Scary ghost stories and stuff (1)

Revelations Part 2

In her more self-pitying moments - usually after finishing a bottle of wine - Penny Flame found she possessed a remarkable ability to blame just about everything that had gone wrong in her life entirely on her parents. Her mother had the uncanny knack of finding fault in absolutely everything she did from her Christmas nativity performances to only getting a 2:1 in her degree. Her father on the other hand; a serial womaniser, had been absent for long periods of her childhood. He had at least three affairs that she knew of before her mother finally threw him out for good.

A therapist had once pointed out that she was still searching for that father figure in her life. Perhaps she was? She only really fancied older men, usually ones twice her age. Also, there was something about sleeping with a married man that really attracted her for some reason. She had enjoyed many guilty flings with men who complained their marriages were dead but in the end they always went back to their wives, leaving her alone and rejected. Each time it got more painful. Although she hated to admit it, she had a real fear of being alone and dying alone.

Clive was the latest lover to be consigned to the ever growing list of failed relationships. She had, naively, thought he could have been ‘the one’ but he had ended it quite recently and gone back to his wife again. His absence still felt very raw and the only way Penny could deal with the rejection, until the next conquest to come along, was to throw herself fully into this assignment.

This wasn’t an official piece of work but something she was pursuing in her own time. It was a little more interesting than covering the school fetes or farmers markets that her sleazy Editor, Derek Charming had her doing these days. He gave her all the dull uninteresting assignments ever since she’d rejected his advances at the paper’s annual barbecue last summer. Sleazy Derek had told her to find out all she could about Alderman and Son’s Funeral Services and report back to a more ‘senior’ reporter who was working on a potentially ground-breaking exposé. Sleazy Derek hadn’t even seen fit to reveal the nature of the story to Penny. So, humiliated but always willing Penny had started her research.

Obviously she was better than this and her skills were being wasted so she decided to take some initiative and start her own mini investigation into the ‘Dodgy’ Funeral Director; Guy Alderman. Perhaps if she could dig up more dirt on him she could impress her colleagues enough for them to start taking her seriously for a change instead of viewing her as a mediocre journalist / office slapper.

Recalling the basic techniques of following someone; she ensured she had kept the recommended ten meter distance from him, wore a variety of nondescript clothes and accessories so he wouldn’t recognise her, and she moved within crowds to avoid detection. This shady investigative work was one of the few areas she believed she truly excelled in. She had successfully used these techniques to stalk one of her lecturers at university, before eventually shagging him. So applying those techniques to this creepy old man had been easy. After three weeks, Alderman was still completely unaware of her. One of the things she’d learned was that every Tuesday afternoon the ‘Dodgy’ Funeral Director would visit the local vicar in the village of Wellby. Despite the weather, this was where the young determined reporter found herself now; freezing her frigging tits off in the snow covered churchyard next to the vicarage.

Snow was falling again in swirling flurries. A kaleidoscope of shifting white shapes softly tumbled from the grey sky overhead. All around her rows of headstones of differing shapes and sizes leaned at various angles. Some were in better condition than others. Encircling the graveyard, skeletal oak trees towered over smaller fir trees whose branches where decorated with glittery white snow. It was under one of these fir trees, nestled up against the grey stone wall that Penny had secreted herself. Almost an hour had passed since she arrived here. The fir tree and the wall were helping to shelter her from the biting winter breeze chilling the graveyard. Her frosty breath plumed up before her reminding her of the last time she had been hiding in a churchyard like this: Back on that particular night she hadn’t been alone. And she’d had had a lot more fun!