Chapter 7
CHAPTER
John
THE BABY WAS crying. Not from hunger. Not from dampness.
Judith had checked twice. Moving with that slow, shaky exhaustion that only a new mother knows, before she finally collapsed into bed.
But the crying didn’t stop.
It remained, a steady tempo. Pressing on, then thinning for a few minutes before it rose sharp and then deepened.
Our baby, Margot, just a few months old.
Her cry stretched itself into something that sounded older than a child. The way she shrieked, it didn’t feel normal.
It gave me a chill, that raw and painful cry.
“Judith,” I whispered. Guilt pricked me, not wanting to wake her, but still needing her to know I would check on the baby. “I’ll go to Margot.” I brushed a kiss on Judith’s brow.
I swung my legs from the bed, the floorboards cold.
“Margot,” I said, her name tumbling out of my mouth before I reached her door.
The gaslight in the hallway shook.
“Just frightened,” I said. “Poor darling.” That’s what it was. She woke with a fright and found herself alone in the dark.
“On my way, darling.”
Her wail shifted. It pierced the walls and threaded through the beams and pipes of this house, and for a moment it seemed as if all of the portraits along the hallway shook with the force of her cry.
Partway down the hall I paused. The cold bit my nose and cheeks. I turned around, half expecting to find the window wide open, but it wasn’t. It was closed and latched. A wreath made of hawthorn and St. John’s wort hung just above.
Judith had seemed displeased when she removed the tissue paper from the box to discover it.
“That’s quite beautiful,” I said. “Very thoughtful of Wendy.”
She gave me a forced smile, “And look, with instruction as to where she wants us to hang it.”
I slipped the letter from the package before Judith could read it. Wendy had a way with worry that made others … uncomfortable, but that I understood.
John, please hang this in the hallway by the window. Hawthorn and St. John’s wort to protect the baby. This will keep it away.
Even after all of these years she worried.
Every now and again Michael and I would receive little packages in the mail, pots of honey, iron keys.
Goodness knows we each had horseshoes sent to use on several occasions.
But even if a part of me thought these superstitions silly, I never once failed to put them to use.
Just in case.
The flame flickered, sending a strip of shadow across the ceiling. I steadied myself against the wall.
Margot’s cry rose and dipped, this strange sort of warbling that did not sound at all like the wail of a baby. The crying fractured, echoing strangely, once above me, once below, somehow close and impossibly distant.
A trick of this old house. Maybe.
The crying stopped.
Another noise. Thin. Fluttering. Leaves rustling the wind. Wings flapping, finding their way.
And then, as if startled by something, the baby—a fierce cry erupted.
I pushed forward.
The floor groaning beneath my feet, the creaks not in step with my movements, instead like a child beating erratically on a drum.
A small draft stirred a mix of smells. Ones that did not belong here.
I stopped, my limbs confused by those scents that didn’t belong within the walls of a home.
It smelled not just like outside, but like a forest pounded by rain. Wet leaves. Rain sliding off gigantic palm leaves.
This wasn’t the smell of London in fall or even spring. This was the sense of a place so far away it didn’t even have a name. We just called it that Far Place.
The baby’s cries reached me in the dark, ivy weaving itself through my fingers and yanking me back.
I shut my eyes and pressed my palms against them. No, that was a long time ago, but still … I slipped into my thoughts.
Wendy, her eyes affright.
“John …” Her eyes flicked from my hands back to my face. “Whose blood is that?”
I looked at my palms in the dark hallway.
“We were hunting boar, and Peter pointed and said: ‘There, quick!’ I drew my arrow. I … I didn’t … it was Tootles behind the bush. I listened to Peter. I trusted him.”
“Colic,” I said to myself. Margot has colic. She’s fine. Just needs her father.
Deep within my ribs I felt something shuddering, dislodging itself: fear.
It had snatched me and my siblings from our nursery, and it dropped us so very far away from home. It promised us a childhood of laughter, games, toys, and sweets.
Within days, I believed we’d die there.
The doorknob to Margot’s nursery felt hot in my palm. I pushed it open. The door sighed. Hinges squealed.
Moonlight washed the room in silver. Dark shadows rose in corners.
“Margot,” I whispered. “Papa’s here.”
The room was quiet. Still.
I approached her crib, and there she slumbered. Her tiny fists tucked beneath her cheeks. Her chest slowly rising and falling.
I pressed my hand gently on top of her head. Her hair so silky and fine. She was deep asleep.
But … I’d heard her crying?
A single floorboard moaned behind me. That smell returned. Pine sap. Wet leaves. Damp soil, and something else … harsh and coppery.
I turned around and flinched, startled by the sight of myself. My reflection looking back at me from a mirror.
Its frame, oval and chestnut, was simple and ordinary, but tonight, in this light, it seemed out of place. The surface wavering, as a breeze rushing over a body of water.
Behind me, in the mirror, I could see the entirety of Margot’s room. From the curtains it seemed as if a form emerged.
“Who’s there?” I shouted.
Laughter. Soft. Childlike.
The room was quiet. I searched behind the curtains. I crouched beside the crib. There was nothing.
Perhaps I was dreaming, I thought. Dreaming of her crying. Dreaming of all of this.
I reached for the doorknob to return to bed, and then I heard it.
A child’s whisper. Thin and singsong.
It was coming from that oval shape.
I returned to the mirror, and in that surface, I saw a streak of black unraveling itself from the edges of the mirror.
Peter, Peter, shadow eater.
There was no one who lived on this earth besides me and my siblings who should know those words.
Wendy said the wards would work, just in case, and here I was … just in case. Iron above our front door. Wreaths made of wild herbs, those which it detested. But still—it made its way back.
“This is impossible …”
I had seen her drag a blade across his neck. Blood splattered onto the forest floor in sheets. He collapsed to his knees and toppled over. Frantic fingers clawing at the widening gash as though he could put himself back together.
Her face had gone white. Her eyes vacant. Unreachable.
“Wendy, give me the knife.”
She stood there, trembling. Holding the blade out. Her fingers slick with blood.
My gaze followed hers, to Roger.
Peter’s blood continued to pour. Pooling. His skin shifting from green to black.
“Wendy, give it to me.”
Quiet tears lined her face. We both looked down to find what had become of Peter, a heap of bone and blood and leaves.
“John …” her voice broke. “How did I allow myself to fall …”
“Don’t blame yourself. He tricked you. He wore a boy’s mask. A boy’s promise. He lied because all he wanted was to steal your happiness, to make himself whole while making you hollow.”
Above us a crow cawed. And another.
I took the knife from her and flung it deep into the forest. “We have to go.” I took her hand, reached for Michael, and the three of us ran, not looking back.
The shadow unraveled across the mirror’s surface. Unfurling like a flag. A black smear loosening from the corners of the glass. It curled, recoiled, like a ribbon of smoke trapped under ice. It slid quickly in nervous spirals. Movements defying the rules of light.
I shook my head no, again and again, because he could not be here. I had seen him die.
But here he was. In my infant daughter’s bedroom.
Not behind me, but there, inside the glass.
A boy with stars burning in his eyes. His red mouth curved into a smile too bright, too sweet, a child’s grin mocking the whole of innocence.
The taste of rotting leaves and dead flesh filled my mouth. My stomach turned.
Peter.
That name was an abomination of time and memory.
His eyes glimmered like winter stars, his lips still set in that dreadful, perfect smile.
“I’m … sleeping. A nightmare,” I stammered.
He stepped through the mirror as if stepping through a curtain.
“Are you dreaming, John? Are you dreaming of me?” He tilted his head, inspecting me. Studying me. His eyes piercing.
He looked of ruin and remembrance. Dressed in green.
Leaves that had died long ago covered his clothes.
Each one shivered faintly against him, their edges quaking and clicking and snapping like insects pinned to his sleeves and trouser legs.
They lifted in faint, restless tremors. Fluttering.
Though no wind blew. It was as if each leaf attached to him breathed on its own.
Light bent around him, and the black shape that trailed him, that dreaded shadow, stood taller than me, as tall as the room, brushing against the ceiling.
Now I understood with a clarity that shocked me cold. The past had not just been real.
It was here.
His hair was the glow of embers in a dying fire.
His face was beautiful but wrong. Sharp, delicate features, and with fine white teeth, of which his incisors tapered into slight points, strong enough to bite clean through raw meat.
My face flashed hot. This was not a little boy. This was madness and monstrosity that relished our pain.
Every time I had cried, Peter laughed. Every time I begged him, please, no more adventures, we went, and for every game we played we returned missing another child, his body left to rot in a cavern, a marsh, or heaved onto a canoe and rolled out into the sea.
Once I tried to go back, to give one of the boys a proper burial, but I found him surrounded by marsh pigs. Nothing left but crunched-up bone.