While my form was busily black-bagging up their desk contents and lockers and cleaning the classrooms, I was sent to Mrs Saul-Hudson’s office for a ticking off about my attack on Clarice.
And that was all I got. A ticking off. I didn’t even receive a billion Blue Tickets for Tudor House or a detention or anything. Just a long monologue about how my parents would ‘have to be told’, how ‘fighting’s never the answer’ and how it was ‘understandable with the amount of stress I was under with my brother’s situation’.
And that was it.
The reason for my lack of punishment had little to do with what I’d done to Clarice, and everything to do with what I knew about the Saul-Hudsons. I was the secret keeper, you see. I’d been Mrs Saul-Hudson’s right-hand man for a long time. I had intimate knowledge of their private apartments and I knew stuff about them that they definitely wouldn’t want spreading around. Punishing me was a risk they couldn’t take, despite breaking a golden rule of the school.
Maggie was incensed.
‘You break a girl’s face and you get nothing? It’s so unfair! Not that Clarice didn’t deserve it or anything, cos she actually did, but you got nothing? Actual factual nothing?’
‘I know. This school is fundamentally flawed, Maggie,’ I told her as the break-time bell rang out in Long Corridor. ‘It’s the reason why you’re still here.’
‘Must be.’
The three of us hotfooted it across the frosty front lawn, up the flint steps into the valley where the Landscape Gardens began.
On hot summer weekends, being at Bathory School was heaven. I loved being a boarder. We could go outside to do our prep or take the three-mile walk into the tiny village of Bathory for ice cream, and we were sometimes allowed to swim in the pool to cool down. We could sit beneath the hazelnut tree on the Orangery lawn in our vests and shorts or play croquet.
But on winter days like this one, we were rarely let outside, except to walk Brody or go up to the Chapel for prayers and Sunday service. The swimming pool was frozen over and the hazelnut tree bare and stark without its leaves. Our noses glowed red and our breath left cloud trails on the air. I was still glad of something to take my mind off Seb. When I thought about him, I felt myself starting to lose my mind. Bathory just wasn’t the place to lose your mind. You might never get it back.
‘It’s just up here,’ said Regan, as she led Maggie and me towards the Temple, right at the top of the bank and up into the woods.
‘It’s not far now.’ She led us deeper in, where the tops of the trees were alive with birdsong.
‘Is this really worth it?’ said Maggie. ‘If we’re late, we’ll miss the fit work experience boy pruning the Quad hedge.’
The Quad was the square expanse of grass separating the French room from the corridor to the Science lab. ‘He’s finished,’ I said. ‘He’s not back again till the spring.’
‘Aw what?’ she groaned. ‘He was the one good thing about being here. Je suis desolate.’
‘He wasn’t that fit anyway.’
‘He bloody was. Didn’t you see him take his top off in the summer? Holy Mary Mother of Abs.’
‘There’s more to boys than abs and pecs.’
‘Not much more,’ said Maggie. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t get horny, Nash. You must crave it, we all do. Have the odd fantasy about Keith the bus driver or Mr Saul-Hudson in his golf trousers. Or out of them …’
I couldn’t even fake a laugh at that one.
‘No, I know who you’ve got the bubbles for,’ said Maggie. ‘Charlie the Shop Boy.’ She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.
‘Shut up.’
Regan looked back at us blankly, and Maggie ‘explained’: ‘Nash fancies the boy who works at Bathory Basics.’
Regan carried on walking in silence.
Maggie gave the back of her head a dirty look. ‘God, what a sulk fest.’ She stopped to catch her breath. ‘Oh come on, let’s go back. Bet you any money she’s taking us to So-Not-Worth-It-Town.’
‘We won’t know until we get there, will we?’ I said, picking up the pace.
Pretty soon, we were up in the highest part of the valley, where a sloping dirt track, worn by centuries of wooden carts transporting ice from Grace’s Lake and Edward’s Pond up to the now overgrown icehouse, led to the Temple.
Maggie and I stopped walking. Pigeon-toed, Regan stumbled gingerly through the prickly bushes and crouched down behind the folly.
‘Come on,’ she whispered, beckoning us with her hand. Maggie looked at me then shrugged, and together we fought our way through. Partially hidden by rotting leaves and damp twigs was something that looked like a long knobbly stick covered in school Bolognese.
‘What the frig is that?’ said Maggie, batting away an errant branch. ‘That’s disgusting.’
I pulled my jumper cuffs down over my hands and shoved one across my mouth, trying to push images from my mind: my brother’s body, cut into pieces by guerrillas in the Colombian jungle.
Regan poked at the thing with a long twig. ‘I found it when I was exploring.’
‘You brought us all the way up here in the freezing cold to show us a sheep’s leg?’
‘It’s not a sheep’s leg,’ said Regan, standing up. ‘I don’t know what it is. What did you think you were coming to see?’
‘That’s not a sheep’s leg,’ I said behind my hand. Neither of them heard me.
‘I dunno,’ said Maggie. ‘A dead body or something? A monster’s cave? A tunnel back to civilisation? Not a frigging sheep’s leg.’
‘I told you it’s not a sheep’s leg,’ said Regan, moving closer and bending down to poke it with a twig. ‘I think it’s from a cow.’
‘I think it’s a spine,’ I said.
‘A SPINE?’ They both cried out, in a chorus of disgust.
‘Yes. Look at the bottom, there’s ribs sticking out of it. And the gunky stuff looks like intestines. It’s thick too.’
Regan levered up the end of it with her twig. ‘Is it … human?’
I shook my head. ‘No, it’s way too big. You’ve seen Bony Bonaparte in the Science lab. A human spine is much thinner than that. This looks to me like it’s come from a large animal. A cow or a horse, or something.’
‘But why is it here? Where has it come from?’ said Regan.
‘I don’t want to think about that,’ snapped Maggie, rubbing her arms. ‘I wanna go back inside, not stand here in the freezing cold, debating about some random bone. I told you this would be a big fat slice of nothing.’ Without another word, she started back through the bushes.
I waited for Regan. ‘I really think the Beast had something to do with this,’ she said.
‘It’s more likely a wildcat or something.’ I shrugged, although not even I believed that theory.
‘You haven’t seen it closely enough,’ said Regan. ‘Come here.’
I looked after Maggie, then moved closer and crouched down to look. ‘See?’ she said, pointing to the top of it.
‘Yeah.’ I put my jumper-cuffed hand up to my mouth again. ‘It stinks.’
‘But look at the bite mark on the top. Something bigger than a wildcat did that.’
‘A big wildcat?’ I said.
‘But what if it’s not?’ She stared hard into my eyes, like she could read the sell-by date under my skull. ‘You saw it on the playing field, didn’t you? That time in netball. I know you did. Aren’t you even curious about it?’
‘Regan, the Beast of Bathory is fictional, okay?’ I sighed, expelling a huge cloud of white air. ‘That’s why it’s in the myths and legends book in the library. It’s a story made up by some weirdo with an Abominable Snowman fetish.’
She wasn’t buying it. ‘Yes, but you hear about these sorts of things all the time, don’t you? Legends made up about beasts and monsters, just to keep people from going to places where they shouldn’t. Like Satan. There’s a school of thought that says he’s just made up to stop Christians from straying from the path of righteousness.’
I snickered nervously, no idea what I was actually snickering about. ‘Yeah, well, this conversation is getting a little too deep for me.’
‘Satan’s not the only one,’ said Regan, flicking a plait over her shoulder. ‘There are myths and legends in every culture, which came about to stop children being naughty or getting out of bed. The Bogeyman. Baba Jaga. Bloody Bones …’
A branch cracked somewhere in the woods.
‘What was that?’ I said, a frozen ache spreading all through my limbs.
‘Maybe it’s the Beast, come back for the spine?’
A distant ting-a-ling-a-ling tinkled in the distance. ‘Come on, that’s first bell.’ We were so far from Main House, I wanted to get going.
‘There has to be a reason why this spine is here and I want to know what it is,’ said Regan stubbornly. ‘Either it’s here because the Beast is real and it’s attacked a cow or a horse—or it’s here because someone wants us to think the Beast is real.’
I stood up. ‘Fine, whatever. I’m going back down now, okay?’
Regan followed me as we picked our way back through the bushes. In front of the Temple, we looked over the valley—I could just see the dot of Maggie walking beside the lake. I started back along the track, but I could tell Regan wasn’t following. When I looked back, she was just standing there, outside the Temple; her stare blank and cold, her eyes appearing almost black in the wintry light.
‘Regan?’
She didn’t move immediately—then, slowly and thoughtfully, she began walking towards me.
‘You know it’s real. There’s fear in your eyes,’ she said, as she passed me. Her own eyes were as dead as a shark’s.
I shivered as she left me there, wishing Maggie hadn’t been so far away.