THE HOUSE
ON THE MOOR
A Haunted House book
William Meikle
Dark Regions Press
—2016—
FIRST EBOOK EDITION
TEXT © 2015 BY WILLIAM MEIKLE
COVER ART AND INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS
© 2015 BY M. WAYNE MILLER
EDITED BY JOE MOREY
ISBN: 978-1-62641-201-9
INTERIOR DESIGN BY F. J. BERGMANN
A Haunted House book
DARK REGIONS PRESS, LLC
P.O. BOX 31022
PORTLAND, OR 97203
WWW.DARKREGIONS.COM
Table of Contents
Chapter 01 Chapter 02 Chapter 03 Chapter 04 Chapter 05 Chapter 06 Chapter 07 Chapter 08 Chapter 09 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23
About the Author
About the Artist
List of Illustrations
And the old man across the fireplace held the key to the last chapter …
… lying, fully naked, spread-eagled on a stone floor, atop a painted pentagram.
Then he started to hear voices in the sound, a rhythmic chanting …
“I believe you heard something … Maybe it was in the library itself?”
“But I thought I saw someone out on the moor this morning …”
Only the eyes were remotely human, although they were fully black, all pupil.
For Alan Garner, Oliver Postgate and Robert Louis Stevenson, who lit the flame.
= 1 '
“Tell me again: what are we doing here?”
John noticed, too late, that Carole was in that fed-up state that was perilously close to heading into a full-blown shouting match. He patted the side of the too-soft bed and invited her over to sit beside him. She walked across the room—reluctantly, but she did it—sitting down so as to leave a two-foot gap between them, as if inviting him to try and cross it. He tried not to rise to the bait.
“I told you. I need to do an interview—and this one’s important to me. It’s not just another job,” John replied. “Besides, it’s a nice long weekend for you. I’ll be working, but it shouldn’t take me long though—he’s an old man, and I’ve been told he’s only good for an hour or so in the morning before the lights go dim and he needs to rest up. Then we’ll have most of each day to ourselves to explore.”
Carole motioned to the window, where sheets of rain lashed against the glass in patterns that were almost rhythmic.
“You’ve brought us to the wilds of Scotland—in March. How much exploring do you expect to get done? You saw what we passed on the way here—bog, cows and hills, and not a Starbucks in sight. I’d have been better off staying at home—at least that way I might have got a decent cup of coffee.”
On that point, John would happily have agreed with her, if he thought it wouldn’t lead to an argument. When he’d found out about the job the week before, he’d considered coming on his own, but there had been a recent tiff about him leaving her alone on too many weekends, so he’d invited Carole on this one. He’d told her they were going to Scotland—what he hadn’t said was that it was twenty miles from anywhere, in a drafty mansion on a patch of remote moorland, with only an old retired man and two equally old servants for company. That—and the inclement weather that looked like it had set in for the duration—meant that their long weekend wasn’t getting off to the best of starts.
^
He’d known as soon as the taxi crested a hill and they got their first look at the property that he was in for some trouble. The trip north from Inverness Airport had cost fifty quid, it had taken over an hour, and, by the time they drove up onto the high moor and had a look down the long driveway to their destination, Carole had already got her not-best-pleased face on. It didn’t help that it had been raining since they got off the plane, constant heavy drizzle that washed everything to misty gray.
The house itself was in the old Scots style—gray granite and little more than a squat ugly block with little in the way of adornment or finery. It had obviously been built for function in a spot where few people were ever going to see it to appreciate anything more aesthetically pleasing. Long-dead branches of crawling ivy dotted with a few yellow leaves stubbornly clinging on against the weather ran across the walls like dried-up veins. The windows appeared to contain original leaded glass, black, like unblinking eyes watching their approach all the way down the drive. The thick slates on the roof were green with mossy slime and looked as old as the hills from which they had been cut.
There were no formal gardens here, no trimmed box hedges or fine mazes, just stunted clumps of gorse and heather interspersed with dark stagnant pools of slow-developing peat on either side of the pothole ridden gravel track. A fine mist defied the drizzle and hung in patches, drifting back and forth across the moor.
Behind the house itself, some ten miles distant across a longer expanse of bog, was a range of cloud-shrouded hills. In the dim light they looked black, almost menacing. Apart from a marching row of telegraph poles that headed off in that direction, there was no other sign of life to be seen in the whole panorama.
The taxi let them off at the door and drove off in a spray of gravel in the driver’s hurry to depart.
An aged butler was already waiting to show them inside, through an echoing hallway that smelled slightly musty and damp, and up a long ornate staircase to the room where they currently sat on the edge of the bed, on the verge of yet another argument.
“Look, Carole,” he said. “I don’t want a fight.”
“Then don’t talk to me,” she replied.
She stood and started to unpack, throwing clothes willy-nilly into the small chest of drawers under the window. Her back was ramrod-straight, daring him to speak. He knew all the signs—an explosion was only seconds away.
He was saved by a knock on the door and opened it to see the old butler in the hallway.
“The Maister will see you whenever you are ready, sir. He has asked that you see him alone. The lady may take tea in the front sitting room, where there are some fancies laid out on the table.”
“Fancies!” Carole mouthed, and smiled for the first time since getting off the plane in Inverness.
John’s mood was slowly starting to improve as he followed the old butler downstairs.
^
His improved mood meant that he actually paid attention to the house on his way down the staircase, which was wide and handsome, with a polished mahogany banister and elegant, thick-pile carpeting. If the exterior of the house had looked rather drab and uninspiring, the interior more than made up for any lack of opulence. The walls were festooned with portraits, landscapes, and the heads of dead animals, obviously a legacy of a long history of hunting in these parts. The hallway at the foot of the stairs had no carpets, but a stunning mosaic floor depicting yet another hunting scene, with a magnificent stag being run down by hounds on a highland mountainside.
And the best was yet to come.
The butler showed him into a high-vaulted library that rose through an interior column the full height of the house. There were three floors of it, ancient oak shelves crammed tight with leather-bound books, some dusty and unloved, others obviously well read and cared for. Balconies ran the full circumference of each floor, connected by ornate wrought iron staircases between levels. John was momentarily dazzled by his sheer delight in the place—he would happily spend several months among these shelves.
He was brought back to reality by a discreet cough from the butler at his side.
The man he had come more than five hundred miles to interview was sitting in a large wing
-backed armchair, as close to a roaring fire as he could get without being burned. His legs were covered by two thick tartan throws, but John guessed they would be as thin as the rest of him. His hands looked too large on wrists that might snap at any moment. His head, bald, liver-spotted and partially tucked inside a heavy woolen pullover, made him look more like a slightly startled turtle than a man who had been a famous philanderer and roué in his day—a day that was long since past.
“Mr. Fraser, I presume?” the old man said, and cackled until he was forced to stop when it brought on a coughing fit.
John nodded, and considered putting out a hand to be shaken, then thought better of it—the old man didn’t look to be up to the effort.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Blacklaw,” he said. The old man managed to lift a hand enough to wave John to the seat opposite his across the fireplace. John moved the heavy chair away from the direct heat before sitting down.
John had expected an exchange of pleasantries, perhaps an introduction, but Blacklaw got straight to the point.
“You look just like him,” the old man said. “I was prepared to answer your questions—but I wasn’t prepared for that.”
“My mother always said I had his eyes,” John said, more for something to say than from any real idea where to push the conversation.
“Oh, it’s more than that,” Blacklaw said. “You’re almost his double. He affected a full beard, but that wasn’t unusual back then. And apart from that, you even have his build—and his walk. I can see why he interests you.”
John hadn’t spoken to the old man when setting up the interview—he’d spoken to a woman—the housekeeper, he’d guessed, and the rest of the deal had been conducted by letter—word-processed and printed from John, hand-written in a crisp, clear hand from the old man’s end. All the correspondence was in aid of one goal—John was researching a book, a biography of his grandfather.
And the old man across the fireplace held the key to the last chapter—if only John could get him to talk about it.
= 2 '
Carole made her way downstairs five minutes after John, taking her time to study the paintings and trying her best to ignore the stares of the dead animals as she descended.
There was only one door open—at the front of the house near the main entrance. She walked into a large room, the focal point of which was a long mahogany dining table. It was handsome, though battered, capable of seating twelve, and of a quality that would make a London antique dealer drool with anticipation of a hefty commission.
A high bay window to the front looked out over the moor, but Carole ignored that and went straight to a long buffet table against the wall where several trays of cakes and small, sweet treats had been laid out. She resisted the urge to take one of everything and put half a dozen of them—the ones that looked least likely to go straight to her hips—on a plate before taking it and a chair over to the fireplace..
She heard the men speaking next door, but only as a low drone—she was unable to make out any words, and it sounded like the old man they’d come to see was doing most of the talking. She pulled her chair closer to a two-bar electric fire dwarfed by a huge stone grate, and picked up her first of what would prove to be many sweets.
The “fancies”—clearly homemade, and fresh that very morning—proved to be the highlight of the trip so far—although Carole foresaw a sugar high in her near future that would mean a crash at some point later. She stared out at the moor and tried not to think about the long weekend ahead that was going to feel like an eternity.
Rain washed in sheets down the window, softening and blurring the landscape outside and making it look like the early stages of an amateur watercolor painting, the view punctuated with infrequent glimpses of a water-soaked driveway surrounded by featureless moorland. Once she saw someone walking in the distance, a squat figure huddled against the elements, tramping through the bog with what looked like grim determination. For an instant Carole was actually glad she was inside, in the dry—then a cold breeze blew through the ground floor, as if someone somewhere had opened a door, and she was forced to huddle closer to the fire.
She had another fancy, but she was close to making herself sick with them—this one tasted cloying, over-sugared and too heavy on the marzipan. She only managed one bite, then put the plate down on the floor at her feet. The butler was at her side in seconds to remove it. Carole tried to make conversation, but the man was all business, calling her “ma’am” and making her feel like an elderly invalid herself. She let him shuffle off and went back to staring out the window.
^
I should have let him come on his own.
It wasn’t the first time she’d had the thought, and wouldn’t be the last. She had indeed been pissed off at him for leaving her alone at weekends when his research called him away—so pissed off that she’d more or less demanded to come along on this trip. She’d hoped for Edinburgh, shops, good hotels and restaurants—anything but this dreary, damp monstrosity on the edge of nowhere.
What the hell am I going to do here all weekend?
The rain got heavier, concealing the view even further, and the light was going now as the afternoon progressed. In the gloom she saw that the hunched figure she’d noticed earlier was back, going in the other direction now, but still bent over, as if battling a wind although the drizzle was falling almost straight down. She felt cold again, and resolved to wear thicker clothing for the duration.
It’s not as if we’re going to be going out anywhere.
She almost jumped when the butler appeared at her shoulder—she hadn’t heard him, almost as if he had glided in on castors. She smiled at that thought, then saw the puzzled expression on the old man’s face, and she blushed, afraid he might think she was laughing at him.
“I’m sorry—you startled me,” she said, but once again the man was all business and efficiency.
“Dinner will be served at eight if ma’am needs time to prepare,” he said. If she’d had the energy, she might have taken that as a slight on her appearance, but there seemed to be no guile or malice in the old man’s smile as she nodded in reply. Once he had left the room she rose and followed him out to the hallway.
The chilly draft was even more pronounced here, coming from somewhere at the rear of the house, and from where she stood she could now hear the familiar clang and rattle of pans and crockery as food was prepared. To her right the door to the library was now partially open and she caught a glimpse of John at the fireplace—head tilted slightly to one side as he always did when he was listening intently. It did not look like he was going to be finished anytime soon.
She considered interrupting the conversation, but she was a guest here, and manners and protocol were clearly of some importance—although that wasn’t anything that normally bothered her. But John looked so serious—and she was too tired for an argument right now. The journey to get here had taken more out her than she’d realized. It had been an early start, followed by delays at the southern end, and a cramped flight full of crying babies, noisy teenagers and bad food. Add in the long dull taxi journey, and a nap before dinner sounded like just the thing to recharge her batteries.
She went back upstairs to their room, trying again to avoid the stares from both the ancestral portraits and the heads of deer, foxes and boar that watched her all the way up. She flopped on the bed and checked her watch—it was just after four in the afternoon.
“Plenty of time,” she muttered.
A minute later she was fast asleep.
= 3 '
“So when did you see him last?” John asked.
The old man had been talking for an hour, but hadn’t really told John anything he didn’t know already about his grandfather. The men’s friendship had been well recorded elsewhere, and although Blacklaw’s anecdotes were as funny and witty as John could have hoped for, that wasn’t what he’d come all this way to hear.
“Ah,” Blacklaw said. “So now we come to it. You want to know
about the mysterious end?”
David Blacklaw and Hugh Fraser had broken records together as young men, back in the fifties and sixties, when there were still records to be broken. They had sailed everywhere that could be sailed, climbed most things there were to be climbed, and walked across deserts that had never previously been traversed. They became celebrities in the days before it almost became a dirty word. And they had done it all in style, smoking and drinking—and wenching—their way around the world and into the hearts of the public, which followed their adventures avidly through Fraser’s dry yet witty reports, sold to as many papers and magazines as would have them. His eye for a good photograph had also played its part—some of Hugh’s black-and-white images had passed into popular culture as iconic depictions of those carefree years. Blacklaw and Fraser were the talk of the town, their fifteen minutes of fame stretching for almost a decade, with not even the whiff of a scandal.
And then suddenly in 1968 it had all stopped—as if switched off like a light bulb. No more reports came from Fraser’s pen—indeed, the man was only seen in public once more, in a public bar in Edinburgh. He’d died suddenly in his sleep shortly after that, more than a decade before John was born, and the family never spoke of him. All John knew of the man was what he’d gleaned from the public image—that was all anyone seemed to know.
Now John wanted to know more—needed to know, for if he could ferret out the details of his grandfather’s death, his proposed book would go from being just another biography to something that might—just might—have a chance of making his name.
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