Creepy kids and isolated haunted house
For the 'drop a horror trope in my inbox and I'll tell you how I'd apply it to kingdon' thing - I love this, this is delicious.
Please, if you will, walk with me and imagine everything I'm saying with an intense Crimson Peak vibe.
Melissa King is an industrious young lady. She lost her father at an early age, but her mother taught her all she possibly could about keeping herself afloat as a woman with few means, and made sure to give Mel the best education she could. Mel is sure the only reason her mother clung to life as long as she did was to spare Mel and Becca becoming wards of the state and possibly losing sight of each other. Now they're orphans, but Mel is doing her best to keep them in as respectable a standing as she can. She's a stenographer, a secretary, she cleans, she minds children and gives private lessons. She makes ends meet and rebuffs any effort from the city council to 'take the burden of her sister off her hands'. They're not thriving, but they're doing well enough.
She works as a secretary and court stenographer for the city's lawyer, and this is where she meets Lord Langdon, a relatively young man, barely thirty, a widower, and he's come to town because he fears his health is declining and his greatest fear in life is that his children will become wardens of the state, as he has no relatives left. He collapses right there in Mel's employer's office, but begs them to please not bring him to a hospital, as that is where people go to die. So Mel volunteers for him to stay the night in her and Becca's place. It's not suitable for a Lord, but at least he'll be tended to, which would not be the case in the inn he's meant to be staying in. Lord Langdon is a gentleman and a kind soul, he thanks her profusely and gratefully eats the stew she makes him, rich in iron which he seems to be sorely lacking given his pallor, and he speaks to her until late into the night, telling her about his wonderful children and his late wife and her not so recent passing. Mel, in turn, volunteers her own story, and come morning, Lord Langdon approaches her with a proposition. A marriage of convenience among new friends. Won't she marry him? When he dies, which he is convinced will happen soon, she would manage his estate until Tanner is of age and he would grant her and Becca life-long right to live there as a thank you, plus a generous stipend to keep them afloat for the rest of their lives, just so long as she cares for his children and doesn't allow the state to put them in a home once their father passes.
Mel agrees, she can't stand the thought either, and before the week is out, the two of them wed in the town's chapel. After five days or so in Mel's care, Lord Langdon (Frank to her now) looks so much better, his cheeks rosy as he lifts her veil, his lips no longer deathly blue as he kisses her to seal their bond. And the way he looks at her makes her heart pound, perhaps it's not just convenience after all, perhaps there could be love? He's in good spirits on the way to his estate and plays cards with Becca, joking with the two of them, making merry. That night they stay at an inn at the halfway point towards their destination, and soft words lead to gentle touches, and shed clothes, and ... oh... so this is what it feels like to be loved? It's wonderful. What a tender gentle man, so enthralled with her pleasure, and so needy for her affection, clinging to her through the night.
The next day, they arrive at the estate, and it's ... not great, it needs a great deal of renovations, but that's alright, Frank is not alone anymore now, they'll manage. The children aren't outside to greet them, but run to him when he opens the door, hugging their father. It's a heartfelt reunion and they're well-behaved children who charm Mel and Becca swiftly.
The joy is short-lived though, because just one night after their return, Frank falls ill again, and he won't entertain the thought that something in the house might make him so. He won't entertain leaving the house while renovations take place, and he won't take the children elsewhere either. The nanny who cared for them while Frank was gone, equally pale, leaves the next morning and tells Mel that if she knows what's good for her she'll leave too, but won't explain what she means. Frank overhears the exchange and begs Mel to please not leave him, and of course she won't.
Over the next days, Mel witnesses some strange happenings. She finds Frank with the children in his lap, seemingly in a trance as he looks into their eyes, and just a few days later, she sees Becca in a similar trance that she can't explain when Mel asks her about it after. And that's when the dreams start, a beautiful red-headed woman comes to her in her sleep, emaciated just like Frank is again now, her lips blue, and begs her to run, and to take Frank with her, to please not leave him here. When she startles awake, Penny is sitting on her chest.
When she goes to put her back to bed, she finds Frank in the children's bedroom, seemingly cradling Tanner, asleep, but this time she sees what's really happening. The little boy has his teeth sunk into his father's chest, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Mel yanks the boy away, and with a scramble manages to lock the children into their room while dragging Frank outside. Frank who barely has a pulse when she feels for it. She screams for Becca and together they manage to get him into the carriage and drive away. A storm rolls in and they end up having to drive into a forest to shelter from it, lest the horses panic and hurt themselves. There, in the forest, Frank comes to, weak as a kitten, and Mel tells him what she saw. They've tied him up in ribbons of fabric they've torn from their night gowns, because he must have known what he was bringing them into, but Frank has no memory of his children feeding on him. Mel asks him about the red-headed woman she saw in her dreams, and he vaguely recalls her name. She asks if he ever saw them nurse on her, and it's like a spell breaks, his eyes clear up and he panics almost to the point of fainting, gasping out what he remembers. He'd been a poor baker's boy when Abby had come to town, looking for a husband, for a man in the house to be an example for her eldest son... and it turns out that the children have bewitched adult after adult, and their spell made each adult lure another one into marriage, and into ultimately becoming their source of nourishment. And as each would-be parent passed, another one was lured in by the weakened bodies and minds of the remaining would-be parents.
Now, free of the spell, they take Frank to the inn they stayed in that first night on the road, and they stay there, nursing him back to health, before they decide together they must put an end to this little devil.
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