Searching for Arthur (The Return to Camelot #1) Read online

  I could feel hands on my ankles. I yelped in fear of the ghosts, and threw myself forward towards the blurred figure in my peripheral vision.

  “Titch, Titch, it’s alright,” cried a familiar voice. “You’re safe now.”

  A thin beam of light shone directly overhead. I became aware of the burning smell of bleach and antiseptic in my nostrils. Bile rose in my throat; I twitched dramatically.

  “Do you think she’s brain-damaged?” said another voice: a simpering high-pitched Welsh accent.

  “SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.”

  “Why is she hissing?” said the female.

  “Because she’s awake,” replied Arthur, and I felt him slap my hand.

  “Be nice,” he whispered in my ear, “she’s been really worried.”

  I couldn’t believe that my brother had brought his girlfriend to my hospital bed. I could have been dying or worse, but no, even then Arthur would have needed a crowbar to part him from Slurpy Sammy. When she sees me, she starts kissing Arthur like he has turned into an ice cream. A big dollop of vanilla ice-cream. It’s why I came up with the nickname, although I always shorten it to SS when my brother is around. I use the initials because I don’t like to hurt Arthur’s feelings. Her full name is Samantha Scholes-Morgan, although she likes to be called Sammy because she thinks it’s cute.

  Rabbits or hamsters called Sammy are cute. Slurpy Sammy with the hyphenated surname is one of the un-dead.

  I knew I would have to open my eyes eventually. When I did, I saw that I was lying in a hospital bed with a drip in my arm.

  “How’s your head?” asked Arthur. He was wearing a different t-shirt from the one he had been wearing earlier.

  “Still attached to my neck, I hope,” I groaned. My throat was dry and sore.

  “The docs will be back in a minute. They said you’ll have to stay in tonight. You have concussion apparently.” Arthur’s fingers were now wrapped around my pinkie, squeezing it tightly.

  Where was my mother? I wanted to know why she wasn’t there. We had exchanged words, I know, but she wouldn’t really stay home while I was hurt, while her kid was in the hospital? I mean, she’s had the practice….No. That wasn’t how it worked in our family anymore. I was still being punished.

  So I didn’t ask why she wasn’t there. There was no point.

  I glanced over towards Slurpy. She didn’t look worried at all. She was helping herself to green grapes that had been left on a sliding tray at the bottom of the hospital bed. Her heavily made up eyes were glued to a ceiling mounted television set.

  “I’m gonna get the docs,” said Arthur. “They should at least know you’re awake.”

  The second he was out of the room, Slurpy’s eyes left the television screen and fixed on me.

  “You do it on purpose, don’t you?” she said accusingly in her thick Welsh accent.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Arthur was taking me shopping. He promised to buy me a ring.”

  “So what? Is the world suddenly expecting a ring shortage in the next 24 hours?”

  “You do it on purpose, you little freak. Always wanting to be the centre of attention.”

  Slurpy had a special way of saying freak. All of her friends did; I heard it often enough. It was the Welsh accent that did it, with extra emphasis on the letter r which rolled off her tongue. It made the word last longer.

  “You really are a total loser, Natasha. It’s pathetic the way you cling to your brother. Why can’t you hate him, like a normal sister? I would rather die than be near my brother – but then Arthur is too good to you, you attention seeking freak.”

  There was no point wasting oxygen in replying. If there was a competition to find Britain’s Next Top Hermit, I would win hands down. I detested being the centre of anyone’s attention, even my brother’s.

  “You know what they call you at school?” continued Slurpy viciously; she cackled like a witch.

  I knew what they called me. It didn’t bother me, despite the lump now forming in my throat.

  Arthur walked back into the room. Slurpy went back to watching the television and shovelling grapes into her enormous mouth.

  “Did you tell anyone about the person with no eyes?” I whispered, hoping beyond hope that he hadn’t. “Or the grave, the hole I fell into?”

  Arthur kept his lips tightly sealed but still spread them out into a knowing smirk-like smile.

  “It’s bad enough that I have the world’s biggest klutz for a little sister,” he whispered back, “without everyone thinking she is also the biggest mental-case in the village as well.”

  “But you believe me?” I whimpered.

  My brother smiled again, this time showing his perfectly straight – and very expensive – top teeth.

  “Yeah, I believe you, Titch,” he whispered, “but we know from experience that most people don’t.”

  Five days later, Arthur was gone.

  Chapter Two

  Avalon Cottage

  The painkillers helped me sleep a little, but it wasn’t restful. My head – which had required six stitches – throbbed continuously, and my scratched hands were stinging. Afraid of the dark, I left the lights on around my bed. A well-meaning nurse kept coming in to turn them down once I had dozed off. The slightest movement woke me, and that only meant I had to put the lights back on again.

  This nurse and mouse game ended at daybreak, and by the time my mother and Arthur came back to collect me, I was beyond exhausted. If Arthur hadn’t placed an arm around my back and gently nudged me forward, I would have slept where I stood.

  They arrived in mother’s car: a gleaming black BMW which smelt of leather and pine air freshener. I definitely saw her flinch when I climbed into the back seat. While she and Arthur had brought me a fresh change of clothes: black leggings and a long blue and white striped sweater, neither had thought to replace my Converse sneakers. They were still caked in mud and dirt and microscopic pieces of ancient flaking brains. All of which transferred onto the black carpet of the prized BMW.

  I hadn’t told my mother the gruesome details of the previous day’s adventure. I wasn’t stupid. My mother believed what she wanted to hear, not necessarily the truth. So I told her I had fallen. The exchange of words that led to it remained the elephant in the hospital room that nobody wanted to mention.

  Falling while running was the basic truth, and so I didn’t feel too guilty.

  At least I wasn’t lying.

  We arrived back at the cottage we had been renting for several months. It wasn’t home, although Arthur called it that. I knew he was trying to cheer me up, but I really had had enough of being uprooted. I just didn’t think it was normal to have lived in more houses than years I had been alive. I had just turned seventeen, and Avalon Cottage, with its little windows and overgrown garden, was the eighteenth place I had lived in. Even hermit crabs didn’t change shells that often. My parents said the hotel in Bangkok or the serviced Government apartments in New York didn’t count, but as my clothes were hanging in closets, and I was forced to attend school lessons, I thought they did.

  Nobody, other than Arthur, understood how hard this was. It wasn’t a matter of geography. My life had become a battle with words. In the US, you order fries and you get fries. In Britain, they are called chips. I get used to calling them chips, move back to the US, order chips and end up with what the British call crisps.

  I couldn’t even eat anymore without getting confused.

  My father worked as a diplomat: Foreign Affairs. When people asked me what he did, I replied that he took up the crap that nobody else wanted to do. It was the only way I could explain the constant moving, the running, often with no notice.

  It wouldn’t matter anymore if there was notice. It wasn’t as if I bothered to make friends. I would watch other girls at other schools, clinging like limpets to one another when it was their turn to leave. A small part of me was jealous at the attention, but once the tears had dried, those left
behind carried on as normal. The person who had left was a ghostly imprint, a name on a Facebook page, but nothing more.

  But I never forgot them, even if they never gave me a second thought. You can’t forget those who have gone – no matter how hard you try.

  Flowers from my father were on the kitchen table: red roses, at least thirty of them. I tried to be cool, but I know I smiled because my head thumped as my jaw muscles stretched.

  “Your father will call later, Natasha,” said my mother, placing her burnt orange Birkin handbag – an I’m-sorry-I’m-never-there present from my father – on the kitchen dresser. “I have a luncheon, but I can cancel if you want me to stay and look after you.”

  We looked at each other. It was my turn to play at diplomatic relations.

  “I’ll be okay, Arthur will be here.”

  If she had hugged me, I would have let her.

  My mother nodded instead, and called out to my brother who had run upstairs in search of his cell phone. I didn’t wait to hear what she intended to tell him. My hand was already sliding back the thick cast-iron bolt that secured the back door. I hadn’t seen Mr. Rochester for over twenty four hours, and I was worried about him. I wanted to cuddle his little body. I wanted to let him know that it wouldn’t be long before he could come back to where he was safe.

  After being thrown out of the box in my bedroom, Mr. Rochester was put at the bottom of the garden in a large two storey chicken coop. There had been chickens, but my mother got rid of them within a week of our arrival. My father was living in London, and we were all supposed to live there – for the third time in six years – but my mother had become paranoid about terrorists and she refused to live in the capital, or anywhere even remotely resembling civilisation. So my mother, Arthur and I all decamped to Wales and some unpronounceable village in the middle of nowhere.

  Terrorists don’t bother attacking nowhere you see.

  Everything that my mother thought charming and quaint about Avalon Cottage soon started to drive her insane. The untamed garden, with its climbing roses and thick vines of ivy, was too much work to maintain. The small lead-latticed windows never let in the light. The gravel track that led to the house was chipping away every scrap of paint from the BMW, and pity any person who got her started about the plumbing, electrics and the fact there wasn’t a decent manicurist this side of the English border.

  Terrorists didn’t come to nowhere, and neither did a decent hairdresser, apparently.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what my mother did with the chickens. We didn’t eat them because we were all vegetarians. Me, through choice; Arthur, because he lived off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; and my mother hadn’t eaten in nine years.

  Not since it happened.

  I made my way into the garden. Overnight, small rings of wild mushrooms had dotted the long grass. Legends would say the fairies had been playing. A rotting trellis had fallen down beside one of the huge oak trees that stood in our garden. Several spiders had already made themselves at home in the diamond shaped holes. Silence had returned again, but as I walked past the trees, I heard whispers.

  It’s just your over-active imagination, said my inner voice. The wind is blowing through the leaves, that’s all.

  But the whispers grew louder. I stopped and looked behind me. The temperature had plummeted. My chest tightened; I could barely breathe. My heart was beating like a bass drum.

  The whispers continued. They were low pitched, definitely male. The voices multiplied. There were dozens of them.

  You’ve hit your head, and you are pumped with painkillers. Calm down. It’s just the wind.

  “Arrrrrrttttthhhhhuuuurrrrrr.”

  The whispers echoed all around me, groaning in the boughs of the trees, the overgrown stems of grass. The elongated vowels filtered through the spider webs, causing them to shudder with fright.

  I still hadn’t reached the chicken coop and my baby rabbit. Out of sight, out of mind was my mother’s mantra. Mr. Rochester was alone, hidden behind laurel and holly bushes. It wasn’t right. He was only a baby.

  It was so cold. The hairs on my arms rose like the dead. I felt them pushing up the thin fabric of my cotton sweater.

  “Arrrrrrttttthhhhhuuuurrrrrr.”

  Tears of terror were pooling in my eyelids. Sickened with shame, I turned and ran back to the house, slipping on the chipped stone steps as I fled. Arthur was already standing at the bottom of the narrow staircase, as I flew through the kitchen and into the hallway.

  Screaming was becoming a habit.

  “Titch, what the hell is the matter? Was that you calling my name?”

  I was crying so hard, snot was running down my face. Arthur didn’t flinch. He just grabbed me and pulled me in, like he always did when I was in trouble.

  “Calm down, Titch. Listen, do you need something to help you sleep?”

  I knew what he meant and I shook my head, wiping my gloopy face over his t-shirt in the process.

  “I heard voices again,” I sobbed.

  Arthur sighed.

  “That’s it. You’re going to bed right now, Natasha.”

  “Don’t you call me that,” I sniffed, as he propelled me up the creaking stairs.

  “Then do as you’re told,” warned my brother, stabbing me in the back with his fingers. “If I skip anymore school because of you, I’ll be getting my qualifications when I’m thirty at this rate.”

  Avalon Cottage had three bedrooms: two decent sized rooms that you could actually fit a bed in, and then the box room which was mine. I would like to say that we at least drew straws for the rooms, but that would be a lie, and I don’t lie anymore. Understandably, my mother took the largest room overlooking the front of the house, while Arthur – in a display of testosterone driven selfishness – stole the other bedroom. My box room – it must have been illegal to describe it as a bedroom – was squeezed in at the far end, next to Arthur’s and opposite the bathroom. It was north facing, cold and damp, regardless of the weather.

  Mrs. Pratchett, who ran the village shop, had taken great delight in telling me that three of the four seasons in the middle of nowhere were usually cold and damp.

  I fell down onto my soft bed and curled my legs up. Arthur drew the curtains across my tiny little window, and pulled a patchwork blanket up over my knees.

  “Sammy is coming over later,” he whispered, “but I won’t take her out until mum arrives back. Just yell if you need me, Titch.”

  “Arthur.”

  “What?”

  “Can you go and check on Mr. Rochester?”

  “Will do.”

  “And Arthur…”

  “What now, Titch?”

  “Take a poker from the fireplace with you, just in case.”

  Arthur laughed.

  “Has Mr. Rochester gone rabid on us?”

  “It’s not Mr. Rochester you should be afraid of,” I whispered. “The voices were calling your name. It’s you they want.”

  My chilly, damp bedroom seemed even colder than usual.

  “It was just the wind, Titch, plus the ridiculous amount of painkillers you’ve swallowed.”

  “You heard them, Arthur.”

  I heard him inhale because it was sharp: a short reflex sniff through his nose.

  “I’ll check on Mr. Rochester, and then bring you up some vegetable soup or something,” he said. “Now don’t get out of that bed. I don’t care if a whole platoon of soldiers with swords starts marching up the garden. You stay put, do you understand?”

  Boys don’t scream like girls, yet Arthur’s cry was so high, it could have been mistaken for one. He stopped me from running further than the fallen trellis, and once I knew why I was grateful. My heart would have broken into a thousand pieces if I had seen him.

  The police blamed the attack on a group of local feral kids, but I knew they were wrong. The local animal shelter said my baby rabbit was probably gutted with a large knife, but I only saw the pointed end of a sword.

  O
ne that I had seen before.

  We buried my beautiful baby rabbit far away from Avalon Cottage. Arthur, Slurpy and I walked for hours to find a pretty little spot where we could bury him. Arthur wanted to dig a hole near a clear blue stream, but I couldn’t bear the thought of Mr. Rochester lying forever near water. It wasn’t safe, and Arthur, of all people, should have known that. So instead we put Mr. Rochester to rest in a shoe box, containing fresh straw and chocolate drops, underneath some wild roses. I didn’t want Slurpy there, but as I had no friends, I had no choice. Mr. Rochester deserved more than just me and Arthur at his funeral.

  Two days later, and Arthur knocked on my bedroom door. He had soup.

  “I need to tell you something, Titch.”

  I sat up and put the book I hadn’t been reading on my bedside table. My fingers nudged the only photo of Mr. Rochester that I had. I had been holding the camera, so I wasn’t even in it – Arthur was.

  Twisting his fingers around the cup of soup, Arthur sat on the edge of my bed. He looked really tense; he was chewing on his tongue, and his blue eyes were fixed firmly on floating bits of carrot.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s about Mr. Rochester.”

  I sat up a little straighter. “What is it?”

  “You aren’t going to like it. Mum and dad don’t even want me to tell you.”

  That just made me want to hear whatever it was even more. I wasn’t a child.

  “What is it, Arthur?”

  Arthur was gulping. He knew what to say, he just didn’t know how to say it.

  “There’s a reason I put Mr. Rochester in the box, Titch. I didn’t want you to see him.”

  Of course I hadn’t wanted to see him. He had been sliced open. My baby had been gutted and…no, even thinking about it made me want to puke. Why was Arthur doing this to me?

  “Whoever killed him didn’t just stab him, Titch.” Arthur looked close to tears.