The Haunting of Annie Nicol

By AJ Kirby

Underachiever John Paul Nicol dreams of living in the big house on the hill, but his dead end job and gambling problems make it impossible for him to afford the property, until his father dies and leaves him the estate, turning his dream into a nightmare. Seems there’s an ancestral ghost who doesn’t want anyone to live in that big house, including John Paul, so his three-year-old daughter Annie becomes a pawn in a deadly game of Burn the House Down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TWB Press
• Release date: Mar 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781936991396

AJ Kirby

A.J Kirby is the award-winning published author of three novels and over forty short stories. He is a sportswriter for the Professional Footballer's Association and a reviewer for The New York Journal of Books and The Short Review.

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The Haunting of Annie Nicol

By

AJ Kirby

Copyright by AJ Kirby 2011

Published by TWB Press at Smashwords

All rights reserved. No part of this story (eBook) may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or book reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidences are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Edited by Terry Wright

Cover art by Terry Wright

ISBN 978-1-936991-39-6

By

AJ Kirby

Chapter 1

It never hurt to have a dream. Something to aim for. Something to hope for...even when life dished out its darkest hours.

John Paul Nicol had a dream. He held it close to his chest like a poker hand. And he came here to revisit that dream, parked in his Ford Mondeo at the top end of the Newton-Mills Estate road, halfway up the steep incline past the old servants’ quarters where the blacktop became potholed and rutted.

Many times he’d promised himself he wouldn’t return, wouldn’t subject himself to the torture of being so close to a dream that could never come true. And he’d promised his wife, Michelle, he would come home directly from work, yet here he was, dreaming again.

The car radio hummed, low and muffled. Windscreen wipers slashed back and forth beating away a late afternoon drizzle. His Sat Nav kept squawking in its monotone voice: Turn around where possible.

John Paul leaned his head against the side window and watched droplets of rainwater race down the edge of the windscreen glass. He made a betting game, a challenge of sorts, a predictor of things to come. When two drops snail-trailed at the same time, he quick-picked which one would reach the bottom first. The stakes: if the right drop won, there’d be no disaster waiting for him at home. Left drop: he was in for another bad night.

The right-hand drop fell so fast he raised the stakes and bet Michelle would be in the mood for love and not another argument. Another fight. Another night of misery.

But as soon as he’d upped the ante, the right drop started to move back up the window, against all natural law, a gust of wind perhaps, and the left drop performed a triumphant skid down to the finish line.

Shit! Michelle was going to be blottoed and in a funk, for sure. Two weeks ago, she’d changed, become a stranger.

He turned up the volume on the radio to drown out the slam of his heartbeat, the dissenting voices in his head, those which told him he shouldn’t bet on stupid things.

Immediately he heard another voice, this one from the radio, a voice he recognised, his boss reciting his latest commercial on the sports network:

"Our Rowley and Son copy machines produce the finest duplicates with no degeneration in quality. Our copies will satisfy even the eaglest of eagle eyes. Come see for yourself at our showroom on—"

John Paul jammed his thumb on the OFF button and shuddered. Nobody needed those big cumbersome machines anymore. Desktop copiers were all the rage. And John Paul’s declining commission checks were proof of his own personal recession.

A big score is what they needed: he, Michelle, and their three-year-old daughter, Annie. They had to get out of their nondescript lives in the renovated old servant’s house his father let him live in rent-free, like he was the family’s charity case.

John Paul Nicol, black sheep of the Nicol empire, a washed up copier salesman, always indebted to his real-estate-developer dad and hot-shot-lawyer-brother, Christopher.

But that would soon change. He pulled the betting slip from his pocket, felt the firm crinkle of the paper, his ticket to financial freedom. The Doncaster Floodlight Stakes horse race and his dream...

He looked out the side window. His gaze traversed the road shoulder overgrown with weeds and strewn with litter: rotting newspapers, plastic takeaway trays, balled betting slips which he’d tossed out that very window, and up to an imposing, though rusty, palisade fence.

Every few feet along the fence hung cable-tied signs with large print that shined in the rain. PRIVATE PROPERTY! KEEP OUT! ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! Gaps between the metal fence stakes revealed the object of the