The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School Read online

  Also by Kim Newman and available from Titan Books:

  Anno Dracula

  Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

  Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha

  Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard

  An English Ghost Story

  Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles

  Jago

  The Quorum

  Life’s Lottery

  Bad Dreams

  The Night Mayor

  The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781165720

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781165737

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: October 2015

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Kim Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Copyright © 2015 by Kim Newman

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For Prano

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kim Newman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Term

  I: A New Bug

  II: Headmistress

  III: Dorm Three

  IV: School Supper

  V: The Witches of Drearcliff Grange

  VI: Broken In

  VII: Kidnapped!

  VIII: Treachery

  IX: The Moth Club

  X: Midnight Retribution

  XI: In the Ruck

  XII: The Real Head Girl

  XIII: Chapel

  XIV: At the Heel

  XV: A Meeting of the Moth Club

  XVI: An Upstairs Dungeon

  XVII: Desperate Rescue

  XVIII: A Parental Visit

  Second Term

  I: The First Drop of Rayne

  II: An Address to the Whole School

  III: The Inspection

  IV: Damocletian Days

  V: Break

  VI: ‘Spend Three and Fourpence…’

  VII: ‘…We’re Going to a Dance’

  VIII: The Coming of the Black Skirts

  IX: The Runnel and the Flute

  X: Ugly Winter

  XI: Becoming a Ghost

  XII: A Summons to the House Captain’s Study

  XIII: In the Playhouse

  XIV: The Viola–Goneril War

  XV: Under the Black Skirts

  XVI: The Exorcism of Mauve Mary

  XVII: Purple and Black and Red All Over

  XVIII: Sisters Light

  The Remove

  I: To the Leper Colony

  II: A Different Form

  III: Remittance Men

  IV: The Invisible House

  V: Fair Copies

  VI: Golden Rules for Detective Stories

  VII: Protective Colouration

  VIII: A Wolf, New to the Fold

  IX: The Swanage

  X: Just and True

  XI: Into the Walls

  XII: The Last Battle of the Johanna Pike

  XIII: A Reunion of the Moth Club

  XIV: Where the Ants Stopped

  XV: The Start of a New Term

  Drearcliff Grange School Register

  Ariel

  Desdemona

  Goneril

  Tamora

  Viola

  Staff

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Coming Soon from Titan Books

  First Term

  I: A New Bug

  A WEEK AFTER MOTHER found her sleeping on the ceiling, Amy Thomsett was delivered to her new school. Like a parcel.

  When the down train departed from Exeter St Davids, it was crowded with ruddy-faced farmers, tweedy spinsters and wiry commercial travellers. Nearer the end of the line, Amy had a compartment all to herself.

  She first saw Drearcliff Grange through the train’s smuts-spotted windows. Shifting from seat to seat, she kept the school in sight as long as possible.

  Amy had hoped the name was misleading. It wasn’t.

  She should have known. Misleading place names like Greenland or the Cape of Good Hope ran the other way, passing off desolate climes as pleasant resorts. Drearcliff was exactly what it sounded like. A rambling, gloomy, ill-repaired estate on top of a cliff. This was wind and rain country. The sky was heavy with dark, roiling clouds.

  For a stretch, the railway line ran parallel with the coast.

  Waves broke against the cliff, washing through caves, eroding supporting rock. Chunks of North Somerset had sheared away, falling four hundred feet to the shingle. Some time ago, this land-nibbling had reached the Grange. A North Wing had tumbled over the fraying edge. Amid the strew of ruins on the beach, a gothic tower stuck up at an angle, white froth foaming around the base.

  Newer wings straggled safely, if dully, inland.

  The train terminated at Watchet. A porter walked the platform shouting ‘end o’ the loine… all orff that’s gettin’ orff!’ The Great Western Railway locomotive discharged excess steam. The clattering hiss was like a rattlesnake with whooping cough.

  Amy stepped down from the carriage.

  ‘Ho, Thomsett,’ called someone. ‘You must be she!’

  A tall, ginger-haired girl strode unscalded through the steam.

  The hailer stuck out a hand, which Amy shook. Her grip was bone-grinding.

  ‘I’m Walmergrave,’ she announced, thumping her chest. ‘Lady Serafine Nimue Todd Walmergrave, in full. All and sundry call me Frecks.’

  ‘Crumpets!’ exclaimed Amy. ‘Why?’

  ‘Freckles. Used to have ’em. Don’t now. Too late to chuck the handle.’

  Frecks had what Mother called ‘a strong personality’, which was code for a friend of Amy’s she didn’t approve of.

  ‘Headmistress has detailed me to slap on the bracelets and ferry you to School. Many new bugs set eyes on the place and flee for the hills. Men with hunting dogs comb the Quantocks for escapees.’

  If not for the skirt, Amy might have taken Frecks for a boy. Her brick-red hair was cut short flapper fashion, her lips were the same colour as her face and she had square shoulders.

  Frecks wore a more lived-in version of the scratchy uniform Mother had ordered for Amy from the school’s recommended London dressmaker, Dosson, Chapell & Co. of Tite Street. Grey skirt with black side-stripe, grey blazer with black piping, grey blouse with black buttons, grey socks with black clocks, grey-ish straw boater with black ban
d, bright crimson tie with black-headed pin.

  At Amy’s old school, girls wore baggy pinafores which made even long-legged Sixths look like children. In a Drearcliff skirt, she felt more like a little adult – on the outside, at least.

  On the hankie-pocket badge, a worried-looking woman – Saint Catherine, presumably – hung upside down on a cartwheel above an embroidered motto, a fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi. ‘A precipice in front and wolves behind.’

  If the dreary cliff counted as the precipice, where did the wolves come into it? Those famous hunting dogs?

  ‘This your gear?’ Frecks asked. ‘All your worldly possessions?’

  A porter had hefted her father’s old brass-cornered trunk on to the platform.

  ‘Yes.’

  Frecks signalled a bent old gaffer, who hefted Amy’s luggage on his back and conveyed it to a horse-cart in the station forecourt.

  ‘Joxer’s odd-job man and general slavey,’ Frecks explained. ‘Don’t mind him. Shot in the head at Vimy Ridge. Came to Drearcliff with the nag, Dauntless. She was in the War too. Charged enemy guns. Not very bright, if you ask me. Say the name’ – Frecks mouthed the syllables Gen-er-al Haig – ‘and Dauntless bolts. Runs perfectly amok.’

  Joxer had the opposite of a beard. His chin was shaven, but thick brownish-white hair sprouted everywhere else on his face except nose and forehead. Cheek-whiskers teased out to nine-inch points. Eyebrows curled like the heterocera of the dryocampa rubicunda or North American Rosy Maple Moth.

  ‘Your tumbril awaits, Highness,’ said Frecks.

  The girl helped Amy climb up into the cart. There were hard benches to sit on.

  Joxer let out a sentence consisting of one long unintelligible dialect word and Dauntless began to clip-clop off. One of the conveyance’s wheels was a different size to the others. The vehicle listed like a ship holed below the waterline, bravely sailing on to certain doom.

  On the narrow road from Watchet to Drearcliff, they acquired a horn-honking retinue of motorists. Frecks smiled and waved at the fuming drivers as if they were all in the Lord Mayor’s parade. The growling roadsters could not get by. Ignoring beeps and shouts, Dauntless kept to the middle of the lane. When the slow-rolling cart turned off for the Grange, the cars whizzed past in relief. Amy saw fists shaken and lip-read swear words.

  A rutted track led to a tall wall. Broken bottles stuck up from a rind of cement along the top.

  ‘No one knows whether the jagged glass is to keep angry mobs out or hungry girls in,’ said Frecks. ‘Dr Swan empties all the bottles herself, for personal use. Green for wine. Brown for beer.’

  ‘What about the blue?’

  ‘Poison, my dear.’

  They came to a set of spear-tipped gates. Frecks stepped off the cart and opened them, standing aside to let Dauntless through. After fastening the gates, she slipped on to School Grounds by a small, almost-hidden door.

  ‘I trust you’re giddy from the privilege, Thomsett,’ said Frecks. ‘You’ve just passed through School Gate. You only get to do that again when you leave for good. It’s symbolic. From henceforth, you come and go through Side Door. And Girls’ Gate, which is further along. Oh, and over the cliff if you can clamber like a monkey or soar like an eagle…’

  Considering how Mother had reacted, Amy thought it best not to mention her floating.

  ‘Hop down and we’ll walk the rest of the way,’ said Frecks. ‘It’s quicker.’

  Amy joined Frecks. They watched as the cart trundled off along a side path, without them but with her trunk.

  ‘Worry not about your gear,’ said Frecks. ‘Joxer will dump it at the dorms. The Witches will go through it for contraband.’

  ‘The Witches?’

  Frecks grinned. ‘Whips. Prefects. A superior type of she-imp. If you stashed a precious heirloom in with your scanties, Gruesome Gryce and her Murdering Heathens will have it away. Sidonie Gryce is Head Girl. Wears scalps on her girdle. Did you bring any dollies?’

  A dread hand clutched Amy’s heart.

  ‘Only Roly Pontoons… I’ve had him for ages, since I was little.’

  Frecks was exasperated. ‘I assume you were warned…’

  Father had brought Roly home from Belgium, on his last leave. After he was killed, she’d liked to think he left the big-headed clown to look after her. Sometimes, she made Roly float in the playroom, flapping his oversize coat like moth-wings.

  ‘Say goodbye to Roly,’ said Frecks callously. ‘The Murdering Heathens have a burning fiery furnace. Like the one Shadrach, Meschach and the other fellow were bunged in. Prophets prosper in flames. Dollies don’t, as a rule.’

  The dread hand squeezed. Amy was determined not to cry.

  ‘Gryce will probably dunk you in a horse trough too, or dangle you out of the North Window. Thinks she’s a caution. Best to grind your teeth and get it over with. You can shiv one of the minor arcana later, if you’ve a mind. It’ll either get the Witches off your back for a term, or declare a war which can end only in the fall of civilisation.’

  Amy didn’t know what to make of Frecks. At her old school, there hadn’t been any girls remotely like her.

  They strolled along a flagstone path between overgrown lawns. On one, a troupe of tall, clumsy girls in wispy Grecian gowns performed energetic leaps and bends under the direction of a large woman who beat time by slapping a riding crop into a gauntlet. On the other, a croquet match descended into a scratching, hair-pulling mêlée as a tiny teacher ineffectually shrilled a whistle. Amy thought she saw blood.

  ‘Unparalleled savagery,’ declaimed Frecks. ‘That’s the Drearcliff spirit. The malleteers are shamming the punch-up, by the way. The Fifth have a pool on who can get Miss Dryden to bust a blood vessel by overtooting.’

  The path wound through gardens.

  ‘Our grand tour continues,’ said Frecks. ‘Sixpence for the guide would be appreciated. Dorms are in Old House, the one that’s falling off the cliff. I’m to get you settled in our cell later. Ames, the birdie who had your perch last, fled to Switzerland for her lungs. Reckon she inhaled ground grit to fake it. Hope you’re made of sterner stuff. It’s a nuisance having to break in new bugs every twenty minutes.’

  Up close, Old House looked no more inviting than from afar. Near the cliff edge, signs warned against straying too close.

  They passed through a short, covered walkway into a grassy square surrounded by low-lying buildings. In the centre of the Quad stood a plinth supporting a giant marble foot, broken off at the ankle.

  ‘Professor Clio Chalke McGill, classicist and plunderer, hauled that there tootsie from Ancient Greece and generously donated it to School. Miss Borrodale, who takes Science, says the rest of the colossus must be hopping mad. She’s mildly droll, though don’t get her on Palaeontology or you’ll never escape – and watch out for her thwacking habit. This lump is called the Heel. Rumour hath it the whole statue was supposed to be Achilles.’

  ‘Death to King Gustav V of Sweden’ was written in red on the white stone.

  ‘Pay no heed to the graffiti,’ said Frecks. ‘Absalom the Anarchist singles out a different oppressor of the people every week. Almost educational, but a Minor Infraction of School Rules. Clock up six Minors and you have to scrub the Heel with your toothbrush. I’ve done it twice.’

  ‘School Rules?’

  ‘Yes, nasty little beasts. Set down at the Diet of Worms in 1066. Memorise ’em, else you’ll be constantly in hot water. In some parts of School, it’s against rules to wear your boater. In other parts, it’s against rules not to. Running from lessons to Refectory is an Infraction. So is not running from Refectory to lessons. If a whip slaps you across the chops, you can be Minored for having a red mark on your face. She can keep slapping until you cease Impertinent Display. A Minor is whatever one of the Witches thinks up if she’s had a “Dear Jane” from her boyfriend and wants to take it out on someone who can’t jilt her for the butcher’s lass. I’ve been Minored for Inappropriate Failure to Whistle.’


  ‘Buttered crumpets!’ exclaimed Amy.

  ‘Major Infractions are the serious ones, though. Gross moral turpitude, grand larceny, public indecency, destruction of school property, arson in a naval dockyard. Anything liable to bring the institution into disrepute. Should you be inclined to such criminal endeavours, the good news is that whips can’t stick a Major on you without due process. The bad news is that Majors are punishable by fifty lashes with the Cat. Or transportation to the Colonies.’

  The north side of the Quad was taken up by a new, three-storey building.

  Frecks led Amy to the front steps. Stone eagles perched on low, twisted columns either side of the doorway. They had glass marbles for eyes.

  ‘I go no further, Pilgrim,’ said Frecks. ‘For me to pass unbidden between the Budgies would constitute a Major. Like School Gate, you only get the honour – if honour it be – of calling in at the Swanage on your first day. Venture within and report to Headmistress, who’ll terrify you for a quarter of an hour. Then trot along to Old House and seek out Dorm Three. I’ll introduce you to the Desdemona Damsels. With that, I bid you adieu… oh, and don’t look Dr Swan in the eye – she’s got the fluence.’

  II: Headmistress

  SHE STEPPED INTO a reception room.

  One wall was three-fifths covered with framed school photographs, taken annually from 1877. Founding year. Generation after generation of girls. Rising through the years and passing out. Staff growing older and being replaced. Amy estimated Drearcliff Grange would have to start on a new wall in 1961.

  A cabinet displayed sporting and artistic trophies. A grinning African fetish of evil aspect was lumped in with silver cups and ballerina statuettes.

  There was a strong smell of pure alcohol. A burly woman stood at a table covered with newspaper, using vaporous astringent to clean a disassembled Lee–Enfield rifle. An enormous bunch of keys dangled from her wide leather belt. She looked at Amy through the long thin telescope of the barrel.

  ‘Go up, new girl,’ she said, nodding to a stairway. ‘Headmistress is waiting.’

  Amy tried to put her foot on the first step, but found she couldn’t touch it – as if a hard, invisible pillow overlay the carpet. She shot a guilty glance at the custodian. Absorbed in oiling a spring, the woman didn’t notice. This wasn’t so much floating as standing on air. A slightly sick-making feeling, like pressing bar magnets together when their poles were aligned to repel. Amy was getting more used to it, though the sensation was still disturbing. She couldn’t get past the wrongness.