Chapter 16
CHAPTER
“SHE DOESN’T SPEAK much,” the nurse whispered, the next day, at Bethlem.
I wondered if she had been here then too, when I had. Same time. Same walls. We might have passed each other in these corridors, a woman and a girl whom no one believed.
The floors were scrubbed white, but the grout between the tiles had gone gray with years of mopped-over filth. The walls were bare. And the windows, so high, so narrow. Iron bars behind the glass. No one could reach them. No one could get in or out.
That was the point, I supposed.
Doors on either side stretched on forever, each one identical, each one hiding someone else’s nightmare. I kept my eyes forward. I didn’t want to know what sounds came from behind those doors. I didn’t want to imagine who else had been put away for telling the truth.
“She doesn’t get many visitors,” the nurse said. Her voice was flat, professional. “None, all the years I’ve been here.”
The door to her room opened with a metallic groan.
It was dim inside. A single window, glazed with decades of grime, looked out over a courtyard of skeletal trees. They looked like hands reaching up from the ground, fingers spread, grasping at nothing.
The bed was stripped. No sheets. No blankets. Just an iron frame and a mattress stained dark with years of sweat and sickness. A wooden chair sat in the corner. A chamber pot beneath it. Nothing that spoke of comfort or care.
But there were books.
Everywhere.
Stacked along the walls. Piled beneath the window. Arranged in careful rows across the floor. I stepped closer, and my breath caught.
The Little White Bird. A first edition, spine cracked from reading.
Peter and Wendy. Three copies. Four. The pages soft and worn.
Playbills from the stage production, edges yellowed, illustrations of a boy in green tights flying across a painted sky.
Pamphlets. Newspaper clippings. Penny-press illustrations of fairies and pirates and children who never grew up.
All of them about him.
Her shrine. Her obsession.
I picked up one of the books. The cover showed a boy silhouetted against the moon, arms spread wide, shadow stretching beneath him. Inside the front cover, in shaky handwriting that might once have been elegant:
He is real. He took my son. He will take others. Someone must stop him.
The same sentence, written over and over, filling the margins of every page. The words grew smaller as they went, cramped and desperate, as if she were running out of room. Running out of time. Running out of hope that anyone would ever read them.
I set the book down. My hands were shaking.
“She collected them,” the nurse said from the doorway.
“Every story. Every mention. The doctors thought it fed the delusion, wanted to take them away. But she …” The nurse paused.
Something flickered across her face. “She fought. Said they were evidence. Said someday someone would come looking for proof.”
I looked at John. At Michael. Their faces had gone pale.
“Mrs. Bell.” The nurse’s voice was too bright for this sad place. “You have some visitors. They are your …” She eyed us, uncertain.
“Niece and nephews,” Michael blurted.
He removed his hat and eased into the chair across from her. “Aunt Bell! It’s so good to see you …” His voice faltered as his gaze swept the room. Cracked walls, peeling plaster.
Mrs. Bell sat facing the window. Her hair hung long past her shoulders. Silvered and unwashed. Both of her hands rested in her lap. Her knuckles swollen. Her fingers raw and red. Nails bitten to nothing.
“That’s lovely,” the nurse said. “I’ll leave you then.”
The door to the room remained open. Sounds from the hall drifted in. A scream. A sob. Somewhere deep in the ward, a woman shrieking “Get them off me, get them off me” until her voice gave out.
Mrs. Bell’s eyes flicked to mine.
Green. They were so green.
She smiled. Not kind, nor cruel, but with the terrible certainty of someone who had been expecting visitors for a long time.
“Niece and nephews …” she said. The words slid out.
“I’m sorry for the deception,” I said.
Outside a crow cawed, then another. Black spots fluttering in the sky and gathering in the trees just outside the grimy glass.
“What do you need?” Sharp now. “Why have you come?”
Michael shifted forward. “Your son—”
“My son is dead!”
The last word landed like a door slamming shut.
Silence, for a long time. And then she spoke again. Her voice flattening into a story she seemed to have rehearsed a thousand times alone in this room, waiting for the right audience to share it with.
“I took him to Kensington Gardens. I was so tired. It’s hard work keeping a baby.
And he would just cry and cry. Colic, they said, but I knew it wasn’t colic.
I was just so tired. So we went for a walk, and we passed the Round Pond.
I set up his pram right next to a bench with this wonderful tree beside it.
He liked it there. Quiet with lovely shade.
The birds circling overhead,” her voice dropped.
“I was just so very tired. I closed my eyes. It felt like the first time I had ever truly slept. And when I woke …”
She stopped.
“He was gone. Instead of my baby I found a crow. This beastly thing. I’ve never seen a crow so large. It sat perched on the handle of the pram, just staring at me. I stood and screamed. He’s taken my baby! He’s taken my baby! So many people came. So many. But it didn’t matter. He was gone.”
Something brushed my ear. Cold. Weightless. Like a child’s breath learning how to speak.
Mrs. Bell leaned forward, motioning Michael closer. He hesitated, then leaned toward her.
“When a fairy takes a baby,” she whispered, “it’s no longer a baby. Not anymore. All of those human parts. Those are all gone. It becomes something else. Timeless. Enchanted.” Her lips pulled back from her teeth. “Dangerous.”
I stepped forward. “Mrs. Bell. What was your son’s name?”
“I told you. My son is dead. That thing that wears his face,” her voice cracked. “That’s not my son.”
She stared at me with a grief so old it had hardened into something else. Madness, or maybe it was clarity.
Her hand lifted, trembling. “You don’t understand,” she murmured. “You’re already his.” Her eyes dropped to the floor. “You and him. Your shadows are combining. One bleeding into the other.” She looked up, her eyes were wet. “There’s no separating you from him. Soon. It will all happen soon.”
She sat back. Her gaze drifted to the window, and she began to hum a soft lullaby.
“Mrs. Bell,” Michael said, trying to get her attention.
Nothing. She continued humming.
I looked down at my shadow. It bent wrong. Too long. Stretching toward the window as if it were reaching for something I couldn’t see.
“Mrs. Bell, please,” John pleaded. “A child’s life depends on this. We just need a name. That’s all we need.”
“Bell,” she murmured. “Bell. Bell. Bell.”
“Yes, Bell,” Michael said. “That’s his surname. What’s his Christian name?”
She began to rock. Humming louder now. Drowning us out.
“Please,” I begged. “Mrs. Bell.”
But she was gone. Trapped somewhere in her own mind.
Michael touched my arm. “Let’s go.”
“What do you mean, let’s go? Michael, we need this name. We only have two days to save Agnes.”
He looked at her, at this small woman. Face gaunt. Humming to no one. He shook his head. “I don’t think we’re going to get it from her. Maybe there’s another family member. If we don’t have much time, then we should be out there looking for who can help us.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to shake him. But I looked at her, this woman who spent all of these years alone. It was as there was no one even there right now. Nothing behind those eyes and nothing behind that humming.
Please, I thought. Wake up. Give us his name.
She turned to me. Her eyes had sunk deeper into her skull.
“Peter Gideon Bell.”
The window exploded.
Glass and iron burst inward in a shrieking wave, and through it came the birds. Black wings. Yellow beaks. Dozens of them. Then more, pouring through the shattered frame like smoke, like a swarm, like a curse brought to life.
They descended on her.
I saw the first beak strike, opening a red line from eye to jaw. I saw her hands come up, too slow. I saw the birds tear at her fingers, at her scalp. Ripping silver hair out in bloody clumps. Her mouth opened to scream, and a crow drove its beak into her tongue.
Her eyes, those green eyes, burst under stabbing beaks. Thick yellow and red liquid ran down her face.
She made a sound. Not a scream. Not anymore. A gurgle. Wet and full.
Then more birds, crowding in, fighting for space on her body. Pecking. Tearing. Shredding. Until there was no face left. Until there was nothing left that looked like a woman at all.
The nurse seized the door. Her face white. “Oh my God …”
Michael grabbed my hand and pulled.
We ran. Behind us, footsteps thundered, nurses, doctors, patients drawn by the screaming. All of them rushing toward Mrs. Bell’s room.
Where they would find what remained of her. Where they would never find her again.
We ran until my lungs burned. Until the screams faded behind us. Until Bethlem was just another gray building against a gray sky.
Michael bent over, hands on his knees. “We got it,” he said. “Wendy, we got his name.”
I opened my mouth to answer.
And tasted blood.
My hand rose to my face. My fingers came away red. From my eyes. From my ears. From somewhere deep inside that had already started to pay the price.
I looked down. My shadow was fading.
We had to move quickly.