The Ice House

By Nicholas Foster

Not a ghost story but more a tale of evil and absolute power as a professional criminal looks back to his first time in prison and remembers a cell-mate who taught him a lesson he would never forget. Proof that "life is not as simple as a walk across a field". A successor to the collected 'Fifteen Ghost Stories' which is also available for free download from Smashwords.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nicholas Foster
• Release date: Sep 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005880026

Nicholas Foster

I have published ten small books of ghost stories on Smashwords; 'Four Ghost Stories' (The Rustling of Silk, The Comrades, Joining the Dance, Ghosts in the Machine), 'Four More Ghost Stories' (Mr Westgrove, The Ghosts Within, A Sound of Singing, The Final Page), 'The Consul from Tunis', 'The Ghostwriter', 'The Ragged Girl', 'Close to the Wall', 'The Hand of Justice', 'Stavrakis', 'On the Bridge' and 'The Ice House'. Many of the stories draw on places where I've lived and worked. All the characters are fictitious, even the ghosts, except for those who have walked out of the pages of History. All my books are available for free download on Smashwords. A collected print version, 'The Consul from Tunis: and other ghost stories' is available as a paperback from Amazon.

Book preview

THE ICE HOUSE

Nicholas Foster

Published by Nicholas Foster at Smashwords

Copyright 2022 Nicholas Foster

Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes. Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.

Chapter One

Someone more impressionable than I am, said Lance, might have at least sensed echoes of the crime in that Ice House. It was a cold January day when I visited it and the dripping slime on the bricks inside was frosted and frozen. I could see my breath as I stood there casting my eyes around the walls. Yes, someone with more imagination would surely have sensed something of the terrible drama that had taken place there. The insane man talking at the edge of the pit, his diabolical laughter which obscured the soft approach of stockinged feet, the blast of the revolvers shattering everything with the sound of bullets being fired in a brick-walled, underground room. Someone more impressionable than I am would have sensed something…

Lance smiled at us as he turned the glass of port in his hand, holding it to the light so that he might better appreciate its colour and its qualities. Lance the professional thief and consummate performer, confident that he’d captured our attention as we basked in the warmth of that wood-panelled private dining-room in a street off Covent Garden, where we’d gathered again for our annual reunion and the telling of ghost stories.

But perhaps I should begin at the beginning, smiled Lance. For what I’d like to talk about tonight is absolute power. I’ve often wondered what it is in that power which attracts people. I suppose it’s my love of Russian history that draws me to it. You can’t get away from tyrants and dictators and Tsars if you love Russian history. Even today they have them, though the current leadership like to call their system a managed democracy. George Orwell would