The Dance in the Dark. Sophie Cleverly

– but my voice faded to nothing in the breeze. She couldn’t hear me.

       Or perhaps – I realised, in the strange way you think in your sleep – it was the wrong name?

       She wasn’t Emmeline, was she? Emmeline had died when she was just a girl.

       Mother! I called, trying to pull my feet from the ground, but it was as though they had grown into the grass, the roots pulling me down. Mother! I’m here!

       Still the figure didn’t turn.

      I slept on …

      And then, in the middle of the night, I awoke with a start.

      Someone was trying our door handle.

      I watched, sick with horror, as it turned. Time slowed to a crawl. Scarlet didn’t even stir in the opposite bed.

      The door creaked open, just a fraction.

      “Who-who’s there?” I whispered, as loudly as I dared.

      The door thumped back into place, and the handle sprang up.

      And I could have sworn that I heard the jangling of keys in pockets, and the clacking of heels as someone hurried away.

      

       Chapter Eight

       SCARLET

      I thought I’d been the one acting strangely that week, but Ivy was really taking the biscuit.

      When I woke up on Tuesday morning, she was sitting by our dorm-room door and staring at it as if it were about to sprout legs and walk away.

      “What are you doing, you oddball?” I murmured sleepily.

      “Nothing,” she said, but she looked guilty about it.

      She was quiet and jumpy for the rest of the day. I only had to speak to her and she would flinch as if I’d given her a slap. In biology, Mrs Caulfield asked her to get something from the cupboard and she just started panicking.

      “Miss, I can’t, I’m … not feeling well!” she said, and ran out of the classroom.

      When lessons were over, I cornered her in the corridor. “What happened last night? Did someone kidnap my sister and replace her with a total wimp?”

      She opened her mouth and gawped at me like a stunned fish. For a moment I expected her to start yelling – ever since we’d been reunited, she’d been so much more … well, like me. She’d stand up for herself, argue back.

      But now … it was like the old Ivy had reappeared. She looked like she wanted to shrink into the wall. I watched her face carefully.

      “I—” she started, then bit her lip. “Actually,” she said, “there was something. I keep having this dream.”

      I took her arm as we started to walk back to our dorm, steering her through the crowds of uniformed girls. “Tell me about it.”

      “It’s about our mother, I … I think. I’m on this hill, and she’s sitting there in front of me, but I can’t see her face. And I can’t get her to turn round.”

      I shrugged – as much as you can shrug with your arm through someone else’s. “All right, it sounds weird, I admit. I’ve had some pretty unusual dreams myself recently. That doesn’t seem particularly scary, or anything.” I was thinking of my nightmares with the rooftop and the dark stage, but I swiped the thought away before it could bother me.

      We climbed the stairs slowly. “It just … it feels so wrong,” she said. “Like I’m doing something wrong. Because no matter what I do, I can’t get to her. And she won’t hear me.”

      “Well, she is dead,” I said, but the look on my twin’s face told me that was not a very tactful thing to say. “Sorry.”

      “I know. But I had a realisation – I kept calling her Emmeline. At first I thought that maybe it’s not her, maybe it’s the shadow of someone else.” I shuddered. “But if she wasn’t called Emmeline, then …”

      I snapped my fingers, almost right in the face of Ethel Hadlow, who glared at me as she passed. “You don’t know her real name. So that’s why you can’t get her attention!”

      “I-I think that might well be it,” Ivy said. “Not that the dream is real, or anything, but …”

      “But it made you think, yes?” We reached room thirteen, and I went to turn the door handle. I could’ve sworn Ivy flinched at that too.

      “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “There’s got to be a way to—”

      “Hello!”

      Both of us nearly jumped out of our skin. It was Ariadne.

      She was sitting on my bed. Ivy backed up against the wall, gasping.

      “Ariadne?” we exclaimed.

      “I’m sorry!” she said, hurriedly jumping to her feet. “I didn’t mean to be scary. Was I scary?”

      “Only mildly terrifying,” I replied, my heart thumping a little. I hadn’t expected anyone to be there, let alone our absent friend.

      “Sorry!” she said again. “Well … hello.” She looked sheepish.

      I bounced over to her. “Come on,” I said, “we’ll need a bit more than that. You were expelled! What are you doing here?”

      “I came back,” she said, as if that weren’t evident from her standing right there in the middle of our room.

      “But how?” said Ivy, before we both hugged Ariadne.

      “Mmf,” Ariadne said, so we stopped squeezing her quite so much and stood back a little to give her some air. “Well,” she said triumphantly, “I persuaded Daddy. Since they found out it was the headmaster who started the fire in the library and not me, the school had no objection to letting me in again.”

      “But Mrs Knight said there was no way your father would let you come back. Because he thinks it’s too dangerous for you to go outside, or something.”

      “Well, I … might have threatened to tell Mummy that he ran over her prize petunias when he was trying out the new Bentley.” Ariadne carried on staring at her feet, her face red.

      Ivy’s eyes widened. “You blackmailed your father?”

      “Oh no! I mean, it’s not blackmail, is it? Well, he shouldn’t have done it in the first place. He’s not even supposed to drive a motor car, that’s Horace’s job …” Her mouth kept on flapping uselessly.

      “Ariadne, you silly goat!” I shook our friend gently by the shoulders. “It doesn’t matter if you locked him in the basement to get back here. You did it!”

      Her face lit up. “I did it! I’m back!”

      I ran out into the corridor, nearly tripping over the little trail of suitcases. “Ariadne’s back!” I yelled to no one in particular.

      Penny leant out of the doorway of her room and glared at me. “Nobody cares!” she shouted.

      But even wicked witch Penny couldn’t dampen my mood. We were a proper team again. This was utterly brilliant. I danced into room thirteen, and spun Ariadne around.

      “Bit dizzy now, Scarlet!” she said primly, and I let her go.