The Farm Read online

  Copyright 2015 Amy Cross

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, entities and places are either products of the author's imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual people, businesses, entities or events is entirely coincidental.

  Kindle edition

  First published: May 2015

  This edition: July 2016

  This book's front cover incorporates elements licensed from the Bigstock photo site.

  No-one ever remembers what happens to them when they go into the barn at Bondalen farm. Some never come out again, and the rest... Something always feels different.

  In 1979, the farm is home to three young girls. As winter fades to spring, Elizabeth, Kari and Sara each come to face the secrets of the barn, and they each emerge with their own injuries. But someone else is lurking nearby, a man who claims to be Death incarnate, and for these three girls the spring of 1979 is set to end in tragedy.

  In the modern day, meanwhile, Bondalen farm has finally been sold to a new family. Dragged from London by her widowed father, Paula Ridley hates the idea of rural life. Soon, however, she starts to realize that her new home retains hints of its horrific past, while the darkness of the barn still awaits anyone who dares venture inside.

  Set over the course of several decades, The Farm is a horror novel about people who live with no idea of the terror in their midst, and about a girl who finally has a chance to confront a source of great evil that has been feeding on the farm for generations.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Epilogue

  The Farm

  Prologue

  There was so much snow in the air, she could barely even breathe.

  Cautious and wiry, and shivering in the sub-zero temperature, Margit had been watching the old farmhouse for more than an hour, from the meager cover of the bus-stop.

  Waiting.

  Hoping.

  Freezing.

  She desperately wanted to get out of the midnight snowstorm, to warm her numb body, but fear held her back. After several months living on the streets, she'd learned the hard way to always, always be careful. Danger could come from anywhere at any time, no matter how peaceful the scene, and she couldn't afford to get hurt, not again. The last time had been hell, stitching herself up in a public bathroom in the heart of the city. Now, out here in the countryside, there were other dangers, other ways of getting hurt or killed. So she had to be careful, because her life could be over if she made one wrong move.

  Even though the farmhouse on the other side of the road was dark, lit only by the moon.

  Even though the For Sale sign was so old, it had started to fall off.

  Even though it was clear that the property had been abandoned long ago.

  Suddenly becoming aware of an approaching scraping sound, she looked along the desolate road and saw that a snowplow was coming, its lights flashing orange against the night sky. There was no time to get undercover, so she simply turned her back and waited, as the sound became louder and louder, as the bus stop filled with the flashing light, and as the snowplow thundered past, pushing vast quantities of snow out of its way and sending a swirling white cloud into the bus stop, covering her with a fine layer and rattling the bus-stop's perspex windows. She waited, barely able to breathe as snow swirled all around her; she held her breath for as long as possible, but when she finally breathed in, there was more snow than air. She coughed a couple of times, and slowly she was able to catch her breath. By the time the plow was grinding into the distance, she managed to turn and look back at the farmhouse.

  In front of her, the road was now mostly clear, although fresh snow was already falling, slowly undoing the plow's good work.

  Eventually, the sensation of numbness became too much and, with chattering teeth, she made her decision and darted across the road like a frightened animal. She scurried across the pavement, past the line of bare trees, and across the farm's threshold. Crunching through waist-high piles of unswept snow in the yard – another sign that no-one had tended to the place for a while – she felt her soaked feet getting colder and wetter with every heavy step, as more snow pushed in through the loose stitching. The thick wool socks had been a godsend when she'd first pilfered them a few months ago, but now they were starting to rot and all they did was collect water like a giant sponge, and her toes were turning a little more yellow each day, to the extent that she no longer dared to look at them. The temperature was at least minus thirty, maybe lower, and as she saw her own breath in the snow-filled air, she realized that getting inside was a matter of life and death.

  So even though she had a bad feeling about the dark farmhouse, she went to it anyway.

  A gale was blowing, whistling as it raced across the yard and whipping the snow into swirling flurries in the air. Old farming equipment had been left scattered around, although most of it had been covered by layers of snow. Snow and more snow. There was trash around, too, although not too much. In fact, for an abandoned building on the edge of a small-but-growing town, the farmhouse seemed to have attracted surprisingly little attention. No vandalism, no littering, no break-ins or graffiti, just vast piles of snow on the ground and on the roof, and spiderweb-like structures of interlaced ice on the windows. Looking around, she saw that there were no other footprints in the snow, which meant that no-one had been near the place for a good long while. It was as if the farmhouse had just been left to rot.

  Good. Surprising, but good.

  The last thing she needed was other people.

  Still, she had a bad feeling, something in her gut telling her to run away now, before it was too late. At the same time, she knew that if she kept walking, that if she set off along the desolate road to look for another refuge that night, she'd most likely die of exposure. So really, fate had left her with no choice.

  As she trudged around the side of the farmhouse, she looked up at the black, bleak windows. None of them had been broken; the local children hadn't even dared to come and throw rocks. Reaching the rear of the property, she stood on tip-toes and peered through one of the downstairs windows, and after wiping away some ice crystals and cupping her hands around her eyes, she was just about able to make out a bare room inside, with no furniture and just a few pieces of newspaper on the exposed floorboards. She tried a few more windows and found the same; the farmhouse had been gutted long ago, left to stand completely empty, just an empty wooden building perched on a concrete foundation.

  Reaching the front door, she tried the handle, figuring that it would have been locked long ago.

  Wrong.

  The handle turned,
and the door clicked open.

  She took a step back, and her sense of unease grew stronger. This was too easy, almost like a trap. Whoever emptied and sealed the farmhouse, they should have locked it up when they left, so why hadn't they? A mistake? Laziness? Or had the farmhouse unlocked itself, as a way of tempting her inside?

  “Run,” her smarter inner voice urged her. “This place isn't good.”

  “You'll die,” her more realistic voice replied. “You'll freeze to death if you have to keep walking tonight.”

  So that's why she slowly pulled the door all the way open, revealing the gaping darkness within. She swore that somewhere deep in the back of her mind, she could sense something welcoming her, something celebrating her arrival with malevolent glee. It was as if the farm was so vastly empty, she couldn't help but imagine a hidden presence.

  “You know this is stupid.”

  “I don't want to die out here. I don't want to be found stiff and blue in a snowdrift”

  “You should stop talking to yourself like this. It's the path to madness.”

  Stepping inside, she pulled the door shut, sealing herself in darkness. Holding her breath, she listened to the silence. Finally, forcing herself to relax, she allowed herself to exhale, and she saw her breath ahead of her. The inside of the house was no warmer than the outside, but at least it was dry. Taking a moment to look around the dark, silent hallway, she realized that the house was almost preternaturally quiet, as as if all the noise of the outside world had been shut out. A silent house felt deeply unnatural, like a silent heart.

  She reached out and flicked the light-switch several times, but of course it didn't work.

  Cautiously, she made her way across the dark hallway until she reached a door. Peering through, she realized she couldn't see much, but as her eyes adjusted to the gloom she was able to make out a long, narrow room with nothing left except a set of curtains that, for no apparent reason, had been left hanging by the window. The sight warmed her. Making her way over, she examined the fabric for a moment and found herself wondering about the people who had lived in the farmhouse before. The curtains were old and faded, and in the darkness she could make out little more than a faint wavy pattern, but what mattered was that the fabric was dry and fairly thick. She reached up and tried to unhook them, before running out of patience and just yanking them down instead. The pole came too, banging loudly against the wooden floor as she scrunched the curtains into a large ball and tucked them under her arm.

  Turning suddenly, she felt a strong sensation of being watched. She kept her eyes fixed on the next doorway, half-expecting a shape to move into view, but of course nothing came.

  “It's just a house. Don't be such a goddamn coward.”

  “I'm not a coward.”

  Her inner monologue was being particularly vocal, questioning her every move.

  Making her way back through to the hallway, with her hands out to make sure that she didn't bump into anything in the darkness, she found the foot of the stairs and looked up. A patch of moonlight illuminated one of the wooden walls higher up, and she felt instinctively drawn to that light, as an escape from the darkness of the ground floor. She began to head upstairs, one creaky wooden step at a time, and she couldn't help but notice that each creak was slightly different, like different keys on a piano. She reached the landing and stopped for a moment, looking down at her hand as it seemed to almost glow in the pale blue light. Turning, she saw various closed doors all around her, and she realized for the first time that this was quite a large house, with five upstairs rooms. Too big for just a couple.

  There must have been children, once.

  Telling herself that she could explore in the morning, she went to one of the doors and pushed it open, peering into the room and seeing nothing but floorboards and emptiness. She did the same with the other bedrooms, just out of a superstitious keenness to make doubly sure she was alone, before picking the smallest room, the one with the most moonlight, and heading inside. Dropping her backpack and the purloined curtains onto the floor, she knelt down and began to pull out a few items she needed: some energy bars she'd managed to steal from the shop at the train station, and a plastic bottle of water she'd refilled in the public toilets, and the tattered old notebook she'd been using to jot down her thoughts and travels.

  “Stupid. Why do you do that? No-one cares.”

  “I care.”

  Looking across the room, she breathed out long and slow, watching her breath in the cold air. She headed over to the window and looked outside, seeing the moonlit yard and the large barn a little further off, before starting to peel her clothes off. Although there was no real hope of them drying overnight, she figured it was worth a shot, and that she might be able to get a fire started in the morning in one of the wood-burning ovens. For now, shivering and numb all over, she stripped down to her underwear, which – although old and dirty and stained, crusty even in places – was at least dry, and then she grabbed the curtains and wrapped them around herself several times. As she fumbled to lay her wet clothes out on the floor, she was still shivering but she could tell that the curtains would at least allow her to get a little warmer, warm enough to sleep and survive until morning.

  “One night at a time.”

  A few minutes later, sitting cross-legged in the patch of moonlight while she waited for her body-heat to make the curtains warmer, she used a shivering hand to hold her pen and start jotting things down in her notebook. She liked to record her daily route and her thoughts, and in the back of her mind she had a vague idea that one day, somehow, she'd get a home and a job, get her life back on track, and then maybe she could try to publish her journal of homelessness, maybe be a writer like she'd always dreamed. All of that seemed so far off now, after almost six months on the streets and with her first homeless winter setting in fast, and with numb toes that she was still too scared to look at in case they were turning gangrenous, but still, the dream -

  “Everyone has to have a dream.”

  “Even me? What if -”

  Looking toward the door suddenly, she held her breath. She felt certain someone had been watching her, but all she saw now was the dark landing and the top of the stairs, and the place where something could have been standing a moment ago.

  She waited, telling herself that she was just being jumpy.

  “You're alone here. You're safe for the night.”

  Silence.

  Finally exhaling again, she looked back down at her notebook and continued to add some scribbles. She was almost onto the last page, and she hadn't quite worked out how to get another book, but she figured she could nab one from somewhere. Stealing had seemed so hard six months ago, but now she'd found she had a knack for -

  “Listen!”

  She looked at the door again.

  Just an empty rectangle, leading out to the landing.

  “There was something there. There was something right there, watching you.”

  She waited.

  “No, there wasn't. You're losing your mind, is all.”

  She told herself not to be foolish, that it was natural to get jumpy all alone in a dark, abandoned farmhouse, but she couldn't help herself; getting to her feet, with the curtains still wrapped around her still-shivering body, she walked barefoot over to the door and leaned out to check that there was no-one on the landing. All the other doors were still closed, and she was certain no-one had come up the creaking stairs. She'd have heard them.

  “Idiot,” she muttered, frustrated by her own jumpiness. Turning, she was about to hear back to the notebook when suddenly she stopped, freezing mid-step as she realized that there was someone else in the room with her, a figure visible just in the corner of her eye.

  “Have you seen her?” a girl's voice asked.

  Slowly, Margit turned and saw that the faint, slightly blurry figure was standing in the corner, wearing plain, old-fashioned clothes and with its hair up in the style she remembered seeing in photos of her mother fro
m long ago.

  “Have you seen her?” the figure asked again, before stepping forward. “Please, you have to tell her we're not angry at her. You have to let her -”

  Racing out of the room, desperate to get away from the ghostly figure, Margit almost slammed straight into the opposite wall before hurtling down the stairs. Slipping partway on the trailing curtains that were falling loose, she fell to the bottom, landing in a crumpled heap and immediately feeling her ankle twist, but she pushed through the pain and hobbled to the front door. She'd lost the curtains now and was only in her underwear, but she didn't even stop to look back as she tried desperately to get the door open, only to find that it was now locked.

  Taking a step back, she heard a creak on the stairs, followed by another.

  She ran through to one of the dark rooms and, spotting the curtain-rod on the floor, she picked it up and hurried to the window. Raising the curtain-rod, she slammed it against the glass, shattering the window, but she had to take a moment to push more glass out of the way before dropping the rod and starting to climb through. She felt a piece of glass cutting into her thigh, but she kept going and finally she fell out the other side, tumbling down into the snow. Still not daring to stop, she scrambled up, breathing in a fair amount of snow as she desperately tried to get away from the house. Before she could get too far, however, she stopped as she saw another figure standing nearby.

  Slowly, the figure turned to her, revealing two dark holes where her eyes should have been.

  “Please,” the figure said, “have you seen Sara? We've been looking everywhere.”

  Turning, Margit began to scramble through the vast piles of snow, making her way along the side of the huge barn before emerging down at the edge of one of the fields. Freezing cold in just her underwear, she was about to turn and run to the road when she stopped suddenly and saw that at the lower end of the barn there was an old wooden door hanging partly off its hinges, revealing a gaping darkness within.

  She knew she should run, but despite the severe cold that was making her shiver, she took a couple of steps toward the door.