by Kim Newman
Mockingly, several girls did their own ant salute.
‘I’m not thinking of them,’ said Amy. ‘I’m thinking of Headmistress. Aren’t we supposed to be her cygnets?’
VI: Golden Rules for Detective Stories
CONVERSATION TURNED TO Dr Swan and her Unusual Girls.
Everyone present, except fluke-among-flukes Palgraive, had received an invitation to Headmistress’s study when they first arrived at School. Only Marsh – who attended a Young Ladies’ Academy in Massachusetts before coming to England – shared Amy’s experience of being singled out as a Third. The others had all been titchy Firsts, overwhelmed by their new school, let alone personal attention from the imposing Dr Swan.
Some, like Frost and Thorn, were puzzled by the cygnets speech; they hadn’t yet twigged they were responsible for the occasional cold spots or smoulderings around their childhood homes. Laurence hadn’t realised her party piece wasn’t something everyone could do if they had a mind to. Dyall, gently questioned, still didn’t seem to understand what she did and looked like she’d cry if pressed on the matter.
Not everyone paid much attention to Swan’s speech. Some resisted any suggestion that they were different. They didn’t want to be flukes. In the Remove, they owned up. Here, they’d be flukes if they weren’t Unusual. Laurence, Frost and Paquignet told stories like Amy’s – their parents disapproved of and discouraged their Abilities.
Only Devlin, whose parents thought she was smashing no matter how far she stretched, was encouraged at home. The indulgence had limited her to trivial good deeds like fetching things down from high shelves. Marsh’s family were all like her and Light Fingers’ parents passed on suspicion of Ordinaries as well as their Abilities – which, it now transpired, included rapid-fire forgery.
Lamarcroft’s father was a Conservative Member of Parliament. ‘Dad told me not to break so many things and keep mum about the battle dreams,’ she said. ‘He was worried that if word got round I was cuckoo, Mr Bonar Law wouldn’t put him in the cabinet. Judging from the Ministers he’s had round our place, a cuckoo in the nursery shouldn’t be disqualification for high office… most of them are round the twist.’
Shrimp admitted her mother came down with a rare wasting disease just after she and her brother Jacques were born. Mrs Harper had been travelling abroad for her health ever since, leaving the twins to the care of a succession of nannies, all of whom got tired and quit after a few months. Even considering Shrimp’s slyness, Amy hadn’t the heart to say outright what everyone thought… Harper must realise she’d come close to killing her mother. She might not be able to own up to it even to herself.
Amy supposed that whenever Dyall’s family suspected something, they’d suffered bad headaches… then wondered what they’d been thinking. Prolonged and repeated proximity to Poppet might wipe her permanently from their minds. They would see family pictures on the mantelpiece and wonder who the little girl in them was.
Paule couldn’t remember if she ever had parents. Amy noticed the others were as wary of Daffy Dora as menaces like Harper and Dyall. They were hard put to remember her ever doing anything to them. It’s just that sometimes she said things which upset people.
‘Dad still thinks I’m only clever,’ said Knowles. ‘If he knew my trick, I’d be for it.’
Know-It-All lived in dread of her father catching on to her. Carleton Knowles wrote complicated detective novels in which impossible crimes turned out to have sensible solutions. The Body in the Belfry, The Cadaver in the Cabriolet, The Head in the Hat-Box. In a newspaper article, he had listed Thirteen Golden Rules For Detective Stories. The First Golden Rule was that a mystery should not have a supernatural explanation. His daughter worried he’d be no happier with her Ability than with a fictional murderer who could strangle a victim in a locked room and seep under the door in ectoplasmic form.
‘Anything that can’t be made sense of is not playing the game, he says, and not playing the game is a gross breach of trust.’
This prompted the Remove to spend a happy hour devising ways each could commit murder in a locked room and get away with it. Amy couldn’t distinguish between who was making conversation and who was thinking seriously about future homicidal enterprises. At first, it was agreed Frost and Thorn would make the best culprits – freezing or boiling victims from outside the window – though, of course, Larry Laurence could stash a bloodied blunt instrument or a just-discharged revolver in her pocket and pass the most thorough police search.
‘Amy, you should be able to lock and unlock doors by making the tumblers move,’ suggested Knowles. ‘You could leave the key in the lock and turn it from the other side of the door.’
That had never even occurred to her. Now, of course, she wanted to try it.
Not necessarily for murder. But not necessarily for anything noble and moral either.
Eventually, the topic of locked-room murders ran dry, and they came back to the matter at hand.
Headmistress.
Whatever their families thought of them – whatever they thought of themselves – the Unusuals were dear to Dr Swan.
‘We have a tradition of Unusual Girls at Drearcliff,’ Headmistress had said to Amy. ‘I like to think of them as my cygnets… My eye will be always on you. We shall see what can be done with your Abilities.’
Amy did not believe Swan’s eye had strayed.
She remembered that face, over and over in School photographs, back to founding day, unchanging with the years. Swan was an Unusual, too. It was the only explanation. If she had a choice, she would not have allowed the Rise of the Black Skirts. Rayne went against everything Headmistress professed to believe. Like her cygnets, she had been removed. She was put away, like a small object in Larry’s pocket.
It was down to the Remove to fetch Swan back.
VII: Protective Colouration
‘THERE’S SOMETHING WE have to do, or – rather – pretend to do,’ said Amy. ‘We have to go Black.’
Hisses rose. Marsh showed shark-teeth. Devlin pulled her face out of shape.
‘It won’t work,’ said Knowles. ‘I’ve tried it. So have most of us. They won’t take us. We’re flukes, remember.’
‘They don’t have to take us,’ Amy continued. ‘It’s protective colouration. We just have to look like them. To get about freely. Knowles, do you still have the black kit? They didn’t strip you of it?’
Know-It-All nodded. ‘It’s in my trunk, back at the stables.’
‘Between us – and Light Fingers’ sewing when her hand’s better after being wrung out from all the copying – we should have enough black uniforms to put up a false front. You’ve noticed how dull they all are, the Soldier Ants. Even duller than the Dims. The Queen Ant thinks for them so they don’t pay attention to anything but their allotted tasks. They should be easy to fool. We need to get about School without being marched back here… or locked up. That’s what they’ll try next, if we give them an excuse.’
‘Three into fourteen doesn’t go,’ said Paule.
Outside the Purple, Amy was rarely sure whether Paule was talking to the point. She sometimes said things which made sense the way patterns in the grain of wood can look like the face of a frog.
‘Twelve is four threes,’ Amy said. ‘So we’re a duodecad, with a secret weapon – a thirteenth girl – and a mystery member – the fourteenth. It’ll be different secrets and mysteries at different times. I’ll work out your moth names when we have the time to think.’
Not everyone was keen on having a moth name, so Amy let it go. Thanks to Rayne and her pest of a mater, entomology was in bad odour. Reason enough for revolution.
Light Fingers got into the home stretch on her thirteenth copy. Palgraive was still on her own.
At Break, Knowles and Shrimp went to the stables to collect black uniforms while Amy and Light Fingers led a raiding party to the theatre. The under-stage area was padlocked and chained. The Queen Ant’s sanctum was secured against spies – presumably since Amy
’s previous expedition. Looking at the trapdoor, she rattled the chains without touching them. She tried to feel inside the locks for the tumblers, but couldn’t really concentrate.
‘I could open that with a bent hairpin anyway,’ Light Fingers said. ‘No need to strain your mentacles.’
The material they needed – yards of black cloth – was no longer under the stage anyway. Much that had been stored there was piled up in the auditorium, shifted out of the way.
Carrying scavenged material, the party left the theatre.
…and ran into a triad. Stonecastle of the Sixth, Duchess of the Dims, with a brace of weedy Seconds, Lapham and Finn. The Triceratops.
‘What are you doing, germs?’ bellowed Stoney – whose black boater didn’t fit properly on her large head.
‘Punishment for Minor Infractions, Prefect Stonecastle,’ said Amy. ‘Removal of rubbish to the school tip.’
There was such a place and whips often had girls haul unpleasant items there on a whim. It was not unknown, under the Gryce regime, for a whip to dispose of the sticky paper which had been wrapped around a bun she had just scoffed by pinning a dreamed-up Infraction on a random passing girl who then had to trudge out to the tip with the single item of refuse.
Stonecastle, no brighter now than when she’d worn Grey, slapped the nearest girl – Green Thumbs, who staggered but otherwise wasn’t bothered.
‘Get on with it, germs. Double time. Rubbish don’t shift itself, you know.’
‘Except in the case of these rubbishy girls,’ said Lapham.
‘Yes, they do shift themselves,’ said Finn.
Stoney was irritated. The tiny brain marooned in her thick-boned skull sparked. There was a joke and she hadn’t got it. An ant crawled on her eyelid.
She gave out a sound that was supposed to be a laugh.
Before she went Black, Stonecastle was the whip girls could make fun of. As mean and ferocious as the others, she was easy to dupe… and driven to tears of frustration when she sensed she was being made a fool of but couldn’t see how. An exemplary Tamora in the question of violence, Gryce hadn’t taken her for a Murdering Heathen. Even Henry Buller deemed Stoney an utter Dim.
Amy and the others hurried off, counting themselves fortunate not to have come up against a shrewder Black Skirt. Lone ants were squashable. Even a few were nothing to worry about.
Amassed, they became a trickier proposition.
VIII: A Wolf, New to the Fold
AMY’S RAIDING PARTY made their way back to Temporary Classroom Two.
Black Skirts were everywhere, formed into skipping circles. Their lessons seemed to be suspended. They all jumped at the same time, shaking the ground. The rhyme was carried by the whole school. It took an effort not to walk in time to ‘ants in your pants all the way from France’ so she gave in to it. The tripping gait was more protective colouration.
At regular pauses, the Black Skirts left off skipping to give the antenna salute and chitter en masse. It was a periodic burst of ritual insanity. With each wave-and-chitter, her skin crawled and she had to fight panic. Amy and the others tried to join in with these spasmodic eruptions, but always started too late and carried on too long. Luckily, the ants paid little notice to anything outside their circles.
In the Quad, Prompt Rintoul stood at the head of a triangular wedge of thirty-nine girls, solemnly leading jumps as if they were a tribal rite. The Sisters Dark were dervishes warming up for a whirl or berserkers getting into the spirit for pillage. In the tridecennead, Frecks and Kali skipped with the rest of them, bereft of expression. Frecks wore her chainmail balaclava, relic of her gallant flying uncle – with a black boater on top. Was its spell tarnished now her cause was no longer just and true?
Regret welled up for something lost. Light Fingers saw her pausing and tugged her sleeve.
‘They’re gone, Amy,’ she said. ‘Into the Black.’
Reluctantly, she allowed Light Fingers to pull her away. They left the Quad, though Amy flicked a backwards look. Frecks’s rattling headdress shone amid the black-and-blank crowd. Silvery coils caught winter sun. Amy was determined her friends in Black should be freed and forgiven. Every day School got blacker and that duty seemed harder. Light Fingers thought Frecks and Kali were lost forever. Amy didn’t. The Moth Club was a stronger idea than that.
They were near an end of it. The Black Skirt takeover was complete. Triads were making new paths everywhere, with the equipment used to mark the cricket pitch. The Runnel now extended throughout School. The Drearcliff Playhouse was a new Flute. With Mauve Mary banished, the Purple was swelling into the Back Home. Malign purpose was being achieved.
More than anyone else in the Remove, Amy was resolved to stop Rayne.
Knowles and Shrimp were already back at TC2 when Amy’s party arrived. Palgraive was on Chapter Two of her fair copy. Paule was talking with Dyall. It was impossible to tell whether they were making up nonsense rhymes or having a profound conversation. If anyone were immune to Poppet, it was Daffy Dora.
Light Fingers took stock of the wardrobe material.
‘First, how many black boaters have we? I’ve a pot of creosote, so we can make our own but they won’t be as good. And they’ll whiff something awful.’
Knowles began counting boaters…
…but was interrupted by a growling from the darkest corner of the room.
It was low and scrapey. Amy had the queases again, badly.
A shape loped out of the shadows.
A curtain of hair fell over a grubby face. Big eyes glistened between lank strands. Dog-teeth showed, sharp and yellow.
Marsh hissed and adopted a fighting stance.
‘Don’t mind me,’ said the newcomer. ‘I’m one of you now.’
Aconita Gould had been removed.
Her black blazer was torn, her skirt muddy. A fresh bruise rose on her lightly furred cheek.
‘You were right, Jan,’ she told Marsh. ‘The ants never meant to keep me.’
Marsh wasn’t disposed to be forgiving.
‘We should chuck furface out of the room,’ she said. ‘She’s a turncoat and a spy.’
Gould, whom Amy had always been a bit afraid of, hung her head like a whipped dog.
‘I’ve read that book,’ said Devlin. ‘In the Wolves’ Den, by Claude Savagely.’
‘You’re part of the Cerberus,’ said Frost. ‘I still have scratches.’
Thorn’s hands smouldered.
Gould was disturbing the Remove.
‘Brown’s got my place,’ said Gould, pulling her blouse aside to show a scabbed-over shoulder wound. ‘The spear-thrower. They kept me as long as they needed, but not as one of them. I know that now. Thought I could be tame, but I’m just not.’
Goneril and the Sisters Dark had gone to war over the Wolf Girl… but they were all one thing now, and Gould was out. The world was broken. This was not the Drearcliff way.
Marsh rolled up her sleeves. Her hair slicked down like sealskin. She was ready to resume the fight, fish-fluke against wolf-witch.
Amy looked at Light Fingers, who shrugged. So far as she was concerned, Gould could take a battering and like it. Amy saw the justice, but…
‘We don’t have time to do this again,’ said Amy. ‘Gould, welcome to the Remove. I expect you, more than any of us, know we’re in a desperate position. Most of us can pass for Ordinary. Those of us who only have Abilities. But you have Attributes. You’re undeniably Unusual.’
Gould’s dog-eyes were sad.
‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ said Lamarcroft, ‘are your Attributes a family thing? All Marsh’s tribe are spawn, she says. Do you come from… what, a pack?’
‘My folk took a Carpathian motoring holiday while the Lady was expecting. The Laird’s a fiend for motoring holidays. Call of the wild, he says. Which is what he got. Something bit the Lady. Just a scratch. Only a wee cub. She wanted to take the beast home to Inverglourie Glen… as a pet. What was in the scratch skipped the Lady and got in me. I ca
me out hairy. I don’t have a pack. I just have me, and a small fur rug. The Laird’s a fiend for shooting, too. Potted the cub. Tricky shot, he says.’
‘You’re a Lone Wolf,’ said Thorn.
‘No one here is a Lone Wolf,’ said Amy. ‘Gould, Marsh, shake…’
Neither were keen. Amy wondered if she should put the Kentish Glory mask on.
After shuffling, Marsh deigned to stick out a hand. Gould briefly held it.
That was over. They could get on with important matters.
The Wolf Girl caught up quickly with the plan. She had her own Black kit – though it needed mending. Light Fingers took up her sewing basket – which Knowles had fetched from the stable – and set about making speedy repairs. Gould’s eyes bulged like the Big Bad Wolf’s in the fairy tale as Light Fingers demonstrated her Ability. Devlin parodied that look, but girls protested when Stretch popped out her eyeballs so she put them back in.
Reluctantly, Gould coughed up her story. At Break, the Cerberus were sent off into the woods to run down a straying Staff member. Gould didn’t know who they were after. Given a perfumed handkerchief to smell, she picked up an obvious – too obvious – trail. Bounding ahead, she followed the scent into a copse… where Brown was waiting with Strikes-Like-an-Adder. While Gould was pinned at javelin-point, Buller tore off her ant emblem. Then, they all gave her an unsporting kicking. Afterwards, she was dragged to TC2 and unceremoniously dumped. She still had earth and snow on her.
‘Minnie Crowninshield said my shooting badges had been taken out of the trophy case and melted them down for bullets.’
‘I doubt they use much real silver in those awards badges,’ said Know-It-All.
Unless other unknown Unusuals hid among the Black Skirts, Gould was the last addition to the register of the Remove.
‘Divisible by three,’ said Paule. ‘Fifteen.’
There was that. Multiples of three were versatile, strong, handy. Threes had significance among insects. Triangular heads. Three stages of life. Six legs. Amy didn’t quite see the point. Paule was looking at it from the Purple, which might make the view clear as glass or opaque as fog.
