Entombed

Rod Bettes, a famous ladies’ man, less famous estate agent, did not mean to kill his lover’s husband. Jack and Innes Rose had an arrangement. Though madly in love, the couple agreed that since Jack couldn’t, Rod would satisfy Innes… But jealousy is a slow, creeping vine. When Jack requested that the arrangement stop, Rod turned up at their door for a chat and an explanation. Things were said, tempers flared, one thing led to another and Jack had his head put through a spike. Little did they know that this wasn’t the first murder in the kitschy seaside home, or that there was a deep, visceral significance to the little stuffed owl on the mantelpiece, with a quiet eye over the whole ordeal. Rod did his best to get rid of the evidence, and the brand new cesspit at the back of his garden seemed the prime location. Referencing a few stray books on mummification had the corpse shipshape. Innes, meanwhile, lay tossing and turning upstairs, shocked unconscious but kept restless as her husband was gutted. Piece by piece, Rod mummified his friend and rival, and as each organ left Jack’s body, Innes thrashed harder in her sleep… Until finally, he was entombed in the back garden. A year later. Innes is in the local mental institution, and Rod is selling the house to a chipper young couple looking for a sea view and room to grow. Steve and Nicki Belmont arrive at what the town knows as the taxidermy murder house. Local boys Michael and John watch as their neighbours settle in. Expecting something terrible to happen, they egg each other on to go and investigate. Innes begins to have visions of the couple in her old home and senses looming danger. The hospital considers this her condition worsening. She tries to escape, but to no avail. Meanwhile, Nicki starts to panic too, having picked up the scent of death. Rod arrives at the hospital with the news that he’s sold the house and they can move away from the town and their past, in an attempt to cover up and forget the circumstances of Jack’s death, but Innes can’t be let out. Nicki Belmont begins to behave strangely. Between her visions and descents into a trance-like state, possessed by the spirit of Jack Rose, all she has is a gut instinct that something is very, very wrong. Unfortunately, Steve doesn’t buy it. She insists they need to move, but it isn’t until a neighbour reveals the house was the scene of a murder that Steve catches on. The couple call Rod, who panics until he realises they don’t mean that murder. He rushes to the house to deescalate, and Innes escapes the hospital to warn the couple of impending doom. But something is stirring, and when Nicki tears open the all-seeing owl and retrieves a human heart - all hell breaks loose.