Shiverton Hall (19 page)

‘Fine,’ she said gruffly. ‘You’ve got five minutes.’

‘Thank you!’ Penny cried.

‘But don’t excite him,’ the nurse instructed. ‘I’ll hold you responsible if I can’t get him to sleep tonight.’

They lingered at her desk, waiting hopefully for directions to Tristan’s room.

‘Well, get off with you then,’ the nurse said. ‘You know where his room is, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course!’ Arthur lied. ‘Thank you.’

It was a grim walk from the reception to Tristan’s room. Fearful, emaciated patients shuffled down the corridors, mumbling gibberish, and the halls echoed with the sound of manic laughter. Arthur, Penny and George peered in through the window of each room they passed, hoping to see Tristan. They saw a woman eating the stuffing out of a decapitated teddy bear, an elderly man conducting an invisible orchestra, a girl tearing at her clothes in a frenzy as though they were filled with bees. Every window brought another glimpse of desperation.

The very last window showed Tristan. He was sitting quietly on his bed, cross-legged and still. The walls around him were crowded up to the ceiling with disturbing pictures that he had clearly drawn himself, and his sheets were stained with ink.

Penny knocked. There was no response; Tristan didn’t even look around. Penny steeled herself and opened the door.

Tristan didn’t seem to notice as Arthur and his classmates entered the room; he was humming quietly to himself and tapping his thumb on his leg to the beat in his head. Arthur nudged George and nodded towards the wall. Above the bed, and made up of twenty or so sheets of lined A4 paper, was a drawing of Shiverton Hall. Tristan had caught its imposing splendour so perfectly it could almost have been traced from a photograph, but it was not such a straightforward likeness as that. There was something in the slant of the windows and the curl of the spires that gave it an unnerving presence, as though the hall itself were quietly breathing, watching out from the paper.

‘Tristan?’ Arthur said, pulling his gaze uneasily from the picture. ‘We’ve come for your help.’

Tristan continued his humming and tapping.

‘We’ve come from your school, from Shiverton Hall. Everyone is in danger there and we think you know why.’

Tristan stirred. The humming stopped. ‘Shiverton . . .’ he repeated, furrowing his brow, trying to recall the meaning of the word.

‘Shiverton Hall,’ Arthur said. ‘Your school, remember? You went there to warn us about something. Can you remember what it was?’

‘Shiverton . . .’ Tristan repeated again.

‘Yes. Shiverton.’

Tristan gave a little yelp and his eyes lit up in a moment of recognition. He stood on his bed and pointed to the picture of the school.

‘Yes!’ Arthur cried. ‘Yes, that’s Shiverton!’

Tristan pointed at the picture again, jabbing it with his finger. ‘Don’t go here,’ he said urgently. ‘Never go here. There is something bad.’

‘We’re there already, Tristan, and some terrible things have happened already. One of our friends is in this very hospital – he jumped out of a tree. Another girl has broken her legs. We need to stop it.’

Tristan nodded. ‘Yes, they’re all in danger,’ he agreed, his voice like that of an automaton.

‘From what?’ Arthur asked.

Tristan shook his head violently.

‘Tell us, Tristan,’ Arthur said more forcefully.

Tristan squealed and crumpled on to his bed, where he resumed the humming, more loudly this time.

‘You have to tell us what they are. We don’t have much time!’ Arthur cried.

‘Arthur, go gently,’ Penny whispered, watching as Tristan began to whimper.

Arthur carefully took Tristan by the shoulders and looked directly at him.

‘What are we in danger from?’ he said slowly.

‘The friends,’ Tristan whispered.

‘Like your friend Charlie?’ Arthur said. ‘What are they? Where do they come from?’

‘They make you do bad things.’

‘How can we stop them?’ Arthur asked.

Tristan shook his head violently.

‘How can we stop them?’ Arthur repeated.

Tristan looked straight into Arthur’s eyes. ‘Your friend is the worst,’ he whispered. ‘Your friend is coming for you.’

Penny looked over at Arthur, who was clearly quite taken aback.

‘Please, Tristan, what can we do?’ George asked.

Tristan shook his head. ‘They want to play. You have to play with them.’

Tristan threw his head back and let out a screech of demented laughter. He stood up on his bed once more and pointed at Arthur.

‘Yours is the worst,’ he shouted gleefully, dancing on his mattress. ‘Yours is coming to get you, Arthur Davies.’

Arthur staggered forward as a flurry of nurses rushed into the room, concerned by the noise. The nurse from the reception desk looked at the trio accusingly.

‘Look what you’ve done!’ she shouted. ‘I told you not to excite him! We’ll have to sedate him now.’

Penny looked away as one of the nurses plunged a syringe into Tristan’s arm.

Tristan lurched on to his knees, his eyelids fluttering, struggling to fight the potent sedative. He looked over at Arthur and said, lucid and sharp for a moment, ‘Look at them. You need to look at them, all of you. They hate to be looked at.’

Then Tristan’s eyes closed and he slumped forward.

‘Out!’ a nurse yelled. ‘Out now!’

‘Arthur,’ Penny hissed, as they were pushed out of the room. ‘Look!’

She pointed at one of the pictures on the walls, scrawled in black ink. The likeness was unmistakable. It was a portrait of Arthur.

Chapter Seventeen

The three of them were crammed into the back of the taxi and Arthur stared out of the window in shocked silence. The driver was singing along loudly to the radio, while Penny and George whispered urgently about what Tristan had said. Arthur turned over his childhood memories in his head, sifting through birthdays, play dates and trips to the zoo, but none of these hazy recollections featured an imaginary friend.

‘Arthur.
Arthur!
’ Penny hissed, nudging him in the ribs.

Arthur pulled himself away from a faraway, sunny afternoon building sandcastles with his mother, and forced his attention back to the cramped car.

‘Tristan said your imaginary friend was the worst,’ Penny whispered, ‘but you said you didn’t have one.’

‘I didn’t!’ Arthur replied, rather exasperated. ‘I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t! I didn’t have an imaginary friend and I can’t just make one up for your benefit.’

‘All right, mate, calm down,’ George said.

‘I am calm,’ Arthur replied tetchily.

‘Maybe it was another Arthur,’ Penny mused. ‘I mean, he got your name wrong. Did you notice? He called you Arthur Davies.’

Arthur felt the dread again, creeping up his neck. He didn’t trust himself to respond.

‘But Tristan had definitely drawn a picture of Arthur,’ George said. ‘How could he? They’ve never met.’

Arthur guided the subject away from him. ‘He said the friends don’t like to be looked at,’ he reminded them. ‘That’s something, isn’t it? Now we know something about them.’

‘It’s not much,’ George complained.

‘But it’s a start,’ Arthur said.

‘But I looked at mine,’ Penny said, ‘and that didn’t seem to stop her.’

‘Well, maybe you weren’t looking hard enough,’ Arthur said.

‘I hate hospitals!’ George said with a shudder. ‘They freak me out.’

‘Me too,’ Arthur agreed.

‘You know Shiverton Hall was a hospital during the First World War?’ George said, glancing at the darkness beyond the window.

Arthur nodded. ‘Your grandfather mentioned it in his book.’

‘That wasn’t unusual though, was it?’ Penny said. ‘A lot of big houses were hospitals during the war.’

‘But Shiverton wasn’t an ordinary hospital,’ George said pointedly.

‘Of course it wasn’t,’ Arthur sighed. ‘Go on then.’

The Babbel Bit

Doctor Gregory Thorne studied under the maverick genius Professor Babbel for ten years in Vienna, after which he decided to set up his own practice in London. Babbel’s methods, and his investigations into the brain’s workings, had been treated with utter hostility by the rest of the medical profession, but the educated public adored them, and every time he came to England he was fêted like a celebrity.

The Babbel Bit, a facial harness whose invention was designed to pacify prisoners, caused a sensation at the Royal Society in 1907 when Babbel demonstrated it on a notoriously violent criminal. The criminal arrived in a straitjacket, swearing and spitting, but after five minutes in Babbel’s contraption, he was as quiet and calm as a lamb. The doctors and scientists who watched the experiment didn’t care for it; the harness itself looked extremely painful and distorted the face grotesquely. However, the papers thought it was the greatest invention of the century and called for a Bit on every criminal in Britain.

Doctor Gregory Thorne had helped Babbel with the design of the Bit and many of his other innovations – the Spine Clamp, the Iron Hat and the Gagger to name but a few – and on his arrival in London he was celebrated as the future of his field. Thorne’s practice was a collection of spacious, white rooms in Harley Street, where he discreetly ‘corrected’ lunatic baronets and wayward daughters of the aristocracy. One such girl, Lady Annabel Watson, had spoken of a desire to go to university, much to the horror of her father, but after one session with Thorne she had placidly agreed to be married off to an elderly earl. He became the favourite doctor to the great and good, so when the First World War broke out, Thorne wasn’t at all surprised to receive a telegram from the government asking him to take charge of a hospital in the country.

Shiverton Hall Hospital didn’t treat physical wounds; it treated those whose minds had been disturbed by the ordeal of the trenches. One such man was Martin Sutherland, a poet who had narrowly survived the Battle of Ypres. Sutherland had caused the government a great deal of trouble by publishing anti-war poetry and writing ‘unpatriotic’ letters to
The Times
. When he began to make a little too much noise, the home secretary thought it prudent to send him somewhere that might make him more agreeable.

And so it was that Doctor Thorne stood on the steps of Shiverton Hall, flanked by hatchet-faced nurses, as the car rumbled up to deliver Martin Sutherland. Thorne bowed obsequiously as the poet exited the car with his arms tied behind his back.

‘Welcome, welcome, Mr Sutherland,’ Thorne said. ‘I trust you had a pleasant journey.’

‘Not at all pleasant, no!’ Sutherland bit back. ‘I woke with a stranger in my bedroom, who promptly put a bag over my head, tied me up and brought me to wherever this godforsaken place is.’

‘I’m afraid these methods are sometimes necessary,’ Thorne said calmly. ‘I very much doubt that you would have come willingly.’

‘No, I most certainly would not!’

‘There we are then. The first sign of a disordered mind.’

Sutherland opened his mouth to protest, but Thorne shushed him with his palm.

‘Welcome to Shiverton Hall Hospital. I’m Doctor Thorne.’