Stonebird
New York ⢠London
Copyright © Mike Revell 2015
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2015
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Cover artwork © Frances Castle
Cover design by Nicola Theobald
e-ISBN 978-1-62365-463-4
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual personsâliving or deadâevents, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Molly Ward, who I will always remember. And for Jade. She would have loved you so much.
It starts at night.
The first thing I do is check my phone. That's what usually wakes me up. The alarm blaring or a text flashing up from Sam or Dave. But the screen is blank.
I sit up and rub my eyes.
A cold breeze drifts in through the open window, rustling the curtains. I crawl across the bed and reach for the latch. The windows in this house are old and stiff and you have to yank them hard to close them. I try to do it quietly, but it still makes a loud bang as it shuts. I hold my breath, listening for any noise from Mom's room, but it's quiet.
Still asleep.
Moonlight fills the room with thin shadows. They drift and twitch on the walls. A shiver runs up and down
my arms, but I try to ignore it. I'm tired, that's all. It's our fourth night here and I haven't had a proper sleep for days, and now I'm having bad dreams and hearing noises and what I really need to do is go back to sleep.
I go to draw the curtainsâand that's when I see it.
A huge shadow in the darkness, a flash of gleaming gold.
It sweeps across the garden and blends with the trees, then flies off toward the rundown church.
I shiver again, but not because I'm cold.
I saw the church on the day we moved in. I've seen it every day since, but I've never gone in. It's hunched on a hill at the end of the lane. Some of the windows are boarded up, and its walls are crumbling. Mom says it used to look great. She says Grandma used to sing in the choir there when she was younger. Now scaffolding covers one side of the building, and even that looks forgotten. I don't think anyone has used the place in a long time.
But that shadowâwhatever it wasâflew right over there.
Maybe I'm still asleep. Maybe I'm dreaming.
I yank the curtains closed and scramble back under the covers.
It's not real,
I tell myself.
It's not real; stop making things up.
Part of me wants to turn the light on. Part of me wants to open the door and keep it open so I can see if anything comes in. But Mom says I'm the Man of the House, and
that means I've got to stop acting like a baby and be more grown up.
So I take a deep breath, pull the blanket up, and stare at the ceiling, counting the cracks.
Waiting for morning.
I find the diary the next day.
It's in a box in the garage, hidden underneath a pile of garbage.
You know how grown-ups always think you're too young to understand anything and talk to you like you're a baby, and you want to shout at them but you can't because you have to Respect Your Elders?
That's happening to me now.
“It'll be better than the old house in no time,” Mom says. “I promise.”
“I just don't get why
we
had to move,” I say, flicking through a bag of old newspaper cuttings. “It would have been loads easier for Grandma to live closer to us.”
“He's right,” Jess says.
Mom stops shifting boxes and glares at us, but after a moment her eyes soften.
“Grandma's lived in Swanbury her whole life. She'd hate to be anywhere else.”
I'm about to say
She wouldn't realize she's moved anyway
, but I don't want to upset Mom, even if she doesn't care that she's upset me. I liked our old house. I had the best room, and our garden was so big that Daisy could run laps around it. This house is much smaller. It was all right for Grandma and Granddad because all they ever did was sit around watching TV. Plus they didn't have Jess playing loud music through the walls.
“I forgot about this,” Jess says, holding up an old photo.
It must be from ages ago, because I look tiny. It's of Grandma and Granddad with Mom, Jess, and me watching a play at their local pub, andâ
My breath catches, and I glance at Mom to make sure she's okay.
Because Dad's there too, running to try to make it into the photo before the timer goes off. Sometimes when Mom sees photos of Dad she goes still, and silent tears trickle down her face.
She takes the picture from Jess, and her eyes glaze over.
“What a lovely photo,” she says.
Then she smiles, and my whole body sags in relief.
I know we moved to Swanbury so we could be closer to Grandma, but Jess thinks we moved because of Dad. Even though he left seven years ago, you could still feel him all around the old house.
When Dad walked out, Mom said nothing would change. She said she would always be there for us and that she would be a mom and a dad at the same time.
But Dad's gone to live with his girlfriend in Australia, and the only way I can talk to him is on Skype. And now we're living here in a dusty old house a million miles away from my best friends, Sam and Dave, and I've got to go to a new school where I won't know anyone, and I'll just be standing around all day with no one to talk to.
“Here,” Mom says. “Help me with this, will you?”
We lift one of the boxes out of the garage and leave it in the storage pile. I asked Mom why we didn't just throw it all away, but she said family might want to take a look at it, so we need to hang on to it.
“Have you seen anything you want?” she says as we tiptoe back through the mess.
“Not yet.”
The first thing we did when we moved in was sort through all the junk. Mom said if we liked the look of anything, we could keep it to remember Granddad by, or Grandma before she went into the retirement home.
I open the nearest box and peer in. More papers, more photos, so old that they're in black and white. At the bottom there's an album in a red leather jacket.
I lift it up, and there it isâ
The diary.
It's impossible to miss. On the front cover is a pencil drawing, a monster or a demon, tall and black with
burning amber eyes. I hold it up so the eyes catch the light, and my heart stops . . .
The thing I saw last night. It looked like this.
“What have you got there?” Jess says, looking over my shoulder.
“Nothing. Just a book.”
I pretend to put it back, then quickly hide it in the front pocket of my hoody.
I don't know why. I just need to have a proper look at it. Mom and Jess have already taken loads of good stuff, and I haven't found anything yet. If Jess sees it, then maybe she'll want it too.
After a while we stop for dinner.
Mom starts singing in the kitchen as she cooks, and Jess is hogging the TV, so I take the book up to my room. I sit on my bed and turn it in my hands, trying not to smear the shading. The cover is old and battered. It's probably been lying there for ages, because Grandma's been in the retirement home for almost as long as I can remember. And I'm eleven years oldâso that's a pretty long time.
I open the cover gently and peer at the first page.
Diary of Margaret Williams, age 13
TOP SECRET
Grandma Williams . . . these words were written by her. Does that mean she did the drawing on the front too? I can't imagine her drawing anything now. I've seen her trying to write her name before, and the pen just wandered
and wobbled until Mom took it off her. The page was covered in so many inky squiggles that they had to get a new piece of paper.
Thirteen years old. That would make her the same age as Jess. I've never thought about Grandma being a little girl before. She's old and wrinkly and calls me Robert even though that's Dad's name, and she gives me one pound when I visit, unless it's my birthday and then she gives me two.
I hold the cover up to the light. It's a good drawing, part eagle, part lion. The pencil shading makes it look like stone. Like aâ
Like a gargoyle.
Suddenly the diary feels weird in my hands. My fingers tingle, and my head goes all foggy. I take one more look at it, then slide it under my bed.