this moment she had never truly considered that it might actually
be
haunted by real
ghosts.
That idea was both awful and thrilling. She could already feel the back of her neck prickling just at the thought of it, and it was on the tip of her tongue to say no, when she realized that Adam Braund
wanted
to tell her, so she said yes instead.
He rolled on to his side to face her, with his elbow under his ear, so Ruby did the same. Their knees touched, but this time they both ignored it.
‘My dad told me this,’ Adam started, thus establishing the truth of it right up front. ‘It was a hundred years ago and there was this pedlar—’
‘What’s a pedlar?’ said Ruby.
‘Like a sales rep. But in the olden days. He came down the hill with all his stuff that he was selling on the back of a donkey.’
‘He can’t have had much stuff.’
‘Nobody did in those days,’ said Adam, and Ruby nodded because that was true.
‘What kind of stuff?’ she asked.
‘I dunno,’ said Adam. ‘Toilet roll and Pledge and things. Just stuff for the house.’
‘OK.’
‘So he came down the hill to sell stuff and there were these two old sisters who lived in this house, and they offered to let him stay over for the night.’
‘In this house?’
‘Yes,’ said Adam.
‘Why?’
‘ ’Cos it was night and it was raining outside.’
‘OK.’
Ruby wanted to glance around the room, but was starting to feel too nervous to do that, in case she saw something frightening. This was nowhere near a ghost story yet, but she was primed …
‘So he tied his donkey up on the cobbles and spent the night here.’
‘OK,’ said Ruby warily.
Adam lowered his voice. ‘And nobody . . .
ever
. . . saw him again.’
The words hung in the salt air between them.
‘Where did he go?’ whispered Ruby.
‘Nobody knows,’ Adam whispered back. ‘His donkey was still there in the morning, but all the pedlar’s stuff was gone, and his money too. Someone stole it
all.’
‘Who?’ said Ruby.
Adam shrugged mysteriously, then went on. ‘This is the good bit. Like fifty years later, when the old sisters died, another man bought this house and was going to fix it up, but he started to hear noises from upstairs, when there was nobody there.’
Ruby glanced nervously at what was left of the ceiling. ‘What kind of noises?’
‘Banging. Moaning.
Ghost
noises, y’know?’ said Adam breezily. ‘And one night he went up to see what was going on, and the bedroom door slammed shut behind him, even though he was alone in the house, and he couldn’t open the door, even though the key was on the
inside.’
Ruby stared at Adam, her mouth suddenly dry.
‘And then something in the room attacked him.’
‘What thing?’ she breathed.
‘Nobody knows,’ said Adam solemnly. ‘He was a grown man, but he screamed so loud that people ran up from the village to see what was happening, but none of them could open the bedroom door, and all they could do was stand there and listen to him screaming and crying until morning.’
‘What happened then?’ said Ruby, her voice cracking with dread.
‘In the morning the door suddenly swung open all by itself, and they found the man inside, all bloody and stuff, shaking under the bed. He’d been beaten up, but there was nobody else in the room with him.’
‘Sssshhh-it,’ Ruby said, even though she wasn’t allowed to.
‘He’d screamed so hard he couldn’t even speak any more. And then,’ said Adam, propping himself up to better effect, ‘and then he
runs
out of the room past them, and down the stairs, and starts digging in the fireplace with his bare hands, all through the ashes that were still hot from the night before, but he didn’t care and he dug until his hands were all bloody and his nails fell off.’
Ruby was cold with fear. She couldn’t encourage Adam any more; she only stared, unable to look away from his sombre face.
‘And under the ashes and the flagstones he found a hiding