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Back Gallows Hill Save as PDF
Chapters (45)
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The highest shelf held the VCR player to one side and a stack of several dozen TV guides squeezed in beside it. Margot pried the top guide out, flinching as part tore from where it had become jammed in the back corner. The paper was dry with powdery dust. Margot found the date in the upper-right corner: 1997.

It’s old. The TV is outdated because they never watched it. They must have never seen any point in trying to replace it.

Now that she looked closer, she saw a sheen of dust across the TV’s slightly curved screen. She eased the TV guide back into its narrow gap.

Still crouched, Margot turned to examine the room behind her. A closed door promised access to deeper into the house. Once, many years before even her parents’ time, this would have been the heart of the home. There were signs that two rooms had been joined to form a larger space: a line ran across the ceiling, showing where a wall had once existed.

The house must have been relatively modest when it was first contracted, built with small rooms and sturdy doors to retain heat in winter. With each new generation that prospered, though, the house was made larger: an extension on one side, a wall knocked out here, an extra wing added there. Over time, it had sprawled. Margot had gotten some sense of its size from the outside, and it overwhelmed her.

Her eyes were drawn back to the shadowed shape on the wall to her right. She’d thought she’d lost her fear of it when the lights came on, but a sticky, prickling unease continued to needle her. When she looked directly at it, she could see it was simply a woven cloth draped over some tall, narrow stand. Every time she looked away, though, the form remained in her peripheral vision. And it slowly morphed. The coils of fabric pooling around its base grew darker. The top began to look uncannily like a face. And its single, narrowed eye glittered…

Margot grimaced and stood. She folded her arms across her chest as she moved closer to the cloth-draped shape. It loomed above her, its top just inches from the ceiling. The fabric had been embroidered. A line of shiny thread ran across the part she kept mistaking for a head. That accounted for what she kept seeing as an eye.

What’s underneath? She’d assumed a decorative coat rack, but that didn’t make sense, she realized. She’d never seen a coat rack go to the ceiling before. Or to have its top curve in just the way that a bare skull would be shaped.