A Blue Smile Through Red Tears

A Halloween Horror Story

(NOTE: Roughly the first third of this story is available to read for free. Since Substack doesn’t let me set subscription prices lower than $5, I recommend you subscribe to my Patreon or Ko-Fi to read the whole thing. Happy Halloween!)

Friday night, and here I was sitting in the back of a van, fiddling with the digital camcorder that Jake had convinced me to borrow from my dad. I looked up from the settings menu and watched a shadowy tree pass by through the van’s rear window, and I leaned back and sighed and wondered—not for the first time tonight—just what the hell I was doing here.

Well, that was a silly thing to wonder. I knew damn well what I was doing here: my best friend asked me to come and record him yelling at some shadows in an old abandoned mansion. Jake’s movie review channel hadn’t been a success, and neither had his game streams, or his thankfully brief foray into political commentary. So now he’d decided he was going to be a ghost hunter, because I guess he figured that if you tried enough shit online, eventually one would go viral just by law of numbers.

Jake’s van shook and rattled its way down the road. I think he ran over a pothole. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had. We were way out in the boonies now, and it wasn’t like this stretch of roadway was a high priority when it came to maintenance.

“Almost there!” Jake called from the driver’s seat. He’d offered me the passenger seat, but so much shit had been spilled on that thing over the years that you couldn’t sit there without getting overwhelmed by stale mildewy odors and an uncomfortable sensation of stickiness. Besides, I could stretch my legs back here.

“Try not to get us killed!” I called back to him.

Jake laughed. “No promises!” Then after a moment, he added: “We’re gonna get some fucking ghosts tonight, Kev! Just you wait! People are gonna eat this shit up!”

“Uh huh.” I tried not to roll my eyes, realized Jake couldn’t see me anyway, and promptly let them roll. “I’ve heard that one before.”

“Trust me, man.”

I did not. I was certain that in two month’s time, Jake would be moving onto whatever the hell his next surefire hit would be. Maybe it’d be an ASMR channel, or a one-man comedy sketch show, or maybe (God help us), he’d go back to political rants. Jake had never been particularly, well, particular about how he wanted to get internet-famous, just that the fame was something he craved.

That was why, when he asked me to do this for him, I agreed on the condition that I would be his camera guy and only his camera guy. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to be in the shot. I didn’t want to do anything but point and shoot. Jake might get off on dancing and making a fool of himself for the amusement of an audience, but that sure-as-fuck wasn’t going to be me.

The van rolled to a stop, and Jake killed the engine. “We’re here!” he called, and I heard the front door open up, followed by the crunch of his boots on gravel. I stood, crouching a bit under the van’s roof, and made my way to the back of the vehicle. I reached it just as my best friend threw open the double doors.

I’ll say this about Jake: he definitely had the look of someone who might go big online. He was that lanky, geekboy style of handsome—not classically suave or rugged, but the kind of guy who, if he grew out his hair a bit and invested in eyeliner, wouldn’t look out of place on a poster hanging on some emo girl’s wall.

Hell, maybe that would be his next attempt at a career move.

“Welcome to Primrose Hill, my dude!” Jake declared, throwing his arms wide and stepping back. “We are gonna get such great fucking footage here, man.”

I hopped out of the van and stretched out my limbs. It felt damn good after being cooped up in there for the better part of an hour. “Cool,” I said. “Where do you want to start filming?” I was eager to get this over with and get the hell out of here. I had a new game downloading on Steam back home.

“Over here.” Jake produced a flashlight—one of those big heavy looking ones with an ultra-adjustable beam—and flicked it on. Light cascaded all around us, and he pointed the beam over toward the ruined remains of a building up the hill.

From where we were, it looked like a handful of dark piles and a couple of jagged towers. I tried to imagine the manor that would have existed here however many decades ago and square it with the destitution before me, but the two images just refused to overlap in my head.

Jake started walking up the hill, and I followed, taking the opportunity to examine the rest of our surroundings. We’d driven up a long driveway, tall trees lining either side of it, their branches stretching out in arches that created a natural, woodland tunnel. The forest was thick with trees right up until it wasn’t—roots and bark gave way to wild grass, tall and unkempt and threatening to look more like a cornfield than anything else. The night sky was cloudless above us, the moon and stars silver against the black, and the song of insects filled the air.

The ruins coalesced into something comprehensible as we drew closer, and I could make out the shadows of a floor plan in the, well, shadows. The spot Jake chose to start filming at had once been a side entrance, maybe for servants, maybe not. Pieces of brick and wood walls stood like gravestones, and a blackened staircase to nowhere loomed over the resulting cemetery. There was one spot where the second floor remained, about ten feet away from the top of the stairs, held up by three walls that looked like they might collapse at any moment.

The door that had stood here was long gone, but the remains of the door frame clearly marked where it had been. Jake stood in front of the ruined threshold and smiled at me. “OK. Tell me when we’re rolling.”

I held up the camcorder, gripping it as firmly as I dared and as cautiously as I could. It was my dad’s camera, after all—his very expensive camera—and I wasn’t eager to return it to him all busted up and broken.

Given how bright Jake’s light was, I figured there was no need for the night vision functionality. So I aimed the camera at my fickle friend and started recording.

“Action,” I told him.

“Hello, true believers!” Jake started, then stopped and frowned. “No, that makes me sound like Stan Lee, doesn’t it? Um, how does ‘seekers of truth’ sound?”

I shrugged.

“We’ll go with that,” said Jake. “Hello, seekers of truth! This is Jake Lowe here, coming to you not live but certainly alive from beautiful Primrose Hill! Well, it’s not too beautiful at the moment, but a hundred years ago this was one of the nicest mansions in Maryland. Unfortunately, all that beauty died with the Heatherfield family.

“Who were the Heatherfields, you ask? They made their fortunes as traders in the 1800s, smuggling supplies over battlelines for both sides of the Civil War. Then they used that money to go legit once the war ended, and for a while it looked like they would become one of the finest families in Maryland. But alas, it wasn’t to be.”

He paused. “Is ‘alas’ too much?” he asked.

“Little bit,” I said. “But I think it works.”

“Alright, cool.” He cleared his throat, shook some of the stiffness out of his arms and shoulders. “OK, here we go.”

In a flash, that showmanship persona of his was back. “Walter Heatherfield was the final owner of this mansion. He was also the second owner—it had only been in his family for a single generation. His wife died in childbirth, and he lived here with their children: the twins, Reginald and Regina—rich kid names if I ever heard them, right?

“Well, the kids had a nanny named Daisy Potter, and one night Daisy went marching through the halls of Primrose Hill with a shotgun in her hands, and she blew the brains out of each and every member of the Heatherfield family, father and children alike. Then she set the mansion ablaze before heading into town, making a beeline for the sheriff’s office, and turning herself in.

“So why did she do it? According to her, the Heatherfields were demons. Obviously that didn’t fly with most people, and she spent the rest of her life locked up in an insane asylum, ranting and raving about demonic children.

“As for Primrose Hill, the manor was never rebuilt, and it was left here to rot forevermore. But in the decades since, there’ve been countless stories about strange lights sighted in these ruins, and people who draw close often report hearing the laughter of children carried on the wind. So is there any truth to these stories? Well, that’s what I’m here to find out tonight.”

He stopped talking again, the persona melting from his face and posture, and looked at me. “How was that?”

“That was… actually pretty good?” I said. “I think you have a real talent for this, man.”

“You do? Thanks, Kevin.” Jake nodded, and his smile threatened to break off the borders of his face it was so damn big. “OK, let’s roll again. So this here’s the servants’ entrance, I think. Or at least it’s what remains of it. Now—”

A twig snapped and gravel crunched nearby, and Jake froze and turned his head to face where the sound had come from. “Hello?” he called.

I turned the camera in the direction of the sound, expecting at most to see a raccoon or a deer or something. Maybe the snap and crunch was just a piece of wood falling off a tree and hitting dead leaves and gravel below. Instead, I saw a man standing in the shadows, watching us.

Jake pointed the flashlight at him, and the man backed away quickly. He was pale—deathly so. The phrase “chalk white” came to mind. He was wearing what looked like a jumpsuit that had once been white but had long since become smeared with old brown and rusty stains. At first I thought he was bald, or had some kind of weird topknot situation going on with his hair, but as he raised his hands to shield his eyes from the light, I realized that he was actually wearing a cap with a red pompom at the top.

“You shouldn’t be here,” said the man, his hand still covering his face. His lips looked like they were blue, like he was colder than this night warranted him being. But… no. There was something else. Something was wrong with them, with their shape or their size, and a feeling of recognition nagged at me. “You should leave now.”

“Sorry, are you the owner of this property?” Jake asked. He was trying to sound all confident and professional, but I could detect the touch of nervousness in his voice.

“No,” said the pale man. “The owners are inside. Please leave.”

“Look man, we’re just doing a ghost-hunting show.”

The pale man stood there for a moment, hands still blocking his face. I noticed that there were also pompoms on his jumpsuit, up and down the front like buttons. I hadn’t noticed them until now because of how filthy the whole outfit was; the pompoms were encrusted with mud and dust in a way that made them blend in with the rest of his dirty suit.

My eyes went back to those blue lips, and I frowned. I zoomed in with the camera to focus on what I could see of the man’s face.

“That doesn’t matter,” the pale man told us. “Leave. And don’t cross the threshold.” He turned around and walked away, shoes crunching on gravel and dead leaves, and vanished into the darkness.

“The hell does that mean?” Jake asked me.

“I think he means don’t go into the ruins,” I told him. “Was that guy dressed up like a clown?”

“You saw that too?” Jake turned and looked at the remains of Primrose Hill, at the pieces of broken and burned walls, at the piles of old debris and charred wood. “Who goes walking around this mess in a dity-ass clown costume? Fucking weirdo.”

“So are we headed out?” I asked. I certainly didn’t want to stick around and risk pissing off some freaky clown guy. Dude was probably off his rocker if he was up here dressed like that, rambling on about owners and thresholds.

“Hell no!” said Jake. “We’re getting our footage!”

“I don’t think that’s…” I started, but Jake was already heading into the ruins. He looked back at me with a cocky grin, and he stepped through what had once been a doorway.

“Come on, Kevin!” he called. “Let’s go find us some ghosts!”