To whoever finds this,
Please read my story. Its very important that someone knows what happened.
My name is Daniel and I’m 12 years old. I was born in Chichester and I have lived my whole life in Arundel. That’s in West Sussex in England.
My life has been ok, Arundel isn’t the most exciting town to grow up in, but I had friends and we could always find things to do.
I’m writing this so that you know what happened on the day my friends Jack and Bill couldn’t come on a bike ride with me.
Arundel is a very quiet town, the river Arun flows beside it and there’s a really nice cathedral. But it doesn’t have much for kids to do. There’s no cinema, no amusement arcades. So for fun, as soon as our parents thought we were responsible enough, me and my friends old ride our bikes up the South Downs and into the woods.
This happened on a Sunday. Jack, Bill and I were supposed to ride our favourite trail, leaving before lunch. We would get home in the late afternoon, just in time for the second match of Super Sunday, which we were supposed to watch at Jack’s house that day.
I arrived at Jack’s house ready to go. I knocked on the door and his Mum answered, she looked surprised to see my bike.
I asked if Jack was ready to go and she said Jack wasn’t going anywhere.
I asked if he had been grounded for something an she laughed at me, which hurt my feelings. She told me that Jack’s dad had bought him a PS3 the day before and he and Bill were playing it.
I was confused because Jack hadn’t said anything to me about it, neither had Bill.
Jack’s Mum invited me in, but I didn’t want to spend all at inside, it was too nice a day for riding. Sunny but not stupid hot. If it had been aiming or cold, I think I would have gone in to play with them and none of this would have happened.
Riding to the start of the trail, I took it slowly, enjoying the ride. Normally all three of us are egging each other on, racing and going fast. That day, I could take my time and have a look at the countryside as I rode down the roads. I lived in an area surrounded by hills and woods and nature. There were a few fields that had sheep in. How odd is it that one sheep is a sheep but more than one is still sheep. Not sheep’s or something else, like five shoop.
The trail I was going to ride started on op of the Downs, which meant I had to ride up a slope that got steadily steeper as it got higher.
This was where I missed riding with my mates. With us yelling at each other, calling names and making the slowest out to be a wimp or a girl, we sort of fight not to be in last place. It makes the climb easier when you have a competition to see who can do it fastest.
Riding it by myself, it was hard. I ended up concentrating only on pedalling, trying to keep my speed up. Getting near the top, I had shifted all the way down into first gear. On flat ground I’d have been spinning my legs around like Road Runner, but up that high, every push was a right effort.
I have to say that I did need to get off my bike before I reached the top and push it the last five minutes, I just couldn’t go fast enough to keep my balance. It wasn’t the first Tim that I or one of the others had had to do that but it had been a long time. Its surprising what you can do when you don’t want to be made fun of by your mates.
Once I crested the hill, I stopped for a drink from my water bottle and had a look at the view. It was something we always did, but usually we didn’t really look at the view, we were just trying to stop each other rom seeing how red faced and out of breath we were.
This time I had a proper look, the massive hills swooping and curving. The different shades of green making a patchwork below. The dark green of the hedges dividing the fields. I’ve been trying to think of a better word than pretty, because I know Jack and Bill would make fun of m for it, but it really was a pretty sight.
When I got my breath back I rode along the road, heading for the downhill trail that I wanted. There’s a few up there, some are much steeper than others and I was going for a fairly steep one, but not one that gets a bit sketchy. The best one makes you go so fast, but there’s a few turns that can be tricky and I thought that trying it by myself would be a bad idea. If I stacked it a bit hard I would be in trouble because it could be hours before anyone found me.
That’s when I saw a new trail on the opposite side.
Let me explain, all of the trails I was looking at and planned to ride, they all head back in the general direction of Arundel. They all go down the same slope. This nw one was on the other side of the hill, so going down it would take me away from home. That meant it would take me longer to get home and I might miss some or all of the match. It was only Man City against Pompey, so not likely to be a great game.
Plus, and this is important, it was a new trail that none of us had ridden before. That meant I could do it and tell Jack and Bill all about it. They might have the PS3 to play on, but I would have discovered something. That was just better.
The start of the trail was through some trees, so I took it steady, I was obviously going to tell Jack and Bill I bombed the whole way, but I was smart enough to not go too fast down an unknown track by myself.
The trail started by going along the length of the Down, so it wasn’t too steep to start with. That meant I still needed to pedal every so often just to keep my seed up, then it took a tight left turn and went directly down for a shot. I picked up enough speed that I kept touching my rear brake to keep my speed down.
It started having more turns, getting a bit technical but I held myself on them. I knew if I remembered most of them, I could really outrace my mates when I brought them up here.
There was a fork in the trail, one led straight down, so I could get loads of speed and really fly, ending up in the field at the bottom and that looked like fun, but the other path curved back into the trees.
If I’d been with the boys, I’m sure we’d have taken the route down, seeing who could go the fastest, feeling that sense of flying when you are freewheeling because you can’t pedal fast enough to make a difference, even in t gear. But I was alone and had a bit of an urge to explore some more. I could always turn around and do the downhill run if I didn’t like what I found.
All of that was decided in the few seconds before I reached the fork. I’d already been out of the woods for a minute or so, riding down the grass slope, so I had a really good view of everything. I wasn’t thinking about the football or lunch or really thinking about Jack and Bill, I was just enjoying the ride and didn’t want it to end just yet.
I swooped away from the downhill and then I was among the trees, enjoying the sudden, cool shade they threw over me.
The trail curved back up the slope, so I had the change gears and start pedalling again.
I was getting deep and starting to think about whether the end of this trail was too far and if I should go back when I saw the car sitting in among the trees.
I had to brake, stop and look.
When I say car, I don’t mean a Ford Mondeo like your Dad has, or a really fancy car like a Lambo or Ferrari. This was an old car. An old, old car. Like one of the first cars ever, old. No roof, boxy looking. Didn’t even have a windscreen.
I could see it through the trees, it was in a bit of a clearing, so I got off my bike and my legs felt a little wobbly under me, I had been pumping harder than I thought.
I wheeled my bike through the trees and came into the clearing.
The car wasn’t rusty or dirty. It looked new. Well, a new old car. Like someone had built it in the clearing. There wasn’t any mud on the tires. It actually sparkled in the bits of sun that came through the trees.
I rested my bike against a tree. I walked to the car, reaching out a hand to touch it, to make sure it was real. It was too perfect to be there, do you see? How could I be sure that it was real? There was no road through the trees that this car could have fit, even if it had been driven here when it was new, time and weather should have messed it up a bit even if trees had grown over the road it used.
It was too perfect to be real.
I touched it. It was absolutely real.
I ordered what sort of effort someone would have to put in to get a car like this all the way here, halfway up a Down and to keep it looking so good.
That’s when the man appeared on the other side of the car and said “Do you like my car?”
If you asked him, he might say I screamed when he spoke, but I didn’t. I did yell, maybe a swear, but I did not scream.
“There’s no need to scream, young man.” He said.
That’s when I actually looked at him for the first time. He looked old, like forty or fifty years old. He was wearing a dark blue tuxedo. His hair was white, tangled and long, went down past his shoulders. He looked weird, I didn’t like him.
“I didn’t scream. I yelled.” I told him.
He laughed at me and I decided that the car wasn’t interesting enough to be laughed at. I started to walk away.
“Wait, young man, don’t you want to know how I got this car here and why it looks so well maintained?” He called after me.
I did want to know, I really wanted to know, because how did he even get it up here. But he had really annoyed me and I didn’t want to talk to him.
“I apologise if I upset you. I haven’t talked to anyone in quite some time. My manners are not what they should be.” He smiled and his teeth were all yellow and broken.
“Apology accepted.” I said, doing what Mum and dad had told me was polite. I still didn’t want to talk to him though.
“The story of how I ended up with this car here is quite interesting, y know. I think you’d like it.” He said.
“No thanks. I need to get home for the footy.” I told him. I planned on going back to the fork and taking the fast downhill run.
“That’s a shame.” He sighed and stroked the car. “I just thought you’d have liked to know why my meeting the ghost of a pirate ended up with this car so beautifully preserved here, amongst these trees.”
I stopped. A ghost pirate? I did like a good ghost story and the Pirates of the Caribbean films were high on my rewatch list. His story couldn’t be as cool as Captain Jack, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan’s was, but he did promise me ghosts and pirates.
I thought I could listen to him for a bit, if he was interesting I’d stay. If he wasn’t then I’d leave him and his car there.
He said I should sit in the car, because it would be more comfortable. My legs were aching a bit and I thought the red seats did look comfy, so I sat behind the steering wheel. The first time I had ever been allowed to sit in the driver’s seat of any car. I really was very nice, very comfy too.
He sat in the passenger seat, so I kept the driver’s door open in case I needed to get away. I’m twelve, but I’m not stupid.
He started to tell me his story and I’ll try to put it down here properly, but you know what its like when you retell someone else’s story. You can’t remember their exact words except for a ew things, you won’t even remember all the details. Like, if after reading this, you try to tell someone my story, you’ll remember bits of it, the idea of it, but you won’t tell everything I’ve told you and that’s ok. That’s what happens when you tell stories.
So, the man said he was out fishing one day, he didn’t say where, just out at sea. Then he saw something on the sea. It was a man, standing up in the middle of it. He wasn’t standing on the water, he was in it, his boots under the waves. When the man got closer, he could see this was someone dressed as a pirate, eyepatch, hook, hat, the whole thing.
The pirate rose out of the sea and the man saw that he was riding on the back of a whale. The pirate asked to be taken back into shore because the whale couldn’t get close enough.
The man asked the pirate how he had come to be on the back of a whale in the sea and the pirate told the man the story. It was something to do with witches and a curse from the Far East. He didn’t provide many details and I didn’t really take them in. I wanted to know how he got from a pirate on a whale to a car in the woods on a hill.
The man said the important part of the story was what the pirate told him, that the whale wasn’t real, it was just a fascinator, something to grab a person’s attention. A ghost like the pirate needed to get someone’s attention so that they could tell them a story. It didn’t matter if the story was true, though based on the truth was better than a complete lie. Because when you tell someone a story, you get inside their head. You hold them in place if you make it short enough. Its like hypnotism.
I wanted to know why hypnotising someone with a story was so important.
The man said it was because of the curse, the pirate wasn’t the first person cursed, he was just the latest. There was a long chain of these cursed people. They were doomed to walk the earth until they could find someone, get into their head and make them still. Then they could kill them, freeing themselves to pass over and their victim would be the next in line.
“How does that explain why this car is in the woods?” I demanded to know.
He laughed and said “Its a fascinator.”
Then he reached into my mouth with his cold fingers and ripped my tongue out.
He said that I would take his place now. He showed me the wound in his belly where the pirate had sliced him open with his hook. The wound that had never healed.
He said that I was the cursed one now. He was free to pass over, but I was cursed to stay.
He apologised for ripping out my tongue. He said he had been thinking about this for a long time and the only way to make the curse end was to stop the cursed person being able to tell someone their story. He said he was sorry, but someone had t be the last and he couldn’t face it being him.
His cold, dry hands wrapped around my throat and he choked me to death.
So, I’ve written this down and placed it somewhere to be found. Because I want people to know what happened to me.
So, thank you for reading my story.
And if you made it this far, there’s just one more thing.
I’m standing right beside you.
© Robert Spalding 2020
Ghost Stories by Robert Spalding 