Free Shadow Spell by Caro King Page B

they could even hear her in the first place.
    One of the voices began singing something, a daft little rhyme about ‘
when bogeymen come to play
’. It wasn’tnice. It made the BMs sound even more horrible than they were. Especially the bit about rending things limb from limb and ‘holding the darkness’, whatever that meant.
    Nin got moving again. She had to find Jonas. Had to. Or her bones would join those scattered throughout the Mansion. Trying not to let panic take over she went through the nearest arch into the next room and then the one after that. And the one after that. Then down some stairs. She called out and then stopped to listen and wished she hadn’t.
    The song about the bogeymen was still going, or maybe the singer was singing it over and over again. The goriness of ‘
… and then they pulled the bones apart and stripped the flesh right off them, and digging free the beating heart they squeezed till it burst open …’
clashed so horribly with the tinkly nursery rhyme tune that Nin began to feel sick. She plugged her ears with her fingers, trying to block it out. The singer raised his voice. There was a hard edge to it.
    Perhaps it’s Ava Vispilio again, she thought, although if she was honest it sounded more like Dark. She didn’t like to think he could be so horrible. Perhaps he’s just teasing me, she thought, trying to scare me. I wish he’d stop.
    Spinning around, she wondered which way to pick next.
    â€˜
And held the dark around their forms, so hidden they could claim, the poor and hapless children, that they wanted fortheir game …
’ The voice rose steadily to a boom.
    â€˜STOP IT!’ yelled Nin. ‘They aren’t
that
nasty!’
    â€˜
What do you know of the Dread Fabulous, little girl?
’ chuckled the voice. ‘
What do you REALLY KNOW about bogeymen …?’
    Silence fell. Outside, rain lashed the windows and a branch, growing from the outer walls of the Mansion, scraped against the glass. It should have been better without the singing, but it wasn’t. She felt watched, and not by anything friendly.
    â€˜It’s just a song,’ she said firmly, ‘it can’t hurt me.’
    The roar came suddenly. One minute the place was quiet, the next it was full of a top-of-the-lungs howl that Nin could feel vibrating in her bones. She screamed and ran, panic taking over in earnest. The roar echoed from room to room, rising in volume, sometimes in front of her, sometimes behind, driving her this way and that as she fled through room after room until …
    She jolted to a stop, frowning. Blue and yellow light surrounded her, dappling the walls with the glow of late afternoon. It was familiar. She was back where she had started.
    Nin walked further into the room and something caught her eye, something scrawled on the polished floor in chalk. It said:
FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE STAY HERE
    Relief flooded through her. Jonas was nearby and hewould come back and find her. He had a better sense of direction than she did.
    She settled down to wait. The room was peaceful now, the singing had stopped and the voices had taken up again, chattering on about Galig’s Hall, whatever that was, and how magnificent it looked. They seemed close, so close she began to imagine they were coming from the room next door.
    There were four archways out of the blue-and-gold room. The smallest and narrowest was on the opposite wall to the others, the same wall as the window. In fact, the reason Nin hadn’t registered it straight away was because she had thought it
was
a window.
    She frowned. Surely that was an outside wall and there couldn’t be a room there? The arch should open on to empty air. Curious, she walked over to have a look.
    There was a room all right.
    It was lit by four great windows of stained glass, one in each wall, including the wall behind her, which shouldn’t be possible because that was the window