by Kim Newman
‘You’ve a “party piece”, like the rest of us,’ said Devlin, wagging her extended digit. ‘Give us a demonstration.’
Thorn sighed.
‘No use pretending,’ said Knowles. ‘You can’t pretend here.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Amy. ‘We’re all Unusuals.’
Amy understood Thorn’s hesitation. In dark moments, she still thought Mother might be right about the floating… especially now Drearcliff agreed that Amy’s Ability was unnatural rather than Unusual.
‘A pin to see the peepshow,’ said Devlin. ‘Come on, Thorn.’
Thorn gave in. She stood up and took a deep breath.
‘Keep well back,’ she said, rolling up her sleeves.
Amy moved her stool. Thorn made shooing motions and everyone shifted further until she nodded for them to stop. She now had room to swing a long-tailed cat.
‘This better be a blinder,’ said Know-It-All.
Clicking her fingers, Thorn made sparks. They lingered for moments like dying fireflies. Rubbing her hands together, she birthed a flame between her palms. A fire shape rose, illuminating Thorn from below, giving her face an infernal cast. Kneeling, she set her flame free on the floor. It whirled like a top. Thorn took some twists of paper – sweet wrappers – from her pocket and fed the fire. The twists went up in flashes like magnesium in the Chem Lab.
Girls cooed and clapped.
Puppeteering with her fingers, Thorn made the fire shape dance like a pixie ballerina, leaving a scorch-mark across the duckboards.
Amy applauded. Thorn was sweating with the effort.
‘You and Frost even each other out,’ said Devlin.
Angrily, Thorn made the ballerina puff and disappear.
‘I’m not like anyone else,’ she said, face dark. ‘I’m Thorn, without an E.’
‘Don’t bust a boiler,’ said Devlin. ‘All flukes together in the Remove, remember?’
It was hard to get House Spirit going in the Invisible House.
‘So, Frost, can you meet the Thorn challenge?’ said Devlin. ‘Want to make a dancing snowman?’
Frost shook her head. Since l’affaire Freezing, she’d buried her Abilities. She was afraid of them. Amy could understand that too.
Devlin, on the other hand, wasn’t averse to showing off. She could make her fingers grow and twist. When she did, her face elongated as if her chin were being pulled.
‘There’s no part of my back I can’t scratch,’ she said. ‘I can scrape my own barnacles. I still don’t see what the fuss is about. I can do things other people can’t. Other people can do things I can’t and no one seems bothered. I’m so clumsy I couldn’t skip in time if I wanted, and it seems everyone can do that.’
‘They are bothered, though,’ said Light Fingers. ‘Knowles could come top in anything, if she had a mind to. So they stopped her.’
Knowles scowled at the reminder.
Rules had been changed to prevent Know-It-All from profiting from her Ability, so she was particularly aggrieved. It would be difficult to frame a rule barring Devlin from fetching down balls stuck in trees or fastening her own hooks if she wore a dress that did up at the back. Difficult, but not impossible. That might come next.
‘They chucked Green Thumbs out of the Horticulture Club,’ said Knowles.
‘Don’t mind,’ said Paquignet. ‘Not much for clubs. Clubs girls too noisy. Happier just with plants. Know where you are with plants. Quiet, are plants. Calm, too.’
Paquignet was another odd one – not all there. Perhaps she inhabited a Green the way Paule lived in the Purple. Her Ability was also her enthusiasm, but Green Thumbs didn’t have an easy time of it. She had weals on her hands and splotches on her face. In the sort of perverse twist Amy had come to expect among Unusuals, Paquignet – her Abilities must run in the family or her parents wouldn’t have called her Fleur – suffered from year-round hay fever. She was allergic to almost everything vegetable. Green Thumbs made plants healthy, but they made her sick.
In a further irony, Paquignet’s thumbs actually had taken on a greenish tinge… which Amy worried was the beginning of gangrene.
‘Lungs,’ said Devlin, ‘what’s yours?’
No one had asked the intimidating Sixth straight out before. Lamarcroft was sheepish.
‘I’m quite strong,’ she said.
‘Can you straighten a horseshoe?’ Thorn asked, presenting an old one which was lying around.
‘I can try,’ said Lamarcroft.
She tugged on the ends of the horseshoe, seemingly with little effort. Instead of straightening, it snapped in two.
‘Behold, the Amazing Amazon,’ said Thorn, impressed.
‘Is that it?’ said Light Fingers. ‘You’re only strong?’
Amy thought Lamarcroft might thump Light Fingers. Back when she was a Goneril Sixth and Light Fingers a lowly Desdemona Third, that tone of voice would have earned an instant Minor. And a cuff round the ear.
But Lungs didn’t bristle at the scorn.
‘I also… have dreams,’ she said. ‘The same dream, over and over. Most nights. You know the poem “and we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night”? I dream of that. Exactly that. I’ve had that dream ever since I can remember.’
‘“Dover Beach”, by Matthew Arnold,’ said Knowles. ‘It’s still in my head after the Eng. Lit. test. Did your nanny read it to you in the crib? Rum choice for an infant, if so. My ayah barely ran to “Fairies in the Dell” and “Grumpy Goat’s Half-Holiday”.’
‘I hadn’t heard of “Dover Beach” until I had the same lesson you did, with Mrs Edwards when she was here. But as soon as Mrs Ed read it out, I knew Arnold was writing about my dream.’
‘The poem’s really about the rise of agnosticism,’ said Knowles. ‘Not beaches and battles. It’s symbolism.’
‘I think he had the same dream,’ Lamarcroft said, ‘and tried to tidy it away by making up a reason for it. No one dies of not going to church. Or perhaps it’s just a coincidence. But that darkling plain is real. I’m in that war. A long-ago war or a yet-to-come war. I think it’s why I was made strong.’
‘What colour is the sky in your dream?’ asked Paule.
Even Lamarcroft was surprised her fellow Sixth had spoken. She seldom asked direct questions.
‘Dark,’ said Lungs, shaking her head. ‘Dark purple.’
Amy hadn’t realised how afraid Lamarcroft was. That made her more afraid than she had been. Even before the Black Skirts penned them in a stable, the girls of the Remove had worries beyond the ordinary. Abilities seemed to come with curses attached, like Amy’s nosebleeds or Paquignet’s allergies.
‘Perky, what of you?’ asked Stretch, cheerfully. ‘What occult talents do you harbour?’
Devlin was trying to lighten the mood. For all her jollity, she was mindful of others’ feelings. She ran into a brick wall with Palgraive, who smiled back as if she hadn’t heard the question.
‘Yes, I wondered why you were here,’ put in Thorn.
‘To learn… my lessons, of course,’ said Palgraive. ‘And… be a good girl.’
Palgraive’s voice was high-pitched, as if it came from a much younger girl. Maggots are the larval stage of flies. The one nestled in Palgraive’s brain might be young in the terms of its species. The strain of working a human body – vast and complex equipment for so small a grub – sometimes told. Putting sentences together was a colossal effort.
‘Why else… should girls go to… school?’
‘There’s something about you, though,’ said Knowles. ‘You’re one of us, all right.’
‘If they chopped your arm off, would it grow back?’ asked Laurence, an intense Second who’d only just been removed.
Palgraive smiled but didn’t answer.
‘Can you walk through walls?’ asked Thorn.
‘Talk to animals?’ Amy ventured.
‘Commune with spirits?’ suggested Knowles.
‘Conjure up the dead?’ elaborated Frost, trembling.
‘How about fetching Rudolf Valentino?’ said Knowles.
General laughter broke out. Stretch draped a sheik-like towel over her head and rolled her eyes as if contemplating a fresh conquest in the harem.
‘Rudy’s not dead,’ said Shrimp quietly. ‘He’s in California.’
‘Same thing,’ said Marsh, who – Amy only now realised – was American.
‘Rudy’s not dead yet,’ said Paule definitively.
That stopped the laughing and joshing. They all looked at Paule askew and shocked. Why would she say Valentino – a youthful film star who played sheiks and bullfighters – was not dead yet? In the sense everyone alive was not dead yet? Or had she private, ominous insight gleaned from the Purple?
Paule was caught up with counting her fingertips. It seemed she couldn’t make the sum add up in her head, though her hands looked perfectly normal.
Devlin turned back to Palgraive. ‘Come on, ’fess up. What makes you a fluke?’
Amy wasn’t sure Palgraive counted as an Unusual. Possibly, the brain-maggot was entirely ordinary and unexceptional as brain-maggots went. The girl-shell it wore wasn’t all that unique. Palgraive had long pigtails and a wonky front tooth.
‘I can tell you what’s special about Perky,’ said Light Fingers. ‘She’s still smiling. If that’s not an Ability, I don’t know what is.’
‘We all know why they call you “Light Fingers”, Naisbitt,’ said Knowles. ‘You have larcenous hands. Do you steal things in your sleep?’
‘Yes… so watch that long nose of yours doesn’t get mysteriously pinched.’
They were laughing again.
Like Amy, Light Fingers had shared some Abilities but kept others quiet, even in this company. Only Amy knew Light Fingers was quick as well as dexterous. Just as only Light Fingers knew Amy could float herself better than she could float a pencil.
‘And Larry’s trick is famous,’ said Devlin.
Amy had heard about Laurence, formerly of Ariel. She sent small items away and brought them back – buttons, pencil-stubs, playing cards.
‘Lungs,’ said Stretch, ‘bung Old Larry the broken horseshoe.’
Lamarcroft handed over the two lengths of metal. Laurence held them up for all to see and then disappeared them… not like a conjurer, with a distracting flourish, but casually. She made a hole in the air as if she were pulling open a drawer, popped the shoe pieces into it, and pushed it shut.
‘We’re in the pocket. Gone.’
She reached into the hole, which had a slight mauve tinge around the edge, and brought the pieces back.
‘…and here we are again.’
The purplish caste objects had when fetched from Larry’s ‘pocket’ suggested where they might have been.
If Paule was Queen of the Purple, was Laurence the Princess?
‘Can you pull Valentino out of your pocket?’ said Knowles.
‘The lass has Rudy on the brain,’ said Devlin. ‘The only thing she doesn’t forget after a month. It’s in the bones and the blood, not the grey matter.’
‘The pocket’s not big enough for a person,’ said Laurence. ‘And I tried it with a mouse once, at home… it wasn’t well when it came back. Cyril had to squash it with a brick. I don’t think the pocket is for living things.’
‘Shame,’ said Marsh. ‘I can think of a fair few who could be shoved into your pocket and not brought back without anyone missing them at all.’
‘Things sent away have to be brought back,’ said Laurence. ‘Or else I get pains. The longer they’re in the pocket, the worse the pains. I put a book away for a whole day, but it was like having a toothache in my hand. When I brought it back, the print had faded. You could hardly read it. In the pocket, it’s not like it is here. I’d just as soon not put things away, but – after a while – if I don’t send something, it’s like an itch. Not as bad as a pain, but you know what itches are. No matter what Nurse says, you end up scratching. In the end, I have to find something and put it away. I think the pocket needs to be fed.’
‘Does the pocket travel with you?’ asked Light Fingers. ‘If you put something away here, you could bring it back in, say, the Refectory or – if you could stand the pain on a train journey – Plymouth or London or Dieppe?’
Larry nodded.
‘You’d be the best diamond smuggler who ever lived,’ said Light Fingers. ‘They’d never catch you at customs.’
‘Or you could be a secret agent and carry letters,’ suggested Amy.
Laurence, youngest daughter of a Marquess, hadn’t made an impression in Ariel, even with her pocket trick.
‘At home I’m supposed to sit quietly and let my sisters show off their gowns,’ Larry said. ‘In the playroom, I have to be the Germans so Cyril can charge my lines. My brother charges everywhere, on his hobby horse. He pokes me with a wooden sword and calls me “Fritz der Schnitze”. Once I put his sword in my pocket and he screamed until I brought it back. He got a new sword and doesn’t use the purplish one any more. I thought everyone could put things in pockets and bring them back, because no one paid attention when I did. Not until I came to School. I wouldn’t need to smuggle diamonds, though. Mummy has enough of those to begin with.’
Amy saw Laurence was coming to life in the Remove.
‘I could get uncensored letters past Keys,’ Larry said. ‘The Black Skirts could search me all they like, at the gates. But I could take letters into town and post them. If I had the stamps.’
There was enthusiasm for the proposition, though passes for Greys to leave School Grounds were in short supply these days.
‘Abilities aren’t enough,’ Light Fingers said. ‘Swan told me that, on my first day here. She said that what I needed was Application.’
It turned out that they had all heard variations on this speech.
(Where was Headmistress?)
Suddenly, they were thinking and talking about Applications.
It was like being in the Moth Club again.
Devlin and Lamarcroft held together the ends of the broken horseshoe while Thorn made flame and tried to join them by melting. It didn’t work because the shoe pieces became too hot to hold with bare fingers.
‘Thomsett, you try holding the bits up,’ said Devlin.
‘And burn my fingers too? No fear.’
‘I didn’t mean with your fingers.’
Amy tried to take a grip on the pieces with her mind, and she lifted them off the duckboard a few inches before they dropped. She shrugged an apology.
‘I think you need an anvil and hammer, not just flame,’ said Thorn.
So that was a wash-out.
Paquignet coaxed a tulip bud open and Frost flash-froze it into a sparkly, stiff ornament… then Thorn made a flame near the shoot and droplets of water fell from it before it began growing again.
Pretty, but useless. Still, there was enthusiasm for the enterprise.
Something like House Spirit.
Marsh and Lamarcroft competed to see who could hold their breath longest. Lamarcroft won, but Marsh said it’d be different if they were underwater.
‘Then it’d only be fair if you held your gills too,’ said Thorn.
Marsh’s eyes popped wider than ever. Generally, people were too intimidated to mention the gills to her face. Even when Marsh was removed, no one had said it was because of her fishy Attributes.
After a moment, when Amy was worried Marsh would fix shark-sharp teeth in Thorn’s neck before Without an E could whip up a flame, Marsh expelled air through her gills and made a dribbly raspberry.
It was unexpected, and everyone laughed. Amy, closest to Marsh, got a close look at her gills. Inside, the flesh was crimson, liverish. Usually the slits weren’t even noticeable.
‘It’s okay,’ said Marsh. ‘You can touch them.’
Amy put her fingers out and brushed the slits. Marsh rippled her gills, giggling through them.
‘All my f
olks have them,’ she said.
She had an unusual accent too.
‘Where are your people from?’ Amy asked.
‘Innsmouth, Massachusetts,’ she said, ‘or the South Sea Islands… or all the oceans.’
Devlin wanted to touch Marsh’s gills, too. A queue formed. The Gill Girl had always been standoffish. Among flukes, she was more congenial, or at least weary of the effort she had to put into sulking.
Even Palgraive put her hand on Marsh’s neck, imitating the others rather than following her own impulse. The maggot was trying to fit in.
‘They’ve made a mistake,’ Amy said tentatively.
The others looked at her.
‘The Black Skirts,’ she went on. ‘They shouldn’t have put us here together and they shouldn’t have left us alone. If they had Unusuals, they wouldn’t have done it. They’d have expelled us… or worse.’
Someone coughed ‘Gould.’ Someone else said ‘Rayne.’
Amy shook her head. ‘Rayne isn’t an Unusual. No matter what she’s done. She’s something else again. And Gould’s given up on herself… but it won’t be enough. Ants can’t abide difference. It’s why they’re so successful. But this isn’t an anthill and this isn’t a prison. This is a school.’
A sarcastic snort from Light Fingers.
‘Yes, Emma, there are similarities. But there are differences. Schools are about changing. We change… we learn, some things in lessons, other things just by being at school. School is like a tunnel through a mountain. We go through it and come out on the other side. We don’t stay here.’
‘The Black Skirts want to spread,’ said Knowles. ‘I’ve heard them talk about it. I went Black too, until they removed me. Rayne plans to send enneads to other schools, to spread their rhyme… and everything else. Boys’ schools as well as girls’. It’s like the measles. Soon, everyone will have spots and hop up and down with ants in their pants.’
Amy shuddered.
‘We can stop them,’ she said. ‘Ants don’t really work together like we can. They just all do the same thing. Like when they lift things – lots of identical ants doing one job. We can be different. Like Stretch said, Frost and Thorn even each other out… their Abilities are distinct, and would be useful in different situations. And our Applications can mesh. Like with the ice flower.’
