London Pride Read Online Free PDF

ever, delighted by the fear in her voice.
    â€˜Wooooh!’ Sam howled, his face just discernible in the mist of diffused light at his brother’s shoulder.
    â€˜I’m off upstairs,’ Fred said, lowering the torch. Now that he’d scored first blood, he knew he could
really
frighten her. ‘There won’t be any ghosts down here. Stand ter reason. Not in a doorway there won’t.’ He was already feeling his way up the spiral staircase.
    â€˜They walk through walls, don’t forget,’ his brother said, panting at his heels, ‘so why not doors?’
    â€˜Up here!’ Fred’s voice echoed down the stairwell. ‘This’ll be the place.’
    If it was, Peggy had no desire to see it, but she followed the ascending flicker of the torch, feeling her way along the rough stone of the walls, because it would have been even worse to be all by herself in the pitch darkness. The unseen stones were rough and cold and as tacky as slugs under her fingers. She tried not to think that ghosts were trying to ooze between them.
    â€˜Here we are!’ Fred sang above her head. And she stumbled on and found herself in the upper chamber.
    Downstairs in the darkness had been bad enough but this place was worse. There was a faint metallic blue light filtering in through the high window, and the silence was so profound she could hear it hissing. As her eyes grew accustomed to light again, she could make out the brooding mass of a huge stone fireplace opposite her, solid and black-shadowed, and the stones of the tower wall which were a weird unearthly grey and seemed to be flickering and shifting as she watched them. A ghost could come walking through those walls at any moment, she thought. There’d be nothing to stop it. Oh please God, don’t let a ghost walk through the wall.
    Sam was prowling about shining his torch at the stones. ‘Over ’ere somewhere is where they used ter call up the devil,’ he said. ‘Here it is. Look. That’s black magic that is.’
    The other two went to join him, Peggy trying not to appear too reluctant, Fred with swaggering eagerness.
    The torchlight was shining on a complicated carving cut into a broad stone next to another door. It consisted of a circle inside a square, with lots of crisscrossed lines inside the circle and letters and figures all round the square. Despite her apprehension Peggy examined it closely. It had been a mistake to let them see how frightened she was downstairs. From now on she was going to keep her feelings hidden.
    â€˜That’s not black magic,’ she said, reasonably. ‘Somebody’s cut his name on it, look. “Draper of Brystow”. And those figures are times tables. You can see.’
    â€˜No they’re not,’ Sam insisted, annoyed by her calm. ‘They’re black magic. Everyone knows that. Because why? Because this is the very room where the ghosts walk. They used to torture people in ’ere.’
    â€˜No they never,’ she said stoutly, hoping it wasn’t true.
    â€˜They did,’ Fred said. ‘They used to stretch ’em on a great wooden rack. When they’d finished with ’em their arms was so long they used to trail on the floor when they walked. When they come back – you know, as ghosts,’ making the word as hideous as he could, ‘that’s how they look. With their arms all long and horrible.’
    â€˜They don’t,’ she said, but she wasn’t quite sure. It all sounded just a little too likely in a room like this.
    â€˜They had a torture mask to put women in an’ all,’ Fred gloated.
    â€˜Yeh!’ his brother said. ‘When they talked too much. It had all spikes inside and they used ter wind it up tighter and tighter until all the spikes was sticking in. When
they
come back as ghosts, they come back all covered in blood.’ It was frightening him to think of it and Fred was looking