Story: A haunted house

[winterstorm2602]

Ahmed and Ahmee, 2 little boys were returning home and should have been back long ago. It was very late indeed and pitch dark. The wind sighed and whistled eerily making the palm trees sway and rustle the frightening sound of moving silk. The road was lonely and they were so far from home.
Suddenly, Ahmee stumbled and fell. “Oh! Get up and come on”,began Ahmed, but he stopped. Ahmee was crying loudly. “I ‘ve hurt my foot and can’t walk.” He whimpered. Ahmed peered through the gloomy darkness and sure enough, Ahmee’s foot was swelling.
“ I’ll have to help you along, till we come to a house”, he said.
So, they battled on through the lonely darkness, until they saw the weird shadowy outline of a house. No lights was shining and it seemed terrifyingly still.
“We’ll have to try in here”. Ahmed started to open the creaking gate abd pull Ahmee through a neglected and over the grown garden.
“ I don’t suppose anyone lives here, but ay least we can rest”, he muttered as he knocked loudly on the door. Suddenly, he felt the door move and beneath his hand, it gradually began to open. But there was no one there.
“ How on earth did that door open?” thought Ahmed.” I didn’t push it, but we’d better go inside; because there is no where else.” By the light of the moon , he could just distinguish doors on either side of the hall across which cockroaches crawled on slimy journeys. Through the first door, they stepped into what had one been a comfortable room. A window was broken and the wind gently rustled the torn and faded curtains and blew eddies of dust from this decrepit chair nearby.
Ahmee sat down. “My foot does hurt,” he whimpered.
“ Never mind. We are safe from the rain here and can get help in the morning. Try to sleep, while I keep watch”, comforted Ahmed.
The silence was so tense, that it seemed to press down on him a
D then, as he sat still as death, he started footsteps, soft at first and then growing, louder, nearer and nearer. Pit! Pat! Pit!, then the silence. Ahmed got up and open the door, but through the white moonlight, he could see nothing. A door further down the hall opened and shut again softly.Ahmed sat down again trembling, for he was really frightened by now. He listened again. “We can’t escape and we can never go back”, moaned a voice which sounded like a man’s but thin, croaking a nd old. It seemed to be coming from the next room.
“Chained with sad and invisible chains,” a woman’s voice answered. “For eternity, we must stay in this unhappy house where we lived and died, for eternity.” She wailed.
Then Ahmed heard the thin , querulous scream of a child. Pitiful and spine-chilling. “He won’t even grow up to be aman. We are all doomed, the three of us. Doomed to walk forever and to roam in this deserted place.”
Ahmed, pertrified sat and listened while Ahmee slept.
“ Who can they be and why they stay here, if they do not like it?”. He thought wildly. He listened again but the voices were fading and soft padding footsteps began drift and fade away into the night’s silence.
Ahmed must have dozed then, for when he looked again, dawn was stealing through the broken window and Ahmed’s foot was stronger. Swiftly the boys got up and crept through the empty quiet house into the deserted garden. A rubber tapper was walking along the road going to his work early. He looked at the boys in astonishment. “ You never stayed in there all night and alone,” he asked incredulously. “ Not in that house and alone?”
“It was the only place I could find” spluttered Ahmed and began to puor out the story of their adventure.
“You’re lucky not to be made queer in the head.”, interrupted the tapper. “The voices you heard would be the Lim’s voice. For years, that house has been haund by them. One bight Lim, miserable, bad-tempered and bullying, chopped his wife and baby to bits with a hatchet. Then he hanged himself. Since then, their ghosts haunt the house and can never be free. Don’t go into lonely house again,” concluded the tapper. “ You might not escape so easily another time.”
“Indeed I shan’t spend a night like that again alone and in a haunted house too” thought Ahmed, as they ran quickly home.