Three Mile Drove, Chapter Twenty One (standard:horror, 1258 words) [22/29] show all parts
Author: Brian Cross	Added: Oct 27 2007	Views/Reads: 2798/1961	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Things are hotting up for Darren Goldwater as events in Three Mile Drove reach their climax

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

the fire while passing the top of the drove would hurry up and get back 
to him. 

And then as if the man might have been psychic, his phone rang. He
snapped at it with the eagerness of a vulture, feeling his pulse rate 
rise as the officer relayed his news. The fire had come from the 
uninhabited house along the drove; he'd placed a call through to the 
fire service, though it was suspected that by the time they arrived the 
worst would be over. It was impossible to guess how it might have 
started. 

Well, that was something the brigade might be able to answer. 

McPherson switched off as the officer rambled on, he was one of those
people who would fill up their pocket book with every conceivable piece 
of nonsense, and could probably spot an expired tax disc from a hundred 
metres. No wonder the man had been in the job twenty-five years and 
never made it past being a constable. 

As McPherson made his way to his car, he turned the situation over in
his mind. The plain fact was there had been a fire at the house, which 
had been at the centre of his investigation into the missing girl. 
Nothing else mattered apart from that. He'd taken out what little of 
content there had been in the property, but as he slammed down the 
receiver, stifling the waffling officer's words in his throat, he found 
his mind spinning back to the day he'd first been called to Three Mile 
Drove, over a reported sighting of the missing girl. He'd thought then 
how it was probably just another wild goose chase, another dead end 
street like the many he'd encountered during the case. 

Perhaps it really had been the wild goose chase his superiors thought it
was, blaming their reluctance to support him on budget cuts, lack of 
funding and all that crap. But they hadn't been there when he'd been 
called, when he'd encountered the unearthly looking kids who'd 
disappeared the moment his back was turned. They hadn't been there when 
he'd found the ankle sock, the same colour as the one the missing child 
had been wearing, they hadn't been there when he'd disturbed an 
intruder in the house, forcing his way past with an intensity that sent 
him crashing down the stairs. He'd found things then, buried beneath a 
blanket in the attic, newspaper cuttings amongst other things, amongst 
them references to a missing child, old cuttings it was true, but 
enough to draw comparisons with the present case, one which his 
knowledgeable senior officers at headquarters had deemed fit to cast 
into the pit of unsolved mysteries. 

Not if he had his way, this little event might just yield something. If
nothing else the fire service might be able to establish what had 
started it. And then he thought of the missing link, the one he'd been 
so angry with over the veil of secrecy she'd thrown around herself. The 
one who had, perhaps not more than twenty minutes ago promised to come 
clean, to tell him what she knew. In his eagerness to rush to the scene 
he'd forgotten her, and upon the realisation of that he almost overshot 
the turning into the drove. 

But the waft of smoke that rose through the semi-darkness drew him like
a moth to a flame. 


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