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The Media Glen
110 Marine Dr.
Cumberland Bay, New Brunswick,
Canada
E4A 3L9
The Sour Ground (Season 1)
EPISODE 1 RECAP:
Michael Corrigan, a skeptical historian, arrived at the decaying Bettiscombe Manor to research its most infamous legend—the so-called Screaming Skull. The manor’s caretaker reluctantly revealed the object: a human skull, kept in an old red Clarks shoebox, said to belong to an enslaved man the Pinney family brought from the Caribbean centuries ago. Local lore claims anyone who removes or buries the skull will suffer dire consequences. That night, Corrigan settled into the guest room and was jolted awake by faint, heart-wrenching weeping echoing from the study.
Episode 2: The Second Silence
There are two kinds of silence that can follow a strange noise in the dead of night. The first is a welcome relief, the kind that lets you unclench your teeth and tell yourself, with the shaky bravado of the recently terrified, that it was only the house settling, only the wind, only a fox knocking over a milk pail two fields away. It’s a silence that allows reason to creep back in and tuck the frayed edges of your sanity back into bed.
The second kind of silence is worse than the noise it replaces.
It’s a waiting silence. A held breath. It’s the silence of the woods after a twig snaps behind you, the silence of the empty playground when you know, you just know, the swing that was moving a second ago wasn’t pushed by the breeze. It’s a predatory silence, and it was this second, terrible kind that now filled Bettiscombe Manor from its ancient, damp foundations to its moss-eaten roof slates.
Michael Corrigan lay paralyzed in the guest bed, every muscle in his body locked tight as a rusted bolt. The weeping had stopped. Not faded away, not trailed off. It had been cut, as if by a knife. One moment it was there, a thin thread of unbearable sorrow in the dark, and the next—nothing. Just that immense, listening quiet.
It was the wind, he told himself, but the words had no traction in his mind. They were like bald tires on black ice. The sound hadn't swirled or gusted; it had been focused, coming from a single point downstairs. From the study. He knew it with a certainty that was bone-deep and terrifying.
Forcing himself to move was one of the hardest things he had ever done. His body screamed at him to stay put, to pull the duvet over his head and wait for the false courage of daylight. But the historian in him, the man who dealt in facts and evidence, rebelled against the cowering animal. You couldn't write a book debunking a legend if you were going to be spooked by a drafty old house making funny noises. It was absurd. He was a forty-two-year-old man with a doctorate, not a kid at a sleepover telling ghost stories.
He swung his legs out of bed. The floorboards were shockingly cold against the soles of his bare feet. He didn't turn on a light. He wasn't sure why, but it felt like a tactical error, like announcing his presence to whatever—whoever—was waiting in the dark. He moved out of the bedroom and into the upstairs hall, a long corridor of deep shadows and pale moonlight slanting in from a tall window at the far end. The portraits of long-dead Pinneys, their faces pale and disapproving in the gloom, watched him pass. Their painted eyes seemed to follow him. Stop it, Corrigan. You’re letting your imagination run away with you.
The grand staircase creaked under his weight, each step a gunshot in the crushing silence. His hand, slick with a cold sweat, slid down the smooth, cool oak of the banister. The air grew colder as he descended, the heavy, earthy smell he’d noticed earlier becoming more pronounced, mingling with the scent of old ashes from the fireplace. He reached the bottom of the stairs and stood in the main hall, a vast, dark space that felt as big as a cathedral. To his left was the closed door of the study.
This was the moment of truth. He would open the door, see an empty room, perhaps an open window letting in the wind, and he would feel like a complete and utter fool. He would go back to bed, and in the morning, this would all seem like a bad dream.
He reached for the heavy iron latch. His hand was trembling. He lifted it, the clink of the metal achingly loud. He pushed the door open.
The study was silent. It was empty. Moonlight, filtered through the tall, mullioned window, painted silver rectangles on the floorboards and across the spines of the silent books. Nothing was out of place. The heavy mahogany desk was just a desk. The fireplace was just a cold, black maw. He stepped inside, his bare feet recoiling from the chill of the floor. He walked over to the cabinet next to the fireplace, his heart thumping a frantic, sick rhythm against his ribs. He pulled the cabinet door open.
The red Clarks shoebox was there. The lid was on. It was exactly as he had left it.
Driven by a compulsion he didn't understand, he took the box, carried it to the desk, and opened it. The skull sat there, impassive, its jawless grin fixed, its dark sockets staring up into the shadows. It looked like nothing more than a piece of old bone. An archaeological curiosity. He felt a sudden, dizzying wave of relief, so powerful it made him weak at the knees. It was the wind. It was the pipes. He was overtired, stressed out, in a strange place. His own anxieties were projecting themselves onto the house, making him hear things, turning drafts into phantoms.
He felt like an idiot. A complete, world-class chump.
He put the lid back on, placed the box back in its cabinet, and shut the door. He walked out of the study, closing the door firmly behind him, and went back upstairs, the floorboards groaning their protest. He got back into bed, the sheets now feeling clammy and cold, and this time, when he closed his eyes, exhaustion dragged him under into a deep and dreamless sleep.
He woke late, the morning sun already high in the sky, streaming through the window and making dust motes dance in its buttery light. He felt hungover, though he hadn't had a drop to drink. His neck was stiff, his head thick and fuzzy. The memory of the night came back to him not as a coherent event, but as the residue of a particularly vivid nightmare. The weeping, the terrified walk downstairs, the profound silence of the study. In the cheerful light of day, it all seemed ridiculous.
"You're losing it, Corrigan," he muttered, rubbing his face. "You need to get out of this house.”
An hour later, after a scalding hot shower and three cups of instant coffee that tasted like hot brown water, he was back in the Land Rover, crunching down the gravel drive. He had to get away, if only for a few hours. He needed people, noise, the mundane reality of the twenty-first century. He needed a pint.
He drove to the nearby village, a tiny cluster of thatch and stone cottages huddled around a Norman church, all of it nestled in the Vale's green embrace. He found what he was looking for on the minuscule village square: a pub, its sign—a faded portrait of a bewigged gentleman—proclaiming it to be The Pinney Arms. Of course it was. The family's name was stamped on everything here, a legacy of land and money and, Mike thought with a grimace, human bondage.
He pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside. The pub was a time capsule. Low-beamed ceilings stained black with centuries of tobacco smoke, horse brasses gleaming on the dark wood, a fireplace big enough to stand in. The air smelled of stale beer, woodsmoke, and Jeyes Fluid. It was the smell of authentic, unchanging rural England. At the bar, a handful of old men in tweed caps nursed their pints, conversing in the low, impenetrable murmur of locals. The landlord, a barrel-chested man with a fearsome white moustache and a face like a relief map of the Pennines, was polishing a glass with a dirty rag. He looked up as Mike approached, his eyes a surprisingly sharp blue.
"Afternoon," the landlord grunted.
"Afternoon," Mike said, sliding onto a stool. "A pint of your best bitter, please.”
The landlord drew a pint of Timothy Taylor's Landlord—the irony was not lost on Mike—and set it on a soggy beer mat in front of him. "You're the new tenant up at the Manor," he said. It wasn't a question.
"News travels fast.”
"This is Bettiscombe, friend. A cat sneezes at one end of the village, they're saying 'bless you' at the other before it's finished. Staying long?”
"A few months. I'm a writer. A historian. Doing a book on local legends.”
The landlord, who introduced himself as Arthur Grimble, let out a short, sharp bark of a laugh. "A book, eh? You've come to the right place for legends. And you're staying in the heart of the biggest one." He leaned forward, his voice dropping. "Seen the skull, then?”
"Last night, yes." Mike took a long pull of his beer. It was cool and hoppy and wonderful. "Fascinating artifact.”
"Artifact," Arthur repeated, tasting the word as if it were a strange new spirit. "That's what the clever folk call it. We just call it the trouble.”
"So you believe the stories?" Mike asked, trying to sound professionally detached.
Arthur shrugged, picking up another glass to polish. "Believe? I don't know what I believe. I know that house has a reputation. Has for as long as anyone can remember. Long before that poor bugger from the Indies was ever brought here. The Pinneys… they were a hard lot. Made their fortune in sugar and slaves. You don't get that rich without having some cruelty in your blood. But the trouble at that house… it’s older than them. They just stirred it up.”
"The Celtic settlement," Mike prompted.
Arthur nodded slowly. "That's it. You've done your homework. The ground up there is… sour. That's the only word for it. My grandad used to say there are places where the veil between worlds is thin as a moth's wing. Bettiscombe Manor is one of 'em. Things happened on that hill, long before the Romans came. Bad things. Sacrifices. The old ones, they knew how to keep the door shut. But people forget. And the Pinneys… they brought a great roaring sadness with them from their plantations. A fresh wound. And sadness like that, it calls to other, older sadnesses. Wakes them up.”
Mike felt a chill that had nothing to do with the pub's dodgy heating. Arthur Grimble wasn't some superstitious bumpkin; he spoke with the simple, unadorned conviction of a man stating a self-evident truth, like pointing out that rain is wet or fire is hot.
"So the screaming…" Mike began.
"Oh, it screams," Arthur said, his blue eyes locking onto Mike's. "Not all the time. But it does. I've heard it myself, once. Years ago, driving home late. A sound that would curdle your blood. Not a human sound, not really. More like the sound of a soul being scraped out of a body with a rusty spoon. Parked my car and ran the whole last mile home." He shook his head at the memory. "You're a brave man, staying up there alone.”
Mike finished his pint, the bitter taste of the beer now mixing with the metallic tang of fear in his mouth. He was no longer a detached historian studying folklore. He was a man staying alone in a house that the locals, the people who had lived alongside it for generations, were genuinely afraid of.
He left the pub with a mumbled goodbye and the weight of Arthur's words heavy on his shoulders. The cheerful sunlight now seemed mocking, a thin veneer over something dark and ancient. He needed to walk, to clear his head. He drove back to the manor but didn't go inside. Instead, he pulled on a pair of walking boots and headed for the hill behind the house. The sour ground.
A small, overgrown path led from the edge of the manicured lawn up into the trees. The moment he stepped under the canopy, the temperature dropped and the air grew still and close. This was old woodland, the trees vast and ancient, their roots coiling over the ground like sleeping serpents. The earth was soft and peaty under his boots. He climbed higher, the house disappearing behind him, the sounds of the modern world fading away until all he could hear was the rustle of his own movements and the frantic drumming of his heart.
He found the clearing near the summit. It wasn't man-made; it was a natural bowl in the landscape, ringed by a circle of moss-covered standing stones, most of them fallen or leaning at drunken angles. This was it. The heart of the Iron Age settlement. He could see the faint, grassed-over outlines of what might have been roundhouses, the raised curve of a defensive ditch. He stood in the center of the circle, turning slowly. The feeling here was profound. It was a place of immense, sorrowful age. A place of waiting. Arthur was right. The veil felt very, very thin.
He was about to turn back when a flash of colour near the base of one of the stones caught his eye. It was the russet-orange of a fox's pelt. Probably just one of the local residents, sleeping in the sun, he thought. He walked closer, and the coppery, sickeningly sweet smell of blood hit him.
The fox was dead. Not just dead. It was… arranged. Laid out on its side as if for a portrait. Its fur was pristine, its eyes were open, staring with a kind of glassy surprise at the sky. But that wasn't the grotesque part. That wasn't the part that made Mike's stomach heave and a cold, acid bile rise in his throat.
Its head was twisted back at an impossible angle. And its lower jaw was gone.
It hadn't been ripped off by a predator. There were no teeth marks, no shredded flesh. The bone had been severed with an impossible, surgical neatness, leaving a clean, dark, weeping cavity where the jaw should have been. The ground around the animal's head was soaked with a black pool of blood that was already thick with buzzing, iridescent flies.
Mike stumbled back, his boot slipping on a wet root. He fell hard, landing in the damp leaves, his mind reeling. This was not the work of an animal. It was a butchery. A ritual. A deliberate, malevolent act of desecration. And the specific nature of it, the missing jaw… it was a message. An echo of the broken, jawless skull sitting in the shoebox down in the house.
He scrambled to his feet and ran. He didn't care about the path; he crashed through the undergrowth, branches whipping at his face, thorns tearing at his jacket. He ran with pure, unthinking terror, the image of that neat, horrific wound burned into his retinas. He burst out of the woods and onto the lawn, not stopping until he was on the gravel drive, his chest heaving, his lungs on fire.
He spent the rest of the afternoon locked inside the house, doors bolted, curtains drawn. He poured himself a large tumbler of whisky from a bottle he found in the pantry, the fiery liquid doing little to calm the frantic tremor in his hands. He tried to work, to impose the orderly logic of historical research onto the chaos of his fear. He brought up Dr. Causey's 1963 report on his laptop, reading the cold, clinical language over and over. European female… aged 25-30… approximately 2000 years old… cranium shows no sign of trauma… It was a shield, but a pathetically flimsy one against the memory of the fox.
As dusk began to bleed through the gaps in the curtains, painting the room in shades of bruised purple and grey, he knew he couldn't face the night in that silent, watching house. Not after what he'd seen. He thought about getting in the car and just driving, finding a cheap B&B, putting miles between himself and this place. But he couldn't. There was the book, the advance, his shredded career. Running would be the final admission of defeat.
So he drank more whisky, and as the house grew dark around him, he drifted into a troubled, half-drunken doze on the sitting room sofa, the empty tumbler slipping from his fingers to roll silently onto the rug.
He didn't know how long he was out. He was woken not by a sound, but by a feeling. A pressure. The air in the room was thick and heavy, like the moments before a lightning strike, charged with a terrible energy. The silence was gone. In its place was a low, guttural humming, a vibration that seemed to be coming from the very stones of the house. He sat bolt upright, his head thick with booze and sleep, his heart instantly hammering.
And then the scream started.
It wasn't the faint, distant weeping of the night before. This was a sound born from the deepest pit of hell. It was a full-throated, soul-shredding shriek of pure, undiluted agony. It wasn't coming from the study. It was coming from everywhere at once. It was inside the room with him. It was outside the windows. It was tearing through the walls and shaking the floorboards beneath his feet.
It was the sound of the woman from the hill, the one who had died two thousand years ago, and she was screaming as if she were being murdered all over again, right now.
The psychic pressure was immense, a physical blow that knocked the air from his lungs. The windows rattled in their frames, the glasses on a nearby shelf chattered against each other. The sound drilled into his skull, bypassing his ears entirely, a spear of pure torment aimed directly at his brain. It was a sound of such utter despair and rage that it threatened to tear his sanity to pieces.
Mike fell from the sofa, clamping his hands over his ears, a useless gesture against a noise that was already inside him. He curled into a ball on the floor, his own voice joining the unholy din, a pathetic, animal whimper that was utterly consumed by the ancient, all-encompassing scream of Bettiscombe Manor. The house had finally woken up, and it was telling him its oldest and most terrible secret.
The silence was a warning. The mutilated fox was a message. Now, the screaming has begun. Pinned down by a two-thousand-year-old agony, Michael is being told the manor's most terrible secret. What happens when the screaming stops?
Episode 3: Next Thursday October 2, 2025