The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls (20 page)

Through cold air and blackness, Victoria tumbled . . .

The voices grew louder, spiraling closer and closer, till one of them whispered her name. It came up from the cracking floor:

“Don’t stop, Victoria,”
they whispered sadly.

A wild thought came to Victoria. She remembered humming and not humming in the darkness past the fireplace; how the noises of the bugs had faded while she sang and come back when she didn’t; how the voices asked her sadly not to stop and said they were lonely, and how those narrow, winding steps had appeared out of nowhere, more and more the longer she hummed, until she fell safely out of darkness, caught by that tangle of fingerlike tree roots.

She closed her eyes and started to hum. The angry noises in the walls fell away as though they’d been slapped, and that frustrated scream rang out again. Blindly, Victoria ran for the hallway, hoping she wouldn’t trip and fall, hoping that whatever was about to burst up from the floor would just leave her alone.

But it did not leave her alone; something long and twisty
and covered with brambles burst up from the floor and shoved her forward, and she tumbled headlong through the hallway, safely out of the kitchen. Darkness reached up and grabbed her as the buzzing and frustrated scream faded into nothing, and she was falling and falling just as she had the first time. Then she landed hard on her hands and knees with a smack and a
crack!

She whispered, “Ow.”

Unseen in the shadows, someone said, “That must have hurt.”

VICTORIA SNAPPED HER HEAD UP TO GLARE INTO
the darkness. “Who’s there?”

“Hello?” said a voice. “Did you just fall through the fireplace? Am I dreaming?”

Victoria blinked and shook her head from side to side. A dim light in front of her illuminated a small, dark figure.

Victoria caught her breath and crawled toward this figure. The ground beneath her had that same gritty, filthy feel from the fireplace in her dorm. In fact, this
was
another fireplace, Victoria realized, seeing the outline of a hearth appear within the light in front of her—or maybe it was the same one? Had she found her way back to the dorm? Victoria crawled out cautiously and found two long rows of beds, but these held
boys instead of girls. A small, wide-eyed boy stood bent over near the fireplace, staring at her.

“I heard a big crash,” he murmured. It was the same voice from a moment ago. “Are you the new girl?”

“That’s me,” said Victoria, climbing out of the fireplace and to her feet.

Yes, it was the boys’ dorm. There was just as much soft crying from here and there as in the girls’ dorm, but it smelled different, and there, a few cots down from the fireplace, sat Lawrence. The moonlight coming in from the boys’ own high window made his skunk streak shine.

Victoria brushed off her pajamas and walked over to him, like it was the most normal thing in the world to walk through a fireplace and get thrown around a bug-filled house that moved like it was alive. The tall boy, Peter, sat up as Victoria passed him.

“You’d better be careful, Victoria,” he whispered. The angles of his face glowed sharply in the moonlight. “I’m going home soon. I won’t have you getting us in trouble.”

“No one’s getting in trouble,” said Victoria, although she wasn’t sure if she believed that. She sat down beside Lawrence, just as she had that first lunch in fourth grade, and said, “Lawrence, you’ll never believe what just happened. I wanted to come talk to you, so I snuck out through the fireplace in the girls’ dorm, and I crawled and crawled. It kept going, not like
a regular fireplace, but like a secret passage or something. At first it trapped me and I thought it was Mrs. Cavendish getting me stuck there, and maybe it was, but then—you’ll
really
never believe this—I started humming, and I think that did something, because suddenly I wasn’t trapped anymore. Steps came out of nowhere, and I climbed up them, and then I was falling, and I came out on the . . . fourth floor, I think it was? I was in the stinky kitchen next. Everything kept moving around and spitting me out in a different place. There were voices and buzzing—that was the bugs, those roaches, they’re
everywhere
—and someone screaming, and it was almost like the bugs and the voices were fighting each other. The voices kept saying they were lonely, and . . . and”—she forced herself to stop and breathe deep—“and I’m sorry. About the hanger, I mean. She put you in there because of me, and I’m sorry.”

It took Lawrence a minute to look at her. When he did, his expression was so foggy, his eyes so strange, that he didn’t look like himself. Suddenly, Victoria felt stupid for having blurted everything at him like that.

“Oh, Lawrence, you can’t give up,” she said. “Don’t you know your birthday is coming up? You’ll be thirteen. Don’t you know what happens when children here turn thirteen?”

Lawrence nodded slowly. “You either leave or you . . . don’t.”

“Do you know what happens to the kids who don’t leave?” Victoria whispered. “Jacqueline didn’t know.”

“I have my guesses.”

Victoria paused at the sudden darkness of his expression. Deciding to try something different, she put her hand on his arm and spoke to him like she would have to a tiny child, pronouncing each word clearly.

“Lawrence Prewitt. Do you know who I am?”

Lawrence sighed. “Vicky, I’m not dumb. I’m just tired.”

Victoria’s heart leapt to hear that awful nickname. “Oh, you’re
not
gone, after all.”

“No, I’m not gone. I might as well be, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re trying to make me give up my music, Vicky,” he said, and at the mention of music, a bit of light came back to his eyes. “That’s why I’m here. Mother and Father got sick of it. They
let
her take me.”

“Well, what in the world’s wrong with music?”

“Everything, to them. You know that. It’s not what they want. It’s not respectable.”

“But you’re
supposed
to play music, obviously,” said Victoria.

Lawrence looked at her in surprise. “You mean it? I thought you hated it.”

“I do mean it,” said Victoria. She felt pretty shocked herself. “It’s annoying sometimes—well, a lot of the time, really—but it’s obviously the thing you’re best at, so why shouldn’t you do it?” Embarrassed at how happy Lawrence looked, she tried to smooth the wrinkles out of her dirty pajamas. “I mean, it’s only logical, isn’t it?”

“If you weren’t, well,
you
—I’d want to kiss you right now.”

It was fortunate that the room was so dark. Victoria’s cheeks turned bright red.

“Well,” she said. “Well.”

Lawrence grinned. “So, you came here to warn me, huh?”

“Yes. I thought—well, after the hanging . . .”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve been in there before. And anyway, I was so happy to see you, I didn’t care.”

Victoria’s cheeks turned even redder. “You didn’t seem happy to see me.”

“Well, at first I was just scared because you were here. I didn’t want you to get trapped here because of me.” Lawrence paused, fiddling with his pajamas. “That’s why you came, right? Because of me?”

“I came because
she
brought me here,” said Victoria. “I mean, yes, I was trying to figure out where you’d gone. I think I got too nosy, and she didn’t like that, and—”

“You were looking for me?”

Victoria wondered if she would be red for the rest of her life. “Yes.”

“Isn’t that something. Perfect ice queen Victoria looking for skunkish old me.”

Victoria flinched. “I’m not an ice queen.” She couldn’t even get angry properly. It felt strange sitting there, with all those crying boys sniveling in their beds and tall Peter at the side of the room, staring at her, and Lawrence being broken one minute and mean the next.

Lawrence put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. You know I don’t think that, Vicky. Not me.”

Victoria shook off his hand.

“Wait,” Lawrence said slowly, “you were saying something about . . . going through the fireplace to get here?”

“Yes,” Victoria said, flushing. The truth sounded silly when Lawrence said it.

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, I don’t either, but it happened. How else do you think I got here?”

Lawrence scratched his head. “I guess I can understand a passage between the fireplaces. I mean, old houses have weird things about them, right? But how did you fall into a hallway? And then into the kitchen? And . . . you said something about humming?”

“And voices,” Victoria said, and the more she thought about it, the fuzzier the memory of all that falling and tumbling became.
Had
it happened? she wondered, peering back at the fireplace. “I don’t know. It happened, though. I think.”

Lawrence frowned. “Maybe you were imagining things?”

“My imagination’s not
that
good. Or . . . I don’t know, maybe . . . well, now I can’t remember.”

“It’s all right, Vicky,” Lawrence said, patting her arm. “This place does things to people. Believe me, the dreams I’ve had . . .” He shuddered.

Victoria swallowed down her protests. It
had
happened, she knew—or, she thought it had. But the harder she tried to remember the hallway, those voices, the stinky kitchen, and the sound of her voice struggling through Rachmaninoff, the faster the images slipped away, just like in a dream. Maybe it had been a dream. Maybe she had been crawling through the fireplaces for so long that she fell asleep and dreamed it all. But she had to have gotten to the boys’ dorm
somehow
. Was it really just a simple passage between the fireplaces, like any old house might have?

A soft sound echoed around at the edges of her mind. It sounded like a woman’s laughter.

“You all right?” said Lawrence, scooting closer to her.

Victoria hurried to her feet, straightening her shirt. She
did not like feeling crazy. “Well, so, what are we going to do about this?”

“This?”

“Yes, this!” Victoria waved her hand about the room. “How we’re all here, and why, and how we can leave. And what’s going on with this house, anyway? Even without the fireplace thing, it’s strange.”

“Don’t talk so loud,” said Lawrence.

“Loudly.”

“Whatever. Look, you can’t just talk about those things where everyone can hear.” Lawrence turned to block his face from Peter’s view, Victoria could tell. She smiled. She had managed to hammer
something
of common sense into his music-addled brain after all.

“How we got here was those beetles,” said Lawrence. “Don’t ask me how—I don’t know. But they do whatever she says. Sometimes I wonder—”

Lawrence paused.

“What?” said Victoria.

“Well, sometimes I wonder if those beetles
are
her. If you know what I mean. Like, they’re a part of her, so she can control where they go and what they do?”

Victoria raised an eyebrow. “Now that’s just ridiculous.”

“And crawling through fireplaces isn’t?”

Never in her life had Victoria thought she would discuss whether or not a woman was made of beetles. However, Lawrence had a point.

“All right, fine, we’ll go with that for now,” she said. “It’s not like I’ve got any better ideas.”

“Right. So,
why
we’re here, from what everyone says, is because there’s something wrong with everybody here. Mrs. Cavendish finds the kids who are wrong, brings them here, and tries to fix them. Degenerates, she calls us.”

“Yes, I’ve figured out that much, and if she fixes you, you can leave,” whispered Victoria, remembering lunch with Jacqueline and Hyena Harold. “But if she can’t . . .”

Lawrence said nothing.

“Well? What does she do?” said Victoria.

“I don’t know,” said Lawrence, but he obviously had an idea. You learn things about a person when that person is your only friend, and Victoria could see it on his face—he knew something, but he didn’t want to know it, and he was afraid to say it aloud.

Victoria clenched her fists. She really felt like hitting something. “But how can she do that? Doesn’t anyone realize we’re gone? Surely our parents won’t let . . .”