Pitch
Thirteen-year-old Liv’s brother is missing, and her family is falling apart. Abandoned with her aunt at a grand house in the middle of nowhere, she finds a boy hidden in the attic—injured, starving, and terrified of something or someone that he will not explain. Sworn to secrecy, Liv tries to heal him and to help him escape, but the pieces of his story don’t add up, and the threat seems to be creeping ever closer. As no news becomes increasingly unlikely to be good news, Liv must ask herself how much of what is lost can she save, and whether she can believe the impossible to save it. The Boy at the Wynyates is a creepy and emotive mystery exploring loss, loneliness, and how we reconcile ourselves to what we cannot know.
Before
They’ve been half-carrying, half-dragging him through the twilight for over an hour, for so long that he hardly knows how they made it to the door. But suddenly they’ve arrived, light is flooding out, and they’re safe; she’s there. Safe for now, at least.
She ushers them inside, and he sinks into a chair, slumps forward, clenching his teeth against the throb of the pain, and against his own whimpers. Around him, everyone is talking at once, frantic, trying to work out what to do. He can’t join in. It’s all he can do to stop himself from fainting.
Then the voices grow more urgent: ‘They’re coming!’ He tries to drag himself upright, but he can’t do it, his legs won’t carry him. The reassuring weight of a hand lands on his arm, gently keeping him down; a familiar voice tells him to rest. The same voice is raised to cut through the rest: ‘What about him, though? He can’t keep moving. Look at him!’
He feels rather than sees them turn to look at him—the weakling, one of the kids who shouldn’t have been there. He feels the building heat of a dull, drowsy shame.
‘He can stay,’ she says tersely. ‘I can hide him. Take him upstairs.’
He’s grabbed by shoulders and hoisted upwards, an arm around each neck. He tries to protest, but as his mouth opens his stomach heaves and he tastes the sour rush of vomit as it splatters down his chin. His face is burning with humiliation, his mouth with bile. She gives a tut of exasperation, but her eyes are kind when his rise to meet them, and she pats his cheek as they drag him past.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘They won’t find you. I won’t let them.’
Continued…