Chapter 9 #3
Far off, a bell began to toll.
I pressed my hands on the desk, trying to hold myself upright, and knocked over the box of chalk.
White pieces tumbled out, shattering on the floor and bursting apart. I knelt to gather them, though my hands shook.
The door creaked open. Rosie’s voice drifted in. “Miss Wendy? You all right? The children said there was a man outside. Samuel’s on his way to check.”
“Thank you, Rosie. I just needed a small break.” We all did.
She stepped closer, finding me hunched over scattered chalk. “You shouldn’t be on the floor,” she said gently. “I’ll fetch the broom.”
“No, I’ll do it. Where can I find the broom and dustpan?”
“Library,” she replied. “I was tidying in there earlier.”
A shriek erupted from the dining room. Then the unmistakable thud of a ball bouncing and rolling.
“Tommy hit me!” Elsie shouted.
Rosie spun toward the hallway. “All of you! None of that in the house! Tommy, no hitting Elsie. Or anyone, for that matter!”
Silence fell behind her, brief and trembling.
I was left alone with chalk dust clinging to my fingers.
The stairwell groaned beneath my feet. Each step a reminder that Eleanor had just offered me a chance to leave my past, my childhood home, behind and move in here to be near the children.
But part of that past had been standing outside moments ago.
When I reached the landing, I found the library door ajar.
I could smell the paper before I pushed it open. The aged sweetness of old pages and ink.
I stepped inside. Books towered in uneven rows. Spines bowed with years of handling. Dust motes spun in the dim light.
The broom leaned against the far wall. Before I reached for it, something caught my eye, a slim volume half buried beneath a scatter of books on a table.
Its cover was familiar in the way heartbreak is familiar.
Green cloth. Gold lettering.
PETER AND WENDY
Our names. Forever entwined.
I thought I had gotten rid of all of these copies, but I knew it was impossible, in a way, to completely sever my name from his. We had been bonded forever in ink.
I moved toward the book.
I had read it years ago, Mr. Barrie’s fictionalized version of what happened to me and my brothers. What he wrote was a story of delight and fancy. What he left out were the missing children, their dried-up bodies appearing in Kensington Gardens weeks after they’d vanished.
The cover flew open. Pages turned and flipped by themselves, until the book settled open on a page.
Air escaped my lungs.
No windows were open. There was no breeze coming in from any corner. The air was still.
I stepped toward the table and reached out. The book was old, its spine cracked, its edges feathered with use.
It had settled on a chapter title: The Flight.
The illustration, nearly faded, showed a boy suspended in midair. His shadow stretched unnaturally long beneath him, curling at the edges.
Beneath him, three children leaned out of an open window, their faces wonderstruck. So na?ve as to what he really was. All of them unaware of how easily a childhood wish could become a snare.
I lowered my gaze to the line beneath the image: “Second to the right, and straight on till morning.”
My fingertips brushed the page. It was warm, as if someone had just been holding it.
Wendy.
His voice.
Lights flickered overhead.
Shadows shifted in the corners. Dust swirled. Pages fluttered on shelves, like wings awakening.
Something brushed against my shoulder. Something else seized in my chest. It felt like the entirety of the floor in the library were tiling.
I spun around, expecting to find someone there, but all I saw were shelves and books and the ladder, its wheels crooked on the rail.
When I looked back at the table, the pages flipped again. A new chapter heading waited.
Wendy Returns
My legs nearly gave out.
That chapter did not exist. Not in Mr. Barrie’s story. I knew each and every word of this book. I’d committed it to heart, and this chapter was not there.
In the margin, in dark ink:
Every story is a doorway. Some cannot be closed.
Light trembled overhead. Dimmed. Then steadied.
The pages turned again, fluttering, flipping, then settling near the end of the book.
My eyes found a line:
When you return, you will be yourself again.
The letters seemed to rearrange themselves. Ink bled, spreading across the page.
When you return, I will never allow you to leave again.
The sound that escaped me wasn’t a scream. It was smaller than that. The sound of remembering things I had forced myself to forget.
Lights flickered again, longer this time.
I stumbled back. My skirt brushed the ladder. Its hinges groaned.
Wendy.
My legs gave out. I caught myself on the ladder, fingers white around the rung.
I wanted to scream. to tell him to stop, to leave me alone, but I knew he wouldn’t. And so I said nothing. I had to figure this out with them, my brothers. I knew he was getting stronger each day, and we had to stop him before he did something awful.
Dust stirred. Another page loosened from the book. It rose, weightless, and drifted through the air like a feather and landed at my feet.
The house shook and from downstairs I heard screams.
I was already moving down the stairs, hands skimming the banister. Feet slipping on the runner. Screams. More screams. Shrieks.
Willie lay crumpled at the foot of the stairs.
Not fallen. Broken. The front hall was too small for what lay in it.
His limbs were bent at wrong angles, folded, twisted, as if someone had forced them past where joints were meant to go. One arm pinned beneath him.
A splintered femur bone jutted out of his leg.
His head lolled to one side, blood trickling from his nose and sliding into his hair.
The children had gathered at the threshold but would not cross. Florence stood with her hands over her mouth, silent. George stared at the walls as if reciting something to himself. Agnes cried silently, and Lillian’s face was pressed into her shoulder. No one moved.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall …
My stomach heaved. Black feathers drifted all around him. Around all of us, like confetti.
Some landed in his blood and clung there, sticking to the floor.
My legs buckled. And my knees hit the floor before I realized I’d fallen. Shock shooting up through my legs.
“Rosie! Eleanor! Someone, call the doctor!”
He did this to you. His sick game. He’s a monster.
Heads pressed into my shoulders. Trembling arms threw themselves around my neck. Cries were muffled on my sleeve.
“Willie …” small voices said.
“Willie …” others cried.
Someone was saying my name. I couldn’t answer.
I couldn’t do anything but kneel there, frozen.
“Willie,” I whispered, leaning close. “Can you hear me? Love, it’s Wendy. We’re going to get you help. Please. Hold on.”
His lashes fluttered. Lips parted.
Please. Please don’t die. Children aren’t supposed to die.
Scattered words escaped him.
“Come …”
“Away …”
His gaze drifted past me. Past the staircase. Past the ceiling. Past the house itself. His mouth softened into a smile. Then his eyes rolled back.
“Willie!” I pressed my hand to his chest. His heart still beat, faint, fluttering, but there. “He’s alive! He’s still alive! Rosie! Samuel! Please, someone help!”
A cold gust knifed through the hallway. Feathers scattered and spiraled into a storm. They lifted and circled over his broken body.
Then Rosie was there, knees hitting the floor beside us. “Dear Lord,” she breathed. Her eyes swept the room. Children. Feathers. Blood.
Agnes was closer now, a fistful of feathers clutched tight in her small hand. Her eyes wide. Unblinking. Her face drained of color.
“He told me to go outside and gather them,” she whispered. “He said they would help Willie fly.”
Lillian sobbed into my shoulder.
Rosie pressed her fingers to Willie’s wrist. Waited. Her face shifted, not blank, but urgent.
Her hands moved with practiced calm, checking his neck, his spine. “Don’t move him. Don’t touch him.”
Somewhere beyond the house a bell tolled.
Eleanor appeared in the doorway, rigid, pale, hand clamped over her mouth. Behind her came the nursemaid, Lucy, Hannah, Samuel. Everyone wide-eyed. Shaking.
“Get them out,” Eleanor choked. “All of them.”
The doctor was on his way, Eleanor said, and she sent Samuel outside to anticipate his approach.
Rosie and the girls herded the children away, voices trembling. They clung to each other, crying, hiccupping, upstairs to their rooms.
Only Willie remained here with me. Still.
His last words. Come away.
Peter was keeping one of his many promises to me.
If you ever leave me, I will tear through everything you love to find you.
I wept. I cried for Willie. I cried for me. I cried for all of those little boys I could not save.
Eleanor put a hand over mine. Cold. Shaking.
“He’ll be fine,” she whispered.
“It’s my fault.” The words scraped out of me. “I did this. I—”
“My darling, no. This is no one’s fault.”
Eleanor caught my shoulders, held me firm. Her breath trembled, but her gaze didn’t waver. “This is certainly not your fault.”
She eased back, hands still on my shoulders, studying me, really studying me, as if memorizing the shape of me before the next blow came.
“The constable is on his way.” Her voice dipped.
I don’t understand. Why is the constable coming … why … I didn’t do this. I told you all the truth. I told you all the names of the boys.
Wendy Darling, always spinning tales …
“Wendy, do you understand? I’m trying to protect you. The doctor is on his way. I had to. The constable will come, will see that this was a dreadful accident, and he will leave. But he will be here and he will be asking questions, and you need to go. Now.”
I understood. The telephone rang from her office, sharp as a crack, and she retreated to answer it.
The wail of the constable’s car rose in the distance.
I raced to my classroom, snatched my satchel from its hook, and slipped out the back door before the siren reached the street.
Cold hit me hard, but I moved fast.
I thought about the constable, and I wondered what he would see and say. I wondered if he knew that I worked here. That should be no crime. But of course … they always considered me a suspect, that I had something to do with all the boys who disappeared, who were found dead.
I stopped and looked at the house. Something stirred in an upstairs window.
A shadow. Not moving. Not hiding. Simply watching.
Last time, when I was young, I didn’t fight so much as flee, but this time, I would do all that I could to stop him.
“Leave them alone,” I said to the thing in the window.
I hoped that when I returned in the morning, he had not hurt another child … or taken another one.