Hero 41: The People in the Wall by Author

Author:Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

THEY SHALL NOT RETURN

‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ Speechless said.

‘Less worrying than “They shall return”,’ said Cat.

‘You really think there are dead bodies down there?’ I asked.

‘More likely than live ones. Could be a whole family.’

‘A family?’

‘Miss Piper might know who,’ Speechless said.

‘Why would she?’ Cat asked.

‘She runs the school library.’

‘That doesn’t mean she knows everything.’

‘No, but she spends a lot of time in there hoping students will come in to borrow books, and she reads while she’s waiting. She told me so.’

‘I don’t care who’s down there,’ I said. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’

I went out through one of the end spaces where a wall used to be. There was a small graveyard the other side of it, dotted with little headstones. There wasn’t much on most of the stones. A name, couple of dates, sometimes just a last name and death date. I noticed a little wall over to one side, with more headstones beyond it, and stepped over it to take a look.

‘All the stones in this part are blank,’ I said as Cat and Speechless followed me out.

‘They’ll be the graves of people executed at the jail,’ said Speechless.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because unlike you I read things. The bodies were carried straight from the Hanging Shed and dumped there without ceremony. The headstones were left blank because the authorities thought executed prisoners shouldn’t be remembered.’

‘Have you also read why they bothered to plant stones if they didn’t plan to put anything on them?’ I asked.

‘No. But the ones over here belong to prisoners who died of natural causes, like illness or old age. Most of their bodies were brought out through an underground tunnel.’

‘An underground tunn—’

‘Listen!’ Cat hissed suddenly.

We listened. Footsteps, coming our way, the other side of the outer wall of the chapel. Not good news on a misty day in a boneyard at the edge of an out-of-bounds ruined village. We swapped wide-eyed glances, then, all together like we’d discussed it, tiptoed back into the chapel and squatted down against the outer wall.

The footsteps were closer now, and it sounded like more than one pair.

‘Maybe it’s the builders,’ I whispered.

‘Maybe it isn’t,’ Cat whispered back.

We carried on crouching, expecting whoever it was to come round the wall any second and see us. But the footsteps stopped just the other side of it and someone spoke in a voice we recognised.

‘My dad!’ mouthed Cat.

The footsteps started up again, but heading towards the cottages. I leaned out to make sure of this and saw that the person with Dr Withering was Mr Soldoni, the Deputy Head.

‘Better scarper while we can,’ Cat said.

As we crept towards the end of the wall something snagged the corner of my eye on the one opposite, the one with people painted on it. I looked towards it and saw something that turned me into a statue for at least six seconds. One of the scowliest, meanest looking people on the wall turned his head, looked at me, and blinked.

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