Shiverton Hall, the Creeper (4 page)

‘This year,’ Long-Pitt said with a thin smile, ‘I shall be allocating the options at random.’

The students groaned.

‘Last year so many of you wanted to work at the bakery that Mrs Thomas was quite overwhelmed. Inexplicably, it appears that testing her cakes was more appealing than removing litter from the side of the road, so I have decided it is fairer that I make the decision for you. You will find the details of your activity in your pigeonholes back at house.’

‘Great,’ Arthur muttered. ‘It’ll be straight in the freezing lake for me.’

‘In rather exciting news,’ Long-Pitt continued, sounding not in the least excited, ‘the school has been bequeathed a most extraordinary painting by Gainsborough, which I’m sure many of you will look forward to seeing. It will be hanging in the school library from tomorrow.’

‘A painting!’ George whispered. ‘Why doesn’t anyone bequeath us something useful like a telly?’

‘There is one final thing,’ Long-Pitt said. For the first time since coming to Shiverton Hall, Arthur noticed Long-Pitt looking uncertain. ‘As some of you who live locally will know, a boy from Grimstone went missing over the holidays.’

The hall filled with whispering.

‘I do not wish to alarm you,’ Long-Pitt continued, her voice ever so slightly raised. ‘I’m sure that he is perfectly all right and will return home soon, but I ask that you are especially careful when you are in Grimstone, and even on school grounds. If you notice anything unusual then please report it to a member of staff immediately.’

Arthur looked over at his friends. Were they thinking the same thing? From the expressions on their faces, it would appear that they were: the Shiverton curse was never far from any of their minds.

‘There is another piece of bad news, I’m afraid. The head of the art school has decided not to come back this term.’

This seemed to disturb the hall even more.

‘I know that she was well liked, and I’m sure we will all miss her greatly, but it seems we have found ourselves a rather distinguished replacement. Mr Inigo Cornwall, who I’m sure you have all heard of, will be gracing us with his presence this term.’

At this pronouncement a man burst out from the curtains behind Long-Pitt. Handsome and tanned, he wore sunglasses and a pair of purple trousers that by anyone’s standards would be considered too tight.

‘Who on earth is he?’ Arthur whispered to Penny as Cornwall sauntered out on to the stage to great applause.

‘Inigo Cornwall?’ Penny asked incredulously. ‘Famous artist, used to be married to that supermodel, puts heads in jars and things.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Arthur said, vaguely recalling seeing him in the paper.

Cornwall yawned and gave a nonchalant wave as the students continued to clap and whoop.

Arthur could have sworn that, at the back of the stage, in the shadows, he saw Long-Pitt roll her eyes.

Chapter Three

Back at Garnons, George and Arthur discussed Cornwall. They were sitting in Arthur’s rickety attic room, sharing a box of salted fudge that George had brought back from Scotland.

‘It looked like Long-Pitt wasn’t that thrilled to see him,’ Arthur said.

‘No,’ George agreed, his mouth full of fudge, ‘but then, she’s not really that thrilled about anything.’

‘And what about the boy who went missing?’ Arthur asked. ‘Do you know what happened?’

‘Ah,’ George said, getting up to look out of Arthur’s round window. ‘That.’

‘Why do I get the feeling that you are about to say something mysterious?’ Arthur laughed.

‘Because, my friend,’ George said, casually tossing a bit of fudge into his mouth, ‘I am an intriguing fellow –’

‘Your flies are undone,’ Arthur cut in.

George glanced down. ‘So they are.’

‘Anyway, what happened?’ Arthur asked.

‘His name was Andrew Farnham,’ George began. ‘He was thirteen, clever, happy at school, lived in Grimstone all his life. He disappeared just before Christmas.’

‘That’s terrible,’ Arthur replied.

‘Awful,’ George agreed. ‘His parents said he had started acting a bit funny about a week before his disappearance. Paranoid, a bit spooked, but he wouldn’t say what was wrong. Then, when they woke up on Christmas Eve he was gone.’

Arthur shivered.

‘Grandpa was very interested, as you can imagine,’ George continued.

‘Of course he was,’ Arthur sighed.

George’s grandfather was another Shiverton ex-pupil, and a friend of Toynbee’s. He had written several enormous tomes on the school’s more unusual aspects. His book,
Studies into the Supernatural and Preternatural at Shiverton Hall and Its Surrounds
, contained many ghoulish stories about the hall’s past, and George was always itching to crack it open and read one to anyone who would listen.

‘So, what does your grandfather think happened?’ Arthur asked.

‘Oh, he has a lot of theories, as you might imagine! Children have been going missing in Grimstone since the place was built. He says it could be another phantom, or a banshee, or a hobgoblin, or even Skinless Tom.’

Arthur shuddered at the name.

‘But he has no idea. There’s nothing to go on. Not so much as a drop of ectoplasm.’

‘Do they think that someone took him? Like, kidnapped him?’ Arthur asked.

‘To be honest I think kidnapping would be the best he could have hoped for,’ George replied quietly. ‘Worse things have happened here, after all.’

Arthur was about to reply when his bedroom door was kicked open with a crash. Arthur and George jumped, as the silhouettes of the hideous Forge triplets appeared in the room. Arthur readied himself for a fight, while George suddenly found something fascinating to stare at on Arthur’s bookshelf.

The Forge triplets were enormous, and looked as though a child had fashioned three identical figures out of a gigantic tin of corned beef. Pink, angry, snobbish and only distinguishable by their noses, which had all broken in different directions during their many sporting activities, the Forges loathed Arthur.

It came as a surprise, therefore, when Dan Forge, the leader of the trio and the brother who hated Arthur the most, forced a grimace of a grin and said mechanically, ‘Hello, Arthur, how was your holiday?’

George and Arthur stared at Dan, waiting for the insult or dead arm that would surely follow. Neither came. Dan continued as his brothers shifted uncomfortably behind him. ‘Looking forward to playing football with you.’ Sweat was standing out on Dan’s brow from the effort of this politeness. ‘Why don’t we all walk there together tomorrow?’

‘What, so you can drag me into the woods and give me a kicking like last time?’ Arthur blazed.

‘No,’ Dan said slowly. ‘Because we’d like to be friends. Wouldn’t we, guys?’

Dan’s brothers grunted in agreement.

‘Riiiiight,’ Arthur replied, utterly bemused. ‘I think I’ll pass on that, cheers.’

Dan’s right eye twitched. He looked as though he wanted nothing more than to throw Arthur out of the window. Instead, he nodded.

‘OK, then. See you around . . .’ Dan took a deep breath and shuddered before he added, ‘
mate
.’

The other two Forge brothers looked as shocked at this term of endearment as Arthur and George did. They trudged off, leaving Arthur gaping.

‘Wh-what. On.
Earth
?’ Arthur stammered.

‘Hey, can you blame them?’ George replied. ‘They know what you did to the last boys who tried to bully you. They probably don’t want to end up in hospital.’

‘Don’t joke about that, George,’ Arthur said.

‘Sorry,’ George said. ‘But at least you have one less thing to worry about.’

‘Either that or they’re planning something.’

‘You might be the next person to disappear – I wouldn’t put it past them!’ George said, starting on the second layer of fudge.

Arthur frowned. ‘What do
you
think happened to that boy?’

George shrugged. ‘Andrew Farnham? Beats me. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I mean, the reason the Shiverton curse started in the first place was because all those girls went missing –’

‘Because Lord Shiverton murdered them and failed to realise one of their mothers was a witch,’ Arthur interrupted. ‘I remember, kind of a difficult story to forget.’

‘But children have been going missing from Grimstone for centuries. Way before Lord Shiverton built the hall too. Don’t forget, there was a reason Lord Shiverton was attracted to this area – it’s a dark place.’

‘You don’t need to tell me,’ Arthur replied.

‘Don’t I?’ George said in a mysterious voice, and Arthur knew immediately that George had already memorised one of his grandfather’s stories for this precise occasion.

‘Go on, then,’ Arthur sighed.

Grey Mary

The Trapper family had lived in Grimstone for many generations, eking out a living on the fringes of the town, all of them crammed into a tiny, dirt-floor cottage in the kind of squalid poverty that was common for rural families in Elizabethan times. Mrs Trapper had died giving life to her twelfth child (and the fifth that survived past the cradle) and so it was up to Mr Trapper and his aged mother to care for them all. Mr Trapper was a tall man, with a stoop and a single tooth, which jutted from his mouth accusingly. He sorely resented having so many children underfoot and often said that he would have much preferred it had all of them perished at birth. There was one child that he particularly resented having to care for, a girl called Mary, who was not his own, but some waif his soft-hearted wife had brought home many years before, and who had somehow become a part of the family.

The Trapper children were sent out to work the moment they could put one foot in front of the other. The boys would help at the blacksmith’s, coming home with a single clammy coin between them at the end of the week, while Mary and Ruth would scrub the floors at the tavern until their hands bled. Mr Trapper was a poacher, and a bad one at that, and the family mostly had to make do with a single, mangy rabbit every other day. Mr Trapper would eat the best part of the meat, old Ma Trapper would gnaw on the legs, while the children had to make do with the guts and heart and eyes.

One by one, the children became as cold and calloused and hard as their father. But none had become so frozen and hardened as Mary.

Perhaps it was the fact that Mr Trapper never let her forget that she was not a true Trapper, or the fact that old Ma Trapper enjoyed beating Mary the hardest with her gnarled broomstick, but as Mary grew, she became wilier and crueller than the others. She was uncommonly tall for her age, indeed for any age, and had to half-crouch inside their small cottage, her long, dark hair almost brushing the floor. Painfully thin, and with skin of a grey, waxy hue, the sight of Mary walking down the dusty Grimstone path at dusk caused her neighbours to shudder. Even Mr Trapper, who was reputed to have throttled a wild boar with his bare hands in his youth, began to fear being alone with her.

Soon the owner of the tavern asked that Mary stop coming to scrub the floors. She was scaring the customers away, he said. With no way of earning her keep, Mary had given Mr Trapper the excuse he needed to be rid of her for good. He cast her out of the cottage and bolted the door behind her. Left to the bitter winter with only a thin shawl and her long hair to keep her warm, Mary disappeared into the woods.

If the other children felt guilty about Mary’s expulsion, they dared not speak of it to their father, and the shame of their betrayal was relieved somewhat by the fact that they had to divide their supper with one person fewer. Soon winter became spring, and as the roots started to struggle their way out of the hard ground, the Trapper family began to forget that Mary had ever been one of their party; they had lost brothers and sisters before, after all.

It was then that the first Grimstone child went missing, while gathering bluebells in the woods to sell at the market. The child was the eight-year-old daughter of the tavern owner and would not have been a stranger to the Trapper children, who helped with the search themselves, shouting her name throughout the village. It would be the first of many searches that spring.

A few days into the search, Mr Trapper went to check one of his rabbit traps, deep in the woods, and discovered something that made him feel quite peculiar. In the pale bark of the ash trees, about seven feet above the ground, were long, deep scratchings.

What could have scored the wood so deep, and so high up? He wondered. There were tales of the Grimstone woods, of course, of the witches that hid there to escape burning, but he had been trapping there since he was a boy and had never seen anything suspicious.

He reached up his hand to feel the marks, and discovered something embedded in the wood. He drew it out, and to his disgust, found that it was a long, yellow talon, about the length of a dagger and just as sharp.

It was no animal claw, that he knew; it was a fingernail.

Mr Trapper took it at once to the tavern, not because he had a care for the missing child, but because the tavern owner had promised a hot supper to any man with evidence of his daughter. Mr Trapper got his hot supper, and the news of the fingernail travelled like quicksilver through the village. People came in their dozens to the tavern just to examine it; in fact, it proved so popular that the landlord’s canny wife began to charge for a look.