Free Shiver by Alex Nye

corridor was bathed in light. This annoyed the little girl. She preferred the shadows. She lifted her nightrobe and swept in silence.
    The electric lights were evenly spaced along the walls, brown glass globes that each gave off a soft light. The light switch controlled all six of them; they were not independent of each other.
    On impulse she decided to play a little game. As Chris Morton walked along the upstairs corridor, Eliza made the lights go out behind her … one by one. Chris Morton turned and stared. She was a brave woman: she was unafraid of the dark, or of loneliness, otherwise she would not have lived here, in so isolated a place.
    The lights continued to go out behind her, until at last she was left in total darkness, with the light switch nowhere inreach. She glanced behind her. The corridor was one long tunnel of darkness. Her rational side told her that the wiring in this house was decidedly peculiar and needed looking at … but her imagination could feel a presence at the end of the corridor … someone watching her.
Don’t be ridiculous
, she told herself.
There’s no one there. Just another power cut
.
     
    Chris Morton appeared in her daughter’s room.
    “Fiona,” she whispered hoarsely.
    No answer.
    Something stirred under the duvet in the four-poster bed.
    Fiona sat up, looking puzzled.
    “Mum? Is that you?”
    “Just checking to see if you’re still awake,” Chris murmured, somewhat breathlessly.
    “Well, I was asleep, but …”
    “I’ve brought you a hot drink. The electricity came back on for a moment and then went off in a rather strange way.” She told Fiona what had happened. “Must be the wiring,” she finished. “I keep meaning to get it checked. Anyway …” She placed a steaming mug on the bedside table and patted her daughter’s arm. “Night then.”
    “Night.”
    Reluctantly Chris Morton closed the door behind her and ventured out onto the dark landing. She returned to her own room telling herself that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

The Other Side
    The next morning the children got together to discuss Fiona’s nocturnal sighting of Eliza, and what it meant.
    “I knew there was something wrong with Lucy,” Fiona explained to the others. “She just wouldn’t settle. Then I saw this light under the door, in the corridor outside. I opened it and there she was … just standing looking at me, with a lighted candle in her hand. That’s when I screamed and Mum came.”
    “D’you think she suspects anything?”
    “Mum, you mean? I don’t think so,” Fiona said. “I told her it was a bad dream … but she’s not stupid. She might put two and two together.”
    “It’s very important that we don’t let on about Eliza and all this other weird stuff that’s been happening,” Charles told the others. “We don’t want Mum freaking out and deciding that it’s time to move.”
    “She’d never move, surely?” Samuel cried. “You’ve been here too long … your family, I mean.”
    Charles and Sebastian looked doubtful. “She has bad memories about the place, though. She didn’t move here until she got married. She might be glad of an excuse to leave,” Sebastian murmured.
    “We can’t let that happen,” Fiona cut in.
    “At least the power’s back on,” Samuel said, flicking a light switch on and off, just for the pleasure of it.
    “I hope our days here aren’t numbered,” Charles added forlornly.
    “Are you kidding?” Sebastian said. “Dodgy wiring, secret staircases, mouldy passageways, ghosts in the walls … who’d want to stay?”
    “We do,” Charles and Fiona said at the same time, without meaning to.
     
    On the other side, the ghost girl drifted … free at last. She left her brother behind in the dismal room, crying his heart out, crying for the past … and for their mother.
    There was no point in doing that, Eliza knew. Their destiny, their future, lay with the children who had found the secret staircase.
    She sailed through