Chapter 19 #3
They were Hands, indeed. Porcelain versions of the people who’d played in the Turning Trials.
“Time’s Trousers, this is a nightmare,” Mimi whispered. “Worse than spiders. So much worse…”
“Careful. Let’s keep walking,” said Seth, and we did, eyes on the dolls, expecting something to happen any second, but none of them moved.
None of them spoke. They just sat there, their painted eyes staring at nothing, their tiny hands frozen in gestures of pointing or waving or reaching for one another.
Some of them were broken—missing arms, cracked faces, heads turned backward on their necks. Some had fallen over and nobody had set them upright.
One cluster near the center of the room caught my eye. Twelve dolls arranged in a circle, their hands connected by thin red threads tied around their porcelain wrists. Their painted mouths were open. Singing…maybe.
Or screaming.
Nobody said another word until we made it out the door on the other side.
Time’s Teeth, it felt like I hadn’t breathed properly in years.
“That was…that was…” Levana kept shaking her head, unable to finish the sentence, but we all understood.
“Hurry up. Just-just hurry up, c’mon,” said Russ, waving for us to follow him down the narrow corridor, and we did.
But when I looked down at the seeker, I stopped again because it moved. Not gradually but fast, swung hard, almost ninety degrees, pointing to the left when there was nothing there but an old, cracked wall with a few pipes over it.
“It’s moving,” I said to nobody in particular.
“There. Over there,” March said, rising on his tiptoes as he looked ahead.
The tunnel forked again, and the left branch was different from any we’d taken so far. I kept my eye on the needle, and the closer we got to the corner, the more it vibrated. That was definitely our direction.
The copper pipes that lined the walls here hummed louder than anywhere else. One look up at the glass ceiling, and we all stopped once more as if by a press of a button.
This time, we were standing below a forest. The roots of the trees spreading over the other side of the glass looked real, but they couldn’t have been. Their branches were heavy with something that glinted in the amber light—not leaves but silverware.
Spoons and forks and knives hanging on branches like fruit, and between them, lanterns, dozens of them, casting a warm golden glow.
Every single cell in my body seemed to implode at the same second. I was floating on air, undone, even though my feet were firmly against the ground.
Spoons growing on trees.
Rotten seconds.
A hat within a-hat within a-hat…
“Is that a table?” asked someone—and the sound of their voice pulled me out of my trance, knitted me back together somehow.
I blinked and I saw again—a table, indeed. A long table that slithered like a snake, with chairs at its sides, and from here we could just see that the top of it was full. Cups and saucers and teapots were just visible from the edge.
The room beneath it was larger than the others, though I couldn’t really see how far it went in the dark.
It had the same footprint as the forest above.
The walls were lined with shelves that held teapots and cups and saucers, dozens of them, all chipped and cracked and stained with something dark. Could have been oil.
On the far wall, a small stove sat cold and black. Beside it, a wooden cabinet with its doors hanging open, full of tea tins and sugar bowls and folded napkins gone yellow with age.
And in the corner of the room, under a section of the glass ceiling where the lantern light was warmest, was a boy in a hat.
I could have been floating again, and those words kept popping in my head, this time dictating what my eyes actually saw: a hat within a hat within a hat.
Right on the head of the boy.
He sat at a small, square table full of dishes and clocks in all shapes and sizes. He poured tea from a pot into a cup, and the motion was mechanical—smooth and precise and utterly empty. He poured, and then he set the pot down, and picked up a sugar bowl, and spooned sugar into the cup.
One spoonful. Two. Three.
He set the sugar away and picked up the cup. Sipped. Set it down.
Then he picked up the teapot again.
Nobody else made a single sound.
We could only see his profile, but his eyes were glassy and distant, and his skin had a waxy quality to it, like porcelain left out in the sun. The hat sat crooked on his head, and the silk clothes he wore were too bright, too colorful, wrong in a way I could feel but couldn’t name.
We made plenty of noise as we came through, but he didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge us at all. He just poured, spooned, sipped, and started again, and…
“Reggie,” Mimi breathed beside me, and the name came out broken.
The boy at the table didn’t react. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t even blink—pour-spoon-sip; pour-spoon-sip.
Then I heard it—a sound so quiet we’d missed it beneath the clink of porcelain and the hum of the pipes.
Breathing. Ragged, uneven breathing, coming from the other side of the room.
I turned and my heart about broke right out of my ribcage.
Silas was on the floor.