Shiverton Hall, the Creeper (2 page)

‘You can be a real idiot, you know that?’ he panted.

‘Hang on!’ Ronnie laughed. ‘We’re all right, aren’t we? No harm done!’

Andrew brought the book out of his pocket and brandished it at Ronnie, who stopped laughing.

‘Why didn’t you put it back?’ Ronnie asked.

‘Because you threw it at me and I didn’t know where you’d taken it from and there was someone coming!’ Andrew yelled.

‘All right, chill out,’ Ronnie replied. ‘We can take it back tomorrow.’

‘There’s no way I am going back there tomorrow,’ Andrew said. ‘You have it.’

Ronnie put his hands up innocently. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you’re the one who took it.’

Andrew looked at his friend disbelievingly.

‘It’s just an old book,’ Ronnie continued. ‘I’m sure no one will miss it.’

‘Whatever,’ Andrew said. He could barely get his door keys out of his jeans, he was so angry.

‘Ah, don’t be like that!’ Ronnie said.

Andrew slotted his key in the door.

‘So, see you tomorrow, then?’ Ronnie asked, flicking his bicycle bell so that it rang out across the street.

Andrew let himself into the house without replying. Ronnie deserved to stew for at least an evening.

Andrew traced his fingers over the scarred cover, then opened the book. He reread the scrawled warning. He knew he shouldn’t look, but he felt a powerful, physical desire to do so – like itching a mosquito bite, or picking at a scab – and before he knew it, he turned the page and began to read.

The writing inside looked as old as the cover; it was handwritten in flowing calligraphic lettering, and none of it made much sense to Andrew. He flicked through the pages until he found a highly decorative page, illustrated in elaborate gold and vermilion ink, with one long word at the centre that he did not recognise. He read the word over a few times, trying to make sense of it.

The room grew colder still, until suddenly Andrew was aware that his breath was clouding in the air in front of him.

And then the noise came. A faint scratching, like a sharp fingernail on glass.

Andrew dropped the book.

Chapter One

Pink football boots. If there was ever a present that a fourteen-year-old boy really doesn’t want for Christmas, it is a pair of baby-pink football boots with sparkly laces. Arthur stared at them, aghast.

‘But they’re a limited edition!’ May Bannister, his mother, insisted. ‘The man in the shop said that all the cool kids are wearing them.’

‘The cool kids?’ Arthur repeated. ‘Wearing these?’

‘Yes!’ May said impatiently. ‘That singer wore them on the telly. You know the one – the guy with the leather shorts.’

Rob and Arthur stared at their mother blankly.

May pressed on quickly. ‘And the boy in the shop, the one with the trendy haircut, said they’re limited edition. All the boys are after a pair.’

‘I think he may have been having you on,’ Arthur said, turning them over. ‘They’ve got fairies on them.’

‘And don’t forget the glittery laces,’ Rob, Arthur’s eleven-year-old half-brother, said gleefully. ‘Nothing more manly than pink glittery laces.’

Arthur couldn’t help but giggle, and then Rob joined in, and May threw up her hands in despair.

‘Why didn’t I have girls?’ she groaned. ‘I’ve no idea what I did to deserve two horrible boys. I’d have known what to get for girls.’

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ Arthur said. ‘At least I won’t get them mixed up with anyone else’s back at house.’

‘
Back at house
,
’ Rob parroted. Rob found Arthur’s boarding-school lingo ridiculous. ‘Why don’t you just say, “Back at
my
house” or “Back at
the
house”?’

Arthur shrugged. ‘That’s just what everyone calls it.’

‘It’s stupid,’ Rob said.

‘Well, I like it,’ their mother said, sensing trouble brewing. ‘I think it’s lovely and old-fashioned.’

Arthur and Rob had always bickered, but since Arthur had received the scholarship to the illustrious Shiverton Hall the term before, she had grown much more sensitive to it. After all, Arthur was hardly ever at home, and she wanted the boys to get along when they were together.

‘You should be glad your brother’s so happy at his new school,’ May whispered loudly to Rob. ‘Especially after what happened at the last one.’

‘Mum!’ Arthur said, going purple.

‘What?’ Rob said innocently. ‘You mean the fact he nearly killed the school bullies with a brick?’

‘Robbie!’ May gasped. ‘He did not nearly kill –’

‘He did!’ Rob replied.

‘Look,’ May said, ‘those boys are perfectly all right –’

‘Apart from a couple of scars –’

‘Yes, well, what are a few scars? They tried to drown Arthur!’

Arthur stood up abruptly. ‘Can we stop now?’ he asked.

‘Of course we can,’ said May. ‘Sorry, petal. Rob, apologise to your brother!’

‘Sorry, Arthur,’ Rob said, completely insincerely.

May changed the subject. ‘I’ve still got the receipt, Arthur. You can exchange the football boots if you like.’

‘No, Mum,’ Arthur said. ‘Actually, I think they’re kind of cool.’ He stuck his tongue out at his brother and slipped them on.

After a huge Christmas dinner, the family crashed out in front of the telly, until Rob’s Brussels sprout farts became too much to bear and they all ran screaming and clutching their noses to their bedrooms to escape the smell.

Arthur had a lot of reading to do before going back to Shiverton Hall; he was determined to get on the right side of the dreaded Professor Long-Pitt this term. Long-Pitt was his English teacher and the headmistress of the school. Pretty terrifying at the best of times, Long-Pitt had taken an instant dislike to Arthur and had set out to make his life a misery from the moment he arrived. Although Arthur would have liked nothing more than to dunk her into Shiverton Hall’s freezing, green fountain, he had made a promise to himself that he would be a model student and make sure she had no reason whatsoever to stick him in detention. She was, after all, a distant relative of his, a fact revealed to him by his housemaster, Doctor Toynbee, at the end of last term.

It turned out that Arthur’s mysterious scholarship to Shiverton Hall was even stranger than he had first thought. His late father, a man he had never met and whose surname his mother had previously refused to tell him, had, according to Doctor Toynbee, been an Australian named David Shiverton and a direct (albeit illegitimate) descendant of Lord Frederick Shiverton himself, the murderous aristocrat who built the hall in the eighteenth century. David Shiverton had died young, as so many of the male Shiverton descendants had, leaving only one child, Arthur, a boy who didn’t even know his father’s name. When Toynbee had discovered this, he had felt it only fair to invite Arthur to the school; Toynbee had read about the terrible business at Arthur’s previous school in the papers and felt that Arthur deserved a second chance. Long-Pitt had taken some persuading, but had relented, and they had offered him the scholarship, deciding it was best not to tell Arthur about his unusual connection to the school.

All of that changed, however, when Arthur and his friends were targeted by a strange and powerful phantom, and Toynbee felt it wise to come clean.

Only Toynbee and Long-Pitt knew of Arthur’s true heritage; Arthur hadn’t even told his friends. Given the reputation of the family, and the curse that was said to be on the Shiverton bloodline, he thought it might be sensible to keep it to himself. The students had already discovered the violent incident at his previous school; if they knew who his father was it would be enough to make him a loner for life. Arthur had not asked his mother about David Shiverton, although he had wanted to many times during the holidays. It would be too difficult to explain how he had come by the information, without revealing the phantom, and he was certain that his mother would never let her son put another foot inside Shiverton Hall if she suspected that he was in danger.

Sometimes he wondered why he wanted to go back there himself. It was no coincidence that the strange supernatural element of the school, dormant for so many years, had reawakened on his arrival there. But then he thought about George, his lanky, ghost-obsessed best friend, and Penny and Jake, and even Xanthe, whose bonkers hairstyles and love of homework hid a surprising brave streak. They were the reason Arthur was going back, and he couldn’t wait to see them.

George had been texting Arthur constantly with updates about his Christmas holiday in Scotland. He had fallen down a mountain after accidentally drinking some sherry and sustained a black eye of such oozing disgustingness that his grandfather refused to look at him unless he was wearing an eyepatch.

Penny had called Arthur earlier that day in desperation and had threatened to run away from home. Her enormous family lived in a freezing, dilapidated castle and her mother had entirely forgotten that it was Christmas. Once someone reminded her she had wrapped up some dusty old knick-knacks and tried to pass them off as presents. Penny had received a brass doorknob, but her poor younger brother Sage had really got a bum deal: a pair of his father’s moth-eaten old pants. Christmas lunch had been baked beans on toast, accompanied by a highly unusual rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’ from one of her seven siblings. Apparently, Penny had spent a fair bit of the meal with bread stuffed in her ears to block out the din.

Arthur had been no help at all, giggling helplessly as Penny described her father’s attempt to play Father Christmas wearing one of his wife’s red dresses and a striped sock as a hat.

‘Don’t you dare laugh!’ Penny had threatened, as Arthur started snorting. ‘I’m going to call Jake and talk to someone sensible instead.’

Poor Jake. Arthur had been wondering how his Christmas had been. Jake’s mother had been struggling with mental illness ever since Jake was little, and Jake had looked after her ever since his father had left them. Jake lived in London too, and Arthur had offered to come over and help, but Jake was extremely proud, and his mother did not like visitors.

Xanthe had written Arthur a letter in a purple glitter pen and covered it in stickers. It went into great detail about the science camp she had been attending and the many prizes she had won while she was there. She had also sent a photograph of herself that she’d cut out of a newspaper. It showed her leaning forward in a wheelchair, her legs still in plaster after she’d fallen out of a window the previous term, and clutching one of the trophies she’d won. There was another person in the photo, a slight, bespectacled boy holding a smaller trophy, who Xanthe was shamelessly elbowing out of the picture. She had suggested in her letter, with only the smallest hint of desperation, that Arthur frame the photograph and put it beside his bed. He had settled for his pin-board instead and it made him laugh every time he saw it. He glanced up at the photo now as he prepared for bed. Xanthe could be pretty batty at times – she was wearing lurid pink dungarees and her hairstyle would have looked bizarre on a porcupine, let alone a human being – but she was also one of the cleverest and most loyal people he knew.

Arthur changed into his pyjamas, and once again tried to get cracking on Long-Pitt’s endless reading list. It wasn’t going very well. He had already begun to snooze on page one of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
when he was startled by the sound of something striking his bedroom window. He sat up in his bed and listened.

There it was again.

Arthur got out of bed and crept to the window, his heart racing. Their flat was on the third floor of a high-rise, and they reached their front door via a concrete walkway, but that was on the floor below and nowhere near within reach of his window.

Arthur waited, holding his breath. His mother would be asleep by now, and Rob would be far too full to be bothered to play a trick on his brother at this time of night. Something struck the windowpane again. Arthur tore open the curtains, and yelped when he saw a face staring back at him.

He laughed nervously when he realised that it was his own face, reflected in the glass. He pulled himself together and peered into the darkness. But he could only see the wet street below, orange in the lamplight and deserted.

Then came the knock at the front door. Arthur felt his skin tighten. His first instinct was to call his mother, but then he shook himself. He was fourteen and the man of the house since Rob’s dad, Arthur’s stepfather, had gone off to open a pub in Leeds with his new girlfriend. Arthur drew himself to his full height and went downstairs with as much swagger as he could muster. He threw open the front door before he had time to change his mind, and poked his head out into the walkway.

Nothing.

‘You!’

Arthur jumped and whirled around. Standing next to him was an old man with a battered stick and a frayed argyle jumper. Arthur sighed with relief.

‘Mr Croomb,’ he said. ‘What are you doing out here?’

Mr Croomb looked at Arthur accusingly. ‘What are
you
doing out here?’

Arthur smiled politely; Mr Croomb had been their neighbour for many years, and he still mistrusted the boys, behaving as though they might knock him over and try to steal his pension at any moment.