DARK COUNTY Read online

  Mummy had spoken to Mr Phelps a few times when they had first moved into the house, three months back. Mr Phelps had knocked on the door that first evening and introduced himself; Mummy had done the same. Timmy had hidden upstairs, peeking down and listening to them talk. The old man’s voice was deep and rasping. It frightened Timmy; it reminded him of the way the bad man had spoken.

  ‘So there’s just you and yer boy?’ Mr Phelps had asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Mummy had answered. ‘His father left sometime ago.’

  Daddy had left after the bad man had taken Timmy, after Timmy had gotten sick. Mummy said that Daddy was not a bad man, he just didn’t know how to deal with what had happened, that he had been unable to protect his son.

  Mummy was sick, too, Timmy had given her the disease. She didn’t blame him, though, it was after the bad man had taken him and done the vile things to him. The bad man had the sickness and passed it onto Timmy when he did the bad thing to him. There was no way they could have known he was poorly when he got home, covered in blood and bruises. Mummy had cleaned his wounds up, but she had a cut on her hand, and that was how she had gotten sick, too. The sickness scared Timmy; he would often cry himself to sleep worrying about dying. Mummy would come in and comfort him, saying that they both had a long time before they had to worry about that. Timmy was not so sure, though. Who could know how long they would have?

  They had lived in the city then and Timmy had gone to school, but that had all changed now. They now lived on the edge of a small village in the countryside. Their house and Mr Phelps’ were the only two around for some distance. Timmy didn’t like being so far away from other people, especially with the way that Mr Phelps looked at him like he wanted to hurt him, like the bad man.

  Timmy didn’t go to school anymore. Mummy taught him at home. She was afraid that if she sent him to school then the other children would learn about him being poorly, and they wouldn’t understand. So they would sit in the living room and Mummy would teach him to do sums and read books and everything else he did at school anyway. Sometimes Mummy got frustrated with him, because he was a slow learner. He never used to be, before the bad man took him. Since then, though, he had found it increasingly hard to concentrate, things would not sink in the way they used to. Mummy would shout at him for getting things wrong, then she would cry and hug him tight and tell him she was sorry.

  Tomorrow was Timmy’s birthday. Mummy had promised him that she would take him out for dinner and they would go to the cinema. He loved going to the cinema more than anything. Mummy kissed him goodnight and he went up to his room. He was changing into his pyjamas when he saw Mr Phelps stood on his porch looking up at him. He just stood there smoking his stinky pipe and watching Timmy get changed. Timmy knew the look on his face; it was the same one the bad man had when he did the bad thing to him. Timmy pulled his thick, heavy curtains shut and ran downstairs.

  ‘I thought you were going to sleep?’ Mummy said. ‘It’s your big day tomorrow.’

  ‘Mr Phelps was watching me,’ he said.

  ‘Oh don’t be silly,’ Mummy said.

  ‘He wants to hurt me.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t,’ Mummy said. ‘He’s just a lonely old man. No one is going to hurt you ever again. I won’t let them.’

  She held him close to her, then patted his bottom.

  ‘Now go to sleep.’

  Timmy went back to his room and laid down, he couldn’t sleep. His mind kept racing with a thousand thoughts. He remembered his Daddy, happy times of them playing together in the park. He thought about what he and Mummy would do the next day, what they would have to eat, and what the film would be like. These were all happy thoughts. He knew that they would go somewhere quiet to eat; Mummy didn’t like to eating in crowded places. Then they would drive the fourteen miles to Lincoln to go to the cinema.

  The image of Mr Phelps staring up at him kept popping back into his head and filling him with fear. Then he would remember the bad man, the way he had looked at Timmy as he walked home that winter evening. He remembered how he had just grabbed him, so strong, and carried him away. Then there was his foul smell, the thought of it made Timmy feel sick, and of course the pain.

  Eventually he fell asleep, only to be woken by a loud banging on the front door. It was a furious thumping that scared him. He heard Mummy moving around downstairs, heading for the door. He wanted to scream at her not to open it, to come and hide with him, but the words would not come. Instead, all he could do was silently creep to the top of the stairs and watch in horror as the scene unfolded before him.

  The banging on the door continued, getting heavier and faster. Mummy stepped in the hallway.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she said cheerfully, as though the force of the knocking was nothing unusual. How could she not be afraid? It was as if whoever was outside was trying to hammer their way into the house. Of course Timmy knew who was outside, Mr Phelps.

  Mummy opened the door, and sure enough there stood the old man from next door. He seemed bigger standing in the doorway than he ever had when Timmy had seen him through the window. He stood there with his hands behind his back. Mummy looked startled to see him, but acted friendly enough.

  ‘Mr Phelps,’ she said. ‘Is everything all right?’

  Mr Phelps didn’t answer, he just stood there silently looking at Mummy, and then his eyes moved slowly up the staircase. He met Timmy’s gaze. Timmy was so scared that he darted his head back into his room.

  ‘Mr Phelps,’ he heard Mummy say. ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

  There was no reply. Timmy looked back through the door carefully, just peeking out enough to see. Mr Phelps was still just standing motionless in the doorway, his hands behind his back. Mummy was starting to look annoyed.

  ‘Mr Phelps, I don’t mean to be rude, but if there’s nothing I can do for you, then I’m sorry but I’m a little busy at the moment.’

  A strange smile crossed the old man's face. Timmy didn’t like it. It seemed full of hate and evil, like the bad man.

  Mummy began to shut the door, but Mr Phelps shot out one of his arms and held it open, that sinister smile still on his face.

  ‘Mr Phelps, let me shut my door please,’ Mummy said. She was starting to sound cross.

  ‘No,’ the old man said in a rumbling tone that filled Timmy with dread. ‘It’s time.’

  ‘Time for wha...’ Mummy began to say, but before she could finish Mr Phelps lifted his other arm from behind his back. He was holding a long knife, Timmy thought it was called a machete, but he wasn’t sure.

  Mr Phelps lunged at Mummy with the knife raised high, the blade hurtling through the air towards her. She was more agile, though, and managed to sidestep the attack. Mr Phelps fell through the door, crashing to the floor. Mummy looked up the stairs and met Timmy’s terrified gaze.

  ‘Timmy, hide!’ she shouted up.

  He wanted to, really he did, he wanted to find somewhere safe to curl up and make all of this go away, but he couldn’t. He was frozen to the spot in fear, unable to stop watching the terrible things happening before him.

  Mummy tried to step over the lump on the floor that was Mr Phelps and get to the stairs. Mr Phelps, though, had other ideas. His hand shot out and pulled on Mummy’s ankle. She screamed as she fell to the floor. They struggled on the floor; Mummy was hitting the old man, clawing at his face and even trying to bite him, something she’d told Timmy he must never do.

  Mr Phelps was too strong, though, he pinned her down and then brought the blade down hard into Mummy’s chest. She looked up at Timmy, blood seeping from her mouth, her eyes full of pain and fear.

  ‘Run,’ she managed to rasp.

  Mr Phelps looked up directly at Timmy; his face was covered in Mummy’s blood. He smiled up at Timmy. The paralysis of fear was broken and Timmy was up on his feet. He wanted to run out of the house, but knew there was no way that he could get past Mr Phelps without the murderous old man catching him. Instead, he
ran to Mummy’s room. He knew there was a built-in wardrobe that had a shelved area at the back that he would be able to fit in. Mr Phelps would be able to find him easily, but Timmy hoped that the old man would not be able to reach him back there. As he began to run towards Mummy’s room, he heard the thunderous footfalls of the old man running up the stairs. Timmy had never felt so scared in his life, not even when the bad man had taken him. At least the bad man had told him that if Timmy let him do what he wanted without fighting, then he would not kill him. Timmy knew that was exactly what Mr Phelps wanted to do. He wanted to kill him just like he had killed Mummy.

  He flew into Mummy’s room, not even bothering to shut the door behind him; it would take more time than he had. Mr Phelps was quick for his age and was almost right behind him. Timmy ran to the wardrobe and pulled open the door. Turning back, he saw Mr Phelps entering the room. Timmy crouched down and went to climb into the space under the shelves. To his horror, he saw that the space was full of boxes wrapped in colourful paper. His birthday presents.

  Mr Phelps grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him out of the wardrobe. He looked down at Timmy with that same dark smile.

  ‘It’s time,’ he said.

  Timmy saw the blade coming down towards his chest and screamed.

  Then darkness.

  He was aware of the sound of his own screaming in the darkness.

  Then the sound of Mummy’s voice.

  ‘Timmy, what’s wrong?’ she said as she came into the room. Even under his cover he could see the light come to life. Mummy pulled his cover off him and pulled him to her.

  ‘Mr Phelps!’ Timmy said through hysterical tears. ‘He killed you and tried to kill me.’

  Mummy stroked his hair.

  ‘I’m right here, baby, no one has killed me, no one’s going to,’ she said soothingly. ‘It was just a bad dream.’

  ‘It seemed so real,’ Timmy sobbed.

  ‘No one is ever going to hurt you, or me. As long as we’re careful,’ she said.

  She sat there holding him for some time, until his sobs had near enough subsided, then she gently lowered him back down.

  ‘I love you, Mummy,’ Timmy said, feeling himself getting sleepy again.

  ‘I love you, too,’ she said, planting a little kiss on his forehead with her cool lips. ‘Now sleep tight, it’s your 130th birthday tomorrow.’

  Timmy smiled.

  Mummy smiled, her perfect white fangs glinting as she did, nothing like the horrible, yellow and stained things the bad man had.

  Mummy gently closed the lid of his coffin as Timmy drifted off into a peaceful sleep.

  COFFIN HALL

  The village of Cofnin laid ten miles southeast of the city of Lincoln. It was a picturesque little village, the local council had insisted that any house built there fit in with the style of the village, so even the new build house were all made of the same sandstone. The village had several countryside walks that encompassed woods, lakes, fields, pubs and the old hall.

  Cofnin Hall had once been the home of Sir Andrew Mayler and his family. It had been built in the early nineteenth century and had served as home to the Mayler family for four generations, until the family ran into financial trouble and were forced to sell the house in the early twentieth century. The house was bought by the Government. Originally, they used it as an office for the Ministry of Agriculture, to oversee all of the work they had to do in the county.

  During the Second World War, the house was handed over to the military. It was used as a hospital, treating airmen injured in operations over Germany, and also used to treat soldiers sent back from the front line.

  The military kept hold of it until the late 1960’s, at which point the house was sold to the national trust. They kept it open as a museum until someone decided to burn the place down in the mid eighties.

  The fire ravaged the building. Though it still stood, the damage to the roof and floors throughout was far too expensive for the trust to consider restoring. So for the last thirty years, the hall has sat abandoned and ruined, surrounded by its overgrown gardens and the woodlands that ever encroached on it. Weeds now grew inside the once great hall, and vines had devoured several walls inside and out.

  With its dereliction came the reputation of the hall being haunted and the punning nickname Coffin Hall.

  Local kids used it to prove their bravery, or to scare their friends, but for one girl investigating Coffin Hall was very serious indeed. That girl was Laura Green. For the last two years, Laura had spent almost every night searching the hall, desperate to find a ghost.

  This night was no different. As Laura walked up the winding drive that led to the hall the sun was starting to set. It was late autumn and there was a fine rain in the air, but that didn’t bother Laura. The house would be wet inside, but there were still some parts that offered shelter from the elements.

  The previous night she had left some things behind, a few little experiments. She had written on the wall in chalk. A simple message, ‘Are you there?’ She had left the chalk on the floor near the message, hoping that tonight she would fine some sort of reply. It was of course always possible that someone living had found the message and decided to reply as a joke, but she hoped that she would be able to tell the difference.

  She had heard all of the stories about the hall, and knew full well that most of them were rubbish. Supposedly, the ghost of a soldier who had died on the operating table in the hall when it was a hospital roamed the corridors at night looking for revenge on the surgeon who let him die.

  Laura had done her research, though; she knew that it never had an operating theatre. It had triage, but most of the care that was done there was about recovery, not treatment. People who needed surgery were sent off to other hospitals.

  There were stories, too, that Sir Andrew Mayler haunted the house. His anguished spirit was supposed to be in eternal torment, as his murderer had never been brought to justice. The problem was that Andrew Mayler died of natural causes at the age of eighty-seven; there was never any suggestion of murder.

  Some of the stories about the house had some element of truth. There was supposed to be the ghost of a young boy, about eight years old, who had drowned in the pond in the grounds. He was supposed to search the house, looking endlessly for his mother.

  Laura had found out that a boy of that age named Joseph Mayler, one of Sir Andrew’s grandsons, had died in the pond in the garden. This gave some validity to the claims people made of seeing him. Apparently, he was always soaked to the skin. One of the few hints of a ghost that Laura had encountered within Coffin Hall was a single, small, wet footprint in one of the upstairs corridors.

  There was also a story about a shell-shocked soldier who had hung himself from the beams in the ceiling of the great hall. Legend said that his spirit could be seen still hanging from the noose. Though Laura had never seen the dangling ghost on any of her many visits to the hall, she had found documents pertaining to the suicide of the soldier, so she supposed it was possible his spirit was there.

  Also, there was supposed to be the spirit of a sad woman dressed all in white who was often seen upstairs, in the servants’ quarters, wailing in despair. This could be the ghost of one of the maids for the Mayler family. She had fallen pregnant. Rumour had it that the father was one of the Mayler family, but the baby was stillborn. Unable to overcome her grief, she, too, had committed suicide, by jumping from the roof of the hall.

  The most recent ghost that Laura knew about was the ghost of a young woman who had been killed when one of the walls of the ruined house had collapsed on her. This had been all over the papers a few years ago.

  Laura came to the hall as often as she could, spending whole nights there on occasions, desperate to see one of the spirits with her own eyes. It had started when her father died, she wanted some evidence of a life after death as this would give her some comfort. In recent years, though, the Hall, and hunting for its spectral occupants, had become something of an obses
sion.

  It was a Friday night and that meant that there was always the chance of her being disturbed in her investigation. Local kids wanting to test their nerve, or just mess around, often came at the weekends, as did drunk adults who really should have known better. She hated it if they saw her; they always wanted to know who she was and what she was doing there. So she had taken to hiding away when she encountered other people in the hall.

  The first thing she did was to check the wall where she had written the message. The rain of earlier in the day had managed to run down the wall a little, fading her question, but it was still legible, ‘Are you there?’ She looked on the ground for the piece of chalk she had left. It was still there, but she could have sworn that she had left it under the word ‘Are’, but now it rested under the question mark at the end of the sentence. She looked back up at the wall; there was something, a white smudge of chalk. She peered at it, trying to see if there was some semblance of a letter or a word there. It was no use. If there had been any kind of intelligent meaning behind it, it had been washed away by the rain. For all she knew it could have been an answer from a spirit, or a joke from a living person, or just some of the chalk that had run off of her own message.

  Disheartened, she moved to the great hall. The roof on this part of the hall was still intact, and the beams remained in the ceiling. One of them was the beam that the shell-shocked soldier had hung himself from. In here, she had lined three stones up on the floor and left a fourth nearby, hoping that one of the spirits would complete the pattern.

  The stones were all scattered. Perhaps a spirit had been annoyed at her wanting it to play games, or perhaps someone living had walked through and moved the stones by accident. This was not evidence.