The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls (24 page)

Little Caroline made really awful grades, so awful the Academy professors had started calling her “a lost cause” and were considering things like “academic probation” and “relocation.” So Mrs. Cavendish breathed down her neck while Caroline worked through her multiplication tables at a high stool in the Classroom of Mathematics. As the other children watched, Caroline tried to solve the problems on the blackboard, and whenever she made a mistake, Mrs.
Cavendish would slap her hand with the switch. Lawrence, Jacqueline, and some of the other children looked away and turned green when little red spots spurted onto the board by Caroline’s hand, but Victoria just watched quietly. So it was blood. So Mrs. Cavendish was hurting Caroline, who was only eight years old and would be here for years, maybe.

Oh well
, Victoria thought. She shrugged.
There’s really nothing anyone can do about it. We are nothing and no one. We
should
be here.

Lawrence’s coaching was the hardest to watch. It took place in the room with all the ruined pianos, their cut strings trailing the floor in spools of wire.

Mrs. Cavendish sat him down at the biggest piano, in the center of the room. Lawrence put his hands on the keys, and for a moment, hope skipped through the line of children watching him, because Lawrence smiled and seemed like a real person again. Even Victoria perked up a bit.

Then Mrs. Cavendish put her hands in the piano’s open lid. Her sleeves bulged. They
crawled
. Mrs. Cavendish stepped back and shook a few last things from the ends of her sleeves. She took a shining pin from her pocket and picked between her teeth. A last little crawling thing popped out from her collar and fluttered down into the piano.

“Go ahead, Lawrence,” said Mrs. Cavendish, trailing her
fingers up Lawrence’s arm to tousle his hair. She sneered at the sight of the silver streak. “Play.”

With the strings cut, the piano made no noise. The mallets hit only air, and sometimes the bottom of the piano’s insides, with soft, broken thuds.

The piano began to crawl, just like Mrs. Cavendish’s sleeves. Black things streamed out of the open lid and onto the dirty keyboard. Some of the children recoiled, and so did Lawrence, but Mr. Alice put the end of his rake at Lawrence’s neck, the rusted prongs digging into his skin. Lawrence kept playing his invisible song. The roaches swarmed in confusion. They ran over Lawrence’s flying fingers. Some of them stuck their pincers into him and bit, hard. Lawrence started to cry, although he screwed up his face to try to look brave.

Fury stirred deep within Victoria, turned over, and went back to sleep. She continued to watch Lawrence get bitten and cry. She cried too. She felt very tired.

But then something happened. Lawrence played and played, and something about the way his fingers hit the silent, buggy keys sparked a memory deep in Victoria’s mind. The keys he was hitting, the rhythm, the way his back and arms moved—it was familiar.

Staring at Lawrence, only half seeing him, Victoria started to hum.

The piano began to crawl, just like Mrs. Cavendish’s sleeves.

At first, she didn’t realize it. Then Jacqueline jabbed her in the ribs. Victoria blinked but kept humming along.
How extraordinary
, she thought, blinking awake.
I appear to be humming.
Her voice matched the strikes of Lawrence’s swollen, bitten fingers, singing whatever silent song Lawrence was trying to play. The tune was so familiar, but Victoria couldn’t remember how she knew it.

Lawrence smiled through his sniffles and pounded the silent keys harder. His pounding started to sound like heavy drums.

Mrs. Cavendish stared at Victoria in shock. Mr. Alice almost dropped his rake, looking for once not evil but merely stupid. The gofers waiting at the doors in case Mrs. Cavendish should need them made awful, excited noises.

The roaches scattered, racing into the next rooms and up into Mrs. Cavendish’s clothes, out of sight, flapping their wings in furious confusion.

The Home
moved
.

IT WASN’T MUCH. IT WAS LIKE WHEN A TRAIN PASSES
nearby and the ground rumbles. It moved with a distant sigh.

Victoria paused in her humming, her skin warm with shock. This time, she wasn’t the only one who had heard it; this was no imagined passage in the dark, no imagined wild ride through the Home that she could convince herself was a nightmare. This was in the middle of the day; everyone was around her, and everyone heard the same, groaning thing and felt the same, shifting floor. She had hummed, and Lawrence had pounded hard on those silent keys, and the Home had moved. But why, and how? And what did this mean?

The others looked around in confusion. Little Caroline blurted out, “What was that?”

From somewhere in all the dark twists of rooms around them, something groaned, creaked, whined. At the doors, the gofers muttered excited gibberish and stomped their feet on the ground. The window closest to them cracked. The ceiling rained down bits of dust and paint.

Mrs. Cavendish snapped out of her frozen, wide-eyed trance. “Silence!”

The gofers fell to the ground and hid behind their hands if they had them, whimpering.

Stalking forward, Mrs. Cavendish whipped the switch across Lawrence’s face so hard that it flew out of her grip. Her face had bright red splotches. Her eyes gleamed. She glared at Victoria, snatched up the switch, and whipped Lawrence again, terribly beautiful in her rage. Her eyes were blue fire, sharp like dagger points.

“What,” she snapped, “have we discussed about singing, children?”

No one said anything; they were too busy looking around curiously for whatever those strange noises had been.

Mrs. Cavendish cracked her switch through the air. Even Mr. Alice jumped.

“I
said
,
what
have we discussed about singing? Or talking
too loudly, or making any unnecessary noise
whatsoever
?”

Immediately, a chorus of frightened voices said:

No one wants to hear you sing,

Or talk or scream or anything.

To Victoria’s surprise, she found herself reciting the rhyme along with everyone else. She didn’t really know the words, but there she was, saying them. It was like someone else was moving her mouth and making her voice sound.

That was just it, Victoria realized, with only a little surprise: she had started to feel like she wasn’t Victoria at all, these days. She had become a nobody and a nothing, tugged here and there, made to do things, like a toy. The only time she hadn’t felt that way was just now, humming a piece of music she was too tired to remember the name of. But the more she thought about this, the heavier she felt; all that was too much for one stupid nobody to think about.

“Oh, well,” she said, sighing later, lying down in her cot. “There’s nothing to do about it.”

That night, Victoria’s dreams were full of strange rumblings that came in waves, and the waves were made up of antennae, pincers, and fluttering wings. She awoke after the fifth one of these dreams and sat straight up in bed.

The rumblings weren’t just in her dreams. They were real. The Home was shifting like it was built on water. It happened only every now and then, and subtly, but Victoria saw little ash clouds puff up from the hearth. Yes, it was moving all right.

But
why
was the Home moving so much, and all of a sudden? Questions began forming in Victoria’s mind. Like a rusted old clock struggling to turn its gears again, Victoria began to think. She folded her sheet down and sat cross-legged as she listened for the next rumble.

When it happened, she got out of bed. It took every last bit of her effort. She felt as though she were waking from a long, heavy sleep. She went to Jacqueline’s bed. It was easy to find her, even though there was only a sliver of moon that night, because Jacqueline had the shiniest hair and was crying over her hurt hand.

“Jacqueline,” Victoria said slowly. It was so hard to move her lips, she had to feel them to make sure there weren’t stitches there sewing them shut. She put a hand out to pat Jacqueline’s shoulder; moving her arm was nearly impossible, the air around her heavy and sticky. She shook her head.
Wake up, Victoria
, she thought.
There’s no time to feel sorry for yourself anymore.

“What do you want?” said Jacqueline. “Leave me alone.
I’m a
degenerate
, don’t you know? You don’t want to be seen around people like me, Victoria. Not you, not Mrs. Cavendish’s favorite.”

Victoria bristled. “I’m
not
her favorite.”

“Yes, you are. Shut up. Go to bed.”

“But . . . do you feel that?”

“Feel
what
?”

“Listen.” Victoria sat on the bed. It took so long for it to happen, Victoria thought Jacqueline would kick her off the bed with impatience, but finally—

A faint rumble sounded deep beneath them, from within the walls. At the far end of the room, Gabby rocked back and forth in her pillows with her hands over her ears. “Not again,” she moaned. “Go away, go
away
.”

“What is that?” said Jacqueline.

They waited for a long time, but it didn’t happen again. The Home had gone silent.

It was still so hard to
think
. Victoria kept shaking her head to clear it, which made her dizzy. She looked around the room at all the lost, frightened girls tossing in their nightmares, and at the ones who slept peacefully because they would be going home soon. Mrs. Cavendish had taught them how to be different, had frightened them into being exactly what a Belleville girl should be.

“No one’s coming for us,” said Victoria.

“You’re just now figuring that out?” said Jacqueline, sniffling.

“We’re all alone,” Victoria continued, slowly. It helped, to say it aloud, to accept it.

“You know, that really isn’t making me feel any better.”

“So, we can’t depend on our parents or the police or anyone,” said Victoria, “but maybe we can do it ourselves.”

It felt like putting together the last pieces of a fuzzy riddle. Victoria caught the moonlight glinting off the nameplate over her bed:
VICTORIA
. It reminded her of her favorite street sign near the Academy:
VICTORY
. Her heart raced as though she had just laid her hands on the freshly copied pages of a new exam. She grinned. Jacqueline stared at her.

“You really
have
lost it,” said Jacqueline. “Just like Lawrence said.”

“Never mind,” said Victoria. “I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?” whispered Jacqueline, but Victoria had already marched to the fireplace and begun to crawl. When she reached the dead end, the brick wall at the back of the fireplace, she put her fingertips to the wall and only felt a little bit silly when she started to hum. Her voice sounded loud in the dark, and she wondered
for a moment if she would wake Mrs. Cavendish and bring her to the dorm in a fury, whipping and hitting with her switch.

But Victoria kept humming anyway, the Rachmaninoff again, and she whispered, “Hello? Are you there?” although she didn’t know to whom she was whispering.
Those
voices
, she thought,
whoever they are.

Finally, the wall gave way, slowly, creaking awfully like a rusted hinge. The same dark passage appeared, shifting and tilting into place amid a wave of black walls and black ceiling and black, cold, dank air.

Victoria smiled and began to crawl.
I don’t quite know what I’m doing
, she thought,
but I’m starting to figure it out.
Angry clicks and hisses roiled at the edges of her ears, as though things were trying to burrow into her through the walls, but the passage remained empty.

“Hurry,”
the ghostly, echo-y voices whispered.
“Hurry now.”

Victoria was afraid but pushed that aside. The heavy sleepiness that had covered her mind for the past few days fell away more and more. She was beginning to formulate a plan, and there were few things she liked better than formulating plans. After crawling for a few long minutes, the angry buzzing growing angrier and louder, little feathery
things biting and brushing at her ankles, Victoria came out into the boys’ dorm. She went straight for Lawrence’s cot and shook him awake.