Hunter Hunted by Jack Gatland (best value ebook reader .TXT) 📗

the back of Camping and Caravanning magazine. They’d arrived late on a Friday evening in May and, as Craig and his dad wrestled with the tent, realising very early in the process that they didn’t have a manual explaining which pole went where, Craig’s mum and his sister Ellie went to visit the camp shop and picked up some fish and chips from a van that had arrived just outside it. They’d been cramped back then; eight-year-old Craig and six-year-old Ellie had to share one of the two ‘bedrooms’, nothing more than a cloth divider between their manky sleeping bags on cheap air beds, and their parents’ double air bed, with equally battered sleeping bags.

They’d had a BBQ on the Saturday and cooked from a single camp stove the other days. They’d played football. Although they had a small TV to watch things on, they didn’t really bother. There was a small boat ramp that led into the Thames, which you could get to by following a path from the first field, or by making your way on a rickety, home made bridge created from wooden pallets across a stream beside the third, furthest away field, and then following the Thames back to it.

He played there a lot. And he built the bridge, too.

It had been a break in every sense of the word; a break from the artificial normality of the world, and a return to an easier time. From that day onwards, the Randalls were born again weekend campers, updating their equipment piece by piece while travelling down every Friday evening, often from the moment Craig returned home from school, and returning mid afternoon on the Sunday, just in time for him to prepare for school the following day.

They weren’t the only people who did this and over the weeks, the months that they lived this double life, Craig had recognised other people, other families, other children who also travelled to Hurley on the weekends. And, they met new families who were just starting the journeys.

Families and children who didn’t know Craig, and had no context of what he was truly like. And thus the second Craig Randall was born.

This Craig was a cool one. He was captain of his school’s football team, had a girlfriend who was super hot and two years older than him, and he was doing these new visiting children a favour by hanging out with them. He was the experienced one, the veteran of the campsite; he knew the coolest places to play in the woods that surrounded the campsite, the best places to swim, and he always had a story of something amazing that’d happened in the past, which was always a story that made him look as equally brilliant. In fact, as the years went on and Craig reached his teenage years, he’d spend the weeks waiting for the weekends, when he could go back to Hurley and gain adoration from the smaller kids there, annoyed when the camping season ended in October and he had to wait almost half the year to return. He didn’t explain what he did while camping to his weekday friends. They weren’t that important to him. They didn’t see him in the same way.

They’d gotten a spaniel named Scamper, named after some book dog his dad had loved as a kid, a couple of years into this. Craig wasn’t a fan of the dog, mainly because he ended up as the de facto dog walker, but that said, it seemed to attract girls to him, all wanting to stroke the dog; and Craig had then reached an age then when girls were very interesting.

And then it’d all gone wrong. His parents now had a caravan, and although Ellie still slept with them inside it, they allowed Craig his own four-person tent, which he’d had to save up for. It was like having his own place; he had a double mattress inside it, even if his sleeping bag fitted one person, and a small radio that played CDs. But for the fifteen-year-old Craig, this was a bachelor pad. He was finally becoming a man. And his attitude to the other kids on the site changed. He wasn’t bothered about playing in the woods like he was five years earlier. He wanted to kiss girls and look cool. He’d just finished his Year 10 mock GCSE exams. You were effectively a grown up when you did that.

He bullied the smaller kids in the campsite, mainly because he could. That, and it was a form of revenge for the bullies who still attacked him at his own school. He’d also realised that he was no longer the ‘veteran’ who could show the coolest places to people; that was now a position given to his sister, or even other younger children who, arriving years after he had now claimed the role, looking at him as some kind of weird hanger on.

And this had angered him.

He’d acted out by hurting the littler kids; not physically, but mentally. He’d take things of theirs, left outside the tents at night and throw them into the Thames, or break them, leaving them back outside the tents for them to find the following morning. He’d tell stories of the Grey Lady, a ghostly woman who hanged herself in Medmenham Abbey, a stately home across the Thames and historically infamous as the location of Sir Francis Dashwood’s The Hellfire Club, who used it for "obscene parodies of religious rites" in the mid-1700s, her ghost walking the banks of the Thames late at night, stealing children’s souls. He’d even pretended to become possessed by Dashwood, terrifying the younger children until they cried, now and then finding an intrigued teenage girl who wanted to know more.

He’d never gone too far with that, except for that one time.

But now it was summer, school was over, and the Hurley campsite had become a prison for Craig. After seven years there, he had built a reputation; one that his parents