That morning they had been playing in the forest behind Tumbledown House where Tom lived and all the while the sky had been getting darker and darker when suddenly there a crash of thunder and a bolt of lightning hit a tree just a few meters away from them. The tree split in half and then it started to rain, and boy did it rain. There were no leaves on the trees to protect the children from the downpour so the rain lashed straight down from the leaden grey sky soaking them in seconds. Tom and his cousins Becky and Jessica ran trough the dripping trees trying to get to the shed before they got even wetter, but as hard as they ran the harder it was to get there. The brambles kept catching hold of them and tugging at their clothes, the wet branches and twigs of the trees tore at their skin causing blood to mix with the rain on their faces and run in bright red rivulets down their cheeks, and the thunder and lightening were directly overhead drowning out the girls screams. Tom laughed at them, he never got scared, he was a man. Eventually they burst through the door of the old shed and collapsed, wet and exhausted, onto the beds in the corner. They sat there quietly for a few minutes, catching their breath and listened to the storm gather ferocity as it battered the already bleak landscape. January was such a terrible time of year, Tom thought to himself.
It was then, after noticing the beds in the shed that Tom remembered the ghost story he'd learnt word for word from his mum. He'd been looking for a suitable time and place to scare the girls with it since they'd come to stay and what better time than this, with the girls actually sat on the beds and the storm raging outside? So he had asked the girls if they'd like to hear a true ghost story. The girls had looked at each other and although they were already quite afraid of the storm outside had decided that it was a good idea. But now as he looked at their terrified faces looking first at him and then at the beds they had been sat on moments before, Tom was beginning to think that this wasn't such a good idea after all. The wind howled around the shed, causing the windows to rattle and the roof to creak. The girls looked even more frightened and clung to each other even more tightly.
"Do you want me to carry on, or shall I stop?" Tom asked, half hoping that they would ask him to stop because he didn't want to get into trouble with his mum for making the girls frightened when they had come to stay with them whilst their mum went into hospital but half hoping that they would ask him to finish as he hadn't got to the good part yet! The girls looked at each other, looked at the bed, looked out of the window, looked at each other again and then looked at Tom.
"Carry on." Becky said very slowly, and very quietly.
The girls sat down, this time not on the beds but on the cold, hard floor huddled together in the opposite corner.
"Now where did I get to?" Tom continued. "Oh yes, I remember. About 15 years after the beds had been delivered on that strange January evening, Mr and Mrs Gaskins had two children, twin girls. These girls grew up and eventually, when they were almost 10 years old and too big to share the box room they had been sleeping in, they both moved into the room that I described earlier and slept in the beds, those beds that Mr Chambers, the undertaker had given their dad, all those years ago. It was in fact, the first time that anyone had slept in those beds since the old couple had died in them 25 years before, as the cold back bedroom that they were put in was only a spare room which was never used. The two girls carried on growing up like any normal children, going to school, playing games in the forest, and all the other things that 10 year old children do. Well one day, not long after Christmas all that changed. It was in fact the 17th January, the same day that the beds were delivered 25 years earlier. It seemed just like any other day, they got up, went to school, came home, did their chores and then had dinner; in fact there was nothing to mark that day out as special. That was until they went to bed."
The lightening cracked again outside the shed lighting up the dark sky and casting strange shadows on the walls above the beds making the girls jump, Tom looked up and saw their faces turn slightly paler.