Scary Tales to Tell in the Dark Read online

  SCARY TALES

  TO TELL IN THE DARK

  ANTHONY MASTERS

  To Robina, Mark, Vicky and Simon

  with much, much love

  Contents

  1 Nasty Nanny

  2 Kelpie

  3 Mountain Madness

  4 The Wrong Bus

  5 The Ghost Mirrors

  6 Number Nine

  7 The Green Man

  8 Time Trip

  9 The Haunted Gondola

  10 The Vampire

  The clock struck nine, the hollow booming echoing around the walls of the old mansion. Tim was sure he could hear something howling outside, but what could it be? It didn’t sound like a dog and there weren’t any wolves in England, were there?

  It was Christmas Eve, and the sixteen of them were lying in sleeping-bags, warmed by the embers of the dying fire in the great hearth. Sometimes a spark soared up the chimney; occasionally there was a hiss as a splutter of flame was rekindled. In the distance they could all hear the adults enjoying themselves. There were the clink of glasses, the odd shout of laughter and the tinkling of the grand piano.

  The house creaked and groaned in the rising wind like the timbers of an old ship. It’s almost as if it’s alive, thought Tim, and shivered. It wasn’t the pleasant-est of thoughts, but he also knew they were lucky to be here. Sometimes Christmas could be boring, with Dad asleep in his chair after lunch, Mum bad-tempered after cooking the turkey and Grandad telling his silly jokes. But this year, Lucy’s parents had invited all their old friends (made over many years) and their children to an all-night party at Ramsden House. They were all together and they were going to have a wonderful time.

  ‘Let’s tell ghost stories,’ said Lucy.

  There was a gasp of nervous expectation.

  ‘What a great idea,’ whispered Tom.

  ‘The scarier the better,’ said someone Tim couldn’t really identify in the dark.

  ‘I’ll start.’ Lucy was firm. Fair enough, thought Tim. Ramsden House belonged to her parents, and there couldn’t be a better background for a ghost story. It was a great barn of a place, standing in remote countryside on the edge of Exmoor, and with its towers and battlements and small latticed windows it looked like an old blind monster slumbering on the moorlands. They hadn’t explored the inside properly yet, but Tim had already been knocked out by the sweeping staircase, the long, silent corridors and the minstrels’ gallery overlooking the great hall with its rows of portraits of Lucy’s ancestors. He was sure that the house must have secret rooms and at least one ghost.

  ‘I’m going to tell a story about the house,’ said Lucy, and Tim felt a wave of triumph. So he was right. This was going to be terrific. A rustle of anticipation went round every sleeping-bag as the charred logs in the fireplace snapped and groaned and Lucy began her story.

  1

  Nasty Nanny

  I’ve had lots of nannies. It’s not because my parents are rich - they’re not, and it’s a big struggle to keep Rams-den House going – but because Dad’s been away in the army and Mum’s been trying to open the house to visitors, so it isn’t possible for them to look after me all the time. I’ve got a nice nanny now, Nanny Barlow – she’s downstairs at the party - but last year I had a really nasty one. She was called Nanny Morris and she was awful, but awful in a special way. It took me a while to find that out, because at first she seemed quite kind.

  I’ll never forget the day she arrived. It was February and really cold and blustery. I’d been waiting for her to come, watching from the round window in my room that overlooks the drive. It was late afternoon and the light was just going and all the distances seemed funny. You know what I mean – it’s that time when you can’t quite see how near or far anything is. I’d wanted to see her walking up the drive – that’s how I check out all nannies. You can often see what they’re like just by the way they walk. That little scurrying run with the head down means she’ll be nervous and anxious to please, so I know I can boss her around all the time and get my own way. The one in the big coat and boots with very stiff shoulders is always more difficult; she’ll definitely shout a lot and expect her orders to be obeyed, so I’ll have to be careful and do things behind her back. Then there’s the tall, thin one who picks her feet up neatly; I always know she’s going to be fussy. But this one – well, she wasn’t like any of the others at all. She – she kind of appeared half-way up the drive without me seeing her, as if she’d just dropped out of the sky. One moment the dead leaves were swirling up the gravel, the next she was walking – well, more like gliding – up to the front door. It was extraordinary, but I thought I must have lost concentration or something.

  She was very tall and skinny, and she wore this black hat and coat and I couldn’t hear her footsteps, even when I opened the window. She looked up and I honestly thought I could see the wind in her eyes; they were all wild and milky and stary. It was weird.

  She knocked at the door and Mum opened it. I crept out into the corridor and heard them talking in the hall. Their voices were very soft and it was almost as if they were whispering. Then I realized that Mum had lowered her voice because the new nanny kind of breathed her words; it was strange to listen to, but once I’d got used to it I could make out what she was saying all right.

  ‘Well, I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Morris. Have you come far?’

  ‘Far enough, my dear,’ the new nanny replied mysteriously.

  Nervously, Mum rushed on. ‘I know the agency recommended you highly, but you’ve brought your references, of course.’

  ‘Here they are,’ breathed Miss Morris. ‘I think you’ll find them all in order.’

  I could hear Mum riffling through them very quickly. Then I heard her say, ‘Well, they seem to be excellent. I wasn’t told you’d worked for someone like Lord Aber-crombie.’

  ‘Oh yes, an excellent gentleman.’ She spoke a little louder, as if she was making sure that Mum knew she was in charge. ‘Now, can I see my little girl?’ Her voice was still low but sharp as a needle. A chill swept over me; I didn’t like that voice one bit.

  ‘Of course.’ Mum seemed quite cowed and I could soon hear their shoes rapping up the sweeping wooden stairs. I hurried back into my bedroom and sat on the bed, feeling odd. Something strange was happening, but what was it? Or could it just be my imagination?

  But when the door opened I felt even worse. The air in the room suddenly seemed much colder, and as Nanny Morris stood on the threshold in her long, dark clothes I was quite certain that she was – different.

  ‘This is Miss Morris – the – your new nanny.’ Mum stuttered and stumbled over her words, which is most unusual for her, and Nanny Morris smiled in a wintry way. Her face was very long and her nose was very sharp. In fact it was so sharp it was more like a beak than a nose. I stared at it, fascinated, the chill inside me spreading even further up my body.

  ‘You look a nice little girl.’ Her voice was like ice, but Mum didn’t seem to notice. In fact she was looking much calmer now, as if she was sure that Nanny Morris and I were going to get along.

  ‘Shall I leave you two alone?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘Yes please,’ replied Nanny Morris with a great big, cold smile that displayed two rows of huge, shiny, well-brushed, tombstone teeth. ‘Then we can get to know each other, can’t we, Lucy?’

  I nodded dumbly, while inside my mind a voice screamed, Who are you? What do you want?

  As soon as Mum had gone Nanny Morris’s smile disappeared abruptly and she sat down heavily in a big basket chair, which creaked alarmingly. Then she kicked off her shoes to reveal some very large feet clad in black stockings. She wriggled her toes and sighed as if I was
n’t there. After a while Nanny Morris spoke again. ‘Well, Lucy?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you going to be a good little girl?’ There was a decided threat in her voice, which was low-pitched and still very cold.

  I shivered. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Because I’m going to teach you things. That’s what I’m here for.’

  I nodded obediently, wondering what she was going to teach me, because she hadn’t been hired to give me lessons – just to look after me. After all, I went to St Elmers, like most of my friends.

  Anyway, for a few days it was all a bit of a let-down, because although she stayed pretty weird nothing out of the ordinary happened. I went to school, came home, Nanny Morris got me my tea, supervised my homework and we would play cards before I went to bed. I even got used to her funny whispering sort of voice, and that long, pale face of hers.

  She could be quite entertaining too. Before I went to sleep, she would sit on the edge of my bed and tell extraordinary stories of places where she had worked and people she had worked for: Crown princes and lords and ladies, dukes and sheikhs and even a Texan oil millionaire. I didn’t really believe her but they were good stories – almost like fairy stories. One odd thing though: none of the stories ever really ended properly; they were always cut off, as if she had left the job she was in very abruptly.

  However, as the days passed her stories changed; they didn’t centre on all the people she’d worked for any more but were about how she’d walked in woods and old gardens, over moors and mountains, where she’d met gnomes and witches and trolls and hobgoblins. Of course, I knew she was making it all up, but her new stories were weird and frightening, about all the dark doings of the little people, and I found myself getting more and more scared. I think it was the look in her eyes that frightened me most; they were all smoky and misty, and when they rested on me I felt cold and had to snuggle right down in the bed and pull the blankets up hard. And the trouble was that once she’d left I felt she was still there, or at least her eyes were still coldly boring into me. I soon began to dream, and in my dreams I glimpsed the same mist that was in her eyes. Slowly it parted and I saw strange lands in which there were centaurs – half horse and half human – and pale gold unicorns and birds with crowns and beards and goblin-eating fish and fish-eating goblins and a desert full of trolls and mountain slopes running with honey and dark things on the peaks; things too horrible to think about.

  One night, when both my parents were away for the first time and Nanny Morris and I were alone in the house, I felt more frightened than ever. I knew something special was up because her whispering voice seemed sharper and she kept smiling to herself as she prepared a special tea. There were four different kinds of sandwiches, doughnuts, biscuits, jam tarts and a huge fruit-cake.

  I looked down at the feast suspiciously and then caught Nanny Morris’s eye. Her face was still stretched in that fixed, secret smile and I knew I had to ask her.

  ‘Nanny Morris -’ I began.

  ‘Yes, my dear.’

  She’d never called me that before and the words had a strange ring to them. ‘Er, is tonight special?’

  ‘Yes, it’s very special.’ The whisper was pencil-sharp.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re celebrating.’

  ‘Celebrating what?’

  ‘I’ve finished my book,’ she said triumphantly.

  I stared at her, thoroughly mystified. ‘What book?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s my little secret. I’ve been writing a book. Sit down and eat up.’

  ‘All right.’ I did as she told me and attacked the delicious chunky sandwiches while she sank her big tombstone teeth into a doughnut. Bright-red jam spattered over her chin as she said, ‘I’ll read it to you later.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ I asked, my mouth full. Normally Nanny Morris would have told me off, but she didn’t seem to notice and was obviously intent on gorging herself on doughnuts.

  ‘We’ll go in the library later,’ she said as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘That’s the right place for reading books.’

  ‘It’ll be freezing in there,’ I protested. The library is a big spooky room full of large, dusty, leather-bound volumes containing an army of marauding black spiders just watching their opportunity to scuttle up your arm. Yuk.

  ‘I’ve lighted a fire,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll have a nice cosy read.’

  When we got down there, the library was in half-darkness, just lit by the flickering flames, and I could somehow feel the spiders everywhere, although I couldn’t see them. Nanny Morris sat on a stool by the fire, her big bony knees making her skirt look like a twin-peaked mountainside, and pulled a book with a purple cover out of her old sewing-bag.

  ‘You wrote that?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘It’s called Nanny’s Dark Directory.’

  ‘Like a telephone directory?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘Not exactly, dear. It’s more like a – a geography book. Now don’t say any more – I’m going to read it to you and show you some pictures. Sit at my feet like a good girl.’

  I caught a glimpse of spidery handwriting and brightly coloured pictures, but Nanny Morris held the book high above my head so I couldn’t really see and began to read in her soft spider’s-web of a voice.

  ‘Dear Reader,’ began Nanny Morris, ‘let us take a magical journey to the dark lands where all the little folk – every troll and goblin, leprechaun and elf, imp and banshee, gnome and ghoul, hobgoblin and boggard, werewolf and fiend – are waiting to play with you. There are castles in the air and a cloud wilderness, marshes and swamps and a desert of magical dust. My will-o’-the-wisp will guide you through the dark lands. Look, Lucy, he’s popped out of the book already. He must be keen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There – he’s in the fireplace.’

  I had the shock of my life when I gazed into the hearth, for just in front of the dancing flames was a little figure – more like a glow-worm than anything else, but with tiny hands and feet and a minute head that I could just make out. It – or he – or whatever – danced up and down on the ancient bricks. Was it just a spark from the coals, I wondered. But no, it was dancing towards us and stopped, poised on tiny feet, just in front of me, looking up with the most venomous pair of eyes I had ever seen in my life. They were red and bloodshot and flames seemed to leap behind the minute pupils. Its lips were parted in a snarl and its breath was like rotten fruit. I leapt to my feet with a scream, but Nanny Morris’s strong, skeletal fingers were on my shoulders, forcing me to sit back down at her horny feet. Meanwhile the will-o’-the-wisp gave a horrible, jarring, metallic laugh and smoke came out of its ears.

  ‘Stay there,’ Nanny Morris snapped. ‘Don’t move.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ I yelled.

  ‘I’m releasing my prisoners,’ she said, and laughed in the same horrible metallic way as the will-o’-the-wisp had. It was like the scraping of a chair across the floor or the sound of a skewer running down a blackboard.

  ‘You’re a witch, aren’t you?’ I said suddenly, and this time the by now familiar chill flooded right over me.

  She nodded. ‘I come from a coven that’s able to penetrate the dark lands.’ Her voice was as cold and menacing as an Arctic night.

  ‘What do you want with me?’

  ‘No one believes in fairies any more,’ she said. ‘So none of the dark lands’ creatures can haunt anyone now. But I had this brilliant idea, and on my last visit I caught some and captured them in my book. Now I can start releasing them and people are bound to believe in what they see, aren’t they?’ She laughed silkily.

  ‘How are you going to release them then?’ I asked, trembling all over but determined not to give in completely.

  ‘It’s not been easy,’ she confided. ‘I’ve been nanny to child after child and do you know what, Lucy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘None of them had any imagination – not
like you.’ Somehow she made the compliment seem the most threatening thing I had ever heard.

  ‘But did they need any?’ I asked crossly. ‘You said these creatures really existed.’

  ‘They do.’ She wrinkled up her long, sharp nose. ‘But they have to be summoned up, by the imagination. And do you know, you’re the first little girl I’ve come across so far who’s got one. I mean, look at that will-o’-the-wisp.’

  As she spoke the will-o’-the-wisp danced up to me again and spat, and the spittle ran down my jeans, smelling of vinegar. Then he laughed his metallic laugh again and danced back into the hearth.

  ‘So, as I say, I’m able to release my prisoners, for their own good. They should be very grateful to me, in the end.’

  ‘And what about me?’ I asked indignantly.

  ‘Oh, you’ll be all right. They won’t all stay here, you know. They’ll want to explore.’

  I shuddered, trying not to think about the creatures of the dark lands and what they might do to my family and my home, in case by doing so I released them from Nanny Morris’s book.

  ‘Nanny Morris?’ I said at last.

  ‘Yes, my dear?’

  ‘What would put them back in your book? What would make you have to kidnap them all over again – and take them back to the dark lands?’

  She laughed uproariously, as if I had made a very good joke, and the will-o’-the-wisp spluttered out more vinegar and clapped its tiny, scaly hands together with a sound like old, dry, cracked leather.

  ‘The only thing that would force me to collect them up again is if people weren’t frightened of them, and that’s not very likely, is it? Watch out – there’s another one coming.’

  Over the top of the book a truly dreadful apparition peered out and I screamed again and again and again. What was it? I can only vaguely remember now. It had the head of a rat, the face of an old man and instead of a nose it had a wriggling worm. The thing winked at me, leering with its wizened little blackcurrant eyes.