Bloody Horowitz by Anthony Horowitz

Author:Anthony Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Fantasy & Magic, Fiction, Horror & Ghost Stories, Children's Stories, English, Horror stories, Short Stories, Horror, Horror Tales
ISBN: 9780142418741
Publisher: Puffin
Published: 2011-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

SHEBAY

It was without doubt the most shocking thing she had ever heard.

“I’m sorry, Jenny, I really am.” Her father was looking terrible. There were red rings around his eyes and he hadn’t shaved. With his bald head, his round chin and his slightly protruding cheeks, he reminded her of one of those stocking stuffers she had once been given, the one where you use a magnet to drag iron filings onto a cartoon face. “You know things have been getting more and more difficult recently. This credit crunch. The business . . . all the problems we’ve been having.”

“Your dad’s done everything he could,” her mother interjected. She had been crying. There was a tissue clamped in her right hand. Tears had turned it into a soggy mess.

“We’ve come to the end of the line,” her father went on. “The banks won’t cut me any more slack and, in a word, we’re bankrupt. The house is going to have to go. And the car. I’m afraid the dog’s going to have to be put down. And we can’t keep you either. You’re going to have to be sold.”

And that was it.

At first, Jennifer Bailey couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She thought that she must still be asleep and that she would wake up in a minute in her pink bed in her pink room and it would all have been a horrible dream. Of course she was aware that her parents were struggling. Her father had been working later and later every night, sometimes spending whole weekends at the office. There had been arguments and Jennifer had plugged herself into her iPod with the volume turned up high to block them out.

Businesses had been going bust all over the country. She’d seen it on the news. But she had never believed it could be as bad as this. Jeremy Bailey ran a garden ornament business, selling fountains, furniture, bird tables, gnomes and exotic plants to customers all over the south of England. He had invented some of the products himself. There was a birdbath, for example, that actually had a small bird shower attached. He had a radio-controlled gnome that sang highlights from Disney’s Snow White and waved its arms in time to the music. And his range of garden furniture, manufactured from recycled wheelbarrows, couldn’t have been more in tune with the times. What could possibly have gone wrong?

For twelve years, Jennifer had enjoyed an almost perfect life. She loved being an only child—it meant twice as much attention on birthdays and at Christmas—and she was never lonely. She adored her mother and she had a pet poodle—Boodle—who was allowed to sleep on her bed. She had a beautiful room in the family’s three-story home in Watford and she had even been allowed to decorate it herself, painting and draping everything in her favorite color: pink. She went to an all-girls school just five minutes from the house, where she was popular and successful, adored by her teachers and admired by her friends.

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