by Kim Newman
She hooked her feet around stone and let herself float face down. At full stretch, she reached the window – and peeped in from the top.
The window let into a small room. No one stood guard here. Amy made out a coiled rope ladder, attached to pitons newly hammered into cracks between the flagstones. She also saw the famous hamper, open and empty. It wasn’t large enough for a feast, so she assumed only two or three Hooded Conspirators guarded Kali. Did the villains bother to give their captive anything to eat or drink? It would be just like them not to.
Crawling insect-like, Amy entered the room.
Letting go of the window-rim, she bobbed up against the low ceiling. She gradually thought herself heavier and settled her ballet pumps on the floor.
There was a doorway, which had stout, rusted iron hinges – but no door. That must have rotted ages ago. Beyond the opening was a light. Poking her head out, she saw a winding staircase. She went back to the window and quietly let down the rope ladder, which Frecks and Light Fingers caught before it flapped away in the wind.
Soon, all three girls were inside the tower.
This time, Frecks had brought a hockey stick for use as a cudgel.
Amy remembered that the Hooded Conspirators had firearms. Was their leader here? The fellow she’d beaned with a cricket ball. She hoped his head was still splitting. He must have a good-sized bruise under his hood.
The Moth Club silently made their way down the spiral stairs.
Then, they heard voices – and froze, a tableau of cloaked, masked figures. On the next landing was a room. Lantern-light spilled out.
‘… there, the princess won’t slip from that so easily,’ drawled an all-too-familiar voice – Crowninshield. ‘My sis is an expert in these things. Houdini himself couldn’t get out of one of her corned-beef constrictor knots. Much less Nut-Brown Nancy here.’
Frecks quietly slapped her hockey stick into her hand.
Kali was here! And the worst of the Witches!
‘Wriggle all you like,’ Crowninshield crowed. ‘The rope only gets tighter. Minnie had more badges for knots than anyone in the Brownies, before they court-martialled her for demonstrating grief strangle knots on Brown Owl’s Pekingese.’
‘She does look funny, Beryl,’ said Crowninshield II. ‘I didn’t think girls her colour could go red in the face.’
An mmpphing noise suggested Kali was gagged. The tone of her muted protest indicated dire promises.
‘Now, give us some of that bottled beer, like you promised,’ Crowninshield demanded of her unknown confederates. ‘You chappies may be the most desperate Thuggees in far-off Whateveristan, but you’re no match for a Drearcliff whip! It’s a wonder Red Flame lets you hang around.’
Red Flame – the Leader of the Hooded Conspiracy!
Of course, who else would be the arch-enemy of the Moth Club but a flame?
Frecks was all for charging in, but Amy held her back. They were too close to blow the game by indiscriminate action.
A hooded man came on to the landing. The Moth Club stuck still, hiding in the dark. The wretched sisters trotted after him. Crowninshield was smoking a black cigarette and wearing make-up. Crowninshield II was fiddling with a cat’s cradle.
‘Beer’s down below, eh?’ said Crowninshield. ‘Makes sense. Keep it cool in the depths.’
‘Drink meeeee-eeeee,’ came a tiny, shrill, liquid voice from the lower floor.
The Hooded Conspirator, unused to Crowninshield’s vent act, clutched his throat in terror. She laughed nastily.
‘Give all your beeeeeer to Beryl,’ said a voice from nowhere. ‘Or face the wrath of the Great God Jumbo-Omooo!’
Crowninshield II tittered nastily.
The Hooded Conspirator produced a curved knife from his loose black blouse, but Crowninshield brushed it aside.
‘I say, for desperate characters, you mob are utter clots, aren’t you? There are Firsts who wouldn’t fall for that. Come on, bucko, let’s get that beer!’
Crowninshield prodded the knife-man with rather more confidence than Amy would have shown around such desperate fellows. With abduction and assassination to their credit, they’d scarcely stop at tossing a couple of extra heads on to the pile.
The sisters were led downstairs, away from the landing.
In the room, Kali mmmppphhed some more. Amy judged that at least one Hooded Conspirator was left to guard her – but probably no more. These were the best odds they would get.
She gave a low whistle, and the Moth Club sprang into action.
XVII: Desperate Rescue
KALI WAS TIED up. Seemingly every part of her was individually tied to a particular part of a stout chair. A white scarf wound round the bottom half of her face, lipstick smile painted mockingly over her mouth. Her exposed eyes were darkly furious.
There was indeed but one Conspirator in the room, not even Hooded. He had taken off his mask to drink a mug of tea, and looked stricken to be caught with a naked face when the Moth Club burst in. He was an Englishman, to judge by his colour – but unthreateningly middle-aged. Hood-wearing had scraped his hair into a funny shape.
Frecks conked the Hoodless Conspirator squarely on the noggin. He went down like a slaughtered bull. His eyes rolled up and blood came out of his nose, but Amy didn’t waste sympathy on him.
Light Fingers patted the prone guard down, and came up with a knife which seemed cousin – if not twin – to the dagger waved by his mate when Crowninshield was showing off her voice-throwing.
Amy got the gag off Kali’s mouth.
‘Mother of pearl, that’s a relief,’ said Kali. ‘Who the heckle are you gals?’
Amy flash-lifted her domino.
‘I mighta knowed. Get these strings offa me.’
Light Fingers sawed rapidly, severing knots which couldn’t be untied.
Kali recognised the swiftness of movement.
‘Light Fingers? And the frail with the blunt instrument has gotta be Frecks. I’m mightily impressed. I was workin’ on a coupla ways out, but this saves time an’ motion.’
Kali was free. She stood up, but wasn’t steady. Amy supported her.
‘I’ve got pins and needles all over,’ said Kali.
Amy helped Kali out of the room. The Hoodless Conspirator groaned and Frecks gave him an extra love tap.
On the landing, they found Crowninshield II. She had a bottle of ginger beer.
‘Ber-ylll,’ she yelled, ‘it’s the Moth Girls, again!’
Kali, arm around Amy, lifted up her leg and planted her foot squarely on Crowninshield II’s chest – then gave her a shove which tumbled her backwards down the stairs…
‘Oh, ow, oh, ow-www, watch out…’
The Fourth rolled out of sight and collided with bodies rushing upstairs, summoned by her cries. Crowninshield swore loudly, unintentionally throwing her voice so that oaths bounced back from the walls.
‘Exite, rapido,’ said Amy.
The Moth Club got Kali up to the window-room and helped her on to the ladder. There was a tense moment as it seemed the ex-prisoner’s hands couldn’t get a grip on the rungs, but her circulation started flowing again and she scrambled down like a monkey.
Frecks and Light Fingers followed.
Amy watched the doorway.
The Hooded Conspirator charged in. Amy threw herself through the window – hoping she’d float not fall. She soared away from the tower and thumped against the cliff. Kali was about half-way down, legs caught in the rungs. Frecks and Light Fingers were stuck above her.
‘Give me that shiv,’ said Crowninshield.
Leaning out of the window, the Witch started cutting rope. The three girls lurched dangerously. Kali got free and started moving down again.
‘You’re going to faa-aalll,’ mocked a voice from the winds. ‘You’ll be squashed flat as a pan-caaake!’
One of the main ropes was severed and the other went tight. Crowninshield got her blade to it.
Amy pushed against the cliff face and
launched herself at the tower, aiming for Crowninshield. Her cloak filled with wind, and she rode the air like a glider.
She held her arms out in front, hands knotted into fists.
Like a battering ram, she thumped into Crowninshield’s face. The whip raised her knife, but Amy back-pedalled in the air and floated out of slashing range.
Bleeding and hurt, Crowninshield took a moment to be astonished by the flying girl.
Kali was on the shingles, the others not far off.
The rope parted, but too late. Frecks and Light Fingers were on the ground.
The ladder fell in a coil at the foot of the tower.
‘Beryl, how are you going to get down?’ asked Amy sweetly.
Crowninshield hissed, snarled and flung the knife – inaccurately – in Amy’s direction. It thumped against the cliff.
Amy let herself descend slowly – she was becoming more expert – and landed on the beach. The others were well ahead, and running.
She looked up and saw the trapped Witch shaking her fist.
They would soon be back in their cell. All four of them.
XVIII: A Parental Visit
NEXT MORNING, KALI reported herself present to Wicked Wyke. She said she had been abducted, held prisoner and rescued, but claimed truthfully that her saviours had been masked. She did not mention that she knew who they were. Though the outcome had been for the good, Drearcliff was not one to forgive Thirds who were off grounds without permission after Lights Out.
Should anyone be inclined to doubt Kali’s narrative, they were welcome to visit the scene of the crime, to wit: the tower. Since Crowninshield had cut off their only means of egress from the secret hiding-place, the rump of the Hooded Conspiracy were still in residence, stewing mightily. Wicked sent a Second with a note to Headmistress, who detailed Keys to lead a deputation to the scene of the crime. The party consisted of Keys, Mrs Wyke, Kali the Accuser and, in the event that a) there were villains and b) they were inclined to put up a fight, the reassuringly male Joxer. Amy suspected that, of the four-strong expedition, Joxer was least able to take care of himself in a mêlée.
Amy, Frecks and Light Fingers had to endure Monday morning lessons as per usual and missed out on the excitement while listening to Digger getting her Tudors and Stuarts mixed up. It was a wonder a period of history so full of people having their heads chopped off could be made to seem so blindingly dull.
Mid-morning, the Moth Club met up in the Quad, between lessons. The Heel, clean yesterday, already bore Absalom’s message of the week, ‘Death to President Juan Vicente Gómez of Venezuela’.
Kali gave them ‘the low-down’.
‘Swan’s called in the cops – you know, that broken-down sergeant from Watchet. The Sadista Sisters are tryin’ to make out they was snatched too, the doity bums. They’re sellin’, but Swan’s not buyin’ – though she’ll let ’em off, since she doesn’t want to dish out another multiple expulsion this term. If I were the Crowninshields, I’d take a spell in the slammer rather than stick around School. Beryl the Vent has had her whip’s licence yanked. They’ve stripped her gold piping off, which makes her meat for anyone with a grudge – and you’ll find me at the head of the line. The Hooded Creeps ain’t squawkin’ – they don’t know enough to be more afraid of Headmistress than their bosses. They were hired goons anyway. I got that much out of ’em.’
‘You’ve no idea what it was all about?’ ventured Amy.
‘Were you up for ransom?’ asked Frecks.
Kali shrugged. ‘They was tightmouth. Something was gonna happen this morning, though. Something permanent, I figure. I lost my hat in the tussle, and one of the jaspers said I wouldn’t be needing one after Monday sunrise. He said a tourniquet might suit me better.’
Kali drew a thumb across her neck.
‘You know your father’s coming,’ said Amy.
Kali looked down. ‘Yeah. How about that?’
‘I doubt we’ll ever get to the bottom of this,’ said Frecks. ‘Still, no real harm done. Jolly jape, as it happens. Kali rescued. Witches routed. Up the Moth Club, down the Murdering Heathens. Hurrah for School!’
Kali knew all about the Moth Club now.
‘It’ll be a shame to hang up the costumes for good,’ said Light Fingers. ‘I’ve ideas on how to improve them. But Kali’s safe, so our charter purpose is fulfilled.’
Amy thought about it.
‘Don’t put the costumes where we can’t get at them,’ she said. ‘I’ve a notion we might need them again. Paule said as much and she’s supposed to be able to see the future.’
Amy couldn’t help wondering who was behind the Hooded Conspiracy. Had Drearcliff heard the last of them? Red Flame remained at large and unknown.
‘Uh oh, here comes the Old Man,’ said Kali.
Dr Swan was coming across the Quad with a tall, dark, dramatically bearded man who wore a white western suit and a cherry-red turban. He had electric eyes, like his daughter’s. They flashed as he saw the girls in a gaggle by the Heel.
‘Don’t get hitched to him, that’s my advice…’
‘No fear,’ said Frecks. ‘He’s ancient!’
‘My last stepmother was a year younger than me.’
‘Crumpets,’ gasped Amy.
‘Don’t worry, doll,’ said Kali kindly. ‘Pop likes ’em fleshier than you.’
It wasn’t the prospect of matrimony which had startled Amy. It was the large pink sticking plaster on Mr Chattopadhyay’s forehead. The patch barely covered a bruise which looked for all the world as if an accurately chucked cricket ball had struck him between the eyes.
‘Double crumpets,’ exclaimed Amy again.
Second Term
I: The First Drop of Rayne
EARLY IN THE new year, Amy returned to find Drearcliff Grange School transformed into a fairy-tale castle. House and grounds were blanketed with thick, white snow. Translucent stalactites hung from sills, gutters and eaves. Frost shapes sparkled on windowpanes. There was delight, especially among Firsts who had yet to experience a Drearcliff winter. Amy had an inkling that living in an icebound palace would have drawbacks, but was still struck by its prettiness.
Headmistress, swathed in white furs like a lady Cossack, greeted the back-from-the-hols rush of girls with cautions not to run on slippery flagstones. Nevertheless, there were outbursts of snowball-chucking, snowman-making and tea-tray tobogganing. Nurse had laid in a supply of ointment, bandages and sticking plasters. Casualties were inevitable.
Night fell in mid-afternoon. Joy sputtered.
Everyone realised how cold it was. Deucedly, devilishly, perniciously, pestilentially cold. Drearcliff wasn’t Fairyland, but Hell Frozen Over. No matter how much fuel Joxer fed into the furnace, scant warmth seeped from the basement to the rest of School. Piping-hot soup was icy by the time it got to table. The water closets were frozen solid until Keys went round with a hammer.
Rumour had it that the wolves of the motto loped from their caves when the weather turned. Smudge – who had not learned her lesson from the Affair of the Hooded Conspiracy – recounted stories of growling in dorm corridors at night and scratches found on cell doors in the morning.
This was not happy weather for moths.
The next day, Hale of the Fifth, the Goneril cross-country champion, refused the option to take part in indoor games for the duration and set out on her habitual run through the woods. In her usual kit of shorts and singlet, she waded through thigh-high drifts to her starting post, cheerfully proclaiming she’d warm up when she hit her stride. Hale and Hearty Hale, a heroine to her House, was cheered at the off, though even her most staunch partisans nipped back inside sharpish as soon as she was out of sight. Three hours later, a search party found her, barely a hundred yards along her route, blue-limbed and frostbitten. Hale mumbled about golden eyes glittering in dark places between the trees before swooning. When she came round, her new handle was Swot of the Antarctic.
The cold became the only topic of conversation.
A thousand schemes were hatched to mitigate its numbing, creeping, deadly effect.
In their cell, the Moth Club piled every blanket and garment they possessed on to their beds, then burrowed into the cocoons. Even at the bottom of the pile, Amy had to set her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. Sleep was troubled by the shivering and moaning of her comrades in distress. She wore mittens over gloves and three pairs of socks to bed, but her hands and feet still froze. If wolves dared trespass in Dorm Three, they’d most likely be skinned by desperate girls, so their hides could be quilted into fur coverlets.
Frecks opined that Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was a charabanc outing to Eastbourne next to winter at Drearcliff. Kali said the eerie high mountain peaks of the Hindu Kush, haunt of the fabled yeti or mi-go, weren’t as dreadful as North Somerset in January. Howling blizzards came regularly, rattling the windows. Kali said if you listened hard, you could hear yeti calling each other in the wind. Each fresh snowfall obliterated pathways and further burdened straining roofs.
The Heel was buried under a white mound until the first week’s Infractors – mostly Seconds who disobeyed Headmistress’s decree about running on flagstones but could still walk afterwards – had to excavate and uncover the relic. Allowed small shovels in addition to the traditional toothbrushes, the punishment party discovered ‘Death to King Herod of Judea… and a Merry Christmas to All Our Readers’ painted on the marble in extremely large red letters. This earned Absalom another term’s worth of Sunday detentions. ‘I’m a second Dreyfus Case,’ she complained, but Amy suspected she welcomed political martyrdom.
Curious, Amy asked Absalom how anarchists celebrated the holidays. The girl explained her family exchanged radical pamphlets and gelignite recipes while dining on a roast swan her father had specifically poached from a royal estate. Instead of carols around a tree, they sang revolutionary songs in front of a fire into which they threw straw dollies made in the image of kings, presidents, colossi of finance and secret police chiefs. Absalom and her sisters nibbled biscuits decorated with red sugar stars and slogans of the struggle.