The Troll Heart Read online

  For my parents, Teresa and Phil

  – and for Craw, the monster who lived in our pool.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  1 A CREEPING FEELING

  2 THE GOAT’S BEARD HOTEL

  3 GINGERBREAD BOY

  4 HEDGE MAGIC

  5 A MIDNIGHT DEPARTURE

  6 A FOGGY CONVERSATION

  7 CABIN FEVER

  8 WARNING SIGNS

  9 TRIP TRAP

  10 COLD CALLING

  11 THE NORTHERN WAY

  12 UP THE RIVER

  13 RAIDING THE PANTRY

  14 TROUBLED WATERS

  15 STOLEN HEARTS

  16 ACID TONGUE

  17 CASES CLOSED

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1

  A CREEPING FEELING

  ‘WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN NEXT?’ said Max.

  Anna shivered as she looked up from her book. The heat vents in the back seat were being blocked by the Professor’s usual array of bags and suitcases, and the air inside the car had become positively chilly. The windows beside them were completely fogged over.

  Max leant towards her, keeping his voice low and mysterious.

  ‘This weather is a bit suspicious, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘It’s been nothing but fog since we left the airport. It could be vampires again!’

  Every word he spoke was accompanied by a puff of white steam.

  Anna wiped her hand against the window. She frowned.

  ‘I don’t think so, Max,’ she said. ‘I think this is just England.’

  It was a cold and misty morning in the British countryside. Low-hanging clouds rolled thickly over grassy pastures, breaking against the car in rippling waves of mist. Bushy green shrubs bordered every roadside, tall and imposing, their leaves heavy with dew. Anna was beginning to feel as if they were driving through an enormous hedge maze.

  Max slumped back onto his own side of the car, frowning at the foggy window pane. Anna looked down at her book, struggling to concentrate. Dark memories were stirring at the back of her mind – memories of a shaggy bear, and a shining knife, and, clearest of all, a wicked, twisted face with white, burning eyes. With a groan, Anna snapped the book shut. She knew she wouldn’t be able to finish the story now. No matter how hard she tried, she could not shut the memories out.

  The memories had fangs.

  It had been one month since Anna and Max had gone on their adventure in the wilds of Transylvania. Working together with their friend Isabella, the children had uncovered a series of frightening secrets – including the fact that vampires were very real, and also very deadly. They had been warned about the existence of other fairy-monsters too, but it was the threat of more vampires that had weighed most heavily on Max’s imagination in the weeks since his capture by the Romanian bloodsucker. He was now reluctant to leave the house whenever it was raining, just in case it was a vampire controlling the weather again, and he had also taken to carrying a clove of garlic upon his person at all times. Anna still wasn’t quite used to the pungent scent, which was constantly wafting out of Max’s pockets; she could smell it even now, lacing the cold air of the car.

  Despite all of Max’s precautions – or perhaps because of them – they had seen no vampires at their house, or on their street, or at their school. Their new housekeeper had not been a vampire; nor had Max’s teacher, however much she complained about the strange smell on all of his clothes. Their lives at home had been completely normal, exactly the same as they had been before.

  Anna closed her eyes. After the vampire’s defeat, she had felt relieved that the monster wouldn’t be able to trouble them ever again. But … hadn’t it been exciting to sneak into the ruined castle, and to ride through the stormy woods on the back of a bear? Wasn’t it thrilling that she had found a magical knife in a creepy old inn – the knife that she still wore by her side, hidden in its sheath? Every book she had ever read about England had told her it was a land of mystery: a place where clubs of intelligent children waged constant war against thieves and smugglers, pursuing the criminals through hidden tunnels and secret rooms. There were probably monsters here, too. With the white knife to protect them, would it be so bad if they met a fairy again?

  Something landed lightly on Anna’s shoulder.

  Anna’s eyes shot open. Sitting on her shoulder was a dead thing, its pale limbs wriggling like a spider. It froze as she stared at it, caught with one finger-leg raised into the air, poised to take its final step onto her bare neck.

  ‘Max!’ squealed Anna.

  There was a muffled yelp from the front seat as the Professor jumped, jolting the steering wheel off-course. The car veered sideways, lurching towards the hedge walls; Anna squealed again as leaves and twigs scratched noisily against the windows. With another sudden swerve, the Professor regained control; the children sighed in relief as the car found the centre of the road once more.

  ‘What’s going on back there?’ said the Professor crossly. ‘That was very dangerous.’

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Anna. ‘It was Max’s fault.’

  ‘It was not,’ said Max.

  ‘It was too,’ hissed Anna. ‘I told you to keep that thing away from me.’

  ‘You know I can’t help it,’ said Max. ‘Sometimes it just walks off on its own.’

  Anna glared at him. Now she had been forced to remember the really terrible thing that had happened on their first adventure: the death of Max’s right hand. The vampire had sucked all of the blood and life from Max’s fingers, and even though a whole month had passed, its condition had not improved. The skin was still shrunken around the finger bones, and the flesh of his palm was coloured grey-white, with creeping tinges of green. Max also claimed that the fingers could move around without him knowing it, but Anna wasn’t so sure about that last part. Claiming to have a magical walking hand seemed like the perfect excuse to annoy her without ever being able to get in trouble for it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Max. ‘I didn’t mean it.’

  Anna realised she was still glaring.

  ‘That’s okay,’ she said, her face softening. ‘Just try not to do it again.’

  ‘Try not to do what?’ said the Professor.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Anna. She leant forward, determined to change the subject. ‘Are we nearly there?’ As usual, the passenger seat was stacked high with maps. Anna was pleased to see that the book on top was a fairly new road atlas, held open at the spine with a strange rock that the Professor had found on an expedition. However, after a closer inspection, her heart swiftly sank. The open map was riddled with roads and lanes springing out in every direction, and it looked like the Professor had even drawn in a couple of lines of his own. Apparently England was even more of a maze than she had first thought.

  ‘Yes, nearly there,’ said the Professor. He squinted as a thick cloud of mist swept over the windscreen. ‘Or maybe we’re there already. It’s a bit hard to tell.’

  ‘Maybe we could stop and ask for directions,’ suggested Max.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said the Professor. ‘There’s nobody out here.’

  Anna tried to look out at the road ahead. It seemed as if the Professor was right.

  And then a figure loomed out of the fog.

  The Professor slammed on the brakes. Anna and Max jerked forward in their seats; Anna’s book slid off her lap and crashed onto the floor, its pages askew. The figure in the fog shuffled closer. One of its hands was stretched out before it, the fingers curled into a fist. Anna and Max watched in horror as the figure raised its arm and brought the fist down upon the Professor’s door, rapping loudly on the side of the car.

  ‘Wind down your
window,’ said a muffled voice.

  ‘Don’t do it, Dad!’ said Max.

  The Professor gulped. With a trembling hand he wound down the window, gasping as a gust of morning air rushed into the car.

  A sharp face was staring at them through the open window – a woman’s face. Her skin was very pale from the cold, and her raven-black hair stood out starkly against the misty sky. In her hand was a large tin can.

  ‘Morning,’ she said. ‘Are you here to join the search party?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said the Professor.

  The woman frowned.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘From out of town, are you? Never mind, then. Just the toll, please.’

  The Professor blinked, his mouth hanging slightly open. The woman gave him a stern look.

  ‘There’s a toll bridge ahead,’ she said. ‘You have to pay to cross. Eighty pence for the car.’

  Anna undid her seatbelt and leant between the two front seats, peering through the foggy windscreen. She couldn’t see a bridge. The Professor clearly hadn’t been expecting a bridge either. He reached absentmindedly for the road atlas, picking it up and holding the map very close to his face.

  ‘There’s someone behind us,’ said Max suddenly.

  Anna looked around. A second car was slinking out of the mist, its headlights glowing feebly. Max shrunk down into his seat, as if afraid of being seen.

  The woman tapped impatiently on the window.

  ‘Eighty pence, or turn around,’ she said. ‘You can’t be blocking the road like this.’

  The Professor muttered something undecipherable, tracing his finger along a line that had clearly been drawn onto the map with a red pencil. The woman opened her mouth again. Anna quickly picked up the Professor’s coin purse and undid the drawstring.

  The purse was filled with coins from a variety of different countries. Some of them looked so old and unusual that Anna doubted they could still be used, or even recognised beneath the layers of black-and-green gunk. Her hands shook from the cold as she sorted through the purse, eventually pulling out two big silver coins marked with the magic words: FIFTY PENCE.

  ‘There’s no change here,’ said the woman as Anna handed the coins over. ‘You’ll not be getting anything back.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Anna (it wasn’t her money). ‘But could you please tell us where we are?’

  ‘I know where we are,’ said the Professor.

  He didn’t say it very loudly. Anna ignored him, looking up at the woman hopefully. The woman pursed her lips.

  ‘If you turn right over the bridge, the road will take you straight into town,’ she said. ‘Should be plenty of signs and people to direct you to the motorway, if that’s where you’re headed.’ The woman paused. ‘You can also follow the river bend around to the left, but there’s nothing out there except the old Goat’s Beard Hotel.’

  Anna thought the woman’s voice had gone a bit stiff as she mentioned the hotel. The Professor, however, didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Just as I thought,’ he said, putting down the atlas. ‘Left once we’ve crossed over the bridge. Easy.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Anna to the woman.

  The woman nodded. For a moment, she looked as if she wanted to say something more, but the Professor was already winding up the window. Anna heard a distant chink as the two silver coins fell into the tin.

  ‘What a nice lady,’ said the Professor.

  The car rolled forward. The hedgerows on either side of them dropped away as other shapes began to emerge from the mist: an old stone building no bigger than a bus shelter, followed by a small sign that read TOLL POINT, and then, finally, the bridge. Anna craned her neck to try to see the water running beneath them, but the mist was riding low on the current. All she could see was whiteness.

  The Professor turned left.

  ‘What did she mean, search party?’ asked Max.

  Anna was about to reply when a siren blared out from the road behind them. The children spun around in their seats as the second car sped past, a red-and-blue emergency light now flashing on its roof. Anna just had time to read the word POLICE beneath the door before the vehicle was gone, vanishing around the next corner.

  ‘Goodness,’ said the Professor. ‘I do hope nobody’s been hurt.’

  Anna sat back in her seat, her brow furrowed. Why were the police driving around in the middle of nowhere? What had the bridge woman wanted to tell them? And if there was a search party, what were they searching for?

  The car was slowing down. A building had emerged from the fog, crooked and tall. Anna felt a chill snake down her body. She suddenly felt like begging the Professor to keep driving – to turn around and go back across the bridge, all the way back to the airport. Max turned to look at her, his eyes wide. Anna could tell that he was feeling the same way.

  ‘This looks like the place,’ said the Professor cheerily. ‘I’ll have to get out and check. You two wait here for a moment. Be good!’

  Before they could say anything, the Professor stepped out of the car and shut the door, disappearing into the mist.

  ‘That woman didn’t want us to come here,’ said Anna. ‘I could tell.’

  Max looked outside, pulling nervously at the drawstrings on his jumper. ‘What if something happens to Dad?’

  The two siblings sat in silence. White tendrils of mist dragged their ghostly fingers along the window panes, leaving trails of dampness on the glass. The children began to shiver.

  And then something crashed into the side of the car with an almighty BANG.

  2

  THE GOAT’S BEARD HOTEL

  ‘WHAT WAS THAT?’ WHIMPERED MAX.

  Anna didn’t know what to say. The crash had been right beside her, on the other side of her door. Her fingers jumped to the hilt of the white knife.

  BANG.

  The sound had come from the front of the car this time, level with the passenger door. Anna wiped a circle in the window and peeped outside, her heart beating fast.

  ‘It’s a monster,’ whispered Max.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Max.

  Anna swallowed.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘But it has horns.’

  Max’s face turned as pale as his hand.

  BANG.

  ‘It’s a monster,’ whispered Max. ‘Come to steal the knife!’

  A guilty feeling curled around Anna’s stomach. She and Max had been warned that keeping the white knife would draw the gaze of wicked eyes – but she hadn’t expected it to happen with so little warning. How had someone – or something – managed to spy it?

  Right now, it didn’t matter how it had happened. Something nasty was outside the car, trying to get in, and Anna wasn’t going to give up her weapon without a fight.

  ‘I’m going out there,’ she said bravely. She pulled the knife all the way from its sheath and pointed it firmly at the side of the car. The teardrop blade shone pearly-white in her hand, gleaming as brightly as ever.

  ‘Don’t do it –’ started Max, but Anna had already opened the car door. In one smooth movement she slipped off her seat and landed outside, the impossibly sharp knife-tip hovering in the air before her, ready to impale their attacker. Max held his breath.

  ‘Oh,’ said Anna.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Max anxiously.

  Something was standing next to the front wheel of the car. The horns that stuck out from the creature’s head were curved and black, and the rest of its body was covered in shaggy white fur. The pupils of its eyes ran sideways, and a tufty beard hung from its chin.

  It was a goat.

  ‘Oh,’ said Max, sticking his head out Anna’s door. He blushed. ‘That’s not very scary.’

  The goat lowered its head, crashing its horns against the side of the car once more. Anna frowned. Without thinking, she pointed the knife directly at the animal.

  There were three things that had happened in Transylvania that Anna, Max and Isabella had agreed not to discuss with anyone else.
The first of those things was the terrifying fact that fairies (and fairy-monsters) really existed. The second thing was Max’s partially dead hand, which (strangely) nobody else ever seemed to notice anyway.

  The third thing was that Anna now possessed a magic power.

  ‘Stop that!’ Anna commanded, her eyes fixed on the goat. She squeezed the knife tightly. ‘Go away!’

  The goat stopped. It blinked. Its body shivered, like it was getting ready to sneeze.

  Then it turned around and trotted off into the mist.

  Anna grinned. It felt good to use her power again, even if it was only on a goat. She held the knife heroically aloft.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Max, annoyed. ‘You know it’s supposed to be a secret. Someone might see it.’

  ‘See what?’ asked the Professor.

  The children jumped; neither of them had noticed the Professor return. Anna quickly slid the knife back into its sheath, hiding the hilt beneath her coat. Luckily, the Professor didn’t seem to see anything.

  ‘This is the place, all right,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody at the front desk, but we might as well take our bags in. Come along!’

  The Goat’s Beard Hotel was perched atop a small hill that rose up from within the crook of a river bend. The outside of the building was painted yellow, but nobody had bothered to repaint the upper storeys for quite some time; the third storey looked so flaky that it might have been covered in scales. Two chimneys protruded from the angled roof, puffing smoke into the already white sky.

  The three travellers stood together in the hotel foyer, glad to be out of the cold. The room was tidily arranged, but it also housed a collection of strange decorations. One wall was adorned with a row of wooden clowns, each of them playing a musical instrument. A wine shelf in the corner held only empty bottles, dusty and cracked; beside it stood an antique baby’s carriage, inside of which rested a lifelike porcelain doll. There were pictures of animals hung all around the room, although whether they were paintings or photographs Anna could not tell. Most of them were snarling.

  All in all, it still seemed a lot friendlier than the last hotel they had stayed at.