Castle Heights

Copyright 2021 for Red Cape Publishing

Cover design by MJ Dixon

Edited by P.J. Blakey-Novis, Red Cape Publishing

First Edition Published 2021 by Red Cape Publishing

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarities to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

CASTLE HEIGHTS

18 storeys, 18 stories

A Horror anthology

Foreword

The journey to Castle Heights started around September 2020 with the inkling of an idea; a tower block full of individual horror stories all set on one fateful night. I bounced the idea off my friend, filmmaker MJ Dixon, and between us it quickly grew into an eventful night with set events that could lap over into each tale. 

Of course, the year 2020 brought devastation to the world. It has been a real-life horror for all of us and too many have lost loved ones, I lost my father who I loved dearly. I’ll never stop missing him. 

But, in times of struggle we are stronger when pulling together. Strength in unity. United we stand. An anthology seems quite apt; a collaboration of some very talented and rather nice people coming together with one purpose - to entertain you. Well, scare you.

I’d like to give huge and sincere thanks to everyone involved in bringing this book to life; MJ, for his ideas and efforts in shaping it and pulling together the writers, Red Cape Publishing who have been patient and incredibly supportive, the talented writers for bringing such a variety of styles and tones to their individual floors, and you, the ever-valued reader.

Thank you!

Until next time, look after each other, stay safe and...

Enjoy the frights of Castle Heights!!

Tony Sands

CONTENTS

A Hole in One by David Chaudoir                  5

Apartment 10 by Anna Dixon                  22

The Demon of Apartment 13 by Jason White            37

Bloody Nightmare in Room 19 by Bob Pipe            59

A Guilty Feeding on the 4th Floor by Teige Reid      80

The Boy on the 5th Floor by Alice Henley            108

Riddled Inside Number 39 by Philip Rogers            122

The Noises Outside Room 50 by MJ Dixon            140

Floor 8 by Annie Knox                        170

The Unravelling in Apartment 58 by Damon Rickard      203

The Plumber on the 10th by Jack Joseph            230

Loathsome Reflections at 69 by Grant Kempster      250

Dr Levin in Number 77 by Donovan 'Monster' Smith      268

Something Foul on Floor 13 by P.J. Blakey-Novis      286

The 14th by Tony Sands                        307

Floor 15: Fear Thy Neighbour by Matthew Davies      340

Blue Daze on the 16th by Freddy Beans            361

The Connection on Level 17 by Richard Rowntree      383

A Hole in One

David Chaudoir

We are all just passing through, we are all just on one long conveyor belt to death. So said Detective Chetwyn’s bleak internal voice that had chimed in as he was staring blankly at a tub of hummus whilst slowly walking around the supermarket. What on earth had he contributed, what had he done to leave a lasting mark on this world? Nothing, he thought, and it bothered him.

Detective Chetwyn was a semi-retired C.I.D. detective who had worked for the Metropolitan Police in London for thirty years before his colitis had unceremoniously reared its ugly head and forced him to take early semi-retirement. Working in a records facility in a god forsaken industrial estate in Croydon was the equivalent of a punch-drunk boxer given the broom so he could sweep the gym and make way for the new generation of young pugilists, or in his case, detectives eager to climb the greasy pole.

He would while away his lonely days surrounded by dusty files and cabinets, mulling or stewing, as his wife called it. Since the children had left home she had become even more intolerant of him around the house. Stop hovering! she would snark at him, whilst he was rootling like a pig for snacks as Megan was cooking. His waistline had increased alongside his dissatisfaction with his marriage. What had happened to the lovely girl he had married? He actually could see malice in her eyes when he crossed her, which didn’t take much these days. Truth was, he was bored, lonely and isolated as much at work as he was at home.

He spent long hours indexing old case files stored at the south London facility, reading, in the vain hope, that he might find something to stimulate his atrophying intellect. So far, he hadn’t.

The Castle Heights case fell into his lap or, expanding on the metaphor, bounced off his paunch and then fell into his lap.

After doing his shopping at the supermarket, during an extended lunch hour, something he never used to do when he cared, he went back to the industrial unit where the records were housed. An old policeman had given him words to live by; Be nice to people on the way up because you are sure to meet them on the way down. There stood a detective he had met on his way up the greasy pole, Detective Kitty Valletta was just such a person he had been pleasant to on his way up within the firm and was now reciprocating during his slow descent into career obscurity.

She was ten years his junior and he had a bit of a soft spot for her, she still occasionally appeared in his fantasies as he would envision her in her WPC outfit and her black stockings, the uniform she was wearing when they first met at a crime scene many moons ago.

Saw these and thought of you, she said, as she dumped an evidence bag on Chetwyn’s small desk that contained a series of black notebooks.

Thank you for coming down to my dusty lair, quipped Chetwyn.

They were probably going to pulp these, but I wondered if you had a home for them? She cast her eye across the acres of metal shelving.

Chetwyn had removed one of the notebooks and was peering at the elegant ink handwriting on the pages when he felt she was looking at him. He caught a look of pity on her face, a look he had seen before. The force was changing so fast that Chetwyn felt like a fossil, whereas Valletta was the future. There didn’t seem to be room for old white men in the Met anymore, despite their experience.

Detective Valletta had brought food too, a few Tupperware boxes were relieved of their lids to bring forth olives, mozzarella cheese salad and Italian bread. This food was slightly outside Chetwyn’s limited palate, so he politely made an excuse and watched the detective perch on his desk and munch through it as they spoke.

You’ll be needing a nice chianti with your Italian food, Valletta.

And some fava beans! she joked back, knowing Chetwyn’s love of the macabre.

There’s some proper spooky goings on in them books, she continued.

Oh yeah?

I got this from the clean-up squad at a residential tower block. This chap they found dead, perfectly mummified with his arm up pointing at the window. They reckon he might have been dead for almost a year. Proper eerie it was, right up your alley.

Chetwyn was hardly listening as he looked at her face which he had the sudden desire to grab and kiss. A rush of passion had welled up and consumed him. The lack of human warmth at home had propelled him toward his idiotic yearning.

Only when Kitty Valletta had left did he calm down and return to a semblance of sanity.

As the daylight faded from the semi-opaque sky, Chetwyn reached into his tweed jacket and removed his Turkish cigarettes, lit his one a day constitutional smoke, and set about reading the books now in his possession. Turning on the tiny desk lamp beside him instead of the antiseptic strip lights, he inhaled the heavily scented smoke, adjusted his glasses, and settled into the chair with a slight growl of contentment.

I am Raymond Garrick, psychologist and Lecturer of Criminal Psychology at King’s College, University of London. I am currently on a sabbatical whilst I write a book. The dean suggested I take this as a sabbatical since my research is not for a peer reviewed paper but a manuscript I am hoping will be picked up by a publisher of lighter factual material. I suspect the dean is doing this to quash any arguments about salaries as well as prevent any grumbling which the fellows and other professors might have on the nature of my proposed book; Ghosts, a clinical psychologist investigates. The dean actually choked on his wine when I told him the proposed title. I imagine he saw my one-time appearance on a morning television show and didn’t want any more embarrassing incidents. He could keep me at arm’s length from the University and cut me off, if my book became successful, without bringing further shame on the department. It was fine to have an Iranian lecturer who actively worshipped and advertised her belief in a supernatural deity, but heaven forbid a middle-aged nutter who claimed he saw a ghost as a child and was planning to write a book about it.

Why that bit? Chetwyn puffed on his cigarette and drew down a plume of heavy white smoke, he reached for his thermos flask and topped up his coffee cup. A tingle of boyhood excitement travelled through him, akin to the feeling he used to have on Christmas Eve as a child or hearing a good ghost story. Chetwyn attributed his desire to join the police force and his love of all things supernatural to watching the black and white film The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. In fact, he could directly credit his first experiments with smoking due to that film, that and his aforementioned love of ghostly stories.

Opening the first notebook to the first page he read;

I, Raymond Garrick, am a Professor of Psychology at King's College, University of London, and I believe in ghosts. This rather unfashionable belief stems from the time I met my dead grandfather.

I was eight years old and I was walking home from school in the village of Levisham, Yorkshire when I saw my grandfather sitting on the stile out of the big sheep field near The Horseshoe pub. My grandfather had once been the local smithy’s boy and usually wore a sixpence piece that he had punctured a hole in, on a leather lace around his neck. It was strange to see him in his black suit, smoking his pipe. Hello Ray, did you enjoy your learnin’ today? he said with his gold tooth glinting and his thick white hair standing up like Stan Laurel. I told Grandpa that I had and he reached out his hand, pulling the lace and sixpence out of his pocket, the memento he had made as a boy, which he put it in my hand. Keep on working, Ray, you’s as bright as a button lad, you’ll go far. He got down from the stile, patted me on the head and walked down the path beside the sheep field. As I walked away, he called out, Look after thy mother.

When I arrived back at our cottage I was greeted by my mother in the kitchen. She was sat at the old oak kitchen table. She had been weeping and there was pink around her eyes and fresh tears on her cheeks. She quickly wiped her face. She sat me down and explained that she had just taken the bus back from the hospital and grandpa had passed away.

But I’ve just seen Grandpa, and he gave me this, I said, reaching into my grey flannel shorts pocket and pulling out nothing. There was no sixpence on a lace. It had gone.

Mother exploded in grief and anguish. She thought I was telling one a y’ jokes.

Two weeks later, at the funeral, Grandma gave me an envelope with Ray written in a rough pencil hand by my grandfather. Inside was a note saying Look after your mother. Grandpa, and the sixpence on the lace. I’ve kept it ever since.

No physical evidence remains but I was not, at the tender age of eight, suffering a psychotic episode and the experience is so clear and deeply ingrained as to be indelible.

This experience has led me on a lifelong quest to seek out other convincing and baffling stories that may or may not have a supernatural bent.

The next day Chetwyn felt full of energy, despite the crick in his neck from sleeping on the sofa, the one he’d been banished to by Megan, his vengeful spouse. He felt fleet of foot, his spirits lifted. This had a lot to do with seeing detective Valletta as well as doing a bit of his own detective work around the Raymond Garrick case, if in fact there was some to be done.

As Chetwyn entered one of the incident rooms, Valletta was bending over a desk, looking at some case files alongside an Indian detective. Very erotic images of Detective Valletta flooded his mind and it was difficult to prevent himself from putting his hands on her hips in a lover’s welcome. If he acted out his fantasies he would be off the force and out on the pavement before you could say Harvey Weinstein. Not only that, he was a gentleman and had never partaken in boorish behaviour.

Chetwyn waited patiently until Kitty Valletta was done. When she spun around she had a furrowed brow that relaxed into a warm smile.

It’s got its hook into you, hasn’t it? She looked at him at the angle that accentuated the way her right eye pointed in slightly. A defect that Chetwyn found endearing.

Let’s just say it’s got me intrigued.

An eminent university professor obsessed by things that go bump in the night, found mummified in a rather down-at-heel residential tower block in mysterious circumstances. Let me get you the case file.

Kitty Valletta bent again slightly as she reached into an archive box under her desk. Her sturdy legs in tights, her charcoal grey suit skirt revealing a little panty line. Jesus, man, get a hold of yourself, that phrase bounced around Chetwyn’s cranium. She booked him a car and he soon found he was on his way to Castle Heights with his pulse racing and damp patches under his arms, luckily concealed under his sports jacket. As the constable drove him, he looked through the file Kitty had slipped him. His brain snacked on the information but was constantly diverted back to Valletta’s bottom.

The WPC who drove Chetwyn to the tower block said almost nothing apart from the obvious.

We’ve arrived Sir, I’ll wait for you here.

Chetwyn nodded and walked through the double doors into the foyer of the tower block, a musty stench of damp from the stairwell hitting his nasal passages. He was relieved he didn't need to climb them as the lifts looked unreliable and the flat was number one, on the ground floor. He pulled the one remaining strand of police incident tape off the door as he entered.

The interior of the flat required, what an estate agent might euphemistically describe as, some updating. Chetwyn surmised that the flat must have been owned by a little old lady. Lladro porcelain dogs cluttered the shelves and the mantelpiece above the three-bar gas fire. A gaudy painting of a clown holding balloons stood above the same gas fire in the living room. Dated furniture, dated brown Formica kitchen, very dated avocado coloured bathroom.

If he had concentrated on the way over, Chetwyn would have learnt that the flat was owned by Irene Smith, a spinster of eighty years who owned the flat that Raymond Garrick was discovered sat bolt upright in. He was found in a kitchen chair with his arm outstretched and pointing at the sliding doors that lead out to a fenced-off patch of grass with ornamental pots and a patio.

Chetwyn turned the key and slid open the door. He walked out into the garden and had he not been concentrating would have fallen into a round deep hole in the grass. He stood peering at it. He found the sensation brought a profound sense of discomfort because he couldn’t see the bottom. He went back into the house and grabbed a porcelain dog. Tossing the dog into the hole, he heard it clatter downward then nothing. Chetwyn stepped backward into the flat. A more youthful man might have exclaimed WTF, but Chetwyn: What on God’s green earth?

Once home and ensconced in his shed, he properly went through the accumulated paperwork as well as an entry by Raymond Garrick in his collection of notebooks. Flicking through the last notebook he picked up, Chetwyn surmised it to be the psychologist’s final one.

Often explanations of hauntings are attributed to aberrant mental behaviour or even illness. The final case I wish to share is that of Irene Smith who is going blind and apparently suffers from Bonnet syndrome.

This case was referred to me by the Consultant Ophthalmologist at University College Hospital.

Irene Smith is a cheerful woman in her seventies, a former seamstress of a West End theatre. She puts her failing eyesight down to re-attaching sequins onto the chorus line’s costumes during the ten-year run of a hit show. Despite the ophthalmologist explaining this is not the case and her oncoming blindness is in fact due to an inoperable degenerative disorder, Irene prefers her explanation.

Bonnet syndrome is a phenomenon named after Charles Bonnet, a Swiss psychiatrist who wrote about it in the late eighteen hundreds. When sighted people begin losing their vision, they oftentimes start experiencing complex hallucinations. In Miss Smith’s case, she started to observe people appearing on the land outside the Tower Block that had been designated as gardens for the ground floor residents.

Again, Miss Smith defied the wisdom of the consultant in favour of her own explanation that in fact these were the ghosts of the ancient people.

At first I didn’t understand what was going on but soon enough I knew these were people from beyond the veil.

Over the telephone she described in detail that the people must be the ancient Britons because the costumes they were wearing were like a play that she’d once worked on.

The costumier did a lot of research, she did. Won an award for it, she did, despite the play being a flop. Anyhow, these ghosts are wearing the same clothes, Miss Smith explained.

When pressed about what she saw these ghosts doing in her garden, she quite matter-of-factly explained that this was an ancient burial ground and that she could see the trees in a circle where the garages now stood.

Whilst this might appear laughable and indeed the hallucinations of a woman suffering from Charles Bonnet’s syndrome, I had to investigate her very detailed description of a series of wooden poles in a large circle and this is where things got stranger. It turned out that Castle Heights had been built on the edges of one of the few discovered wooden henges in Britain. The cultural and historical significance was lost on the developers of the hideous erection of Castle Heights.

I decided I had to investigate.

This is hotting up nicely, thought Chetwyn as he absentmindedly reached into his tweed jacket, drew out the Turkish cigarettes and lit the second of the day. Turning a page of the notebook, he saw a strange diagram. It looked like the same design as the Swastika Stone of Woodhouse Crag, an image Chetwyn had seen before.

I must try to describe accurately what I saw when I spent the evening at Irene Smith’s flat last night. I arrived at eight thirty pm whilst there was still some residual daylight and had a cup of tea. At nine, Miss Smith fumbled her way across the living room and turned off the lights. She made a giggled remark about what the neighbours would think about a young man being seen in her living room at that hour with the lights off (despite the fact she was a partially blind woman in a darkened room sitting with a middle-aged professor in sight of nobody.) We sat sipping tea with Miss Smith explaining, They’ll be here soon. Infuriatingly, she made this remark several times over.

This last sentence was struck through with a line. The old bird was pissing him off, thought Chetwyn.

Peering into the gloom of her back garden, only illuminated softly by streetlamps, I began to enter the strange nether world of Irene Smith and her hallucinations. In the shadows I started to see the drifting black wisps of something, perhaps smoke?

Here they come, whispered my companion.

The loose smoke coalesced into straight columns like tree trunks placed at regular intervals and described the edge of a circle. Now other plumes of smoke rose from the ground and began to move. Human motion was easily detected, even when fleshed out by this strange spectral smoke or mist, whatever it was. In the gloom, one blinks to try and gain definition and bring what one is seeing into focus, but there is no clarity.

Then a confusion of mist gave way to a flailing of limbs and a woman in rags was being dragged by four men. The silhouettes became fuller, the mixture of light from centuries ago and the yellow sodium streetlights fused into three-dimensional forms that crossed into the here and now.

I saw a huge circular stone with a strange carving upon it. The woman was dragged onto it before one of the men lifted a huge rock and smashed it downward on the struggling wretch’s head. The body twitched. Another man in a cape and pointed hat moved to the centre of the rock and slashed at the woman’s neck. The men lifted the woman’s body upside down and, like a slaughtered pig, the blood drained on the rock.

Fancy a brew? came Irene Smith’s voice from behind me.

I remained transfixed on the scene still playing out before me. The woman’s body was tossed into a huge dark hole very close to the patio door in Irene’s garden. A hole that I had not seen earlier. The woman’s body landed like a rag doll on the lip and bounced on the edge of the chasm before falling in.

Oh my God, the hole, thought Chetwyn, is that what it’s for?

The next morning, he himself had commandeered a car and driver from the pool and was driven from his house to Castle Heights. Sod the paperwork, he’d deal with it later.

It was the same monosyllabic WPC who dropped him at the tower block before.

He still had the keys with him from the previous day and was soon in the vacant but still furnished flat. As he’d crossed the lobby, Chetwyn had seen who he assumed was the concierge, leaning on a broomstick, eyeing him suspiciously. What had happened to Irene Smith? He jotted a note in his pocketbook to locate her before he strode into the living room. He unlocked the patio doors to the garden and gingerly walked towards the grass. No hole? He went back into the living room and looked about him as if he had let himself into the wrong flat. He felt truly discombobulated. Out in the garden he felt the ground to check the earth was solid; it was. He got on his knees and slowly examined the grass.

Back inside the flat, he spun around on the spot in confusion, trying to reassure himself that he was in the right place.  An uneasy excitement grew within him.

That Saturday evening Chetwyn sat in his shed, stewing on the case. He pulled out from behind a book on his shelf a small hip flask of very expensive malt whiskey and totted his coffee with it. He lit his fourth cigarette of the day, gulped at the warming brew, inhaled the deep rich smoke and read Garrick’s notebook once more.

I returned several nights in a row. Thankfully Miss Irene Smith has been taken into Denville Hall, a retirement home for theatrical professionals, so I wasn’t disturbed by her inane wittering (omit / remove). Activity seems to be gaining momentum. In the gloom I spy garlands of flowers and lit torches around the stone with strange symbols. According to Professor Dunitch’s Esoteria of Pagan Practices, a festival of Mabon, a gathering in, or precursor to a harvest festival. Tonight I believe something momentous is about to happen.

A bolt of realisation hit Chetwyn. The date of the festival in the book. That’s tonight. Sod it, thought Chetwyn as he got into his battered old Volvo and sped to Castle Heights.

He was smoking almost nonstop now, his blood pressure through the roof with excitement. For the first time in months, he felt alive again.

Chetwyn skipped across the lobby to the flat and called a cheery Good evening to the gormless concierge, who nosily had stuck his head out of a doorway to gawp at him.

Once inside the flat he switched on the lights, availed himself of Miss Smith’s toilet and drew up a kitchen chair close to the patio doors. He then readjusted the lighting in the living room to prevent reflections by turning off the central lighting, favouring a little lamp resting on the shelf with the gaudy porcelain dogs.

He cupped his hands on the glass so as to see by the yellow light of the sodium streetlamp what was going on.

Nothing happened, not until eleven fifteen. Then, in the nether world, the strange plumes of smoke belched from the earth, just as Garrick described, and soon murky, shadowy people were moving about in front of him. Then he noticed it. The huge gaping hole in the ground, then the flat stone with a design carved in. He had heard about this but not seen it himself. The excitement gave way to unease, but not fear, as what was happening outside the glass appeared almost as if it were a faded film playing out. Chetwyn turned the key in the patio door and slid it open a little way so as to get a better look. There appeared to be six caped men, twenty-five feet away.

Chetwyn pulled his flask from his pocket, twisted off the cap and swigged. The flask slipped from his fingers, causing him to look down.

He felt a sudden cataclysmic crushing pain in his chest as the whiskey was flowing down his neck. He looked up again as he fell to his knees, seeing the six men standing in front of the opening in the patio door. It was like a bizarre game of grandma’s footsteps. Suddenly they were right in front of him. They were still dark shadows but now they also appeared solid too. They were all pointing at him. He realised they had come for him. The flat’s lights flickered as the six men grabbed him and pulled him into their world. Chetwyn tried to open his mouth and scream as he saw the men, blood on their hands, illuminated by the flickering torches, the sodium street lamps and light from the flat. The men wrestled with him as they dragged him onto the large flat stone. He could hardly breathe, the pain and dread constricting his whole being. In the torchlight he noticed one of the hooded figures had a tattoo on his chest of the same strange four-pointed design. They pinned him down onto the cold stone surface. He looked back at the flat. The lights flickered once more and he saw three women standing over his body in the flat. It was Kitty, Megan and the monosyllabic driver. They all had smiles on their faces as Chetwyn saw himself writhing on the carpet, clutching his chest.

Chetwyn was somehow in the flat and outside at the same time. He decided he was dead already.

The rock was raised above his head by one of the pagan priests and brought down swiftly. A neurological bolt of lightning locked his right arm and leg as pain exploded in a canopy of stars across his vision. They then dragged him to the hole. His broken soul moaned like a wounded animal as he was tossed into the pit.

***

In the darkness of the flat, Kitty Valletta lit a cigarette, illuminating Chetwyn’s wife Megan and the police driver. The driver switched on the torch of her phone, illuminating Kitty and Megan as well as the immobile crumpled heap of Chetwyn close to the sliding patio doors. All three women were wearing gold pendant necklaces with the same strange symbol.

Kitty exhaled and gripped Megan’s hand tighter.

Now you’ve joined the order, I told you we would always answer our sisters’ prayers.

Apartment 10

Anna Dixon

Scarlet sat at the kitchen table in her new apartment staring at her open laptop. On the screen was the social media page of Charlie, the love of her life, the person she had trusted more than any other, the man who she now knew had lied, cheated and deceived her for years. She read through his last few posts:

15:00 FREEDOM! Sun’s out, guns