Monkey and Me (4 page)

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 than
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 fright 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.

“Come on!” And he had that look that said he would kill me if I didn't get back to the rest of them.

I jumped down most of the stairs. Mark grabbed me.

“Do. Not. Go. Off. On. Your. Own,” he said threateningly, his mouth close to my ear. If I hadn't been wearing my beanie he'd have sprayed all over me.

“There's something upst—”

But he pulled me into the room before I could tell him. Maybe it was better that I didn't say anything. Panic can be a terrible thing. But I lifted one edge of the beanie so I could listen for any more sounds from the darkness upstairs.

It was a very old-fashioned room. There were more missing memories on the walls and the floorboards moaned every time we took a step.
The thin line of light from the edge of the windows showed dust floating in the air.

Big old chairs sat on a threadbare rug that must have had a nice flower design on it at one time. A coffee table with spindly legs was in the middle and they were all nestled round the fireplace. But someone had ripped out the mantelpiece – it was probably marble like the one in the Civic Hall – and so now there was just bare brick and the black hole of the grate. If you thought about it long enough that could be a portal to the Underworld. Sometimes it's not a good idea to have a vivid imagination like mine. Dad says I could be a politician with the stories I tell.

There were two old cups and saucers on the coffee table and a book lay open, as if whoever had been reading it had been interrupted and left the room. The book was called
The History of Lacemaking
. That's something we've never touched on in Mrs Carpenter's class, but I suppose lacemaking never had much effect on the world, not like real history – wars and stuff and plagues. Though I have seen pictures of knights in the Crusades with chain mail, and who knows, maybe that came about because
someone saw some old lady making lace, and thought, That's a good idea. Instead of a lace doily I'll make some arrow-resistant chain mail…