Chapter 4 #2
Roger stepped closer, lantern light trembling across his jaw. “We’ll fetch your brothers,” he said quietly. Fiercely. “And then you’ll say with me. Here, you can have whatever you want. The land. The sea. I’ll bring the sky down for you. I’ll give you everything.”
I’d fallen for this before. Promises from a boy that turned out to be lies. But from this boy … I believed him. Not because he seemed so sure of himself like the other, but because he seemed so sad at the possibility of me saying no to him. But I had to. I owed my brothers the safety of home.
Willie had said the name aloud.
And names were doors.
“Promise me something. Don’t ever say those words again. Not aloud. Not to anyone.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“It’s part of a story,” I said gently. “One I need to finish.”
He hesitated, then nodded, crossing his small hand over his chest. “I promise.”
“Good boy,” I said. “Now, run along back to Marigold House. It’s nearly dark and I’m sure they’re all searching for you.”
He grinned. Saluted. And then dashed off. Coat flaring behind him.
I remained beneath the gaslight, journal pressed tight against my chest.
I can hear Constable Finch’s voice.
“Were there other children there with you?”
The room had gone still.
My parents stood behind him, pale, rigid, while the other officers loomed nearby.
“Yes,” I said finally. “There were many children.”
“Do you remember their names?”
I reached for my journal. My finger brushed its edge, the leather worn smooth.
Father pinched the bridge of his nose the way he did when pain overtook him. Mother’s lips parted, then pressed shut.
“Their names?” Finch coaxed.
I flipped to the back of the journal, to the page where I had written them all. One by one.
I read.
“Tootles. Nibs. Slightly. Curly. The Twins. Stix and Patch. Moth. Cricket. Bram. Robin. Wren. Button. Chime.”
No one spoke.
Then it came. A single laugh. Low. Disbelieving.
They didn’t believe me. They were making fun of me.
Finch’s jaw flexed. “And where can we find these other children?”
“Through the gate in the South Flower Walk. In Kensington Gardens. Past the man with the balloons.”
A pause. He sighed. His boots struck the polished floor as he turned away.
The officers followed him out.
Only Father remained. He knelt before me.
“But those are their names,” I said.
“Constable Finch just wants to find those boys.”
“But they’re there,” I insisted. “Just past the gate. They’re waiting. They’re scared, that’s all. But maybe the constables can fetch them.”
He stood and crossed into the hall. The door remained slightly ajar.
Through the crack, their voices drifted.
“This many missing children,” Finch said. “Something grave and terrible is happening.”
“My daughter’s told you everything she knows,” Father answered. Clipped. Steady.
“It’s disturbing how much she thinks she knows,” Finch replied. “It may be childhood fancy, or something worse. I’ll recommend she be sent to Bethlem Royal Hospital for observation. Then afterward to St. Adalbert’s.”
“No,” my father snapped. “Absolutely not. She’s done nothing wrong.”
“You’re right,” Finch said, colder now. “Her parents have. The Magistrate’s Court will issue an order. She’ll be removed from the home and placed in Marigold House after she’s evaluated at Bethlem and they deem she’s safe enough to be around other children.”
My brothers spoke less and less of it until they said nothing at all. As if it had been a dream we’d shared once, and I alone refused to wake.
Sometimes I think it was because I wrote it down. Because I made it real. And what is written cannot die.
Maybe Mr. Barrie knew that too, and a year later he wrote his book.
Of course he couldn’t choose different names.
He had to choose ours. The Darling name.
My name. There was no escaping what had terrorized me, because it was everywhere, in the book, in the play, in every hand that applauded our suffering as fantasy.
They thought we were pretending. They thought we were playing a game. None of it was a game. It was our lives.
My house waited at the far end of the street. Bricks dulled by soot and ivy climbing the walls. The windows clouded by years of dust.
Father had nailed the nursery window shut the night we returned, sealing the room, and everything it once held. That chapter is over, he’d said. Not another word about it.
But chapters don’t always end so cleanly, and sometimes stories had a continuation, and I think that’s where I found myself now in this part of the story.
A faint light flickered in the window above the door. Behind the lace curtain something moved.
Peter, Peter, shadow eater.
“There’s more writing there,” I remember telling Roger. The script carved into the Black Rock continued on under water.
“I’ve never noticed that before. These words were left here by the people who lived on this island before all of us. They left this warning, but I don’t think Father knows about those words. I’ll tell him. We have to go. The sun is setting.”
Before I could knock, the front door opened.
Liza stood in the hall, dusting flour from her sleeves.
“How was the hospital?” she asked.
“Shocking. The ward was nearly full …”
“You look pale, love.”
“I’m just tired …” I hesitated. “Were you just upstairs?”
“You know I don’t go up there.”
It was true. She only visited with me in the evenings now, to make supper and to sit a while. She’d made a promise too, to my parents. They’d left her a small sum for my care. I’d told her she didn’t need to keep coming, but she insisted.
Liza followed as I made my way to the coat closet. She unpinned my hat, admiring the ribbon.
“Pretty,” she said. “I thought you didn’t like green anymore.”
“Lillian pinned that for me.”
“Such lovely children.”
Dinah barreled in, paws skidding across tiles. I bent to kiss the top of her head. She smelled bright and fresh, with a hint of coal dust.
Liza reached for my satchel. I shifted it out of reach.
“School papers,” I said.
“Michael’s enlisting this week.”
I froze.
I had known it was coming. But hearing it spoken aloud made it real. My baby brother, who lined up his toy soldiers on the windowsill at night playing at battle, would soon be going off to one.
“Margot’s getting big. Three months now. I know John and Judith would love a visit from you. And Margot to finally meet her aunt.”
“Oh …” I said. “Maybe soon. I just have a lot of work.”
“They’re your brothers, Wendy. All of you can’t keep going on like this, sidestepping one another. Especially now. Especially with Michael off soon.”
“I’ll write them soon,” I said.
“Wendy. Really? A letter?”
I sighed. Fine. “I’ll phone them soon.”
“Wash up,” Liza said briskly, still not pleased with my responses. “I’ll fix you a bowl.”
The sconce on the landing flickered as I climbed the stairs. The frosted glass pulsed, dim, then bright again.
The floor sighed beneath my feet. The carpet, once rose-colored, had faded to a gray. Beneath the worn pattern, faint petals still showed through.
My hand skimmed the wall, the paper cool and ridged beneath my fingers. I could almost feel the wall trembling with the memory of us, the rush of our feet. Our laughter finding itself into each room.
At the far end of the hall, another light trembled. First dim, then guttering, the same faltering buzz the bulb above Edward’s bed had made. I thought of the soldier in the hospital, standing in the corner. Asking for a name, and me begging him not to answer.
I moved down the long hall lined with photographs; their gilt frames dulled with age.
Mother and me by the pond at Hyde Park, her smile soft, mine uncertain.
Michael in his bonnet, a white blur on a picnic blanket in Kensington Gardens, eyes wide as coins.
All three of us once: John to one side, Michael to the other, my arms around Nana, our great shaggy guardian.
Her fur always smelled faintly of summer rain.
Then the wedding portrait. Mother radiant, clutching her flowers. Father tall, already beginning to stoop. Their eyes bright with belief in something that wouldn’t last.
After their funerals, I couldn’t bear these faces.
I would walk this hall in darkness, afraid the photographs might turn to look at me.
My brothers had been polite at the wakes. Dutiful. Distant. There was no mention of our childhood. No mention of the newspapers nor of any of the vanished or murdered children.
We mourned, then poured our grief away.
By day, I belonged to Marigold House, laughter, and books. By night, to this home, silent and shuttered.
At the end of the hall, something flickered. A shift at the edge of vision, like the brief flutter of a wing behind glass.
When I turned, nothing.
Only my own reflection, lengthening across the wall. I moved closer.
The nursery door waited at the far end, still sealed. The brass lock had dulled beneath a film of dust. The key was tucked safely in Father’s old desk, now mine. No one had entered our old room in years.
And yet, beneath the threshold, a pulse of light.
It quivered faintly, the color of candle flame seen through water. A ripple that breathed once, then vanished.
I held my breath. Listening.
The house exhaled around me: the tick of pipes, the distant groan of settling timber. But beneath it all, a sound too soft to name.
That room contained everything we had been. A history sealed in dust and quiet.
It was there John had lined dominoes again and again in perfect rows, toppling them just to hear them fall. It was there Michael had arranged his wooden soldiers by height and rank, the smallest ones always at the front, brave by necessity.
And it was there I’d sat between them, inventing stories so we wouldn’t hear the silence outside.
The flicker came again. Brighter this time. Then gone, as if it had blinked.
I stepped forward before I could stop myself.
The air smelled faintly of cedar and something older. Something metallic, like blood gone to rust.
My palm hovered above the knob. Cold radiated from the brass, deliberate and alive.
I thought of the soldier, Edward, how he had stood rigid in that corner, eyes unfocused, voice trembling. Caught between worlds.
I drew my hand back from the door, pulse quickening. The light beneath the threshold had vanished. But the air still shimmered with what it left behind.
The hallway dimmed.
Shadows gathered.
I stepped forward and pressed my palm to the door. The chill climbed my arm, not the cold of neglect but of something deeper. The wood was dry beneath my cheek when I leaned close, yet it pulsed faintly.
My heartbeat stumbled in time with it.
Thud. Pause. Thud.
I listened.
The silence beyond the door was too whole. Not emptiness, but it felt like something was listening back. Listening to me.
Then came the sound.
A click.
A whir.
A breath of air slipped through the keyhole, cool, sudden, brushing my cheek. The window at the end of the hall was shut, yet the draft carried the faint scent of salt. Of tide. Of sand.
The doorknob trembled.
Once.
Twice.
Then began to rattle with purpose, as if a hand on the other side had remembered how to turn it.
My pulse faltered.
The hairs along my arms lifted. Not in surprise. In recognition. This isn’t happening, I told myself. But I had stopped trusting denial years ago.
It had begun again.
Willie speaking that cursed name into the air.
Edward whispering to someone who wasn’t there.
And now, here, the echo finding its way back to me.
The air thickened. The light beneath the nursery door flared once, sudden, searing.
I shut my eyes and pressed my back against the opposite wall, forcing myself to breathe. I tried to recall Eleanor’s voice, the first night I arrived at Marigold House.
“Fear,” she had told me, “is just a story we tell ourselves. And stories can be changed.”
The rattling ceased.
In the hush that followed, something slid across the floorboards inside, soft, deliberate, like a child dragging a toy.
The light beneath the door blinked out.
And I was left in the dark, listening to the wind outside.
“Your food’s getting cold!” Liza’s voice rose from the stairwell, warm, ordinary. I blinked hard.
The hallway had returned to itself. Dim and still, the gaslight trembling in its glass. Yet something lingered. No scent. No sound. Just a feeling I couldn’t name.
I stepped sideways toward the stairs, my body unwilling to turn its back on the nursery door.
The movement was gone. But it had been there. And it remembered me. I stood a moment longer, listening to the silence. Then I went downstairs, knowing Liza was right. It was time I got in touch with my brothers.