The Haunted

1. Trains, Mud and Ghosts

My little brother loves trains, he knows everything about them, from different types of engines, to the sounds they make when breaking at a station, and he'd never been more excited in his life when he found out we were taking a two hour trip on a train down to Devon to live in an old creepy house that was definitely haunted.

Well, he was excited about the train part.

Mum and Dad had found the house a couple of weeks ago whilst looking for cheap, four bedroom houses in Devon. Dad had got a promotion and was being moved down there to expand his company and their resources. And of course, his family had to come with him.

"It will be fun, Amy, just be happy for your Dad, please," Mum said as she sat at the computer checking schools, "Oh! Look here! Doesn't that school look nice?" She pointed to an old victorian building with tired windows and worn down bricks, a small modern room jutted off to the right side and a marble fountain was sinking into the ground outside of the main entrance.

"Looks great, Mum," I said and walked off.

Dad had already started packing, his cricket trophies were the first to be boxed. He didn't want the removal men coming and breaking his precious babies so he had decided to pack them himself before they arrived the next day.

I wasn't going to waste my time packing my precious stuff because all of it was replaceable. Apart from my guitar pic, but that was constantly in my phone case and the removal men would not be touching my phone with their grimy fingers. I almost wished I was as excited as Benji was. He couldn't wait, when Mum and Dad told him about the train ride, he almost wet himself. Benji didn't care where we lived, as long as he was with his trains and his stuffed dog, Camel, he was fine.

I walked past his tidy room and heard whooshing noises as he played with his superhero dolls Mum and Dad had got him for Christmas, they didn't like me calling them 'dolls' in front of Benji, but he was happy with them and didn't care what I thought.

I crouched under the bar that held my door frame up and walked over to my worn out double bed in the corner of the room. I had the smallest room in our flat because I was the most expendable. I'm pretty sure I had heard my Dad say that when we first moved here three years ago. It was a gross room with peeling wallpaper no matter how many times we redid it. It was just too damp. I had a small radiator next to my bed and near the broken window was a white desk, or it was supposed to be white, it was more like a muddy grey now. My posters of favourite bands were attached to the wall with blutac (which was probably a bad idea considering the wetness and the fact that blutac hardens over time and when it does come off, brings the wall with it) and pictures of the friends I was going to leave behind stacked carefully on shelves, my desk and my bedside table. I would miss them the most about this place. This grotty, ugly place.

I could't wait to leave, but I just wish we were moving somewhere nicer.

The house we were moving too was a large mansion on a twenty acre estate surrounded by woods and a small stream. Normally it would've cost about one million, but for some reason, it was going for three hundred thousand, and the owners were willing to go for cheaper but Mum and Dad didn't want them to loose money from selling this 'beautiful, old building'. It was crumbling in places, especially the east wing which was closest to the stream, and kind of falling into it, but Mum and Dad had fallen in love with it. If it was a person, I think they would've felt sorry for it because it was in such a state.

But it wasn't. So they didn't.

And now I had to live in it.

I'd already decided that I would choose a room far away from the rest of my idiot family. Unlike here, where there were only three bedrooms packed into a small apartment on the thirteenth floor of a crumbling building, this new house had seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms, two living rooms, one massive kitchen, a basement and an attic. The main hall was huge, decorated with glass chandeliers which were hanging by metal chains that looked like they would break any minute.