The Haunted Book Read online

  She paused as she was passing her aunt and uncle’s bedroom window. Had she heard voices from inside?

  A long, slow snore. She hadn’t even needed to come outside. How about that?

  She kept walking, one hand on the wooden rail of the deck, staring out into the night. Even living in a tiny town like Axe Falls, it was easy to forget how dark it could get out in the mountains, away from all the streetlights and illuminated billboards and glowing petrol stations.

  She was passing Dale’s room now. The window was too high to see in, but she could hear a voice—someone grumbling and grunting under his breath. Come to think of it, it didn’t sound much like her cousin. But who else could it be?

  ‘Dale?’ she called softly. ‘Is that you?’

  The voice stopped.

  There was a long silence.

  The hairs on the back of Sarah’s neck stood up. ‘Dale?’

  Still no reply from beyond the window.

  Maybe she had heard him talking in his sleep. She hoped so. It was the only explanation she could think of that didn’t frighten her.

  Sarah kept moving, past the bulky air-conditioning unit and to the back door. She had worried that it would be locked, but the handle turned easily. She pushed the door open—

  And saw something reflected in the glass.

  Sarah whirled around. A bobbing light was flitting between the trees in the forest below. She squinted down at it. Was that a torch?

  No. Stranger than that—a lantern.

  She hesitated. The sensible thing to do was probably to go inside, wake Uncle Claude and bring him outside to investigate. But even if he believed her—and that was unlikely—by the time he got out there, the light might be gone. It was moving quickly. Purposefully.

  It was a question of whether Sarah’s fear could overwhelm her curiosity.

  It couldn’t.

  She shut the door and tiptoed down the wooden steps to the brick path which led into the scrub. The lantern kept bouncing and weaving at the same rate, oblivious to her presence. It did little to illuminate the trees, and revealed nothing of its owner. Occasionally it was blocked by something—an arm? A chest?—but soon it reappeared, swaying giddily, moving deeper and deeper into the forest.

  Could this be the same man Dale saw in the house? Sarah wondered. Heading back to his car? If I could get the registration number …

  The lantern swung left and right as though unsure which way to go. Sarah edged closer. She just wanted to see who was holding it, that was all. At the moment, the shadows made it impossible to tell.

  The lantern kept swinging gently. Sarah held her breath as she tiptoed towards it, desperate to see who was carrying it …

  And then she did see. It was no-one.

  The lantern was dangling from a tree branch.

  The owner was nowhere to be—

  A hand snaked out of the darkness behind Sarah and clamped over her face. She tried to scream, but her airway was completely cut off. When she struggled, another arm wrapped itself around her torso, squeezing her like a giant constrictor.

  ‘Shhh,’ the crazy old man said.

  Part Four: The Diary

  Disaster in the basement. I came down to find my workbench in pieces and my subject missing. The barrels of Credence B, thankfully, were untouched.

  I turned around in circles, trying to stifle my panic. It seemed that I had underestimated Mr Sop. Judging by the wreckage on the floor, he had rocked from side to side until the workbench overbalanced, and not only had he survived—the Credence B must have given him amazing strength—the impact against the stone floor had severed one of the table legs. This must have allowed him to detach his chains from the bench.

  Curses!

  I was so close. His mind was all but erased. With a few more days, I could have recited to him my life story. Under the influence of Credence B, my memories would have become his memories. He would have become me, so that I may live forever—when he became old, he could have acquired a young specimen and repeated the procedure.

  I racked my brain for a new plan. I had left for work at Quirin a full ten hours prior, so Mr Sop could be miles away. But luck was on my side. He didn’t know his own name and wouldn’t remember the circumstances which led to his imprisonment—thank heaven his escape had not happened a few days earlier! When he contacted the police, they would think he was a lunatic, escaped from the local asylum.

  And yet, when they attempted to return him they would discover that no such patient had gone missing. The asylum may take him anyway—I had been told they weren’t picky—but there was a chance that a description of Mr Sop would be circulated. Sooner or later, someone would remember him—a fellow university scholar, perhaps, or another of his prospective employers. Despite all my precautions, I would soon have the constabulary darkening my doorway.

  My only option was to flee this place. Abandon this town, and possibly even this country.

  But what of my immortality project? It could take me years to find another subject, and to re-synthesise the Credence B. I could hardly take the barrels with me.

  Brilliant scientist that I am, it took me only a few hours to come up with a new plan.

  Yes, I would flee. But I would leave something behind.

  A diary. The story of my life, with all the necessary details. I would place it somewhere, not hidden but not obvious. A place from which it would eventually be plucked by a curious reader …

  And I would soak the pages in Credence B.

  With every turn of the page, more and more of the chemical would be absorbed through the skin. The words would perform a kind of hypnosis, transplanting my own mind into their highly suggestible subconscious. It wouldn’t take more than a day or two, particularly if the reader was smaller than Mr Sop. And while Sop resisted the process, whoever found the diary would not even realise it was happening.

  Tell me, dear reader, have you started to see things? Or hear things, perhaps? Echoes of the diary should already be surfacing in your perception.

  When Mr Sop was unconscious, I observed his arms and legs moving. Sometimes he would speak, and he had already taken on my accent. I suspect that sleep is when the new identity takes over. Tell me—have objects started to move inexplicably while you slumber? You may already have been me without realising it.

  At the beginning of this journal I told you not to stop reading—my life depended on it. Now it is too late. The words in this diary have exposed you to my thoughts and memories, while the Credence B infused in the paper is erasing your own. Soon your identity will melt away and you will be me—forever!

  L.F. Greenway

  NAMELESS TERROR

  He lurched up. The diary slithered off the bed and hit the floor with a papery splat.

  His heart hammered his ribs. It all made sense now. The way the book had moved during the night. How he had gone to sleep on the couch and woken up on his bed.

  Even the signature on the mirror made sense. He had written it himself.

  And the things that he had seen—the slugs, the ghost in the lake. Parts of the diary had been materialising in front of him more and more as he was repeatedly exposed to the pages soaked with Credence B.

  He staggered over to the door. He had to get help, while he still remembered who he was.

  But who was that? The boy rubbed his temples. His name was … Derek? Daniel? Yes, that sounded familiar. Daniel.

  He fumbled with the door handle. His fingers wouldn’t obey him. In fact, his whole right arm seemed to have taken on a life of its own—fingers flexing, wrist twitching. He was so tired.

  He used his other hand to open the door and stumbled out into what seemed to be someone’s living room. Whose house was this? He didn’t recognise any of the furniture.

  A bucket sat in the centre of the room, emitting a vile stink. When the boy peered in, he saw the putrefying remains of a dozen dead rats.

  It’s not really there, he told himself. It’s just another illusion. Part of the di
ary.

  But it looked real. It smelled real. His mind was no longer his own.

  He was about to scream for help, but then he realised that he had no idea who else was in the house. Were they friends? Was there anybody at all? He knew he was running from something—what if yelling gave away his position?

  Instead, he looked around for an exit. There was a window, but he had nothing with which to break through it. An archway let him into a kitchen, but that was as far as he could get. One of his legs was dragging, as though it, like his arm, was under the control of someone else.

  His eyelids were heavy. He felt like he was submerged in a warm bath. He hit the wall and slid down it onto the soft carpet.

  ‘Don’t go to sleep,’ he mumbled. ‘Something terrible will happen if you go to sleep.’

  But he no longer remembered what, and soon his eyes were closed.

  RETURNED

  ‘My name,’ the old man told Sarah, ‘is Henry Sop.’ He sat on a nearby tree stump.

  ‘But it took me a while to figure that out,’ he added, when Sarah said nothing. His voice was deep and raspy. Sarah wondered how old he was.

  ‘Uh, OK.’ She rubbed her arms where he had grabbed her. ‘What are you doing here, Mr Sop?’

  ‘I’m sorry I scared you.’ Mr Sop wiped his face with one massive hand, somehow leaving his features even dirtier. ‘I just didn’t want you to go back up to the house. There’s someone in there. Someone bad.’

  It was almost exactly what Dale had told her. ‘You could have just said that.’

  ‘I know. My head hasn’t been right. Not for a great number of years.’

  Sarah eyed him. He was strange, that was for sure, but she didn’t feel threatened by him. Something about his eyes—tired, sad, a little scared—reminded her of the way Dale had looked for the last couple of days.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked again.

  ‘That’s a long, long story.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll get comfy.’ Sarah sat down on a log and tilted her head until the joints popped in her neck.

  ‘I’ve also forgotten most of it,’ Mr Sop said.

  ‘Oh. Well, that’s OK. Just tell me what you do know.’

  The lantern swayed between them. Sarah wondered how many nights he had spent out in the forest and how he had survived the cold without any camping gear. He was really big—could this be the man Dale saw near the lake? The one who left the huge footprint?

  ‘I escaped,’ Mr Sop began, ‘from the basement of that house. Decades ago. I don’t remember how I came to be trapped there in the first place, but I remember what my captor wanted. He was trying to turn me into him.’

  ‘Turn you into him? Like, with plastic surgery?’

  Mr Sop shook his head. ‘The opposite of that. I would look the same, but underneath, I’d be him. A mind transplant, he called it. Anyway, he nearly succeeded, but I got away.’

  ‘And now you’ve come back.’

  ‘I came back once before,’ Mr Sop said. ‘Tried to break into the basement. But it turned out that the house was occupied, and the owners called the police.’

  ‘That was you!’ Sarah cried. ‘My uncle arrested you!’

  Mr Sop blinked. ‘He did? My, that’s quite a coincidence. Nice man, your uncle. Didn’t believe a word I said, but he did his job respectfully. As gentle as he was permitted, I reckon. Anyway, I was sentenced to five years in prison. I got out a few days ago.’

  ‘Why did you want to get into the basement?’

  ‘Because that was where he stored his chemicals,’ Mr Sop said. ‘He had twenty big barrels of something called Credence B. That was what he poisoned me with, and I didn’t want the same thing to happen to anyone else.’

  Sarah looked back up at the house. ‘So you were going to pour the chemicals down the drain, or something?’

  ‘Goodness me, no. Can you imagine what would happen if the Credence B got into the water supply? You’d have a whole population of mindless zombies. No, my plan was to bury the barrels, just far enough away that no-one would ever find them. I already had a hole dug, three kilometres north of here.’

  ‘But Uncle Claude got to you first.’

  ‘Right. In hindsight he might have done me a favour. My muscles have been stronger since that man exposed me to Credence B—a side effect, I guess—but the basement is a long way down, and I was already eighty-five years old. I might have broken my back carrying all those barrels up the stairs. This time, the plan was simple. I was going to burn the house down. Leave the barrels stuck under a few tonnes of ash.’ He sighed. ‘But just my luck, the house is occupied again.’

  Sarah’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘You don’t need to destroy the house. We can help you get rid of the Credence B.’

  ‘No offence, but you’re a small girl,’ Mr Sop said. ‘And those are big barrels.’

  ‘We don’t necessarily need to lift the barrels. My best friend’s dad is a construction worker. If we got a few bags of cement mix, we could pour some into each barrel. The Credence B would go hard, and then the guy who kidnapped you couldn’t inject it into anyone.’

  ‘Unfortunately, the chemical is absorbed through the skin. It doesn’t need to be in liquid form to work. Barrels of solid Credence B might be just as dangerous as liquid.’

  ‘Well, we can at least help you find a way to get the barrels out of the basement.’

  Mr Sop stroked his chin. ‘I don’t think your uncle would be inclined to help. He didn’t believe me last time.’

  ‘Let’s go wake up my cousin,’ Sarah said. ‘He’ll give us a hand.’

  IN CONTROL

  Luke Greenway stretched his arms behind his back. Stood on his tiptoes and gradually lowered himself back down.

  Yes, this was a good body. Young, flexible. Not much stretch—a little tightness behind the shoulder blades—but that would improve with exercise. It would be nice if it were taller, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  He looked around. The living room had changed so much that he barely recognised it. Where was the oriental rug? And what about the Monet? Some blackguard had probably sold it.

  And what was this? A strange rectangular object on the table, like a writing slate, but with a face of opaque glass. Greenway picked it up, examined both sides—the back seemed to be plastic—and put it back down, confused. He scanned the walls for a calendar, but saw nothing. There was no way to know how long he had been indisposed. He might have a lot of catching up to do.

  He walked through into the nearest bathroom. At least it was still in the same place. There were no lanterns—not even fixtures for them. A toggle on the wall looked like a switch for an electric light, but he didn’t want to flip it in case he wasn’t alone in the house.

  He peered in the dark mirror. He looked very young. Pre-adolescent. That could make reclaiming his possessions difficult. But at least it would be a long time before he had to find another body. And he would become taller.

  Something chimed nearby. Greenway jumped. The noise had come from very close by. Like a small bell in his pocket.

  He spun around, but no-one was in the room with him.

  Greenway reached into his pocket and found something cold and flat. The object was like a smaller version of the glass slate in the living room. When he pulled it out, a message seemed to be printed on it in luminous ink:

  New message

  from Josh

  A voice shrieked in his head, so loud that Greenway winced.

  Josh! Help me!

  It seemed that Greenway’s host hadn’t quite surrendered yet. Some people were not as suggestible as others. Closing his eyes, he mentally pushed the boy way down into the black until the screaming was silenced.

  He must be inhabiting the body of a trained cynic. Unusual in one so young. Never mind—a few more hours and he would be gone.

  Greenway could always read the diary again to speed up the process. The combination of chemicals and words would erase the host more quickly.

  H
e shook the object in his hand, but it didn’t chime again. After a second, the glowing ink faded away before Greenway’s eyes.

  Evidently he had been gone for a long time. The first order of business would be to find an updated encyclopaedia and read each volume from cover to cover.

  Well, the second order of business. There was something else to take care of first.

  He wasn’t sure if anyone else was in the house. If they were, he didn’t know whether he could fool them into thinking he was his host. Safer to go down to the basement.

  A substantial amount of time must have passed. The device in his pocket was decades ahead of his era. So this host may not be the first person to come across the diary. There could be other Luke Greenways out there. Once he had his secret weapon from the basement, he could find them and join forces.

  Last night—or perhaps the night before, he couldn’t be sure—he had become semi-conscious as his host slept. His thoughts had been muddled, since the boy hadn’t read the whole diary. But he had been aware enough to search the cupboards for tools. He had located a hacksaw and used it to cut open the secret passageway.

  But a hacksaw wouldn’t get him through the boarded-up door downstairs. He would need something with more emphasis.

  Greenway walked out the back door and scanned the surrounding forest. Some of the trees had become enormous. Others were missing. But he was conscious that this could be an illusion. Anything that he hadn’t written down in the diary wasn’t a genuine memory—it was a mixture of his host’s subconscious and his own.

  Either way, he was delighted to find his trusty axe stuck in a log. He braced his foot against the wood and wrenched the blade free. It looked as sharp as ever.

  He swung it through the air, left and right, getting used to the weight of the handle. Perfect. Greenway hefted it over his shoulder, ready to bring it down with bone-crushing force at any moment. Then he turned around and climbed the steps back up towards the door.

  Soon, he thought, I will be unstoppable.