The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (28 page)

It depressed Amy that girls who should know better would pass on the hurt others ladled on them. For one thing, the tactic didn’t work. Trying to mollify monsters was useless. They got bored easily and would lash out at anyone within reach, including their own toadies. The Black Skirts didn’t discipline their rogues, even in the way whips did. Rayne, once the most put upon of putupons, gave out badges for bullying.

Dr Auchmuty came out of the Library. At sight of her, the perishers scarpered. Merrilees turned back to shoot Amy a nasty look and tripped over some frozen snow that happened to shift into her way. Doc Och lectured Pest about self-endangerment. The edict against not running on slippery ground was still in force.

‘Amy, Amy, they’re at the shimmer,’ repeated Paule.

Amy tried to pay attention.

Paule grabbed Amy by the scarf and yanked. Which hurt.

‘The shimmer, Amy…’

‘Slow down, Paule,’ said Amy. ‘And don’t throttle me. What, where, when, how and why?’

Paule blinked as if answering in Morse.

She was more in the Back Home than usual, capable of recognising Amy and seeking her out. But she was straining herself to stay focused.

‘The wreckers are tampering,’ she said. ‘They’ve found one of the shimmers… the places where the Purple comes closest to the Back Home.’

‘Like the Runnel and the Flute, in the woods?’

Paule nodded. ‘Yes, but that place is locked. It needs an oblation to open. For most, not me. I can get to the Purple from anywhere. I can
make
shimmers. The wreckers are at one of the thin shimmers, where the barrier between here and there is wavery. They’re shutting her out, but that’s not it at all. They’re making a breach!’

‘Her?’

Paule pointed towards the Quad. Amy realised there was activity in the covered walkway.

‘Mauve Mary?’

‘That’s not her real name.’

‘You know who she is?’

‘Have you ever thought it was funny ghosts are called “presences”? Because they’re not present, are they? They’re not all here. They’re mostly there. Remind you of anyone?’

‘Is she
you
, Paule? The other part of you?’

The Sixth shook and nodded her head at the same time – which Amy wouldn’t have thought possible – and didn’t clear up the matter.

Paule kept tugging at Amy’s scarf as if it were a dog’s lead.

It was just after dark. Mauve Mary’s favourite time of day.

Amy gave in and let Paule lead her towards the walkway.

The all-too-familiar rhythm of jumping up and down to that blasted rhyme sounded. Black Skirts rarely said the words out loud any more. Most didn’t even use skipping ropes. They just hopped and stamped. It was like an eternal drumbeat. The pulse of the anthill.

‘There’s no going through at the moment,’ said a Black Skirt whose triad barred the way. It was Keele. ‘You can take the long way round if you need to get to the Quad.’

Paule yanked on Amy’s scarf again, exposing her torn blazer. If Keele, a whip, Minored her, she’d be annoyed. At the moment, the Sixth overlooked the infraction.

‘The wreckers, Amy… the wreckers.’

‘She’s upset, Keele,’ Amy pleaded.

Keele had looked after Paule before she went Black. She was still the same person. She understood more than most.

‘You know she’s not just mad. She sees things we don’t. If she’s worried, we should be too.’

Keele paused, as if out of the habit of thinking.

‘Boney?’ she said, at last.

‘Yes, she knows about Boney.
Boneys
.’

Amy was encouraged. Keele was at least listening.

In the walkway, by Mauve Mary’s shrine, a Black Skirt ennead circled, hands joined, jumping while turning. Rayne was in the middle of the ring, arms antenna-waving. Braziers burned foul-smelling stuff. The circling Sisters Dark all had metal ants stuck to their faces. Others crowded into the walkway, blocking off both ends. Amy guessed this was a ritual of summoning or exorcism.

The Black Skirts had a down on Mauve Mary – the Walkway Ghost.

A grown-up triad was there too, keeping to the shadows. Ponce Bainter, Red Flame, the Professor. The Hooded Conspiracy was a part of the Black Skirts or the Black Skirts were a part of the Hooded Conspiracy or they were all parts of the same horrid thing.

‘Paule feels this is
dangerous
, Keele,’ said Amy.

The Sixth looked sceptical. She glanced over her shoulder at the jumping circle and shrugged.

‘I’m more worried that it’s
ridiculous
,’ she said. ‘But ridiculous today is often common sense next Thursday. It’ll be over soon. Then you can get through to… to wherever you’re going.’

The scarf was getting tight around her neck.

‘Incidentally, where
are
you going?’

Now Keele was suspicious.

Amy thought she saw a ripple on the wall of the walkway, as if it were a liquid surface. Was this what Paule meant by ‘a shimmer’?

‘It can’t be mended, it’ll never get fixed,’ said Paule, insistent.

‘Keele, please, listen to her,’ said Amy. She’s your
friend
.’

The Sixth looked as if Amy had slapped her.

Amy felt very, very cold – inside and out. She couldn’t feel her hands or feet or face or heart.

‘She’s not my
friend
,’ Keele said, as if astonished by the notion. ‘She’s a
fluke
!’

And
that word
was as if Keele had slapped Amy.

She was strangling now, the scarf knotted tight.

Keele’s eyes widened as she looked up.

‘…and so are you, Thomsett!’

Amy was three feet above the ground. Her scarf was taut as a balloon string. Her Kentish Glory mask was tucked into its pocket, and no use at all.

She was exposed as an Unusual.

Keele’s triad partners – She-With-No-Mercy Aire and Black-at-last Wychwood – stared and pointed. Amy stretched her arms out for balance and wobbled. She had a headache coming on.

Whips often Minored distracted girls for having their head in the air or not having their feet on the ground. Amy was guilty of these vague Infractions in a terribly specific way. She could be Majored for this.

At the moment, too much else was happening.

Looking over the heads of Keele’s triad and into the walkway, Amy saw the skipping circle more clearly. The ripples in the air pulsed to the beat of the rhyme. On the paving stones, where Ellacott’s shadow was still marked, a design had been made with chalk and pebbles. The Runnel, again. Rayne, skipping higher than the surrounding ennead, was the Flute. As the Queen Ant jumped, she saw Amy floating. They looked at each other, as if no one else were present… and an electric thrill passed between them.

Paule screamed!

A dazzling light. A vile smell. And change…

W
HEN
P
AULE FIRST
transported Amy here, the Purple was weird beyond her previous experience… but calm, a respite from the turmoil of Back Home.

This time, the turmoil passed over with them.

Paule hadn’t brought them here. The Black Skirts had, by performing the dance of the Runnel and the Flute.

Paule said wreckers might break the Purple.

Amy itched with the
wrongness
.

Was this place broken? Or just its natural state?

Insect cacophony sounded – metal clashing on metal, steel-capped boots stamping on stone, vast war engines in motion, grinding and chewing and crushing. The ant army marched.

The atonal music Amy had heard before – the banshee ululation – was louder, more strident. Agitated tendrils rippled and lashed. Infinite eels or airborne seaweed. The music came from them. The tendrils vibrated like disembodied vocal cords.

Amy’s scarf came undone and she was floating freely. Her antennae stung – not a new sensation, but a new sense.

Perhaps she had not been transported but transformed? The Purple wasn’t entirely another place, but another layer of the place she knew. It was always there, but only in this shape could she perceive it – and could its denizens perceive her. Below her dangling feet was an almost familiar landscape.

The cover was off the walkway and a desert had risen to engulf School. The sea had receded. In the Purple, you could walk from Somerset to Wales without wetting your shoes. Buildings were fallen down or built on to, as if the Drearcliff that was and the Drearcliff that will be were tumbled together and left to fight it out. The masks on the Drearcliff Playhouse were as big as sphinx faces. The tumbled Tower still stood, though it floated high above the shingles, the cliff eroded away from under it.

Amy’s wings, rooted again, flapped and she held steady in mid-air. It was an instinct, like breathing. She did not have to concentrate to flutter, though wondering about how her wings worked made her waver and fall a few feet. She caught the wind and held steady.

On her previous trip to the Purple, time stopped for everyone but her and Paule… now – because the shimmer had been opened by the skipping circle? – they had company.

The wreckers.

Keele’s triad was frozen. So were most of the Black Skirts at the periphery of the circle, including the Hooded Conspirators. Amy saw them more clearly under the violet light of three moons. The masked chauffeur, Gogoth, was with them. This side of the shimmer, he was even more misshapen.

The skipping circle still revolved, but at quarter time – as if they were asleep but still hopping. Their faces betrayed no alarm, so they couldn’t be seeing what Amy was seeing. They were Back Home, mostly.

Rayne didn’t have wings, but rose from the Flute anyway.

The Queen Ant could fly. She was fully in the Purple, alert and aware. She was still looking at Amy.

Should they dogfight, like Captain Skylark and the Demon Ace? Amy didn’t think she was up to aerial combat just yet. She’d need a catapult or something.

Beneath them, Paule was stricken and writhing. Half her head was swollen out of proportion. One eye filled with blood, as if on the point of bursting like a boil. Her scalp stretched thin over bulbous skull-bones. Previously in the Purple, she was grotesque but lucid. That compensation was gone. Paule shrieked like a loon, mind scattered between Back Home and here.

Amy and Rayne floated upwards at the same pace.

As they rose, Amy saw more and more of the land below. The contours were familiar. There were the woods, as winter-leafless as Back Home, but with trees twisted out of shape. Twig-limbed, yellow-eyed dog-shapes detached from the trunks. The wolves of the Purple, neither animal nor vegetable, creaked as they loped along spiral paths.

There was no snow here, but fine sand drifted everywhere. The air was full of it, and Amy’s wings pins-and-needlesed. She tasted a vileness worse than Drearcliff swede… worse than the cigar she had once filched from Uncle Peasegood’s humidor and shared with Lettie, which had made them both sick for days. The dust clung to her antenna. She knew it was slow poison.

The wall that bounded School still stood, with a few breaches of spilled brick and broken glass. Where Watchet should have been an inferno raged, pouring thick dark smoke into the sky. Two of the moons were blotted out. Things with beating wings hid inside the cloud, disturbing the smoke into eddies and puffs. Were the things animals or aircraft? She suspected a ghastly commingling of gigantic insect and fighter plane.

Amy saw that the Runnel extended beyond the space it covered Back Home and spiralled through the woods and around School Grounds and across the landscape, scored deeper into the dry earth and becoming ever more branching and elaborate. The Flute here was a black sinkhole. Sand poured into it as if it were an earthy whirlpool. Wood-wolves squatted around the Flute like guard dogs. One missed its footing and was sucked into the maelstrom, then flew to pieces as the throat of the hole ground it like grain.

Rayne looked into the clouds. She waved her arms in that silly salute, which was returned by the things in the smoke. They had eyes, carapaces and scythe-like mouthparts.

Rayne’s mouth opened and she exhaled insects.

Ants, Amy supposed. In pants.

…clouds of them. Not pants as in knickers, but pants as in breathing.

Rayne was a living Runnel and her mouth an open Flute. The ants poured through her, swelling the clouds. The smoke was alive with them.

Cross-currents lashed Amy and she flew lower to avoid being torn apart. The stinging, foul-tasting sand-dust made her unsteady.

She couldn’t blink. She had no eyelids here.

Folding her wings, she set down. The ground was spongy and pulsating. In the Purple, was the earth – the Earth? –
alive
? Any warmth came up from the world’s skin not down from the violet moons.

She saw the skipping circle through a small dust storm. The rest of Back Home was less clear. She could make out a few floating figures – Keele and Aire, Gogoth and the Professor – but they were transparent. In the Purple, the denizens of Back Home were ghosts.

Keening cut through the other din.

Dora Paule was in pain.

Amy saw her on the ground, struggling against purposeful tendrils wrapped around her. She was fully ten feet tall or long, but not strong in limb. Three wood-wolves – with the carved and painted faces of Pest, Hoan and Fulwood – worried at Paule’s shrivelled legs and feet. They nosed her great bulk along a path – the Runnel – and took an occasional nasty bite, embedding splinter-teeth in her spindly calves. The tendrils dragged her.

If the Runnel and the Flute Back Home led here, where did the Runnel and the Flute of the Purple lead?

Not Back Home, she was sure.

Amy stretched her wings and zoomed towards Paule.

She took hold of her friend and fought the tendrils. The wood-wolves came at her. She crushed their throats with a mental pinch, popping their eyes and snapping their necks. A deep crack ran across the Pest mask. Sappy green pus dribbled through. Heads lolling wrongly, the wood-wolves scarpered.

Paule, unknowing, fought Amy.

Taking handholds on gigantic blazer-buttons, Amy hauled herself up Paule’s body and put her face in front of her friend’s handspan-across good eye. Recognition flared. Paule stopped resisting and Amy dug her heels in.