The Hunting Ground (16 page)

Elliott and Ben were also in the picture. Elliott was half way up the slope, trying to get away, running his heart out. Ben had already been caught. Cullayn had restrained him with a rope, and was now gazing at Elliott in anticipation of the chase to come.

‘Cullayn!’ Dad roared. ‘Where are you?’

But he suddenly knew that Cullayn was
everywhere
. The owner of Glebe House wasn’t restricted to any one part of the East Wing. His presence swirled in the dust and the plaster of the walls. The entire East Wing was his kingdom and manipulation.

Rhymes were being whispered in the closest corridors. Cullayn’s essence enlivened them, ramped up their
volume. The verses were brought to Dad’s ears by two children. He recognised Eve’s voice from the higher pitch. He also recognised Ben’s.

‘Boys and toys and ploys, right and left, round and round his father goes, and down and down …’

Dad tried to listen only to Ben’s voice. He thought he heard a catch, a hesitation. Then it sounded like Ben was pleading. As Dad lurched to where the voice was coming from, it faded. Moments later he heard it again to his right – again pleading. Twice more Dad heard it. Twice more it faded.

Cullayn’s leading me on
, he realised.
This is one of his games
.

There was no way Dad could even be certain it was really Ben’s voice he was hearing. But how could he walk in any other direction when it might be?

‘Wha—’

Abruptly Dad lost his torch, snatched away by a smaller hand.

All around him it was suddenly black. Dad twisted around, bringing his hands up to defend himself.

No attack came, but now he was alone in the dark.

He shuffled his way onward as best he could. Tiny shafts of daylight in the ceiling guided him. Corridors fanned ahead.

And inevitably, of course, he came to one that
descended. That led to a small set of steps. To a dark passageway with a bare, unlit wall.

Without hesitating, Dad took the descending corridor.

He powered down the steps.

‘Ben?’

No answer, but the corridor beckoned. As Dad walked inside, the rhymes sung earlier sprang up again. Eve and Ben were hissing them.

‘… and right and left, and round and round, and down and down …’

Dad suddenly wondered how long he had been inside the East Wing. More than an hour? Had Elliott made that call yet?

The dark passage awaited him.

Did he dare walk into the middle of it?

Yes.

As Dad took the first steps his pulse suddenly raced, the hair all over his body standing on end.

‘Ben!’ he screamed into the darkness. ‘Answer me!’

The wall to his left was pale and pictureless, lit up by a sliver of ceiling light. Something about that wall frightened him. The opposite wall was not lit at all. It wasn’t logical, but Dad wanted to keep to the darker side of the wall where the portraits were. He was afraid of the lighted, blank wall. The dark wall was scary only
because it was dark. The blank wall was scary for a reason he could not understand.

He walked up to the blank wall and felt it. Smooth. It was very smooth. The corridor was quiet and so, the rhymes abruptly ceasing, was Dad.

A strangely terrified feeling fluttered inside him. He couldn’t identify the reason for it. Then he realised it was because the worst thing had not yet happened. The worst thing was in one of the sketches Eve had done all those years ago. It was to be hunted down by those you loved.

Moments later Ben stood in front of him. Pushed from a side doorway, he waited only a few metres away, shivering.

As Dad turned towards him, recognising Ben’s shape if not his face in the near-dark, something with a long reach thrust from a hidden partition in the blank wall. It was a fist. Covering that fist was a metal-studded glove. The glove clenched a bludgeon – one of the weapons Elliott had failed to pick up earlier. The bludgeon caught Dad with a crushing blow this time, ringing his temple.

Dad clattered to the floor, his legs folding under him.

‘Ben,’ he murmured, the word barely emerging. And as it died on his lips, Cullayn’s voice loudly, impressively, rippled from the darkness.

‘Yes, he’s here. And, Janey willing, I’ll have your other son as well.’

Dad made a huge effort to get up, could not. Feeling himself beginning to lose consciousness, he forced his stinging eyes to focus for a second. Ben and Eve were both standing over him. Neither did anything to help. Ben, though, looked uneasy. That was the only heartening thing Dad could take from the moment, so as he felt himself slipping from consciousness he took it.

He managed to raise his head. There was a shadow behind Eve and his son: a dark veil. It was all hunter.

‘Eager spirits and cunning wiles,’ Cullayn said, and Dad felt himself roughly lifted, dragged and dumped inside the wall. ‘No, don’t die yet,’ Cullayn growled, standing astride him. ‘Remain with us. At least until my Janey brings me Elliott.’

Elliott sat on his haunches outside the East Wing, breathless, waiting for Dad to come out. After watching and listening for an exact hour, he reached for his mobile to dial 999.

Before he had depressed a single digit, Jane Amanda Roberts appeared smoothly at the entrance to the East Wing.

Elliott backed away three steps.

She stood leanly there, old and grey, and he wondered if that was part of her plan: to look helpless. The diary entries had convinced him she was far from that. They had also convinced him that whatever Janey was like before, she was now under Cullayn’s sway. Seeing her outside the East Wing with the screwdriver, re-opening the entrance, only made him more certain of that.

Her hands were clasped behind her back. She was holding something. A good hunter keeps its weapons hidden, Elliott thought. Her gaze was all calculation.

‘Still pretending to be a weak old lady?’ he said, hiding his fear inside a growl.

‘Pretending?’ she answered serenely back. ‘If so, I’ve got away with it for a long time, haven’t I?’

Elliott backed off another step. ‘It was you who opened the East Wing when we arrived, wasn’t it?’

She nodded.

‘You did it so Ben would go inside.’

‘Just so.’

Elliott bristled and stood tall, two or three inches above her.

Janey took no notice. ‘What do you think I am?’ she snarled. ‘Something you can defeat with your stature? Your fists? A gentle grey lady, a whiff of bath salts? Is that what you take me for?’

Elliott retreated another step. ‘You’re the one who spoon-fed us bits of the diary.’

‘Of course. Enough to keep you interested. And tiptoeing inside the East Wing, despite yourselves. Exactly. Where are you going, Elliott?’ she added. ‘Trying to walk away from me already? You haven’t finished the diary yet. Is this what you’re looking for?’

One of her hands fluttered forward. Clenched inside was a bundle of hand-written pages. Elliott recognised the writing at once.

‘The next part of the diary,’ he said.

‘The final part,’ she corrected him.

Elliott swallowed. ‘Did you kill Eve?’

No answer. Followed by: ‘Perhaps.’ And then, as if she was growing bored, or merely tired, Janey took a step sideways. She leaned forward so that her head was inside the East Wing while her wrinkled neck was still in the hall. ‘Watch and learn,’ she said.

The outline of her hair abruptly crackled with light.

Seeing his chance, Elliott ran. He set off in the opposite direction, through the hall and up the main flight of stairs.

Janey scurried after him. She saw where he’d gone. A bathroom – the one place on the first floor with a working lock on the inside of the door.

She clasped the diary as she came after him. To Janey the words contained in its pages were so full of melancholy that they seemed to be flooded in moonlight. Opening out the folded sheets in her palm, she watched them expand like a living thing.

She pushed the pages under the crack of the shut bathroom door. Elliott backed away.

‘I will leave you in peace to read them, but don’t take too long,’ Janey said curtly.

Walking away from him, she made her way downstairs into the morning room. It had always been her favourite part of the house, the place where the windows gathered the sun best. She sat on the sofa.

Arranging her legs comfortably, she inclined her head to listen to the birds in the overgrown garden.

*

Elliott waited until she had gone. There was an old toilet and a grimy sink in the bathroom. Dad had dropped a couple of towels in there for the boys to use in case they were downstairs. Elliott laid the towels out on the dirty floor tiles so that he had something to sit on. Apart from the diary, he didn’t want any part of this old house touching him any more.

He gathered the diary pages together. They still felt warm from Janey’s hand.

In a crabbed script Elliott guessed must be Janey’s, she’d jotted down the missing lines from the previous cut-off entry. Elliott double-checked the lock on the door was solid. Then, easing himself down, he took an uncertain breath and read the last words ever penned by Theo William Stark.

25th December. Christmas evening. OK. I’m going to record the time because somehow it seems important. It’s 8.46 p.m., and it’s been dark for hours. I’m trembling as I write this, but sitting here outside the East Wing I’m going to make myself record every detail of the hunt, in case anything happens to me. If it does, this diary had better survive, because I don’t want what’s happened to my family to happen to anyone else.

*

It all started around quarter past five this afternoon. We’d finished a late Christmas dinner. With everything going on lately, none of us were in the mood to celebrate, and we’d spent most of the meal deciding when we were going to leave Glebe House. Even Mum had had enough now. She and Dad had gone to the back of the house – I can’t remember
why. I stayed with Eve. No way I was going to leave her alone after the episode with the fence and the stuff in Janey’s room.

We were both in the hall. I was looking at one of the portraits. Maybe more than one. I can’t remember. I’ve no idea how long I’d been staring at them. I only remember this: Eve suddenly looked up at me, let out a howling scream and ran from the house.

I went after her. I thought she must have seen Janey behind me or something. I’d been dreading a moment like this – Cullayn using Janey in a last ditch attempt to get to Eve before we left. It was why I was sticking so close to her.

Eve could have fled anywhere, but she took off for the slope, aiming for the hunting ground. I couldn’t understand that. I thought Cullayn must be luring her there. It was only afterwards I realised that it was me who drove her in that direction.

It was almost dark already, with snow everywhere. Eve wasn’t a fast runner at the best of times, so I had no problem catching her before she got far up the slope. She was wearing her favourite red dress, and for some reason that annoyed me. I grabbed the hem of it and yanked her back. ‘Get back indoors!’ I shouted, shaking her. ‘You idiot! It’s not safe out here!’

She dug her nails into me.

‘Stop it!’ I growled. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’

I wasn’t listening to her screams. I wasn’t listening to anything. I dragged her across the slope. Terrified, Eve kicked me a couple of times, then reached up to scratch my face. What happened next is a kind of blur. Something inside me exploded with rage. I was so angry I hit Eve. Then – still not understanding what was happening to me – I snatched her left arm and started hauling her up the slope towards the trees.

‘You!’ Eve screamed.

Her eyes must have been filled with terror, but I wasn’t looking. Her endless whimpers only irritated me. Such a stupid kid. ‘Shut up!’ I yelled. She fought me all the way to the woods. It didn’t even occur to me to ask why I was going towards the trees until I heard a rustle from their leaves.

Eve was so scared of me that she managed to yank her hand free. She fell back, whacking her head on a tree root. I heard an awful crack and for a moment she was unconscious, completely still.

‘Eve?’ I gasped, a tiny part of me still able to respond to her in a normal way. As I leaned over her she woke, opened her eyes. Her mouth was lined with blood. Then, seeing me, she held her hands
over her face to protect herself. In that long second, for which I will never forgive myself, she really thought I was going to hit her again, and I realise now that I was about to do just that.

It was not me making the choices
.

Somehow Eve squirmed away, stood up and scrambled across the slope. I didn’t follow at first. I’d spotted something bright between the trees. There was a clear sky above the wood, and I thought it must be the moon, or a mixture of that and starlight. But then I realised how excited I was, and that it was another kind of light altogether – Cullayn’s brightness, orange and red, lighting up the trees.