The Hunting Ground (20 page)

He heard a sound: the opening of a door, the opening of many doors.

Janey sniffed, leaning casually against the nearest wall. She picked idly at her nails. ‘Cullayn’s right about one thing,’ she said. ‘The longer I’m in this place the more I realise it’s not at its best in these floodlights. Too garish. Shadows and dark work better with this particular decor.’

She flicked a petal off her dress. ‘You think you know darkness, Elliott,’ she said. ‘But it comes in many forms. There is darkness, and then again there is darkness akin to the final darkness that will arrive for us all at the end of the world. That’s what I’m going to give you now. That’s
Cullayn’s darkness
.’ As she raised her hands, a shiver of terror passed though Elliott.

‘No!’ he yelled, but Janey laughed and brought her hands together, and as she did so every mote of light in the East Wing was snuffed out.

The darkness was absolute, supreme, pure, utter.

‘Quick!’ Janey hissed, dragging Elliott towards her. ‘Now’s our chance. Even Cullayn needs some light to find us. And I’ve extinguished every bit. We must get away from here!’

‘No, you’re working for
him
!’ Elliott thundered. ‘Get away.’ He shoved at her in the total darkness. ‘I won’t do anything you say.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ she growled in his ear. ‘That was just a show! He was listening! Haven’t you learned anything yet? Don’t give him any advantage. Only surefootedness will save us.’ She created a tiny candle brightness in her hand and held it out in front of her, already striding away. ‘This light and no more. Can you see me? Wait.’ She stopped, with a flick of her hands cupped her ears. ‘There. He can’t hear us. Not until he gets close.’

Elliott stayed where he was.

‘Take my hand,’ Janey insisted. When he did not she strode impatiently towards him. ‘You’re right, Elliott,’
she whispered. ‘I
did
underestimate him, but he was eavesdropping on our conversation and I couldn’t have him knowing my mistake. I delivered him everything – Ben and your father all packaged up, and he thinks I’m delivering you, too. He thinks I’m still in his pocket, or he would not have even allowed me in here. Don’t you understand? Everything I did was to get us
this far inside
. From here we can go to where we have to be. The knight’s room. It’s our only chance.’

When Elliott still did not trust her, Janey’s voice became urgent. ‘Not directly, but by the backdoor, Elliott. I told you! Via the link. Via Eve. The two of them together are way too powerful for me to face. We’ve got to get her alone. This is the only way.’

Elliott reluctantly followed Janey down the corridor as she hurried, illuminated by the hand’s width band of light. ‘I’m sorry I had to put you through that performance,’ she said, ‘but Cullayn gave me a plan to follow and I had to go part-way with him. Eve’s the key. She’s been here so long that almost half of Cullayn’s power has dribbled into her. That’s why you can see her. She’s made of the same powerful stuff as Cullayn now. And that’s our advantage. Because if we can snatch her out, separate them, I might be strong enough to fight him on my own.’

‘How do we separate them?’ Elliott demanded, trembling but determined Janey wouldn’t see it.

‘We coax her. That’s the plan. What’s the one thing in the East Wing that makes you stop and gaze, Elliott?’

‘The portraits.’

‘And for Eve, one portrait in particular. I’m not sure why she’s so fixated on it, but even Cullayn’s attention wavers sometimes, and when it does there’s one room, and a single figure, that she always hurries off to see. Cullayn will already be sniffing us out. But he won’t come himself, not at first. He’ll send Eve. She’ll probably hide from us, but I know which room she’ll enter. She won’t be able to resist it. And we’ll briefly have her to ourselves.’

Janey kept the pace up, but from her occasional stumbles Elliott could tell she was beginning to tire. She guided him right and left, and left again, until they were in a corridor that to him looked identical to all the others. There she stopped, flexing her fingers with a flourish. As her fingertips parted, the dim natural daylight of the East Wing returned.

‘We need to invite her in,’ Janey explained.

They entered the second room on the right of the corridor. Inside, there was a window. It was the first window Elliott had seen in the East Wing and, predictably, it looked towards the slope of the hunting ground.

‘This room is the place Cullayn always brought his
victims just before the hunt,’ Janey said. ‘He liked them to get a good eyeful of what was in store.’

She closed the door behind them and Elliott studied the room. Apart from the window it seemed as elaborately anonymous as all the other bedrooms he’d seen in the East Wing.

‘You’d better tell me what you’re going to do in here, or I’m not helping you,’ he said. ‘I mean it. Tell me now.’

Janey opened her hand, allowing light to spill between her fingers. ‘Keep your voice down,’ she warned. ‘Do you see what makes this room so different?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘There’s just the usual furniture, and … oh.’

Elliott saw it now. There were no portraits of Cullayn. Instead, behind him, a huge picture hung over the bed. The picture was not a painting but an intricately-embroidered tapestry. It depicted an ancient medieval battleground, and at the calm centre of that battleground was a knight. He sat on a white horse, holding a gleaming sword aloft in defiance of whole armies scattered like insects across the tapestry. It was a spell-binding scene. The knight was life-sized, and armed with mace and lance as well as sword. There was something magnificent about the way he was rearing up on his horse against seemingly impossible odds. Seeing
the knight’s heroic stance in the crippled setting of the East Wing for some reason made Elliott stand up straighter.

Janey glanced from the tapestry back to Elliott. ‘Artwork can have a power beyond the value Cullayn puts upon it, eh? I suspect he tolerates its presence because he fancies himself as the knight. He doesn’t realise he’s one of the maggot-soldiers on the plains below. But the reason
we
care about the picture is that Eve comes here. She stares at this picture all the time. I’ve followed her, seen her reaction. It makes her heart swirl with emotion.’

‘Why?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

Elliott studied the tapestry closely. ‘Because Cullayn’s not in it?’

‘Yes. Partly. This is the only room where he is not present. I have checked them all to be sure. But also …’ Janey leaned forward. ‘Eve
wants
a knight to come and rescue her, Elliott,’ she whispered with sudden passion. ‘I’m sure of it. If only she knew it, she wants to be rid of Cullayn. She’s desperately lonely in the way only a child can be. The whole house is saturated with her loneliness. Surely you’ve felt that? But she’s got no way out. Cullayn’s kept her close, never offered her that choice. I think that if we give her half a chance Eve will join us.’

Elliott almost laughed. ‘We’re her knights in shining armour?’

‘Yes.’

‘But how do we make her come with us?’

‘Shush,’ Janey said under her breath. ‘She’s here.’

Janey extinguished the light in her hand and hustled Elliott into a shadowed corner behind the door.

Daylight illuminated the room from the window, falling like a bar across the embroidered knight. Elliott waited nervously, and as he did so Eve entered.

She was singing a quiet rhyme about one of the dead boys, about Leo, but it ended when she took her first step inside. Just as Janey had predicated, Eve stopped in front of the tapestry and quickly knelt down. She smoothed out her red dress and crossed her legs under her. She was silent. If you could say it of anyone in the East Wing, she looked content.

‘Eve,’ Janey whispered.

Elliott heard the quaver in her voice, the anxiety. It was the first time he realised that Janey was herself deeply afraid, and he turned to Eve to see how she reacted.

Eve gasped, looking back at them with an exaggerated
O
. Then she smiled, grinning in a way that made Elliott realise the initial gasp of surprise had been staged – a bit of fun.

‘I thought you’d be here,’ she said.

Janey had been moving tentatively towards Eve, but now she stopped. ‘Did you?’

‘Yes, at least Daddy thought so. He got me to do a drawing for you when you arrived. I took ages over it. Do you want to see it?’

Eve reached into the inside pocket of her dress and pulled out a folded piece of creamy-white paper. In overlapped lines of hard pencil, she had sketched the entire present scene in the room. There was the knight rearing up in the tapestry. There was Eve kneeling on the worn carpet beneath it. There was an old woman peering at the sketch, looking baffled.

Elliott heard a tight, compressed wheeze from Janey. He didn’t know what the noise meant at first. Then he sensed it was fear – that he was witnessing the wholesale wreckage of all Janey’s plans. Cullayn
had
been waiting for her. She hadn’t outwitted him. He’d predicted she’d come here. Dangled Eve as a prize. All Janey’s subtle traps, turns and tricks were for nothing.

‘Welcome,’ Eve said, her tone child-like but abruptly pitched like ice. And she bowed – but not to them.

Elliott did not need to be told whom she was honouring.

Janey registered Cullayn’s presence before Elliott, and fervently raised her hands to increase the light in the room, but that gesture was not enough to ward him off.

Eve chuckled, and Elliott became aware of stirrings
around him so centuries-old and deeply wrought that their intent was unfathomable.

The light began to fade.

For a few moments Janey struggled against the dimming, held it in check. Then she dropped her hands, gave a terrible groan of defeat, and the room flared red and orange as the master of Glebe House brought his long-considered plans into place.

The air thrummed and shifted of its own accord.

Janey backed against a wall.

‘He’s coming!’ Elliott shouted at her. ‘You have other things you can do, don’t you? It’s
him
! You brought us in here. You must know what to do next!’

Janey clung to the wall. She looked like she might snap. The light was being unmade in front of her eyes and she did nothing except gape at Elliott in bewilderment, her face shaking in soundless fear.

It was, of course, exactly the reaction Cullayn had been waiting for before he made his grand entrance.

‘What time is it?’ boomed a voice from the darkness as brash as the midday sun.

‘Five minutes to midnight,’ Eve answered at once, standing to attention.

‘Five to midnight?’ the voice questioned. It was full of odd, light tones, far more melodious and lively than Elliott had expected. ‘High time, then. High time. No victory ever so sweet as this, Janey, or so longed for.
Once you danced to my door to give battle, but now I see you come in secret with a boy in tow. Was it truly with such obvious artifice as your sleight-of-hand entry and these tricks of light that you intended to unman me? Yet I am an owner with simple appetites. A simple man.’

‘A simple man,’ Eve echoed.

‘Yes. The hunter always,’ the voice said from the darkness. ‘Therefore shall we continue with this fine game of ours, Janey? So far we have merely tested our intentions and resolve with lights, fingers and wagging tongues. That’s a beginning, but shall we now prepare for the hunting ground?’ The voice waited, as if expecting an answer from Janey. When none came, it gave a loud guffaw of absolute triumph and suddenly all eyes turned to the centre of the room.

The air swirled with meticulously-crafted points of light. Like stars erupting from slowly condensing nebulae, the points joined to form an outline. It was the outline of a shoulder and arm – a hunter’s arm, gathering itself, balanced to strike.

Eve knew her place. She now stepped smartly aside.

Cullayn’s lustrous beard grew before them. He was very proud of his beard. Bathed in a persecution of shimmering light, initially it was only a faint flowing of hair, stubble on the rise. Then its whole girth came loose to sparkle against the room’s darkness. First the beard, then the mouth, writhing, a near-purr of contentment on lips that were already open and ready to command. Above the mouth, two stars globed into circles and, as they levelled their radiance on Elliott and Janey with terrible purpose, Cullayn detached himself like a nightmare kissed into life from the darkness.

He was already half the hunter: he was never anything less. Feet trussed and booted, peaked hat angled rakishly
with child-like pride, he brushed his close-cropped curls. Cullayn did not waste time. Even now, as Elliott watched in dismay, the hunter was girding his limbs, preparing for the joy of the fight ahead. He brought one of his muscular forearms up to fasten the brass buttons of a sturdy leather long-coat. His other arm tightened a black-buckled belt.

Once he was ready he smiled indulgently, glowing with light, and raised both hands.

‘A game!’ he bellowed. ‘A game, if you will!’

Next moment a variety of weapons appeared above his head. Cullayn juggled them in a conjuror’s circle: guns, whips, stones, arrowheads, swords, flames, all kept constantly aloft.