The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

by Kim Newman

  As for the rest of the clues, the team was at sixes and sevens…

  The application of guesswork and specialised knowledge was by no means sure, even with Knowles coughing up nuggets from maps and gazetteers. There was a Luck Street in the Old Jago in London E1. That rang a distant bell. Could Bad Luck Bertram be Burlington Bertie from the music hall song? No, said Miss Memory, that was a Bertie from Bow – EC3.

  Light Fingers, a devotee of sensational literature, recalled Bert Stevens, tried in 1887 for the murders of a Salvation Army Major and her younger brothers. The Police Gazette called him ‘the Ill-Omen of Luck Street’. Summoning court notices from the recesses of memory, Knowles recounted the story. The corpses were propped up at a dinner table with Stevens at the head. He claimed he’d sat there, paralysed with horror, while oriental hatchet men slaughtered Major Goodenough and the twins Freddy and Victor. Chinese laundrymen were attacked by mobs in the streets of the East End – one was killed – before the police, tipped off by a consultant, realised the bloodstains on Stevens’ person were of a unique character. He could only have received arterial spray full in the face if he were none other than the murderer himself. A mild-mannered, pleasant-faced youth, Stevens was taken up as a cause by maiden ladies who sent him scented letters in prison and petitioned against his sentence. He went to the gallows all the same. ‘And a good job too,’ said Light Fingers, who had surprisingly little sympathy with miscreants in general and none at all for violent criminals.

  The team agreed Stevens was ‘Bad Luck Bertram’. The toby must be hidden at the scene of his crime. Understandably, no one wanted to live at 13 Luck Street after the murders. Knowles closed her eyes and remembered a particular page in the current street directory, then said the address was now a rag and bone man’s storehouse.

  Stretch ventured that ‘Rache in Red’ must be ‘Rachel in Red’ but Frecks said the Undertaking didn’t make typing mistakes. Thinking along the lines of the E1 clue, she prompted Light Fingers and Knowles to rack brains for murders in Brixton. Both, at once, hit on the 1881 killing of Enoch Drebber in an empty house in Lauriston Gardens.

  ‘Rache – German for “revenge” – was written on the wall in letters of blood…’ said Light Fingers. ‘Which was strange,’ continued Knowles, ‘because Drebber was poisoned, so the murderer must have cut himself to write the word.’ ‘These days,’ said Light Fingers, ‘he’d have been caught in a trice because daubing his message would leave prints Scotland Yard would match.’ ‘Though, since he turned out to be a cab-man,’ argued Knowles, ‘he might have worn gloves. His name was Jefferson Hope, but he died before he came to trial so the case is listed as unsolved even if – thanks to that tattler Dr Watson – everyone knows he did it. The story’s in A Study in Scarlet. It was to do with Morons.’ ‘Mormons,’ corrected Light Fingers.

  When Miss Memory relied on ordinary general knowledge rather than cramming, she often got things slightly wrong. It was Light Fingers’ habit to blurt out corrections. Knowles was getting a frown groove in her forehead from pretending not to mind. Accustomed to snubs from her Ordinary classmates for being ‘too clever’, Miss Memory was uncomfortably adjusting to the Remove, where girls who knew how her Talent worked thought she might really be something of a Dim.

  Stretch, holding a flickering flame for the mistyped Rachel, wasn’t convinced. She also thought the reasoning of the ‘Bad Luck Bertram’ clue was shaky… and, besides, what was ‘Villa DeVille’ all about?

  ‘House of the House? How does that make sense?’

  Light Fingers ended the debate with a canny suggestion. She admitted they couldn’t be sure they’d puzzled out any of the clues properly, but they could trust Richard Cleaver – ‘Clever Dick’, the Most Brilliant Boy in Britain – and his Brain-Boxes to get the answers. All Drearcliff Grange had to do was tail the junior swots, then use their superior reach and height to force the infants to give up the tobies. ‘Like taking sweeties from babies,’ Light Fingers said, making quick passes which turned her hands invisible – a rather alarming effect. The suggestion wasn’t entirely in the spirit of playing the Game, but certainly in the spirit of winning it.

  Though Amy had private doubts, she hadn’t spoken out.

  For a start, she had no earthly idea what ‘Villa DeVille’ meant.

  From Miss Gossage’s buzzed report, she supposed the ‘Burnt Pudding’ and ‘Bad Luck Bertram’ tobies were in the bag, either by ingenuity or subterfuge. The plan was that the team would now divide. One group would head South of the River, at least starting with a poke around Lauriston Gardens. Another would feel their way about the West End, searching for the mysterious villa or dogging the tracks of the Brain-Boxes. Knowles and Light Fingers said too many murders were committed amid the glittering lights of the West End – more even than in the slums – for any particular one to stand out. Every nightclub, café and theatre had a horror story.

  Standing orders were to stay on the alert against harrying from the House of Reform. Kali’s point about not expecting a bacon tree was well taken. Queenie Quell’s crew of she-pirates wouldn’t sit idle while Drearcliff Grange collected their parcels. Sitting idly was indubitably what the Humblebumblers were doing though. Why the boys even bothered fielding a team was a mystery – they never took anything seriously.

  Eyes now stinging as badly as her nose, Amy considered that the Humble College tactic of chucking in the Game and scoffing pork pies while chatting up waitresses might appeal to low, craven sorts of person. Such dereliction of duty was alien to the Spirit of Drearcliff Grange.

  She was on the alert for rival teams. She was wary of Draycott’s girls, but at least understood them. The Brain-Boxes bothered her more.

  Would she even notice small swollen-headed figures creeping in the fog?

  The oddest team in the field, they made her eyebrows itch. Clever Dick, youngest of the Splendid Six, was oldest of the Brain-Boxes. He was taken out of primary school for devising equations that opened portholes to other spheres while his classmates hadn’t mastered the two-times table. His teammates were equally impressive. Some believed that, thirty years hence, these prodigies would be the guiding geniuses of Britain… Serene, unfathomable deep thinkers with huge eyes, egg-dome skulls and thinning hair. They would plan a perfect society, offer wise counsel to government, and wipe enemies off the map with thought alone. Amy didn’t like the sound of it at all.

  Unbeatable when it came to solving puzzles, the Brain-Boxes were still children. Spoiled children, at that. Amy pitied Miss Vernon, the haggard young governess who was their chaperone. Whatever holy hell the Remove put Miss Gossage through was pleasant balm beside the nightmare of daily dealing with the Brightest Sparks in the Nursery. The Boxes had invented their own language, using mirror-reversed Inca symbols, just to bedevil Miss Vernon. They once took her bicycle to pieces and put it back together as a giant fly trap.

  New to the Great Game last year, the Brain-Boxes managed to come second – a poor second, admittedly – when Drearcliff Grange were derailed. Clever Dick & Co. fitted gears, cotton reels, rubber bands and bicycle-pump pistons into a suit of armour and despatched the automaton to snatch a toby. The clumsy contraption brought back pieces of china cupped in its gauntlets.

  Cheated of a five-toby clean sweep, the House of Reform decided to see whether Sir Clankalot was up to swimming and heaved the clockwork knight into the Thames. The metal marvel took on water rapidly and went under. It pulled itself ashore on the Isle of Dogs and was torn apart by scavenging mudlarks.

  Meanwhile, most of the Drearcliff Grange team was beyond reach of the Sausage’s buzzes. When the Draycott’s team owned up, the Undertaking sent a rescue party into Under-London. Moria Kratides and company returned in bad odour. An epic scrubbing with lye got the muck off, but their clothes had to be burned. They hadn’t so much as sighted the bristles of a giant sow. Since then, any Draycott’s girl who so much as glimpsed a Drearcliff Grange tie would grunt like a hog.

  Even the Humble Co
llege boys did better, stirring from the pie house at dawn to claim an undistinguished Third Place.

  They would throw it away again this year.

  Humble College were famously big-heads and lackwits, featherbedded from the cradle. When they left school, they got on swimmingly. Cushy positions were held open in finance, the church and the law for the marginally intelligent. Commissions awaited in fashionable regiments for the totally dim. Debutantes lined up at balls, obliged to put up with being whirled off by a St Cuthbert’s fellow in a dance that would zigzag towards a divan behind a potted palm. Old Boys were obliged to welcome nephews into secret government departments and exclusive gentlemen’s clubs. It didn’t matter if Humble College boys came a cropper in the Game or bungled their examinations. So long as they were ‘good sorts’ and from the right families, they were set up for life. Half the Splendid Six were Old Humblebumblers. Come to that, so were Frecks’ brother Ralph and Uncle Lance, and – astonishingly – Kali’s father Kabir Chattopadhyay, Bandit Rajah of Kafiristan.

  If anything, the fog was getting worse.

  She could have been given the answers to all the clues, along with a map showing how to get to the locations of the tobies… and still be lost.

  Light Fingers’ tactic was liable to be scotched by the fog too. Even the Brain-Boxes – especially the Brain-Boxes – would be impossible to follow. Anyone small could disappear in this without trying.

  In theory, the Boxes were the cadet branch of the Splendid Six. Amy had read yarns in which Clever Dick saw through the schemes of diabolical nemeses like Stepan Volkoff or the Gaiety Ghoul and sent Lord Piltdown, the Palaeolithic toff, to fetch their (usually foreign) heads mighty cuffs with his long, hairy arms.

  Everyone who worked with the Cleaver Boy said in interviews that he was, outside of his phenomenal mental capacity, ‘as merry, decent a little fellow as you could hope to meet’. That they all used exactly the same words to describe him suggested someone had written the sentence down and requested it be said as often and as loudly as possible.

  Frecks’ Uncle Lance, formerly of Pendragon Squadron, knew Teddy Trimingham, the Blue Streak of the Splendid Six. He helped keep the Racing Swift – the Blue Streak’s streamlined, land-speed-record-setting vehicle – on the road between daredevil chases and smash-ups. According to Frecks, Lance reported that when no one was writing down what he said for the papers, Trimingham declared Clever Dick, ‘The worst pill I’ve met in all my puff… Everyone who’s had the misfortune to spend more than five minutes with the blighter is itching for him to grow up. When he’s tall enough to have his fat head punched, there’ll be queues round the Hippodrome.’

  Amy wasn’t going to make assumptions on hearsay evidence.

  But she was getting an impression that the stories in Girls’ Paper and British Pluck weren’t always 100 per cent truthful.

  At the Off, she’d seen the Brain-Boxes. They had blue wool hats stretched over swollen heads and wore matching miniature duffle coats with clothes-peg fasteners. Miss Vernon kept counting heads, sure one of her charges was missing… and even more sure they were up to no good and she would come out the worst of it.

  With his bulging eyes and fat cheeks, Clever Dick was more like a bipedal baby than a little boy. Dyall tried to get his autograph on his cigarette card, but he loudly informed the air that he didn’t talk to ‘twivial girls’. He must not get on with the youngest of the Boxes, six-year-old Trude Smarthe – the only English pataphysician Andre Breton accepted into the Dada movement. Her duffle coat was pink and she had cat-ears and whiskers on her knitted hat.

  After the Off, they’d scattered.

  It was hours past sunset.

  Amy had lost track of everyone… on her team and on all the others.

  She’d welcome a friendly, or even a familiar face.

  A couple of fellows from the Midnight Bell stumbled through the alley towards her, harmonising on ‘There is a Tavern in the Town’. They sang unfamiliar words that made her blush. In this version, it wasn’t the singer’s harp that got hung from a weeping willow tree.

  She thought it best to stay out of their way.

  Her brown-and-white markings made decent camouflage. She flattened against a cold, damp wall, covered her head with her cloak, and held her breath.

  The singers – who really ought to be ashamed of themselves to do such ruin to a harmless traditional ditty of infidelity and probable suicide – stumbled past. They were in a right state. Peeping through her wings, she saw the blurred outlines of fur-collared coats and silk hats. They might be drunk, but evidently weren’t louts. She could have reached out and touched them.

  She did reach out with a mentacle – imagining a padded mallet – and applied an on-your-way touch to their rears. Thus goosed, they yelped without breaking off the song and hustled onwards.

  Leaning on each other, the two-man cats’ choir got through the alley.

  The practices they ascribed to the true love-stealing ‘damsel dark’ would have been anatomically demanding even for Stretch Devlin and medically inadvisable to boot.

  She heard them for a while after they were gone from sight. The stink of beer lingered too, almost as pongy as the fog.

  When they were gone, she missed them.

  She let out a Drearcliff ‘halloo cuckoo!’

  The team had agreed on the signal.

  She called again…

  …and thought she heard a faint answer.

  ‘Cuckooo hallooo…’

  She called, louder.

  The response was definite. Not an echo of the alley.

  Cautiously, but with determination, she walked through the fog. It eddied around her ankles. She tried to push it away with her mentacles. This made odd curlicue waves but didn’t appreciably thin it out. Unlike solid objects, fog resisted being poltergeisted. She wasn’t good with water either.

  The alley kinked and got wider as if two teams of navvies working on completely different streets had met in the middle and decided to leave it at that.

  The ‘cuckoo halloo’ came again.

  Someone was huddled against a wrought-iron lamp post. The globe was smashed, so no circle of light fell.

  Amy knelt. Prickles of glass under her knees made her stand again.

  The lamp had been broken recently. Her brows itched.

  ‘Thomson?’ came a whisper from the huddle.

  ‘Thomsett,’ she corrected.

  ‘The flying Unusual?’

  ‘Floating.’

  ‘Huh,’ said the huddle, wearily.

  Amy took a pack of Swan Vestas out of one of her pockets and struck a light.

  The huddle shrank away, blinking.

  Hjordis Bok sat under the lamp.

  So far as Amy remembered, she’d never spoken with the Goneril Sixth.

  She didn’t really know what to say now.

  The match burned out. She struck another.

  Bok held her right knee, which was swollen and discoloured. She had dirt in her hair and on her face. She was pale and – despite the cold – sweaty.

  ‘They’ve broken my leg,’ said Bok.

  Amy reached out and the Sixth drew back.

  ‘Where’s Larry?’ she asked. ‘The pocket Unusual,’ she specified.

  Bok tried to shrug, but that evidently hurt.

  ‘Down the way,’ she said, nodding further along the alley.

  ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Arrows on their coats and berets.’

  ‘Draycott’s girls?’

  Bok nodded, and winced again.

  The House of Reform uniform ran to dark-blue skirts and blazers with fine black prison arrows. It was dramatic, subtle and quite smart. Draycott’s skirts were practically above the knee. Dosson, Chapell & Co. of Tite Street, who had the school-kit racket sewn up, seemed – annoyingly – more inspired when outfitting Lobelia Draycott’s she-convicts than when inflicting drab, scratchy uniform on Drearcliff Grange girls.

  Primrose Quell had a tiny arrow inked
under her eye. A beauty mark for convicts. That showed a kind of School Spirit, Amy admitted.

  ‘The toby?’

  Bok breathed painfully. She was on the point of unconsciousness.

  Amy wondered if the Sixth had other broken bones. Dropping her match, Amy dug out a tin of lozenges. She popped a Fisherman’s Friend into Bok’s mouth.

  She should carry first-aid supplies – sticking plasters and such – in her Kentish Glory kit. She had needle and thread, but for repairing torn clothes not fixing open wounds.

  Bok rolled the lozenge around her mouth and bit.

  Her eyes opened wide and tears started.

  ‘The Brain-Boxes beat me to Helen’s Hole,’ she said. ‘The perishers were blubbing in the street because the bouncer shooed them from the door. When Laurence showed up, Miss Lawless handed over the toby… then Draycott’s tried to take it. Quell was onto the trick from the start. They marked me the way Naisbitt said we should mark the brats. Came out of the fog like savages. This small girl – she wears one white glove – touched me… There was a flash, and my leg twisted. I heard the bone snap. Not even a punch, just a touch. Another Unusual. A Wrong ’Un! Laurence put the toby away… somewhere. What is she?’

  Bok was dizzy from pain and puzzlement.

  ‘Larry? An Ordinary soul… with a party piece.’

  ‘Quell couldn’t get her to give up the jug, not even when she had the Glove Girl threaten to touch her forehead… so the Draycott’s girls just took Laurence with them.’

  Amy was afraid for Larry. She was an Unusual, but still only an undersized Third. What would her captors do to get her to turn her pocket inside-out? They must know three parcels were posted in the Pillar Box. A winning score, if not a clean sweep.

  Who was this Glove Girl? How did her Talent work?

  What with the everyday enmity between tattletale Haldane and racketeer Quell setting the tone of the grudge match, Amy hadn’t given much thought to Draycott’s Hidden Talents. She’d heard the term Wrong ’Un before – meaning notorious Unusuals like the Slink or the Rat Rabbi, who put their Abilities to immoral or illegal ends. The House of Reform was a whole school of Wrong ’Uns. Lobelia Draycott probably gave out end of term prizes for the most inventive crimes.