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‘I think they’ve gone inside,’ Kelly said, feeling a little mischievous. ‘I think we can safely go back downstairs now. But, oh my goodness, look at that!’

She pointed towards the window.

‘Huh?’

Esmeralda turned, but as she did so, Kelly tapped the little foot switch under the carpet that she’d left switched on.

The image of the creepy lady flashed up, and Esmeralda jumped in fright.

Kelly, sniggering, patted the girl on the shoulder.

‘I thought you’d be used to that by now,’ she said.

25

Noises in the Night

Once Kelly was sure that the Littleslades were inside their room, she and Esmeralda headed back downstairs.

Now linked by their partnership in crime, when Esmeralda gave Kelly a scissors gesture, it was with a conspiratorial smirk. Kelly couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps she’d made a new friend.

She ate dinner in the dining room, receiving a fright of her own when she discovered a plastic spider hiding under a piece of lettuce, only to glance at Esmeralda behind the bar and get a wink for her troubles.

Tonight, the pub was unusually quiet, maybe because a real howling gale was rolling in. With thunder rumbling and lightning flashing outside, rain battering the windows, Kelly had to revise her evening plan of walking up to the Carnival of Horrors to make some excuse to talk to Edward.

Instead, she hoped to get a chance to talk to the Littleslades, again under the pretense of an interview about the upcoming parade, while secretly hoping to uncover some truth to her theories. However, if they did have dinner, they had it in their room because they did not appear in the dining hall. And when she went up to bed, she saw a strip of light underneath their door and heard the low mumble of a television.

At least if they were in their room, they weren’t out kidnapping people.

With the storm killing off any chance to get a connection for her computer or her phone, in the end she had no choice but to call her boss on the pub’s payphone and relate word for word tomorrow’s article down the line. Mr Walsh was somewhat frustrated, muttering about not signing up to run a retro newspaper. But Kelly at least felt better for making her deadline, albeit in an unexpected way.

With little else to do now that the storm made going outside impossible, she checked around her room for any more surprises, inspected her windowsill for toads, and then decided to go to bed.

She was woken up in the night by a thunderous blast of noise, which at first, as she groggily came awake, she believed to be from the storm still raging outside.

However, as she sat up in bed, the sound came again. It sounded like the slamming of a door out on the corridor.

She crept out of bed, cracked her door and peered out. There was only a nightlight on in the corridor, and everything appeared dark and quiet.

As she listened, another thump came from downstairs. Her curiosity overriding her fear, she sneaked out of her bedroom and crept along the hall to the top of the stairs.

No sounds came from behind any of the other doors, and she saw no strips of light, so perhaps she was alone in being disturbed.

As she slipped down the stairs, however, each step creaking one by one, more bangs and crashes came from downstairs.

Stepping over the forbidden step, she reached the bottom of the stairs and noticed in the hallway that a number of books had fallen from a shelf, and a picture had fallen off the wall.

She crept a little further along the hall. The doors to the bar and the dining room were both closed. But then a came a loud clatter from the kitchens on the other side of the main bar.

When she tried that door, however, she found it locked tight. But still the clattering sound came from inside, like someone shaking a bowl of cutlery with rapid, violent motions.

She crept down to the dining room door, remembering that there was another door leading into the kitchens from there.

She cracked the door.

The room was mostly dark, aside from a couple of night lights in the shape of candles flickering on the windowsills.

She opened the door and stepped inside.