Orphans of Chaos tcc-1

by John C. Wright

  I was wearing a smock from the art room, and had my hair tucked into a kerchief. I remember there was a bucket of smelly stuff I was rubbing into the floorboards with a brush. I had taken the bigger bucket, because I thought Tertia (Vanity) was too small to carry it. I remember how proud I was when I picked up that bucket, because I felt like a grown-up girl; and I remember how terrible it was, once I had walked out to the spigot and filled it, that I could not carry it. I staggered and stumbled as I waddled up the steps (and the steps were taller back then) and there were tears in my eyes, because I was so afraid I would be punished if I spilled it.

  We had been studying astronomy in Lecture Hall that morning, and I remember thinking that if the five of us could build a rocket ship, we could fly to the moon, and be away from this place forever. And I remember my plan was to ask Tertia to stay aboard the ship once we landed, so I could be the first woman on the moon; and the moon people would be so grateful they would make me their princess; but I was going to let her be the first off the ship when we landed on the next planet, Mars or Venus, to make it up to her.

  It was actually Tertia who found the notes, some sheets of foolscap paper folded and refolded and crammed into a little crack where the wainscoting had become separated from the wall. We were both kneeling and scrubbing, and we exchanged a quick glance at each other. By the look in her eye, I knew she knew (as I did) that we had found a great treasure, which must be kept away from the grown-ups at all costs.

  I pretended I had to go to the lavatory and made a fuss, while Vanity stole a fork from the silver drawer. Mrs. Wren, of course, did not let me go until chores were done. So we both diligently pretended to scrub the section of wainscoting where our treasure was, and Vanity would pluck at the papers with the tines of the fork when Mrs. Wren was idling near the liquor cabinet.

  Like a fluttering pale moth, the papers came free with a rustle of noise, and I quickly stuffed them down my shirtfront. We were let out for recess and exercise, but I was too cunning to take them out where someone might see, so I quickly folded them into my uniform shirt when I was changing into my field hockey gear, and then ripped a button from the shirt. Sadly, I displayed the torn shirt to Mr. ap Cymru, who was coach then, and I got permission to go put it in the hamper in the East Hall for the maid to repair, and told to get a new blouse from the dormitory, so that I would have something to change into after practice.

  Easy as pie. The notes were soon hidden in my room. I gazed at the handwriting, seeing the fine but strong feminine penmanship, and thinking how lovely it would be to have a hand as fine as that. Whoever wrote this (I remember thinking) would never have her knuckles rapped because her Q’s and O’s were lopsided. It was some sort of fairy tale, but one that made no sense, merely fragments; and I remember thinking that I was too old for fairy stories.

  This will seem strange, and impossible to explain, but I did not recognize the stories, the handwriting, any of it. I wrapped the sheaf of paper in a plastic bag and took it to a hidden spot, a dry deep hole in the bark of a tree on the back campus, deep enough so that rain could not reach. And left it.

  A year, perhaps two, went by before I was old enough not to be ashamed of my interest in children’s tales, and I thought to look at it again.

  By that time, I had learned my penmanship. My cursive letters flowed in a fair, clean hand from my pen, far better than the crooked scrawl I had been using even a year before.

  And here were these papers at least ten years old, or more. It was my handwriting.

  4.

  You must have guessed what was on those papers. I read the tales we had told each other that night in the coal cellar. I had forgotten every single one of them, including my own. The paper trembled in my hands when I held it, and the tears blurred my vision.

  I did not for a moment doubt the truth of them. Titans trapped in ice. Werewolves running through trees so tall their branches caught the stars. Magic dogs who sit by the door, and poets who sing tales of yore. A city in outer space, inhabited by creatures wiser than man, meant somehow to protect the world. A castle of light, where a throne sits on a magic glass where everything in every world can be seen.

  One moment, it merely sounded familiar, like a dream you can half recall. The next moment I remembered the coal cellar, that night of terror. Victor had saved Quentin from freezing to death. He made a vow never to forget stories that were obviously already half-forgotten things, pages torn at random from lost diaries.

  But I did not remember the events captured in the Tale. I remember telling the others about my mother and father, but I did not remember my mother and father. Nothing. Not a face, not a sound of voice, not the feel of a hand holding mine.

  I told Victor what I had found. He was as tall as a man at that time, but it was before the hair appeared on his lip, so perhaps this was a year or so before the experiment when he tried to measure the moon, and prove Einstein’s theory false.

  It shook him. I had never seen him actually so frightened before. He kept wiping his eyes, as if the fear was making him want to cry.

  He said, “If they can erase our thoughts, if they can blot out our past, what chance do we have?”

  I was more shaken by the fact that he was shaken than I was by the fact itself. “You believe it? All this stuff?”

  He shook his head, but it was one of those head shakes where you don’t know if you mean yes or no. “I don’t see why not. It is no stranger than some of the things we learn in science. All this time, I was thinking we were from France, or maybe Asia, or, well, at least the planet Mars. Or…”

  He took a deep breath, and calmed himself.

  I said, “Let’s not tell the others.” I was thinking that if Victor, who was (in my mind) the paragon of self-control, was frightened by this, Quentin would go mad.

  Victor said curtly, “We keep no secrets from each other.”

  5.

  Vanity did not faint; she was delighted. “My mother has red hair!” I remember how she used to whisper that to herself as she was falling asleep in the dormitory bed next to me, as if it were her own form of prayer.

  We did not have many chances to speak together without being overheard. But, from time to time, Colin would create an opportunity, such as by pulling the fire alarm.

  I told him the story in hurried whispers as the alarm was ringing and ringing in the hall, and slipped him the papers quickly. He had some questions for me, so there were fire alarms the next day, and the next.

  Colin acted as if he did not believe it. “They might have faked your handwriting. Put those notes up to fool us, ruin our morale,” he said. But I overheard him asking Quentin a few weeks later, “People don’t really die from grief, right? That’s just a saying, right…?”

  Quentin’s reaction was the opposite, when he found out. He was not skeptical at all. I remember it was after he got the copy of the papers from Colin that he began, during our very rare trips into town, to ask the librarian, or the local fishermen, or the granny selling flowers on the street corner, about tales of Welsh witches, King Arthur, or the Great Gray Man of the Hill. He took in every little story he could find, and asked for extra homework, just to get the chance to spend more hours than normal in the library, leafing through Ovid’s Metamorphosis, or the Malleus Maleficarum.

  By that time, Colin had bored a hole through the locker room wall into the girls’ shower, with an awl he stole from Mr. Glum, so we could have longer conversations in private, so he said.

  Myself, I just got into the habit of squirting hairspray into any hole I saw in or near the shower. I never heard Victor’s voice suddenly cry out in pain from behind the wall, and Quentin’s only once.

  But nearly a month passed while that whisper hole was in place, and no teacher really minded if you spent a long time in the shower. And we supposed the sound of the water might hide our voices.

  That was the summer Victor formalized our rules, and put them to quick votes which we registered in whispers, or by a quick knock
on the wall.

  It was Quentin who insisted we all take once more the vow we had made, and forgotten, in the coal cellar. “Vows are powerful things,” he said. “They set things in motion.”

  We could not all put our hands together through the tiny hole in the locker room, so Vanity and I held hands, while the boys (I assume) did their Three-Musketeers slogan.

  And Quentin added one personal codicil to the group oath. “Whatever has been hidden in darkness, I will discover. I will learn the secret, I will find the key, I will dare to turn it; I will pass through the door. The sleeper slumbers; he shall awaken.”

  Quentin was the one who discovered the secret. It was more than a year, but he kept his word.

  6.

  We had been told that the boundaries were bad for our health, that we would become ill if we passed too far beyond them. Victor dismissed this alarming news as a trick, something to keep us away from the estate boundaries, gathered in toward the center of the grounds. He defied this ban as often as he could, and the Headmaster could invent no reason to keep Victor from climbing among the rocks and slopes of the Eastern Downs, provided he stayed inside the bounds.

  As I said, it was Quentin who discovered the first of the secrets. He had been among the barrows and ancient graves of the North, perhaps in some place told to him by a winged shape which flew at night, late in the year.

  It was an autumn day, then. It was cold for the time of year. Morning dew formed frost on the windowpanes. I remember how, in that season, the rising red-gold sun sent weakened beams to bring a mist rising from the North Lawn like steam from a cauldron. The trees to the South seemed to be afire, if fire could burn cold. We had icicles hanging from the rain-spouts and the saints in the chapel, even before the leaves had turned.

  I remember it was not long after Quentin’s first experiment with shaving. He appeared at the breakfast table, dressed, as we all were, in formal morning clothes, but with daubs of cotton clinging to his cheek where he had nicked himself. I remember this was about nine months after Colin’s first attempt to grow the stringy mess he called a goatee, and almost two years after Victor’s lip began to show fuzz.

  On that day, Quentin announced at the breakfast table that he had learned how to fly. He spoke in a very low voice, without moving his lips.

  Dr. Fell and Mrs. Wren, who normally sat at the great walnut table at breakfast, had been called away that morning to prepare for some important meeting of the Board of Visitors and Governors (who were due later that week). Only Mr. Glum was there to watch us, but he was not allowed to sit at the table as the teachers were. There was a window seat at the bay window, and the morning sun was sparkling off the diamond-shaped panes. Mr. Glum sat there, yawning and grumbling over his porridge. The sunlight glanced off his balding head, and he kept pushing aside the drooping ferns Mrs. Wren had placed in the hanging pots before the bay window.

  He was too far away to hear us, and Quentin had given Colin the secret sign (asking for the butter twice) that told Colin to make a racket. Colin was asking Mr. Glum about the trees in the orchard, whether they moved at night, or spoke to each other in leaf-language when the wind blew, or if they felt pain when their branches were lopped off.

  I held a piece of buttered toast before my lips and hissed to Quentin, “Where did you get an airplane? The nearest airfield is in Bristol.”

  I remember feeling green with jealousy. But I do not remember doubting him, not for an instant.

  “No plane. I don’t use a machine. I can make the wind dense. Its essence is to give way, but other essences obtain when the signs are right.”

  I daubed my lip with a napkin. “You’re going to show me tonight.”

  Victor leaned across the table, teapot in hand as if to pour some tea into my (full and untouched) teacup. Victor whispered, “Not tonight. There are workmen and a cleaning crew going over the Great Hall. We’ll be locked in early. Tomorrow. Their guard will be relaxed.”

  He was right. We knew the Headmaster had ordered a large antique table, made of a single huge slab of green marble, to be moved into the Great Hall to prepare for the meeting. It was too large for the main doors. Workmen were tearing shingles off the roof and were going to lower the enormous table in on a crane. The table was resting in a temporary shed on the North Lawn, covered in rope and canvas.

  We also knew the teachers kept a closer eye on us whenever there were outsiders around.

  And yet it was Vanity who said, “Oh! I’ve an idea! Oh! Listen! Being locked up is better! No one searches for a locked-up person.”

  Victor looked dubious.

  Quentin rubbed his nose, so that his hand hid his mouth. He whispered in his soft, smooth voice, “Triune of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn tonight. Jupiter moderates between the warm violence of Mars and the leaden coolness of Saturn. Good time for transitions. Should be tonight.”

  Vanity wiggled and whispered excitedly, “I can get us out of the girls’ dorm room. Secretly. It’s my Talent. If you can get out of the boys’, we’ll meet. Where?”

  Quentin muttered, “Barrows. Midnight. Look out—!”

  Mr. Glum straightened up from his porridge. Evidently Colin had not completely distracted him, or maybe he had been resting his eyes on Vanity, and had seen her lips move. She had also been louder than the rest of us.

  Now Mr. Glum stood up. “What’s all this peeking and whispering, then? What plot are you lot hatching?”

  Vanity half-rose from her seat, and leaned forward, palms on the table top, exclaiming in her cheerful, earnest voice: “But Mr. Glum! Dear, dear Mr. Glum! We were just talking! It cannot be wrong to talk: you did it just now, when you told us not to talk!”

  Whether she intended it or not, her posture was such as to afford Mr. Glum a clear view down her shirt.

  That same youthful electricity, which often I found annoying in her, adults (especially adult men) found fascinating. She was so fair skinned that she blushed at the slightest emotion; her eyes flashed like emeralds. Between her red lips, red eyebrows, and red hair, Vanity was an incandescent thing, glowing.

  Mr. Glum was not what could be called handsome in any part of him. His nails were grimed with dirt, always. I assumed the only woman who ever spoke to him was Mrs. Wren; I don’t think he ever saw any pretty young girls, except us. Usually he was out in the garden, weeding, and we were behind the windows of the classrooms, gazing outside with longing. I wondered in pity if perhaps he ever looked up and saw Vanity and me staring out, dreamy-eyed, and wished we were dreaming of him.

  Mr. Glum was confounded with lust for a moment. He could not take his eyes from where Vanity’s bosom strained against her starched white shirt.

  But he gathered himself and barked at her, “Enough of your jaw! Impertinence! Rule of silence! You’ll eat your food as quiet as Jesuits, you will. Rule is on!”

  Victor said stiffly, “But I didn’t talk back to you, sir. I wasn’t talking at all.”

  “Then you won’t notice any difference, will you? And you’ll have detention for talking when I just put the rule on! Rule is on for all of you! Any more back talk? Eh? No? And no passing notes nor making signs with your fingers, neither!”

  And so Victor had no chance to overrule our plan. Tonight was to be the night.

  7.

  As was her custom, Mrs. Wren had taken a nightcap or two before she came in for evening inspections. This evening, her breath, as usual, stank of sherry; her eyes were blurred.

  The routine was always the same: we would stand in the nude, usually on tiptoe because the floor was cold, with our hands out in front of us, either palm up or palm down depending on whether or not she was looking at our nails. She would hand one of us a tape measure, and would have us measure the other one: neck, bust, waist, hips, inseam. Vanity always tried to tickle me or get me to break attention; I tried to pinch her when Mrs. Wren was not looking when it was my turn. Meanwhile, Mrs. Wren would jot down in an unsteady hand the numbers we called out.

  We had decided long
ago always to call out the same numbers, no matter what the measurements were, or how different they were from night to night.

  Then she would have us stand at attention and she would peer at us while we were ordered to smile and show our teeth. I have no idea why she would stare at our teeth. When I was young, I thought it was to make sure we were brushing. But she stared and never said anything whether we brushed or did not.

  Then she would ask, “Any moles or skin discolorations today? Aches? Pains? Strains? Strange dreams?”

  Vanity would usually answer back: “I’ve got freckles! Does that count?”

  Mrs. Wren never seemed disturbed by back talk. She had a melancholy face, and eyes that always seemed to be staring somewhere else. There was no sign of gray in her hair, no wrinkles on her skin, and yet she never stood fully erect, and walked with a stoop-shouldered shuffle, as if weights were on her shoulders. Her hair was a mouse-colored bun, with wisps and unruly curls always escaping it; her eyes were half-hidden behind coke-bottle-glass spectacles. She always wore the same gray sweater, which had as many loose threads and escaping wisps as her hair.

  “Well, duckies,” she would answer, “don’t fret about a few spots. I am sure, in time, you will appear as howsoever fair or foul you wish to appear. In time, in time. All chickens come home to roost in time.”

  And she would sigh.

  Then she’d say: “Hold out your pretty fingers for the needle, my chicks, ’twill only prick a slight prick.”

  She would take a small blood sample from a forefinger or an elbow, and spend (what always seemed to me) several minutes fumbling with the self-adhesive label, onto which she had written the date in her wandering hand. No matter how long she muttered and fretted (and it always seemed long to me) the labels always went onto the little plastic sample bottles crookedly, or wrinkled, or with their sticky sides stuck to each other.