The Kids Who Lived In a Hole Read online

  THE KIDS WHO LIVED IN A HOLE

  C.G. LAMBERT

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by C.G. Lambert

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright.

  The Moral Right of the author is asserted.

  First paperback edition June 2021

  Published by Clamp Ltd

  Cover Art by Nick Castle

  Map by Karin Wittig

  ISBN 978-1-914531-00-2 Paperback (KDP)

  ISBN 978-1-914531-01-9 Hardback

  ISBN 978-1-914531-02-6 Paperback (IngramSpark)

  ISBN 978-1-914531-03-3 ePUB

  www.cglambert.com

  www.clamp.pub

  For Ange

  CONTENTS

  MAP OF THE EASTWELL ESTATE

  PROLOGUE

  ARRIVAL

  LONDON

  THE ESTATE

  THE DUCK’S BARK

  HANGOVER

  DINNER

  INGENUE

  FIRE IN THE NIGHT

  THE HOLE

  THE HOLE: PART TWO

  WAITING

  THE PLAN

  EXECUTING THE PLAN

  REUNION

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Even self-published novels have many people helping—and while every mistake is my own, the following people have been most helpful with their contributions:

  Thanks to my beta readers—Andrew Grenfell, Todd Gault, Leah Carson & Ann Donato for their insights and feedback.

  Thanks to my Editor, Michael Thorn for his gentle guidance and local knowledge. There are indeed no stone walls in Sussex!

  Thanks to Nick Castle for the great cover art and to Karin Wittig for the brilliant map. It’s always great when you’re dealing with professionals who get what you’re trying to do and make it work for you.

  And always, thanks to my First Reader.

  MAP OF THE EASTWELL ESTATE

  PROLOGUE

  The gunshot pierced the night sky. A silhouette in the car headlights twitched and fell. Another shot rang out and the second figure outlined by the lights fell too. Marcus was watching from a great way off but could see perfectly clearly four or five figures in front of the Earl’s mansion stop and look towards their position. The threatening clouds that had been accumulating since late afternoon briefly cleared above, allowing a moonbeam to pick them out on the hill opposite the mansion. It was like a stage spotlight showing exactly where Marcus, Zoe and Uncle Reggie were standing, watching from half a mile away. The darkened figures immediately jumped into their cars and started the engines.

  “Time to go,” urged Uncle Reggie, collecting a hand in each of his and starting down the road back towards their mansion. They broke into a run, Marcus’s uncle able to move quite quickly when he got going. Behind them, they could hear tyres screech as their pursuers took corners at breakneck speed. Marcus found himself hoping they would crash.

  He chanced a glance behind and saw that the Earl’s mansion was ablaze, with half a dozen other properties also aflame. The cars’ headlights could be seen driving along Crest Road. Soon they would be turning into Split Lane—the country lane the three of them were running down— and then they would likely meet the same fate as the Earl and his wife.

  Uncle Reggie stopped. They had reached the point in Split Lane where they needed to turn off to make their way back to the mansion. But Uncle Reggie had other ideas.

  “Marcus, wait. Listen. There’s a bunker in the pasture in front of our cottage. You know where the cottage is, right? Take Zoe there until it's safe to come out. The door is hidden, but line up the lights from the fish farm and the power lines and where those lights are on top of each other you’ll find a door in the ground. There’s enough food in there for a hundred people for a hundred days. The code is Aunt Meredith’s birthday. Go quickly! Look after your sister!”

  ARRIVAL

  Marcus stared out of the window of the old Land Rover, a thousand-yard stare on his fifteen-year-old face. It seemed a lot longer than a 30-minute car ride after twenty-five hours in the air and lacklustre sleep. Idyllic pastures and woodlands flashed by unseen, a bleary streak of green. Aunty Meredith was sitting in the middle of the back seat between him and his younger sister Zoe, who was likewise there but not there, staring trancelike out of her window. They’d felt quite special, walking out at Arrivals to be greeted by Uncle Reggie and Aunty Meredith, with William the groundsman holding up a sign bearing their names. Uncle Reggie and Aunty Meredith looked every bit the odd couple: Uncle Reggie tall as ever, only slightly stooped by age, just a few wisps of hair on an otherwise perfectly bald head and a deep-pile Victorian gentleman’s moustache on his top lip. Aunty Meredith was still a petite beauty, a shower of auburn hair cascading below her shoulders with only the odd strand of silver visible. William, probably of similar age, was more thickset. His muscular frame resulting from a lifetime of manual labour was just beginning to turn to flab.

  Local time had just turned 10 am as they loaded their bags into the old dark green Land Rover and headed out of the airport short-stay multi-storey. They left the airport surrounds and joined the M25 to bypass London proper and head into the heart of Sussex.

  Marcus was tall for a 15-year-old and a bit on the slim side. A dollop of Afro-like hair sat incongruously on his pale face. He wore thick-rimmed glasses and was prone to breakouts of acne. Zoe was slim too, with long straight mousy hair and a smattering of freckles. She was ten but acted a lot younger. She had proved more than a handful on the three flights over from their home in Auckland, New Zealand. Marcus had not been able to sleep much at all while Zoe, when she wasn’t being annoying, had taken advantage of her smaller size to curl up on the seat, propped against the window and snored. Marcus was convinced she’d brought every piece of clothing she owned and his persistent memory of the long-haul journey had been trying to keep an eye on her while dragging both their suitcases through the airports. He was hopeful he wouldn’t have to look after her much on their holiday.

  The stretches of motorway were punctuated periodically by blink-and-you'll-miss-them sliproads with signs for country towns with names so weird that they threatened to take Marcus out of his zen-like state. Picklestone. South Blargsberry. Nether Wallop. And, once they were off the motorway, small parish churches flashed by, they passed through railway overbridges and splashed through wet lanes bordered by tall mature trees meeting high above, making tunnels through both time and space. The most interesting things he saw were the camping store at Gloomsley Heath—looking at first glance like a circus set up in someone’s front yard—and the Tudor houses in Lungfield. After that, the lanes became narrower and the trees lining the road thickened and deepened, the ground disappearing under a carpet of moss and leaves. A little way further led to where the banks were built up on either side of the lane, the trees starting to tower above them and the road narrowed to a single lane.

  “Are we nearly there?” whined Zoe.

  “We’re actually already here, Zoe. The land on each side of the road is part of the estate,” answered Aunty Meredith. They pulled into a driveway on the right, easing past a number of white cottages set behind hedges. Marcus had imagined that they’d pull into a long driveway and circle an expansive lawn up to a stately mansion so he was a bit surprised that they were effectively driving down a country suburb, lined with hedg
es instead of fences.

  Zoe frowned. “Which one is yours? I thought you had a big house?”

  Uncle Reggie was about to answer when they came to an equestrian facility and Zoe squealed. “Horses!!” Her face pressed up to the window and quickly turned to keep the barn in her view as they headed past and on to the house. Once the stables had disappeared from view, she turned back to face the front just as they drove up to the house itself. It was three stories tall with white walls like the Tudor buildings in Gloomsley Heath. Where the Tudor houses at the Heath had shown signs of age and wear, their dark wooden beams bent and bowed, Eastwell Manor was all straight lines. The roof had four impressive chimneys and trees and bushes clustered around the walls, concealing some of them and making the house seem almost part of its natural surroundings. Uncle Reggie smiled and turned in the passenger seat. “Big enough for you?”

  William parked in front of a double garage. He grabbed the luggage while the others headed inside. They were greeted in the reception hall by a bustling matron of a similar age to Groundsman William, carrying a tray of cookies fresh from the oven, oven mitts protecting her hands and flour still on her apron. “I’m Francine the Housekeeper. Go ahead and help yourselves to a cookie!”

  The warmth and scent of the cookies filled the air as Zoe rammed most of one into her mouth and immediately helped herself to another. “For later,” she grinned. Marcus was more polite, taking only one, but he did not need telling twice when Francine suggested he also take another. The gooey chocolate chips’ goodness eased the travel-weariness. While he was eating his first cookie, Marcus glanced around. The interiors were white plaster between dark wood beams, the floors black and white tiles, and a wooden staircase headed upstairs covered in a muted apricot runner.

  “Come on through to the library and we’ll give you the lie of the land,” suggested Uncle Reggie. He led them into a large room with fitted bookshelves and a fireplace. A lemon-yellow couch with two pouffes faced the fireplace and a couple of desks sat under the windows at the far end of the room. As in the hall, the room was bathed in natural light—not the dark brooding interior gloom that Marcus had seen on TV period programmes set in Tudor buildings. As Marcus and Zoe made themselves comfortable on the couch, Uncle Reggie unravelled a map on the coffee table.

  “So, we’ve got a bit over 500 acres, laid out very, very roughly like a figure eight knocked on its side. The right-hand loop has the manor house, the horses and cottages, the formal gardens and lakes with woodlands and a bit of forest on the other side of the road. We usually have the house as a B&B—thirteen rooms and the two masters have ensuites, but the local plastic surgery has block booked the whole place for one of their patients for two months. Our agreement with them says we can’t accept public bookings, but family can stay and that's why you guys are able to come over. We’ll put you two in adjoining rooms away from the patient—she expects her privacy after all!”

  “But Uncle Reggie, don’t you and Aunt Meredith live in the big house?”

  “Uncle Reggie thinks that the money we make from the larger rooms is worth the slight inconvenience of living on the other side of the estate.” Aunty Meredith didn’t seem to be bitter about this at all, although she did have a wry grin when she mentioned it.

  “Ahem, as I was saying… So, the left-hand side is more wooded, it's still got a few fields separated by hedgerows but the majority of it is unspoiled wilderness. A few lakes, that sort of thing. The points of interest on that side are our cottage and meadow.” Here he pointed to the extreme left-hand side of the map, almost as far as you could get from the main house. “The power station and the chicken farm. I’ve also added a fishery here, and an apiary as well.”

  Zoe wrinkled her nose. “What’s an apiary?”

  Uncle Reggie smiled, obviously pleased with himself. “Bees. So we’ve got pastures running cows and sheep. We’ve got a full-on chicken run, plus the fishery and bees. And horses in the Equestrian Centre.”

  Craning his neck, Marcus pointed at a collection of buildings not far from the chicken farm. “What's that?”

  Uncle Reggie smirked. “That’s the neighbours—the Earl of Dormansland. When we moved in, I walked over there to borrow a cup of sugar. It was hilarious the look on their cook’s face as I walked over the fields back home, climbing the fences with this cup of sugar.”

  Aunty Meredith shook her head. “I don’t think anyone else thought it was quite as funny as you did,” she suggested.

  “Apparently he wasn’t impressed when we put a chicken farm so close to his estate. He was lucky it wasn’t pigs! We’ve been invited to his estate for dinner this week, so you’ll be able to see how the posh people live. Anyways, we’ve got some other neighbours here,” Uncle Reggie continued, pointing to just above the central point of the figure eight. “And some others a bit further away in every direction. If you get bored you can walk up past our cottage here to the North and do laser tag or paintball, and if you’re after a little bit of excitement you can do fishing in the lake down here on the southeastern corner or showjumping on one of the horses.”

  Now he had Zoe’s attention.

  “Do you have your own horses?”

  Uncle Reggie looked slightly embarrassed. “Well, no,” he admitted. “But I can have a word with the lady who leases the Centre from us and see if she’ll let you ride a bit.”

  “Oh, yes please! Marcus, I’m going riding, yay!!”

  Marcus looked pleased for his sister.

  “Plus there are the facilities at the house: we’ve got two pools, a gym, tennis courts and a couple of kayaks for the lake. I’m trying to get a couple of small sailboats for the lake but I really don't think it's big enough for them. You’d pretty much be tacking the whole time. But if you go to the lake or for a swim, do not drown. That’s not a conversation I want to have with your mother!”

  He paused to let them take it all in, before continuing. “And we can head into London to see the sights, or go to the beach at Brighton. Or visit one of the stately homes or castles nearby.”

  “Wow, Uncle Reggie, how much did all this cost?” Zoe asked.

  “Well, I got it for a bit of a bargain - I don’t think the previous owners knew what they had. Or maybe they were in a spot of bother and needed to cash out, I’m not sure.”

  “How did you make all your money?”

  Marcus started to tell Zoe not to be rude, but Uncle Reggie held up his hand, smiling that it was ok. “What did your Mum say?”

  “She said that one of your crazy ideas must have eventually worked, but she didn’t know exactly which one.”

  Uncle Reggie nodded. “I have tried a few things,” he allowed. “Can you two keep a secret?” he asked, a little quieter, leaning forward over the map. They nodded, leaning in to hear. “I started trying to be a writer, but I was terrible.” Aunty Meredith snorted in agreement. “Terrible, terrible. And then I discovered there was some software which would tell you how good your writing was and how likely it was to sell. Not much use when you’re terrible, right? But they had three tiers of use—one that allowed you a single test, one that allowed one test a month for a year, and one that had no restrictions at all. So, I wrote a little bit of computer code that would randomly create one hundred thousand words, because that's what a novel is, right? Create a book of one hundred thousand words, and then automatically send it to the software. I would get the answers back from their software which says how good or bad the book was, and I set up my code to use that feedback to train my code how to write well. I started off with about three months of reports that had various grades in the range F to D, but then the code got better. A lot better. Soon I was generating books with B’s and C’s. I started to make the code more flexible so I could make it less random and more driven by inputs—make a book that was more romantic, or had more action, less conversation, that sort of thing. After I did that, I got it to focus on certain genres, relearning the difference in rules for the differen
t types of stories and soon I started getting A’s. I generated about a hundred grade A stories in ten genres and then the software stopped working. I reached out to the people running the service. I’ll buy this from you, I told them. But nothing. I searched and researched for the people responsible but they had literally vanished into thin air. So, I made up ten fake author names, grabbed some pictures from the internet for profile pictures and made up some bogus back story for each book then started sending them out to agents and publishers and eventually they sold. Every year I send out another ten books and every year I get ten checks, and occasionally I’ll see one or other on the bestseller list. One reviewer once pointed out that the author they were reviewing looked a little like a young Salvador Dali, because I had literally used an old photo of a young Salvador Dali, but I just replied ‘C’est Romanticism, c’est moi!’.”

  Zoe and Marcus looked blank, so he continued. “I tell you what, it’s a lot easier to ignore bad reviews when it's a computer doing the writing!”

  Marcus looked astonished. “But didn’t you learn anything about writing from all this?” he asked. “Don’t you want to write under your own name?”

  Now Uncle Reggie looked surprised. “Write myself? Do you know how hard it is to write a book? A hundred thousand words is hard.” He glimpsed Aunty Meredith rolling her eyes and collected himself. “Anyways, let's make a plan for the month. We don’t have to plan out what you want to do every day, but let's lock in the days that you want to go into London so that you don’t reach the end of your holiday and have a whole bunch of things that you wanted to do and never quite got around to doing. Oh! While I remember…” He pulled out two phones, one black and one a light grey, but otherwise identical. “Here’s a phone each. They’re cheap and nasty but the charge lasts for a month so even if you forget to charge them, they should be fine. I’ve put in a sim card and the bill is paid for the month that you’re here. I’ve put our numbers in the address book, so you’ve got mine, Meredith’s, the house number and William and Francine’s numbers in there. They’re not smartphones so nobody can track you or anything, but they are almost indestructible and are small enough to take everywhere. Some parts of the estate are a bit patchy when it comes to coverage, but when we go to London or Brighton, we should be able to keep in contact even if we get separated.”