Horror stories

The first thing I hear is the stitcher, I think, still cycling down after the eight o'clock run. That metal tick-tick-tick as the staple arm settles into its rest position. I don't look up from the…

"...and that's why we never open the day room curtains after nine, not since before you started." Pam says it over her shoulder, already halfway out the fire door with her coat on, car keys jingling.…

I'll tell you the rule first because you'll want it before anything else makes sense. You never walk the same transect twice in a day. Out then back is fine. Out, back, and out again on the same…

I was cleaning the windlass wrong, running the rag along the square end instead of the shaft, and I didn't notice till I'd taken half the brass off with it. My hands were somewhere else. I kept…

Paulette said it was pigeons at first. That scratching under the sash window at two in the morning, claws on lead flashing, the kind of sound you get used to in old terraces. She told me this over…

My aunt Denise won't take the stairs in any car park now, not even the two-storey one at Tesco, and for years she wouldn't explain why. She told me the whole thing last November, at her kitchen…

When a call goes quiet, you count to ten and you disconnect. That's the only rule Marnie ever gave me, back when I started at Riverside, and she never said why. She just made me repeat it back to her…

Denise told me this three times over about a year, and it wasn't the same story twice. That's the main reason I still don't know what to believe. First time, we were on our break in the staff room at…

My uncle Colm did fourteen years as a warden on the tidal defences out past Wells-next-the-Sea, walking the sea wall at night checking the sluice gates hadn't jammed. He told me this story maybe…

The first sound my coworker heard, she said, was gulls fighting over chips down on the boardwalk. Three in the morning, nobody on the pier but her and the machines, so gulls made sense. It took her a…

My dad did eleven years as caretaker at Barrow Court, that grey fifteen-storey block off the ring road in Nuneaton before they redid the cladding. He wasn't a man who told stories, so when he gave me…

"Third callout in a fortnight, same house, same complaint. He says there's a knock in the pipes." That's my brother-in-law Terry, halfway through his second can, telling this at my sister's kitchen…

I was ironing school blouses badly, which is how I know it was a Monday, because Monday's the only day I bother with the collars. Our iron's an old Morphy Richards that belonged to my mum, no steam…

When we moved into 14 Corry Vale there was a phone on the landing windowsill. Not a mobile, a proper corded phone, cream-coloured, the kind with the coiled cable gone slack from age. Nobody plugs…

Rule I keep, even now doing freelance subs at home: once you've typed a caption, you don't read it back. You check the timestamp, check the audio's roughly lined up, and you move on. I don't explain…

The first thing I heard was what I thought was the pallet lift, that low mechanical groan it does when the hydraulics are cold. Took me a second to place it wrong, because the lift was still switched…

I was coiling the mooring rope wrong the whole time Denny was talking, over-under instead of over-over, and by the time he finished I had about four feet of it tangled into something like a fist.…

It wasn't the coffee machine. I want that out the way first because everyone always asks about the coffee machine and it's fine, it's a normal Costa machine, it just runs all night same as everything…

It isn't empty. We want that clear before anything else. Number 9 has no car in the drive and never has, not once in the eleven years we've lived here, but that doesn't make it empty. The first time…

The wingback chair was the only furniture left in Nan's spare room, and it faced the wall instead of the window. We noticed that before we noticed anything about the carpet. We'd come to clear the…