Dark Lord Rob's DarkForce

The Secret of the House

     A haunted look crept over Brother Woodbine's face. "Once we were inside I felt the house's power at once. I felt an overpowering, overwhelming sense of Evil. So huge, so overbearing that I didn't have the strength to be afraid. It wore me out, spiritually. Drained me like a vampire. With my last ounce of will I turned to my buddies and said, 'C'mon, man, let's get out of here. Bad vibes.' But they wanted to stay.
     "So we checked it out, as the saying goes, poking around, looking for a cool place to 'party, man'." Woodbine shook his head, ashamed of his misspent youth. "I was lost in those days, I know it. But there is a God, boys, and he was looking over my shoulder even then... He brought me here, He brought me to my destiny."
     "'He moves in mysterious ways'," Nathan said, politely but with just enough sarcasm so that he'd be sure I got the joke.
     "To be sure," Woodbine answered, not giving on whether he doubted Nathan's sincerity or not. "Now, back then, the doorway to the stairs that lead to the room we're standing in right now wasn't there. Someone had walled it over... but, as I said, I was being guided, and somehow I managed to lean on that spot on the wall. Rotted, badly put together in the first place (the man who built it was no Bob Vila!) I crashed right through. Screaming!" He laughed.
     "Why was it walled over?"
     "Well, that's a bit later in the tale but I'll jump ahead. Among the many other residents of this house, in the twenties it was occupied for a time by the infamous occultist Madigan Smythe."
     "No way!" I'd heard of him. He was like, King Satanist in his day, Father Diablo they called him, the Great Goat, and lots of other colorful names. He was run out of so many towns back then that I guess it's not really too surprising that ours was one of 'em. He's been dead for a while, I think, must have been the forties; but nowadays he's sort of a "cult figure" in both senses of the word. There are even a couple of songs about him; Ozzy Osbourne did one, I think. "Mister Smythe, what'd you do with that knife" or something like that.
     "Yes, it's true," Woodbine explained, "I did a lot of research after my first encounter with this house... Smythe bought it in 1927. He was very mysterious about the whole thing, never had any visitors here, even though he was well-known for his decadent parties. He still had the parties, of course, but he rented hotel rooms and halls to have them in. All he would say about the house was that he planned to use its unique properties as a basis for some sort of Grand Experiment, about which he was very evasive. At some point later that year he became rather smug and satisfied, and friends and hangers-on believed that his experiment had been successful; but not long after his demeanor became furtive and haunted... and then he began to grow sickly and paranoid. And then he moved out."
     "Is this his work?" Nathan asked. "I mean, it would explain a lot."
     "Yep. This is his Grand Experiment. He opened a door to Hell. But he had to leave before it swallowed him up."

Next: The Devil and Brother Woodbine