By Bernadette Hale
In deepest Monmouthshire loomed a dark, dank, cobwebby old place called Elech Mansion. It sat at the bottom of a hill, the ruins of an eerie castle reaching into the sky like a thorny crown above it.
No-one knew when or why Elech Mansion had turned bad. It just had.
Attached to the back of the rotting grey house was the Flower Box. A tall room with a glass ceiling and glass walls, it let in plenty of light - nourishing sun by day, mystical moon by night.
Once it had been well tended. The Flower Box used to sing with bees, butterflies and other insects buzzing and fluttering in through its welcoming, open doors. It earned its name with colourful rows of roses, carnations, lilies and marigolds potted and displayed along benches and worktops, or bedded and fussed over in indoor troughs.
Now it festered like the rest of the mansion. The roses were dead, a film of brown gunk covering their shrivelled petals and congealing in the bottom of vases. The air was heavy and rank. A nauseating smell of decay infused what little scraps of fabric were left - a faded tapestry here, a pink chaise longue there.
In the middle of the room waited a winding metal staircase. It snaked up slowly to a skinny walkway. There was a legend about that staircase and what it looked out onto: a lake, at the far edge of the gardens, so black and so still it was rumoured to be bottomless.
Legend tells that if you walk to the top of the staircase and speak a specific incantation while staring at the lake, you will raise something evil: a ghoul come to eat your flesh and your soul.
As with most legends, no-one knows its origins. But that doesn't mean it's not real; that it should be ignored. Or worse, tested. Over the course of a century, not long after the last live-in owners of Elech Mansion had fled town, legend become a joke, then a parenting tool for opportunistic locals who used it to scare children into behaving.
All that changed one sharp wintry night in February 2007, when two twelve year old boys were there on a dare, sent by bigger boys at school.
"Raise the ghoul and live to tell the tale, and you can be one of the lads," promised their would be leader. The gang they wanted to join ruled the town's school, and promises of bikes, footballs and skateboards to borrow lured them in.
This is the story of what happened to those boys that fateful winter's night...
Scuttling like beetles across the overgrown lawn, Tommy and Charlie ignored the eerie sight bending down upon them from the hill: the thorny castle, backdropped by a full moon, was covered in mist that fell like water over its stone remains, down the hill, and across the grass towards them.
"Come on, Charlie. Hurry!" Tommy broke into a jog. He led the way as mist coiled around his ankles, spreading itself fast ahead of him like a giant white blanket.
"I don't like this place. It gives me the creeps." As they passed the black front door, Charlie glanced at the knocker and saw the devil. There sat his face, carved from bronze with pointed eyebrows and little horns.
The boys rounded the back of Elech Mansion and found a side door to the Flower Box. It was locked.
"Just smash it. Stick a brick through it." Tommy's chattering teeth worked through a layer of enamel as he stood, freezing, watching his friend hurl a piece of slate.
It smashed a hole in the door just big enough for Charlie to slip his hand through and grasp the handle. "Sick! It stinks," he complained, glass crunching beneath his boots as he stepped inside.
"Yeah, man, smells like rotten eggs." Tommy shone a torch over the black and white tiled floor, the long benches, and the endless vases and troughs acting like mausoleums to the dead flowers.
"Look, there it is. It's taller than I imagined." Charlie unzipped his red waterproof and nodded to the staircase.
"Sure it's big, but we'll climb it in no time." Tommy yanked off his blue knitted hat and stuffed it in the pocket of his puffa jacket. "Hey, why does nobody live here any more?"
"Dunno. I asked my mum once and she said the family who own it won't sell it on for any price. They won't live here, but they don't want anyone else to either."
"Probably because of the ghoul," Tommy laughed. "What a load of crap!"
"Don't say that in here. It's bad luck." Charlie cast around, half expecting something scary to leap out at them.
"Don't sweat it, man. It's all fake," Tommy was convinced, "and I'll prove it to you right now." Moonlight poured in through the glass, illuminating an elaborate silver etching on the staircase handrail as he gripped it.
"No!" Charlie whimpered. "I've changed my mind. I don't want to do this. I want to leave."
"We can't leave now. They'll think we're cowards if we don't do this. And then they'll never let us join the gang and we'll never get to ride Carl's pro bike or go skateboarding with the boys on Saturdays."
Charlie gazed over his shoulder at the lake. He was trying to figure out how far away it was, and how much time he would have to run if something did emerge from its murky depths. But it was impossible to tell at ground level - he would need to go up to see.
He badly wanted to be part of the gang, and didn't want to let his best friend down either, but there was something wrong with Elech Mansion. Some kind of evil hung over it, and his intuition was screaming at him to flee.
Sadly, Charlie ignored it. "Ok, let's do it quickly then get out of here." Producing a camcorder from his pocket - something the gang leader gave him to prove the dare was carried out for real - he flicked hay coloured hair from his face and ascended the stairs. A constant swell of jitters made his scrawny chest and shoulders shake.
Tommy bounded up behind him with more bravado. "We'll be legends on Monday for doing this. We'll rule school before the year is out." Too busy scheming and dreaming, his grey eyes didn't pick out the stone gargoyles in each corner, staring down and poking out their tongues from decaying buttresses.
"I know that, but I got a bad feeling. Like, what if it's real?" Charlie was getting dizzy as they kept circling up.
"The legend? Real?" Tommy's laugh bounced off gargoyles, vases, and a red stain on the floor below that they didn't see upon entering. "You really think something's gonna crawl out of that lake to eat us? Shut up, man!" He shoved him in the back, pushing him on faster.
"You shut up!" Charlie thumped him. Laughing and mocking, they were soon racing each other up the steep spiral, trying to out do one other with their quickening steps.
Half way up, the stairs started to shake under their combined weight. Even though the boys weighed no more than seven stone apiece, the staircase was neglected. Groaning and swaying to the left, it just about supported Tommy and Charlie as they made their way onto the walkway.
"Shit me!" Tommy whistled down from the top. "Look how high up we are."
"Hey, what is that?" Charlie was more concerned with the dried, dark red stain on the floor below. "Tommy, take a look."
With a bored expression, he peered over the handrail and shrugged at the stain. "Who cares, man? Let's get this done and go home." Fiddling with the camcorder until he figured out how to record, Tommy aimed it at his own face. "This is Tommy Boom coming to you live from Elech House."
Charlie cringed as the other postured on camera, the black lake just out of shot.
"It's Saturday night, just after seven," he checked his watch, "and we're in the manky old Flower Box about to raise you know who."
Staring out of the window, Charlie saw for the first time just how big and foreboding the black lake was. Parts of it were covered in the same mist stalking the Mansion, except on the water mist seemed to waver and drift like steam.
"Oi!" Tommy blasted, shining the camcorder light in his friend's face. "Smile, Charlie boy, you're on TV."
"Um, yeah, hi," he waved clumsily, flicking his fringe around to hide fear.
"Go on then. Read it out." Tommy thrust a crumpled sheet of paper at him.
"I'm not saying it!" Charlie drained. "No way!"
"I'm filming, doofus! I can't exactly read that and hold this, can I?"
"Then let me film. I'm not saying it. No way."
Covering the camcorder's external microphone, Tommy hissed, "Stop acting like a pansy. They'll never let us in if they think we're a pair of babies." Still, he handed it over and cleared his throat to read from the sheet bearing the incantation.
The words had been copied straight out of a library book on local folklore and demonic legends. When read aloud, the incantation was said to raise a flesh eating, soul sucking ghoul from the depths of the black lake.
"Don't do it. I have a bad feeling about this." Charlie trembled, but the other glared until he shut up.
Tommy tried speaking the incantation as best he could. It took him a few goes to memorise the words until, finally, he stared out at the water and spoke loudly, "Consurgo lamia. Vindico hoc corpus et anima aeternum."
Stuffing the paper in his back pocket, he watched the lake as Charlie filmed it - his hands were shaking violently around the camcorder.
Mist swirled at the base of the Flower Box. Long shadows, cast by the moon, walked over the hill.
"Told you it was a lot of old rubbish," Tommy clucked after a few minutes had passed. "We're legends now."
"Yeah, I guess so." Charlie relaxed. Nothing had changed. Elech Mansion was still as creepy, the lake still as vast, but there was no ghoul to be seen.
The moon passed behind a cloud, plunging everything into darkness. The boys stood within a smothering pitch black save for the puny light of their torch and camcorder. "Ok, we did it so let's go," Tommy grasped for the handrail.
"Don't be an idiot," Charlie said. "We'll break our necks if we try and leave in this kind of darkness."
At his last word, the moon reappeared.
"Now can we go?" Tommy took a few steps anyway but soon found he was making the descent alone. "Move it, Charlie, or I'm leaving you behind." He called up and around the corner of the staircase he had just passed. "Charlie?" Still no answer.
Walking back up, he found his friend completely white of face while staring out of the window. The whirring gaze of the camcorder was picking up on something that made Charlie's skin sting with goosebumps and his brain constrict with fear. "What's wrong?"
"Shh... Shhhee..." with a trembling finger, he pointed at the lake. "SHE'S COMING!" It was a terrifying whisper: high and swollen with fear.
"Stop messing around, man. No-one's coming." Tommy wasn't amused.
"She is!" Charlie cried. "Look!"
Taking the camcorder and training the lens on the lake, Tommy zoomed in but didn't see anything. "Where? Where are you looking?" But then he saw it, and the sight was so fearful - so unbelievably wrong and unholy - that he dropped the camcorder. "RUN!"