Free Shiverton Hall by Emerald Fennell Page A

against her will, and her hands groping the ground. Unable to control what she was doing, her fingers closed around a sharp rock.
    Lola’s eye glinted and her red smile widened.
    Penny struggled against herself. She knew what Lola intended – the rock would split Penny’s skull in two with a single blow – but she could not stop her own arm as it moved towards her head. Lola is making me do it. She remembered when she’d spilled nail polish on her mother’s dress. Lola made me do it. When she’d traipsed mud into the house. Lola made me, Mummy. Lola made me.
    Lola looked on with glassy approval, her moth-eaten dress fluttering in the wind.
    Penny extended her arm, the pointed corner of the rock ready to strike her own temple, as Lola began to skip and dance with excitement, her patent shoes scuffling wildly against the concrete ground. Penny squeezed her eyes shut.
    ‘Are you all right?’
    Penny opened her eyes to find a mustachioed man in an apron standing in front of her.
    ‘What are you doing back here?’ he asked. ‘Not smoking, I hope?’
    Penny looked at the rock in her still-outstretched arm, then peered apprehensively behind the landlord.
    Lola was nowhere to be seen.

Chapter Eight
    The bus journey back to Shiverton Hall was tense. Penny felt cold with fear and was still shaking with shock as she recounted in a faltering whisper what had happened in the car park. None of the boys really knew how to comfort her or what to say. Jake put an awkward arm around her and offered his jumper, and they returned to the school in an uneasy silence. The possibilities of this unsettling new development weighed heavily on all of them: it was one thing to have a strange dream in the middle of the night, but it was quite another to see a doll come to life in a pub car park at three in the afternoon.
    Penny swore the boys to secrecy – she didn’t want to do anything that might anger Lola – but George persuaded her to let him speak to his grandfather that night. If anyone would know how to handle something like this it was him.
    ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be safer at home?’ Arthur asked anxiously.
    ‘No.’ Penny shivered. ‘If that thing can follow me to Grimstone it can follow me home. I don’t want it near my family.’
     
     
    Later, George sat in Arthur’s room before lights out, dividing his sweets with Arthur and discussing his less than helpful phone call with his grandfather: ‘George, you nincompoop, stop bothering me when I’m watching the golf!’
    ‘I thought you said he was an expert on this stuff?’ Arthur said.
    ‘He is, but he’s a bit doddery these days,’ George admitted, sucking on a liquorice twist.
    ‘Great! So we’re done for then?’
    ‘I thought you didn’t believe in the supernatural?’ George said smugly.
    ‘Well, it’s all pretty weird. Even I have to admit that.’
    ‘Maybe another of Shiverton’s terrible tales will tip you firmly into our camp of believers?’ George said, itching to crack open the leather tome written by his grandfather, Accounts of the Supernatural and Preternatural at Shiverton Hall and Its Surrounds , which sat heavily on his knees.
    ‘Oh, go on then,’ Arthur sighed, pretending to be far less interested than he was.

The Picture
    Sir Jack Flipp was hastily buried in the Shiverton Hall mausoleum. While his solicitors scrabbled around to find his heir, they saw no harm in upholding the contract with the family who had agreed to rent the house, though they felt it prudent not to inform them of the circumstances of Sir Jack’s death. The Gordon family were already on their way: it wouldn’t do to scare them off.
    The Gordons arrived in a procession of elaborate, gilt carriages, pulled by white horses with plumes of feathers in their manes. An ostentatious display of wealth that they were mildly annoyed to discover no neighbours were there to see. Mr Gordon, a rotund man in a silvery coat and a foot-high powdered wig, helped his wife and four