The Cider House Pact

The autumn of 1987 was the season of rot. In the small town of Ashburn, the apple orchards had produced a bumper crop, but a mysterious blight had turned the fruit to mush within a week of picking. The air smelled of vinegar and decay, and the old cider house at the edge of town—long abandoned—seemed to groan under the weight of the season.

I was seventeen that year, old enough to know better but young enough to believe I was invincible. My cousin, Milo, was fifteen, and his friend, Ezra, was a wiry kid with a nervous laugh that always made me uneasy. They had heard stories about the cider house—that it had been a place of ritual and sacrifice in the old days, when the town’s founders had tried to appease the spirits of the forest. We didn’t believe it, of course. We were just looking for a thrill on a Friday night, and the cider house was the perfect place.

We snuck out after midnight, flashlights in hand, the beam cutting through the fog that had settled over the orchard. The cider house stood at the edge of a dried-up creek, its timber walls sagging, the roof half-collapsed. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of fermented apples and something else—something metallic, like blood. We set up a circle of candles on the dusty floor, and I, being the eldest, took the lead.

I had read about séances in a library book, and I mimicked the rituals, chanting words I didn’t understand. The candles flickered, and for a while, nothing happened. Milo started giggling nervously, and Ezra kept glancing at the dark corners. I was about to call it off when the temperature dropped. It was like stepping into a walk-in freezer, and our breath began to fog. The candles went out all at once, and we were plunged into darkness.

Then we heard it—a low, gurgling sound, like liquid bubbling up from a drain. It came from the far corner of the room, where a rusted iron press stood, its heavy screw still in place. The gurgling grew louder, and then the press began to turn on its own, squeezing an invisible mass. A second later, a dark liquid seeped from the press’s spout, pooling on the floor. It smelled not of apples, but of rot and salt. The liquid began to rise, spreading across the floor toward our circle. We panicked and fled, stumbling over each other in the dark, not stopping until we were back on the road.

We swore we would never speak of it again. But the next morning, we found the cider house intact, no sign of our candles or the puddle of dark liquid. It was as if nothing had happened. We tried to convince ourselves it had been a prank, that one of us had spooked the others. But that week, Ezra started coughing up black fluid. He claimed he couldn’t taste anything anymore, and his skin took on a waxy, pale hue. He died two weeks later, and the doctors called it a rare fungal infection. No one believed us when we said the cider house was responsible.

Twenty years later, in 2007, I returned to Ashburn after my aunt passed away. I hadn’t been back since I was a teenager, and I hoped the town had moved on. But when I walked into the local diner, I saw a group of teenagers—no older than Milo and Ezra were—sitting in the corner, whispering about the cider house. They said that kids had been going missing, and that strange lights were seen in the orchard at night. I tried to ignore it, but that night, I had a dream. I was standing in the cider house again, but this time it was filled with rows of wooden barrels. A man in a bloodstained apron was pressing apples into a vat, but the apples were human heads.

I woke up drenched in sweat, and I knew I had to stop them. The next evening, I drove out to the cider house, half-expecting to find it as it was—abandoned and empty. But it was alive with activity. Candles again, a circle of teenagers, and a girl in the center, her eyes rolled back, speaking in a voice that wasn’t her own. She was channeling something, and the air was thick with that same vinegar and blood smell. I burst in, shouting for them to stop, but it was too late. The girl collapsed, and from her mouth crawled a mass of black, writhing maggots. They swarmed toward the iron press, and the press began to turn, juices spilling. I grabbed the girl and dragged her out, but her skin was cold as ice, and she was dead before we reached the road.

The police found the other kids in a state of shock, and I was questioned for hours. I told them what I saw, but they dismissed it as a hallucination. The case was closed as an accidental overdose on the girl’s part. But I knew the cider house had claimed another victim, and I felt guilty for not acting sooner.

The third account is the one I can’t fully discuss due to legal constraints, but I can say this: last year, in 2017, a group of urban explorers from the city broke into the cider house. They livestreamed their séance on social media. The video ends with a close-up of the iron press, the screw turning on its own, and a dark stream of liquid—thicker than blood—dripping into a bucket. The livestream was cut off, and none of them have been seen since. The case is still open, and I am not allowed to comment further.

But I know what they found. I know because I felt it too. The cider house is not just a building; it’s a conduit. The blight was the first warning, the turn of the press was the second, and the deaths are the third. There is a pact, sealed in apples and blood, and it demands a seepage—a draining of life into the earth to feed what lies beneath. I am writing this as a warning, not as a story. If you find yourself in a place that smells of vinegar and rot, leave. Do not call it. Because once the press begins to turn, it does not stop until it has squeezed every last drop from you. And in the end, all that will be left is a thin, dark liquid, seeping into the ground, and the memory of a night you can never forget.