IN THE EVENINGS, the children were given mugs of hot chocolate before bed, served in the great drawing room, a large but cosy room featuring big armchairs and sofas covered in cushions. There was a fireplace, empty save for a tall porcelain dog sitting where the fire would be in the winter. Ashley sat in one of the armchairs, sipping her hot chocolate and feeling oddly content. The bag of clothes Malory had given her had been taken to the dorm room and placed under her bed, and knowing that she had such a gift made the awkwardness of spending time with the other children less painful. She was special, after all, despite what Richard had said. Even the strangeness of the dirty man in the corridor had not, in the end, been enough to dampen the day for her. The lamps were low, and the tall windows were filled with the dark blue skies of twilight.
And then, she began to see the Heedful Ones.
They flickered into existence like silent blasts of soot, one after the other. Two at first, then three, then five. In her seat, Ashley drew back a little, uncertain what to make of this. She had rarely seen more than two Heedful Ones at a time, yet here they were, crowding into the drawing room like guests at a party. Nine, ten, twelve. Ashley drew her legs up onto the armchair; she wanted to make herself as small as possible.
‘Ashley? Get your feet off of that chair, please.’ Mr Haygarth appeared in front of her, his eyebrows raised. ‘This is someone else’s home, remember? You’re not to treat it like a slum.’
‘But, Mr Haygarth …’ Ashley couldn’t move. To put her feet down on the floor was to expose herself. ‘No.’ She had no reasonable explanation for him, after all. Mr Haygarth shook his head slightly.
‘Really, Ashley, I expected better of you. Feet off. Now.’
Gritting her teeth, Ashley put her feet back on the thick rug, and at that moment, a Heedful One moved noiselessly towards her, passing right through the body of Mr Haygarth. For the barest second, while he was contained with the shifting, smoky black, the teacher had looked different. Changed in some huge, fundamental way that was difficult to look at. Then the Heedful One was gone, moving off behind the fireplace.
‘There you are.’ Mr Haygarth smiled, some warmth coming back into his face. ‘I’m sure your mum doesn’t like you getting your feet all over the furniture, does she?’
Ashley shook her head, looking down at her knees until she heard Mr Haygarth sigh and walk away. But when she brought her head back up, the Heedful Ones had only increased – there were so many of them now that the room was filled with their slender, sooty bodies. They were moving faster than they normally did, as though they were agitated in some way.
‘What do you want?’ Ashley asked under her breath. ‘What are you all doing here?’
‘Look at this weirdo! She talks to herself.’
Ashley recognised the boy from the communal dinners; he had big eyes and thick eyelashes, in that way boys sometimes do, and permanently flushed cheeks. He made her think of one of the words from her word tin she had never had to use: cherub.
‘You having a nice little chat with yourself, are you, weirdo?’ The boy had two other boys with him and a girl. They had all finished their hot chocolate.
All of Ashley’s contentment drained away into the floor. The children had begun to notice her again, and the Heedful Ones were swarming.
‘Leave me alone,’ said Ashley, her voice little more than a whisper. She didn’t know if she was talking to the cherub boy or the teeming shadows. ‘Leave me alone.’
The boy laughed, apparently delighted with her demand. One of the Heedful Ones came and stood behind him and inside him. The shape of the boy, with his blond hair and his pink cheeks, was lost. Instead, he became a dark thing of sticks and smoke, his human shape little more than a sketchy impression, a bag of animated bones. She saw the teeth in his skull, cracked and blackened.
Ashley’s mug of hot chocolate slipped in her hands, a slop of the brown liquid splashing over her jumper. One of the other kids laughed. As if the sound had attracted it, another Heedful One slipped across, covering the child in its darkness and revealing something skeletal within; Ashley could see tiny flecks of burning orange in that darkness too, rising up on some unseen wind.
The other children were still speaking, but she wasn’t listening any more. As she looked around the room, the other kids were smothered by the forms of the Heedful Ones, revealing to her some dark secret she didn’t understand. She had never seen them do this before. Had never even guessed that they could.
‘Right!’ Somewhere in the fog of the drawing room, Mr Haygarth had clapped his hands together once. His raised voice was a beacon of ordinariness. ‘Time to make your way up to the dorm, kids. We’ve got another busy day tomorrow!’
The Heedful Ones followed them up to the dormitory.
Ashley moved along in the crowd, feeling about as alone as she had ever felt, even in the midst of a large gang of children. She couldn’t tell anyone about what she was seeing – she knew that without question – so she just had to suffer it and hope it would be over soon. As she crept into her pyjamas, she snuck looks at the other children. Almost all of them were now shadowed by a Heedful One. The shifting patches of darkness hung over each like a shroud, slightly out of step with their movements but clinging on as though attached by some unseen cord. Mr Haygarth still had his shadow too. And where the flesh-and-blood person met the insubstantial form of the Heedful One, some dreadful truth was revealed: black, smoking bones; glistening body cavities; steaming fluid – all seen in flickering glimpses.
Ashley got into bed and burrowed down under the scratchy covers, the top blanket pulled right up to her chin. The larger strip lights on the ceiling had been turned off, and the room was lit only by the small table lamps that sat on each bedside table. One by one, these were turned off too, patches of safe yellow light surrendering to the dark. Ashley watched them go, frozen with fright even as the giggling and the chatter of the other children rose slightly in pitch; bedtime always saw a peak of excitement.
‘That’s enough now,’ Mr Haygarth called good-naturedly. From her vantage point, Ashley could see the top half of his torso. His head was a charcoal skull. ‘Time to settle down. Lights off, please. Myself and Miss Lyonnes are just down the corridor if you need anything, but do try to sleep. Good night!’
The few lights clicked off, and there was a flurry of giggles again. The night sky from the tall arched windows seemed much closer, a splash of stars like cream across blue velvet.
‘It’s harder to see them in the dark,’ Ashley whispered to herself. ‘I can pretend they’re not there. And they’re not, not really, anyway. No one else can see them.’
‘Uh, can you shut up, please?’ The voice came from the girl in the bed next to hers. ‘Why did I have to get stuck next to the weirdo that talks to herself?’ There was a ripple of laughter from the larger room. Ashley pulled the covers up to her nose.
After that, the whispers and the laughter gradually stopped. Ashley lay very still, her arms and legs rigid, and kept her eyes on the windows. She had never been afraid of the Heedful Ones before, but then she had never seen them do this before, had never seen them swarm or cover people with their shadows. She didn’t like what their shadows revealed. A busy silence filled the long dorm room, punctuated with the odd squeak of a mattress as someone turned over in bed, the fluting snores of someone near the door, the occasional cough.
And then, just as Ashley’s eyelids were getting heavy, the blue starscape caught in the window frames was broken by a tall, dark shape. One of the Heedful Ones was at the bottom of her bed. Its face, such as it was, was hidden in shadow, but it was looking at her.
Ashley moaned. Was this what the Heedful Ones had always been waiting to do? Her whole life, they had been an odd but innocuous presence. It was as alarming as the old family dog that turns on the baby and as treacherous as the swing that breaks at the peak of its trajectory. The shape moved along the bed towards her, passing through the frame and the mattress and the duvet as though they were made of mist. Ashley shrank back, but there was nowhere for her to go.
The first thing she felt as it passed into her was a dreadful heat, a crisp crackle of hot air that instantly dried out her mouth and stung her eyes, and there was a roar of sound that pressed against her eardrums. Looking out from within the Heedful One, it was as though the whole dorm room had been covered in a fine, black gauze. The other Heedful Ones had vanished, but she could see the other children – they weren’t in bed any longer but rather crowding around the door, trying to get out. The door itself was shut fast, and the ceiling was on fire.
‘What’s happening?’
Ashley sat up in bed, choking in the smoke and heat. As she watched, pieces of fire fell from the ceiling onto the floor and the beds. The old feather-filled duvets and scratchy blankets lit up like they’d been waiting to do it all their lives. Very quickly, much of the room was ablaze. Ashley sat where she was, unable to move beyond the Heedful One that held her in place. Some of the children had given up battering down the door and had moved to the windows instead; one of the larger boys picked up a suitcase and hurled it at the glass, but it bounced off. The ceiling was now too bright to look at. The rain of flames was starting to alight on the children too; a piece of fiery debris landed directly on top of one girl’s head, giving her a flaming cap, and her screams became a shriek of agony.
‘No, no, no.’ Ashley felt her eyes well up with tears, but it was too hot in the dorm room to cry. Some of the children had started to hide under their beds; she saw a boy slide down the far wall, overcome with smoke. Other children were trying to break the windows, but none succeeded. One boy, his pyjama top on fire, ran into the corner of the room and curled up there, as though trying to hide from the flames that were burning him alive. The choking stench of the smoke changed slightly, becoming the hot, sweet smell of burning flesh. Ashley bent over in her bed, her head on her knees, but somehow she could still see it all, and more: she saw the room become a roaring inferno, and she saw the children screaming, their flesh burned away. At one point, three of the windows simply exploded, but by then it was far too late for any of the children trapped inside the dorm.
And then, in a blink, it was all gone. Ashley sat in her bed, in a clear, unburned room. Around her were a few children, their faces pale and their eyes wide. Mr Haygarth was there too, and he had one hand on Ashley’s shoulder, shaking her lightly. He looked both alarmed and slightly exasperated.
‘Ashley, wake up. Wake up! You’re having a nightmare.’
It was at that point that Ashley realised she was screaming.