Chapter 19 #2
Tin cups hung from hooks, six of them, rusted through. I brushed a finger against one of them, remembering how I used to serve the children pretend tea with these.
“She’s not here,” John said, standing beside a hammock. It sagged between two dead trees.
On what remained of a shelf, I found a row of figures whittled from sticks. Crude little men with acorn heads. The kind the boys made when they were bored.
One was missing an arm. Another had no face at all.
I called out. “Agnes? Honey, where are you?”
A blanket I had sewn from scraps of fabric rotted in the corner, covered in mud, and something dark that had dried long ago.
Beneath the wreckage of it all, there was something I mistook for stones. Small white shapes rising through the moss.
As my eyes adjusted, my stomach dropped.
Ribs.
Not animal ribs. Not chicken. Not boar. Not pig. Not even an adult.
These bones were narrow, delicate, no thicker than reeds. Pale arcs pushing up from the earth.
No.
Tiny arm bones lay half buried in the dirt. A skeletal hand, small, fingers curled inward, as if motioning Come here, let me tell you a secret.
I spun around. They were everywhere. Michael and John were both still, shocked by what we were standing on.
“A graveyard,” John said.
“Not a proper one. They weren’t buried,” Michael said. “It looks like they just died here.”
Skulls … there were skulls scattered throughout. Too small. Too round. One had a crack straight through its middle. Another, its eye cavity pulverized.
“He murdered them,” I said. “He massacred all of them.”
John caught me before I fell back, and he held me there. Michael put his arms around us. And none of us knew what to say.
Our boys. They had been left where they fell. Left to molder and rot. To sink into the earth. Piece by piece. Bone by bone. Parts of themselves covered in moss, and cavities became worlds to insects that made their nests in their caverns.
Bones settled into the earth. Seeds that could never sprout.
But this land, it didn’t just take children, I had learned.
It split them. The dreaming self stayed on the island, forever young, forever dying.
The waking self returned to London as desiccated, mummified shells.
Found in riverbeds or fields or alleys with no marks of violence, no explanation. Just empty.
Two deaths. The one that fed the island and the one that broke their mother’s hearts.
They were left as offerings to his arrogance. A testament to his self-importance. Arranged without ceremony. Without mercy. Reminders to him, and to us, that everyone who entered this land was meant to serve him. And when he tired of one, he ended them.
A sound tore out of me. Not a word. Not a cry. Something older. Something animal. It ripped through my chest and shredded the air, and I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t push it back down. My whole body convulsed, as if my bones were trying to reject what my eyes had seen.
“Why?” I screamed it at the sky. At the trees. At nothing. At no one. At me. “I SAID I’D COME BACK!”
Tears streamed down my face. John and Michael hugged me tight, both of them sobbing. All of us mourning what had been done here.
“I told you,” I sobbed. “I promised …”
But I was too late.
Every single one of them had died waiting for me. They died believing I would return for them.
This is what it means to lose to him. This was what happened to children Peter keeps.
I thought of Agnes. Agnes with her bird-quick laugh and her questions that never stopped. I thought of her in that treehouse.
I thought of her thinning.
I thought of the children at Marigold House.
Willie, so grievously injured.
Grace with her drawings.
Frederick, who still believed in happy endings.
All of them.
If I fail, this is what becomes of them. Bones scattered atop a garden. Skulls too soft to hold the weight of what was done to them. Offerings laid at the altar of a boy who called it love.
“I’m sorry,” I choked. “I’m so sorry. I—”
You left them.
The thought was a knife.
You flew away and left them here with him, and they died calling your name.
The grief was tectonic, too large to feel all at once.
Somewhere above me, in the rotted ribs of that treehouse, Agnes was running out of time.
A breeze moved through the clearing. Bones shivered. A faint rattle. Teeth clicking in a skull.
Michael dropped to his knees. Or his legs simply gave out.
We were all so tired already, and we’d just begun.
His hand hovered above the nearest skull, small, fragile, the jaw hanging open. He did not touch it. Could not. He didn’t speak. His shoulders hunched forward, trembling. His breath came in quick, sharp bursts.
Michael, who’d played war with these boys. Who’d called them brothers. Who now, as soon as we returned to the real world, if we returned, would be off to a real war.
John stood rigid beside me, his face gone pale. “We have to keep searching. She can be somewhere else, but she’s not here.”
He was right.
The air changed.
Trees leaned inward. Not swaying. Leaning. Folding forward. Branches creaking as they bent low.
A tremor moved through the canopy. Dead leaves spiraled down around us.
Then we paused when we heard a sound. Thin. High. Like breath drawn through teeth.
I wiped my eyes.
“Let’s keep moving,” Michael pressed.
We moved.