Differently Morphous

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “Are . . . are you for real?” asked Alison, before she could stop herself.

  An eyebrow came up. “Is that your third question?”

  “No! I—ah—uhm . . .” Her sentence disintegrated into fragments of words.

  “Speak!” ordered Diablerie.

  “I’m sorry, I . . . I’m just really confused!” Tears formed in Alison’s eyes. “I just want to do the best job I can, but I don’t . . . I don’t know what you want from me!” She met his gaze in the rearview mirror, jaw quivering, and didn’t detect an ounce of sympathy. She sucked in a deep, noisy breath through the nose. “I-I keep thinking this has got to be some kind of test. Like I’m supposed to call you out to pass it, and then you can start being serious.”

  Diablerie’s shoulders shuddered, and his eyes narrowed. “I assure you, girl, that I am as real as the consequences of reading Richard Danvers’s unguarded comments to his father’s face.”

  Alison shrank, fighting off the urge to burst into further tears. “Right.”

  She gripped the steering wheel tighter and concentrated on the road. This was her opportunity, she reminded herself. Elizabeth Lawrence had given her this chance for redemption, and she would not be impressed if Alison demanded a different assignment just because her new boss was an insane silent-movie villain and she was afraid of being lashed to some railroad tracks.

  Shortly, they found themselves on the lonely and less traveled section of road that Alison recognized as the way to the monastery school. She was keeping an eye on the treetops, waiting for the first sight of the grand old building where she had lived for six months, when the satnav unexpectedly chirruped and directed her to make a turn.

  Dutifully she did so, and was almost immediately on an unfamiliar road. The trees became denser, the canopy thickening until they blocked most of the sunlight. She checked the satnav. There was the monastery school, clearly indicated with a pentagram-shaped map marker, but their actual destination was marked as another mile east.

  “I thought we were going to the school?” said Alison.

  “Diablerie is no longer bound by the compact to answer your questions, girl,” said Diablerie, bored. He was leaning back with his top hat tilted in front of his eyes.

  “That was more of a statement . . .”

  “Argue not niceties with a master spellcrafter. It was a statement with a distinctly inquisitive aura.”

  Without warning, the road transitioned from tarmac to dry dirt that had been churned up by the tires of many heavy vehicles. Diablerie’s car was the exact opposite of appropriate for off-road driving, and he was forced to maintain a mystic gesture about his temples to hold his hat in place.

  The trees thinned and the dirt road sloped downwards into a large, bowl-shaped clearing. In the center of the crater was a cluster of concrete buildings that made up for their distinct lack of windows with a bounty of severe straight lines and right angles. Between them was a huge, circular courtyard, walled off with ten feet of cement and coils of razor wire.

  Alison parked the car between two black armored buses, near a brick sign bearing the words blackmoor young offenders institute in harsh serifed letters.

  “Doctor, this isn’t the school I was at,” she said quietly, staring up at the flat, gray, front-facing wall of the reception building.

  “Of course not,” sneered Diablerie, who was already out of the car, although Alison hadn’t seen him move or heard the car door open. “This is the secondary school. This is where you would have been taken had you ever manifested the taint.”

  Alison recalled the one time she had seen someone in Brother Burling’s class demonstrate magical ability. Chris Lewis, a short boy of sixteen, had managed to make all the ants in his focusing tray march in perfect circles and figure eights. Brother Burling had showered him with praise and led him gently from the room, then returned twenty minutes later, alone. Lewis had never showed up in class again. Alison had been concentrating entirely on being a diligent student and had never, until now, wondered where he had gone.

  Diablerie glided over to the forbidding steel double doors and rapped the top of his cane against them, creating a sonorous clang that must have echoed through the entire building. The door swiftly opened with a reproachful metallic creak.

  Diablerie made his signature move, flinging his cloak about his face. “Cower now! Doctor Diablerie has answered the summons! This household will surrender to the whims of the Ministry of Occultism!”

  A young monk was standing at the door in the usual robe and tattoos, as well as a black gun belt around his waist with a Taser pistol. His hand unconsciously groped for it as Diablerie spoke. “Er, yes,” he replied. “We were told to expect . . . someone. Brother Trevers will see you.”

  Without lowering his cloak, or indeed moving his upper body at all, Diablerie slid into the lobby. “Hello, nice to meet you, I’m Alison,” said Alison in one rapid cluster of words as she brushed past the monk. He frowned, opened his mouth, looked to Diablerie, hesitated, then closed his mouth.

  The lobby was as severe as the exterior. The floor was bare cement, and two spiral staircases led up floor after floor of steel gantries and heavy, forbidding doors. A second monk was rapidly descending one of the staircases, his shoes making a lively percussion on the metal steps. “Hello, hello, hello, hello,” he began, before he’d even reached ground level. “Nice to meet you, I’m Brother Trevers.”

  Alison renewed her smile. “Hello, nice to meet you, I’m—”

  “Curtail your inane discourse!” boomed Diablerie, his voice echoing nicely throughout the hall in a way that even he had to take a moment to appreciate. “Diablerie comes to cast judgment upon this house of dread. Tarry not with your paltry demonstration.”

  Trevers was a large, rounded man with a red face and a Cockney accent, clearly accustomed to being the most dominant personality in the room, so having to apply the emergency brake to his introduction left him discombobulated. “Er, righty-o then,” he said, awkwardly withdrawing the hand he had extended to shake. “Let’s, er, head on over to my office through the exercise yard, and you can see how the kiddywinks are doing on the way.”

  He politely held open another set of double doors, and Diablerie and Alison passed through into the enclosed yard. From within, it seemed even bigger than it had from outside; it contained hundreds of young men and women, arranged into perfect rings that stretched all the way around the circular space. Each one was wearing a gray jumpsuit and marching slowly around the perimeter in perfect time. The air was filled with the collective scraping of hundreds of uncomfortable shoes stirring the sandy ground.

  In the center of the ring was a raised wooden platform, surrounded by a smaller ring of monks, all with one hand resting on the Tasers on their belts. Upon the platform stood a bored monk holding a loudhailer.

  “Left, right, left, right, left, right,” he droned. “Listen to my voice. It is the only voice speaking. Stop.” There was a deafening crunch as the entire company halted. “Jump up and down three times.” Three more crunches. “That was my voice. I am the only one talking. Continue. Left. Right.”

  Trevers led Diablerie and Alison around the perimeter wall, keeping at least six feet of distance between them and the outer ring of marching inmates. “Yeah, we’re up to two hundred and six pupils,” said Trevers. “You’re in luck. We’ve got all of them out here today. No one’s in solitary for once.”

  Alison couldn’t stop looking at the body language of the “pupils.” It was as uniform as the clothing they wore. Their faces were tilted toward the ground, wearing dreamy expressions of sadness. Their shoulders drooped as if their arms had grown too heavy to lift. She did, however, catch one or two of them taking confused sidelong looks at Diablerie as they passed.

  “Sorry, what’s going on here?” asked Alison, after mulling over how to begin for several minutes.

  “You what, miss?” said Trevers.

  “My assistant is new. She has only borne witness to the primary
school,” explained Diablerie.

  “Oh, say no more. That whole Dumbledore-ho-ho-ho-young-wizards thing. That’s what we call the carrot phase. You’re looking at the stick now.”

  Alison was agape. “So it’s a lie?”

  “What do you mean, a lie?” Trevers paused in his stride and turned to face her. “The nice school is still nice. The nice school has to be nice. You’re more likely to spark off a magic power if you’re comfy and relaxed and encouraged. Once it has been sparked, that’s when you need to bring in the discipline.”

  “Stop,” said the monk with the loudhailer. “Turn around twice. I am talking again. Obey only my voice.”

  “Now, it would be a lie if the people at the nice school told them they’ll be getting hot cocoa and buns for their whole education,” said Trevers, resuming the walk towards the far door. “But they don’t. It’s not our fault if anyone assumes that, is it?”

  Alison cast another look around the exercise yard before following the two men into the next building. She thought of looking for Chris Lewis, but it was hopeless. The pupils had different genders, body types, and hairstyles, but the universal shadow of despair made them completely interchangeable.

  As Alison looked over the crowd, a new revelation crept into her mind. In another sweeping look, she had confirmed it.

  “Girl!” barked Diablerie, who was holding the door open for her with the end of his cane. “Daydream about hairstyles after our duty is concluded.”

  “Doctor!” She hurriedly dashed to within conspiratorial whispering distance, which caused Diablerie to raise his cloak again defensively. “There’s only two hundred and four. Mr. Trevers said all the pupils were out here, didn’t he? All two hundred and six? There’s only two hundred and four. Isn’t there?”

  Diablerie peered at the marching rows of youths. “Could it be that you miscounted?”

  “That I . . . what?”

  “Miscounted. Calculated falsely.”

  Alison looked over her shoulder, brow furrowing. “Sorry, I . . . I don’t understand. There’s two hundred and four. I’m looking at them now. That’s just how many there are.”

  Diablerie gave her the sort of look that he himself normally attracted. “I see. We shall keep this to ourselves. For now.”

  The two of them followed Trevers through what appeared to be one of the dormitories: a long, narrow room with two rows of militaristic metal-framed bunk beds, each with a mattress the depth of a piece of thick-sliced bread. Alison thought of the plush wooden beds from the two-to-a-room dormitories in the monastery, and felt sick.

  Trevers’s office adjoined the dormitory and was itself more of a sleeping than a work area. The desk was tidy and clean, while the cot in the corner was well used, the sheets rumpled and peeling from the mattress. Behind the desk was a large high-backed office chair, the seat a full foot higher than those of the two hard plastic chairs that had been provided for visitors.

  Trevers made an unsubtle beeline for the big chair and began to hunt through the desk drawers. “So, is there anything in particular you wanted to inspect, or . . .”

  Diablerie took two strides into the center of the room and struck a dramatic pose, flinging out his splayed palms and standing with legs far enough apart to admit a fat Shetland pony. “Silence!” he boomed. He pressed the first two fingers of one hand to his temple and grimaced. “The arcane spirits bring a message. They sense . . . guilt. In this very room. Burning hotly in an oven of secrets.”

  He aimed the pointed finger of his free hand squarely at Trevers, who was leaning back in his chair so hard that the backrest mechanism was clicking like a Geiger counter. “Uh . . .”

  “Yes, it all becomes clear,” said Diablerie, narrowing his eyes. “Something dominates your thoughts, Trevers. Your struggle to suppress it only makes it clearer to my Sight. A presence? No . . . an absence. More than one. Two people. Two students?”

  Sweat was pouring from Trevers now. It was channeled by his double chin into a single line that dripped down the front of his throat. “But . . . we only just . . . how could you possibly . . .”

  “Diablerie’s Sight is all encompassing! You are not dealing with magical whelps now!” Diablerie was keeping Trevers pinned with his fiercest gaze. Alison wondered if this was partly to avoid having to look at her. “Who has escaped?”

  Trevers stared at his own belly miserably. “There were two missing from roll call this morning. I’ve got men still searching the buildings. That’s why we have the rest of them out there now . . .”

  “The names of the missing,” said Diablerie. He finally broke his gaze to clutch his forehead again and stare at the ceiling fan. “The spirits form. They form . . . the letter D. No. C?”

  Trevers had produced some loose-leaf files from his topmost desk drawer. “Aaron and Jessica Weatherby—”

  “B! The letter before C, of course, it’s clear now. B as in Weather-bee. And I sense . . . a bond. They are brother and sister, are they not?”

  “Yes!” admitted Trevers, spilling pieces of paper from the files. “They’re local. Very local. Lived with their parents in a little village just south of here . . . Bratton Fleming, that was it.” He was reading from some kind of entry form. “They probably got help from outside. That’s what we’re thinking.”

  Alison fingered the two photographs that had spilled out onto the desk and pulled them closer. Both subjects wore identical startled expressions against a background the same shade of institutional blue green that Alison had seen on most of the secondary school’s interior walls. The sister, Jessica, was a dumpy girl with thick plastic glasses and black hair that came down to her double chin. Aaron, meanwhile, was quite good looking, in a shaggy-haired, messy-bearded Game of Thrones kind of way. His photo certainly made him look pale and miserable enough for the part.

  “And you haven’t yet sent men to their home?” demanded Diablerie, fluttering his cloak indignantly, bobbing onto tiptoe to enhance the effect.

  “W-well, we’re still hoping that they haven’t left the grounds . . .”

  “hoping?!” stormed Diablerie. He loomed over Trevers so hard that the office chair’s backrest finally gave in and snapped explosively, sending Trevers tumbling backwards in a shower of plastic splinters. “Hope! That most destructive of mortal vices. Come, girl. We will investigate the village ourselves. Gods only know what hideousness those tainted ones are scheming even as we speak!”

  10

  jess sent a message at 15:48pm

  jess: heeey

  jess: guess who escaped from prison :3

  xxreaverxx: Jess? What happened?

  xxreaverxx: Last I heard from you, you were heading off to that really great government school?

  jess: yea turned out it wasnt that great

  jess: things got really fascist after a while

  jess: so aaron and me escaped and we just got back home :D

  xxreaverxx: And the first thing you had to do after your daring escape was talk to someone on the internet?

  jess: well mum and dad are gone soooo

  jess: also we might technically be on the run now so shh

  xxreaverxx: Should you even be online?

  xxreaverxx: They can probably trace you.

  jess: nah ill just delete my browser history when im done

  xxreaverxx: ...I think it’s more complicated than that now.

  xxreaverxx: I think you need to have a proxy or something like that.

  jess: they probly haven’t even noticed were gone

  jess: there were loads of kids at that school

  jess: we just have to lie low

  jess: oh i forgot to mention we have magic powers now

  xxreaverxx: Wow, you really haven’t grasped the basics of lying low, have you.

  11

  If the Lake District was, as Mike Badger’s father had declared, Britain’s tit, then the Peak District was the strange, lumpy birthmark in the middle of her torso. It was there that Mike and David Badger found themse
lves, after several exhausting hours pursuing the path of drying shoggoth slime through the countryside.

  Mike was lying prone in long grass at the top of a shallow hill not far from the village of Edale, peering through binoculars with his thermos flask companionably at his side. “Looks like the slimy buggers finally stopped fer a rest,” he muttered.

  On the bottom of the long slope, on the shores of a picturesque reservoir, the shoggoths had gathered. At this distance, it was impossible to differentiate individuals, but going by volume alone Mike was prepared to swear that there were at least a hundred. They were huddled together in a huge, disorganized blob a thousand shades of swampy brown, providing the much larger ellipse of the lake with a filthy little companion.

  “God only knows what’ll ’appen to the locals if them things start piddlin’ in the water,” he commented.

  David was sitting upright about six feet back, huffing sulkily because the battery on his phone had run out. “I am really hungry,” he said. “This is technically child abuse.”

  “We are witnessin’ the biggest group of shoggies that have ever been seen in this plane of existence,” said Mike patiently. “There’ll be ’istory books written about us. Children of the future will be writin’ essays about how Davey Badger sat on his arse and moaned about being ’ungry the ’ole time.”

  “No, they won’t. The government’ll hush it up again.”

  “Aye, well, not if we can’t sort this out now. Ministry can’t hush up nowt if they go on the rampage in a big town. Bloody miracle they haven’t, yet.” Privately, this was something that was weighing on Mike’s mind. The trail had been sticking to wild countryside and poorly tended farmland, giving every town, village, and major road a wide berth. One could almost suppose that the shoggoths were deliberately trying to go unnoticed, which was behavior far too sophisticated for a mindless, flesh-eating blob from space. Still, he had found them now, so all he needed to think about was how to cull the herd.

  “Dad, I’m really hungry, I’m serious,” insisted David, switching to a more plaintive tone.