Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls

by Claire Legrand

  Only now did Victoria realize how much she had enjoyed herself.

  Victoria’s fists clenched in her blankets. How dare Mrs. Cavendish take him so near his birthday, she thought. He doesn’t have a chance.

  But then she remembered how small and shriveled and beaten Lawrence had looked when Mr. Alice took him out of the hanger after supper. Mrs. Cavendish made everyone watch. There were red marks on Lawrence’s wrists and ankles where the straps had bound him. His head hung low, like his neck had gone rubbery. Mr. Alice had had to half drag him by his collar.

  Maybe Lawrence had more of a chance than she thought. Maybe he was already on his way to being changed.

  Victoria got out of bed, ignoring the quiet sobs she could hear from various cots—and the utter silence from Gabby’s cot—and tapped on Jacqueline’s shoulder.

  “Too scared to sleep?” said Jacqueline.

  “I need to talk to Lawrence,” said Victoria. “How can I do that?”

  Jacqueline sat up. “You can’t. He’s in the boys’ dorm.”

  “And how do I get there?”

  Jacqueline stared in horror. “You can’t walk around after lights-out, remember? It’s not safe.”

  “But is the door locked?”

  “Well, of course it is.” Jacqueline paused. “People have tried, you know. To sneak around before bed. They slipped out past the gofers when they shut us in for the night and ran down the hall. But then it was lights-out, and they never came back.”

  Victoria ignored the quiver of fear in her throat. “There has to be a way. I won’t just sit here like a dog or something, all tied up. I need to talk to Lawrence.”

  “But there’s no way to—”

  “Of course there is.” Victoria started at the corner nearest her and started working her way around the room, patting the walls. “I always find ways to.”

  Jacqueline followed. “People are watching, Victoria.”

  And they were; as she crept close to the walls, kicking around in the shadows and peeking behind furniture, Victoria felt the eyes of the other girls upon her. Some were sleepy and some were sharp and hard, and some of them whispered things to each other. Victoria was glad she could not hear what they said.

  “I don’t care, let them look,” she said. “There has to be another way out, and I’ll find it.”

  “But there isn’t. Let’s go back to bed, Victoria.”

  At the door, Victoria jiggled the doorknob and hinges. She shoved hard against it. She poked her fingers beneath the door, into the hallway beyond.

  Something rustled past her fingertips, stinging them.

  She yanked her hand back, glaring at the red marks on her skin.

  “Victoria, please,” Jacqueline whispered. “I don’t like this.”

  Victoria scoffed. No wonder Jacqueline isn’t top of the class, she thought. She whines too much. She turned and looked back down the aisle of beds, trying to ignore the other girls’ stares. At the bottom of the opposite wall stood a tiny black spot.

  The fireplace.

  “I wonder,” said Victoria, and she headed for it with her chin in the air. All these girls with their staring and whispering and hiding in bedcovers were annoying her. What did they care what she did? If she had the time, she would dazzle every last one of them under their beds.

  The fireplace was small, and when Victoria knelt before it, her hands scraped against ash and grubby bits, like old food or crumbly fingernails. Trying not to think about how disgusting that was, Victoria gritted her teeth, crawled a few inches forward, and waved her hand around in the dark. It was silly, it was stupid, but she had to try. She had to talk to Lawrence. Every minute that passed was a minute closer to his birthday, a minute closer to him either disappearing or changing, forever. She couldn’t decide which would be worse.

  My name is Victoria Wright, she recited to herself, and I’m going to make this work.

  Jacqueline tugged on Victoria’s pant leg. “What are you doing? Have you lost your mind?”

  Victoria shrugged her off and crawled a bit farther, then farther still. She reached out into the dark, and her fingers brushed a dirty brick wall.

  She sighed and sat back on her heels. It was a dead end.

  “Like I said,” began Jacqueline, but then cold air rushed out at Victoria and hit her face, and the dirty floor just ahead of her . . . trembled.

  Jacqueline backed away, eyes wide. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Victoria said. It felt strange to admit such a thing out loud. She crawled forward, one hand out in front of her. Where she expected to brush against the dead-end wall, she met only more cold air, and more and more. This new cold, dark space swallowed her away until she could not see her own fingers right in front of her.

  “You’ll get in so much trouble for this,” came Jacqueline’s voice from somewhere far behind her.

  Although Victoria wanted to see Lawrence more than almost anything and warn him not to be an idiot and ensure that he knew about the thirteenth-birthday thing, because he probably hadn’t paid attention—the phrase “get in so much trouble” sent chills down her spine.

  She gulped but didn’t turn around. “Don’t worry. I never get in trouble.”

  “I could get in trouble, just for talking to you while you’re doing this. Someone could be watching, someone could tell.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “You’re acting like a degenerate.”

  “Nonsense,” Victoria said. “I just want to talk to Lawrence.”

  After a moment, Jacqueline said quietly, “This place isn’t like home, Victoria.”

  “I’d figured out that much, thanks,” Victoria snapped.

  “Getting in trouble here isn’t like getting in trouble at home.”

  At the fear in Jacqueline’s voice, Victoria almost turned around and went back to bed, but her pride wouldn’t let her stop now. And besides, Lawrence was hopeless without her; he needed her.

  She crawled back into the fireplace, sneezing on soot—she hoped it was soot—and kept crawling. The floor turned slicker, slippery with a thin coat of slime. Victoria wiped her face with her sleeve and caught a sour whiff off her fingers. When she looked back over her shoulder, she saw no fireplace, no Jacqueline—nothing but more darkness.

  Then the walls began to change.

  IT BEGAN FROM BEHIND VICTORIA, BACK NEAR THE opening of the fireplace—a soft rumble and rustle, like something enormous and slow turning in its sleep.

  Then the slimy, gritty floor beneath Victoria began to ripple.

  The walls on either side of her expanded and contracted.

  If she didn’t know better, she would have thought this little tunnel was breathing. All around her, the walls heaved. A low buzzing sound began, from all around her. She tried to scramble away, first to one side, then the other, but the damp stone walls moved too quickly. Soon they surrounded her on all sides, and the buzzing grew into a whir and then a drone of wet, flapping wings. Darkness pressed in close, mere inches from her face, closer, closer . . .

  Victoria curled into a ball, breathing fast. “No, no,” she murmured, but the walls did not listen. They would crush her, they would smash her to bloody bits between them, they would devour her with buggy teeth. Curling into a knot on the floor, Victoria buried her head in her arms, as she had done in the parlor. “Getting in trouble here isn’t like getting in trouble at home,” Jacqueline had warned her, and Victoria had not listened, and now she was in the parlor again. It had to be. Somehow, Mrs. Cavendish had trapped her here, and she would never let her out this time.

  “No, no,” Victoria wanted to say again, but she could not find her voice, so she had to settle for saying it in her mind: No, no, no, no . . .

  She began to hum.

  At first, she didn’t even realize it. All she knew was the cold, heavy dark pressing in on her and the wings swarming over her as though trying to burrow beneath her skin. But soon the never-ending buzzing quieted, and then it was onl
y a few lonely wing flaps as the walls around her fell away, and then there was silence.

  Victoria opened her eyes and stared. Of course, she couldn’t see anything, but the darkness seemed somehow quieter than it had been a moment before. It seemed, in fact, to be holding its breath.

  Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3. Victoria recognized the melody now as she drew herself up onto unsteady feet. She could almost picture Lawrence’s hands banging and flying across the keys. As she stood there, shaking, waiting, the sounds of bugs and wings returned—quietly, from a distance. The walls around her began shifting again, creaking a little this time, as if straining against something that was trying to hold them back.

  “No, wait,” Victoria whispered, sinking to the floor, hiding her head once more. It was all a trick; they were coming back. Mrs. Cavendish was toying with her, drawing her into this dark place only to trap her and release her and trap her again, between stone and bugs and blackness. Victoria hid her face in her knees, folding up as tightly as she could, and forced herself to start humming again. At least if she thought of Lawrence and his stupid, wonderful piano and imagined that she was sitting in his living room watching him play, caught between jealousy and awe, she would be distracted when the bugs came back and started peeling back layers of her skin with their pincers.

  The buzzing stopped. The walls stopped. Silence returned. The only sound there in the darkness with Victoria was her own trembling voice humming the opening bars of Rachmaninoff’s concerto over and over again. She did not lift her head. There was safety in this, in the thought of Lawrence’s smiling face bent over his piano, in the shaky, ugly notes of Victoria’s voice. She had never been a good singer.

  Finally, after what could have been hours, Victoria did not have the breath to continue. She looked up, slowly, taking long, shuddering breaths to steady herself.

  Immediately, a whisper of wind rushed past her from a corridor in the dark. It breathed, “Don’t stop.”

  Victoria shrank away into the nearest wall. “What?”

  “Lonely, so lonely,” the whisper came again, but it was more like a thousand whispers all blended into one. Their words didn’t all quite line up, echoing off one another into gibberish, but “lonely, so lonely” remained clear.

  I’m hearing things, Victoria thought. That can’t be good.

  “Don’t stop,” the echoes whispered again. Victoria felt the shadow of a breath behind her, in front of her, the trace of a finger, the brush of a foot against her own.

  “This is insane,” she said, and started crawling. Her heart would surely burst from her chest, it pounded with such fear.

  “I can’t be afraid.” Her words shrank in the dark, but she would not think about to where. “I have to find Lawrence.” Lawrence, who hummed when he was happy. Well, Victoria was the farthest thing from happy, but it would have to do. She began humming once more, and the walls sighed and shifted around her, catching her off guard.

  She froze and fell silent. So did the walls.

  Odd, she thought. She crawled a few hesitant steps forward, humming again. The walls moved again, pushing her gently to the right, in a different direction from before.

  Ridiculous, she thought, but all the same, a tiny thrill raced up her chest. The floor fell away, and steps formed beneath her, causing her to stumble, but she climbed up and up. The faster she crawled, the more she hummed, the faster everything shifted. The ceiling shrank so low, she had to slither up the stairs on her belly. She did not like the closeness of the ceiling; it reminded her of the parlor.

  Then, in rolls of movement like waves, the floor dropped away.

  She was falling.

  Through cold air and blackness, Victoria tumbled, banging her knees and heels against stone. She reached out for something to grab hold of, but her fingers only scraped slimy stone, and then dry stone, and then rubbery, fluttery things that felt suspiciously like wings.

  Victoria finally caught enough breath to scream, and yanked her hands back. She hit something, belly first—oof—and was still. Something had caught her. Cautiously, she felt around for it and felt a long, spongy thing with rough edges. She tried to use it to push herself up, but it disappeared, fwoop ing away like a spring, and she fell again—

  —but only a few inches or so, onto a carpeted floor.

  Victoria’s heart drummed so loud she could hardly hear herself think.

  Once she realized nothing was moving anymore, Victoria climbed to her feet using the nearby wall, which wasn’t slimy anymore; it was smooth, with polished wood panels. Victoria flexed her toes to feel the plush carpet underfoot. She was in a hallway lit by a pale light from a window at the far end. It cast just enough light for her to see that what had caught her was a long, finger-shaped tangle of tree roots, now creeping away from her and . . . sinking into a wall?

  “Wait,” she whispered, and rushed for them, but they seemed to be in rather a hurry. By the time she reached their corner, they had disappeared into the crack between the floor and the wall. Victoria poked around and pulled at the carpet and, rolling her eyes at herself, said, “Come back. Please?” They didn’t. Everything was silent.

  Victoria backed away and turned around. She looked up to see the fireplace tunnel she had fallen from, but it was only a ceiling, with molding along the edges painted with pictures of pigs gnawing on the feet of sleeping children.

  “Where am I?” Victoria whispered.

  A faint laugh answered her, a whispering echo of a girl’s laugh.

  Victoria pressed herself against the wall, clapping a hand over her mouth to silence her breathing. For what felt like hours, she waited for the laughing girl to show herself, but nothing happened.

  She crept forward, inching along the wall toward the dark wooden railing to her left. She sank to the floor and crawled till she could peek out between the railing posts and look down . . .

  . . . and down and down, to the gleaming wooden gallery floor below her.

  Her head reeled. Already dizzy from trying not to breathe too loudly, she imagined slipping through the railing and falling forever. Or worse, splatting her head open.

  “Don’t go, don’t go,” someone said behind her. It was a boy this time.

  Victoria scrambled to her feet and whirled around. “Lawrence?”

  Again, she saw nothing—only the hallway with the window at the end. She turned left: a steep staircase. She turned right: another hallway, with the railing on one side and paintings on the other, framed in heavy golden swirls of fishes and curlicues of water.

  “What is going on here?” Victoria said, backing up into the railing. Overhead, something fluttered. Wet wings zipped past her ear, followed by a distant, frustrated scream. Victoria almost shrieked, and her elbow bumped the railing, and then the railing wasn’t there.

  The floor rippled, throwing Victoria up in the air. The staircase flattened—she watched it happen below her as if in slow motion, not believing it—and when she fell, she slid down it, and it was flipping over, twisting around and around in a knot of angry wings and scrabbling pincers . . .

  She tumbled out into a dark room. The air stank of onion, and something worse, a heavy tang of rot. It was so awful, Victoria almost threw up. She blinked several times to see better and caught the shapes of a table and countertops and a pair of pots. Piles of something scattered across the floor. Shining tools.

  A cloud of flies swarming over the stovetop.

  It’s the kitchen, Victoria realized, recognizing the room from that first night she’d met Mrs. Cavendish. And if this is the kitchen, the door must be . . . there!

  She ran blindly to the left and found a rattly doorknob, but it wouldn’t turn, and the door wouldn’t budge.

  Voices called out from what sounded like very far away. From the other side of the room came a sharp snap—a cacophony of hissing wings. The walls shook. Someone was inside the walls, slamming to get out. The kitchen floor jumped, and something snaked toward Victoria beneath the floor, crackin
g the tile. But this did not carry with it the sound of buggy wings; it carried the echo of voices.

  Through cold air and blackness, Victoria tumbled . . .

  The voices grew louder, spiraling closer and closer, till one of them whispered her name. It came up from the cracking floor:

  “Don’t stop, Victoria,” they whispered sadly.

  A wild thought came to Victoria. She remembered humming and not humming in the darkness past the fireplace; how the noises of the bugs had faded while she sang and come back when she didn’t; how the voices asked her sadly not to stop and said they were lonely, and how those narrow, winding steps had appeared out of nowhere, more and more the longer she hummed, until she fell safely out of darkness, caught by that tangle of fingerlike tree roots.

  She closed her eyes and started to hum. The angry noises in the walls fell away as though they’d been slapped, and that frustrated scream rang out again. Blindly, Victoria ran for the hallway, hoping she wouldn’t trip and fall, hoping that whatever was about to burst up from the floor would just leave her alone.

  But it did not leave her alone; something long and twisty and covered with brambles burst up from the floor and shoved her forward, and she tumbled headlong through the hallway, safely out of the kitchen. Darkness reached up and grabbed her as the buzzing and frustrated scream faded into nothing, and she was falling and falling just as she had the first time. Then she landed hard on her hands and knees with a smack and a crack!

  She whispered, “Ow.”

  Unseen in the shadows, someone said, “That must have hurt.”

  VICTORIA SNAPPED HER HEAD UP TO GLARE INTO the darkness. “Who’s there?”