Stonebird Read online

  New York • London

  Copyright © Mike Revell 2015

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to [email protected].

  Cover artwork © Frances Castle

  Cover design by Nicola Theobald

  e-ISBN 978-1-62365-463-4

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  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 persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  For Molly Ward, who I will always remember. And for Jade. She would have loved you so much.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Acknowledgments

  1

  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 curtains—and 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 shadow—whatever it was—flew 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.

  2

  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, and—

  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 wi
th 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 is—

  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 old—so 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 a—

  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.

  3

  It’s impossible to sleep that night.

  I can see it every time I close my eyes. The gargoyle, glaring out of the darkness. Normally I snooze my alarm twice before getting up, but now I can’t wait for morning.

  “You look like you’ve been run over,” Jess says, when I trudge downstairs.

  She’s sitting at the kitchen table dressed in her school uniform. Jess starts secondary school today and has to wear a full-on blazer and everything. They have different periods throughout the day, like science in period one and math in period two, and you can get double periods like in Harry Potter when they have double potions, and her lessons aren’t all in one room with one teacher, like mine always have been.

  “Did you have trouble sleeping?” Mom says to me.

  “A bit.” I try to smile to show it’s all right. I don’t want her to know that I always have trouble sleeping here. She’s got enough to deal with.

  “Sorry, dear.” She puts the kettle on and stares out of the window, mumbling something about the garden looking hideous. Then she turns to face me. “I spoke to the school this morning. They’re looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow! I completely forgot. Mom must see the look on my face, because she wanders over and strokes my shoulder.

  “It won’t be like last time, I promise.”

  She means the time I got called Daddy Longlegs and had dead fish hidden in my drawer and got invited to Jack’s party just so the other kids could lock the door and laugh when I couldn’t get in.

  “It’s a good school. Your grandma used to teach there, you know. And anyway, you’re lovely, kind, and caring,” she says. “The other boys will be lucky to have you as a friend.”

  “It’ll be all right,” I say. There’s a smile on my face, because if Sam and Dave heard that, they’d smack my arm and call me a mama’s boy. But it doesn’t last for long, because kind and caring won’t get me very far when the bell rings.

  One more day.

  One more day until I walk into a class where everyone else has known each other for years and I’ll be the only new kid. A class full of staring eyes and secret whispers.

  I don’t like picturing that, so I sit there in silence, just thinking, Orange penguins orange penguins orange penguins . . . because that always works when you want to take your mind off something. And after a while I can breathe again.

  When we finish breakfast, Jess leaves to catch her bus.

  Daisy’s waiting outside the kitchen door, so I run through to the living room and play with her for a bit. I chuck her ball, and she grabs it, brings it back, and drops it at my feet. She cocks her head and stares at me, nudging the ball closer. Her eyes are big and brown and her mouth hangs open and her tail’s swishing across the floor like a snake at a disco. That’s the thing about a dog like Daisy. You can be having the Worst Day Ever, and she’ll still make you smile.

  I chuck the ball again, and she scrambles on the wooden floor and bounds after it—

  Then stops. She stops dead still, looking out of the French windows.

  “What is it, Daisy?” I ask.

  She forgets about the ball and goes over to the glass, whining to go out.

  I let her into the garden, and I’m just about to turn back and put the TV on when Daisy stops again, completely still in the middle of the lawn. What’s got into her? There’s a pub next door, and they have a cat that sometimes leaps over the wall. If Daisy sees it she goes crazy. But I can’t see the cat anywhere. And Daisy . . . she’s not going crazy or looking into the bushes, where the cat normally hides. She’s staring up at the roof.

  I know it’s stupid, but my heart’s beating faster and faster.

  I’ve never seen her like this before, not even when she sneaks up on pigeons at the bird table. Her whole body’s frozen.

  “What’s wrong?” I say, poking my head out into the cold air.

  She doesn’t look at me, just keeps staring up at the roof.

  “What have you seen, Daisy?”

  Then she barks. She barks and barks, leaping up on her back legs.

  I rush outside, but she’s off, running across the garden to the gate, barking louder and louder. I don’t stop to think, just chase after her. If she’s this worked up, she might try to jump the fence, and if she jumps the fence . . .

  Round the side of the house and across the drive. and she’s going to do it, I can tell she’s going to do it. She’s legging it closer and closer and—

  “Daisy, no!”

  But it’s too late.

  All that’s left is a cloud of dust where she kicked the gravel.

  I should go back for Mom. I know I should. But in the time that takes, Daisy could get lost—or worse, run over. I rub the sweat from my forehead, then roll over the fence after her.

  I know where she’s going before I even see it.

  The church.

  It’s ahead of me now, surrounded by bare trees. In my head I picture that shadow again, the weird yellow glow as it flew off. Did it come back? Is that what Daisy’s chas
ing? My breath catches in my throat, and I lick my lips. I don’t want to go any closer. I want to turn around and run, just run and run without looking back. But I can see the dark shape of Daisy leaping through the grounds. I’ve got to get her back.

  I walk quickly, breathing hard. The graveyard is lumpy and misshapen, as if they just piled bodies one on top of another until they ran out of room. All the gravestones are weather beaten and broken. There are no flowers beside any of them.

  I close my eyes and picture the cold, dark emptiness inside the church.

  “Daisy?” I hiss. I don’t know why I’m whispering.

  Nothing. She’s disappeared.

  The path leads all the way to the church. There’s a small roofed entranceway in front of the main door, where a black metal gate swings on its hinges, creaking and groaning.

  “Daisy, come!”

  She pokes her head out of the gate, then turns and disappears again.

  Great. I let out a sigh and follow her.

  The light from outside doesn’t reach very far into the entranceway. I can hear Daisy sniffing in the darkness, hear her pawing the ground. I follow the sound and reach out, grabbing her collar.

  Right. I’ve got her. I should go straight back.

  But now I’m here, I want to go in. I need to go in. Just to see if I’m right.

  My heart’s beating loud and hard.

  Quietly, quietly, I creep up to the door, reaching out to touch the damp wood. I feel for the latch, and something tough sticks to my hand. It bends and snaps—spider webs! Even in the dark I know it. Without letting go of Daisy’s collar, I flap my arms and brush my clothes and clench my eyes shut, and all the time I’m reaching until I touch the cold metal and grip hard and twist.

  The door opens with a loud clunk.

  My heart jolts as something small scuttles past my feet and off into the graveyard.

  It’s so quiet you can almost feel the silence.

  “Come on, then,” I say to Daisy, sounding braver than I feel.

  I take a deep breath and lick my lips. Then I walk inside.

  Dust clouds around me. The early-morning sun filters through holes in the roof, illuminating the aisle and the old wooden pews.