Whisper For The Reaper, Jack Gatland [good books for high schoolers txt] 📗

could go back to Hurley and gain adoration from the smaller kids there, annoyed when the camping season ended in October and he had to wait almost half the year to return.

He didn’t explain what he did while camping to his weekday friends. They weren’t that important to him. They didn’t see him in the same way.

They’d gotten a spaniel named Scamper, named after some book dog his dad had loved as a kid a couple of years into this. Craig wasn’t a fan of the spaniel, mainly because he ended up as the de facto dog walker, but that said, it seemed to attract girls to him, all wanting to stroke Scamper; and Craig had by then reached an age where girls were very interesting.

And then it’d all gone wrong. His parents now had a caravan, and although Ellie still slept with them inside it, they allowed Craig his own three-person tent, which he’d had to save up for. It was like having his own place; he had a double mattress inside it, even if his sleeping bag fitted one person, and a small radio that played CDs. But for the fifteen-year-old Craig, this was a bachelor pad. He was finally becoming a man.

And his attitude to the other kids on the site changed.

He wasn’t bothered about playing in the woods like he was five years earlier. He wanted to kiss girls and look cool. He’d just finished his Year 10 mock GCSE exams. You were effectively a grown up when you did that.

He bullied the smaller kids in the campsite, mainly because he could. That, and it was revenge for the bullies who still attacked him at his own school. He’d also realised that he was no longer the ‘veteran’ who could show the coolest places to other kids; that was now a position given to his sister, or even other younger children who, arriving years after he had claimed the role were now looking at him as some kind of weird hanger on. And this had angered him.

He’d acted out by hurting the smaller kids; not physically, but mentally.

He’d take things of theirs, left outside the tents at night and throw them into the Thames or break them, leaving them back outside the tents for the owners to find the following morning.

He’d tell stories of the Grey Lady, a ghostly woman who hanged herself in Medmenham Abbey, a stately home across the Thames and historically infamous as the location of Sir Francis Dashwood’s The Hellfire Club, who used it for "obscene parodies of religious rites" in the mid-1700s, her ghost walking the banks of the Thames late at night, stealing children’s souls.

He’d even pretended to become possessed by Dashwood, terrifying the younger children until they cried, now and then finding an intrigued teenage girl who wanted to know more.

He’d never gone too far with that, except for that one time.

But now it was summer, school was over, and the Hurley campsite had become a prison for Craig. After seven years there, he had built a reputation; one that his parents had often argued with him about. They were one strike away from being banned because of his antics, they’d say. He’d laugh and tell them that the ghost of Francis Dashwood had done the terrible things, not him, and then walk out before they could reply. In fact, he’d just done that, walking with Scamper eastwards along the Thames, towards Hurley Lock, a mile or so away.

The Thames was to his left, strangely quiet for the time of day; nobody was fishing, there weren’t even any kids playing in the water. It felt wrong, odd, somehow. The bank of the river became an open field to his right, and about fifty yards away a bank of trees showed the woodland copse that bordered the campsite. This was where Scamper was running to, as Craig tried to get his battered old iPod Nano to work. If he’d charged it earlier, he wouldn’t have heard the barking.

And that would have changed everything.

As it was, he hadn’t charged the iPod, and therefore it wasn’t playing music and he heard Scamper barking at something somewhere near the edge of the woods. The bloody dog wouldn’t come back after being called, and Craig almost continued on, convinced that Scamper would just follow him, or just do him a favour and leave forever, when he heard the barking cut off abruptly with a yelp.

Turning back to the trees, Craig could see that Scamper had run over to the rickety bridge. And, walking towards it, frustrated that Scamper had most likely run into the trees, he stopped about twenty feet away from it, as a man appeared the other side, emerging from the woods.

He was old, maybe in his fifties. He was slim, had short brown hair in a buzz cut, and wore a green Barbour jacket. His face was pale, like he didn’t get out into the sun that much. And he was smiling.

‘Have you lost your dog?’ he asked, his voice showing the slightest hint of a European accent. ‘He is right here. Come and get him.’

‘Nah, it’s okay,’ Craig said. There was something about this old man that unnerved him. ‘I’ll just wait.’

‘I think he is tangled in nettles,’ the man replied. ‘You must come and help him.’

‘It’s cool, I’ll wait until you’ve moved on,’ Craig tried to smile, but it came out as a leer. The man however nodded at this.

‘Understandable,’ he agreed. ‘I am a stranger. You are right to be wary. But we are not strangers, are we Craig?’

At the sound of his own name, Craig felt an icy wind blowing down his spine. He’d never seen this man before, and he’d sure as hell not given his name away.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘How do you know who I am?’

‘I know everything about you,’ the man continued to smile as he spoke, and Craig found himself irrationally angry at this. ‘I know you have been coming here