Published in 2023 by Welbeck Flame
An imprint of Welbeck Children’s Limited,
part of Welbeck Publishing Group.
Offices in: London - 20 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JW &
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Design and layout © Welbeck Children’s Limited 2023

Text copyright © Carolyn Ward, 2023
Illustrations copyright © Beatriz Castro, 2023

Carolyn Ward and Beatriz Castro have asserted their moral right to be identified as the Author and Illustrator of this Work in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners and the publishers.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 80130 095-7
eISBN: 978 1 80130 096-4

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK)

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Disclaimer: Any names, characters, trademarks, service marks and trade names detailed in this book is the property of their respective owners and are used solely for identification and reference purposes. This book is a publication of Welbeck Children’s Limited, part of Welbeck Publishing Group and has not been licensed, approved, sponsored or endorsed by any person or entity.

IN MEMORY OF MY BELOVED DAD, JAMES FINNEY.

FOR MY BRILLIANT AND BRAVE MUM, ELIZABETH FINNEY.

‘We’re here!’

Mum’s voice cut through the podcast burbling from my headphones and I pushed them back, sitting up and looking out of the car window. In front of us was our new home: Darkling Manor.

Mum turned up the long winding drive, and I swear a flock of bats took off from the roof. I leaned forwards, not quite believing my eyes. It looked like a haunted house, all black and gnarly and wonky. I saw it had a clock tower in the centre, and about fourteen crazily angled chimneys. Mum was oohing and ahhing but I just shook my head.

She drove all the way up and jerked to a halt by the front door, where there was an overgrown turning circle for visitors to take one look and keep going.

We climbed out of the car and I had a babyish urge to hold her hand. Instead, I folded my arms, scowling. The sun was going down behind the house, casting a blood-red edge around the coppery roof tiles, which glowed as if they were on fire. I fiddled with my phone, all of my senses on high alert. The neighbourhood was quiet except for the mad flapping of a crow, and the growl of an occasional passing car.

‘Are you sure about this, Mum?’ I asked, absorbing the state of the place.

‘Of course, Bells!’ She put one arm around my shoulders and squeezed me tight. ‘Another absolute gem for our portfolio! Just imagine what we can do to it!’

Probably best to just demolish it and start again, I thought, resting my head on her shoulder for a moment.

Mum fished in her massive handbag for Darkling’s keys, which the owner had posted to her last week. There were loads of them on a metal ring big enough for me to slip my hand in.

‘Couldn’t lose these,’ joked Mum, trying to keep it all light-hearted despite the nightmare we were walking into. She struggled to wind one of the biggest keys off for me. I looked down at it, flakes of rust already staining my hand orange. The properties we did up always started off rough, but once we got a team of builders, carpenters, carpet-fitters, electricians, plumbers and the random odd-job people, they ended up looking amazing. Mrs Hallorann was Darkling’s owner, and had inspected Mum’s work at the old water mill we’d just finished, saying she was ‘blown away’! She was American and liked wearing a feathery wrap. Combined with her long, skinny legs, she reminded me of an ostrich.

Mum slotted her key into the huge, arched front door as I tripped up the crooked step. After a good deal of wrenching and clanking, the door swung wide with a sharp creak. It seemed to fall open at a downward angle, too, like the house behind it had sunk.

‘Have the surveyors checked this place out?’ I asked. Mum usually insisted on her surveyor, a yellow-eyed old man called Bob, to thoroughly check anywhere we would be living. He followed us all over, happy enough as Mum paid for his train tickets. Before Bob she had fallen through a floor, and did not want it to happen again.

‘Actually… no.’ She looked back at me guiltily, swiping black curls out of her eyes. ‘There wasn’t time with this one, as Mrs H wanted the work starting straight away. It’s to be a hotel, did I tell you?’

I nodded. There was an odd breeze flowing out of the doorway at us, like the house was exhaling. It smelled like I imagined a grave would, after a hundred years of rotting dampness. I wrinkled my nose.

Mum went in, stumbling a little on the floor, which was tiled like a checkerboard in a way that made me blink. I stumbled too, and had to force my attention away from the mesmerising patterns.

‘Mrs H wants everything.’ Mum sounded gleeful as she stared around. The ceiling was high, with a whole extra layer of dust-filled cobwebs hanging from it like a thousand tiny hammocks. ‘Complete revamp, all the furniture, fixtures and fittings. This will be such fun, Bella!’

The house certainly looked like a lot of things, but fun was not one of them. I opened my mouth to disagree, when the front door slammed behind us.

‘Bella!’ tutted Mum, examining an old cracked mirror. ‘Don’t slam doors in old properties!’

‘I didn’t!’ I held my hands out and stared pointedly back at the door. Couldn’t she see I was miles away from the thing?

‘I need you to be careful, OK?’ she called back at me as she went into the room on the right, while I pulled a face. I had been nowhere near the stupid door.

I turned back to it, as now her key was on the outside and I didn’t fancy any local jokers locking us in. The handle stuck, and took ages of wrenching and yanking before it suddenly swung down at me, making me stagger. I clambered back up like some sort of ice-skating giraffe and snatched the key from the outside, kicking the thing shut again. But now, of course, the door wouldn’t fit into the frame.

‘What?’ I muttered.

Finally I got it closed, by jumping up and down and using my left shoulder. I put our keys on the floor by a vase shaped like a screaming woman. Who’d left that there? I set off to follow Mum, when I heard a piano playing. I faltered, listening. Whoever it was wasn’t very good. They were playing scales, running up and down in pitch, but getting more than a couple wrong.

‘Where’s the piano?’ I called out.

‘Piano? There isn’t one of those here. Anything valuable got taken out by the last owners.’

I screwed up my face. No piano? The quiet tinkling stopped, and I swore I heard a giggle.

‘Mum, is there someone here?’ I called again, looking around me just in case there was a squatter or burglar or something.

‘Nope – nobody’s been in here for months.’ Mum breezed out of one door and flashed a grin at me. I swallowed.

Then something totally bonkers happened.

There was a whisper in my ear.

I froze, standing absolutely rigid. Everything else in the house was now so silent I could hear my heart thumping. The whisper made my ear cold, like a snake tongue tickling deep inside my head. I started to shake and, after a moment, forced my feet to move, running as fast as I could after Mum.

I risked a glance back along the hallway, trying to pull in a breath. There was definitely nobody here except for Mum and me. This was impossible. I rubbed my ear, trying to lose the feeling.

I managed not to whimper as I scampered through the front parlour after her, my mind trying to explain what I’d heard. It didn’t make any sense at all.

Three words. With another of those giggles.

They ran on a loop through my head.

‘Play my game!’

I ran my hand along the red metal gates that seemed to be exactly the same as the metal gates wrapping around every school I’d ever been to, and took a deep breath. I’d managed to get some sleep in our first night at Darkling, even though I had insisted on sharing a room with Mum and she snored like a gorilla.

‘You could have that super little pink room by the stairs?’ she’d wheedled, but I shook my head hard enough to make my plaits fly into my mouth. No way was I sleeping alone in this place until we’d hoovered… I mean, all of those cobwebs! Clearly there would be a million giant spiders just waiting for me to fall asleep so they could crawl over my face. The misbehaving front door, the piano… and the whispering… no way.

I kept thinking about it, that voice. It had sounded quite young. Maybe there was a kid who had sneaked in. Old properties always had unlocked doorways and passages and kitchen gardens, and sometimes we’d had trouble with local teenagers breaking in to mess about in the grounds of some of the previous places. Mum usually solved it by fitting security lights and beefing up the perimeter fences. I decided to tell her to make it a priority after school. After school! I couldn’t wait for this day to be over. I had begged Mum to let me stay home and help her with the planning, but she just gave me a massive hug.

‘If you don’t go to school you won’t qualify as an architect or a builder… or a plumber or something useful to our family business.’

She was right, of course. But starting a new school every six to eighteen months was like living in a weird Groundhog nightmare.

This school was tall and thin, towering above me, bits of rubbish blowing about in the wind. Counting in my head, I realised Springhill Comprehensive was my eighth school, but it was different in one major way – it was my first secondary school. I was extra-nervous because of this. Due to a very overdue finish on the water mill and the difference between Welsh and English school dates, it meant that I was quite late for the autumn term. Being the new girl nearly two whole months after everyone else had already started sucked. Even the fact that it was a Tuesday and not a Monday made it suck BIG TIME. And I was late. Off the scale of suck, like a vacuum cleaner on warp speed.

Typical Mum getting busy on a conference call just when I should have been setting off. I was in the background pulling faces to try and get her attention, but all she did was put her hand over the phone and holler ‘Remember your speech therapy training!’ at me. I opened my mouth to reply but she blew me a kiss and started striding around the drive, yapping about gargoyles, waving to me and sticking her thumb up. I knew I had no chance. Instead of the lift she’d promised me, I had to walk, waiting until I was outside Darkling so my phone actually worked to give me directions. Another thing to remember to tell Mum… get the internet people around to boost the signal. I needed a working phone to do all the normal teenage stuff, like text people and take selfies to spruce up with cat ears. I pulled a face. Who was I kidding? I had never texted anyone except Mum in my life.

Sure, people had been ‘friendly’ to me at the other schools, but never enough to swap mobile phone numbers. Never enough to get asked around to tea, or gossip about other people. Never. Maybe one good thing about moving house every six-to-eighteen months was the fact that I kept getting new chances. Maybe this time I’d do better.

As I headed in, I couldn’t help but think that compared to the other seven schools I’d attended, Springhill seemed particularly scruffy. There was chipped paint everywhere and black marks on the staircase to my left. The place smelled of dust and hot custard. The skirting boards were mismatched and rough. I diagnosed a little hand-sanding and then some ice-white gloss. As I pushed open about a hundred heavy glass doors and then buzzed at reception, I had never felt more alone in my life. I’d never imagined my first day at big school to be quite so disorganised. ‘I can do this,’ I muttered. The receptionist stared at me blankly, before pointing to the left, to a series of offices.

‘See the head,’ she said. My imagination conjured up an alien head sitting on a desk, maybe with green tentacles reaching out to the phone and the computer, all dripping with acidic slime.

The head turned out to be a massive woman called Mrs Hip, who did have a body after all. I couldn’t help but notice her first name was Christine, meaning she was literally ‘Chip’. She smelled of vinegar, too, quite like the acidic slime thing, actually, and I couldn’t stop myself wrinkling my nose. She stopped her welcoming speech until I looked up and put my listening face on again. When she had warbled about the rules and the fire escapes for ten minutes, she passed me out to a bored secretary in the adjoining room who actually tutted when she pulled up my records and ran her eyes down all of my previous schools. Like it was my fault we kept moving around. It’s not! I wanted to shout. You try having a mother who hates staying in one place. She’s not normal, I swear. I had to fill in a million forms and it was hard to remember my new address. ‘Darkling Manor’ I did recall, but I had no idea about the postcode.

‘Darkling Manor?’ she repeated, looking at me oddly. She leaned in to look through the head’s door and waved the papers at her. ‘Darkling Manor!’ she repeated in an awed tone.

I blinked. What was she on about? Our newest home-for-now did happen to be a particularly odd, creepy house, but I didn’t realise they’d know of it. ‘Did someone just move out?’ I asked.

‘A few years ago. It’s been empty since then – now what were they…’ She tapped her pen on her teeth. ‘Ah yes! The Blewitt family. Had a boy here, bit older than you. They barely lasted a month.’

‘Sounds like they… blew it?’ I cringed at myself but she wasn’t listening.

The secretary pulled her cardigan closer and said, ‘Everyone around here knows about that place.’ Her shoulders gave a shudder.

‘Oh?’ I said politely. ‘Really?’

She peered at me over her glasses. ‘The tragedy all those years ago! Apparently, the house has never recovered. Nobody has ever really settled there. Quite shocking.’

Just as I was bubbling over with questions like a dropped can of pop, she leaned over to the humming copier and handed me a timetable. ‘You’ve missed form time, but if you hurry you won’t be late for chemistry with Mr Brand.’

‘Oh good,’ I said, and she peered sharply at me in case I was being sarcastic. I kept my face blank.

‘Lab four,’ she said, handing me a blurry map, pointing at the science labs, which looked to be right over on the other side of the school. Great. I gathered up my backpack and headed out, peeping back at her, hoping for a smile for some stupid reason.

‘Get a grip,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Like I care? I’m not going to be at this school for long either. Mum will finish renovating Darkling and make it all beautiful and shiny again, and then we’ll be off to who knows where.’ Maybe the far north, I mused, or better still, down south where it was warm and beachy. But most likely it would be somewhere dull and boring again like this place. Castleton, a sprawling village on the edge of a large town. It had sounded smoggy and mucky when we first read about Darkling Manor, but it was actually quite close to lots of green countryside and thick, dark woods. At least it was an improvement on the water mill, I thought. That had been bleak, deep in a valley hemmed in by brown mountains. I still had nightmares about the long icy walk to the outdoor toilet.

My feet followed the map up the scuffed stairs and along a wide grey corridor as my lungs tried to breathe normally. There were a few kids around some lockers, and all of them seemed to sense that I was new, jerking up their heads like lions scenting a gazelle. Maybe panic was sweating out of my pores. At first I tried to smile at everyone who stared at me, but nobody smiled back so I gave up. Down some more stairs, narrow and red this time, and out of a heavy fire door. I checked the map again and looked east, where a huge set of black metal doors had a big sign made out of spanners – Welcome to Science Block. I felt a rush of relief. There were a few other kids racing around, obviously late like me. A couple weren’t making any attempt to hurry, and I avoided their curious eyes. For the eighth time, I wondered if anyone here would talk to me.