The Hunting Ground

by Cliff McNish

  He drew both boys closer to him. ‘This little girl …’ Elliott could see how difficult it was for Dad to believe in dead little girls, saw him searching for a simpler, more logical explanation. ‘ … This Eve,’ he continued. ‘Are you sure she matched the description of the girl in the diary?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elliott and Ben said together.

  ‘It was the same girl? You’re certain?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Ben insisted.

  ‘In that case,’ Dad said turning towards him, ‘I need to understand exactly what happened to you in the East Wing last night. Did you just fall over in the dark when you went inside? Or is there something else I should know?’

  Ben clammed up, his face pale. When it was obvious he wasn’t prepared to say anything more, Dad exchanged a concerned private look with Elliott and drew him aside. ‘I wonder if the old woman you saw outside the garden, Jane Roberts, knows anything about what’s going on?’ he said. ‘She seems to be the same one as in the diary.’

  Elliott had been thinking along the same lines. ‘Yeah, we should ask her,’ he agreed. ‘If the diary’s telling the truth, she’s linked to the ghosts somehow. She can’t live too far away. She was on foot when we saw her.’

  Dad nodded. ‘I’ll make some calls.’ Then he gave Elliott a measured gaze. ‘I’ve no idea what’s going on around here, but are you OK to stay with Ben for a while?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘A ghost,’ Dad said, shaking his head.

  ‘We did see her,’ Elliott told him firmly. ‘I thought she needed help. That’s what she told us.’

  ‘So you went in the East Wing after her?’

  ‘I know it was stupid …’ Elliott began, thinking Dad was criticising him.

  Dad placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Yes, it was stupid, but it took guts as well. Going after her into the East Wing like that. I’m not sure I’d have done it.’

  That surprised Elliott. He’d never known anything frighten Dad.

  ‘Twice I’ve been inside that place,’ Dad said. ‘Both times I was out again in less than five minutes. Looking at those portraits, I wonder if there was anything the owner didn’t hunt. Or want to.’ And as he said that, a pinch of fear settled over Dad’s face. Elliott didn’t like seeing it. The timing made him feel strangely vulnerable.

  Together they led Ben back to Elliott’s room. Dad took the room next door. ‘I’ll make the calls from in here,’ he said. ‘Shout if you need me.’

  Elliott removed his trainers and sat on one of the antique, upholstered chairs near the window of his room. He was still shaking from his ordeal inside the East Wing. He kept seeing the owner’s knee on the rise, the willingness of the land to receive his booted foot.

  Next door he could hear Dad’s urgent voice on the phone. Ben, on the other hand, was quiet and subdued. Elliott tried talking to him about Eve, but Ben didn’t want to talk about anything to do with her, and Elliott decided to leave him alone for now. Eventually, though, it was Ben who broke the silence. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ he said. ‘I found something on the fourth floor.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a special portrait of the owner. I came across it when I was looking for you.’

  Making sure Dad knew where they would be, Elliott let Ben lead him upstairs. In an out-of-the-way bedroom, tucked in an alcove, concealed behind a screen, was a large painting of a teenage boy.

  ‘How did you find this?’ Elliott asked.

  Ben shrugged, gazing vaguely at the floor. ‘I’m not sure. I just followed the other pictures.’ He looked puzzled. ‘They sort of led me to it.’

  The painting was of a boy. A boy around seventeen years old, wearing heavy outdoor clothing. His mudcrusted brown boots were tucked inside padded baggy trousers. Elliott recalled Janey’s words from the diary. ‘Sam Cosgrove. A farmer’s boy. He died with his boots on. Hunted.’

  Was this him? Elliott sensed it was.

  The hunting ground was familiar to Elliott by now from his time in the East Wing. There it was, the slope and woods, awaiting the pursuit. But this time the owner hadn’t yet started up the slope. He’d delayed the chase to record the emotion of the scene. Specifically, Sam Cosgrove’s emotion.

  At first Elliott thought the owner was missing from the picture. Then he realised his mistake. The owner was as present as ever. Only this time he was reflected in Sam’s wide dark eyes. As Elliott leaned forward, the owner seemed to lean forward with him. His body was set in a crouch. Stripped down to shirt sleeves, he was coming at Sam with his bare hands, his enjoyment of the scene caught with relish.

  Elliott gasped, pulling back. It was, he realised, a statement of intent. The owner was brashly declaring that he did not always hide behind traditional weapons like guns and blades. Sometimes, he was saying, when I hunt in private, I alone am the weapon.

  The picture was damaged. At some point in the past a knife had been slashed through it. Deliberately? It looked like it, because the cut went right through the middle of Sam’s lower face. It made his exact expression unreadable. Oddly, however, the damage to the canvas itself appalled Elliott as much as what had happened to Sam Cosgrove. He wanted to repair the painting. Fix it. Briefly that was more important to him than anything else.

  Shaking that ridiculous thought from his head, Elliott looked across at his brother.

  Ben seemed unaffected by the portrait. ‘I’ve found the slope and the woods as well,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘You can see them from upstairs.’

  A dazed Elliott allowed Ben to guide him to the fifth floor.

  And there it was, in plain sight – the hunting ground. It wasn’t concealed or hidden away. It was a broad hillside surrounded by woods within easy walking distance of Glebe House. The topography of the land simply made it hard to recognise from the lower floors.

  Nothing had significantly changed in all the years since the hunting ground’s depiction in the paintings. The woods ranged around the slope were still extensive. If anything, the hunting ground seemed to have grown since the owner’s time, the trees fuller, more numerous. The only major difference was that the cleared slope was now strewn with meadow-grass.

  Seeing the hunting ground confirmed as real and still there made all the hairs rise on Elliott’s neck. It was also obvious now why the owner had included the trees as well as the slope as part of his killing territory. The slope alone simply wasn’t large enough for a proper pursuit. It was only a short scurry to get up the bank, at least for a strong adult. The owner might have used that for a quick chase and hack-down, but for a true contest he needed the woods as well. The thick trees fringing the slope offered a chance for his prey to hide, or even escape. Much more interesting.

  Turning away in disgust, Elliott looked at Ben … and found him standing utterly, utterly still. His arms were relaxed and by his side. Elliott realised that he had been standing like that, staring raptly at the hunting ground, ever since they entered the room. He also noticed for the first time a snag of tell-tale dust in Ben’s hair.

  ‘When did you go back into the East Wing?’ he demanded, shocked.

  ‘I … I was searching for you, remember?’ Ben said guardedly.

  ‘You never told me you went into the East Wing.’

  ‘Well I did, OK? I thought you’d gone in after Eve, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to go inside. To help you, I mean.’ A confused expression crossed Ben’s face. ‘In the end all I found in there was … well, I’ll show you.’

  He led Elliott back downstairs to his own bedroom. Swiping Old Albert off the mattress, Ben reached up to the mantelpiece. Several loose sheets of paper were there. Elliott recognised the writing style at once.

  ‘Is that the bit of the diary we gave Dad to read?’

  ‘No.’ Ben gazed at him innocently. ‘It’s the next part.’

  Elliott snatched the pages off him. ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘It was just lying on the floor in the East Wing.’

  ‘It wasn’t there when I was
inside,’ Elliott said suspiciously. ‘I’d have seen it.’

  Ben looked genuinely confused. ‘It’s dark in there. You must have missed it. The diary was just lying right in front of me when I went in. The pages were all mixed up, but I’ve sorted them out.’

  Elliott stared at Ben. ‘Hold on. Are you saying that you didn’t go to find Dad after we saw Eve? That first you went into the East Wing again, found these, took the time to get the pages in the right order, brought them up here, and only then went to look for Dad?’

  Ben nodded. Elliott could tell that Ben saw nothing wrong with the sequence in which he’d done things. What was going on with him? Shaking his head, Elliott fingered the pages. ‘Have you read them?’ he asked. ‘Did you do that before looking for me as well?’

  ‘No.’ Ben’s face was expressionless.

  ‘So let’s do it,’ Elliott said in bewildered exasperation. ‘Let’s read them.’

  ‘All right.’

  But Ben seemed to be in no hurry to get started. He was distracted, his gaze constantly being drawn to the nearest portrait. Elliott recognised it. The pike fish. It had not been in Ben’s room earlier. It was meant to be hidden under magazines in Elliott’s own bedroom. Ben had obviously taken it from there and added it to his personal collection of portraits. That collection seemed to be growing. No less than six paintings of the owner gazed down from the walls now.

  ‘Why did you put the picture of the pike up?’ Elliott asked him nervously.

  Ben just shrugged.

  Feeling his pulse quicken, Elliott turned to the diary. The first entry started the day after the last. Nothing was missing. But the tone was different. Previously the diary had contained jokes, unusual facts, as well as occasional references to events taking place in the village. Now only two subjects retained the attention of the increasingly frightened diarist, Theo Stark.

  11

  JANEY

  9th November. No matter what Mum and Dad say to her, Eve keeps going inside the East Wing. ‘It’s no accident,’ Janey told me this morning. ‘It’s not the mystery of the dark Eve finds so alluring. She’s not being naughty, Theo. It’s him. It’s Cullayn, murmuring from inside. Always the hunter.’

  ‘Cullayn?’

  ‘The original owner,’ Janey said grimly. ‘The man who built the East Wing and did all those paintings your mum’s starting to admire so much. Vincent Cullayn. The murderer of Alice, Sam, Leo and Nell. And a lot more adults.’

  While I stood there blinking in shock, Janey took my hand and walked us across the estate. On the way she told me about Alice Everson. Alice died in 1689. Officially she fell down some stairs while delivering a message to a labourer in one of Cullayn’s outbuildings. But what really happened, the ghost version of Alice told Janey, was that Cullayn carried her off to his hunting ground. He let her loose on it, counted slowly to one thousand and then went after her.

  Nell Smith was found lifeless in the kitchen of the main house. Everyone thought she’d been working alone there for hours. In fact, Cullayn had snatched her out, carried her to the hunting ground and brought her back to the kitchen while she was still freshly dead.

  ‘But … but why did he kill them?’ I asked, unable to believe what Janey was telling me.

  ‘He liked killing,’ Janey said evenly. ‘Who can say why anyone enjoys something like that? Sam thinks it started with the animals – Cullayn had always brutally hunted those. Then one day a troublesome farm hand disappeared, and doing away with him seems to have given Cullayn a taste for murder. The deaths and disappearances gradually escalated after that. The four kids Cullayn took made a nice change for him from the adults. Easy prey, of course, but it also gave Cullayn the opportunity to be creative. He invited Leo Jenkins into his study. While he was there Cullayn offered him a little gift: a bright blue cape. Leo was a bit surprised when Cullayn began hanging heavy bits of metal on his own legs and shoulders, though. Cullayn loaded himself down with so many weights for Leo that he could barely stagger up the slope of his own hunting ground.’

  I stared in horror at Janey. ‘But I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why … why wasn’t he stopped?’

  ‘Because he was careful,’ Janey explained. ‘Cullayn owned several estates in this part of the country, and he made sure there was never more than a victim or two per season. Nothing too obvious. A drowning. Someone burning in a fire. A man falling unseen from his horse, and then crushed to death.’ Janey shrugged. ‘Some people just went missing. A wife disappears, but her husband is known to be violent. A young man vanishes, but so what? He was the ambitious type, and not liked anyway. Cullayn kept his eyes and ears open for opportunities like that.

  ‘But Sam became suspicious, and followed Cullayn one time,’ Janey went on. ‘Saw him hunting on the slope. There was still no proof, though. The woman involved just disappeared. It was Sam’s word against Cullayn’s. Sam himself disappeared shortly after. No one knows what happened to him, but I do.’ Janey shivered. ‘Cullayn brought him to the hunting ground. Welcomed him in his own special way.

  ‘That’s how Cullayn got caught, in fact,’ Janey said. ‘He was so furious with Sam that he was careless, left clues. When people finally came to get Cullayn for Sam’s murder – they found no evidence he’d killed anyone else – Cullayn led them on a merry hunt all over the Glebe estate. They never found him.’ Janey clicked her fingers. ‘Pff. He vanished. Squirmed his way out of his hanging. But the children know where he went. Cullayn died inside the East Wing. An accident, actually.’ Janey smiled. ‘You see, he had a secret room inside one of the walls. While everyone was searching for him, Cullayn hid himself in there for months. He only slipped out at night to take food and water from stashes he’d set aside on the estate in case he got caught. From outside, the secret room was opened by a pressure point on the wall. But inside the room there was just a simple lever. Cullayn used it once too often. The lever snapped off, and he couldn’t fix it. He died of thirst, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

  I followed Janey in a daze across the southern grounds. She stopped to peer sharply up at the main house. Letting go of my hand, she turned to face me.

  ‘Cullayn’s an incredibly dangerous spirit,’ she murmured. ‘Normally only the ghosts of children can remain with us in our world. Even for them it’s a hard thing to do, but for adults the pull of the other side is too strong to resist. Their spirits leave quickly. Cullayn, though, built the Glebe estate out of his own brutal desires, and somehow he’s managed to keep himself here. And he’s still hunting.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By encouraging children inside. Children like Eve. If he can capture her spirit at the point of death he can feed off her. Use her energy to boost his own. He’s stuck here for now, close to where he died. But if he can get energy from another ghost he might even be able to escape and carry on hunting beyond the Glebe estate.’ Janey pursed her lips. ‘The ghost children are constantly having to hide from Cullayn. They evade him by staying still. But doing that’s hard for them, Theo. They’re spirit-things. If the air moves they want to move with it. Cullayn looks for that motion when he drifts across the grounds.’

  ‘But why don’t they just leave?’ I asked.

  ‘I keep encouraging them to,’ Janey said. ‘To just go, pass on to the other side, get away from Cullayn. But they won’t. Not while he’s still here.’ Janey shivered as a breeze came up. ‘The truth is that the ghost children have been waiting all this time for someone like me to come along,’ she said quietly. ‘Someone able to hear and see them. That way they can at least warn us. So far Cullayn hasn’t killed anyone since he died, but the ghost children think it’s only a matter of time before he does. And he seems to have taken a particular interest in Eve. He’s been more active than ever recently. The ghost children aren’t sure why. But they’re trying to protect you by warning me. Cullayn’s already influencing Eve. You’ve seen that. He can’t touch the living. Not physically. But he still has influence. He’s dead, but the hunt goes on. It
’s all in the portraits. They’re calling Eve closer. Even if you can’t hear them, they’re whispering. And they’re inviting you, too, Theo.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Don’t pretend you haven’t caught yourself looking at them,’ Janey said. ‘Eve’s just easier to influence. That’s why Cullayn’s concentrating on her. But listen …’ Janey took a sharp breath. ‘Because of my talent, skill, whatever you want to call it, I’ve discovered something. I’ve realised I can do more than just warn people. I can be a weapon against Cullayn as well.’

  ‘A weapon?’

  Janey nodded eagerly. ‘There are tricks, ways to pierce Cullayn’s little realm. Ways to attack him. I’m learning all the time. Things the ghost children can’t do, or won’t, but maybe Ican.’

  Janey gave me an uncertain smile. ‘I’m going after him, Theo. I’m not ready yet, but I won’t let Cullayn hide forever. He’s like a snake, waiting inside the East Wing, biding his time. Eve offers him the promise of far more fresh energy than the ghost children can give him after all these years dead. To get it, Cullayn’s doing everything he can to make sure she dies within his reach. If he can take Eve’s spirit for himself he’ll become much more powerful. He’s still incredibly ambitious. He intends to leave this place and take his hunt to the wider world. That’s what Cullayn wants. To hunt forever, wherever he feels like it. But to get away from the Glebe estate he needs Eve dead. And he probably needs you, too.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you,’ Janey growled. ‘Stop thinking it’s only Eve’s who’s in danger. Adults are no good to Cullayn. He’ll kill your parents if he gets half the chance – he’ll do that just for fun – but their spirits slip too fast across the divide for him to capture their energy. There’s a moment of hesitation before the other side takes a child, though. It’s you and Eve he needs. Cullayn will have an opportunity then, at the point of death. He just has to be there when it happens. And to be sure of that he needs to make it happen.’ She gripped my arm. ‘No, it’s OK, don’t worry, I won’t let him hurt either of you,’ she said. ‘So far Cullayn’s stayed away from me. I think it’s because he’s scared of what I can do to him. He feels safe tucked up in the East Wing, but why should he?’ She lifted her chin. ‘I’m going after him.’