by Robin Jarvis
Mrs Early shook her head. “Still in his office, still on the phone. I don’t think we’ll be seeing much of him today.”
“I wonder if he had a hearty meal?” the history teacher said sadly.
Mrs Early agreed. His days as Head were numbered and his career in education was finished.
“Oh!” she said with sudden realisation. “I’ve got those boys this afternoon.”
“Watch them,” Miss Smyth cautioned. “There’s something not right there. Not right at all.”
“I’m almost looking forward to it. Might take my mind off who Barry’s replacement will be.”
“Now that really is something to worry about,” Miss Smyth sighed.
Paul’s next lesson was art. He normally sat at the same table as Graeme and Anthony, but found an empty seat at the back of the art room and avoided any eye contact with them.
He usually enjoyed this lesson, but just then he wanted the day to be over so he could go home and lose himself on the computer or in a DVD. One thing was certain, the first thing he’d do would be delete those two from his Friends list.
The art room smelled pleasantly of poster paints and drying papier-mâché. Gazing at the walls, Paul saw that several new pictures had been Blu-tacked up since last week. They were fresh, lively paintings of castles. Studying them more closely, he saw that they were all supposed to be the same castle – a white one.
During lunch he took himself to the library to prevent another incident like the one that morning at break. He just wanted to sit quietly and be left alone. Pushing through the library doors, he was surprised to find it crowded. There were at least forty pupils from different years in there. There wasn’t a spare seat to be had, except for the ones at the computers. That in itself was extremely odd.
The astonishment must have registered on his face because Miss Hopwood, the librarian, came across to him.
“There’s plenty of computers free if you want,” she said brightly. “Or you can choose a book from the shelves… unless you’ve brought one of your own, like everyone else?”
Paul hardly heard her. He was staring at the children hunched over the tables, their eyes glued to the books in their hands, oblivious to everything else around them. Some of them were swaying backwards and forwards in their chairs.
Without answering the librarian, he turned around and left.
Miss Hopwood didn’t blame him. She couldn’t understand what was going on. Some of the pupils present never visited the library and she found their intense concentration on the books they had brought in with them to be unnatural. Looking over their shoulders, she saw that they appeared to be reading the same book.
“What’s all this then?” she tried to ask Sandra Dixon, in a forced, chirpy manner. “The latest fad?”
The Year 10 girl lifted her bruised face from Dancing Jacks and seemed to look right through her. “I am the Jill of Hearts,” she said in a far-off voice. “I am the Jill of Hearts, I am the Jill of Hearts…”
Miss Hopwood stepped away nervously. Then every child began rocking in their chair and chanting under their breath as they read.
The librarian crept out of sight. For the rest of the lunchtime she stayed hidden behind the shelves.
That afternoon during English, Paul was forced to sit in his usual place in front of Graeme and Anthony. Nowhere else was free.
He need not have worried though. The boys did not even glance up at him as he sat down. Anthony had his eyes closed and was moving his head from side to side as if lost in an enchanting dream. Graeme’s face was hidden behind his bag on the desk.
When Mrs Early came in, she turned to the boys immediately. She was ready for them – or so she thought.
“Bag off desk,” she instructed right away.
Graeme peered sullenly over the top of it.
“Bag!” she repeated.
Very slowly he dragged it from the desk, revealing the book in front of him.
“Put that away,” she told him. “We’re not doing a reading comprehension today, we’re having a spelling test – lots of lovely, tough words.”
An audible groan could be heard in the room. Mrs Early gave everyone a mildly scolding look. Then she noticed that Graeme had not done as he had been told.
“I said put that book away,” she repeated.
He ignored her and continued reading. “Graeme Parker – are you listening to me?”
He read to the end of the page before lifting his face and staring at her.
“What’s the point of spelling tests?” he said flatly. “Every computer has a spellchecker. You’re wasting our time. This is an English lesson. We should be reading. I am reading.”
Mrs Early was taken aback. She had been expecting some sort of trouble, but nothing quite so rude or said with such flagrant disregard for her authority.
“Don’t you speak to me like that!” she told him. “You will do as you are told, young man. Put that book away at once and I will tell you just why being able to spell correctly is important, if only to stop you looking like a village idiot in chat rooms.”
“A Master of Hounds doesn’t need to spell,” Graeme answered belligerently. “That’s what I hope to be one day.”
“And a groom doesn’t need to spell either,” Anthony chipped in at his side.
The rest of the class held their breath. The boys were going further than they had in history that morning. Paul shifted around slowly to watch what would happen.
Mrs Early came towards them, arms folded.
“Both of you are stopping behind tonight,” she said quietly.
“I’m not and you can’t make me,” Graeme told her with an indifferent shrug before giving his attention back to the book. “The hounds need me. My Lord is going to hunt the talking fox.”
“And I’ll need to get the horses ready,” Anthony added.
Mrs Early came closer. She was wonderfully composed. They weren’t going to unnerve her.
“Give me that book,” she said, holding out her hand.
“Get your own!” Graeme answered back.
“Give it to me.”
The boy grunted unpleasantly and turned the page to continue reading. Mrs Early’s hand reached out and pulled the book from his hands.
His reaction was startling. “Give it back!” he screamed as though scalded. “Give it back, give it back!”
Mrs Early was already returning to her desk, to deposit the book there before dealing with them properly. Then pandemonium broke out.
Graeme leaped from his chair, clambered on to his desk and launched himself at her. He sprang through the air, landed on her back and bit her shoulder.
“Give it me!” he yelled. “Give it me!”
Mrs Early twisted about and managed to throw him off. The boy hit her desk then crashed to the floor. In an instant he was back on his feet and Anthony was at his side.
“Give it him back!” the other boy screeched. “Give it him back!”
The other children could only stare in horror and disbelief as the two of them attacked her. They tore at her hair and slapped her face. Then they hit her with their young fists. Molly Barnes began to cry and the rest looked on in stricken silence.
Paul didn’t know what to do. He was frozen in his seat. The boys were as ferocious and savage as rabid dogs. Then he heard Mrs Early crying for help and he jumped up to drag them off. Three other lads and a girl hurried to join him, but Graeme and Anthony were wild and stronger than anyone could have guessed. The noise and chaos was deafening. It was a fierce, desperate fight that ended only when a terrified girl fled the classroom to fetch another teacher and ran smack into the Head who was striding down the corridor.
Barry Milligan came tearing in. Not wasting a second, he barged into the unholy scrum and wrenched the children clear. Not knowing what had happened, he treated each of them with the same contempt. Seizing them by the collars, he dragged all the boys away from Mrs Early and pushed them against the wall. The girl he merely glowered at
and she tearfully joined the rest of the line-up.
“You!” he thundered in a voice that frightened everyone in the room. “Have made the biggest mistake of your lives. I have had the day from hell today and might just forget myself and knock your bloody heads off!”
The children were breathing hard, unable to answer. They looked into his furious, beetroot face and even the innocent ones were scared. Anthony and Graeme stared at him and the madness was quelled within them. They began to shiver.
“Are you all right?” Barry asked the woman.
Mrs Early leaned against her desk. Her face and arms were scored with red scratches and angry purple slap marks. She put her hand out to steady herself then nodded.
“Dear God!” he said, looking at the state of her. “What the…”
He glared at the children against the wall then turned away from them in disgust. “I’ve seen some things,” he said, clenching and unclenching his fists and struggling to resist the urge to smack each of them into next week. “But this is… you’re worse than animals. Let’s see what the police have to say about it, but understand one thing – you’re all going to be expelled. If it’s the last thing I do as Head of this school, I promise you that. As for you, Paul – I’m sickened and appalled at you.”
“Mr Milligan,” Mrs Early interrupted as she caught her breath and collected herself. “It wasn’t all of them. It was only Graeme Parker and Anthony Maskel. The others… they were helping me.”
Barry’s eyes narrowed. “Right,” he said. “The rest of you, back to your seats. You two – in my office – NOW!”
Graeme and Anthony hurried from the classroom in cowed silence.
The Headteacher put a caring hand on Mrs Early’s shoulder, but she shrugged it off, angry at herself and bewildered. How had that situation spiralled out of control?
“I’m fine,” she said.
Barry thought otherwise. “I’ll get someone to cover for you here,” he told her. “I need you to come tell me what happened.”
The English teacher stared down at the copy of Dancing Jacks on her desk. How could she tell him that when she didn’t comprehend it herself?
Chapter 18
The forbidden library of Mooncaster is locked — and rightly so! Even Jangler is denied the key to that iron door. The secret knowledge contained therein is far too deadly and dangerous for the Court and Kingdom. It is perilous to pry. Ancient powers slumber within those vellum and parchment pages. Let them sleep, sound and undisturbed. Doors and books are sealed for the best of purposes. Let dust lie deep inside, let spiders spin – do not go poking through the webs.
“SO THEY ATTACKED her simply because she’d taken a book away?”
Paul was trying to explain to Martin what had happened in the English lesson as they drove home that afternoon.
“It was like she’d taken a piece of meat from a mad, starving dog,” he said. “No, it was even worse than that – like they were junkies and the book was their drug. None of the rest of us could believe what was going on. They’d lost it, totally – absolutely nuts, the pair of them. I didn’t recognise them at all – they’ve never been like that.”
“They were both quiet by the time the police came,” Martin told him. “I had a word with Barry afterwards. He couldn’t get any sense out of them and nor could they. Mind you, when their parents turned up, they were a bit weird as well. What’s this ‘Blessed be’ thing people are saying now?”
“It’s to do with that book,” Paul muttered. “There’s something really wrong about it.”
“Funny,” Martin said. “You’re the second person who’s told me that in two days.”
Paul stared moodily out of the window. There wasn’t anything ‘funny’ about it from his perspective. He believed it was something to be very, very scared of. Martin hadn’t seen the intensity of rage on the boys’ faces or witnessed the weird scene in the library.
“This is the last thing Barry needed on top of everything else,” Martin continued.
“Is he getting the sack because of what the papers did to him?”
“Don’t tell anyone this, but the governors and the local authority have been ripping into him all day. He’s been told to resign, quietly.”
“Oh.”
“No doubt we’ll get some clueless drone as a replacement, someone whose tongue is the same colour as the government’s posterior. The school will go downhill so fast – just you watch.”
“Mr Milligan was great today, just like Gene Hunt – but louder.”
“A man out of his time,” Martin said sadly. “Someone called him a dinosaur today, and they were right. Barry Milligan is a T-rex among rabbits and ostriches.”
“What does that make you then?”
“David Attenborough!”
They pulled into the drive and Paul hurried upstairs to his room. Sitting at the computer, his cursor hovered over the delete button to eradicate Graeme and Anthony from his contacts, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Even after everything they had done that day, he pitied them more than he hated them. He sensed that none of it was really their fault.
Instead he typed “Dancing Jacks” into Google to see what it came up with. Most of the results were links to references made by children at his school. One of them was a page created by Anthony about falconry. Paul made a quizzical face. What did Anthony know about that? Checking the page, it seemed he knew quite a lot. The detail there was quite astonishing and it didn’t appear to be cut and pasted from elsewhere.
The rest of the results were by other people who had bought the book that Sunday. One of them had started a blog about making a costume for the character she was obsessed with. Through Martin’s fanaticisms, Paul had seen similar blogs before. Dressing up as favourite characters was called cosplay and was more prevalent in America than here. The devotion to other worlds could consume a true fan’s life. Martin always said that was because the most successful fantasy realms had clearly defined rules whereas the real world didn’t any more. It was more comforting to inhabit the clothes and invest in the ideals and merchandise of those invented places when the everyday world was such a confusing mess full of disappointments and contradictions. Everyone escaped somehow.
This woman had certainly done a lot of work since Sunday. She had chosen a character called Columbine, or had the character chosen her? Apparently in the book she was a pretty kitchen maid who wore patched clothes and carried a tambourine with which she warded off the unwelcome advances of the Jockey. A scan of the illustration was on the blog and her replica outfit was almost complete. It was clear she had taken a lot of pains over it.
Paul skimmed through the other links. Then he stopped as the realisation sank in. There was another, even more important, search he should be doing…
Curiosity, laced with a sense of dread, percolated inside him as he typed the name.
“Austerly Fellows.”
He pressed Return and waited nervously.
First on the list of results was a Wikipedia entry. He clicked on it. The page flashed up. Paul took a breath, but before reading the text, he stared at the accompanying black and white photograph. It was a man wearing some kind of monk’s robe.
“More cosplay,” he murmured.
It was an unpleasant face. It looked cruel and arrogant. The thin lips were fixed in a sneer and the sharp nose jutted from scowling brows. As for the eyes…
Paul did not like to look at them. They seemed to stab out of the monitor at him. When he was very young, he used to think the newsreaders could see him through the television. This photograph of Austerly Fellows, author of Dancing Jacks, induced that same unsettling feeling. The boy told himself he was being silly and turned his attention to the biographical text alongside.
Austerly Fellows (1879–1936) The self-styled ‘Abbot of the Angles’ and ‘Grand Duke of the Inner Circle’. Though now largely forgotten and succeeded by other, less influential and inferior imitators, he was an English occultist, artist, writer an
d composer.
Paul pulled the neck of his jumper up to his mouth and began chewing it absently. He read on.
Early life The middle child of a successful Suffolk doctor, he also studied medicine in his youth until the untimely death of his elder stepbrother, after which he abandoned his studies.[1] There were rumours circulating at the time that he would have been expelled from the college anyway. He was not a popular student. His eccentricities were becoming too extreme and it was said, even then, that he dabbled in the occult. [citation needed]
Travels At the turn of the century he journeyed to Europe. On the continent he pursued a life of hedonism and debauchery, leaving a trail of scandals wherever he went.[2] Such was his notoriety, Switzerland refused to allow him across its borders. [citation needed]
In Italy he resumed his researches into esoteric knowledge and joined several cults, rising swiftly to the highest levels within their orders. [citation needed] He was ruthless and ambitious and once again he created a new reputation for himself, this time a sinister one.[3] In 1903 there were nine ritual murders in the catacombs of Rome. Suspicion fell on the macabre cult of il Portello Scuro, of which he was, by then, a leading member. But no proof could be found and the only witness was decapitated before she could give evidence.[4] In 1905 Austerly Fellows was a suspect in the theft of an ancient and forbidden manuscript from the Vatican. Again nothing could be proven, but the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, ordered him to leave the country and never return.[5]
From there he journeyed to the Far East and reportedly learned much from the mystics of India and secret priesthoods in Egypt. While living in Cairo, he became known as the English Devil.[6] Rumours circulated that he robbed tombs and was initiated into the cult of the demon Shezmu, whom he later boasted to have communed with in the desert. Eventually the authorities forced him to leave.[7]
Paul paused and looked round his room. The hairs on the back of his neck were prickling, as if someone was watching him.
