Obsidian Pebble (3 page)

“Since Michael has gone, it's like there's this old black dog that keeps following me around, Oz,” she said, shivering. “He's always there no matter what I do to try and shake him off. And whenever I look at him he makes me feel so sad and lonely.”

Oz had gone to the window and looked outside. There'd been no sign of a dog, but when he'd finally managed to get back to Mrs. Evans' class at Hurley Street Juniors, he'd drawn an ugly old black mutt in felt pen. At the end of the year, he'd taken home all his artwork and promptly forgotten all about it until, months later when she was better, Mrs. Chambers had found the drawing and pinned it up on the fridge door; she fixed the calendar over the top of it to hide it and explained that this could be their signal. If ever she was beginning to feel sad again, she'd shift the calendar so that some of the dog was showing. And if Oz thought that she was acting strangely, he could do the same. She'd called it their early warning sign. Mostly, the calendar hung square over the picture. But sometimes Oz had come down to the kitchen in the morning and found that a bit of the dog's ear was showing, or perhaps half its head, and he'd known that he'd have to be careful and not stress his mother out too much.

He looked at the badly drawn bit of ear again now and breathed in and out to let the ripple of anxiety fade. It was just a kid's drawing under a calendar, after all, wasn't it? A calendar that was too thick to be held in place by four rubber magnets, which had a tendency to slip if you closed the fridge door too hard. It was stupid to think of the ear as an omen of any kind. After all, his mother hadn't moved the calendar for months now, and she was fine; she'd just made brain pâté, for cripes' sake. He was not going to let a little thing like that spoil the night.

He repositioned the calendar to hide the drawing completely, put the fridge magnet back in place and pushed all the business about the black dog to the back of his mind.

Through the kitchen window the night beyond looked inky and solid, the only lights coming from the backs of the smaller houses in Tottridge Street. He imagined being in one of those tiny houses on a night like this with Ellie and Ruff. Yet no matter how hard he tried, he knew it just wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't have ceilings that looked like they should be in an art gallery, or a chandelier with a hunting falcon as its centrepiece. In other words, it just wouldn't be Penwurt. He held on to that pleasant thought as he made his way back to the dorm.

* * *

He decided to set his watch alarm for half past three as he climbed up the staircase, so he put the Coke bottle down to adjust the settings. There was no sound at all in the atrium as midnight approached, but outside the wind moaned as it gusted around the stone walls and beams creaked as the old place resisted the elements. Oz finished adjusting his watch and reached down to pick up the bottle when a noise made him start.

Footsteps.

Oz looked up suddenly. Maybe Ellie wanted something else from the kitchen. More likely it would be Ruff. But there was no one there.

He started to climb the stairs again. Must have been his imag… Oz stopped and stood stock-still.

Soft and deliberate and sounding very near, the footsteps came again.

The hairs on Oz's arms stood instantly to attention. He swivelled around. The atrium was empty. Except for the faint moaning of the wind, the only other noises he could hear were the hammers of his heart pounding out a drum roll.

Then they came once more. This time they were distinctly louder.

Oz tilted his head to try and pinpoint exactly where they were coming from. Not above. Not below. Oz realised he was standing on the step below the first floor landing. Whatever was making that noise was behind the wall separating him from the rooms beyond. Someone or something was walking across the floor in one of those rooms, rooms that had been locked up for years. He craned his neck to listen. The noise had died. He took another step forward just as something tapped on the wall right next to where he was standing.

Oz jumped and almost dropped the Coke bottle. His pulse took off like an Atlas rocket and he had to stuff his fist in his mouth to stop from crying out. He leapt up the remaining stairs and through the oak door into the dorm. The shock must have shown in his face because Ruff frowned the minute he entered.

“What's wrong with you?” he asked.

Oz put his quivering fingers to his lips and tiptoed across to where Ellie and Ruff were sitting with the Xbox switched on.

“What is it?” Ellie asked.

“Turn that off and listen,” Oz commanded in a whisper.

“O-oz,” Ellie said with an accusatory stare.

“Shhh. This is not a wind-up, honestly,” Oz whispered again. “Just wait.”

They did. For a very long thirty seconds until…thud… thud…thud…thud.

Ruff's eyes became instant dinner plates. “What the buzzard…?” he whispered.

“Sugar! Are they…?” Ellie asked.

“Footsteps? Yes, they are,” Oz said.

“Whose?” breathed Ellie.

“Dunno, but they're coming from downstairs. From rooms that have been locked up for as long as we've been here.”

Oz, Ellie and Ruff stared at each other in speechless wonder. It was Ellie who broke the stalemate.

“Sounds like
Hidden Haunted Houses of Great Britain
got it right, then,” she said in a whisper edgy with excitement.

Ruff shook his head but he, too, kept his voice low. “There's probably a perfectly normal explanation.”

“Is there?” Oz asked. “Like I said, as far as I know those rooms have been boarded up for years.”

“Maybe it's your mum playing a trick on us,” Ruff said waveringly.

“Mum? You heard her. She was more nervous than anyone about us coming here. She's on emergency standby to come and rescue us, remember? No way is that my mother.”

“Then who is it?” Ellie asked.

“Or what is it?” Ruff mumbled.

Ellie shook her head and rolled her eyes.

“Well, there's only one way to find out, isn't there?” Oz said finally.

“You're not going to go looking?” Ruff asked, horrified.

But Ellie's face lit up at the suggestion and she reached into her pocket for her mobile. “We totally should. I've got three megapixels on my camera phone. We'd make loads of money if we got a picture of it.”

“Wait a minute,” Ruff said. “If it isn't someone trying to scare us, then maybe it's burglars.”

“What's there to burgle?” Oz said with a scornful laugh.

“Okay, but we don't know, do we?” Ruff pressed on. “I don't think it's a brilliant idea to just barge in like a cow in a crystal maze.”

Ellie frowned.

Oz explained. “He means bull in a china shop.”

“It could be really dangerous,” Ruff went on. “In
Spirit World Three
, there's this ghoul and…”

“Xbox games again, Ruff?” Ellie said, her head tilted in a scathing glare.

“Loads of these games are based on real legends,” Ruff said defensively.

“I'm sure they are,” Ellie said, “just as I'm sure that you're just a
little
bit scared.”

“Don't tell me you're not a bit scared, too.” Ruff glared back.

Ellie just smiled at him.

Ruff shook his head. “All I'm saying is that we ought to be really careful. Maybe I should stay outside on watch, just in case.”

“Okay, fair point,” Oz said. “But there are three of us. What could possibly happen to the three—”

The muted thud of more footsteps filtered up from somewhere beneath them once again and Oz never finished his sentence.

“So how do we get in?” Ellie whispered, her eyes glinting with anticipation.

Oz grinned. He took a couple of steps back the way he'd come before turning back to the other two, who were staring at him questioningly. “I know where the key to the padlock is,” he said. “Stay here.”

The key was on a key ring hanging behind the door of the cupboard under the sink in the laundry room. Oz met Ellie and Ruff on the stairs outside the padlocked door on the orphanage's first floor landing.

“So, what's the plan?” Oz whispered.

Ellie shrugged and sent Ruff a disparaging glance. “If we're doing this we're doing it together, according to him.”

“But I thought—”

Ellie shook her head. “Ruff's too stubborn to stay outside even though I pointed out that I'm the one that does martial arts if anything does happen—”

“Yeah, but it was never my idea to go looking anyway—”

“Okay, okay,” Oz said. “We'll all go.”

As quietly as he could, Oz slid the key into the padlock and felt the mechanism click smoothly open. In seconds, he had the chain on the floor in a serpentine loop.

“This door is bound to creak,” Ellie whispered a warning.

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.