was bolted to were crumbling.
Emma and Todd dashed out just in time to see Gingie throw open the doors of their balcony. For a second their daughter hesitated.
Then all the strange thoughts that had filled her young life suddenly made sense.
Before Emma and Todd could reach their daughter she raised her arms.
Gingie was engulfed by a brilliant light.
The old man had never told them to expect this.
Huge, opalescent wings unfurled from their daughter’s slender back.
With one downbeat she flew up into the storm. Buffeted like a butterfly in the turbulent wind, Gingie reached the petrified Armando just as the railing he was clinging to fell away from the wall.
Gingie caught him before he could fall into the roaring waves below.
His astounded family could not take it what was happening.
As soon as he was flown to their welcoming arms, the apparition that had rescued their son blinked out of sight, leaving a tiny globe of light to dart away into the wind and rain.
Losing Gingie was yet another bereavement for Emma and Todd. But this was different. Although life was going to be empty without the flame-haired child gifted to them by the strange man, the memory of Gingie would remain forever.
A few weeks later they returned to the address on his golden card. The grassy mound was covered with toadstools and mushrooms. Gone was the house with its sunken courtyard and croaking frogs.
The couple were still young enough to adopt a child. There were many they could have given a loving home to, but knew they would never find another Gingie. So they asked Charlene’s parents if they could become her godparents, hardly expecting those possessive people to agree.
As they had just lost their child in a tragic accident, and without the chance to bury the body taken by the sea, Charlene’s parents agreed. Their daughter would be allowed to spend the occasional weekend with Emma and Todd, which would give them the opportunity to help compensate for the oppressive home life the young teenager had to endure. She was free to play in their small orchard with a neighbour’s children, dash under the branches of the apple trees and watch minnows in the stream that ran through the small orchard in the way she had never been allowed to as a child. Charlene relished every moment. Emma and Todd could see why Gingie and her friend had been such kindred spirits.
Charlene’s parents became aware that she was changing. She was becoming dreamy and less anxious, so they stopped their daughter visiting her new godparents before she developed the confidence to defy them.
From then on Charlene was watched more closely than ever.
One day the teenager was sitting quietly on the patio that had been prepared for a visit by her father’s important business friends. Their daughter’s gaze was focused on a small dot of light, which they assumed to be a stray reflection from the cut glass on a nearby table.
Their daughter lifted a finger to touch it.
The light swelled and luminous, opalescent wings unfurled to envelope Charlene.
There was a tiny ‘pop’ like a bubble bursting as she disappeared.
Two small globes of light gleefully circled each other for a moment, before darting away into an evening sky filled with fireflies.
Twinkie
This was the first time that Sally had been allowed out on her own, and she had a sneaking suspicion why. Nobody else would take the job.
Given the history of this boarded up old house, it was hardly surprising the other the estate agents didn’t want to survey it. Of course, once the property was assessed and had flattering photographs added to a brochure about its amazing potential, older hands would immediately snatch the commission and the credit. Once there was the real chance of a buyer they might even take the customer to view it. With company and a confident sales pitch the place would seem less haunted - not that this part of its history would be mentioned to a potential purchaser.
Sally didn’t mind. She was an 18-year-old still learning all the tricks and cunning ways of the house selling business. It was inevitable that she would need to survey a remote, run down property, which had a ghost, at some time or another. Sally just wished it hadn’t been this one. Local legend claimed that the sinister rocking horse in the upstairs nursery would sway backwards and forwards accompanied by the wicked giggles of young children. And there it was, looking down from a bay window, glass eyes staring at her as though knowing that it was due to be tossed onto a rubbish dump. Having survived the fire of over one and a half centuries ago, no one had endeavoured to rescue the antique toy. Other furniture and collectible items had long since been salvaged. Once the house had been virtually stripped of fixtures and fittings, that rocking horse remained exactly where it had been on the night of the fire. It was probably that expression... Sally certainly wouldn’t have wanted it in her flat, however much of a conversation piece it might have been when entertaining her antique collecting friends. The mythology attached to it alone was enough to give anyone nightmares.
Once the front door was unlocked, enough light escaped through the half boarded-up windows to show the way through the hall. As a precaution against treading on a rotten floorboard, Sally took out her torch.
The dimensions of the downstairs rooms were taken with a laser measure and added to the old plan scanned onto her smartphone. Sally took her time, snapping more photos than necessary, reluctant to ascend the stairs to where the nursery was situated.
A call from her office to check up on how things were progressing meant she could not put off measuring the bedrooms any longer.
Sally ascended the stairs in trepidation. She was surprised to find that the Victorian rooms were light and airy. The fire that had briefly swept through the house had left its charred evidence, but had been quickly doused. Although smoke damaged, the half drawn curtains in the nursery had hardly been scorched and allowed in a shaft of sunlight which fell on... that sinister rocking horse.
Already familiar with its malevolent gaze from the forecourt below, Sally could now feel the toy’s evil presence. Part of its mane and tail had been shrivelled by the flames and on the bridle, across its forehead, was the name ‘Twinkie’.
To make up the time she had wasted downstairs, Sally quickly measured up the other rooms. The last thing she wanted to do was spend her lunch hour in that house.
Soon, only the nursery remained. Trying not to look at the rocking horse, Sally quickly recorded its dimensions and took a few snaps.
Then Twinkie moved.
Perhaps a freak breeze from the broken window had given him a slight nudge. She was rooted to the spot, but not yet intimidated enough to flee the room.
Then came the high pitched giggling of two young children. It was not the normal, gleeful laughter of infants, but resonated with wickedness.
Rotten floorboards or not, Sally dashed out of the house.
Safely back at her desk, she grabbed a sandwich and mug of tea. Feeling calmer, the trainee estate agent pulled out the folder of documents the current owner of the property had provided. The house had remained unoccupied since the fire one and a half centuries previously. It had been inherited by a distant relative of the owners who lived in Ontario. They only bothered with its basic maintenance and security to prevent it becoming vandalised.
There were foxed pages of copperplate handwriting; too many for anyone else in the office to waste time with. The only thing that interested them was how much the derelict property and its grounds would bring in if sold for redevelopment. Hang the complaints from local historians claiming that it was a local, haunted landmark which should be preserved in all its decaying glory. At one time Sally might have agreed with them, but after her brief experience inside the house it would have been a relief to see it demolished.
At the bottom of the box folder was a large manila envelope containing early police reports. This handwriting was a round, legible print, probably learnt in a 19th-century Mother Hubbard school. At the top of each page was printed t
he name of a local constabulary and below it the address of the incident. It was surprising that no local historian had managed to ferret out this constable’s account of events at that sinister house.
There was no time to read it, so Sally dropped the manila envelope into her briefcase.
There were usually too many distractions after work; Facebook, drinking with friends in the pub, or watching a good film. But that evening something insisted that the contents of the manila envelope were too terrible to be ignored. Sally poured a glass of wine and curled up on the sofa with the police report.
In the autumn of 1865 Constable Flowers had been summoned by the distraught house owner to investigate the sudden and unexplained death of the young nanny he had employed to take care of his four-year-old twin sons. Their mother had died giving birth to them and the father, having to spend so much time away, had gratefully engaged this personable young woman to oversee them. Alice had come from a poor, but respectable, background and was well educated. The rest of the household thought highly of her, even the grumpy housekeeper who could be very territorial.
Dominic and Simon were problem infants, unresponsive to what was going on about them, and had created a small world of their own, which excluded adults and other children alike. Their father had put the identical twins’ behaviour down to the fact that they had never known their mother and the small