Read Online The Haunting of Emily Stone by Amy Cross - Free Book Online Page B

somehow it might be open, and that there'd be muddy paw prints on the sill, but it was closed and locked, just as she'd feared. Turning, she looked back across the room.
    For a moment, just one brief moment, she thought she could see a figure standing right behind her. Something dark and tall, something staring straight at her.
    Something she'd seen once before, when she was a child.
    She blinked, and it was gone.
    “Mummy?” Lizzie called out from the main bedroom. “Are you coming back?”
    “Yeah,” she whispered, hurrying to the door before turning and looking across the room again. She waited, as if she expected something to make its presence known, and then she stepped out onto the landing and pulled the door shut.
     
    ***
     
    By the time dawn arrived, Emily had quietly climbed out of bed and left Lizzie sleeping. Down in the front room, she'd fired up her laptop and begun to do some research, looking at images she'd spent the past twenty-four years trying to forget.
    “Tortured by evil forces?” asked one headline, on a newspaper front-page that had been scanned and posted online. “A little girl and her mother from the north of England say their house is haunted by a terrifying poltergeist that has been making their lives miserable.”
    Shuddering at the memory of those days, Emily clicked through to another image, this time showing a front-page from the day after the hoax was exposed.
    “Liars!” the headline shouted. “Coltreath haunting exposed as clever hoax!”
    She remembered those days like they were yesterday. The shame, the humiliation, and her mother's furious anger. Finding a link to a forum for ghost-hunters, she clicked through and found that even as recently as a year ago, people had been discussing the case.
    “They were just after money,” one forum member had written. “No big mystery there.”
    “The mother was a fucking liar,” replied another, “and the kid was a dumb little shit.”
    “Once a liar, always a liar,” added yet another. “I used to feel sorry for the girl, but then I figured, she was old enough to know better.”
    Scrolling down, she was shocked to see a photo of Doctor Robert Slocombe. He'd been handsome back in the old days, but the years clearly hadn't been kind. Now, he had the puffy, reddened, slightly bloated face of a man who drank too much, and she felt there was a hint of sadness in his eyes. According to one forum member, Slocombe had been asked at a conference about the Emily Stone hoax, and he'd responded “irascibly and with obvious anger”. She felt a shudder in her chest as she realized the hoax must have left him humiliated.
    “Mummy?”
    Turning, she saw that Lizzie was standing in the doorway.
    “I woke up and you weren't there,” Lizzie said. “Why did you leave me?”
    “I was only gone a minute or two,” Emily replied, closing the laptop lid before her daughter reached her for a hug. “It's okay. Everything's going to be fine. I'm going to fix it.”
     
    ***
     
    “She's been outside a bit more,” added the nurse as they made their way along the corridor at the nursing home. “We're trying to get her to socialize a little more, but it's taking time. She's also very annoyed about the ban on smoking inside. She hates the nicotine gum, and she keeps setting off the smoke alarms by lighting up inside.”
    “Sorry about that,” Emily muttered. Reaching the door to the common area, she immediately spotted her mother over on the far side, sitting alone in her wheelchair and looking out at the garden. All the other residents were at the main table, playing cribbage, but as usual Joyce Stone was excluding herself.
    “I think it'd be good for her to join in,” the nurse continued. “If you could try to encourage her, that'd be great. Unfortunately, at the moment it seems like she prefers being by herself. If she'll just get talking to the rest of them, I'm sure she'll start to get a few friends.”
    Making her way across the room,