by Rhys Jones
But it didn’t. Instead, it opened smoothly and silently and a draft of stale, dank, freezing air wafted over their faces. It was like stepping into a cave. Four doors led off the corridor. They were all shut.
“Oh, sugar,” Ellie whispered.
“Which door were the footsteps coming from?” Ruff asked, his voice a nervous hiss.
“Not sure,” Oz whispered back. “Let’s wait to see if we hear it again.”
The door swung silently shut behind them, plunging them into darkness. But Oz didn’t flick on his torch, worried in case it gave them away. In pitch-blackness and with Oz in the lead, they crept forward with Ellie clutching Oz’s jumper and Ruff at the rear hanging on to hers. Nothing happened for three long minutes. Oz’s mind was churning. Was what was in one of these rooms a lost soul? Or could it be that waiting for them was something dark and horrible, intent on doing them real harm, like in Ruff’s Spirit World Three? He wanted to ask Ellie and Ruff if they were thinking the same thing, but common sense told him to keep quiet. He couldn’t see anything and all he could hear was Ellie’s steady breathing behind him. Finally, after what seemed like an age, he put his finger on the torch’s switch and was about to flick it on when it happened. Inches away, they heard the footsteps again.
“Second door,” whispered Oz urgently, and reached out his hand to feel for the handle. “Ready? On three—one, two…”
“Go,” Ellie and Ruff said in high-pitched unison.
Pulse accelerating madly, Oz flicked on the torch and thrust the door open. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. An apparition? Something spectral and ghostly? At the very least a creeping thief in a balaclava… But what he wasn’t expecting was what was revealed to the three of them as they stepped across the threshold. In the stark light of the torch beam, the room, in which seconds before they had all distinctly heard footsteps, was completely and utterly empty. Oz frowned. Behind him, he heard Ruff let out a sigh that was a mixture of relief and disappointment.
They scoured the walls, floor and ceiling in the torchlight but found no sign of any footsteps in the dust that lay thick and undisturbed on the floor. Ellie took half a dozen pictures, but all they showed was more yards of dark paneling with huge cobwebs dangling from the dusty corners like net curtains. There was no other door in or out, nor any sign of occupation. And somehow, that made it worse.
“What time is it?” asked Ellie as they stood near the window that looked out onto the garden. She shivered, but Oz wasn’t sure it was entirely from the cold.
“Five past midnight,” Oz said, squinting at his watch.
“Looks like we’ve frightened it off.” Ruff shone his torch into the four corners of the room one last time. There was no denying the relief in his voice.
“It? Aren’t ghosts supposed to be the spirits of people?” Ellie said.
“Yeah,” Ruff said as if he was talking to a three-year-old, “but it hasn’t left a name and address, has it?”
Oz breathed on a window pane and drew a ghostly shape in the misty circle. “Well, if it really was a ghost, then the answer as to who it was must be here at Penwurt somewhere.”
“Okay. So where do we start?” Ruff asked.
Oz looked at Ellie and they said in unison, “The library.”
They hurried out and Oz sensed that the others, like him, were glad to be away from that room. They made their way back to the main house without speaking and went straight to the spiral staircase that led upstairs. But when they got to the second floor landing, Oz put up his hand and peered upwards.
“There’s a light on in Caleb’s room,” he whispered.
“And I can hear voices,” Ellie added.
There were voices. They were low and barely audible, but the rise and fall of the intonation suggested that a discussion was taking place. Oz crept forward and called out, “Ummm, hello? Anybody there?”
The voices stopped. There was the scraping of a chair on block flooring and a voice said, “Oz, is that you?”
“Caleb?”
Caleb Jones’ rooms were on the same floor of Penwurt as Oz’s, but on the other side of the spiral stairwell that separated the two wings. Caleb had been renting those rooms for almost as long as the Chambers had owned the house. It was pure luck that he’d been looking for somewhere at exactly the time that Oz’s mum and dad had started looking for tenants. And as a colleague of Dr. Michael Chambers in the history department of the university, he’d also been the first to hear that they were renting. But he was not alone in his sitting room that night. At the table with him, and looking her usual misery-guts self, was one of the other tenants, Lucy Bishop.
“What are you three doing wandering around at this hour?” she said frostily. She was a small, thin girl with elfin features, short dark hair and a constantly intense expression. Her clothes were shapeless and fashionably drab and she’d gone for “backwards through a hedge” as a hairstyle, with great success. Her chosen subject at the university was history of art, though Oz hadn’t seen her show much interest in Penwurt at all, which to him seemed full of all sorts of interesting history as well as art.
“It is Halloween,” Ellie said.
“Yeah, and we were in the orphanage and we heard this—ow!” Ruff’s sharp exclamation of pain was the result of Oz’s shoed foot meeting with his ankle.
“Owl,” Oz said in a flash of brilliant inspiration. “Hooting, you know.”
“And we were having a discussion about the house and decided to find out a bit more about it,” Ellie explained, taking her lead from Oz.
Lucy Bishop stared at them blankly.
“The Bunthorpe Encounter? You must have heard of it?” Ellie added.
Caleb’s eyes crinkled in an almost smile, which he disguised under a hand massaging his cheek. He was thin with longish brown hair and always looked to Oz as if he needed a shave. But even though he hardly ever smiled and had a deep furrow in his forehead that lent him a slightly fierce look, Oz still felt that there was a softer centre under the stern exterior—though it was sometimes quite hard to find.
“The old place spook you a bit, then, did it?” Caleb asked.
“Sort of,” Ruff muttered through clenched teeth as he rubbed his other foot against his sore ankle.
“You two are working late,” Oz said to deflect attention away from Ruff’s grimacing.
“Are you sure your mother approves of you wandering about at all hours like this?” Lucy Bishop said crossly.
“It was Mrs. Chambers that made us our feast,” explained Ellie.
“Kids should be in bed at this time of night.”
“Hang on, this is Oz’s house—” Ruff’s voice rose in protest.
But Oz cut him off. “Sorry if we’ve interrupted something.”
“You haven’t,” Caleb said calmly. “We were just discussing an essay that Lucy is having problems with, but we can do that another time.”
Lucy Bishop pushed herself away from the table and stood. “Of course we can,” she said pointedly. “No rush. No pressure. I have all the time in the world.”
She didn’t look at any of them as she stomped out of the room.
“Who threw her toys out of the buzzard pram?” Ruff asked after she’d gone.
“She’s just a bit tired,” Caleb explained. “And you three look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
No one answered.
Caleb studied the three of them. “Look, I’m about to turn in, but how about I make us all a hot chocolate first? Good antidote for the jitters.”
“I’m in,” Ruff said quickly.
No one was surprised by that.
They followed Caleb down some wooden stairs that led to the ground floor of the east wing which, in grander times, had been the servants’ quarters. Three minutes later, they were sitting at the table in the kitchen Caleb shared with the other tenants, sipping hot chocolate from steaming mugs. One of Mrs. Chambers’ rules was that Oz was not to bother the paying guests too much. Since Lucy Bishop
wore the constant look of someone who’d just opened the door of a sewerage plant by mistake, and the third tenant was another student of about the same age as her called Tim Perkins, who seemed altogether a bit too chirpy for his own good, Oz had found it no hardship. But with Caleb, it was different. He’d known Oz’s dad well and although he kept a polite distance as a lodger, Oz had always found him a brilliant source of information on just about anything.
“If it’s Bunthorpe you want to know about,” Caleb said, “you might try A Short History of Seabourne’s Ancient Houses. There’s a copy upstairs in the library. But to cut a long story short, in 1761, something happened in a barn on this very site. An apparition appeared out of thin air. It even spoke. Four people, respectable churchgoers, all witnessed the same thing and they claimed it was a ghost. Of course, in those days superstition was rife. But someone didn’t like the thought of the barn being haunted and so it ended up being burned to the ground.”
In the silence that followed, Oz could hear his own pulse thudding in his ears. “Do you think there’s anything to it?” he asked eventually.
Caleb inclined his head thoughtfully. “There’s no doubt that this place is a bit special.”
“But do you think it’s haunted?” Ellie asked, her expression intent.
“Let’s put it this way—I believe that some places attract strangeness like a magnet. Perhaps it’s something to do with where they’re sited or something about how they were built, I don’t know. But too many odd things have taken place here to be put down to sheer coincidence.”
“It’s not just Bunthorpe we wanted to know about, though; it’s the orphanage, too,” Oz said quickly.
“Ah, well.” Caleb clutched his mug in both hands. “This place is old, eighteenth century. But the actual building—the orphanage as you call it, that dates back to Jacobean times—the sixteen hundreds. The original house was built by an abbot. He put it on top of an old fortification that was there long before that. Bunthorpe barn was literally next door. When it was burned to the ground, the squire bought the land and the old abbot’s house. He built two new wings and joined them on to try to make it a property suitable for a squire and his family. That was finished in 1770.”
“Was it him that painted the ceilings and stuff?” Ruff asked.
Caleb shook his head. “The abbot started it all, but Squire Worthy did some, too. The paintings tell stories, you know. Proverbs and life histories. Amazing, aren’t they?”
“So it became an orphanage after that?” Ellie said.
“Almost a hundred years later, yes. And it stayed an orphanage until the end of the First World War. I think the last orphan left around 1920.”
“And after that?” Oz probed. Caleb was better than Google.
“Then it became the property of one Daniel Morsman, who had been an orphan here himself.”
“Wow,” Ruff said. “Liked it so much he bought the place.”
“Was he famous then?” Ellie asked.
“In his time. Bit of an explorer.”
“So then came Great Aunt Bessy, and after that my dad, right?”
“Absolutely,” Caleb nodded. He paused to sip his hot chocolate before asking, “I assume you all know what Penwurt means?”
Oz knew, of course, but Ellie and Ruff shook their heads.
“It’s a mixture of Celtic and Old English. Pen is the Celtic for hill and Wurt comes from Old English or German. It meant fate or destiny. But weird and odd will do just as well. So, it’s the hill where weird things happen, and odd things have, indeed, been happening in exactly the spot we’re sitting in now for a long, long time.”
Suddenly, the back door rattled and Ruff jumped off his seat with fright. Oz, too, almost spilled his hot chocolate as the door flew open and a creature wearing dirty, dust-covered clothes, its hair matted with cobwebs, face smeared with dirt and its jeans torn, shambled in.
“Oh, hi,” said Tim Perkins to the startled group sitting at the table.
“What happened to you?” Ruff asked with his mouth hanging open.
“Me?” Tim asked, momentarily nonplussed. “Oh, you mean my clothes?”
“And your hair,” Ellie said. “I hope you didn’t tip your hairdresser.”
Tim looked at his reflection in the kitchen window. “Go on, be honest, would I pass muster as one of the undead, do you think??”
“Not,” Ellie muttered dubiously.
“I thought I’d done well,” Tim said, sounding crestfallen, “but the others at the party said I looked like a painter and decorator that had fallen asleep in a corner for two years.”
“Fancy dress?” asked Caleb.
“All I could come up with,” Tim explained, and took in the hot chocolate. “You four look nice and cozy.”
“The Three Musketeers here have been Halloweening in the old orphanage.”
“Ah.” Tim grinned. “That must have been fun.”
“Buzzard,” Ruff said, smiling.
Ellie shot him a disbelieving glance. Clearly, the beverage was working its magic and morphing what had been quite a scary supernatural experience into a great adventure in Ruff’s hot chocolate-mellowed mind.
Tim frowned as if he’d misheard and was thinking about asking Ruff something else, but then decided against it and just stood watching them and grinning good-naturedly for several long seconds. “Right,” he said finally. “I’m going to hit the shower. Oz, tell your mum that I’d be happy to have a go at that guttering for her. I’ve managed to borrow a long ladder, okay?”
“Fine,” Oz said without the faintest idea of what he was talking about.
“He seems quite…helpful,” Ellie said when Tim had gone.
“Doesn’t he just,” Caleb said in a way that made them all glance at him. But his face remained inscrutable.
By one o’clock, they’d finally decided that going back to the orphanage was not a great idea. They would leave attacking the library until first thing next morning and, after
Ruff set up an infectious bout of yawning, they all agreed that bed was probably the best option. Twenty minutes later, Oz lay in his, duvet up under his chin, mulling over the evening’s events and not feeling the least bit tired, hearing his stomach groan under the internal pressure of one too many freaky fingers.
But it wasn’t indigestion that was keeping sleep away. Since the conversation with Caleb, an idea had taken root in his head and was growing with every minute. The thought that Penwurt really was haunted thrilled Oz. He’d always known that it was a different sort of place and the mysterious footsteps merely confirmed what he’d suspected. He still vividly remembered the day they’d first driven here after hearing that his dad had inherited the place. The Chambers had sat in the car outside the old house like a gang of potential burglars, looking at it in silent awe.
“It’s huge,” Oz had said.
“It’s brilliant,” replied his dad. “Just look at those bartizans and those mullioned windows and that turret at the top. I bet you can see for miles from there. And this street, can’t you feel it?”
Previously, they’d lived on the outskirts of the town in a small house that had been modern and identical to a hundred others on a sprawling new estate. But in the car on that first day, Gwen Chambers went very quiet.
“I dread to think what it will cost to heat,” she muttered.
Michael Chambers turned to her, his eyes shining with excitement, his grin infectious.
“We’ll take in lodgers. The university is always looking for accommodation.”
Mrs. Chambers had merely smiled wanly. In that smile was the knowledge that she’d lost the battle before it had even started.
So began the adventure.
And in the seven or so months before the accident, what an adventure it had been. Oz and his dad explored the house, and almost every week found something new and surprising that they could investigate and enthuse over. Great Aunt Bessy had done little in the way of decoration since the middle of the last century and muc
h of the old house was hung with ancient photographs and portraits of stern-faced people.
Oz could still clearly remember his dad’s whoops of delight whenever he came across a spectacular section of fancy Georgian tiling over an ornate washstand, or another sepia print of some Edwardian gathering, the women in long dark dresses and the men moustachioed and proud, posing with their chests out. Even now, Oz still half-expected to turn a corner and find his dad studying some antique, or stroll into the library to find him running his fingers over the oak panelling, his face full of enchantment.
“There’s something about this place,” he’d say, looking up at Oz and grinning. “Something strange and timeless. I can feel it in every creak of these old beams.”
Memory brought with it a sudden constriction in Oz’s throat and a warm wetness to his eyes. It was over two years since Michael Chambers had walked out of the door to begin one of his expeditions, never to return. That was the last time Oz had seen him alive. A freak accident as he’d travelled home from the airport had seen to that. More than anything, Oz regretted that he’d never properly said goodbye to his father. He’d been too busy doing something mindless the morning his dad had left. And since that day, Penwurt had lost some of its sparkle.
But after tonight, Oz had the strangest, most tantalising conviction that they’d inadvertently stumbled upon one of the house’s secrets. Recaptured somehow that promise that had excited his dad so much. And he wasn’t frightened, not in the least. In fact, quite the opposite—he felt a warm glow spread up from his toes to the top of his head just thinking about it. He basked in it, revelling in the possibilities his imagination was throwing up. Caleb had said that some places attracted strangeness like a magnet. At that moment, Oz could think of no better way to describe Penwurt.
Chapter 3
Pheeps
The next morning, both Ruff and Ellie had breakfast dressed in their football kit of maroon and blue stripes in anticipation of their game that morning. But immediately after breakfast, they headed straight for the library.
“What’s the big attraction?” a suspicious Mrs. Chambers asked as they wolfed down a small hill of toast and jam.
