Smout Hall was a dilapidated ruin on the outskirts of the village. It had been built in the early 1800s by Obediah Smout, a shrewd businessman who’d made his fortune during the cotton boom. Obediah had lofty aspirations to elevate his family up into the upper echelons of rural country gentry. Unfortunately for him, the lords and wealthy landowners of the area cared little for money. Birth was the only quality that mattered. To them, poor Obediah and his family were little more than upstarts with ideas above their station. Which made the fact his fortune was greater than all theirs combined rankle even more.
The Smout family was shunned. The lavish garden parties Obediah threw were empty affairs attended by only the family and their servants. Obediah couldn’t understand it. He had wealth. In his eyes that was all that mattered. Victoria Smout, his wife, who had a much better understanding of the cruel politics of human nature, understood only too well, and she passed her bitterness down to her children.
Obediah Smout was liked and respected as a tough but fair businessman who’d benefitted his community greatly with generous contributions. His son, grandson and great-grandson, however, were not. They were caught between two worlds—two strata—and belonged to none. They grew up to be dilettantes and ne’er-do-wells, each more shifty and debauched than the last. The worst of them all was Willis Smout, the last of the line.
Willis Smout had an unsavoury reputation even for the Smout family. Dark rumours—of sexual depravity, drug addiction and even devil worship—followed him around like a cloud of malodorous flies. The parties he threw at Smout Hall were attended by all sorts of queer folk—folk that dressed all in black and never came out when the sun was up, painted jezebels with no respect for polite decorum, weird foreign types with dark skins and swarthy complexions. Even, though no-one was ever able to establish for certain, the Beast himself, Aleister Crowley.
The village was rife with gossip. It came as no surprise and a sort of relief when a scandal over a missing girl and Willis’s subsequent drug overdose in prison finally put an end to the strange goings on at Smout Hall.
After Willis Smout’s death, Smout Hall and grounds had fallen into disuse and disrepair. Initially it had been its cursed reputation that had put off potential buyers. Then, in more sceptical times, the eye-watering cost of the repairs needed.
Seduced by ever-increasing UK property prices and hoodwinked by unscrupulous estate agents, Smout Hall was eventually bought by a Texan entrepreneur at the end of the nineties. He’d flown over, taken one look at the ‘charming secluded country manor’, and promptly sued the estate agents into oblivion. The Texan entrepreneur was a stubborn man who refused to take a loss on any investment, and so Smout Hall was left to moulder until such time as the land became valuable enough for something else. As the Texan entrepreneur was a rich man with many other similar properties, he could afford to buy Smout Hall and then simply forget it existed. Which, after suing the estate agents into oblivion, he did.
And so, owned but not maintained, Smout Hall was left to rot and fall apart on the outskirts of the village. It is said some houses go mad, either through years of neglect, or through the horrors witnessed by their walls. Smout Hall quietly mouldered away in peace, as if embarrassed at being built in the first place.
The three young men making their way to Smout Hall through a gap in the broken wall encompassing the grounds felt equally embarrassed.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Kris Hatton said. “No-one comes out to Smout Hall at night.”
“Why?” Jase Wilcox asked.
Jase hadn’t grown up here. His mother had moved back a couple of years ago and Jase hadn’t been at an age where he had any say in where he lived. To be honest, he wasn’t sure what that age was. He had thought it was something that happened when you hit eighteen or so, but he’d already passed that milestone and didn’t think he’d be moving out of his bedroom in his mother’s little cottage any time soon.
“Because it’s something you do when you’re a dumb kid and don’t know any better,” Kris Hatton said.
“It’s a tradition around here. Every Halloween the kids sneak out to the hall and try to scare the shit out of each other,” Donnie Hatton said.
“Until they grow up and realise how fucking stupid it is,” Kris said.
Donnie and Kris were brothers, and cousins to Jase. Their mother was Jase’s mother’s sister. Jase had grown up not knowing much about this side of his family. They had disapproved of his mother’s choice of husband, which had led to her estrangement and moving out of the area. This had ended with Jase’s father’s untimely death from an accident at work two and a half years ago. That loss had mended the rift in the family and his mother had moved back to the village to be closer to her sister. Jase had had no say in the matter, but at least he’d discovered a couple of cousins his own age he’d been unaware had previously existed. Donnie and Kris were fine even if they were a pair of giant idiots half of the time. Kris was into heavy metal, same as Jase. Donnie liked black metal and fancied himself as some kind of latter-day black magician.
Jase and Kris took the piss out of him mercilessly for it, as you should.
It had been Donnie’s idea to come out to Smout Hall this night.
They fought their way along an overgrown path. A bramble snagged at Kris’s leg and he kicked it away in frustration.
“I can’t believe I’m fucking doing this,” he said. “I should have stayed at the pub. A few more drinks and I reckon I’d have gone home with Emma Beddoes.”
“Bro, everyone’s gone home with Emma Beddoes at some point,” Donnie said. “Half the village has had a bounce on that trampoline.”
“That pussy has seen so much use you wouldn’t even touch the sides,” Jase added.
Yeah, but it’s still sex,” Kris said. “Better than pissing about Smout Hall like a bunch of ten-year-olds trying to fool each other into thinking it’s haunted.”
“Is it haunted?” Jase asked.
“There have been rumours,” Donnie said. “Strange noises. Lights. Hints of otherworldly presences.”
“Bullshit!” Kris said, thrashing a low hanging branch out of the way.
“Willis Smout performed a lot of bad juju a century ago. It leaves a mark,” Jase said.
They walked out into an open area and saw the ruins of Smout Hall for the first time.
“What a shithole,” Kris said.
Smout Hall was less a hall and more a house that had once had delusions of grandeur. Smout Hall was not impressive. It had never been impressive, even during the days it was lived in. Obediah Smout had been an incredibly astute businessman, but he hadn’t had a shred of imagination about him and that was reflected in the building that bore his name. Now, broken and crumbling to ruin, it squatted on the land as if embarrassed to be there. As supposed haunted houses went, it was singularly unprepossessing.
“Think of the succubi, gentlemen,” Donnie said. “Think of those hot and ever so sexy devil chicks wanting to satisfy your every sexual desire.”
“You’re fucking nuts,” Kris said. “And I’m fucking nuts for letting you drag me out here.”
“I’m just here to laugh at you when we find nothing,” Jase said.
“There are more things on this Earth than can be explained by mere science,” Donnie said.
Kris shook his head.
Their feet crunched on gravel as they walked across the open area to the main building. The front entrance had been busted open and trampled down by successive years of intruders. One door had fallen from its hinges and lay flat on the hallway floor. The other hung grimly on at a skewed angle.
“We’re looking for the summoning chamber near the back of the house,” Donnie said.
He shone his torch through the entrance. Dust motes were caught and sparkled in the beam. The hallway beyond was dilapidated. The walls were blemished with dark patches of mould and the floor was covered in various bits of detritus.
“I know that room,” Kris said. “It’s at the back of the house, down some steps. It’s the one with stone pillars and weird shit carved into the walls and floor.”
“That’s the one,” Donnie said. “It was added to the mansion in 1919, to highly specific astrophysical requirements. It was in that room that Willis Smout held his black masses and carried out unspeakable rites.”
“That room is fucked up. Do you remember that year we got Lucy Brown so scared she pissed herself?”
“Oh yes. I told her about how the cult used to sacrifice virgins and suggested she should lose her virginity in order to avoid a similar ghastly fate,” Donnie said.
“With you, I presume,” Jase said.
“I did offer to help her out with this task,” Donnie said.
“And how did that go?” Jase asked.
“About as well as you might expect,” Kris answered for him with a raucous chuckle.
They picked their way through long corridors. Obediah Smout might not have been the most imaginative of gentlemen, but he had a good grasp of practicality, reliability and solidity. Despite its age and neglect, Smout Hall had not yet fallen into the state where it was unsafe to enter and explore.
“So where do the hot demon chicks come in?” Jase asked.
“Back in the early twenties, under the influence of Grand Magus Edvard Licht and Pontifex Capella, Willis Smout performed a rite so foul it ripped a permanent opening between this world and hell itself. But only on one night of the year, and only between the hours of midnight and dawn. Succubi, the most alluring and debauched creatures of hell, came through and entered our world. That first night Willis Smout and his cabal engaged in an orgy with their demonic guests that would have entered legend had not all the participants swore a blood oath of secrecy.
“The following year surpassed even that high point of depravity. Rumour has it the Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, was present and what he witnessed was so shocking, so transgressive of all standards of moral decency, he refused to speak of it again.
“Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the world never got to see what Willis Smout had planned for his third hellish orgy. He was arrested and later died of an overdose in prison. However, the portal is still open. And every year, on this particular night, succubi are free to enter the summoning chamber at the back of the house. Anyone lucky enough to find themselves within their presence will be subjected to erotic pleasures beyond their wildest imaginings.”
“Where did you find all this out?” Jase asked. He was staggered and a little bit impressed, even if he would never openly admit it.
“He read it on 4chan,” Kris said.
“I was carrying out some personal research on how to summon a succubus,” Donnie said.
“On 4chan,” Kris said.
“Wait, aren’t all those threads on 4chan about succubus summoning just trolls trying to get idiots to drink their own cum and other gross stuff like that?” Jase said.
“I did tell him,” Kris said.
Donnie walked on ahead of them and carried on with his exposition.
“There is information—plenty of information—freely available on black magic and summoning rituals. Unfortunately, most of it is false and misleading. The high-level practitioners of the black arts guard their secrets well, by burying them in mountains of lies and falsehoods. Oh, some of the rituals and texts look genuine enough, but most of them have deliberate errors subtly inserted so that the uninitiated would never be able to get them to work.”
“So did he?” Jase asked Kris.
Kris didn’t answer, just pulled a grin.
Jase pulled a face. “Euw.”
“I was struggling with the same problem all prospective neophytes face—how to distinguish the real from the fake. Then, by happy happenstance, I came across a fellow delver into the mysteries of the occult.”
“On 4chan,” Kris said.
Donnie ignored him.
“He found out I lived close to Smout Hall and gave me the full history of the mansion and the Smout family. I mean, I knew some of it, had heard the rumours, but I’d never realised just how deeply Willis Smout had explored the dark arts.
“Crowley was here! Imagine that. The Beast himself actually came to our little village.”
Jase didn’t know who Crowley was or why he should be excited that he’d visited here. Wasn’t he a character in an old Ozzy Osbourne song? Jase didn’t listen to the older classic rock that much. He preferred newer metal—more energy, more aggression.
They picked their way through rubble-choked rooms and hallways. Anything of value had been stripped out long ago. Now there was nothing more than bricks, plaster, spider webs and dust.
“So, in this room we’re going to find a bunch of demonic pussy all eager to fuck our brains out?” Jase said.
“Yes. And they’re complete experts—masters—of the sensual arts. They know everything there is to know about pleasure.” Donnie’s eyes shone almost as bright as his torch.
“It sounds fucking amazing,” Jase said. “But that’s where I have a problem. If it’s that amazing, how come nobody else knows about it? Willis Smout, whatever his name is, did this ritual years and years ago. How come nobody came back for this extra-special night, or stumbled in on it by accident. If I stumbled on something as amazing as this you can bet I’d be back again and again every year. Word would get out. Every year you’d see a plague of horny dudes descend on this place for a piece of super-hot demonic pussy.”
“It’s more unlikely than you’d think,” Donnie countered. “First, they would have to be here on the right night between the hours of midnight and sunrise. Second, they would have to enter the summoning chamber at the back of the mansion. This one is more unlikely than the first. You see, the demonic realm gives off negative vibrations we sense on a primal level and seek to avoid unconsciously. If someone did manage to seek shelter in Smout Hall on this night, they would not enter the summoning chamber unless they were actively searching for it. They would avoid it without even realising they were avoiding it.”
“That room is creepy as fuck,” Kris said.
“Yeah, but what about the people that would be actively looking for it. You found out about it. Others must know about it too.”
“Ah, but they’d be looking for it on the wrong date,” Donnie said. He looked at them craftily and tapped his nose. “It’s very hard to pin down the exact date of the original ritual. Willis Smout was a complete animal. Practically every night had a wild party or orgy.
“However, according to rumour, Aleister Crowley attended the second demonic orgy in 1922, the year before Willis Smout died of his overdose in prison. Now, for most of 1922 Crowley was living on his commune in Sicily. This is a well-documented fact. Crowley was in Britain for the funeral of Edvard Licht in February 1922 and then returned to his Abbey of Thelema on Sicily for the rest of the year. As a result, anyone looking into Smout Hall mistakenly assumes that the ritual took place sometime in the second week of February. That’s the time they visit to investigate the ruins. And still do. Kris, you remember that Swedish black metal band that passed through a couple of years ago.”
“Aye, right bunch of pretentious knobs,” Kris said.
“They would have found nothing, same as everyone else, because Willis Smout didn’t perform the ritual in February. You see, what most people don’t know is that around this time Crowley was experimenting with having a body double. The attentions his activities were drawing from authorities were becoming intolerable, so he found a simple peasant man with a similar appearance to him, improved the resemblance with plastic surgery and then hypnotised him into thinking he was the real Crowley. Then, while the fake Crowley was engaged in ridiculous feats of hedonism at the Abbey of Thelema, the real Crowley was abroad in Britain and practising more morally dubious black arts out of sight of prying eyes.”
“How do you know all this shit?” Kris demanded.
“My contact is a highly knowledgeable individual,” Donnie said.
“This is the contact you met online?” Jase asked.
“Yes.”
“On 4chan?”
“Yes.”
Both Jase and Kris rolled their eyes. Donnie paid no attention.
“The question then is, what night did the real Aleister Crowley stop at the village? My contact didn’t know this, so I had to do a little sleuthing myself. Back in 1922, the only place any visitors could stop at the village was at the Foresters Arms. While carrying out some bar work there last autumn I was able to obtain their log book pertaining to the year 1922. While going through it I was able to determine that a Mr Arthur Grimble checked in on the 14th July for one night. This is one of Crowley’s known aliases. I took a picture of the signature and my contact was able to verify the handwriting is identical to Crowley’s. That meant he had to be here at Smout Hall on the night of July 14th.”
Donnie turned to them with his face lit up with triumph.
“Therefore this has to be the night of the famed succubus orgy. It can be no other.”
Jase was moderately impressed. The tragedy of it all was that if his cousin actually bothered to put the same amount of dedication into everyday normie stuff he might not be the seen as the weirdo loser everyone in the village thought he was.
Still, it couldn’t be true. Could it?
They went deeper into Smout Hall. These were the extensions added by Willis Smout and were far more chaotic than Obediah’s staid vision. After carefully clambering over some fallen beams—this part of Smout Hall was the most wrecked despite its more recent construction—they came to a flight of steps. The steps looked like they led to some kind of cellar, except the door at the bottom was metal and embossed with various outlandish occult designs. The door radiated cold dark energy. The door gave off such bad vibes Jase actually wondered if there was something in Donnie’s crazy tale of demonic pussy.
“Spooky, eh?” Kris said.
Jase stared down the steps. Another reason for why no-one had ever confirmed the existence of the succubus orgy had come to him, and it was not a pleasant one.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Let’s just say there is a harem of sexy succubi waiting for us in there. What’s to stop them ripping our hearts out and drinking our souls or whatever shit demons like to do to people for shits’n’giggles. It could be the real reason we never hear about this crazy sexy succubus orgy is because the stupid idiots like us who stumble in on it get totally fucked up and sent to hell in little bloody pieces.”
Donnie tapped his nose again. “Safeguards,” he said. “There are wards carved into the walls, floor and ceiling. Think of the room beyond as like foreign embassy territory. The demons can enter, but they can’t go any further and they have to obey a strict set of rules while they’re here. They can’t harm anyone in there. People might have thought Willis Smout was a crazy hedonist, but he was thorough and careful. You don’t fuck demons, even super sexy ones, without a lot of careful foreplanning.”
They walked down the steps. To Jase it felt like the waves of dark energy were growing stronger the closer they got to the door. They’d come here to have a laugh at Donnie after he made a right tit of himself when the room turned out to be empty, but now he was wondering if the only fool they’d laugh at was him for turning tail and running back up the steps like a scared kid. And even then he was wondering if that was preferable to actually opening that door.
No way. He was letting Donnie’s spooky black magic nonsense get to him. Maybe that was the whole point after all, Donnie and Kris giving their stupid cousin a good scare. Whatever, he wasn’t going to fall for it, even if his senses were currently screaming at him that something wrong and not of this world was beyond that evil-looking door.