The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

by Kim Newman

  Though, if Miss Kratides was on the money, she should be.

  ‘Since Speke came to me, I’ve investigated the Broken Doll,’ said Knowles. ‘I have collected reports.’ Knowles tapped her swollen head. ‘The first mention is one of the earliest ghost stories of Drearcliff Grange. Older than the Bloody Bosun or Mauve Mary. Not even a proper story. Just a description. Of an Apparition. Two apparitions. A figure in a long dress. A grown woman with a doll’s face – cracked across. Sometimes, she’s limping. Sometimes, she’s missing an arm. She carries a doll herself, but a doll with a living child’s face. The child’s mouth is open as if screaming. But these are silent spectres. Visitors to the Grange saw them if they opened a wrong door. Always, behind the door was an abandoned playroom…’

  That detail chilled Amy.

  ‘But it wasn’t always the same door. It could be a cupboard or a stable door as easily as a bedroom or a cellar door. From descriptions, it was always the same playroom. Full of broken toys for the Broken Doll. The woman with the dead doll’s face and the doll with the living child’s face. Folk who saw that didn’t forget it easily. The local versions of the story you hear from old wives in cottages or rambling gents on the beach often end with the ghost-seeing visitor dying before the month is out… or, worse, their children dying and becoming playthings for the Broken Doll. I’ve gone over the records and that part’s not true. Three diarists and one vicar left accounts of the haunting, over a period of 150 years. All lived to ripe old ages afterwards, and none had any problems with their children. Except the vicar, whose daughter dressed up as a boy and joined the army. She came home in the end. With a medal. Ghosts get blamed even for things that didn’t happen. It’s human nature to make sense of a manifestation by making up a story to go around it. Even an unhappy ending is an ending.’

  ‘Our folder on the Broken Doll is in the Haunting File,’ said Devlin. ‘No Hoax detected. Since she’d not showed her face in over a hundred years, she wasn’t exactly a pressing concern. Not like Mauve Mary or Eyeless Egbert.’

  ‘Some ghosts have lifespans after life,’ said Knowles. ‘They linger a while, then fade. Like an echo dying. There are theories… but you don’t need to know all that. We’ll put it in the footnotes. That Broken Doll – for the want of more evidence, let’s call her the original – retired even before Squire Teazle’s day. Others have claimed the name. In the 1860s, Bath and Bristol were plagued by a Broken Doll Gang. Little girls waved sad, smashed-face dolls under the noses of decent folk as a distraction while other children lifted wallets and watches. These weren’t urchins, but well-dressed, well-spoken, well-off brats. A few got arrested but juries let them off for being polite little rotters. Speculation was that a dismissed governess was behind the racket. Adults didn’t want to admit that the kids might have come up with the game on their own. They should have asked children what children were like. As we know, the dullest Dims can sparkle with ingenuity when devising larceny or torment. The Broken Doll Gang may have startled the burghers of Bath, but I’d bet they’d not last two days at this school. The whips would have them.’

  ‘There’s a song called “A Broken Doll”,’ said Kali. ‘Jolson sang it.’

  Knowles nodded. ‘Yes, and Stretch found a storybook by Uncle Satt, The Beeswax of the Broken Doll.’

  Devlin nodded. ‘My Auntie Ruth was given it when she was a little girl – as a prize for eating all her greens during the Golden Jubilee. The verses are piffle but the illustrations are lovely.’

  ‘The artist might have heard the Drearcliff Grange Broken Doll story,’ said Knowles. ‘One of his pictures shows a big doll and a small child.’

  ‘Auntie was so frightened by that picture she gummed two pages together so she wouldn’t have to look at it. The glue got old and I used a breadknife to uncover the dread sight.’

  Devlin pulled a face – big eyes, stiff cheeks – for a moment.

  Little jumped and was upset. Speke calmed her down with a smoothing pat on the back. Little wasn’t disturbed by her friend’s hands. That made Amy determined not to be either.

  ‘Other broken dolls might be Chinese whispers versions of ours, or might be fresh manifestations of a many-faced entity,’ said Knowles. ‘Thomas Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, dealt with an entity in the shape of a Broken Russian Doll. You know, those babushkas with smaller and smaller wooden dolls inside. Each smaller doll was more deformed. In the centre was a writhing centipede with the head of a miniature human baby. That’s supposed to be in the Mausoleum now, where they keep all the cursed objects, captured entities and convicted Wrong ’Uns.’

  The Undertaking was in charge of the Mausoleum. They served as a combination of prison warders and museum guards. Their involvement in the Great Game was one of their minor functions.

  ‘Oh,’ put in Stretch, ‘there are lots and lots of yarns about mud dolls made by witch doctors. When broken or burned, the people they are supposed to represent snap their necks or melt like waxworks left near the fire.’

  Devlin couldn’t mention a snapped neck without unconsciously kinking her own at a terrible angle and poking out her tongue. It was a funny habit, but not at all amusing. The face she pulled when she mentioned melted wax figures was so disturbing Speke clapped her hands over Little’s eyes.

  Amy didn’t know if any of these stories related to her Broken Doll.

  ‘Why have you dug this up?’ Amy asked.

  ‘Not because of your secret,’ Knowles admitted. ‘Because of what happened to Speke and Little. Which is why I’ve roped them in. Amy, I think you’ll need to hear this. The rest of you too. Harriet, if you’ll do the honours…’

  X: What Happened to Jimmy Wood

  ‘I DON’T KNOW IF you’ve noticed,’ said Harriet Speke, ‘but my hands are funny. Peculiar, not ha ha. Here, look at ’em. I’ve more fingers than you and in different places. The skin is hard and rough, like seashell or painted muslin. You could strike a match on it. Hold the flame to my palm and I feel only a tickle. People say my hands look a bit like crabs.’

  ‘You can touch them,’ said Little. ‘She doesn’t mind.’

  ‘I really don’t. They’re not special. Just different. When I was Removed, Miss Gossage told me about Unusuals and Talents and Abilities and what not. It took me ages to twig she wasn’t talking about the rest of the class. She meant me. It still doesn’t feel right. On one hand – ahem! – I’m different and a tidge strange, but we all are, aren’t we? Like Gillian being bigger than most other Firsts—’

  ‘Than any other Firsts.’

  ‘Or you lot, with your floating and stretching and whooshing and so forth. When you think about it, all girls are different and a tidge strange. We wear the same boaters and skirts but that doesn’t make us all the same. I have crabby hands. Williams has that white patch in her black hair. If a beak chalks a complicated sum on the blackboard, Toulmin can write down the answer without jottings or crossings-out before the rest of the class have sharpened their pencils. If my hands are weird, so’s her face. Being in the Remove is a wheeze. The lessons are livelier than the babyish subjects I have as a Viola Second. But I don’t see I’m that unusual. Patch Williams hasn’t been Removed. See my point? You’ve got Abilities. I’ve only got Attributes. Gillian’s not the same, because she’s big and strong. As soon as my hands changed, I was booted from my old class and sent to Miss Gossage.

  ‘I wasn’t crabby until last year. I was born with “doll’s hands”. There’s a Latin name for it. Dad got splashed with chemicals before he was married. Which might have something to do with it. He does secret work for the Department of Supplies. To do with germs and gases. Anyway, they were unbendy lumps. My baby hands. I know that’s an odd expression – I mean it like baby teeth. I had the usual number of fingers, but stuck together like mittens. I could wiggle my thumbs a tiny bit. Generally, not much use.

  ‘Last summer hols, my hands swelled as if I’d been bitten by wasps. My fingers fell off, one by one. I have them in a cigar box. There’s n
o Finger Fairy to reward little girls like me. I’d ask half a crown for a finger. Gum leaked from the stumps and wrapped my hands in a jelly that set hard. The colour of Pears soap. For a week, my hands were like toffee apples. They itched but I couldn’t scratch. No fingers, no fingernails. Then the crust turned brittle and flaked away from these lovelies.’

  Speke held up her hands, and clacked all her fingers.

  ‘After years of holding a beaker between my paws and dipping my head just to have a sip of milk, it’s a relief to do things everyone else can. Fasten buttons, use a pencil, tie a shoelace. I don’t care how it looks. When I pitched up for Autumn Term, Mademoiselle ’Obbs took one glim at my hands and had me Removed. I was pulled out of my cell and sent to the Green Room—’

  ‘Where she met me!’

  ‘Yes, where I met Gillian. Goneril didn’t even try to find her a cell. First Year cots aren’t her size. Sixth Year cots aren’t either. Do you know the Green Room? It’s off the Music Room in the Main Building. Third floor. Low ceiling this one keeps bumping her head on. Before me and Gillian moved in, it was a storeroom for old instruments and sheet music. It was the only place the school could spare for us. A normal cot for me and a reinforced bed for Gert Gertie.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. It wasn’t my cellmates who chucked me out. Williams, Wheele and Ring are stout fellows all. They were kind to me when I couldn’t twist a doorknob. They are almost as kind now I can open anything, even if it’s locked. Almost. Dad wrote School a letter about what my hands get up to at night and Dr Swan decided to put me in the Green Room. I wish he hadn’t made a fuss but see why he did. I’m happy to muck in with Gillian.’

  ‘We have many larks.’

  ‘Yes, Gillian. We do.’

  ‘When my new hands appeared, the doctors came back and prodded me a bit. Does anyone like doctors? I’d rather have a once-over and some salts from Nurse Humph than be prodded and have a syndrome named after me in Latin. It wasn’t just the outsides of my hands that changed. I got the impression doctors wanted to peel the shells and poke about inside to see what’s what. Dad sent them packing. Miss Borrodale says a cove called Othniel Marsh put about the funny idea that dinosaurs had extra brains in their bottoms and knees. Fancy that! Bums with minds of their own! There’s a theory that I have brain tissue – not brains, but brain tissue – in my hands. It doesn’t go to sleep when I do. You’ve heard of wandering hands? Well, I have two of the beasts. At home, I woke up a few times to find my hands had decided to crawl out of my bedroom. I was being dragged over the landing carpet. Once, I was bumped downstairs. I don’t know what they want – what the brain tissue wants, rather – and I don’t think they do either. They aren’t clever, just alive. They’re like cats or dogs… They want to wander, get the lie of the land, leave scratch marks.

  ‘I read a big book about crustaceans, but it wasn’t much use. I’ve not woken up in a rock pool yet. My hands aren’t crabs. They’re hands that look a bit like crabs. What they get up to when I’m asleep is another thing. Dad tried tying bags over my hands at night – but they got shredded. Then tied me to the bedposts but – guess what? – one thing my hands do perfectly well on their own is untie knots. My littlest fingers have sharp, knify sorts of nails. I have to be careful not to cut myself. Locking the bedroom door was a joke. My fingers can pick locks just like snap! I’ve learned to do that when I’m awake. The way I’ve learned to play the harpsichord. No sense in letting these clutchers have all the fun while I’m asleep and can’t join in. Eleven years of doll’s hands was enough for me.

  ‘Dad was worried I’d hurt myself… or my hands would break something dangerous. He keeps a laboratory at home and worried about me getting splashed with chemicals. He said I might end up with lobsters for feet or a winkle for a nose. That’s hardly likely but he’s a fusspot. He started sitting up to watch me fall asleep. He said he was fascinated by the way my hands crept over the counterpane and scuttled around on the end of my arms. If he didn’t put a stop to it, they’d drag me out of bed and into mischief. Once, he dozed off and woke up with my hands on his face, pulling his beard. I stayed asleep through it all and don’t remember anything about it.

  ‘Can you guess how Dad solved the problem with my wandering hands?’

  Shaken heads all round. Gillian Little grinned.

  ‘Simple,’ continued Speke. ‘He gave them something to play with. First, it was a knitted ragdoll – but my hands saw that as a lot of knots done up in a doll shape and undid them, letting the stuffing out. Then he took an old soldier toy out of a trunk of his own dad’s things. Carved from a single piece of wood. Sat on a little horse. With a musket and busby. Most of the paint gone. Dad says Jimmy Wood was in the Light Brigade when they charged. He looks like he’s been in the wars – ha ha, that’s funny. Grandad must have had big battles in his nursery. I’m sure Jimmy was once one of a set, but all his comrades were casualties. He’s a sole survivor. When Dad inherited his dad’s toys, he sent Jimmy on punitive expeditions against hostile tribes—

  ‘Sorry, Chattopadhyay – I didn’t think. I’m sure hostile tribes are very brave by their own lights.

  ‘Jimmy Wood got speared and burned a lot. Dad was interested in chemicals even as a lad and dripped acid on Jimmy’s tunic. Grandad was in the Royal North Surrey Regiment. Dad remembers him saying Jimmy was typical British Army. You could do all sorts of horrid things to him, but he’d report smartly for duty the next morning. It turned out that my hands couldn’t unpick him or shred him or pull him apart. The most they could do was scratch – and not very deeply. Old wood is like baked iron. With Jimmy on my pillow, my hands were busy – and I wasn’t dragged out of bed any more. So, a happy solution.

  ‘At School, this wouldn’t work. Besides all the rules about dollies and such – which that horrible Gryce explained when confiscating Cecily Wheele’s Sir Boris de Bruin last year – there’s the question of the scratching. No one could be expected to sleep with that to-do in the room.’

  ‘Except me.’

  ‘Yes. Except Gillian. She’s a sound sleeper.’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘So it’s been the Green Room for us. A Remove of our own. Not as cosy as a dorm cell and we keep tripping over musical instruments.’

  ‘She means I keep tripping over musical instruments.’

  ‘The Green Room isn’t warm either. We have to pile on extra blankets and it’s a long walk to the washroom but it’s a quiet place to do prep and I can nip next door and practise the harpsichord all I want. Even late in the evening. Because – whisper it! – we have no Lights Out. Flyte and Kite, the Viola Sixth whips, can’t be bothered to hike over to the Main Building to scold us. At night, we’ve the run of the place. Gillian, me, my hands… and Jimmy Wood. He’s been granted special dispensation. No dollies allowed at Drearcliff Grange, except veterans of the Crimean War. He’s been in the Green Room all year. One of his eyes got clawed away before Christmas, but it was only a paint blob and I fixed it with pencil. For two terms, things settled. Then, in the last two weeks, things unsettled. Someone new has come to school. She doesn’t like Jimmy Wood at all.’

  ‘The Broken Doll,’ said Little.

  ‘That’s what Gillian calls it.’

  ‘Her. I’ve seen her.’

  ‘So have I, but I’m getting ahead of the story.

  ‘At first, I thought my hands were wearing Jimmy down. His musket broke. I couldn’t find the barrel anywhere. If my hands had snapped it off, the bit’d be there, wouldn’t it? But it was gone. Spirited away. My hands don’t have mouths, so they couldn’t have eaten the thing. They couldn’t shove it in my mouth and make me swallow it without me noticing. We didn’t give it much thought. It must have rolled away somewhere, I said. Gillian agreed. Jimmy Wood looks wrong without half his musket, though. The stock is still there. Just the barrel and bayonet gone.’

  ‘His face changed. He’s angry and scared.’

  ‘I didn’t see that. He looks the same to me. But
Gillian may be right. She notices things. The next night, Jimmy’s horse’s head was off. Like it was chopped with an axe. The wood inside was white. The head was just gone. I blamed my hands.’

  ‘Bad hands.’

  ‘I thought they’d gone too far. I put Jimmy in my trunk and gave my hands something else to play with – an old violin case, with a face painted on it. They scratched at that, but I wasn’t dragged out of bed. Gillian said she missed Jimmy and wanted to know he was all right—’

  ‘In the trunk. Nobody should be locked in a trunk. Or the wedge-shaped cupboard under the stairs that smells of tennis balls. That happened to me once a few times and I didn’t like it much at all.’

  ‘I unlocked the trunk and found Jimmy Wood. He had a cleft in his head. Through his busby and forehead. As if someone had hit him with an axe.’

  Little started sniffling.

  ‘It’s all right, Gillian. He’s stout-hearted. He doesn’t feel it. A British soldier.’

  ‘Are you sure, Harry?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. You could chop him to bits and he wouldn’t feel it. He’d still be him and he’d still be on duty.’

  ‘But the Broken Doll…’

  ‘The name didn’t mean a dickybird when Gillian first said it. I didn’t know all those stories, Knowles. The doll-faced grownup and the living-faced doll. The pack of pickpockets. They don’t sound like our Broken Doll. She isn’t a life-size dress-shop dummy or a wax murderer in Tussaud’s. She’s only big for a doll. Bigger than any child who’d own her. A doll for babyish princesses or millionaires’ daughters. Her frilly dress must have cost as much as a ballgown. It’s old and crinkly stuff, scummy with lace mould. She scurries like a monkey, but her face doesn’t move. It’s china, cracked across. Her hands are like mine used to be. Doll’s hands. Stiff, but if she presses them together she can hold a chopper.’

  ‘Harry said I was dreaming when I saw the Broken Doll… but she chopped things.’