Tick tick tick tick tick.
Sara stared at the wall of the headmistress’s study. Its entire surface was covered with clocks. They beat asynchronously, creating overlapping waves of sound that washed across the room.
One particular clock transfixed her. An old-fashioned Swiss, complete with two miniature wooden platforms. A carved female figure with braided hair in a dirndl stood on the extended right platform. Sara stared at the other side of the clock, where the left platform stood empty, projecting out from a tiny dark doorway.
‘Sara?’
Sara couldn’t take her eyes off that opening. There was something terrifying about it. Anything could be crouching in the darkness, waiting to come out.
‘Sara.’
The voice was louder and broke the spell. Sara turned around to face the headmistress. She was in her sixties, dressed in black jacket and trousers. Her face was large and round, the main features disproportionately gathered together in the centre, leaving a wide perimeter of flesh underemployed.
She was standing behind her desk, staring down at a piece of paper.
‘Sit down,’ she said.
Sara sat. She recognized the paper. It had been torn out of her exercise book an hour earlier, seconds before the class erupted into chaos.
‘This school was built to house girls with troubled pasts …’ began the headmistress, walking to the window and looking out. She still had not made eye contact with Sara. ‘… so I wasn’t concerned by your history: expelled from three schools in three years. I looked at your admissions file. All that brawling, with students and teachers. I recognized an anger in you that I’ve seen in other girls abandoned by their families. I felt I could help.’
Sara disconnected from the headmistress’s voice. She was still struggling to comprehend what had happened in the classroom. She had been staring out of the window, the teacher’s voice drifting in and out of her consciousness, merging at times with the drone of the lawnmower outside. Sara’s hand idly doodled in the margins of her exercise book, scribbling patterns in an easy, hypnotic flow as she watched the gardener perched on the ride-on lawnmower execute lazy figure-eights in the grass. Then the teacher appeared over her shoulder and was wrenching the book from her grasp, and all hell broke loose.
‘Do you know what you wrote, Sara?’ asked the headmistress, meeting her eyes for the first time. She walked slowly back to the desk and lifted up the scrap of paper.
Sara’s mouth was dry, and she fought the feeling that was rising up in her. It started in her chest, like a bird trapped inside the skeletal cage of her ribs. It fluttered and beat around inside her, banging into the bones and organs in a state of agitation. It crowded out the air from her lungs and kept her breathing in shallow gasps.
She took an involuntary glance back at the Swiss clock, staring into the shadow of the opening.
‘One of the staff speaks Arabic,’ said the headmistress. ‘They translated it for me.’
Sara looked back at the desk. She could see the paper now. A densely printed cursive script covered the top half of the page. The writing meant nothing to her: just a decorative font with no meaning.
‘It’s a martyr’s confession, Sara.’
The headmistress looked at her closely, as if the essence of her could be gleaned from her features.
‘When did you learn Arabic?’
Sara held her eye but didn’t respond. She doesn’t speak Arabic. At least, the person she believes she is does not speak it. But she has long ago given up the search for a demarcation line between who she is and who she is not. There is the person she thinks she is, and there is the other person. A being that lives in her shadows. A creature who could emerge at any time and fracture any sense of normality she has.
‘I …’ she began, and then petered out.
‘As a last-resort school, expulsion is against our credo. But you are eighteen in three months,’ said the headmistress. ‘Consider yourself suspended until then. That means you don’t need to come back. I thought I could help you. I was wrong. Whoever you really are is worse than I imagined.’
Sara turned to leave. She had stepped over the threshold of the door when the clocks on the wall began pealing, striking the hour with an atonal concert of bells and chimes. She stopped, rooted to the spot, staring at the Swiss clock and the dark portal. The blonde girl was retreating, and something else was emerging from the shadows.
Sara watched, her mouth dry.
‘Goodbye, Sara,’ came the headmistress’s voice.
On the right side of the clock, the female figure was almost gone. And on the left, two extended wooden arms were coming into view. The fingers were stretched and twisted, like the gnarled branches of a tree.
Before she could see what emerged, the door slammed shut.
The driveway of the school inclined down towards the main road, where it dead-ended in a set of high steel gates.
Sara walked towards the main road with a purpose.
This school had as little claim on her as any of the others in the last six years. They all blurred together in her memory.
Before she reached the gates, she left the road and ducked into a dense bush. By the base of the trunk was a collection of flat stones arranged into a heap.
Sara kicked the piles of stones, dug off the top layer of soil and pulled out a dirt-encrusted backpack she had buried there the day she arrived.
With school over, there was nothing left to stop her now.
Her path was clear.
She needed to unlock the secret of her past.
And inside the backpack were the only clues she had.