by T. H. Hunter
“Serves her right,” Jayden said lazily.
The Middle Common Room in the South Tower was packed with people, drinking and laughing, talking and kissing. News of my encounter with Vanessa in Doctor Matei’s had spread like wildfire throughout our year. I couldn’t remember being this happy in a long time, surrounded by people I liked and who in turn liked me.
Lynn was sitting next to Jayden. Jayden looked rather pleased with himself, sporting a smile stretching from ear to ear.
“Hey, Beccs,” a voice came from my left.
I turned my head. It was Steve.
“Hey, Steve,” I said, “come and join us.”
“I heard you’re kicking butt in Matei’s class already,” he said, sitting down on the comfortable sofa. “How come you’re so handy with the blade?”
“No idea,” I said honestly. “Animal instincts?”
“Man, I’m really looking forward to the tournament.” Jayden asked.
“Yeah, it’s going to be a blast,” Steve said.
“Damn, no drinks left. Who’s turn is it to go downstairs?” Jayden said.
“I’ll go,” Lynn said immediately, adding: “With Beccs.”
I looked rather bewildered, but noticing Lynn’s pressing yet telling stare, I agreed.
“Yeah, ok,” I said quickly, taking the key to the wine cellar from the table. One of the guys had ‘borrowed’ it from the janitor, or so they told us at least.
“Wait, you’d better take some matches, too,” Jayden said. “For light.”
“Thanks,” I said, pocketing the matches.
***
On the stairs, when we were safely out of earshot, I turned to Lynn.
“What’s the matter, Lynn?”
“What do you think of Jayden, Beccs?”
“An upstanding young gentleman, ready for dinner parties at your parents’ place anytime.”
“No, I mean seriously, Beccs.”
“Well. He’s cute, sporty type. What’s wrong with him?”
“I – we just don’t seem to have that much in common. All he ever talks about is getting into the Knights and that stupid tournament.”
“So what do you want to talk to him about?”
“I don’t know, I mean, more personal things than that. I feel I don’t really know him properly.”
“A lot of them don’t like talking about that, I’ve noticed,” I said. “Probably best to get him in the right mood. Somewhere cosy.”
We had reached the end of the stairs and found ourselves in a circular corridor, with doors leading off it all-around. Most of them seemed to be for storage of one kind or another. Finally, we found the door that read “Wine Cellar”.
Fumbling for the key in my pocket, I took it out and placed it in the lock.
The wine cellar was much larger than I had expected, though quite dark as the only source of light was a single torch burning in the corridor behind us. I lit one of the matches Jayden had given me. It wasn’t really a cellar, as there were several very narrow windows at the back, but the night was so dark it didn’t matter. From what I could make out, the room not only had a lot of wine but was also stacked with all sorts of foods and other drinks.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Lynn said.
I didn’t like to admit it, but the place gave me the creeps, too.
“Come on,” I said, pretending to be unperturbed. “Let’s grab the wine and get back upstairs. Damn, I dropped the match.”
Suddenly, there was a sound like breaking glass.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered, stopping in my tracks.
“Maybe somebody’s here?” Lynn said.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
“It came from the direction over there,” she said. “Beccs, wait, what are you doing?”
I lit another match and walked over to where the sound had come from. Lynn, more out of terror than out of adventure, followed close behind me.
“There’s another door over here!” I said.
I tried to open it, but it was locked. Squinting hard at the faded letters imprinted on the door, I held the match higher to read the dusty description, but the light was too dark and the letters too faded to read anything.
“Oh, look,” Lynn said in a relieved voice. “It’s just a broken bottle of wine. It must have fallen from the rack.”
She was right. Lighting another match, I side-stepped the dark puddle of spilt wine in front of the rack and looked at the wines. I was no expert, but the collection certainly looked impressive, with old vintages from all over the world. We passed along them in awe.
“It’s too dark, I can’t read any of the labels properly,” Lynn said, squinting at one of the wines.
She leant over to me to get some light.
“Careful, Lynn,” I said.
But too late, Lynn, had stepped right into the puddle.
“Yuck,” she said, moving back. “My trainers are all sticky.”
I lowered the flame to see. From close up, I could see Lynn’s shoe pattern imprinted in the dark red liquid on the floor. Then, with a rush of fear, I saw that there was another print, of a much larger foot, right next to it. I gripped her by the arm.
“There’s somebody else here,” I whispered.
“What?” Lynn said, panicking fast. “What do you mean?”
“Look,” I said, pointing at the other print.
Lynn’s face went white.
“We’ve got to get out of here, I –”
We froze. There was another sound, a very faint tinkling. It was coming from the other room.
“There’s something behind that door,” I said.
“Beccs, let’s get out of here. I’m scared.”
But before we could so much as move, the door suddenly burst open, and a figure of a large man appeared in the doorway. Lynn gave a bloodcurdling cry as he rushed at us with such force that we were both knocked off of our feet, hurling us back into the rack of wines. I hit my head hard against a wine bottle and fell onto the ground. We were bathed in a shower of glass and wine, getting cut by the shards that were flying all over the place. The figure of the man jumped to the door, slamming it violently behind him.
“What on earth was that?” Lynn said in shock.
“No idea,” I said, gingerly massaging my head, which was bleeding slightly. “I was distracted by bottles pounding my skull.”
“Very funny, Beccs.”
We heard voices outside.
“Who’s that?” Lynn asked, her panic returning.
This time, however, it was unfounded. It turned out to be some late-comers, two second years, who had been on their way upstairs to the party and had overheard the commotion.
“Woah, what happened, did you fall into the wine rack?”
“No, we didn’t, we were pushed,” I said with some irritation. Our would-be rescuers were a little too amused at the scene for my liking. “Did you see who came out of this room just a second ago? You must have seen him.”
“No, sorry, there wasn’t anyone.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
I got up painfully. My head was still buzzing as I helped Lynn get back on her feet. The room looked like a total mess. There was wine and glass everywhere, as the entire rack had collapsed on us.
The door to the adjacent room stood wide open now. Holding my still buzzing head in one hand and a match in my other, I huddled over. What had he been after in there?
“What is the meaning of this?”
The sound of Mrs. Prill’s shrill voice, which was never quite authoritative, was unmistakable. We were in deep trouble now.
I pulled out the key. If they found out we had it, there’d be even more to pay for. Looking around, I quickly stuffed it into a large wooden box on the nearest shelf.
I slipped back into the wine room as smoothly as I could. A bad-tempered Mrs. Prill had arrived in a nightgown and was in the process of berating Lynn.
“But it w
asn’t us!” she said.
“Us?” Mrs. Prill said, glancing around. Her eyes focussed on me in her usual hawkish manner. “Miss Flynn, what on earth have you been up to in here?”
There was no use denying it. At least, not the whole thing.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Prill. We were having a party upstairs and…”
“…and you thought you’d help yourself to Castle property, did you?”
“I mean…”
“And then you decided to vandalise the entire room!” she said, almost in a fit now.
“We were attacked! You didn’t think we did this ourselves, do you?” I said, also angry.
“Of course I do. I will write my report first thing in the morning. Student vandalism is punished very severely at this institution, I can assure you, Miss Flynn.”
“But Beccs is right, we were attacked. A man…” Lynn said.
This just seemed to irritate her further.
“Please, Miss Adams, I do not want to listen to your rehearsed stories. You’ve been caught stealing from the wine cellar, and you will have to bear the consequences.”
“He was in there,” I said, pointing to the room in which the attacker had hidden.
But she wouldn’t hear any more protestations.
“Enough. You will return to your bedrooms immediately. Your punishments will be announced at breakfast.”
“Announced?!” I said.
“Goodnight, Miss Flynn.”
There was nothing else we could do. Miserably, Lynn and I traipsed out into the corridor and back to our dorm.
11
The announcement turned out to be even more humiliating than I had feared. Before breakfast, as the restless students filed into the room and took their seats, Lynn and I had to stand next to the fountain in the great dining hall, facing the staff’s balcony. Mrs. Prill, who was fully in her element now, approached the balustrade and read from a sheet of paper the terms of our punishment.
“Silence please. In accordance with college regulations, the following punishments are pronounced upon Rebecca Flynn and Lynn Adams for vandalism and attempted theft of castle property,” she said. “In addition to the restoration of the room to its original and unblemished form, the college requires of each of you four weeks library duty.”
“I suppose they need some cheap labour,” I said to Lynn out of the corner of my mouth. But she was too close to tears to react. She hadn’t so much as got extra homework in her life.
***
I was still seething at the injustice of it all when I arrived once again at the door of the wine cellar. The two janitors, a white-haired man, Mr. Harrow, and his son, were delighted to have a couple of students to boss around for a change it seemed.
We walked in. The cellar looked even worse than I remembered. This would take hours. My eyes immediately flickered to the door to the adjacent room, the room in which I had hidden the key. It was closed again.
“And make sure you two clean up everything. Don’ want any of the teachers cutting themselves on shards o’ glass now, do we?” the elderly janitor said. His son was sniggering at every other word.
“This door’s locked,” I said, trying it.
“Tha’ one’s always locked. Nobody uses that room no more, not in years,” Mr. Harrow said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s the old Alchemy storage room. This room ‘ere used to be the Alchemy classroom, as a matter o’ fact. But when they moved the department over to the East Tower, they changed this here place into a wine cellar.”
“So what’s all the stuff in there, then?”
“Oh, jus’ worthless leftovers, old equipment an’ the like,” he said.
“I think some wine got through the cracks at the bottom,” I said. “Could you open this door for us?”
“You do want to do a thorough job, don’ ya? No ‘arm I suppose,” he said, surprised at the enthusiasm. He produced a large bundle of keys from his pocket.
Lynn was looking at me quizzically, but I just gave her the faintest of winks.
Mr. Harrow finally found the key and opened the door.
“Jus’ make sure you leave everything as it is,” he said. “I’ll be ‘round in a couple ‘o hours to see how you’re doin’.”
***
As soon as we were alone, I entered the old Alchemy storage room.
“What are you doing, Beccs?” Lynn asked me.
“I hid the key in here,” I said. “I was scared they’d search me.”
The room was full of boxes and dusty old apparatuses and metal instruments. There were cobwebs everywhere.
“Here it is,” I said, producing the key from the box.
Despite the bright daylight shining in from the windows, the room still had something sinister about it.
“Hey, look, this is where he must have been standing,” I said.
Next to the door, the dust on the ground had quite obviously been disturbed. Next to the imprints, a glimmer of something caught my eye. I bent down and picked it up. It was a small silver figurine. It felt odd in my hand, as if I suddenly had pins and needles after sitting for too long.
“What’s that?” Lynn said, craning her neck to get a better look.
“I don’t know, some sort of figurine,” I said.
“Do you think the attacker dropped it?”
“He may have, I don’t know. Have a look.”
I handed it over to Lynn.
“Looks like some dancing woman. Should we hand it over to Mrs. Prill? It might be important.”
“You heard her, she doesn’t even believe we were attacked. She’s already made up her mind that it’s ‘student vandalism,’” I said.
“But we can’t just withhold evidence,” Lynn said, though she sounded unconvinced herself.
“They’re not even looking for evidence. This is just going to get thrown in with the rest of our ‘rehearsed’ stuff like everything else we’ve said. Anyway, it was us who got attacked, remember? I just want to find out what this is, then I’ll hand it over.”
This mollified Lynn’s doubts.
“It’s strange,” Lynn said, turning over the figurine in her hand. “Vampires usually hate to use silver in anything, especially if it’s pure.”
“How do you know it’s pure silver?” I said.
“You can tell from touching. I suppose it’s some sort of allergic reaction or something. Your skin goes all fuzzy.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Is it… dangerous?” I asked.
“Not in this form, no. The Slayers used to make weapons of silver to kill us. And there have been some nasty incidents in history where people were thrown into a bath of liquid silver and things like that.”
“Charming,” I said, pocketing the figurine.
“Yeah, history tends to have that effect,” Lynn said, smiling and shifting her glasses.
“Well, I suppose we’d better get back to it, what do you think?”
***
Collecting the shards of glass and scrubbing the floor took ages. We missed our first class and only had a few minutes to spare before the next began. Luckily, Mr. Harrow, who had been rather taken by our ‘enthusiasm’, seemed quite willing to do the rest. We thanked him and ran off to the lecture hall for Haematology with Doctor Balewa.
It seemed to be quite a popular class, for about a hundred or so students had squeezed into the narrow wooden seats. It didn’t take long for me to find out why. Despite the rather dry subject matter, the numerous properties and peculiarities of vampire blood, Doctor Balewa was undoubtedly a master of her art. We spent the remainder of the 90 minute lecture taking notes.
***
After the classes of the day had finished, Lynn and I parted ways. We were to do library duty on alternate days.
I’d never been to the library tower before. It was located at the back of the castle, where the corridors were narrower and older. I was quite used to scaling stairs by now, one of the perks of living the castle life, I suppose. Do
ctor Yurasov welcomed me at the entrance.
“Hello, Miss Flynn, please come in, but quietly please. We do not want to disturb the other students,” he said.
“Of course, Doctor Yurasov,” I said, feeling rather out of place as I stared at the high ceilings and endless bookcases. The room was the most beautiful place in the entire castle I’d seen so far.
“You are impressed by our little collection, I take it?” he said, chuckling. “There are still two more floors above us. The view from the uppermost floor is really quite magnificent, you know. It even sports a little terrace where I like to read sometimes.”
This didn’t seem like much of a punishment to me – not that I’d be complaining about it.
“So, erm, what should I be doing …”
“Oh that, yes. I quite forgot you are here as a punishment, Miss Flynn. I was only half-listening at breakfast this morning – so irksome these ridiculous punishments they insist on dishing out to students,” he said. “So ineffective. Please, come in. I’ll show you around first.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We walked casually along the shelves as he explained the various sections and subsections, including ancient tomes bearing titles such as “The Slayer Menace” and “Werewolves, Dragons, and other Ancient Superstitions”. When we arrived at the section devoted solely to martial arts, Doctor Yurasov turned to me with a knowing smile.
“I have heard of your exploits in Doctor Matei’s class. This section should be of particular interest to you. You will find all major European treatises and historical combat manuals here from the last 800 years onwards. I’ve spent quite some time here myself, in fact.”
“Are you a swordsman, Doctor Yurasov?” I asked eagerly.
“Well, I try,” he said. “Perhaps we should have a friendly match sometime?”
“I’d very much like to, sir, but I have no weapon. Doctor Matei provides them each class, you see, and…”
“Ah yes, of course. Never mind, I’m sure I can find one that is suitable for you. Now, let me show you to your post, and I will explain your duties to you,” he said.