Shiver

  SHIVER

  A Halloween Anthology

  from

  Accent Press

  Edited by

  Catriona Camacho and Greg Rees

  A selection of spooky, scintillating, and scary stories from some of Accent Press’s best-loved authors. Featuring gruesome crime from Bill Kitson and Andrea Frazer, a frighteningly modern fairy tale from Helena Fairfax, ghostly goings-on from Christina Jones, David Rogers, Jane Risdon, Marie Laval, and Tricia Maw, a twisted take on a national pastime from Cara Cooper, and the supernatural side of reality TV from Caroline Dunford.

  So this Hallowe’en, if you’re hankering for a haunting, could murder a mystery, or are prepared to be scared – let Accent make you shiver.

  Laying the Ghost

  by Christina Jones

  It’s Halloween, and Tyrone, the ghost of Mrs Pooh’s cottage in Merryleggs Lane, is getting rather upset with the village children trying to taunt him into materialising. Fed up with his attitude, Mrs Pooh enlists the help of white witches Bella and Donna, who get more than they bargain for when they force the old ghost to show himself …

  Your Number’s Up

  by Cara Cooper

  Nasreen could have set her watch by the young man who bought a lottery ticket at her father’s shop every day, and when he starts to make conversation with her, she’s over the moon; this could be her chance to start a new life. Unfortunately, Fate has other ideas …

  The Dark Night of Dawn

  by Caroline Dunford

  When Dawn reluctantly appears on a spooky reality TV dating show, she laughs at the clichéd, overblown sets and host – the only thing gruesome is her boorish date. So the last thing she expects is an unpleasant blast from the real-life past …

  The Haunting of Anne Chambers

  by Jane Risdon

  Anne and Andrew are lovers. They’re also privateers – pirates – and they’re planning to run away together to a new life, after one last raid. But when Anne is knocked out cold, she comes around to find that the world that has changed disturbingly …

  Uncle Henry

  by Tricia Maw

  Amy didn’t fancy the usual drill of sitting in the pub all night long on Halloween, but she’s pretty perturbed when her friends dare her to spend the night at a creepy old castle instead. But a dare’s a dare, and she can’t back down now …

  Cemetery of the Two Princesses

  by Marie Laval

  Paulette’s father disappeared one night ten years ago, but her grandmother remains convinced that he’ll return. But Paulette’s mother has her doubts, and risks her mother-in-law’s wrath when she decides to remarry. When her mother suddenly becomes strangely ill, Paulette wonders just how far Grandmother would go to bring her only son home …

  All Hallows

  by Andrea Frazer

  While most of the Market Darley police enjoy a welcome Halloween night off, crime doesn’t just stop because the jack-o-lanterns are lit! DS Carmichael’s trick-or-treating is interrupted and he joins DI Falconer in investigating the strange case of a man found dead with a hollowed-out pumpkin jammed over his head …

  Curtains

  by David Rogers

  When love falls apart, and you’re driven to despair by betrayal, how long is too long to make your revenge last – how about eternity?

  The Pumpkin Hacker

  by Helena Fairfax

  Clive is in deep trouble when the special Halloween game he promises to code for a scratchcard company proves beyond his skill. Desperate, he promises his daughter Rosalie will be able to solve the problem. Rosalie struggles all night but can’t make the program work, until a strange-looking cleaner offers to help– in exchange for one of the winning scratchcards …

  Dead Ringer

  by Bill Kitson

  It’s All Hallows Eve in Lingfold village and two teenagers are up to something they shouldn’t be in the graveyard. But that’s soon forgotten about as a body is found – one that really shouldn’t be in that crypt! Who is he, and why was he killed?

  Contents

  Laying the Ghost

  Your Number’s Up

  The Dark Night of Dawn

  The Haunting of Anne Chambers

  Uncle Henry

  Cemetery of the Two Princesses

  All Hallows

  Curtains

  The Pumpkin Hacker

  Dead Ringer

  Laying the Ghost

  Christina Jones

  Mrs Pooh’s ghost was called Tyrone. Mrs Pooh, incidentally, wasn’t actually called Mrs Pooh. The misnomer had come about because Mrs Pooh’s first name was Winnie, and kiddies being kiddies had found it side-splittingly funny.

  Anyway, Tyrone had stomped cheerfully round the end cottage in Merryleggs Lane in the village of Ferny Fronds, for nigh on five hundred years, slamming the odd door, creaking the fourth stair down in the dead of night, stopping clocks. All the basics. The sort of thing that was expected of any self-respecting ghost. Nothing too over the top.

  Tyrone was well aware that, had he put his mind to it, he may well have graduated to howling or chain-rattling or – heaven’s above! – a spot of poltergeisting. The latter of course was a bit of a grey area since the EU Haunting Regulations had been introduced, and as Tyrone was exceedingly lazy and had always enjoyed a happy haunting relationship with the various incumbents of the cottage, it seemed foolish to attempt anything too new or strenuous.

  No, on the whole, Tyrone’s ghostly days had been mainly blissful.

  However, today, Tyrone was far from happy.

  Halloween. Again. A biggie in the ghost calendar, and the day that, in the twenty-first century, might just as well have been invented by Disney, given the amount of way-out costumes and vibrantly coloured accessories that appeared.

  No one, Tyrone thought irritably, had any idea of scary traditions any more. There was no old-fashioned decency these days in celebrating the most bloodcurdling date on the ‘things that go bump in the night’ calendar.

  And, even worse, now Mrs Pooh had her ‘I know you don’t want to hear this, but …’ face on. And that never, ever boded well.

  ‘Look, I know how you must feel, Ty.’ Mrs Pooh said, addressing a space about six inches above the mantelshelf. ‘But if you could just co-operate …’

  Tyrone, siting crossed-legged in the rocking chair, smothered an irritated tut. Why did Mrs Pooh always stare into space when she talked to him? Why did she always imagine he was floating? Had the woman any idea of how much energy a ghost wasted in floating?

  ‘I tried to tell them, Ty,’ she continued, fluffing fussily at the array of hollowed-out orange pumpkins on the windowsill. ‘But they wouldn’t listen. You know what children are …’

  Sure, Tyrone nodded laconically. He knew. They didn’t scare easily.

  ‘So, just to put the rumours to bed so to speak,’ Mrs Pooh spoke hopefully to the corner beside the china cabinet. ‘If you could just materialise tonight … what with it being Halloween and all … then they’d know and …’

  Materialise ? Tyrone nearly tumbled from the rocking chair. Dear God! The amount of energy involved in materialisation could lay him up for weeks.

  ‘Ty?’ Mrs Pooh smiled hopefully up at the pelmet. ‘Are you still there?’

  Yawning, stretching out a lethargic spectral hand, Tyrone made the kitchen door creak.

  ‘Oh, goody,’ Mrs Pooh beamed over at the refrigerator. ‘I’ve done my best to tell them what you look like, tried to scotch the rumours so to speak, but they were so impertinent …’

  Tyrone nodded. They usually were, children. But this slight was far more than impertinent. And Mrs Pooh was really not the best ambassador for this particular mission. It was doomed from the start.

  As Tyrone had never materialise
d in all his nearly-five-hundred years, and never seen himself before ghosting, he actually hadn’t any idea what he looked like. Vain as well as lazy, he knew full well that Mrs Pooh pictured him as a Tyrone Power look-alike – all Hollywood glistening swarthiness, macho moustache, and swashbuckling demeanour – and that was more than OK by him.

  It was certainly an improvement on the salacious rumours currently circulating the village.

  It was enough to break the strongest spirit, knowing that Ferny Frond’s pre-pubescents visualised him as the affable but less-than-glamorous put-upon bloke from Coronation Street …

  … And said so. Loudly. It was so rude. Tyrone was cut to the quick.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ty,’ Mrs Pooh stared across at the standard lamp, ‘but it’s getting me down. All those kiddies standing outside the cottage and shouting things. And now they think, because it’s Halloween, that you’ll appear and they’ll be able to say they’ve seen a ghost. So, maybe, you could just …?’

  Tyrone shuddered in horror and drifted to the sofa. He fluttered a hand towards the pumpkins and the candles flickered and died.

  ‘There! See!’ Mrs Pooh cried in delight. ‘You can do it! Now if you’d only materialise …’

  Tyrone fluttered his fingers again and re-lit the candles, then extinguished them quickly again with an angry, icy gust.

  ‘OK, if that’s the way you want it …’

  Mrs Pooh sighed, crammed her beret on to her sparse pink hair – Rampant Red it had said on the packet but on Mrs Pooh it was pink – fastened her cagoule to the chin, and picked up her best snap-clasp handbag. The Ferny Fronds children were getting her down and living with a sulky and uncooperative ghost was something she could really endure no longer.

  She needed help and she knew where to get it.

  ‘Won’t be long, Ty,’ she said gaily to the washing machine. ‘And don’t worry about it any more …’

  Tyrone waved a sleepy hand. Worrying was beyond him. Deep emotion exhausted even the youngest of spirits and, to be honest, solved nothing. Dead was dead. Why worry?

  Pushing her way into the snug bar of the Keg and Ferret, Mrs Pooh blinked at the plastic day-glo orange pumpkins, ducked under an entire cat’s-cradle of witches-and-black cats bunting, and frowned at the array of flashing skeletons along the bar.

  Maurice Footer, landlord of the only pub in Ferny Fronds, was doing Halloween in style.

  ‘Well, hello, Winnie!’ A seductively low female voice called from the corner table, making all the customers turn and stare. ‘We don’t often see you in here, do we?’

  ‘Er, no …’ Mrs Pooh gulped. ‘And actually I was looking for you. I’m so glad you’re here. I wanted to have a little word with you if that’s possible.’

  ‘’Course it is. Lovely to see you. Mine’s a brandy and Babycham!’

  Removing her cagoule in the tropical heat and tucking it untidily under her arm, Mrs Pooh took a deep breath and headed towards the snug’s darkest corner.

  Bella and Donna, the Nightshade sisters, were seated on either side of a rather sticky and ash-burned table.

  ‘Don’t sit down yet, Winnie,’ Bella chuckled throatily. ‘You forgot my brandy and Babycham.’

  ‘Actually, I’m not here to drink,’ Mrs Pooh twisted her fingers nervously. Close contact with the Nightshade sisters always made her uncomfortable.

  ‘Maybe you’re not here to drink,’ Bella said severely. ‘After all the whole of Ferny Fronds knows you’re just this side of tee-total, but we are. And Donna will have a champagne cocktail while you’re at it.’

  Oh, dear … Mrs Pooh swallowed anxiously. Her pension would hardly stretch to lemonade. She always made a few demi-johns of her own wine for Christmas. But that was as far as it went ‘No, look, honestly, I just need to talk to you …’

  ‘You talk away,’ Donna Nightshade, a vision in skin-tight Lycra and wet-look thigh boots, stood up, shaking out her mane of raven black hair. ‘I’ll get the drinks. Maybe just a small sweet sherry for you, Winnie? I believe even the Queen enjoys an aperitif …’

  ‘Well, I really shouldn’t …’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake!’ Bella said huskily, raising her voice above ‘Thriller’ belting from the juke box and hauling at her scarlet bra straps that seemed to be fighting a losing battle in supporting her pneumatic chest. ‘Everyone knows Maurice Footer’s sherry is a close second to flea’s wee. A bucketful of the stuff wouldn’t hurt a child.’

  ‘Actually,’ Mrs Pooh tightened her grip on her cagoule, ‘that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘Joined the Customs and Excise have you?’ Bella gurgled. ‘Waste of time, Winnie. Everyone in Ferny Fronds knows that Maurice Footer waters down.’

  ‘Not about the sherry,’ Mrs Pooh gnawed her narrow lips. ‘About children.’

  Bella flicked her luxurious platinum blonde curls away from her very made-up face and exhaled. ‘Really? Children? Don’t think I can help you there, Winnie. Me and Donna have managed to avoid motherhood and you … well, you’re well past childbearing age, surely? Now – if you want me to mix you some sort of potion I suppose I could … but honestly, what do you want to be doing with nappies and cack at your age?’

  Mrs Pooh blushed heavily. ‘Goodness no! Not children in that sense … oh, dear me no … No, not that area at all … It’s about what the children of Ferny Fronds are saying about my Tyrone …’

  ‘Ah – yes … that …’ Bella winked a heavily false-eyelashed eye. ‘I’ve heard that rumour myself. Very unkind.’

  ‘And now he’s gone sulky on me,’ Mrs Pooh gulped gratefully at the sherry Donna handed her. It was, as predicted, very, very weak. ‘And I’m so fed up with the whole business. I need the kiddies to know what he looks like, scotch the rumours so to speak, so that they leave us alone.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Donna nodded, her full lips teasing the surface of the champagne cocktail. ‘An unpleasant experience, a sulky ghost, and coupled with a horde of braying children …’ She shuddered. Most of her shimmied. All the men in the Keg and Ferret stopped drinking and stared happily. ‘But I’m not sure what you think we can do, Winnie.’

  ‘Er – well, I thought,’ Mrs Pooh’s prominent teeth clattered against her sherry glass. ‘I thought … I thought that you might be able to persuade him to materialise so that he’s visible for the first time, what with it being Halloween and all, and then the kiddies will stop calling him names and go away from my cottage and we can go back to nice peaceful living again and …’

  Bella leaned forward. The scarlet bra lost the battle with her bosoms. Several punters at the bar cheered. ‘And he’s refusing to co-operate and do it himself?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Pooh nodded. ‘Refuses point blank.’

  ‘Lazy little beggar!’ Donna gave a tinkling laugh. ‘Always had that reputation. And selfish, too, Winnie. A bad attitude, that boy. He should have been exorcized years since in my opinion.’

  ‘Oh, I think we could help you,’ Bella seductively crossed her legs in skin-tight denim, and downed her brandy and Babycham in one. ‘Don’t you, Donna?’

  Donna smiled sleepily. ‘Yes, I’m sure we could help Winnie out of her current predicament, yes. Especially with the aid of the magic whizzing around tonight …’

  ‘Off we go then,’ Bella stood up, displaying the bosoms to their full advantage as she pulled on a little leather jacket over her totally, in Mrs Pooh’s opinion, inadequate lace camisole. ‘Get that sherry down your neck, Winnie. There’s no time to waste.’

  Once outside the pub, Mrs Pooh shuddered in the chill October air. She couldn’t wait to reach the cottage and turn up the heating and snuggle into her slanket.

  ‘Hang on a sec,’ Bella called, still hovering in the Keg and Ferret’s porch. ‘I need a ciggie … bloody smoking ban … madness … what’s the point of a pub if you can’t have a ciggie or ten with your drinks, I ask you?’

  She flicked her lighter, the flame jumping in the darkness, inhaled, and sighe
d blissfully.

  Donna, towering above Mrs Pooh, chuckled. ‘Bella tried to give up when the smoking ban came in but even her expertise in spells and enchantments didn’t work … Nor did mine. It’s our only area of failure. Ever.’

  Mrs Pooh, whose late husband had enjoyed a pipe after his tea and a cigar at Christmas, nodded sagely. Luckily he’d never tried to give up his only pleasure. He’d have been hell to live with. A bit like Tyrone, only more bulky. And the smoking hadn’t been the cause of his demise. Five years earlier, an out-of-control pedalo at West Wittering had made Mrs Pooh a widow before she’d even unpacked the picnic hamper …

  Bella, puffing away happily, caught them up and they all linked arms along the High Street. Ferny Fronds was out in force, with little huddles of tiny tots dressed as fairies and witches and clutching plastic buckets for their spoils prancing excitedly up and down paths and coming away with the best sugar-rush goodies Poundland had to offer.

  ‘Trick or treat!’ A cluster of village teenagers demanded menacingly, blocking their way. ‘And we don’t want no cheap lollies or mini bars of mouldy chocolate neither. We wants money.’

  Mrs Pooh frowned at them. They were some of the children who had been making her life a misery.

  ‘Go away …’ she flapped at them with her capacious handbag. ‘Leave us alone.’

  ‘Gerroff,’ a pimply youth wearing designer labels and incongruous flashing devil’s horns sneered. ‘We ain’t scared of you, Winnie Pooh. Or your so-called ghost …’

  His cohorts laughed. ‘Who’d be scared of a ghost who looks like he should be in a soap opera? Silly Tyrone …’

  Another youth, stepped forward and sneered. ‘You give us some money or else!’

  ‘Or else what?’ Donna looked down on them from her huge height. The boots’ heels were what the fashion pages describe as skyscraper. ‘Or else what, little boy?’

  ‘It’s the chuffing Nightshade sisters!’ The first youth said, his voice cracking slightly. ‘Chuff! We ain’t scared of you, neither.’