The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (24 page)

Other secret places drew other categories of Infractor. Absalom and her disciples – the Ariel Seconds Frensham and Dace – met in the Sewing Room to plot the overthrow of capitalism by embroidering quotations from Marx and Kropotkin on handkerchiefs. Rather improbably, they had become a Black Skirt Triad overnight. Absalom claimed they were practising Trotskyist
entrisme
, though Amy was disappointed to find them skipping to the same rhyme as the rest of the ants. Phillips of the Fifth sold sweets, make-up and racy literature from her cell in the Tamora dorms. All Phillips’ contraband was smuggled into School by baggy-trousered beaux she cultivated in town. Lately, with the snow, supplies were running low. Sally Nikola’s Arcane Science Circle performed illicit experiments in makeshift laboratories, giving off loud bangs or puffs of foul-smelling, bright-coloured smoke.

Light Fingers wasn’t in any of these hidey-holes.

After lunch, Amy tried the Drearcliff Playhouse. Traditional Viola territory, the theatre was now a Black Skirt nest… but Light Fingers knew the building intimately. She might seek sanctuary in the prop storage basements. It was worth a peep under the stage.

In the foyer, posters for the Mid-Winter Revue depicted Mansfield and Crawford as Scott of the Antarctic and Nanook of the North. The show was called
Poles Apart!
Judging from the illustration, it featured dancing penguins, the late unlamented Captain Freezing and something like a goggle-eyed cuttlefish exploding out of a husky’s head with musical notes dotted all around. ‘You’ll shiver and shake – with merriment! Your teeth will chatter – from laughter! Nurse will be in attendance to sew up any split sides. May not be suitable for Firsts and those of a Nervous Disposition.’

The auditorium was empty and dark. Amy felt her way down the side-aisle towards the stage. She heard a humming, deep underground, and felt a vibration… as if vast dynamos were whirring in the depths. A light moment came on her. Unable to see the floor, she found her feet weren’t on it. Panic took hold. She staggered through the air, arms flapping… and fell badly, jarring her knees and the heels of her hands. She made a racket, which resounded in the theatre. Her heart raced and she took long moments to overcome her terror.

She
was
alone in the big, dark space. But not in the building.

Her eyes adjusted and she saw a little better. Just in front of the stage was a trapdoor. Amy took hold of the brass ring set in the floor and, lifting with her mind as well as her arms, raised the door a crack. Sound came out of the basements, and a rush of warmth…

Dum-dum-dee-dum… dumdee-dumdee Dum…

Ants in your pants… all the way from France.

Her heart sunk. She wasn’t likely to find Light Fingers under this stage.

…but she felt compelled to lift the trap further, to see what was going on. She squeezed under the heavy door and took its weight on her shoulders, then went down a flight of steps, lowering it after her with a minimum of noise. Inadequate electric lights were strung over the stairs. The understage area smelled of paint, sawdust, stale make-up and dead flowers.

Lately, Amy kept her Kentish Glory mask about her at all times. She couldn’t wear the whole uniform under her clothes – though she had thought of it, especially in this weather – but the mask rolled into a soft tube and fit into a customised inside pocket. Pulling her mask on, Amy felt instantly braver.

She also had to watch her step. Before its (temporary?) breakup, the Moth Club had experimented with eyeholes. Too small, and they severely limited peripheral vision (those Hooded Conspirators must be almost blinded); too big, and they gave away your identity – in which case what was the point of a mask? She wished she still had her confiscated goggles.

Spend three and fourpence… we’re going to a dance!

Amy went towards the noise – the chanted rhyme and the beat of skipping.

The main cavern was hosting a Black Skirt rally. She kept to the shadows.

Clutter was tidied away or got rid of, changing the character of the vault. It was more like the hold of a warship than the innards of a theatre. Spotlights shone bright beams which cast stark shadows.

An unrolled backdrop hung on a rear wall. A painted plain of blasted trees and burned-out huts represented the aftermath of battle. The canvas was still stained with the arcs of stage blood overenthusiastically sloshed by Handsome Helena in her controversial
Grand Guignol
production of the Scottish Play. Girls still had nightmares about Vanity’s Lady Macbeth, who – in an added business intended to ‘beef up’ the Bard – clawed out her eyes during the mad scene and tossed two poached eggs slathered in raspberry jam at the front row.

The skipping and chanting stopped dead. Amy thought she was discovered, but heads did not turn her way.

The Black Skirts were assembled before the Queen Ant.

Rayne sat on a huge throne used in history plays. Her feet dangled. Thirty or forty girls, mostly Violas, stood to attention in the cleared space. Arranged in order of size, titches at front and beanpoles at back. Once ordinary girls – friend or foe or indifferent – but now part of the Black-Skirt army. Lapham, St Anne, Phair, Hone, Pulsipher, Stannard, Vail, Sundle, Dungate, Acreman, Brydges, Aire, Inchfawn, Oxenford and Frump – apostates of Desdemona. Pelham,
House Captain
of Desdemona. Mansfield, daringly in black
trousers
. Skipping done, they wound their ropes around their middles like belts.

The ranked silhouettes on the backcloth looked like the trees of Birnham Wood, ready to march. One of the smudge pots was lit. Greasy smoke pooled.

Amy couldn’t make out what Rayne was saying. Her audience nodded, as if agreeing. Rintoul and Beeke flanked the throne like handmaidens. Besides black uniforms and ropes, they wore black shoulder-sashes pinned with ant-shaped clasps. The Cerberus had their own bench. Gould of Goneril, of the talons and teeth, sat alert, like a good dog. Garland, an expedient defector from the Murdering Heathens, was on her knees in front of Buller, polishing her shoes and smiling like a convert.

Three hooded grown-ups also stood near the throne. Amy recognised them. Ponce Bainter wore his hood tucked into his dog-collar. The Professor was still all in tweeds. Kali’s father had a new hood, with a bigger Red Flame.

The Black Skirts had a hierarchy. Orders of rank were denoted by brooches, sashes, clasps, badges, ropes and pins. The insignia must be manufactured on the premises. By Viola costumiers? Rayne’s ant brooch was copied over and over, in simplified form. The design impressed Amy. She remembered Light Fingers’ advice. The ant emblem was more striking than her moth sigil. She had seen it chalked up around School, inked on exercise books and scratched in snow.

Some Black Skirts thought it a great jape to daub black treacle ants on the backs of gray blazers. Greys were Minored for unknowingly sporting sticky insects on their uniforms. Black Skirts weren’t punished for putting their mark on someone else’s kit.

A canvas sheet was spread on the floor before the throne – a backdrop face-down. On it was traced a design in black paint. Amy recognised the Runnel and the Flute, and recalled the strange traceries and plain of hatching eggs of her Purple dreams. The spirals drew her eye in. She felt dizzy looking at the Runnel to the Flute, as if her mind were pouring out and circling a plughole.

Down the drain was the Purple.

She crouched, making herself small, wishing her Moth Club friends were with her. Being alone among the Black Skirts felt less like an adventure and more like dangerous foolishness.

Rayne kept talking, as if leading a prayer. The rhythm was different from the skipping rhyme, but the words made no more sense…

‘Hieroph
ant
eleph
ant
sycoph
ant
phoo

Ant
elope
ant
edates
Ant
ony Stew

Cormor
ant
corusc
ant
celebr
ant
mites

Ant
imony
ant
ipathy
ant
agony bites…’

Amy got the message…
ant, ant, ant, ant, ant!

She tried to listen and her head hurt. She tried
not
to listen and her head hurt more. She tried to understand… but the words weren’t to be understood. They were like music… to be felt.

And she
felt
stark fear.

Her Purple dreams bubbled up, intruding into her waking mind. She looked at the blasted heath backdrop and saw it as the Purple, extending into the far distance. Littered with bloodied corpses and cast-off armour, the plain was vaster than the space under the Drearcliff Playhouse. Ugly birds flew slowly through skies she had thought painted. Beyond the purple horizon, dark fires burned.

She stood and was drawn towards the ranks of the Black Skirts. She walked in a curve towards them, as if entering the Runnel…

Despite what Light Fingers said, there
was
a place for her in the anthill… she could shed her wings and join the reinforcements who were going to advance. She could get the three and fourpence and buy a ticket to the dance.

She wanted to be part of
something
. This was bigger than the Moth Club, than Desdemona House, than School… this was, in the end,
everything
. The Purple and the Back Home. She could be a part of it all.

She was close enough to see Rayne’s smile. A tiny insect crawled across her face and she did not twitch. There were ants in her eyes!

…Amy was horrified by Rayne’s face, and more horrified by the lull she had been in.

They had
nearly
had her. She had nearly given in.

She had been following the Runnel and forgetting the Flute.

The Black Skirts didn’t even want her. Because of what she was. Because, when she got close, when she saw Rayne’s smile, she knew what was wrong with this picture. The farmer had two left feet. The kitchen window was upside down. The wind was blowing in one direction and the weathervane pointing in the other. The cat had too many eyes. She would always see what was wrong… and she would never completely give in. She could be unmasked, unwinged, made to skip, made to chant… but inside would always be an uncrushable, persistent bud of resistance… of glory.

Kentish Glory.

‘Queen Ant, Queen Ant,’ recited Rintoul, ‘you sit in the sun,

As fair as a lily, as white as a wand…’

‘I send you three postcards,’ Beeke took over, ‘and pray you read one.

You must read one, if you can’t read all…’

‘So pray, Miss or Master,’ said Rayne, clearly and loudly, looking straight at Amy, ‘for down will you fall!’

She was noticed!

‘Down, down, down will you fall,’ said the Ant Queen and her Princesses in unison. They all pointed at Amy.

‘I spy strangers,’ said the Professor loudly. Heads turned en masse.

The lines of perspective on the backdrop changed… the birds froze, painted again. A spell had been broken by Amy’s presence.

Again, she had interrupted the Ritual of the Runnel and the Flute.

The Professor pointed at Amy and screeched. She still wore her mandibled gauntlet. Arcs crackled between the talons.

Who was under the hood? A mistress? A tall, stout Sixth?

Amy backed away, fast… up the stairs and through the trapdoor. A rush of Black Skirts jammed together as they came after her. The ants were swarming. They clacked their mouthparts, jumbling their rhymes.

‘…hieroph
ant
, eleph
ant, Ant
ony Stew… down, down,
down will you fall
!’

She let the trap drop on them with a bang. She hurried through the auditorium and foyer and out of the theatre.

Blinking in the sunlight, she realised she still wore her mask.

She tore it off and stuffed it back in its secret pocket.

The trapdoor wouldn’t keep back the Black Skirts for long.

J
UST OUTSIDE THE
Playhouse, Amy ran into Frecks’ triad. She started chattering about wanting to borrow something from Light Fingers and wondering where she was.

Frecks shrugged. Kali looked away. Beauty was blank.

Beeke and two other Black Skirts came out of the theatre. They looked around purposefully.

Had Amy been recognised?

She went on about the book she needed a lend of, trying to seem as if she’d been with Frecks and company for ages. She flapped her hands in an exaggerated ‘silly me’ manner and was breathless with jollity… rather than terror.

‘Sisters Dark,’ Beeke addressed the triad. ‘Did you see a foolish girl running just now? A Grey pest who’s shoved her snout where it’s not wanted?’

‘Running? No,’ said Frecks – not lying, since Amy had
walked
.

‘Keep an antenna out,’ said Beeke. ‘You know how things are.’

She went back into the theatre. The other Black Skirts stood by the doors. They unwound their ropes and began skipping slowly.

‘I say, pal-o-mino, you’ve gone scarlet,’ observed Frecks. ‘Been doing anything you shouldn’t haven’t oughtn’t to have been?’

‘Not I, sir.’

‘You don’t say so, sir.’

‘Say so sir, I do.’

‘Thought as much. Any notion what Nosey Beeke was on about?’

Amy shrugged.

‘Another of life’s mysteries,’ said Frecks.

Frecks, Kali and Rose had no sashes or badges. Amy hoped that kept them out of any inner circles of sinister Black Skirt intent. They hadn’t been at the meeting under the stage – though Desdemona was represented by Pelham, Inchfawn and other feckless Gone-Blacks.

Something was up among the ‘Sisters Dark’. Amy didn’t think it would be cheering to know what it was. It had to do with the Purple.

She wanted to confide her worries to her friend, but a voice in her head – very like Light Fingers’ – cautioned against it. She couldn’t tell whether Frecks had covered for her with Beeke or just not realised Amy was the pest the Black Skirts were after.

Not realising things was becoming a Frecks trait. It was unlike the old her. Last term, her keen perception fringed on the borders of Ability.