Sker House Read Online Free Page B

encouragingly. “At first I thought it was just the stress of everything. But after a while I came to realize there was more to it than that. Sker House seems to suck all the energy out of you and just puts you in a bad mood.”
    Dale almost groaned out loud. Nobody would be interested in an article about a place where the proprietor was in a bad mood. Where was the story in that? He needed good, hard, meaty copy. Gruesome murders, restless spirits, witch trials, werewolves, vampires, or any combination of the above.
    Machen must have sensed Dale's disappointment. “Look, I told you it's hard to explain, okay?”
    “Sure, I understand,” Dale lied. “So have you or the staff ever actually seen or heard anything out of the ordinary? Anything specific?”
    “And how would you define ordinary? Is there any such thing? This world is anything but ordinary, lad.”
    That was a fair comment. Dale was beginning to feel that the fragile bond between interviewer and interviewee was in danger of being severed completely. Irreparably so. There was more. He could tell. And right now, the landlord was probably having an internal dialogue about how much he could safely say. Dale decided to stay calm and see what developed. The worst thing you can do is push interview subjects into a corner, unless you were Jeremy Paxman, because they always came out fighting.
    “If you've done your research like you say you have, then you'd know there's a lot of history attached to this place.”
    “Yes, indeed.”
    “Over the years people have seen many, many strange things here and hereabouts. You say you are familiar with the Maid of Sker legend?”
    “A little,” replied Dale with a shrug. He actually knew more than a little, but needed Machen to tell him the story, not the other way around. Right on cue, Lucy appeared, gliding silently through the door mouthing, “What did I miss?”
    Machen appeared not to notice the new arrival. Instead, he slipped into an obviously well-rehearsed raconteur routine, one he probably used on any tourist or out of towner who expressed an interest, and undoubtedly a few who didn't. Over the years, he had almost perfected the technique, his sing-song Welsh lilt bringing the classic tale to life.
    “In the Eighteenth Century, Sker House belonged to a wealthy landowner by the name of Isaac Williams,” Machen started. “He had a daughter named Elizabeth. A very beautiful girl, by all accounts. She fell in love with a local minstrel called Thomas Evans, but her father was very strict. Fathers were in them days, see. He didn't approve of the romance and locked poor Elizabeth in her room, upstairs in this very house, until she agreed to marry someone her father picked out for her instead. A man by the name of Kirkhouse.”
    “He sounds like a nasty piece of work,” Dale chipped in.
    “Isaac Williams? Oh, yeah. Had a reputation, he did.”
    “A reputation for what?”
    “Always getting his own way I s'pose is the simple way of putting it. He had friends in high places see, magistrates and the like. That's how he got to be so powerful. The story goes that he kept an old plough on his land. If he had any kind of disagreement with a neighbour, he would arrange for that plough to 'disappear' and be found on the neighbour's property. Isaac would then have them charged with theft and his magistrate friends would do the rest. Sometimes, the poor neighbour ended up in jail. But more likely they would have to pay a fine, and be happy to do so in exchange for their freedom. Either way, Isaac got what he wanted, whatever that may have been, the magistrates got a lump of extra cash out of it, and the neighbour was very careful not to step out of line again.”
    “Tell me a bit more about his daughter and the guy she married,” Dale asked, eager to get back to the story.
    “It was a marriage of convenience, which wasn't unusual in that day and age. Although she put on a brave face, Elizabeth always pined for her true