The Hunting Ground Read online

  By the way, she recreated the singeing moment this morning over breakfast. She used hay strands and leftover bits of bacon rind to symbolise her hair before setting it alight. Typical of Mum. I’m used to her wacky ways, but I tend to keep her away from my friends. Actually, what am I talking about? I haven’t got any friends here. Glebe House’s latest owners are on some kind of extended holiday in Italy or something, so Mum, who knows them, nagged/ begged Dad to grab the house for the year while they’re away. So here we are – middle of nowhere. I haven’t even got much to do. I finished school in July, and still haven’t decided what to do yet.

  Anyway, now you know my family. We’ve been in Glebe House for about a week already. It’s weird here. There are these strange portraits everywhere, and the place is so big. You never know where anyone is.

  Elliott lowered the pages. ‘Have you read the rest?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Dad said. ‘Only the start. Like I said, there’s not much. Only a handful of pages. Pity, really. He sounds like an interesting boy.’

  Elliott nodded. Rifling through the sheets, he checked back to the date. September 1962. So the diary must have been written shortly before the house was boarded up.

  ‘Hang on to it,’ Dad said. ‘I’m repairing woodwork in the library. If I find any more pages I’ll let you know. And Elliott’ – he eyed him seriously – ‘I don’t want you or Ben going anywhere near the East Wing. Stay safe, eh?’

  ‘You bet.’

  Elliott casually read a few more lines of Theo’s diary, then took it upstairs with him. Would Ben be interested? Probably not. He tended to dismiss anything old. But Elliott decided he might as well show it to him.

  When he got to Ben’s room, however, it was empty. Checking around, Elliott finally found him on the second floor landing. At first, Elliott thought that Ben was just staring at a blank wall. Then he realised that his gaze was fixed on one of the portraits of the owner.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Elliott asked.

  ‘I’m looking at this picture, that’s what I’m doing,’ Ben said, folding his arms. ‘I can’t work it out. It’s not like the other portraits.’

  Glancing up, Elliott saw that Ben was right. Instead of the usual figure of the owner grinning cheesily over his kill, this painting showed only a single arm.

  ‘It’s definitely still the original owner,’ Ben said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I recognise the brown leather hunting cuff on his wrist.’

  Impressed, Elliott looked again. The arm was skilfully constructed to guide your eyes down towards the bottom of the canvas. That’s where the hand was – in the act of throwing something. The palm was open, fingers splayed wide. The owner looked as if he had just cast a weapon towards the viewer. Perhaps a throwing knife. The hand was so lifelike and realistically proportioned that Elliott instinctively turned round to look for the weapon, as if it might be behind him.

  The picture unnerved him. In the other portraits the owner’s weapons were always on clear display. In this painting it was as if the owner was hiding something – or as if he did not want to reveal his full intentions just yet. With a jolt, Elliott realised, He’s playing games with us. The toothy old owner has been dead all these years, but he’s still having his bit of fun.

  Elliott couldn’t help smiling at that: the sheer audacity of the owner trying to wriggle his way inside people’s heads after all these centuries. But he didn’t like the way Ben kept staring at the picture.

  ‘C’mon, let’s go,’ he said to him. ‘Dad’s found something worth checking out.’

  Back inside Elliott’s room, Ben surprised him by grabbing the diary pages, instantly curious. ‘What are we waiting for?’ he said eagerly. ‘Let’s read it.’

  Elliott let Ben catch up with Theo’s introduction, then they flipped through a handful of pages that were mostly descriptions of the nearest village. Part-way down the next section, though, Elliott came across this:

  5th October. Hi again. Eve just did an amazing thing. She went out with one of Mum’s art pads and came back with a really impressive sketch of trees near a slope. Mum and Dad are both in awe. Until now Eve’s just been proudly handing us stick-type drawings. None of us know where this great new leap in skill’s come from. Mum’s jumping for joy, of course. Even more so when Dad had the idea of getting Eve to sketch her favourite doll, Katerina.

  Eve got all bashful and went off on her own to do the sketch – for some reason she’s been hiding herself away a lot recently. But the picture she brought back was … well, the likeness is nearly perfect.

  Katerina’s not the prettiest doll in the world. She’s not pretty at all, in fact. She’s just a humungous hard plastic baby-thing with loads of blonde hair that Eve never stops combing. Eve got her as a present from Nana Bertha ages ago, and she’s been carting her round ever since. This is the first year Eve’s been strong enough to carry her with one hand. I wish she’d still use two hands, though. Eve drags her everywhere by her feet. All we hear all day long is Katerina’s hair sliding across the floorboards.

  Ben looked up wide-eyed from the diary.

  Elliott also raised more than an eyebrow. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  Ben nodded numbly, then laughed. ‘But it can’t be, can it? You think a doll’s hair was making that noise?’

  ‘I hope not,’ Elliott said seriously.

  They both bent closer to the diary.

  10th October. I met a girl a few days ago. Her name’s Janey Roberts. Her family live in a tiny little detached house just outside the estate. She’s a year or two older than me, and she’s tall, with these really intense blue eyes and straight black hair.

  Eve started calling it witch-hair as soon as she saw her. That’s dumb. Janey’s hair isn’t witchy at all, but for some reason Eve’s taken an immediate dislike to her. If you need any proof of that you only have to look at the horror sketch Eve did. It made Janey look like a monster. For the record, Janey doesn’t look a bit like a monster. She’s quite pretty, actually. She was home schooled. Seems to have a lot of time on her hands as well, because she’s forever wandering on her own around the Glebe estate.

  Eve won’t explain why she drew such a nasty sketch of Janey. I didn’t even know she could draw a sketch as freaky as that. Mum’s been telling everyone about how brilliant Eve is, but she was upset when she saw the Janey picture. Eve didn’t care, though. She just added the flowers and left the sketch with us.

  Actually, I wonder if it was the flowers which freaked Eve out so much. Janey always wears a dress with real flowers on it. Not that bizarre, you might think, but at any one time about a third of the flowers are shrunken and dead. I asked Janey why she doesn’t get rid of the dead ones. She told me that she wears them ‘as long as she can, even if they’re not in season, because they’re the children’s favourites. The children choose them’.

  I’ve no idea what she’s on about. It’s typical of Janey to talk in riddles like that. She’s a loner. She never seeks my company out or anyone else’s. She’s kind of intriguing, to be honest.

  14th October. Eve keeps mysteriously disappearing. It’s not so much the way she goes off on her own without any explanation that’s worrying. It’s that we keep finding her standing in front of the old owner’s portraits. I spotted her twice today doing it. Looking at a dead guy and his slaughtered animals. I don’t get it. Little kids can be funny sometimes, can’t they?

  Elliott glanced sidelong at Ben to see if he was getting the parallel. He didn’t seem to be.

  ‘What?’ he said, impatient to continue.

  ‘Never mind,’ Elliott answered, turning back to the diary.

  16th October. Janey walks around in flimsy dresses all the time. That’s OK in summer but it’s getting colder now. Worried about it, Mum and Dad decided to introduce themselves to Janey’s parents. Mum looked like she’d been crying when they got back. ‘They weren’t very welcoming,’ was all Dad said at the time. But later Mum told m
e that Janey’s house is a filthy tip. ‘They’re allowing that girl to rot freely in a dark, private universe all of their own making,’ she said angrily.

  Whatever Mum meant by that, since then she’s given Janey free run of the estate. She can go where she wants. Janey’s invited in for meals, too, which she always eats fast and without stopping. You can see how hungry she is sometimes. Mum and Dad have both taken a real liking to her. Janey won’t talk about her home life to us, but I can already tell whose parents she’d rather have.

  SEVERAL SHADES

  OF BLUE

  Elliott lowered the page. He thought about the old woman they’d seen walking past the grounds. The diary was fifty-odd years old, so she was about the right age to be Janey.

  ‘C’mon,’ Ben said restlessly. ‘Keep reading. There’s not much left.’

  18th October. The way Eve keeps hanging around the owner’s portraits is weird enough, but now she’s started creeping inside the East Wing as well. Why anyone would want to go near that place I’ve no idea. Oddly, though, I think it frightens her. I caught her crying in there today, near the entrance. ‘Scared, scared,’ was all she’d say, unable to take her eyes off one of the portraits inside.

  Eve wouldn’t say what had scared her so much, but she wouldn’t leave either. I had to practically drag her out in the end. As soon as we were back in the hall her arms went around my knees, holding on tight. Looking at her, I don’t think Eve even knows what she’s scared of. Mum can’t get any sense out of her, either. She’s already told Eve off about going into the East Wing. Dad’s going to make sure it doesn’t happen again by blocking off the entrance.

  Elliott stopped reading. Outside, mid-morning sunshine shone in bursts through the bedroom window, lighting up the bruise on Ben’s head.

  ‘Hey,’ Elliott said, prodding him. ‘You paying attention to this?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’ Ben demanded.

  ‘So you’re doing the same thing, that’s what,’ Elliott said bluntly. ‘You’re going into the East Wing just like Eve did.’

  Ben gave Elliott a puzzled look. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘But I only went in there once,’ Ben protested. ‘It’s not the same.’ He shrugged as if he didn’t get the connection at all. Elliott narrowed his eyes, checking Ben out. Was he having him on? Ben’s expression remained vacant.

  ‘Look,’ Elliott said at last, ‘just tell me if you’re thinking of wandering off somewhere, eh?’

  ‘Like where?’

  Elliott couldn’t help laughing, then said with enough edge to make sure Ben knew he meant it, ‘Like somewhere you can’t find your way out of. Somewhere you might get your head bashed in.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ Ben bristled. ‘I can look after myself. You sound like Dad. What are you going to do? Follow me everywhere?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Into the toilet?’

  ‘Yeah. If I have to. That’s always when the ghosts get you, of course – when your pants are down.’ Elliott waited for Ben to grin first, then said, ‘Listen, I’m just saying this is weird stuff, so let’s not go anywhere alone, OK?’

  ‘There’s no way some ghost of Eve made the noises last night,’ Ben said dismissively. ‘What do you think she’s doing? Wandering about dragging her ugly dolly around?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Elliott answered honestly. ‘It fits what we’re reading. Have you got a better explanation?’

  ‘Anything could have made that noise,’ Ben argued. ‘Plenty of other stuff.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like a million things.’

  ‘So many you can’t think of one, eh?’ Elliott said. ‘What about the old woman we saw? It’s got to be Janey, hasn’t it? There’s her age, all the flowers on her dress, and she’s living near us. It’s got to be the same person.’ And, as he said that, Elliott thought back to the way the woman had peered at him in the garden. There’d been nothing neighbourly about that stare of hers. He didn’t want to admit any fear of her in front of Ben, but she’d unsettled him. The fact that Theo in the diary liked Janey didn’t make Elliott feel any better about her.

  ‘There are still some pages left,’ he said to Ben. ‘Do you want to read them now or later?’

  ‘Now.’

  20th October. I came across Mum outside today. She had her easel open, and was painting. The whole canvas was covered in a single light blue colour. Mum corrected me when I asked her about it. Several shades of blue, apparently.

  ‘It’s a portrait,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you seen this colour before?’

  I looked at the picture for a long time before I worked out what it was.

  Of course. Janey’s eyes.

  ‘She’s fascinating, isn’t she?’ Mum whispered, and something about the way she said it made me realise she’d been watching Janey a lot. ‘It’s the way she moves,’ Mum said, lowering her brush. ‘She’s naturally graceful, but it’s as if she’s responding to something else as well. She’s always in motion, have you noticed that? Always anticipating something. Her body’s full of odd changes in direction, tilts and turns, which should look clumsy, but don’t. She’s poetry somehow.’ Mum shook her head, laughing. ‘And how on earth am I going to capture all of that on canvas?’

  Mum got more serious later on, though, when Dad showed us both something. He’d come across a new sketch done by Eve. It was under her pillow. The words scrawled near the edge of the picture are bad enough.

  To be killed by those you love

  Scary or what? Eve says she read the line in a book somewhere, but she can’t name the book. It’s not one of her fluffy-bunny picture books, I can tell you that.

  But the sketch itself is almost worse. I couldn’t work out what it was of at first. Nor could Dad. Mum took less time than us, and when she figured it out she was really upset and tried to dismiss it. Here’s why: the picture shows a man and woman lying dead underwater. And though Eve denies it, the drowned man and woman look suspiciously like Mum and Dad. ‘It’s only a drawing,’ Eve said when asked about it. ‘But why did you do it?’ Mum demanded. ‘Why?’ No answer.

  Later, when I went up to see Eve in her room, I found her gazing at one of the portraits of the owner again. I hadn’t realised before just how many portraits of him there are in the house. Whenever you look up there he is, smiling away with his big ugly teeth. Even when you’re between rooms, he’ll be grinning away at you from some hall or ceiling. It’s impossible to get away from his gaze. I’ve watched Eve following the portraits from floor to floor, room to room. She always ends up outside the East Wing, looking inside.

  But here’s the weirdest thing – Mum’s fascinated by the portraits as well. Being an artist herself, she’s worked out all sorts of things about them, too. The biggest surprise to me is that – get this – the owner did all the portraits himself. The painting style is consistent with a single artist, apparently. And it couldn’t have been someone else who painted them, she says, because if anyone had been commissioned to do so many boringly similar paintings there’d be signs of careless or rushed work.

  ‘There’s no evidence of that in any of the portraits,’ Mum said. ‘Every brush stroke is lingered over. The owner obviously couldn’t wait to show us everything he’d killed and how good he felt about it.’

  THE GRAVEYARD

  Elliott stopped reading and gazed around him. So did Ben.

  They were not alone. The owner stared back at them from a portrait on the nearest wall. He was also staring at them from a portrait on the farthest wall and from a miniature canvas over the dressing table. In this smaller portrait the owner had just killed a big freshwater pike fish. Its body was suspended from a steel hook jammed into its gills.

  Elliott reached up to the portrait.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ben said, stopping his arm.

  ‘I’m taking it down.’

  ‘Why?’

&n
bsp; ‘Because I’m sick of seeing it. All right with you?’

  Ben licked his lips uneasily and Elliott yanked on the wooden frame. The effort to prise it off brought his face close to another portrait.

  The dead animal depicted in this one was a grey wolf. The picture was done in heavy spatula strokes, and this time the owner looked especially happy, especially pleased with his kill. His left hand was under the wolf’s pelt, a single arm holding up its full deadweight. He was strong, Elliott realised, and for a moment he forgot what he’d been doing with the picture of the pike. He was in the process of placing it back on its mount again when he caught himself. Then, glancing at Ben, he stashed the portrait under an assortment of magazines.

  Ben writhed uncomfortably, but said nothing.

  Elliott went back to the diary.

  25th October. Eve tore down the makeshift barrier leading into the East Wing today. Dad put it straight back up again and really told her off this time, but I’m not sure Eve was even listening.

  Later, Mum found a whole new set of drawings. Eve’s been busy. The drawings were all stuffed under her bed and every single one is a copy of the owner’s portraits. When I mentioned it to Janey later she said matter-of-factly, ‘They warned me this might happen. There hasn’t been a child in the house for a long time.’

  I stared at her. ‘They warned you? What are you talking about?’

  She glanced at me warily, as if she wasn’t sure I was ready to hear what she had to say. Then she led me towards the graveyard in the north corner of the estate.

  No one reading this diary is going to believe me, but this is exactly what happened next. Janey stood beside a broken headstone. She was looking at me with a weird smile on her face. Then she turned her head. From the way she did it I knew someone was close by, except … there was only empty space. Then, offering another sideways smile (but not to me), Janey nodded (again not to me), walked straight across and stroked my cheek.