Although Pickering had been walking out front the whole time telling us he wasn’t scared of security guards or watchdogs or even ghosts – Cus you can just put your hand froo them – when we reached the bottom of the wooded hill no one said anything, and we never looked at each other. Part of me always believed that we would turn back at the black gate, because the fun part was telling stories about the house and planning the expedition and imagining terrible things. Going inside was different because lots of the missing kids had talked about the house before they disappeared. And some of the young men who broke in there, for a laugh, always came away a bit funny in the head. Our dad said that was because of drugs.
Even the trees near the estate were different, like they were too still and silent and the air between them was real cold. But we went up through the trees and found the high brick wall that surrounds the grounds. There was barbed wire and broken glass set into concrete on top of the wall. We followed the wall until we reached the black iron gate. The gate is higher than a house, and it has a curved top made from iron spikes, fixed between two pillars with big stone balls on top. Seeing the PRIVATE PROPERTY: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED sign made shivers go up my neck and under my hair.
‘I heard them balls roll off and kill trespassers,’ Ritchie said. I’d heard the same thing, but when Ritchie said that, I knew that he wasn’t going inside with us.
We wrapped our hands around the cold black bars of the gate and peered through at the long flagstone path that goes up the hill, between avenues of trees and old statues hidden by branches and weeds. All the uncut grass of the lawns was waist-deep and the flower beds were wild with colour. At the summit was the tall white house with the big windows. Sunlight glinted off the glass. Above all the chimneys, the sky was blue. ‘Princesses lived there,’ Pickering whispered.
‘Can you see anyone?’ Ritchie asked. He was shivering with excitement and had to take a pee. He tried to rush it over some nettles – we were fighting a war against nettles and wasps that summer – but got half of the piss down his legs.
‘It’s empty,’ Pickering whispered. ‘Except for hidden treasure. Darren’s brother got this owl inside a big glass. I seen it. Looks like it’s still alive. At night, it moves its head.’
Ritchie and I looked at each other; everyone knows the stories about the animals or birds inside the glass cases that people find up there. There’s one about a lamb with no fur, inside a tank of green water that someone’s uncle found when he was a boy. It still blinks its little black eyes. And someone said they found skeletons of children all dressed up in old clothes, holding hands.
All rubbish; because I know what’s really inside there. Pickering had seen nothing, but if we challenged him he’d start yelling, ‘Have so! Have so!’ and me and Ritchie weren’t happy with anything but whispering near the gate.
‘Let’s just watch and see what happens. We can go in another day,’ Ritchie said.
‘You’re chickening out!’ Pickering kicked at Ritchie’s legs. ‘I’ll tell everyone Ritchie pissed his pants.’
Ritchie’s face went white and his bottom lip quivered. Like me, he was imagining crowds of swooping kids shouting, ‘Piss pot! Piss pot!’ Once the crowds find a coward, they’ll hunt him every day until he’s pushed out to the edges of the playground where the failures stand and watch. Every kid in town knows this place takes away brothers, sisters, cats and dogs, but when we hear the cries from the hill, it’s our duty to force one another out here. It’s a part of our town and always has been. Pickering is one of the toughest kids in school and he had to go.
Standing back and sizing up the gate, Pickering said, ‘I’m going in first. Watch where I put me hands and feet.’ And it didn’t take him long to get over. There was a little wobble at the top when he swung a leg between two spikes, but not long after that he was standing on the other side, grinning at us. To me, it now looked like there was a little ladder built into the gate; where the metal vines and thorns curved between the long poles, you could see the pattern of steps for small hands and feet. I’d heard that little girls always found a secret wooden door in the brick wall that no one else can find when they look for it. But that might just be another story.
If I didn’t go over and the raid was a success, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being a piss pot and wishing I’d gone in with Pickering. We could be heroes together, and I was full of the same crazy feeling that makes me climb oak trees to the very top branches, stare up at the sky and let go with my hands for a few seconds knowing that if I fall I will die.