The Ghosts and Hauntings Collection

by Cat Knight

  Monica opened the door, and a blast of cold air hit her. She shivered, her skin twitching from the cold.

  “I get you, Thelma,” Monica said. “You don’t have to freeze me.”

  The dumbwaiter consisted of a platform and a rope looped around pulleys. It was simple enough, load the platform and pull the rope sending the platform up and down. Monica examined the rope and was none too impressed.

  While it didn’t look as if it had been gnawed by rats, it didn’t look hardware store fresh either. Grey, old, it looked like something meant to break on the first pull. Monica stuck in her head and looked up the chute. There were several slits of light above. She supposed those were the doors on the upper floors. But she saw nothing else. She pulled back her head.

  “Are you sure?” Monica asked.

  The knocking came faster.

  Monica nodded. “Of course, you’re sure.”

  With some difficulty, Monica climbed onto the platform. It was a tight fit, but she was able to grasp the rope. Her first pull did nothing, which didn’t surprise her. Mechanical devices needed to be used or else they froze. For a moment, she considered climbing out and finding some oil. Lubricating the pulleys seemed like a good idea. But she was fairly certain that if she climbed out, she wasn’t going to climb back in again. So, she gave the rope a good yank, and the platform moved an inch.

  It took Monica the better part of fifteen minutes to raise the platform perhaps six feet. Then, the platform stopped. No matter what she did, she couldn’t get it to move. Sweating, panting in the confined space, Monica wondered if she had a touch of claustrophobia, because she felt panic rising in her mind. What if she couldn’t get out? If she screamed, would anyone hear her? If no one did, would anyone think to check the dumbwaiter? Not bloody likely.

  She told herself to remain calm. She looked up. What appeared to be a door loomed above her. She struggled, and after a minute or two, she managed to stand up but squeezed by the contraption. She reached as high as she could, but her fingers fell agonizingly short of the door.

  She wanted to scream.

  And the knocking grew louder.

  “No, Thelma, no,” Monica growled. “It’s not going to end like this.”

  Monica stretched for all she was worth, but she couldn’t reach the door.

  And the loud knocking grew faster.

  A wave of dizziness washed over Monica. She grabbed the rope to steady herself, and for some desperate moments, she fought what could only be described as a fainting spell. If she passed out… The dust filled her nostrils, and she breathed through her mouth. What had ever possessed her to get into the dumbwaiter? She could die here, and no one would find her until the carcass began to stink.

  Don’t think that way, she told herself. Don’t you dare. You’re going to get out. All you have to do is look around and think.

  She looked around in the mostly dark chute. She couldn’t see much, but she did notice a niche in a brick wall.

  A niche? Why would a dumbwaiter have a niche? Monica had to twist and contort her body in order to run her fingers up the bricks.

  She wondered if the twisting would permanently disfigure her. Stretching, she managed to put her hand into the niche and her fingers felt…

  Fur.

  She screamed and jerked out her hand. Her head cracked against another wall. Had she touched a rat? A mouse? Some other creature? She saw stars for a moment, and again, she willed herself not to black out. Eyes closed to the pain, she fought the urge to vomit. A rat!?

  Think, she told herself. Whatever it was, it wasn’t alive. That was obvious. A live animal would have reacted, jumped or run or something. Great, she thought, I touched a dead rat. No, she thought. A dead rat would stink. What she had touched didn’t stink, and it didn’t run. So, what was she afraid of? She could think of a dozen things to be afraid of, but that wouldn’t disclose what was in the niche. Shaking, biting her lip painfully, she stretched her hand into the niche and grabbed the furry thing.

  Even in the faint light, she could see that what she held was a small, antique teddy bear, something from a bygone era, like nothing she had ever seen before. Odd.

  Who would hide a toy bear inside the dumbwaiter? Before she could answer the question, the knocking grew louder.

  Over the knocking, she thought she could hear Charlie, and Charlie was yelling something.

  “HERE,” Monica called. “HERE IN THE DUMBWAITER!”

  Despite her volume, Monica was pretty sure Charlie couldn’t hear. Too much house and too much noise, and the noise made her headache worse. Why wouldn’t Thelma let up?

  Monica knew. She tucked the teddy bear under her arm and stretched yet again. Her hand disappeared into the niche. And this time, she felt leather.

  Before Monica even looked, she knew what she had found—a leather document pouch, a worn leather document pouch. She felt the leather and heard the rope snap. Before she could say a word, the dumbwaiter plummeted.

  Epilogue

  Monica, her eye blackened, her foot in a cast, smiled her best smile at the cameras. She waved a black leather pouch. Her story was a timely event, being more so as it was especially being aired for the eve of Halloween.

  “And in this pouch,” Monica said, “lies the answer to a mystery that has baffled people for decades. Was there a second will in the case of Arnold and Thelma Brooks? The answer is a resounding yes, and it reads exactly as Thelma claimed it did. She wasn’t lying.”

  Charlie watched the TV where Monica displayed the newfound will. Like watchers everywhere, Charlie feasted on every word. Unlike the other watchers, though, Charlie would soon talk to Monica directly.

  Charlie filled the flute with champagne and handed it to Monica. “To the best damn detective in Britain,” Charlie said. They were in the kitchen which seemed like the best place for a celebration.

  Monica toasted and sipped. “I owe it all to Thelma.” Monica raised her glass. “To the person who wouldn’t let go. Rest in peace, Thelma.”

  The women sipped. “She is gone?” Charlie asked.

  Monica nodded. “Not a knock or blast of cold or anything.”

  “And to think, all it cost you was a black eye and a broken ankle.”

  “And more repair work than I can afford, although, I’ve got something up my sleeve. I’m going to negotiate a book deal, co-authored with Gustav.”

  “But you are going to wall up that dumbwaiter, right?”

  Monica shook her head. “I’m going to restore it.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Because, there’s something very special about it. I don’t want to lose that.”

  Monica wasn’t about to tell Charlie that she was restoring the dumbwaiter because a certain old man had come visiting in the night. She was certain it was all to do with the small, teddy bear that sat on her dresser. She made a pact with the spectre that as soon as the dumb waiter was safe for her to climb into she would put the bear back right where she found it. She promised she would. And so far, he’d just been hovering. It had been tempting, just for a minute to sell the bear to the highest bidder. But Monica swiftly decided she would keep the deal. She wasn’t about bring down the wrath of Arnold.

  THE END

  THE HAUNTING OF KNOLL HOUSE

  CAT KNIGHT

  ©Copyright 2017 Cat Knight

  All Rights Reserved

  Prologue

  Knoll House

  South Downs

  West Sussex

  United Kingdom

  August 1992

  Claire didn’t believe the rumours, and she didn’t see why anyone else should either. She rolled her eyes at the gasps she got when she told people what she was planning to do, and their warnings just made her more determined. At least, until Sarah refused to join her.

  “You can’t be serious,” Claire said. They were sitting on Sarah’s bed and Sarah was playing with a doll.

  She was avoiding Claire’s eyes, both of which struck Claire as very childi
sh – eleven was far too old for that sort of behaviour.

  “You know what they say,” Sarah said.

  “I know the scary stories our parents use to keep us away from the place.”

  “Maybe there’s a reason they want to keep us away.”

  “They probably just think it’s unsafe because it’s old and rickety. As if we can’t take care of ourselves. Come on; imagine the looks on everyone’s faces when we tell them what we did.”

  “I just don’t think that’s worth dying,” Sarah said, now twisting the doll’s hair especially roughly.

  “Are you scared?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do realise there’s no such thing as ghosts?”

  “Well I don’t realise that because I’ve never seen a ghost so how would I know for sure?”

  “Listen.” Claire grabbed the doll and threw it on the floor, which made Sarah finally meet her eyes. “All the boys who say that we can’t join in with them will have to shut their fat mouths when they find out what we did. When school starts we’ll be legends.

  And we don’t have to tell them when we find nothing – we can come up with all kinds of crazy stories about what happened in there. I mean, obviously we’ll have to get them straight together so it all matches up and people believe us, but it’s totally worth it. And I won’t have anyone saying that Claire Anderson backs down from a dare. Never have, never will.”

  “That does not seem like a smart way to live your life” Sarah said parroting something her parents often said. “What if somebody dared you to jump off a cliff?”

  Claire ignored this.

  “Sarah, you didn’t see the look on Dave’s stupid face. He wants us to back out.”

  “I want us to back out,” Sarah retorted. “And I never agreed to it so it wouldn’t even be backing out anyway.”

  Technically Claire did not agree with that – given that she had already said Sarah would do it.

  But that was an unimportant detail. “Please Sarah?” she said. “Do it for me. We go in, we take a few photos, we get out. What’s–“

  “Don’t say ‘what’s the worst that could happen’,” Sarah said. “Whenever people say that the worst does happen.”

  “Sarah,” Claire leaned forward. “It’ll be fine. There is no such thing as ghosts. In, out, legends. I promise we don’t have to stay long and I promise it’ll be worth it.”

  Sarah bit her lip. Claire had to smile at that. She knew it meant she had won. They waited until past midnight, telling each other stories to keep awake until Sarah’s parents had gone to bed.

  When they were sure they were asleep, Claire and Sarah snuck into the kitchen where Sarah’s mother kept her camera then, with one last nervous glance at each other, they walked out into the cold night and headed for the house Knoll House, up on the windy hill.

  Claire had to admit, as each step took them slightly closer to their destination, that she was a little scared. She tried to remind herself that was illogical and stupid; old empty houses were just that – empty.

  But it was hard to argue with years and years of ghost stories, and rumours, about the old mansion on the hill.

  She was pretty sure her parents had grown up scared of the place and her grandparents and probably every generation back to the last one who had lived there. But Claire believed in evidence. She had figured out Santa Claus wasn’t real when she was three and she had never been the type to believe in anything she couldn’t see with her own two eyes. It was that knowledge that made her push away every excuse.

  It was too cold, they should wait until they had a better way of proving it, they should bring more people just so nobody could argue with what they had done.

  It would be so easy to find a reason to turn back and Sarah would agree without hesitation and despite promising that they definitely would go in the house at some point they’d probably never say another word about it and laugh at how silly and scared they were in ten years’ time.

  But that was the thing; that which separated Claire from generations of scared kids was a bull-headed determination. It made her keep walking, even as every shadow cast by a tree or streetlight started to look like skeletal arms reaching for them and the half-moon vanished behind lazily drifting dark clouds.

  The streetlights became sparser as they left the central part of the village and soon they were on the long, country road fringed with overgrown fields behind fences, the part of the village everyone liked to pretend didn’t exist.

  Any time she glanced at Sarah she could see, even in the darkness, how pale and terrified her friend was, and so she stopped glancing and locked her eyes on the road ahead.

  A couple of times she thought she saw Sarah, out of the corner of her eye, turn to her, mouth open, ready to ask if they could turn back. Maybe part of her wanted that to happen.

  But Sarah never did and so they kept walking as the whistling wind picked up and the road slowly began to slope upwards.

  A chill that had nothing to do with the weather came over Claire as she saw, in the distance at the top of the ever-steepening hill, the shape of the house. Why somebody every would have designed something so horrid, Claire couldn’t say. Even in its prime it must have looked somewhat like an elongated skull.

  Narrow windows overhung the dark maw of its veranda, the pillars seemed to hold it up like leering teeth, the only thing between them and the darkness beyond. Now the wood and stone were worn and grey, where once they had been painted brilliant white – something Claire was fairly sure could only have worsened the skull likeness.

  A towering fence surrounded the house, but the hill meant that you could still see the whole bulk of it even from a distance, jutting up from the weeds and tangle of unkempt bushes that nobody ever did anything about. Over the years her parents had spoken idly of people who wanted to buy the place and fix it up, turn it into a bed and breakfast.

  But that never seemed to happen. When Claire had been very small the almost permanent ‘For Sale’ sign that sat on the side of the road had been removed because, really, after so long what was the point anymore?

  The best thing for the place would have been a visit from the wreckers.

  But nobody in this village could be bothered to go to those lengths, or maybe they were too scared to, and so Knoll House remained, terrifying everyone with the lingering belief that there was something inside you didn’t want to disturb. Until tonight.

  Feet from the fence, Claire and Sarah came to a halt. Claire’s eyes scanned the distant building, focusing on the shape of it so as to keep her attention on anything but her beating heart. Beside her Sarah hugged herself, not saying anything. They must have stood there for at least ten minutes; both wanting to leave, neither wanting to say it.

  But Claire had made a promise to herself and she was not going to give up on that.

  In under an hour they would be on their way back home, victorious, with a camera that proved there was nothing inside but cobwebs and dust. Then finally everyone could shut up about the haunted house and finally, maybe, the boys would let Claire join in their games.

  “Are you ready?” Claire whispered.

  Sarah didn’t reply. Worried that looking at her would weaken her resolve, Claire decided to take her silence as a yes and so she started to walk. For a few seconds, she heard nothing behind her and worried that Sarah might refuse to come after all – what she would do in that situation she couldn’t say – but then she heard footsteps and together they headed for a famous gap in the fence, one people tended to come up and look through but never enter.

  She felt short of breath already and her heart was growing louder by the second.

  But passing the first threshold that was the gap, seemed to have ignited a tiny flame of courage in her heart, a flame that let her smile knowing she was already braver than just about every kid who had ever tried to take this challenge.

  She turned to share her smile with Sarah, but one look at her friend’s face made it clear that smiling w
as not on the agenda for her. Fair enough.

  They kept walking. The wind was picking up with every step, the dead trees and sprawling bushes rustling and shaking with increasing violence. Had Claire been more imaginative she almost could have fancied the sounds forming a voice.

  Go back, it said. Go back now before it’s too late. She laughed quietly and shakily. She was not scared.

  ‘Go back’.

  The voice was as clear as day, from right behind her. She spun, but Sarah was still walking, head down.

  “Did you say something?” Claire had to try hard to keep the tremor out of her voice.

  Sarah shook her head. “Please don’t try to scare me,” she said. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  Claire’s eyes moved past Sarah, but all she saw were the bushes and the weeds. She made to turn.

  ‘Please.’

  She spun again. Sarah had passed her now and the voice had definitely come from behind, pleading and desperate. It sounded like somebody who would do anything to stop this moment from happened.

  It sounded like the stupid fear Claire had pushed away since she was a kid, the fear that made her want to cry out for her parents every time she had an ugly nightmare, the fear that tried to drag her down and tell her she was just another weak little child.

  No.

  Claire refused to entertain stupid fantasies a second longer. She turned her attention fully to the house now, which loomed up above them, dark and shadowy and more like a skull now than ever. She let herself feel that fear then she put it away in a little box, locked it and threw away the key. No more.

  She picked up her pace, passing Sarah and climbing the front stairs on to the veranda. Rotting wood creaked and gave way slightly beneath her feet.

  If that voice came again she couldn’t say – she pushed everything away, everything except for the house.

  She reached out and grabbed the rusted doorknob. It was ice cold. She looked back. Sarah had not come on to the veranda yet. She was frozen in front of the house, staring up at Claire, tears in her eyes.