Copyright © 2025 by Glen Munro. All rights reserved.
Previously in Glen Munro’s The Sour Ground
Fleeing a ruined marriage and a dead-end career, historian Michael Corrigan has rented the infamous Bettiscombe Manor to write a book debunking its “screaming skull” legend. He finds the supposedly terrifying artifact kept unceremoniously in a shoebox. The caretaker, Mrs. Albright, gives him one simple, dire warning: never take the skull out of the house. Almost immediately, the old manor begins to press in on him. A simple touch of the bone sends a violent shock up his arm, and his first night is disturbed by the faint, heartbreaking sound of a woman weeping.
His academic skepticism begins to crumble after a trip to the local pub, where the landlord insists the true evil of the manor is far older than the accepted legend, tied to the “sour ground” of an ancient Celtic settlement on the hill behind the house. A walk on that very hill confirms his growing dread when he discovers a ritually mutilated fox—its lower jaw cleanly removed, a gruesome echo of the skull in the box. The haunting escalates from subtle whispers to a full-blown psychic assault: a soul-shattering scream that physically cracks a windowpane and proves to Mike that he is not losing his mind.
Buried in the manor’s library, he uncovers a 17th-century rector’s diary that reveals the truth: the haunting began when the house was first built, after workmen disturbed a barrow on the hill and stole the skull of an ancient woman. Convinced he must appease the spirit, Mike resolves to break the cardinal rule and return the skull to its rightful resting place. But when he opens the box to begin his quest, he finds a fresh strand of long, black hair coiled around the bone and a single word scratched into the dust: BRING. He realizes with cold terror that he hasn’t discovered a solution; he has been masterfully lured into a trap.
Chapter 5
The Offering on Barrow Hill
The word on the cardboard was a judgment. BRING. It wasn’t a request. It was a command issued from a place so far beyond human comprehension that to call it a ghost or a spirit felt laughably inadequate. It was a geological feature of sorrow that had somehow learned to write.
For a long, silent moment, Michael Corrigan simply stood there, the chilly shoebox in his hands, his mind a roaring vacuum. Every rational instinct, every scrap of self-preservation he possessed, screamed at him to throw the box, to run, to burn the house to the ground. But he knew, with a certainty that was as cold and hard as the skull itself, that it would do no good. Running from this would be like trying to run from his own shadow. She wasn’t just in the house anymore; she was in his head. He had read her story, heard her voice, touched her remains. He was part of the narrative now. A character, late to the play, who had just been handed his script.
The alternative to obeying was to stay. To wait in the dark for the next scream, for the next foul eruption from the pipes, for the house to slowly, patiently, dismantle his sanity piece by piece. He thought of the cracked window, the dead fox, the look in the Reverend Poole’s words of a man who had stared into the abyss for twenty years and felt it staring back.
There was no choice. There was only the illusion of one. He was a rat in a maze, and the only path left open was the one that led directly into the jaws of the trap.
“Alright,” he whispered into the gloom of the study. The sound of his own voice was a tiny, pathetic thing. “Alright. I’ll bring it.”
He didn’t bother with a coat. The chill he felt wasn’t something wool or fleece could protect him from. He grabbed a heavy Maglite from the kitchen drawer, its metal barrel cold and solid in his sweaty palm. A weapon? No. A comfort. A tiny, man-made sun to pit against a darkness that was two thousand years old.
He went to the front door, the shoebox tucked under his arm like a parcel he was taking to the post office. His hand hovered over the doorknob. This was the moment of transgression. Don’t you ever take it over the threshold. Mrs. Albright’s voice, solid and certain. For a second, he faltered. The house, for all its horror, was a known quantity. Outside… outside was her territory.
He took a breath and pulled the heavy oak door open.
The world outside was silent. Utterly, unnaturally silent. The normal night-chorus of a country evening in mid-September—the chirr of crickets, the distant hoot of an owl, the faint hum of the A35 over the hills—was gone. It had been wiped clean, as if a giant hand had pressed a mute button on the entire Marshwood Vale. The air that rushed in was cold and sharp, carrying the scent of damp earth and something else, a faint, electrical tang, like the air after a lightning strike.
He stepped outside, pulling the door shut behind him. The click of the latch was the sound of a cell door closing.
He stood on the gravel drive for a moment, letting his eyes adjust. A sliver of moon hung in the sky, casting a weak, skeletal light on the world. The house behind him was a block of impenetrable shadow, its windows like vacant eyes. In front of him, Barrow Hill rose up, a great, sleeping beast crowned with a mane of skeletal trees. It was waiting for him.
He switched on the Maglite. The beam cut a nervous, trembling tunnel through the oppressive dark. He left the drive and stepped onto the lawn, his feet sinking into the damp grass. The shoebox under his arm was growing colder, the chill seeping through his shirt, a spreading patch of frost against his ribs. It was also getting heavier, the slight weight of an old bone somehow acquiring a leaden, magnetic density, as if the hill itself were pulling it, and him, forward.
He found the path that led into the woods. Stepping under the canopy of trees was like stepping into a different world. The air grew thick and close, the silence even deeper. The Maglite beam seemed to shrink, its power devoured by the sheer, light-eating blackness of the ancient woods. He walked, his own footsteps a clumsy, cracking thunder in the stillness. Crunch, snap, rustle. Every sound was an indictment. Every sound said, Here I am. I am coming.
The woods were not empty. He couldn’t see anything, not really, but he could feel it. A constant, prickling sense of being watched by a thousand unseen eyes. The trees themselves seemed to have changed. Their branches, bare of leaves, looked like twisted, arthritic fingers reaching for him. The trunks were not trunks, but tall, silent figures, their bark like wrinkled, impassive faces. He kept his eyes locked on the small, illuminated circle of ground in front of him, not daring to look into the impenetrable darkness to his left or right.
Then came the sounds. A faint whisper, just at the edge of hearing, that could have been the wind in the high branches, except there was no wind. A soft, wet sobbing that seemed to come from right behind him, but when he spun around, his heart leaping into his throat, there was nothing there. He saw things, too. A flicker of white at the very edge of the flashlight’s beam, gone before he could properly focus on it. A shadow that detached itself from the trunk of an ancient oak and slid away into the deeper dark.
He stumbled on, chanting a low, desperate mantra in his head. Just get to the clearing. Just leave the skull. Just get back to the house. It was a prayer to a god he no longer believed in.
Halfway up the path, he saw the first one. A badger, laid out neatly in the middle of the track, its striped face turned up to the moonlight. Its lower jaw was gone, the wound as clean and surgical as the one on the fox. A few yards further, a dead crow, its wings spread as if in supplication, its beak open but its lower mandible absent. They were markers. Offerings. A welcoming party of the dead to greet the new arrival.
The shoebox was vibrating now, a low, steady hum he could feel buzzing up his arm and into his chest, a sickening resonance that matched the frantic rhythm of his own heart. He was getting closer. The air grew colder still, thin and sharp as a razor. He could see his own breath pluming in the flashlight beam.
He finally broke through the last line of trees and into the clearing.
It was as he remembered it, but transformed by the darkness and the moonlight into something alien and terrifying. The standing stones were no longer just old rocks. They were immense, black teeth in the jaw of the world, stark silhouettes against the star-dusted sky. They seemed to hum with a silent, ancient power. The air was thick with it, a static charge that made the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end.
In the center of the clearing was a large, flat-topped stone, like a sacrificial altar. He knew, with an instinct that went deeper than thought, that this was the place.
He walked forward, his legs feeling heavy and disconnected, as if he were wading through deep water. He reached the altar stone and stopped. His hands were trembling so badly he could barely hold the shoebox. The humming from inside was louder now, a resonant, guttural drone. It was the sound of a voice trying to remember how to speak after two millennia of silence.
With fumbling fingers, he lifted the lid. The skull sat inside, and in the pale moonlight, he could have sworn it was glowing with a faint, phosphorescent light of its own. The strand of hair was gone. The word scratched in the dust was gone.
He reached in. His fingers brushed against the bone. It was not cold now. It was warm, humming with a low, vibrant heat, like a living thing. A jolt, not of static this time but of pure, undiluted information, shot up his arm. He felt a dizzying flash of images, sensations, emotions not his own: the taste of wild berries, the smell of woodsmoke, the feel of a rough-spun tunic against skin, the terror of a spear point, the crushing weight of earth, and a single, overwhelming, eternal wave of rage and loss.
He snatched his hand back with a cry, stumbling away from the stone. The skull… it wasn’t just a bone. It was a vessel. A container for a consciousness that had been trapped in the dark for sixty generations, waiting.
He knew what he had to do. He reached back into the box, grabbed the skull—the touch searing his skin—and placed it gently in the center of the altar stone. His offering.
The moment he let go, the humming stopped. The vibration ceased. The oppressive, static charge in the air vanished. A single, gentle breeze rustled the leaves in the trees surrounding the clearing. The normal night sounds, the crickets and the owls, slowly, hesitantly, began to fade back in.
It was over. The silence was no longer predatory. It was just… quiet.
A wave of unbelievable, giddy relief washed over him. It had worked. His insane, desperate gamble had actually worked. He had returned what was stolen. He had appeased her.
He began to back away from the altar, not wanting to turn his back on it just yet. One step. Two. Three. The skull just sat there, a pale, lifeless object on a rock. He had done it. He was free. He turned, ready to run, to sprint down the hill back to the house, back to his life, back to a world where things made sense.
As he turned, the beam of his Maglite swept across the face of the altar stone, just below where he had placed the skull. He stopped dead, his breath catching in a dry, painful knot.
There was writing on the stone. Scratches in the ancient, moss-covered granite. They glowed with the same faint, pale light he had seen in the skull. The scratches were fresh. They hadn’t been there a minute ago. He knew this with an absolute, soul-destroying certainty.
The first two words were a polite thank-you note from the depths of hell.
THANK YOU
He stared, his mind refusing to accept it, his eyes tracing the impossible letters. And then he saw the second line, scratched below the first. A question that was not a question. A demand that promised an eternity of servitude.
NOW. WHERE. IS. THE. REST. OF. ME?