He looked to one side, and saw the little girl kneeling in the bushes. His heart leaped with relief, and he started to get up.

“Shhh.” She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t.”

He sat down again. But it was hard. He wanted to bounce on the bench! She looked exactly the same as she always did, wearing the same blue-and-white dress, with that graze on her knee and her hair swept oddly out to one side.

“Just sit as you were,” she said. “I don’t want the other children to see you talking to me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I shouldn’t be here.”

“Yes, you’re not wearing the right uniform, for one thing.”

“That is one thing, yes.” She thought about it. “It’s good to see you again, Jake. I’ve missed you. Have you missed me?”

He nodded vigorously, but then forced himself to calm down. The other children were there, and the ball was still thudding around. He didn’t want to give the little girl away. But it was so good to see her! The truth was that he’d been very lonely in the new house. Daddy had tried to play with him a few times, but you could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. He’d play for ten minutes and then get up and say his legs were hurting from kneeling on the floor, even though it was obvious he really just wanted to do something else instead. Whereas the little girl would always play with him for as long as he wanted her to. He’d been expecting to see her all the time after moving to the new house, but she hadn’t been around at all.

Until now.

“Have you made any new friends yet?” she said.

“Not really. Adam, Josh, and Hasan seem okay. Owen isn’t very nice.”

“Owen is a little shit,” she said.

Jake stared at her.

“But a lot of people are, aren’t they?” she said quickly. “And not everybody who acts like your friend really is.”

“But you are?”

“Of course I am.”

“Will you come to my new house and play?”

“I’d like to. But it’s not as simple as that, is it?”

Jake’s heart sank, because no, he knew that it wasn’t. He wanted to see her all the time, but Daddy didn’t want him talking to her.

I’m here. We’re here. New house, new start.

Or, at least, Jake wanted to see her all the time when she wasn’t looking as serious as she was right now.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me the rhyme.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Say it.”

“If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken.”

“And the rest.”

Jake closed his eyes.

“If you play outside alone, soon you won’t be going home.”

“Keep going.”

She sounded barely there now.

“If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass.”

“And?”

The word was so quiet that it might have been nothing more than air. Jake swallowed. He didn’t want to say it, but he forced himself to, speaking as quietly as the little girl just had.

“If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.”

The bell rang.

Jake opened his eyes to see the children in the playground in front of him. Owen was there with a couple of older boys Jake didn’t recognize. They were watching him. George was there too, a concerned expression on his face. After a second the children started laughing, and then headed away toward the main doors, glancing over their shoulders at him.

Jake looked to his side.

The little girl was gone.

* * *

“Who were you talking to at lunchtime?”

Jake wanted to ignore Owen. They were supposed to be writing neatly on the lines in their books, and he wanted to concentrate on that, because it was what they’d been told to do. Obviously, Owen didn’t care; he was leaning over the table and staring at Jake. It was clear to Jake that Owen was one of those boys who didn’t care about being told off. He also knew that telling Owen about the little girl would be a very bad idea. Daddy didn’t like him talking to her, but Jake didn’t think he would ever make fun of him for doing so. He was pretty sure that Owen would.

So he shrugged. “Nobody.”

“Somebody.”

“I didn’t see anybody there. Did you?”

Owen considered the matter, then leaned back.

“That,” he said, “was Neil’s chair.”

“What was?”

“Your chair, idiot. It was Neil’s.”

Owen seemed angry about this, although once again Jake wasn’t sure what he was supposed to have done wrong. Mrs. Shelley had told them all where to sit that morning. It wasn’t like he’d stolen this Neil person’s chair on purpose.

“Who’s Neil?”

“He was here last year,” Owen said. “He’s not here anymore because someone took him away. And now you’ve got his chair.”

There was an obvious error in Owen’s thinking.

“You were in a different classroom last year,” Jake said. “So this was never Neil’s chair.”

“It would have been if he hadn’t been taken away.”

“Where did he move to?”

“He didn’t move anywhere. Someone took him.”

Jake didn’t know what to think about that, as it didn’t make sense. Neil’s parents had taken him somewhere but he hadn’t moved? Jake looked at Owen, and the boy’s angry eyes were clearly full of dark knowledge that he was desperate to pass on.

“A bad man took him,” Owen said.

“Took him where?”

“Nobody knows. But he’s dead now, and you’re sitting in his chair.”

A girl called Tabby was also sitting at the table.

“That’s horrible,” she told Owen. “You don’t know Neil’s dead. And when I asked my mummy she said it wasn’t nice to talk about anyway.”

“He is dead.” Owen turned back to Jake and gestured at the chair. “That means you’ll be next.”

That didn’t make sense either, Jake decided. Owen really hadn’t thought this through at all. For one thing, whatever had happened to Neil, he’d never sat in this particular chair, so it wasn’t like it was cursed or anything.

And also, there was a much more likely possibility. It was one he knew he shouldn’t say, and he remained silent for a second. But then he remembered what the little girl had told him outside, and how alone he felt, and he decided that if Owen could treat him like this, then why couldn’t he treat Owen the same right back?

“Maybe it means I’ll be last,” he said.

Owen narrowed his eyes.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe the bad man will take the class one by one, and they’ll all be replaced by new boys and girls. So that means the Whisper Man will take you before me.”

Tabby gasped in shock, then burst into tears.

“You’ve made Tabby cry,” Owen said matter-of-factly. The teacher’s assistant was making his way over to the table. “George, Jake told Tabby the Whisper Man was going to kill her like he did Neil, and she got upset.”