The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

by Kim Newman

  ‘Not just Jimmy. She dented a bassoon. We got infracted for that, because we were the only girls in the Green Room so we must have done it. We didn’t tell Flyte and Kite about the Broken Doll, because we knew they’d say we were fibbing. We told Knowles because I read one of her father’s books and wondered if she’d ask him if Mr Phatt could solve the mystery. She was so nice and didn’t say Gillian was dreaming or my hands must have done it. See these marks – like healed cuts. I didn’t have them last week. The Broken Doll did them. I don’t know why she didn’t chop me where it would hurt. I’m not hard-shelled all over.

  ‘You said the Broken Doll was a ghost. I don’t think she is. Ghosts are mist or water. Not solids. They can scare you but not hurt you. Not all people see them. The Department of Supplies asked Dad to make a chemical solution to wash ghosts out of places. The Navy has a haunted submarine they’d like back. In the end, the chemicals didn’t work. It’s easier to recruit a crew who don’t see drowned sailors and get on with their duties. This Broken Doll isn’t a drowned sailor. She’s more like a goblin in a dress and wig and mask. Drowned sailors are sad. The Broken Doll is spiteful. She’s a thing. A girl. An Unusual. She’s not a practical joker in a phosphorus-soaked sheet, going woo-woo-wooo. Nobbs of the Fifth tried to throw a fright into Gillian and me the first week we were in the Green Room—’

  ‘I thumped her. She stopped wailing and started crying.’

  ‘As if anyone wouldn’t recognise the stink of phosphorus. Or tell a sheet from a shroud. This Broken Doll is no practical joke. I knew she was real even when only Gillian saw her. Then I started seeing her too. Not in dreams… but while lying in bed, not awake or asleep. She pokes about early in the morning, well before getting out of bed time but after it’s light. I don’t think she likes real darkness. No ghost would be afraid of the dark, would they? When she’s around, I don’t move… it’s not that I can’t, it’s that I forget to… I lie stiff as a board, eyes shut but for a sliver so I can peep out. I don’t know what’s worse – seeing her full on or not seeing her at all but knowing she’s there. She crawls up onto my cot and plays with my hands. Then I do shut my eyes all the way, because I don’t want to see her cracked white face too close. I hear her, though – scratching and breathing.’

  ‘She tuts like a Governess,’ said Little. ‘Mrs Fessel always has a hatpin ready for when Mama looks away.’

  ‘I don’t know where she hides most of the time or how she gets into the Green Room,’ said Speke. ‘She doesn’t glow. No phosphorus. Her dress is old, not a costume. You can’t make mould. She’s not pretending. She is what she is. She doesn’t carry a chopper that I can see. She’s not interested in hurting Jimmy Wood any more. That was to get our attention. Now she wants to hurt people who aren’t wood. Or she will soon. She’s playing with us.

  ‘I wondered if she was a girl on the register, booted from the Remove. Too unusual even for our mob. Weirder than that Desdemona Third who smiles all the time with her mouth but has screaming eyes. Weirder than the Scots doggie girl or the Yank carp girl. Knowles says no one like the Broken Doll was ever in the Remove, all the way back to Founding Day. This Broken Doll has only been at Drearcliff Grange for two weeks. She’s a new bug.

  ‘She started after you came back from the Great Game. I think she came back with you.’

  XI: Yorick of Basingstoke Viewed Rosie in Garters

  SO THE SECUNDUS prize Amy had won for Drearcliff Grange was a spiteful ghost. Perhaps not a ghost, but something worse.

  The Broken Doll.

  After a procedural chinwag, the combined forces of the Moth Club and the Real Spook-Spotters determined to put a night watch on the Green Room. While Speke and Little slept as soundly as possible under the circs, a two-girl team would mount a vigil in shifts. Speke said the Broken Doll most often manifested in the hour before dawn. So, for the final shift of the night, the girls would wake each other properly with slaps and water and both be fully alert. In theory.

  Knowles drew a rota and everyone tossed coins. Light Fingers and Kali were up for the first night. After Kaveney finished corridor patrol, they slipped out of the dorms. Light Fingers’ speed and Kali’s stealth fit them for night work.

  Amy and Frecks stayed behind.

  In case of a bed-check, all the cots in their cell were occupied.

  The Moth Club rented wickerwork frames and papier-mâché heads from Lucinda Leigh of the Fifth. Though not listed on the Desdemona register, Sleeping Betty and Dinah Snore were among the most popular girls in the house. Dissatisfied with the hoary device of plumped-up pillows, Morrigan McHugh and Adrienne Penny had fashioned the twins to lie in for them while they jaunted on nocturnal adventures that were – all things considered – fairly mild. They mostly sat on the roof in their nighties and giggled while drinking ginger beer. Their handiwork was more inspired than their misbehaviour. Sleeping Betty’s clockwork mechanism raised and lowered blankets to simulate breathing. A balloon inside Dinah Snore gradually let air escape in a gentle murmur. McHugh and Penny passed out last year, leaving their creations to the enterprising Leigh, who made them available for a fee to those in-the-know… which was practically every girl in the house except Kaveney.

  With the cell to themselves, Amy could talk with Frecks about Laurence. Something should be done about her. Something should be done for her. Amy needed to make it up to the girl, but Larry wasn’t interested in reparations from her. She sought only Frecks’ grace.

  Before Amy could initiate that thorny conversation, Frecks fell asleep.

  Amy didn’t. She lay on her cot, listening to the breathing clockwork and the sighing balloon.

  How did all these Broken Dolls – the ones Knowles dug up stories about, the one Speke and Little had seen – fit with her Broken Doll? It couldn’t all be a lot of coincidences.

  Other worries nagged.

  Her personal tutorial was tomorrow morning. Miss Kratides was seeing each of the Remove in alphabetical order by first name. The system was unthinkable anywhere else in school. Not calling a register by surname was like reordering the colours of the rainbow.

  Amy still hadn’t matched her second secret to a name.

  She will blame you for not telling what you know about Laurence.

  Could it be Larry? No – the girl blamed Amy for a wealth of wrongs, but surely not for keeping quiet about her new Ability. It wasn’t as if Larry proudly announced her pocket could make Unusuals Ordinary.

  Amy turned over in her narrow cot. Her pillow got on top of her face. Her sheets and blankets were loose and her bottom stuck out into the cold. She turned over again, wrestling the pillow under her head. She tried to settle comfortably and wasn’t satisfied. Now she was too hot under all the swaddling. Expanding a mentacle, she lifted the bedclothes and let cool air into her cocoon. Then, she withdrew and the blankets settled.

  Her thoughts drifted back to her first secret.

  You are right to be afraid of the Broken Doll.

  Whoever or whatever the Broken Doll was, Miss Kratides knew about her. They all took their teacher’s wide-ranging knowledge for granted… but how did she know these things? How much did she know about the Broken Doll?

  More than just the name, obviously.

  Tomorrow, should she ask Miss Kratides about the Broken Doll?

  Could she trust any answer from the teacher? The most infracted girl ever to pass out of Drearcliff Grange. Daughter of a professional murderess.

  Amy lay flat, trying not to fidget. She shut her eyes but didn’t sleep. She opened them but saw only gloom.

  She needed a good night’s sleep tonight. Apart from wanting to be alert for her tutorial, she mustn’t be too tired to stay awake tomorrow when she was on vigil.

  She thought of green bottles, accidentally falling…

  She lost count but did not lose consciousness.

  The clockwork and the balloon sounded like a hammer on an anvil and a blacksmith’s bellows. Amy was tempted to silence the dummies by getting menta
cles into their chests and pulling out wires. Turning an automaton off wasn’t murder. Even the small, contented, happy-sleep sounds Frecks made were a cats’ chorus. Amy could stifle the noise with a pillow, without even getting off her cot. She shrank from that thought, as if she’d touched her tongue to a battery.

  She wished she’d won the coin toss. If she had to be awake all night, at least she’d have been some use on watch in the Green Room.

  How much more broken could the Broken Doll get?

  Would she be such a horror as the Smashed-to-Bits Doll?

  At length, exhaustion and numbness quieted her thoughts. Her bedclothes felt not too heavy and not too light. She was on the point of dropping off… when Sleeping Betty made a loud noise – wicker struts creaking and internal gears screaming – and sat up in Kali’s cot, papier-mâché head kinked sharply to one side, a rip across its smiling face… and live eyes staring venom at Amy!

  ‘Stir yourself, or you’ll miss breakfast.’

  Dark turned to daylight in a snap.

  Betty’s terrifying new face… dissolved into Frecks’ first-thing-in-the-morning bleary jollity.

  Amy had been asleep and now was jolted awake.

  Her heart was racing. Her eyes were gummy.

  Frecks shook her again.

  ‘You were far gone,’ said Frecks. ‘Dismal Drearcliff day awaits…’

  Kali and Light Fingers were back in the cell. Kali was lively and awake. Light Fingers was alternating lassitude with bursts of speed. Kali had found perfect poise and balance cross-legged on a flat mat. Light Fingers had cricked her back and neck trying to get comfortable in a hairy chair.

  They were folding the twins’ wicker frames. The disembodied heads – unbroken and smiling – went back in a pillowcase. Betty and Dinah could be dismantled and concealed between napping appearances.

  ‘It was a no-show,’ said Kali. ‘We were ready to give ’em the works, but no one turned up.’

  ‘Speke’s hands are weird though,’ said Light Fingers. ‘When she’s asleep, they get frisky as kittens.’

  ‘Light Fingers tried to talk with ’em.’

  ‘Morse code,’ said Light Fingers. ‘I tapped on the knuckles and gave them a pencil case to tap back on.’

  ‘No dice?’

  ‘None whatsoever. I had to pull back sharpish not to get nipped.’

  Amy got out of her cot and unstuck her nightie from her back. She had sweated it through – all in a spasm, at the sight of that face.

  She was calming, soothed by the chatter of her pals – but where had the night gone?

  Had she only dreamed of lying awake for hours?

  In the Refec at breakfast, Knowles slid down from the Fifth table to get a report from the Moth Club. She talked too fast and got sidetracked often. She bombarded the night watch with Psychical Investigation questions about cold spots – Kali thought she meant cold sores – and other phenomena. Light Fingers admitted they’d heard a slight twang of string instruments in the Music Room next door. Miss Memory said it was probably differential cooling.

  ‘First seek a natural explanation,’ said Knowles.

  She was misquoting Guilbert Phatt, whose dictum was ‘First and last seek a natural explanation.’

  Amy didn’t mention Sleeping Betty sitting up wearing the face of the Broken Doll.

  Dawn had come and gone uneventfully in the Green Room.

  Had the Broken Doll come to the Moth Club’s cell instead?

  XII: Notes from Miss Kratides

  AFTER BREAKFAST, AMY had an hour of Mademoiselle ’Obbs on passé simple, passé composé and passé antérieur. It was dawning on brighter sparks – who had scored high marks when the subject was taught by the lively, departed Miss Bedale – that Mademoiselle ’Obbs only knew French in theory. Her lessons were stuffed with tenses, cases, rules and exceptions but devoid of speaking, reading or writing. Her practical skills were limited to talking in English with an ooh-la-la accent like a maid in a variety turn. As a consequence, Monday Morning French supplanted Thursday Double Deportment as Dullest Lesson of the Week.

  Amy heard ‘Madame-Weasel’ droning but could not concentrate.

  At ten o’clock, according to her Time-Table Book, she should have Sciences with Miss Borrodale – who was often alarming, but never boring. Today, she was required to report to Windward Cottage for her tutorial with Miss Kratides. A note of passage shielded her from prowling whips who would otherwise infract her for being out of class.

  Walking on her own to Windward Cottage wasn’t like trooping there with the whole Remove. That had been almost the start of an adventure. This was following a chalk line to doom: beside the playing fields, through the trees, past Lamarcroft’s Leap, across Clifftop Meadow.

  To avoid thinking of what was to come next…

  She will blame you for not telling what you know about Laurence.

  She thought about what would come later.

  An all-night vigil in the Green Room, with Frecks. Would their quarry show her cracked face? Itching for a scrap, Frecks went about loudly defying ‘the Damaged Dolly’ as if the frightful thing could hear her.

  You are right to be afraid of the Broken Doll.

  Everything came back to secrets.

  Amy walked into the copse. Shoes hung in front of her face. A girl sat on the lowest branch of a tree. Amy tensed, thinking Laurence might be perched in wait, purple stones in her pocket like bullets in a gun. Her mentacles went up, to bat away missiles.

  It was Fleur Paquignet.

  ‘I should be before Amy,’ the girl told the tree.

  The whole class was flummoxed by Miss Kratides’ informality.

  ‘F isn’t before A,’ Amy said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘P is before T, but only everywhere else. In the Remove, things are different.’

  Paquignet didn’t seem to hear. Her ear was pressed to a knothole.

  ‘Talk to trees all you want,’ said Uncle Freddie, who thought he was a card. ‘Get worried when they start talking back. Ha Ha.’

  Uncle Freddie had no idea about Unusuals.

  Amy couldn’t talk to moths, but Marsh could communicate after a fashion with fish. Amy wouldn’t be surprised to learn Paquignet got sounder tips from oak and ash than Nurse Humph got from dead horses.

  Leaving the peculiar Fifth to commune with nature, Amy stepped onto Clifftop Meadow.

  Windward Cottage seemed picturesque and inviting. It was a pleasant morning. Someone nimbler than Joxer had straightened the weathervane. With fresh paint on tin sails, the ship proudly indicated a north-east breeze.

  Amy remembered the gingerbread house was a booby trap set by a witch.

  The front door opened. Gould loped out on all fours – face pushed forward like a snout, teeth bigger and yellower than ever, a crop of bristles on cheeks and forehead. The moon was down and not full, but the Sixth was at her wolfiest.

  Aconita came before Amanda. She had first tutorial.

  Gould spied Amy on the path and reared. Not sitting up to beg, but establishing dominance with fangs and scowl. Gould’s body was rearranged. Not stretched like Devlin, but corded with animal muscle. Her shoulders strained her blazer seams. The stub of a tail pricked up her skirt.

  Rather than have her throat bitten, Amy doffed her boater.

  Satisfied, Gould stalked off on two legs.

  Amy pitied the whip who tried to infract her for improper tail display.

  She went up the front steps and into the cottage.

  The classroom was empty, but a door – previously unnoticed because it stood flush with the wall – stood open.

  ‘Come in,’ called Miss Kratides.

  Amy sidled into a room decked out as a Captain’s cabin. A grilled porthole cast a wavery sea reflection on the low ceiling. Fitted shelves had ropes to keep books from spilling in rough seas. A figurehead thrust over a low roll-top desk, spongy face worn off by salt spray.

  Miss Kratides was beside the desk, cosy in her chair-on-wheels. Her feet didn’t
touch the carpet. She wore polished black Sunday pumps, strangely speckled with scarlet. Amy had forgotten how small the teacher was. Germs were small too – and more died of influenza than in the War.

  An armchair was set out for the victim. Miss Kratides indicated it. Amy sat. Gripping the arms, she noticed new scratches.

  ‘Don’t mind the wear and tear,’ said Miss Kratides. ‘Last customer had claws.’

  Amy put her hands in her lap.

  ‘I’ve twelve of these tête-a-têtes today,’ said Miss Kratides. ‘I’ll be here till ten o’clock at night. What fun. The other eight of you on Wednesday. Imagine – an hour with Polly Palgraive. I’m supposed to talk to the worm in her brain. Dr Swan insists no girl is written off in the Remove. Even the smiling dead. We all must answer to Dr Swan. Girls and staff.’

  Amy wondered what Miss Kratides had planned for tomorrow – maybe she had Tuesdays off.

  ‘Amanda,’ said Miss Kratides. ‘Are you an Amy or a Mandy?’

  ‘Amy,’ she admitted.

  ‘You have other names.’

  ‘Uh… Thomsett.’

  ‘Not that one,’ said Miss Kratides, half grinning. ‘The nighttime name.’

  How did she know about that?

  ‘The same way I know everything else,’ Miss Kratides said.

  She was a—

  ‘Mind-reader? Overrated Talent. People don’t think clearly enough to give telepathists much advantage. No… I pay attention and make notes. I’m naturally nosy. A bit of it’s a parlour trick. I look at your shoes and tell you that you squandered your inheritance on worthless opal mines in New South Wales, are foreman in a bicycle factory, and are about to leave your wife for a left-handed acrobat. You’re amazed. I imply I’ve deduced all this from mud on your trouser cuffs. But really I’ve combed newspaper archives and listened to gossip in your local. I know all there is to know about you before you even come through the door. A man my mother worked for said deduction was much less reliable than simply finding out.’

  When she talked, Miss Kratides was animated. Her curls bobbed. The smile-side of her face dimpled.