Monster (15 page)

You go for the eyes. The throat. Weak points, see?

Can I kick you in the crotch again?

If you must. Use any means necessary. Just don’t give up.

Eventually I allowed the sound of the roaring wind and
the dumb pummelling of the snow against the windows to lull me into a twitchy, troubled sleep.

The next thing I knew, I was being awoken by someone vigorously shaking my shoulder.

‘Nash.’

‘What?’ I croaked. I opened my eyes to see Maggie, her tiny clip-on book light clutched in her grasp, illuminating one side of her face. She was looking at nothing and everything all at once, like her eyes were searching for sounds. ‘What is it?’

‘I heard something,’ she whispered. ‘Something outside.’

‘Like what? What sort of noise?’

‘I dunno. I was in the bathroom and I heard it through the toilet window. Sort of scuffling. A scrabbling noise. Should we go and check it out?’

I nodded, grabbed my own book light from my bedside drawer and clicked it on, settling it on my tissue box while I found my pea coat and slippers. I swept my tiny light around the room. There were four lumps in the other beds: Clarice, Regan, Dianna and Tabby. All seemed to be sleeping soundly.

I joined Maggie at the window. We drew back the curtains and stared out into the dark night. It was still snowing, though there didn’t seem to be any wind. The only things we could see through the cold panes of glass were the pitched snow on the ground outside and the reflections of our book lights.

‘I can’t see anything,’ I said. Then I heard a noise. It sounded halfway between a roar and a cough. And not too far away either. Maggie’s gaze locked onto mine.

‘What. Was. That?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, craning my neck to try to see further through the window than the freezing single pane would allow. ‘It definitely came from out there, though.’

We heard it again. Further away now. And another noise accompanying it. A rumbling noise. Like a …

‘Purr,’ we both said at the same time. ‘Definitely a purr.’

‘Okay, what do we do, what do we do?’ Maggie whispered.

‘What do you mean, what do we do?’ I whispered back. ‘What
can
we do?’

‘That thing’s out there right now. That stupid little gimp Regan was right!’

‘We don’t know that,’ I said. ‘We don’t know what that was.’

‘We both heard a purr, Nash. The kind of purr a mahoosive cat with great big teeth makes.’

‘I know. But even if it is, we’re helpless, aren’t we? We’ve just got to stay put, in here, where it’s safe.’

There came another noise, even further away now. An echoey, throaty growl from the direction of the Landscape Gardens.

‘You heard that too, right?’ said Maggie, her breath fogging up the glass.

‘Yeah. I heard that.’ I caught my breath. ‘It’s gone away now, over there.’

‘It was stalking the school, wasn’t it? Looking for a way to get inside. That’s why I heard it in the girls’ bathrooms and why we just heard it then. It knows we’re in here, Nash.’

We waited at the window for what seemed like an hour. There were no more noises. I looked across at the digital clock on Clarice’s nightstand. It had just gone one a.m.

‘All the doors downstairs are either bolted or wedged. Nothing’s getting in. I checked it all when we came up.’

‘You’re sure?’ said Maggie.

‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘We’re safe.’

She looked at me and gulped. ‘I need a drink. My mouth’s gone all dry.’ She went back to her bed and opened the door of her nightstand, retrieving a mostly empty bottle of Evian. After swigging down the remaining dregs, she screwed the lid back on and flung the bottle onto the rainbow rug beside the wardrobe. It landed with a dull
bonk.

‘Probably was a fox or something. They make some weird-assed noises, don’t they?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, drawing the curtains again and removing my slippers and coat.

‘Morons,’ she muttered, clutching her book light.

I smiled. ‘Yeah. Foxes are morons.’

‘And badgers. I hate badgers. And stoats. And them things that build dams.’

‘Beavers?’

‘Yeah. Bloody stupid noises.’

I laughed.

‘Nash?’

‘Yeah?’

‘What if it’s … the Beast?’

‘It won’t be, Maggie.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah. Go back to sleep.’

‘I can’t. Nash … I’m scared. I wanted to leave this bloody place
before
I knew there was a real-assed tiger or something in the woods but now it’s like … Oh God, there it is again.’

I sat up in bed, my heart pumping for all it was worth.
There was no point denying it any more. We both had ears. And that had been a definite growl. ‘Even if it was … that, it can’t get in. All the doors downstairs are bolted. We’re safe. I promise.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m sure.’

‘You don’t think we should go down and get some javelins out of the sports cupboard, just in case?’

‘Do you want to go down two flights of stairs, all the way down Long Corridor, past the gym, down towards the cloakrooms and break in to the sports cupboard and get a javelin? In the dark?’

‘No.’

‘Well then.’

‘Okay. Night.’

‘Night.’

I found it oddly refreshing that Maggie was more scared than me. That Maggie was scared of anything at all. She was always so fearless. Even when we played netball against some really rough schools, who ripped us mercilessly for our long pink socks and tidy hair and straight partings. We were all petrified, but they never messed with Maggie. But all the while she’d been carrying this fear about the Beast and I hadn’t seen it. I mean, I was fearful of whatever the Beast was too, and the fact we had a murderer in the vicinity wasn’t filling my mind with Christmas mirth, but these weren’t the biggest monsters in my mind. The phone call was the thing keeping me awake. That had chilled me to the marrow.

‘Nash?’ Maggie was back under her duvet now, pulled up tightly to her chin.

‘Yeah?’ I said, getting back into my bed.

‘It couldn’t have been the madman, could it? You know, Dianna’s brother.’

‘He hasn’t come up to the house before, has he?’ I replied. ‘Why would he start tonight? He wouldn’t risk anyone calling the police to report an intruder.’

‘Yeah, but we can’t call the police, can we? The phone’s out.’

‘He doesn’t know that,’ I said. ‘Try to get some sleep, okay?’ I reached out for the switch on my book light.

‘Nash?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘Leave the light on for a bit, yeah?’

W
e were all up before first light. Maggie hadn’t said another word about what we’d heard in the night, either because she didn’t want to look scared in front of the others or because she couldn’t be sure she’d heard anything out of the ordinary. Nights in the countryside
were
full of odd noises and creatures crawling around that didn’t do so in the daytime.

I’d slept for about two hours in the end. Everything was now coloured a sick grey by my new certainty that my brother was either dying or dead. Getting the news was a mere formality. I had to stop hoping.

When I was showered and dressed, I put on the greeny-blue Howlite necklace Charlie had bought for me up the Gorge, tucking it beneath my collar so it couldn’t be seen
and feeling the cold stones against my neck. I padded downstairs to the payphone and checked to see if a dialling tone had magically returned to us in the night. It hadn’t. The world outside the windows was white and silent in every single direction. None of us knew how deep the snow was, but we all knew roughly where the ponds and lakes were so we could steer clear of them. I cleaned the massive kitchen oven while I waited for the others to come downstairs. It had congealed red and yellow drips of lasagne sauce on the metal shelves inside, and I needed to keep my hands busy. It kept the thoughts at arm’s length.

Leaving the two long oven shelves in the big sink to soak, I joined the others in the main hall to formulate a search plan. Bundled up in tights, jumpers, coats, boots and anything else to keep the cold air out, we gathered at the foot of the main stairs.

‘Dianna, why don’t you take this one?’ I suggested, sitting on the bottom stair and leaning against the warmth of Brody’s deep soft fur.

Her eyes swivelled from me to Maggie to Clarice, and then back to me. ‘Take what?’

‘The lead. Decide who’s going to do what, where we’re going to search first.’ I felt sleep tug at my heavy eyelids.

‘No, I can’t, Nash. I don’t know where to start.’

I looked at Clarice. She had so much make-up on I was surprised she could hold her head up. No help there.

‘Okay,’ I said sleepily, getting off the stairs. ‘Someone needs to stay with Tabby.’

Dianna and Clarice both shot their hands up.

‘Dianna, you stay. Keep Brody with you. See if you can find Mrs Saul-Hudson’s spare set of keys in case we can’t find Matron’s.’

‘Aye aye, Cap’n,’ said Dianna, doing a weird salute thing, and seemingly delighted with her new role as Tabby’s nanny. Removing her coat and boots, she took Tabby’s hand and led her and the dog off in search of DVDs and colouring books.

‘What do you need me to do, Nash?’ said Maggie, and a little burst of warmth flooded into my chest. I knew I could rely on her. ‘How about weapons?’

‘Weapons?’ cried Clarice. ‘Why weapons? We’re a search party, aren’t we?’

‘Will you keep your voice down!’ whispered Maggie. ‘I think we need weapons because there’s an escaped murderer out there.’ She looked at Regan who was rubbing the tooth on her yarn necklace. ‘And who knows what else. We should be prepared.’

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said. ‘We probably won’t need them, but it would be good to have them on us all the same.’

‘What did you have in mind?’ said Clarice, more quietly this time.

I shrugged. I didn’t really know what I meant. My mind was too fogged up with flashing images of us finding a body in the snow. Frozen blood on the ground. Gnashing teeth. ‘Knives?’ I suggested.

‘I couldn’t stab anyone,’ said Regan. ‘I just couldn’t. I’m not strong enough.’

‘Ooh, I don’t think I could either,’ said Clarice.

I looked at Maggie. ‘I probably could,’ she said. ‘If I had to.’

‘What if your life was at risk? Or someone else’s life was at risk?’ I said, turning to the two naysayers. Neither of them said anything.

‘All right, fair enough then,’ said Maggie. ‘How about if one of them goes with each one of us? We’ll take a kitchen
knife each and one of these two pussies and we’ll go off in two directions, yeah? Bagsy not going with Clarice.’

Maggie and I found two small, sheathed fruit knives in the kitchen. She tied one loosely to the belt loop of her coat while I shoved mine in the top of my drawstring tote bag and carried it on my back. I didn’t think I’d be able to use mine. I’d been attacked by a little dog once when I was younger, and I’d just stood there, frozen to the spot, without the courage to bat it away. We also grabbed three javelins from the PE cupboard for poking the snow.

‘It’s too heavy. I can’t lift it,’ Clarice moaned, so she had to make to with a rounders post, sans base. Outside, the air was bitterly cold and the snow was still flurrying down in light drifts. The place was white and crisp as a new duvet and the landscape was completely snuggled up for winter. White had enveloped the trees, the flint steps—even the school minibus was just a large rectangular white lump. It hid everything that had been green, brown or grey. And anything that could have been covered in blood. I didn’t know if that was good or bad.

‘There’s no footprints anywhere,’ I said. ‘No one’s been wandering around in the night, which is good. Maybe Leon hasn’t left from the Tree House, just like Dianna said.’

A red blush quickly developed over Clarice’s face, even on her eyelids.

‘It might not mean that,’ said Maggie, pulling her scarf away from her mouth and nose for a second to sniff the air. ‘He might have gone the back way round, past the stable block. He could be … What’s that smell?’

‘Smells like burnt toast,’ said Clarice.

‘Yeah, it does,’ said Regan, snapping her head round to look for a source. ‘It stinks.’

‘Never mind that,’ I said. We’d reached the large white expanse that used to be Edward’s Pond, the gateway to the Landscape Gardens. ‘We need to start looking for Matron. Clarice and I will check the top path by the Chapel, cos that’s where I last saw her.’

‘The Tree House—’ Regan muttered.

‘Yes. Maggie, you and Regan take the bottom path that runs parallel to ours and check the bank in case she’s fallen somewhere. And we’ll meet up by the Tree House.’

‘The Tree House—’ said Regan again.

‘Yes, we’ll go there once we’ve checked the paths, in case she’s still alive.’

‘No, the Tree House!’ said Regan, for a third time.

‘What?’ I looked behind me, fearing the worst, but seeing something I didn’t expect. It was the burning shack from my dream.

‘Yeezus wept,’ said Maggie.

‘Oh my God,’ said Clarice.

Except I wasn’t dreaming. There was a fire burning, up in the trees. A ferocious orange bonfire, vomiting huge grey plumes of smoke up into the sky on the far left side of the valley. It was where the Tree House used to be.

I
ran along the valley path, stumbling and slipping and kicking up powdery snow the whole way until I was parallel with the burning Tree House. Then I scrambled up the snowy bank. Someone—Maggie—was yelling my name.

‘Nash, what are you doing? Come back!’

I scrabbled desperately to get a foothold on the bank of slippery snow, the stench of burning wood strong in my nostrils. Inch by inch by inch, I climbed, finally grabbing some knotweed to pull myself up to the upper path.

‘Seb!’ I called out.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ I heard Maggie call out behind me.

Ducking underneath the tree canopies, I found the
wooden ladder to the Tree House and began to climb, feeling the heat blasting down at me from above.

‘Nash!’ That was Regan’s voice, now. ‘You’ll fall. It’s not safe!’

Her voice got closer as I kept climbing, getting my head just above the floor of the Tree House. I had to keep closing my eyes in the heat, but I saw it. A long sausage-shaped lump, in the corner underneath the window hole. A sleeping bag.

‘Hello? Is anyone in there? Can you hear me?’ I shouted. As I took another step up the ladder, the rung snapped and broke away and
down down down
I fell until I
thumped
hard onto the snowy ground below.

‘Nash!’ Maggie’s voice again. My body ached all over. When I opened my eyes, I saw only a blinding white sky above me. Then Maggie’s panic-stricken face came into view, leaning over me. ‘Jesus Christ, what the hell were you trying to do?’

‘He’s in there, Maggie. We’ve got to get him out.’ I struggled to my feet, everything aching, my vision swimming. Regan came running along the path from the Chapel, Clarice bringing up the rear.

‘Nash, are you okay?’ she puffed.

‘Leon’s in the Tree House. Nash saw him,’ said Maggie. ‘Nash, we can’t get him out. The whole thing’s on fire and the ladder’s broken.’

‘Oh my God!’ Clarice started to cry. ‘Oh God, we’ve got to do something.’

‘Nash, listen to me,’ said Maggie, holding both my wrists. ‘You can’t get him out, you’ll both be barbecued. It’s not Seb, okay? It’s not Seb!’

I yanked back from her. ‘I know that, Maggie. Whatever he’s done, we can’t leave him to burn to death.’

‘But there’s nothing we can do!’ she shouted.

‘We’ve got to try something,’ Clarice wailed. ‘Water, we need water …’

‘The lakes are frozen,’ said Maggie. ‘Even if we had buckets, we couldn’t get any water out. Are you sure it was him? Not just … a pile of clothes, or something?’

‘I only saw it for a second before the ladder broke. I saw a sleeping bag.’

‘So he might not have been there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He would have got out,’ Clarice cried. ‘He would have seen it and got out in time.’

‘I can’t smell pork,’ said Regan.

‘What?’

‘They say burning human flesh smells like pork, don’t they? I don’t smell it. It’s just that woody smell, isn’t it?’ I looked at her. ‘I’m saying it’s a good thing.’

‘Just … don’t put that image in our heads, okay?’

Just then, Clarice screamed. ‘Guys, there’s blood! There’s blood, here—on the ladder and on the ground.’

‘Check yourself, you might have done it when you fell,’ said Maggie, looking at me.

I rubbed my legs and hands. ‘It’s not me.’

The broken ladder lay in pieces on the ground. There were bloody fingerprints on two of the broken rungs, and a couple of tiny red puddles on the ground.

Regan picked up a twig and poked at the puddles. ‘It’s coagulated. This has been here a while.’

All of a sudden, there was a tremendous creaking above us and, as we all ran as fast as our panic would afford us,
the whole structure, wood panels and roof and everything it had been resting on, came crashing down through the tree canopy and scattered all over the ground.

‘Blimey,’ I said, fogging my own face with my rapid white breaths.

We looked down the path. The sleeping bag was lying open on top of a pile of broken, charred wood. It was just a sleeping bag. ‘Oh thank God,’ said Clarice.

‘We need to get back and call the police,’ I said. ‘This is just getting more and more weird. We can’t handle this by ourselves.’

‘Nash is right. This is a game changer,’ said Maggie. ‘We need to get people here. Ambulances. Firemen. Police.’

‘How are we going to do that?’ said Regan. ‘The phone’s still out.’

‘We’ll look for our mobiles again. There’s got to be some way of getting a message to someone. Let’s just get back inside for now.’

The three of them followed me towards the Chapel and down the winding path towards the flint steps near the entrance to Main House. None of us said a word, although the silence was deafening. We were all looking round, looking for signs of Leon the Murderer, of life, of death, of the Beast.

We were halfway down the flint steps, carefully dodging the patches of compressed ice our footprints had made earlier, when Clarice sidled up to me. I didn’t like that her arm was grazing mine as we walked. I moved away.

‘What are you going to say to Dianna?’

‘About what?’

‘About Ed—about Leon?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to tell her about the fire. That’s all I really know.’

‘What if he’s run away?’

‘Well then, he’s not our problem, is he?’

Dianna must have heard the front door opening and closing. In seconds, she and Tabby were there in the main hall.

‘Oh, thank God you’re back. Did you find anything?’ she asked, clutching Tabby’s hand. ‘Any sign of Matron?’

We all looked at each other. Regan shook her head.

‘What, nothing?’

‘It snowed too heavily in the night,’ I said, turning to make sure the front door was bolted. Tabby left Dianna and came to stand between me and Maggie, holding both of our hands. Dianna was standing alone now, opposite us.

‘Nash?’

‘Did you find any spare keys?’ I asked her, delaying.

‘Yes,’ she replied, delving into her tunic pocket and pulling out a bunch of assorted silver and gold keys. ‘I found these hung up in a kitchen cupboard. Well, Tabby found them.’

I looked down at Tabby and smiled. ‘Good. That’s great. That’s really great.’

‘What’s happened? What did you find?’

I could see myself in her face. I could see myself when that phone eventually
did
ring and it was Dad, telling me they’d found Seb. ‘Why don’t we go into the library?’ I said.

‘Tell me, Nash,’ she said, through clenched teeth.

As I reluctantly opened my mouth, there was a loud
thud
on the glass behind us.

Our heads whipped round, but there was nothing at the window—just blinding white as far as the eye could see. On the glass, there was one tiny patch of snow.

‘What the hell was that?’ said Clarice.

‘I think it was a snowball,’ said Maggie, going to the window to inspect it. There followed a sharp intake of breath.

We ran over to the windows. On the snowy patch of grass in front of the house, a man was lying on his back, another small ball of snow in his hand. There was a thick red streak on the ground, leading from where he lay right across the lawn and disappearing around the side of the building. He had dragged himself here.

‘Oh my God!’ cried Dianna, rushing to unbolt the door.

‘Dianna, what are you doing?’ said Maggie.

‘It’s Leon!’ she screamed, fumbling with the locks. ‘It’s my brother!’