The Harrow Testament
Copyright© 2025 by Eric Ross
Part 5: Ascent
Fiction Story: Part 5: Ascent - They thought it was just a haunted house. But the Harrow House doesn’t feed on fear—it feasts on secret desires. As old wounds surface and forbidden temptations rise, the line between terror and longing dissolves. Fear burns off like fog, replaced by touch, heat, and surrender. The Harrow Testament is a gothic confession of aching bodies, unraveling minds, and pleasures too strong to resist.
Caution: This Fiction Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Fa/Fa Mult Consensual NonConsensual Reluctant Romantic BiSexual Heterosexual Fiction Horror Mystery Paranormal Ghost Light Bond Polygamy/Polyamory Oriental Female Anal Sex Analingus Double Penetration Masturbation Oral Sex Petting Sex Toys Squirting Voyeurism Leg Fetish Smoking Halloween Slow AI Generated
To strip a Body is but Pastime. To strip Silence is Torment. Cruelty lieth not in Nakedness, but in the Word unsaid after the Hips have spoken.— Testament of Elias Harrow, 1764
They drifted back toward the landing as if tied to it by frayed string. Their lights jittered over bruised lilies in the wallpaper, over nailheads that gleamed like tiny eyes. The air felt denser than before, a held breath that never quite exhaled.
“Okay,” Jade said, knocking ash from the corner of her lip with her thumb. “We regroup, pick a direction, and—”
Her candle guttered without warning. One sharp hiss and it was gone, a thin thread of smoke unwinding into the dark.
“Great,” Marcus said, feigning a groan he didn’t feel. “Energy-saving ghosts.”
Naomi’s beam slashed sideways. “Stop joking.”
Clara lifted her flashlight to compensate and the cone flickered—once, twice—as if someone tapped the bulb with a fingernail. Panic nipped her ribs. Not now. Please.
Dylan angled his own light to overlap hers, steady, deliberate. “I’ve got you,” he murmured. It shouldn’t have helped as much as it did. But it did.
The runner down the center of the landing rippled. Not the way fabric ripples when a draft gets underneath, but in a low, traveling wave—as if something walked unseen from one end to the other and brushed the nap with an invisible foot. Naomi’s throat tightened. She heard herself say, crisp and too loud, “That’s not air.”
“Mouse,” Jade said reflexively. Her voice had lost an ounce of swagger. Only an ounce, but anyone listening closely would have heard it go.
The door nearest Marcus swung inward a few inches, then stopped. Hinges whispered. He flinched, covered it with a bad grin. “House is inviting us. Chivalrous.”
“Or herding us,” Naomi said.
Before anyone could answer, two doors slammed. One to Clara’s left, one to Jade’s right—sharp, decisive, with a mean echo that ran up the staircase like a shouted name. Then the half-open door snapped shut between them with a second, angrier crack. Dust lifted; the smoke from Jade’s dead candle twisted and vanished through the floorboards.
For a heartbeat it was frantic confusion—white light cones catching hands and coats and faces in angles that didn’t belong to them—then the truth settled: Clara and Dylan were on one side of the landing, sealed off in a short corridor that ended at a dim bedroom. Jade and Marcus found themselves opposite flanked by two doors that now stood slightly ajar, like crooked smiles. Naomi had the stairhead at her back and three yards of empty runner in front of her, a no-man’s-land of thin air and the smell of hot wax.
“Are you kidding me?” Jade snapped, stepping forward. The door in front of her refused, firm as a shoulder. She shoved. It didn’t budge. “Seriously?”
Marcus tried his own, gentler, with a nervous laugh. “Hey, hey, open sesame—” It moved a grudging inch, then thunked home again like a stubborn jaw. He swallowed. Don’t let them hear your heart.
On the other side, Clara’s fingers had gone slick on her flashlight. “Dylan—”
“I know.” His tone was mild, but the set of his jaw had sharpened. He palmed the knob of their door; it turned and then stopped as if something on the other side put its palm gently over his. No strain. No rattle. A courteous refusal. He let go. “Nothing to be gained by forcing it.”
He was right, anyone could see that—but knowing and liking are different skills, and Clara had always been better at the first. Fear and a quick, bright heat tangled under her coat. The memory of the velvet room’s nearly-kiss—no, not yet, not yet—shivered along her skin.
Naomi stood very still, hand flattened over the scarf at her throat as if that thin layer of wool could hold her together. A sweet scent, faint as memory, drifted past—anise and old perfume. Her skin prickled where the unseen hand had touched her earlier. “Don’t move,” she said, though no one could obey; they were already moving, each trapped lane drawing them in. “Just—wait.”
Jade barked a laugh that cut itself short. “Since when do you get a vote?” She planted her palm on the wood again, like she could intimidate the door into opening. The panel was warm beneath her hand. Warmer than wood should be. She snatched it back, hid the instinct under a curl of lip. “Fine. We take the other one.”
Marcus followed close—closer than he meant to. If she stops I’ll run right into her. Perfect. His flashlight trembled once and steadied. He could feel a thrill that wasn’t fear alone; some part of him wanted to see what the house thought they should see.
Dylan tipped his head, listening. The hush on their side had a different grain to it—less hallway, more room. “There’s space up ahead,” he said quietly to Clara. “It will be safer inside than standing in a bottleneck.”
“Safer,” she echoed, knowing how foolish the word sounded and needing it anyway. She nodded. If he goes first, I’ll go. If he looks back, I’ll manage this.
Here’s a cruel truth about places like this, the kind that shouldn’t be said aloud but will be said anyway: someone always convinces themselves that forward is the kindest direction. Backward feels like surrender. Standing still feels like a dare.
Naomi shifted a single step to her left. The runner sighed. The lilies in the wallpaper seemed to tilt their faces toward her. “Don’t you dare,” she whispered to the house, or to herself; it didn’t matter which.
Clara and Dylan moved as one. He lifted his light; she matched it. Their shoulders brushed, a narrow electricity. The corridor welcomed them with a low, satisfied groan. The bedroom door at the end eased open a fraction on its own—as if it had been listening for the right footfall.
“Of course it did,” Clara said, too soft for anyone but him. Her voice shook. His didn’t. That steadiness felt like a hand at her spine.
Jade hooked two fingers under Marcus’s sleeve and dragged him toward the opposite ajar door with a grin that had too many teeth. “Come on, Reed. Field trip.”
“Do I get a permission slip?” he asked. Keep it light. Keep it light. The door widened a breath to meet them—as if amused.
Naomi remained at the stairhead, caught between calling out and swallowing it. A draft—no, not a draft—threaded past her calves and slipped under three doors at once. She felt it like a cat weaving between ankles. Her hand flew reflexively to her hip, to the place where warm fingers had pressed. The skin there burned memory-hot. “I’m not playing,” she said, but her voice had stopped sounding like a rule and started sounding like a wish.
Lights dipped. The scorch-scent of the planchette rose thin and definite, as if someone had just overturned it again on the floor below.
Dylan’s knuckles brushed wood. The door yielded with a long, patient sigh, as though it had been waiting for just that touch.
“After you,” he said softly. The courtesy was ridiculous, out of place—and yet it steadied Clara more than any bravado could have. She stepped through, light quivering across a room that smelled of velvet rot and perfume gone stale.
Behind them, the door swung shut on its own. Not a slam. Not defiance. Just a slow closing, like lips sealing around a secret.
Jade and Marcus vanished at the same moment into their own crooked passage. The door caught Marcus’s heel before it finished; he stumbled, laughed too loudly, and Jade shoved him the rest of the way in. Then theirs closed too, a thud like a gavel.
Naomi was left alone. The stair yawning behind her, the sealed doors ahead, and the runner sighing under some weight that wasn’t hers. She clenched the brass candlestick tighter in her hand, pulse banging in her ears.
The silence deepened. Then from somewhere below came a low, dragging groan, like heavy furniture being shifted across a floor. Naomi lifted her light, throat dry.
“Fine,” she whispered to no one. “Fine. Then I’ll play.”
And there it was: division. A parlor trick as old as fear—split the crowd, thin the courage. It isn’t clever, but it doesn’t need to be. The house has time, and taste, and a very good memory for which pairs will burn brightest—and which solitary ember will smolder longest.
The bedroom was smaller than Clara expected, a box lined with peeling blue wallpaper and a wardrobe that loomed like a silent sentry in the corner. The air was thicker here, warmer, scented faintly of anise and damp velvet.
Her flashlight beam slid across the wardrobe doors. One was slightly ajar. Inside, a pale sleeve of fabric shifted on its hanger, though no draft stirred.
Dylan caught it too. His brows lifted. “Do we look?”
“No,” Clara said immediately. Then, softer, “Yes.”
He smiled—not mocking, but with that maddening courtesy of his, as though her contradiction were perfectly reasonable. He moved first, hand resting lightly on the warped handle, and tugged it open.
The smell came at once—dust, mothballs, and something sweeter, lingering like a ghost of perfume. Coats and gowns hung in a sagging row, their shoulders caved, their sleeves limp. The beam found sequins that still winked in the dark.
Clara brushed one with her knuckle. The fabric disintegrated almost at once, powdering to dust. Beneath the collapse of coats, a hollow was revealed: a narrow opening, a brass latch, a slice of shadow that plunged downward.
“A staircase,” Dylan murmured, crouching to test it. His hand came back faintly blackened. “Concealed.”
She tried to laugh. “Because every normal house has one.”
“Not normal at all, is it? But clever.” His voice lowered. “It was meant for sneaking.”
The word sneaking caught her too hard. Her mind leapt—for trysts, for assignations, for sins whispered about Lantern Hill. Heat rushed her skin. She shifted her weight and tried not to notice how her thighs brushed together.
“Shall we?” Dylan asked.
Her heart thumped once, hard enough to echo in her chest. “You first.”
The staircase was a mean little spiral, steep, boards worn shiny by centuries of feet. Dylan descended carefully, beam grazing the wall, and Clara followed close behind. The narrowness forced her into him, her chest brushing his back whenever he slowed to test a step.
The rasp of fabric against fabric set sparks flickering through her body. She willed herself to lean back, to leave even a sliver of space, but the spiral allowed none.
Dylan felt it—the whisper of her body against his spine, the ghost of her breath near his neck. His own breath faltered, though he forced it level. His bulge stirred traitorously, shifting against the seam of his trousers with each careful step. He clenched his jaw, praying she wouldn’t notice. God help me, if she pressed any closer—
Clara gripped the railing tighter, knuckles whitening. It’s nothing. Just proximity. Just stairs. But her body refused the excuse, answering instead with another insistent throb between her legs.
The spiral blinded them to what lay beneath. The air grew heavier, sweet with the residue of smoke and perfume.
“Feels like it’s ... pulling us,” Clara whispered.
“Then best not to keep it waiting,” Dylan answered, his voice steady though his pulse hammered at his throat.
Anyone could have seen it then: not merely two young people descending stairs, but two bodies already leaning into one another, caught in a gravity older than fear. Houses like this aren’t built with nails alone. They’re built with appetite.
The stair ended in a half-rotted panel that looked, at first, like a wall. Dylan pressed his shoulder to it, and the wood gave way with a low sigh.
They stepped into warmth. Not the drafty chill of the halls above, but a close, perfumed air that clung like fingers. The room was too large for where it should have been, its ceiling bowed with shadows. Velvet couches lined the walls, their nap rubbed bare in patches, their colors fading into a bruised burgundy.
Clara touched one with her free hand. The fabric wasn’t merely dusty. It was warm. Almost damp, as if someone had just risen and left their shape behind. She jerked her hand back.
The mirrors were worse. Tall, foxed with black, they stood between the couches like sentinels, reflecting fragments: Dylan’s shoulder, her own throat, the cone of light from the flashlight slicing through dust. But the reflections lagged. Tilted. Exaggerated. In one panel, Dylan leaned closer than he was, lips a breath from hers. In another, her blouse gaped wider, showing the swell of her breast as though the mirror had tugged it loose.
Her stomach clenched hard. A heat she knew too well pressed low, insistent. She swallowed it down, furious. Not here. Not in front of him. Not like this.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.