By Sean Dempsey
8/29/25
During the waning of a drear and tempestuous season, while the dank forests of New Hampshire trembled beneath winds unseasonable and a melancholy haze spread like a funeral pall across its pale and resolute villages, there came into my possession a mysterious, but not unwelcome, letter whose contents so disquieted the chambers of my soul that I knew no peace until I had fulfilled its plea. The hand was that of an old and once-beloved schoolmate, Dempsey of the brooding village Stratham; yet the letters upon the weathered page, though still recognizably his, were trembling, wandering, unstable things, as if the ink itself had been guided by a hand convulsed with fever or by a spirit hovering close upon madness. The lines breathed of affliction, spoke in phrases at once urgent and despairing, and entreated my presence at his ancestral home with such supplicating intensity that I felt the command of duty weigh upon me more heavily than any consideration of comfort or repose; and so it was that, though my heart shrank from the enterprise, I set forth at once, urged on by a sense of fidelity to a cherished friend long estranged yet never wholly forgotten.
The evening was sinking fast into its vacant shroud when at last I approached the House of Dempsey, and here, upon the margin of a stagnant and petulant bog whose black waters spread about the estate like a moat of vile corruption, my spirit was assailed by such a sense of gloom, of inarticulable oppression, as I had never before conceived.
The magnificent house itself, a vast and mournful structure shaded in vermilion and darkening brick, loomed through the vapors like some colossal monument to corruption itself, and whose tenants were surely not of this earth but of the charnel realms beneath. I recall this moment vividly; for the sight of this lugubrious manor weighed heavy upon my soul like a dense fog or an inky soot that clenched to my mortal coil itself like a rank vapor. It was a queer sensation by virtue of the untethered panic it embroiled within me! I recoiled but stepped forward, nonetheless.
The very air surrounding the manor seemed heavier than that of other places, and I could not shake the conviction that in that sombre atmosphere some breath of the grave was perpetually exhaled. The blood-red bricks, worn and fissured with age, seemed less the product of human hands than the residue of some malignant growth, and the windows, tall, narrow, and unclean, glared down like hollow orbs of a corpse in which the light of life had long since guttered out. Pungent odors alighted my nose with distain; the nearby and surrounding bog emitted sulfuric gasses of a caustic and almost deafening cadence that demanded escape via entrance into the dwelling before me.
I knocked twice upon the door, and to my amazement and sublime dismay it opened thence without the aid of mortal hand to guide it.
My dry throat seized, and I unconsciously swallowed, and entered.
No soul greeted me. Yet in gritty defiance, or perhaps sheer will to break away from the inner voices in my head screaming for me to flee in terror, I proceeded into the anteroom, desperate to find and console my long lost friend. The interior of the house was in no way calculated to lift the burden that pressed upon my soul; indeed, it seemed rather to fasten it closer. The hall into which I soon found myself unexpectedly admitted was cavernous and unwholesome, the light of the single candelabra doing little more than reveal the immensity of the surrounding gloom. Shadows clung to the vaulted ceiling like festering sores, and from the walls hung portraits of the line of Dempsey, their visages stern, cadaverous, and cold, each eye seeming to follow with an accusing glare, each lip sealed in sepulchral silence.
The furniture was massive and forbidding, carven with grotesques that hinted at forbidden lore and abominable imaginings. The very air itself was heavy, damp, and unwholesome, laden with the odor of age and decay, and seemed scarcely to stir even when one passed through it, so that it clung to the flesh with the intimacy of a blood-soaked bedsheet.
Finally, coming forth from the shadows with no discernible sound, my friend himself received me with a warmth at once fervid and hollow; for though he pressed my hand with feverish intensity, his lips trembled with a smile that was but the ghost of welcome, and his eyes…wild, wandering, and lurid eyes, his eyes fled ever to the darkened corners of the chamber as though they expected there to behold some presence unseen by me. His frame was wasted, his cheeks hollow, his lips cracked; his thin, white hair laid upon his skull in wild clumps like cobweb-like strands that trembled with every nervous shudder. He seemed less a man than the shadow of one: a pale silhouette of what once had been my schoolyard mate.
We embraced. His voice shook with the passion of a soul in great agitation, and he spoke almost in a frenzy. He inquired about my voyage, and as I began to tell the tale of my long travel to meet him, he then changed the subject and laughed suddenly in a shrill and uncouth manner that gave me great alarm. Moreso, his left eye seemed to jut out further than the right and never quit my own, not even for a moment. For as he would pace throughout the room with exasperation and speak in a wild and pitched expression, his left eye remained at all times fastened upon my visage, even while the other moved to and fro as if dancing in the flickering candlelight. Finally we got to speaking of his health and the point of prime concern was broached. “Alas, I am most wretched.” Said he, “I fear my sands grow fewer and fewer still,” he reflected picking up a nearby hourglass from his large oaken desk. “The darkness is inside this place,” he stated with urgency. “It is inside me. My health wanes with each passing hour.” Then he suddenly came up close enough for me to feel his hot, rank breath upon my face and in a conspiratorial whisper moaned, “The house breathes as I do, and aches with my pain. Be cautious, my friend. My dear, dear friend. Yet, I am so glad you have come…”
I did not share his sentiment. I felt myself drowning in an unseeable Black Sea of misery. But still, I remained resolute: determined, if it were possible, to help at all costs my ailing friend.
That night, unable to sleep beneath the weight of unnameable impressions, I rose and wandered the long corridors of the mansion. After some hours, lost in thought, it perchanced that I beheld the Lady Dempsey, formally unannounced and previously unseen, gliding past in her spectral whiteness. Her lone candle threw a wan light upon features pallid as alabaster, yet was so devoid of recognition that, when I addressed her in tones of alarm, she passed without pause or motion of the eye, drifting as one bereft of consciousness, until she was swallowed by the darkness of some unseen chamber.
Unnerved, I tried in vain to dismiss the scene as due to lack of sleep, making me prone to unexpected visions. However, it was not long after that I encountered the daughter slowly wandering the dark passageways of the home, humming to herself in pitch dark. She was a slender child of no more than eight years, and yet whose aspect was such that my spirit recoiled in unutterable horror. Her frame was wasted, her skin pallid and tight, her eyes gleamed with a lustre unwholesome and fevered; but most loathsome of all was her hand, upon which the index finger, elongated beyond all proportion of nature, writhed with spasmodic energy, twitching and pointing with an intention that froze my blood! She raised that damned, monstrous digit toward me, accusing, relentless, as though to consign me to some doom unspeakable; and I fled, my knees unsteady, my heart convulsed with terror, to the refuge of my chamber, where I lay till dawn in sweat and trembling.
The next day passed without event. My friend and I invested time in deep and thoughtful discussions of philosophy, poetry, literature, and history. These were the topics that connected us as schoolmates. The hours flew by as we lost ourselves in passages from scholars learned and forgotten by one or both of us. His immense library afforded me much delight, and I would often open a tome and read aloud of its pages as my host would either murmur his quiet assent or voice boisterous dissent of the topics described. Truly, I witnessed life becoming restored to him before my very eyes, and I felt hope rekindled in my soul that his malady may escape him yet…
Alas, my hopes were dashed some time later, and within a fortnight there came the event which sealed the fate of us all. The Lady Dempsey, after a succession of disastrous swoons (for which I was kept very much at arm’s length and never witnessed myself), apparently sank into one so profound that her husband declared her lifeless, and with frantic grief commanded that she be enshrouded and laid in their ancestral tomb. It was in the subterranean vault beneath the house, a chamber dank and foul with the exudations of the bog, that he and I worked for several hours, and placed her coffin and sealed it with iron and stone. The clang of the tomb door reverberated through the corridors like the knell of doom, and thereafter a silence fell upon the house more dreadful than any calamitous sound!
…Days passed, and I perceived my friend sinking ever deeper into distraction. His frame seemed to shrink into itself, his shoulders bowed beneath invisible weight, his thin hair lying in wild and wet strands upon his clammy brow. His eyes, previously bright with intellect and wonder, now gleamed with an unnatural luster, flitting always to shadowed corners, as though in dread of some form rising from the dark. He did not speak of his now deceased wife nor his child, who was left to wander the halls in a foreboding and silent reverie. In fact, when I would bring up the topic of family or friendship, even in passing, his temperament would grow wild! He woukd shriek with despair and ask me to be silent or return to my room. As such, these matters were avoided at all cost and I persisted on more scholarly topics to attest his attention (as well as my own).
I noticed as the days ticked by that my friend’s cheeks grew as hollow as tombstones, and his lips cracked; his voice would often utter an uncertain whisper or else a sudden cry. And as a growing thunderstorm gathered with a violence uncommon even in this bleak land, I saw in his visage the countenance not of a man merely afflicted but of one upon the threshold of annihilation.
Indeed, as dark as my benefactor’s mood, the brooding tempest outside broke upon the house with infernal majesty. Thunder rolled ceaseless, overlapping like the clash of a thousand iron shields; the lightning, in rending sheets, cast the windows into convulsions of light and blackness; the very foundations trembled as though in sympathy with the convulsion of the heavens!
He ran to my room in a deadly fright! I urgently sought to calm my host, whose wasted body shook as if each crash of thunder fell upon his bones alone. In desperation, as one clutching at any artifice of comfort, I began to recite verses…strange, melancholy lines I scarcely knew whence I summoned, but whose rhythm I trusted might soothe him. Yet my voice trembled, and as I spoke, his hollow eyes fixed upon me, his face drawn ever tauter with dread.
I slowly recited:
“Hark! the sky resounds with epic thunder,
Splintering rafters crack asunder;
Echoes crawl from vaults below,
Whispers lost where no winds go.”
No sooner had these strange words left my lips than a faint thudding rose far beneath our feet, so faint that reason urged it to be the groaning of the beams. Yet Master Dempsey started violently, his thin hands clutching the arms of his chair till the wood creaked, his limp reeds of dead hair falling across his face in damp strands. “There, there! Do you not hear?” he gasped. I pressed on, determined to banish coincidence with the continuity of verse:
“Stone on stone begins to moan,
Hollow chambers breathe and groan;
Tapping fingers, sharp and slow,
Rise from graves that none should know.”
The wind shrieked through the corridors, and with it came a scraping, scraping, scraping! It was indistinct and dreadful, like iron dragged across stone. I faltered, my voice quivering, but forced myself to continue. ‘Merely the storm’ I reasoned. I was desperate to be logical and ignore the noise for my poor friend’s sake. So thusly I gave no voice to my wild musings so as to give no credence to the mere notion of irregularity. ‘Or perhaps some piece of roof being dislodged outside,’ I hoped upon fevered hope to myself. However, Dempsey’s eyes rolled wildly; sweat coursed down his pallid face; his lips moved soundlessly, as though in secret prayer to a God long deaf to him.
“Clang and clamour, storm on high,
Hear them knocking, hear them cry!
Bloody hands against the door,
Pleading voices, nevermore!”
At that instant a hollow cry, muffled yet distinct, arose from outside our room. It bore the unmistakable sound of human agony. I sprang to my feet, my blood frozen. My reason, till then desperate to disbelieve, crumbled before the evidence of the real and ghastly din. Master Dempsey reeled upward, his withered frame quaking. “She lives!” he screamed, his eyes wide, bulging, unearthly. “Dear God in Heaven, she was entombed alive, and she is here!”
He pointed with skeletal hand toward the chamber door. His features convulsed with horror, his lips trembling with spasms of madness. I seized him, imploring, reasoning, declaring it but the mocking of the tempest, the fancy of his shattered nerves. For a moment, he sank into his chair, trembling like a man half-spent, and I believed him subdued. But even as I spoke, the thunder crashed above us in a detonation that shook the glass in the windows, and a loud moan of wild misery bellowed from just outside our room. Amidst that blaze of devilish lightning and unearthly shrieking his eyes caught fire again with the frenzy of conviction. With a sudden, convulsive strength, he tore himself from my grasp, staggered to the door, and flung it wide.
The tempest rushed in like a legion of demons; the lightning blazed so fiercely that the chamber stood bathed in a pallid, infernal light. And there…there stood Lady Dempsey, the grave’s own fugitive, her white garments rent with red as dark as brick, her hair disheveled, her wild eyes rolling with the madness of suffocation, her face livid with the torment of entombment, yet animate, dreadful…alive!
At the sight my companion, he gave forth a scream so dark and piercing that it seemed to rattle the heavens themselves. His withered frame convulsed, his lips parted in a cry that ended in silence.
He collapsed at her feet, dead.
Then the house itself, as though conscious of its crime, yielded to the fury of storm and judgment. From every wall there came a groan and they began to weep with rain water as dark as blood; fissures split the dark, sulphur-infused bricks; timbers cracked like bones beneath an unseen hand. The bog outside churned and seethed, as though eager to reclaim the accursed edifice.
Losing all semblance of composure, I fled my chamber, down the long winding staircase, past the long hallway, through the antechamber, and into the wretched night! I passed over across the sodden earth, the rain lashing, the thunder pursuing, until I gained the far slope and looked back one final time.
Lightning, in a ceaseless cataract, illuminated the collapse as the ancient mansion bent, swayed, and with a roar like a world’s despair, plunged into the mire. The waters rose in a boiling surge, swallowing brick, timber, corpse, and spirit alike. Then all went black and the harvest moon above was unseen, hidden completely by tempestuous, dark clouds. A wicked ribbon again arrested the sky in an angry sea of light. Beneath it, the bog now lay still, black, unbroken, its vile surface calm as glass, reflecting only the torn and livid heavens above. Of the Dempsey House, nothing remained, consumed fully.
Thus perished the House of Dempsey, line and legacy, horror and habitation, sucked into the swamp’s eternal maw. Yet in my memory it persists, not as mere recollection, but as a living shadow: a dread from which I shall never wholly awaken…a darkness whose whisper shall forever haunt me till my last and final hour!
