Soul Stealer (3 page)

“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
L
^2.50
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 yours,” 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.

The last period of the day involved returning to the
chemistry laboratory to be dismissed by Mr. Yoland, who stood by the door as they filed out.

Walking past the teacher, Pip momentarily felt the strangest sensation. Although he was standing at least two meters from
her with his arms folded across his chest, looking down the corridor at the other departing pupils, she somehow felt he was
reaching out towards her. It was, she thought, as if she was going through a sort of magnetic field which was attracting every
cell in her body, tingling every muscle and tugging at every nerve. A meter behind Mr. Yoland stood Scrotton, ostensibly rummaging
in a grubby sports bag yet watching her intently at the same time.

“Well, kids, how’s your day been?” asked Mr. Ledger as they got into his car.

“It’s a huge school,” Tim said. “Lots of equipment and stuff. Not like the junior school at all.”

“No,” said Mr. Ledger. “This is the real thing. Secondary education. Learning in the raw! No more playing in the sandpit,
sitting on the story mat, cuddling Georgie the gerbil and eating the play dough.”

“Do you have any idea at all what we actually did in junior school, Dad?” Pip inquired.

For a moment, Mr. Ledger took his eyes off the road ahead and grinned broadly at them over the back of the driver’s seat.