The Hunting Ground (2 page)

They stayed listening for a while longer, but the house remained silent, and finally Ben headed back to his room.

‘What were you doing in the East Wing?’ Elliott mouthed silently over Dad’s shoulder, but Ben ignored the question, firmly shutting his door. Elliott wondered what was going on. Secretive behaviour wasn’t Ben’s style at all. The nervous, distracted glance he’d given Elliott before closing the door hadn’t been like him either.

‘He definitely went into the East Wing tonight,’ Dad said, once they were away from Ben’s room. ‘What
I don’t understand is why he’s denying it.’

‘He probably thinks you’ll punish him.’

‘I told him I wouldn’t. Still couldn’t get a word out of him.’

‘Why don’t you believe his story about falling down the stairs?’

‘Because he came into my room last night with his feet covered in East Wing dust, that’s why,’ Dad said. ‘A little grey trail of it led right back there. I found the main entrance prised open. Ben denies it, but I didn’t break the barrier down. Unless you …’

‘No way,’ Elliott said.

‘OK, that’s what I thought. But Ben … well, I guess curiosity got the better of him.’

Elliott frowned. ‘You say he came to your room?’

‘Yeah, and he was upset, too. Hiding tears. As soon as he saw me he recovered his nerve, but something strange must have happened to him in that place because he was all emotional. At first I thought it might be his head injury, but that’s just superficial. Whatever happened to him in there, though, he doesn’t want to talk about it.’

‘You reckon he got lost inside?’

‘Probably. There’s no working electricity in that part of the house. He could easily have slipped and hit something. Scared himself. Only …’ Dad hesitated ‘ … I’ve been trying to work out how he got in there.
Whoever originally sealed the East Wing up used a cross-pattern of reinforced wood bracing. That’s pretty hard to shift.’

‘You don’t think Ben could have opened it?’

‘No, he could have done it. It’s just that it would have taken him ages. He must have been standing there for hours in the dark, patiently dismantling the wooden slats layer by layer. And he took it down quietly as well, or I’d definitely have heard something.’ Dad shrugged, gave Elliott a tired grin. ‘Oh, well, I’ll ask him again tomorrow. Or more likely he’ll tell
you
what happened.’

‘Yeah, you know Ben,’ Elliott said lightly. ‘He can’t keep anything to himself for long.’

But secretly Elliott was more concerned than he was letting on. If there was anything Ben hated it was big shows of emotion. It would have taken a lot to drive him into Dad’s room. Why didn’t he just come and tell me what happened? Elliott wondered.

Dad yawned and clapped an arm around Elliott’s shoulder. ‘Before we go back to bed, let’s make sure we haven’t got an unwanted guest sharing the house with us, eh?’

Elliott nodded, grateful to have Dad taking him seriously as they searched the house. For over an hour they went methodically from room to room, finding nothing. They ended up at the attic on the fifth floor. Easing out a stiff set of iron steps latched to the ceiling,
Dad made his way up and squeezed through the narrow entranceway. He shone a torch around.

‘Well, well, no intruders,’ Dad chuckled, ‘but some poor girl’s missing out.’

‘What’s up there?’

‘A doll’s house. Looks like a vintage model, too. Someone loved it enough to preserve it in mint condition. You want to see it?’

‘Nope,’ Elliott said dryly.

After the search was over Elliott said goodnight to Dad and went back to his own bedroom. He hadn’t quite decided to dismiss the noises, though, and lay awake for a long time. He was just beginning to nod off again when he had a feeling that someone was inside the room with him.

Quickly sitting up, he stared around. No one was there, but for a moment he thought he heard the lilting echo of a rhyme. Then he wondered if it was his own breath scaring him. What was going on? It wasn’t like him to be this jittery. He always settled fast into a new place. Why was he so jumpy?

Glancing around his musty bedroom, Elliott shivered. The furnishings had been untouched for decades and, as he peered up at the ceiling, a feeling crept over him. It was a feeling of being indescribably
alone
. Not scared – at least not scared enough to wake Dad or Ben up again –
but horribly lonely. Elliott wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t a feeling he associated with himself. He didn’t know where it came from.

Propping himself up on his elbow, he checked the room again. His bed creaked and it was cold. Despite being the middle of summer, after years of neglect and lack of heating the entire house felt clammy and abandoned. There wasn’t even an aerial for TV or an internet connection in Glebe House, and in the dreary silence Elliott missed his friends. They’d moved over a hundred miles from the last house, so seeing them wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. All their lives Dad had taken on generally less interesting or well-paid work so that Elliott and Ben could at least attend the same schools across whole academic years, but money was tight at the moment and the Glebe House contract had simply been too lucrative to turn down.

Elliott sighed. Until he started his A-levels at his new college in a month’s time, the chances of bumping into any interesting company were thin. Glebe House was so isolated that it took a full ten minutes to walk from the iron-grilled front gates to the main house. The grounds were endless as well. But Elliott had already decided that getting to know new people could wait. He’d make plenty of new friends in college in September. He and Ben would be outsiders here for
a while, of course, but they were used to that, and could rely on each other.

Yawning, he reached for his MP
₃
and played a few random tracks. Half an hour later, still feeling restless, he decided to get up. He’d check the house again. Do it on his own this time, without Dad holding his hand. A point of pride.

Striding through the bedroom door, he paced to the end of the corridor.

A wide staircase curved below him. The staircase was oak-panelled and swept down to a cavernous hall. The hall was the centrepiece of the house. Dad had told Elliott that its white-mottled marble floor alone was worth more than the entire last house he’d done up.

Elliott didn’t care. He preferred carpets.

Looking down, he could see the entrance to the high-ceilinged morning-room. Two broad reception rooms lay beyond that, which overlooked a sizeable lake. Glebe House even had its own library. When they were built the rooms must have been light and airy, but now they were mostly shuttered and obscured by dirt.

Elliott paused at the top of the staircase. Without admitting it to anyone, he’d been unnerved by his first sight of Glebe House. The property, unusually for a seventeenth-century dwelling, was five storeys high, and set at all sorts of crazy angles. Trees had been left to
grow unchecked as well, so that they now shaded two-thirds of the house for most of the day.

But perhaps the most sinister aspect was the paintings. The main house was filled with oil portraits of its first owner. The man had placed literally hundreds of portraits of himself in every room, corridor, alcove and stairwell of the property.

In each portrait the owner was dressed in leather outdoor clothing – hunting attire – and stood with a weapon in his hand. Sometimes the weapon was a gun. Other times a sword. The owner had obviously favoured knives, but occasionally his weapon of choice was something more exotic, like a musket, crossbow or lance. And in all the portraits, lying at his feet, was the animal he had just killed. A fallow deer, its throat coated in blood. A hairy-sided boar. Doves. Gutted fish. White-feathered owls. Other birds, too, their lifeless feathers always spread wide by the owner’s own hand.

There were even cats and dogs. Elliott had paused for a long time to look at the owner’s expression when he saw those. There was almost a smile there. It was as if on that particular day he’d run out of wild things on the estate to kill, so rather than wait had simply chosen one of his loyal hunting hounds or even a pet to terrorise.

The owner was always the central figure in the portraits. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a tight, red-curled beard, small close-set eyes and fleshy
lips. The teeth protruding from those lips were large and exceptionally white. Maybe the owner had asked the artist to touch up their whiteness to improve his looks, but Elliott didn’t think so. Otherwise, surely he’d also have asked for the goofyness the oversized teeth gave him to be smoothed out as well. The owner’s expression in the paintings was always enigmatic, too. It was as if even after all this time dead he still held the advantage, knew something you did not.

But the portraits weren’t the only ominous aspect of Glebe House. The estate had its own graveyard as well, hunkering in cold stone next to a church at the northern edge of the grounds. Locals from the village a mile or so away had used it for centuries to bury their dead.

And then there was the mysterious East Wing.

What had happened to Ben inside there? He’d find out tomorrow.

Stretching out his arms, Elliott checked the time: nearly two a.m. No wonder he was so tired. Giving the third-floor corridor a last quick once-over, he returned to his room, slid back under the bed covers and tucked the musty blankets around his shoulders.

Then he listened. Glebe House was settling down for the night, its timbers and ironwork contracting with the cold. Elliott smiled as he heard the ancient mattress on his bed groan under his weight. Gradually, to that familiar, unfrightening sound, he drifted off to sleep.
But just before he did so he realised that he could hear a distant noise again. It was like a voice whispering incessantly. But the sound was faint, and Elliott dozed off with its puzzle still trickling across his mind.

*

Once Elliott was fully asleep, the grey-faced visitor made its way back inside his bedroom. It flashed rapidly through his doorway this time. The hours were beginning to speed up for it again.

Elliott lay on his back with his mouth open. In the moonlight his tongue glistened like a wet shining disk. Keeping to the shadows, the visitor watched that tongue closely. It opened its own smaller mouth, imitating his expression.

Then it retreated again. Fetching the baby-sized object up from the floor, the visitor kissed it once, twice, before dragging it away back down the staircase. And as it departed, it sang a little ditty:

Five minutes to midnight,

Five minutes to treason,

Here comes the truth without the reason.

No time left for fathers & children,

Here comes the ogre,

Into his season.

Next morning over breakfast Elliott noticed that Ben was back to his usual cocky, confident self. There was none of the subdued irritability of last night. His hazel-green eyes twinkled when Dad mentioned the doll’s house.

‘Did you play with all the dolls inside, then?’ he asked Elliott.

‘I gave each of them a good hour,’ Elliott replied. ‘I knew they’d get grumpy otherwise.’

Ben leaned forward. ‘I bet you loved it.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Elliott said. ‘I left them all out for you. You can sneak up there when we’re not around.’

Dad reached for the milk. ‘’Course,’ he said airily to Elliott, ‘I still remember you playing with my old train set when you were Ben’s age.’

‘I was
nine
when I stopped playing with that, actually,’ Elliott pointed out, which made Dad and Ben both roar with laughter.

Towards the end of breakfast, Elliott gazed out
through the kitchen’s double-bay windows at the western gardens. A huge area of tiered lawns, collapsed walls and dried-up ornamental fountains met his eye.

‘You’ve really got your work cut out this time,’ he said to Dad.

‘You’re not kidding,’ Dad groaned. ‘The garden features alone will take another week. I’ve even been asked to hose down the gnomes.’

‘The gnomes?’

‘Trust me, they’re out there. The grass is so long the little fellas are hiding.’

Ben looked up from his plate. ‘Dad?’ he said hesitantly. ‘When you got given this job, were you told anything about the house?’

Both Dad and Elliott turned in curiosity towards Ben. He normally didn’t care about the history of a property.

‘Why do you ask?’ Dad said.

‘No reason. It’s just … the portraits.’ Ben stared self-consciously around him. ‘They’re weird, aren’t they? But sort of interesting as well. Do you know anything about him? The man in the pictures, I mean?’

‘Not really,’ Dad said, rubbing his stubbled chin. ‘But you only have to look at the paintings to know there was something wrong with him. All those animals he was so proud of killing. Plus, well, I’ve never come across anything like the East Wing before.’

‘It’s not a standard build, is it?’ Elliott said.

‘No,’ Dad answered. ‘It’s a bespoke job. A truly nasty bit of construction. Now that it’s been conveniently opened up’ – Dad didn’t avoid looking at Ben – ‘I’ve had a chance to check around in there. It’s a labyrinth. Deliberately underlit and confusing throughout. Literally hundreds of criss-crossing corridors that all lead back on themselves.’