• Dear Reader,
    Before you read this story I must impress upon you that the memory of this story will haunt you forever, and that as time passes it will ware away your very soul. So I beg of you Reader, please, Dig a hole to the centre of the earth and hide, for ever, the monstrosity of misery, pain, fear and death that is this story, dispose of it as I could not. Please Reader, I beg you, do not plunge any further into the devastation, for if read you on, if you even glance at one page, you will be trapped evermore in the cold, dark embrace of suffocating horror that is, “The House of Darkness”. Sophie and Mark glanced at each other, Sophie raised her eyebrows and tucked a piece of light blonde hair behind one ear. Mark smiles and catches her eye, still smiling, he lifts the cover...


    Think of “The Place” the one that looms over your childhood…that leaves a shadow of mystery in your life…the one that is forever locked…forever abandoned…forever empty...the one that is the essence-the basis, of all ghost stories. Think of it on a hill, a hill that dominates the town of Rumbete, think of all life, people, animals, grass, flowers, trees, steadily dying away, leaving nothing, nothing but dust and the remains of dead organisms. Think of even the sky itself being erased, to be replaced by a dark, daunting, swirling mass of storm. Think of an old, abandoned, dilapidated mansion. Think of empty windows being occupied by silhouettes, the darkness that moves out of sight when you look again, leaving you unsure you even saw them in the first place.
    Think of the big doors crashing open in a protesting shriek of rusted hinges. A girl exploding out of the house, her white blonde hair a flash of colour among the dead brown of the surrounding ground. A boy stumbles out of the open doorway holding his head and calls after the fair-haired girl, she glances behind her and accelerates, her foot catches on something on the floor and she stumbles forward, she thrusts her hands out and tumbles to the ground. The boy darts across to her, he reaches out to help her up. She looks up at him with terror in her eyes, she kicks out and the boy doubles over, she stumbles up and races across the ground, she scampers down the hill at break neck speed. They boy right on her heels. Why is she running from him? He is the one that opened the book. Sophie never finished the it, not even the first chapter; she had run out of the room, Mark had already been trapped.
    She slammed the door behind her, she pressed her ear to the door and listened, she could he it moving around outside. Panting she tried to make out the interior of the room. She stopped, she couldn't hear anything. She dashed over to the door, she couldn't hear h - it! Always it, never him, never him. She frowned, a memory, when they had first entered the house, they had gone through a room, it had one door opening out into a kind of inner garden, she had just gone through the inner garden, and it had had another door, near the back. Mark... Sophie swallowed, fighting back tears, Mark had opened it for her. Sophie froze, a door behind her creaked open, at that moment Sophie realised she wouldn’t be going home...