by David Gilman
Pete-the-Feet can run faster and further than anyone we know. He started training when he was very young, running away from his stepdad, who used him as a punchbag. And Pete-the-Feet is so tall and skinny one good thump could shatter him like glass. Best to run when you can.
“I’ve got it!” he gulped after a big spit to clear his lungs. He looked as though he’d run a marathon.
My mind spun for a moment. Was he a plague carrier? Is that what he’d got?
Everyone watched him. He had a mad look in his eye, not that that’s too unusual. Sometimes after he’s been running his hair smothers his face and gets stuck with sweat so he looks a bit like the Abominable Snowman and all you can see are these two black eyes peering out – like a scared creature peering through bushes. I think Pete-the-Feet hides in there when it suits him. His feet help him escape, his hair is his secret den.
Then he uttered the words that could scare anyone to death. “The Black Gate.”
Mark miskicked the ball. I’ve never seen him do that before. It caught Rocky on the side of the head and for a minute I thought he was going to thump Mark. Rocky can be a bit aggressive at times.
“You’re off your head!” Skimp said.
“Nobody goes in there!” Rocky told him.
“I know. That’s the beauty of it. No one will know where we are. It’s the perfect HQ. We don’t have to actually go into the house, there’s a few old ruined buildings in the grounds.”
The Black Gate. You might as well suggest we dig up a grave in the cemetery and climb in the hole with the dead, even that wouldn’t be as scary as going into the Black Gate.
Pete-the-Feet can run fast but his brain tends to lag behind a bit. A bit like a relay race.
“Just under the fence. That’s all we have to do. There’s a least half a dozen acres and we don’t have to go anywhere near the house,” he gabbled.
Everybody knows that there are creatures in there that can sneak out the grass, fall out a tree, jump out the dark, snatch you from the bushes, and then drag you screaming into the Black Gate – which is what the old country house is called. It was a couple of miles beyond where all the other houses had been built. It had been sold off years ago but there was some kind of legal stuff that stopped anyone buying it and redeveloping the site. There’s a huge sign over the old iron gates: Dangerous Building – Condemned – Keep Out. Along the top of the old walls are strands of barbed wire to make sure no one can get in, but you wouldn’t want to because everyone knows there’s something inhuman in the Black Gate. People have heard screams and sounds of someone moving round inside, but when the police investigated they didn’t find anyone – or anything.
Definitely haunted then.
And obviously by a creature with fangs and claws – a throwback mutation that could have been created when the sewage works blocked up last year and spilled into Millbrook’s Farm. It flooded five acres of King Edward potatoes with disgusting stuff which stank for months – but it gave the farmer a bumper crop. I’ve never eaten spuds since then. Not even Mum’s beyond excellent thick-cut home-made chips. Can you imagine what she’d be deep-fat frying? Sealing in all the goodness, she used to say. I don’t think so, Mum.
“You’re off your head,” Skimp said again.
“Well, we could always leg it if it got too scary,” Pete-the-Feet replied.
He would say that, wouldn’t he?
“What? And leave us for bait?” Rocky pointed a finger at him.
“No one’s ever got out of there alive,” I told them.
“Don’t talk rubbish, Beanie,” Rocky said.
“No one’s ever died in there,” said Mark.
“That’s because no one knows how many people have gone in and never come out,” I tell them.
I’m not sure even Pete-the-Feet could run fast enough to escape the ghosts and sabre-toothed monsters, whose teeth are probably all gunged up with the remains of anything that walked or crawled in there. Kimberley Morris says her brother went in and hasn’t been heard of since – but everyone knows he really got nicked for stealing cars and is in prison. Still… you never know. She and her mum and dad have never visited him. So maybe he’s not – in prison I mean. Or alive.
I hear myself say words that make no sense to my brain… I don’t know where I get these ideas from sometimes. Like climbing up onto the Sweet Dreams Sweet Factory top floor, or the time I tried to balance across the old stone bridge and fell in the canal, or when I climbed the tree and the branch gave way and I broke my wrist – and that started a lot of problems. Hospitals! But even they aren’t as frightening as the Black Gate. You’d have to be two spanners short of a tool set to even think about going in there… but the words fell out my mouth. It was so cold all the letters froze in the air and you could have hung them on a clothes line.
“I’ll go inside. I’ll do it. I will. You’ll see.”
“You’re going home,” said Mark. “It was a mistake letting you join the gang.”
“He’s only a probationary member,” Skimp reminded him.
A gang member is a gang member even if he is a probationary. That’s called semantics. I’d have mentioned this, but Mark would say I was just being a know-it-all clever-clogs.
Rocky had a strange look on his face. I’ve seen him like that when we go round his house – he’s got a great collection of war and horror movies which we’re not supposed to watch. It’s a bit like him drooling in front of a sweet shop. There’s something very needy about Rocky.
“Let him do it,” he said.
“No way!” said Mark. “I’m not getting grounded for the rest of my life because Jez gets devoured by some creature from a hidden tomb in Black Gate’s cellars.”
“I want to do it! And you can’t stop me.” There were all those words dangling in front of my face again. Where did they come from? But I had to show Mark and the others that I didn’t need looking after all the time.
Skimp nodded. “I think Rocky is right. Beanie should go in if that’s what he wants. Then, if he doesn’t come out, we’ll know it’s true about the monster. But if he does come out alive then everyone will stop picking on him because we’ll be witnesses that he dared to go in.”
Suddenly Mark was wrestling Skimp to the ground. “He’s my brother! He doesn’t have to prove anything!”
Rocky and Pete-the-Feet pulled him off.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I’m not scared.” And this time the air from my breath held the words like angels dancing on a cloud.
It must have been cold because everyone froze in that moment. They all looked at me. And then Rocky broke the silence. “Me neither.”
“Nor me.” Skimp.
“All right. Let’s do it.” Pete-the-Feet.
We all looked at Mark. This was a command decision. His whole future as a possible world leader was in the balance.
“We’ll go in as far as we can,” Mark said.
“And Beanie?” Rocky asked. “He should go in first. It was his idea.”
“He stays behind me.”
And the way Mark said it everyone knew there wasn’t going to be any argument.
Being scared is blaming the cold when you shiver. But when your legs are trembling so much that you couldn’t run away if you had to, that’s like living in an igloo with no clothes on.
“It’s getting really cold,” I said.
They looked at me and nodded because they were shivering too. Skimp hugged himself, maybe he was trying to keep from running away by holding himself down. We skirted the walls and found a few slippery handholds, there was moss growing on the one side and Rocky told us that means it’s north facing. I didn’t know if that was true or not. I didn’t care. All I knew was I wouldn’t be able to climb the wall there. So we trudged around a bit further. Mark was in front, then me, then Skimp, Pete-the-Feet and Rocky was Tail-end Charlie. And he kept looking over his shoulder.
I noticed we were all whispering. We reached the gates, and they were huge, much bigger th
an I remembered them. They were like prison gates with spikes on top. They were rusty in places and the grass and weeds had grown all round the hinges and the bars. We looked up at the sign: Dangerous Building – Condemned – Keep Out.
Condemned. That’s like being executed or something.
Only Pete-the-Feet was tall enough to see the house’s roof in the far distance above the undergrowth.
“There’s no sign of life,” he said.
And we all looked at him. Of course there was no sign of life – it was haunted!
“You’re as daft as a brush, you are,” Mark told him.
“We’ll never get over these gates,” said Mark. And I think there was a bit of relief in his voice.
“We can squeeze through here,” Skimp said, and rubbed his hand between the iron gate and the wall. Some of the stone had crumbled and the gap was just choked with weeds.
“Nice one, Skimp,” said Pete-the-Feet. But I don’t think he meant it as a compliment.
“You said you wanted to find a way in, well, here it is.”
“Yeah, but maybe not right now. This is just a recce,” Rocky whispered.
Mark looked at his watch. It’s supposed to be a Swiss Army watch, but it’s just a knockoff we got down the market, so it’s not always as accurate as a Swiss watch would be and there are times I hope the real Swiss Army has real Swiss Army watches because if they haven’t and they’ve bought a knockoff like us, they’re never going to be on time for anything – like avalanches, which appear to happen at fairly regular intervals. Though I don’t think you can time them.
“It’s nearly ten past,” Mark said, “Mum’ll be home soon for our tea.”
Rocky looked at his watch. His is an Argos digital. It always works. It was really cheap too, cheaper than Mark’s Swiss Army knockoff – it just didn’t have the little red cross logo, but so what? He was always on time because he said soldiers had to be in the right place when they were supposed to – that’s called getting to the RV. I’ve never really had an RV – which means rendezvous – unless it’s getting out of bed and down to breakfast on time. I don’t need a watch for that because Mum always shouts so loud, Dad says she could wake the dead.
The dead.
“Are timeless.”
“What?” Mark said.
“The dead are timeless,” I told him. “They don’t need watches. Ghosts hover everywhere all the time, even in monster form. It depends on the light. When the light fades and it gets darker, they suck it in and that gives them a shape to their bodies.”
“What are you on about?” Skimp asked.
“It doesn’t matter what time it is, as long as it’s daylight. I think we’ll be safe as long as we are out of there by the time it’s dark.”
Skimp checked his watch. “Mine says a quarter to,” he said.
“It’s exactly eleven minutes to,” Rocky said. “If we’re going to do this we’d better be quick about it because it might take us ages to get to the house. I think that’s an animal track through the bushes.”
No one said anything for a minute because we were all thinking of what kind of animal could have made it. One thing was for sure – I knew it wasn’t made by the postman. Because that’s my dad and he’s never been here in his life. I suppose it could be someone getting in to read the electricity meter. I’ve heard of people being sent electric bills when they’re dead. But I don’t think that’s the case here. No one in their right mind would really go into the Black Gate.
I squeezed between the gate and the pillar.
Sometimes you just have to be brave. That’s what Dad says when we go to the hospital.
It doesn’t matter how many times you see a scary movie or read a book about vampires or monsters or graveyards where people pop out the ground and grab you and drag you below – walking in the grounds of a haunted house is a hundred times worse than that. Because he was leader of the gang Mark had to go first and because I was his brother I went second, the others shuffled and shouldered each other because no one really wanted to be Tail-end Charlie. Everyone, but everyone knows the last person in line always get snatched first. It’s the law.
Rocky ended up at the back but he found a hefty stick and promised everyone that if anything twitched in the bushes he was going to attack it. But by the time we got to the old gravel driveway that looped around the house like a snake curling around its victim, nothing had moved. We hadn’t even heard a bird singing. Things were worse than I thought.
The windows were boarded up and there was no way inside so we edged around the back of the house where huge, stone-edged windows stood like upright soldiers guarding the place with the boards looking like their shields. The terraced gardens were completely overgrown, but below the first terrace was some kind of entrance, which might have been where the gardeners kept all their tools. The old wooden door was rotten and half off its hinges and Pete-the-Feet and Skimp pulled it away carefully and as quietly as they could. It was like a small cave inside, with the old stone walls dribbling with water. There were a few ruined old tools, a rake, a couple of spades and a rotten wooden wheelbarrow. It was like an ancient tomb.
“I bet there’s bodies buried down here,” Pete-the-Feet said.
It was highly unlikely because we could all see this was a garden store that just happened to be underneath one of the terraces, but still we shoved each other to get outside. I’m not sure if that’s called panic or imagination.
By the time we had gone through the gardens and climbed up the other side of the house we saw a padlocked door on the side of the house. The gravel crunched beneath our feet. We stopped and looked at each other. It’s very difficult to tiptoe quietly on gravel. Skimp had picked up the broken shafted spade from the store.
“Stick the blade in the hinge,” I told him. “See if it’ll give.”
They all looked at me. I wasn’t supposed to tell people what to do but Skimp did it anyway and the rotten wood crumbled like a Flake bar.
Rocky took out his torch; he always had one with him. You never know when you might need one, he always said. I use mine for reading in bed at night when I’m not supposed to, but I could never see any need to carry it when I go to school every day or to the dinner table or get on the bus. Why would you carry a torch around with you unless one day you expected to go into a haunted house?
“Give me the torch,” Mark said.
“It’s my torch,” said Rocky.
“But right now, I should have it,” Mark insisted.
“This is a Maglite. Do you know how much it costs? No way. I’ll be point,” he said, and eased past Mark – because going first is what being point means. I put a hand on Mark’s arm, and nodded. Let Rocky do what he wants, he’s seen more war films than us and he’s brilliant at Call of Duty.
Besides, I thought this wasn’t a good time to argue because ghosts, as everyone knows, can pick up vibrations in the air and if you start shouting that’s like ringing the school bell for break. There would be ghosts coming out the woodwork to see what all the fuss was about.
As it happened we didn’t need the torch once we got deeper into the house. The door we’d gone through led us into a kind of wash house that was attached to the side of the kitchen, a bit like Mum’s utility room, but there were no washing machines, just big slabs of granite work counters and deep square sinks. This must have been where the servants did all the scrubbing. Mum says she needs domestic help with all our dirty washing, because she never knows how our clothes get so filthy. I always thought it was fairly obvious. It’s because we play in places like Sweet Dreams Sweet Factory and haunted houses. Though to be honest this was the first haunted house I’d ever been in.
Skimp turned on a tap and there was a horrendous gurgling and rattling; the pipes shook and a deep, low groan echoed through the house. Skimp nearly fell over backwards in shock; the rest of us froze in fear.
“You idiot! What are you doing?” Pete-the-Feet shouted at him.
Skimp got such a frig
ht that he shouted back. “Don’t yell at me! I’m thirsty. I wanted a drink! I couldn’t help it!”
“SHUSH!” the rest of us hissed.
The pipes settled into a long sigh. We waited and held our breath. Apart from the occasional clunk the pipes didn’t make any more noise. We tiptoed forward. There was enough light coming around the edges of the boarded windows to show us a doorway. We all stood and waited. None of us was too keen to go any further. I heard thumping – but it was just my heart. But there was another sound. A groan. It was as if we’d stepped inside and stood on something that hurt. The house. It was the house that was groaning – that was why it was condemned.
Rocky put his torch on anyway.
A corridor with wood-panelled walls disappeared into the darkness and a big staircase went up from the hallway, which had nice big black and white tiles. They were just like the tiles Dad had tried to lay in our front porch, but he got the sizes a bit wrong when he cut them so instead of being black and white diamonds they ended up being more like different sized rectangles.
There was just enough light to see up the wooden stairs, which creaked under my feet. The staircase was so wide you could have carried a grand piano up it. There wasn’t much light up there – the stairs just got swallowed by the gloom. There were marks on the walls, brown stains that showed where pictures had once hung. It was as if someone’s faded memories had been stolen. Suddenly the house felt very sad.
Have you ever just wandered off? You’re so entangled in your brain, thinking about lots of different things all at the same time that you suddenly don’t know how you got to where you are.
I stopped dead in my tracks. One foot hovered over the next step.
There was something up there.
It sounded like a little whisper. Like rat’s breath.
Whispers can be very damaging to your nervous system.
“Beanie!” Mark hissed.
I gasped.
I was halfway up the stairs. Another dozen steps and I’d have been in the murk. The others were going into another room that led off the corridor.
