Shiverton Hall (24 page)

His legs began to move. They took him away from the window, back through the dark hall corridor and down, down the cold steps and out on to the wet grass.

Amber gave him a beatific smile as he walked towards her. She was standing on the stone lip of the fountain.

‘Join me,’ she whispered.

Arthur hauled himself up, teetering close to the edge of the water. Amber clapped her hands and skipped along the rim, giggling like a child, and Arthur found himself giggling with her.

‘Good boy,’ she said with a sneer, and kicked his legs out from beneath him.

Arthur plunged into the black water.

The spell broke as his head hit the slimy bottom of the fountain. Panic clutched at him as the icy water rushed into his lungs. He wanted to move, to push away from the floor, but he couldn’t think straight. He looked up to see Amber’s warped figure dancing gleefully above, the moon wavering behind her.

Arthur could feel darkness encroaching; he was under the water again, in the reservoir, alone.

As the last bubbles of air rose from Arthur’s mouth and popped on the surface, Amber squealed with delight. She trailed her fingers over the water, smiling down at Arthur’s indistinct, slumped body.

Her smile dropped as two long shadows appeared from behind her. Amber turned with a frustrated roar.

Toynbee and George stood on the lawn, their chests heaving, their eyes fixed on her face.

‘We see you, Amicus!’ they shouted.

Amber let out a cry of inhuman anguish and fury so loud and piercing that it made the leaves tremble in the trees. She staggered towards Toynbee and George, but it was as though their gaze burned her skin. She writhed and screamed, all the features of her beauty fizzing and crackling away. The air filled with a repulsive, sulphurous stench as Amber juddered and screamed.

Toynbee and George maintained their stare, as Amber screeched in a demonic tongue, her skin splitting and crumbling to the ground. She tried to turn, to get away from them, but her dry bones creaked and cracked with the effort of it. She let out one final, banshee howl and her body collapsed in on itself, until there was nothing left but a pile of black, smoking dust and a ring of scorched grass.

George shrugged off his dressing gown and dived to the bottom of the fountain, groping blindly along the floor for Arthur. He found a cold hand and grabbed it, swimming to the surface, pulling Arthur’s limp body behind him. Toynbee helped George manoeuvre Arthur out of the fountain and on to the ground.

‘He’s not breathing!’ George cried.

Toynbee leaned down, putting his ear to Arthur’s lips. He listened for a moment.

‘What?’ George whispered urgently. ‘What?’

Toynbee shook his head.

Chapter Twenty-one

Arthur’s eyes fluttered open. He was in a painfully bright, white room.

‘Where am I?’ he asked groggily.

He saw a figure above him.

‘Am I dead?’ he whispered.

‘I’m afraid so,’ the figure said sadly.

‘George!’ an exasperated voice warned. ‘For goodness’ sake leave the poor boy alone!’

Arthur recognised the voice: Penny. She leaned over him and grinned.

‘Hello, Arthur,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’re OK.’ She sat on the side of the bed and hugged him.

‘Ow!’ Arthur winced. ‘Everything hurts.’

‘Sorry,’ Penny said, sitting back up, ‘but it’s so good to see you.’

‘What happened?’ Arthur asked, trying to sit up.

‘Well, as it turns out,’ George said, nonchalantly inspecting his fingernails, ‘I’m a complete hero.’

Penny rolled her eyes.

‘It’s true!’ George protested.

‘You didn’t exactly get rid of Amber on your own, did you?’ Penny reminded him.

‘No, not exactly,’ George admitted. ‘But who remembered their first-aid course in the nick of time and managed to perform CPR?’

‘You did, George,’ Penny said obediently. She would never hear the end of this.

‘Exactly!’ George said triumphantly. ‘So, without being too immodest –’

‘God forbid!’ Penny muttered.

‘I single-handedly saved your life and saved the day, while looking incredibly handsome all the while,’ finished George.

‘With a little bit of help from Toynbee,’ Penny added.

‘Fine, yes,’ George agreed, ‘with a tiny bit of help from Toynbee.’

‘Thanks, mate,’ Arthur said.

‘Oh, it was
nothing
,’ George replied.

Arthur had been put in the school sanitorium, a neat little building near the chapel, which smelled of boiled soup and Dettol, to recover overnight. Only Penny and the headmistress had been told what had happened the night before.

‘But what about the other imaginary friends? What about Stripes and Lola and Brian?’ Arthur asked.

‘They were all the same phantom,’ George replied. ‘It just appeared to each of us differently. But it seems it spent most of its energy on you.’

‘What
was
it?’

‘Grandpa called Toynbee last night. He’d found some dusty old encyclopedia on the supernatural that had an entry in it about an Amicus phantom. They’re extremely rare, and they almost always prey on children or teenagers. They haven’t been recorded since the eighteenth century – that’s why Grandpa had so much trouble identifying it. Amicus phantoms feed off misery. So that’s why we only saw it when something bad had happened, when we were feeling low. And the more frightened we were, the stronger it got. It spent the whole term manipulating you, gaining your trust and then breaking it, because you were the unhappiest. Because of what happened to you last summer, you were vulnerable, and the phantom used that vulnerability. It targeted us because we’re close to you – the more it attacked your friends, the more susceptible you became.’

‘If it hadn’t been for Amber Crighton we would have known,’ Penny said bitterly. ‘I should have known there was something fishy going on when she said she’d never heard of you. I just assumed she was being rude.’

‘But how did you get rid of the phantom?’ Arthur asked.

‘I think I can answer that, if I may?’ Toynbee said quietly.

The group looked at him with surprise: none of them had seen him enter.

‘Amicus phantoms are strange beasts,’ he said. ‘Very unusual. The defining feature of a phantom is that it cannot cause you major physical harm – unless it grows very powerful. It could not, for example, pick up a sword and run you through. Though it might be able to move something light, such as a newspaper.’ He looked at Arthur meaningfully.

‘So that’s how Dan found out!’ Penny muttered.

Toynbee continued, ‘What a phantom can do, however, is get inside your mind. Its powers of persuasion are frightening, which is why it chose the method that it did to try and make you harm yourselves. The Amicus lives a crepuscular, darkling kind of existence between waking and sleeping, reality and imagination. But it can only exist when one person is looking at it, as it is, essentially, a figment of that person’s imagination. If two pairs of eyes look, the phantom shatters; it ceases to exist, since it cannot exist for two people at once – that’s impossible.’

‘So that’s what destroyed it?’ Arthur asked. ‘The fact that both you and George were looking at it at the same time?’

Toynbee spread out his arms.

‘Oh my God. I should have known something wasn’t right,’ Arthur said, slowly realising. ‘Every time I saw Amber I was completely alone.’

‘Phantoms are devious,’ Toynbee said. ‘You didn’t notice it simply because it didn’t want you to.’

‘But where did it come from?’ George asked.

‘Where do any of these creatures come from? It may have been here, dormant for years, waiting for the right person to come along. If it had succeeded in killing you, Arthur, it would have become immensely powerful. You’re a considerable prize.’

Arthur frowned. ‘Why?’ he asked, confused. ‘Because of what happened last summer?’

‘Perhaps,’ Toynbee answered quietly. Arthur sensed there was more to it, but something in Toynbee’s face made him reluctant to press the matter.

‘Well, I’m glad it’s over,’ Penny said.

‘Indeed,’ Toynbee said, with only the shadow of a smile.

George was looking out of the window. It had started to snow and the flakes drifted lazily towards the hard ground. He noticed a lone figure, limping towards the sanitorium.

‘Look!’ George gasped.

‘What?’ Penny asked, rushing to the window.

The white blond hair and red cheeks were unmistakable.

‘Jake!’ Penny cried.

Arthur tried to get up, but Penny turned a stern finger on him.

‘Don’t even think about it, Arthur,’ she warned. ‘We’ll bring him up here to you.’

Penny and George dashed out of the room, and Toynbee chuckled as they nearly knocked him over in their haste. He moved over to the window and watched them run out of the sanitorium to envelop Jake in an enormous hug. Toynbee sighed.

‘Is everything all right, sir?’ Arthur asked.

Toynbee continued to stare at the falling snow, something clearly bothering him.

‘There was something that I didn’t want to say in front of the others,’ he replied finally. ‘Although I’m not sure it would be wise to say it even now.’

Arthur studied his housemaster. In the cold, morning light he looked terribly old and tired.

‘What is it?’ Arthur asked.

Toynbee turned to Arthur and gave him a wan smile. ‘How much do you know about your father, Arthur?’ he said gravely.

‘Nothing much.’ Arthur shrugged. ‘He was an Australian. Mum met him on holiday when she was nineteen.’

‘And his name?’

‘David – Dave, I think.’

‘His last name?’

‘No idea, Mum never talks about him. He was horrible to her apparently.’

‘He was Australian and he was called David. And he certainly was very horrible indeed,’ Toynbee said quietly.

‘How do you know all this?’ Arthur asked, with a sudden prickle of panic.

‘I know,’ Toynbee said, ‘because his name was David Shiverton.’

The Lost Son

Mary Butcher was a young girl of fifteen when both of her parents were killed in a fire at their butcher’s shop in the middle of a summer night. Mary had only barely escaped herself, and was forced to watch as her family, her home and all their possessions burned to cinders in the muck-strewn backstreet in Bristol. Without any money, and with no one to look after her, she soon took to begging, and lined herself up with the vagrants and drunks outside the Smugglers’ Tavern, an unsavoury public house where rich gentlemen often went to gamble and drink, and where the occasional coin might be tossed her way.

It was on one such evening that a handsome man with a cruel mouth and an elaborate crested cape offered her some food and a place to stay. Cold and desperate, she agreed and, in spite of her better instincts, she went with the man to his house, where he secreted her up the back staircase. Once the door to his chamber was closed it became apparent that the gentleman was no gentleman at all, but a pitiless fiend, who kept Mary half-starved and locked in his rooms for nearly a week.