The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

by Kim Newman

  ‘Or else what?’ asked Kali.

  ‘Something nasty and legalistic. And Cap’n Belzybub’s curse.’

  Logbooks found in the Johanna Pike, a full-rigged frigate discovered last year in the caverns under Drearcliff Grange, proved that the outwardly respectable Sir Wilfrid, Squire of Drearcliff Grange in the 1750s, was secretly the notorious pirate Belzybub. When raiding up and down the Severn Estuary, he dressed as a red devil and wore two twisted burning tallow horns on his sea-captain’s hat. His crimson tunic and cloak were supposedly stitched from the tanned skins of murdered Welshmen – which suggested how well he took the news that he’d been chucked for Taffy the Poet.

  Now Devlin mentioned it, Amy knew the house. So did everyone else.

  It was just a short hike across the grounds. It was odd that the place was so seldom visited. A Keep Out sign would normally be taken as an invitation – luring girls to prohibited premises for secret feasts or ceremonies. Daring clots were always accepting dares to spend nights in forbidden caves, copses or attics. Invariably, they got pestered by woo-woo-wooing chums in sheets. It was strange that the Keep Out signs of Windward Cottage were taken seriously. In Amy’s experience, girls got everywhere… especially where they were told not to be. Trespass might entail a Black Notch, but some bold pioneer always took up the challenge to plant a house flag where none had flown before.

  However, no one wanted to be first to set foot in the home Johanna Pike never called her own.

  ‘Is that even on school grounds?’ asked Frecks.

  Stretch shrugged. ‘Drearcliff Grange used to be the Teazle Estate, when Sir Wilf was Squire of These Parts. Windward must be part of that. You’d have to go over the deeds to be sure.’

  Devlin had a passion for tall stories of the sea. She’d retrieved the logbooks and other items of historic interest – but no treasure, sadly – from the wreck of the Johanna Pike, and was putting together a history of the Life and Crimes of Cap’n Belzybub. Knowles said there would be a market for such a book. She knew about publishing. Her father, Carleton Knowles, wrote complicated detective stories about impossible crimes – with scrupulously fair logical explanations in the last chapters that still felt like cheating.

  ‘Shouldn’t we hike to this Windswept Cottage before we get infracted for not being there,’ suggested Frost.

  ‘Windward,’ corrected Devlin.

  ‘Windward, Windswept, Wind-Up,’ shrugged Frost.

  Stretch wagged her long finger. Frost flicked droplets of ice at her.

  It should have been the duty of the Captain of the Remove to lead the way, but that had ended up being undersized, unpopular Jacqueline Harper. Everyone knew to keep shy of Shrimp. Her Talent was draining the pep from anyone she latched onto. Dyall scrambled wits without meaning to, but Shrimp was a deliberate, calculating leech. She would find Count DeVille’s cloak a perfect fit.

  The other Sixths – Bok, Marsh and Frost – weren’t inclined to take command. Bok, knee thickly bandaged, had been turfed out of the Infirmary and sent to the Remove. The All-Rounder smarted at her exile, but gained a helpful familiar as Laurence experimented with a fresh crush. When stiff-legged Bok needed support to negotiate a door or stile, Larry was always handy. Frecks professed not to notice her former worshipper’s new devotion.

  As so often, it was down to the Moth Club to go over the top.

  ‘You’re the expert, Stretch,’ said Frecks. ‘Lead the way. The rest of us will fall in. Kali, watch for snakes in the grass. Come on, Amy. Give the sour face a rest…’

  Amy didn’t even know she was pulling a face.

  She tried not to, which made it worse.

  Devlin set off and the full register of the Remove – twenty girls – followed in a scattered crocodile. The Viola band interrupted ‘Rites of Spring’ to deliver a mocking, ragged ‘Funeral March of a Marionette’ as the Remove trooped past. Te-tum-te-tum-titty-tum-titty-tum… Te-tum-te-tum-titty-tum-titty-tum… PARP!… Te-tum-te-tum-tum… Tum-te-tum-tum… Tum-te-tum-tum… Tum-titty-tum-titty…

  Gillian Little’s tread shook the ground. Green bottles hanging on any wall near her would fall all at once, making for a short song and a lake of broken glass. The ogre-sized First was sweet-natured if babyish, but could damage property or people by sitting down thoughtlessly or flinging her arms out. What would she be like as a Sixth? Amy thought the Little Girl hadn’t finished growing.

  The Remove skirted the Dorms and marched between cricket pitches. Play stopped so girls of all houses could make unkind comments. After the Great Game, a licence to pick on the Remove was accepted. Amy suspected it would soon expire. Not a few of her classmates were the sort it was unwise to irritate. Nuisances were liable to be singed, frozen or foot-boxed. A lass brave enough to jeer at ‘flukes’ from fifty feet away in broad daylight might be more respectful if she found a snarling Aconita Gould at the end of her bed in the middle of a night of the full moon.

  Early last year, during a school-wide crisis, the Remove had shown what they were capable of if they worked together. A year was an age in school life. So much had happened since the Reign of the Ant-Queen and the Dance of the Runnel and the Flute that even Amy sometimes recalled that winter term as a purplish dream. Other worries plagued her now.

  North of the playing fields, beyond a thicket of uncoppiced trees, grassland gently sloped to the crumbling cliff edge. An outcrop once called Suicide Rock had been renamed Lamarcroft’s Leap when the former Captain of the Remove executed a high dive from it to erase the spot’s bad reputation. A notice prohibiting imitative feats stood in Lungs’ honour.

  Long grass was dotted here and there with blue and red wild flowers. Good moth country, though Amy had rarely explored this part of the grounds. Crossing the meadow, she wondered whether the shadow of Windward Cottage had put her off. She certainly didn’t like the look of Sir Wilf’s folly.

  ‘Come on, leadfoot,’ said Light Fingers. ‘Race you there.’

  Amy knew better than to take that bet.

  Devlin strode through the grass. She literally stretched her legs – and her spine – till she was a head and a half taller than most of the girls wading after her. Paquignet stopped to coo at particular flowers, but Speke clacked crustacean fingers by her ears to remind her to keep walking. Little left crushed footprints wherever she trod.

  Harper trailed along with Palgraive, the only girl she couldn’t feed off. Palgraive’s pep was long since spent and her puppeteer worm beyond Shrimp’s draining. Even among Unusuals, they were flukes.

  Here was Windward Cottage, the cage Cap’n Belzybub made for his faithless songbird.

  When Sir Wilfrid, an ancient crock of thirty-seven, pitched unwelcome woo at her, Johanna Pike was barely older than Amy was now. No wonder she preferred her harp-plucking beardless bard. In those days, unmarried girls the age of Fifths or Sixths were written off as old maids.

  Windward Cottage was what a grown-up would imagine a child would like. A life-and-a-quarter-sized wendy house. Big oval windows looked to sea, so the Cap’n’s pining bride could scan the horizon for sight of his sails. The pretend home was spruced up – by Joxer, presumably – in anticipation of the Remove’s arrival. The Keep Out signs were taken down. A path mown into the grass led to the front steps. The oversized door was freshly painted bright, inevitable purple.

  The house was familiar. Part of the scenery.

  But the last time Amy had seen the cottage wasn’t at Drearcliff.

  The ship-silhouette weathervane was fixed to the tallest chimney. Amy recognised it. The doll’s house in the cellar of Villa DeVille was a miniature Windward Cottage. Exact in every detail.

  Frecks, bringing up the rear, pushed past Amy and caught her hand, then dragged her towards the Remove’s new classroom.

  ‘Feet on the ground, old thing,’ she said.

  Without meaning to, Amy had floated off the grass. Frecks now tugged her like an errant balloon.

  Stepping down to the ground, she let herself be drawn alon
g the path towards the purple door.

  ‘It doesn’t look so bad,’ said Frecks.

  ‘Death traps never do,’ said Amy. ‘That’s the point.’

  Frecks gave her a cheer-up-you-clot squeeze. Over her friend’s shoulder, Amy saw Larry – waist-deep in grass – giving her the voodoo stare, hands clamped over her middle as if she had a tummy ache.

  ‘It can’t be haunted,’ said Frecks. ‘No one has ever lived here.’

  Amy would need to see a thorough report from the Hypatia Hall Psychical Investigation Soc before accepting that. Even then, with the Remove in the house – even if not overnight – several candidates for resident ghost would come forward. De’Ath might already have picked out the corners where she’d hang crochet cobwebs. If there was a cellar, there’d be a nice niche for Harper’s dirt-filled casket.

  Amy went with Frecks, towards the now-open door.

  Five neat wooden steps led up from the path.

  Most of the others were already inside.

  Little had to scrunch and sidle to get into the house, and even then needed some help. Little often pulled off doorknobs and got stuck inside rooms – which set her off on crying fits, since she had an understandable funk about close spaces. Speke, sanguine about her own oddity, looked out for the huge First, deftly negotiating fiddly tasks for her. Speke was one of the Remove’s better eggs.

  Once Little was inside, Amy set foot on the steps.

  Light Fingers poked her head out of the cottage, quivering. Standing still, she shook with excitement and flickered. If she vibrated fast enough, you could see wallpaper through her blur.

  ‘Hurry up, slowcoaches,’ said Light Fingers. ‘Kali’s defending our square!’

  IV: Old Girl, New Miss

  INSIDE, WINDWARD COTTAGE was mostly one big, airy room. Those porthole windows let in a lot of light. Chairs stacked against the back wall were the right size for Gillian Little, but too tall and thick for other girls. Doll’s house furniture, Amy realised. The kitchen probably had a wooden play stove and a bin full of plaster loaves. Was there even a privy? Squire Teazle seemed to think women were indistinguishable from porcelain milkmaids.

  Devlin was disposed to picture pirates as dashing Doug Fairbanks types, but Amy suspected Cap’n Belzybub was more like the gruesome boobies Mother brought home and introduced as uncles. A portrait of Sir Wilfrid posed in his red devil costume covered most of a wall. He stood on a foredeck, candles burning on his hat, cutlass in one hand, pistol in the other. By his side, Johanna was dressed as a curvy cabin boy. Their huge heads topped tiny bodies – reminding Amy nastily of toby jugs. No doubt Jo’s saucy costume was the Cap’n’s idea. The wench wasn’t happy en travestie.

  Ordinary school desks were set out in four rows of five. Amy knew the torture devices all too well. A lidded oak escritoire (with blackened hole for inkwell) bolted to an iron frame. A plank polished by generations of restless bottoms served as seat. Their chief virtue was indestructibility. Manufactured in the era of the Great Exhibition and Wackford Squeers, the desks would still be in use when lessons were taught by tickertape and pupils came to school by monorail.

  Drearcliff Grange tradition was to sit in houses, with alphabetical order within that grouping. The system was suspended in the Remove, which instead operated the principle of gold rush. Girls scrambled to stake favoured spots. Shunned spaces were left for those inclined – or encouraged – to keep their own company. Disputes were settled by whoever sat down first gripping her preferred desk with both hands and hissing.

  Kali had bagsied a back corner for the Moth Club, fending off claim-jumpers with designs on this desirable region. Beyond the beak’s sight line, it was perfect note-passing country. Opportunities for huddling and giggling were unlimited. Amy slid behind her desk. She had Frecks to the right, Light Fingers behind, and Kali over her right shoulder. A Moth Club square. In the Conservatory, Laurence positioned herself in front, semi-permanently turned in her seat, paying more attention to Frecks than Miss Gossage. Larry ostentatiously took a desk on the other side of the room – in front of Bok, of course.

  Dyall – at Larry’s prompting, Amy suspected – made a slow beeline for the desk on Amy’s left-hand side. Mercifully, Bizou De’Ath got there first, not to be beside Amy but to secure an unimpeded view over Knowles’ shoulder, an ideal position for a girl more inclined to copy another’s work than do her own. To be polite, Amy nodded at her new neighbour, who ignored the gesture and concentrated on scratching a pentagram into her desk lid with a nail file. Amy’s Talent troubled the would-be weird sister. De’Ath felt Abilities should be bestowed upon those who performed the proper arcane rituals, not allotted randomly at birth like hair colour or complexion. As it happened, she was unhappy with her lot in those departments too.

  Speke and Little sat together at the front, eager for a teacher’s benison. In a droller moment, the Sausage observed ‘Little says little, but Speke speaks for ’em both.’ When a question was asked, Speke’s hand went up – all eight fingers wiggling and chittering. If she didn’t know the answer, she’d take a hopeful stab. She once ventured that Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ was ‘probably a beautiful woman who never says “thank you”’. Asked a direct question, Little would blush crimson and whisper in her friend’s ear. Miss Gossage set the chestnut about the single question which will identify the twin who always tells the truth and the twin who always lies. After Little whispered to her, Speke reported, ‘Little would thump them both and ask “Who wants another poke in the nose?” The lying twin will be the one who says “me, please!” The truth-teller will be the one who says “no, thank you”.’ The Remove agreed the Alexandrine solution made as much sense as the one in the back of the book. That put such a smile on the Little Girl’s face the Sausage hadn’t the heart to overrule the consensus.

  Paquignet, Palgraive and Dyall occupied the other front row desks. Dyall couldn’t confuse Palgraive’s worm. Amy had a moment of concern for Laurence, sat directly behind Poppet. A glance across the room – greeted by the voodoo stare – quashed her worry. Larry seemed to have invisible armour plating. If immune to Dyall, she might be proof against every Unusual in the room. After all, she could strip a girl of her Talent. Did she wonder whether Amy had shared her secret? She hadn’t – yet.

  Along with Kali and Light Fingers, the back row – popularly known as ‘the Animal Kingdom’ – was home to Gould and Marsh. Harper was at a far corner, urged with menaces to shuffle her desk out of formation.

  ‘I think you’re all horrid,’ said Shrimp as her desk scraped floorboards.

  ‘Further back, Remora Girl,’ said Marsh.

  Shrimp’s desk bumped against the wall.

  Marsh and Gould exchanged looks and shrugged.

  ‘That’ll have to do,’ said Gould, drawing four sharp fingernails across her varnished desk lid. ‘But if you so much as sniff, I’ll take it out in patches of your hide.’

  ‘Lovely, I don’t think,’ said Shrimp.

  ‘And don’t go battening on Bok,’ said Marsh. ‘She’s Goneril, like us.’

  Bok, hearing her name, paid attention. Gould made a potato-fist sign that Amy recognised as a secret Goneril salute. Bok reluctantly returned the favour.

  ‘You’ll all be sorry,’ said Harper. She was Tamora, but couldn’t expect support from Thorn, the Remove’s only other specimen of that fierce house.

  Gould growled at the Shrimp, and she stopped whining.

  Thorn and Frost sat together in the second row, evening the temperature between them. Equally inevitably, the desks next to them were taken by Devlin and Knowles. All the pals acts sat together, in twos and fours. Light took in the only remaining spot – next to De’Ath. Amy suspected this was what the sorceress and the vamp preferred. Their enmity was as clubbish as the exclusive friendships of Thorn and Frost or Marsh and Gould. Hot and cold, fish and game, light and dark. Some opposites couldn’t be kept apart.

  The clatter and screech ended. The Remove had arranged t
hemselves.

  All eyes looked to the front. Where there should be a teacher.

  Miss Tasker was tardy. Which was out of character. Her habit was to be early at her desk to watch girls file in sheepishly.

  Other teachers let their audience settle, waited for the rustle of programmes to die down… then made a dramatic entrance. Miss Borrodale once began a lesson on propulsion by shooting an arrow through an open window into a target chalked on the blackboard. The nick in the slate was still there.

  The Remove sat quietly for all of a minute.

  Devlin stuck her neck out. Her head revolved like a lamp in a lighthouse. That put painful creases in her throat.

  ‘Nope, no beak on the horizon,’ she said. ‘Though a new shipmate hoves into view.’

  One of Stretch’s more alarming party pieces was pointing by semi-popping her eyes, which swelled like eggs on the point of hatching. She aimed her egg-eye glance at the wall, between two big portholes, and everyone swivelled in their seats.

  A girl stood there. Slight, slim, dark-haired. Her face was in shadow.

  If she’d been there all along, no one had noticed. If she’d come into the room after the girls, no one had noticed that either. Which was a party piece in itself. Though titchy – as short as Shrimp Harper or Larry Laurence – she shouldn’t have been able to slip past the huntress eyes (and nose) of Aconita Gould. Was her Ability fading into the woodwork?

  Amy thought the undersized newcomer might be a Third. She wore skirt and blazer, but instead of the mandatory tie and house pin, she sported a gauzy red foulard and a white-gold cameo. The brooch showed a Victorian woman in profile, with piled-up hair.

  ‘Egads, multiple uniform infractions,’ said Speke, clacking. ‘Better get a neck-rag on, chum-ess… before Miss shows up.’