Return to Groosham Grange (4 page)

This door was open but the room behind it was shrouded in darkness and silent but for the flutter of the bats that lived high up in the rafters.

David reached the bottom of the staircase and stood silently on the cold, marble floor. He was surrounded by oil paintings, portraits of former heads and teachers—a true collection of old masters. All of them seemed to be looking at him, and as he moved forward the eyes swiveled to follow him and he heard a strange, musty whispering as the pictures muttered to one another.

“Where’s he going? What’s he doing?”

“He’s making a mistake!”

“Don’t do it, David.”

“Go back to bed, David.”

David ignored them. To one side a passage stretched out into the darkness, blocked at the end by a door he knew led into the library. There were two more doors facing each other halfway along the passage. The one on the left led into the office of Mr. Kilgraw, the assistant headmaster. As usual it was closed and no light showed through the crack. But on the other side of the passageway . . . David felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. A square of light stretched out underneath the door. This one was marked HEADS. The room behind it belonged, of course, to Mr. Fitch and Mr. Teagle.

David was certain they weren’t in their study. Only that afternoon they had complained of the very worst thing they could possibly get—a headache—and had announced they were going to bed early. Mr. Fitch and Mr. Teagle had no choice but to sleep in the same bed (though with two pillows) and rather curiously both men talked in their sleep, often having animated conversations right through the night.

But if Vincent was behind the door, what was he doing there? Going as quietly as he could—even the slightest movement seemed to echo throughout the school—David tiptoed along the corridor. Slowly, he reached out for the handle, his hand throwing an elongated shadow across the door. He hadn’t even worked out what he would do when he discovered Vincent. But that didn’t matter. He just wanted to see him.

He opened the door and blinked. The room was empty.

Closing the door behind him, David entered the heads’ inner sanctum. The room was more like a chapel than a study, with its black marble floor and stained-glass windows. The furniture was solid and heavy, the desk a great block of wood that could have been an altar. Leather-bound books lined the walls, the shelves sagging under their weight. David knew he would be in serious trouble if he was found here. Nobody was allowed in this room unless summoned. But it was too late to turn back now.

The light that he had seen came from a lamp on a chest of drawers that stretched the whole length of the room. David ran his eyes along the surface, past a tangle of test tubes and pipes, a stuffed rat, a human skull, a computer, a pair of thumbscrews and a German helmet from the First World War. He was puzzled. What, he wondered, was the computer for?

But this was no time to ask questions. Vincent wasn’t in the room. That was all that mattered.
He
shouldn’t be here either. He had to go.

It was as he turned to leave that he saw it. There was a small table in the far corner with a circular hole in the wall just above it. A picture lay faceup on the carpet nearby. A safe! Somebody had taken down the picture and opened the safe. Like a moth to a flame he moved toward the table. There were four sheets of paper lying on the top. David knew what they were even before he reached out and picked them up. He looked down at the front cover.

He was standing beside the open safe, holding the exam papers, when the door crashed open behind him. With a dreadful lurching feeling in his stomach, he looked round, knowing that he had been set up, knowing that it was too late to do anything about it. Mr. Fitch and Mr. Teagle were there, wearing a bathrobe and pajamas. With them (and this was the only surprise) was Mr. Helliwell. He was fully dressed. All three men—or all two and a half—were gazing at him in disbelief.

“David . . . !” Mr. Fitch exclaimed. His long, hooked nose curved toward David accusingly.

“What are you doing here?” Mr. Teagle demanded. He was wearing a nightcap with a pom-pom dangling just next to his chin. He shook his head disapprovingly and the pom-pom swung back and forth as if in agreement.

“I never thought it would be you, David,” Mr. Helliwell said. The voodoo teacher looked genuinely astonished—and sad. He turned to the heads. “I heard someone go into your office,” he explained. “But I never dreamed . . .”

“You were quite right to come to us, Mr. Helliwell,” Mr. Fitch said.

“Quite right,” Mr. Teagle agreed.

“You can leave us now,” Mr. Fitch continued. “We’ll take care of this.”

Mr. Helliwell paused as if he was about to say something. He glanced at David and shook his head. Then, with a quiet “good night,” he turned and left the room.

Mr. Fitch and Mr. Teagle remained where they were.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself, David?” Mr. Teagle asked.

David thought for a moment. The bitterness of his defeat was in his mouth and he wanted to spit it out. But he knew when he was beaten. Somehow he had been lured into a trap. The portraits had tried to warn him, but he hadn’t listened and now it was too late to talk himself out of it. What could he say? The safe was open. The exam papers were in his hand. There was nobody else in the room. Trying to explain would only make matters worse.

He shook his head.

“Really, I am very disappointed in you,” Mr. Fitch said.

“And I am disappointed too.” Mr. Teagle stroked his beard. “It’s not just that you were cheating. That would be bad enough.”

“But you were
caught
cheating,” Mr. Fitch continued. “That’s even worse. How could you be so clumsy? So amateurish?”

“And why did you even bother?” Mr. Teagle asked. “You would easily have come first in Advanced Cursing without stealing the papers. Now we’ll have to change all the questions. Completely rewrite the exam . . .”

“The exam is on Wednesday.” Mr. Fitch sighed. “That only gives us two days.”

“We have no choice.” Mr. Teagle said. “We’ll have to start again.” He turned to David. “You won’t believe this,” he went on, “but writing exams is almost as boring as taking them! It’s all most annoying.”

Both men nodded at the same time, narrowly missing banging their heads together. Still David said nothing. He was furious with himself. He had walked into this. How could he have been so stupid?

“Are you aware of the seriousness of this offense?” Mr. Teagle asked.

David was blushing darkly. He couldn’t keep silent any longer. “It’s not the way it looks,” he said. “It’s not what you think—”

“Oh no,” Mr. Fitch interrupted. “I suppose you’re going to tell us that you were framed.”

“Maybe you didn’t mean to come in here and look at the exams,” Mr. Teagle suggested sarcastically.

David hung his head low. “No,” he whispered.

“You realize that we could expel you for this,” Mr. Fitch said.

“Or worse,” Mr. Teagle agreed.

Mr. Fitch sighed. “Sometimes I wonder, David, if you’re suited to Groosham Grange. When you first came here, you fought against us. In a way you’re still fighting. Do you really think you belong here?”

Did he belong at Groosham Grange? It was something that, in his darker moments, he had often wondered.

When he had first come to the school, he had indeed fought against it. As soon as he had learned about the secret lessons in black magic, he had done everything he could to escape, to tell the authorities what he knew, to get the place closed down. It had only been when he had found himself trapped and helpless that he had changed his mind. If you can’t beat them . . .

But here he was, a year later, determined to become the number one student, to win the Unholy Grail. He remembered the fear he had once felt, the sense of horror. Classes in black magic! Ghosts and vampires! Now he was one of them—so what exactly did that make him? What had he become in the year he had been here?

He became aware of the heads, waiting for an answer.

“I do belong here,” he said. “I know that now. But . . .” He hesitated. “I’m not evil.”

“Evil?” Mr. Teagle smiled for the first time. “What is good and what is evil?” he asked. “Sometimes it’s not as easy as you think to tell them apart. That’s still something you have to learn.”

David nodded. “Maybe that’s true,” he said. “But all I know is . . . this is my home. And I do want to stay.”

“Very well.” Mr. Fitch was suddenly businesslike. “We won’t expel you. But tonight’s performance is going to cost you ten points—”

“Fifteen,” Mr. Teagle cut in.

“Fifteen points. Do you have anything to say?”

David shook his head. He was feeling sick to the stomach. Fifteen points! Add that to the twelve points he had lost earlier in the day and that left . . .

“David?”

. . . just three points. Three points between Vincent and him. How had it happened? How had Vincent managed to lure him here?

“No, sir.” His voice was hoarse, a whisper.

“Then I suggest you go back to bed.”

“Yes . . .”

David was still holding the exam papers. Clenching his teeth, feeling the bitterness rising inside him, he jerked his fingers open, dropping them back onto the table. He hadn’t read a single question.

He left the study and walked back along the passage and past the portraits, trying to ignore them tut-tutting at him as he went. With his mind still spinning, he climbed the stairs and found his way back to the dormitory. He stopped by his bed. Vincent was back. His clothes were on the chair, his body curled up under the blankets as if he had never been away. But was he really asleep? David gazed through the darkness at the half smile on the other boy’s face and doubted it.

Silently, David undressed again and got back into bed. Three points. That was all there was between them. Over and over again he muttered the figure to himself until at last he fell into an angry, restless sleep.

W
ednesday quickly came, and with it the last examination of the year: Advanced Cursing.

There was a tradition at Groosham Grange that all the ordinary exams were taken upstairs, in the Great Hall. But for the more secretive ones, the exams relating to witchcraft and black magic, the pupils went downstairs through the network of tunnels and secret passages that lay beneath the school and into an underground chamber where sixty-five desks and sixty-five chairs had been set up, far away from the prying sun. This, then, was to be the final testing ground: a hidden cavern among the stalactites and stalagmites with a great waterfall of crystallized rock guarding the way out.

The exam was to start at eleven o’clock. At a quarter to, David made his way downstairs. His mouth was dry and he had an unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was crazy. When it came to Advanced Cursing, everyone agreed he was untouchable. At the same time, he knew that it was one of Vincent’s weakest subjects. That morning he had checked the standings list one last time. He was still in first place. Vincent was three points behind. After that there was a gap of seventeen points to Jill, who was in third place. Looking at the bulletin board had told him what he wanted to know. This exam was between him and Vincent. And Vincent didn’t have a chance.

So why was he feeling so nervous? David opened the door of the library and went in. Ahead of him there was a full-length mirror and he glanced at his reflection while he walked toward it. He was tired and it showed. He hadn’t slept well since his encounter in the heads’ study. He was still having the dreams: his parents, the school breaking up and the face that he was sure he recognized.

He was right up against his reflection now. He scowled at himself briefly, then walked into the glass. The mirror rippled around him like water and then he had passed through it and into the first of the underground passages. His breath steamed slightly in the cold air as he followed the path down and he could feel the moisture clinging to his clothes. The examination room lay straight ahead, but on an impulse David took a fork, following a second passageway to the right. This was no more than a fissure in the rock, so narrow in places that he had to hold his breath to squeeze through. But then it widened out again and David found himself face to face with what he had come to see.

The Unholy Grail was kept in a miniature grotto, separated from the passageway by six iron bars. The bars were embedded in the rock, and there was no visible way through to the chamber behind. The Grail stood on a rock pedestal, bathed in an unnatural silver light. It was about six inches high, a metallic gray in color, encrusted with dark red stones that were either rubies or carbuncles. There was nothing very extraordinary about it to look at. But David found that his breath had caught in his throat. He was hypnotized by it. He could sense the power that the Grail contained and he would have given anything to reach through the bars and hold it in his hand.

This was what he was fighting for. He would take the exam and he would come in first. Nobody would stop him.

“David . . . ?”

Hearing his name, David swung around guiltily. He had been so absorbed in the Grail that he hadn’t heard anyone approach. He turned and saw the arts, crafts and voodoo master, Mr. Helliwell, standing at the entrance. He was wearing a dark, three-piece suit. It was the old-fashioned sort and made him look like a funeral director. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I was just looking . . .” David was being defensive. After their meeting two nights before, he had nothing more to say. But to his surprise Mr. Helliwell moved closer and there was a frown of puzzlement on his face. “David,” he began. “I want to talk to you about the other night.”