Beswitched (5 page)

Virginia pulled Flora back into the corridor. “You get two baths a week—Wednesday and Saturday.”

Flora felt slightly sick. Two baths a week! This was like
prison. She stumbled after Virginia, trying not to start crying again.

Each door in the corridor had a flower name—Rose, Carnation, Iris, Eglantine. There was a babble of voices and giggles, and—from somewhere—loud shrieks.

Virginia halted in front of Bluebell. This was where the shrieks were coming from. Behind the door, Flora heard a girl’s voice shouting, “Ow! Stoppit, you beast! OW! You utter putrid BEAST!”

“Charming,” Virginia said calmly. She opened the door. Two girls were wrestling on the dormitory floor. When they saw Virginia, they scrambled to their feet. “If I were the cruel type of prefect,” Virginia said, “and if I could be bothered, I’d deal out some hideous punishment. Wasn’t the rumpus last night bad enough?”

The tallest of the girls mumbled, “Sorry, Virginia.”

“I’ve brought you the new girl, Flora Fox. Try not to converse with her in bloodcurdling screams.” She pulled Flora properly into the room. “Flora, meet your fellow Bluebells, Daphne Peterson, Cecilia Lawrence and Dulcie Latimer.”

Each girl solemnly shook hands with Flora—there was a lot of handshaking in the past.

“Look after her, you three.”

“Yes, Virginia,” the three girls said.

This was a very strict school, Flora thought—or why did these three girls take orders so meekly, and from someone who wasn’t even a member of staff?

“Don’t forget, it’s lights-out in half an hour. Goodnight, Flora—it won’t look so ghastly in the morning.”

When Virginia had gone, the three girls stared in silence at Flora. She stared back, relieved to see that, despite their stupid uniforms and the yawning time difference between them, they seemed to be as normal as anyone in her class at APS.

She looked round the room. It was large and pleasant, cheerfully lit. At first, Flora thought it was furnished with four large, flowered tents; then she saw that these were beds surrounded by curtains, like cubicles in a hospital. Each cubicle contained a bed with a metal frame, a chest of drawers and a bedside table with a lamp.

The tallest of the three girls said, “How do you do. I’m Pete.”

Flora thought she must have heard wrong.

“My full name is Daphne Peterson—but I decided to call myself Pete because ‘Daphne’ is so wet. My middle name is Flora, same as yours. But I didn’t like that either.”

Pete’s hair was short and dark, and just curly enough to be in a constant state of untidiness. The first thing you noticed about Pete was her untidiness. Her school clothes had an air of hanging in tatters. Her tie was crooked, and her hands were stained with blobs of blue ink. In spite of this, however, there was something commanding in the way she held herself. Her eyes were of a piercing, fearless blue. They swept over Flora in a way that disturbed her to the marrow of her bones—she had no idea why. Could she have seen Pete’s sharp features before? And if so, in whose life?

Pete patted the skinny shoulder of the girl beside her. “This is Pogo Lawrence.”

“My brothers nicknamed me Pogo when I was a baby,” she explained. “I’ve never managed to shake it off. Only my mother and Old Peepy call me Cecilia.” She was a couple of inches shorter than Flora, and she looked as wizened and wiry and tough as a little jockey.

“I’m just Dulcie,” the third girl said. “How do you do?”

Dulcie was plump and fair, pink and blooming. She had two long, pale yellow plaits. Her eyes were huge and babyishly blue behind round glasses.

There was a silence, and Flora felt that the other three girls were sizing her up.

“Your bed’s the one nearest the door,” Pete told her. “Sorry about that—it’s the penalty of arriving last.” She jerked back the curtain around Flora’s bed. “You won’t need to worry about unpacking your overnighter.”

“My what?”

“You know. The small bag with your pajamas and sponge bag—the things you’ll need for tonight, before you unpack your boxes. Ethel did it for you. She’s such a brick.”

“She told us you were crying,” Dulcie said solemnly, “because you were homesick.”

“Your parents have gone back to India, haven’t they?” Pogo asked. “I know how rotten that feels. Mine are in Rangoon—my father’s the Bishop of Burma.”

Flora saw that the three girls wanted to be kind. For the first time since the transformation on the train, she was with people she could talk to as an equal—they might think she was crazy, but they couldn’t lecture her or hand out order marks.

She took a deep breath. “My parents aren’t in India. They’ve never even been to India. They’re in the next century. That’s where I come from. I live in Wimbledon in the twenty-first century. I’ve fallen under some kind of spell and traveled back in time. I was supposed to be going to a modern school called Penrice Hall, but I ended up here. You probably don’t believe me, but I don’t care. It’s the truth.”

The other three girls gaped. There was a silence.

“Oh-h-h-h!” quavered Dulcie.

“You mean …,” Pete said, “you mean you’re from—the future?”

“Yes.”

“This is some kind of trick,” Pogo said sourly. “Very funny.”

Flora was very tired. She didn’t have any more strength to argue. “I swear it’s not a joke and it’s not a trick. I had a mad dream on the train.”

Their reaction was puzzling. She had expected them to laugh at her. Instead, they were pale and scared, and—in Pete’s case—excited.

“Great snakes!” she whispered. “It worked!”

Dulcie’s lips trembled. “Oh, Pete, I’m so scared!”

“Rubbish!” snapped Pogo. “She’s not from the future—it’s a trick!”

Flora looked around the room again, trying to work out what was niggling at her memory—then she saw it.

The curtains at the window and around the beds, patterned with bluebells, were the curtains she had seen in her dream.

5
The Summoning

“T
his is it!” Flora blurted out, almost choking with excitement. “This is where it happened!” The curtains were the same, the windows were the same. This was the same dark chamber Flora had seen in her dream. She sat down heavily on her bed. “I’ve been here before, when I was asleep on the train. There were some white shapes—someone screaming—and a voice—saying a poem about milk thistle and hog’s bristle—and I think there were candles.” She reddened slightly while she was saying all this—it sounded so barking mad.

But the other girls did not laugh at her, or argue. They stared at Flora like three statues of amazement. Dulcie began to cry.

“Wow,” Flora said. “You believe me!”

“So we jolly well should,” said Pete. “We’re the ones who brought you here.”

“You? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you see?” Pete turned eagerly to the others. “The ghostly figure we saw was HER! And she saw us!” She turned back to Flora. “We did it last night, because it was the first night back and we wanted something to cheer us up. We had sheets over our heads to get into the mood. The voice you heard saying the spell was mine—”

“And the screams were Dulcie’s,” Pogo said, with a dry chuckle. “She had the whole corridor in an uproar. We got into absolute oceans of hot water.”

“I couldn’t help it!” protested Dulcie. “I was so frightened! She was all transparent like a jellyfish!”

Flora’s heart was beating so hard that she could hear it inside her ears. “But I don’t understand—why did you do this? How did you? Why am I here?”

“Well, we summoned you,” Pete said, rather grandly. She seemed very pleased with herself. “Crikey, this is thrilling—what was it like?”

At last, someone was really listening. Her words falling over each other, Flora poured out the whole story of her turbulent day. It took a long time, because the three girls kept interrupting.

“A laptop what?” asked Dulcie. “Is it a little table for having breakfast in bed?”

“Do you really carry your own telephones in the future?” asked Pogo. “Don’t the wires get in the way?”

Pete asked, “Did your evil granny really have four husbands? How did they all die?”

“Look, I’ll answer questions later,” Flora said eventually. “I’m more or less at the end, but there’s something else you should know—I think I’ve swapped places with another Flora Fox, whose parents really are in India. I keep having flashes of her memories. And she’s probably having flashes of mine, wherever she might be. I don’t want to go back to the future to find she’s done something terrible while she was in my life.”

A bell clanged loudly.

Pete groaned. “The ten-minute warning! Just when it’s getting interesting!”

“We should get moving,” Pogo said, pulling at her tie. “Harbottle’s dying to give us another pony.” Seeing Flora’s bafflement, she added, “A pony is what we call a black mark here—it’s short for
poena
, which is Latin for ‘penalty.’ ”

“Oh.” Flora tugged uncertainly at her tie. The other girls stripped off their complicated layers of old-fashioned clothes amazingly quickly. Dulcie, in the next cubicle, kindly helped her with the endless buttons. Flora hurried into the horrible but comfy blue pajamas she found under her pillow.

The bed was strange—sheets and blankets instead of a duvet—but Flora’s darling old bear from home was sitting on the pillow, with his bald nose and—wait a moment, this was not her bear. He belonged to the other Flora. Her own bear was at Penrice Hall. But this one somehow felt very friendly and familiar.

“Your bear’s nice,” said Dulcie.

Flora looked at her sharply, to check she was not having a laugh—none of her friends talked about childish soft toys. But Dulcie was innocently cuddling a large, floppy white rabbit. “This is Mr. Bunny. I’ve had him since I was a baby.”

The bell rang again, and the girls switched off the lamps beside their beds. The room sank into mysterious shadow. After a few moments, Flora’s eyes adjusted. The curtains were not drawn, and the night was clear. She could soon see the shapes of the others quite clearly, and the bright glitter of their eyes in the shadows.

“We have to keep quiet for ten minutes,” Pete whispered. “Until Harbottle goes off to listen to the news; then we can talk.”

“Who’s Harbottle?”

“Shhh! She’s an old barnacle, but we can’t talk yet!”

The ten minutes seemed to last for ages. Eventually, a door was heard to close along the corridor. Then the questions began again, this time in loud whispers.

“Do you all have your own private airplanes in the future?” Pogo asked.

“No, of course not,” said Flora. “Not unless you’re a rock star.”

“Golly, what’s that?”

“If you’re from the future,” Dulcie said, “shouldn’t you be wearing a silver suit?”

Pete snorted with laughter. “Don’t be such a chump—she’s from Wimbledon, not Mars!”

Flora was a little insulted by the cheerful way Pete was
taking this, as if being pulled back through time were a joke. “Would someone please tell me how I got here?”

“We cast a spell,” said Dulcie.

“You what?”

“You’re telling it wrong!” Pete’s voice rose alarmingly.

“Shhh!” hissed Dulcie and Pogo.

“All right, but let me tell. It started last term, when we decided to explore the attics.”

“Not that we’re allowed up there,” Pogo put in. “But Ethel sleeps up there, and she told us she’d heard queer noises through the wall. We were hunting for ghosts.”

“Please, Pogo!” snapped Pete. “Didn’t you hear me say I was doing the telling?” (Pete was in charge here, Flora noted, or thought she was.) “That’s when we discovered the secret room. We were staggered nobody had ever noticed it before. In fact, it was Pogo who worked it out first.”

“Yes, I’m the intellectual in this bedroom,” said Pogo. “I remembered that there were eight windows on the attic floor—we went outside and counted them, just to be sure—but we only found seven doors. The eighth door, next to Ethel’s, had been covered up and papered over. Naturally, we were all wild to know what was going on.”

“I was scared,” Dulcie whispered. “I thought there might be dead bodies up there. Or mice.”

“Look, belt up, you two—let me finish, or we’ll be here all night.” Pete turned back to Flora. “We got into the secret room by climbing out of Ethel’s window and crawling along the gutter.”