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Addict
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Perth, WA
Gender: Female
Posts: 165
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Night Visitor (1450 words)
Night Visitor (New Version)
Picture a small country village with rolling green hills and a darling stone church. There’s a short main street which is the hub of everything that happens in the place, where the baker’s first cousin is the butcher and the postman was the guy who shouted at you to lock your dog up in the morning. That was my village and I knew everybody there. On a good morning I would walk to school but on a lousy one, I’d ride my rusty old bike there, whizzing past the Jones’, the Parks’ and the Malloys’ houses and shouting greetings to all and sundry.
One day, my parents told us the exciting news that the old vicarage house by the cemetery had become vacant and they had decided to buy it. I pictured it in my mind, a two-story old stone house with ivy creeping along the walls and low dark windows. There were tall black iron gates that opened onto a large tarmac area in front of the entrance door and a garden bordering on that. Tall evergreen bushes surrounded the house, garden and tarmac. Surrounding those tall evergreens was a large cemetery. We never went in the cemetery. It was too big and we were too scared of getting lost in it at night. Every now and then, though, after school, we would dare each other to run inside, all the way up to the large crypt we could see about fifty paces in. During the summer, it wasn’t so bad but when the sky got dark early during winter, it became more of a challenge. Now we were going to virtually live inside it. Imagine the kudos we would get at school for being so brave.
The day we moved in, I ran from room to room, exploring its old-fashioned charm. My mother, a self-confessed romanticist, exclaimed over the kitchen the most. “Oh, isn’t it just adorable, with those lovely dark wood beams along the ceiling, that gorgeous dark wooden table and benches and don’t these diamond patterned windows make it look just like an old country pub?”
The room they had chosen for me was large and had a window overlooking the street. I imagined myself sitting at the window with my fluffy pink feather pen, doing my homework and waving at all my friends as they passed by. This was going to be great. “There is one small snag though.” My Dad winced as he patted my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “I’m afraid there is some damp in your room that’s going to need some fixing. Do you mind sharing with your sister until we get it sorted?”
I looked over at my sister, Davina, whose cute blonde pigtails couldn’t hide from me the fact that she was a thief and always went through my stuff. I scowled angrily and opened my mouth to protest this outrage when Dad held up a cautionary finger. “Unless, of course, you’d like to sleep in the caravan for a few days? It’s up to you.” I looked out the window at our family caravan parked on the side of the tarmac area next to the evergreen bushes, the one we took for long weekends at Butlins twice a year. It seemed like there was no choice really. Dad opened his hand and there was a very large key. “It’s a copy of the front door one,” he said. “You know we always lock up at night. This way, you can come in and out if you need to use the bathroom, okay?”
I settled in with no dramas but the repairs to my room took longer than they had originally anticipated and soon the caravan started to feel like home. I never forgot that there was a cemetery with real graves just a few feet away from me behind those bushes but I couldn’t see them and that was the most important thing, if you thought about it. What you can’t see can’t scare you. I developed a habit, though, of always locking my caravan before I went to sleep at night. Who knew what kinds of things roamed the night when all the world was asleep? I wasn’t about to tempt fate. I began to tell my friends at school about my living arrangements to try and impress them with my bravery. “I sleep next to a bunch of graves,” was my favourite way to spread the news and I’d be stared at with gratifying awe.
I never forgot to lock that caravan door though and that’s why I knew there was something in the room with me that wasn’t human one night. My mind woke first and all I knew was that I was shaking with extreme cold and fear. I remembered something I saw on TV once where they said that when a place was haunted, the temperature could drop many degrees. It certainly felt that way now. I kept my eyes shut though. A crowbar wouldn’t have been able to pry them open at that moment. I knew I was awake and that this was no dream. I was lying in the foetal position facing into the caravan and felt the…whatever it was…coming closer towards me and I shook so hard with fright, I had to squeeze my legs together to stop myself from wetting the bed. I somehow knew it was a female presence, despite my terror, and part of my mind, the sane part, kept thinking, “Oh yeah, that’s right, ghosts can walk through walls, can’t they?”
My horror leapt a further few notches when I felt the bed give way as the being sat next to me, inside the curve of my body. I even heard the springs in the mattress creak as it sat down. I thought if I pressed my eyes tighter together and refused to open them that she would eventually go away, like if I refused to acknowledge her, she would lose her form or something. I sensed her amusement at my naivety and that’s when she spoke to me, only it’s true what they say, those experts on the paranormal, you can’t hear spirits with your ears, they speak to your mind. That’s how I heard her.
She said, “You can open your eyes now. There’s nothing to be afraid of”. Something in the tone of her voice must have reassured me because I opened my eyes then and saw her. She was indeed sitting within the curve of my body on the bed next to me. I could see right through her and she was looking directly at me but, most wondrously, she was smiling and that smile took away all my fear. I felt a wave of peace wash through my body and I released the breath I was not even aware I had been holding until then. She had long hair that stretched past her waist but she looked to be in her forties. Her face continued to smile down at me until I could feel the corners of my mouth lifting in an answering smile, then I closed my eyes and fell right back asleep, almost as if she had told me to. I fell into a deep sleep for the rest of the night.
The next morning, I burst out of bed on a wave of adrenaline. I knew what I had seen but I also knew nobody would believe me if I told them. It was crazy talk. I’d been visited by a ghost. I went in to breakfast and my mom smiled as she poured me a bowlful of porridge, “Good night’s sleep, dear?” I ate and nodded my head. Later, I asked the question that had been burning in my mind.
“Mom, do you believe in ghosts and spirits?”
“Of course, darling.” Her reply was distracted but there was no lie that I could detect there. “Now go get your bag and get off to school or you’ll be late.”
As I pedalled my bike to school on that miserable grey day, I thought about it some more. I was scared at first but then I wasn’t. Maybe though, I had been lucky. What if a ghost visited me that had gone mad because it was murdered or what if it was a nasty ghost? What then? I didn’t tell any of my school friends about what had happened. Now that I had something I could really scare them with, I felt the need to keep it secret, mine alone.
A few days later I told Davina the story of my night visitor. This was in revenge for my foundation make-up that went missing and was found again on the bathroom floor. Her eyes grew wide as I described the lady of the night, a strange, mysterious figure who moaned and cried in the dark. I chuckled to myself when she refused to leave the house on her own when it got dark from that moment on.
The repairs to my room were continuing. A deeper problem was uncovered, with the rot having seeped further into the walls than previously thought. I didn’t mind as I’d made the caravan quite cosy now and wheedled the keys from my Dad so I could lock it from the outside. There were no more missing items from my room.
A week later, I was sitting up in bed reading when there was a bang on my window and a rustling sound like dead leaves being scraped along the tarmac. Knees shaking, heart racing, I tip-toed to the door. I gathered my courage and threw it open.
“Hello?” My voice came out in a mousy croak. It was pitch black out there and I could see nothing. I locked the door again and ran back to the bed, diving under the covers. Minutes later, I heard it again. This time I pulled back the curtain and espied that little wretch of a sister of mine as she dived round the side. I jumped out of bed, fuelled by righteous anger.
“Why, you rotten little…come back here.”
She giggled like a maniac and shone the flashlight under her chin as I chased her. “Ooooh, hoooo, ooooh,” she mocked me. I caught her and pushed her back into the house, locking the door behind her.
“Now stay there and go to bed. You didn’t scare me,” I shouted in defiance. My fear gone, I stomped back to the caravan and slammed the door.
It must have been hours later that I heard a bang on my window again. “Right, that’s it,” I huffed in annoyance. I was sure I had only just fallen asleep. I stomped over to the door yelling, “I’m gonna get you for this.” Then I threw it open.
What I saw stopped my breath in my throat and I gulped it back in shock. My limbs froze, all the muscles tightened up and on this occasion, I really did wet myself. There were dozens of them, milling around my caravan and around the garden, see-through spirits that walked through bushes and the black iron gate. Some of them were hideous, with malevolent eyes that stared at me and knew I could see them. Somehow, knowing that they knew I could see them was the most horrible thing of all. I fumbled for the front door key which I’d always kept by the caravan door. For a heart-stopping second, I couldn’t find them and then my fingers touched something cold and hard and my breath left me in another whoosh.
They didn’t do anything, just watched me watching them. I scanned them quickly for my lady of the night. They wouldn’t harm me if she were there, I was sure of it but she wasn’t. It took more courage than I believed I had to inch my way down the caravan steps and walk slowly to the front door. They had stopped milling now and the atmosphere amongst them was…alert. I got the key in first time and slammed the door behind me, locking it fast. Then I must have lost it because I don’t remember what happened next. I was in a hospital for some time and Davina came to see me almost every day, her eyes so downcast with shame and apology that it broke me down and I told her it wasn’t her fault. When I returned home, the village seemed much the same as ever. Only I was different. To my great relief, my Dad told me that my room was finally ready for me to move in. I was grateful. I had no more night visitors after that, but that was probably because I slept most nights with my sister Davina.
Last edited by RachelA : 08-10-2006 at 03:34 AM.
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