We rented a place in Bath and my dad took time off from the university to sort everything out. I wasn’t sure what would happen to us, where we would live and stuff like that. But now it turned out that we were actually very rich. It seemed an incredible coincidence but just before we had moved into Twist Cottage, Dad had taken out an insurance policy on Louise’s life. If she died as a result of an accident or an illness, my dad would receive three quarters of a million dollars! Of course, the insurance company was suspicious. They always are. But the police had investigated. There had been an inquest. There was nothing they could do except pay.
And so we were able to buy a new house in Bath, just around the corner from the one we had sold. We tried to put Louise behind us. Everything began to go back to the way it had been before.
And then, one day, I happened to find myself at Bristol University. I’d arranged to meet Dad when he finished work. We were going to the movies together—just like the old days. Only he’d gotten held up in a tutorial or something and I found myself kicking my heels in the little square box that he called his study.
There was a desk with a photograph of me (but not one of Louise, I noticed) and a scattering of papers. There were a couple of chairs and a sofa. Two of the walls were lined with shelves and there were books everywhere. I think there must have been a thousand books in the room. They were even piled up on the floor, half covering the window.
I figured I’d read something while I was waiting but of course they were all history books. Then I noticed a Marvel comic on one of the shelves and I reached up for that but somehow my fingers caught one of the books that had been lying flat, out of sight. It slid out and toppled into my arms. I found myself looking at the cover. It was called Haunted Houses from the Elizabethan Age.
I was curious. It was almost as if my dad had hidden the book right up on the highest shelf, as if he didn’t want it to be seen. I carried it over to the desk and opened it. And there it was, on the first page, among the chapter headings.
Twist Cottage
I sat down and this is what I read.
One of the most famous witches of the sixteenth century was Joan Barringer, who lived in a cottage in the woods near Avoncliffe. Unlike many of the witches, who were usually elderly spinsters, Joan Barringer was married. Her husband, James Barringer, was a blacksmith. Sometime around the year 1584, in the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, James Barringer began an affair with a local girl, Rose Edlyn, daughter of Richard Edlyn, a wealthy landowner.
It seems that somehow Joan Barringer found out about the affair. Her revenge was swift and terrible. She placed a curse on the unfortunate girl and in the weeks that followed, Rose Edlyn became ill. She lost weight. She lost her hair. She went blind. Finally, she died. The recently discovered letters written by Richard Edlyn show what happened next.
James Barringer was persuaded to testify against his wife. She was summoned to court on a charge of witchcraft and sentenced to death. The method of execution was to be burning at the stake. However, before the sentence could be carried out, she managed to escape from prison and returned to her cottage in Avoncliffe. The house was surrounded. The local villagers were determined that the evil woman should pay the price for what she had done.
And it was then that Joan Barringer made her appearance. Standing at an upstairs window, with a rope draped around her neck, she screamed out a final curse. Any woman who ever entered Twist Cottage would die. She blamed women for what had happened to her. Rose Edlyn had been beautiful and had stolen her husband from her. She had been ugly and would die unloved.
Then she jumped. The rope was tied to a beam. It broke her neck and she ended up dangling in front of the villagers, her head wrenched to one side. The last letter written by Richard Edlyn reads:
“. . . and so we did discover that wretched, evil crone, a sight most horrible to behold. Her eyes were swolne and bloodie. Her fanges were drawne. And so she hung by her twysted neck beside that horrid, twysted house.”
This is how Twist Cottage got its name.
So Dad had known about the history of Twist Cottage before we moved in. That was my first thought. But there was more to it than that. I remembered how angry he had become when I had asked him if it was haunted.
For heaven’s sake, Ben, this is the twenty-first century . . . That’s what he’d said. But he’d known.
He’d known that the house had been cursed—and that the curse only worked on women! Could it possibly be true? I used the telephone in his office and called Carol, the girl who had warned me about Twist Cottage in the first place. Six people had died there, she had told me. And now she confirmed what I already knew. Mrs. Webster had drowned in the bath. Mrs. Johnson had fallen out of a window. Dr. Stainer had fractured her skull and Professor Bell had fallen down the stairs. Both of them had been women. Another woman had had a heart attack and an Australian woman had electrocuted herself.
I thought back to the day we had moved in. The driver who had broken an ankle and the carpenter who had slipped with a saw. Both of them had been women too.
My head was spinning. I didn’t want to think about it. But there could be no avoiding the truth. Louise had ruined my dad’s life and had refused to give him a divorce. All along he must have wanted to kill her but he couldn’t do it himself. So he had moved her into Twist Cottage—knowing that, since we were both male, he and I would be safe—and had waited for the ghost of Joan Barringer to do the job for him.
It was incredible!
I put the book back on the shelf and left the room. I never, ever asked him about it. In fact, we never mentioned Twist Cottage again.
But there is one other thing I need to mention.
My dad hung on to Twist Cottage. He didn’t sell it. With all the money he got from the insurance, he didn’t need to. But later on I found out that he rented it out from time to time. He demanded an awful lot of money, but the men who rented it always paid.
It was always men. They would go with their cruel, nagging wives. Or their screeching, senile grandmothers. One took his mother. Another went with a peculiarly vindictive aunt.
The women only stayed there a short time.
None of them ever came back.
The Shortest Horror Story Ever Written
I want to tell you how this story got included in this book.
About a week before the book was published, I broke into the offices of Orchard Books, which are located in a rather grubby street near Liverpool Street station. Maybe you haven’t noticed but the book you are holding at this very minute was originally published by Orchard and I wanted to get my hands on it because, you see, I’d had an idea.
Generally speaking, publishers are stupid, lazy people. Orchard Books has about twenty people working for them but not one of them noticed that a window had been forced open in the middle of the night and that someone had added a couple of pages to the collection of horror stories that was sitting by the computer, waiting to be sent to the printers. I had brought these pages with me, you see, because I wanted to add my own message to the book. Nobody noticed and nobody cared and if you are reading this then I’m afraid my plan has worked and you are about to discover the meaning of true horror. Get ready—because here it comes.
Twelve years ago I desperately wanted to be a writer and so I wrote a horror story (based on my own experiences) that was rejected by every publisher in London because, they claimed, it wasn’t frightening enough! Of course, none of them had the faintest idea what horror really meant because they had never actually committed a murder, whereas I, my dear reader, had committed several.
My uncle Frederick was my first victim, followed by my next-door neighbor (an unpleasant little man with a mustache and a smelly cat), two total strangers, an actor who once had a bit part in EastEnders and a Jehovah’s Witness who happened to knock at my door while I was cooking lunch. Unfortunately, my adventures came to an end when a dim-witted policeman stopped my car just as I was disposing of t
he last body and I was arrested and sent to a lunatic asylum for life. Recently, however, I escaped and it was after that that I had the wonderful idea that you are reading about at this very moment and that can be summarized in three simple stages. Drop into the offices of one of those smarmy publishers in London and slip a couple of pages into somebody else’s book (with many apologies to Anthony Horowitz, whoever he may be). Exit quietly and stay in hiding until the book is published. Return only when the book is in the stores and then wait in the background, until some poor fool buys it and follow that person home . . .
Yes, dear reader, at this very moment I could be sitting outside your home or your school or wherever you happen to be and if by any chance you are the one I’ve chosen, I’m afraid you’re about to learn a lesson about horror that I know you’d prefer to miss. Orchard Books is also going to wish that they’d published me all those years ago, especially when they start losing readers in particularly nasty ways, one by one. Understanding will come—but I’m afraid you’re going to have to read this whole story again.
Start at the beginning. Only this time look carefully at the first word of each sentence. Or to be more precise, the first letter of each first word. Now, at last, I hope you can see quite how gloriously, hideously mad I really am—although for you, perhaps, it may already be too late.
About the Author
Anthony Horowitz will not settle for just one kind of success. A renowned screenwriter for television and movies, a playwright, and a multiple best-selling author, he has been called the “busiest writer in Britain.” Now he is staking claim in the United States with his wildly popular Alex Rider Adventures.
Among his many upcoming projects is the film version of Stormbreaker, the 2001 best-selling first installment of the series.
Mr. Horowitz lives in North London with his wife, Jill, and their two children, Nicholas and Cassian.
More Horowitz Horror Page 13
