A simple farmer receives a horse from the gods, a man sells ice creams named after missing schoolkids, the demolition of a hotel brings an old horror to light, a wounded soldier finds the real enemy is in his own camp, a family inherits a peculiar r...
We didn't bring much stuff when we moved in, and it was lucky we didn't, because Mum had inherited all of Great Uncle Alfred's junk. This came as a surprise to Mum, but she took it with her usual good humour. The old bloke had owned many weird old things. The cottage was basically a mausoleum. We took most of it out to the shed and stowed it there. The shed was even more rundown than the house, but it was a good size, with a high roof, and a loft you climbed up to on a ricketty ladder.
Mum couldn't be bothered with the spare room. It was already full of the old man's stuff, so we just left it like it was. I guess it must have been his study or something. There was an ancient desk with strange stains on it and stinking of sulphur, as if he'd whiled away his time putting matches out on it. The desk drawers were locked (we never found the keys). There was a chair that had been sat in so long that it had got a funny shape. A bookcase full of mouldy old volumes stacked up to the ceiling. I'd taken a look at a few of the books, but they were all written in strange languages - they smelled damp, and when I put them back on the shelf I rubbed my hands on my jeans. There were weird masks hanging on the walls: tall, narrow, wooden masks, with strangely elongated ears and drooping noses. The faces leered at you and showed triangular teeth and poked out forked tongues. There were a couple of black-and-white photographs of people with blurry faces standing in front of blurry backgrounds. Mum told me they were at least a hundred years old. One photo showed a small boy with an animal laid out dead on the ground beside him. I couldn't tell what kind of animal it was. Perhaps it was just the blurriness of the photo, but its face seemed oddly human.
Then there was the rug.
It was so faded with age and heavy with filth that I couldn't tell what colour it had originally been, though I could make out some faint zig-zagging markings on it. It stunk. Probably diseased or something. I was careful to walk around it. The first time I'd gone in there it was in the middle of the room. The second time it was over by the desk. I wondered why Mum had moved it – how she'd even brought herself to touch it. Just the thought of stepping on it made me shudder.
One night I woke up thirsty and got up and went to get a glass of water. When I got into the hall I saw that someone had left the study door open. Either that or it hadn't been closed properly. All the doors in the cottage were dodgy. Mum told me that when it was built they didn't use rulers or spirit levels or anything – they probably couldn't even count to ten - so they did everything by eye. Pretty impressive really. But it meant that there wasn't a straight line in the whole place. None of the doors quite fit in their jambs, and when you closed them you had to check that the latch had engaged. I guessed that this was what had happened with the study door.
Still, I paused outside my bedroom and peered down the dark hallway. What was that shape on the floor? It lay on the other side of a shaft of moonlight that shone through the study window and out into the hall.
Muffy, I thought.
Muffy never slept in the hallway though. She slept on my sister's bed.
I switched the hallway light on. It made a pflop! sound and died, glowing for a millisecond, leaving an imprint of its shape on my retinas. Great.
When my eyes had readjusted to the darkness I peered up the hallway again.
Had the shape moved?
I thought I heard a low snuffling sound, but it might have been the wind outside. I stood there for a moment undecided, then turned around and went back into my bedroom and shut the door and forgot about being thirsty. I lay awake in bed for a long time, listening to the cottage creak and sigh and the scree of branches scratching at the corrugated iron roof, but I heard no more snuffling sounds.
When I woke up the next morning the study door was closed. I guessed Mum had shut it when she got up. It's funny how much more sensible you are in the morning with the sun shining through the windows, and I soon forgot all about the shape in the hallway.
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