The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (29 page)

The tendrils snapped and flapped.

Paule could sit up, though that meant rearranging her huge head so it didn’t crush her ragdoll body. Amy saw her friend was struggling with herself.

Amy looked up and couldn’t see Rayne any more. The clouds of smoke and insects whirled into a great Runnel pattern. The third moon was obscured and night fell in the Purple.

‘Paule, Paule,’ she shouted. ‘What’s wrong here? What can we do?’

‘Knowles should read the big book,’ said Paule conversationally.

‘Knowles of the Remove? Miss Memory. What book?’

‘In the Swanage. That book.’

The Swanage was called Tempest Keep on the maps. It was the building where Headmistress had her office and rooms. In the Purple, a windmill with mottled silk sails stood in its place. Dr Swan had shelves of books.

The pull of the Flute grew. Amy felt it too. It tugged at her wings, and a pain – a new kind of pain – burned in their roots. She flapped, trying to fight. She tasted rotten tangerine with her antennae.

The tendrils seized Paule again, winding more thickly around her.

Rayne was engulfed by the black cloud.

Were the things inside the Other Ones?

Amy held Paule’s wrists and wouldn’t let her be drawn back onto the Runnel.

Both girls were coughing. The dust was whipped up by the winds which stirred the clouds above. In the dust, tiny insects swarmed and bit. Amy choked on them. This wasn’t like house dust Back Home. More like fine gravel or the shingle on the beach. It was partially composed of fragments of eggshells. She remembered the plain of hatching eggs.

Dust shapes rose to form tubby torsos, football heads, broad shoulders and thick arms. They were like Frost’s snowman, not alive but ambulant. Three of them – like the wood-wolves or Black Skirt triads. Hulking, malign dust-golems of the Purple. They stumped towards Amy and Paule in formation. Gold eyes glittered and third eyes, in the foreheads, began to glow. The arrangement was the same as the moons above. And matched Ellacott’s description of Mauve Mary. The recurrence of threes persisted.

Amy flat-palmed the air, fingers slightly curved, and pushed out with her mind to block the lead dust-golem. A hole punched through its chest, but it kept on walking. Bugs swarmed in its bulk, eating each other and spitting out pulp that wove together to fill in the hole.

‘Let me go, Amy,’ said Paule. ‘You can get Back Home. I’ll have to go on from here…’

Behind the dust-golems appeared a tall, slender figure. She strode through the storm.

It was a girl in Drearcliff uniform, but fully present in the Purple. An inner light spilled through her own forehead-fissure. She struck a dust-golem from behind with a hockey stick…

…and the creature flew apart, a ball of yellow energy slammed out of its head, dissipating like a dandelion clock. Its fellows stopped in their tracks. Their heads revolved away from Amy and Paule.

The new girl smote them both and they collapsed. The insects crawled away from their heaps. She swept through the bugs with her stick. Small fires erupted where she scythed – burning blue, like a Bunsen lamp. Tiny scraps of creatures flared into nothingness.

Amy looked at the girl’s face and didn’t recognise her. But she knew who she was.

Mauve Mary.

She wore a whips’ blazer, in Drearcliff Grey. An Ariel tiepin.

Amy wondered if their rescuer would say anything…

Then, there was a lightning crack and the stink of spent matches.

It was very dark and Amy and Paule – the girl-sized Paule of Back Home – were in a small, sticky place. Someone had hands on them, a firm grip. They were hauled through oily stuff. Amy was her normal self, without wings or feelers. She felt the loss acutely, as if suddenly struck deaf or blind… but a moment later couldn’t describe even to herself what her moth-senses had been.

Another lightning strike and they were tumbling across paving stones.

Back Home.

‘You, girls,’ shouted someone – Keele! ‘What are you doing?’

Amy and Paule rolled into the skipping circle, like a ball into skittles.

The ritual disrupted, the ennead got tangled up with each other. Ropes were underfoot. Gould growled, fangs bared, and Crowninshield II spat oaths which would have earned her a Language Infraction in less chaotic circumstances.

Keele waded in to sort things out.

The walkway was covered again. Rayne was here too, standing stock-still on the Flute. Insects crawled on her face and lapels. No, they were just badges…

‘You came out of the wall,’ said Keele.

There was still a purple glow. The shimmer.

‘Look,’ said Keele. ‘There…’

Amy untangled herself and looked above the shrine.

She saw Mauve Mary. The ghost had been in the Purple. Mary had saved her and Paule from the dust-golems and whatever raised and commanded them. She had sent the girls Back Home. Mauve Mary was guardian of the thinning spot between the worlds. An anti-wrecker.

Apart from the glowing spot on her forehead – as much like Kali’s castemark as the bud of a third eye – she looked normal. She had thick eyebrows and dimples. She solemnly sank into the wall, waving goodbye.

She was gone and so was the violet light. Someone turned on a torch.

There was a great deal of milling-about as Black Skirts tried to tell each other what just happened. The Hooded Conspirators stepped back into the night.

Amy felt her own face and Paule’s, finding no injuries. The Purple left aftertastes and lingering images.

Torchlight swung across Keele’s face. She was astonished.

‘Enid,’ she said. ‘That’s Enid. Mauve Mary is…’

‘Who?’ asked Amy. ‘Enid who?’

‘ffolliott. Enid ffolliott.’

‘ffolliott-Absent?’

‘No,’ said Paule. ‘ffolliott-Presence.’

‘
T
HIS IS WORSE
than last term,’ said Light Fingers. ‘Then, the Moth Club were strictly outside School Rules, but so were the Hooded Conspiracy. The Black Skirts
are
School Rules. Nothing hooded about them. Moth masks are no use any more. So few of us are left in Grey that even the dullest of the Dims could tell at once who we were.’

Amy was forced to agree.

This inquorate meeting of the Moth Club was convened in the Biology Lab annexe. In autumn, before the Black Skirts were dreamed up, Miss Borrodale had supposed that Amy might be interested in the Calloway Collection. The most exotic specimens were in the annexe, stuffed under glass domes, floating in jars of brine or arranged in drawers. Loosely interpreting casual invitation as actual permission, Amy had let Light Fingers pick the lock. If they approached Fossil now and requested the key, they would have no joy. The science teacher only bestowed favours on the Sisters Dark. Inchfawn was restored as Fossil’s pet, which made Amy all the warier of the six-eyed sneak.

It had been a mistake to think Inchfawn permanently sent to Coventry. Going Black was a way back.

Light Fingers lit a Bunsen burner. Adjusted to burn pure blue, it gave off enough light for the girls to see each other’s faces and enough heat to warm their hands.

‘You know what we are,’ said Amy. ‘Moths around a flame.’

‘…which is supposed to be dangerous. For moths.’

Amy had tried to tell Light Fingers everything. Having lost Kali’s friendship by keeping uncomfortable truths from her, she didn’t dare chance it again. She did her best to explain Daffy Dora Paule and the Purple, the true identity of Red Flame, the unholy partnership of Hooded Conspirator and the Black Skirts, and that Mauve Mary was ffolliott-Absent. A lot to take in. Light Fingers had trouble following it all – especially when it came to wood-wolves and dust-golems. Amy knew she sounded like the old Smudge. Indeed, her story was more far-fetched than Smudge’s wildest exaggerations.

Her friend seized on the oddest things to fuss over. Told about Amy and Kali saving Beauty Rose from the Runnel and the Flute, Light Fingers was miffed she hadn’t been included in the rescue party – which was entirely her own fault for making herself scarce. She was so aggrieved to have been dropped from the team that she forgot to be appalled by revelations about Ponce or horrified by the dread shadow of the Other Ones.

‘…and, in this Purple place, you have
feelers
? How can you keep your hat on?’

Light Fingers put her hands up to her forehead and waggled her forefingers.

Amy couldn’t help but laugh at that.

‘I don’t understand where Dr Swan is in all this,’ said Amy. ‘I thought she was for us. She went on and on about Unusual Girls. I can’t see how she’s let this happen.’

She detected a whininess in her own voice which she disliked, and resolved firmly to change her tone… though it was difficult to complain cheerfully.

‘I told you how the Ordinaries are,’ said Light Fingers, crowing a little too much. ‘Headmistress couldn’t stand against all of them. I’m not surprised Bainter and the rotters have got her out of the way. It was bound to happen.’

‘What should we
do
?’

‘We can’t do anything, Amy,’ said Light Fingers. ‘Too many of them and precious few of we. I’m giving it until the snow melts enough that I don’t leave tracks, then I’m over the wall. Will you come with me? There’s nothing for us here.’

‘The Moth Club,’ Amy said, searching for a hope.

Light Fingers shook her head. ‘Frecks and Kali aren’t with us this time. Even if they weren’t Black Skirts, they’re not like us.’

The other half of the Moth Club left off talking whenever Amy came into the cell, but were elaborately polite. Kali started speaking proper English, with a musical Kafiristani accent. Frecks sounded more and more grown-up and stopped taking crafty naps in Double Geog. It was as if they’d been fetched off by the fairies and replaced with well-mannered changelings.

Beauty Rose was often in the cell, occupying Light Fingers’ rocking chair. Since the Runnel and the Flute, she and Kali had become friends. They were always passing notes back and forth between them, with smiles and smirks and strange little giggles that had a razory touch on Amy’s skin. For a girl who didn’t talk, Rose filled silence with a great deal of meaning.

Once, Amy came back to the cell to find Frecks, Kali and Beauty waving their arms like a proper Black Skirt triad. When Amy hove in view, they all three quickly folded their arms and tried to look innocent. Their simpering lasted only a few seconds before they collapsed into laughter – Beauty laughed by tapping her chest and nodding her head at the same time – directed at the Grey interloper.

‘Too difficult to explain, old thing,’ said Frecks, wiping away tears of mirth. ‘Just take our word for it, it’s
funny
.’

That set them off again. Amy withdrew and went to the Library – angry and hurt and sad.

…and yet Amy still wasn’t ready to give up on her friends. Or on School.

But Light Fingers was persuasive.

‘Schools are like prisons,’ said Light Fingers. ‘I know that from my parents. Jails have cells, lights-out, Chapel, flicker shows, bells, slop, stains, whips – just like here. Modern schools and modern prisons are built on the same model, Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. Old ones just turn out the same, like Drearcliff Grange and the Mausoleum. Look at the bottle-topped walls. Patrolling guards in black. Your wood-wolves are guard dogs. I’d rather pick oakum or sew postbags than brush the blasted Heel. I’ve been working out escapes. Wherever you go, you should think how to get out if you have to. Every building, every room, every friendship.’

Amy’s heart hurt. She had heard this doctrine from Light Fingers before, but it had seemed like a game rather than a serious way of life.

‘Even without snow, Gould could track you.’

Light Fingers shook her head. ‘I’m prepared. You know the perfume Peebles got from her uncle for Christmas. That pongy stuff she hates and never uses? I can take it off her hands. I’ll sprinkle scent on my bed and some clothes I’ll leave behind, then douse a fox or a rabbit so it’ll leave a false trail while I nip off in the other direction. I’m quick, remember. It’s an advantage.’

Amy saw Light Fingers had thought it through.

Had she dreamed up tricks to deal with
anyone
who might go against her? Was that level of distrust sensible, or dangerous? Amy knew what being alone was like and didn’t want to go back to it. At Drearcliff, she had found friends.

Light Fingers saw her hesitating.

‘Amy, even without you, I’m going…’

The door was opened. Light flooded the annexe.

‘Going where?’ asked Miss Borrodale.

Snitcher Garland had gone to Fossil, of course. A Black Skirt triad came with them – Inchfawn, Bryant, Vail. With skipping ropes wound round their fists, they tried to look like a Wild West lynching party. The effect was somewhat spoiled by them being titchy schoolgirls rather than rangy cowboys. The black hats helped, but not enough. Ants were only fearsome in a horde… as individuals, or even in small groups, they were just
bugs
, the lowest, dullest, meanest sort of insect.

‘The lock’s been tampered with, miss,’ said Inchfawn, holding a magnifying glass to show the tiny scratches Light Fingers had left.

Occasionally, Amy had felt sorry for Inchfawn. Never again.

‘Naisbitt, Thomsett. Major Infractions. The Heel. Naisbitt – this comes as no surprise. The apple, in this case, does not fall far from the poison tree. But Thomsett… I have to say I’m disappointed. I had thought more of you.’

Inchfawn’s excited smile was terrifying. She was close to wetting herself.

Vail, to whom Amy had never paid attention, was blank-faced, not even relishing petty victory or advantage as Garland or Inchfawn did. What did Vail get out of the Black Skirts? She had always been among Viola’s ‘courtiers, attendants, guards, clowns, & co.’ An ant crawled down the side of Vail’s face, like a tear.

‘This, girls, is what grasshoppers look like,’ Fossil lectured the Black Skirts. ‘The lack of industry, the slyness, the arrant sabotage. We are
not
grasshoppers.’

She tapped her ant brooch.