The Hunting Ground (24 page)

‘Not me,’ Theo said.

He turned to Eve. She blinked back at him, confused.

‘Eve,’ Cullayn growled, his whole body in motion. ‘Kill Janey.’

Elliott threw himself across the floor to defend Janey as best he could, and Ben joined him.

Eve stared at Cullayn, clearly wanting to obey the master of Glebe House. But Theo’s eyes held her, too. Wavering, she comfort-snatched Katerina up from the floor, pressed the doll to her cheek.

‘You left me!’ she shrieked at Theo. ‘You left me!’

Cullayn continued to writhe to free himself from Janey’s restraints.

‘I never left you,’ Theo explained, tears in his eyes. ‘I was always here. I had to wait. I couldn’t ever let him see me. But I was here, watching over you. And now it’s time to go.’

‘No!’ Eve said. Events, choices she had to make, were moving too fast for her. She clutched herself through her dress, and in that terrible moment of indecision Elliott knew that Cullayn had truly lodged the hope of the everlasting hunt in her heart, and everything hung in the balance.

‘Eve!’ Cullayn’s voice was rich and warm. With a great shriek he part-broke from Janey’s control, lunging at Theo.

Janey made a triangle of three fingers and
clicked
them
hard together, stopping Cullayn in mid-lunge. Making a fist of her hand, she blocked, pushed and bent back his arm. At the same time Theo formed a circle with his hands and squeezed it towards Cullayn, hemming him in.

Snarling, unable to make his blow count, Cullayn studied Janey intently, observing how her control techniques worked. As he gradually did so, Elliott saw that Cullayn was the stronger of the two. In fact, he was stronger than any combination of her and Theo. And suddenly Cullayn must have sensed that, too, because he changed tactics. Using one jutting fist after another he punched the air, thrusting out, hitting nothing except emptiness, but weakening Janey.

Eve watched – horrified, mesmerised. Her wide-eyed expression was lodged somewhere between awe and disbelief, but there was also soul-searching there. For a moment she looked at Ben, and it was simply a young girl looking at the child closest to her own age for advice about what she should do. Ben stared resolutely back at her, and stood closer to Elliott.

Outside the window three ghosts hovered. They were so near to Cullayn that Elliott could see their outlines.

‘Smash the window!’ Janey yelled desperately at him. ‘Let them in!’

‘No!’ roared Cullayn. He raised a fist to flatten Elliott.
Then he gazed down in curiosity as that fist was held again. Not this time by a barrier erected by Janey, however. It was Eve who held it. She possessed so much of Cullayn’s power, and now she gave him an arch look that he knew as his own.

‘I watched you with her,’ Theo said to Cullayn with cold deliberation. ‘I watched everything. You taught her well.’

‘Eve, please …’ It was an astonishing moment. Cullayn pleading. Eve held his fist and he pleaded and, because she was still partly his creature, his weakness was enough to end any doubt in her mind, and she gripped him tighter than ever and looked fiercely at Elliott.

‘Do it!’ she told him.

Elliott dragged his injured knee across the room. Using an elbow, helped by Ben, he smashed the window.

Outside it was a warm, calm summer morning. Three figures came through that calm – ending it.

Sam was the first to blast past Elliott and Ben. He came so fast that he knocked both brothers aside and placed himself in front of Cullayn, raising his arms. Nell and Alice came next, taking up a determined position left and right of the owner, bracketing him.

Cullayn looked between them, wavering between fighting tactics. Leo was holding back, floating alone
beyond the window. He was still too afraid to come inside. All those centuries ago too much had happened to him. Even Eve could see that, how torn he was. But at least he stood his ground outside, and when Cullayn bared his teeth at him, with a shiver Leo managed to whisper, ‘
L is for Leo, who gave his all
,’ hissing Cullayn’s own verse back to him at last.

Eve gasped when she heard that. She put one hand to her mouth, and when Cullayn tried to answer Leo back she tightened her other hand on the owner’s wrist until he squealed. That squeal brought movement. Suddenly the ghosts were all on the move. They came at Cullayn, they were all over him, Alice and Nell on his back, Theo pinning him down, Eve holding his arms still while Janey stood and wrenched the air around Cullayn’s spine, restricting his motion. And finally, bursting through the window with a yell, Leo joined them.

Cullayn’s limbs were restrained as one by one Eve and the ghost children clambered on top of him, and though he kept throwing them off they always came back, until eventually Cullayn was exhausted and Janey was able to relax her efforts and collapse on the floor.

At the same moment Theo bent down, and it was to kiss Eve.

She seemed surprised, and suddenly she sobbed, and
to the sound of that Cullayn was dragged by the ghost children to the shattered window. There was something fresh and wonderful about the ghosts as they did so. Elliott, Ben and Dad could see them clearly now. It was not only Cullayn’s power but their own that illuminated them.

They hauled the owner of Glebe House across the knight’s room and out, out towards the slope. Elliott and Ben stumbled as best they could to the window as Cullayn was taken to the foot of the hunting ground. Janey managed to heave herself from the floor as well and, assisted by Ben, Elliott got Dad to his feet, holding him up so that they could all take in the view.

Cullayn was carried onto his slope. From the base of it he stared up at the distant woods. The ghost children encircled him. Visible in flashes, their own light colours competed against Cullayn’s darker flecks of orange and red. With the others gripping him tightly, Sam took Cullayn by the scruff of the neck. Holding him like a dog, he gazed back at Dad.

‘Say it,’ he spat. ‘Say it!’

Dad nodded, his measured gaze meeting Cullayn’s.

‘Run,’ he said.

Cullayn did not immediately do so. His still-calculating mind roved, assessing the children, not quite believing they would chase him. Then he looked at Eve.

They all did. And for a moment her cold eyes were utterly the owner’s again, and Cullayn understood: it didn’t matter if the other children did not start the hunt. If they were too scared to set the first foot on the slope to begin the chase, Eve would.

Never taking her eyes off Cullayn, she raised a single foot – and with a small jump, Cullayn scuttled off.

He looked over his shoulder as he ran. It was a new experience for the owner, to be looking backward instead of forward on that slope. A rise of about two hundred metres was in front of him, in ruts of mud and meadow-grass. The ghost children watched him race towards the trees as intensely as anything has ever watched anything, but they did not chase him.

Two thirds of the way to the wood Cullayn turned to see their lack of pursuit.

‘I knew you’d be too afraid to come after me,’ he crowed. ‘I knew—’

A wind struck his cheek, interrupting him. Cullayn swatted idly at it. ‘I told you—’ The wind struck him again, harder, knocking him off his feet.

Bewildered, intensely frightened, Cullayn tried to see who was there.

Nobody. No one. But not nothing. A living presence seethed against him. A hunter of Cullayn’s own creation had arrived.

Even from here Elliott could feel the lacerating aura
of the hunting ground. The trees shivered, seemed to inhale a vast and unseen collective breath and, hearing it, the ghost children fled back to the knight’s room. Cullayn was still staggering sideways on the slope, trying to stay upright, when the hunting ground came for him. He’d kept it waiting, and though it was only trees and a patch of land when he was not on it, with his arrival it was
his
appetite it shared, and now it was impatient. Abandoning all restraint in the same way Cullayn himself had done so often, the land came for him.

Inside the knight’s room everyone – young and old, alive and dead – instinctively held each other. Janey put her arms around the ghost children, as naturally a part of them as she had always been.

Outside, the leaves of the massed trees heaved. Many shapes they formed, framed by branches. Only Cullayn recognised those shapes, because they dwelled entirely and solely in his own nightmares. It was all a game being played, just a game – one of Cullayn’s very own – but even the best games have to end. And finally the hunting ground chose that end. It selected the longest path a wounded victim had ever had to crawl on Cullayn’s slope, and, in a final heart-stopping shriek it did not even allow the owner to complete, it made him dance along it until he was gone.

It was over. The trees stilled, relaxing into themselves
again. Birds rose skyward, their beaks dipped in silence. Beneath them, the cleansed oak trees, dappled in sunshine, wrapped themselves in evening dew.

A week later, once the worst of Dad’s injuries were mending, and Elliott’s cheekbone had been set, and everyone living and dead could do so, they gathered in the warmth of a late summer evening in September on the western lawns of the Glebe estate.

The western lawns were the finest of the venerable old property. Glebe House had possessed gardens long before Cullayn arrived, and they had been laid by people who loved to grow things, and though the grass was now patchy and waist-high, tree saplings sprouting everywhere, and most of the garden ornaments falling to pieces (Dad still hadn’t found a single one of the gnomes), the quality of the original landscape gardeners’ vision remained. Never more so than to the ghost children. They had witnessed the grounds in their golden years, and remembered them that way still.

It was a sultry day. Summer cumulous had built all afternoon in the heat haze, but now the sky was a smooth ceramic blue.

Elliott stood with the others. With sleeves rolled up, he stared at the East Wing, giving it his full attention.

Something special was about to happen. Dad had managed to persuade the owners of Glebe House that the East Wing was an eyesore that reduced the estate’s value. The owners were only interested in selling it, and when he offered to take care of the problem for a modest fee a deal was done.

To bring down a building Dad normally used a straightforward wrecking ball. He’d been toying with something economical and sensible like that for the East Wing as well, but he was glad when both Ben and Elliott came to him early in the planning stage to request something slightly more spectacular.

‘I want it to be exactly like a bomb going off,’ Ben said.

‘Yeah, it needs to be impressive,’ Elliott agreed. ‘Flames. Lots of flames. Portraits on fire flying out of the building, that sort of thing.’

‘Mm,’ Dad mused. ‘Of course I’ll have to place the portraits on the outer walls to create that effect. But I guess that’s not impossible. Any more requests?’

Ben beamed. ‘I want to be the one who blows it up.’

‘You OK with that?’ Dad asked Elliott.

‘Sure,’ Elliott said. ‘As long as I can drive the tractor that wrecks its foundations.’

‘It’s illegal for you to drive a piece of machinery like that,’ Dad told him. ‘You’re underage. Unless …’ he pretended to sort through papers ‘ … I’ve somehow got your date of birth wrong.’

‘You have,’ Elliott said. ‘I’m legal to drive anything. I’m seventeen.’

Dad peered at the East Wing, then back at Elliott. He gazed at his son’s cheek, still full of temporary pins holding it together.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are.’

*

It was an enormous pleasure for Janey, assisted by Elliott, to hoist the hydraulic drill up to her shoulder and punch the first holes into the East Wing’s walls for the explosives. A demolition team then rigged the building to blow, using special shaped charges to make sure it did not damage the main house.

The last act was to carefully remove the tapestry of the knight. Elliott undertook this with Janey, and they were watched as they did so by Eve and Theo. Like the other ghost children they had stayed behind, and for the last few days Janey had been their go-between in many conversations with the living. At first talks were halting as everyone felt their way towards an understanding despite all the years between them, but they soon got
over that, and now there was nothing the children, living and dead, did not know about each other.

With the sun now hanging low in the sky, Ben stood beside the plunger, gripping the handle. Theo, Eve and the other children were next to him, adding ghostly weight to his hand. The plunger was linked by neat wires to explosive devices. They were only waiting to be triggered.

Dad gave Janey the nod. Smiling, she wiped a grey curl out of her eyes, and quietly said, ‘
Now
.’

Seven sets of hands lowered the plunger.

For a moment nothing happened. It looked as though the signal to the charges had been jammed, and everyone collectively held their breaths.

Then they picked up the internal
crump
of the first detonations. It was one of the most beautiful sounds any of them had ever heard.