The Mystery of Wickworth Manor (3 page)

‘It’s a good story,’ Curtis said. ‘But it’s just a story. Made up. Fiction. There won’t be any dungeons here, the house is too young.’

Paige raised her eyebrow. ‘You don’t believe me?’ She pointed to the broom. ‘What was that then? The broom just fancied seeing what the view was like from down there?’

‘No, but perhaps two people coming in here, one of them like a whirlwind, disturbed the air and destabilised the broom. Perhaps it was Chaos Theory.’

‘What?’ Now Paige sounded scornful.

Curtis wondered whether he should explain Chaos Theory to her. The complex and intricate idea that actions could reverberate and echo in quite unexpected ways, influencing events far from their original source. He looked at her raised eyebrow. He wasn’t even going to try to explain. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts. And that’s just a painting of a boy,’ he said instead.

‘You what? Of course there are ghosts. I know loads of people who’ve seen one. My mum, for starters. She saw a ghost in a hospital once. She told me. Oh, wouldn’t it be great if I could tell Mum that I saw a ghost too. And my cousin, Chantelle. She’s in Year 8 now. She’d be dead impressed if I told her we’d found the Wickworth Boy.’

‘But we haven’t,’ Curtis said.

Paige leaned in closer. ‘Yes, but we could have though.’

Curtis looked at the painting. How long had it been hidden away, trapped inside a bed frame? Ten years? Fifty years? A hundred years? Someone had wanted to get rid of it. They wanted the painting out of their sight, forgotten, like the rest of the junk in this room. So they had boarded it up where no one would ever look. And then he had come along and rediscovered it. He dug his fingers into his palms. The thought of the boy being abandoned here made him angry. It wasn’t right. ‘I want to know who he
really
is,’ Curtis said quietly.

‘We can do a seance!’ Paige said. ‘I’ve read about them in my mum’s
Fortean Times
and I’ve seen it on cable. You can speak to souls trapped between here and the beyond. It’ll be cool! I’ll have something amazing to tell Mum when I get home.’

‘How about something a bit more reliable?’ Curtis said. ‘Like looking on the internet, or perhaps in the library.’

‘Where’s the fun in that?’ Paige asked. ‘Come on, if you don’t believe in it, where’s the harm?’

Curtis suddenly felt exhausted. He just wanted to lie down on the bed, curl up and forget about everything – Mum, Northdene, all of it. He just wanted peace and quiet and to be left alone.

‘Say yes, go on,’ Paige said.

If he agreed, would she go away? Curtis sighed, then shrugged:
OK then.

Chapter 5

CJTE/006 – Crew list of the Sandford Frigate, 18th C.

He had never felt so sick before in his life. Not even when he and the other children on the plantation had sneaked into the boiling shed and eaten the sticky sweet molasses until they couldn
’
t move for gluttony. He had been beaten, like the others, when they were caught. But it had been worth it. The taste had been so good. Maggie, his mother, had looked at the red stripes across his hands and said that soon enough he
’
d grow to hate the very smell of the sugar canes.

But he had not grown to hate the canes. His life had taken another direction. Eastwards. Across the ocean. For he was on a sailboat and the swell and break of the sea had turned his skin ashen and his stomach inside out. Wherever it was they were heading, as long as the land stayed still, it had to be better than the sea.

Chapter 6

A seance! Paige leapt up off the bed. This was going to be cool. She and Mum often watched
Ghost Finders
curled up together on the sofa with a tub of ice cream. It was their favourite programme. And now, there was an actual real live ghost to look for. Though there was the whole of the rest of the day to get through first. ‘Come on, we’re meant to be in Art,’ she said.

By the time that they managed to find Art – it was hidden in a courtyard at the back of the house in some old barn – the session was pretty much over. Mr Appleton looked a tiny bit cross as they walked in but Paige just beamed at him.

There was the beginning of a wicker structure in the middle of the room; it looked like a very leaky boat. Around it, everyone was packing away and clearing up snipped tissue paper. She picked up a few stray pencils that had rolled on to the floor. It was always a good idea to look helpful when teachers were cross with you.

Suddenly, the back of her neck tingled. It was a feeling she knew. Only last week she and Mum had spent the afternoon practising their sixth sense. One of them would close their eyes and try to feel whether the other was staring at them or not.

So Paige had a pretty good idea what the tingling on her neck meant.

She whipped her head round and caught Liam O’Brian staring at her. He half smirked, half grinned.

‘What?’ she asked. ‘What’s so funny?’

Liam lived on her estate, but Mum didn’t like her having anything to do with him. His big brother was always getting into trouble with the police.

‘Nothing,’ Liam said. ‘Just wondering where you found your new boyfriend.’

Curtis gasped beside her. Did he have no sense? Reacting to Liam was like waving a red rag to a bull, then kicking it on the shins for good measure: bound to end badly. ‘Just ignore him,’ she whispered. She raised her chin and said loudly to the room, ‘Some people just aren’t worth bothering about.’

Liam snorted. With phlegm.

She tugged Curtis’s arm and followed the swell of people heading towards the hall. What had he gasped for? Did he want Liam to pick on him? Paige was even more sure, if she hadn’t been already, that Curtis was one DVD short of a box set.

The hall had been rearranged after the boring speeches earlier. The wooden floor was hidden by rows of tables and chairs. Grey racks of cutlery and towers of trays were set out near the door. A queue of people stood in front of a serving hatch. Food. Her stomach rumbled. She just hoped there was a good vegetarian option, like pizza.

‘Paige!’ Sal waved from the queue. ‘Guess what? We did archery. With real arrows. I nearly shot the teacher.’

‘I hit the board, but not the middle of the target,’ Jo added.

Paige walked towards them. Curtis trailed behind her like a lost dog. ‘Well,’ Paige grinned. ‘We found the Wickworth Boy.’

‘No!’ Sal’s eyes flashed wide.

Jo grabbed Paige’s arm and pulled her closer. ‘You did what?’

‘Hey, you can’t push in,’ a voice said.

Paige glared at the boy who’d spoken.

He shrugged. ‘Well, you can’t, can you? It isn’t fair.’

‘Fine.’ Paige sighed. ‘Sal, Jo, keep me a place at your table.’

Paige went to join the back of the queue. So did Curtis. Didn’t he have any friends of his own? Paige wondered for a second which school he was from. And why he’d turned up in a car, not a bus. But then she saw a pinned-up menu and the thought went clean out of her head.

‘Salad?’ Sal asked, wrinkling her nose.

Paige put down her tray. The salad was already wilting in the heat. ‘It was that or burgers. Sal, Jo, this is Curtis. Curtis, sit down.’

‘Hi, Curtis,’ Sal smiled shyly.

‘Tell us about the ghost,’ Jo said, biting into her bun.

‘It’s the one Chantelle told us about. Remember? We found a painting of him in Curtis’s room. And then there was a spirit manifestation.’

‘A broom fell over,’ Curtis said.

‘A broom?’ Sal giggled.

‘It was a manifestation!’ Paige rapped the table with her fist. Why was he being so difficult? ‘And tonight, we’re going to hold a seance.’

‘We are?’ Jo wriggled with excitement.

Sal looked a lot less happy.

‘Yes, we are.’ Paige thought about
Ghost Finders
. ‘We need supplies. I’ve seen it on telly. We’ll need a candle, and some incense and a table.’ Paige looked around the room. ‘We can’t take a table from here, they’re too big.’ She looked over her shoulder at Curtis. ‘Hey, there are all those broken ones in your room. They’d do.’

‘I’ve got some perfume,’ Jo said. ‘It isn’t incense, but it’s what Mum wears to church. I’ve borrowed it from her.’

‘Fine. So, we just need a candle then. Where will we get that from?’

No one answered. They just looked at each other. There was probably a rule book somewhere that said Year 6s weren’t allowed candles. At least not to hold seances with anyway.

Then Curtis spoke. ‘Does it have to be real?’

‘I don’t know,’ Paige said. ‘What else could it be?’

‘Well, I’ve got an app on my phone. It looks like a candle.’ He looked a bit embarrassed. ‘I use it like a nightlight. You set it off and it burns down until it goes out.’ He shrugged. ‘I like it.’

‘Perfect,’ Paige said. ‘So, tonight we’ll speak to the spirits of the dead.’

Chapter 7

Curtis lay across the foot of his bed. It was dark now, though the temperature hadn’t dropped much. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the ceiling light; he wasn’t even sure whether it worked. Instead he had his phone. On the screen a simple white candle burned with an orange flame. It was bright enough for him to make out the colours of the objects nearby: the beige mattress, the green towel he was using as a pillow and the gold frame of the painting propped against the headboard. The rest of the room was in shadow.

The Wickworth Boy.

There was no such thing.

This portrait was something else. It was real. Dumped like junk. Why?

Curtis wanted to know. He wasn’t sure why it felt so important, but it did.

He minimised the candle on his phone. Now the only light came from the glow of the icons on the screen. The face of the boy in the painting was plunged into darkness.

He opened the internet browser. He could Google ‘Wickworth Manor’ and find out whether anyone knew about the boy. That was more likely to produce results than any weird seance or tea leaf reading or other daft idea that Paige might come up with.

Oh.

There was no 3G coverage, or Wi-Fi. Still, there must be an internet connection somewhere in the house. There had to be: you couldn’t run an activity centre without email, surely? He would look for it as soon as he had a chance.

His finger hovered over his phone. He paused. He might not have internet coverage, but the bars showed that the phone was working just fine. The ache in his chest that had been dormant all afternoon suddenly blossomed. People could call him, if they wanted. Mum and Dad could call.

But they hadn’t.

He remembered the sound of Mum’s car pulling away earlier in the day. Had she looked back at him in her mirror? Had she waved, or blown a kiss? She had on his first day at Northdene. On that day he had stood watching her leave, waving and waving until his arm felt sore. And she had waved right back, until the car pulled out of sight. He had felt so hopeful then, his heart swollen with the possibility of it all. He had been sure that he would be a star pupil, a hero at sports, a leader.

And now look at him.

In an attic, hiding from everyone, with a pretend candle for company. And Northdene was over, he would never see it again and it was all his own fault. Mum knew that. No wonder she hadn’t rung.