Monster (14 page)

But she didn’t stop. ‘What if Seb was Leon? What if he came to you, begging for help? Would you turn him away?’

‘Seb wouldn’t kill anyone, even to save himself!’

‘I know what you’d do, Nash. You’d help him. You’d do what you could.’ She was holding my arm again. Finger by finger, I peeled her away.

‘Shudder to think what’s going on in those woods,’ Maggie chipped in. ‘He could be out there right now. Doing unspeakable things to Matron’s corpse.’

‘Oh stop it, Maggie, just shut up,’ Dianna raged. ‘He’s
not some freak. He’s a burglar, yes, he’s killed someone to defend himself, but he’s not insane. He’s just—’

‘Drawn that way?’ Maggie suggested. ‘Misunderstood? Deprived of parental love?’

‘Scared,’ Dianna corrected, wiping the tears from her face.

I shone my torch through the window. It was snowing heavier than ever outside. When everyone stopped talking, I could hear the
pat pat pat
of the larger snowflakes against the pane. The night was growing ever stormier. I thought about what the old man at the museum said.

You don’t go walkin’ at night. You don’t go lookin’ for it in the winter. Winter’s when he takes ‘em.

‘It’s not safe outside,’ I muttered into the cold glass.

‘What, Nash?’

I turned to Maggie. ‘We can’t do anything tonight. We can’t search. It’s snowing too hard and it’s pitch dark. We need to make this place secure and get some food inside us and some sleep. We’ll all have to sleep in the same dorm tonight, to keep safe.’

‘What about Matron?’

‘We’ll go out and search for Matron first thing.’ I looked at their frightened faces. ‘We can’t risk ourselves.’ I looked down at my hands.

Maggie nodded. ‘Yeah, all right—I guess.’

Clarice began to cry, even louder than before. As I looked at her, I caught sight of the Head Girl badge glinting on Dianna’s lapel. She’d moved it to her coat from her jumper so that it would always be visible.

She caught me looking at it. ‘I know,’ she said. She bowed her head and unpinned it from her coat, handing it to me. ‘Take it.’

‘No.’

‘We need a leader, Nash. You’re in charge now.’

‘I don’t want it,’ I repeated. ‘In fact …’ I pulled open my coat. There were my netball, hockey, swimming, tennis and athletics badges, all equidistant down one side of my cardigan V, my prefect’s badge in perfect alignment with the base of my half-Windsor knotted tie. I ripped them all off, including the one I’d bought at the Gorge saying ‘I’ve Seen the Bathory Beast’. ‘None of us are any better than the others, all right? Not any more.’

A single tear rolled down Dianna’s cheek, dripping onto her empty lapel. She put the Head Girl badge in her coat pocket. ‘But we don’t know what to do.’

The grandfather clock struck nine p.m. Its chimes echoed in the silence around us.

Dianna, Maggie and Clarice were looking at me.

I breathed in deeply.

‘Okay. Dianna, go and help Maggie lock up.’

‘How?’ she cried. ‘The main key bunch was on Matron’s belt loop.’

‘Okay, but all the doors have bolts and the ones that don’t have chairs in the rooms that you can wedge them with. Do that. Bolt both the internal doors on the long corridor too. Clarice, check the windows. If we have any lights on, the curtains should be closed so we don’t draw any extra attention to ourselves.’

Clarice nodded. ‘Okay. What are you going to do?’

I looked down. ‘I’m going to wash my hands.’

I turned to leave the room, the blood dry enough now on my palms that I didn’t leave a print on anything I touched. I walked down the corridor into the kitchen, where Regan and
Tabby were drying Brody off with a large, scruffy-looking beach towel. ‘Is everything all right, Nash?’ asked Regan.

‘No,’ I told her, making my way over to the sinks. ‘Dianna’s been hiding her brother in one of the follies. He’s …’ I looked at Tabby’s innocent little face. ‘He’s a bad man. Escaped from prison. And Matron hasn’t come back.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Regan. ‘And he’s out there? Loose?’

‘Well, in the Tree House. We hope,’ I replied.

‘Let’s hope he stays up there then,’ said Regan. You know—just in case.’

She was still convinced the Beast was out there, even after this.

‘Well, I don’t know anything for sure,’ I said, rubbing my hands into a foamy pink lather then swilling them off in the rinser. ‘Apart from the fact that I’m tired and hungry.’

She stood up and came over, lowering her voice. ‘Tabby was asking questions. About the blood. I told her it was paint, and that Brody must have knocked over a pot of it somewhere. Was that all right?’

I smiled at her. ‘Yeah, I think that’s good.’

Regan took a deep breath. ‘Look, I know what you think of me, well, what everyone thinks of me really, and I know you think all this …’ she hesitated ‘… all this b.e.a.s.t. stuff is just me being stupid, but I really think …’

‘I know,’ I told her. ‘I’m sorry I doubted you, Regan. Who am I to say the you-know-what doesn’t exist?’ I felt very tired all of a sudden. ‘But we’ve got another kind of monster to worry about now, so we should probably concentrate on that for the time being.’

Regan twitched a brief smile back at me. ‘Okay.’

‘I’m hungry,’ said Tabby softly, rubbing Brody’s ears.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘let’s lay the table and have some dinner, shall we?’

It was well past nine o’clock. Matron’s lasagne and a jam sponge and jug of custard sat on one of the worktops under a clean tea towel, all ready to be heated up. That morning seemed like such a long time ago. My day out with Charlie. My excitement. Walking around the museum. Our kiss.

I walked over to the oven and flicked the dial over to ‘on’ as Dianna, Clarice and Maggie appeared at the kitchen door.

‘I’m going to warm up the lasagne,’ I said. ‘Go and lay the table.’

W
e barely said a word at dinner. Even Maggie was quiet—I think she’d run her batteries down. But for the howling wind outside, the huge Refectory was still of our noises. Everyone seemed to be waiting for someone else to call the police about Leon Pfaff, our resident weirdo. I was thinking about Seb and how I’d barely thought of him all day. Now he merely appeared in my thoughts.

Maggie scarfed down her lasagne, as did I. Regan ate like she usually did—slow and considered, like she was counting the bites. Clarice pushed her pasta round her plate. I knew things must have shifted between us because the sight of her wasn’t making me baulk as much as usual. She was even taking orders from me without so much as a whine. Tabby had three mouthfuls before her head lolled and she
fell asleep on the table. And Dianna watched me like a hawk throughout, probably afraid that at any moment I was going to call the police.

‘Thought you were still working on your thigh gap?’ Clarice said to Dianna, watching as she suddenly filled her mouth with a giant forkful.

Dianna stopped chewing, then started again, slowly. ‘I am.’

Clarice raised her eyebrows and nibbled a tiny mouthful of mince. She’d pushed all her pasta to one side of her plate.

‘Eat,’ I said. ‘All of you. There isn’t much food left in the larder and we don’t know how long we’re going to be here.’

‘But I don’t want it,’ said Clarice. ‘I don’t like pasta.’

‘It’s fuel,’ said Regan. ‘You’ll need it to keep warm and keep …’

‘I don’t care,’ said Clarice.

‘Can we watch
Con Air
after dinner?’ said Maggie. Nobody answered. She actually hurt. She mumbled something about girls having no taste in movies and then a sound out in the main corridor made each one of us jump in our seats.

The main phone was ringing. We all stopped eating, or sleeping, or pushing food around, and just looked at each other.

‘I’ll go,’ said Dianna.

She left to answer it and we all went back to eating and being silent again.

Mum had called me courageous in her last letter. How did you know when you had courage? I just felt scared, about everything. Scared of the phone ringing. Scared about what we’d find when we went looking for Matron tomorrow. Scared about calling the police and what might happen to us if they found Matron’s body in the snow. Scared about meeting Leon Pfaff. Scared Charlie Gossard hated me.

Tabby was snoring on the table and the rest of us were halfway through our jam sponge and custard when Regan spoke.

‘Jam sponge is nice.’

We were all suddenly visibly sad. Matron had made that sponge. It was the last thing she’d done for us, and now we were completely on our own.

‘Do you think she will come back, Nash?’ said Clarice. I think it was the first time she’d ever directly addressed me without sarcasm.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

When Dianna came back in, she’d been crying. She sat back down in her chair, snuffling, but didn’t offer an explanation.

Begrudgingly, Maggie eventually asked, ‘All right?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘My mother was due to fly back from Spain tomorrow. All flights have been cancelled or diverted because of the snow. She said it’s chaos. She doesn’t expect to leave Malaga for at least another three days.’

‘I wonder if my mum and dad will be delayed too,’ said Maggie.

‘And mine,’ said Clarice.

‘And mine,’ I said.

‘They all will. Anyone trying to board a plane to or get away from England right now is snookered.’ Dianna sniffed.

‘We need to get the latest news,’ said Clarice. ‘Or internet, where can we get internet?’

‘Here if we can unlock the damn system,’ said Maggie. ‘Nash, where’s the router for the WiFi?’

‘By the main phone but there’s no way we can get into it without the code. And that’s in Matron’s head.’

Clarice batted her eyes at Maggie. ‘Nash, you said there’s an internet café at the Gorge, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, but it’ll be shut now,’ I said. ‘Besides, look at the weather.’

The snow and wind outside howled and clawed at the windowpanes like hungry white wolves.

‘Okay, Plan B,’ said Maggie. ‘We
must
be able to get internet access in the IT room or the Reference Library.’

‘It’s blocked,’ said Dianna. ‘Didn’t you hear what she just said? We can’t do anything without the router passcode. Thanks to you sexting in class and Googling Molotov cocktails.’

‘I wasn’t actually going to
make
them,’ said Maggie, rolling her eyes. ‘If we could just bypass the code. Can we do that, Nash?’

I looked at her. ‘How?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘You’re good with computers.’

Dianna looked at Maggie as though she’d just sneezed her out. ‘Do I need to get crayons out or something? As we’ve established,
Matron
is the only one who can give us internet access, and she’s. Not. Here. Is. She?’

‘No. I. Wonder. Why,’ Maggie threw back at her. ‘Perhaps because she tripped and fell on a certain someone’s meat cleaver, fifty or sixty times.’

‘I told you, Leon wouldn’t have—’

The phone rang again, its shrill chimes tinkling along Long Corridor, foreboding as a wagon full of clowns. This time, Maggie shoved her chair back.

‘How about the TV in the common room?’ Clarice suggested. ‘We must be able to pick up Sky News or BBC or something on there.’

‘There’s no aerial going to that TV,’ I told her. ‘It’s just for DVDs.’

‘What about in the Headmistress’s quarters?’ said Regan. ‘She’ll have a TV in her apartment.’

‘We’re not allowed up there, are we?’ said Dianna.

‘I think she’d overlook it just this once,’ I said.

‘Well,
I’m
not going up there. I don’t want to get into trouble when she comes back and finds we’ve been rooting through all her things.’

‘We won’t be rooting through her things, will we?’

Dianna huffed. ‘Maggie will. You can bet the house on that.’

‘She won’t,’ I said. ‘But we need to find out what’s happening, Dianna. Find out when the planes are expected to run again. It would be good if you could lead us up there.’

Dianna weakened. ‘Yes, all right. It would be for the common good. And we do need to know what’s happening at the airports. But they’ll be locked, won’t they? And the apartment keys are on the main key bunch—on Matron’s belt loop.’ She put her spoon back in her bowl with her half-finished pudding.

Maggie came back from the phone and confirmed all our fears.

‘My mum’s getting a flight out on Christmas Eve. She thinks it’ll be all right by then. Dad’s plane from New York had to land in Dublin. No one can get into any of the English airports in the south cos of the snow. Couldn’t be more screwed.’

‘So your dad’s in Dublin?’ I said.

‘Yeah, in a hotel by the airport. I don’t know how long for. How long’s a piece of string, Mum said. Guy at the airport said he’d never seen snow like it in forty years.’

‘Typical, isn’t it?’ said Clarice. ‘It was the same when that bloody volcano erupted. That mucked up my chances of going to Euro Disney.’

‘The weather doesn’t do it to spite you, Clarice,’ Maggie snipped.

I shuddered. ‘We just have to make the best of things—keep safe and not panic.’

‘Keep safe?’ said Maggie. ‘How are we supposed to keep safe, Nash? We’ve got a frigging murderer running loose about the hills, there’s so much snow out there I keep expecting a Yeti to come hiking through it at any minute, and we’ve got no internet connection. How do you expect us not to panic?’

‘Leon’s not running about the hills,’ snapped Dianna. ‘He’s in the Tree House. It’s too cold to go out in this. He’s probably just as frightened as we are.’

‘Poor baby,’ said Maggie. ‘Are his lil’ stabby hands getting all frozy-wozy?’

‘Shut up, Maggie!’

‘Maggie, leave it,’ I said.

She picked up her spoon and shoved it in her mouth.

The phone rang, yet again, out in the long corridor.

‘I bet that’s my mum and dad,’ said Clarice. ‘Bet they’re stuck at Sydney Airport right now, ringing to say the same thing.’

Maggie licked her spoon on both sides. ‘Go and answer it then. You should get them to ring the clap clinic and book an appointment while they’re there. Find out what you’ve picked up from Jailbird Jim.’

‘Oh will you just
shut
your pie hole for one minute, Maggie!’

The phone was still ringing, but nobody else was volunteering.
‘I’ll go.’ I pushed my chair back and ran out, hesitating before I picked up the receiver.

‘Bathory Girls School, Natasha Staley speaking, how can I help you?’

‘Nash?’

A man’s voice.

‘Hello?’

‘Nash, is that you?’

The line was so scratchy I could barely hear him.

‘Dad?’

‘No, it’s me. Nash?’

A younger man’s voice. A boy’s voice.

Seb’s voice.

‘Seb?
Seb.
Oh my God, is that you? Seb?’

‘I’m not going to make it … I just wanted you to know. I love you …’

The line went silent. And then, the line went dead.

And then, all the lights went out.

A small cacophony of screams floated up the corridor from the Refectory, the loudest of them coming from Dianna. How had he got a phone? Maybe he had reached a village. Maybe he had reached a town. What was wrong with him? Was he injured? Why would he say that? My heart was banging as I ran back to the others.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll get the torches. Stay in here, all right?’

Sobbing—Dianna’s sobbing.

‘Nash, what happened?’ Maggie’s breathless voice.

‘Power cut, I think. Just stay there, everyone. Don’t move out of this room.’

I felt my way back into Main Hall, where the wind was whistling through the cracks under and over the front door,
and grabbed all our torches from the table in the middle. I was in automatic pilot mode now, trying not to think about the phone call. I found my torch and flicked it on to guide me back to the Refectory.

‘What’s happened, Nash?’ said Clarice, waveringly.

‘What do you think’s happened?’ I said, handing Dianna the torch I thought was hers. ‘There’s a storm outside. The power’s been tripped. I need to find the fuse box.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Maggie.

‘We’ll all come with you,’ said Clarice.

They needed me. I needed them.

‘Okay, stay together, then, and don’t run. Maggie, grab Tabs. Follow me.’

Maggie picked up Tabby, who, to her credit, wasn’t crying, and we trailed our slow and silent conga into the passageway between the kitchens and utility areas.

The brooms, brushes and mops were kept inside the third utility room, along with a chest freezer and the bins by the back door. On the door were hooks where the cooks hung their coats and bags. To the left, high on the wall, was a large grey box. I saw a small stepladder in the corner of the room, which I opened up so I could reach the box. I flicked down the cover to reveal a long row of small black levers, most of which were in the ON position.

‘What can you see, Nash?’ said Regan, as though I was getting a bird’s-eye view of Narnia from a rocky outcrop.

‘Nothing much, just a bunch of little levers.’ I spotted one lever at the end of the row that was in the OFF position, and flicked it up.

Immediately, a light came on in the kitchen passageway. Regan broke away from the group and ran back towards the Refectory. ‘They’re back! They’re all back!’ she called out.

‘Great,’ I said, replacing the cover and climbing back down. ‘Check the phone too.’

‘Yay, Nash!’ said Maggie, jiggling Tabby about on her hip.

Tabby rubbed her eyes and smiled wearily, laying her head back on Maggie’s shoulder.

‘Well done, Nash,’ said Dianna.

We piled up the plates and ferried them all back into the kitchen where Clarice offered to wash up. While we were all standing in a state of shock, Regan came in with unwelcome news.

‘Um, everything’s come back on … except the phone. It’s dead.’

‘What do you mean, the phone’s dead?’ said Clarice.

‘She meant what she said. The phone is dead,’ said Maggie.

‘It can’t be. We’ve all used it tonight,’ I said. ‘The pylon must be down at the end of the drive, or something.’

‘Is it?’ asked Clarice.

‘I don’t know, do I? I’m not a telephone engineer. It’s happened before, a couple of years ago when we had that big storm. When the tree went over on the lawn.’

‘But you fixed the lights,’ said Clarice. ‘So you can fix the phone.’

‘I didn’t fix them. The trip had flipped, that’s all.’

‘What are we going to do?’ said Regan.

I rubbed Tabby’s back as she snored contentedly against Maggie’s neck. ‘Look, she’s knackered, we all are. We need some sleep. We’ll deal with it in the morning.’

‘Can’t we at least go and look for our own phones?’ said Clarice.

‘They’ll be in the staffroom,’ I said, my voice as flat as
a dead man’s heart monitor as I tried to push the phone call from my mind. ‘It’ll be locked. I don’t have the key.’

I’m not going make it. I just want you to know. I love you.
The words pushed their way back to the forefront of my thoughts. Around and around and around. Seb … Abruptly, I left the Refectory.

Annoyingly, everybody followed me up the stairs to the dorms and began making up their beds. Maggie and I undressed Tabby and settled her in her bed next to mine, then Maggie took the bed next to hers. No one said a word until lights out.

Then the thoughts came back, fast and strangulating. The tiny sound of my tears hitting my pillow on both sides of my face was interrupted by Maggie’s voice.

‘I forgot to ask, Nash, how did your date with Charlie go?’

‘It was nice,’ I managed to say, without sounding like I was crying. ‘But I blew it.’

‘Blimey, you’re a fast mover,’ she said.

I couldn’t laugh. My brain was throwing up all these memories I didn’t want. Me and Seb at home on the hearthrug one Christmas, watching
Karate Kid.
Him teaching me some of the moves: the Crane Kick, Wax On, Wax Off. Other than kicking him in his crown jewels (and the
oooooffff
noise he made every time), I couldn’t see the fun in it and kept sneaking off to steal chocolates from the Christmas tree. But he said I needed to know how to defend myself. He showed me moves that weren’t in the film.