly enough to kill a person. The staircase went down three stories before stopping. I looked up and saw that it went up two stories. "Do it now!" the little girl urged. "Otherwise, you'll be trapped here!" "Make her go away, Daddy," Cassie said. "Make her go away!"

"Fine," the little girl said. "I'll do it." As she rushed toward us, the wall behind her morphed from a flat, wood-paneled section into a sponge-like material that seemed to buzz with life, like the surface of a cup of water when a high-speed train passes by. Demonic shapes lurched out of the wall, made of shadows with hard edges, reaching out with sharp nails. Several of these ghastly creatures grabbed the little girl, who screamed as they pulled her back.

The girl disappeared into the wall, which returned swiftly to its natural state. I stared at the wall, more sure than ever that I was in hell. No other place could accomplish such dark, impossible things. I sat, hugging Cassie to my chest, and waited for whatever infernal experience that would besiege us next. A shadow moved across us, and I looked up at the staircase, seeing the skeleton man standing there as though having just appeared.

He smiled and spoke to me in a refined, yet raspy voice. "I suppose the fun is over. It's time to end things once and for all." As he spoke these words, his facial skin seemed to go translucent, revealing the grinning skull underneath. He moved with lightning speed, snatching Cassie from my pitifully weak arms. I scrambled after him, shouting, as he backed up the stairs.

"Come," he said, turning and going upstairs with a writhing and screaming Cassie in his abnormally powerful arms. Knowing there was nothing else to do, no other choice, I got unsteadily to my feet and followed him up the stairs, toward whatever end he had alluded to. The room into which the man took my daughter was itself like a circle of hell. It was as big as a gymnasium, with vaulted ceilings made out of glass, held in place by ornate iron grills.

A mat of thick, dark clouds sat low in the sky, erratically releasing rain to patter unsteadily on the glass ceiling. Torture implements of a less civilized time in human history took up much of the floor space as I passed an iron maiden. I was taken aback to see wide eyes staring out at me from its dark confines, tracking me and pleading silently for help I could not give.

Much of the tile floor was covered in blood. Some of it was old, but much was new. Bits of hair and flesh clung to blades and bludgeons and medieval tools of torture. The walls were covered with fiendish scrawls of a madman that seemed to pulsate with a sickening yellow glow. I took all this in as I followed the skeleton man and my still-screaming daughter. I was looking for something I could use to kill the man, or at least to hurt him enough to free my daughter from his grasp.

but even walking up the two flights of stairs had taken its toll on me. I had to buy time to gather my strength again. I had to choose my moment wisely, or else suffer the consequences of failure. After glancing around at the horrid room, I put my eyes back on the skeleton man. He approached a large desk that looked as if it were made of bone. A tall chair behind the desk was turned away from the room toward the hearth that glowed with a red-flamed fire.

As the man approached, the chair turned to reveal the skeleton man's twin. There were two of them, completely identical in every aspect, down to the small downward tilt of the left eyelid. But as the one carrying my daughter moved around the desk, he turned faintly translucent just a moment before sitting down in the chair and morphing into the man already sitting there. Suddenly, there was just one skeleton man sitting in the chair, holding my daughter.

He put a skeletal hand over her mouth, muffling her cries. "Before I could make any sense of this or plead with him to let my daughter go," the man spoke, "how do you like my home, Elijah? I spent the better part of a lifetime constructing it and tweaking it to my exact standards, and I spent an almost equal amount of time staffing it. So to speak, I'd sincerely like your opinion on it.

"You and your daughter are to be living here for all of eternity after all." My throat felt as if it were stuffed with sand. My legs shook with the effort of standing where I was, a few feet from his desk. After a moment of struggling to get my thoughts together, I had only one question for the man. "Is this hell?" "Not quite," the man said with a smile. "Although you could be forgiven for thinking so. After all,

Part of the Luciferian deal I made allows certain unsavory elements from the fiery world to come up here, to this house, when the veil is thinnest. Cassie still fought in his arms, but he seemed to have no trouble holding her down. I scanned the desk for a suitable weapon, settling on a dagger that looked as if its handle had been made from parts of a human spinal column.

The blade, also apparently made of bone, looked plenty sharp in the strange red light coming from the fireplace. "Release my daughter, and I will do whatever you wish," I said, stepping closer to the desk, closer to the dagger. "Release her?" the man asked. "Well, that's exactly what I was planning to do. Just like I've released my own daughter from her mortal coil. I believe you met her."

"She was trying to help you, wasn't she? Trying to give you advice that you refused to take. I'm afraid she often disobeys me when I have new guests in the house." He gestured with his head over to the wall to the right of the desk, next to the fireplace. This one morphed, becoming a roiling sea made of sticky black tar. The girl emerged, held by arms formed from the dark substance.

"Daddy, please!" she pleaded, each of her limbs gripped tightly by those monstrous clawed hands. "Sabrina knows the punishment for insolence," the skeleton man said. "If I were to go easy on her, what example would that set for the rest of the staff?" A moment later, Sabrina began to scream as the arms tore at her. Her left leg was the first to come off.

Blood splattered the floor at the base of the wall. Her screams grew shrill, filled with unimaginable pain. A hand tore at her stomach, just as her right arm ripped at the elbow and came off. She was disemboweled before her other two limbs were torn and swallowed by the wall. She still screamed, blood pouring from her nubs, intestines hanging out.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she was pulled back into the wall and her screams cut out as it returned to a regular wall. "Just because you're a spirit doesn't mean you can't feel pain," the skeleton man said. "You very much can. In fact, had she still been alive in the true sense of the word, she probably would have passed out from the pain. That's one of the things about being a ghost. You don't pass out.

"Not ever," I threw myself forward, grabbing the dagger from the desk as I lurched over it. Lunging and aiming for the skeleton man's head, he moved easily, shoving my daughter forward and into the way of the dagger. The blade sunk into her throat, and her eyes went wide with pain and betrayal, too weak to stop myself from falling. I pulled the blade out, as if doing so could take back what had already been done.

I fell to the floor next to the man's chair as he stood up. Blood drained out of Cassie's neck in great torrents. The skeleton man laid her on the desk and looked down at me with a smile. Then he gripped either side of Cassie's skull and dug his thumbs into her mouth, yanking, ripping open her cheeks before moving up to her eyes. I whipped the blade out, stabbing him in the back of his left thigh. He winced and then laughed as he gouged Cassie's eyes out of her skull.

Screaming, I got to my knees and stabbed the skeleton man in the upper back. I pulled the blade out and stabbed him again and again until he sunk forward and went still. Lying over Cassie's body on the desk, his limp legs against the floor, leaving the dagger in the man's back, I got to my feet and then pulled his body off. Cassie! I said, shaking her, looking into the gory holes where her eyes had been. Cassie! Wake up!

"Making ghosts doesn't just happen," the skeleton man said from behind me. I spun around to see him standing there, over his own body, which still lay on the floor. "Children's spirits are easy. A crushing betrayal by a parent usually does the trick, even if it is an accident," he continued. "But adults? Well, it takes time to break them."

to demean them and trick them enough so that their spirits will stay around. Add a little black magic and you can gather a small army of spirit slaves to serve you in the afterlife." A shriek of such force escaped me as I lunged for the man, hands going for his neck. He simply sidestepped and watched as I fell to the floor next to his body. I pulled the dagger out, but the man kicked it away easily.

"You should have listened to my daughter," he said as he knelt down and put a knee to my throat. "If you had killed her and yourself by jumping off the balcony, you probably could have avoided this whole thing. Killing her out of love might have done the trick, but it's too late now." He grabbed my head and twisted it to the side, forcing me to look at the wall where his daughter had been ripped apart.

But now it was my daughter there, held by grotesque hands that dug into her pale flesh. "Daddy," she said. "What's happening?" "Cassie," I said, but that was all I could manage, before they started ripping my daughter limb from limb. Her screams filled the room, only joined by the skeleton man's laughter. "At least you got to kill me," he said halfway through the horrific scene.

The cancer would have gotten me sooner than later, but I was ready to go because now, well, now I'm more free than I ever was when I was alive. He hauled me to my feet as my daughter's limbless body was pulled into the wall. He shoved me over to a wooden table and forced me to lie on my back before strapping my limbs down. As he moved off to do something else, I heard Cassie again from the wall.

Looking left, I saw her, whole and uninjured again, held by those strange creatures. "Please, Daddy!" she pleaded. "Please, don't let them do it again!" Tears spilled from my eyes as I tried to come up with words to give her comfort, but I could not. The skeleton man soon returned with the cage, containing several large rats. He strapped the cage to my stomach and then withdrew a door so that my stomach was exposed to the rodents.

He moved over to the fireplace and extracted some glowing coals, which he put into a metal container with a lid. He then strapped the hot container to the top of the rat cage. I could feel the heat immediately. And so could the rats. Their only escape was through me. As the rats grew frantic enough to start biting and clawing at my skin, the black demon limbs started ripping my daughter apart again. The skeleton man laughed. My daughter screamed.

And as I felt the first rat slip inside me, I added my own screams to the cacophony.

These ads do not represent my own political viewpoint. So if you hear a political ad play on the podcast and it's not in my own voice, then it has absolutely nothing to do with me personally as a podcaster. Thank you again for being a dedicated listener of mine, and I can't wait to have another amazing year with you guys. I'll see you in the next episode.