Chapter 1

The house stood dark in the moonlight, among tangled undergrowth that had once been an expanse of shrubs, carefully tended flower gardens and lawns. Old mossy trees loomed around its perimeter, stretching their bare-looking arms up into the sky as if begging for some release from terrible torture. Smaller trees had volunteered to fill the empty space around the three-and-a-half story structure, which had been built during the American Civil War, over a hundred years now past.

Built in the Victorian style, the house had many gables and a tower that reached into the sky like it was some attempt to reach the stars. While the windows were intact, they were dark and had been dark for more years than most in the little town of Nettleton could remember. Scraps of white showed through the grimy glass, remnants of window coverings that seemed to move in the wind occasionally, even though the wind couldn’t reach them. Like sightless eyes, the the windows stared out at the world, and hid what might be inside. No paint remained to give life or color to the exterior of the gloomy place and what, in daylight, was a uniform gray, appeared as a mottled collection of shadows in the weak light of the quarter moon.

While all appeared to be lifeless in and around the old mansion, there were a multitude of sounds about the place; creaks, groans and popping noises as if the tired structure was shifting its weight on the stony ground. Tree branches rubbed against each other in the breeze and a number of creatures provided a soft susurration of noise as they struggled to stay alive in their daily routines of hunting food and avoiding predators.

Many in the town that surrounded the Nettleton Mansion believed that its builders, after which the town was named, still roamed the rooms and staircases of the old place, even though they had been dead and buried for over a century.

The fact that four of the exotic old building’s residents had been murdered over its long and painful history was responsible for the belief that it was haunted. That, and those flutters of movement in the dark windows, among other things.

One death was an attempt to separate Jeramiah Nettleton from a significant portion of his wealth, in the form of trying to kidnap his 12 year old son. The boy fought and was strangled during the incident. Two men were caught, one of which had the boy’s pocket watch on him. Both were hanged from an oak branch on a tree that still grew on the property.

Forty years later Joshua Nettleton’s wife, Constance, was found murdered in her bedroom, stabbed repeatedly by an obviously angry and demented person. When her almost decapitated body was discovered, she was naked, and her clothing was neatly stacked on a sideboard nearby. Her gardener was accused of accosting her and, when she tried to resist the rape, he was believed to have killed her in a fit of anger. The gardener was also hanged, though in this case, from a proper gallows in the town square.

And, in 1931 both Roger and Elizabeth Nettleton had been murdered in their sleep. Investigation revealed that the murderers, when they were caught with the family silver, admitted that they had been hired to kill the whole family by Roger’s business partner, who would have then inherited the entire mining operation. The men confessed that they hadn’t been able to find the children in the house, and had therefore taken what they could carry and taken off. In fact, it was the two children, ages four and six at the time, who had raised the hue and cry by appearing in a servant’s room in the carriage house, soaked with blood. That resulted in the bodies being found, and the murderers being pursued and caught. The children couldn’t talk very well at that age, and all the questioners could get out of them was that they had been in the tower room and had heard screams. The fact that the only route from that room to the outside led right by where their parents were being killed, and the fact that the children were too young to understand that the reason Mommy wouldn’t get up was because she was dead, just made things more mysterious.

That mystery was also solved. The robbers were caught red handed. Technology had advanced by then, and the criminals, to include one Chauncey Fallworthy, the mastermind of the horrific crime, were electrocuted instead of being hanged.

The children were removed from the sad place and fostered until their majority, but in the decades since the murders no Nettleton had returned to the place. It had too many sad and painful memories.

Including the criminals, eight people associated with the place in one way or another had died violent deaths.

But, banks being what they are, managed the already existing trust fund set aside to take care of taxes, and produced the required funds each year, duly transferred to the county. And, county governments being what they are, the funds were received and disbursed. County commissioners didn’t care where the tax money came from. They just wanted to spend it.

There were only a very few people who knew what had happened to the Nettleton fortune that had resulted from sharp investments and savvy supervision of a mining empire.

Most of those who knew worked at the bank, but they were not willing to part with that information lightly. There were no heirs other than the two sad children, so people drew their own conclusions.

The property sat and decayed. Various teenagers tried to get in, probably on a dare, or in an attempt to establish a makeout haven, but the wrought iron fence that completely surrounded the property had been made specifically to keep people out. And, after the last murders, someone had gone to great lengths to securely board up the lower windows and doors, foiling casual attempts to plunder or engage in other mischievousness. Various people in town swore they’d seen mysterious lights through the grimy windows in the house on dark nights, over the years and, though there was no data to support it, most townspeople thought of the place as haunted. It was easy for those who swore over the years that they saw movement in the boarded up house to believe that unhappy spirits roamed the dark place.

One attempt at raising the property taxes had been made, years ago, but had failed. The current absentee owner, one Robert Ellsworth Nettleton, who was one of those sad children fostered after his parents’ murder, and whom almost no one in town had ever met, fought off that attempt. No one was beating down the doors to buy the place. In that part of the state land ... that wasn’t haunted ... was plentily available. The fact that the town had been named for the mining baron who had originally built the house was only a dim memory documented in dusty old papers in a box of historical documents in the basement of the town library.

Over the years, people began to think of “The Nettleton Mansion” as having been named after the town ... rather than the other way around. The haunted wreck was a thing of mild curiosity, mostly ignored as people drove past its nearly invisible rusty iron fence, which was now screened by a tangle of vegetation. Only the imposing wrought iron gates were really visible from the road any more, and beyond them a dim unpaved track that was impassable to vehicles these days due to the three inch saplings that were trying to fill the empty space.

And so the old house sat and waited for something to happen.

In some ways the house mirrored what had happened to Nettleton, the town. When, as the ore veins were cleaned out and the operation began to be less and less profitable, the miners were laid off, a few at a time, until the mines finally closed for good in the late forties. Nettleton lost about half its population in the process, and property values plummeted. While that might have made it attractive to outsiders, there was nothing else in the town to bring them there.

The town, like the Nettleton mansion, slid slowly and almost gracefully into a quiet decline. Once a population equilibrium was reached, people began to decide, on more or less a nationalistic basis, not to let the town die completely. A cold storage company was induced to buy one of the larger mines and turn it into something that generated some badly needed jobs and the wages that they provided. During the fifties a manufacturing plant was built, to get the tax incentives, and several other businesses took advantage of the low cost of living in the area to produce goods that were shipped to more lucrative markets. Things had settled into a workable little place where people liked to live, but which had no hope of ever being in the limelight again.****Debbie Franklin lay on her bed in her bedroom, staring at the ceiling. She was bored. She lay listening to Petula Clark, singing her new hit song Downtown and scowled that, in Nettleton, there was no “Downtown” to go to for the excitement the singer drew reference to.

It was early summer between her junior and senior year in high school and she couldn’t wait to be a senior. Due to her late birthday, she hadn’t been able to take Driver’s Ed in her junior year like most kids did. While the state didn’t require Driver’s Ed to get a license, her mother did. The way she thought of it, though, was that when school started again, she’d turn sixteen and be able to get a license. A license meant freedom to Debbie and she yearned for freedom. Living in Nettleton was, she had decided several years ago, punishment of some kind, imposed on her, probably by fate, and probably as a result of the fact that she loved to masturbate. It was 1965 and, despite the sexual revolution under way in America, adults loved to classify self pleasure as a nasty habit that was probably responsible for a variety of personal ailments and social ills.

Debbie ignored all the warnings though. Even though she was classified by her friends and most adults as a “Tomboy”, she loved nothing more than the exquisite pain and thrills that her fingers frequently brought to her as they teased the little bump between her slippery pussy lips that she had only recently learned the proper name of.

Debbie thought about masturbating now. But she dismissed the idea. She preferred to be totally naked when she got those wonderful feelings, and it was the middle of the afternoon. While her mother, Ramona, was at work at her job as a teller at the bank, Debbie’s twin brother Robby was around somewhere with his friend Mike. He had a bad habit of just walking into her room when he wanted to see her. Privacy was a word he didn’t seem to understand. And, while she wouldn’t have minded her brother finding her gyrating on the bed with her fingers stuck up in her, she sure didn’t want Mike to see that.

Debbie sighed and got up off the bed. She wandered to the window and looked out at the forest beyond their yard. Her eyes were drawn to the tall round tower with its conical cap that topped the old Nettleton mansion next door.

Unlike ... and unknown to ... most people in Nettleton, she was intimately familiar with that old house. Having lived next door to it their whole lives, she and Robby had naturally explored the dark forest surrounding it. They had never heard the stories that caused most adults in town to avoid the place and, to them, the forest was a magical place. The house was too, though it was a bit daunting and dark and ... scary somehow ... at first.

She thought back to some of the things that were imprinted indelibly in her memory about the mysterious place next door.

It was when they were about ten, and were playing in the forest that they found “the secret”. There was an old root cellar behind the house, off to one side of the sagging carriage house that had once held horses, and still held an old carriage with only three wheels and rotted leather seats. Their tentative exploration of the overgrown cellar entrance was the result of a fantasy that there must be gold in there, since it looked like a mine to them. Instead, when they had snitched a candle from home and illuminated the dark hole, they had found that it had walls of brick, covered by wooden shelves, which themselves were partially covered with glass jars containing something dark and gelatinous that they knew had been food at one time. Their fantasy morphed into pretending that the gold had been hidden in these jars of muck, since no one would think to look for it there. They only opened one, though. The stink convinced them that this particular daydream wasn’t worth pursuing.

But they had made the cellar into a hideout, where they could evade various imagined bad men, or police seeking trespassers, or just be in a place that was theirs alone, and which nobody else knew about. They fixed it up with old furniture found in the carriage house, and pillows and blankets from home ... a small hidden nest where they could disappear into when they wanted to.

And they kept it a secret from everyone. They somehow knew their mother would disapprove in the strongest terms if she found out they had found a place they could slip through the fence that surrounded the Nettleton Manor, as they had renamed it.

But the cellar itself wasn’t “the secret.” It was while they were moving things around in the root cellar that they had discovered “the secret.” Robby had been tugging on a tall rack of shelves, trying to break off a piece of wood that he needed to put under an old overstuffed chair which had only three stubby legs. But instead of the board coming loose, the whole shelf unit had, with a creaking groan, swung outward from the wall, exposing a dark tunnel behind it.

More candles were smuggled into the hideout and the tunnel was explored. It was featureless, a tube of old, crumbling brick that led nowhere for sixty feet to an oaken door with a thick iron ring on it instead of a knob. Neither child, at only ten years of age, had been able to figure out how to open the door. It seemed to be stuck fast. But their dreams of hidden treasure were re-awakened and, for a week, they examined the obstacle, which was solid as a rock. The close fitted planks of the door were held together by thick iron straps with huge rivets holding them to the door. Hammers and screwdrivers, which were all the tools available to the exploring siblings, made only dents and scratches.

Debbie was the one who solved the mystery when, in frustration, she hit one of the thick rivets with the hammer and the door made a grating, popping sound and moved a quarter inch.

It took the combined weight of both kids to pull on the ring and get the door to move more. Their excitement, aided by a little adrenaline, caused the door to suddenly creak open, dumping both youths on their butts. They stared at the wooden steps beyond the door ... steps covered in a thick coating of dust ... steps that led up ... into the Nettleton Mansion.

Fighting bouts of continuous sneezes brought on by dust that hadn’t been disturbed for decades, brother and sister held hands and climbed the steps. They found themselves in a hallway of sorts, so narrow that they couldn’t walk side by side. The expanse of wall, made only of boards butted together and nailed from the other side of the walls to studs, extended beyond the range of the two candles they had.

They crept forward, afraid now for some unknown reason, until they came to another door with a ring in it. That one opened fairly easily when they both pushed against it and they found themselves in a room that looked startlingly like the root cellar. Its walls were covered with shelves, and they recognized it as a pantry. The back of the door had shelves on it, like the one in the root cellar. These shelves too were cluttered with old cans and jars. There were traces of what was left of sacks too, but mice had feasted on their contents over the years and all that was left was their droppings and tatters of cloth.

The discovery of the secret tunnel and what turned out to be a secret corridor inside the house which gave either visual or physical access to almost every room in the mansion, changed the lives of the twins. Now their private world had been expanded a thousand fold. Over the next five years they roamed the old house as if they owned it.

Almost everything had been left behind, but little of worth was left. The good dishes were gone, leaving behind mismatched bowls and plates probably used by children and servants. The same was true of utensils. Furniture was still there, but most looked to be in bad shape. There were still paintings and portraits on the walls, but they were dark with age and dust, and it was difficult to tell what, or who they portrayed. Anything made of, or covered with cloth had deteriorated and faded.

Everything exposed to the air, that was.

There were chests made of cedar wood that had preserved their contents remarkably well, and some drawers had contained some kind of pungent smelling substance that had also kept the rigors of time and mice at bay, mostly. There were beautiful gowns and suits packed away that the children gasped over. There were hats and shoes and umbrellas made of lace. There were shirts and things that looked like a ballerina’s tutu, but which hung down to the floor instead of sticking out. There were old smoking pipes, carved into the likeness of fishermen, or a tiger’s head and some decorated with tarnished silver, or simply plain. They found a few scattered coins, which were immediately identified as part of the treasure they forever sought.

Because the only things they found in reasonably good condition were the clothes, they played dress up together. Debbie gathered too-big dresses around herself and paraded back and forth while Robby put on a top hat and tails that hung to the floor, one of the pipes clamped in his jaw as he struck poses for his sister. It was in this way that they kept on discovering their bodies after their mother, for some unexplained reason, established separate bath times for them.

During dress up play, Debbie unashamedly stripped out of her street clothes to don a gown while Robby watched with interest, noting that, as time went by, her breasts began to push out from her flat chest and then got bigger and softer looking every year. She watched as he skinned out of his clothes too, to don some fancy vest that, at first, covered him like a jacket, but as he grew, left his growing genitals exposed.

They pretended to be lords and ladies of years gone by, each one with their own wardrobe, and they had these characters interact with each other, requiring frequent changes of costume. So they saw each other naked almost daily as they grew into puberty.

It was Debbie who developed pubic hair first ... mere wisps of golden strands that sprang from her skin almost overnight, or so it seemed. Then there were more and suddenly Robby could see them.

“You have something on you,” he pointed out that first day he noticed.

She looked down at her pubescent mound with its tightly closed lips that covered up the little bud she already knew all about by then. She’d never told her brother about what she did in her bed at night. They shared almost everything in the world, but that was one thing she instinctively wanted to keep for her own secret.

“That’s my hair,” she said, as if it were obvious, which to her it was.

“When did you get hair?” asked her brother.

“I don’t know. One day it was just there.”

Robby bent over, examining his penis. “I don’t have any,” he said, disgruntled.

There was some competition between them. Their father had died in an accident when they were little and their mother had never sought another husband. They got by on her salary at the bank, but there was no extra money for frills. As a result, whenever something did come into the house, ownership was heatedly discussed and quite often things were portioned out. If it was a food item, like a box of candy, each got his or her portion. If it was something else, each claimed a certain percentage of the use of the item. It was mostly a game, because they shared everything they had, but establishing ownership meant that they could then choose to share, which was somehow important to each.

For her to have hair, and him not ... seemed unjust somehow.

“Do you have those singing things too?” he asked.

Debbie paused, her pert young breasts with their soft pink puffy nipples hanging a little as she bent to step into a gown of forest green.

“What?” she asked.

“You know, what we heard about in health class” said Robby. “Those singing periods where you have blood ... down there.” He pointed to what was already covered.

“Menstrual periods?” she asked. “What do they have with singing?”

“Didn’t minstrals go from place to place in the old days and sing songs and tell stories and stuff?” he asked. “I never could figure out what that had to do with girls bleeding, but I’m sure that’s what they said.”

“Dummy!” she laughed. “I have men-stral periods, not min-stral periods.” She giggled. “I sure don’t feel like singing when they come around. I’ll tell you that!”

“It all sounds the same to me,” sighed Robby, who took no offense at being labeled a ‘dummy’. “But you have hair and you have ... those thingy periods. Doesn’t that mean you can have a baby?”

“I guess so,” said Debbie, unconcerned. Her mother had simply explained that periods happened to girls as they grew up, and it was something they had to put up with. She understood the remorse and tears in her mother’s eyes as that was said when her mother made her put the thick pad between her legs that soaked up all that blood. It was awful! The pad rubbed her legs and was uncomfortable. But if she didn’t use them it ruined her panties and even the jeans she loved to wear, so she ... put up with it.

Later that night, back home, she found Robby with the textbook they used in health class, reading avidly.