The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School

by Kim Newman

  ‘I say, g-g-g-girls,’ stuttered Buller. ‘I’ve come over queerly…’

  Buller’s waist-length braids rose as if on stiff wires and bobbed like charmed snakes. Her crossed bats lifted from her shoulders, seemingly of their own accord. Her eyes almost popped – which wasn’t Amy’s doing, just a natural reaction.

  Dora Paule hissed. An Unusual herself, she recognised another.

  ‘I d-d-don’t like this,’ said Buller, her croak close to cracking. ‘S-s-s-Sid, m-m-make it s-s-s-stop!’

  The bats were tugged out of Buller’s hands. Amy made them dance in the air like dangerous puppets. She let go and the bats clattered, thumping Buller’s shoulders as they fell.

  Inchfawn, out of sight, was still making a fuss.

  ‘Cut out the yelpage, stoat,’ said Frecks. ‘Dangle with some dignity. For the House’s sake, if not your own.’

  Seemingly unperturbed, Gryce signalled her Murdering Heathens to spread out, cutting off the Moth Club’s avenues of escape. Buller was hors de combat, but the Head Girl had other minions. The Crowninshield sisters took flank positions, chins down as if expecting a charge, evil mismatched eyes peeping up through long fringes. Their identical smiles of unhealthy excitement were all the scarier in moonlight. Paule seemed, as usual, distracted – but was stationed between the Moth Club and the access door to the backstairs.

  ‘How gaudy you look,’ commented Gryce. ‘I note a dozen Minor Infractions of the dress code. Or has there been some minuit masquerade to which, by an oversight, we were not invited? In any case, mes enfants, the party is fini.’

  This was worse than facing the Hooded Conspiracy proper. Grown men might shoot at you, but couldn’t dish out extra punishments for having the temerity to fight back. If the Moth Club survived and were unmasked, they would be cleaning the Heel with their tongues and have burning bamboo shoved under their fingernails in the Whips’ Hut for the rest of their lives at Drearcliff.

  ‘Mes filles,’ said Gryce, ‘let us see which spotty faces cower behind those ridiculous bug disguises…’

  The Crowninshield sisters stepped forward. They had rounders bats. Frecks had taught Amy ‘only bounders play rounders’, a game for twits who had not the patience and poetic soul for cricket. Buller was now superstitiously afraid of her own weapons, but her ham-sized fists were clenched.

  It was going to be a ruck.

  ‘Let the Witches have it,’ cried Frecks. ‘Tally-hoooo!’

  Light Fingers, faster than a nocturnal hummingbird, zig-zagged towards Crowninshield, but stepped into a shadow at the last moment, leaving the whip blinking. Then, swiftly, she came out of the lea of a chimney and tweaked Crowninshield’s nose. She could keep this up all night. Frecks stepped under a bat-slosh from Crowninshield II and punched her square on the nose, staggering her back. She ripped her opponent’s weapon from her hands and sailed it off over the edge of the roof.

  Amy realised she was floating. The thrill of the moment had made her lighter. Her feet hung limply, about nine inches from the rooftop. Using her moth-wing cloak, she tried to swim through the air towards an astonished Buller, but found herself flapping in place. The gentle-seeming wind filled her cloak as if it were a sail. She had to resist being borne backwards over the parapet.

  She made herself heavy and landed hard. Her ankles hurt.

  Buller charged her, snorting like a heifer. Amy wished she had persuaded Kali to teach her Kafiristani foot-boxing.

  She held out a hand and floated Buller’s dropped cricket bat, tripping the girl up.

  Then, she took the fight to the Queen Heathen.

  Pushing Buller aside, giving the Sixth enough extra weight to keep her sprawled on the roof, Amy ran at Gryce. The Head Girl was used to delegating the thumping and scratching to her Murdering Heathens. Amy had an idea she was, like all bullies, a coward at heart.

  Amy screeched. This was her moth-cry. She had practised. She knew it set teeth on edge.

  ‘Filles,’ shouted Gryce, calling for help. ‘Beryl…’

  The trailing mask-wings tickled Amy’s mouth as she kept up her cry. She saw fear in the Head Girl’s eyes. It was welcome.

  In this disguise, the Kentish Glory costume, Amy was not a feeble Third, a new bug who could be shoved around. She was a mystery, a creature, a terror to the wicked, an angel to the well-intentioned. Free of the weaknesses of her person and position. Free to strike!

  She pushed Gryce up against a chimney stack and drummed fists against the girl’s chest and face. She grabbed handfuls of the Head Girl’s unbound hair and tugged. She screeched in the Witch’s face.

  Gryce was helpless.

  Amy kept up the attack.

  Crowninshield did not come to help the Head Girl. She was dancing around the roof with Light Fingers, tossing her voice to throw off her opponent but too slow to avoid swift slaps and cuffs. Having put Crowninshield II down with a bloody nose, Frecks laid into Buller with the prefect’s own hockey stick.

  The Moth Club were giving a good account of themselves.

  Why had Amy been intimidated by the Murdering Heathens? Gryce was blubbing as badly as any Viola First now.

  A hand clasped her shoulder, and a mouth pressed to her ear.

  ‘Amy Thomsett,’ whispered Paule, ‘stop this. Now!’

  There was a light, and a smell, and the sky changed…

  XII: The Real Head Girl

  THE ROOF WAS bathed in the harsh purple light of three big, shining moons. All was still. Amy’s cloak collar itched. Her new costume felt heavy, the domino tacky against her cheeks.

  She could no longer hear the sea. Far off, something wailed musically. Soft and mournful, but bone-scrapingly wrong.

  To Amy’s surprise, everyone else was floating. They weren’t drifting ever upwards to be lost in the stratosphere – which Amy was always afraid would happen to her. Frecks, Light Fingers and the Murdering Heathens bobbed gently a few inches above the roof, as if suspended in invisible liquid. To Amy, they looked like waxworks – frozen in mid-air, mouths open, clothes stiff, hair starched. She let go of Gryce and the Head Girl drifted away. Her face was a contorted mask, eyes open but unseeing. Her hands were raised in defensive claws. She looked silly, but Amy wasn’t inclined to laugh.

  She turned, knowing this was Prefect Paule’s doing.

  Amy had thought Dora Paule wasn’t quite there. Now, she knew that was the honest truth.

  Paule wasn’t a floating waxwork, but wasn’t herself either. At least, not the self she usually showed.

  She was like a balloon person who’d been blown up irregularly. The head was five or six times normal size, swollen cranium distinct beneath a vast dandelion clock of hair. The rest of her was undeveloped, with feeble, withered limbs. Her feet trailed on the roof, but her head must be floating. Her spindly body couldn’t otherwise support its weight.

  The face, though expanded, was unmistakably Paule.

  ‘Good evening, Amy,’ she said, mildly. ‘This must be a shock. Did you think you were the only Unusual? When I first came to School, I did. It’s natural. You read about Blackfist, Dr Shade or the Slink in the story papers, but never think “they’re like me”.’

  In this purple light, Paule sounded less mad. That was not comforting.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘A step outside,’ said Paule. ‘I call it the Purple. I’m always half-here, which is why I’m half-gone Back Home.’

  ‘Do you really look like that?’

  ‘In the Purple, yes. Don’t take it seriously. Consider yourself. You have wings here.’

  It was true. The itching tug Amy had felt was not the cloak Light Fingers had scavenged, but a set of moth wings anchored to her shoulder blades. She shrugged and they spread in display – but she didn’t know how to flutter. It must be a knack you had to learn, like wiggling your ears. Her forehead tingled where her antennae were rooted. She had smells in her mouth, tastes in her eyes, colours in her ears.

  ‘Why’ve you brought us here?’ Amy a
sked.

  ‘Not to save Gryce,’ said Paule. ‘She can take her lumps. Though she’s not who you should worry about. She’s no real idea what’s going on. No one does, except me. Looking at Back Home from the Purple is like watching a play with the script in your hand – you can flip back and forth, read the stage directions even, know what’s coming. But you can’t change the story. For that, you have to be Back Home.’

  Amy, fascinated, touched Gryce’s frozen face. Her skin was warm, but not pliant.

  ‘So you’re claiming Gryce isn’t in the Hooded Conspiracy? That Inchfawn was fibbing?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  Amy’s antennae prickled with irritation.

  ‘No,’ said Paule, picking up her reaction, ‘I’m not being wishy-washy, I’m answering both your questions in order. Yes, Gryce is not party to the kidnap plot. No, Inchfawn was telling the truth when she said a whip made her dupe you on to the beach. It was Crowninshield. She’s clever. She works at it, like she does her ventriloquism. She’s not a natural Unusual, but thinks she can gain Abilities. It’s all about money. She hires out. The people you call the Hooded Conspiracy gave Beryl ten pounds to make sure Princess Kali was on the beach yesterday. That’s not important. We’re important. So’s Emma Naisbitt, if only she’d look beyond the ends of her fingers. We are the School Spirit. You know what it means to be a Drearcliff girl…’

  Tendrils of thicker purple, like the ghosts of eels, wound at ankle height. The quality of the light was unpleasant in this place. Though there was no heat, the moons’ shine was as oppressive as a blazing summer’s day. The wailing was closer and raised Amy’s hackles like the brush of razors. Her antennae stung. She felt sparks behind her eyes.

  Paule leant towards her. Her forehead seemed to be expanding further. Her eyes were the size of apples.

  ‘Why do you think they send girls to school, anyway?’

  Amy was taken aback by the question.

  ‘Your mother said it,’ began Paule, ‘“Boys grow up and go out to conquer the world, make fortunes, fight battles, invent aeroplanes and miracle cures and the wireless. Girls get married and have children. Why fill their heads with anything not relevant to that?”’

  Once, when she didn’t think Amy could overhear, Mother said that to her own mother. Grandmama – a lifelong suffragette – had marched, broken windows and chained herself to railings to get the vote. Since female enfranchisement, Mother had pointedly never voted. They had differences over Amy.

  ‘“School prepares a girl for life,”’ said Amy, quoting Grandmama.

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ said Paule. ‘Ordinary schools prepare ordinary girls for ordinary lives. Babies and cakes and wallpaper. Drearcliff is not an ordinary school. We are not ordinary girls. We will not have ordinary lives. Certainly you won’t, Kentish Glory.’

  Amy’s wings stiffened involuntarily – with something like pride, but also apprehension. She didn’t want to know what happened in the last act before the overture was finished.

  ‘Back Home, there’s a demand for educated girls,’ said Paule. ‘Not too educated, but enough. It’s like white slavery. Girls are put on the market and bought with a wedding ring or a villa in Nice or an endless supply of dear little hats. Drearcliff girls don’t marry masters of foxhounds and raise gallant captains for the next war. The men we end up with are different. Unusuals. There are more around now than before the War, have you noticed? Men with great and secret purposes. Freakish geniuses and bold explorers in nether regions. Men with Abilities and Attributes. Unusual men need Unusual women. Swan realised that when she started. She saw what was coming, saw the need for Drearcliff girls. An ordinary fellow wants a wife who serves tea prettily and puts up with mess in the bedroom in order to pop out healthy children. Other men want a woman who can walk through the walls of the Tower of London with a crown jewel in her mouth, or keep an entire tribe of pygmies on mind-strings under the impression that she’s a volcano goddess. Some men want women who actually are volcano goddesses or winged creatures or night-gaunts. Those are the lives Drearcliff prepares you for. Who do you want to marry when you grow up, Amy? A curate, or a masked mystery man?’

  Amy wasn’t sure she wanted to marry anyone.

  ‘You can forget the curate,’ Paule continued. ‘It’s too late for him. Look how you’re dressed. Think what you can do. No matter what your mother wants, you can’t cut out the part of you that floats. That means you’ve got no choice but to live in a night world.’

  Amy looked at the other girls, the frozen ones. Light Fingers was an Unusual, in the sense Paule meant. The rest – Frecks, Inchfawn, the Murdering Heathens – were… well, not Ordinary, not exactly. There was even something odd about Henry Buller, with her mannish arms and stutter, or Crowninshield II, with her knot-making fingers and cruel twist. Unusuals? Not entirely. But they were unmistakably Drearcliff Girls.

  ‘Do you know who sends their daughters to Drearcliff?’ asked Paule. ‘Criminal masterminds, outlaw scientists, master magicians, clubland heroes. Sally Nikola of the Fourth is the daughter of the Fifth Most Dangerous Man in the World. Did Swan mention the Drearcliff girls who have been hanged? Two for murder, one for treason. We have three or four girls at present who aren’t strictly human. Janice Marsh, the girl with gills, for a start – but she’s only an obvious one. Polly Palgraive, the Second who smiles all the time and never closes her eyes, has been asleep for six months. A parasitic maggot crawled up her nose into her brain and works her like a puppet. If you try to have a conversation with her, you’re actually talking to the maggot. I’m not sure myself if I’m human. I’ve been kept back while I develop. I came to Drearcliff when Victoria was Queen. Back Home, I’ve stopped growing, but in the Purple I still have a way to go.’

  Paule flapped her flaccid hands apologetically.

  Amy was worried about what the prefect had said.

  ‘Oh, you’re human, all right,’ Paule reassured Amy. ‘You only have wings and antennae because I’ve brought you into the Purple. Back Home, you’ll be you again. But you’ll still have the knack of floating.’

  The tendrils were thicker now. One brushed past Amy’s legs like sandpapery seaweed.

  ‘You’ll have to leave soon. Apart from me, girls generally can’t stay in the Purple long. Others attract undue attention. That’s not pleasant. I learned my lesson after I lost some visitors. Misplaced, rather. I’m sure they’re here somewhere. I’m glad we’ve had this little chat, though. We should be friends, if you can be friends with the half of me in the Back Home. We are both in the know.’

  There was something desperate, something yearning, in Paule. If she had to keep repeating the Sixth Form – while other girls left School to get on with the lives for which they had been prepared – she must be lonely.

  Amy understood that. She had been lonely too. Keeping her secret.

  …but she wasn’t lonely now. She had Frecks and Light Fingers and Smudge and… and Kali. She had her cell, her House, her School.

  She realised something about the Purple. It was a deadly distraction. Here, you thought about what Paule wanted you to. You paid attention to her. This place had three moons, but Dora Paule was its star, its sun.

  Back Home, other things were important. Amy concentrated, her antennae taut and curved. She remembered the secret charter of the Moth Club.

  ‘…to oppose the Hooded Conspiracy, no matter who their agents or masters might be, to rescue Princess Kali Chattopadhyay from their vile clutches and return her to safety. We vow not to rest until this purpose has been achieved.’

  Paule’s head was so large now that her body was like the basket hanging under an air balloon.

  ‘Paule,’ said Amy urgently, ‘where’s Kali?’

  ‘Oh, she’s Rapunzel, waiting,’ Paule said, off-handedly. ‘She won’t be got rid of till the third dawn.’

  The purple light shut off.

  Gryce was screaming again. A full three feet off the ground, Amy grabbed Gryce’s lapels. She tugged the
Head Girl upwards and plopped her bottom in a chimney. Gryce stuck fast, arms and legs waving, yelling like a dervish.

  Amy landed on the roof, better this time, bending at the knees.

  Dora Paule, regularly proportioned, stood aside.

  ‘What did you mean?’ Amy asked her. ‘Rapunzel? Got rid of?’

  ‘Mean? I’m not mean. I don’t mean. I… oh, good night…’

  Frecks, breathing heavy, wings torn, tugged at Amy’s cloak and made for the open door, dragging Amy away from Paule, who fluttered her fingers in a distracted farewell. Light Fingers was already on the backstairs.

  The Murdering Heathens clustered around the Head Girl, wondering how to get her out of the chimney without being hurt by her kicking feet or flailing fists.

  The Moth Club rattled back to their cell, divesting themselves of their costumes en route.

  A thin voice sounded from outside the window. Inchfawn dangled still.

  ‘That reminds me,’ said Frecks. ‘Light Fingers, go rouse Wicked Wyke. She’ll be up early, since it’s Sunday Chapel at seven, Lord help us! Report that some larcenous harlot has stolen your rocking chair! Best shift any oncoming blame on to persons unknown, eh? Say it was probably one of Ariel’s well-known not-funny japes.’

  Light Fingers got into her dressing gown and hurried off.

  Frecks was abuzz, exhilarated at the Moth Club’s first outing. While Amy had been in the Purple, no time at all passed for the others.

  Amy didn’t know what to tell Frecks.

  Rapunzel? Got rid of!

  ‘Crumpets,’ she exclaimed. ‘Calamity and crumpets!’

  XIII: Chapel

  SUNDAY CHAPEL AT Drearcliff was more about mystery than enlightenment. All School – no excuses accepted, including deathly illness – filed in and took their pews. Miss Dryden, of the futile whistle, improvised at a wheezy organ, pumping stately, presumably devotional music with an occasional shrill screech or dramatic detour. Frecks claimed Dryden sometimes played ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas!’ very slowly as if it were solemn and religious.