The Hunting Ground Read online

  For Justina Robson, optissima

  CONTENTS

  1: THE VISITOR

  2: GLEBE HOUSE

  3: THE OLD WOMAN

  4: THE DIARY OF THEO STARK

  5: SEVERAL SHADES OF BLUE

  6: THE GRAVEYARD

  7: DO YOU WANT TO PLAY?

  8: A IS FOR ALICE

  9: THE EAST WING

  10: THE HUNTING GROUND

  11: JANEY

  12: UNTIL MY WILL MATCHES HIS

  13: A RIVER OF MOONLIGHT

  14: WITH HIS EYES WIDE OPEN

  15: UNFED FOR SO LONG

  16: THE DOLL’S HOUSE

  17: THE DRIFT OF CORRIDORS

  18: THE OPPOSITE OF CALM

  19: THE LOVELY QUIET AND DARK

  20: A GENTLE GREY LADY

  21: THE LAKE

  22: DON’T YOU TRUST ME?

  23: TAKE MY HAND

  24: PICK A WEAPON!

  25: AS LIGHT AS A SMALL GIRL

  26: THE DARK PASSAGE

  27: A MILDEWED BENCH

  COPYRIGHT

  THE VISITOR

  Dead things can sound alive when they choose. Dead things can move around.

  At first nothing woke sixteen-year-old Elliott. Asleep in bed, he failed to notice the eerie whispered rhymes. Or the sighs. Or the footsteps. Those footsteps came lightly and swiftly towards him – someone or something running incredibly fast across the floors of the old house. A presence long dead was on its return to the world of the living.

  The visitor wrapped itself in its own hush. It pressed against cold walls, deeply excited. It swept its death inside shadows. It rarely came in a straight line. It came in impossible ways: soaring above lampshades, drifting between stuffed chairs. Passing over lush burgundy carpets, it never once needed to touch them. Floors are not only to be walked upon, one foot in front of another.

  Gliding past portraits in the corridors, the visitor tenderly stroked them. It made time for that, kissing one or two of the less grimy paintings. Its lips, opening and closing upon the wooden frames, were never quite still.

  To start with the visitor kept well away from the new occupants of Glebe House. Only when it was certain everyone was asleep did it travel from the East Wing to the first floor of the main house. Elliott’s dad, Stephen, lay in his own room. He was turned away from the door, one of his bare arms inside the top blanket, the other flung across his pillow like an afterthought. The visitor knelt beside his face. For a while it simply stayed that way, gazing at his strong, muscular body.

  Then it floated up to the third floor.

  Elliott’s fourteen-year-old brother, Ben, had his bedroom there. The visitor lurked just inside Ben’s door, observing his chest rise and fall. It watched until the moon rose like a pale creamy promise in the window. Then it was drawn towards the partially-open bedroom opposite.

  Elliott was inside, asleep on his back.

  The visitor wafted smoothly up to his face. Its movements lightly stirred the air, sending up small puffs of dust. In gentle waves the dust settled on Elliott’s black eyelashes, dotting the upturned tips grey. The visitor’s mouth was an even deeper grey. Grey face, grey mouth. Lips pursed in the moonlight. Lips that never stopped murmuring. Tiny whispers. A rhyme that sparked the air, over and over.

  ‘Where’s the Ogre?

  Where’s he been?

  Where’s he hiding?

  In your dreams …’

  The visitor hovered over Elliott. It noted his strong chin, his slim, handsome face. He looked vaguely like someone the visitor had once known, and it had to resist an impulse to peel back his lids to check the colour of his eyes.

  An hour passed. Maybe longer. It was hard to be sure. It had been a long time since time had meant anything much to the visitor.

  Eventually, it left to collect something it had forgotten. When it returned, it was carrying a heavy object the size of a large baby. The visitor dragged the object’s head across the wooden planks of the hallway. Dirty hair strands caught between scalp and floor made a harsh sliding scrishhhhh.

  And at last, hearing that extended sibilant hiss, Elliott woke.

  GLEBE HOUSE

  Lifting his face off his hard, scratchy pillow, Elliott peered around. He couldn’t see anything wrong. No one was in the room. But he’d definitely heard a noise. It must have come from outside.

  He sat up. He wasn’t frightened yet. He’d been through so many house relocations that unusual noises didn’t bother him. His dad was a renovator – paid to repair valuable old homes prior to resale. Every couple of years Elliott and his younger brother, Ben, were shunted off to another property, living there until Dad’s work was finished. The new home they had moved into, an enormous mansion property called Glebe House, was just bigger than normal, that was all.

  Scrishhhhh.

  Intrigued now, Elliott sat up, wiping the tiredness out of his eyes. He’d learned to sleep peacefully through more or less anything: squirrels nesting in walls, infestations of mice, squawking birds. Glebe House, built mainly in the seventeenth century, had enough classic creaks and sighs to cause a little kid to wet the bed. Elliott and Ben always enjoyed tracking down those kinds of sounds in a new home. Especially the nighttime ones. They were good at it.

  Scrishhhhhhhh.

  There it was again. And wasn’t it closer to his room this time?

  Twisting his head to and fro in the darkness, Elliott listened hard. Since arriving a couple of days ago, he and Ben had barely checked out a quarter of Glebe House. There were no less than twenty four bedrooms in the main building alone. Saying Take your pick, Dad had gestured for the boys to grab whichever ones took their fancy.

  Elliott chose a room across the corridor from Ben on the third floor. They usually grabbed rooms close together if they could. Their mother had suffered a complicated breakdown when Ben was still a baby, and decided to leave the family. With all the house-swapping over the years, both boys forever coping with new schools, and Dad often busy, they’d come to rely on each other’s company more than most brothers.

  Scrishhh Scrish. Scri—

  With alarm scattering like sparrows inside his chest, Elliott flung the sheets off his bed and stood tensely on the mattress, listening. Was an intruder in the house? The estate, empty for generations, was in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by fields. Maybe someone had secretly made a home for themselves here …

  Elliott checked the window overlooking the abandoned eastern part of the house. He was sure he’d just heard a sound from there. Stay calm, he told himself. It’s probably just animals. But the next noise he heard exploded that possibility. Because when did an animal ever approach a bedroom sounding so excited? That’s what Elliott heard now. Something with a mouth at the crack of his open door, panting.

  ‘Scrishhhhh …’

  ‘Hey!’ Elliott yelled to scare off whatever it was. At the same time he staggered into the hallway and bellowed at the top of his voice, ‘Dad! Ben!’

  A door opened from somewhere below him, and Elliott sighed with relief when he saw Dad stamping up the staircase in his dressing gown. ‘Was that you making a noise just now?’ Elliott asked him.

  ‘No,’ Dad said blearily. ‘I was asleep. What noise?’

  ‘Just a sec.’ Elliott raced across the corridor to check his brother’s room. Finding Ben in his usual coma-like sleep, he nudged him awake. ‘Come on, get up,’ he told him. ‘Something’s going on.’

  Hastily gathering them all together in the corridor, he told them about the sounds.

  ‘This had better be worth it,’ Ben warned, yawning. ‘What are we listening for? I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘Shush,’ Elliott said. ‘Stay quiet and you might.’

  The
y waited for over a minute, but the scrishing noises had stopped. Glebe House sounded as empty as it was meant to be.

  ‘I definitely heard something moving around,’ Elliott said.

  ‘People?’ Dad gazed at him doubtfully.

  ‘Not sure. It was a sort of sliding noise.’

  ‘Sliding?’ Ben said, deadpan. ‘That sounds really scary.’

  Elliott glared at him and turned back to Dad. ‘I know how dumb it sounds, but there was something near my room. Then I heard another noise. It seemed to be coming from … I think it might have been the East Wing.’

  ‘The East Wing?’ Dad repeated.

  Yeah. Why?’ Elliott said, noticing the sharp glance Dad shot Ben.

  The East Wing was Glebe House’s great mystery – the one part of the property still boarded up. Dad’s first instruction to the boys had been to keep well away from it because it was unsafe. From the evasive look now on Ben’s face, Elliott could tell that he’d ignored the order.

  ‘Your brother was up late exploring in there,’ Dad told Elliott, clearly annoyed. ‘At least he got his reward.’

  ‘What reward?’

  Dad motioned, and Elliott saw a bump on the left side of Ben’s head. The swelling wasn’t large, but it was surrounded by a nasty, discoloured bruise.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with the East Wing,’ Ben said quickly. ‘I did it on the way to the kitchen. I was hungry. But none of the lights work, so I missed a step, fell over, that’s all.’

  Elliott had an impulse to laugh in Ben’s face, he was so obviously lying. He held back, partly because they automatically tended to back each other up, but also out of sheer surprise. If they were going to take risks like this, they mostly did it together. It wasn’t unusual for Ben to sneak into some crumbling part of a house he’d been warned about, but why hadn’t he got them both involved if he was so interested in checking out the East Wing?

  They stayed listening for a while longer, but the house remained silent, and finally Ben headed back to his room.

  ‘What were you doing in the East Wing?’ Elliott mouthed silently over Dad’s shoulder, but Ben ignored the question, firmly shutting his door. Elliott wondered what was going on. Secretive behaviour wasn’t Ben’s style at all. The nervous, distracted glance he’d given Elliott before closing the door hadn’t been like him either.

  ‘He definitely went into the East Wing tonight,’ Dad said, once they were away from Ben’s room. ‘What I don’t understand is why he’s denying it.’

  ‘He probably thinks you’ll punish him.’

  ‘I told him I wouldn’t. Still couldn’t get a word out of him.’

  ‘Why don’t you believe his story about falling down the stairs?’

  ‘Because he came into my room last night with his feet covered in East Wing dust, that’s why,’ Dad said. ‘A little grey trail of it led right back there. I found the main entrance prised open. Ben denies it, but I didn’t break the barrier down. Unless you …’

  ‘No way,’ Elliott said.

  ‘OK, that’s what I thought. But Ben … well, I guess curiosity got the better of him.’

  Elliott frowned. ‘You say he came to your room?’

  ‘Yeah, and he was upset, too. Hiding tears. As soon as he saw me he recovered his nerve, but something strange must have happened to him in that place because he was all emotional. At first I thought it might be his head injury, but that’s just superficial. Whatever happened to him in there, though, he doesn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘You reckon he got lost inside?’

  ‘Probably. There’s no working electricity in that part of the house. He could easily have slipped and hit something. Scared himself. Only …’ Dad hesitated ‘ … I’ve been trying to work out how he got in there. Whoever originally sealed the East Wing up used a cross-pattern of reinforced wood bracing. That’s pretty hard to shift.’

  ‘You don’t think Ben could have opened it?’

  ‘No, he could have done it. It’s just that it would have taken him ages. He must have been standing there for hours in the dark, patiently dismantling the wooden slats layer by layer. And he took it down quietly as well, or I’d definitely have heard something.’ Dad shrugged, gave Elliott a tired grin. ‘Oh, well, I’ll ask him again tomorrow. Or more likely he’ll tell you what happened.’

  ‘Yeah, you know Ben,’ Elliott said lightly. ‘He can’t keep anything to himself for long.’

  But secretly Elliott was more concerned than he was letting on. If there was anything Ben hated it was big shows of emotion. It would have taken a lot to drive him into Dad’s room. Why didn’t he just come and tell me what happened? Elliott wondered.

  Dad yawned and clapped an arm around Elliott’s shoulder. ‘Before we go back to bed, let’s make sure we haven’t got an unwanted guest sharing the house with us, eh?’

  Elliott nodded, grateful to have Dad taking him seriously as they searched the house. For over an hour they went methodically from room to room, finding nothing. They ended up at the attic on the fifth floor. Easing out a stiff set of iron steps latched to the ceiling, Dad made his way up and squeezed through the narrow entranceway. He shone a torch around.

  ‘Well, well, no intruders,’ Dad chuckled, ‘but some poor girl’s missing out.’

  ‘What’s up there?’

  ‘A doll’s house. Looks like a vintage model, too. Someone loved it enough to preserve it in mint condition. You want to see it?’

  ‘Nope,’ Elliott said dryly.

  After the search was over Elliott said goodnight to Dad and went back to his own bedroom. He hadn’t quite decided to dismiss the noises, though, and lay awake for a long time. He was just beginning to nod off again when he had a feeling that someone was inside the room with him.

  Quickly sitting up, he stared around. No one was there, but for a moment he thought he heard the lilting echo of a rhyme. Then he wondered if it was his own breath scaring him. What was going on? It wasn’t like him to be this jittery. He always settled fast into a new place. Why was he so jumpy?

  Glancing around his musty bedroom, Elliott shivered. The furnishings had been untouched for decades and, as he peered up at the ceiling, a feeling crept over him. It was a feeling of being indescribably alone. Not scared – at least not scared enough to wake Dad or Ben up again – but horribly lonely. Elliott wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t a feeling he associated with himself. He didn’t know where it came from.

  Propping himself up on his elbow, he checked the room again. His bed creaked and it was cold. Despite being the middle of summer, after years of neglect and lack of heating the entire house felt clammy and abandoned. There wasn’t even an aerial for TV or an internet connection in Glebe House, and in the dreary silence Elliott missed his friends. They’d moved over a hundred miles from the last house, so seeing them wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. All their lives Dad had taken on generally less interesting or well-paid work so that Elliott and Ben could at least attend the same schools across whole academic years, but money was tight at the moment and the Glebe House contract had simply been too lucrative to turn down.

  Elliott sighed. Until he started his A-levels at his new college in a month’s time, the chances of bumping into any interesting company were thin. Glebe House was so isolated that it took a full ten minutes to walk from the iron-grilled front gates to the main house. The grounds were endless as well. But Elliott had already decided that getting to know new people could wait. He’d make plenty of new friends in college in September. He and Ben would be outsiders here for a while, of course, but they were used to that, and could rely on each other.

  Yawning, he reached for his MP3 and played a few random tracks. Half an hour later, still feeling restless, he decided to get up. He’d check the house again. Do it on his own this time, without Dad holding his hand. A point of pride.

  Striding through the bedroom door, he paced to the end of the corridor.

  A wide staircase curved below him. The staircase was oak-panell
ed and swept down to a cavernous hall. The hall was the centrepiece of the house. Dad had told Elliott that its white-mottled marble floor alone was worth more than the entire last house he’d done up.

  Elliott didn’t care. He preferred carpets.

  Looking down, he could see the entrance to the high-ceilinged morning-room. Two broad reception rooms lay beyond that, which overlooked a sizeable lake. Glebe House even had its own library. When they were built the rooms must have been light and airy, but now they were mostly shuttered and obscured by dirt.

  Elliott paused at the top of the staircase. Without admitting it to anyone, he’d been unnerved by his first sight of Glebe House. The property, unusually for a seventeenth-century dwelling, was five storeys high, and set at all sorts of crazy angles. Trees had been left to grow unchecked as well, so that they now shaded two-thirds of the house for most of the day.

  But perhaps the most sinister aspect was the paintings. The main house was filled with oil portraits of its first owner. The man had placed literally hundreds of portraits of himself in every room, corridor, alcove and stairwell of the property.

  In each portrait the owner was dressed in leather outdoor clothing – hunting attire – and stood with a weapon in his hand. Sometimes the weapon was a gun. Other times a sword. The owner had obviously favoured knives, but occasionally his weapon of choice was something more exotic, like a musket, crossbow or lance. And in all the portraits, lying at his feet, was the animal he had just killed. A fallow deer, its throat coated in blood. A hairy-sided boar. Doves. Gutted fish. White-feathered owls. Other birds, too, their lifeless feathers always spread wide by the owner’s own hand.

  There were even cats and dogs. Elliott had paused for a long time to look at the owner’s expression when he saw those. There was almost a smile there. It was as if on that particular day he’d run out of wild things on the estate to kill, so rather than wait had simply chosen one of his loyal hunting hounds or even a pet to terrorise.