Free Higher Institute of Villainous Education by Mark Walden Page B

Malpense, but you know how worried I get about these things.’ She sniffed and dabbed at the corners of her eyes with the hankie. ‘And it’s not that I don’t have faith in you, but that letter seems so final. I just don’t see what we can do.’
    Otto picked up the letter from the desk again and, scanned its contents. There was a lot of overblown language and official-sounding jargon, but it all boiled down to just one thing. St Sebastian’s orphanage was to be closed down in two weeks’ time and that was the local council’s final decision. There was mention of missed performance targets and restructuring of local childcare provision but these just sounded like excuses to Otto. They were going to close HIS orphanage, and he had just a fortnight to persuade them otherwise.

    He had arrived at St Sebastian’s twelve years before, left in a cradle on the doorstep in the middle of the night with no form of identification except a single piece of white card with the handwritten name Otto Malpense on it. The staff of the orphanage were used to dealing with these kinds of situations and had gone through the usual motions of reporting the nocturnal delivery to the police in the hope that they might be able to track down Otto’s parents. The search, however, had proved fruitless; there was not a trace to be found of whoever had abandoned Otto on that dark, stormy night. So, there being no other place for him, the strange little white-haired baby had been taken in and St Sebastian’s had become his new home.
    When Otto first arrived there, St Sebastian’s was a long way from being the most well-staffed or -equipped orphanage in London. It had been built over one hundred and fifty years previously and the tired old house showed many scars from its long years of busy occupation. Its ornate facsade was covered in ivy and the roof had clearly been patched many times over with whatever materials were immediately to hand. The interior of the building had just as many problems. The water pipes clanked and rumbled, the floors were uneven and creaky and it was too big and old to really keep it thoroughly clean so dust seemed to gather everywhere. The children’s dormitories were old-fashioned; each lined with steel-framed bunk beds and served by only one cramped, rusty bathroom for every twenty or thirty children. Many of the older sections of the building had proved to be too expensive to renovate over the years and so there were what seemed like miles of abandoned, dusty corridors that were rarely, if ever, used by anyone. Somehow St Sebastian’s had managed to avoid closure over the years, possibly because it was one of the only orphanages left in the area. Nevertheless, the money available to the orphanage had dwindled as the years went by and this had led to the accelerated decline of the grand old building. Indeed, the staff seemed to spend as much time carrying out makeshift repairs as they did looking after the children.
    At first Otto had seemed to be quite a normal child, with the obvious exception of his unusually coloured hair, but as he got slightly older people had started to notice that there was something a little bit odd about him. At the age of three he taught himself to read. He sat on the floor of the common room staring for hours at several of the books that older children had left lying around, his face frozen in a look of intense concentration. The staff had thought this was highly amusing.
    ‘Look at him! He looks just like he’s reading,’ one of the staff would say.
    ‘Oh, he’s just copying what the other children do,’ another would reply.
    But he wasn’t just imitating what he had seen other people do. As he sat staring at the letters on the page it was almost as if his brain just understood them. At first the words had meant nothing to him, but as he stared at the pages their meaning became clearer and clearer to him, as if the knowledge was somehow just growing in his head. Not only that but