The Ghosts and Hauntings Collection

by Cat Knight

  “Thank you.” Eliza’s voice sounded thin and pale. Claire turned around and saw her, pressed against the bookshelves. She seemed to blend into them. Claire held out the fiddle and made to set it in her hands with the reverence of a priest holding out the Eucharist.

  “Thank you,” Eliza whispered. “But I don’t need anymore. Because you have it now.”

  “Eliza?” breathed Claire. “What are you talking about? What’s wrong? This is what you wanted.”

  Eliza gave a small sad smile. “Keep it – it’s yours.”

  There was a terrible scream, so close behind Claire that she clapped her hands over her ears, and Eliza flickered in an out of being.”

  “Claire,” Lisa whispered. “Behind you.”

  Claire whipped around, expecting to see a ghost, a monster, a great roaring rearing beast ready to consume them all.

  What she saw was worse.

  The upper corner of the library, previously perfectly well-lit by the incandescent lamp on the end table, had dissolved into shadows, and in the darkness, shadows were moving, watching.

  “It is done” Eliza wailed. “I have no unfinished business. My debt is paid!” The shadows danced closer.

  And then Eliza was gone.

  The darkness was encroaching, burning Claire’s eyes, and then Lisa screamed.

  Lisa had moved towards the bookcase, getting in between the darkness and Claire, as if some-how she could protect her with her presence. But a pair of hands appeared, and reached out for her, Lisa recoiled.

  “No!” Claire shouted. Still clutching the fiddle, she dove for her friend, throwing her to the ground, but, somehow suspended mid-tackle. Two ice-cold sets of fingers clamped down around her upper arms. She was suddenly frozen, the way she had been before, when she stood in front of Eliza. Her voice didn’t work, she couldn’t move, not even her fingertips, and she felt the ground fall away beneath her feet. As if from a great distance, she could hear Lisa screaming. Her vision was clouding with darkness.

  A female voice thick with accent unfamiliar to Claire’s, hissed. “Debts must be paid.”

  The voice chortled, Claire could see nothing through the darkness, yet she felt a presence at her side, sucking the warmth out of her crushing the air from her lungs. Unable to draw breath through the cold force covering her face, and it felt as if her torso were in a vice. Stars began to pop behind her eyes.

  “Let her go” Lisa screamed. “She isn’t even family.”

  “She’ll do.” The voice rose to a shriek in Claire’s ear. The stars in her vision began to eclipse the darkness. She could feel herself teetering on the edge of sleep.

  “WAIT!”

  There was a crash, and then the pressure over Claire’s nose and mouth were gone, and she felt herself falling through space for what felt like an impossible amount of time before she cracked into the ground, and the stars behind her eyes started to dissipate, and she could see Lisa, arms out, taking hold of the fiddle. Tears streamed down Lisa’s pale cheeks.

  Chapter Nine

  Claire didn’t know whether she was out for a minute, or ten minutes, or maybe several long black hours. But she woke to Lisa, tearful, shaking her, begging, “Please, Claire, wake up, Claire, please.”

  “Lisa?” Claire croaked. She could hear, but she couldn’t see, and then she could see, but she couldn’t hear. Everything was slipping in and out.

  “Claire, come on, Paul’s here, Claire, come on.”

  “What happened?” Everything snapped into focus and Claire sat bolt upright, smacking her forehead against Lisa’s. “Where’s Eliza?”

  “She’s gone, Claire,” Lisa choked, her voice breaking into a sob.

  Claire looked from side to side. The library was in disarray. The floor was cracked. Books had fallen from the shelves. A chipped fiddle lay on the floor next to Claire.

  “She, the voice, said something about a debt.”

  Everything was a blur in Claire’s mind, which raced to try to piece things together. “Or, it did. I don’t know. What did she mean?” Lisa didn’t answer the question.

  Claire lifted herself up off the floor. “Come on – we’re leaving. And we aren’t coming back.” She started to steer Lisa towards the door. “Leave the fiddle, let’s go.”

  “I can’t leave it. This is my obligation.”

  “What are you talking about?” Claire’s voice cracked with hysteria.

  “If I don’t take it, it will be yours whether you want it or not. Eliza gave it to you. But I’m the rightful heir with all the obligations that go with it.”

  “Are you SERIOUS, Lisa!” Claire dashed the back of her eyes with her hands. “Alright. If it means so much to you. Let’s just get out of here.” Lisa allowed herself to be steered out of the house, down the driveway, into the idling truck with Paul and Paul’s Garage emblazoned on the side, still clutching the fiddle. The storm had died away, though the walkways were wet.

  “What’ve you got there?” Paul asked, as Claire helped Lisa into the back seat of the truck. He was a stocky, clean-shaven man, maybe ten years Claire and Lisa’s senior, with a pleasant smile and large, calloused hands.

  “Just a fiddle. It belonged to a great aunt.”

  “Where’d she get it from?”

  “How do I know, Paul?” Lisa demanded. She wasn’t about to enter into discussion with Paul about the evil thing

  “It’s only that those patterns on it are rare. I reckon it might be a family heirloom.”

  “I don’t want to look at it.” Lisa shoved it into the backseat.

  Epilogue

  Claire was walking home from the all-night coffee shop, where she had just put the finishing touches on the conclusion of her dissertation. It was dusk, and the streets were quiet, just the ambient noise of the suburbs to disrupt her thoughts of Grace Aguliar. None of what she had written was quite as good as the pages that she’d done up at the house. But it was serviceable.

  She paused at the bottom of Lisa’s street. She hadn’t talked to Lisa much, since that night. They smiled at each other when they passed, but both of them could feel the tension, the fear of mentioning what had happened.

  On a whim, Claire turned up the street. The light was on in Lisa’s flat, the second floor of the building a few doors up from the intersection. The windows were thrown open, and the white curtains billowed in the spring wind.

  Claire paused underneath the window, staring up. Maude was lying on the windowsill, her fluffy orange tail swishing back and forth in the light.

  Inside, Claire saw a pale figure barely recognisable as Lisa, and she could hear the unmistakable sounds of a fiddle. She stood and listened, a chill running up and down her spine. It was probably the radio, she told herself. Or the TV.

  But then the music stopped. Lisa’s gaunt form silhouetted in the window and she patted Maude with the back of her hand. Then Lisa turned and faced out of the window, looking sorrowfully at Claire. The bow in her hand was red and dripping as she raised the fiddle to her chin and began to play again. A lively merry tune.

  The End

  About the Author

  Cat Knight has been fascinated by fantasy and the paranormal since she was a child. Where others saw animals in clouds, Cat saw giants and spirits. A mossy rock was home to faeries, and laying beneath the earth another dimension existed.

  That was during the day.

  By night there were evil spirits lurking in the closet and under her bed. They whirled around her in the witching hour, daring her to come out from under her blanket and face them. She breathed in a whisper and never poked her head out from under her covers nor got up in the dark no matter how scared she was, because for sure, she would die at the hands of ghosts or demons.

  How she ever grew up without suffocating remains a mystery.

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