Lizard's Leap: Chapter Eleven: Captured

Chapter Five: From Whence She Came

They stood by the expansive drive of Brampton Hall, terrified.

It was fronted by a pair of huge, wrought iron gates. They were as tall as two men and had wicked spikes on the top. Worked cleverly into the ironwork was a crude picture of a road leading through a valley and above the graphic some wording in an arc completed the monogram style logo.

‘From Whence They Came,’ read Vicki. It didn’t make any sense. She thought it sounded sinister, a warning to turn back. She took out her hanky and blew her runny nose.

To the left of the main gates was a small kissing gate.

‘Let’s go home. This is daft,’ Vicki said.

Kerry agreed with her. ‘I want to watch Walking with Dinosaurs.’

‘My mum’s making beef pie for tea,’ Mark stated, hopefully.

Emma sighed. ‘Okay. Fair enough. Give up and go home then. Go on, off you go.’

The others whooped with relief. They turned and walked back down the hill towards home—and comfort—and safety.

‘Oh no, Hey, you two,’ Kerry said. ‘Somebody isn’t with us.’

They turned around, knowing what they were going to see. Emma had gone through the gate and was already striding stubbornly up the drive on her own.

‘Flipping heck,’ Vicki said before shouting after Emma, ‘Hang on, Em. Wait for us.’

‘I knew you were going to say that. I just knew it.’ Mark looked towards home. He looked towards the dark, scary mansion and then down the hill again. It was a nightmare of indecision. He knew what he wanted to do but he couldn’t leave the girls to go on into nobody-knew-what on their own. He took one more, wistful look—wondering if he would ever see home again—and then he set off at a run to catch up with the others. He comforted himself with the thought that, if the crazy woman did lock him in a cage with the intention of eating him for Christmas lunch, then at least she would fatten him up first. As a precaution, before they set off, he had hidden a letter inside his Mickey Mouse pyjama case. It said:

Dear Mum and Dad,
I have been capshurd and eaten by the wickid witch of Bramton Hall. Maybe the
police will find me in time cuz I mite not have been eaten just yet. If I do get out in
time, can I have Lsanya for tea please this will help me to get better. Don’t throw
my toys out. I love you.
Mark.

He caught up with the girls and they walked up the huge gravel drive. They tried to walk quietly so that the crazy woman wouldn’t hear them coming and let a pack of savage dogs out to get them but Vicki kept sneezing loudly, ruining the plan. The gardens were a wilderness. To their right was a wooded area. They walked all the way over to the left as anything could leap out from that wood and grab them. On their side of the drive were expansive lawns. These days they were an overgrown mass of wild grass and weeds. The flowerbeds had long since overflowed and lost all of their form and what was either a bird bath or a fountain had grass growing right past the rim of its bowl so that it was almost invisible.

They rounded the last corner and were standing in an open circle leading up to an enormous, gothic, main door. The front porch should have been beautiful, honeysuckle, cyclamen, and climbing roses framed the archway, but the pretty, nice smelling flowers were suffocated and smothered by sinister, dark green ivy. They didn’t see any beauty; they only saw danger and menace.

Emma raised her hand to pull the rope that rang the bell while the others shrank back, ready to run if need be. She had wrapped her fingers around the rope but hadn’t pulled on it when the door was flung wide open and the crazy woman stood on the threshold in a mass of swishing skirts.

They were so shocked and taken by surprise that they backed up, partly through fear and partly because they had no choice as the crazy woman took up most of the room on the small porch. Mark stumbled over his feet, which seemed to have somehow become tangled with the step and he fell, sprawling into the overgrown flower beds. Kerry tottered into a branch of the climbing roses. It snagged her new woolly tights. She put her finger on the snag to feel if she was bleeding and felt an enormous ladder flutter down her leg, leaving a finger sized hole where the snag had been. She wasn’t impressed; the tights had been labelled as ladder resistant.

Her temper rose and she forgot about being scared, she was too angry. She strode up to Sylvia and twisted her leg in an unnatural way to show off the back of her calf and the offending ladder.

‘Oh, thank you very much. Do you know these are my new tights? They cost two pounds ninety-nine pence, and now they’re ruined.’

Sylvia looked down on Kerry as though she was an irritating fly buzzing round her head. She waved a hand at her dismissively. ‘Well you lot took your time to get here, didn’t you? Now that you’ve finally seen sense, you’d better come in. Oh, for goodness' sake, get up off the floor, Mark. You aren’t hurt.’

She ushered them inside the house and slammed the door. They looked at each other. How did she know Mark’s name?

‘Ugh,’ Mark said, as a cobweb floated down from a dusty old chandelier and wrapped around his face.

‘What’s the matter with you, now, boy? Scared of a little-biddy spider home? And what do you suppose the spiders think of you when they see your ugly mug?’

Mark opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and shut it again before anything alive and creeping crawled into it. He shrank back from the woman.

‘Come on then, we’ve a lot to talk about. Can’t stand here all day. What time are your parents expecting you back and do they know where you are?’

‘Of course they know where we are and they’ll send the police here looking for us if we aren’t back by five o’clock. So you’d better watch out,’ Mark lied. He’d been the one to lie to their parents, too. They thought the kids were at the cinema where Karen had dropped them off an hour earlier. ‘My granddad’s got a twelve-bore shot gun and he’s a member of a big shooting club. They’ve got you surrounded, so you’d better walk out slowly with your hands on your head, and I’ll tell them not to shoot you.’ The girls felt less uncomfortable with this spate of lying because at least part of it was true. Granddad did own a twelve-bore and was a member of a shooting club, but it was only clay-shooting and that’s as far as the truth stretched.

‘Oh, I see. Yes, that does change things. I’ll have to be extra careful and make sure that I don’t leave any evidence, won’t I?’ She pushed them ahead of her and motioned across the tiled floor of the main hall.

Although they were terrified, Mark still nudged Vicki in the side and pointed to Sylvia’s slippers.

‘I don’t know what her problem is,’ whispered Emma, ‘but I bet it’s hard to pronounce.’

Sylvia swung round daintily for such a round lady. ‘What are you smaning at? Haven’t you seen a pair of slippers before?’ They shut up and huddled closer together.

‘You can’t hurt us. Kerry knows karate.’ Mark was really clutching at straws; Kerry had attended two lessons before dropping it in favour of ballet class.

Without being told, Sylvia knew which of the girl’s was Kerry and looked her up and down. ‘What’s she going to do, pirouette me to death?’ she said. ‘Watch your shoulders in arabesque, they’re sloppy.’ She couldn’t know about the ballet, it was impossible.

Kerry’s lip quivered. ‘Madam Verde says that my arabesque is very good,’

‘Then Madame Verde’s an ass.’

Their heads were buzzing with questions that none of them dared ask. They just stared at her.

How did she know that Kerry’s arabesque is sloppy? And how did she know Mark’s name? Emma's face twisted in concentration as she tried to work out how the crazy woman knew so much.

For once, Sylvia’s clothes almost corresponded with each other. She was wearing a long black skirt and matching top, and although she still wore the little hat on the top of her head, her gaudy scarf was missing. The only things that really looked out of place were her bright orange Ali Baba slippers. They were enormous and curled round like wound-up caterpillars at the tips.

The hall tapered at the far end into a long, narrow passageway which then became a flight of steps leading downwards. These led into the biggest kitchen that they had ever seen. It was dark because there was a board nailed to the windows, presumably to keep vandals and thieves out, or maybe it was there to keep kidnapped kids in. Sylvia turned on the light. Every surface in the kitchen was thick with dust and cobwebs; it hadn’t been used in a very long time. Vicki sneezed, twice, making them jump. They could feel the dust building up at the back of their throats.

The crazy woman—who didn’t look very old anymore and had lost her limp—walked across the kitchen to a beam that was strung with pots and pans. She pulled on the third saucepan from the left and the hook moved down in a lever action. The children jumped round and clutched at each other, startled by a low rumbling sound behind them. An entire wall was shifting. It opened to reveal a passageway leading back into the house.

‘Wow, a secret passage.’ Mark exclaimed, impressed.

‘There are several of them all over the house.’ Sylvia said. ‘It’s a proper rabbit warren, people could get lost forever.’

Emma wrote, Help, in big letters in the dust on the stainless steel table. She wrote her name underneath it and was halfway through writing the date when the crazy woman ushered them through into the secret passage. Emma didn’t think that her message had been noticed. She wished she'd had time to write about the third saucepan from the left.

They walked through the hole in the wall and down a long, dust-free, reasonably lit corridor until they came to a door at the end. They had passed several intersections in the passageway but kept on moving straight ahead. Sylvia unfastened the three locks on the door with a variety of modern keys all fished from the pocket of her skirt. The children were scared; how would anybody ever find them down here?

‘I want to go home,’ Kerry was fighting back tears.