Bellman & Black: A Novel
Diane Setterfield
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1476711992
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the instant #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Thirteenth Tale comes a “poetic and mysterious” (Booklist) ghost story that will haunt you to your very core.
Caught up in a moment of boyhood competition, William Bellman recklessly aims his slingshot at a rook resting on a branch, killing the bird instantly. It is a small but cruel act, and is soon forgotten. By the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, William seems to have put the whole incident behind him. It was as if he never killed the thing at all. But rooks don’t forget…
Years later, when a stranger mysteriously enters William’s life, his fortunes begin to turn—and the terrible and unforeseen consequences of his past indiscretion take root. In a desperate bid to save the only precious thing he has left, he enters into a rather strange bargain, with an even stranger partner. Together, they found a decidedly macabre business.
And Bellman & Black is born.
Return to the Carnival of Horrors (Give Yourself Goosebumps, Book 22)
Haunted Heritage: A Definitive Collection of North American Ghost Stories
How unusual, he reflected. This is a man to whom a bank is just a place to put money. If money were raindrops then the Westminster & City is no more than a water butt. Large, expensive, and made of marble, but a water butt nonetheless. Turning into the corridor leading to his colleague’s office in search of the paper he had left there this morning, he congratulated himself. If Bellman’s venture did as well as he thought it might, then he, Anson, had just done the best day’s business in his
come forward and claim his due. It would be evidence—not that it would come before a court of law, of course not, there would be nothing so extreme—that he, Bellman, had no intention of claiming as his own that portion of the business that was rightly Black’s. He would call the shop Bellman & Black. Opening his eyes onto the misty mirage of his emporium, he found the point where the platform projected over the front entrance and his imagination placed a grand double B on it. That would do it!
she had come. Bellman’s hand returned to his page and for a second or two he failed to remember what it was he had meant to write. He hadn’t got to the bottom of that Black business. Next time he saw her, he would ask her about it again. Then he picked up the thread and applied his pen to the paper as before. · · · It was the end of the first month. He and Verney had double counted the day’s takings, separating the coins into stacks of like with like, and putting them into red felt bags. Every
Anson saw a thing he had never expected to see. Bellman squeezed his eyes closed and a tear welled out of them. “No lawyer can get me out of this. I am bound.” When Bellman’s eyes opened, Anson saw melancholy of the blackest tint. Bellman took a breath and went on, as if the tear had never been shed. “Furthermore, the quarterly payments into the account are to be made on a monthly basis henceforward. And from thirty-three percent they will rise to fifty percent. All clear?” Anson walked back
torment returned instantly to him. He returned to his nightly dose but needed a little more to achieve the same effect. After a little while, though, Bellman began to realize that medicated sleep was not true sleep. It had not the same capacity to restore. For one thing, the very second after he laid down his head to sleep, he was awake again and it was morning. Where were the ebbs and flows, the waves of deeper and lighter sleep of his earlier years? Where the fruitfulness of sleep, where he
