The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls

by Claire Legrand

  Victoria caught her breath and crawled toward this figure. The ground beneath her had that same gritty, filthy feel from the fireplace in her dorm. In fact, this was another fireplace, Victoria realized, seeing the outline of a hearth appear within the light in front of her—or maybe it was the same one? Had she found her way back to the dorm? Victoria crawled out cautiously and found two long rows of beds, but these held boys instead of girls. A small, wide-eyed boy stood bent over near the fireplace, staring at her.

  “I heard a big crash,” he murmured. It was the same voice from a moment ago. “Are you the new girl?”

  “That’s me,” said Victoria, climbing out of the fireplace and to her feet.

  Yes, it was the boys’ dorm. There was just as much soft crying from here and there as in the girls’ dorm, but it smelled different, and there, a few cots down from the fireplace, sat Lawrence. The moonlight coming in from the boys’ own high window made his skunk streak shine.

  Victoria brushed off her pajamas and walked over to him, like it was the most normal thing in the world to walk through a fireplace and get thrown around a bug-filled house that moved like it was alive. The tall boy, Peter, sat up as Victoria passed him.

  “You’d better be careful, Victoria,” he whispered. The angles of his face glowed sharply in the moonlight. “I’m going home soon. I won’t have you getting us in trouble.”

  “No one’s getting in trouble,” said Victoria, although she wasn’t sure if she believed that. She sat down beside Lawrence, just as she had that first lunch in fourth grade, and said, “Lawrence, you’ll never believe what just happened. I wanted to come talk to you, so I snuck out through the fireplace in the girls’ dorm, and I crawled and crawled. It kept going, not like a regular fireplace, but like a secret passage or something. At first it trapped me and I thought it was Mrs. Cavendish getting me stuck there, and maybe it was, but then—you’ll really never believe this—I started humming, and I think that did something, because suddenly I wasn’t trapped anymore. Steps came out of nowhere, and I climbed up them, and then I was falling, and I came out on the . . . fourth floor, I think it was? I was in the stinky kitchen next. Everything kept moving around and spitting me out in a different place. There were voices and buzzing—that was the bugs, those roaches, they’re everywhere—and someone screaming, and it was almost like the bugs and the voices were fighting each other. The voices kept saying they were lonely, and . . . and”—she forced herself to stop and breathe deep—“and I’m sorry. About the hanger, I mean. She put you in there because of me, and I’m sorry.”

  It took Lawrence a minute to look at her. When he did, his expression was so foggy, his eyes so strange, that he didn’t look like himself. Suddenly, Victoria felt stupid for having blurted everything at him like that.

  “Oh, Lawrence, you can’t give up,” she said. “Don’t you know your birthday is coming up? You’ll be thirteen. Don’t you know what happens when children here turn thirteen?”

  Lawrence nodded slowly. “You either leave or you . . . don’t.”

  “Do you know what happens to the kids who don’t leave?” Victoria whispered. “Jacqueline didn’t know.”

  “I have my guesses.”

  Victoria paused at the sudden darkness of his expression. Deciding to try something different, she put her hand on his arm and spoke to him like she would have to a tiny child, pronouncing each word clearly.

  “Lawrence Prewitt. Do you know who I am?”

  Lawrence sighed. “Vicky, I’m not dumb. I’m just tired.”

  Victoria’s heart leapt to hear that awful nickname. “Oh, you’re not gone, after all.”

  “No, I’m not gone. I might as well be, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re trying to make me give up my music, Vicky,” he said, and at the mention of music, a bit of light came back to his eyes. “That’s why I’m here. Mother and Father got sick of it. They let her take me.”

  “Well, what in the world’s wrong with music?”

  “Everything, to them. You know that. It’s not what they want. It’s not respectable.”

  “But you’re supposed to play music, obviously,” said Victoria.

  Lawrence looked at her in surprise. “You mean it? I thought you hated it.”

  “I do mean it,” said Victoria. She felt pretty shocked herself. “It’s annoying sometimes—well, a lot of the time, really—but it’s obviously the thing you’re best at, so why shouldn’t you do it?” Embarrassed at how happy Lawrence looked, she tried to smooth the wrinkles out of her dirty pajamas. “I mean, it’s only logical, isn’t it?”

  “If you weren’t, well, you—I’d want to kiss you right now.”

  It was fortunate that the room was so dark. Victoria’s cheeks turned bright red.

  “Well,” she said. “Well.”

  Lawrence grinned. “So, you came here to warn me, huh?”

  “Yes. I thought—well, after the hanging . . .”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ve been in there before. And anyway, I was so happy to see you, I didn’t care.”

  Victoria’s cheeks turned even redder. “You didn’t seem happy to see me.”

  “Well, at first I was just scared because you were here. I didn’t want you to get trapped here because of me.” Lawrence paused, fiddling with his pajamas. “That’s why you came, right? Because of me?”

  “I came because she brought me here,” said Victoria. “I mean, yes, I was trying to figure out where you’d gone. I think I got too nosy, and she didn’t like that, and—”

  “You were looking for me?”

  Victoria wondered if she would be red for the rest of her life. “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that something. Perfect ice queen Victoria looking for skunkish old me.”

  Victoria flinched. “I’m not an ice queen.” She couldn’t even get angry properly. It felt strange sitting there, with all those crying boys sniveling in their beds and tall Peter at the side of the room, staring at her, and Lawrence being broken one minute and mean the next.

  Lawrence put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. You know I don’t think that, Vicky. Not me.”

  Victoria shook off his hand.

  “Wait,” Lawrence said slowly, “you were saying something about . . . going through the fireplace to get here?”

  “Yes,” Victoria said, flushing. The truth sounded silly when Lawrence said it.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, I don’t either, but it happened. How else do you think I got here?”

  Lawrence scratched his head. “I guess I can understand a passage between the fireplaces. I mean, old houses have weird things about them, right? But how did you fall into a hallway? And then into the kitchen? And . . . you said something about humming?”

  “And voices,” Victoria said, and the more she thought about it, the fuzzier the memory of all that falling and tumbling became. Had it happened? she wondered, peering back at the fireplace. “I don’t know. It happened, though. I think.”

  Lawrence frowned. “Maybe you were imagining things?”

  “My imagination’s not that good. Or . . . I don’t know, maybe . . . well, now I can’t remember.”

  “It’s all right, Vicky,” Lawrence said, patting her arm. “This place does things to people. Believe me, the dreams I’ve had . . .” He shuddered.

  Victoria swallowed down her protests. It had happened, she knew—or, she thought it had. But the harder she tried to remember the hallway, those voices, the stinky kitchen, and the sound of her voice struggling through Rachmaninoff, the faster the images slipped away, just like in a dream. Maybe it had been a dream. Maybe she had been crawling through the fireplaces for so long that she fell asleep and dreamed it all. But she had to have gotten to the boys’ dorm somehow. Was it really just a simple passage between the fireplaces, like any old house might have?

  A soft sound echoed around at the edges of her mind. It sounded like a woman’s lau
ghter.

  “You all right?” said Lawrence, scooting closer to her.

  Victoria hurried to her feet, straightening her shirt. She did not like feeling crazy. “Well, so, what are we going to do about this?”

  “This?”

  “Yes, this!” Victoria waved her hand about the room. “How we’re all here, and why, and how we can leave. And what’s going on with this house, anyway? Even without the fireplace thing, it’s strange.”

  “Don’t talk so loud,” said Lawrence.

  “Loudly.”

  “Whatever. Look, you can’t just talk about those things where everyone can hear.” Lawrence turned to block his face from Peter’s view, Victoria could tell. She smiled. She had managed to hammer something of common sense into his music-addled brain after all.

  “How we got here was those beetles,” said Lawrence. “Don’t ask me how—I don’t know. But they do whatever she says. Sometimes I wonder—”

  Lawrence paused.

  “What?” said Victoria.

  “Well, sometimes I wonder if those beetles are her. If you know what I mean. Like, they’re a part of her, so she can control where they go and what they do?”

  Victoria raised an eyebrow. “Now that’s just ridiculous.”

  “And crawling through fireplaces isn’t?”

  Never in her life had Victoria thought she would discuss whether or not a woman was made of beetles. However, Lawrence had a point.

  “All right, fine, we’ll go with that for now,” she said. “It’s not like I’ve got any better ideas.”

  “Right. So, why we’re here, from what everyone says, is because there’s something wrong with everybody here. Mrs. Cavendish finds the kids who are wrong, brings them here, and tries to fix them. Degenerates, she calls us.”

  “Yes, I’ve figured out that much, and if she fixes you, you can leave,” whispered Victoria, remembering lunch with Jacqueline and Hyena Harold. “But if she can’t . . .”

  Lawrence said nothing.

  “Well? What does she do?” said Victoria.

  “I don’t know,” said Lawrence, but he obviously had an idea. You learn things about a person when that person is your only friend, and Victoria could see it on his face—he knew something, but he didn’t want to know it, and he was afraid to say it aloud.

  Victoria clenched her fists. She really felt like hitting something. “But how can she do that? Doesn’t anyone realize we’re gone? Surely our parents won’t let . . .”

  But even as she spoke, Victoria knew it wasn’t true. She wanted to believe someone in Belleville would realize they were gone and try to come find them, but whenever that had happened before—with Vivian, for example, and Professor Alban—whoever had tried it hadn’t come back. And Jacqueline had been here for eight weeks, and Harold for months . . .

  Lawrence shook his head. Someone nearby began to cry harder. Victoria remembered Mr. Tibbalt, his brother Teddy, and Vivian Goodfellow. Mr. Tibbalt said he hadn’t really missed his brother when Teddy disappeared. He said it felt like living in a blank, cold fog. It was peaceful. It made you forget things and not care about the people you were supposed to care about most.

  Victoria gulped, hard. People were forgetting them. And if they ever got out of here, everyone at home, at school, in town, would forget they had forgotten their children, and things would go on like before. Mrs. Cavendish would go on snatching kids. No one would say a word. It wasn’t the Belleville way to talk about unpleasant things.

  Victoria gritted her teeth till the tears and images of her parents faded. There were things to figure out first. We mustn’t go soft, Victoria, she told herself.

  “And the Home?” she said. She thought about how the floor had rippled beneath her feet and the kitchen floor had cracked like in an earthquake. “Do you think it could be . . .” She swallowed hard. She did not want to say it. “Could it be alive?”

  Lawrence frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “I think so,” whispered a small voice from the next cot over. “It does whatever she wants. Just like those roaches and Mr. Alice. She makes rooms pop up out of nowhere, and the hallways are different every day. You’ll see.”

  “Go back to sleep, Donovan,” said Lawrence.

  “I should know, though, shouldn’t I? All those nights in the parlor . . .”

  Victoria recognized the flabby sack of boy on the next cot and gasped. “Donovan? Donovan O’Flab—I mean, er, O’Flaherty?”

  Lawrence jabbed her side with his elbow.

  “That’s me,” said Donovan. He turned over, so Victoria could see the flaps of skin hanging off his cheeks, like the FEAR head hanging in the classrooms. “Hi, Victoria.”

  Ignoring the urge to kick the ugly version of Donovan away like Mrs. Cavendish might kick a gofer, Victoria said, “What’s happened to you?”

  “Coaching,” said Donovan. He sighed. His face drooped even more. “You’ll see. It happens to everybody, one way or the other.”

  “But what is it? What’s coaching?”

  “It’s when Mrs. Cavendish tries to make you stop doing whatever’s wrong with you,” said Lawrence quietly.

  “But how can she change a person like that?” said Victoria.

  “She just can. I’d never have thought before, ever, that I could hate music and want to leave it behind, but now—”

  “Lawrence Prewitt,” said Victoria. Her voice was shaking, but she stood up and put on such a fierce dazzle that even Donovan seemed to wake up. “Don’t you dare ever start talking like that again, or when I get out of here, I’ll leave you behind with the gofers.”

  Lawrence smiled. “I’ve missed your threats, Vicky.”

  “Did I hear someone mention leaving?” said Peter, strolling over. He sat down at Donovan’s feet and stared at Victoria. His mouth and fingers twitched in a sharp, wolflike way.

  Victoria narrowed her eyes. She recognized that look. The Academy professors had had it. So had Jill and the Prewitts, when they weren’t all bright and smiling. Victoria had the feeling that when people looked like that, Mrs. Cavendish was somewhere very close.

  “Yes, you did hear someone mention leaving, Peter,” said Victoria, smoothing her pajamas. “I’m leaving. I’m going back to bed.”

  With that, Victoria got up and headed for the fireplace. She wished she were wearing her nice Academy shoes with the buckles and heels. Stalking away barefoot did not have quite the same effect.

  “Careful of the dark, Victoria,” said Peter, suddenly at her side, leaning on the fireplace wall, staring at her. “Sometimes it . . . changes things. You never know.”

  Victoria rolled her eyes. “Oh, be quiet. You can’t scare me.”

  Peter grabbed her arm.

  “I won’t let you get me in trouble, Victoria,” he whispered, his eyes hard and afraid. “Just remember that. I’ve done enough, I’m a new Peter now. It’s my turn to leave. I won’t let you ruin it.”

  “Thank you for the information,” said Victoria. She pulled her arm free and crawled till she was in the dark again and the soot turned to slime.

  “I won’t let you get me in trouble, Victoria,” she said, making fun of Peter’s shaky voice. “I’m a new Peter now, blahbity blah.”

  But her own voice sounded teensy in the shifting, twisting passage, and the floor crunched and bulged beneath her hands. Don’t throw me around again, she thought. Please?

  She concentrated on crawling, moving forward bit by bit, clenching her teeth till her jaw hurt. This time, she did not have to hum or do anything at all; a dank passage awaited her, heading straight forward into darkness. Victoria paused. She did not like that one bit. She even thought about turning back and hiding in the boys’ dorm, but she didn’t think that would go over well with the gofers when they came to unlock the door in the morning.

  “Hello?” she whispered. Nothing answered her—no buzzing wings, no ghostly voices. The passage remained steady and solid. Victoria looked back over her shoulder; Peter remained at the firepla
ce, a black figure hunched over and watching her.

  Victoria gulped. “I’m not afraid.” She put up her chin and set her jaw. “I’m not, I’m not. I’m Victoria Wright.” She started crawling again, humming just in case, and kept waiting for the floor to fall out from under her again, or a staircase to shift out of the walls—but before she could think about that too long, her hands hit the fireplace grate, and she was back in the girls’ dorm. Her nameplate glinted on the wall. Jacqueline had gone to bed. Everyone was asleep. Victoria felt so relieved to be back that she sat in the soot for several minutes before she could stand up. She looked behind her to find a dirty brick wall. The passage had disappeared.

  What does it mean? she wondered, frowning. Did I imagine the Home moving like that, and spitting me out in all those different rooms?

  “I must have imagined it,” she told herself, slipping into her bed and shutting her eyes tight. “I imagined it, I imagined it. Houses don’t move like that. Houses aren’t alive.”

  “WELL?” SAID JACQUELINE THE NEXT MORNING as they gathered at the door to go down to breakfast. “What happened last night?”

  “Our fireplace goes to the boys’ fireplace,” Victoria said. “There’s a passage that connects them. So, I went over there, and I talked to Lawrence.” She shrugged, trying to seem casual about it. Falling forever and ever and coming out in that hallway; the strange voices, the stinky kitchen, how she had hummed and what that had done, or what it hadn’t done—no, she wouldn’t tell Jacqueline anything about that. Besides, it hadn’t actually happened.

  Houses aren’t alive. She had to believe that; she would not let Mrs. Cavendish turn her crazy. Houses aren’t alive. Houses aren’t alive.

  “I just can’t believe it,” said Jacqueline. “I watched you go through, and I still didn’t believe it. People have tried to mess with the fireplace before. Even I’ve tried. But there’s always just been a brick wall. No one’s ever gone through it like that.”

  So, Victoria thought, was that especially for me, Mrs. Cavendish? Did you let me through on purpose? Were you trying to scare me?

  That must have been it. Of course. It made perfect sense: Mrs. Cavendish pulled some nasty trick and sent Victoria on that wild ride to frighten her into not making any trouble. Victoria smiled and gave herself a couple of tally points on the blackboard in her head. Obviously, Mrs. Cavendish thought she was a worthy opponent. And after all, why wouldn’t she? She was Victoria Wright.