Ghost Stories - Lorna Bradbury [16]
‘You’re insane,’ I said, turning away.
He grabbed my arm. ‘Just touch it.’
He pushed my hand against the server wall. I flinched. it was hot.
‘So what? These servers are working 24–7. They’re all hot. That’s why the air conditioning’s so high.’
‘Those servers are processing,’ said Lake, his eyes flashing, ‘because they’re networked. This one isn’t. it’s stand-alone. Completely offline.’
I looked around. The only cable was the power input. ‘So where’s the activity coming from?’ I gasped.
He knelt before the tower and tenderly plugged in the USB drive. we watched the LED on the drive flicker as the data was transferred, then it died. But it wasn’t over. we both looked up. Timorously at first, then with growing confidence, the LEDs on the server started to pulse and dance like a myriad of stars cascading into black: swirling, constellating, coruscating with joy.
‘They’re meeting their new friends,’ he said.
Extract from
The Small Hand
Susan Hill
One
It was a little before nine o’clock, the sun was setting into a bank of smoky violet cloud and I had lost my way. I reversed the car in a gateway and drove back half a mile to the fingerpost.
I had spent the past twenty-four hours with a client near the coast and was returning to London, but it had clearly been foolish to leave the main route and head across country.
The road had cut through the Downs, pale mounds on either side, and then run into a straight, tree-lined stretch to the crossroads. The fingerpost markings were faded and there were no recent signs. So that when the right turning came I almost shot past it, for there was no sign at all here, just a lane and high banks in which the roots of trees were set deep as ancient teeth. But I thought that this would eventually lead me back to the a road.
The lane narrowed. The sun was behind me, flaring into the rear-view mirror. Then came a sharp bend, the lane turned into a single track and the view ahead was dark beneath overhanging branches.
I slowed. This could not possibly be a way.
Was there a house? Could I find someone to put me on the right road?
I got out. opposite me was an old sign, almost greened over. THE WHITE HOUSE. Below, someone had tacked up a piece of board. it hung loose but I could just make out the words GARDEN CLOSED in roughly painted lettering.
Well, a house was a house. There would be people. I drove slowly on down the track. The banks were even steeper, the tree trunks vast and elephantine.
Then, at the end of the lane I came out of the trees and into a wide clearing and saw that it was still light after all, the sky a pale enamelled silver-blue. There was no through road. ahead were a wooden gate and a high hedge wound about with briars and brambles.
All I could hear were birds settling down, a thrush singing high up on the branches of a walnut tree and blackbirds pinking as they scurried in the under-growth. I got out of the car and, as I stood there, the birdsong gradually subsided and then there was an extraordinary hush, a strange quietness into which I felt I had broken as some unwelcome intruder.
I ought to have turned back then. I ought to have retraced my way to the fingerpost and tried again to find the main road. But I did not. I was drawn on, through the gate between the overgrown bushes.
I walked cautiously and for some reason tried not to make a noise as I pushed aside low branches and strands of bramble. The gate was stuck halfway, dropped on its hinges, so that I could not push it open further and had to ease myself through the gap.
More undergrowth, rhododendron bushes, briar hedge growing through beech. The path was mossed over and grassy but I felt stones here and there beneath my feet.
After a hundred yards or so I came to a dilapidated hut which looked like the remains of an old ticket booth. The shutter was down. The roof had rotted. a rabbit, its scut bright white in the dimness of the bushes, scrabbled out of sight.
I went on. The path broadened out and