Chapter 20
CHAPTER
WE OBEYED THE forest’s push.
The path had already decided where we would go, and we let it, our feet sinking into damp moss with each step.
The bones watched us go. I felt their gaze on my back long after the treehouse was no longer in sight. In the forest, every now and again I’d think I’d hear their voices, shushing one another, giggling. Singing.
The forest shifted around us. Colors and light changing with each step. Trees groaned as they twisted into new shapes on our approach Shadows leapt ahead in quick bursts, stretching and multiplying until I couldn’t tell which darkness belonged to us and which belonged to something else.
“Agnes!” I called. “It’s Wendy. I’ve come to take you home.”
I called again, but everything was so quiet. There were no sounds of insects or animals or birds.
The path dissolved. The ground beneath our feet softened, then hardened again. The pain returned in my center, bright hot, and then … I stumbled. Michael caught my arm.
“We’ve got you, Wendy,” he said.
The forest walls peeled back, all at once, into a clearing.
“That can’t be …” John said.
It was our nursery.
It was whole. Intact. Golden with dusk-light, as if the sun had been trapped inside that room for twelve years, waiting for us to return.
“That’s not really our room.” My voice trembled. “Be careful. Just … don’t believe anything that you see.”
The windows were open, and from outside we heard birdsong. Sweet. Lilting. Clean.
Wallpaper shimmered with rose patterns. Their petals flushed as though freshly painted that morning. Dust motes drifted lazily through the air, catching the light in soft, deceitful halos. Pretending to be magic. All of this was pretending to be home.
“Do you smell that?” John asked.
I opened my mouth to say that I didn’t … but now I caught the scent he was talking about.
“Liza’s lemon cake.” The smell, fresh and bright.
The room breathed familiarity and dread in equal measure. Each inhale was a reminder that this place looked safe but that underneath it was untrustworthy. A lie.
At my feet, spongy moss dissolved into carpet. Fibers swelled up through the green like memory seizing control of the world, weaving themselves into the pattern I had traced with my fingers as a child.
John’s hand tightened on my sleeve. His fingers trembled.
Both of my brothers scanned the room waiting for something to leap out at us.
I knew the truth before I let myself see her.
Some truths announce themselves by the way the air changes.
By the way a room holds its silence. By the way your heart recognizes a shape it has mourned for years.
But some things are just not real, no matter how much you want to believe in them.
No matter how much we all wanted to believe what we were seeing now.
Mother.
Standing at the window.
“John. Michael.” I whispered.
Her posture was too perfect. Spine too straight. Shoulders too stiff, as if she were suspended from an invisible string. A marionette waiting for the hand that controlled her to decide what came next.
Her head tilted at an angle necks just can’t angle. Just a few degrees past normal. Past human.
But what made it seemed real was that she hummed the lullaby that once carried us to sleep.
Each note arriving a fraction of a second too late.
That melody I knew by heart, but here, it was distorted.
Like a music box that played with a broken gear.
All of her seemed shaped by a memory in which someone never lived.
“My darlings,” she said.
That voice was warm. That voice was soft. That voice was a lie, emerging from a costume of my mother.
Her smile was flawless. Every tooth in place. Every crease around her eyes exactly where I remembered them. But her eyes …
Her eyes were empty in a way that eyes in some paintings just are flat.
“You’ve come home,” she said.
Michael made a sound beside me. John’s grip on my sleeve tightened until it hurt.
“That’s not her,” John breathed. “Michael. Wendy.… That’s not her.”
“I know.”
I stood in shock, staring at the thing wearing my mother’s face.
She opened her arms. “Come,” she said. “Let me hold you. I’ve waited so long.”
None of us moved.
Then somewhere, behind her, in the shadows beyond the window, a boy began to laugh. His sick and twisted games knew no limits. The pain and the terror were the point.
Her fingers drummed lightly against the windowsill. A beat that sounded disjointed. Disconnected. Impatient that none of us ran to her, to it.
“Mother?” Michael whispered.
“Michael. No.” I reached for his shoulder, but he slipped from my fingers.
“John!” I hissed. “Do something!”
“Michael,” John said quietly but with force. “Stop right there. That thing. It’s a trick. This is him. It’s not our mother.”
But Michael was the baby of the family, so spoiled and nurtured that even the thought of her being real, being here, even for an instant, was enough to put him under a spell.
Mother’s head rotated like an owl’s.
That is not our mother. That is not our mother. That is not …
“Start backing up,” John whispered.
“Mum …” Michael whispered, and he sounded like he did so long ago. A little boy who was just so scared of the dark and wanted his mother.
That thing wearing our mother’s face tilted its head. “My darling boy,” it said. “Come here. Let me hold you.”
It extended its arms and the illusion rippled.
The nursery began to melt.
Wallpaper slipping off the walls. Roses curling and blackening. Floorboards splitting open.
Mother’s features slid downward. Eyes pooling into cheeks. Mouth stretching wide, revealing rows of teeth with points.
John lunged and snatched Michael by the back of his jacket and yanked him back.
Mother reached her arms out. “Darlings …” The word morphed into a series of trills and chirrups.
Chunks of Mother collapsed in piles of flesh and bone, but there was no blood. In its place were black shadows writhing like eels.
We stumbled out as with a screech, the forest engulfed the false nursery.
The three of us stood surrounded by trees, our hands trembling, reaching for one another, as if lost in a nightmare.
“Are you all right?” I asked Michael, and all he could do was nod. Tears filled his eyes, and he turned to look at the spot where the unreal nursery had appeared.
Mother’s lullaby lingered in the air, sweet and putrid. Like perfume sprayed over something dead.
This was what Peter does. He discovers what we love the most and he forces us to watch as he takes it away. Our childhood, our friends, more.
He used our memories as weapons against us.
He could show us anything he wanted. As long as we were here, he could reach into the deepest chambers of our hearts and pull out things we loved the most. Things we buried deep to keep them safe.
Our hidden treasure. He’d steal it. Twist it. And torture us with it.
Nothing was safe here.
“We’re close to her,” I said. “That’s why it’s doing all of these things. To slow us down. Or get us to stop.”
“We keep going then,” John said. He led the way.
Ahead, the trees cracked open.
The world shifted and the ground dropped out from beneath us. I stumbled. My boots hit something wet. Something that squelched and sucked at my ankles.
Mud. Mud everywhere. Thick, gray, brown. Churned to the consistency of old porridge. It reached past my ankles. Now, past my calves. Cold and clinging.
I turned around, and Michael’s face grew pale. Mud flecked across his nose.
“What is it?” I asked.
“That smell …”
Sweet, then sour. I could taste it in my mouth, like bile. Sulfur, gunpowder, scorched cloth, and burnt hair.
The decay of humans.
I gagged and pressed my hand to my mouth.
We were standing in a trench.
Earth rose on either side of us, walls eight feet high, shored up with splintered timber and sandbags that had burst their seams. The wood was black with damp.
Water pooled at the bottom, gray-green, covered with a film of oil and floating debris.
Cigarette butts. Scraps of cloth. A single boot, still laced, with something pale inside.
“Wendy …” John pressed against the trench wall, his face the color of bone. “Wendy …” he repeated. “Where are we?”
A shell screeched overhead.
I threw myself down, hands over my head, mud splashing into my face, into my mouth. My stomach flipping from the sickening taste of it. The explosion hit somewhere to our left, rocking the ground. Dirt and rocks sprayed across us.
My ears rang. Buzzing. Humming. Unable to hear what Michael was shouting. His mouth open. Lips moving. Arms waving overhead to get my attention.
It felt like the air was sucked back into the world and Michael came into hearing. “Aisne! Aisne! This is Aisne!”
Aisne? The Battle of Aisne. We were in the war. In France. I remember reading about this battle in the newspapers. Both sides dug along the Aisne River. Steep ridges. Limited crossing points. Shredded shrapnel rained down from above.
Bodies. Dozens of them. They were in the walls. Pressed into the mud and timber, limbs jutting out at angles.
Another keen in the sky. John closed his eyes and covered his ears.
Debris sprayed and the world shook.
A hand emerged from the dirt, fingers curled, reaching for something. Its flesh gray-green. Nails peeling back and black from their beds.
My chest locked tight.
A face pressed out from the mud. Mouth open. Eyes collapsed inward. Jaw hanging loose where something had chewed through the tendons.
Further down, a torso without legs. A leg without a torso. A helmet still strapped to a head that had its face blasted off by enemy fire.
British uniforms.
I could see the khaki beneath the mud, the brass buttons, belts rotted to leather strips. Boys. They were just boys who’d never return home.
It wasn’t real here, but somewhere a version of this was.
“John! Michael!” I tried to reach for them, but my feet felt connected to stone. The mud held me. “It’s Peter. He’s doing this. He’s making you see it.”
“But it is real, Wendy. This is real!” John shuddered.
Michael watched on, stunned. Tears streamed down his face. Cutting pale tracks through mud.
A sound cut through the trench. A whistle. Short. Sharp.
The bodies in the walls began to move. Not all at once. A twitch here. A shudder there. Fingers flexed in the mud. Heads turned with wet, grinding sounds.
“Time to go, lads,” a face in the wall said, its mouth working through mud.
Then the dead were pulling themselves free, arms reaching, legs kicking, bodies lurching upright.
They didn’t stand apart. They pressed together, limbs stacking, flesh merging, until I couldn’t tell where one soldier began and the other ended.
The mass of them spoke as one: “Time to go over. Time to meet the wire. Time to feed the guns.”
They were all looking at my brothers.
“Come with us,” they said. A chorus of ruined voices.
John dropped to his knees in the mud.
“No, please. I’m so sorry. God, I’m so sorry …”
“Coward,” they began to chant. “Coward. Coward. Coward.”
A boy slipped out from behind the advancing dead. Young. Too young for any war.
The little boy’s smile widened. “I can take you back. Years ago. When you were a little boy. I can make you forget all of this. The shells. The screaming. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?
To be a boy again? To never remember? To never worry about work or wife or baby or a war you avoided enlisting in, for which they all called you a coward. ”
John looked up, and for a moment I dreaded that he was considering it.
“John, no!” I wrenched my foot free of the mud, trudging through and grabbing his arm. My fingers digging into his shoulders.
“It’s a lie,” I said. “He can’t take the memories away.”
The dead soldiers stopped. They stood in a ring around us, me and my brothers. The soldiers’ eyes were empty. Fixed. Waiting.
Michael whispered, “Wendy, I can’t do this anymore.”
John remained silent and stunned. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Please, help me. Don’t abandon me.” My voice was pleading. Then it was as if they could see again, and they each took one of my hands.
“How boring!” the little boy said. “You’re all boring, the three of you!”
Corpses and scattered limbs sank into the mud. The trench evaporated into mist.
The gray sky cracked apart like a broken shell, and through the fissures poured a sickly light. Not quite twilight. Not quite dusk.
We stood in that forest again, gasping, trembling, covered in mud that was beginning to fade like morning frost.
My brothers stood silent, faces wet with tears and rain, and a lingering fear that I don’t think any of us could ever name.
John wiped his face on his sleeve. “Any other ideas of where she may be? Where he could have taken her?”
I thought for sure they’d be at the treehouse. There were so many places here. Too many to name. Peter could create them on a whim. The river where we’d danced. The hollow tree where we’d hidden from the boys. The moonlit pool where he’d held my hand and promised me I would never grow up.
“We’ve already checked the treehouse,” Michael said, his eyes rimmed with exhaustion. “He’s not in the clearing. I … I don’t know.”
A memory emerged. Stone. Salt. The rhyme carved into black rock.
“Maybe …” My breath hitched. “Maybe he could be at the Black Rock?”
“Let’s go then.”