The Ticking Ghost: A horror thriller by Phil Miles

Author:Phil Miles [Miles, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

10:32

31 hours and 28 minutes remaining

Drew had gone upstairs to be as far from Megan as possible. She never seemed to leave that dining room anymore. She’d claimed it for herself. Fine. He would claim the bathroom then. He closed the door and paced the room, contemplating the illusionist. The fraud. The spy who posed as a ghost hunter, for reasons that still eluded him. Or maybe there was no reason for it atall. Maybe spies simply lied and cheated reflexively, whether deception was necessary or not. They might even lie to their overlords in the Home Office, paying lip service to its nominal conservatism while secretly cheering on its firmly entrenched leftist die-hards, whose telltale signs were the ongoing equality mantras and the ‘diversity is strength’ Orwellian bullshit. Strength isn’t diversity, you pricks. Strength is unity. Remember unity? Not that Megan would have understood, or even cared. She would be too busy climbing that greasy pole, no doubt given constant leg-ups by some woke as fuck HR policy. Megan would never stop. She was too ambitious. She would go far, and all in the name of equality, or worse, equity. Communism in all but name. If they called it communism people would smell a rat, so of course they had to give it a nice, reasonable sounding name. That was the key trick. And never mind about the history. Never mind about the famines and the purges and the gulags. Just warn the kids about Hitler and leave it at that.

Drew rubbed his eyes. They burned with fatigue. At least there were no holes in the floor up here. Here he could stretch out properly and finally get some sleep. And sleep he did, as soon as he lay down.

He woke after what seemed like moments, but now there was something subtly different about the light in the room. Daylight still streamed in through the windows, but it seemed brighter, sharper. The other odd thing was that the walls looked different. The bricks were gone, replaced by horizontal wooden slats. He got up and went out onto the landing. There was no landing. He was outside. Outside in the camp, surrounded by wooden huts like the one he’d just emerged from. It was snowing again; a fresh covering lay thick on the stony ground. It never seemed to stop snowing in the camp.

The dream about the house at the end of the pier had been a vivid one, but now he remembered where he was, and what day it was, and his heart leapt. He looked out beyond the huts, at the barbed wire fences and the watchtowers. Uniformed women manned the towers, rifles slung over their shoulders, binoculars raised, on the lookout for detainees who weren’t where they should have been. Drew wasn’t where he should have been. Today was Volunteer’s Day, and he had volunteered. Head down, hands in pockets, he trudged through the snow towards the muster point.

Shouts came from the women in the watchtowers. He’d been spotted.

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