Groosham Grange (6 page)

He could feel his heart tugging against his chest as if it were urging him to go back to bed and forget all about it. But David was wide awake now. He would get to the bottom of this even if it killed him. And, he thought to himself, in all probability it would.

He tiptoed down the corridor, wincing every time he stepped on a creaking floorboard. Eventually he reached a fourth dormitory. He shone the torch on the handle of the door.

Behind him, a hand reached out of the gloom.

It settled on his shoulder.

David felt his stomach shrink to the size of a pea. He opened his mouth to scream and only managed to stop himself by shoving the torch between his teeth. It was a miracle he didn’t swallow it. Slowly he turned round, the back of his neck glowing bright red with the beam of the torch shining through his throat.

Jill stood opposite him. Like him, she was wearing a dressing-gown and slippers. She looked even more frightened than he did.

“Where are they?” she whispered. “Where have they gone?”

“Nggg…” David remembered the torch in his mouth and pulled it out. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was trying to find out.”

“I saw them go.” Jill sighed, relieved to have found David awake and out of bed. “It was about twenty minutes ago. One of them woke me up as she left the dormitory. I waited a bit and then followed them.”

“So where did they go?” David asked, repeating Jill’s own question.

“I saw them go into the library,” Jill replied. “All of them. The whole school. I listened at the door for a bit but I couldn’t hear anything, so then I went in myself. But they weren’t there, David.” Jill took a deep breath. David could see that she was close to tears. “They’d all vanished.”

David thought back. He had been in the library after tea, surrounded by the stuffed animal heads. It was a small room, barely big enough for sixty-three people. Apart from a table, a mirror, a dozen chairs and the animals, there was nothing in it. And that included doors. There was only one way in. Only one way back out again.

“Maybe they’ve all gone outside?” he suggested. “Through a window.”

Jill scowled at him. “In this weather? Anyway, the windows in the library are too high. I know. I tried…”

“Then they must be somewhere in the school.”

“No.” Jill slumped against the wall, then slithered down to sit on the floor. She was exhausted – and not just through lack of sleep. “I’ve looked everywhere. In the classrooms, in the dining hall, in the staff room … everywhere. They’re not here.”

“They’ve got to be here somewhere!” David insisted. “They can’t just have disappeared.”

Jill made no answer. David sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. Neither of them spoke. David’s last words echoed in his thoughts. “They’ve got to be here somewhere! They can’t just have disappeared.”

But sitting in the dark and silent passage he knew that he was wrong.

Impossible though it seemed, they were alone in Groosham Grange.

Three days before Christmas it began to snow.

By Christmas Day the whole island had been blanketed out. The ground was white. The sea was white. It was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began, and standing in the fields you felt like a single letter on a blank page in an envelope waiting to be posted.

There was no central heating at Groosham Grange. Instead, huge logs burned in open fireplaces, crackling and hissing as if they were angry at having to share their warmth. All the windows had steamed up and the plumbing shuddered, groaned and gurgled as the water forced its way through half-frozen pipes. A colony of bats that inhabited one of the northern towers migrated downstairs for warmth and ended up in the dining-room. Nobody complained. But David found mealtimes something of a struggle with about a hundred eyes examining his rhubarb crumble upside down from the rafters.

Apart from the bats and the weather, nothing else had changed at the school. At first David had been surprised that nobody seemed to care about Christmas. Later on he had glumly accepted it. Captain Bloodbath came to the school once a week, on Tuesdays, but he never brought any letters or took any so there were no Christmas cards. There were no Christmas decorations either. David had seen Mrs Windergast with an armful of holly and that had raised his spirits – at least until lunchtime, when he had had his first taste of holly soup. There was no Christmas tree and, of course, no Christmas presents. Despite the snow, nobody threw any snowballs and the only snowman turned out to be Gregor, who had dozed off on his gravestone just before the heaviest fall and had to be thawed out the next day.

Only one teacher even mentioned Christmas, and this was Mr Creer in religious studies. Mr Creer was the only normal-looking teacher in the whole school. He was the youngest too, about thirty, short with curly hair and a neat moustache. His full name was Ronald Edward Creer. David had been a little unsettled to see the same name on a tombstone in the school cemetery – “Drowned off Skrull Island: 1955-1985” – but he had assumed it was a relative. Nonetheless, Mr Creer did smell very strongly of seaweed.

“Christmas, of course, has very little to do with Christianity.” Mr Creer gave the class a ghostly smile. All his smiles were rather ghostly. “There were festivals at the end of December long before Christianity appeared; the Roman ‘Saturnalia’ and the Persian ‘Birth of the Sun’, for example. In the north it is a festival of the dark spirits, for it is at Christmas that the dead return from their graves.”

This was all news to David. But he had to admit that living in London and being surrounded by tinsel, department-store Santas, last-minute shopping, mince pies, puddings and too many old films on TV, Christmas had never had much to do with Christianity there either.

Christmas Day began like any other day: baths, breakfast, three lessons, then lunch. For some reason, however, the lessons in the afternoon had been cancelled and David and Jill found themselves free to wander as they pleased. As usual, all the other pupils went to bed. That was what they did whenever they had any free time. Then, late at night, they would go to the library. And then they would disappear.

David and Jill had tried to follow them several times, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, but without success. The trouble was that there was no way they could follow the others into the library without being seen, and by the time they opened the door everyone had gone. One afternoon they searched the room thoroughly, certain that there must be a secret passage. But if there was a secret passage, it must have had a spectacularly secret entrance. All the walls seemed to be made of solid brick. A fireplace with a stone mantelpiece dominated one of them, and there was a full-length mirror in a frame decorated with bronze flowers on the other. But though David pressed and prodded all the animals while Jill fiddled with the mirror and even tried to climb up the chimney, they didn’t find anything.

And where was Jeffrey during all this?

In the weeks that they had been at Groosham Grange, Jeffrey had changed and this worried David more than anything. He still remembered Mr Kilgraw’s words. “If anything, he’ll be the easiest…” It was certainly true that Jeffrey had taken to spending more and more time by himself and less and less time with David and Jill. Quite a few times now, David had seen him in deep conversation with William Rufus and although he had questioned him about it, Jeffrey had refused to be drawn. Although there were no books in the library, he seemed to be reading a lot; old, dusty books with yellowing pages bound in cracked leather.

It was Jill, with her short temper, who had finally started an argument. She had rounded on him one evening in an empty classroom as they talked about their progress – or lack of it.

“What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “You’re beginning to act as if you actually like it here!”

“Perhaps I d-d-do,” Jeffrey replied.

“But the whole school is mad!”

“All p-p-public schools are mad. But it’s a lot b-b-better than Godlesston.”

“But what about our promise?” David reminded him. “Us against them.”

“We may be ag-g-gainst them,” Jeffrey said. “But I’m not so sure that they’re ag-g-gainst us.”

“Then why don’t you just go off and join them?” Jill snapped.

It looked as if Jeffrey had.

David and Jill were alone as they trudged across the playing fields, up to their ankles in snow. They knew every inch of the island by now. Groosham Grange was in the north. A forest sprawled all the way down to the eastern side. Its trees could have been sculpted out of stone and looked at least a thousand years old. The point, where the jetty stood, was at the southernmost end. This was a long, flat area below the multicoloured cliffs which soared up behind. David was sure that he could see the entrance to a cave at the bottom of the cliffs and would have liked to explore it, but there was no way they could reach it. The cliffs themselves were too sheer to climb down and the point was separated from the cave by an inlet, the waves pounding at the rocks and sharpening them into needlepoints.

There was also a river on the island – although it was more of a wide stream – running from the north into a lake beside the forest. This was where they went to now. The water had frozen over and they had thought it would be fun to go skating. But they didn’t have any skates. And anyway, they didn’t feel much like having fun … even if it was Christmas Day.

“Have you learnt anything since you got here?” Jill asked.

David considered. “Not really,” he admitted. “But then there are never any tests or exams or anything so it doesn’t really seem to matter.”

“Well, I’ve learnt one thing.” Jill picked up a stone and threw it across the lake. It hit the ice and slithered into a tangle of weeds. “The boat comes every Tuesday. Captain Bloodbath unloads all the supplies and then he and Gregor drive up to the school. So for about one hour there’s nobody on the boat.”

“What of it?” David asked, suddenly interested.

“The day after Boxing Day is a Tuesday. And when they’re up at the school there is going to be somebody on the boat. Me.”

“But there’s nowhere to hide.” David had been with Jill when she had examined the boat a week before. “We looked.”

“There isn’t room for two,” Jill admitted. “But I reckon one of us can squeeze inside the cabin. There’s a heap of old rags on the floor. I think I can hide underneath.”

“So you’re really going.” David couldn’t help feeling sad as he spoke the words. Jill was his only true friend in the school. With her gone, he would be more alone than ever.

“I’ve got to go, David,” Jill said. “If I stay here much longer I’m going to go crazy … like Jeffrey. But once I’m away, I’ll send a letter to the authorities. They’ll send someone over. And I bet you anything you like, the school will be closed down a week later.”

“Where will you go?” David asked.

“I’ve got four brothers and two sisters to choose from,” Jill said. She smiled. “We were a big family. I was number seven!”

“Did your mother have brothers and sisters?” David asked.

Jill looked at him curiously. “What on earth has that got to do with anything?”

“I just wondered…”

“As a matter of fact she was a number seven, too. I’ve got six uncles. Why do you want to know?”

“Seventh daughter of a seventh daughter,” David muttered and said no more. It meant something. It had to mean something. But what?

He was still pondering over it later that evening as he sat by himself in the library. Christmas dinner – if you could call it that – had been ham and chips, the chips only slightly warmer than the ham. David was feeling really depressed for the first time since he had arrived. Jill had gone to bed early and there wasn’t even any television to cheer him up. There was one television in the school but it was a black and white model held together by Sellotape. The volume switch had fallen off and the reception was so bad that the screen always resembled a miniature snowstorm. It was fine if you were watching a programme about deaf and dumb coal workers in Siberia. Otherwise it was useless.

The door opened and he looked up. It was Jeffrey.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, D-D-David.” The fat boy stood hovering beside the door as if he was embarrassed to have been caught there.

“I haven’t seen you around for a while,” David said, trying to sound friendly.

“I know. I’ve been b-b-busy.” Jeffrey looked round the room, his eyes darting behind his wire-frame spectacles. “Actually, I w-w-was looking for W-W-William.”

“Your new friend?” Now David sounded scornful. “Well, he’s not here. Unless of course he’s under the c-c-carpet or in the f-f-fireplace or wherever it is they all go at night! And all I can say is, if you want to join them, they’re welcome to you.”

“I d-d-didn’t…” Jeffrey stammered to a halt, blushing, and David felt angry with himself for having lost his temper. He opened his mouth to speak again but at the same time Jeffrey backed out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

David got up.
He’ll be the easiest
. Once again Mr Kilgraw’s words echoed in his mind. Of course Jeffrey would be the easiest of the three of them – whatever it was that Groosham Grange had planned. He was fat. He wore glasses and he had a stutter. He was one of life’s victims, always the one to be bullied. And by rejecting him, David had just played right into their hands. It had been three against the rest when they began. But his own thoughtlessness had left Jeffrey out there on his own.

Quickly, he left the library. Jeffrey had already disappeared down the corridor but David didn’t mind. If he could find out what was really going on at Groosham Grange – behind the façade of the lessons and everyday school life – then perhaps he might be able to put a stop to it, saving Jeffrey and himself at the same time. And he was in the perfect place to start looking. The answer had to be in one of two rooms.

He began with the door marked H
EADS
. In all the time he had been at the school he had never once seen the two headmasters, Mr Fitch and Mr Teagle. But for the fact that he had heard their voices, he wouldn’t have believed they even existed. Now he knocked gently on the door. As he had expected, there was no reply. Glancing over his shoulder, he reached for the handle and turned it. The door opened.