Chapter 10
CHAPTER
I HIT THE WATER hard. Cold slapped the breath from my lungs.
I sank. Hair whipping around my face like tangled weeds. The world became a blur, and in that moment, I grew so tired and my limbs began to grow so still.
It was quiet here. Peaceful.
And then, hands.
He hooked his arms beneath mine and hauled me up through green light. We burst through the surface, both of us gasping, water splashing, kicking, coughing.
“I got you!” I heard him shout above it all … but … who was he?
He dragged me toward a slick black rock rising from the shallows. Its face gleaming like oil, like something alive.
We collapsed across it. He patted my back, hard. I vomited seawater. Cried, and shook. The world existed at an angle; it was cold and cruel. When I lifted my head, I saw words carved deep into the black stone. Sharp and jagged. Forced into the surface with fury.
I whispered them: “Peter, Peter, shadow …”
“Don’t say it,” he said.
The boy who saved me was lying on his back and looking up into the sky.
“That’s what he is,” he rasped. “That’s what he does.”
Long dark hair fell past his jaw in salt-stiffened tangles. A faded coat with brass buttons, sleeves rolled to the elbow. A dagger on his belt. A thin gold hoop in his ear, not the mark of a sailor, something worse.
When I realized who it was, I glanced back to the water, wondering if I should jump back into the sea.
He caught my movements. “Please don’t jump back in, or I’d just have to save you again.”
“You’re his son.”
“I do have a name.” He sat up, facing me. “Roger.”
I didn’t move. “I’m Wendy.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” he said. “My father’s not a monster. Nor am I.”
His hair clung to his forehead in wet strands. His eyes held that last feverish green of the sky.
“You don’t know anything about what he tells me.”
“I know he almost killed you,” he said. “And he’ll try to do it again.”
“It was … an accident.”
He arched an eyebrow. “An accident?”
“A game.”
Roger went still. His jaw tightened. “What an awful game to play.”
I was lying to myself, because I didn’t want to admit how bad it’d gotten. I didn’t want to admit how I feared every time he and all of the boys, and John and Michael, went off on “adventures.”
Why was it that they always returned without one or two of the boys?
Why was it that they returned covered in mud and grime, scrapes and deep cuts, and their eyes far and distant?
Each time they returned, it was as if another speck of them had been taken, stripped away.
And each meal was quieter, each bedtime a little more still, and the sparkle in their eyes faded more and more.
I lowered my voice. “Can’t he hear us here? What we say?”
“No, not out on the water. Not on the ship either. He can’t access any of our thoughts here or there.”
Roger reached for his belt and unhooked a dagger. He turned it over, offering me the hilt. It shimmered with tiny emeralds, each one catching the dying light.
I didn’t move.
“What do I want that for?”
“You have to kill him, Wendy.” His voice was flat. Certain. “If you don’t, the next time I find you out here it may be too late.”
My hands shook. “I can’t do that.”
“You can. You must.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Listen to me.” He leaned closer. “Don’t forget what I’m telling you, because it’s already happening. You’re forgetting who you are.”
I shook my head.
“Do you remember your mother?” he asked. “Your father?”
“Of course I do.”
“What do they look like?”
I laughed. Sharp. Defensive. “What a stupid question. Mother … she has …” I reached for an image. Searching. There was nothing.
“And your father? What does he look like?”
There was nothing there.
The dagger glinted between us. My hands were still shaking, not just from the cold water but something else.
“Do you remember where you’re from, Wendy?”
I looked at the sky, searching, for what …? Buildings. Yes. There were buildings there. A bell. A tower.
“London.”
“Good. You’re still there. Whatever you do, don’t forget. The unraveling starts in the forgetting.”
I stared at him, the boy who had dragged me from the mouth of death.
“Stab him in the heart and tell him he’s nothing. He’s only a story, one that feeds and lives off the lives of others.”
I stared at the dagger.
“To get back home,” he continued, “there’s a fork in the forest. A path overgrown with vines. If you look hard enough, you’ll find a great tree with a hollow in its trunk. Looks almost like a little house carved right into it. Follow that path. Keep walking. Don’t turn back.”
“What lived in there?”
He flashed a smile. “What lives in there, you mean.” The smile faded. “Don’t disturb it. They get angry. They don’t like children much.” He paused. “Just follow the path home.”
“What about you?” I whispered.
He faced the sea, where the waves hissed Peter’s name. The entirety of this place buzzed with him, was made of him.
“Forget me too. Forget all of us,” he said.
I had a thought. I don’t know why, but it felt like it was the first clear thought I had had in so long.
“You should come with me. When I leave.”
His mouth fell open, and he angled his head, as if he were hearing a song for the first time.
“Why would you offer that?” he asked, still surprised.
“Because this isn’t our home. Neither of us. And we deserve a proper home …”
When I returned to camp, Peter and my brothers embraced me. Peter told me how worried he was about me. He went on to tell the boys all about how I landed in the water. No one challenged him. Why would they? This was his world he forced us all to live in.
I tucked the boys in that night, and that’s when I noticed how Peter’s shadow curled around his body like a loyal animal.
As they slept, the sky burned green. Black feathers fell like rain, soft and weightless.
In my journal I wrote, furiously, about all that had happened. The water. Roger. The warning. I wrote and wrote, so I would not forget. Each word a stitch toward the murder I planned, and escape.
I almost didn’t come today.
The walk to the hospital felt longer than usual.
The streets were the same, the same gray buildings, the same gray sky, the same gray faces of people going about their gray lives, but something had shifted.
The shadows seemed darker, like dark black pools.
Every few feet the crows seemed to multiply, on rooftops, lampposts, and bare branches.
I was being watched. I knew it by the prickle at the back of my neck as if someone’s eyes were boring down on me.
But still, I had to be here, because the only one I could talk to about any of this was Edward.
He wouldn’t give me those looks of concern the doctors and nurses had given me once.
Or worse, a sneer of contempt like Constable Finch gave every time he saw me.
Edward wouldn’t ask me questions that were meant to lead me into another stream of thought.
Edward wouldn’t make me think that what I was saying held no weight and did not matter.
Because Edward did not talk, not at all.
The ward today was busier. New arrivals. Young men whose eyes had aged decades. Parts of them bandaged, wounds seeping through the fabric. Beatrice was assisting in surgery. I’d see her later. I nodded to the nurses and made my way to his room.
Edward lay as he always did. Still. Silent. Face turned toward the light.
But something was different.
I stopped at the foot of his bed. Studied him. Tried to name what had changed.
His color, maybe. He looked paler than before. Almost gray. There was something around his eyes, a darkness, a hollowing, as if the skin had thinned overnight.
“Edward, it’s Wendy. How are you feeling today?”
I moved closer. Sat in my chair and reached for his hand.
His fingers were cold. Ice cold, despite the warmth of the ward.
“Edward, can you hear me?”
Nothing. The same nothing as always. But it felt different now. Heavier. Like the silence was listening back.
I pulled my hand away. Rubbed my palms together to chase away the chill.
“I thought I’d read some Tennyson today,” I said. I stared at his chin, nose, mouth, waiting for movement, but there was none.
I turned the pages to “Sweet and Low.”
Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea
I paused and glanced at him. His lips were moving.
Maybe it was a twitch. Maybe it was a tremor. But I saw it, the faint motion of his mouth forming shapes around words.
“Edward?”
I leaned closer. My heart hammered against my ribs.
His lips moved again. Barely a whisper.
I bent until my ear was inches from him.
And I heard it, an exhale and with it came my name. Wendy …
I jerked back. The chair scraped against the floor.
“You hear me, Edward. Yes, it’s Wendy. I’m here.”
His eyes were still closed. His body was still motionless. But then … his lips curled at the corners. Just slightly. Just enough.
A smile.
But this was someone else’s smile. I knew that for certain. This was someone wearing Edward’s face and smiling at me.
I stood so fast the chair toppled behind me. My satchel fell, spilling books across the floor. I didn’t stop to pick them up.
Beatrice. I needed to get Beatrice. I can’t be here alone with him. Not again.
I walked, I didn’t run, couldn’t run. The nurses would ask questions.
I heard them before I looked. Squawking. Screeching. At the window I spotted two of them, then three. Black crows swooping across the sky.
And then the worse thought came to me: How long had he been listening?
The thimble. Roger. Everything I’d whispered to Edward in the dark, thinking no one else could hear.
Peter had heard it all.