Just chaos.
Every creature Hargreaves had forced them to acknowledge were real, suddenly roaming around.
And then of course there were the others that she hadn’t mentioned at all.
The ones that still teetered in their minds, between the myths they’d been taught, and the potentially terrible reality. Vampires, for example, didn’t sleep in coffins, or wear cloaks, or fear sunlight. They weren’t even actually called vampires, in the Underneath, in the magic world. That was their fumbled, cobbled-together title, made by a man who had most likely half glimpsed them once. Their real name, she knew, was Areifen—arei, meaning “wrong,”fenmeaning “fey” or “fairy.” Or at least the fairy- orfey-like beings that existed down there. Some looked winged and pretty, like people thought.
But she knew now that some didn’t.
That some had teeth instead of eyes.
“Yes, precisely so. That sort of thing no longer happens. And it shall not as long as there is constant care and vigilance,” Professor Hargreaves said. But when she did, Mina thought of the people of Stanley Bridge. The ones who had been told it was just a collapsed stanchion. Instead of what she suspected it had actually been:
Tentacles as big as buildings from a being that closely resembled Cthulhu.
She’d seen pictures, in an unverified account in a book the librarian hadn’t wanted to give her. And Cthulhu was not alone. “If it did, though, if you thought it had, if you believed a being from the Underneath had breached or maybe slipped through one of the doorways without permission, what would you tell that person to do, Professor?” she asked. And now everybody was looking at her. It felt like she was drowning in a sea of eyes—not least of which were the professor’s.
There was a flinty look to them now.
Like Mina was disrupting something, instead of what she was actually doing:
Trying to goad that fucker. Trying to warn him. It was time for her plan now.
And the professor fit her answer into that perfectly.
“I would tell them to speak to me directly. Most fears are unfounded—we call it the first-year frights, as exposure to these many wonders and horrors can be quite unsettling. But in the eventthat they are not, I should like to know. My forte is dealing accordingly with anything untoward, Miss Morrow. So do feel free to come to me, any time you feel the need,” she said.
And then she turned away, as did the rest of the class.
Except, of course, for the one she had been really speaking to.
Chapter Nine
She was tempted, very tempted, to take the professor up on her offer. It was even easy to picture: a most likely austere little office, with mean chairs and a view out of the window of a wall. Hargreaves stood ramrod straight, face getting sourer and sourer as Mina spilled the beans.He is attempting to sully you, and I shall not have it, she imagined the professor saying, before she took her wand from between the folds of her black skirts.
Mina had seen her do just that in fact, the other day.
In the halls, over a student using his flying tool—a bespelled hockey stick, it had looked like—to fly up to the second floor. She’d made him drop like a stone with a flick of her wrist, then left him crying in a heap.I think my leg is broken, he had sobbed. And Hargreaves had replied,Well, you should have thought of that before you did something you know you shouldn’t.
Plus there was the quiz. The rap of that book being shut.
It was clear she brooked no nonsense.
And had the power to back up that stern disapproval.
Yet somehow, when she came to the turn that would take her to Hargreaves’s office, she kept on going. She stepped out into the dying daylight. And she hadn’t the faintest idea why. Because he was Harker St. James, boy wonder? Because it wasn’t supposed to be something that happened?
Maybe, maybe.
But there was something else there, too. Something about the way Professor Hargreaves had spoken—like she might blame more than the creature that had attached itself to some hapless human. That she might think someone like her had encouraged such attentions. And even if she didn’t, there was every chance the magic authorities might feel differently.
She had read the other day about them banishing people from the community for doing things they weren’t supposed to.Being shunted, it was called. And it didn’t just involve going back to where you came from.
It meant memory erasure.
So yes, true, it was risky to deal with this alone.
Sure, there was every chance she was very wrong about certain things.
