Hollow Chest

by Brita Sandstrom

  “You don’t understand what happened to him over there—”

  “He was in a war, I know. I know bad things happened to him—”

  “Stop, Charlie. You can’t know, you can’t understand because you weren’t there.” Reggie squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath before opening them again to look straight at him. “He gave his heart up, Charlie. He let them eat it. That’s how it happens. You can’t get it back.”

  “You’re wrong!” Charlie’s own voice startled him, how loud it was, how sharp, how angry. And he was angry, he was furious with Reggie, with Aggie, with everyone, saying such things when he was so close.

  Reggie flinched away from him at that, his body shrinking in on itself. And in it, Charlie saw Theo fall to his knees in the snow, felt the cold of the snowball in his hand. Shame burst inside him. He kept doing this, he kept hurting people without meaning to, without thinking. He kept making everything worse.

  Reggie pinched at the skin on his arm, so hard it hurt to look at, over and over, shaking his head like he was trying to clear it. Without touching him, Mellie sat down on the edge of his bed.

  “It’s all right to be scared, Reggie,” she said. “My son, David, he used to get scared of things. I told Charlie here that he was even afraid of birds when he little. And he was little. So much smaller than the other boys. Afraid of birds, can you imagine that? But he was clever, David was, so much cleverer than me. I don’t know where he got it from, but he always was. Anyways, he was so afraid of birds that he decided he would learn everything there was to know about them, because if you understood how a thing worked, you didn’t have to be afraid of it. So many books he read. Textbooks, too, like veterinarians use, I’ve no idea where he even found them.” She laughed, a dry little huff of a sound.

  “But that’s how he got the pigeons. He read about homing pigeons and how easy they are to keep, so he built a coop on the roof of the flat where we lived, and he left out food until the pigeons started sleeping there, and laying their eggs. The ones that hatched there would eat out of his hand. They were so small, I was afraid to touch them, afraid I would crush their little bones. But David was so gentle, and so sure. He took such good care of them.

  “And I used to make fun of them a bit, I asked why he liked such ridiculous little birds. They’re not very clever, not much to look at, common as rain. He told me that the one thing—the one thing—pigeons are brilliant at is coming home. That no matter how far away they were, they always knew the way.

  “He even let the army use some of his birds during the war. They would drop the birds where they thought there might be resistance groups with no way to communicate, so people could send intelligence back. A lot of birds died that way. Guns and hawks and weather. David even sent his favorite bird, because he knew Pudge was the brightest, that if anyone could get a message home, it would be Pudge. But weeks and weeks went by and Pudge didn’t come. Months, even.” Reggie’s breath was still shaky, but it was slowing down, his chest casting a shadow every time it rose and then fell.

  “And then, one day, there he was again. He had a mangled wing and he couldn’t really see straight, but he was the same bird. ‘You see?’ David said. ‘They’ll always find their way home, if you give them enough time.’

  “He said . . . he said, ‘That’s you and me, Mum. You’re my home, and I’m yours. If we get separated, we’ll always find each other, even if it takes a while.’ And then David died, a few weeks later. Everything he was, everything he’d learned, all the love inside of him—just gone. And I thought, David was wrong, you can’t find your way home if there is no home. So I threw open all the doors to the coop. And I left. And I never went back. But one day, I woke up outside, and there were pigeons all around me. At first I thought they were just pigeons, but then I saw one with one bright white wing that I recognized, and there was another with a soft green head, and there was the pigeon with the bad wing. David’s pigeons.

  “The pigeons didn’t think the coop was their home, they thought I was their home. Because David was right, because he was right about everything, because he was the cleverest person I’ve ever known. He was my home, and I’ll find my way back to him. It will just take longer than I’d prefer. You’ll find your way eventually.”

  She patted his hand, once, with her thick, veiny hand with its papery skin. Reggie, his eyes still closed, gripped her hand tight.

  Charlie felt sick. He had to make this worth it. If he could find the last wolf, the last key, if he could get Theo’s heart, this would all be undone. Because it would have been for something, for the most important thing in the world. They would see. He would show them. Soon.

  26

  CHARLIE WAS WALKING TOO FAST FOR MELLIE to keep up. He had never realized how much Mellie leaned on her pram when she walked, how slowly she moved now without it, but she wouldn’t ask him to wait and he couldn’t make himself slow down. By the time they got back to his house, it was starting to snow, just a light dusting of confectioner’s sugar over everything. London, spread out in every direction, glowed new and promising, but Charlie just felt wound-up and sick.

  A burst of warm air enveloped them as he pushed the door open, like one of Mum’s very best hugs. Wanting the real thing now, Charlie started towards Mum where she was washing dishes in the sink.

  He stopped short halfway there. Mum’s face was red and puffy from crying.

  “What’s going on?” Charlie spun around. Theo was sitting at the kitchen table, his shoulders hunched up by his ears; Grandpa Fitz was standing by the door, but there was something in the drooping set of his shoulders that spoke to an absence. Just outside the doorway, Mellie fretted in place, as if she were afraid to let the light from inside touch her. Charlie was torn between the warring urges to go to everyone at once. Everyone needed his help right now.

  Mum wouldn’t want Mellie here for this, whatever this was. He grabbed her pram from where he had stashed it earlier and pushed it out to her. She grabbed its handle like he would try to snatch it away, and pushed it away from him and down the street, wilting against the handle as she slipped away into the dark.

  Charlie shut the door and turned back to the horrible little tableau in the kitchen. There was a letter open on the table, which looked as though it had been crushed and then smoothed out again. Mum and Theo were both angled towards it, as if it were a bomb that had gone off and all they could do was look at the empty space left behind.

  No one tried to stop him as he picked it up.

  Mr. Theodore Merriweather,

  We are pleased to inform you that a space has become available at the Rosehill Home for Returning Soldiers starting May 5. Please reply to confirm your acceptance with the enclosed form by the above date. Space is limited and in high demand.

  Best regards,

  The Rosehill Group

  “You’re leaving,” Charlie said from somewhere underwater. “You want to leave. After everything, after everything I did to fix it—” Charlie had found war wolves. He let them lap up his tears, his blood, his pain. He cried and he stole and he lied over and over and Theo was just going to give up. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Everything,” Theo said with a bitter laugh. “And even if there weren’t—there’s no place for me here, you don’t even need me anymore, you can take care of everything yourselves. Everything except me. I’m just making things worse.”

  “I’m taking care of everything because you told me to!” Charlie’s voice in his own ears sounded like he was shouting from a very distant room. “You told me, you said I needed to be the man of the house, you told me I had to take care of things, even though I didn’t know how and I had to work it out all on my own because you weren’t here.”

  “I didn’t want to leave, Charlie—”

  “But you’re leaving now.” His voice was coming out in a high, babyish whine, but he couldn’t stop it. “No one’s making you, you’re just giving up.”

  “Charlie, I’m—” Theo put his fa
ce in his hands and gave a ragged sigh before looking up again. “Charlie, I’m trying to get better. I can’t do that here.”

  “Yes, you can. You will, you’ll seen, soon.” Charlie’s voice was all mangled, his throat was swollen and itching.

  “He can’t,” Grandpa Fitz interjected. He sounded so tired. “But he has a chance to, Charlie, somewhere else. They’ve got special doctors at this place, new ideas for treatment, just for people like your brother. It’s not like it was when I was young. He could have a real chance with their help, Charlie.”

  Mum started to cry again, very softly, and something strange and fragile inside Charlie wrenched and tore.

  “You said you’d take care of me, but you didn’t,” Charlie said to Theo, ignoring his grandfather. “You won’t even take care of yourself. You left and I had to do everything. Grandpa Fitz is old and he’s going to die, and someday Mum will be dead, too, just like Dad—or she’ll be old and confused and she won’t even know me and that’ll be worse. Someday I’m going to be all alone because you won’t even be there because you’re already gone.”

  “Charlie, listen—”

  But Charlie wasn’t finished. “If you were just going to leave again, you shouldn’t have come back.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he couldn’t believe that he’d said them. But he could see from Theo’s face that he had.

  You shouldn’t have come back.

  He didn’t mean it, he wanted to scream.

  But part of him did. Just a tiny, angry, hurt little part of him, but that little sliver of him meant it. And Theo had seen. And Theo had known.

  And now, in the After of the bomb he had just dropped on them all, Charlie found he couldn’t face the full, crushing shame of what he had said, what he had done. He wasn’t a good brother, or a good son, or a good person. He wasn’t generous or openhearted or selfless or kind. He was a monster, as sure as a war wolf was. Different, but no less vicious or any less bloody.

  Mum choked a sob into her hands. And Charlie ran out the door and away, like the coward that he was.

  Grandpa Fitz must have followed him out, because he caught him in the street, snagging him gently by the shoulder and spinning him around. But there was still something not there in his expression that Charlie couldn’t understand, like he still hadn’t fully woken up from his haze.

  “Stop this, Charlie. Theo leaving for this Rosehill place, it’s not what you think.”

  “But he doesn’t have to.” Charlie’s voice came out in a broken sort of sob. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head back and forth, trying to clear the shrapnel from his mind. “I can fix it. I’m almost done, I just have to get one more key, Remorse told me—” Charlie bit his cheek to stop the stuttering flow of words.

  Grandpa Fitz grabbed him with his one hand, his long fingers wrapping easily around Charlie’s skinny arm. “What did you say, Charlie?”

  With a savage push against his grandfather’s chest, he broke free, and the force of it sent them both stumbling. Grandpa Fitz kept his balance, but Charlie landed hard on the slippery ground. Charlie scrabbled to his feet, his shoes slipping and stumbling beneath him. He heard Grandpa Fitz calling Charlie’s name as he started running. Charlie didn’t dare look back. If he did, he might lose his nerve, and he couldn’t, not now, not when he was so close—

  “Charlie, come back!” Grandpa Fitz shouted into the cold empty street, the echoes biting at Charlie’s heels like teeth.

  27

  CHARLIE RAN UNTIL HE HAD TO WALK BECAUSE his side with seizing bright with pain. It had felt like an incantation, almost, the horrible power of those words. You shouldn’t have come back. So Charlie ran to the spot where Theo had returned, as if he could go back to before all this, to before he knew about war wolves or Hollow Chest, as if he could yank the words out of the air before he ever had a chance to say them, to think them.

  The train station was so much farther away than he remembered. But he didn’t dare stop.

  It was waiting in plain sight under the sickly orange wash of light coming from a soot-coated lamp. Huge it was, almost twice as big again as Wrath, its bones jutting out under its skin, its fur a muddy brown color, like rust. Or old blood.

  “What do you want?” Charlie gasped. He was still out of breath from running. Or maybe he was just scared.

  “Lots.” The wolf grinned, wide and yellow. Saliva dripped down each great fang to land, hissing, in the frost.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Everything.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Poor, stupid boy,” the wolf said, his voice so low that it thrummed through Charlie’s bones and made his teeth grind. “Alone in the cold with Agony and Anguish.”

  A laugh rumbled up from behind Charlie. He spun around and a second, nearly identical war wolf winked a yellow eye at him as it stepped out of the shadows and into the dim light. One of its ears was half-missing and a scar stretched the left side of its face into a mad rictus grin.

  “Heh heh, heh heh.” Drool pooled in the ruined corner of its mouth and dribbled down its chin.

  “Too right, brother,” said the first wolf. “Manners. That one is Agony,” he said, jerking his head back to face Charlie. “This one is Anguish.”

  “I’m Charlie.” His voice came out in a whisper.

  “We know you, little Merriweather. We know bigger Merriweathers, too.” Anguish licked his chops and Charlie smelled something coppery. “Sweet, sweet hearts.” Anguish padded closer to Charlie, sniffing the air, his nose pointed at Charlie’s chest. “And legs. And hands.”

  “Heh heh, heh heh.”

  Charlie couldn’t breathe. Grandpa Fitz, with his neatly pinned sleeve. Grandpa Fitz, trying to pet Biscuits with his missing arm. Theo, his leg sticking out at the wrong angle, the fat snake of scar tissue twisting up around his knee that would never bend right again. And Agony just kept laughing.

  “You need a key, yeah?” Anguish asked. “You need a way in. To the War Room. Maybe Agony and Anguish can help. Something for something, yeah? A key for a just a little something?”

  “Did you eat my brother’s heart?”

  “Heh heh, heh heh.”

  The wolves began to circle him, their claws making soft clicks on the ground as they moved. There was a dull chattering sound coming from somewhere. Charlie clenched his jaw shut and the noise stopped.

  “Did you eat my brother’s heart?” he repeated.

  “Yeah,” said Anguish. “And it was sweet. Love and tenderness, and all hope lost. The finest flavors. Succulent, it was.”

  “Something for something,” Charlie whispered. “I can’t . . . I won’t give you my heart. You must know that by now. So what do you want that I can actually give you?” He thought of wolf tongues—licking his cheeks and knuckles. The intimate horror of it. If Remorse had craved tears and Wrath blood, what would Agony and Anguish ask for?

  “Just a little thing. Just what the middle Merriweather keeps hidden.” Anguish’s wide, wet smile oozed wider still, like a wound tearing. “Hidden where his heart should be.”

  A splash of dread washed over Charlie, straight through to his guts. What did that mean, hidden where Theo’s heart should be? He had a horrible vision of sticking his clammy hand into the wet inside Theo’s chest and rifling around like Mum searching for lipstick at the bottom of her handbag.

  He swallowed down the wave of nausea that brought on, keeping his gaze firmly on the ground in front of his feet. He did not see the wolves leave, only heard the click of their nails fade away as they retreated to wherever it was monsters went to wait.

  Knowing he had a mission was the only way he could make himself walk through the door. He wanted to die rather than face the shame of what he had said, he wanted to curl up in the snow and suffocate under it, but he couldn’t. Getting into the War Room was the only chance now, the only way to keep Theo from leaving, to have the chance to make right what he’d said. If he could get Theo�
��s heart back, it wouldn’t matter, it would all be undone, atoned for, back to the way things had been before any of this had happened. He could still fix it.

  Theo’s coat and boots were gone from the front room, as were Grandpa Fitz’s. Charlie’s knees buckled with relief. He didn’t know where they’d gone, but he knew he couldn’t face Theo, not yet, not empty-handed, not after what he’d said. Mum was asleep in the chair by the fire, her face still red from crying. Charlie did not dare wake her as he crept upstairs.

  Theo’s room both was and wasn’t exactly how Charlie had left it before his homecoming. Theo’s things he’d brought back were spread across it, but they felt somehow apart from the room, like a fungus spreading somewhere it didn’t belong. The picture of Charlie and Theo on the dresser was turned facedown.

  Charlie started badly when he saw the shape of a coat in the mirror, hanging off the back of the closet door like a flat, bulky ghost. It was the drab, thick military coat Theo had worn as he had come off the train that day a hundred years ago. The coat seemed misshapen somehow, bits of it stuck out strangely, as if parts of someone were still inside it. It didn’t seem scary, just . . . sad, the way things that had lost their purpose sometimes did. It was a coat for a soldier, but the war was over.

  Charlie went over to it and investigated the lumpy bits, finding one pocket filled with wrappers and strings and a small, smooth rock. The other had three thin gloves stuffed inside, all of them with the fingertips worn through. The breast pocket of the coat was bulging from the inside—

  The breast pocket of the coat.

  Hidden where his heart should be.

  Charlie’s fingers felt numb and shaky as he pulled open the coat and felt around the smooth lining. His finger hit a lump of what felt like paper, and he pulled it out with some difficulty. A crumpled pack of cigarettes fell out.