by Kim Newman
An anarchist Christmas sounded more fun than Amy’s hols. Arriving home after her first term away, she found Mother bright-eyed with expectations of a change in circumstances. Mother felt that, warmed by grog and mince pies, Amy’s latest uncle could be inveigled into addressing a Certain Pressing Matter. She ordered Lettie to decorate and sent Cook out to fetch a goose… but an ‘incident’ at a cocktail party in Altrincham prompted the revocation of Uncle Horace’s dinner invitation.
By Christmas, the house was left half-decorated and presents were returned unopened. On the day itself, Mother took to her bed with a headache. Lettie and Cook were with their own families and the goose was forgotten in the pantry. Amy worked on her Book of Moths. In the evening, she put a Chopin Étude on the gramophone and defiantly floated around the drawing room in her nightie, pushing herself off the walls and ceiling to drift gently like a balloon. She rolled herself up into a ball, tucking in her knees, and bobbed about the chandelier, then concentrated hard on becoming steadily heavier and setting down on the carpet. She wished she had thought to bring her Kentish Glory costume. She floated better with the leotard and mask.
On Boxing Day, Uncle Horace came round to apologise and left with a black eye and tea all down his shirt. He had not been one of Amy’s more inspiring uncles… indeed, he scored near the bottom of a bad bunch. Only after four or five of the beasts did Amy notice what they had in common. They were all fellows who had found some excuse not to be in the War. Uncle Horace, an alderman, said he would have happily served at the Front, except that someone sensible had to stay behind and keep the women-folk in line. He was proprietor of a munitions factory where girls who protested about the ratio of sawdust to gunpowder in the shells were dismissed out of hand. Army protests about Uncle Horace’s habit of sending them misfiring duds failed to effect a change of purchasing policy, thanks to his expert toadying, lobbying and backhanding. But getting round the War Production Board was easier than appeasing Mother.
Amy wouldn’t be surprised if Uncle Horace were mysteriously shot.
Worcestershire would scarcely be bereft were someone to collect the full set by potting Uncle Simon, Uncle Ernst, Uncle Clive, Uncle Peasegood and Uncle Stanislas like china ducks in a fairground shy.
Two weeks into term, snowmen made in fun on the first day were no longer jovial, friendly presences but visible minions of an invisible enemy. The unmelted monsters mocked the warm-blooded fools who had created them. Coal eyes took on a malicious cast, carrot noses sneered at shivering mortals and jaunty brooms were shouldered like rifles.
Girls began pitching cricket balls at the snowmen, knocking off hats or punching holes through heads. At first, superstitious Firsts and Seconds effected repairs, trying to placate idols who’d been given appealing names like Captain Freezing or Mr Cold. Offerings were laid on altar trays placed before their squat, primal forms. As conditions persisted, the worshippers fell away. Apostates took to bitterly denouncing their former beliefs.
Smudge, of course, said the snowmen came to life at night – in league with the prowling wolves. Even those who should know better started listening to her. With long, long nights and not much else to do for entertainment, there was an epidemic of ghost-storytelling. Not just from Smudge. Peebles Arbuthnot – hitherto taken for a sensible lass – came back to the dorm in a tizzy one evening, gabbling about a brush with a glowing violet apparition in the covered walkway leading from the Quad. She described a partially transparent girl, posed in an attitude of terror. One moment, she was there; the next, she was gone, leaving behind a whiff of chem lab stinks. Peebles’ House Sisters assumed someone was ragging her. Frecks suggested this was one of Ariel’s unamusing practical jokes. Peebles wasn’t especially high-strung or imaginative. Amy saw she was genuinely spooked.
‘I jumped,’ Peebles said, ‘but she was the frightened one… and not by me. I could see her, but she was looking at something else, something terrifying I couldn’t see. The expression on her face was awful. I’ll be walking the long way round from now on. I shouldn’t care to encounter that ghost girl again if I were let off R.I. for a whole term.’
It transpired there had been other sightings of this purple spectre – some highly dubious, a few unnervingly credible. She already had a name, Mauve Mary. Bowman of Tamora and Laverick of Ariel had seen her in the same spot. It took a while for the story to get beyond their dorms. Mauve Mary always appeared to a girl walking alone, late in the afternoon but after dark.
The apparition’s purple hue made Amy think of Dora Paule.
Was this a case for the Moth Club? With the Hooded Conspiracy in abeyance, they could do with a fresh mystery. They resolved at least to investigate. Pretending to be from the Drearcliff Trumpet, Amy and Light Fingers interviewed Laverick and Bowman. Laverick sent them to Trechman, an Ariel Third who’d been teased last term after reporting what now seemed to be the first Mary sighting. A chem whizz, Trechman was trying to concoct a brew to match the spook’s stink. She compounded something truly disgusting, but admitted it wasn’t quite the right order of pong. Trechman didn’t believe in ghosts. She insisted Mauve Mary was simply a phenomenon which would be dispelled by scientific explanation… as soon as she could come up with one.
Everyone who saw Mauve Mary agreed she wasn’t a girl they recognised, though she wore Drearcliff uniform. Amy told Peebles to find an excuse to visit Keys’ office and look at the old photographs to see if she could find the ghost among the classes of yesteryear, but Peebles was more afraid of the custodian than any mere supernatural presence.
The Moth Club investigation stalled. Since Mauve Mary wasn’t doing anything except popping up and popping off again, it was hard to determine whether she should be banished by exorcism or helped against whatever it was that terrified her so. From what they gathered, Mary was in distress – but Kali warned Amy that ghosts were slippery customers, who’d pull a pitiful act in order to get close enough to tear your ears off. None of the Moth Club had seen Mary themselves. Once the story got about, knots of ghost-finders were always poking around the walkway in the hope of scaring up the spook. That seemed to frighten her off far more than bell, book and candle.
A vaguely worded rule against dawdling was invoked to crack down on loitering in Mauve Mary’s walkway. A little shrine appeared at the spot where the spectre was habitually seen. A cult of Ariel Seconds adopted the phantom as a House Sister. They left paper flowers and cut-out dolls for her. Amy was surprised the whips didn’t order the mess cleared away, but Ariel always had more licence than other Houses. Smudge said any who tampered with the shrine would wake in the night to find a huge violet face pressing down on theirs then die of stark terror.
One Break Amy ventured into hostile territory – the Whips’ Hut – to seek out Dora Paule. The prefects’ lair was more of a bungalow than a hut, and usually shunned by girls who didn’t wear gold braid. Having drifted away from the Murdering Heathens last term, Paule was no longer in any particular clique. Amy couldn’t tell whether the other whips were wary of her or protective. Daisy ‘Even’ Keele, who let her into the Hut, warned her that Paule was ‘having one of her confused spells today’. Keele, a Desdemona set upon becoming a woman doctor, showed Amy through to a snug little room where Paule had a favourite wonky chair.
When Amy tried to ask if Mauve Mary had anything to do with the Purple, Paule went off on a verbal tear about goblins and giblets and golems and guillemots. It might be a nonsense rhyme or a witches’ spell. Too much of Daffy Dora’s mind was elsewhere.
Keele shrugged, not unsympathetically.
‘My great grandmama was like this,’ said the whip. ‘Couldn’t remember who we were fighting, but knew there was a war on. Kept a cutlass under the bed in case Boney came to Sevenoaks. Ninety-three when she pegged it. I reckon she kept Boney off for a good long while.’
‘There’ll be wars here soon,’ said Paule. ‘Wars between colours.’
That made no sense to Keele, but Amy saw a glimmer of meaning.
Sadly, Amy stood up to leave.
‘Call again any time,’ Keele said satirically. ‘We’re open all hours.’
‘Amy,’ said Paule, just as she was nearly out of the room. ‘You’ll think it’s about Black and Grey, but it’s not… it’s about Purple. It’s always about Purple.’
‘What’s that about when it’s at home?’ asked Keele when they were out of the room. ‘How do you even know Daffy Dora? You’re a Third, aren’t you? Desdemona.’
‘We’re interested in some of the same things,’ Amy said.
‘Really? What manner of things?’
‘Moths,’ said Amy.
‘Ugh. Can’t stand the smell of those balls.’
‘Me too. I’d rather have a dress with a few tiny holes no one can see than one whiffing of poison.’
Keele was suspicious now. Whips were trained to ferret out hidden Infractions. Girls who fraternised across the lines were usually up to something rum. If in different Houses or Forms, sisters or cousins brought up together went through School without acknowledging each other’s existence.
‘Are you one of them? An Unusual?’
Amy didn’t like to say. Keele was decent as whips went, but people were funny about Unusuals. Light Fingers was always pointing out the little ways they were treated differently from the Ordinaries – not even with malice, but tiny stings all the same.
‘If you’ve any idea what can be done for Dora, speak up. Great Grandmama was a dear old stick, no matter how much Clan Keele wanted her shut away. We should all be ready to fight Boney. She didn’t just mean Napoleon. Boney was around before Mr Hat-on-Sideways and didn’t die on St Helena. Even Napoleon had to fight Boney at the end. Daffy sometimes talks about Boney too, but only to me. She knows what Boney is for everyone. Davey Jones for Hern and the Cold Knights for de Vere. Is it the Purple for you? This Mauve Mary story that’s going around?’
‘I don’t know yet. I’m a Third. For me, Sidonie Gryce is Boney.’
Keele was shocked. Amy feared she’d presumed too much. She sensed that she might get slapped with a Major for Impertinence. Stabbing a Second was a Minor, but cheeking a Sixth was punishable by burning at the stake… or at least a term of scrubbing the Heel with Absalom, Palgraive and the recidivists.
Then Keele melted and she laughed. Not every Sixth liked the way Gryce did business, but rifts in the united front were rare. In the Whips’ Hut, there were possibly concealed phonograph recorders and certainly ears out for potential treason.
‘There’s no harm in Daffy,’ said Keele. ‘And she’s not as doolally as some folk think. Sometimes I think she’s what School is all about.’
‘She’s the real Head Girl,’ said Amy.
Keele laughed again, but was then thoughtful.
‘You’re very sharp, Thomsett. My eye is upon you.’
Break was over. Amy hurried on to French with Miss Bedale. It was even harder than usual to concentrate on irregular verbs.
Her mind was infused with Purple thoughts.
Since her brief transportation last term, Amy dreamed often of the sky with three moons and the trailing tendrils… and other things, which she hadn’t seen for herself but still knew were of the Purple. A twisted, leafless, ancient tree with eyes in the knots of its bark. A sea of ankle-deep sludge, boiling with reptile spawn. A circle of chanting priests or devotees in pointed hoods – some misshapen by swollen heads or antlers – holding up their arms and waving in unison. A burning sensation in her back, as if her shoulder blades were straining to break free of her skeleton.
Sometimes, Amy dreamed she stood in the middle of a flat desert where an intricate diagram was scored in the sand. Slowly, she would rise above it on moth wings and the design became apparent. It had to be looked down at from on high to be seen in full. Entwined spirals drew the eye towards a centre that was painful to look at directly. At points where the spirals crossed over each other were placed large white eggs, which shook and cracked as they hatched. If she was far enough above the sands to make out the whole pattern, she was too high to make out what manner of creatures were emerging from their shells.
When she dreamed of the Purple, she was difficult to wake. Light Fingers told her she floated in her sleep and only a great deal of shaking brought her out of it. Amy still hadn’t told the Moth Club about the Purple. Hooded Conspirators and Mauve Mary were everyday topics of conversation, but the Purple was too weird to mention without seeming potty. The example of Dora Paule was there to prove that.
* * *
Being an Unusual didn’t bestow special advantage in winter.
Amy tried floating over the muddy frozen slush the snows turned into after a few days, but the cold numbed her Abilities as well as her toes… so she had to trudge with all the rest. Light Fingers kept her hands in constant motion, rubbing her arms and legs. She reported that it made little difference. Gould of the Fourth, who was supposed to have wolf blood, shivered and went blue-limbed on the hockey field like everyone else.
Joxer’s seaweed – Drearcliff’s prime meteorological resource – was frozen stiff, suggesting spring was a good long way off. At this rate, not everyone would make it through winter.
On the third Saturday afternoon of term, Marigold de Vere – least hated of the whips – pitched up at Hypatia Hall. Amy had taken the extreme measure of asking Miss Borrodale for extra prep involving Bunsen burners in the hope of warming her perpetually chilly hands. De Vere put out a call for volunteers.
This was unheard-of. Whips, as a rule, press-ganged, enslaved and commandeered.
‘It’s been decided that the snowmen must go,’ announced de Vere.
Slightly warmed hands – including Amy’s – shot up.
De Vere smiled broadly. She was a humorous Desdemona Sixth, with dimples, wavy blonde hair and a brother who drove racing cars. If Gryce ever fell from power, it was thought de Vere would replace her as Head Girl. Some invested hopes in a de Vere ascendancy the way pre-unification Italians believed in Garibaldi, but the hour of liberation was certainly not at hand. Gryce might have lost a few lieutenants – the Crowninshield Sisters skulked about together, avoiding the vengeance of those emboldened now the older witch was no longer a whip – but Head Girl was secure in her position. De Vere was too mild, easy-going and straightforward to undermine a rival, though many of her supporters weren’t above chicanery.
Amy remembered what Keele, a chum of de Vere’s, had said. Her Boney – the phantoms that troubled her dreams the way those hatching eggs disturbed Amy – were creatures called the Cold Knights. How did Amy know it was spelled that way? She just did – it was an unsettling insight. That came with being Unusual.
The murder party consisted of Amy, Light Fingers, FitzPatrick and a random Ariel Second called Mrozková. De Vere marched them to Joxer’s shed, wrenched open the door and issued weapons – a rake, a hoe, a cricket bat and a long-handled axe. The whip herself took a paraffin blowlamp and lit it with a long match. She puffed an experimental burst of flame in the air. FitzPatrick jumped out of the way to avoid losing her eyebrows.
‘Leave no snow blighter standing,’ de Vere ordered.
Captain Freezing, first and foremost of the snowmen, commanded the front lawns, in sight of all School. The eight-foot creature wore a plumed shako from a bygone Austro-Hungarian pageant. Leftover Christmas holly and ivy garlanded his broad shoulders. The very model of a Cold Knight. Ice-hearted to the core, the Captain had to go. De Vere strode across the snows, lamp thrust forward and upwards, and squirted fire into Captain Freezing’s face. His rope moustaches caught light. His head hollowed out. Hot meltwater gushed over his chest, eating like acid.
De Vere stood back and signalled a general attack.
Amy swung the axe, which sliced through Captain Freezing’s snow torso without doing much damage. FitzPatrick’s cricket bat was much more effective in smashing the snowman’s insides out. With savage glee, the party brought down the Captain and kicked his remains across the lawn. Mrozková raked over the spot where the Cold Knight had stood until only the flattened shako remained.
Amy expected cheers of triumph and encouragement – but everyone else was indoors, huddling around whatever warmth they could find.
De Vere lead them on to the next snowman, and the next, and all the others. The Widow Winter, Chill Charlie, Glacé Cherry, the North Pole Cat, Frigid Freda, Sandokan the Snow Bear. With each victory the murder party grew more determined, more relentless. At first they whooped and yelled and insulted the enemy, jeering as faces melted and bodies exploded into fragments. Then, it became quiet, desperate work. The Cold Knights put up a fight, staying standing long after they should have gone down. It took all afternoon. When they were done, no one wanted to talk about it.
Amy had sores from gripping the axe handle with wet mittens.
As a reward for the volunteers, de Vere arranged hot chocolate at teatime. Amy and the others dutifully accepted their treats. She sensed warmth, even burned her tongue, but couldn’t taste anything. Her hands and feet were dead – soaked through with sweat and snow-seepage, then frozen solid. Her face was icy rubber and her nose was blue. The snowmen were gone, but the snow was still here.
The next morning, when the girls rose early for Chapel, Captain Freezing was back – hat, moustache and all. The Cold Knight had advanced, as if on a chess-board. He was stationed ten feet nearer the dorms, and seemed to angle his head upwards, glaring at the slit windows of the Desdemona staircase.
Amy and Light Fingers exchanged a grim look.
There were no footprints around the Captain. It had snowed in the night so it was possible the marks of guilt were naturally obliterated. Amy’s first thought was that it must have been Gryce, putting her rival in her place… but she couldn’t imagine the Murdering Heathens braving Arctic dark to fashion a new Captain Freezing.
