HALLOWEEN NIGHT ACROSS FROM THE MANSION (a.k.a. The Horror Begins in Earnest)

            'There was a fisherman,' Monty said, getting comfortable on the grass. 'He was working early in the morning one day, near a cliff side. I forget which. Anyway he looks up for a minute and sees something on the cliff's edge, bright white cloth wafting about in the breeze. He manages to get the boat in a little closer and sees that it's a woman, possibly in her nightie.'

            'Like this twist,' Darius muttered.

            'Keep your eye out. They might come to the window.' Monty sighed. 'As I was saying, there was a woman on the cliff top in her nightie. Our fisherman is dangling his line in the water whilst he's watching this spectacle and suddenly he notices that all the fish are rising up on their side. Dead. He feels ambivalent, on the one hand it's his lucky day but on the other this is all fairly ominous.'

            Darius stretched out his fingers. Monty waited until the cracking had stopped.

            'He throws out a net and brings a few of the fish in. He pulls one out and examines it, looks it right in the mouth. There's something there, a small scrap of white cloth, not as bright as it once was. He checks a few of the other fish and finds that they all have tatters and tears of white cloth in their mouths too.

            'The fisherman looks back up at the cliff top again. The woman is now dancing naked.' Monty raised his finger before Darius could say a word. 'And then she dives. He steers the boat away as fast as he can but somehow she disappears halfway down. Even her scream fades away.'

            Darius picks up a couple of cashews and chews on them. 'That's a good tale. Quite spooky.'

            'Only quite?'

            'Hang on.' Darius looked out through the crosshairs. He fired once. Inside the mansion, a teenager's head exploded. 'That's one.'

            'Fairly sloppy,' Monty remarked.

            'Oh, get over yourself. Like the old man said: the messier, the better.'

            'I still don't quite see how this will perpetuate that old myth of his.'

            Darius turned to Monty. 'It's not about us new snipers, it's about the old bullets.'

            'I'm sure,' Monty said. 'Personally I just think he's extremely prejudice towards squatters.'

            Darius laughed before lining up another shot. It went clean through the kitchen window and through the target's leg. 'Now I've got a ghost story for you.'

            Monty fired at someone in the attic. 'Go on then.'

            'There was a lot of barking on my street when I was a kid. Some old girl kept this pack of Dobermans within her back garden. They barked late into the night.

            'One night the Dobermans got out. I wasn't there to see it, I was out on my first contract. Anyway when I got back, people said the dogs had split up, spread out across the neighbourhood, all barking, all driving the neighbourhood round the fucking bend.

            'The funny thing was they found the dogs dead, every single one of them, mysterious circumstances. So what was it that was barking? It took a while before it stopped.'

            'When the old girl died?' Monty said.

            'Something like that.'

            'I'll give it to you, that was chilling.'

            'Thank you.'

            Monty caught a teenager with a bullet to the chest as he was creeping past the thick ivy on the left side of the mansion. The lad span around and collapsed.

            'You could have sexed it up though,' Monty said. 'The execution.'

            Darius snorted.

            They just had to hold this position for the rest of the night. The old man would be round in the morning to 'discover' the damage, point out the old bullet casings and claim to be haunted.

            Another year of life for a deathly tale. The scary part was that Monty and Darius would be long gone by then.