World's Greatest Liar Read online

  The few minutes after that were spent in awkward silence and, within half an hour of Jas arriving, the strain was already starting to show.

  We had left the dining end of the front room and were now in the living area, sitting on the sofas and perched on the arms. Max had moved over to Dad’s armchair and was sprawled on it, upside down, watching cartoons. Dad kept giving him a dirty look, but Max was too engrossed in the telly to notice.

  “So, I’m guessing you haven’t planned anything for the weekend?” said Jas, ever so slightly accusingly.

  Mum’s whole body stiffened. “I have, actually,” she replied.

  Jas raised an eyebrow. “Oh? What?”

  Mum hesitated. “It’s a secret,” she said, eventually.

  “A secret?”

  Mum nodded. “Yep.”

  Jas smiled. “It’s OK if you haven’t. We’re happy just slobbing around here like you lot.”

  “Slobbing?” said Mum. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I leaned over the back of the sofa, getting between them before things could kick off. “You may as well tell them, Mum,” I said. She looked at me blankly. “About the trip you’ve organized. With the castle visit and all that stuff.”

  “Oh … yes. The castle visit,” Mum said, almost laughing with relief. “Well, I guess the secret’s out.”

  “And the trip to the high-wire adventure park on Sunday,” I added.

  I saw Mum’s eyes narrow, and quickly put an arm round her shoulders. “I’ve been asking to go for months,” I told Jas, “but she’s always said it’s too expensive. Not for you guys, though. ‘Nothing’s too good for Aunt Jas and her family.’ That’s what you said, isn’t it, Mum?”

  Mum gritted her teeth and forced a smile. “Yes, that’s what I said.”

  “And you said you’d raise my pocket money,” I continued, giving her shoulders a squeeze.

  She shot me a sideways glance. “Don’t push it.”

  “Well, that sounds just awesome,” said Steve from behind his mirrored lenses. He gave a double thumbs up which he must’ve thought was cool, but was just a bit embarrassing, really. “Doesn’t it, kids?”

  “No,” said Max loudly. Sophie just stared in eerie silence from across the room.

  “As long as we don’t have to rely on you to give directions,” said Jas, flashing an insincere smile. “We might never find it.”

  Steve sighed. “Come on, cutie-smoosh, it was one wrong turn.”

  “It was four wrong turns. One of them into a field. We’d have been here ages ago had it not been for your navigating.”

  Dad leaned closer to me. “I knew I liked Steve,” he whispered. Mum shot him an angry look that shut him right up.

  “It wasn’t my fault – Max had drawn all over the map!” Steve protested.

  Aunt Jas was still smiling, but the strain of keeping it in place was beginning to show. “He drew a dinosaur, and you tried to navigate round it,” she said. “Did you really think there was a whole area marked ‘Here Be Dragons’ off the M4?”

  “Not off the M4,” I chipped in, “but Junction 12 of the M6 used to be heaving with dragons, back in the day. Of course, they didn’t call it the M6 then, because numbers hadn’t been invented. They called it ‘Ye Olde Dragon’s Road’. Because of all the dragons,” I added helpfully.

  Everyone stared at me in silence. Especially Sophie, who stared at me in silence twice as hard as everyone else.

  “Well, if you’d just let me use the satnav like a normal person, it wouldn’t matter what was drawn on the map, would it?” Jas said.

  “Where’s the fun in that?” asked Steve, trying to laugh the situation off.

  “You call that journey fun?” seethed Jas.

  “Right,” said Dad, leaping to his feet and startling everyone. “I’m off to bed.”

  Mum looked up at him. “What? But it’s barely seven-thirty.”

  “Is it? Already? Blimey. No wonder I’m so tired,” he said, stepping over the tangle of legs around the coffee table. “Night, everyone!”

  He faked a yawn, then darted out of the room. And to think people had the cheek to call me a liar! I’d never stoop as low as that.

  Or would I?

  I stretched, faked a much more convincing yawn, then got to my feet. “I think I might get an early night, too. My bed is calling.”

  “Um yes, about that,” said Mum. She glanced across to Jodie, who was staring intently at her phone. “You and Jodie are going to have to share.”

  Jodie’s head snapped up. “What? Why?”

  “For space. Jas, Steve and the kids can take Dylan’s room, and Dylan can sleep on your floor.”

  “No, I can’t,” I pointed out. “I’ve got a bad back.”

  “No, you haven’t.” Jodie shot me one of her Looks. She’s got a lot of different Looks, none of them good. This was her “Don’t push it” Look, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me.

  “I have,” I replied. “I jarred it playing football at school last week. The nurse thinks it’s a herniated disc, so I’m afraid I’ll have to take the bed.”

  Mum’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Because you’ve got enough on your mind, Mum,” I said, resting my hand on top of hers. “The last thing I wanted to do was worry you.”

  “You are not getting the bed,” Jodie growled.

  “Well, I am,” I said. “Firstly because of my bad back, and secondly because I can run faster.”

  With that I raced out of the room, took the stairs two at a time and hurled myself on to Jodie’s bed.

  I’ll be honest – I slept like a log and woke up feeling very refreshed the next morning. The same couldn’t be said for Jodie, who woke up looking like an extra from a zombie movie. Her hair was knotted, there was drool on her cheek and she hobbled about like she’d aged eighty years overnight.

  “I’ll get you for this, Beaky,” she warned, as I skipped past her out of the room. “I’ve had it with your lies. You need to stop.”

  “OK,” I said.

  Jodie blinked. “Really?”

  I stuck my tongue out. “Nah. That was a lie, too. Good, eh?”

  I ducked round the door as she chucked a shoe at me, then slid down the banister and strolled into the living room.

  At breakfast, I had great fun making up stories about how Jodie had spent the night snoring and talking about boys from her class. Jodie tried to punch me under the table, but accidentally thumped a very unimpressed Dad instead.

  After we’d cleared away the breakfast stuff, we all piled into Aunt Jas’s seven-seater car. Considering there were eight of us, this wasn’t easy. We had to bring Destructo along, too, because whenever he’s left alone he tries to eat the TV. I was wedged into one of the back seats between Jodie, who kept digging her elbows into me, and Sophie, who I caught staring at me whenever I glanced her way.

  Dad and Steve were up front, while Mum and Jas sat on the two seats behind them. Jas had Max on her knee and was holding him in place with a complicated armlock.

  “So … is everyone ready to have some fun?” asked Mum, as Steve guided the car out of the driveway and on to the main road.

  Jas shrugged. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’ve got a castle near us which is bigger, so… I’m sure it’ll be fine, though.”

  “This one’s older,” said Mum.

  “Queen Victoria once stayed at ours,” Jas retorted.

  Mum looked crestfallen. How could she compete with that?

  “Queen Victoria built this one,” I said, leaping to her aid, “with her bare hands.”

  I gave Mum a sly wink. She sighed, but smiled with it. “Well, I don’t think that’s quite true,” she said, “but it’s still an impressive castle.”

  Dad made a sudden dive for the radio. “Ooh, ooh, turn it up, this is one of mine.”

  Jodie and I groaned. Dad had written dozens of radio jingles over the years and whenever he heard one he insisted on singing a
long. The more ridiculous the lyrics, the more he seemed to enjoy it. Which was handy, because all of the lyrics were ridiculous.

  He took a deep breath. The music swelled. He opened his mouth and…

  “Dad!” Jodie said. “Please. No one wants to hear you singing about butt cream.

  ”Steve raised his hand. “Dude! I totally want to hear you singing about butt cream.”

  “Thank you, Steve,” said Dad triumphantly. He looked back over his shoulder. “Second verse, same as the first. Iffff yoooou’ve…”

  Jodie and I sank deeper into our seats. Even Destructo gave a whine from the boot. This was going to be a very long drive.

  What felt like hours later, but which was actually just twenty agonizing minutes or so, the humans in our group stood outside Piddington Castle, looking up at its moss-coated walls. Destructo, meanwhile, was locked in the car with the windows left open, under strict instructions not to destroy anything.

  My class had done a project on Piddington Castle the year before, although we hadn’t been allowed to actually visit it in case we somehow found a way to knock it down. I remembered the teacher had made it sound like a pretty exciting place, but I’d completely forgotten all the details. Still, I wasn’t about to let that stop me.

  “Of course, it was originally called Piggington Castle,” I said. “Because the first family to live here was actually a family of pigs. Not many people know that.”

  “Because it isn’t true,” Jodie said.

  “It is. I did a project on it at school.”

  Mum leaned past me to look at Jodie. “He did do a project on it at school. I remember.”

  “Oh well, then it must be true,” Jodie tutted.

  “It was also originally built of solid gold, but cars kept crashing because the gold dazzled the drivers.”

  “They didn’t have cars back then, did they?” Steve frowned.

  “They did round here,” I said proudly. “We’ve always been very advanced in these parts.”

  “Aaaaaargh! You’re driving me crazy. Just stop!” Jodie cried. She crammed her earphones in her ears and crossed her arms, signalling she wanted nothing more to do with any of us for the rest of the day.

  I rolled my eyes and gave an amused shake of the head. “Teenagers, eh?”

  Aunt Jas looked up at the castle. “It’s not very big, is it?” she said.

  “It’s bigger on the inside,” I assured her. “Like the TARDIS in Doctor Who. Now,” I said, gesturing towards the castle’s unimpressive-looking front door. “Shall we?”

  We found out there was a battle re-enactment taking place in the castle grounds, so we hung around with half a dozen other people to watch that. I’d never seen a battle re-enactment before, but it wasn’t quite what I expected. I’d been hoping for hundreds of actors all bashing each other to bits, but it turned out to be two blokes in chain-mail armour running around in circles and vaguely swinging at each other with fake swords. The ground was quite muddy so they kept falling over, which was funny the first six or seven times, but the joke began to wear thin pretty quickly after that.

  Even my fascinating-and-fun trivia about the history of the battle wasn’t enough to keep everyone interested. Just after I’d told them about how one side of the conflict had successfully rallied an army of bees to help them, they all decided to go for a look around inside.

  I’m the first to admit that the outside of the castle was not that impressive, but inside was a different story. Inside was really unimpressive.

  The floor was grey. The walls were grey. The ceiling was grey. The sky outside was overcast, which meant the windows also looked grey. There was an occasional tapestry hanging on the wall, but even those had faded away to shades of charcoal. It felt more like being inside a pencil drawing of a castle than inside a real one.

  The castle guides (who wore grey uniforms and mostly had grey hair) looked almost as bored as everyone else. They wandered around with their hands behind their backs, loudly sighing whenever anyone asked them a question.

  “Well … this is nice,” said Mum, smiling hopefully. “Isn’t it?”

  “It’s rubbish,” said Max. He had a finger up his nose all the way to the second knuckle, and was rummaging around like he might strike gold up there. “It’s boring.”

  “Now, now, Max, that’s not nice,” Jas scolded. “Your aunt has worked very hard to arrange this for us.” Jas glanced around, then looked over at Mum. “He’s right, though. It is rubbish. Why did you bring us here?”

  Mum turned and shot me a very deliberate look. “Yes, remind me, Dylan – why did I bring us here?”

  It was a very good question. I’d always wanted to visit the castle since doing our school project, but now I was here I had absolutely no idea why.

  “Because it’s haunted, of course,” I announced, thinking fast.

  Max’s finger paused, mid-rummage. He glanced along the castle corridor in both directions. “Cool.”

  Steve’s face lit up. “Haunted? Oh man, that’s awesome. You mean, like, with ghosts?”

  “No, Steve, with monkeys,” Jas snapped. She was still angry with Steve, and I was beginning to suspect the problem was bigger than his lack of map-reading skills. The marriage issue, I guessed. “Of course with ghosts. What else would it be haunted with?”

  “Actually,” I said, “one of the ghosts is a baboon. Which, while not technically a monkey, is pretty closely related, so—”

  “A ghostly baboon?” Jodie snapped, raising her voice over the music only she could hear. “In a gold castle that used to be run by pigs? Do you even listen to the words that come out of your mouth, Beaky?”

  “No, but only because I’m self-deaf,” I said. “Meaning I can hear everything except the sound of my own voice.”

  Jodie gritted her teeth. “Argh! Shut up!”

  “It’s a terrible affliction and I’m hurt you’d choose to make fun of it,” I said.

  Before Jodie could say anything else, Aunt Jas spun on the spot. “Where are Max and Sophie?”

  Everyone looked around, except Jodie, who kept glaring at me and cracking her knuckles. Max and Sophie were nowhere to be seen.

  “Oh no! What if the ghosts got them?” said Steve. I glanced at him, not sure if he was joking. With his sunglasses on, it was difficult to tell.

  “I’ve got tracking experience,” I said. “I once tracked an ant from one end of town to the other. When it was raining.”

  “No, he didn’t,” said Dad.

  “Well, I did, I just didn’t tell you about it. If anyone can find them, I can,” I said, setting off along the corridor. “I’ll be back in no time. You stay here in case they come back. Just relax and admire all the … grey.”

  It didn’t take an expert tracker to find Max and Sophie. There were only two doors leading off from the corridor and one of them was locked. I followed the next passageway for a few metres, then stopped and listened.

  Any second now…

  Yep, that was bound to be Max. I set off towards the sound and found my cousins standing over a fallen suit of armour. They were in a dimly lit room which was cordoned off by a length of red rope. I glanced around, then ducked under the rope and joined them. They both looked up, surprised to see me.

  We clearly weren’t supposed to be in there, so I closed the heavy wooden door behind me, plunging the room into a gloomy half-darkness.

  “It was like that when we got here,” insisted Max, pointing to the scattered armour.

  “Was it?” I said. “Then maybe it was knocked over by the Piddington Phantom.”

  Max frowned. “The what?”

  “The Piddington Phantom,” I whispered, glancing nervously into the shadows for dramatic effect. “Legend has it the phantom stalks the corridors of this very castle, always on the look-out for trespassers.”

  Sophie swallowed. “T-trespassers?”

  Hey, she could talk! That was a turn-up for the books.

  I nodded solemnly. “The younger the better. I
t scuttles through the shadows like a spider, sniffing out those who have wandered into places they aren’t supposed to be.”

  Max and Sophie glanced around and took a step towards each other.

  “And don’t ask what it does when it finds them,” I said. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Why? What does it do?” Max asked.

  “It wraps them in its long, ghostly tendrils…”

  “Yes?”

  “It carries them to its lair, deep within the castle walls…”

  Sophie let out a whimper. Max took a shaky breath. “And?”

  “And then … it drinks their blood!”

  Max blinked. “It what?”

  “It drinks their blood!” I said, waving my hands in the air for effect.

  “Ghosts don’t drink blood. Vampires drink blood,” Max snorted. “You’re making it up.”

  He glanced at his sister, who was shaking from head to toe, and looked like she might burst into tears at any moment.

  “Well, Sophie believes me,” I pointed out.

  “She’ll believe anything,” Max said with a shrug, “but you can’t fool me. I’m not scared of no Piddington Phantom.”

  The moment the words left Max’s lips, there was a bang from outside the room that made us all jump. Slowly, surely, the door began to creak open, inch by ominous inch.