by Chris Ward
‘I don’t know. I’ve never tried before.’ She dropped the mushroom into their basket. ‘But I have to be careful. If Professor Eaves knows I’m using … special influence to find mushrooms, I’ll end up in the Locker Room again.’
‘How do you do it? What does it feel like?’
Miranda shrugged. ‘I don’t know, really. I think about it, then imagine it a little bigger. And there it is.’
At the front of the group, Professor Eaves had stood up. ‘Gather,’ he cried, holding his arms wide, like a preacher calling to his flock. ‘Gather, quickly. The weather’s taken a turn.’
Over the last few minutes, clouds had come rolling in and the red sun was completely obscured now behind a cloudbank more dark purple than pink. Five minutes ago the skies had been clear. Now, a shadow was racing across the land, bringing with it fat drops of freezing rain.
‘Back,’ Professor Eaves shouted. ‘Back to the school. With haste.’
Wilhelm came running up, holding something under his jacket. ‘Look at these big ones old Dusty let me have,’ he said, pulling back his jacket to reveal a cluster of fat mushrooms. ‘He said I could get Longface to add them to tomorrow’s breakfast. He’s not so bad, really. You know, for a teacher.’
The other kids were already hurrying for the door in the school’s outer wall, a five-minute walk back up the path. Miranda took one each of Wilhelm’s and Benjamin’s arms and dragged them like two slacking children up the path to the castle, stamping her feet as if threatening punishment for any dissent.
‘You’re the best of friends now, aren’t you, Dusty and you?’ Miranda said.
Wilhelm shrugged. ‘You get used to the old blower.’
‘Perhaps you can form a mushroom club together. Won’t that be nice—’
A lightning flash lit up the grey sky, leaving the rest of Miranda’s sentence unheard. Farther up the path, Professor Eaves waved the pupils toward the door. It was the only way into the castle for a long way in each direction. The other pupils were running now, leaving Benjamin, Miranda, and Wilhelm behind.
Rain had begun sheeting down, and the air had gone quite dark. Another lightning flash lit up the sky, and in that split second between light and darkness, Benjamin caught Professor Eaves’ gaze. The smile had dropped, and the professor’s mouth closed, jaw set hard. With a look that was part regret, part relief, he followed the last of the other pupils inside the door and slammed it shut.
‘Wait!’ Miranda shouted. Turning to the others, she added, ‘He didn’t see us in the rain.’
‘Oh, he did,’ Benjamin said, kicking at a clump of couch grass. ‘He left us. That old git left us outside.’
‘Look over there.’ Wilhelm pointed at the clifftop to their right. ‘What are those orange lights?’
Amidst the dark green grass, hundreds of what might have been flowers on a less sinister day blinked on, shifting back and forth and rising up through the rain, slowly bringing with them lumps of brown earth and grey rock encasing the metallic spines of ancient buried machines.
‘Ghouls,’ Miranda whispered. ‘Oh, wow. There’s so many.’
‘Yeah, we, um, need to run,’ Wilhelm said.
Benjamin stared as the creatures rose out of the ground, shaking off the dirt to stretch out stiff, rusty limbs.
‘They’re all so different,’ he said, remembering the creature that had attacked them. ‘It’s like they can’t decide what form they want to take.’
‘Doesn’t matter what they look like,’ Miranda said, voice trembling. ‘They’ll rip us apart if they catch us.’
The otherworldly horde rising up out of the ground was a sea of human remains fused with broken machines, mechanics and bone and rotting flesh, wire-cloaked and veiled, with only the uniformity of their orange glowing eyes out of bleached human skulls to give them a shared identity. Some walked like men, others bounded on all fours, still others slithered on the ground.
‘Benjamin!’
He gasped and staggered back as something hard struck him across the face. He looked away from the lights to see Miranda lifting her hand to slap him again.
‘Don’t stare at them! Edgar said they can hypnotise you, and then you’re dead!’
She jerked his arm, turning him back toward the school. Wilhelm had already reached the door but no matter how hard he jerked on it, it wouldn’t budge.
To either side, the school’s stone outer wall rose like a castle’s keep; there was no way up the vertical climb to the lowest circling promenade without scaling equipment. To the right, around the wide arc of the outer wall lay the cliff’s edge with paths leading down to the beaches, though they were treacherous in bad weather. Left was inland, around the base of the school’s outer wall to where it straddled a deep gully, the tower of the teachers’ apartments rising over it like an ice cream cone above a pit of coal. There was a way down, with an entrance into the basements beneath the school, but it was always kept locked.
‘Stick close to the wall,’ Miranda said. ‘We have a head start. We make for the gully, and then, when I say, we turn toward them, outpace them to where the gully’s shallow enough to cross. Then we head around the north side of the school to the main doors.’
She glared first at Wilhelm, then at Benjamin, searching for agreement. Though Wilhelm’s face was streaky with rain, sobs betrayed the tears that hid there. Benjamin said nothing. At his nod, they turned as one and raced for the gully, boots sloshing in the waterlogged grass.
They had gone no more than a few steps, when a bounding creature much like a tiger but with metal poles for legs barreled into Benjamin from behind, knocking him to the ground. Spiked front arms swung toward him, but then it was rolling away, knocked aside, and Miranda stood nearby, shaky hands raised and eyes filled with terror.
Another creature that rolled like a bulbous, out-of-control cable wheel knocked Wilhelm over, then spun, its metal outer wheels leaving a muddy trail behind them. It shuddered as it found purchase, then raced at Benjamin, who avoided it with a sideways dive. He had barely gathered his breath before Miranda was pulling him up again, dragging him along behind her.
They made it to the edge of the gully, though too slowly to cut back to where it was shallow enough to cross. Instead, they found themselves at the top of the steeply meandering path that led down into its dark depths and to the door that would almost certainly be locked.
‘The door’s our only chance,’ Wilhelm gasped, bounding down the path without waiting for Miranda and Benjamin to follow. Something looming and dark that looked like an old, upended carpet had risen up to block their path, twin orange eyes glowing out of worn and frayed threads, before it blew apart in a flash of silver, showering them in lumps of damp, musty fabric.
‘Nice one!’ Wilhelm shouted.
‘That wasn’t me,’ Miranda said. ‘Someone’s helping us. Come on. This is our chance.’
The lightning regularly splitting the darkness had been joined by other flashes of light from the battlements above—arrows of silver that blew apart the ghouls on impact, turning them back into lucid smears of light and substance that the drumming rain dissolved back into the earth. Their anonymous helper was doing what he or she could, but for every ghoul that exploded into a quickly dissipating cloud of metal and flesh, two more appeared to take its place.
‘I’ve almost got it!’ Wilhelm screamed from the door farther down the path, hands jerking at a stick he had poked into the heavy lock. ‘Come on!’
Benjamin found himself on a set of crude steps cut into the gully’s side. Wilhelm and the door were right ahead. Miranda was behind him, but then she cried out as something with hooks caught hold of her school blazer and dragged her back toward the edge of the precipice. Wilhelm screamed. Benjamin tried to reach her, but something else knocked into him from behind, and then Miranda and the creature were tumbling into the gully, locked in a tangle of limbs and metal.
‘No!’ Benjamin roared, and a blooming pain filled his head, seeming to rend him ap
art from within. A blinding, glorious light split the sky, the clouds parted, and then there was silence.
24
SANCTIONS
‘You say you have no idea what you did?’
Benjamin shook his head, jaw set, resolute. ‘No.’
Professor Loane uncrossed his legs, then crossed them again. Beside him, Ms. Ito sat on another chair. Captain Roche paced up and down, while Professor Eaves stood behind Professor Loane, arms folded. Benjamin couldn’t look at him. Professor Eaves had claimed not to see them out on the cliff, believing them already inside, but Benjamin could see the lie sitting in his eyes.
‘Benjamin, this is very serious. The kind of power you displayed should never be used. Don’t you understand the Oath? That the existence of the beyond powers can never be acknowledged or used, for the safety of everyone? Such power can jeopardise this school. It has to be locked away, forgotten about.’
‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘You repelled the weather.’
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘Then who was it?’
Benjamin shrugged. He had no idea whether or not it had been he who had repelled the weather. He had felt a sudden white heat emanating from his body, but he had no idea why or what it had done. All he had cared about was Miranda. The creature had pulled her over the edge, and a terrible rage had burst out of him.
‘Benjamin … I’m afraid that we have no choice but to impose further sanctions on you. The ghouls were repelled this time, and our deanimation sprays have cleared the land outside the school for the time being, but this can’t be allowed to happen again. We will require you to have a companion of our choosing at all times, an older boy to watch over you, because your friends can’t be trusted. In fact, I think it would be for the best if you don’t see Miss Butterworth or Master Jacobs for the next few days. We will review your sanctions at the end of the week.’
Benjamin tried to speak, but no words would come. He looked from one teacher to another; they all shared the same expression of solemn agreement.
‘I’m still waiting,’ he said, so quietly that Professor Loane frowned and cocked his head to hear. ‘I haven’t had my orientation. When will I get to meet the headmaster?’
‘Insolent, self-assumptive boy,’ Professor Eaves muttered, shaking his head, but Professor Loane silenced him with a sharp narrowing of the eyes before turning back to Benjamin.
‘I’m afraid Grand Lord Bastien isn’t back yet.’
‘I keep getting told that. When will he be? How long have I got to put up with the lies of this horrible place?’
‘No supper,’ Professor Eaves grunted.
‘I think it’s time you retired to your room,’ Professor Loane said to Benjamin, giving Professor Eaves another long glare. ‘I’ll have supper brought up to you. You should get some rest after your ordeal today. In the meantime, we shall give some consideration as to whom might make a good shadow companion to keep you out of trouble.’
‘And inside locked doors,’ Professor Eaves added, before giving a swift shake of his head and turning away.
Captain Roche took Benjamin up to his room. Of all of the teachers, he was the only one for which Benjamin had much of a soft spot. Despite Benjamin’s inability to shake the feeling that his eyes had switched to widescreen mode whenever he looked at the captain, he was perhaps more human than any of them. Ms. Ito was awe-inspiringly terrifying, Professor Loane brought back bad memories of automation-like teachers from his Basingstoke school days, and Professor Eaves, he was convinced, wanted him dead, one way or another.
‘Where’s Grand Lord Bastien gone?’ Benjamin asked as they reached the corridor leading to his room.
Captain Roche stared straight ahead, and just as Benjamin began to think he hadn’t heard, he said, ‘Keep this to yourself, or at least within your little circle of chitchat friends. He’s missing.’
‘Where?’
‘He went north, to the High Mountains. He hasn’t returned yet. He was due back a week ago.’
‘What’s he doing there?’
‘That, I’m not privy to.’
‘Do you think ghouls got him?’
Captain Roche looked amused. ‘Ghouls are of no concern to the Grand Lord,’ he said, as though that should have been obvious. ‘He went on a consultation mission. He should have returned by now.’
‘What kind of consultation mission?’
‘Boy, you ask too many questions.’
‘Only when there aren’t enough answers.’
Captain Roche shrugged. ‘Get some sleep. You get no pass from climbing tomorrow morning.’
Though his voice contained no humour, a barely perceptible curl of his lips suggested this was the captain’s idea of a joke. Benjamin gave him a polite smile and went inside.
He locked the door, grabbed a pile of old comic books the teachers had brought for him and lay down on the bed. Concentration came poorly, though, and he glanced over the pictures without really taking them in. At first he had found them fascinating. Some dated in the far future, and while their simple stories of war and space adventure gave no clues as to how technology might have advanced, Benjamin was aware he might be holding some antique that, in his time, was yet even to be born.
He was just dozing off when a tap-tap-tap came at the window. Benjamin jumped up and pulled back the drapes to see Wilhelm leaning against the sill, one hand poised for a second knock. Benjamin pulled up the sash and the smaller boy happily climbed through. As Benjamin shut the window again, Wilhelm hopped from foot to foot, rubbing his arms against the cold.
‘How is she?’
‘She’ll be fine,’ Wilhelm stuttered. ‘She’s still in the hospital room, but she’ll be discharged in the morning. Nothing broken.’
‘She was lucky.’
Wilhelm puffed out his cheeks, letting the air slowly filter out. ‘Ms. Ito said that had that ghoul’s hook not gotten caught, Miranda could have died. As it was, she was able to climb out and knock it down.’
‘Do you think it was Ms. Ito who helped us?’
Wilhelm shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Seriously, just when I thought I was starting to figure this place out, you come along and make everything go even crazier.’
The sudden grin that bloomed across Wilhelm’s face made Benjamin feel a little better. ‘I wish I could go to see her,’ he said.
‘The trellis will probably hold your weight, you know.’
Benjamin shook his head. ‘No chance. I can’t climb like you can.’
Wilhelm shrugged again, not pressing the issue. Benjamin had seen the terrifying ascent to the overhang of the teachers’ tower, and knew he would splat like bird droppings should he even try it. Wilhelm, however, could climb like a squirrel, and even though Benjamin regularly told him to stay away, the smaller boy wouldn’t be perturbed. Since Benjamin had been brought there, Wilhelm had shown up almost every night, and even on days when he had nothing much to say, he gave Benjamin the greatest gift he so desperately needed: company.
‘Do they know what you did to scare the clouds away?’ Wilhelm asked.
Benjamin shrugged and told him what the teachers had said.
‘You really think Dusty wants rid of you?’ Wilhelm asked when he was finished. ‘I know he’s a bit of a stickler, but I never saw him as the murderous type.’
‘You know what I think? They all say there’s no such thing as magic, that it’s just unexplained science, and that some people can control it and all that, but that’s a load of rubbish. I think there is magic. This whole country—or whatever it is—is built out of it, but it’s unravelling, and they don’t know how to stop it.’
‘I guess it would make sense.’
‘We’ve all been brought here for reasons that no one understands, not even the teachers. Half of our classes are about trying to control everything—keep stuff from coming alive, fix stuff that breaks. This place is falling apart, and you know what?’
‘What?’
‘I think i
t’s been getting worse since I arrived.’
Wilhelm frowned. ‘I guess there were no ghouls around the school until you arrived. You’ve definitely got them riled up a bit, there.’
Benjamin ran to the window and pulled back the curtains. Beyond, a deep twilight covered everything, casting shadows upon shadows until only a few mounds of hills were visible, backed by an expanse of black forestland.
‘I need to make a phone call,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Can you help me? Can you get me to the school lobby without us being caught?’
Wilhelm nodded. ‘Of course I can. What do you need to do?’
Benjamin shook his head. He had a theory, of course, though so outlandish it made even Endinfinium seem normal. ‘I’m not sure, but I’ll tell you as soon as I figure it out.’
25
DAVEY’S ABSENCE
Wilhelm disappeared for a couple of hours, then showed up again around midnight, bringing with him a stolen climbing harness. Benjamin, he explained, didn’t have the skills to do the kind of underside climb Wilhelm’s small frame and bravado were designed for. Instead, they affixed a pulley rope to the leg of Benjamin’s bed and lowered the pulley out through the window. Benjamin went first, with Wilhelm holding the rope secure. With his feet in a brace, Benjamin tugged on a central rope to lower himself to the ground.
Despite the horrors of the afternoon, it proved far quicker to get down to the lobby by going around the school’s outer wall to the main entrance, rather than cutting through the school itself. All afternoon, Benjamin had watched cleaners spraying chamomile on the ground outside, but now, while he waited for Wilhelm to descend, the pungent scent of the calming flower thick in his nostrils, Benjamin stood nervously back by the wall, trying not to imagine more ghouls climbing up out of the ground.
Wilhelm hopped down from the rope, making Benjamin jump. His friend was like a mouse—utterly silent. ‘Here, wipe this on you. Just a bit on your clothes is enough. I didn’t want to do it in the room because the teachers might smell it.’