Smout Hall was a dilapidated ruin on the outskirts of the village. It had been built in the early 1800s by Obediah Smout, a shrewd businessman who'd made his fortune during the cotton boom. Obediah had lofty aspirations to elevate his family up into the upper echelons of rural country gentry. Unfortunately for him, the lords and wealthy landowners of the area cared little for money. Birth was the only quality that mattered. To them, poor Obediah and his family were little more than upstarts with ideas above their station. Which made the fact his fortune was greater than all theirs combined rankle even more.
The Smout family was shunned. The lavish garden parties Obediah threw were empty affairs attended by only the family and their servants. Obediah couldn't understand it. He had wealth. In his eyes that was all that mattered. Victoria Smout, his wife, who had a much better understanding of the cruel politics of human nature, understood only too well, and she passed her bitterness down to her children.
Obediah Smout was liked and respected as a tough but fair businessman who'd benefitted his community greatly with generous contributions. His son, grandson and great-grandson, however, were not. They were caught between two worlds—two strata—and belonged to none. They grew up to be dilettantes and ne'er-do-wells, each more shifty and debauched than the last. The worst of them all was Willis Smout, the last of the line.
Willis Smout had an unsavoury reputation even for the Smout family. Dark rumours—of sexual depravity, drug addiction and even devil worship—followed him around like a cloud of malodorous flies. The parties he threw at Smout Hall were attended by all sorts of queer folk—folk that dressed all in black and never came out when the sun was up, painted jezebels with no respect for polite decorum, weird foreign types with dark skins and swarthy complexions. Even, though no-one was ever able to establish for certain, the Beast himself, Aleister Crowley.
The village was rife with gossip. It came as no surprise and a sort of relief when a scandal over a missing girl and Willis's subsequent drug overdose in prison finally put an end to the strange goings on at Smout Hall.
After Willis Smout's death, Smout Hall and grounds had fallen into disuse and disrepair. Initially it had been its cursed reputation that had put off potential buyers. Then, in more sceptical times, the eye-watering cost of the repairs needed.
Seduced by ever-increasing UK property prices and hoodwinked by unscrupulous estate agents, Smout Hall was eventually bought by a Texan entrepreneur at the end of the nineties. He'd flown over, taken one look at the 'charming secluded country manor', and promptly sued the estate agents into oblivion. The Texan entrepreneur was a stubborn man who refused to take a loss on any investment, and so Smout Hall was left to moulder until such time as the land became valuable enough for something else. As the Texan entrepreneur was a rich man with many other similar properties, he could afford to buy Smout Hall and then simply forget it existed. Which, after suing the estate agents into oblivion, he did.
And so, owned but not maintained, Smout Hall was left to rot and fall apart on the outskirts of the village. It is said some houses go mad, either through years of neglect, or through the horrors witnessed by their walls. Smout Hall quietly mouldered away in peace, as if embarrassed at being built in the first place.
The three young men making their way to Smout Hall through a gap in the broken wall encompassing the grounds felt equally embarrassed.
"I can't believe we're doing this," Kris Hatton said. "No-one comes out to Smout Hall at night."
"Why?" Jase Wilcox asked.
Jase hadn't grown up here. His mother had moved back a couple of years ago and Jase hadn't been at an age where he had any say in where he lived. To be honest, he wasn't sure what that age was. He had thought it was something that happened when you hit eighteen or so, but he'd already passed that milestone and didn't think he'd be moving out of his bedroom in his mother's little cottage any time soon.
"Because it's something you do when you're a dumb kid and don't know any better," Kris Hatton said.
"It's a tradition around here. Every Halloween the kids sneak out to the hall and try to scare the shit out of each other," Donnie Hatton said.
"Until they grow up and realise how fucking stupid it is," Kris said.
Donnie and Kris were brothers, and cousins to Jase. Their mother was Jase's mother's sister. Jase had grown up not knowing much about this side of his family. They had disapproved of his mother's choice of husband, which had led to her estrangement and moving out of the area. This had ended with Jase's father's untimely death from an accident at work two and a half years ago. That loss had mended the rift in the family and his mother had moved back to the village to be closer to her sister. Jase had had no say in the matter, but at least he'd discovered a couple of cousins his own age he'd been unaware had previously existed. Donnie and Kris were fine even if they were a pair of giant idiots half of the time. Kris was into heavy metal, same as Jase. Donnie liked black metal and fancied himself as some kind of latter-day black magician.
Jase and Kris took the piss out of him mercilessly for it, as you should.
It had been Donnie's idea to come out to Smout Hall this night.
They fought their way along an overgrown path. A bramble snagged at Kris's leg and he kicked it away in frustration.
"I can't believe I'm fucking doing this," he said. "I should have stayed at the pub. A few more drinks and I reckon I'd have gone home with Emma Beddoes."
"Bro, everyone's gone home with Emma Beddoes at some point," Donnie said. "Half the village has had a bounce on that trampoline."
"That pussy has seen so much use you wouldn't even touch the sides," Jase added.
Yeah, but it's still sex," Kris said. "Better than pissing about Smout Hall like a bunch of ten-year-olds trying to fool each other into thinking it's haunted."
"Is it haunted?" Jase asked.
"There have been rumours," Donnie said. "Strange noises. Lights. Hints of otherworldly presences."
"Bullshit!" Kris said, thrashing a low hanging branch out of the way.
"Willis Smout performed a lot of bad juju a century ago. It leaves a mark," Jase said.
They walked out into an open area and saw the ruins of Smout Hall for the first time.
"What a shithole," Kris said.
Smout Hall was less a hall and more a house that had once had delusions of grandeur. Smout Hall was not impressive. It had never been impressive, even during the days it was lived in. Obediah Smout had been an incredibly astute businessman, but he hadn't had a shred of imagination about him and that was reflected in the building that bore his name. Now, broken and crumbling to ruin, it squatted on the land as if embarrassed to be there. As supposed haunted houses went, it was singularly unprepossessing.
"Think of the succubi, gentlemen," Donnie said. "Think of those hot and ever so sexy devil chicks wanting to satisfy your every sexual desire."
"You're fucking nuts," Kris said. "And I'm fucking nuts for letting you drag me out here."