The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls (21 page)

But even as she spoke, Victoria knew it wasn’t true. She wanted to believe someone in Belleville would realize they were
gone and try to come find them, but whenever that had happened before—with Vivian, for example, and Professor Alban—whoever had tried it hadn’t come back. And Jacqueline had been here for eight weeks, and Harold for months . . .

Lawrence shook his head. Someone nearby began to cry harder. Victoria remembered Mr. Tibbalt, his brother Teddy, and Vivian Goodfellow. Mr. Tibbalt said he hadn’t really missed his brother when Teddy disappeared. He said it felt like living in a blank, cold fog. It was peaceful. It made you forget things and not care about the people you were supposed to care about most.

Victoria gulped, hard. People were forgetting them. And if they ever got out of here, everyone at home, at school, in town, would forget they had forgotten their children, and things would go on like before. Mrs. Cavendish would go on snatching kids. No one would say a word. It wasn’t the Belleville way to talk about unpleasant things.

Victoria gritted her teeth till the tears and images of her parents faded. There were things to figure out first.
We mustn’t go soft, Victoria
, she told herself.

“And the Home?” she said. She thought about how the floor had rippled beneath her feet and the kitchen floor had cracked like in an earthquake. “Do you think it could be . . .” She swallowed hard. She did not want to say it. “Could it be alive?”

Lawrence frowned. “I don’t know.”

“I think so,” whispered a small voice from the next cot over. “It does whatever she wants. Just like those roaches and Mr. Alice. She makes rooms pop up out of nowhere, and the hallways are different every day. You’ll see.”

“Go back to sleep, Donovan,” said Lawrence.

“I should know, though, shouldn’t I? All those nights in the parlor . . .”

Victoria recognized the flabby sack of boy on the next cot and gasped. “Donovan? Donovan O’Flab—I mean, er, O’Flaherty?”

Lawrence jabbed her side with his elbow.

“That’s me,” said Donovan. He turned over, so Victoria could see the flaps of skin hanging off his cheeks, like the
FEAR
head hanging in the classrooms. “Hi, Victoria.”

Ignoring the urge to kick the ugly version of Donovan away like Mrs. Cavendish might kick a gofer, Victoria said, “What’s
happened
to you?”

“Coaching,” said Donovan. He sighed. His face drooped even more. “You’ll see. It happens to everybody, one way or the other.”

“But what is it? What’s coaching?”

“It’s when Mrs. Cavendish tries to make you stop doing whatever’s wrong with you,” said Lawrence quietly.

“But how can she change a person like that?” said Victoria.

“She just can. I’d never have thought before, ever, that I could hate music and want to leave it behind, but now—”

“Lawrence Prewitt,” said Victoria. Her voice was shaking, but she stood up and put on such a fierce dazzle that even Donovan seemed to wake up. “Don’t you dare ever start talking like that again, or when I get out of here, I’ll leave you behind with the gofers.”

Lawrence smiled. “I’ve missed your threats, Vicky.”

“Did I hear someone mention leaving?” said Peter, strolling over. He sat down at Donovan’s feet and stared at Victoria. His mouth and fingers twitched in a sharp, wolflike way.

Victoria narrowed her eyes. She recognized that look. The Academy professors had had it. So had Jill and the Prewitts, when they weren’t all bright and smiling. Victoria had the feeling that when people looked like that, Mrs. Cavendish was somewhere very close.

“Yes, you did hear someone mention leaving, Peter,” said Victoria, smoothing her pajamas. “
I’m
leaving. I’m going back to bed.”

With that, Victoria got up and headed for the fireplace. She wished she were wearing her nice Academy shoes with the buckles and heels. Stalking away barefoot did not have quite the same effect.

“Careful of the dark, Victoria,” said Peter, suddenly at her side, leaning on the fireplace wall, staring at her. “Sometimes it . . . changes things. You never know.”

Victoria rolled her eyes. “Oh, be quiet. You can’t scare me.”

Peter grabbed her arm.

“I won’t let you get me in trouble, Victoria,” he whispered, his eyes hard and afraid. “Just remember that. I’ve done enough, I’m a new Peter now. It’s my turn to leave. I won’t let you ruin it.”

“Thank you for the information,” said Victoria. She pulled her arm free and crawled till she was in the dark again and the soot turned to slime.

“I won’t let you get me in trouble, Victoria,” she said, making fun of Peter’s shaky voice. “I’m a new Peter now, blahbity blah.”

But her own voice sounded teensy in the shifting, twisting passage, and the floor crunched and bulged beneath her hands.
Don’t throw me around again
, she thought.
Please?

She concentrated on crawling, moving forward bit by bit, clenching her teeth till her jaw hurt. This time, she did not have to hum or do anything at all; a dank passage awaited her, heading straight forward into darkness. Victoria paused. She did not like that one bit. She even thought about turning back and hiding in the boys’ dorm, but she didn’t think
that would go over well with the gofers when they came to unlock the door in the morning.

“Hello?” she whispered. Nothing answered her—no buzzing wings, no ghostly voices. The passage remained steady and solid. Victoria looked back over her shoulder; Peter remained at the fireplace, a black figure hunched over and watching her.

Victoria gulped. “I’m not afraid.” She put up her chin and set her jaw. “I’m not, I’m not. I’m Victoria Wright.” She started crawling again, humming just in case, and kept waiting for the floor to fall out from under her again, or a staircase to shift out of the walls—but before she could think about that too long, her hands hit the fireplace grate, and she was back in the girls’ dorm. Her nameplate glinted on the wall. Jacqueline had gone to bed. Everyone was asleep. Victoria felt so relieved to be back that she sat in the soot for several minutes before she could stand up. She looked behind her to find a dirty brick wall. The passage had disappeared.

What does it mean?
she wondered, frowning. Did
I imagine the Home moving like that, and spitting me out in all those different rooms?

“I must have imagined it,” she told herself, slipping into her bed and shutting her eyes tight. “I imagined it, I imagined it. Houses don’t move like that. Houses aren’t alive.”

“WELL?” SAID JACQUELINE THE NEXT MORNING
as they gathered at the door to go down to breakfast. “What happened last night?”

“Our fireplace goes to the boys’ fireplace,” Victoria said. “There’s a passage that connects them. So, I went over there, and I talked to Lawrence.” She shrugged, trying to seem casual about it. Falling forever and ever and coming out in that hallway; the strange voices, the stinky kitchen, how she had hummed and what that had done, or what it
hadn’t
done—no, she wouldn’t tell Jacqueline anything about that. Besides, it hadn’t actually happened.

Houses aren’t alive.
She had to believe that; she would not let Mrs. Cavendish turn her crazy.
Houses aren’t alive. Houses aren’t alive.

“I just can’t believe it,” said Jacqueline. “I watched you go through, and I
still
didn’t believe it. People have tried to mess with the fireplace before. Even I’ve tried. But there’s always just been a brick wall. No one’s ever gone through it like that.”

So
, Victoria thought,
was that especially for me, Mrs. Cavendish? Did you let me through on purpose? Were you trying to scare me?

That must have been it. Of course. It made perfect sense: Mrs. Cavendish pulled some nasty trick and sent Victoria on that wild ride to frighten her into not making any trouble. Victoria smiled and gave herself a couple of tally points on the blackboard in her head. Obviously, Mrs. Cavendish thought she was a worthy opponent. And after all, why wouldn’t she? She was Victoria Wright.

But then . . .

A certain pesky thought wouldn’t go away.

“Or maybe . . . ,” Victoria began. She frowned and stared at the fireplace.

“What is it?” asked Jacqueline. “You look strange. Is everything all right?”

Maybe Mrs. Cavendish had nothing to do with the passage moving
, Victoria thought. She remembered how, in the gardens two nights earlier, Mrs. Cavendish had kept looking around the Home like she was searching for something.
Victoria herself had seen the front of the Home move when she came to question Mrs. Cavendish, just the other day.

Letting Victoria get through the fireplaces and throwing her around to scare her was one thing; but why would Mrs. Cavendish have made the Home move that day, when she was shoving Victoria out onto the porch, trying to make her leave?

“I wonder why I could get through,” Victoria said slowly. “Why me?”

Jacqueline tilted her head. “Maybe it was a trap or something. Maybe she’s spying on us.”

“Maybe,” said Victoria, but then a gofer came to get them, and Victoria changed the subject. That awful
between
feeling was back, where Victoria didn’t know what to think.

In scattered whispers, on the way down to the dining room, Victoria and Jacqueline discussed what they thought Mrs. Cavendish did to the children who failed coaching, and why Jacqueline was here. She had been ugly, with hunched shoulders and ratty hair and a splotchy face, and she had insisted on painting that freakish, ugly art of hers. Victoria studied Jacqueline’s face. Her coaching was making her into something different, prettier, more normal—better, supposedly. Victoria wasn’t sure she agreed. It would be one thing for Victoria to help Jacqueline be prettier and more normal while they were both safe at home. Why, it would be just
like helping Lawrence keep his hair combed and reminding him to please not hum to himself in public.

But what Mrs. Cavendish does is different
, Victoria thought.
Isn’t it?

An uncomfortable feeling unwound in her belly, all the way down a new hallway made of shiny gray stone with jeweled eyeballs for doorknobs. In the gallery, gofers scurried between chores, and the shadow-eyed birds settled back into the ceiling.

At breakfast, Victoria picked at her eggs and avoided the meat bits. They looked funny and tasted even funnier, and she couldn’t stop thinking about that awful, rotten-smelling kitchen. When she caught Mrs. Cavendish staring at her from the head of the table, Victoria stared right back, but she didn’t pay attention to her fork and ended up eating a chunk of rubbery, spicy, stinking meat. Mrs. Cavendish smiled, and on the way to the first class of the day, she petted Victoria’s hair.

Victoria tried to distract herself as they walked single-file down the second-floor corridor of classrooms by planning her and Lawrence’s escape—but she didn’t really know where to start.

Walking out the front door was no good. Surely before they got there, the Home would wind around and trap them somewhere till Mrs. Cavendish found them.

They couldn’t persuade Mrs. Cavendish to let them go,
either, although Victoria thought it might be either funny or horrifying to try. Maybe Mrs. Cavendish would laugh.

Victoria shuddered. No, that wasn’t an option. She would rather see Mrs. Cavendish angry than laughing.

Maybe if they looked hard enough, they could find a secret way out of the Home. If it was always changing, if that fireplace opened up for Victoria, maybe a door would open up somewhere, too, and let them out onto the grounds.

Maybe it was possible to . . . 
ask
the Home to let them out? Would it take a trade?

But if the Home
was
Mrs. Cavendish or whatever, then it would just report to her, or Mrs. Cavendish would know herself, and then they’d probably be in big trouble.

Or would it?
Was
the Home a part of Mrs. Cavendish? Could she control it and turn it this way and that way as easily as she would walk or wave her arms? Or was the Home something separate? And if it wasn’t part of
Mrs. Cavendish
, what was it?

And what was making it ripple and groan? What made it shift around? What made it look different every day? If Mrs. Cavendish didn’t make the Home move, what did?

Victoria was so wrapped up in these thoughts that she entered the classroom of manners, sat down at her desk, and pulled out her notebook before she realized what was going on.

Donovan O’Flaherty sat at the front of the classroom on a
high stool, and on a high table next to him sat a pyramid of Mallow Cakes. Victoria recognized their white and yellow icing at once. After all, she had seen Donovan stuffing his face with them for years in the Academy lunchroom.

Now that he was up in front for everyone to see, Victoria realized how sad and misshapen Donovan looked. His skin was pasty and sweaty, and it didn’t seem to know what to do with itself. It hung limply off arms and legs that weren’t quite fat or skinny.