Duplicity Read Online Free

stopped by a malevolent glare.
    ‘I thought I could hear something else, man. Would you just keep your big mouth shut for a while? You never stop blethering.’
    Fergus grimaced and said no more, but he looked even more alarmed at the sound of approaching footsteps in the corridor outside. His head jerked up, but Archie motioned to him to be still. The footsteps drew nearer.
    ‘We’d better get out of sight,’ Archie whispered. ‘We don’t want anybody to know we’re here. We’ll just have to wait and see who they are and what they do.’
    They stood up noiselessly, and went to crouch behind the dilapidated sofa by the far wall. In a few seconds, the door creaked slowly open.
    ‘I canna see a thing in here,’ a deep voice said, peevishly. ‘Hold up the lantern, Sandy.’
    An arc of pale light swept round the room, growing brighter as the bearer advanced, and Archie had to hold Fergus back from poking up his head to have a look.
    ‘It’s an awful big room, Donald,’ said another voice with less resonance.
    ‘It is that, and just look at that fireplace. It’s big enough to roast an ox.’
    ‘You’d never want to roast an ox, surely?’
    ‘It’s just a saying.’ Donald sounded rather exasperated. ‘And that couch. It could seat six, I wouldna be surprised.’
    The lantern now illuminating the area around their hiding place, Archie and Fergus remained absolutely motionless until the beam swung away again. They had been unable to look before, but with the light not focused in their direction any longer, they took the chance to peep over the low back of their shield. At first, all they could see was the lantern, because everything behind it was in darkness, but as the light moved round, they could see two shadowy shapes. One was round and small, but the other was huge.
    They looked at each other in dismay, and with his mouth against Fergus’s ear, Archie whispered, ‘We’ll have to scare them away.’
    Fergus turned his head and put out his hand to find the other man’s olfactory organ. ‘You canna scare them away, if they’re ghosts,’ he muttered into it.
    Archie gave him a push, and started to moan softly.
    ‘What was that, Donald?’ One of the newcomers stood still to listen. ‘Did you say something?’
    ‘I thought it was you, Sandy.’
    Both voices held a deep note of apprehension, so Archie moaned again, a little louder this time and Fergus joined in, an octave higher, more a screech than a groan.
    There was dead silence when they stopped. The two figures in the middle of the room stood as though transfixed. ‘It sounds like g … ghosts,’ Donald said at last, his voice low and quivering.
    ‘You never said nothing to me about the place having ghosts,’ Sandy said, nervously.
    ‘Nobody never said nothing about it to me, either, and I’m not paying good money for a haunted castle, even if it is cheap. Come on, let’s get out of here.’
    To convince them, Archie moaned again. He didn’t fancy strangers moving in and upsetting their placid existence.
    ‘I thought it was cheap because it was needing a lot of repairs,’ Sandy observed slightly unsteadily, as they moved towards the door, ‘and I was quite willing to give you a hand to fix things up and get rid of the draught there would likely be, but …’
    The door closed behind them with a loud click, their footsteps echoed along the corridor and died away, then the heavy portal clanged and there was the sound of chains and lock being secured.
    ‘You see what you did?’ Archie exclaimed, accusingly. ‘If you hadna been so sure they were ghosts, they’d have bought the castle and fixed things up, and we’d have been warm every winter instead of near freezing into snowmen.’
    ‘It was your idea to scare them away,’ Fergus said, childishly, ‘for I thought the little one might be Santy Claus, and I’ve aye wanted to see him, ever since I was …’
    ‘For any sake, man! It’s your brains that get touched wi’ the cold,