I've always had a vivid imagination, but when I was young, it wasn't all that big. I skipped town as a teenager with no family to go home to, and I left it behind. I came back to Pittsburgh with my friends in my late teens, but I moved away soon after. My mother in law lived in Scotland, and passed away a couple of years ago. There was a lot of grief from my family, but I was left with a castle she owned. It was old, and had several turrets, so I knew when she first bought the place that it wouldn't be much fun to live in, but it was land, so it was a good deal.
Being an only child, I didn't have too many relatives, so when the estate was included in the will, I didn't have too many choices. I was the sole inheritor, so I wasn't sure what to do. I avoided going to Scotland, because I didn't want to go back to the time with my mother in law while she was alive. My wife and son came to live near me, and I didn't know what to do. My other relatives weren't interested in the castle at all, so I asked my father in law to help sell it. I didn't see any point in keeping it, just sitting there.
It was in a small village that was pretty much forgotten. The last major event was an armed robbery in 1990, so a lot of the country-side had fallen into disrepair. The old castle, which was called Broxam Castle, but everyone in the village was calling it, 'old Uncle John's Castle', was on the edge of the village proper, so it looked out over the village and the farmland. The road to the town ran past it, and was a stone-paved road that ran out to a warehouse that was in the village proper. The village proper was a cluster of white stone buildings, with slate roofs that gave the whole town an old-fashioned look. Nobody lived there, as it was so remote that the only travel was to the village mainly.
I wanted to fix it up and sell it for a profit so I could go traveling, but I wasn't sure how much to spend on fixing it up. I was hoping that I could get enough from the hike from the village to town to be able to fix up the castle and then sell it for a profit. It was small, but I could work on it for a couple hours on the weekends at time. I got the paperwork going, but it took a week before the lawyer could make it back to the village to get the title, and then I had to wait a week before I could sell the property. I was hoping someone would come buy it and I had a buyer, but after a week, I'd given up.
I had the mailboxes in the village painted black to hide the letters from the post office, and I placed ads in the tourist information in the village, but nobody showed up. I figured that the country-side was a ghost-town, and if people came to live there, I would sell it for more as a summer-farm, but it was still a pretty castle, so I left it just as it was.
My wife took to visiting when she wasn't working, but she was busy, so she passed several nights there, going through the castle. It was a good sized building for being in the country, about 90 by 60 feet. There were two large wings on either side, a large keep in the center, and one big tower. There was a large courtyard in back, and a wall surrounding the courtyard behind the towers. The keep was burnt out, and there were two bedrooms in the two wings, each occupied by two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a small bathroom. The one in the right wing had three rooms, a small porch, and a kitchen, but the left wing was untouched, and there was a large fireplace with a fresh fire burning and a coffee pot on the fireplace.
When we first got there, there was a large hole in the kitchen wall. My wife said it was where someone had tried to break into it. There was a dead deer in the kitchen, and it had been there for a while. It must have died from whatever killed it from the outside, and way back in the window-hole, where it had fallen over after being taken. There was some dried blood on the floor and walls. We tried to clean up the dead-animal, but our dog, a golden lab mix, kept investigating it. It smelled awful, and we had to clean up a bunch of left over blood.
My wife came with me the first weekend I wanted to get started on the place. I decided to make the kitchen my first project, and clear out the floor, walls and ceiling. I got my tools and got going on it, moving the old fridge out and making room to get the old style sink out that was in there. I anchored some rope over the hole it left, and pulled it up before taking the old sink out. I started to prop it up to be able to take it out, when it fell right on my head, knocking me out.
I woke up back in the castle and couldn't remember what had happened. My wife cleaned me up and put the sink in the bathtub to soak, and said that I passed out from hitting my head. I didn't go to the doctor, because she said that I had just stood up too fast, so I made excuses, but my wife went and got some medicine from the village.
The next weekend, I was just about to start on the kitchen, when I heard a sound over the radio that all of a sudden went quiet. My wife said that it was a bad storm that was coming, so we decided to wait until the next day, to give us some time to finish it up. My wife went to the village to get some things while I started on the floor. I was shoveling the floor into a large bucket, when the radio in the kitchen began to play. I turned the radio off thinking it was a bad radio connection, but then it turned itself on again. My wife is a radio station director, so I asked her to come over and listen. She thought that the radio was fine, but it was as if the radio had a mind of it's own. It turned itself off and on at will, even when it was unplugged.
I stopped working on the floor, and waited to see if it would turn off by itself. My wife helped me clean up the mess, using a maids mop to clean up the floor. The radio got eerily quiet, and we thought the storm must have ruined it because the storm came out of nowhere, and I had heard an announcement on the radio about it. We turned on the television only to see a black screen and then the same announcement from the radio.
I was going to fix the television, but my wife didn't want me to touch it, because it would take a lot of time, and she said that TV's were basically junk when they broke. She thought that it might mess it up more, and I agreed, so I just left it. We decided to make a fire, since the storm was getting bad, and my wife went off to the village to get a few things.
My wife took her car, since the cars in the village were all so old and beat up you couldn't tell from their age. When she was coming back, I went to the door to grab her, and saw the motor that powered the cars, with a lot of blood on it and a door to the motor that led to a large hole, which looked like a river. When I opened the door, into a strange looking room at the end of the car. It was a small room, and I wondered what it was as I looked around at the strange looking engine parts, damaged but old looking, with silvery exhaust and oil stains on the side. I saw the limousine inside with the words, 'Timmy Jones' on it, and heard a noise behind me. I turned around, and set eyes on a creature I had never seen in my life. It was a strange looking furry creature with a long pink nose, long fangs and long, pointy claws. It looked human except for its long claws, and shiny-looking fur that must have be some sort of technology or a costume. I made a small noise and it hissed at me and ran towards me, and I ran the other way just in time to see some small, glowing lights up the hillside, where the car was.
I went back to the kitchen, and called my wife, who was driving home, while I checked the radio to see if it had turned itself off, and it still worked fine. I went to turn it off when it suddenly turned off, and went to a musical station that went off in short spurts. I turned it back on, but the radio shut off again, and only played static.
I was in a daze, so I just decided to wait until everything was finished, sitting at the dinning room table, and heard a sound I knew all too well. I turned, and saw the thing from the car coming, across the courtyard and into the kitchen. I grabbed a broom and used it to hit it, which caused a horrible screeching noise, as if someone was crying in agony. I made more noise at it, and it ran off, but I followed it to the courtyard where I saw the small lights again, and went to the car, by the engine, and it led me through a small door into another world.
Suddenly, I was not on the castle grounds but in a strange looking town. There were strange looking people walking around and small blinking lights. I saw the thing with two claws and it came at me, but I ran before it can get to me. I hid behind a wall and heard it looking for me, and it found me.