Scary Tales to Tell in the Dark Read online

‘Now look what you’ve summoned up,’ cackled Nanny Morris. ‘But I’m sure your imagination can release some even nastier things than that.’

  The creature disappeared behind the page. ‘What was it?’ I whispered.

  ‘Hobgoblin,’ she replied. ‘Rat-head type – usually found in the Fanged Forest. I had quite a time collecting him.’

  I nodded. I was sure she had.

  Then something scuttled behind me, something that sounded as if it had a good number of legs. I didn’t dare to look round. Suddenly I caught sight of a scaly tail swinging behind a picture, and although I tried to glance away I saw a bloated face with four eyes, two mouths and what looked like another eye on top of its head. All were swivelling wildly.

  ‘Boggard,’ said Nanny Morris gleefully. ‘Caught in the Yellow Swamp.’

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said, determined not to allow any more of these horrors out of the pages of the book.

  ‘Sweet dreams.’ She smiled.

  I hurried out of the library, knowing that it was all only just beginning. The blood pounded in my head and I was shivering all over, but when I reached my room all was as usual and gradually the trembling began to stop. Maybe they weren’t as powerful as she said; maybe I didn’t have as much imagination as she thought – either way I was silently relieved, and the longer I just sat quietly on the bed, the more relaxed I felt.

  Ten minutes later I was still sitting there, feeling better and better. Possibly the creatures and the book didn’t exist at all. Had Nanny Morris hypnotized me in some way just to give me a scare? Well, my parents would be home in the morning and I’d tell them. Then they would sack her, and good riddance.

  I yawned, undressed and put on my pyjamas. It would be lovely in bed, warm and comfortable, and I would be able to forget this living nightmare. But when I twitched back the duvet, the scream bubbled up into my throat.

  There were six of them, small gnomes with entwined tails and black, hairy faces. They were lying on the pillow, making a terrible grinding noise with their teeth, and the smell was awful. Then suddenly I heard a whirring sound, rather like a broken clockwork mouse, and out from underneath the bed slipped a banshee and a ghoul. I can’t tell you which was the more foul, but they were hand in hand, grinning as if I was going to like what I saw.

  ‘Go away,’ I said feebly, but they advanced on me instead, while the miniature gnomes on the pillow continued to grind their teeth. ‘Go away!’ I yelled, but they continued advancing on me until I was giving out little yelps of fear. I had tucked myself under the windowsill, but they kept on coming, the banshee all wavy and wafty with no lips and blackened teeth, and the ghoul dead white with a long face and great darting eyes. Its tongue kept flicking out towards me, like a snake, and there was something on the tip of it. Then I saw that it was a very large, black, leggy spider that looked poised to spring.

  I wasn’t screaming now, just whimpering somewhere deep down, and I knew I was going to be sick. A small, scruffy elf with a dirty face and tousled hair was swinging on my favourite picture of my parents. Then the picture string broke and the elf and the frame plunged down in a wreckage of smashing glass.

  In my desperation an idea came to me. Suppose, just suppose, I could destroy Nanny Morris’s directory. Would there be a chance then of all its recently released captives being returned to where they came from? It was an outside chance, but I had to take the risk.

  I pounded down the great staircase towards the library, but as I reached the foot of the stairs, I was greeted by the most amazing sight: the whole of the hallway was filled with flying, gibbering, hideous little creatures from the dark lands, all waving and grunting and calling to me at the same time.

  I wrenched open the library door to see dozens of weird and terrifying creatures filling the room, standing, crouching, flying, crawling in a semicircle around Nanny Morris. I could see her large feet, long black skirt, powerful arms – but her head was no longer there. Instead she had the head of a huge goblin with protruding eyes and hard lips that looked as if they had been made out of dead wood.

  Instinctively I ran for the book and, taking the goblin off guard, I snatched the directory out of its horny hands. With a cry of triumph I pushed the goblin away and threw the book into the flames. Somehow I knew this was the right thing to do, for at least I had deprived the inhabitants of the dark lands of their means of transport. But I hadn’t realized I’d also deprived them of a home, of their very existence – for there came a series of wild shrieks and guttural cries as the creatures began to shrivel up, just as though they themselves were burning. In a very short time they were dried husks lying on the floor and soon they were dust, blown hither and thither in the draught from the long library windows. When I looked up, I saw Nanny Morris’s goblin head was growing larger and larger by the second.

  ‘You’ll pay for this,’ she screamed as she watched the directory burning in the roaring fire

  Then, to my horror and amazement, her pumpkinlike head exploded and the flames leapt out from the fire and seized Nanny Morris’s body. In seconds she melted before my eyes to a pool of oily water on the library carpet. Then the pool evaporated and there was nothing there at all to show that she had ever existed.

  Lucy walked through the firelit shadows to a desk. She opened it and rummaged in a drawer. Then she brought out a small, flat box and opened it.

  ‘What’s in there?’ asked Roger.

  ‘It’s the front cover–’ began Annie.

  ‘Of a book,’ said Lucy as she held it up.

  They all stared hard at the partly burnt binding. Then Roger slowly read: ‘Nanny’s Dark Directory’.

  ‘I thought I’d keep it as a souvenir,’ said Lucy quietly.

  ‘I’ve got the next one,’ said Derek. ‘It’s a bit out in the wilds, right out in Shetland in fact.’

  2

  Kelpie

  It all started when George disappeared from an island off Shetland. Everyone thought he’d drowned, until the message in the whisky bottle was washed up on the beach; the sea is very wild and treacherous round that coast and it’s easy to get cut off by the tide. But the writing was clearly George’s, although no one could understand the message at all. Written on a scrap of paper from his Filofax, it read: It’s started. God help me. I know ... Then the writing faded away into a scrawl and petered out. There weren’t any other clues at all.

  George was a TV producer and he was my dad’s best friend. We’ve got this farm in Devon and George and his daughter Becky always used to come for their summer holidays. His wife had walked out on him years ago and he’d brought Becky up on his own. They were devoted to one another, and when George disappeared, Becky came to live with us. It was a real tragedy. Becky was heart-broken, and although we tried to look after her as best we could, I thought she’d never stop being unhappy.

  But it was Dad as well as Becky who really worried me and Mum. He and George had been childhood friends and I knew they were very close, but ever since the bottle had been washed up on the beach, about two weeks after George’s disappearance, Dad had been acting strangely. Apart from being grief-stricken, there was something else – a peculiar restlessness about him. He went for long walks, was very silent, and kept sitting on his own, as if he was trying to puzzle something out.

  Then one September evening he said to us all at supper, ‘I’m going up to Shetland.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Mum, looking very worried.

  ‘There are some things about George’s death I’m not satisfied about.’

  ‘What things?’ said Becky. But she looked more hopeful than afraid, as if any new information about her father might somehow keep his memory more alive.

  ‘Just things,’ he said vaguely. Dad could be like that; he was one of those people very much in touch with the earth, as if the fields and the trees and the wind gave him a special knowledge. He’d never done anything other than farming, and his father before him, and his father before him – and so on. It went right back in t
he family for hundreds of years. I saw Mum looking at Dad in that special way of hers; she knew and understood him better than anyone.

  ‘I want to go with you,’ said Becky suddenly, with characteristic determination. She was just like her father in that way. Once she had decided to do something, she had decided to do it, and that was that.

  ‘Then I’m going too,’ I insisted.

  ‘You’ll miss school,’ Dad protested.

  ‘Great,’ I replied.

  ‘I think you should all go,’ said Mum slowly, and I knew she felt it would do Becky good – help her come to terms with her father’s death – and anyway, once my dad had had one of his hunches there was no stopping him. He’d done it before. For instance, he had been certain that the tide would breach the sea wall at Break-mouth – had tried and tried to get it strengthened – and was still arguing with the council when the sea broke through. They were all very sheepish about it. Dad had had another of his hunches about an old abandoned quarry, used as an unofficial children’s playground. He was suddenly quite sure that the sides were unsafe. Sure enough, one of them caved in and it was only luck that saved the children there. So we all took Dad’s hunches very seriously.

  ‘You three go – and I’ll look after the farm,’ volunteered Mum, and Dad smiled at her gratefully.

  ‘We shan’t be gone long,’ he promised. ‘Just for a few days. It won’t take much time for me to -’ and his voice had died away in that irritating way it had when he was concealing an unthought-out theory.

  George had been up in Shetland doing some research on one of his TV programmes. They were usually terrific; often about creatures in some far-away place – mysterious and haunting. He’d done programmes about sharks on a Pacific reef, elephants in the depths of Africa, wild dogs in Australia and some strange little hummingbirds in Paraguay. But no one, not even Becky, had really known what he had been doing in Shetland.

  ‘Something about seals,’ she had told me. ‘But he was very secretive about it – which is pretty odd. I mean, he’s not usually like that. And, Derek – I know he’s still there. I can feel him.’

  I wondered if she’d got my father’s gift of ‘hunches’ but I didn’t really know, so I had mixed feelings about the trip to Shetland, which is one big island and lots of little ones off the east coast of Scotland. I was partly glad to be going because I thought the journey might help Becky – even if it was a sad one – but I also wanted to go because I had loved George dearly. Apart from being a really exciting person, he was a very kind one, and I knew that he had been fond of us all.

  We flew to Aberdeen and then on a propeller aircraft to Lerwick. Directly we arrived on Shetland I knew we were in a wilderness. There were hardly any trees, just mile after mile of wind-blown open land with lochs and mysterious ruins and great craggy cliffs soaring up above a lashing sea.

  From Shetland we went in a ferry to Sula, a tiny uninhabited island just off the coast – uninhabited except for Macleish, a hermit who lived in a ramshackle cottage practically on the beach of a small bay. He had allowed George to put up a tent on the spiky grass on a ridge behind his house, and he was going to allow the three of us to do the same. All this had been organized by a hotel owner on the mainland who knew Macleish and had this to say about him: ‘We don’t even know his first name – no one does; he’s been on Sula for years, entirely on his own. Weird old man. Hardly speaks and roams the island day and night. He’s got a few sheep. Does a bit of fishing and grows a few potatoes. Completely self-sufficient. Wouldn’t say a word about George’s disappearance.’

  Once the ferry left we all felt a bit lost, as if we shouldn’t be there. Like Dad, I was used to the sounds of the countryside at night, but this was different. The sighing of the waves on the rocks, the shriek of the gulls, the roaring of the sea in a cave, the whining of the coming night wind, all made me feel unwanted, as if we were trespassing.

  Dad went and knocked on Macleish’s battered old wooden door and Becky and I waited anxiously, wondering if he would be unfriendly or even aggressive. But instead, when he had withdrawn an amazing number of bolts and opened the door, Macleish turned out to be a very fragile old man with rheumy eyes and long, lank, snow-white hair. He looks a bit like a ragged old seagull, I thought, and for that reason he made me shudder. His hands and face looked clammy, as if he was running a fever; there was perspiration on his forehead despite the chill of the night air.

  ‘What do you want?’ His accent was broad but he enunciated the words very precisely, as if he was speaking to three foreigners and was determined that they should understand him.

  ‘You said – the hotel said –’ Dad began to muddle up his words, as he often did when he was nervous. I could have screamed because the old man stared at him as if he was barmy, and I could feel Becky getting very tense beside me. ‘The Glen Hotel – Mr Ferguson – he said you wouldn’t mind if I put up a tent.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘A tent. We want to put up a tent.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘It’s rather windy,’ said Becky. ‘We’ve got to sleep somewhere.’

  ‘Aye.’ He seemed to see the reason for the tent at last. ‘Well … you’ll put it behind the house where Mr Patrick had his. Poor devil.’

  ‘He’s my father. What happened to him?’ Becky’s voice trembled and I really admired her for the way she spoke up. It took guts.

  ‘The sea took him.’

  ‘Just like that?’ asked Dad.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Macleish gazed at him quizzically.

  ‘Do you know any more?’ translated Becky.

  Macleish turned to her and smiled gently. He seemed to be much more at ease with her. ‘It’s a wicked coast.’

  ‘Did you see anything?’ she insisted. Again there was that slight tremble in her voice, but the old man didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘What should I have seen?’

  ‘Anything strange.’

  ‘There are many strange things,’ he said. ‘Particularly on Sula.’

  ‘What sort of things?’ She was very persistent.

  ‘Legends. Myths. The Norsemen were here, you know, with their magic. But there’s old magic too.’ He seemed to be speaking only for her, totally ignoring Dad and me as if we’d suddenly stopped existing.

  ‘What sort of old magic?’

  ‘Kelpies. The seal people. They’re here, you know. That’s what your father came about. It was a mistake.’ His voice died away.

  ‘Why?’ Becky was still persistent.

  ‘You mustn’t look. If you do –’

  ‘Look at what?’

  ‘The kelpie.’ He cleared his throat as the wind got up. ‘Away and pitch your tent,’ he said dismissively. ‘Go and get under cover. I don’t like the wind.’

  ‘Don’t like it?’ I said, speaking for the first time.

  ‘It’s a kelpie wind,’ he replied, and slammed the wooden door shut in our faces.

  We pitched the tent with some difficulty in the gusty weather and tried to make ourselves comfortable inside it. Above the wind there was a new sound – a kind of hollow booming.

  ‘The sea comes in underneath us somewhere,’ said Dad, trying to boil a kettle under the awning. I shivered; it was frightening to think of the thousands of tonnes of churning water thundering about below us. I imagined being trapped in a cave, caught by the tide, waiting to drown. Had something like that happened to George? I looked across the shadowed walls of the tent at Becky, wondering if she was thinking the same thing, but she was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin, her head down, and I couldn’t see her expression.

  Suddenly she stiffened and looked up. ‘What’s that?’

  I tried to listen but all I could hear was the booming. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘Listen.’ She was absolutely rigid and I wondered if she was ill. ‘They’re calling,’ she said.

  ‘Who are?’ For a moment I thought she must have been asleep, but when I saw her eyes so wide and in
tent I decided that she hadn’t.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Dad, peering into the tent as he poured out the tea at last and opened up packets of rather battered-looking sandwiches.

  ‘Becky’s heard something –’

  ‘The sea,’ he muttered.

  ‘No,’ I replied, staring at Becky in concern. ‘It was something else.’ There was a light in her eye that was unearthly, horrible, inhuman, and I stood up, bumping my head against a tent-pole.

  She looked up at me and smiled. ‘Now you can hear it, Derek.’ Her voice was barely recognizable – a hoarse half-whisper that was deep and animal-like.

  Appalled, I was about to call out to Dad when I heard it – a cry that came from beneath us, a cry that really terrified me. There was definitely something human in it, but not much; the rest was a haunting, animal-like yearning, and when I looked at Becky my terror grew, for she was half-crouched, her eyes filled with longing. Then she, too, made the cry, which seemed much more despairing, much more fearful.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ asked Dad, blundering into the tent and sending a couple of rucksacks flying.

  ‘It’s Becky. She’s ill.’

  ‘Becky –’ But she had her hands up and her teeth gleamed in the darkness.

  ‘Kall Kallandis.’ Now she was talking gibberish, but it was gibberish in a hard, grating language that once again was not entirely human. ‘Kall Kallandis,’ she yelled. ‘Kallandis Raman.’

  As Dad and I stood there, gazing at Becky in amazement, the tent flap was pushed aside and I saw the mad eyes of Macleish, his face chalk-white in the bright moonlight. ‘Who gives the call?’ he cried.

  Dad whirled round. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Becky – she’s ill. Not herself.’

  ‘She gave the call.’

  ‘What call?’ yelled Dad.

  ‘The kelpie. The call of the kelpie.’

  ‘What rubbish!’

  I turned back to her, and cried out in fear, for Becky was gazing up at Macleish in a strange kind of awe and wonderment and her beautiful big eyes were shining with joy. ‘Raman,’ she shouted. ‘Master.’