by Kim Newman
‘I shall be awfully sorry when you are Removed, Thomsett,’ she said. ‘I shall miss our little talks.’
The new Smudge made Amy’s skin crawl.
But she was just a single ant. It was the whole army that made Amy fear for the future.
Rayne’s antenna-arms hail caught on. Black Skirts did it all over School, especially if the Queen Ant hove into view. Rayne’s shoulders must ache from returning so many salutes. In purposeful moments, the waving included odd, double-jointed hand-flapping that mimicked the twitching of feelers. It wasn’t a trick Amy wanted to learn. The circle of priests in her dreams of the Purple made similar gestures.
Between lessons, Black Skirts patrolled in triads, hexads and enneads. Triads had six legs, of course – as many as an insect – and functioned as composite creatures. Each group had – or seemed to have – its own duty. They were always doing something. No wasted effort in the anthill. Amy stopped thinking of Black Skirts as girls, and started perceiving insect patterns in their movements. It was obvious the Black Skirt movement was modelled on ant behaviour… if only as described by Rayne’s mother.
Many Black Skirts carried Rosalind Rowley Rayne’s Formis like a pocket testament, consulting it as if it were an almanac or book of wise saws. One evening, Amy caught Kali reading the wretched yellow thing, hidden inside an Edgar Wallace.
‘Why are you rotting your mind on such tosh?’ she asked.
‘Dunno, doll,’ Kali responded, turning a page. ‘Some say it’s got all the answers.’
‘All the answers to what?’
‘Everything, doll. Everything.’
This was Amy’s longest conversation with Kali since that night at the Runnel and the Flute.
‘Give us a read of it, then,’ she asked. ‘I’m always open to answers.’
Kali handed the booklet over. Amy had tried to get through it but given up halfway. The new edition – the eleventh impression in the year since publication – bore enthusiastic recommendations from authors, politicians and journalists Amy made a mental note not to trust in future. Mr Wells, Mr Chesterton and Mr Shaw should know better than to provide endorsements willy-nilly to any fathead who wrapped a tenner around a presentation copy of their book. And Mr Roderick Spode – whoever he might be – could do with a long lie down and a cold compress, judging from his statement that Formis ‘set my veins a-throb and expanded the old brain matter as if it were a turgid sponge!’
‘Note none of this praise comes from entomologists,’ she said, tossing Formis back.
‘That’s because it’s not about insects,’ Kali said.
She caught the thing and affectionately smoothed its pages as if it were a ruffled kitten.
Amy sputtered. ‘Of course it is – it’s about ants!’
‘Think about it,’ said Kali, tapping the ornament in her nose. It wasn’t a gold snail any more, but an ant in amber. ‘Think about it.’
Kali looked at Frecks, who was lolling on her own cot waiting for nail polish to dry. They exchanged knowing, in-on-the-secret smiles and manufactured identical simpers of pity to direct Amy’s way.
Amy was outnumbered by Black Skirts.
Light Fingers was doing her prep elsewhere these days, coming into the cell just before Lights Out.
Amy felt more and more isolated.
XVI: The Exorcism of Mauve Mary
WORD RAN ROUND that the Black Skirts were going to ‘do something’ about Mauve Mary.
What with the other to-do, Mary had slipped off the front page of the Trumpet. The Hypatia Hall Psychical Investigation Soc, informally known as the Spook-Spotters, regularly tramped through her haunted walkway with plumb-bobs and anemometers – which seemed to scare the spectre off. Besheeted jokers tried to sub for Mauve Mary, but were quickly found out. Impersonating a ghost was inflated from Minor to Major Infraction, and the ragging stopped.
Then, Mauve Mary popped up again…
Ellacott, a Goneril Third, was hurrying through the covered walkway on the way to some secret Black Skirt activity. She was, as usual, not on time. Ellacott had earned the handle ‘the Late Miriam Ellacott’ through chronic tardiness. With use, the soubriquet transmogrified into ‘the L.M.E.’ or ‘the Ellemy’. Thiele and Meade, her irritated triad partners, were waiting in the foyer of the Playhouse. On hearing the story, Amy was relieved to learn that not all Blacks ran like clockwork. Rayne didn’t have everything her way.
When Ellacott passed Mary’s shrine, she was dazzled by purple light. As she reported it, the ghost girl loomed out of the wall and clutched. There was an attendant crackle, like lightning. Ellacott saw Mary’s face clearly, but didn’t recognise her. A glowing bump on the spook’s forehead threatened to open like a third eye.
The fright put salt on Ellacott’s tail. She ran into the Playhouse and gabbled her story at her triad partners. They first took it for the latest in a long line of sorry excuses. Thiele in particular was near the end of her patience with the Ellemy, who persistently held them back. Unless Ellacott pulled her socks up, they’d never earn their next ant badges. Meade, more sensitive than most Sisters Dark, realised quickly that the Ellemy was genuinely upset. Before they went Black, Meade was a Viola Fourth and Ellacott and Thiele Goneril Thirds. The younger girls still deferred from habit.
What struck Meade and Thiele most was that, uniquely for March, Ellacott seemed to have caught the sun. Normally, she had little colour… but now her complexion was bronze, with reddish skin flaking on her forehead and cheeks. Amy had heard of apparitions frightening folk so much their hair went white, but never of ghosts giving people spots. Just what manner of ghost was Mary? The Ellemy must have thrown up her hands at the clutching creature. Her palms were nut-brown while the backs of her hands were pale.
Thiele, formerly of the Spook-Spotters, was irritated that Mauve Mary failed to appear to qualified persons with proper scientific equipment but put on a show for a rank amateur. She insisted they hurry to the shrine to test for ectoplasmic residue. Ellacott took some persuading, but was dragged across the Quad. She had begun to doubt her own senses. An idea formed that she might have been the victim of a rag involving a more elaborate deception than a sheet with eyeholes. Stage lights, Chem Lab fizzling potions, magic lantern slides… rigged up by smugglers or counterfeiters. Meade later admitted she found the rational explanation harder to credit than ghosts.
To the triad’s shock, they entered the walkway to find Mary still manifesting. She sank back into the wall. Her arm stuck out for moments, then withdrew – leaving no ripples in the brickwork. There was a smell of spent matches. With her battery torch, an essential instrument from her Spook-Spotters kit, Thiele cast light around the walkway. Mary hadn’t just given the Ellemy a tan. The paving stones and the opposite wall were faded. A poster for the cancelled Poles Apart! was bleached nearly white. An outline of Ellacott, cringing in terror, was burned onto the ground. Thiele was excited by the physical evidence. Past experience with practical jokers made her test for paint before she listed the effect in her Diary of Parapsychological Phenomena.
The musically inclined Meade drew her partners’ attention to a ululation audible under the winds that blew through the walkway. The eerie sound continued for a minute or so after Mary’s departure, then quieted as if the procession had turned a corner. Meade couldn’t say whether the music had been an unknown instrument – something like an aeolian harp, perhaps – or the voices of an unearthly choir. There was something eerie and skin-prickling about the sounds.
In her detailed report for the Trumpet, the main source for the story, Thiele theorised that Mauve Mary was a wailing spectre, like the Irish banshee or the Mexican llorona. In a footnote, Meade suggested the song was more enrapturing than terrifying, which might make her an ondine, like the classical Greek siren or the German lorelei. In either case, she was an ill omen. Wailing spectres presage disasters and ondines lure sailors onto the rocks. The fact that Joxer and Ponce Bainter were the only men on School Grounds limited the pool of
suitable victims, though there was discussion as to whether girls and women could succumb to the lorelei lure or siren song if no men were about. Hern, after all, was a sailor. So far she hadn’t seen or heard Mary and claimed to be tone-deaf.
Having won a war with Goneril over Gould, the Black Skirts were ready for another with Mauve Mary over Ellacott’s suntan. The victim wasn’t much damaged by her hair-raising experience. Indeed, she quite enjoyed her celebrity and went around without mittens showing off her varicoloured hands. Her normal colour soon returned and the blotches cleared up. Her shadow – a tourist attraction, even for sceptics – remained on the flagstone path, despite Joxer’s attempt at scrubbing it off.
The precedent of Captain Freezing and the Frost, an earlier Black Skirt victory, triggered a witch hunt that raged through School. Amy saw the reasoning. Was there a Frost-like unknown Unusual who could summon or create Mauve Mary and set her on unwary souls? The Mystic Maharajah could depart from his body in astral form, so Mary could be the wandering soul of someone very much alive.
Equally, Amy remembered the Runnel and the Flute and could envision a Hooded Conspiracy ritual to allow angry intrusions from the Purple. Mary, with her neither-Gray-nor-Black uniform, might be the Purple’s idea of how to pass for normal in what Paule called the Back Home. Thinking like Light Fingers, Amy could even imagine the Hoodeds and the Black Skirts conjuring Mary as an excuse to root through School in search of fresh flukes to pick on. Frost was in the Remove along with Harper, Dyall and Palgraive. Their Grey blazers might as well have ‘Leper’ written on them in luminous paint.
Black Skirt Triads were about everywhere. Anyone who had seen Mauve Mary was put to the Question. Then, not having seen the ghost seemed even more suspicious and the investigation widened.
Amy was cornered in the Library by Sundle, Ker and Pinborough.
This triad was called the Chimera, second only to the Cerberus when it came to Black Skirt violence. It was all round that they had given Susannah Thorne a beating for being a fluke. No Infractions were marked against the Chimera, but Thorne was Minored for having her blazer misbuttoned after she’d taken her lumps.
‘What do you know about the Walkway Ghost?’ asked Sundle, a curly-haired, rather pretty Viola Fifth. She had three ant badges on her lapel and another on her hat-brim.
‘Mauve Mary?’
Sundle shook her head. ‘We don’t like that name,’ she said. ‘It’s misleading.’
‘She’s not mauve?’
‘More violet.’
‘There’s a difference?’
‘To the discerning eye, yes.’
Amy shrugged. ‘I’ve not seen her, whatever her name is. All I know is what I read in the Trumpet.’
Sundle put the questions, while Ker and Pinborough radiated menace. Kicker Ker played with a pencil, giving the impression she could snap it with her eyelids if she had to. The Blonde Bruiser’s hands were knotted into fists.
‘Do you know anything about the Walkway Ghost?’ asked Sundle. ‘Think carefully. If you omit or conceal anything now that later comes to light, there will be consequences. You want to be a credit to School, don’t you?’
‘Of course. But I don’t know any more than you do. I’ve heard far-fetched yarns, but if you’re going around asking all and sundry about Mau… about the Walkway Ghost, I suppose you’ve heard the same fairy tales. I wouldn’t put a farthing on any of ’em. For what it’s worth, I doubt it’s smugglers in phosphor-treated sheets.’
Sundle gave her a hard looking-over. This was part of the Treatment. Amy tried not to be flustered.
She was not fidgeting. But was being calm more suspicious than being nervous? Her soles tingled and she pressed her toes down. She did not float.
Four ant badges was suggestive. A clever Black Skirt, on the rise in the anthill. Sundle wasn’t overtly threatening. With Ker and Pinborough to back her up, she didn’t need to be. The Chimera wasn’t as showy as the Cerberus, but Amy guessed they’d be around longer and do more damage.
‘I’ll tell you a secret, Thomsett,’ confided Sundle. ‘We don’t think it’s smugglers either.’
Ker took Amy’s boater off a library desk, looked at it from several angles, and put it back down.
‘Thank you for your co-operation,’ said Sundle, half-turning away.
Amy didn’t want to sigh with relief.
‘One more thing,’ said Sundle, turning back again. ‘You seem a clean, healthy, productive sort. Why are you, ah…?’
Sundle gestured towards Amy’s boater.
‘Still in Grey?’ Amy shrugged. ‘I only came here last term. This is still a new uniform. Mother is a fiend for economy, and won’t replace it till it’s worn out…’
‘Say no more,’ said Sundle, patting her arm.
‘I could help you go Black,’ said Pinborough. She had a strangely high-pitched voice. ‘Part-way, at least.’
The Blonde Bruiser flicked back her hair, as she did before launching her best punch. Amy flinched, but bit.
‘How?’ she asked.
Pinborough leaned forward into Amy’s face and bared her teeth.
‘…by blacking your eyes for you!’
‘Leave off, Pinners,’ said Sundle. ‘We’ve more to see.’
Sundle raised her arms and did the antenna-wave. After being breathed and snarled at, Amy was too unnerved to laugh at the ridiculous salute.
She didn’t return it either.
Ker reached over and felt the material of Amy’s badgeless lapel. Amy held her breath, expecting a blow. Ker smiled sweetly, then pinched and pulled. There was a rip, and a flap of cloth hung loose.
‘Grey wears poorly,’ said Sundle. ‘That could be an Infraction. Watch out for the whips.’
The Chimera turned in unison and walked away, skipping at every third step as if to the rhythm of the ants in your pants rhyme. Amy breathed again.
Amy examined her torn lapel. She needed to find Light Fingers – who was still keeping out of sight and earning too many absence Infractions – and get repairs done. She was luckier than Thorne, in that only her blazer was damaged… but that could change.
She wrapped a scarf around her neck and arranged it to cover the rip.
On the Library Steps, she was accosted by Dora Paule, who was in a flap. Amy hadn’t known she was out of the Infirmary.
‘Amy, Amy, you must come… they’re going to break the Purple!’
The Sixth was wild-haired and big-eyed, though at least wearing shoes. The gold piping was gone from her blazer, signifying the loss of whip status. Loose threads showed where the braid had been unpicked.
Paule had come down in the world. Only her unofficial status as Holy Fool saved her from being plastered with multiple Infractions whenever she set foot outside her cell. She was still beset by midges. Three annoyances – the undersized Third Pest Merrilees and the overgrown Seconds Joan Hone and Dottie Fulwood – had trailed Paule to the Library.
‘Daffy Daffy Daffodil,’ they chanted. ‘Daffy Daffy Daff-o-dil!’
Pest chucked a pebble at Paule’s tilted boater. Instinctively, Amy warded off the missile with her mind. Pest’s mouth hung open as the stone changed direction in mid-air. Amy wished she could pop the pebble into the chit’s gaping gob… but let the thing go.
‘Daffy Daffy Daffodil,’ chanted Hone and Fulwood. ‘Daffy Daffy Daff-o-dil!’
‘Push off, you perishers,’ said Amy.
They ignored her and kept up the barracking.
‘Daffy Daffy Daffodil,’ Merrilees joined in again, ‘Daffy Daffy Daff-o-dil!’
‘Is this really how you want to spend precious time?’ Amy asked.
‘Yes, miss,’ cheeked Hone. ‘Yes it is. Daffy Daffy Daff-o-dil!’
‘Most certainly, miss,’ echoed Fulwood.
Last term, this rabble of Dims would have been cowed by a Third, but Black Skirts thought they didn’t have to pay attention to anything a Grey said.
Paule was too worried about the Purple to notice he
r mocking retinue.
Amy thought of floating Merrilees, Hone and Fulwood up into the air and dropping them from a height. But she didn’t do it. She shouldn’t get in a bate. Pest was a pest, that’s all. Not worth wasting her Abilities on.
In the Back Home, Paule was still a popular ragging target.
When the whips stripped her piping, season was opened. Even the most meagre could go at her. Titches sought respite from their own torments by persecuting Paule, hoping to cosy up to horrific harpies like Aire or McClure.
It depressed Amy that girls who should know better would pass on the hurt others ladled on them. For one thing, the tactic didn’t work. Trying to mollify monsters was useless. They got bored easily and would lash out at anyone within reach, including their own toadies. The Black Skirts didn’t discipline their rogues, even in the way whips did. Rayne, once the most put upon of putupons, gave out badges for bullying.
Dr Auchmuty came out of the Library. At sight of her, the perishers scarpered. Merrilees turned back to shoot Amy a nasty look and tripped over some frozen snow that happened to shift into her way. Doc Och lectured Pest about self-endangerment. The edict against not running on slippery ground was still in force.
‘Amy, Amy, they’re at the shimmer,’ repeated Paule.
Amy tried to pay attention.
Paule grabbed Amy by the scarf and yanked. Which hurt.
‘The shimmer, Amy…’
‘Slow down, Paule,’ said Amy. ‘And don’t throttle me. What, where, when, how and why?’
Paule blinked as if answering in Morse.
She was more in the Back Home than usual, capable of recognising Amy and seeking her out. But she was straining herself to stay focused.
‘The wreckers are tampering,’ she said. ‘They’ve found one of the shimmers… the places where the Purple comes closest to the Back Home.’
‘Like the Runnel and the Flute, in the woods?’
Paule nodded. ‘Yes, but that place is locked. It needs an oblation to open. For most, not me. I can get to the Purple from anywhere. I can make shimmers. The wreckers are at one of the thin shimmers, where the barrier between here and there is wavery. They’re shutting her out, but that’s not it at all. They’re making a breach!’
