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Authors: Vanessa Curtis

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The Haunting of Tabitha Grey

BOOK: The Haunting of Tabitha Grey
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It’s like the house is waiting.
Waiting for me to move in.

 

The Haunting of Tabitha Grey
first published in
Great Britain 2012
by Egmont UK Limited
239 Kensington High Street
London W8 6SA

Copyright © Vanessa Curtis 2012

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

ISBN 978 1 4052 5721 3
eBook ISBN 978 1 7803 1127 2

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Whilst this book is based on real events, it is still very much a work of fiction and should be read as such.

 

To Dad, for giving me
a love of ghost stories

 
Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

 
Prologue

W
hen Dad first crunches the car up the semi-circular gravel drive outside Weston Manor I don’t take much notice.

My head’s tipped forwards on the seat and Mum’s got a wad of tissues stuffed up my nostril and is telling me to keep still. Ben is crying next to me, impatient to get out of the car
where he’s been sitting stuck next to a pile of cases and boxes for a hot half-hour.

Nosebleeds.

I hate them.

Gran says that they’re a sign of a ‘sensitive soul’ and that all the best people get nosebleeds at my age. But that’s not much comfort when you’re swallowing salty
blood that runs down the back of your throat and your mother is yelling at you not to move and your father is drumming his fingers on the car window with impatience, is it?

Nope.

Gran’s not moving in with us, anyway. There was some talk of it, cos she’s living on her own now and not very mobile, but Mum and Dad had one of their rare frosty conversations and
Dad was heard to utter the words, ‘If that lunatic is moving in, I’m moving out,’ and since then it hasn’t been mentioned again. Besides, she’s only half an hour away
from here by car.

Dad’s switched the engine off now and as the blood finally dries up in my nose I become aware of how quiet it is.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Mum says. She’s gazing up at the house in front of us. ‘Like a palace!’

I shoot her an astonished look when she says that. Even Ben stops fiddling about and stares at her.

‘But it’s not,’ I say, ‘like a palace. This is just a house.’

Mum and Dad exchange smiles.

‘Only you,’ says Dad, ‘could call Weston Manor, “just a house”. Take another look, Tabitha.’

I scowl at him using my real name and glare up at the house in front of us. Yeah, it’s kind of smart, I suppose. It’s probably more of a mansion than a house. Elegant, painted white
with dark green shutters and great long glass windows running along a verandah on each side. There are smaller windows up on the top floor and a wing on each side of the house with a pointed gable
on top.

‘Emma says the servants lived in one of those wings,’ says Mum, following my gaze.

Emma Houghton is the head of museums and galleries at Weston Borough Council. She’s the one who has arranged for Dad to take the job of curator.

I glance at Mum where she’s gathering her bags up in the front seat of the car.

She still looks like a dancer even though she’s dressed in a fleece and combats. Her hair is tied back into a loose ponytail and wisps of her glossy brown hair hang around her face so that
she resembles one of those old-fashioned women in paintings. She’s thin – you can see her cheekbones trying to cut through her fair skin.

‘What’s that?’ I say, pointing at a flight of white concrete steps in the middle of the grass. ‘How can they be stairs? They don’t go anywhere!’

Mum smiles. ‘That was where the ladies of the manor would mount their horses,’ she says. ‘So that they didn’t have to leap up from the ground and ruin their long
dresses.’

I pull a face.

‘Weird,’ I say.

Dad is getting out of the car and stretching, even though we’ve only come a few miles.

‘I think the first thing I’ll do is find a kettle and make some tea,’ he says, rubbing his eyes and blinking.

Mum nods in agreement.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Your nose has stopped bleeding now. Get out of the car.’

She addresses her remark to me, but Ben’s the one who needs to be told the most. He’s now fiddling about with the electric button on the car window, lost in his own little world as
usual.

I shove him with my foot until he shoots me a sullen look and slides out of the car on the other side.

Mum, Dad and Ben stand for a moment in front of the house, gazing up at the dark windows with shutters pulled across them. Dad has his arm draped over Mum’s shoulders. Ben stands next to
them, very small beside Dad’s giant frame. All three of them have the same shiny dark-brown hair. I don’t look like them. Mine, for some reason, is as yellow as corn. I’ve got
Dad’s skin, though. In summer my cheeks go strawberry red. Mum’s the only one who tans.

The house reminds me of a giant white square that’s been plonked down in the middle of an enormous green park. It’s very quiet. No signs of life; no smoke coming out of the chimneys;
no cars or vans or coaches pulling up next to us. The arched gateway leading from the side of the house into the back gardens is padlocked shut. That’s because the house isn’t open to
the public on Sundays, or so Mum has told us way too many times.

Mum and Dad and Ben are still staring up at the house. They look like they are frozen solid, but when I get out of the car Mum turns towards me, smiles and holds out her hand.

Then she turns back to gaze up at the manor like she’s in some weird trance or something.

‘We’re going to be so happy here,’ she says. ‘I just know it. This is what we all need – a fresh start.’

Dad squeezes her hand when she says this and pulls her closer.

I look up at the dark, unblinking eyes of the house and I get the weirdest feeling.

It’s not a good feeling.

It’s the feeling of being pulled into something dark by a hand I can’t see and not being able to stop it happening even if I want to.

It’s like the house is waiting.

Waiting for me to move in.

 
Chapter One

D
ad’s new job title is ‘Keeper of Weston Manor’.

He used to have another job nearby until the council decided that they couldn’t afford to pay him any longer because they needed our flat for offices and storage space.

Dad was worried he’d have to sign on to the dole, but Emma Houghton called him one night and said that after twenty years of having no live-in Keeper, the council had decided that Weston
Manor needed one again and that she was keen for somebody with the right experience to take over even though she couldn’t offer him as much pay as he got in his last position.

So I guess you could say that this job came up in the nick of time, or else we’d be homeless.

We don’t have a house anywhere else.

We used to have a flat in London near to the Royal Ballet when Mum danced there every night. After she retired, there was a long period when she had no work and Dad hadn’t yet found his
Keeper job and was working as an art historian at a big London museum and it didn’t pay enough for us to stay in our beautiful Georgian flat so we sold up and moved in with Gran for a few
months until Dad managed to get work.

Mum was a really famous ballet dancer until she got to thirty-eight and decided to retire so that she could devote more time to Ben and me. She never talks about it much, but sometimes I wonder
if she wishes she had carried on longer. The time at home didn’t exactly work out as she’d planned it.

This new place, Weston Manor, looks kind of OK.

Yeah. I reckon things are going to be better here.

We walk through the grand front door to the manor and Dad flicks switches and lights up the enormous entrance hall.

‘It’s gorgeous!’ says Mum, gazing around with her eyes wide.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I mutter. I’m tired and lugging a heavy suitcase. ‘Where’s our flat?’

Mum and Dad laugh when I say this, but Dad leads us down a long corridor on the ground floor, past two very large grand rooms to a brown front door with a gold doorbell and a plate with our
surname on it.

‘Here we are,’ he says. ‘Home sweet home.’ He staggers in holding a box in one hand and jangling his keys in the other.

Mum puts her bags down. She unpacks the kettle from the top of the box and heads into a pleasant, blue-tiled kitchen with a view of the front drive to Weston. She drifts around our new flat in
the wing of Weston Manor, inspecting the bedrooms.

‘Do you fancy this one, Tabs?’ she says, opening the door to a square, light-filled room on the second floor. It looks out over the croquet lawn at the back of the house. ‘I
think it used to be a servant’s bedroom. Not a bad size, is it?’

I shrug.

‘OK,’ I say. But my heart lifts. The room is really pretty. And it’s going to be all mine. I help Mum carry boxes and suitcases up into my new room and then she goes downstairs
to choose her and Dad’s room and I bounce on the bed a few times and look around my new room.

There’s a small white fireplace just by the window and wooden floorboards that have been stripped back and varnished, covered by a thick Indian carpet, with a single bed in the middle of
it. The ceiling is bare and white and there’s no furniture other than one ancient-looking oak chest of drawers.

I turn the handle of a door and find myself in a tiny adjoining bathroom. There’s a deep white bath with enormous gold taps and a toilet with a wooden seat with a chain pull hanging over
it. The sash window over the loo has the same view as from the bedroom.

I go back into my room and finish unpacking. I’ve packed all my make-up and brushes and moisturisers in a little leather bag that Gemma lent me. Gemma’s my best mate at school and
she looks a lot like a young Cat Deeley which is a bit sick-making. I arrange all the little brushes and compacts and bottles on the oak chest of drawers and then I lie on the bed and stare at the
ceiling for a while.

It feels OK, this room. Mum said that the entire wing is much newer than the rest of the house. Before that the servants had to work and sleep in the basement kitchens in the main house,
although a couple of the senior maids had bedrooms upstairs near the family and sometimes the junior housemaids had tiny attic rooms right up in the roof.

BOOK: The Haunting of Tabitha Grey
5.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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