by Kim Newman
Seraph sauntered into the room.
Another habitué of the shadow world, her name was on the members list of Britain’s least-known intelligence and investigative outfit, the Diogenes Club. You could be clapped in the Tower of London for even knowing where she bought her hats. Even Jonathan was wary of the Diogenes Club, dwellers in deeper darks even than Dr Shade. Serafine had been put up for membership by one of their old teachers, Catriona Kaye, and seconded – with superhuman decency, under the circumstances – by Captain Jeperson.
After Mrs Edwards reclaimed her rightful place, it turned out Miss Kaye had been at Drearcliff to keep an eye on Dr Swan’s cygnets. She had been scouting for long-term potential recruits. Amy, Kat Brown (Olympic javelin Silver, 1936), Lu Lamarcroft and Venetia Laurence had done odd jobs for the crown under the aegis of the Diogenes Club, but only Seraph earned full membership.
Dr Auchmuty, the librarian, had also been looking to recruit girls for unusual endeavours, but on a mercenary basis. Her employment agency specialised in adventuresses, seductresses, assassins and deceptively decorative body guards. She had placed the De’Ath Sisters, Bizou and Angela, with the Haghi Circle in Berlin. Doc Och had also made overtures to Gould and Marsh, but they hadn’t been interested.
The others pounced on Seraph. They linked arms and jumped.
‘Ants in your pants,’ said Seraph… who then ducked to avoid the general head-sloshage that came her way.
‘Ouch, ouch, pax pax,’ she said.
‘Not one of my favourite memories,’ said Emma.
‘In spades, sister…’
‘I’ve not thought of that… of Rayne… in… how many years?’ said Amy. ‘Not since…’
She found it hard to concentrate, to fit memories together.
It was like looking through to the Back Here from the Purple. Paule had said you could skip ahead in the playscript or riffle backwards, but you never saw the whole thing properly.
So much had happened… so much.
‘It ended down below, on that pirate ship,’ said Light Fingers.
‘Sea-raider,’ corrected Amy.
‘The Johanna Pike,’ said Frecks.
Seraph wore a plain necklace of silver links. Amy realised they were unpicked from her uncle’s coif. Much more stylish and practical than the balaclava, but… just as effective?
‘We stopped the Hooded Conspiracy,’ said Amy. ‘All of us in the Remove…’
Knowles was a writer now, like her father – though she concentrated on true-life crime. She had been ‘Stargazy’ at Girls’ Paper before paper shortage killed the publication. Aconita Gould was whatever you called a lady laird. A lairdess? No, probably just a lady. A strike team of German saboteurs who recently landed near Inverglourie Glen with orders to blow up coastal defences were found badly scratched and blubbing on the beach, so Amy knew Gould was contributing to the war effort. Thorn and Frost, on parole, were undergoing tests at a weather research station in Sutton Mallet, to see whether their Abilities had military application. From what she knew of the army’s Unusuals division, Amy thought they’d be better off in jail. Laurence was tucked under Seraph’s wing, travelling between neutral territories with pockets full of experimental fuses and crown jewels. Lamarcroft was in Burma, serving in the Regiment of the Damned. General Flitcroft took anyone tough enough into their ranks, no questions asked, even if they wore petticoats. The Japanese, apparently, were terrified of Lieutenant Lamarcroft, V.C., and called her the Tall Demon Archer Lady. She was still looking for her battlefield.
The others of the Remove, Amy wasn’t sure of… Harper, Dyall, Paquignet, Palgraive. She hoped they’d found places
…even thinking of Dyall made her lose track of things and ponder gaps in her memory… and she was even more discomfited when Palgraive’s smile crossed her mind. There had been a scene with Palgraive and Rayne, she knew, but the details were lost in violet haze…
The Purple, again…
‘Paquignet’s at Kew Gardens,’ said Emma. ‘Superintendent Bright had her in for questioning on the Strangling Vine Case. She didn’t do it, though. Some Aztec Nazi cult was behind that.’
Amy didn’t even bother to ask her friend how she had known what she was thinking.
‘Did you see that gangster picture Jan Marsh made with Humphrey Bogart?’ said Kali. ‘Who’d a thunk?’
‘You have picture palaces in the Hindu Kush?’ Seraph asked.
‘We have motion picture studios,’ said Kali. ‘We could throw over all the smuggling, blackmail, gambling and jewel-snatching and make more dough legit with musical pictures.’
‘But you won’t?’ said Emma.
Kali shrugged. ‘Where’d be the giggles without deviltry and daring? You’d be out of a job, for a start. It’s not like you can stay home and bake cakes…’
Emma laughed.
A not-always-happy girl, Emma Naisbitt had become a serious, purposeful woman… but Kali could always make her smile. Amy was sad for a moment, because she couldn’t.
This was why the whole Moth Club was needed.
Amy’s antennae buzzed.
She had to resist an urge to touch her forehead, to make sure her feelers hadn’t sprouted. Her back itched too, where once… long ago and in another place… she had grown real wings.
Her friends’ faces wavered. Layers peeled away and she saw them as girls.
It was as if they had returned after years away but only minutes had passed.
‘Dr Swan,’ she said. ‘Something’s always bothered me…’
Headmistress nodded, allowing her to ask a question.
‘Rayne… why did you let her go so far?’
Dr Swan angled her head to one side but said nothing.
‘You knew what she could do… what she was. You knew about the Runnel and the Flute, and Professor Rayne, and the Other Ones, and the Purple… Mauve Mary and Mr Bainter and Kali’s father. You knew what was happening in School, but you left us to deal with it. Us. The Moth Club. The Remove. Everything you had worked for, all the girls you had invested so much time and effort in… you let it all be at hazard. Just… why?’
Headmistress’s eyes opened wider and purple light reflected.
‘I think you have answered your own question, Thomsett,’ said Dr Swan. ‘I have always had confidence in my cygnets.’
Amy was a little queasy – she remembered that, too, from the rise of the Black Skirts, the ways that Rayne and all her works had made her sick.
‘It was an exam?’ said Emma. ‘An exercise?’
‘And you passed.’
Amy was still appalled. At the time, and all these years on, it hadn’t seemed like anything you could call educational. More than just the school had been put in danger.
It had very nearly been the day the sun rose purple.
The Black Skirts might now rule the world, ants swarming over the face of the globe.
And they might all be dead or changed or lost in the ranks.
But Headmistress always had confidence in them.
Her Unusuals had proved themselves. The Remove had come together, even flukes among flukes like Harper and Dyall, and had learned how much more effective they were playing as a team, finding Applications in their complementary Abilities, helping each other overcome handicaps, embracing and celebrating their unique natures.
Afterwards, Amy hadn’t cared what Mother thought of her – she could fly.
Light Fingers stopped worrying about what Ordinaries thought or her parents said and came to her own decisions.
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 W
izard 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.
XIV: Where the Ants Stopped
DORA PAULE 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.