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.
Dad called me from Heathrow just before lunch, just to say I love you and We’ll be back soon. I could hear everyone back in the Refectory as I put the phone down, pulling their Christmas crackers and cheering as the turkeys were brought out to be carved by staff members at the ends of the tables. It was a joyous time. I just wished I’d felt it.
I rejoined the school midway through the turkey course. Christmas didn’t mean the food got any better at Bathory, despite all the little extras—roast potatoes (hard), organic carrots (mashed), peas (frozen), stuffing (God knows), pigs in blankets (raw) and figgy pudding and custard (grim) and though the sight of it all brought bile into my throat, I took a spoonful of each, knowing that if I didn’t there was nothing else to eat until dinner. The food at Bathory had always been bad. When I’d first arrived as an eight-year-old Pup, I’d been vegetarian. The first week, when I realised the vegetarian option was either a saucer of grated Smart Price cheese or a grey hard-boiled egg, I quickly switched back to meat to keep myself alive.
On a more positive note, Clarice Hoon hadn’t given me any more grief about Seb, aside from the odd snide look as I walked up Long Corridor. This I could handle. First to lose their cool loses the argument, Seb told me, and he was right. As always.
Midway through lunch, Mrs Saul-Hudson marched in and dragged Maggie out. It turned out she’d just had a phone call from a pilot at RAF Lyneham who’d done a fly-past the previous day, who’d kindly informed her that the school now had letters crudely daubed on its roof. Instead of assisting with the Christmas Fayre preparations, I gladly spent the afternoon helping Maggie to clean it off.
‘Why though? Why not expel me for this? It does NOT make sense!’ she shouted, as I scrubbed away at the second S in ‘SAVE US’. ‘Why keep giving me these stupid meaningless detentions? I mean, I’ve tried EVERYTHING to get out of this place. I’ve done it all …’
‘… even vandalised a listed building now,’ I added.
‘Yeah. I don’t know what more I can do,’ she cried. ‘Maybe I could get a boy in here. Yeah, that might do it.’
‘Why do you want to leave so badly?’ I asked. She didn’t answer immediately, so I pressed. ‘Seriously, you can tell me.’
‘I just wanna go home, that’s all. I don’t need an education.’
‘But they’ll only send you somewhere else, won’t they?’
‘Fine. Then maybe they’ll send me back to my old comp where I was happy and settled and didn’t have to wear this cheap scratchy boy-repeller.’ She loosened her tie like it was hurting her neck.
‘I’d miss you,’ I told her.
‘Yeah, right.’
‘I would. You’re the thing that’s keeping me going at the moment.’
‘Yeah, well, you’ll get over me eventually.’
She carried on scrubbing. I felt no padlock on my urge to tell her any more, so I just said it. ‘They’re paying double the fees.’
‘Huh? Who?’
‘Your parents.’
‘WHAT?’ she cried, standing up and slamming her scrubbing brush down on the flat roof where a thousand soap bubbles flew up into my face. ‘What do you mean? How? How do you know that? Are you joking me?’
I shook my head, wiping little flecks of foam from my nose and cheeks. ‘Your file was out on her desk when I was in there a few weeks ago. I wasn’t going through it or anything, I was just putting her cocoa down. And it was there, in your file. I read it.’
Maggie sat back down on the roof. ‘Double fees? That’s really why I’m still here?’
I nodded. ‘There was a letter in the file, open, from your dad. I only read a bit, as I said, it was just there on the desk. He wants you to get your GCSEs here so you can go to a good Sixth Form or get a good apprenticeship when you leave. He doesn’t want you sponging off them like your sister does. And because you were kicked out of two other schools, Mrs Saul-Hudson agreed to keep you here, come what may. He thanked her for it. But that was it, that was all I read.’
Maggie