Chapter 2 #2
I stood beside my desk and counted them off as they filed past.
“Florence. George. Harold. Lillian. William. Tom. Frederick. Agnes. David. Elsie. Edgar. Percy. Mabel. Henry. Grace. Stanley. May. Albert. Gladys …”
The room quieted as other parts of the house grew louder. Pots clattering in the kitchen. Distant footsteps. More children’s chatter. One name was left to be called.
When I turned, I found Willie still seated. Shoulders hunched.
“What’s the matter? Worried Rosie’s still cross with you for leaping from the stairs?”
He shrugged.
Oh dear. He is upset about something.
I crossed over and took a seat beside him. The chair creaked beneath me. I noticed fresh initials gouged into the desk. I chose to ignore them, as I did small rebellions. Scolding children only made for unhappy adults.
“My father said he’d write,” Willie muttered. “It’s been three weeks since he left for Belgium.”
I drew a deep breath. “I’m sure he meant to.” But my heart ached with a truth I didn’t want to think about.
Willie sniffled, rubbed his sleeve under his nose. “I even miss the twins, my baby sisters.”
“Your mother must speak of you to them all of the time.”
His chin trembled. “Mum said there wasn’t enough food for all of us after Father left to fight.”
And that’s why Willie came to us two months ago.
“We’ll keep you fed and safe. That’s my promise.”
He gave a small nod. “I’m twelve. I hear boys go to war at fourteen. That’s not far off.”
I cleared my throat. “Let’s hope this terrible business is over by then.”
“Why don’t you live here, Miss Wendy?”
My mouth opened before I could think. “I used to.”
His eyes lifted. Curious. “You did?”
“A long time ago.”
“Why don’t you now?”
I looked around the classroom. Strange to think I’d been Willie’s age when I first came here. I’d spent hours in this room, reading, writing stories, and staring out that window.
“I grew up,” I said.
That was partly true.
He swallowed. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” he whispered. “Lots of noises at night.”
I lowered my voice. A secret between us. “I get frightened at night too. I sleep with the lamps on.”
His eyes widened. “You do?”
“Always.”
Light from the window shivered. For the briefest moment, I thought I heard it again, that faint, deliberate tap from the kitchen this morning.
“Told you,” Willie murmured. “There’s always funny noises around here.”
“We mustn’t give things that frighten us too much power,” I said.
“What do you mean?” His small brows knitted together.
I glanced at the trembling window. “Try your best to ignore the scary thing.”
Above us, a crash. I flinched.
Willie startled upright. “Wasn’t me!”
Another sound followed. I glanced toward the ceiling. Something scraped above. Quick. Skittering. Beneath it, the unmistakable flutter of wings.
I rose at once, heart knocking against my ribs. I kept my voice steady, because that’s what adults are supposed to do in times like these, act brave for the little ones.
“Come now. Let’s get you to Rosie. Then I’ll see to whatever that is.”
We hurry down the corridor. The din grew louder with every step, clattering spoons, shrill giggles, the familiar chaos of children eating.
Inside the dining room, it seemed like none of them heard the commotion above.
“Wasn’t me,” Willie said to Rosie.
She gathered him in her arms. “Oh, I know it wasn’t you, love.” She smoothed his hair.
“What do you think that was?” I asked quietly.
Rosie’s brow tightened. “Not sure at all.”
I nodded and began to cross the room, but something flickered at the edge of my sight. A thin streak. Black. A shadow slithering across the far wall.
I scanned the room. Children seated. Bowls in front of them. Spoons in hands. No one standing to cast such a shape.
When I looked back, the dark shape was gone. A trick of the gaslight, surely.
Then I heard something rise from the noise of children eating. A low murmur threading between the clinking of cutlery and laughter.
A chant.
I paused. Listened.
The air shifted. Warmer. Thicker.
The voices grew clearer. Several children chanting in unison. Singsong and hollow:
And all alone by myself I go,
With none to tell me what to do,
All alone beside the stream,
Into the Land of Nod I dream.
For an instant, I felt it again, that iced breath on my cheek from that raven so long ago.
I didn’t teach them that song. In fact, I don’t even know where any of them had learned that poem. It seemed much too adult for children. Maybe one of the older ones had heard it at home. Memorized it and taught the others?
“Who taught you that poem?”
They burst into laughter.
“The Land of Nod,” by Robert Louis Stevenson. The same man who wrote about pirates and buried treasure and maps. Yet, he’d also written that poem, “The Land of Nod,” about the places children travel to in dreams.
Across the table, Agnes stared at me. Wide-eyed. Stunned. As if she’d woken up from a dream. She leaned close to Willie and whispered something, her hand shielding her lips.
“What is it?” I pressed.
Agnes hesitated. “He told us not to tell.”
He.
Before I could ask, another crash echoed from above. Samuel shouting. Glass shattering, as though being swept into a bucket.
My breath caught. A warning screamed through me.
A window.
I turned and charged toward the stairs. The stairs groaned beneath my feet as I climbed.
I reached the second floor, library to my left, as well as the boys’ quarters. Girls’ quarters to my right.
“Samuel?” My voice came out breathless.
“Upstairs,” he called back. Heavy. Unsettled.
Upstairs. Where Eleanor had asked me to move into this morning. I hesitated, not wanting to climb farther, but still, I did.
Eleanor inside the doorway of what would be my new bedroom. She held a handkerchief to her nose, knuckles white, shoulders trembling.
Samuel stood in the center of the room, pail in one hand, mop in the other. Motionless. As though afraid to take another step.
The window gaped like a broken mouth.
Shards of glass were strewn across the floor, glittering red.
Black feathers clung to the baseboards in sodden clumps.
And, on the far wall, a smear of blood, dragged downward in an uneven line. Thick at the top. Thin as a thread at the bottom.
I couldn’t move.
A bird. A bird had flown into the window, punched through the glass and slammed into the wall. That was the only explanation. Birds did this sometimes. That’s what Eleanor said.
But I had never seen a bird punch through the window like this.
My throat closed around a cry I couldn’t find.
Eleanor reached for me with a trembling hand. “We’re safe, Wendy. Please don’t tell the children.”
I nodded, but my gaze stayed fixed on the shattered window.
Cold wind pressed through the jagged frame, stirring a single feather near my boot.
We descended together.
My feet obeyed, but part of me remained in that room, staring at that window, wondering what else could come through it.
By the second landing, my breath had steadied. My hands had not. My fingers trembled in the folds of my skirt, my mind still assembling that image: bloodstained feathers, a twisted thing of shredded flesh crumbled in the corner of the room.
“When I first came here as a child,” I murmured half to myself, “a bird did this. Flew straight into the window. You said …”
“Mistaking glass for sky,” Eleanor finished.
The memory sharpens.
Nighttime. A dull thud. A burst of feathers. And me, racing barefoot through the halls, until I reached Eleanor. Her arms open to receive me.
“He’s coming to get me!”
“No one’s coming to get you,” she’d reassured.
I slept in a cot in the library closet for the rest of my time here. For years, I was too afraid to sleep in a room with windows.
“They’re just restless things,” Eleanor said now, though I wasn’t sure if she meant the birds or the memories.
“How does a bird do that?”
At the door, Eleanor studied me. “It’s just a terrible accident.”
“Just like in the book? A large black crow?”
Eleanor pushed open the door to her office. “That …” She paused. “That was not an accident.” Her voice dropped. “And you must learn to stop living in the past.”
I followed her inside. “This morning, I found Agnes burying a bird skull beneath the elm tree.”
“Childhood games,” Eleanor said, lowering herself into the chair behind her desk. She cleared her throat. “Are you still certain about the hospital?”
“Yes.”
Yes, because I knew what it was to return from a foreign place broken in ways no one could see. And maybe I could provide some small comfort because I understood, in my own way, what they must be going through.
The afternoon’s arithmetic lesson was meant to be easy. Something steady before the church bells began again, tolling for boys sent off to war.
I drew neat columns across the blackboard and then faced the room.
Rows of bowed heads bent. Pencils whispering in small, perfect unison. The rhythm soothed me, finally, something ordinary after a day streaked in darkness.
Except for Willie, who held a pen instead.
He sat crooked in his seat, shoulders hunched, as if trying to fold himself into the desk. His tongue pressed at the corner of his mouth, deep in concentration. Not on arithmetic. On a scrap of paper.
“Willie,” I said, approaching. “Numbers, not pictures.” Dried ink speckled his fingers.
I expected the unusual, houses, clouds, the wanderings of a child’s mind. But the image stopped me midstep.
A boy with wings. Not white. Black and jointed, like an insect’s. And the face, all sharp angles, as if carved with a knife rather than drawn with ink.
Willie’s pen trembled, leaving a dark stream along the paper’s edge.
“Who is he?” I asked.
Willie looked up. His brown eyes were solemn. Steady. “He told me not to say.”
The same words Agnes had used.
I glanced across the room and found her watching us through the curtain of her golden hair. Her pencil hovered midair.
“Your numbers, Agnes.”
Her eyes returned to the page.
A draft slipped beneath the window. Then a metallic sigh, followed by a click. The upper sash dropped several inches on its own.
Every eye in the room fixed on the window.
A single feather drifted through the gap. Black. It wavered in the air before landing on my lesson book.
Lillian placed a hand over her mouth, stifling a laugh.
My breath snagged.
What is happening?
My thoughts stumbled over themselves. Bird skulls. A dead bird outside the kitchen door. A bird crashing through an upstairs window. Now this.
I crossed to the window and shut it, fastening the latch until the metal bit into my thumb.
When I reached for the feather, it felt like ice between my fingers. I set the feather on my desk. I would deal with it later.
“Eyes on your work,” I said.
Chairs shifted. Creaked.
The silver pocket watch at my desk clicked steadily away.
Beyond the glass, fog thickened, swallowing the lawn, the brick fence, all of London.
I turned to the blackboard and pressed a piece of chalk against the surface. A rasp. Once. Twice. Then I stopped.
A sound bled through the wall. Not the rush of wind. A whisper. A child’s voice, lilting and sure:
He can fly.
I glanced over my shoulder.
Every head remained bowed. Every pencil midstroke. The voice hadn’t come from any of them. It came from somewhere else.
The sound coiled through me, familiar as an old dream clawing its way up from the dark. I thought of his voice. That voice in the trees. That voice that promised me he’d always hold on to me, and he’d never let me fall. That voice. The very well who’d later commanded me to jump.
“Books away,” I managed. The words came out hollow. “Early recess.”
The children bolted for the door without asking why. Their laughter too high. Too sudden.
When they were gone, the quiet returned. Thick. Sentient.
Fog smothered the windows, swirling in ribbons.
The chalk in my hand split between my fingers. I opened my palm. White dust collected along my lifeline.
Then, a tap.
Soft. Deliberate.
Something was moving behind the blackboard. Tapping to gain my attention. But behind this wall there was nothing. Only brick, and then outside.
A sound unfurled, slow, rhythmic. The scrap and drag of wings against wood. Not frantic. Not trapped. Testing its boundaries. Learning its limits.
I stepped back. My heel skidded on the floorboards. My heart hammered against my ribs.
Another flutter. Then a tremor.
From inside the wall came a slow, rhythmic hum. A crystalline note, deep beneath the skin of the house. The beginning of a song I thought I’d forgotten long ago.
The house exhaled.
The blackboard rippled, its surface disturbed like a dark pool struck by a stone.
I backed toward the doorway, both hands pressed to my chest, as if commanding my heart to stay where it belonged.
Behind the wall, the sound intensified. Wings gathering. Stretching. Trying. Testing. Remembering how to fly.
The fog erased the world beyond.
And then, as quickly as they had begun, the noises ceased. I looked toward my desk, expecting to see the black feather. It was gone.
What remained was stranger. A thin scatter of tiny, sharp-edged glints, like powdered glass. They caught the dim light in quick silver flashes.
I stepped closer. Slowly. Reached out my hand.
Before my fingers could touch it, the shimmer shivered, dimmed, and slipped away, as though absorbed into the wood.
In its wake, the desk pulsed once. Faint as a heartbeat.
I pulled my hand back as if burned.
He was here. Not yet in the room. But close. Closer than he’d been in twelve years.