Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,36
pointing to a class on Thursday morning. ‘Look. What’s That Smell? A Masterclass in Minor Distractions. Anyone else got that?’
‘You’ve all got it,’ Miss Cheery called out from her driver’s seat at the front of the carriage. ‘Everyone does What’s That Smell? once they’ve been invited into the Gathering Place. Think of it as an introduction to small-scale mayhem. Clever ways to get out of sticky situations, help others and maybe even save lives by distracting and confusing the people around you. Throwing your voice, crying on cue, that sort of thing. Useful stuff – it will really help you on Golders Night, and you’ve only got a few weeks to prepare for that. I still use some of the tricks I learned in – OH MY DAYS, NOBODY PANIC.’ Miss Cheery leapt up from her seat, eyes wide as teacups, and everyone immediately panicked.
‘What? What? What? WHAT?’ said Anah, jumping up from her cushion.
‘STAY STILL, FRANCIS, DO NOT MOVE. THERE IS A SPIDER ON YOUR SHOULDER. I SAID DO NOT MOVE.’
‘WHERE?’ Francis yelped, frantically craning his neck to see his shoulders. He ran his hands repeatedly over his close-cropped hair and shook out his cloak. ‘WHERE IS IT? GET IT OFF ME!’
‘Calm down, Francis,’ said Arch, looking terrified but determined. ‘I’ll help you, just stay still and stop shou—’
‘GET IT OOOOFFFFFF!’
Screams, flailing and spider-searching ensued, and it took a good fifteen seconds for Unit 919 to realise they’d been had. They turned as one to glare at Miss Cheery, who was already back in the driver’s seat, grinning at them.
‘My mistake,’ she said, shrugging as she polished off the last chocolate biscuit.
Morrigan didn’t have to wait long to begin learning the Wundrous Arts; it was her first class of the day. Mrs Murgatroyd met her on the ground floor of Proudfoot House, kicked a group of senior scholars out of their brass railpod and waved a slightly embarrassed Morrigan inside.
‘Watch carefully and memorise,’ said Murgatroyd as she pushed and pulled the complex sequence of buttons and levers. ‘I won’t always be here.’
Murgatroyd made her transformation during the journey, while Morrigan winced and averted her eyes, trying to ignore it. She would never get used to the horrible sound of The Scholar Mistress’s spine cracking and popping like tiny fireworks.
When they arrived on Sub-Nine, Rook led her once again down the deserted hallway of the School of Wundrous Arts, but left her with Conall and Sofia before making a hasty retreat.
They carried on down the darkened hall, Conall leading the way. ‘Have you learned about ghostly hours yet, Wundersmith?’ His cane clicked sharply on the marble floor.
‘No. I mean, I’ve only heard the phrase.’ Her old teacher, Henry Mildmay, had briefly mentioned ghostly hours once during Unit 919’s Decoding Nevermoor class, but they’d not had the chance to study them. Mildmay had betrayed her – had betrayed the entire Wundrous Society, in fact, by conspiring with the Ghastly Market to kidnap Society members and auction them off for their knacks – and she’d tried to banish him from her mind, just as he’d been banished from Wunsoc. She preferred not to dwell. ‘Aren’t they some sort of … what do you call it? A geographical oddity? Like Tricksy Lanes? Are there actual ghosts involved, or—’
‘Bah. The name is a stupidity,’ Conall grumbled. ‘They’re only called ghostly hours because some idiot once got the false impression that they were a phenomenon somehow created by the dead. Now we’re stuck calling them that.’
‘It is misleading,’ Sofia agreed. ‘But usefully misleading. Ask most people in Nevermoor what a ghostly hour is and they’ll say it’s a thing that doesn’t really exist, or otherwise they know they exist and they’re afraid of them. Everyone’s heard an urban myth, some friend of a friend of a friend who stumbled into a moment from the distant past and witnessed it as if they were there. But mostly they’re hard to find unless you know what to look for, and that protects them from scrutiny.’
They stopped outside a chamber with the name Corcoran carved across the arch. The room itself was vast – easily the size of the Deucalion’s largest ballroom – and, like all the others, it was cold, bare, windowless and dark. Morrigan shivered as they stepped inside, even though she was wearing a second jumper.
‘Even here in the Wundrous Society, it’s only the oddballs from the Geographical Oddities Squadron who’ve given them more than a passing thought. Good for us. Shame for everyone else.