“Mrrrrmph.” Clumps of burrs and little white moths spilled out of Professor Alban’s mouth.
“What has she done to you?” Lawrence knelt in front of him. “Is this because you tried to help Victoria? Tried to help us?”
Professor Alban’s treeish throat jumped. It looked like he was trying to speak again, but his eyes were rapidly losing their shine. They were hardening. So was what remained of his skin. He was becoming part of the gardens, part of the Home. He was dying.
Somehow—impossibly—Professor Alban had grown into the Home.
“Professor Alban,” said Victoria. She snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Victoria Wright. Remember? From the Academy? And this is Lawrence Prewitt, and we need your help. You can’t just turn into a useless pile of bricks on us.”
A tear of sap pooled at the corner of Professor Alban’s left eye. Victoria dug in her heels to keep from running away in horror. She wondered if it hurt, being soaked up into a house like that.
“Professor?” she whispered. “Stay awake, please. We need to get out of here. There are lots of us, and we’re all alone.”
Victoria turned away to fight her tears in private, unable to say more. She tried to tell herself that it wasn’t her fault Professor Alban got snatched, but it wasn’t really working. Dry crackling noises popped behind her, like a tree zipping itself shut. Victoria bent over and put her hands on her knees, trying not to get sick.
“He’s gone,” said Lawrence quietly, his hand on Professor Alban’s frozen knotted, leafy shoulder. “Well, I think so, anyway.” He wiped his cheek on his sleeve and took Victoria’s hand. “Vicky, are you—?”
But Victoria was already staring at something else—that big, wild tree in the corner, so overgrown it seemed like five trees in one. There was something familiar about it. In the center of its trunk, the bark formed a distinctive shape. It looked almost like a—
“There’s something in the bushes,” said Lawrence, pointing to a rustling pile of leaves all knotted up in the big tree’s roots. He grabbed Professor Alban’s eyeglasses and thrust them out like a sword. “Don’t worry, Vicky, we’ll get out of this somehow.”
“Yes, with broken eyeglasses, I’m sure,” said Victoria, but she wished she had something to hold out too, because the bushes were growling now. She ducked behind Lawrence’s arm just in time for something to come flying toward them.
“Gallagher!” Victoria whispered, holding out her arms. Gallagher jumped into them and slopped a whiskered kiss on Victoria’s nose. He was absolutely covered with muck, but Victoria didn’t care. “I’ve never been so glad to see something so smelly.”
“Isn’t that Mr. Tibbalt’s dog?” said Lawrence.
“Yes, his name is Gallagher. But why is he all the way out here?”
Lawrence kicked around the bushes Gallagher had been hiding in. “Looks like he’s been here for a while. He’s brought a bone. Lots of bones, actually.”
“Right there at the base of that tree,” said Victoria. She put Gallagher down to inspect the tree more closely. He followed, whining and sniffing along the tree roots.
“Maybe he could lead us out of here, back through the grounds,” said Lawrence. “I mean, he had to get in somehow, right?”
As if in response, a cold wind swept around them, flinging dirt and leaves into their faces.
Lawrence spat a snail from his lips. “All right, never mind, maybe not.”
“This marking,” said Victoria, running her finger over a knot in the bark. “What does it look like to you?”
“It looks like a heart,” said Lawrence. He put his fingers on the knot too. They brushed Victoria’s, and he drew back. “I mean, not that I think about things like that, or—well, you know.”
“And doesn’t it sort of look like a face, up there?” said Victoria. She pointed up at the branches, the knots of bark between them, the swirling leaves.
“Actually, it does,” said Lawrence. “That’s weird.” He paused. “Do you think . . . maybe there are other people like Professor Alban here? Other people who tried to help before she caught them?”
Victoria backed up to get a better view of the great tree. The moonlight illuminated what was clearly a face in the bark and leaves. The branches looked like wild, black curls. And the heart-shaped marking sat exactly where a neck would be, exactly where Victoria had seen that heart shape before. Mr. Tibbalt’s gnarled finger had caressed it in the photograph on his lap—a heart-shaped locket.
“Vivian Goodfellow,” Victoria whispered. Gallagher whined louder, looking away into the gardens. “I don’t believe it. It can’t be.”
“Who’s that?” said Lawrence.
Just then, Gallagher started yapping so angrily that he tipped over.
“Look,” said Lawrence, pointing back toward the lit-up cottage. The door opened, becoming a bright yellow rectangle. Then the lights went out. The door slammed. Something dark, long, and thin slithered into the gardens.
“Go!” said Victoria. Hand in hand, she and Lawrence dashed around the corner, across the terrace, and through the doors (which thankfully, ominously, had remained unlocked). They ran through the gallery and up the staircase with the snake banisters (they writhed and hissed golden tongues; “Don’t look at them!” warned Lawrence), back through the hallway of golden smiling faces, and to the wall where they’d come down the fireplace staircase.
“Come on, let us in,” said Victoria, pounding on the wall as loudly as she dared.
“Someone’s coming, Vicky,” whispered Lawrence, craning his neck back down the hallway. Candlelight bobbed on the emerald-snake stairs. Shadows flickered up across the golden metal faces, and their smiles melted into frowns and toothy snarls.
Victoria dug her fingers between the wooden panels and tugged hard, but the wall didn’t move. “Um,” she said, her voice shaking. “Um, right.” She started to hum. It was a very disjointed song. It didn’t sound like much. She was afraid to hum too loudly.
Lawrence backed up, putting himself in front of her. The candlelight grew brighter. Whoever it was, they were almost up the stairs.
“Vicky . . . Vicky, hurry. . . .”
“I can’t find the door!” Victoria whispered, but just at that moment, the floor opened beneath them, and they fell into darkness. Above them, the floor snapped shut.
Lawrence screamed as they fell, but Victoria found him in the tumbling dark and jabbed his side. “It’s all right,” she said. “This is what happened last time.”
“This . . . is not . . . all right,” Lawrence gasped.
They hit soft, mushy ground, and then they were rolling down a slope of stone and crumbly dirt. When they came to a stop, it was in the hearth of the boys’ dorm.
“Angry,” those whispering voices rushed down after them, ruffling their hair. “So very angry. Run. Run.”
“Hurry,” said Victoria, pushing Lawrence toward the cots. “Go back to bed. And if anyone asks what we did, for goodness’ sake, don’t tell them. Not yet.”
“But what did we find out?”
“I don’t know, I need time to think. Go!”
Victoria turned and ran-crawled through the fireplace passage, scrabbling along the walls for a grip. The floor rumbled but stayed in place. I hope that doesn’t mean Mrs. Cavendish is angry, Victoria thought.
“Hurry, hurry” whispered a voice, but this wasn’t a child’s voice; it was a man’s, and for a wild moment, Victoria thought it was Professor Alban.
“Professor Alban is gone,” she told herself, but her teeth still chattered. Once in the girls’ dorm, she smoothed down her hair and brushed off her clothes, just in case someone came looking for her, and sat down on her cot to think.
“What happened?” said Jacqueline, hurrying over. “Where did you go? Did you find out why the Home was moving like that?”
Victoria told Jacqueline about sneaking through the Home, the birdies, the gofers and their eyes (Jacqueline looked a bit ill at th
at point), the gardens; the stinking cottage (Jacqueline definitely looked ill) and the puppet cottage (Jacqueline gasped and shivered), and Professor Alban (Jacqueline covered her mouth). When Victoria got to the part about Gallagher and the big black tree, and about Mr. Tibbalt and Vivian Goodfellow, Jacqueline said, wide-eyed, “What do you think that means?”
“I’m not sure.” Victoria’s brain had never worked so fast in her entire life. “But that tree—its roots go all over the place, even up against the Home, where Professor”—Victoria gulped down the sick feeling in her throat—“where Professor Alban was. I think Mr. Alice tries to keep it all nice and under control, but . . .”
“Maybe he can’t,” whispered Jacqueline.
“Maybe there are others in the gardens,” said Victoria, remembering what Lawrence had said. She swallowed hard. “It sounds crazy, but . . . what if it’s true?”
Jacqueline’s eyes got even wider. “Others? Like Professor Alban?”
“Yes. But what we can do about it I don’t know. I wonder. . . .”
They went on whispering for a while, but they kept hearing noises and feeling things watching them from the shadows. Jacqueline couldn’t stop shivering and went back to bed, and Victoria kept wondering about everything for a long time, till the moonlight in the high window changed to sunlight.
She was still wondering as they headed down for breakfast through hallways that were actually normal for once. Nice pictures of nice people doing nice things hung along the walls. None of the people in the pictures had horns or leathery wings, and they weren’t smiling nastily at the children as they passed. The banisters weren’t made of snakes, the birdies were quiet, and the shadows weren’t crawling with bugs.
“I don’t like this,” whispered Jacqueline as they entered the dining hall. “It’s too quiet in here.”
“Hmm,” said Victoria, deep in thought—till she caught sight of Hyena Harold’s empty seat across from her. She frowned harder. “Jacqueline, look. Harold’s not—”
Victoria caught sight of Lawrence’s horrified face down the table. He was staring at a gofer—a gofer shoveling eggs and meat onto Caroline’s plate. A gofer who, when he got pepper up his nose, sneezed in an awfully familiar way—loud and harsh, like a hyena’s laugh.
“No,” said Victoria, staring at the gofer’s dumb, yellow eye, the drooling, tongueless mouth. It had only one hand, stubs for legs, and chunks missing from all over its gnarled body.
At the head of the table, Mrs. Cavendish scratched the side of her mouth with one shining fingernail.
The gofer grunted as it spooned casserole onto Victoria’s plate. The steaming meat chunks looked fresher today—plumper and juicier. It smelled like the scabby kitchen and that stinking cottage in the gardens.
Victoria watched the gofer hobble to Jacqueline’s seat. She looked at her plate and back at the gofer, over and over.
Mrs. Cavendish began to cut into her own casserole, primly. She wore a terrible smile. Meat juice dripped from her lips.
Victoria didn’t believe it. It was nonsense. It was too horrible to be real. But nevertheless . . .
She turned Harold into a gofer, Victoria realized. All the gofers were children. And all the bits missing from them—their tongues, their hands . . .
Victoria looked down at her plate. Her stomach flipped and shriveled.
. . . she feeds us with them.
TWO DAYS LATER, VICTORIA, LAWRENCE, JACQUELINE, Donovan, and Caroline huddled together at the fireplace in the girls’ dorm. Victoria had led the boys over from their own dorm. It was late, and pitch black. The moon was barely a sliver.
It felt strange to talk; Mrs. Cavendish had made them stay silent for two days straight. If anyone had talked, unless they were called upon, if anyone had laughed or coughed or cleared their throat too loudly, they were hit and whipped and slapped. All of them bore the welts and scratches to prove it, even Victoria. “No one wants to hear you,” Mrs. Cavendish had shrieked after Lawrence had coughed during supper just that very night. “No one, no one!” She had hit him across the face. The Home had shifted and groaned, and Mrs. Cavendish had paled and hissed at them all, “Eat your food, eat your meat,” her eyes wild.
Now they whispered together in a little knot. It was strange how thrilling it felt just to whisper. Just that little action felt like a triumph.
“So, let me get this straight,” said Lawrence, ticking off points on his fingers. “If you don’t get out of here by the time you’re thirteen, Mrs. Cavendish chops you up and feeds the other kids with you.”
Caroline hid her face. Donovan covered his mouth like he wanted to vomit. Jacqueline couldn’t stop shaking. Victoria allowed herself to do none of this. Someone had to keep her head. She swallowed hard and took a deep breath.
“Right,” she said.
“And then she turns what’s left of you into a gofer, to help her run everything.”
“Right.”
“And anyone who tries to help, like Professor Alban or Mr. Tibbalt’s friend, that Vivian lady—”
“Vivian Goodfellow,” said Jacqueline.
“Yes, her. Any grown-ups like them who try to help get swallowed up by the gardens, which Mr. Alice tends.”
Victoria exhaled. “Right. I mean, unless anyone thinks I’m wrong?”
There was a heavy silence. Caroline started to cry into Jacqueline’s sleeve. Donovan mumbled, “No,” and wiped his clammy forehead.
“Well, now that that’s all cleared up,” said Victoria, “we’ve got to do something. I mean, we can’t sit around and let her chop us up into gofers, can we?” She started pacing. “We can’t let her use us like that—cut us up and make us too afraid to stop her.”
“And what about those puppets you and Lawrence saw?” said Donovan. “What are those all about?”
Victoria had been thinking about that. She had pictured the puppet cottage in her mind a hundred times and pictured Mrs. Cavendish tying strings and setting them here and there, just so. When one wasn’t allowed to talk for two days straight, it was very easy to think and gather one’s thoughts. Victoria smirked. You didn’t plan on that, did you, Mrs. Cavendish? she thought.
“Here’s what I think,” Victoria said, leaning in close. “You know how everyone forgets you once you’re here? And people don’t care enough to come find you? And people act so strange, like your parents, Lawrence, and mine, too, and Mr. Waxman and the professors at the Academy. . . .”
“And my sister, Jill,” added Jacqueline.
Caroline sniffled. “My big brother, Adam. He was acting like he hated me. But he had always called me his ‘little goober’ before. Before.” She sniffled again.
Everyone nodded. Everyone remembered how it had been, just before. Victoria imagined her parents smiling coldly at her, how they had stayed in their bedroom, how they had not come when she called for them, that day the bugs took her away.
“Right, so,” she continued, “I think that’s how she makes everyone act that way, how she gets everyone to do what she wants. How else could everyone really forget about us like that? Simple: She controls her puppets, and her puppets control the town.”
“But—but—” Donovan spluttered a bit. “How? How is that possible?”
Victoria remembered back to what Mr. Tibbalt had said: “There are magic tricks, like pick-a-card and white rabbits, and then there are other tricks. Nasty ones. I’d guess that’s what Mrs. Cavendish is all about. But I surely don’t want to find out.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter how she does it. What matters is how we’re going to stop her.”
“Lawrence’s birthday is tomorrow,” whispered Jacqueline, out of the blue.
Another silence fell. Donovan solemnly clapped Lawrence on the back.
“Yes, well, we’re not going to think about that, are we?” said Victoria, although it was, as a matter of fact, all she could think about. She couldn’t stop imagining a Lawrence gofer with a streak of gray in its greasy, matted hair.
“Instead, we’re going to focus on this—I’ve got a plan,” Victoria said.
“You do?” Caroline said, sniffling.
Victoria kept herself from wrinkling her nose at the sight of Caroline’s messy face. Instead, she wiped it with her sleeve and patted Caroline’s shoulder and tried to smile. She would not think about Caroline snot on her sleeve; there were more important things.
“Of course I do,” she said briskly.
Lawrence tried to smile, too, but it looked a bit sick. Victoria wondered if he was also imagining a Lawrence gofer. “Vicky always has a plan up her sleeve.”
Victoria flushed with pleasure and tossed her curls without really thinking about it. This was good. This felt like school, taking charge of group projects and doling out assignments. She could do this. She straightened her dirty pajamas.
“Yes, I do,” she said, “and this one should work, but everyone has to help.”
“Everyone?” Caroline squeaked.
“Yes. But don’t worry, it’ll be okay.”
“But how do you know?”
Victoria raised an eyebrow. “Because my plans always work. Now listen. . . .”
As Victoria whispered instructions, other children crept up to listen—a couple of the girls, and also three boys Lawrence recruited from next door. By the time they all gathered at the fireplace to leave, they were a dozen.
“You’re sure Peter’s still asleep?” Lawrence said to the boys.
“Didn’t even move when I tripped in the dark,” said one of them.
Victoria was worried about that. Out of everyone, Peter would be the likeliest to go find Mrs. Cavendish and ruin the plan. But it was a risk they would have to take.
Victoria crawled in first, Lawrence just behind her, everyone else behind them. (“Stop grabbing me, Caroline,” Jacqueline snapped.)
“Well,” said Victoria, coming to a halt, “that’s new.”
A black door with a dark, curving handle stood in front of them, far back in the fireplace’s shadows. She hadn’t even had to hum or whisper to the Home for help.
The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls Page 20