There it was again. That creepy feeling in the small of my back. I swung round and looked back down the road. I could feel someone watching me. But where from? The street was deserted, not even a car coming down it. I scanned windows for twitching nets, and my gaze settled on number twenty-five.
Number twenty-five had been boarded up for ages, years. Ever since Mr Copps, the old man whoâd lived there, had died. Thereâd been some sort of legal battle about who was meant to inherit it, and until this was settled it couldnât be sold.
Jamie and Gemma called it âthe spook houseâ, and I must admit that on occasions, when they were being a real pain while I was baby-sitting, Iâd made up ghost stories about it to keep them quiet. Jamie had woken up screaming with a nightmare one night, so Mum had put an end to that. She was livid.
Number twenty-five looked pretty spooky, as a matter of fact, on an overcast afternoon like today. It was a tall terraced house like the others in the street, but the windows, with their rough covering of weathered boarding, gave it a blind, desolate look. Paint was peeling off the window frames and weeds had grown up through the front path. There was a row of house-martinsâ nests under the eaves â slowly nature was taking over.
I shook myself and continued down the road. I decided to put the whole thing down to an over-active imagination. My own fault really for making up all those stories.
It was later that evening, when he was meant to be getting ready for bed and was hiding from Mum behind the curtains in my room, that Jamie suddenly let out a whimper.
âTasha!â He ran and clung to me.
âHey ⦠what is it?â
Theyâre there ⦠theyâre really there â¦â
âWho are where?â
âAt number twenty-five â the spooksâ
âDonât be silly. âCourse theyâre not. No such thing as spooks. You know that, donât you?â
âBut there are. Theyâre there â¦â He dragged at my sleeve. âCome ân look ⦠Thereâs lights moving around in the house.â
âRubbish,â I said. But I could feel the little hairs on the back of my neck rising in spite of myself. âYouâre making it up.â
âNo honest ⦠There are ⦠Look.â
I let him lead me to the window, and we crouched in the dark part between the curtains and the windowpane, staring out.
âWhere?â I demanded. This was typical of Jamie, always blowing up the most trivial thing into a drama.
âWait â¦â he whispered. His hand was holding my arm so hard it hurt.
I scanned the bleak façade of number twenty-five. And then I froze. He was right. Just the faintest glimmer of a light, but it was moving through the rooms. You caught a glimpse of it every time it passed a crack in the boarding. It would pause and glimmer and then it would flicker on. It was moving up now as if something was floating upwards through the house â¦
âWhat are you two up to?â Mum pulled the curtains back and found us sitting there.
âWeâve found a spook,â said Jamie, now emboldened by the presence of Mum and the cheery light of the room.
âTasha â¦â said Mum with a warning look.
âNo ⦠its not me this time, honestly. But there is someone or something in number twenty-five ⦠See for yourself.â
The three of us huddled behind the curtain. It took some minutes before Mums eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and then she pronounced:
âSquatters.â
âWhatâs squatters?â asked Jamie, his lower lip wobbling. To his six-year-old brain âSquattersâ were quite possibly as bad as spooks, or maybe they were worse â a special kind of spook, one that moved around by a kind of legless elevation like those weirdo yogic flyers.
âThatâs the limit,â she said. âI knew something like this would happen if that house was left empty like that.â She set off down the stairs to find Dad.
âTasha â what are squatters?â demanded Jamie again in a wavering voice.
I put an arm round him. âSquatters are people who havenât got homes of their own. So they find empty houses and they break in and squat in them.â
âWhy canât they stand up straight?â
âThey can, silly ⦠âSquatâ is just a word that means ⦠umm ⦠to take over an empty house and live there, without paying rent or anything.â
âWhy isnât there a proper word?â
âI donât know!â I hadnât time to get into âwhy-modeâ for a discussion with Jamie â I wanted to know what Dad was going to make of the situation.