Haunted Tales E-Book

Adam Macqueen

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 234

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'A brilliantly eclectic mix of dark, unsettling tales' Joanne Burn, author of The Bone Hunters 'Guaranteed to give you goosebumps' BestMagazine 'Atmospheric collection of spooky stories' Observer 'A lovely present' The Spectator 'Inspired by all the great ghost story writers' BBC Open Book Editor's Pick 'Tis the season to be haunting An unexpected and unwelcome voice on the world's first radio broadcast in 1908. A son who won't stop messaging his family on Facebook, although he's been dead for quite some time now. A frozen forest in a far north land where the sinister elf-kin lurk in the snow. A Scottish island where the locals make very sure their old folk don't go hungry through the long winter. Over the past two decades Adam Macqueen has sent a Haunted Tale to his family in place of a Christmas card. A collection in the grand tradition of ghost stories – to be read by the fire in the depths of winter – it proves that terror lurks in many places, and the dead take on infinite guises . . . READER REVIEWS 'Spine-chilling' 'Dark and twisty' 'Pleasing terrors indeed' 'An awesome collection … I loved how each story had its unique twist'  'An amazingly spooky collection … Excellent' 'What a wonderfully weird and unsettling collection of short stories this is!' 'Fabulous … I can't recommend this book enough'

Leseprobe

For my mum, Sandra Macqueen, who collected my ghost stories proudly together, while never believing a word of them.1937–2023and after

Contents

The Wrong Teletubby Come Quick, Danger The Old Folk Panic Room The Hawthorn Tree Multiple Occupation The Elf-Kin The Lily-White Boy The Gift that Keeps On Giving Afterlife

This side of the darkest meadowsI’ll make my winter dwellingAnd thereI’ll crush my bones

‘Hot Meat’, The Sugarcubes, 1989

The Wrong Teletubby

Richard’s son stopped speaking to him a week after he died.

He had got into the habit of logging in to Facebook first thing every morning, when the weight of what had happened made it difficult to do anything, just to see once more the last thing his son would ever say to him.

Luke Davies cant wait to hit the surf this w/e!!!!!

23 October 2010 at 23:08

Comment/Like

And then, on the day of Luke’s funeral, after Richard stood and watched his child disappear impossibly into the ground, he got home and fired up the computer only to find he had taken his final message with him. Luke’s face was still there, grinning out of some overcrowded freshers’ week bar crawl, complete with the remnants of his gap-year tan and the wispy beginnings of a goatee beard Richard had never got to see in real life. And his name was still there, and the photos he was tagged in that had become so familiar, and the news that he had changed his location to Loughborough and become a member of Loughborough University and the Department of Modern Languages and the Athletics Soc and the Indie Soc and the Windsurfing Soc, and he was attending Fresh ’n’ Wild at the Union and the Poly Bop in the Cellar Bar and was now friends with dozens of people Richard had never heard of. And there was even a message from the very same day from someone called Hal Barnett asking if NE1 got spare car space down to Plym on sat??????, but his status update was gone. Kaput. Disappeared. His son had gone silent.

Richard supposed they just cleared themselves after a while. Now he thought about it, he had put one up when he first joined – Richard Davies is not sure about this newfangled technology! or some such – and that wasn’t there any more, even though he didn’t remember deleting it. He only had a handful of friends – he’d only really joined the thing because Luke had said it would be a good way for them to keep in touch after he went to uni – and most of them never bothered to update their status things either, apart from Bob at work who seemed to put some rubbish about what he was eating or doing or watching on telly every couple of hours, till Richard had even thought about deleting him as a friend except he knew he would notice.

He sat staring at the computer screen for so long that the white light that bleached his face dropped to a dull grey and then switched itself off completely, and he became aware of the shadows and the cold around him and the fact that he hadn’t switched on a single light in the house, let alone the central heating. He twitched the mouse to bring the computer back to life, and accidentally managed to click on one of the links in front of him on Luke’s page: the Windsurfing Soc.

And he was so glad he had. The first thing he saw beneath the logo was a message from someone called Alistair Thorne. He remembered an Alistair from the funeral: a nice lad, he had come over to talk to him and Luke’s mother specially.

As many of you know, the society suffered a terrible loss last weekend when Luke Davies, one of our newest members, drowned in a freak accident at the BUCS event in Plymouth. I know all members will join me in passing on the society’s deepest condolences to his friends and family.

A party from the university will be attending his funeral in Guildford this Saturday at 3pm; I will be going on behalf of the society. There are still places in the minibus for any of Luke’s friends who would like to attend – contact Dr Buckland for details.

I’ve also started thistribute page for those who will not be able to attend so they can leave their memories of Luke.

Richard clicked on the link and let out a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a sob: here was his son again, in a photo he had not seen before, in his wetsuit, grinning and waving at the camera on a shingle beach with sails in the background. The beard was a lot more impressive. This must have been taken on the day the accident happened. It was like he had been given another chance to see him.

He scrolled down, his eyes misting as he read through the messages beneath. There were dozens of them.

I only knew Luke a few weeks but he was one of the nicest people to me in the first week, showing me how to work the cooker in our kitchen and rescuing me in the bar more than once like a true gentleman! I can’t believe he is gone and I will miss him so much

I was at school with Luke for five years and was lookin forward to seeing him at xmas. Can’t believe I will never see him again. He was such a great bloke, neva had a bad word for anyone and was a real team player – we played rugby together in the First XV that took the Charter cup for the first time in four years. But more than that he was a great laugh and a superb guy. RIP buddy

RIP Big Man. Never see his like again

Just heard the news I am so gutted. Raced against Luke many times but only managed to beat him once – and that was because he was having treatment on his ankle at the time! He was a true sportsman – one in a million.

He recognised some of the names; one or two of the pictures looked familiar. But there were so many people here he had never heard of, people from around the country, around the world, even – there was a chap here writing from Malaysia – and his son had touched every one of their lives enough that they had come here to pay their respects to him.

Richard left the computer to blow his nose, splash water on his face and get himself a whisky. He wasn’t certain he actually liked whisky, but he generally had a bottle in for occasions that demanded it, and this was surely one of them.

Once he had located the bit where you could leave a message – he knew it was right because a little picture of himself came up beside it – he took a good twenty minutes or more to compose it properly, half worrying that there would be a deadline on these too and it would go out there half-finished, making him look demented. In the end he kept it simple:

Hello everyone, this is Luke’s dad. Just wanted to say how much these messages mean to me and our family. Luke was so loved and touched so many people wherever he went. I will miss my son so much but it is a great comfort to me to come to this page and read all your memories of him. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

He took out the bit about ‘our family’ before he pressed Comment. Denise had always hated him speaking for her. He sent her the link to the tribute page instead. She was on Facebook – though she kept some of her pages protected – but he wasn’t sure to send links that way, so he ended up emailing it to her instead.

After that he sat up looking through Luke’s photo albums for a few more hours until he’d finished the whisky and he suddenly realised it was three in the morning and he still hadn’t switched the central heating on.

When he checked the page the next evening three of Luke’s friends had added messages after his one. He didn’t recognise any of the names, but it was very nice of them all to send their condolences.

He went on checking the page every morning before he went into work. It did him good to see Luke’s grinning face first thing, gave him something to get out of bed for, and he could hardly look at it in the office after what he’d said to the youngsters about not using Facebook or Twitter or any of the other ones during working hours. Besides, if he started looking at it at work he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to do anything else.

On the Tuesday there was a short message from Denise at the bottom of the page – As Luke’s mother it gives me great strength to read the messages here thank you all god bless xx – so he knew she’d got the email. She hadn’t written anything back to him, but the counsellor had said there would probably be elements of blaming the other, and it wasn’t exactly as if they’d been having many civil conversations before the accident. Although he had to admit she’d been a tower of strength at the funeral.

Towards the end of the week he got a private message. He knew because a little icon he’d never noticed at the top of the page lit up red and when he clicked on it, it said he had a message from someone called Sadie. She was a friend of Luke’s from university – the girl he had helped with the cooker – and she said how sorry she was not just about his death but not to have had a chance to talk to Richard at the funeral as well. She told him a bit more about what Luke had been like at university. Apparently a whole bunch of them had gone back to his room on the first night after the bar had closed and he had cooked everyone cheese toasties and made so much tea that she had felt guilty and taken him round some of her spare teabags the next day and they had been good friends from then on. She wasn’t on the same course as him but they’d hung out, as she put it, lots ever since, and she’d seen him just the night before he went off on the windsurfing trip and how excited he was about it and how he’d shown her his new wetsuit and his equipment all laid out and ready to be packed.

It wasn’t clear from the message whether they’d been boyfriend and girlfriend, but Richard got the impression she might have liked to have been. Whichever way, it wasn’t for him to ask, so when he wrote back he tried to keep it quite chatty and said how nice it was of her to get in touch and how much he appreciated it, and how it helped to hear about how happy Luke had been in the weeks before he had died and everything he’d been up to. And then he said, please keep in touch if you’d like to, and she wrote back and said that would be nice and then added in an apologetic sort of PS that she’d already been down to visit her own parents twice since Luke had died even though at the beginning of term she couldn’t wait to get away, but losing him made her feel totally different and more appreciative of each day and what she had. And he wrote back to her and said if that was the lesson that Luke’s friends took away from him dying then perhaps something good could come from it after all, and when he switched the computer off there was a part of him that really believed it. Which was progress.

The lad from the windsurfing club wrote to him too, a week or so later. His message was a bit more stilted and formal, but then the insurance claim and the investigation into the accident were still going through, so that was understandable, especially since he was writing partly in an official capacity to say that they were going to put up a commemorative panel in Luke’s memory in their clubhouse, and he would very much like both Richard and Denise to come to the unveiling the following term if they were able. Richard wrote straight back and said he couldn’t speak for his ex-wife but he would definitely be there, and he went out the next day and bought a diary for the following year to put the date in, which meant he was Looking Ahead like his counsellor had said, and that was definitely progress too.

Time passed. Mostly it seemed to go at a glacial pace. When a couple of pints that Mike and Eleanor dutifully insisted on taking him for in the Rose and Crown had loosened his tongue and his inhibitions, he admitted to them that it sometimes felt like he was wading through treacle. And then one day he looked up and noticed that the Christmas lights had gone up in the shopping precinct and it was more than a month since his son died.

He still checked Facebook every day. There hadn’t been any more entries on the tribute page, and he knew all the old ones off by heart by now, but it still gave him comfort to read his favourite ones. He sometimes clicked through to Sadie’s page just to see what she was up to, and she seemed to be getting on fine. She’d got a part in the end-of-term panto – she was studying Drama and English – and there were all sorts of messages from her other friends, but he felt a bit weird reading through them. He was sure she wouldn’t mind him keeping an avuncular eye on her, but he drew the line at clicking on any of her photographs. Unless they were ones that Luke was tagged in, of course, but it wasn’t like there was ever going to be any more of those.

And then, all of a sudden, there was. Not on Sadie’s page, but around halfway down the main page you got when you logged in, lost among all the stuff about what Bob thought about last night’s Apprentice and people inviting him to play Farmville or Golden Gems and the updates from Audi and Genesis Official and the golf club that he couldn’t work out how to switch off. It was way down on the page, even though it said it had only been posted seven hours ago, and it was all he could do to keep his hand steady enough on the mouse to actually click on it.

He couldn’t make head or tail of what he saw. It was just a black rectangle. It looked like, whoever had taken it, their flash hadn’t gone off, or they’d pressed the button by mistake, but why would they bother to go through the faff of putting it up on Facebook, let alone tagging it with Luke’s name? He moved the cursor around the picture to see where Luke was supposed to be, but the square that lit up with his name was just a dark patch in more darkness. He even tried turning the brightness right up on his screen, but it didn’t help much. All you could see was a bit of what might be a chessboard, or a floor covered in black and white tiles, and the rest was all darkness and shadows.

He was hovering over the monitor, trying to look at it from a different angle that might help him make out more, when he spotted the tag and thumped down heavily into the protesting chair. He could taste bile in the back of his throat. He had been looking at the wrong thing.

Posted by Luke Davies, 11 December 2010

It was impossible. It was awful. It was grotesque.

When the hammering in his head had subsided enough for him to be able to think, he tried to convince himself it must just be a horrible coincidence. Could it be that there was another Luke Davies on Facebook, and he had stumbled across him because of crossed wires somewhere in the system? He was always getting things suggesting he become friends with all sorts of people he had never heard of. What if Facebook had just decided he ought to look at this person’s photographs because they had the same surname?

No. He clicked on the name, and it took him to the familiar page with his son’s smiling face still staring out from the top of it. And there it was again, at the top of his own page above all the familiar photos from months earlier, the little black rectangle with its impossible date.

He felt like he couldn’t breathe. How could this be happening? It must be a mistake. It had to be. He forced himself to walk away from the computer and the black hole burning in the middle of the screen, went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of ice-cold water which he made himself down in one. The glass skittered across the draining board when he put it down, his hands were shaking so much.

He forced himself to think about it logically. His son was dead. The fact that Facebook said it was Luke who had put the photograph there just meant someone had posted it using his account. They warned you every time you went on to it about not leaving yourself logged in, and that must be what had happened. Someone was using his computer, and he’d left his Facebook open – because why wouldn’t he, it’s not like he knew he wasn’t coming back – and they’d accidentally put the photo up on his account rather than their own. It was a simple mistake, and they would probably be mortified when they realised.

Which would be a fine explanation, if he wasn’t looking at his son’s laptop right now. It was sitting in his bedroom on top of the boxes of things he had collected from the hall of residence the week after his death. He hadn’t had the strength to go through them yet.

There could be another explanation. He went back to his own computer, averting his eyes from the inky blackness in the centre of the screen, and clicked through to Sadie’s profile instead. He had three goes at writing a message to her before he gave up. Her mobile number was on there. It wasn’t too late. Not for a student.

‘Hello?’ She took a while to pick up, probably wary of the unfamiliar number.

‘Sadie? Hello. Sorry to phone you, it’s Richard Davies – Luke’s dad.’

‘Oh!’ She sounded taken aback.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, I hope you’re not busy.’

‘No. No, I’m just – bit of an essay crisis.’ A nervous giggle.

‘Oh dear.’ He couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he came straight to the point. ‘Look, it’s just – something funny’s happened with Luke’s Facebook profile, and I’m such an old fuddy-duddy when it comes to this sort of thing, and I wondered if you might be able to help explain it.’

‘OK.’ She sounded dubious.

‘You see this photo has come up, and it says it’s been posted from his account. You may have seen it.’

‘No … I – I haven’t looked at – I don’t think I’ve checked Facebook today.’

He glanced down at her profile. There were several entries posted during the last twenty-four hours. But he understood what she was trying not to say, and he was grateful for it.

‘Well, it’s nothing really, I’m sure it’s just a mistake. But I was wondering if he sometimes used, I don’t know, other people’s computers to look at Facebook. In case he’d left himself logged in, do you see?’

‘Oh. Right. Yes. Um … I think so, probably. I mean we all use the computers in the library sometimes, even though we’re not meant to.’ She giggled. ‘And sometimes, you know, if you’re round at someone else’s room and you’re expecting a message or something.’

Absurdly, this little insight into his son’s life made his eyes start to prickle. ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I thought. Well, I’m sure that’s what’s happened. I expect whoever it was didn’t even realise they were logged in as him until they put the photo up. It’s just the one photo – they probably logged out as soon as they realised. Nothing to worry about.’

‘I expect so. What a horrible shock for you, though!’ She was a nice girl. Thoughtful.

‘It was a bit.’

‘What was it a photo of? It’s just – you know, I might recognise the people in it.’

‘Oh – well – nothing really. That’s the funny thing. It’s just a sort of black hole. I don’t know why anyone would bother putting it up there.’

‘How weird.’ Her words made him suddenly conscious of how weird this conversation must be for her too, and he felt foolish for making such a fuss.

‘I’d better let you go. Sorry to disturb you.’

‘Don’t worry!’

‘Everything going alright with you?’

‘Yeah. Well. You know. Essays!’

‘Must be nearly the end of term, isn’t it?’

‘Next week. I can’t wait to go home.’

He thought he managed to get the phone down before she could tell he was crying.

He made himself forget all about it. He even stopped checking Facebook every day, figuring it was time for him to move on like Luke’s friends were obviously managing to. He started playing golf again. And he even said he’d go round to Mike and Eleanor’s for Christmas Day because they wouldn’t stop going on about it until he agreed.

And then this.

Luke Davies is cold. So cold.

He just kept staring at it.

15 December at 02:14

Comment/Like

A wave of anger rushed through him. Too right he would comment.

Richard Davies you sick bastard. How dare you?

How could anyone do this? The worst thing was that it must be someone who knew about Luke, who knew what had happened. That message wasn’t the sort of thing you would put if you just stumbled across a stranger’s Facebook still open on a random computer. It was deliberate. It was heartless. It was cruel.

Unless – unless. It had turned cold the night before. He had felt it when he got up for the loo in the middle of the night like he always had to these days, and the frost had been so heavy on his windscreen in the morning that clearing it off had made him late for work. Was there any way this could be the same thing he’d assumed had happened before – some poor innocent student stumbling into the library wanting to share the change in the weather with his friends, opening up Facebook and not noticing that it was still open under somebody else’s name? Would that even be possible after all this time?

His finger hovered over the mouse. He looked at his son’s smiling face, and his own face below it. Calling him a bastard. If he clicked Comment then it would be there for ever. It would be the first thing anyone saw on Luke’s page. His own father, insulting his memory.

He deleted the words and clicked away from the page for good measure. He was going to have to get Luke’s account closed down. That was the only thing for it.

He was up until four in the morning trying to work out how.

*

Richard Davies This is Luke’s father. I do not know if someone has left the comment above on Luke’s account by mistake. I hope so, because the alternative – that someone has been sick and cruel enough to write it as some kind of joke – is unthinkable. I have contacted Facebook about having the comment removed. If it happens again I will have no choice but to get Luke’s account permanently deleted.

16 December at 19:04

Several hours went past before there was any reply.

Luke Davies dad?

17 December at 05:12

*

The counsellor had told him there were four stages of grief he would have to work through before he started accepting Luke was gone. One of them was anger, and in a funny way it was good to have an excuse to give that full vent. He rang work and said he wouldn’t be in until lunchtime. Instead he headed for the police station and refused to leave until he saw someone who would take his problem seriously. In the end he talked to a nice lady sergeant who was very sympathetic but pointed out that there wasn’t a lot they could do unless the messages were actually threatening, and he had to admit that a picture of a black space and a few words, however upsetting, didn’t really compare to some of the things that she mentioned.

He had even less luck with Facebook. It turned out to be impossible to speak to anyone real in charge of the website; instead he went round and round, clicking links to Report a comment and Report a photo, and getting drop-down menus which offered all sorts of reasons why something might be abusive or offensive, but none of them were Someone is pretending to be my dead son. He tried all the links for Compromised accounts because that seemed to fit the bill, but they turned out to be all about asking for money and things like spam and phishing which he didn’t really understand but was pretty sure weren’t what this was.

And then, while he was still online working his way through all this stuff – could they tell, he wondered – came the next message:

Luke Davies is lost

a few seconds ago

The policewoman had warned Richard that reacting could only encourage whoever it was, but he was so furious he couldn’t help himself. He pulled up his son’s profile and sent him a private message – he knew his way round the website by now, that was one thing to come out of all this.

Whoever you are and whatever your reason for doing this, just stop and let my son rest in peace. It is sick. I have been to the police about you.

He sat for a long time staring at the screen, but there was no reply.

As soon as he spotted it, he had no idea how he had missed it. He had spent so long staring at the stark black words on the page he had taken no notice of the grey text beneath it, save to note its inexorable march into the past: about an hour ago; 2 hours ago; 3, 8, 19 hours ago; Monday at 00:13; 20 December at 00:13. And he couldn’t even swear the little symbol had been there all the time, because he had just assumed it was part of the website, one of the many little hieroglyphs littering Facebook that he didn’t understand and didn’t even notice any more.

But even he could tell what this one represented: it was a mobile phone.

Luke had one of the new mobiles: an iPhone 4 that Denise had bought him as a going-away present. He’d been so pleased with it. It wasn’t with the rest of his stuff, which was still in the boxes in his room, or, rather, scattered all over the floor once Richard had been through them to make doubly sure. He tried ringing it, but he just got a message saying the phone was out of range.

If the messages were coming from Luke’s phone, that meant someone had stolen it, which meant there had been a crime after all, which meant the police could do something.

His heart was pounding; he felt more alive than he had in weeks. He forced himself to sit down and think things through logically. Luke would have had his phone with him when he went windsurfing. Obviously he wouldn’t have taken it out on the water because he’d never risk getting it damaged, so he must have left it with his clothes and stuff when he got changed into his wetsuit. So what had happened to it after the accident?