Hailey blinked.
“I’m sorry, sir. My what?”
“Your flail-beat. Didn’t you read my instructions?”
“I read your letter, sir, but there was no mention of a flail-beat in it.”
“Hartley received a tampered package,” Fin said through a mouthful of fried chicken as he made his way to Woodfork.
“Really,” said Woodfork with great interest. “What was in it?”
“Two letters,” Hailey told him. “One signed by you and the other was…” She shook her head. “The other was one sentence long.”
“One sentence?” Woodfork wrinkled his forehead and looked at Fin then back to Hailey. “How was it written?”
“It looked like scribble. Like a five-year-old wrote it.”
“Thick letters?”
Hailey nodded.
“I believe you’ve attracted a poltergeist, Miss Hartley.”
“Oh.” She already knew she had a poltergeist and wondered if that little trouble-maker, Tomas, was responsible for sabotaging her silver envelope.
“In any case,” the professor said, clapping his hands together, “Pádraig here will find you a handbook, and everything else you need is in your welcome package. But before you leave this hall, I must advise you, Miss Hartley, to ready your flail-beat.”
“Okay…”
“You see, due to the random breaks in the veil here at Bear Towne, we recommend all students practice their extraction technique should they stumble upon an unmarked in-between and become accidentally trapped there.”
Pinching her face together thoughtfully, she replayed Woodfork’s sentence in her head, but she literally had no idea what he was talking about.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand one word of that.”
Woodfork smiled brightly at Fin who gnawed the last sliver of meat off a chicken leg then left to fetch another.
“Ah, what a delight you are indeed,” said the professor. “Most students would try to bamboozle me. Nobody admits when they don’t know something anymore—this is so refreshing.” He drew a breath and continued. “The veil is a barrier that separates Earth from the two other realms—the Aether and theHeavens. An in-between is a partial opening through the veil—not large enough to travel completely through, you see, but still sufficient in size to pull one partially across. It leaves one trapped and somewhat vulnerable—it’s a bit like stepping into deep, sticky mud.”
That, Hailey understood.
“Every in-between is fraught with danger. One never knows what to expect inside. Any new student would be fortunate to escape unscathed, only…well, given your…er…statushere, one might try to harm you irreparably or even kill you completely if you fell into such a hole, you understand?”
“No. What’s my status?”
Woodfork waved his hand, dismissively. “No need to fret about that now. What’s important is that you leave here ready and able to pull yourself out of an in-between, and the only way to do that is to perform a flail-beat.”
“Okay.” Hailey nodded, ready to learn how to flail-beat.
“It’s quite simple,” he told her kindly. “All you have to do is use your hands or your feet to produce a regular, recurring percussive noise by striking them against whatever surface you find inside the in-between. That’s very important, to find a surface, as clapping usually doesn’t work. Of course, you already know that a regular percussion repels most non-humans,” he said, but this was all news to Hailey. “So it repels an in-between as well. With your background in percussive dance, it should be fairly simple for you, yes?”
“You mean you just have to…to dance your way out of an in-between?” Surely it couldn’t be that simple.
“Ah, then you understand. Alright, if you would please—just this once—demonstrate for me your flail-beat?”
Not since the day Holly vanished had Hailey urged her feet to dance. Glancing around, she made sure nobody was watching. Then, with a heavy heart but eager feet, she tapped out a simple reel beat.
Woodfork clapped her on the shoulder after two short seconds. “That will do. Can you do the same with your hands?”
