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quarry in the night, making sure people weren’t stealing any rock. When the quarry closed he lost his job and moved out of the house and nobody has lived there since. That was my haunted house for Jake and I hoped that it didn’t look too friendly in the sun.
    I told Jake the story of the real haunted house as we walked along. It’s a story that’s passed along from year to year at the high school and all the older kids in Raithswaite know it. I told him that it started when Mr Lorriemore was getting his gear together to go hunting. He was downstairs, it was about half five in the morning, and he’d filled his flask and packed his bag and was checking that everything was in working order with his rifle. Just as he was aiming it skyward his wife was climbing out of bed to make sure that he hadn’t forgotten to pack the sandwiches she’d made for him. She left the bed, stood and reached for her dressing gown, and was about to make her way across the room when Mr Lorriemore took a pretend potshot. He pulled the trigger, but there was a bullet in the chamber that shouldn’t have been there, and the bullet went straight through the floorboards and into his wife. She fell to the floor and was dead in minutes. It’s said that when the ambulance and police turned up Mr Lorriemore was hugging his dead wife’s body, weeping. Mrs Lorriemore was carried out of the house, covered in a blanket, and Mr  Lorriemore  was arrested and led away. There was lots of gossip at the time about another man and revenge on Mr Lorriemore’s part, but when the police came and took measurements and did their investigation, everything confirmed the story Mr  Lorriemore  had told them. There was a hole in the ceiling and the bullet had entered Margaret  Lorriemore  at such an angle that it had to have come from below. The police concluded that a man intent on taking revenge on a cheating wife would not take a potshot through floorboards and be lucky to strike gold with his first and only shot. Mr  Lorriemore  eventually left Raithswaite and was never seen again. I told Jake that some said it was guilt that drove him from town, but the more popular story was that he couldn’t bear to stay in the house and hear his wife’s ghost calling out the name of another man.
    ‘So he shot her dead?’ Jake asked.
    ‘He did.’
    ‘And she’s the ghost?’
    ‘She is.’
    ‘And that’s where we’re going?’
    ‘It is.’
    He started to speed up again.
    It had been years since I’d been to the house. It sits at the furthest point in the quarry away from my house, but I knew that the best way in was still probably through the back door that had been forced open years ago. We stopped at the front gate, both of us hot from the walk in the sun, and rested for a second.
    ‘Do you still want to go in?’ I asked. Jake nodded, I opened the gate and we walked up the path and around the back.
    ‘You OK?’ I asked Jake as we stood looking at the house.
    ‘Is this it then? Is this the haunted house?’ he wanted to know. I told him it was and he looked at it like he believed me. I followed his eyes and could see that the look of the place would convince any eight-year-old it was haunted. It must have been white back in the glory days of the quarry, but now it stood grey and desolate, broken and sad-looking. Even in the sun on a Saturday afternoon I could almost believe that it was haunted myself.
    ‘Shall we go in then?’ he asked.
    ‘Are you sure?’ I knew he was sure but I wanted to build the tension.
    ‘Yeah, let’s go in, but you go first.’
    We approached the door and I gave it a hard shove with my shoulder and pushed until it opened. I walked a few steps into the cool dark and waited. I turned to the light of the half-open door and saw that Jake’s confidence had evaporated. He was stood just inside the door, a small black silhouette against the sunny day, one quick step away from daylight and overgrown greenery.
    ‘You don’t have to