Haunted: Perron Manor by Lee Mountford

Author:Lee Mountford [Mountford, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

21

2 Days Later…

‘I could have just come on my own,’ Chloe said, dropping the carton of baby tomatoes she held into the shopping trolley.

‘Well, I can’t just leave you to do the grocery shopping all the time, can I?’ Sarah responded. ‘Seems a bit lazy. Plus, I wanted to get out of the house for a little bit.’

The supermarket was large, which was surprising for a small town like Alnmouth. The aisles inside were packed with goods, and the trolley Chloe pushed squeaked across the laminate flooring underfoot. The high ceiling above them consistent of corrugated metal sheeting and exposed steel purlins.

Emma sat in the built-in child’s seat at the rear of the trolley, happily looking through one of her sturdy board-books, one about a dog who had gone missing just before dinnertime. As they passed an elderly man, who walked on his own, Emma pointed at him.

‘Man!’

Chloe gave the old man an apologetic smile, but he just chuckled and gave Chloe a friendly wave. The girls moved on, browsing the isles.

For weeks, Chloe had taken it upon herself to fulfil the weekly task of shopping, but today Sarah had been keen to come along as well.

And Chloe was quick to notice that her sister looked tired.

‘Still not sleeping too well?’ she asked.

Sarah shook her head. ‘Not really. It’s getting a little worse now, to be honest. It seems like I’m waking up every single night.’

‘Always at same time?’

‘Yup, roughly between three and four in the morning.’

‘Well, don’t take this the wrong way but… why don’t you try speaking to someone?’

Sarah picked up a packet of chocolate bars and looked them over. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked before setting the chocolate back.

‘Well, isn’t not sleeping a symptom of going through some kind of trauma?’ Chloe wasn’t a psychologist, but it certainly sounded right to her.

Sarah whipped her head around and frowned. ‘Dealing with trauma? What the hell are you talking about?’

‘You know what I mean,’ Chloe replied. ‘What happened with Tania. Maybe something isn’t sitting right, and talking about it could help.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Sarah stated dismissively. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Fair enough,’ Chloe said, deciding to drop it. For now. But she knew Sarah was not fine.

The two women then moved on to the frozen section, and the air around them dropped in temperature. Chloe was picking through the frozen meats when she heard a jingling tone emit from her phone.

Sarah’s too.

It was the camera system they had installed at the house. Detecting movement was a regular occurrence, and nine-times-out-of-ten, it was a false alarm, set off by God-knows-what.

Both girls pulled out their phones and flicked on the live-feed application, which displayed the full-colour stream from the activated camera. It was from the rear door, and looked out over the courtyard of Perron Manor.

‘Nothing,’ Sarah said. ‘I swear to God, that thing is so sensitive the fucking light from the sun could set it off.’

And that was true enough. They’d had an engineer check the system over, but all he’d said was that it was configured correctly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.