Creepy Christmas Read online

Creepy Christmas

  by

  Jaimie Admans

   

   

   

  Creepy Christmas © Jaimie Admans.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents portrayed in it are a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the author.

  First published in 2012 by Jaimie Admans.

   

  Cover design by Jaimie Admans. Image © fotolia.com/lattesmile

   

  Find out more about the author at https://www.jaimieadmans.com

   

   

   

  Also by Jaimie Admans:

   

  North Pole Reform School

  Mistletoe Bell hates Christmas, until she is whisked away to a reform school at the North Pole, run by elves determined to make her love the festive season!

   

  Not Pretty Enough

  A young adult romantic comedy about making the boy you love realise you exist.

   

  Kismetology

  A feel-good romantic comedy about finding the perfect man… For your mother!

   

  Afterlife Academy

  Even being dead isn’t enough to get you out of maths class.

   

   

   

   

  CHAPTER 1

   

  Friday nights are rubbish now.

  They used to be my favourite nights of the week.

  Every Friday when I got home from school, I would cook dinner for our family—that’s me, Mum, Dad, my little sister Pippa, and even our dog Harry would get a small plateful, but his opinion of dinner doesn’t count because he would eat the dust out of the vacuum cleaner if he could get the bag open. I love to cook. And on Fridays, because Mum finished work late, and my homework could be put off until the weekend, Mum and Dad would let me cook the whole dinner and dessert as long as I left the kitchen door open, Dad came in to supervise occasionally, and Pippa wasn’t allowed near the oven or the kettle.

  Mum said that nothing would change after the divorce, and that I could still cook for her, Pippa and Harry, and we could make up a plate for Dad and take it to him the next day. I argued that the food would be spoiled by the next day, but Mum insisted that it wouldn’t. She even said that maybe Dad could come over on a Friday night to eat with us, but that hasn’t happened. And my Friday nights of cookery… well, I cooked a few times at first, but one time I automatically set a plate for Dad, and Mum got upset about it. Since then, I’ve really given up on the Friday night dinners. What’s the point in cooking for your family when you don’t have a proper family to cook for? It’s never been the same without Dad here. Sometimes I bake a batch of cookies at the weekends, and we put some in a bag and take them to Dad, but he never gets them hot and fresh out of the oven like he used to, and they just don’t taste the same when they’ve gone a bit soggy in a bag overnight.

  Hi, by the way. My name is Kaity. Yes, spelled like that. I like it. It gives my bog standard boring name something different from the millions of other ‘Katies’ out there. We live in a small village called Chelferry. I’m ten-years-old and I’m in J6 class at school with my best friend Tammy and our teacher Mrs Platkin.

  I live in a small house with my mum, Pippa, and Harry. And since last week, Mum’s new boyfriend seems to have taken up occupying our basement. But he has to go. As soon as humanly possible. Really, the less said about the new boyfriend, the better. Dad not living here anymore is a temporary situation and I intend to fix things before the year is out.

  Dad moved out in the summer. He got an apartment in a huge block of flats across town. He lives so many storeys up that you get vertigo from looking out of his window. The elevator to his floor smells of pee and the stairs are smeared with an unknown and very unpleasant looking brown substance, so you have to walk up carefully while trying not to touch anything. It’s very disturbing. The only night that Mum did let me stay over with Dad, something happened to his hot water heater and there was no hot water at all in his whole flat. And I had to sleep on his lumpy bumpy, uncomfortable pull out sofa bed.

  I haven’t stayed with Dad since then. Mum says there’s no need to until he gets a better place. Then she mutters something about how unlikely that is on his salary. At least my dad has a job, unlike the stupid layabout that Mum says she’s dating. She uses that word like she thinks I don’t know what it means. Of course I know what it means, I just don’t see how you can date someone you met on the internet a couple of months ago, and whom you only met for real last week, when he moved into our basement to carry on his laying about there.

  There’s no way Mum is really dating this guy. She and Dad love each other. They do. This divorce is just a temporary glitch. Just as soon as I can get rid of the internet boyfriend and get Mum and Dad back on speaking terms, they’ll realise that as well. I know they will.

  Right now they’re just mad at each other. Once they’ve had a chance to cool off, they’ll see how much they really love each other. Dad moved out in the summer, which was a whole six months ago now. You would have thought six months was more than enough time to cool off, but it turns out that my parents are really stubborn.

  The day Dad left was right at the beginning of the summer holidays. I’d had an unexplainable sick feeling in my stomach all morning, and in the afternoon, Mum and Dad called me and Pippa into the living room and explained that they were separating.

  Pippa was really too young to understand and all she wanted to know was where Harry was going to go, but Harry was to stay with us of course. Dad said his new place wasn’t as big as he had hoped, and besides he wasn’t allowed to have animals in his flat.

  After Pippa had gone to bed that night, Mum asked if we could have a grown-up chat. She made us a cup of tea each and gave me a plate of toast because I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, and I took my tear-stained, puffy, red face down to the kitchen. Mum sat at the kitchen table, and didn’t tell me off for sitting on the counter like she normally would, and I sipped my tea and nibbled my cold toast and tried to pretend I didn’t feel like I was breaking apart inside. Mum said that she and Dad had been “having problems”—those were her exact words. Problems. Everyone has problems, even me. Even Pippa probably and she’s only five. A few problems are no reason to break up a fifteen-year marriage. Parents are supposed to deal with their own problems, not give them to their kids. But, apparently, Mum isn’t very mature on that front because she kept insisting that she and Dad had been trying to fix their problems but that it just wasn’t working. I said “Couldn’t he just have moved into the spare room or something,” and she laughed and asked where we would pile all our junk and exercise equipment that we buy every New Year and never end up using. I didn’t find that very funny, and when Mum got serious again, she said that it would never have worked. I wanted to cry again and ask how she would know if she never tried, but I controlled myself. I wanted Mum to think of me as a mature adult and crying and screaming doesn’t seem very mature. I took some deep breaths and tried to concentrate on what Mum was saying, that it would be for the best, and that Pippa and I might even like having two homes to go to. In all fairness, Mum hadn’t seen the rabbit hutch of a flat that Dad had moved into then.

  Now it’s nearly Christmas. Christmas is the best time of the whole year, and Dad still hasn’t come home.

  A
nd I have to do something about that.