Horton Girls

Chapter 1: On The Hill

Violyn's P.O.V 

Grandma's voice rings in my ears: Always wear your pendant for good luck. Never look behind you when walking alone at night even if someone taps you on the shoulder.

I've spent most of my life in a boarding school. Horton's School for Girls. The school is on a hill on the edge of the small and strange town of Redstone Valley, next to a large jungle reserve. In the jungle is a tribe of monkeys that constantly steals food from the staff room. Although teachers are used to this, they run screaming when monkeys swing in the doors.

Horton's School for Girls is where wealthy people from all over the country send their girls. It is where young girls who are too noisy, too bossy or unladylike, too disobedient or merely too hard to look at are sent to be "put" into shape. This is the school's reputation. Here troubled young girls are taught to read and write, to figure numbers and cross their legs when sitting, to play netball and dress accordingly. Horton's School for Girls is the oldest and the only boarding school in Redstone Valley.

Its walls are wide, its ceilings held up by shiny pillars and its floors are tiled in places with imported tiles. Its doors are carved from the heavy woods of ancient forest trees.

Its walls are thick enough to contain the shouts of the most boisterous girls, its dormitories with wire-screened windows and bare floorboards echoing with deliberate footsteps of the staff at bedtime.

Over the years the school has grown in spurts. A new dormitory is added whenever the board of governors, teachers and student representatives  council raise enough money. They've even transformed a few abandoned areas into a proper laundry, new bathrooms on each floor, a clinic centre, a theatre, an expansion of the library, a junior science laboratory, a swimming pool and a large gym within the past twenty years. It is now a school that accommodates over a thousand students, fifty teachers and forty auxilliary staff.

Despite it being a rather well equipped learning environment, it is also a place where humans have to constantly fight against the roots of nature for their rights to stay.

In the playing fields great forest trees spread their roots over which Horton girls clamber at free time. In the evenings gusty jungle winds shed jungle nuts and seeds onto the lawns and flowerbeds which grow into sturdy jungle seedlings that girls have to weed out with their bare hands as punishment for disobedience. Jungle vines wind their way inch by stealthy inch over the wire fence, under the drainpipes, through the cracks in the brickwork to leave stubborn brown stains when ripped away.

Horton girls drape the ripped-away creepers around their necks and shoulders, they perched twisted crown creepers on their heads and dance in sneaky circles when the teachers aren't looking.

From the time I was a small child I have always known I would go there. I have two older sisters, twins, Delia and Dianna who graduated from Horton two years ago and another sister, Sherri who is now a final year student. I guess it's by sisterhood that I become a Horton girl too.

Before I ever saw the school I knew the shape of its buildings and the grain of its wooden floor under bare feet. The swing of its heavy doors. I knew the smells that crept in from the forest in the evenings and the early mornings and the way moonlight slashed through the shuttered windows. I knew the way the corridors twisted and the weird-shaped rooms one came upon at sudden corners and the way if one was sharp-eyed, one could sometimes see a hidden door. But where these doors and twisting corridors led to, I didn't know.

That's the place to begin. The private boarding school on the hill where I spend most of my life was famous long before I was sent there. Once before the owner, Rachael Celestine Horton bought the place and turned it into a school it was only one building, a shambles, a mansion abandoned for years by everyone except the jungle. The mansion was filled with rubbish and decaying furniture, its fine marble floors were heaved and prised apart by jungle roots as thick as an anaconda. Its windows were hung with jungle creepers allowing only a feeble light. Once it was the headquarters of some evil happenings. The superiors of the town were very shady back then and this was where they took bandits and other enemies of the town to torture and eventually kill.
Once, long ago before that, a rich man lived here. When he lived here, it was filled with exotic plants and trees brought back from the rich man's travels: the Rose of India, the juniper, the rain tree, the great hog plum. The rich man was a collector of the exotic. Every year he set out for something new. He planted a garden as far as the eye could see.

The rich man cut back the jungle and built the mansion from stones carved from a foreign country and glass blown and tinted by foreign craftsmen and mixes of sand, mosaic, masonry made up of secret formulas. Only the natives who helped build it left traces of a local presence in the rich man's mansion: their drops of sweat mixed in with the foundations, their blood and crushed limbs marking the beams that held the ceilings up. Their stray hairs and skin scuffs cemented forever between bricks.

The rich man's mansion perched on the hill like a shimmering palace the likes of which neither the hill nor the jungle had ever seen; an incomplete palace, for the rich man was never satisfied. When he was home, builders and carpenters forever plagued the place, working in remote corners, adding an attic garden, constructing curved staircases to rooms he later decided he did not want.

Long before the school became a school it was famous for the parties the rich man threw. The rich man's parties were the talk of the town and lasted all night, all-night music blared from his mansion, all-night dancing and shrieks of laughter greeted each other. Politicians, kings, queens and other rich folks would come from all over the continent to get a taste of his parties. An experience to bring back to their countries and kingdoms.

Grandma was there as a child. She's seen it all and has lived the stories our teachers dismiss as "just stories". Grandma has told me many things about the hill. She's even lived in that mansion as a servant girl. She said that if you look closer you'll see that the hill is in a shape of woman giving her back to the town below.

"Violyn! Rise and shine sleepy head," the sound of my roommate's voice startles me awake.

I sigh loudly and push the covers aside before climbing down the metal bunker. "Thanks a lot Laura, I was having a good dream."

She scoffs. "Oh you were dreaming alright but I bet it's not about something comforting. Like cakes and stuff. You were probably dreaming about those ridiculous stories your grandma used to tell you  about this place."

I know she  believes that there is some truth in Grandma's stories but that's the thing about Horton girls. No one's brave enough to speak up about the walls that whisper of the shadows that float. They've been turning a blind eye since the day six Horton girls went missing three years ago. My sister, Sherri doesn't openly admit it but I know she's seen things too. When I ask her about it she simply says it's just the tricks of the jungle. She pretends to not pay attention to Grandma's tales but I know she listens.

I know the other girls see and hear things as well but they don't talk. No one admits. Everyone keeps silent or they will come for them too just like they came for those six girls who couldn't stop prying.

***
So what do you think of the first chapter?