I watched it in the fading light through the wire mesh of our netball court fencing. A black mass, stalking quietly across the playing fields, its two yellow eyes turning to stare at me every so often as it walked, unchecked. Unafraid.
Pheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! went the whistle.
‘Nash, pass! Pass! I’m free! I’m free!’
I was watching it as much as it was watching me.
Pheeeeee! ‘Natasha, are you playing netball today? Or are we playing netball and you playing Musical Statues?’
I tried to get my head back in the game. ‘Sorry, Mrs Scott.’
‘Rebound, pink team,’ she called, marching back up the court, whistle ready in her mouth. I sneaked a look behind me to the playing fields, but there was no sign of it. It must have dashed into the hedge. I put my trainer to the yellow line and clutched the ball firmly, looking for a free pink-bib to throw to.
‘Aaaaaaand …’ Pheee!
‘Nash! Nash! Overhead! Here! Here!’ Maggie Zappa was calling for it. Wing Attack, socks at half-mast, hair a mass of black curls. School rebel. I wasn’t throwing to her.
‘Nash! Here!’ Clarice Hoon, Goal Attack, too much make-up, bedmate of half the Lower Sixth St Anthony’s boys. We had a history. I wasn’t throwing to her.
Dianna Pfaff, my opposition Centre, was using everything she had. She wasn’t as fast as me, but she was tall, with a ballerina’s balance, and had several times marked me out of the game. Her thick blonde curls bounced and flew as she darted left to right in front of me, shadowing my every movement with her hands. I had to throw.
I saw Regan. Wing Defence, black plaits hanging down and thick, clear-framed glasses. Way back on the line. She had arrived in the Lower Fifth with a subtle smell of wrongness about her and the appearance of a spinster in her late fifties. She wasn’t even calling for it. I threw to her.
It bounced high off the ground in front of her, and she fumbled it offside.
Pheeeeeeee! ‘Foul ball. Advantage blue team.’
Regan bit her lip. Clarice rolled her eyes.
Maggie Zappa puffed and blew her fringe curls up from her face. ‘Da fuq didn’t you throw it to me? I was free. I had acres!’
‘Margaret Zappa!’ yelled Mrs Scott.
‘But I was free!’ She turned back to me, slapping her hands to her sides. ‘What did you throw to her for? You might as well have thrown it over the fence.’
The blues scored a goal before Mrs Scott had finished dressing down Maggie for a string of ensuing bad language. We all went back to the centre. Dianna Pfaff had the ball.
Pheeeeeeeee!
‘Dianna, here! Here!’
I marked Dianna’s movements like a shadow. She couldn’t pass, couldn’t get to anyone. Frustration screamed from her.
Pheeeeeeee! ‘Possession. Advantage pinks.’ Mrs Scott’s fat thighs smacked together as she marched over to us and pointed to the spot, handing me the ball. I spotted a free pink and lobbed it across the court.
‘Aw, hospital pass!’ cried Mrs Scott, as the ball bounced away from Jenny. ‘Rebound! Advantage pinks. Rebound. Advantage blues. Come on, you’re not nailed to the ground, reach for the ball! Jump for it!’ Goal Attack to Goal Shooter. Score. Pheeeeeee! ‘Pinks lead two to one.’
Dianna threw me a look as the ball was lobbed back in my direction.
Pheeeeeee!
‘Nash, pass! Over here, over here! I’m free!’
‘Nash, for God’s sake!’
‘Natasha! What are you …’
It had stopped there, just in front of the hedge, a black shape moving in the falling darkness across the playing fields. The huge black shape. It was waiting for me to go over to it. I went across the gravel, across the grass of the playing fields to the swings.
‘Natasha, come back here! What on earth …’
I had to see it more clearly. I had to know if it was there for sure, the thing I’d been seeing for weeks now, darting across fields, hiding around corners, vanishing behind trees. The killer of dozens of sheep and chickens. And possibly humans.
But, in a second, it had gone, vanished into the hedge with barely the rustle of a leaf.
Someone was behind me, walking quickly to catch up. I turned. Regan Matsumoto.
‘That was it, wasn’t it?’ she said breathlessly. ‘You saw it, didn’t you, Nash?’
I didn’t answer. Our PE teacher was marching up the grass behind us, face as red as her Aertex shirt. I was going to be punished. The only punishment Mrs Scott ever doled out: the thing no one wanted to do.
‘Just what the hell …’
‘I’ll collect the balls, Mrs Scott.’ I walked past her back towards the court.
There were many bad things about Bathory School for Girls—the rules, the staff, the food, the beds, the homesickness and the spooky legends including the Beast of Bathory—but some things about it were truly wonderful.
For a start, there was the amount of time we were expected to be outside. We were always playing sports—netball, hockey, tennis in the summer, swimming when it was hot enough in the outdoor pool.
Then there were the Hidey Holes, secret doorways and passages all over the main house, which had been there since Elizabethan times. Apparently their original purpose was to conceal Catholic priests who’d visited South Devon and taken refuge there—according to legend, one priest had hidden in a Hidey Hole for so long that he suffocated and died. Bathory girls had found four main Hidey Holes—two linking the Fiction and Reference Libraries, one in the Laundry room behind the towel rails and one in the wall behind the stage at the back of the gym—but there were more. The house itself was this huge, imposing grey building, surveying the remote South Devon moors like some buxom grey nursemaid with shining black eyes. It had a long flat roof and large turrets at either end. One turret was the Observatory where we had telescopes for stargazing, and in the other was the Weather Station where we took readings for science.
We had Hogwartsy-style Houses—Plantagenet, Tudor, Hanover and Windsor—and there was an unwritten rule that girls seemed to get picked for them according to their status, which was kind of like Hogwarts too. All the bad girls went in Plantagenet, all the ones good at sport went into Hanover, all the brainy ones went to Tudor and all the, well, the ones who weren’t really good at anything went in Windsor.
Another wonderful thing about Bathory was its setting. It was literally in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields and woods and acres of land in which to get lost. We were miles away from any form of civilisation, but we were quite self-sufficient. We had tennis courts, netball courts, playing fields, hockey pitches and formal and kitchen gardens where the cooks grew herbs and vegetables. Behind the house was a huge wooded valley with two large ponds and five beautiful follies in the upper sections of the woods. These were called the Birdcage, the Temple, the Wendy House, the Tree House and the Chapel. If you stood at the bottom of the valley by Edward’s Pond and looked up, you could see all of them, dotted around at regular intervals, like ornaments on a giant cake.
Back in the mists of time, before it became a school in the 1930s, Bathory House was the private home of the Duke and Duchess of Bathory and their twins, Edward and Grace, who were incredibly spoilt. When the little boy had asked for a pond to keep some fish, the little girl asked for a lake. Then the boy had asked for a tree house in the woods, but the girl had asked for a life-size version of her doll’s house, and so on and so forth. So basically, the Follies were monuments to the tantrums of two greedy little brats.
The