The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

by Kim Newman

  Light Fingers held up the envelope. ‘Recognise it?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s… one of those,’ said Amy. ‘A real one.’

  Light Fingers turned it over. ‘Knowles, Charlotte,’ she read aloud.

  The card was still inside.

  Again, the Moth Club craned to read.

  Your father makes plans to murder you.

  She can’t feel anything. ‘Knowles’ first secret is my second,’ said Kali.

  ‘Unless this is snide too.’

  Light Fingers held the card under her nose as if sniffing a cigar.

  ‘It’s authentic. Right card, right handwriting, right ink.’

  Amy wondered who couldn’t feel anything. Palgraive, possibly?

  ‘How come the Gawk gave it over?’ said Kali.

  ‘She’ll have been paid at both ends,’ said Light Fingers. ‘In for a halfpenny, in for another halfpenny.’

  ‘Something’s written on the other side,’ said Frecks.

  Light Fingers turned the card over.

  ‘Come to the Library Annexe – Miss Memory.’

  ‘We’ve been summoned,’ said Frecks.

  VIII: The Archivist in the Annexe

  THE LIBRARY ANNEXE was behind the Library Proper. The stout-walled building used to be the estate’s ice house. Cap’n Belzybub used the gothic shed to stash contraband rum, gunpowder and abducted barmaids. According to Devlin, his rakehell notion of a weekend lark involved a combustive mix of strong drink, high explosives and a village spitfire. The escape attempts of many a prize baggage must have been thwarted by the arrow-slit windows, especially if the tavern wenches of the 1760s at all resembled the barmaids of today.

  The path to the Annexe was overgrown. Joxer didn’t roll his grass-mower this way often.

  ‘This could be a trap,’ said Amy, hating herself – and, because her waveriness was his fault, A.H. Wax – for being over cautious.

  ‘Don’t see how,’ said Frecks. ‘Unless Miss Memory’s going to drop a hundredweight of old sermons on us – and you could toss them aside with your mentawhatchumacallits…’

  ‘…cles,’ said Light Fingers. ‘…cles.’

  ‘Yes, them fellers,’ said Frecks.

  Amy sensed vague, formless menace.

  Kali stretched and yawned. Not from fatigue, but to look around without being obvious. Least Unusual of the Moth Club, she had the best instincts and reflexes.

  ‘I spot her too,’ said Kali, not whispering obviously but low enough for only Amy to hear. ‘We’ve got a tail. Lonesome Larry.’

  Amy hadn’t seen Laurence before and didn’t now.

  ‘Young Larry,’ piped up Frecks, loud enough to be heard back on the Quad. ‘Isn’t she off mooning around Bok, poor thing?’

  Now Amy spied a small figure withdrawing hastily behind a bush.

  It was possible to feel a voodoo stare through shrubbery. Amy’s hackles rose, she was sure Larry’s peepers were fixed on a point between her shoulder blades where a dagger would do the most damage.

  ‘She shadows us off and on,’ said Light Fingers. ‘I reckon she hopes to overhear our secrets. I wonder what hers is.’

  ‘“She has cause to hurt you all”?’ said Kali, quoting Frecks’ second secret.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ said Amy, bristling – though more shocked that Kali agreed with her unspoken suspicion. ‘It’s only me she has anything against.’

  ‘And me,’ said Frecks. ‘My own foolish fault, as you kindly pointed out, Emma.’

  Light Fingers shrugged. She’d always been impatient with Larry.

  ‘This is a distraction,’ she said. ‘And the limpet’s pushed off now.’

  Amy wasn’t sure of that. She still had a frisson. There were plenty of bushes and shadows in this part of the grounds. Dr Swan put things here she wanted buried.

  The Annexe held books relegated from the Library Proper for the sin of being ‘pre-war’. Dr Ailsa Auchmuty, the librarian, was a modernising fiend. Some beaks got het up when prep-dodgers reported half the reading list was no longer available to girls without an Annexe pass. Mark Robarts’ A Counterblast to Agnosticism and Dr Graeme Ruxton’s Fairy Sprinkles and Monthly Matters: Hygiene for Young Ladies had been taught at Drearcliff Grange since Founding Day. To Doc Och’s way of thinking, that was reason enough to drop them from the curriculum and into a ditch.

  The Annexe collection also purportedly included material too racy for delicate sensibilities. Bizou De’Ath talked of eldritch grimoires and tomes of wicked summoning. Everyone else imagined stacks of confiscated smut.

  Charlotte Knowles was custodian of this literary abyss. Dr Auchmuty trusted Miss Memory to oversee the Annexe while she patrolled her airy, neat, modern library, where all information was bang up to date and every book had numbers neatly stamped on its spine. It was in Knowles’ gift to admit girls to the Annexe, though she kept a meticulous log of whose twitching nose poked into which forbidden books.

  Amy had visited before, hoping to turn up moth-related rarities. However, the Annexe’s entomology section consisted of a row of slim, yellow-backed copies of Formis by Professor R.R. Rayne. A year after the sudden end of its vogue, that tract – not pre-war, but pre-posterous – had few remaining admirers at Drearcliff Grange.

  The Moth Club approached the squat, grim building.

  Kali boldly strode up and rapped on the heavy door.

  Instinctively, Amy started fiddling with the tumblers of the lock.

  She had neglected to practise this since the Great Game.

  The door was wrenched open before she could work her party piece.

  Knowles stood there – hair awry, eyes pink, temples scratched. Her face suffered from bulginess, as if her brain were swollen to twice normal size, warping her skull plates.

  Miss Memory was still suffering from her overdose of Poppet Dyall.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ she said, fussing like a bowed old woman, hauling the door open. It scraped the stone floor and stuck halfway, but the Moth Club sidled round it.

  Amy was last in. She looked back at the shrub and didn’t see Larry.

  The girl’s persistent, determined presence was perturbing. Her resentment went beyond thwarted crush. Amy realised, with regret, she had made a stubborn enemy of Venetia Laurence. Another potential arch-nemesis. She was collecting them. Did all great enmities begin with a small wound – ‘Oh, Larry, what have you done?’ – which could never heal? It was hard to imagine Achmet the Almost Human first vowing to devastate European civilisation because he was snubbed at a May Ball or refused service in a newsagent’s – but maybe something in his past festered, something as unintentionally devastating as the casual comment that twisted Larry’s insides. Sidonie Gryce was a witch from the cradle, though. Amy had no doubts about that.

  The Annexe was a cramped labyrinth of bookcases – volumes stacked two deep, with items of inconvenient size shoved in to fill horizontal gaps. Anyone who wanted to take a particular book from the jammed shelves would need a chisel and some tongs. Spongy bundles of periodicals barricaded fields of obsolete learning. This was a repository for things fallen into disuse but too old or expensive to put out for the dust cart. An ornate globe with terra incognita blanks representing unexplored continental interiors. Trays of photographic slides that wouldn’t slot into modern projectors.

  Knowles ushered the Moth Club into an octagonal room where she was set up with a good-sized desk – balanced on three of its original legs and seventeen volumes of Billson’s A History of the Low Countries. Amy sat down on nothing – a trick adapted from Stephen Swift – but the Annexe was so gloomy nobody noticed. Miss Memory had electric lamps to read by. They were on a generator not the mains, so light wavered unnervingly. There was a persistent smell of burning dust.

  ‘What fun,’ said Knowles. ‘It’s like being in an air raid. I enjoyed air raids. Mama sang lieder and gave me cherries glacées for being brave. Papa fulminated against the Hun. He’s highly patriotic, you know, Papa. Foreigners i
n his mysteries are always baddies, even if they aren’t the murderer. During the War, he wrote leaflets which Mama translated into German. The RFC dropped them over enemy lines. He made up far-fetched fancies that silly fritzes bought book, lie and stinker. One was a genealogy pamphlet by Prof Sigismund von Doppelganger, proving the Kaiser was actually a Dutchwoman with a false moustache. Another was a set of “secret” instructions to Hussar officers about how to impress High Command and win lots of medals by sustaining the most casualties among their men. That wasn’t distributed because the British and French generals in charge of propaganda thought Papa was getting at them. How foolish! Papa was ever so cross. Ever so ever so.’

  Knowles was in a dizzy tizzy. That was what Poppet had done to her.

  ‘Now what was it I wanted to talk with you about?’ she said.

  Frecks gave her back her card.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘Secrets.’

  ‘Your father plans to murder you?’ asked Amy, concerned.

  ‘Your first is my second secret,’ said Kali. ‘But I’m not the frail who can’t feel anything.’

  ‘No, that’s Stretch,’ said Knowles. ‘Ever since – well, that house, you know the one, Thomsett, in Piccadilly, where the – um, the thing – happened, she’s been numb. Pliable as ever, but losing sensation in her skin. Can’t feel hot or cold. Doesn’t notice pins.’

  Kali whistled. ‘She can’t be hurt? That’s some handy Ability!’

  Knowles shook her head, whipping her cheeks with her bangs.

  ‘Uh, ah, no… there are drawbacks. She can’t feel the pins going in, but she bleeds all the same. Just because she can’t feel pain doesn’t mean she can’t be harmed. She could break an ankle or something – like poor, angry Bok – and do herself more of an injury by walking around on the break. Pain is the body’s way of sending messages to the brain. Keep your fingers out of the fire. Don’t put those scissors there. Not all feelings hurt, of course. There are nice feelings too. Feelings you’d miss if you couldn’t have them. I’m worried about her. Very worried. I’m worried about me, too. I expect you’ve noticed. I lose my train sometimes. The choo-choo chuffs off out of the station and – whoops, silly me! – I’m not on it. For instance… what did you ask me, Thomsett?’

  Amy had lost track too.

  Then remembered. ‘Your father—’

  ‘—plans to murder me? Yes. Often. All the time. In ingenious ways. He’d never get caught. There aren’t any really clever detectives any more.’

  Light Fingers solved it. ‘In his books,’ she said. ‘Your father thinks up murders for his books. The Body in the Belfry, The Head in the Hat-Box, The Corpse in the Coal Hole…’

  Knowles nodded vigorously.

  Carleton Knowles, a university lecturer, wrote murder mysteries as a hobby – though Amy suspected the sideline raked it in, topping up the stipend that came with the chair in classics at Brichester. Improbably for the father of Miss Memory, Professor Knowles pooh-poohed the notion of Talents and Abilities. Murderers in his books were never Unusuals.

  In The Novice in the Niche, the anchorite strangled inside a walled-in cell was not throttled by someone with mentacles. The author abided by strict rules. Hocus-pocus was as unfair to the reader as having a victim turn out to have killed themselves or died by accident. It needed three chapters on Catholic doctrine for eccentric detective Guilbert Phatt to rule out suicide. In the last chapter, Phatt proved the bricked-up Sister Carlotta was killed by rosary beads strung on a wet leather thong that shrank round her neck on a hot day. Amy was sure that wouldn’t work, just as she was sure a murderously inclined person with Abilities like hers – Stephen Swift for instance – could nix the nun in a trice. It was obvious from the first page that the most helpful, learned, handsome monk did it. Several nasty, dried-up, sniping elder brethren were obvious red herrings. In Carleton Knowles’ books, the most helpful, learned, handsome suspect always did it… just as it was always a woman who had it done to her.

  Professor Knowles – whose books she and Light Fingers scorned and picked holes in, but read avidly – had changed his spots. In Guilbert Phatt’s early outings, the victims were mature, attractive, amusing women. In The Body in the Belfry, the helpful, learned, handsome dentist/campanologist killed his mature, attractive, amusing wife by ringing a bell at a particular frequency that cracked the cyanide-filled false molar he’d glued in her gob.

  Five books ago, with The Corpse in the Coal Hole, the murderee was suddenly a fresh type. A clever, pretty, infuriating schoolgirl. The murderer was the same old helpful, learned, handsome fellow. Subsequent victims all fit the clever, pretty, infuriating girl model.

  ‘He used to murder Mama,’ admitted Knowles. ‘She was like us – at least, like you and me, Thomsett, and Naisbitt too – an Unusual. Not with Attributes, but Abilities. If she heard a language, she understood it. All it took was “Ou se trouve le plume de ma tante?” and she could read Diderot in the original. Like my cramming, it didn’t last. She’d be fluent for a week, then it’d fade.’

  That sounded like a Talent with Applications.

  ‘Mama wasn’t a dunce like me. Even when not dosed up with Japanese or Swahili, she was bright and clever. Papa’s friends said she was too interesting to be married to a stick like him, though they are to a man stickier sticks than he ever was. Classicists take his boring book about the Comedies of Eubulus seriously but sneer at him for sullying his first-class mind with “shilling shockers”. Papa disapproved of Mama’s Talent. No matter how often it was proved, he claimed it was a parlour trick. If real, it was cheating. It rankled that he had to spend years struggling to translate fragments of cuneiform, while she overheard a Neapolitan fishwife cursing her Giuseppi and could suddenly talk nineteen to the dozen in a whole new language. I expect that’s why he murdered her—’

  ‘I knew it,’ said Frecks.

  ‘—in his books. Over and over. She thought it funny, at first. After six or seven murders, she brought it up in conversation. He had a queer turn and got offended, then said his characters were imaginary and not important anyway. Readers only pay attention to the puzzles. That’s the artistry. He kept murdering her and she stopped reading the books. Sometimes, when people were chuckling about the new Guilbert Phatt, she’d ask me about the latest victim, then not listen when I told her. After she died – a brain aneurysm, which is something we have to worry about, Unusuals with mental Talents, because it’s a common complaint among us – Papa stopped murdering her… and started murdering me. I’ve been chopped up in a coal bin… drowned in a desert… stabbed in the arras… fed to beetles.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ asked Frecks.

  ‘Well… yes. Wouldn’t you? Like Mama, I tried bringing it up and…’

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Light Fingers. ‘The characters are imaginary and not important anyway.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You don’t think he’d ever… you know, try any of his plots in real life?’ asked Amy.

  ‘Why ever would he do that? What an odd thing to say!’

  ‘It must mean something,’ said Light Fingers. ‘Even if he doesn’t know he’s doing it.’

  ‘It’s just Papa being Papa. Mama used to say that all the time. In languages he didn’t understand. One thing he was terribly good at was catching her. Amusing, but sly. Teasing dry old sticks with such cunning they had to smile and put up with it. I re-read those books up to the chapters where Mama is murdered, to remind myself of her. When she said something funny to you that only you understood, it was flattering. She turned heads. Especially the heads of dry old sticks, I can tell you. The meaner a classicist is about Papa’s “shilling shockers”, the harder you knew he’d been knocked back by Mama. Papa’s not nearly as good at catching me.’

  Amy didn’t think that was true. Sister Carlotta was Knowles to the life – well, to the rosary-throttled corpse. Talking knowledgeably about everything under the sun, with interjections, digressions and footnotes. The novice chose being bricke
d up over a vow of silence she knew she’d break inside two minutes. It struck Amy that Carleton Knowles murdering his wife over and over – and now his daughter – might honestly be an expression of tender feeling.

  She didn’t understand how the Professor ticked, but there was something sweet and sad about him – at least, about the part of him he showed in his mysteries. Maybe that was why Amy stuck with Guilbert Phatt after nineteen disappointing last chapter explanations. Light Fingers was more interested in the guessing game. While they were reading the latest, passing a copy back and forth between chapters, Light Fingers was always trying to out-think Phatt and see how the murder was managed before he tumbled to the trick. Amy preferred the odd, funny, sort of pompous/sort of melancholy bits and bobs between the grinding plot gears. Often, they made her titter in a way she couldn’t explain to her friend.

  So Knowles’ secret was out and explained.

  Amy wondered if Miss Kratides wanted each girl just to identify the classmate who matched up to her second secret – or would she quiz more deeply? Was this just a guessing game? Or were the other things important. Carleton Knowles didn’t care about motive – he was as evasive about why his murderers murdered as he was about whether his characters were drawn from life – but Miss Kratides might.

  On Knowles’ desk were bound volumes of the Police Gazette, the Strand Magazine and the Newgate Calendar. And other sensational literature: Famous Edinburgh Trials. The Life and Actions of Jonathan Wild. The Memoirs of Vidocq. The Many Faces of Colonel Clay. She was always more interested in true stories than made-up crimes.

  ‘My mother’s name was Frances Hall,’ Knowles said. ‘When I write books, I shall call myself “Charlotte Knowes-Hall”. It was Halle, originally, but her family changed it in the War, just like the King.’

  The post-Poppet Knowles was a different creature. She retained more of what she crammed into her head, and coughed up titbits once wiped off her blackboard which now popped up again. All the facts, learned and unearned, were shoving Knowles’ essential self into a smaller and smaller space.