Read stories by runners-up Shirley Wright of Avonmouth, Bristol and Roger Wareham of St Ives, Cambridgeshire.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Except it wasn't. And besides, it was a cliché. You can't start with a cliché.

There was a wind blowing. More of a stiff breeze, really. Mild for September. Mild for the Isle of Skye, too. But not dark and stormy.

The clouds scudded against the setting sun, out towards the purple line of Harris on the horizon. The cliff face across the bay burned orange. A gull drew lazy circles over the vast drop to the sea.

Not dark and stormy. Not at all. The first line of his ghost story looked feeble. He crossed it out.

A FRIEND HAD TOLD HIM ABOUT THIS place. Raved about it. So when he'd rung and found there had been a cancellation for the very next week, he'd taken it. He could afford it. His share dividends were due this week.

He sat at an upstairs window, where the view was better. He couldn't see a single house. Not one. What little there was of this community was dotted sporadically back up the hill behind him. This ancient cottage was its last outpost. He could be the last person left in the world. Just him. Just him, and the half-dozen sheep beyond the fence. And Rex, his dog, asleep by the hearth downstairs. And the gull, now dipping out of sight towards the water far, far below.

The old woman was a witch, they said, and she died as she had lived, alone and unloved. They had nailed her doors to their frames, boarded up her windows, and left her inside to starve. It took weeks. Her screams of panic had turned to defiant rage, then to pleas for mercy, unbearable pleas that sent her neighbours hurrying away ashamed. The pleas became whimpers, and when finally the house seemed silent John Buchanan, one of the braver villagers in Callichbane, crept up and pressed his ear to the boards to listen.

The house was not silent after all. He heard a rustle of clothing, a weak cough, and a dry whisper that said: “I shall come. On a harvest moon. I shall come when they expect bounty, and deny it to them. They shall suffer as I have suffered. Nay, fivefold. Tenfold. Unto the twentieth generation. They shall see. They shall all see.” And Buchanan could hear no more.

He couldn't decide if it was a good start.

It had taken him unawares. His rush to get started had dissipated fairly soon that first evening. The cliff stared blankly back at him, and so did the sheet of paper under his hand. A dark and stormy night. He hated it. Hated even the paper.

He spent the next day alternating between sitting uselessly at the upstairs window and the invention and execution of pointless chores. And yet that evening, as he sat vacantly watching the moonlight glinting on the waves, he had looked down and, to his surprise, found the first paragraph fully formed before him. He hadn't been conscious of writing it, and yet there it was.

HE'D BEEN WORRIED ABOUT MONEY. Packing everything in to be a writer was exhilarating, but risky. He'd need to start earning very soon. But the payout on his shares came in tomorrow, Wednesday. That would tide him over for a few months.

He went downstairs. It was cooler this evening, so he'd made a fire in the living room, and Rex was asleep on the rug in front of it. The dog was whimpering slightly, and its tail twitched. Dreaming.

He had no idea where this story was going. But every evening the words came to him from somewhere. It was good. He was sure it was good. He hoped it was.

The kettle boiled. A faint scent caught him, and he just stopped himself in time from adding the milk. He sniffed the carton. “God,” he said. He poured it in lumps down the sink. Lord knew what these village shops got up to. He'd have to drive into Portree tomorrow. There was bound to be a proper supermarket there.

Five years had passed since the death of the old woman, and Elizabeth was now queen. The sheep had grown fat that season, their fleeces thick, and though the land was not especially suited to crops, a goodly quantity of barley had ripened in Buchanan's fields. And so he was vexed when James Ross failed to appear for the reaping. He had promised only the night before.

Buchanan knocked loudly on the door and, getting no answer, pushed it open. It was a poor dwelling, little more than a bothie, and its two rooms were cold. On the table were a loaf and a tureen of stew, a skin on its surface.

“Ross?” he said. He stepped into the inner room.

His shout brought his wife running. When she peered in, she saw Ross there, on the bed with his wife and his four children in their arms. Their bodies were wasted, their bellies distended, and their eyes stared at a ceiling they could not see. A soundless scream was frozen to Ross's lips.

“Starved,” Mary said. “Starved. Mother of God.” She kept to the old faith.

“Goodly?” he thought. Where had that come from? And what on earth was a bothie?

IT COULDN'T BE TRUE. IT SHOULD BE there. He checked his diary. Wednesday 26th September. From mutiny to bounty, he'd written. His private joke, to mark his resignation and his imminent payout. There was a circle printed next to the date. Full moon.

He rang his broker.

“I've checked my balance. Why haven't I been paid yet?”

“You've not heard?”

“Heard what?”

“The bank's announced there won't be a dividend. Not this year. It wouldn't be right.”

“What do you mean, it wouldn't be right?”

“Look, don't shoot the messenger, OK? I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry. I've got nothing to live on.”

He hung up.

“Nothing,” he said again. The dog raised its head and looked at him.

“We're screwed,” he told it.

THE STORY DIDN'T MATTER. HE SAT and looked at it, taking an angry swig from the wine glass by his side. He hated it. He'd been a fool to think he could do it. And he'd never get his job back now. The parting hadn't been on the best of terms.

He was a fool.

John Buchanan's wealth made him the natural choice to host the annual ceilidh at harvest time. The barn was decked with ribbons, the barley heaped to the rafters, and the trestles creaked with cold pies and sweetmeats.

Buchanan stepped among them all and spread his arms wide.

“Close the doors, and let the music play!” quoth he. “Welcome, one and all!”

An hour later, hot from dancing, Buchanan decided to take the air. The great door was fast, so he went to look for one of the hands.

“Murdo,” he called, reaching for a jug of barley wine. “Why won't the door..?” He looked at the vessel in his hand. Creatures squirmed in its depths, and it smelled foul.

“Holy Father!” he said. “Murdo, open the doors.” He hied him to them once more himself, and pushed with all his might.

“Murdo! Willie!”

No one came. The barn was in darkness, the torches extinguished. What little light there was streamed in through thin cracks in the boards. The music had stopped.

He called his wife.

“John,” she answered. He could not see her. He struck the tinderbox he carried in his pocket.

A mass of humanity lay heaped in the middle of the floor. His wife protruded from its base, prostrate, a hand clawing towards him, her dull eyes fixed on his. “John,” she whispered. His guests, his children, the entire heap moaned and writhed above her, skin drawn tight against their fleshless skulls. Sitting astride them all, a besom in her hand for a sceptre, was the old woman whose body they had dragged from her cliff-top cottage and burned those five years past.

“Welcome,” quoth she, and as she smiled her blackened skin parted company from her jaw.

HE'D BEEN IN A DAZE. THE WORDS swam on the page before him, and it was a while before he could register them. Was he drunk? Possibly. Hungry? Yes, most certainly.

“Quoth,” he said. “Hied. Besom.” He didn't even attempt to pronounce ceilidh.

“Bollocks,” he said, and reached for his glass. A silverfish clung to its rim. He hooked it out and drank anyway. It tasted rancid.

It wasn't that easy to read, actually. A band of light from the window illuminated only a strip of the page. He stood and went unsteadily to the light switch.

He clicked it several times. Nothing.

“Fused,” he said. Damn it all.

He must have been daydreaming for a while, it was so dark. But no. It was light enough outside. He felt his way back to the window and peered out. Through the gap he could see the moon, large, full, burning orange. A moon one could work by, indoors or out in the fields. A harvest moon.

A gap. What gap?

A gap between boards that covered the window. The other window, too.

He was scared now. He blundered on to the landing and down the stairs. The glass porch was pitch black, and the door refused to move.

He hammered on it.

Shouted. “Please!” he said. “Please!”

He stumbled to the kitchen, but the back door was no better. He turned, and the moonlight caught maggots squirming in the bread he had bought that day. The stench was immense.

He retched, and reeled back out again. A movement caught his eye, and he stopped.

There was a mirror across from the window. In the light of the harvest moon, he saw the reason for his unsteadiness. A stranger looked back at him, his eyes hollow, dark shadows where his cheeks used to be, his clothes hanging limply from a meagre frame.

“Please,” he said again.

“Mercy,” a woman's voice said. “I, too, asked for mercy.”

He turned. No one was there. But by the hearth a pair of eyes blazed. The dog's ribs jutted from its thin coat.

“Rex,” he said. The animal sat back on its sinewy haunches, and growled. Drool hung from its lower jaw. “Rex. No. No, Rex.”

The dog bared its teeth, and sprang. He screamed.

THE PAPERS WERE LAZY, AND SAID Glendale, the name of the nearest sizeable village. But what was left of his body wasn't found in Glendale at all, but in the clifftop cottage in Callichbane. The cleaning woman had pushed the door open and found him

on the floor in front of her. His dead face was pressed to the cold stone, and his arm stretched towards her. She didn't see how painfully thin he was. That was only noticed later. Her immediate and terrified attention was given to the bloody mess of his torso. His body had been ripped in a frenzy, flesh torn from his stomach and thigh, his throat and his buttocks, and shreds of it smeared the floor and furniture throughout the house.

They found the dog in the kitchen, dried blood round its muzzle, starved, dead, next to a bowl of untouched dogfood. A farmhouse loaf rested on the breadboard, still soft to the touch.

THE POLICE TOOK CHARGE.

“What do you think..?”

“I have absolutely no bloody idea, Sergeant. What do you make of this?” He held out a sheet of paper he had taken from the desk. It was the only one on which anything had been written.

It was a dark and stormy night.

The sergeant had literary pretensions. “A cliché, sir.” He shrugged. “That's what I make of it. He must have been writing a story. And you can't start a story with a cliché.”

The Times-Vintage Hallowe'en ghost story competion was judged by the author Susan Hill, Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times, and Liz Foley, editorial director of Vintage Classics

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