The Orchard House

The Orchard House

The old asylum loomed above the town like a scab that never healed.

Locals called it The Orchard House — not because anything grew there, but because of the apple trees that strangled its perimeter.

They were warped, blackened things — their fruit gray and bruised, their limbs reaching skyward like begging hands.

It had been abandoned for decades. Every kid in town knew the stories — whispers of experiments, of children who were different.

But this Halloween, five seniors decided to see for themselves.

There was Evan, whose grandmother once worked there as a nurse.

“She said Dr. Corbin was obsessed with healing,” Evan muttered as they climbed the hill, flashlights bobbing through the fog.

“She said he ran something called the Renewal Ward. The kids there weren’t sick—they were… being remade.”

Inside, the asylum breathed like something asleep.

The air was thick with rot and chemical sweetness, the smell of old disinfectant and something deeper—something fermented.

Their footsteps stirred the dust of decades. Wheelchairs rusted into the floor. Wallpaper peeled like flayed skin.

As they passed through what used to be the children’s ward, they began to hear it—

Soft murmuring. Like children whispering secrets through cracked teeth.

Every time they turned, it stopped.

They found the doctor’s office at the end of a long corridor, its door still marked WARD SUPERVISOR — DR. H. CORBIN.

Inside, they discovered a journal, its pages stiff with age.

The doctor’s handwriting began neat and clinical, then unspooled into panic.

“The regeneration works. Tissue restores faster than decay can claim it.”

“Their skin will not die, but it no longer breathes.”

“They hunger… for sweetness.”

The next entry was nearly illegible, smeared with something dark.

“They prefer the orchard now. They bury their teeth into the fruit until it bleeds.

I hear them outside my window.

They are becoming one thing. They whisper in unison.”

A crash echoed down the hall.

Something wet.

The group froze. Their lights swung toward the sound.

Through a broken window, one of the orchard trees had forced its way inside.

Its trunk pulsed faintly, like veins beneath skin.

Apples trembled on the branches—not round anymore, but vaguely… human.

They were pale, smooth, and breathing.

The whispering rose again, now a chorus of tiny, delighted voices.

And then they saw them—

Dozens of small figures writhing among the branches, their skin waxy and translucent, their faces slack and smiling.

Their mouths were stuffed with apple flesh, their fingers slick with juice and blood.

Evan’s flashlight caught one face clearly — a little girl with hollow eyes and hair black as rot.

She looked at him, smiled wide, and chewed.

The sound was not of eating — it was tearing.

The tree shivered, and more faces bloomed from its trunk, pressing out of the bark like new fruit, mouthing silent laughter.

The lights flickered. The whispers became words.

“Stay.”

“Join.”

“Grow.”

When the flashlights went out, the orchard began to feed again.

And the town below slept peacefully, never hearing the sound of small, perfect mouths chewing in the dark.