Amie's House E-Book

Ilona Galvagni

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 76

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Quite unexpectedly, Julie inherits an old, decrepit house in a remote part of Wales. On the spur of the moment, Julie decides to move in but she soon realises that she and her cat are not alone in the house. There seems to be another occupant who she never gets to see. She can't make any sense of the strange and terrifying things which happen and which drive her to the brink of insanity. Eventually, Julie understands that she is caught in a cruel game, and there can be only one winner. Will it be her?

Leseprobe

Amie's House is the author's second book. Her debut novel Ruhelose Seelen – Kann ein Verfluchter jemals glücklich sein? was published in German in 2018 (ISBN: 9783748108917). An English translation is in progress.

For my Welsh friends Julie and Amie whose childhood memories of their haunted house inspired me to this book and who are happy for me to use their names in it.*

* All other names and all places are fictional. Any similarities are entirely coincidental.

Done! What a relief! Julie straightened up, wiped her hands on her jeans and rubbed her aching back. The last cardboard box was unpacked, the last cupboard stocked with crockery. Finally the move was complete.

She cast an approving look around the oldfashioned but quite spacious kitchen. Her very own kitchen in her new home. The manor had been built in 1901 and she had unexpectedly inherited it from a great-aunt of whose existence she had not had the faintest idea. She considered it a bit of an exaggeration to call the house a manor. It was a large house and definitely very old but she didn't find it very impressive. Anyway, that was its name. Maenor Tywyll. Welsh for »Dark Manor«. She found the name a bit creepy and tried not to think too much about why it may have been given it all those years ago. It was definitely dark and also a bit gloomy, both inside and out.

As she was always strapped for cash, she moved in right away instead of refurbishing or modernising anything first. As long as she could save the expensive rent for her city apartment, the renovations could wait.

So here she would live now, in the small village of Gwyllin, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the most northerly part of Wales. In a small valley, surrounded by rough nature and high mountains. She would have to get used to that. After having lived in a tiny and very overpriced apartment in the centre of Cardiff, the capital of Wales, this was a huge change.

Being a freelance translator, luckily she could work from anywhere in the world as long as she had an internet connection. Conversely, this meant that she could not work initially as this ramshackle pile didn't even have a telephone line, let alone Wi-Fi. She had not considered this fact and when it finally occurred to her, she had already terminated the lease of her tiny studio apartment in Cardiff. She may have been a bit rash and impulsive there once again, as she often was. The prospect of her own big house embedded in a romantic landscape had simply been too overwhelming.

Oh well. Now she'd saved the rent but had no income either. She could only hope that she would soon be provided with telephone and an internet connection. At least she had applied for it.

She jolted from her thoughts when she heard a clank behind her. She turned and sighed when she spotted the old rusty soup ladle lying on the floor. Siyah seemed to behave as badly here as she had behaved in Cardiff, only that this house offered her much more space and the possibility for mischief. She'd rather not think about this yet.

She had taken in Siyah, her old pitch-black cat, as a kitten after her mother had been run over by a car. She had spent many a night nursing and bottle feeding the kitten. Fortunately, the tiny cat had survived and Julie had named her Siyah as according to her research that was the Turkish word for »black«.

Julie adored her. It always annoyed her, however, that the cat did not care at all about the fact that she was, in theory, banned from walking and sitting on the kitchen counter and table. She did it anyway. Sometimes Julie even felt like she did it on purpose because she knew she was not allowed to. Siyah was 13 years old and if she hadn't learnt it by now, she never would. Julie was resigned to that. The cat simply was more pigheaded than herself. There was nothing to be done about it.

One moment later, Siyah came strolling into the kitchen with her head held high, loudly meowing for her dinner. Right, her food was long overdue. Julie had been so busy with unpacking the boxes and stocking the cupboards that she had lost track of time. As soon as she had filled Siyah's bowl with her nightly ration of food and put it on the floor, the cat came running up excitedly and started eating happily while purring loudly.

»Enjoy. I hope you like it. Your first meal in our new home. « Julie said and lovingly petted the cat's dark fur.

Julie stretched and yawned. She should eat something herself. After this long relocation day she was starving but she was way too tired to take on that antiquated monstrosity of a cooker. She would postpone that challenge to tomorrow. For today, all she wanted was sleep.

Somewhat exhausted, she climbed the creaky old wooden staircase leading to the upper floor. The last thing that crossed her mind before she fell sleep was that she would have to renovate that staircase.

Julie opened her eyes, confused and caught in a state somewhere between sleep and being awake. It was pitch-dark around her, so it had to be the middle of the night. She had neither closed the worm-eaten wooden shutters nor the moth-eaten curtains before going to bed and yet not the slightest ray of light entered her bedroom.

Why had she woken? She listened to the silence and heard nothing. Oh well, back to sleep. Julie nestled back down in the worn mattress, pulling the way too thick blanket up to her nose. Suddenly she heard it again. The noise that must have woken her. It sounded like….footsteps. Heavy, shuffling irregular footsteps. And they seemed to come from above. From the ceiling.

What was up there? Nothing but the attic. Had someone broken in and was searching the old attic for valuables? That was possible. The house looked a bit run-down from the outside and had stood empty for a long time. There were no direct neighbours and it was highly likely that nobody had noticed that someone had moved in. Maybe some youngsters were using her attic as their nightly den?

Should she call the police? Oh, damn! She couldn't. A bit difficult without landline or mobile phone signal. Swearing under her breath, she switched on the bedside lamp – a hideous fringed thing made of a fabric that had once likely been white but had long since yellowed. She swung her legs out of bed, put on her slippers and, wrapped up in the fluffy dressing gown she had laid out for the coming morning, she opened the bedroom door as quietly as possible and listened. She heard nothing for a moment, then the footsteps resumed their walk across the attic.

What should she do? She would have to check who was up there but she didn't have the courage to do it. What if the burglar was armed? She returned to the bedroom, looking for a suitable weapon. The fire irons next to the old fireplace caught her eye. She grabbed the poker and almost collapsed under its unexpectedly heavy weight. Gosh, was it made of cast iron? She held it with both hands and slinked back out into the corridor where she paused until her eyes got used to the darkness. She could not switch on the lights after all, unless she wanted to warn the burglar.

With bated breath she tiptoed towards the dusty staircase leading to the attic and climbed it, placing her feet slowly and carefully, worrying that the decayed wood might break or at least creak. Luckily, neither happened. At the upper end of the staircase there was another door. It was closed but she could hear the shuffling steps behind it, even louder now. They were definitely coming from there.

Julie took a deep breath before she pushed open the door with a jerk and shouted out: »Who's there?« The steps stopped abruptly. She expected someone to run towards and past her, perhaps trying to knock her down or overpower her, but nothing happened at all. There was nothing but silence.

With clenched teeth Julie groped about for the light switch on the wall next to the door until she eventually found it. A single dusty bulb lit the attic with dim half-light. Or, strictly speaking, with shadows rather than light. And those shadows were bloody ghostly. Even more so as the attic seemed huge. Julie's spirit broke. What could she do alone against a potentially aggressive intruder hiding somewhere in the shadows or behind the boxes? She was only 159 centimetres tall and rather petite. Her arms were already shaking under the weight of the poker which she could only just hold. Was she trying to fool herself? She stood no chance. So she changed her strategy.