Free Kiera Hudson & The Creeping Men by Tim O'Rourke Page A

big enough to keep Ms. Locke busy trying to keep the place looking smart and tidy.
    I dared to inch my way nearer to the treeline that stopped at the edges of a vast lawn that lay before the house. It shone as if covered with glitter, the fresh morning dew shining in the sunlight. To my left I could see what looked like a small outhouse. I guessed at once that this was the building that Ms. Locke had spoken of. Keeping to the treeline and crouched low, I made my way toward it. From the shade of the trees I glanced across the lawns and back at the house. There appeared to be no glimmer of life. It was still early, and even if Ms. Locke and Sir Edmund were up and out of bed, I could not see them.
    So dropping to my hands and knees, and with my nose just an inch from the ground, I began a thorough inspection. My attention was first drawn to some scratch marks at the very bottom of the wooden door. They were long, sharp grooves and gouges. Whatever creature had made them had five ragged claws on each paw. I pushed against the door, rattling it gently in its warped frame. I shook it enough to rouse any such creature if one were inside. With my ear pressed flat against the door, I couldn’t hear any movement or sound. Just as Ms. Locke had described them to be, the small windows on each side of the outhouse and been covered from the inside so I could not see in.
    It was as I re-inspected the ground, I saw what looked like two sets of tracks leading away from the outhouse. But as I looked further, I could see that one set were human, as whoever the tracks belonged to wore shoes with a square toe. The person was male, and I could see by the size of boot print and distance between each of them that he was at least six foot tall. The other set of tracks had belonged to some large animal. The same creature that had left the scratch marks at the foot of the outhouse door. The spread between each paw print suggested that Ms. Locke had been right, and the creature was some kind of giant hound – or as I suspected it to be, a wolf. All that I could see was suggesting that Ms. Locke had given a true and honest account of the odd occurrences at Bastille Hall.
    Crawling forward on my hands and knees, I followed the tracks from the safety and security of the shaded treeline. I was fearful that either Ms. Locke or Sir Edmund would get quite a shock to look out across the lawn and see me crawling about on my hands and knees, nose touching the ground. But something wasn’t right. Something about the tracks that led along the edge of the wood was wrong. At first it appeared that there were indeed two sets of tracks. One set left by a male, the other left behind by some kind of giant hound. And although they ran side by side as if the creature and man had been walking together, one set of tracks was actually heading back toward the outhouse. I could only therefore guess that it had been a man who had walked away from the outhouse and some kind of hound that had returned to it.
    Hidden by the trunk of a large oak tree, I knelt, looking down at the tracks left behind in the ground. They didn’t ring true with the account Ms. Locke had given me and Potter the night before. Locke had told us that she had seen Sir Edmund leading what looked like a large dog tethered to a leash along the boundary of the wood. But it just didn’t make sense, because the tracks indicated one of two things: Either Sir Edmund was being led by the creature or the creature walked backwards. But what kind of creature did that – and why would it? The only plausible explanation I could see was that Sir Edmund left the outhouse as man and came back as wolf. That would explain why the two sets of tracks were side by side, as he followed the same route as the wolf back to the outhouse.
    But if that were true, then Ms. Locke was mistaken in her account of what she had seen. Or she was lying. But why? Perhaps her eyes had deceived her in the darkness, just like Potter believed