The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls

by Claire Legrand

  “No!” Victoria shouted as she tumbled out of the gardens and onto the terrace. She was so frightened, the word burst out of her. She whirled around to face Mrs. Cavendish and opened the shears, thrusting them up into the dark.

  With a whine, Gallagher jumped out of Victoria’s arms and ran off to the left.

  At the gate to the gardens, Mrs. Cavendish crouched on her fingers and toes, dancing back and forth once more, flicking out her tongue. Her pretty white dress flew around her like wings. Her eyes were so, so blue, her smile too large, snapping and clacking. Her arms were far too long to be real, snaking up the terrace steps toward Victoria’s ankles.

  Victoria jabbed with the shears. “Stay away from me!”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Cavendish. Roaches fell out of her mouth when she spoke, and out of the ends of her sleeves, fluttering. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  That voice made Victoria blink. It was so sweet, so kind. Perhaps if she just lay down for a moment, she could get some nice, restful sleep. . . .

  Somewhere in the storming shadows, Gallagher barked. It woke up Victoria a bit. She raised the shears higher and gritted her teeth.

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” she said, putting her chin up. “I’ll do what I want.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Cavendish. Her head turned around till it was hanging low, upside down. She laughed a sweet, upside-down laugh. Roaches slid out of her collar and into her hair. “You’ll do exactly as I say.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Vicky,” came a strangled voice—Lawrence’s voice. Faint with dread, Victoria glanced toward the Home, never lowering the shears.

  There, gathered in a frightened knot, was everyone—Donovan, Caroline, Jacqueline, the others who had helped her. Peter, looking smug and a bit unbalanced.

  Lawrence.

  Mr. Alice had him by the collar, his rake at Lawrence’s throat. The rusted prongs dug into Lawrence’s neck, but there wasn’t any blood—yet. Holding the children in place with fireplace pokers were the gofers. Their eyes blinked yellow moonlight. They smacked their mouths stupidly. They seemed uncertain even as they held the children in place.

  “Don’t hurt them,” Victoria said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, and Mr. Alice looked far too happy, his rake ready to strike. Victoria could maybe throw the shears at Mrs. Cavendish, taking Mr. Alice by surprise, and grab Lawrence and run away. But any wrong move on Victoria’s part and Lawrence would be—

  Victoria thought she might pass out from the fear. On one side, Mrs. Cavendish inched closer, pulling herself up the terrace steps, flat on her belly. Spitting and crooning, roaches spilling from her clothes, she slid closer and closer.

  On the other side were Lawrence, Mr. Alice, and all Victoria’s friends—All my friends, Victoria thought, surprised. They’re my friends. I have friends now. How strange.

  “I have something special planned for you, Vicky,” said Mrs. Cavendish, her face growing longer and thinner and distinctly not human. “Oh, yes. You’re going to stay with me and help me, for a very, very long time. I would’ve treated you well, I would’ve taught you things you’d never believe . . . but you’ve ruined that now.”

  Victoria held out her shears. The gofers shifted restlessly. Lawrence made a choking sound as Mr. Alice pressed the prongs closer against his throat. Some of the younger children were crying.

  “Why do you do it?” asked Victoria. She stared down at Mrs. Cavendish through the open blades.

  Mrs. Cavendish’s long black tongue flicked out to release a single roach. It crawled toward Victoria’s foot. “Do?” she said, laughing.

  “Why do you bring us here? Try to fix us?”

  “Because they want me to,” said Mrs. Cavendish, laughing sweetly, reaching up with clawed hands, following the roach up toward Victoria’s legs. “Your parents, your teachers, everyone. They want me to make you perfect, and I do. I keep their town beautiful, I keep it perfect. And they’re happy. Or they were, till some people got too nosy, like that professor of yours, like you yourself, Vicky.”

  Over the laughter singing Victoria to her doom came frantic little barks—Gallagher, in the shadows by the overgrown tree. The tree that was Vivian Goodfellow, kept in the garden for years, forever a part of the Home because she didn’t keep quiet. A part of the Home, which had vines and tree roots growing up its sides.

  Victoria thought quickly, remembering Lawrence’s coaching. She had hummed and sung as he played the piano, and he had pounded the silent keys, and the Home had moved, and it had kept moving all night, in waves, like something was beneath it, rumbling awake. She had hummed and talked to the Home, and it had helped her get from place to place. And tonight, it had kept the bugs from swarming through the walls and snatching them away, and with all of them running around and shouting and breaking things and banging things, it had moved even more. Even now, the ground beneath them quivered like gentle water lay beneath it.

  And Mrs. Cavendish, ugly and horrifying and beastly, was still flicking nervous white eyes toward the Home’s gray walls. . . .

  Inside Victoria’s mind, everything clicked into place—the shifting, restless Home, the bugs in the walls, the tree roots that had caught her as she fell; Professor Alban growing into the brick wall; the Vivian Goodfellow tree; the sad, whispering voices.

  “Of course,” Victoria said. She slapped her forehead. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Why didn’t I think of this before? So obvious. Professor Alban would give me a B for this, and I’d deserve it.”

  “What are you saying?” said Mrs. Cavendish, sliding closer. Her hands opened. Her claws scraped Victoria’s ankle. “Speak up, speak up, little Victoria.”

  “Um,” said Victoria. Then, she began to sing the same tune from the other day, from Lawrence’s coaching—the Fauré duet. She remembered what it was now. During his coaching, he had pounded it across the silent keys. They had played it together the morning before Lawrence disappeared.

  Everything was suddenly clear, especially the soft, friendly, Lawrence-y place in her brain she tried to ignore. Focusing on that soft place, and on Lawrence’s face and Caroline’s and Jacqueline’s and Donovan’s, helped her sing past the terrified jumps in her throat.

  “Ba-dum-dum-dum DUM. Ba-da-dum-dum-dum DUM. Ba-da-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-DUM-DUM-DUM-DUM-DUM!” sang Victoria.

  This didn’t take long to sing, because it was a fast piece (Victoria remembered Lawrence’s featherlight fingers flying), and Victoria didn’t have a good voice, either.

  But it was enough. Everyone froze.

  Immediately, something rumbled quietly beneath their feet, beneath the stone of the terrace and the mud of the gardens. Stupidly (or perhaps not so stupidly, considering the circumstances), Victoria thought the storming air around them suddenly seemed a little bit friendlier.

  Mrs. Cavendish shrank back, spitting, frantically looking around into the night. “Quiet,” she snapped. “Quiet!”

  Lawrence joined in, smiling at Victoria from Mr. Alice’s arms. His voice was strained because he could hardly breathe, but he sang a few notes along with Victoria, till Mr. Alice choked him quiet.

  “Sing,” Lawrence managed to gasp out as Victoria kept bum-bum-ing and carefully backing away from Mrs. Cavendish. “Sing something, anything!”

  “Scream!” Victoria shouted. “Yell! Just make noise!” She remembered the voices whispering, “Lonely, so lonely.” “It likes singing, it likes noise!”

  The other children looked at each other in confusion. Mrs. Cavendish saw their fear and grinned. She darted for Victoria, three black tongues and three sets of gleaming teeth ready to strike. . . .

  “Er. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream,” sang Jacqueline, her voice a bit rusty. The gofer beside her pinched her arm, but she kicked him and went on anyway. “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”

  Then she started again, and the other children started to sing too, and scream and holler and whistle and whoop lik
e sirens. They sang all sorts of things, like rock songs and nursery rhymes, and the Impetus Academy school song, of all things, and little Caroline, trembling, piped up with an opera aria, much to everyone’s surprise. The notes soared on the air like golden birds. One of the smallest boys, who couldn’t have been more than five, started zooming around the terrace like an airplane.

  “Stop it,” Mrs. Cavendish shrieked, her face drooping in horrified flaps of skin. She tried to lunge for Victoria again, but this time, the terrace lunged too. The stone rippled, and an enormous tree root broke up through the banister, whipping at Mrs. Cavendish. Clinging to the root were rotting, bark-covered arms and tiny bare feet. But that was only one root, and the terrace wasn’t moving enough yet; the Home wobbled but stood tall.

  “Sing louder!” said Victoria, waving the shears wildly. “Yell! Scream! As loud as you can—it’s waking them all up!”

  As it turned out, seeing a giant tree root lashing out at Mrs. Cavendish was quite an inspiration. Caroline trilled louder, and one of the new boys made guitar motions with his hands as he belted out his rock song, and Jacqueline kept rowing merrily, a wide grin on her face. More kids crept out of the Home, those who had been too afraid to help. The doors were falling; the windows were collapsing. Everyone started running around and screaming their heads off, banging on anything they could find, hollering out war cries. Songs turned into an angry din of shouts and chaos.

  “What’s happening?” said Mr. Alice, clapping his hands to his ears and releasing Lawrence. Some of the gofers clapped their hands to their ears like Mr. Alice, but some of them started grunting and banging their fireplace pokers along the terrace walls. One fat-bellied gofer smashed a window and squealed.

  “BANG BANG BANG,” it shouted. The other gofers began echoing him, their voices so loud and hoarse that Victoria’s ears rang.

  “Bang!” repeated the smaller children, and they and the gofers began pulling up the terrace stones, helping to free the gardens underneath.

  Mr. Alice’s face started to crumble and writhe, like things were moving beneath his skin, and when Lawrence let out a bellowing roar, Mr. Alice moaned horribly. His skin broke open, and he collapsed into a shining pile of confused roaches that spilled everywhere. Lawrence danced away, kicking cascades of them toward the Home. They swarmed across his legs, and Victoria ran for him, but Lawrence waved her away.

  “Go, Vicky!” he yelled, and Victoria ducked just in time, because Mrs. Cavendish had come crawling toward her, through the mass of whipping roots. There were lots of them now, coming up through the terrace and the Home itself. Victoria threw the shears at Mrs. Cavendish’s face, but Mrs. Cavendish dodged them and leapt at Victoria with arms outstretched.

  “But I can fix you,” Mrs. Cavendish cried at Victoria’s heels, tearing through the gardens like a giant beast. She didn’t even look remotely human now, just shining and spiderlike, a monster skittering closer and closer, too horrifying to look away from. Her clawed fingers tore through the mud for Victoria, reaching, reaching . . .

  “I don’t want to be fixed,” Victoria shouted, and finally, she reached the great, wild tree. She darted behind it and pressed close to the bark, panting. Gallagher was there, his paws on the trunk, yapping like mad. Victoria picked him up and peeked out.

  The gardens weren’t even gardens anymore. The children’s singing and screaming and chaos and noise, and the ruckus of the gofers, had woken them up and brought them to life. Branches waved through the air, the ground rumbled like an earthquake, and here and there, the groaning ground erupted into hills and ridges. Victoria also saw hunched-over things rising up out of the gardens. Shaped vaguely like people, the things crawled up brokenly out of the twisting gardens, their heads tilted weirdly, their movements sharp and unstable. Victoria saw rotten arms and legs and angry, gaping faces in the tangle of writhing trees and flowers, but she didn’t look too closely at them for long.

  “Vivian?” Victoria whispered. The tree groaned, its branches and roots snapping free into the air. “Please help us? I know you’ve tried before—and you’ve been trying, haven’t you? You and the others. But now you really can help the most of all. Please, please . . .”

  Mrs. Cavendish dodged the tree’s whipping branches. She leapt over the roots that popped and twisted up out of the dirt. Behind her, the Home began to collapse, the chimneys swaying dangerously in the air, bricks and bugs and dried-up arms exploding in rattling cascades, but Mrs. Cavendish didn’t seem to care. She lunged at Victoria, her mouth opening wide, wider than a window, wider than a door.

  Victoria hid her face in Gallagher’s fur. Well, so this is the end, she thought. After everything else, it seemed easy to let the end happen.

  But if Victoria had thought the tree was alive before, it was nothing compared to what happened now. The tree sprang taller, so many roots and branches flinging themselves up into the air that it became a forest, surrounding her. And the rest of the gardens reared up, too, and the Home was a mass of shining, clicking things. It wasn’t a Home at all anymore, and all of it surged toward Mrs. Cavendish in waves of roaches, angry branches, and eyeglasses and fingers and boots and other things that had been on the people fed to the Home over the years, including one ugly heart-shaped locket. Black with rust and mud, the locket popped up out of the great tree’s roots, and Victoria grabbed it before it could tumble away. The lashing roots stung her hands, and she gritted her teeth in pain, but she just couldn’t let that locket disappear.

  One of the tree’s branches shoved Victoria away, and she took the hint, running as quickly as possible in the opposite direction from the collapsing gardens, right into Lawrence and the other children.

  “Vicky, you’re all right,” Lawrence whispered, and he hugged her so close she couldn’t breathe, but Victoria had never felt anything so wonderful. Together with the other children, they watched the Home and its gardens swallow Mrs. Cavendish into the ground. She shrieked in rage, darting this way and that till the black sea of thorns and mud swarmed over her, swallowing her up. None of the children covered their ears to block out her screams.

  When it was over, there was no Home, no gardens, no stinking cottages. They stood in an empty, naked-looking clearing in the middle of an empty, lonely woodland. The ground rumbled softly a few times. Dim lights flashed from deep underground like lightning. Then all was silent. The only thing left was a black spot on the ground where Mrs. Cavendish had gone under.

  The breeze became nice and cool, and the remaining trees throughout the grounds rustled peacefully. Everyone looked at each other, dazed, shivering, and tried to smile. After all, they were free now, weren’t they?

  “Look, Victoria,” said Peter, stepping forward. He kept blinking, like he was waking up, and maybe, Victoria thought, he was. “I’m really sorry about—I mean, it wasn’t me—”

  “It’s all right,” Victoria said, although she didn’t altogether believe him. It hadn’t always been Mrs. Cavendish making Peter do things. Just like it hadn’t been only Mrs. Cavendish doing bad things in Belleville. People had let her. They had wanted her to, at first, all those years ago.

  Victoria didn’t like thinking about that, but she made herself anyway. It would not do to forget. Luckily, Victoria never forgot anything.

  Everyone poked around in the rubbish for a while, but there was not a lot to see—only shriveled bits of garden, like something had burned all the little twigs and thorns to a crisp.

  “What about the gofers?” squeaked little Caroline. “What happened to them?”

  Lawrence shifted uncomfortably. Victoria put her hands on her hips and kicked her foot around Mrs. Cavendish’s black spot. Ash flew up, and dirt, and specks of what Victoria dearly hoped was not bone.

  “Mrs. Cavendish made them,” she said, “so when she went, I guess they did, too.”

  Some of the children looked away. Others lowered their heads. Donovan looked as though he might lose whatever Mallow Cakes were left in his stomach.

  �
�So, we can’t forget about them,” Victoria said. She heard her voice sounding bossy, but she didn’t care. Sometimes it was all right to be bossy. “And we can’t let it happen again. Agreed?”

  Everyone nodded, their faces suddenly fierce and solemn. The night around them was very quiet and cool and barely silvered with moonlight.

  “Well,” said Lawrence at last. He took Victoria’s hand.

  “Well,” Victoria agreed. She squeezed Lawrence’s fingers and didn’t let go for a long time.

  Gallagher trotted away toward the street, barking happily. A light bobbed toward them, and when it got closer, Victoria saw that it was Mr. Tibbalt and a flashlight.

  “Hello, everyone,” he said. He looked around where the Home once stood, his eyes lingering over the spot where the big, black tree used to be. It was strange to see him out in the real world, outside his house. He looked small beneath the trees, and lost.

  “Mr. Tibbalt,” Victoria said, hurrying toward him. She dug around in her pocket until she found the dirty, half-shattered old locket and pressed it into his hand. “This is yours now.”

  Mr. Tibbalt’s purple-tinged, wrinkled fingers closed shakily over the locket. He did not look up for a long time. Victoria wondered if she should say something else but decided against it; enough had been said—and done. Mr. Tibbalt would understand.

  Finally, he looked up. Beneath his glasses, his eyes shone and his mouth trembled, but he stood a little taller now. He could straighten his hunched-over shoulders. After a moment or two, and for the first time in Victoria’s life, he even managed a smile.

  “Would anyone like to come over for hot chocolate while you call your parents?” he said, and they did.

  EPILOGUE

  SEVERAL YEARS LATER, VICTORIA HUGGED HER PARENTS good-bye at the train station five times before they would let her go. They had been excessively affectionate ever since that storming night when twelve-year-old Victoria came home in dirty pajamas they had never seen before. They had even started saying “I love you” on occasion, although not in public. It wasn’t the most dignified of things to say, after all. But for Victoria, it was enough. She knew that they would never again forget her, and she would not let them.