A Tale of Two Ghosts Read online

  A Tale of Two Ghosts

  Sarah Riad

  Also by Sarah Riad

  The Sharp Knife of a Short Life

  364 Days a Year

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1. Ab

  2. Finn

  3. Ab

  4. Finn

  5. Ab

  6. Finn

  7. Ab

  8. Finn

  9. Ab

  10. Finn

  11. Ab

  12. Finn

  13. Ab

  14. Finn

  15. Ab

  16. Finn

  17. Ab

  18. Finn

  19. Ab

  20. Finn

  21. Ab

  22. Finn

  23. Ab

  24. Finn

  25. Ab

  26. Finn

  27. Ab

  28. Finn

  29. Ab

  30. Finn

  31. Ab

  32. Finn

  33. Ab

  34. Finn

  35. Ab

  36. Finn

  37. Finn

  About the Author

  Please enjoy the following excerpt from Sarah Riad’s 364 Days a Year:

  364 Days a Year

  Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Riad

  A Tale of Two Ghosts

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Sarah Riad to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Sarah Riad has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

  ISBN 9798608371639

  First edition

  Cover art by Tallulah van der Made

  Editing by EditElle

  Acknowledgments

  Book number three! Who would have thought it? Not me, that’s for sure but then I say that after every book I finish. I can’t actually recall how this story came to me but it’s definitely fair to say that it’s nothing like the first idea I had. I remember thinking that my last book, 364 Days a Year, was tough to write but boy was I wrong. This story has been the hardest yet. It took a lot of work, motivation and time away from writing to finish it. At points, I even considered throwing the whole thing in the bin but it didn’t seem fair on those that had pushed me to the finishing line. Which brings me to this bit of the book where I thank those special people because without them this would be all still be sitting in a folder named ‘Drafts’ on my computer. I’ll try to keep this short and sweet so please don’t be offended if I haven’t included your name—you know who you all are and hopefully know how thankful I am of you.

  First and foremost, to my editor, Elle Fort—what a woman she is! Not only is she exceptional at her job but she has this ability to know exactly what it is that I am trying to do (even sometimes when I don’t know what I am trying to do). There are not enough ways I can thank you, Elle—you’re an absolute wizard of the words and I cannot wait to continue working with you.

  This story is all about friendship and I think we often forget that though some of us are surrounded by family and significant others, it’s our friends that sometimes make the biggest impact in our lives. And though some might not always stay until the end, they play huge parts in our journeys. These past two years have been a strange couple for me. I ended a few friendships and some have just naturally come to their end but I also gained some incredible people that have become so important to me.

  Megan, there are no words to sum up our friendship. You are the American half of me. A sister. A best friend. My biggest fan (I’m yours too). Thank you x1,000,000.

  Cath & Sameera, the newbies in my life but it feels like I have known you both forever. Thank you for always supporting me in every aspect of my life and reminding me how fabulous I am especially when I don’t feel it.

  Lastly, the golden oldie—the girl who has been there since we were barely teenagers. We’ve been through so much together over the past seventeen odd years and watched each other grow into the almost thirty-year-old’s that we are. Samantha, thank you and I love you as though you were my sister.

  To my immediate family, though we annoy each other relentlessly, I wouldn’t swap you for the world and thank you for pretending to be interested in my new ideas though none of you are big fans of books.

  To the following bookstagramers who discovered my last book and have stuck with me since: @cortnereads, @all_books_great_and_small and @elle_love_books. There are many days where I feel like giving it all up and then by absolute chance a message from you will pop up reminding me why I do this. Thank you for loving my books as much as I do.

  And lastly, to everyone who has chosen to buy this book and read it—thank you. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you make a nobody feel like a somebody.

  Love, Sarah x

  To all the lost souls.

  The ornament of a house is the friends that frequent it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  1

  Ab

  In your world I am dead. But in mine, I couldn’t be more alive.

  Well, as alive as I could be.

  Every day is the same for me as I wait for the sun to reach its tallest point and release its amber glow through the arched windows of a room belonging to an old library. I remember a story told to me years before that the room was once an attic but converted into the library by the owner for his wife. She had been expecting his child after many years of trying when they finally gave up to later find out she was pregnant. She gifted him with a son, and he gifted her with the library of her dreams. Now the room had been my favourite. Not only for the story but it was also the lightest room and in a house of darkness, a little light never hurt. It was also because of that room that I found my love of reading. Most of my days had been spent reading the books I had used my fading strength to pull off the shelves and as the dust belonging to the room basked alongside me in the orange haze, I would blow with all my might to turn the pages of the stories I had read a thousand times. But like always, the sun soon begins to settle, and I am robbed of any chance to read. Every corner of the house begins to absorb the darkness, growing rapidly around me despite my silent protests.

  I don’t fear the darkness. In fact, on the right days, we reunite like old friends but on other days, I am simply irritated by it. As the perfect orange and pink sky begins to darken at its edges so too does the light in the room. With my books redundant for the night, I begin my wander of the house, wishing time away, desperate for the moment when the start of sunrise begins.

  I do the same thing every night. I look into each of the bedrooms, never knowing what it is I am looking for but hoping one day it appears. Perhaps maybe an explanation for all of this, perhaps maybe even a way out. Once the bedrooms are checked, I make my way downstairs and peer out of the cloudy pane of glass beside the front door. I close my eyes and pray to anyone that’ll listen for someone to show up and let me have my fun. By this point, even though I haven’t had access to the time for decades, I know it’s only b
een a mere few minutes rather than the hours it feels. With very little strength left, there’s not much left for me to do. I sing my favourite songs, but it’s been so long since I last heard them that I have now mostly made up new words to them. Cyndi Lauper would hate me after hearing my version of ‘Time After Time’. When I am not singing, I visit the others that live in the house—Simon the Spider and his wife Sheila. There are a few rats in the house too, but we don’t like each other’s company, so we stay well away. I wish most nights that the days would last as long as the nights, but they rarely do unless of course, I gain a visitor or two. That’s when darkness and I reunite, working together to put on the most spectacular of performances for our guests.

  At the moment when I hear the cautious footsteps walk across the beaten pathway, leading to the house, a feeling of electricity rushes through me. Already, I can feel the weakness in me slip away, and it’s replaced with a strength I have sorely missed. The sound of their shaky whispers causes me to become giddy as I rush to my feet and wait by the front door, peering out of the glass panes.

  ‘Come on,’ I urge.

  As I look on through the glass, I watch my new visitors look up at the building with wide darting eyes as they approach the door. It always seems to be a group of teenagers from the nearby town that come to visit. Always because of a dare and only sometimes because of intrigue though either suits me fine as I begin to grow excited. I can hear their beating hearts race erratically. I can feel the beads of sweat form at the back their necks and I can taste the drops of bile as it rises from their stomachs. For most, this is as far as they’ll get. They’ll get to the door and chicken out before even reaching for the door handle as their friends mock from the safety of their parked cars. Though I’ll have not gained nearly enough strength if they run away, I will have gained enough to at least pull another book off the shelf, keeping me occupied for another few months or until the next visitor arrives. Yet, as often as it rains in a desert, a visitor will take hold of the door handle and twist it open.

  Years before, my inexperience and hunger for strength would always get the better of me. I would scare as soon as the door would open but now, I know better. I wait, first sipping on the fear people create in their own minds and once their heart rate lowers, I cause a noise, and this is where the darkness comes in handy. Without her, I’m just an expected noise from an old, abandoned house but with her, I become the possibility of so much more. I follow them as they go deeper into the house, already bathing in my new strength. With their concentration and torch lights focused on what’s ahead of them, I toy with what’s behind them. A fallen piece of debris or a creak from upstairs causes their hearts to pound urgently and their chests to rise rapidly. I can sense their want to run as their eyes scan the darkness. It’s at that moment that their imagination gets the better of them. Was that an old floorboard or was that someone walking behind them? You see, I exist in their minds long before I exist in the room.

  I had been doing it for so long that I had learned when they are about to give up and run but just before they do, darkness and I perform our finale. Our finishing touch. I lace my finger against the smooth keys of a piano and begin to slowly play the only song I could play which happened to be Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. As the sound of the out of tune notes mix with the screams of my departing guests, I wave them off, glad they never outstay their welcome. I always spend the following days after consumed by the temptation to do everything I can with all the new strength I have but as much as darkness is a friend, she is also a lesson in patience and soon reminds me that without my strength, I become a prisoner to her once again.

  I had no visitors last night. In fact, I haven’t had any for what feels like months. My strength is now nothing but a memory and I have spent the last few weeks re-reading the same pages of an open book. Now, even when sunrise begins to appear, I remain rooted to the spot. There’s no point in me rushing when I’ll only have three hundred of the same words I read yesterday and the day before to read. Instead, I sit and continue to play a lead role in my self wallow party. I begin to imagine the outside as I could hear the gentle wind whistling through the cracks of the window. I picked at old memories of the sun, remembering how the warmth felt against my bare arms as I walked through town to this very house. The garden was always so vibrant with brightly coloured flowers amongst a bed of emerald grass. I could actually hear the crunching of the gravel beneath my feet as I approached the huge white door of the house, excited to see the face behind it when a car door slammed shut.

  I scrambled to my feet. My imagination was good but not good enough to make real sounds. Someone was here. Someone was at the house.

  I raced downstairs as I heard the sound of the gravel once again. As I reached the windowpane allowing a slither of dawn into the hallway, I saw them. There, staring towards me on the other side of the front door, stood five people. One man, one woman, two boys, and a little girl.

  ‘Well, this is it, I guess. Don’t you think it has some great potential?’ The man who spoke was carrying a box with black letters spelling ‘Kitchen’. His face looked like the result of a challenging life with frown lines across his forehead and deep wrinkles branching out from his eyes. Despite this, you could see from his dark hair with only the odd strand of silver, and his tall, muscular frame that he was not as old as he first appeared.

  No one replied. Instead, the others stood back and looked at the house. I hadn’t seen people in daylight for what felt like years, but that didn’t stop me from being able to see none of these people wanted to be here. All their jaws were locked tightly with eyebrows that met high in the middle. Even the little girl bit on her lip as she clung to her mother.

  ‘Sure, Dad. A little work and it could be...nice,’ one of the boys said, taking a moment to carefully choose his words as he grabbed a box labelled ‘Theo’s trophies’.

  ‘You’re right, Theo. Once we get it cleaned up with some fresh paint, it will look as good as the old house,’ the woman said, also lying but with tight eyes, as she bit on her soft pink painted lips. The children, except the little girl, had her eyes, a pale blue that almost looked translucent, compared to their dad’s dark eyes which the girl had inherited.

  ‘Which begs the question, why leave the old house in the first place?’ said the other boy, his face hidden behind scruffy, unkempt hair. A statement that I think all but their dad agreed with silently. It was strange because you could tell he was Theo’s brother but only after you stared for long enough. You had to see past their obvious differences to notice their similarities.

  ‘Don’t start, you idiot.’ Theo rolled his eyes as he shoved him with his broad shoulders.

  ‘Theo, leave your brother alone. Finn, stop with the scratched record.’ Their mum sighed as she brushed back her auburn hair with her fingers into a ponytail. ‘Let’s just get inside and see what our new home looks like.’

  New home?

  If I could, I’d have screamed so loud that the windows would have shattered in protest. They would have all looked back in absolute fear, which would have only made me stronger and allowed me to send them flying. They’d scramble to their lorry, dropping the boxes, in a hurry to leave this house that didn’t belong to them and never return. Of course, none of that was possible with my current strength. So instead, I stood back and watched them unlock the door and walk straight into the house.

  2

  Finn

  It’s huge,’ Theo said running down the stairs, sounding as though they were moments away from collapsing under his weight. ‘Three floors including a library at the top.’

  ‘Plenty of room to each have our own space then,’ Mum said with an overly enthusiastic smile, the same smile she put on whenever we received an unwelcome visit from her mum. She shifted her eyes over to me.

  ‘The house is a mess. It’s dirty, old, and…’ I paused and reached my hand out to the nearest light switch. ‘...has no electricity. We left our home for this? For an extra floor
and a library that no one will ever use?’

  Mum’s smile quickly fell and was replaced with the glare I’d become familiar with the past year. ‘Give it a rest, Finn.’

  ‘No,’ I said surprising myself with the volume of my own voice. ‘This makes no sense. You can’t just pack up our whole lives and move us miles away without telling us why. We had a life there.’ I could feel the heat in my cheeks begin to smother the rest of my face.

  ‘Finn. I said, enough,’ Mum yelled as Dad stepped into the house. There was something off about him today. I had noticed it ever since we had loaded the car earlier that morning. He was distracted, so much so that he had not yet shouted at me despite the number of times I knew I had done things to irritate him during the journey here.

  ‘Jack, will you please talk to your son?’ Mum said in the usual way she did—scare me with the threat of Dad’s louder voice—except this time Dad didn’t move. It was like he was rooted to the spot, frozen with a side table in his arms. I watched the colour in his face drain away as though it were being sucked out of him. His breathing was shaky as he glanced around the room with darting eyes. His grip of the table legs tightened displaying white knuckles before he finally opened his mouth without a sound.