Return of the Emerald Skull (11 page)

‘Which way?’ I murmured.

And then I saw it – a gold-painted plaque on the door opposite.
MASTERS’ COMMON ROOM
, I read. I'd struck lucky.

Checking again that the coast was clear, I darted across to the door and tried the handle. It was locked. Somehow I wasn't surprised. I removed a skeleton key from the fourth pocket of my waistcoat, and gingerly inserted it in the lock.

From my left I heard voices. One of them sounded like Thompson's. I froze. To my relief, a moment later they all faded away.

Click
.

The lock gave. I turned the handle, pushed open the door and walked into the room. Inside, tied hand and foot, were twenty schoolmasters sitting stiffly on the floor, surrounded by the shattered debris of what had once been finely upholstered armchairs and side tables. It was as if a hurricane had hit the first-class salon of an ocean liner and I was looking at the shipwrecked survivors.

They turned wide, staring eyes towards me – eyes filled with fear and trepidation, rather than any hope of rescue.

‘It's all right,’ I tried to reassure them, sweeping back my curtain disguise and revealing my waistcoat and swordstick. ‘I'm an outsider. I'm not from the school.’ I looked from one to the other. ‘Can any of you tell me what's going on here … ?’

I stopped, for I'd suddenly noticed, lying at my feet and staring up at me with unseeing eyes, small whimpering sounds escaping
from his cracked lips, the mud-caked games master, Mr Cripps.

‘W-what happened to him?’ I asked.

The tall, hook-nosed master whose face I'd glimpsed at the window stared at me. ‘He tried to escape,’ he said, swallowing anxiously. ‘They … they … took him to see the head.’

s I stared down at the games master, a mere husk of his former self, his body drained and his mind destroyed, I heard sounds from the other side of the common-room door. Tramping footsteps and voices, getting rapidly louder as they approached along the corridor.

‘Follow me, Falcon House, proceed!’ The barked command came from right outside the door of the masters’ common room. I'd been careless. I'd unlocked the door with a skeleton key – and left it unlocked. The discovery was bound to give me away. I leaped forward, pulled the key from my
waistcoat pocket and slipped it into the lock.

‘Give me the keys, Simmonds major.’

My heart hammered in my chest. The prefect's voice was inches away. Only the thin panel of wood separated us.

At the sound of his command, there was a jangling of keys on a key chain. I turned my key quickly, hoping no one would hear the telltale click, and removed it – and not a moment too soon. An instant later, the prefect in the corridor thrust his own key into the lock and turned …

Leaping back from the door, I ducked down behind an upturned armchair beside the window. The next moment, the door flew open, slamming against the wall with a thunderous
crash!

‘All of you, up!’ barked one of the prefects. ‘The head has work for you.’

‘Now!’ shouted a second, and from my hiding place I heard the sound of a heavy implement – a makeshift bludgeon or a
home-made studded club – hammering against a cupboard, splintering the wood.

There were sighs and groans as the bound masters struggled awkwardly to their feet. One of them muttered something under his breath.

‘And no talking!’ bellowed the first prefect. ‘Take them to the bird hall.’

There was more clomping of feet as the boys trooped into the room.

‘What about him?’ someone asked.

‘What, Cripps?’ the prefect said. ‘Leave him. He won't be going anywhere.’

The boys laughed unpleasantly. I found their indifference to the master's suffering deeply shocking.

‘You lot! Get a move on!’ the prefect's voice sounded again. ‘The head is getting impatient!’

As the footsteps and voices retreated, I stole a glance from behind the wrecked armchair. The last couple of teachers – both
of them escorted on either side by boys who were prodding them viciously with their makeshift weapons – were disappearing through the door. A tall prefect with red hair and a blue feathered head-dress, who was bringing up the rear, reached out and grabbed the door handle.

Seconds later, the door slammed shut. I waited a moment, then emerged from behind the armchair, to see Mr Cripps sitting on the floor and staring out of the window, his eyes lifeless, his gaze unblinking. It was unlikely that he'd noticed a single thing that had just happened.

‘Here,’ I said gently as I poured him a cup of water from a chipped pitcher. ‘Drink this.’

He neither heard me nor saw me, and when I put the cup to his cracked lips, the water simply trickled down over his chin. It was hopeless. The master was like one of those stuffed birds I'd seen earlier – hollow,
lifeless … There was nothing I could do for him.

I shuddered. I doubted there was anything
anyone
could do for him.

The masters had been taken to the bird hall and I intended to follow them, but at a safe distance. I, for one, had no intention of being sent to the headmaster. Gripping the handle of my swordstick tightly, I set off along the corridor.

I heard the footsteps retreating, and the sound of the masters’ protestations and appeals fading away.

‘Please, Ridley,’ beseeched one. ‘Stop this madness. You're a good lad at heart …’

‘Morrison!’ came another. ‘It's not too late. Release us, and we can talk about it …’

At the end of the hallway I glanced through a large window. Outside, in the quad, the boys of Heron and Eagle houses were working on the pyramid of wrecked furniture.

And what a pyramid it was!

Its four sides consisted of a series of rough steps, rising to a flat platform at the top, almost as high as the roofline of the quad. The surrounding classrooms must have been stripped bare to construct this massive pile.

Ahead of me, the crocodile line of teachers was being led up a separate staircase – one that, from my previous visit, I knew went to the headmaster's bird hall. The prefects beat their cudgels and bellowed at the hapless masters, who were still pleading to be freed.

‘The head says, “No talking!” Hurry, time is short!’

Just then, from behind me, I heard a noise that made my heart jump into my mouth. I spun round, my hand gripping my sword-stick beneath my curtain cape, to find myself staring at a rather hot and sticky-looking Sidney junior. He was struggling up the stairs with a carpet bag under one arm and a wickerwork basket under the other.

‘Give me a hand,’ he wheezed breathlessly, shoving the wicker basket into my hands.

I took it and followed Sidney, who was redder than ever from his recent exertions in the quad, his flaxen hair plastered to his temples with sweat.

‘What is this?’ I asked.

He frowned. ‘Matron's sewing basket, of course,’ he panted. ‘The head wants it in the bird hall. Immediately. And this’ – he held up the carpet bag – ‘is the rest of her yarn. Come on! We've got to hurry, the head says …’

I followed him along the corridor, past the big window, round to the left and up the staircase towards the bird hall. I remembered the last time I'd been here. The headmaster had been insistent that no boys were allowed in there unsupervised – yet there were Sidney and I, making our way up the stairs on his express orders.

Nothing about this school rebellion made sense.

The route to the bird hall bore all the scars of the chaos and destruction that had afflicted the rest of the school. The carpet had been torn from the floor; the pictures on the walls had been smashed to smithereens. As for the door to the hall itself, the wood around the handle was a mass of jagged splinters, where the lock had been smashed in.

Sidney knocked. The broken door opened with a creak, and Thompson stood there, hands on his hips and an impatient expression on his face.

‘The head said to hurry,’ he said. ‘Time is short.’

‘I came as fast as I could …’ Sidney began, tears springing to his eyes.

Ignoring him, Thompson pointed across the room.

If the corridor had been damaged by the unruly pupils of Grassington Hall, then the headmaster's beloved bird hall had been all but destroyed. Without exception, the glass
in each and every one of the display cabinets had been smashed, and now lay on the floor like the shattered surface of a frozen lake, which crunched underfoot as we stepped inside.

‘Put them down over there!’ Thompson commanded, pointing towards the window at the far end of the long, thin gallery.

We did as we were told. I kept my head down and my curtain cape pulled close round me as I took the opportunity to glance furtively around.

Inside the broken cabinets were the masters, seated upon the floor. Before them lay a pile of birds, wrenched from their mounts; beside them were sacks full of feathers. Each of the birds, which had been so lovingly stuffed, named and mounted in a setting that matched its origins, was now being systematically plucked.

The master nearest to me was sitting in a jungle scene, tugging the feathers from
a green and red parrot. His crouching neighbour was plucking a duck. The hooknosed teacher I'd spoken to earlier squatted in a beige and khaki savannah, his head down as he yanked out the salmon-pink feathers of a giant flamingo with the single-minded determination of a man possessed.

‘“Faster!” the head says. “Faster!” ‘ urged the red-haired prefect, striding between the stooped heads of the masters, brandishing a cane.

Even as he spoke, I heard a voice close by my ear. ‘
Faster, my children
,’ it whispered urgently. ‘
Work faster!
’

As if in answer, the red-haired prefect rained a series of savage blows down on the shoulders of the hapless masters, who groaned and whimpered pitifully. I felt the blood rush to my face, and took a step towards the bully, only to feel a hand on my shoulder.

‘You! Grimes minor, isn't it?’

I turned to see Thompson eyeing me
suspiciously. ‘Gather the feathers and take them to the cloak maker.’

He nodded across the hall. I followed his gaze.

There, at the centre of the chaos, a small fair-haired pupil in wire-framed spectacles and an over-sized apron festooned with needles of all shapes and sizes was busily working on what looked at first sight to be a great carpet of feathers.

I stooped and picked up a sack of exotic feathers, recently plucked from what had once been a pink-kneed stork from the Ocavandia Wetlands, according to the label on the case. Brushing past Thompson, I made my way across the broken glass to the diminutive carpet weaver.

As I stood over the little fellow, whose nimble fingers darted back and forth in a blur of movement, I could see that it wasn't a carpet he was working on after all. In fact, dashing backward and forward like a crazed
woodpecker, he was sewing feathers onto roughly cut squares of some dark material – formerly stage curtains by the look of them.