Author's Note
I was there doing another "Inexplicably out of place English idiot somehow becomes the romantic focus for someone out of his league and fails to notice har har lots of talking wanky wanky nonsense" things because I enjoy those wanna fight about it when I thought - out of nowhere - why not do this instead? Just because?
And so I did.
If you know what it's about then you'll know what it's about.
And now - ugh - 'tagged' with 'horror' because ghosts are scary, I'm told.
Sit down
Dirty Deeds and Tim were sitting outside the pub, side by side, eyeing the house on the cliff that overlooked the tiny little podunk town in which they happened to find themselves.
Nag-on-Sea was not the most exciting place around. Indeed, it was likely in the running for one of the least exciting. Just another seasalt-pickled collection of buildings by the coast, clinging on through the years more as a result of the stubbornness of its residents than anyone actually enjoying being there.
Sure, the sea views were nice, but there were nicer places to get them.
Not that Tim or Dirty Deeds were concerned. It being quiet was kind of the point. Quiet meant that there would be less reason for someone to come and try to find them. Which someone might, given that the heat from their last escapade had not yet fully died down.
Dirty Deeds and Tim being rapscallions of the highest order, you see, and ones who were also not above taking on a little work even while they were supposed to be lying low.
Hence eyeing the house on the cliff. A local fixture that was difficult to miss, and which Dirty Deeds had been digging up some information on, being as how she was closer to the brains of the pair, with Tim being the fingerman. Because he had fingers
“So you’re saying it’s a holiday home?” He said, sipping on his pint and wincing, suddenly convinced they used brine in whatever local brew this was. Dirty Deeds nodded eagerly. From what she’d learnt she was already feeling good about their prospects.
“That’s what my guy told me, yeah. Holiday home. Owners’ not here basically all year round for years on end, place’ll be empty,” she said, rubbing her hooves together. Tim raised an eyebrow.
“Hopefully not empty,” he said.
Would kind of defeat the point of breaking and entering.
Dirty Deeds punched him in the leg.
“You know what I mean. Deserted. We can just go in and have the run of the place,” she said while he rubbed his thigh and winced.
“Nothing like a leisurely burgle,” Tim said, his thigh-rubbing hand moving up to stroke his chin.
“I know, right? We can take our time, really find the good bits and this means that we’re not just spinning our wheels here! We’re still working! It’s perfect,” Dirty said, finally taking a sip of her own drink and - from the look on her face - reaching much the same conclusions as to its ingredients as Tim had done. Putting her glass back onto the table she delicately but firmly pushed it away from her.
Tim reached out and gave her mane a ruffle.
“You do find the best leads,” he said, withdrawing sharply as, with a growl, Dirty snapped after his fingers.
“I’ll bite your fucking hand off, I’m not a pet,” she snarled. Tim just grinned. He’d known the risks, and he did enjoy how she’d picked up human swearing from hanging around with him. He’d always known he was a good influence.
The plan they then struck was a simple one. They would wait until it was dark, sneak up to the house, break into the house, steal valuable things from the house and then leave the house. Both of them agreed this was a marvellous plan and, with that, waited for sunset.
Once things had reached an acceptable level of gloomy the pair of them - wearing their bandit hats - headed on up the cliff, making sure to circle around to come from a side that no-one from town would have been able to see. Not their first time at the rodeo.
Creeping up the blindside, chinning up the wall. Tim held up Dirty to have a peek through a window or two and it was eventually settled on that going through the backdoor would be the best idea and so Tim got to work on the lock. Some fiddling later and they were both in. Easy as anything.
Inside all was quiet, which was always reassuring. With Dirty leading the way - she had a yen for knowing where one should put one’s foot or hoof so as to move in total silence - and Tim following behind they went into the first room and got to work, no time wasted.
Dirty Deeds and Tim both had the keen and practised eye of the experienced house-breaker, both of them zeroing in at once on stuff that was self-evidently valuable and also on the stuff where they just-so happened to know a guy who knew a guy who’d heard of a guy who would be able to shift it.
Picking up the pieces, putting them away, all of it easy enough.
Something didn’t feel quite right. Something tickled at Tim’s sixth-burglar sense.
He was about to give voice to it when a noise from upstairs meant that he didn’t have to. Not the regular creaking of a house at night but the unmistakable creak of something with weight moving around.
Something like a homeowner.
Both burglars froze. Then, slowly, turned about to look one another in the eye.
“I thought you said no-one was living here?” Tim hissed. Despite having been as quiet as he could Dirty clearly felt he hadn’t been quiet enough and promptly yanked him down to her level by the collar so she could shush him better.
“No-one is living here!” She said in hushed tones, followed by another groaning of the floorboards from upstairs. Good timing on that groan. “Okay, well, it might just be the one old guy but that’s as good as no-one living here! What does it matter?”
That seemed like kind of an important detail to gloss over. Tim glared, glanced up briefly and then glared at the pony even harder, just to get his point across.
“It matters if we get caught!”
“He’s old! If it’s even him! They just said they sometimes see someone moving around! It’s probably nothing! Just be quiet!”
A very tense moment of silence wherein which both criminals furiously thought about what the next most-prudent course of action should be. The nature of their partnership was that both of them considered themselves to be the leader.
“I’m gonna go check,” Dirty said, beating Tim to the punch by slivers of a second. Though Tim’s suggestion was going to have been to grab anything within reach and run. Going and checking seemed a reasonable enough idea to him, especially as it wouldn’t be him doing it.
“Good plan, good luck,” he said, giving her a thumbs up.
Giving him a nod she slunk from the room and moving with admirable and total silence went up the stairs and out of sight. Tim, for his part, perched on the edge of a sofa and waited, feeling tense.
Time passed. Tension mounted. If Tim had had a watch he would have checked it. Instead he just looked through a window. This told him nothing.
Eventually - after what he arbitrarily judged to be a long enough time to be concerned - it became too much. Moving back out to the foot of the stairs he bobbed on his heels, considered whether it was worth it or not and then cupped a hand to his mouth:
“Hey. Hey Dirty. Hey!” He hissed. No response. The house was quiet, or at least mostly quiet. It was still creaking every now and then. Was that the wind? Tim supposed it was quite windy here down by the coast.
Hadn’t been that windy today though. Had it? Maybe it had changed.
“Dirty?” He tried again. Still nothing.
How hard was it to go upstairs and see if there was someone else there?
Going up and checking would be risky. Hell, trying to call up the stairs was risky enough, actually going himself would just be asking for trouble - human weight on pony stairs in an old house not being a solid recipe for stealth in Tim’s experience.
So he was reduced to twiddling his thumbs, trusting to Dirty’s experience and expertise.
Although, if she didn’t come back in, say, ten minutes then he’d just call it quits. She’d understand.
And so he was back on that sofa. Waiting. Looking around the room.
It really was alarmingly dark inside this house. Unsurprising given that it was nighttime and all and nothing out of the ordinary, but still. Tim hadn’t quite fully appreciated until just that moment how smothering the darkness was. The window and the starry night beyond didn’t seem to be doing anything at all.
And out of the darkness he suddenly heard:
“Welcome to the home by the sea.”
Leaping into the air as though someone had shoved a jumper cable up his arse Tim spun on the spot and braced himself to come face-to-face with the owner of the place, probably holding Dirty by the scruff of the neck, probably not looking very happy about having received visitors.
But no, nothing, no-one. Just more darkness.
More, more darkness. That took TIm a few heart-pounding moments to grasp. The room had not got darker, there was just more darkness in it, and individual chunks of darkness, too. Shadows, he supposed. Discrete shadows moving about and within the greater blackness of the room.
And getting closer.
It was difficult to see - obviously - but the movement still caught his eye. A flicker here and there of something deeper and blacker sliding out from beneath furniture or slipping from between cracks in the woodwork, leaking in through the door that Dirty had left open behind her, pushing from above and below, all moving across the room in his direction, all converging on where he was stood.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.
“Dirty? Dirty!” He made to call out, but the words only croaked past his lips and the sound went nowhere. Shaking from head to toe Tim stumbled backwards, nearly tripping over an end table and falling arse-first onto a chair that just-so happened to be behind him. It hadn’t been there before.
The movement of the shadows surrounded him now, circling him, round and down and sideways. Some, he saw, looked to be pony-shaped. At least one or two were person shaped, though it was hard to tell - they wouldn’t stop moving and they were, well, shadows. They didn’t really have enough substance for him ot be sure.
Swallowing, his throat now painfully dry, he made to speak again and made to try and stand up and sprint from the room but he found his shaky legs too weak beneath him to rise.
“Sit down,” came the same voice as from before, coming from somewhere just to the edge of where he might have been able to see who’d spoken.
Were he in a better mood he might have pointed out that he was already sitting down, but the thought didn’t really occur to him then and there. All he could do was stay planted in that chair, frozen rigid with fright, eyes locked to a swirling band of dark that, he noticed with mounting discomforting, had eyes that had locked onto him, too.
And they started talking, for a given value of ‘talking’. There weren’t distinct words as such, more impressions. Hints. Shadows, it transpired, lacked the substance to speak for any extended period of time but could quite easily convey enough bits and pieces for Tim so that he could fill in the blanks himself.
Images of sorrow, pictures of delight, things that go to make up a life.
The ghosts - for they were ghosts, not shadows he realised - yearned for the lives they’d had, once, and saw in Tim a chance to relive them, if only briefly. A chance to retell their stories and so for some blissful moment remember that they too had lived, once. All Tim had to do was sit there and listen. All Tim could do was sit there and listen.
There was no order in how it happened. Often, the eager spirits would overlap and muddle whatever it was Tim was being told. Sometimes they would all seem to go quiet and Tim thought that it might have been over, but it was only ever a pause - another would always start not long after. Over and over, on and on it went.
Tim felt the weight of years of silence and tedium and isolation pressing down on him with every story told. These were stories that had lived in this house for years with nowhere to go and no-one to listen to them, until him. Stories that had been desperate to be told, so their owners might even for a second remember what it had been like to be alive.
Bliss, to retell the stories. To live again, if only a little bit. To forget even for the merest moment their circumstances. To dream of a time when they were free, so many years ago, before the time when they had heard ‘Welcome to the home by the sea’.
Throughout all of this there was something else, too. An undercurrent. Something inferred more often than it was said and whenever it was said it was more as though the words slipped in between the others without anyone having put them there. More an impression than anything else, really, again.
Help us someone. Let us out of here.
But that would never happen. Tim knew this. None of them were ever getting out. That was not how the house worked. The ghosts could not - and would not - ever leave.
The living might, though.
Tim found himself utterly unable to rise from the chair. He couldn’t even raise an arm. It felt as though every inch and cavity of his body had been filled with the most dreadful weight. It was all he could do just to even blink, and that was exhausting enough. So pinned, he could do little else but listen, and let all of these stories and lives just flow over him.
Eventually - to Tim’s silent and immense relief - the sun started to rise. If there was one thing he knew about deathly spectres, spooks, ghosts and other assorted unquiet spirits it was that they were famously ill-favoured towards sunlight. It just didn’t agree with them at all.
And, indeed, as light began trickling reluctantly into the room he could already see the shadows started to retreat, taking the ghosts with them, and already he could feel the weight that had been filling him starting to lift. Relief flooded him.
Albeit not for very long.
For though the weight was leaving him, it wasn’t so much a sense of it lifting away but more that his substance was being pulled away. He was not returning to normal, but diminishing, reducing. So weightless he became that he felt himself starting to be pulled from the chair. Pulled by the same force that was pulling the shadows and the ghosts back into hiding.
Once this became obvious it was, perhaps, too late. Tim was already off the chair and slipping across the floor, towards a crack between the boards. He tried to hold on but there was no grip to him anymore - he couldn’t even see his fingers, let alone grab ahold of anything.
He scrabbled for the sack he’d been stuffing the goods into and though he could have sworn it was within reach he just couldn’t get a hold. He swiped clean through it and carried on along his way, drawn more and further into that crack, away from the light and down, down under the floor and deeper still, into a place that hadn’t known sunlight for decades if not longer.
There to join the ghosts.
You won’t get away, no with us you will stay for the rest of your days
