Shiverton Hall, the Creeper (5 page)

Was it a monster? the villagers wondered. A witch?

When the second child went missing in the woods a few weeks after the first, Grimstone began to hum with panic. It was a witch, they were certain, a child-eating witch in the woods. Children were forbidden to leave their homes. Their mothers kept them close to their skirts, and their fathers slept by their beds. All except for Mr Trapper, of course, who was more concerned about foolishly giving the lucrative fingernail away in exchange for a half-rotten pie.

In the middle of a warm May night, the village baker was at his furnace, preparing the day’s bread. He was often the only man awake in Grimstone at that hour, aside from the odd passing traveller or drunkard lurching home. The baker whistled as he worked the dough and shovelled loaves into the oven. On that night, he was whistling a new tune, one that he had picked up from the tavern a few evenings before, a jaunty song about a pretty girl.

As he was merrily kneading a few currants into some buns, he smelled burning, a dreaded thing for any baker, and, cursing, he rushed over to the ovens. He peered in, but found his loaves perfectly golden, with not a scorched top among them.

But the smell of burning was still there, catching the back of his throat. It wasn’t burning bread, he realised, but an altogether more unpleasant odour: that of burning hair. He shuddered. He remembered the smell from his boyhood, when his mother had taken him to watch one of Queen Mary’s heretic burnings. The smell of the hair burning was always a good sign, his mother had said, because it meant that the flames of the pyre had finally reached the heretics’ heathen heads.

The baker staggered out of his kitchen, only to find that the stench was even more cloying outside. He peered down the dark street. Perhaps an untended bedroom candle had set a woman’s hair alight, he thought, but he could see no flames and hear no shrieking from any of the houses. A little nervous now, the baker turned back to his work, quietly whistling, when he heard the same tune, whistled back to him from the darkness at the other end of the street. The baker stopped abruptly and turned. The whistling continued, but he could not see the source of it, and although he was not a superstitious man, he felt very strongly that he must not call out.

A little way down the street, a door opened, and the small figure of a girl crept out and walked slowly towards the music. The baker whispered to her, ‘Stop! Stop, child!’ but the child did not heed him, and he dared not go after her. Then another door opened, and another, and two more children peered out, and walked barefoot in their bedclothes into the night. The baker stared after them.

Was that a shape he could see?

The figure was as tall as a tree and thin as a reed, with long hair that floated around it like tentacles. Its outstretched arms clasped the children to its side, one by one.

Before the baker could cry out, the whistling stopped, and the burning smell disappeared with it.

The figure and the children were nowhere to be seen.

The baker’s story of the strange figure held the village in a grip of terror. Five children were missing, and the villagers began to cast around desperately for an explanation. It was the landlord’s wife who first brought up Mary Trapper, and her uncommon height, and her strange, grey skin. It was not long until the whole of Grimstone took up her name.

Grey Mary. That is what they called her. Grey Mary was coming to steal their children.

Soon children were seeing Grey Mary everywhere, grasping out at them in their sleep from beneath their beds, roaming the streets at night, whistling a flat, hollow tune. Every child in the village lived in terror that she would snatch them away in the night.

All except two.

Farrus and Peter were twins, and the sort of boys that other children avoided. Small, pale and sickly, and always whispering to each other in a strange, shared language, they drifted around the village, plucking wings from butterflies and twisting the heads off ants. Even their mother was unsettled by them, and prayed fervently every night that they would change.

The twins didn’t care that children were disappearing; in fact, they were rather enjoying the hysteria and the spectacle that Grey Mary had brought to their dull little village. As far as they were concerned, their neighbours had it coming to them. Their mother hushed them fearfully when they said such things, but they ignored her. They wanted to see the witch for themselves, and no amount of whining from Mother was going to stop them.

In the middle of a crisp, moonless night, they crept from their cottage as their parents slept, making their way to the woods.

The following morning, their mother found them in their beds, covered in blood. She stifled a scream and ran to them. Peter’s blue eyes opened, bright and beady against the red that caked his face.

‘Get off me,’ he hissed, and his mother staggered back in surprise.

Farrus giggled.

‘Boys,’ she whispered, ‘what have you been doing?’

‘We’ve been in the woods,’ Farrus replied, with a strange, sly smile.

‘Are you injured?’ she asked.

They frowned.

‘The blood,’ she said.

Farrus and Peter said something to each other in their private language and laughed.

‘What are you saying?’ Their mother was annoyed.

‘Blood?’ Farrus giggled. ‘This isn’t blood, Mother. It’s mud.’

Their mother had not been into the woods since she was a girl, but she remembered that the clay in the soil did give the ground a red, bloody hue.

She dared not tell their father, who was rather free with his fists, and so she made them wash with a cloth, and begged them not to return to the woods.

The twins did not listen. Every few nights they would disappear from their room, and when they returned in the morning they would be covered in the red mud, and another child would be missing. Not knowing what else to do, their mother would wake on their return and creep past her sleeping husband to the twins’ room, to find her sons smiling their curious smiles, and would force them to wash.

She began to notice changes: they were growing taller, stronger, their thin hair turning thick and lustrous, and their eyes clear. Desperate to do something, she confronted her sons in the middle of the night and begged them to see sense, to stop going to the woods, to listen to their poor mother. Peter turned to her and laughed. ‘We have a new mother now,’ he sneered. She dared not ask him what he meant.

As dawn broke the following morning, their mother crept out of the house to speak to the parson. She was convinced her children had been possessed by the witch and were somehow doing her bidding. Her sons had been sleeping when she left the house, but as she hastened up the path to the parsonage she saw something that almost made her faint with horror. Walking towards the woods, their steps in unison, were the twins. Between them, holding their hands, was a little girl, no more than a toddler.

The mother called out to her sons, but they carried on, laughing and teasing the little girl.

‘Stop!’ their mother cried.

She ran after them, chasing through the woods, screaming for help, but her sons, and the child between, had disappeared.

The twins and little Betty Archer were the last children to go missing that year. None of the villagers found so much as a hair to help them in their search.

There was no clue as to why, or how, the children had been taken, and the twins’ mother remained silent about her sons’ possible involvement. What good could it do to speak of it now?

A few weeks later, after a church service for the missing children, the parson overheard one of the Trapper children whispering something to her brother.

‘It looks like Mary got what she was after,’ the Trapper girl said.

‘And what was that?’ the parson asked, not minding that he had been caught eavesdropping.

The Trapper girl looked up at him and said, with a toothless grin, ‘A family.’

‘Creepy,’ Arthur said. ‘How many children went missing?’

‘Thirteen of them altogether,’ George replied.

‘Thirteen!’

‘A witch’s dozen,’ George said, ‘including Farrus and Peter.’

‘How on earth does your grandfather find out this stuff?’ Arthur asked.

‘The parson’s diary,’ George shrugged. ‘The twins’ mother confessed everything to him before she died.’

‘Thirteen kids abducted by a witch? Sounds a bit far-fetched even for your grandfather,’ Arthur chuckled.

‘That’s what you said last term,’ George sighed. ‘And look how that turned out.’

Chapter Four

Shiverton Hall’s impressive art block had been built in 1930 by Professor Long-Pitt’s grandfather. Made almost entirely of glass and wrought iron, and covered with twisted ivy, it resembled a greenhouse or an enormous birdcage more than it did a school building. It was quite unlike the rest of the school, being a light and friendly sort of place, and after so many lessons in the darkness of Long-Pitt’s wood-panelled study and the archaeological clutter of Toynbee’s room, Arthur always looked forward to going there in spite of the fact that he had no artistic talent whatsoever.

The vast main classroom was set in an atrium in the middle of the building, and sunlight flooded in through the windows, illuminating past students’ work that hung on the walls. There were no desks in the art block, only large paint-spattered tables, and Arthur, Penny, Jake and George settled around one of them, speculating about the famous Mr Cornwall’s first lesson. Just as the bells sounded, Xanthe stumbled in, carrying a satchel bursting with books, and slumped down on the stool next to Arthur. ‘Have I missed anything?’ she whispered. ‘I was helping Long-Pitt put away the chairs at break time.’

‘No one likes a suck-up, Xanthe,’ George sang.

‘Everyone loves a suck-up, George,’ Xanthe snapped. ‘That’s why I’m going to be prime minister, and you are going to have to marry a rich, old crone because no one will ever give you a job.’

‘How old is this crone exactly?’ George asked.

‘More importantly, how rich?’ Penny giggled.

Just as Xanthe was about to throw her glittery pen at Penny, the doors to the art room opened with a slam, and Cornwall, wearing a pair of enormous sunglasses and some silver trousers that were even tighter than the last pair, staggered into the room rubbing his temples.

He looked up slowly, and jumped when he saw a sea of expectant faces staring back at him.

‘What are you all doing here?’ he groaned.

Someone cleared their throat. There was a pause.

‘Um . . .’ Xanthe said, ‘we’re your second-year class – you’re supposed to be teaching us.’

‘Teaching you?’ Cornwall replied, bewildered. ‘What am I supposed to be teaching you?’

‘Art,’ Xanthe replied slowly.

‘Oh . . . right . . . yeah,’ Cornwall said, smoothing down the worst excesses of his hair. ‘OK, everyone, grab a . . .’ He stopped and clutched his head. ‘You know . . . a . . . thing . . . you put the canvas on it . . .’

‘An easel?’ Xanthe deadpanned.

‘An easel. Exactly. Ten points to you, tiny child.’

‘We don’t have points here,’ Xanthe muttered as she pulled an easel towards the centre of the room. ‘And I’m fourteen.’

‘What’s going on with him?’ Arthur whispered to Jake.

‘No idea,’ Jake sighed. ‘He’s a conceptual artist – you know, puts heaps of rubbish on the floor, that sort of thing. He’s probably never held a paintbrush in his life.’

‘This is going to be amazing,’ Arthur giggled.

Soon all of the class were standing by their easels in a circle around Cornwall, who, having been fetched a glass of water, was looking a little more sensible.

He took off his sunglasses and winced at the blinding light.

‘Right,’ he began, ‘I’m sure your last art teacher wanted to teach you how to draw an apple, paint a still life, that sort of thing?’

The class nodded.

‘Good. Well, I am not going to teach you those things. You don’t need to paint to be an artist, OK?’

‘What about Michelangelo, sir?’ George asked.

Cornwall ignored him.

‘To be a good artist,’ Cornwall continued, ‘you need to
feel
.’

Xanthe snorted.

‘Out!’ Cornwall roared, with surprising ferocity.

‘What?’ Xanthe replied uncertainly.

‘Get out,’ he repeated, pointing towards the door. ‘I don’t mind rebellion, but I can’t stand squares. Come back next lesson with an open mind.’

Xanthe, her mouth furiously agape, snatched up her satchel and stormed out.

‘Anyone else?’ Cornwall challenged.

The class shook their heads.

They spent the rest of the lesson on a series of experimental exercises, drawing with their eyes shut, drawing upside down, drawing with the charcoal in their mouths. When the bell went it seemed as though the class had gone by in a moment.

‘No homework,’ Cornwall said as the students gathered up their things. ‘I don’t believe in homework.’

As Arthur and his friends left the art block, George was completely awestruck. ‘He’s so cool,’ he gabbled. ‘Did you see his earring? It was a skull with a snake in it!’