Welcome to sleep stories with Steph your go-to podcast.
That offers you a calm and relaxing transition.
Into a great night's sleep.
It is time to relax and fully let go.
There is nothing you need to be doing now.
And know where you need to go.
Close your eyes.
And feel yourself sink into the support beneath you.
And let all the worries of the day go.
Drift away.
This is your time.
And your space.
Take a deep breath in through your nose.
And let it out with a long sigh.
That's it!
There is nothing you need to be doing now.
And know where you need to go.
Happy listening.
Chapter 1 Once upon a time when I was 11 years old.
.
.
I thought being small would last forever.
I was so impatient to grow up because I thought being an adult would be so much better than being a child.
How wrong I was.
My name is Chloe Marsh and back then I lived on the outskirts of an English town called Mountford West.
Wasn't a very big town,
But growing as fast as London allowed it to,
Under the watchful eye of its only parent,
Lord Mountford,
Or Monty M as Dad said whenever he got home late from the pub.
Our house stood on the edge of town,
In a lonely lane that wound all the way down from the main road to the allotments,
Where my dad grew his prize-winning marrows.
It was the first of many.
Old with red bricks and it had blue curtains and a blue front door.
My mum loved the colour blue.
She said it was very becoming.
And father liked it because,
Like all the important families in Mountford.
.
.
We voted Conservative.
Our front garden had a well-trimmed lawn.
That was Dad's thing.
And a metal gate and a metal arch over which grew pink tea roses and white lobelia.
These bloomed when the sun came out,
Which was usually later than we wanted it to,
But very welcome nevertheless.
Outside in the lane there was a long line of tall fir trees that hung heavy over the footpath and shielded us from the rain whenever mum was cleaning the floor.
On the opposite side of the lane,
An old horse,
Chestnut,
The king of all trees,
We called it,
Shed its load once a year,
Much to the frustration of my father and the delight of my younger brother,
Who was Concord King of Mountford Primary.
Seven years old he was when he designed his magic formula.
And I'll give him his due,
It worked every time.
Even though mum was far from impressed when all the vinegar went missing.
The funny thing was,
She was just as surprised every time it happened.
Maybe that was because she was so busy and forgot.
Mum was always very busy.
On one side of our house lay an overgrown footpath with spidery weeds that poked out between the paving stones.
I like to sit there sometimes when they were warm from the sun and make daisy chains.
I also like to check to see whether I still like butter or not with the buttercups.
Dad told me that was just a myth.
But the fact is I do like butter,
And myth or not,
Those buttercups confirmed it every time.
On the other side of our house lived our neighbour.
She was called Mrs Bantry.
Anyone who didn't know her thought she was a very quiet woman.
But that was anyone who didn't know her.
I can tell you without a doubt.
She was more exciting than anyone I'd ever met.
Even that bloke who brought snakes to the village hall for people's birthday parties.
For one thing,
Mrs Bantry was a white witch.
She said so herself and I didn't dare argue with her.
For another,
She was a genius at carving wood.
She could turn the most boring piece of timber into a box with a secret compartment,
Or an owl that watched you when you walked up to the front door.
She even made my brother a skateboard with go faster wheels!
In hindsight,
That was probably more of a curse than a blessing,
As Mountford Lane was quite fast enough,
Thank you very much,
And Jack being Jack,
He had no idea of danger,
None whatsoever.
It took six weeks for him to recover from that.
Looking back,
It was a good job there were only two of us Marsh kids.
When I was born in the early 80s,
Mum said enough was enough and I think she was probably right.
Then she had Jack.
That were a lesson.
Admittedly,
I could never stop getting into mischief because I'm someone who needs to know everything all at once.
And Jack's just clumsy.
There's no flower in that one,
I'll bet.
Now you might think we got bored of each other,
Just us two.
But it never really was just us.
There was Cathy down the road.
She was small and neat with a fringe.
And she was in Jack's here at school.
Then there was Sam,
Who was ten and lived next door to her,
And Bradley and Elliot,
The Button twins.
Elliot was funny.
There was no two ways about it.
He didn't mean to be,
But he was the funniest person I ever met.
He was always smiling and there was something about his face which screwed up in a ridiculous kind of way when he was ever in trouble.
And Elliot was always in trouble.
My mum said he'd grow out of it.
But even Elliot didn't believe that.
Bradley,
His brother,
Was the golden boy of the Button family.
His mum treated him like he was the second coming.
We all agreed that was ridiculous seeing as he was one of twins.
So we made sure to make up for it as best as we could.
All the attention Elliot missed at home he got from the Mountford gang.
That's what we called ourselves,
The Mountford Gang.
There was me,
Jack,
Kathy,
Sam and Elliot.
Bradley we kept out of it most of the time because he was a nuisance and a tell-tale.
Now this story begins on the day Aunt Susan came to stay.
Aunt Susan was my mother's sister and not very nice.
It seems rather disloyal to say that.
But I'm much older now and when you get older you learn to tell the truth and stand by it.
I'll probably die on that hill,
But so be it.
Aunt Susan was a small woman,
Sharp-faced and thin.
Rather odd-looking and not very good with children.
She wanted to be,
Mum said.
But wanting to do something and actually doing something are two completely different things.
We learnt that the hard way.
Every Sunday we were subjected to board games after lunch.
This was mom and dad's way of getting rid of us,
We knew.
But we suffered it because we were lucky enough to have morale most of the time.
We were the only ones in our street that did.
And what's wrong with board games,
I suppose you're wondering?
Well,
Nothing when you say it like that.
But you didn't have an aunt like Susan.
Playing games with her was like drinking milk of magnesium.
You knew you had to do it,
And you held your nose to save yourself,
But the minute you let go,
It came right back to bite you.
She just couldn't relax.
Everything had to be by the book.
Rolls this and rolls that.
According to Aunt Susan,
There was the right way and the highway,
Which would have suited us fine.
But unfortunately,
The highway meant disturbing mum and dad.
And even we knew that weren't fair.
Rules are meant to be broken,
Declared Jack bravely one particularly boring Sunday,
So I'm going to go this way.
Then he snatched up his metal hat and went round the monopoly board in the opposite direction.
You can't do that,
Aunt Susan Snappy.
But Jack had already placed his money down and chosen less a square from the pile.
That's a set!
" he squealed.
I'm buying houses!
This was like a red flag to a bull.
As we watched Aunt Susan turned green,
Red and every other festive colour.
Only this was far from the season of goodwill to all men.
Polly it back,
Jack,
" I said,
In as humorous a tone as I could muster,
But secretly I wanted him to have it.
Jack loved the yellow set and this was the first time he'd ever had a shot at it.
Then Mum came in and asked what all the shouting was about.
You know Aunty Susan gets tired,
She protested.
You're not being kind,
Are you?
Then she pulled down the blinds and took out tablets four and five from Aunt Susan's little plastic box.
That made us wince.
But it didn't make us like her anymore.
Aunt Susan didn't want to get well.
Everyone knew it.
After Grandad died,
She decided it was Mum's job to look after her.
But we didn't really know what it was she was looking after.
Was it the shingles?
Was it the flu?
Downright laziness,
Dad said.
And for once we had to agree with him.
Now go outside and play,
" said Mum as Aunt Susan sat back in her chair.
So we went trying to not look too pleased about it.
Once through the gate,
We ran as fast as we could down to the green triangle.
We called it that because it was a perfectly green triangle of grass which the man from the council came and mowed with his ride-on machine every few weeks.
We love the smelly cockerels.
If we were ever lucky to be let out,
This is where we would go to find each other.
And of course it wasn't long before Kathy,
Sam and Elliot joined us.
It was a sunny day,
So of course they'd be out,
Wouldn't they?
And Kathy was always good to go anyway.
Her mum couldn't wait to get rid of her.
She was noisy.
She loved singing,
Which was not a problem in itself.
But once Kathy had fixated on a song,
It was that song over and over until she'd hung,
Drawn and quartered it.
This could last anywhere from a week to a month.
Sam,
Meanwhile,
Wowed his older sister up every day with his spyware.
He was a master at electronics,
Everyone said.
But his inventions had to be tested,
So who better than on his long-suffering sister?
As for Elliot,
As long as he'd done his chores and cleaned up after himself,
His absence always went unnoticed.
That first hour we had a great time playing run outs.
The triangle was home and we had the whole road to hide in,
Parent free.
They were usually sitting in their back gardens,
Gossiping about each other.
Elia always won runouts.
He always hid in the same place,
Funnily enough.
But he always,
Always managed to get back to base untagged.
That was because he was faster than all of our sport together.
Now what?
I remember saying as soon as the game was over.
I was always ready to move on to the next thing faster than everyone else.
My mum said it was because I had a quick brain and as it happens my teachers agreed with her.
Not that it didn't annoy them when I finished my work faster than they wanted me to.
Let's get some blackberries,
Jack suggested.
He loved his food and Mrs Bantry promised him a blackberry pie if he got enough of them.
She'll make one for each of us,
He said,
If we got enough.
That was something.
So we made our way to the path near the allotments.
It was a wide path with a low wooden fence on one side to keep the sheep out and a high wall on the other with the ripest,
Plumpest blackberry bushes peeping over it.
People said that house on the other side was haunted,
But we never believed a word of it.
We just wanted to climb the wall,
Get the blackberries and away we'd go.
We knew they'd only be right for a week or so.
This was just the season for it.
And we also knew we weren't the only ones who liked blackberries.
As usual,
Caffeine was prepared.
She ran back to her garden to get the buckets usually reserved for trips to the seaside.
Sam had blue,
Me and Jack had red,
And Kathy and Elliot had green.
Jack was the first over the wall.
Jack was always the first,
But he was also the clumsiest and caught his shorts on the way down.
Get me down,
Chloe!
" he yelled.
I'm stuck!
I had to laugh.
He looked ridiculous up there hanging and whining and moaning.
So I took a leg up from Kathy and helped him out.
And when we were all successfully over.
.
.
We saw the rumours were in fact true.
There was a house.
In the garden.
It looked like it was built in the 1930s,
Like the other houses up the road.
It was red brick with a little round window on the first floor that looked like that belonged to the side of a ship.
And the garden around it was overgrown with weeds.
But we liked it because that meant no one could tell us off for trespassing.
This could be our place,
Our secret place.
No one can stop us from playing here.
Or so we thought.
We got pounds and pounds of blackberries that day and we were so pleased with ourselves.
But when it started to get dark and Jack called out,
We're late!
We all panicked.
Not only because Eva next door smiles away when you're late.
But because when we climb to the top of the wall.
.
.
To our horror.
As we turn to face the house and climb down again on the other side.
We noticed a faint little light come on.
In the round window.
