(Thanks to Maddie for the starting sentence.)
I woke up at 3:13 a.m. to the sound of persistent scratching that came from the wall above the furnace.
“Too early!” I called out. “You’re a day too early! It’s not Halloween until tomorrow.”
The poltergeist, or whatever it was, took no notice. The scratching continued.
These noises were an annual event. Strange noises appeared every Halloween, but this time they were a day too early. Nor had I ever heard them at night before. The first time it happen I was terrified out of my skin. Now that it’s occurred on Halloween for the last nine years I find it more annoying than anything else. There are footsteps, and a little bit of giggling, the sounds of a boiling kettle whistling and of water flushing, and scratching, scratching, scratching. I have never heard any speaking. It seems that poltergeist don’t like to talk.
And then I heard it! A faint and muffled voice. “Help! Help!” followed by more scratching. “Help! Help!”
“Too early!” I called out again. “You’re a day too early! It’s not Halloween until tomorrow.”
The noises stopped. The call for help faded away. I went back to sleep.
The next morning, quite early, there was a gentle knock on the door. It was a distraught woman. Had I seen her husband? Every year he came to clean my chimney at this time. She remembered because it was always on Halloween. But this year he was two days early because of a daughter’s wedding, and she hadn’t seen him for two days.
Oops!
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Oops is an excellent response to a calamitous tragedy!
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Holy Shit! Now there are going to be muffled cries of ‘Help, help!’ each Hallowe’en instead of the scratching heard in earlier years.
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Exactly – and that’s what happen in the days of chimney sweeps – they could get stuck in chimneys and no one gave a shit – let along Queen Victoria – the Empress of India.
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Talk about that!
Chimney sweepers remind of the fine essay of Charles Lamb on the poor things. Watching those space movies in which astronauts keep sliding in and out of narrow spaceship chutes, I wonder if the tribe of chimney sweepers is set to make a comeback.
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Agreed – I’m not a fan of confined spaces.
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Oh dear and now he really will be a ghost…
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Well you had a prompt, but I still think you got this story from scratch 😉
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Yikes!
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