Soul Stealer Read online

  To defuse the situation, their father went on, “I’m actually working on the promotion of a new store loyalty card.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “The Kard. With a K.”

  “Krap name!” Tim declared. “With a K.”

  “Aren’t you ever going to do music videos?” Pip asked longingly.

  Ahead, a pupil in a Bourne End Comprehensive uniform was walking by the side of the road. He was stocky and looked scruffy, his clothing creased. He moved in a vaguely apelike fashion.

  “I didn’t know your school took in pupils from the monkey house,” Mr. Ledger quipped.

  Two

  Zombie Frogs and Dead cows’ Eyes

  The school day began with all the pupils lined up in the main hall. On the stage, in front of an oak table which displayed an impressive array of sporting cups and shields, stood the headmaster, Dr. Singall.

  “Welcome, everybody,” he announced, “either upon your return to Bourne End Comprehensive or into its ranks for the first time. I trust we all have a happy and rewarding term ahead of us. Our academic results in the summer exams were our best yet and we look forward to going from strength to strength in the future.”

  He waved his hand in the direction of the trophies. “As you can see, we also have a great field of sporting excellence here. And our congratulations go out to Stephen Wroxall who has, during the summer, won the All-England Under-Fifteen Marathon.” At this point, his speech was interrupted by loud applause.

  “However,” Dr. Singall continued as the clapping died away, “school is more than winning cups and passing exams. It is also the forging of your futures, molding the person you are to be throughout your life through friendship, consideration for others, diligence, hard work and, dare I say it, hard play.” He looked around the hall to where the staff, accompanied by the school prefects, were lining the sides, standing beneath photographs of various school plays or victorious sporting teams. “We all welcome you, myself and the entire staff. For those of you who are new, it will be a puzzling first few weeks, but bear with us. You will soon feel at home in the community which is Bourne End Comprehensive.”

  At that, he stepped aside, and the deputy headmistress took over, reading out the bulletin. When this was done, the teachers stepped forward to gather their individual classes, picking out each line that was to be their homeroom and taking them around the school to their various bases. Pip and Tim found themselves in a line of Year Sevens being led towards the science wing, where the classrooms were filled with scientific equipment and furnished with stools and workbenches rather than chairs and desks. The specific room into which they were taken was, according to the sign on the door, Chemistry Laboratory One.

  The class filed in silently, looking around. Some of the pupils were clearly awestruck by the sight of the scientific apparatus. The wide workbenches were lined with retorts, bottles of common laboratory chemicals or reagents in central wooden and metal racks. Tripods and Bunsen burners stood in rows beside polished brass gas taps and, every meter or so, there was a white porcelain sink with two brass taps arching over it. Whereas in many of the classrooms the floors were made of wood, in this room they were made of hard formica tiles, many of them stained where chemicals had been spilled on them over the years. Along the walls were glass-fronted cabinets filled with jars and tins of chemicals and equipment such as beakers, racks of test tubes and white electronic chemical scales.

  The pupils shuffled about and sat down on the stools behind the benches. The teacher they had followed there stood behind the large demonstration bench, which was slightly higher than the pupils’. Behind it, set into the wall next to a very large whiteboard, was a fume cupboard with glass doors and sides and a silver foil-lined chimney flue leading up from a hood in the center towards an extractor fan in the ceiling. Through the fume cupboard could be seen the next-door preparation room where experiments could be made ready. Like the classroom, it too was lined with cabinets of chemicals and equipment. To the left rear of the demonstration desk was the door into this inner sanctum, a label stuck to its single glass panel reading starkly: Absolutely No Entry to Pupils.

  “Good morning,” the teacher greeted them when everyone was settled and looking in his direction. “My name is Mr. Yoland. I am the head of chemistry. This is my laboratory but it is also your homeroom and, for as long as it is your home base, you must be…” he looked around the class, his eyes passing from face to face, “… exceedingly careful in here. These chemicals are dangerous, many of them are poisonous, and you must not touch anything without my express permission. Furthermore,” he added curtly, “much of the equipment is very expensive and I will not — I repeat, not! — condone breakage.”

  Pip and Tim looked briefly at each other. This was not what they had expected. In junior school, the classrooms were cozy places, almost friendly, the walls decorated with pictures, murals, friezes and project folders. This room was, in stark contrast to all they had known before, foreboding. Yet both of them were excited by the prospect of what lay ahead. As for their new homeroom teacher, he was clearly a very strict and stern man, yet the reason for his brusqueness was obvious to both of them. The laboratory was indeed a dangerous place, and it was clear that there had to be rigorous rules governing it for safety, if nothing else.

  “There will be no running or playing the fool in this room,” Mr. Yoland went on. “Bags may only be brought in at the start or end of the day. No food or drink may be consumed here, and you are not allowed access during break or lunchtime unless I or another teacher is present. Is this implicitly understood?”

  The class nodded in respectful silence.

  “If a rain break is announced and you are excluded from the playground, you do not return here under any circumstances, but you go directly to the dining hall. Understood?”

  Everyone again nodded their agreement and understanding.

  “Now,” Mr. Yoland pointed to the door, “down the corridor on the left you will find your lockers. They already have your names on them and I suggest you all go and acquaint yourselves with where they are positioned. Put your bags and coats in them, then return here. You may secure the locker doors only with combination padlocks, the setting of which is to be any year that is memorable for you. It might be your birth year or, much better, one of your parents’ or grandparents’ years of birth or a famous year in history like 1066. This will prevent you from forgetting your individual combinations. Any questions?” No one responded so the teacher continued, “If you forget the number and the custodian is obliged to cut your lock free, there will be a charge of L2.50 for this service. These locks may be purchased from the school office. No other types will be permitted. We won’t have any chatter. Off you go.”

  Everybody filed out, Pip following Tim.

  “I wonder what Sebastian would make of our homeroom,” Pip murmured. Yet no sooner had she spoken than she sensed someone watching her. She glanced over her shoulder, half expecting to see Mr. Yoland looking at her, but he was in the laboratory. Behind her in the corridor only other pupils mingled.

  As Tim and Pip reached the rank of lockers, another Year Seven boy came up to them. He was short and scrubby with a thick neck and large hands which were out of proportion to the length of his arms. His small ears seemed to come out from the top of his neck rather than from the side of his head, and his salt-and-pepper-colored hair was close-shaven. He was, Pip thought, one of the most unsavory-looking boys she had ever seen. Tim recognized him as the boy they had observed walking along the road.

  “You!” the boy bluntly addressed Tim. “What junior school have you come from?”

  “We just moved here,” Tim replied. “You wouldn’t know it.”

  “And you!” the boy said curtly, addressing Pip. “What about you?”

  “That’s my sister,” Tim told him.

  Ignoring this information, the boy went on, “And where have you moved to?”

  “Well, if it’s any business of you
rs,” interrupted Pip, who was becoming intensely annoyed by the boy’s rudeness, “we’ve moved to Rawne Barton.”

  Pausing for a moment as if considering this information, the boy then turned on his heel and walked abruptly away.

  “That was the Neanderthal we passed on the road,” Tim said.

  “His name’s Scrotton,” said a boy standing next to them, “Guy Scrotton. He was in our junior school. You want to watch out for him. He’s a nasty piece of work. He’s a bully,” the boy went on. “Sucks up to teachers, too. Rats on you. He’s a real little dung ball.”

  Once they had found their lockers, Pip and Tim returned to the laboratory, where Mr. Yoland was still standing behind the demonstration bench.

  “Right,” he said as the class filed back in once more, “please be seated.” He opened a foolscap register book and took out from his inner jacket pocket a fountain pen with a gold cap. “When I call your surname, I’d like you to come out to my desk one by one and give me your home address, home telephone number, parents’ work addresses and telephone numbers if you know them.”

  As she waited for her name to be called, Pip noticed, lingering in the air, a faint but obnoxious odor which irritated her nostrils.

  Rubbing her nose, she whispered to Tim, “Can you smell something?”

  Thinking of de Loudéac’s alias — Malodor, which meant “bad smell” — she snuck a look at the pendant. It was milky, as if a tiny waft of gray smoke were trapped in it. The discoloration put her mind at ease.

  “Smells like rotten eggs,” Tim muttered.

  A girl sitting on the next stool whispered, “We had a science lesson here on a registration day last term. It’s a gas called hydrogen sulphide.”

  “Well,” Tim replied quietly, grinning at her, “that’s chemistry for you,” and, turning to Pip, added, “if there’s going to be a room that smells odd, it’s either going to be this one or the boys’ locker rooms. Like in the junior school, sweaty socks, manky underwear and wet pullovers that stink like damp dogs.”

  “You know, Tim,” Pip murmured, “you can be really crude at times.”

  Tim’s response was to softly hum the opening bars of The Simpsons’ theme tune and grin. This grin, however, soon disappeared when, on looking up, he saw Mr. Yoland watching him intently, one eyebrow critically raised, the other eye narrowed disapprovingly.

  “If you wish to sing, young man,” he said tersely, “kindly go to the music department.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tim replied, guiltily.

  After another few seconds of pointedly staring at Tim, Mr. Yoland turned his attention back to registering the students.

  Eventually, Pip’s name was called and she found herself standing before Mr. Yoland.

  “Phillipa Ledger?” he inquired.

  “Yes, sir,” Pip confirmed.

  “Address?”

  “Rawne Barton, sir,” Pip answered.

  At this piece of information, Mr. Yoland briefly looked up from the register. The daylight from the laboratory window seemed momentarily to glint in his eye. As if at the back of his eye, Pip could make out what appeared to be another reflection, of a tall, thin, wavering, narrow flame with a cold, blue conical core dancing in a gentle breeze. She turned to see if, on one of the benches, there was a Bunsen burner alight: yet there was not. None were connected to a gas tap, and most of the equipment was neatly stored away as it must have been throughout the summer holidays.

  “Really?” Mr. Yoland remarked. “A very fine old house. Fifteenth century, I believe, with quite a fascinating past. We have had a number of very successful school history field trips there. If I recall correctly, there are some most interesting Roman remains in the grounds. Tell me, Phillipa, what is your father’s occupation?”

  “He makes television commercials,” Pip replied. “He works from home.”

  “Fascinating! Most fascinating!” Mr. Yoland glanced at his homeroom list and looked up at Tim, continuing, “and that, I assume, is your musically inclined brother, Timothy?”

  “Yes,” Pip confirmed.

  As the teacher spoke, Pip felt a faint trembling against her chest, as if a mobile phone was going off against her skin. She touched the pendant through the material of her shirt. It was quivering.

  Mr. Yoland entered Tim’s name in the register and, with an old-fashioned brass and wood scientific ruler, drew several short lines and some ditto marks beside it. Pip noticed how precise and neat his writing appeared. The ink in his pen was sepia, the color of old documents or faded photographs.

  As Pip turned to go back to her stool, she found the trembling ceased but the flame she had seen in Mr. Yoland’s eye remained in her own, the shifting image temporarily burned into her retina. At the same time, a faint perfume seemed to come from the teacher as if he was wearing a strong aftershave scented with thyme and lemon blossom.

  When the registration process was finished, course timetables and maps of the school were handed out. The class was then dismissed to find the rooms in which they would be taught.

  It was a large school, but well ordered. All the subject rooms were labeled — even the custodian’s office and store, full of mops, industrial vacuum cleaners, buckets and tins of polish bore a sign reading Janitor. Some of the classrooms were big: the geography room had a massive globe hanging from the ceiling, while the history room had cabinets full of displays of stone tools and old bottles with diagrams and pictures of famous battles hanging on the walls. In the IT room were ranks of PCs and printers. The design and technology workshops contained planing machines, a circular saw and a bandsaw, wood and metal-turning lathes, a forge and several anvils — and an old Mini Metro in pieces. The art room had rows of easels, pottery wheels and a kiln for firing clay. The biology laboratory was lined with racks and shelves of preserved specimens in jars — pickled frogs and newts, a dissected chicken, a cow’s head that had been sliced in half lengthways so that one could see the interior. There were even some cows’ eyes in one jar that stared out disconcertingly from within a murky liquid.

  The gymnasium was particularly impressive: it contained a wide range of equipment from blue crash mats to indoor cricket nets, climbing bars and ropes, parallel bars, benches, a trampoline and several vaulting horses.

  At break time, Pip and Tim followed all the other pupils out into the playground. Most of the new Year Seven pupils stuck together in a large mass, talking to friends whom they had known in their junior schools but, as Pip and Tim knew no one, they kept themselves to themselves. Scrotton, they noticed, also tended not to mix.

  “What do you reckon to the place?” Pip asked her brother.

  “Pretty impressive,” Tim replied.

  “And what do you think of Mr. Yoland?” she continued. “I bet, when he started teaching, they still caned you and he wore a black gown like some emaciated Batman.”

  “And I bet,” Tim added, “he’s not someone to mess with, either.”

  Shortly before the bell went for them to return to their classroom, the boy Scrotton approached again, sidling up to them with an irritating smirk on his face.

  “You any good at chemistry?” he asked Tim forth-rightly.

  “No, not really,” Tim admitted. “I’ve never done it before and neither’s my sister. We didn’t have real science courses in junior school.”

  “Huh! I am,” Scrotton said dismissively, grunting and strutting off, pushing another boy out of his way as he went.

  As he walked away, Pip said quietly, “He smells a bit.”

  “Only a bit!” Tim agreed. “It’s definitely time he shook hands with Mr. Soap.”

  “And became acquainted with Mrs. Toothpaste,” Pip added, “but it’s not just BO or bad breath,” she went on. “He smells sort of…” She searched for an apt word, “… earthy.”

  “Who cares?” Tim said. “We’ll just give him a wide berth. He’ll sort himself out in time and we can ignore him. It’s a big school — there must be at least two hundred in Year Seven alone. We don’t
have to come across him if we don’t want to.”

  Back in the chemistry laboratory, more formalities were completed. Scrotton came and sat around the corner of the bench, close to Tim. From there, he kept looking at him, as if studying him or trying to catch his eye to engage him in conversation. Every now and then he cast a quick look in Mr. Yoland’s direction. The teacher, save just once when he briefly acknowledged Scrotton’s look, ignored him. Tim similarly did his best to pay him no attention.

  When the lunchtime bell rang, Pip and Tim collected their food from their lockers and followed everyone else to a huge room marked Dining Hall. At one end was a counter selling cartons of juice or milk, soft drinks, biscuits, sweets, fruit, salad boxes and pre-packed sandwiches. Down the center were rows of plastic tables and chairs. Pip and Tim chose a table and sat down, opening their lunch boxes. They had just started to eat when Scrotton approached them and positioned himself across the table. He did not appear to have any food.

  “What have you got?” he inquired.

  “Sandwiches,” Pip said.

  “What’s in ‘em?” Scrotton demanded.

  Tim kicked Pip’s ankle under the table, but he was too late.

  “Cheese and tomato,” she replied.

  “Give me one. I forgot mine,” Scrotton retorted.

  “No,” said Tim firmly. “If you want something, go and buy it.”

  “Forgot me money,” Scrotton answered.

  “Tough!” Tim exclaimed and he purposefully bit into his first sandwich, holding it so that Scrotton could see it and adding, “Mine’re Marmite and lettuce.”

  Scrotton gave them both a sneer and walked away to disappear among the tables.

  “Charming!” Pip exclaimed.

  “Every school’s got one,” Tim observed.

  For the remainder of the day, Pip and Tim visited all their different subject teachers. In each classroom, they were given sets of text and exercise books. They gathered them all up and put them in their lockers. For one period, they were separated to be placed into groups for games and PE.