The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (44 page)

Kali – like others pulled into the Black Skirts – overcame what had been imposed on her, and shrugged off the remnants of her insect carapace.

And Frecks kept their cause Just and True.

So much had happened since… too much to remember, so much more than Amy had expected or imagined as a girl.

…the Creatures from the Serpentine, Colonel Slaughter and the Slaughter Boys, the Adventure of the Crooked Thumbs, the Burrowing Behemoths, the Wizard War, the Jollity Plague, the Wrath of the Onion Men, the trial of Olivia Gibberne, the Gorilla of Mile End, the Last Ride of Dick Turpin, Spring-Heel’d Jack and Razor Strop Reg, the Gibbering Doom, Biffo the Crime Clown and the Circus of Carnage, the War That Never Was, Bunyip Nowlan, the Abdication Abomination Crisis, the Last Will of Decimus Dexter, the Bristol Burglaries, the Vengeance of Madame Maupertuis, the Haunting of Hellespont Hall, the Philately Will Get You Nowhere Affair, the Loss of the
LS908
, the Reign of the Sordid Seven, the Green Obscenity, Mr Eius and the Murder Memoranda, the Poisonings at Judas Cross College, Lord Piltdown’s Final Innings, the Miscalculation of Primrose Quell, the Centurion of Caerleon-on-Usk, the Daughters of Dien Ch’ing, Stepan Volkoff’s Enthusiasm for Atrocity, the Unlikely Bicycle, the Calderon-Munster Prizefight, the Appearance of the Hole, the explosion at Winnerden Flats, Emma’s unfortunate but short-lived marriage, the persistent problem of Moria Kratides, the Rot in the Gideon Family Tree, the Frinton Fascisti, the Girl With the Ghost Lantern, the Overground Moles, the Electric Uberman, Tom B. Idle, the Hydes of March, the Buggleskelly poltergeist, the Boat Race That Vanished, the Burning of Parsimony Dell, the Lilac Monk, the Slink (again and again, the Bloody Slink), the Spawning of the Slithards, the Tea Exchange Scandal and its Remarkable Aftermath, the Duel of the Seven Stars, the Clockwork Churchill, the Monkey-Gland Monstrosities…

…through it all, she had
flown
.

The others didn’t use their moth names any more, but she was still Kentish Glory.

Jonathan – Dr Shade! – had come into her life or she had stepped into his world… which was not anything she could have imagined when reading about him and the Aviatrix and Shiner Bright in
Girls’ Paper
and
British Pluck
in her cell at Drearcliff.

It had been a long, exciting, challenging night.

And she was giddy from it.

She remembered it was here, at School, where she first put on a mask… where she first admitted to herself that she couldn’t just float, where she had learned to reach out with her mentacles like Devlin with her arms…

Stretch was married to a bank manager and had five pliable children. She called herself Plump Devlin now. She was the one who settled down.

The Hooded Conspiracy.

The Black Skirts.

The oblations to the Other Ones.

The Yettymen.

Kratides of the Sixth.

The Sisters of De’Ath.

All of it…

Jumbled up together in her mind, swirling round and round, in a spiral, like the Funnel and the Lute…

No, the Runnel and the Flute.

…Dora Paule pulled through the shimmer, into the Purple. She had reached after her, fallen in…

‘Are you all right, Amy?’ asked Emma.

It was as if photographers’ bulbs were flashing and popping around her. Flashing
purple
.

Now, nails were driven into her forehead – where her feelers were rooted.

Seraph took her shoulders and held her up.

Headmistress stepped back, against a bookcase, which revolved and took her into the secret passages.

‘Whaddya know whaddya say?’ said Kali.

Frecks looked at her with concern, then recognition.

‘It’s you in there, Amy,’ she said. ‘Not the you you… the
young you
.’

The walls of Headmistress’s study dissolved.

Everything had been… what? A dream, an illusion, a peep at the last act of the play?

Amy was falling through purple twilight.

No, she was
not
falling.

She was
flying
.

D
ORA
P
AULE WAS
below her, tumbling towards a desert plain. The sands were shifting, a swirling wind erasing the lines of the Runnel.

Things swam under the ground. Things big as whales.

Amy flew fast – here, wings burst through the back of her blazer – and circled around Paule’s straight plummet. She closed in and snatched Paule, gripping her around the waist. Paule flung her arms about Amy’s neck and held tight.

In the Purple, gravity was upended and inconstant… but, for Amy, that was normal.

They wobbled alarmingly as Amy tried to account for the added weight and awkward shape of Paule. She had to extend her wings like glider-planes to regain stability.

Above was the shimmer… the Flute from the other side.

Amy had been thinking of something, but it was gone like ice in hot tea.

She descended gracefully and set down on the sands, letting Paule go.

The Purple was spinning dizzily, like water circling a whirlpool… everything preparing to drain into the Back Home. The Other Ones – whose shapes made Amy’s feelers throb with pain – would be washed into the world.

A strange automobile, boxy yet streamlined, was half-buried nearby. She recognised it as
hers
.

…no, that couldn’t be. She didn’t know how to drive.
Girls don’t drive
, Mother said. But that contraption was
hers
, she knew. Was it just a car, or could it burrow into the ground or run underwater? It was called a Falcon, but didn’t have wings… she guessed it couldn’t fly.

Other things were strewn across the plain… some girls had been sucked into the Flute and deposited here. A few weren’t moving.

A grown-up woman, about fifty, walked over. She wore a black boater.

Ignoring the sandstorm and the hole in the sky, let alone the three moons and burrowing behemoths, the woman took hold of Amy’s lapel.

‘Grey wears poorly,’ she said. ‘Uniform Infraction.’

It was Gladys Sundle. An
old
Gladys Sundle.

An ant the size of a human hand was pinned to her jacket, legs writhing. It leaked yellow ichor. Mandible-pincers nipped the soft fold of Sundle’s throat, making red, inflamed punctures.

Sundle didn’t seem to notice the ant… any more than she noticed she was years,
decades
, older than she should be.

Where had her life gone?

Amy had barely noticed the Fifth before she went Black, so didn’t know whether Sundle was naturally a cold, nasty piece of work or had just given up and gone along with Rayne like so many others. She had seen Sundle’s charcoal sketches in the Art Room and thought them quite good. Her speciality was contemplative portraits of Viola ‘stars’. Sundle gave Crawford, Mansfield and Upton her own curly hair, heavy eyelashes and bee-stung lips… so the sketches ended up looking more like the artist than her sitters.

After putting a Black Skirt on, she stopped sketching and led the Chimera.

‘Watch out for the whips,’ said Sundle.

The woman walked on. Five or six more giant ants were stuck to her back. Holes were chewed in her clothes. Mandibles were embedded in her flesh. Dried blood and ichor stained the back of her blazer and skirt.

‘Come back,’ Amy shouted. ‘We can help you home.’

‘Wherever would that be?’ Sundle said, over her shoulder.

She disappeared into the dust-swirls.

How many like her were in the Purple? Stuck or changed or dead?

‘This is a pretty pickle,’ said Paule.

Amy couldn’t tell how
compos mentis
Paule was. If she was now daffy in the Purple, that was bad.

It meant
nothing
was reliable.

‘I was in School, but here… a lot happened,
years
of it, and I was… a grown-up, I think? Or dreamed I was. Like Sundle, only not as ancient… and without the ants in the pants.’

‘That happens to me sometimes too,’ said Paule.

‘I met you… a you of the future. There was a war on. Another one. Or the same one, started up again. See that car? It’s from then.’

‘What car?’

The Falcon was buried. Then the sand moved on, and uncovered the car’s skeleton – engine, frame, wheels, all polished like chrome. The rest of it was eaten away, consumed by the desert.

The shifting sands weren’t sands.

‘Did you meet my husband?’ asked Paule, cheerily. ‘He’s someone like me… doesn’t get old. Gavriel Skinner. We’ll be a dance team, like Vernon and Irene Castle… only with funny-sounding music that’s like fireworks going off in an orchestra.’

Amy had a flash-image of Paule sitting down. In a wheelchair.

‘I didn’t think you danced,’ she said.

Then she remembered
dancing
with Paule… or at least shaking her all around the room – a room with class photographs on the walls – to music.

Doodly-acky-sacky want some seafood, mama
.

What did that even mean?

With a clanking, the last of the Falcon fell apart. Cogs and rods melted as sand-things swarmed over them.

The desert was made up of tiny insects, dead and alive. Mites, not motes. In the air, midges.

Sand-coloured ants swarmed around Paule. She didn’t seem concerned.

‘Can you take us Back Home?’ asked Amy. ‘Like before.’

Paule was wincing now. Half-deflated, she was becoming a wriggling scrap of herself… she couldn’t concentrate, the compensatory clarity of thought she had in the Purple was torn away by ten thousand little bites.

Amy looked around, hoping for help.

Enid ffolliott – Mauve Mary – lay nearby, face up, arms crossed on her breast, sand-ants slowly piling over her. The guardian of the shimmer had been brought down by the Hooded Conspiracy’s allies in the Purple.

The Other Ones.

Amy lashed out with her mentacles, and scattered the bugs off Paule’s legs. They reformed at once and redoubled their swarming. Living winds – zephyrs – funnelled cruel clouds of them at Amy.

Her face was numb from stings. Now, she felt sharp bites in her wings.

‘Paule,’ she pleaded. ‘We can’t take this much longer.’

Paule wore a mask of ants, like writhing ochre mud. They stayed away from her eyes and mouth, but grew thick on her face.

Her eyes were panicked.

Amy wiped away ants with her hands, but they came back.

She didn’t even think the insects here were properly alive. They were little sand golems in the shape of ants. Tiny Black Skirts with pincers and poison.

‘Ants on your face, what a great disgrace,’ she said. ‘Spend two and sixpence on cleaning up this place.’

Paule heard her and closed her eyes.

She was part of the Purple, living in two worlds. She could no more be consigned here than she could be kept Back Home.

Amy felt the changes coming.

Paule didn’t need mentacles.
Everything
here was connected to her.

ffolliott sat up, eyes alive. Bugs poured away from her, clearing a circle. The bare ground was more like bone than rock.

Amy heard water and shouts and fire. An air-raid siren went off.

A newspaper seller shouted ‘
Starnewsnstandard Starnewsnstandard Starnewsnstandard!
’ Headlines floated…

MAGISTRATE DECAPITATED
–
HEAD STILL MISSING
!
KENTISH GLORY CAPTURES DIAMOND GANG
!
A NATION MOURNS
–
DR SHADE FEARED LOST
!
A NATION CHEERS
–
DR SHADE RETURNS
!
WHO IS THE KENTISH GLORY
?

She was dizzy from it all.

A phantom ship, a broken hulk, appeared around them. On every deck, phantom girls were scrapping, silent and see-through and juddering. It was like the flickers when the projector went wonky and Miss Dryden ran out of music to play… pale ghosts in Black and Grey, swimming through mud or slipping on ice, mouths open but mute.

The figures became more solid, recognisable.

Lamarcroft knocked out Pinborough and wrestled with Ker.

Frecks had Bainter on his knees, crooking her arm around his neck from behind. His bald pate was going red.

The Purple faded. Amy and Paule were Back Home.

It was noisier here.

Amy held Paule, who was exhausted. By force of her will, she had withdrawn the oblation. The shimmer was gone. The Runnel and the Flute were ruined.

‘I might not be able to go back, Amy,’ said Paule, terrified.

Amy tried to comfort her.

‘…oh, and I can’t feel my legs.’

Paule was heavy in her arms. Amy set her down on a coil of old rope and arranged her as comfortably as possible.

‘Wiggle your toes,’ she said.

‘I
am
,’ insisted Paule.

Amy looked – the Sixth’s feet were like dead fish.

They were on the foredeck, the most solid part of the ship.

Kali’s father sat nearby, sobbing. Tears soaked through his hood, making damp sticky spots over his cheeks. Kali stood over him, his revolver in her hand… she didn’t shoot him in the hood, though Amy could tell she was in two minds about it. She wanted revenge, but not to be an orphan.

Amy looked around, wondering how the pieces had fallen. She stood up, to try to get a better view.

Rayne, furious, ran at her – charging along the deck. Dead ants fell from her clothes and hair. She had compound eyes and mandibles. She shrieked and chittered, mouthparts working weirdly, ropes of spittle flying.

Amy tensed, ready to fly at the deposed Queen Ant and join battle.

Someone – Palgraive! – got in the way, and Rayne was slammed aside. The fight was knocked out of her.

Palgraive, head lolling like a hanged man, held Rayne up. Inside her brain, a maggot was hatching.

Into what? A fly?

Rayne hung limp, an empty suit. Palgraive’s head shifted, with a crack as her neck settled back in place. Something looked out through her eyes and into Rayne’s slack, vacant face.

‘Good girl,’ she said – rather, the thing in her brain said. ‘One should be a good girl.’