Shiver Read Online Free

though. Can’t wait to tell the others.
    “Maybe we should start heading back,” Fiona murmured, still concerned by the thought of being trapped in there, forever.
    It seemed to take an age to find their way back again and, for Fiona, the sight of daylight at the bottom of the narrow stone staircase was a huge relief as she had started to feel claustrophobic.
    “Phew! Am I glad to be out of there!” she gasped, as they burst back into the library.
    Samuel wasn’t listening. “We’ve found a secret staircase. How brilliant is that?”
    But Fiona was staring at something over Samuel’s shoulder.
    “What is it?”
    She shook her head, trying to formulate the words. She had just seen – or thought she’d seen – a small, dark, shadowy shape sweep past the open doorway; so fast she wasn’t even sure she’d seen it at all. But it left her with an inexplicable
feeling
.
    “Hello?” Fiona called, walking slowly towards the entrance to the drawing room. “Is anyone there?”
    “What
are
you doing?” Samuel began. Fiona put her finger to her lips.
    “Sssssh!”
    Silence. Then … a child’s laughter. As faint as a breath of air. Hardly discernible.
    “Did you hear that?” Fiona whispered hoarsely, spinning round to face Samuel.
    He nodded. “It could have been anything.”
    “Charles or Sebastian, you mean? I don’t think so,” Fiona said.
    “Then what do you think it was?” Samuel asked nervously.
    They looked at each other.
    Anything was possible in this old house. Maybe they
had
found Catherine Morton’s laughing children.

Charles’s Story
    In his bedroom, up in the tower, Charles glanced at his computer screen. It was switched on, but he hadn’t been near it in hours. He sometimes liked playing computer games, or downloading music from the internet onto his iPod. One of the games he played followed the adventures of a boy trapped in a haunted house, who had to find his way out of a maze of passageways. Like all computer games, it was repetitive and unsatisfying in the end, but he liked it and played it obsessively, to the point where it almost became a fixation. He was also trying to write his ghost story for school, but it wasn’t going very well. Fiona had put him off with her comments.
    It could be so boring in the school holidays with no one but his brother and sister to hang about with … apart from Samuel. Fiona had taken to him and the two were as thick as thieves. Part of him envied his sister for having a friend she could confide in. Charles was a loner. He didn’t confess his secrets to anyone. Not even to his brother, Seb, who had the room next door.
    He stared out of the window at the grounds and garden below, turning when he heard a light tapping noise on the keyboard behind him. On the blank computer screen had appeared one sinister little word.
Hello
    That was strange. He moved closer, peered at the screen, then pressed the delete button. It was an instinctive reaction – an attempt to remove the evidence, erase it. Words didn’t appear of their own accord like that. Had he been typing earlier and left something on the screen? A computer could hardly produce text all by itself, no matter how amazing modern technology might be.
    â€œThat’s weird,” he said to himself. His voice sounded uncannily loud in the silence of the enclosed space. His room was quite small, without much furniture in it, apart from a bed, the computer desk, a bookcase and a wardrobe. He liked it this spartan. He didn’t need much.
    On an impulse he sat down on the chair, and typed in the words:
Hello to you, too, whoever you are.
    â€œStupid,” he muttered out loud. He pressed the delete button again, and watched the sentence disappear, swallowed up by the cursor.
    Then he swivelled about on his chair and wrote a fresh sentence, beginning with the title of his story.
SHIVER. A ghost story.
    He liked that. He’d made a start. Now – he stared thoughtfully at