“I would do anything to be rid of her,” read one entry. “I would give away all of my toys, and every book that I ever owned. I would give up my savings. I would sweep the floors every day for the rest of my life. I would sell my soul if she would just GO AWAY!!!!”
But the final entry was the shortest of them all. It said simply: “I have decided. I will do it.”
Glued to the last page was a photograph of a family, its four members standing beside a vase of flowers in a photographic studio. There was a father with a bald head and a pretty mother wearing a white dress decorated with lace. At her feet sat a boy dressed in a sailor suit, who scowled at the camera as though the photographer had just said something nasty to him. Beside him, David could just make out the hem of a dress and a pair of small black shoes, but the rest of the girl’s image had been scraped away.
David turned back to the very first page of the book and saw what was written there. It read:
Jonathan Tulvey. His Book.
David closed the book with a snap and hastily stepped away from it. Jonathan Tulvey: Rose’s great-uncle who had disappeared along with his little adopted sister and had never been seen again. This was Jonathan’s book, a relic of his life. He remembered the old king, and the loving way in which he had touched the book.
“The book has value to
me
.”
Jonathan was the king. He had made a bargain with the Crooked Man, and in return he had become the ruler of this land. Perhaps he had even passed through the same portal that David had used to come here. But what was the arrangement, and what had happened to the little girl? Whatever bargain he had made with the Crooked Man had cost him dearly in the end. The old king, pleading to be allowed to die, was living proof of this.
A sound came from above. David shrank back against the wall as the figure of a guard appeared on the gallery, resuming his position now that the chamber was empty once again. There was no way David could get back to his room without being seen. He looked around and tried to find another way out. He could take the doorway the king had used, but that would almost certainly mean being confronted by guards. There was also the tapestry on the wall behind the throne. Somehow, the Crooked Man had found a way out through there, and David doubted that there would be guards where the Crooked Man had gone. David was also curious. For the first time, he felt that he knew more than the Crooked Man or the king thought he knew. It was time to try to use that knowledge.
Silently, he made his way to the tapestry and lifted it back from the wall. Behind it was a door. David pushed down on the door handle, and it opened without a sound. Beyond lay a low-ceilinged passageway, lit by candles set in alcoves in the stonework. The roof of the passage was so low that it almost touched David’s hair as he entered. He closed the door behind him and followed the passageway down, down, deep into the cold, dark places that lay beneath the castle. He passed disused dungeons, some still littered with bones, and a chamber that was filled with instruments of pain and torture: racks upon which to stretch prisoners until they screamed; thumbscrews with which to break their bones; spikes and spears and blades to pierce the flesh; and, in a far corner, an iron maiden, shaped like the mummies’ coffins that David had seen in museums but with nails set into its lid so that anyone placed inside would face an agonizing death. It made David feel queasy, and he passed through the chamber as quickly as he could.
At last he came to an enormous room dominated by a great hourglass. Each bulb of the glass was as tall as a house, but the top bulb was almost empty. The wood and glass from which the hourglass had been constructed looked very old. Time, for someone or something, was draining away, and now it was almost gone.
Beside the hourglass room was a small chamber furnished with a simple bed, a stained mattress, and an old blanket resting upon it. On the wall across from the bed was an array of bladed weapons, daggers and swords and knives, all arranged in descending order of length. Another wall held a shelf covered in glass jars of different shapes and sizes. One of them seemed to glow faintly.
David’s nose wrinkled at an unpleasant smell from close by. He turned to find the source and almost bumped his head against a garland of wolves’ muzzles hanging by a rope from the ceiling above, twenty or thirty in all, some still damp with blood.
“Who are you?” said a voice, and David’s heart came close to stopping from the shock of hearing it. He tried to find the source of the sound, but there was nobody there.
“Does he know you’re here?” said the voice again. It was the voice of a girl.
“I can’t see you,” said David.
“But I can see you.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m over here, on the shelf.”
David followed the sound of the voice to the shelf of jars. There, in a green jar close to the edge, he saw a tiny little girl. Her hair was long and blond, and her eyes were blue. She shone with a pale light, and wore a simple white nightdress. There was a hole in the gown at her left breast, with a large chocolate-colored stain around it.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said the little girl. “If he finds you, he’ll hurt you, just like he hurt me.”
“What did he do to you?” asked David.
But the little girl only shook her head and clenched her lips tightly, as though trying not to cry.
“What’s your name?” asked David, trying to change the subject.
“My name is Anna,” said the little girl.
Anna.
“I’m David. How can I get you out of there?”
“You can’t,” said the girl. “You see, I’m dead.”
David leaned in a little closer to the jar. He could see the girl’s small hands touching against the glass, but they left no fingerprints upon it. Her face was white and her lips were purple, and dark rings surrounded her eyes. The hole in her nightdress was clearer now, and David thought that the stains surrounding it might be dried blood.
“How long have you been here?” he said.
“I’ve lost count of the years,” she said. “I was very young when I came here. There was another little boy in this room when I arrived. I dream of him sometimes. He was like I am now, but he was very frail. He faded away when I was brought to this room, and I never saw him again. I’ve been growing weak, though. I’m afraid. I’m scared that what happened to him is going to happen to me. I’ll disappear, and then no one will ever know what became of me.”
She began to cry, but no tears fell, for the dead can no longer weep or bleed.
David placed his little finger against the jar, just where the girl’s hand was touching it from the inside, so that only the glass separated them.
“Does anyone else know that you’re here?” asked David.
She nodded. “My brother sometimes comes, but he’s very old now. Well, I call him my brother, but he never was, not really. I just wanted him to be. He tells me that he’s sorry. I believe him. I think he is sorry.”
Suddenly, everything began to make awful sense to David.
“Jonathan brought you here, and he gave you to the Crooked Man,” he said. “That was the bargain he made.”
He sat down hard on the cold, uncomfortable bed.
“He was jealous of you,” he continued, speaking more softly now, talking as much to himself as to the girl in the jar, “and the Crooked Man offered him a way to be free of you. Jonathan became king, and the one who preceded him, the old queen, was allowed to die. Perhaps, many years before, she had made a similar bargain with the Crooked Man, and the boy you saw in the jar when you came was her brother, or cousin, or some little boy next door who annoyed her so much that she dreamed of getting rid of him.”
And the Crooked Man heard her dreams, because that was where he wandered. His place was the land of the imagination, the world where stories began. The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours. But with them came the Crooked Man, prowling between his world and ours, looking for stories of his own to create, hunting for children who dreamed bad dreams, who were jealous and angry and proud. And he made kings and queens of them, cursing them with a kind of power, even if the real power lay always in his hands. And in return they betrayed the objects of their jealousy to him, and he took them into his lair deep beneath the castle…
David stood and returned to the girl in the jar.
“I know it’s hard for you, but you have to tell me what happened to you when you came here. It’s very important. Please, try.”
Anna screwed her face up and shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “It hurt. I don’t want to remember it.”
“You must,” said David, and there was a new force to his voice. It sounded deeper, as though the man that he would become had briefly shown himself before his time. “If it’s not to happen again, you have to tell me what he did.”
Anna was trembling. Her lips were pressed as thin as paper, and her tiny fists were clenched so tightly that the bones threatened to break through her skin. At last, she released a moan of sorrow and anger and remembered pain, and the words poured out.
“We came through the sunken garden,” she began. “Jonathan was always being so mean to me. He would tease me, when he spoke to me at all. He would pinch me and pull my hair. He would take me into the forest and try to lose me there, until I started to cry and he had to come back for me in case his parents heard me. He told me that if I ever said anything to them, he would give me away to a stranger. He said that they wouldn’t believe me anyway because he was their real child and I wasn’t. I was just a little girl that they’d taken pity on, and if I disappeared then they wouldn’t be sad for very long.
“But sometimes he could be so kind and so sweet, as though he forgot that he was supposed to hate me and the real Jonathan shone through instead. Perhaps that was why I followed him down to the garden that night, because he’d been so nice to me that day. He’d bought me sweets with his own money, and he’d shared his pie with me after I dropped mine on the floor. He woke me in the night and told me that he had something to show me, something special and secret. Everyone else was asleep, and we sneaked down to the sunken garden, my hand in Jonathan’s. He showed me a hollow place. I was scared. I didn’t want to go inside. But Jonathan said that I’d see a strange land, a fabulous land, if I did. He went ahead, and I followed. At first, I couldn’t see anything. There was only darkness and spiders. Then I saw trees and flowers, and smelled apple blossom and pine. Jonathan was standing in a clearing, dancing around in circles, laughing and calling to me to join him.
“So I did.”
She fell silent for a moment. David waited for her to continue.
“There was a man waiting: the Crooked Man. He was sitting on a rock. He stared at me and licked his lips, then spoke to Jonathan.
“ ‘Tell me,’ he said.
“ ‘Her name is Anna,’ said Jonathan.
“ ‘Anna,’ said the Crooked Man, as if he was trying my name out to see if he liked how it tasted. ‘Welcome, Anna.’
“And then he leaped from the rock and wrapped me in his arms, and he began spinning round and round, just as Jonathan had done, but he spun so hard that he dug a hole in the ground and he dragged me down with him, through roots and dirt, past worms and beetles, into the tunnels that run beneath this world. He carried me for miles and miles, even though I cried and cried, until at last we came to these rooms.
“And then—”
She stopped.
“And then?” prompted David.
“He ate my heart,” she whispered.
David felt himself grow pale. He was so sickened that he thought he might faint.
“He put his hand inside me, tearing at me with his nails, then pulled it out and ate it in front of me,” she said. “And it hurt, it hurt so much. I was in such pain that I left my own body to escape it. I could see myself dying on the floor, and I was being lifted up, and there were lights and voices. Then glass closed around me, and I was trapped in this jar and placed on this shelf, and I’ve been here ever since. The next time I saw Jonathan, he had a crown on his head and he called himself the king, but he didn’t look happy. He looked frightened and miserable, and he’s stayed that way ever since. As for me, I never sleep because I am never tired. I never eat because I am never hungry. I never drink because I never feel thirst. I just stay here, with no way to tell how many days or years have passed, except when Jonathan comes and I see the ravages of time on his face. Mostly, though,
he
comes. He looks older now too. He’s sick. As I fade, he grows weaker. I hear him talking in his sleep. He is looking for another now, someone to take Jonathan’s place and someone to take mine.”
David saw, once again, that hourglass in the room beyond, its top half nearly empty of grains. Was it counting down the days, the minutes, the hours, until the end of the Crooked Man’s life? If he was allowed to take another child, would the hourglass be turned upside down so that the great count of his life could begin again? How many times had that glass been turned? There were many jars on the shelf, most of them thick with dust and mold. Had each one, at some point, held the spirit of some lost child?
A bargain: by naming the child to him, you doomed yourself. You became a ruler without power, haunted always by the betrayal of someone smaller and weaker than yourself, a brother, a sister, a friend whom you should have protected, someone who trusted you to stand up for them, who looked up to you, and who would, in turn, have been there for you as the years went by and childhood became adulthood. And once you had struck the bargain there was no way back, for who could return to their old life knowing the terrible thing that they had done?
“You’re coming with me,” said David. “I’m not leaving you alone here for a minute longer.”
He lifted the jar from the shelf. There was a cork in the top, but David could not release it, no matter how hard he tried. His face grew puce from the effort, but all was in vain. He looked around and found an old sack in a corner.