The Bone Snatcher

by Charlotte Salter

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” said Sophie when it died away. Scree was looking at the machine as though it might explode. “I don’t think you’re silly. I think you’re the only reason this place hasn’t crumbled into the sea.”

  This made Scree cackle, long and loud. He patted the machine on the head, and for the first time he looked close to smiling.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said. “I’m not worried about the twins, ’cause they’re not bothered about me. I know what they really want.”

  “But they have everything they want! Including you running around after them, finding them pineapples. They love it.”

  “What they want is to grind Cartwright into the carpet,” he said, tapping his nose. “When Cartwright turned up, Laurel really took to him. Taught him how to invent. The twins were jealous. Her Battleshipness was annoyed ’cause she wasn’t leading the grand life she expected, so she encouraged all the smashing.”

  “Poor Laurel,” she said.

  “Aye. He was clever enough to change the world, but instead he got stuck here.”

  He stared at the hulking machine as though he could see the face of his dead master in there, and Sophie felt a twinge of sympathy. She wondered where Scree came from, whether he had a family somewhere, how he’d ended up on this horrible island. She thought Laurel might have been a good friend to him. She reached out and brushed some of the dirt off the face of the machine, and smiled at him.

  “Anyway,” he grumbled, “the moral is, don’t talk to Cartwright.”

  “How’s that the—”

  “It just is.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Good,” he agreed. “I reckon we’re done now. You should’ve brought some of the glowfish up with you. They’re easy pickings down there. Easier than hauling ’em up on a line.”

  “I’ll do better the next time I fall in,” she said.

  They left the cavern, Sophie following Scree through the gloomy tunnels, up and up toward the house. After a while he started to whistle a slow, summery tune that Sophie recognized from somewhere, the fairground perhaps. Then he broke off and turned to her craftily.

  “There’s time to pass before the next feeding,” he said. “And you’ve wrung a story out of me, even if it wasn’t fancy. What do I get in return?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I heard you tell the boy a tale last night. Oh yes, I was there, hiding behind my mop. I want one, too.”

  “I don’t have anything to tell you.”

  “You call yourself a storyteller?” he said, and snorted. “I thought you might be different, but you’re just like all the other Bone Snatchers. Nothing to say for yourself.”

  “I’ve got plenty,” she said.

  “Go on, then.”

  She knew she was being tested, but for some reason she didn’t mind. There was something about Scree that she was starting to like.

  “All right,” she said as they started walking again. “I was going to save it for a special occasion, but you’ve forced it out of me. I’ll tell you the story of the skeleton fish.”

  Chapter 10

  The Skeleton Fish

  In Which We Find That Nobody Is Ever Really Dead

  Hundreds of years before the sun and moon rose in a regular pattern, when the stars were newborn and the planet was a thin, fragile egg, there was a pit in the middle of the ocean. It was bottomless, and dark like a blanket, and teeming with young and frightened life.

  There were countless fish in the pit, crammed together like tissues in a box: the bladderfish that emitted a putrid smell, the bookfish with its hundreds of white gills, the unfortunately named maggoty starfish, and thousands more, spiraling into the depths.

  But the only truly remarkable fish were the skeleton fish, which had no visible flesh. There was nothing in or on them. They had empty eye sockets, and gaps between all their shining bones, and holes in their nonexistent hearts. They were deeply unhappy, in a special way that only fish can be.

  But the sea provided for them. Many sailors drowned in storms, and refusing to cease existing, their ghosts attached themselves to the skeleton fish, giving them luminous flesh. Then the sailors’ ghosts had bodies and the fish had a shape.

  One day a girl with frosty hair dropped into the ocean, weighed down with a red stone, to find the crown of the sea. It had belonged to a drowned king who was now a glowfish. She took the crown and swam away.

  The girl was triumphant but soon became deeply troubled; after all, she had stolen the crown from its rightful owner. Even if he was no longer a king, there had to be a way she could pay the glowfish back. And so, after swimming to the surface with the crown, she threw her prized red stone into the water. She had killed for that stone, and she missed it greatly, but it was more than a fair exchange. It made the king very happy, for it, unlike his crown, didn’t remind him of being human, and it trapped the light and kept all the glowfish warm.

  Even today, if someone dies on this island, their ghost will become a glowfish. And when the glowfish they inhabit dies, the ghost remembers the kind gift of the red stone and keeps watch over those that live on their island. They attach themselves to all the water drops in the house, growing into colonies of mold and beautiful umbrella-like mushrooms. They make the house see and hear and breathe. They do this so the people inside know they will never be alone, and that their dead will never be truly lost.

  Chapter 11

  The Room of Remains

  Sophie spent the rest of the day collecting bones and trying to avoid Cartwright. As she plucked skeleton bits from the ground, trying not to look, her mind went to all the places that she did not want it to.

  She kept thinking about last night, when she’d tried to escape, and couldn’t shut away the feeling that she had been wrong.

  Her parents had always called her selfish and bad-blooded, bent on getting her own way just to torture them. She’d gone to their stupid parties, and worn their horrible clothes, and smiled and told all her parents’ friends how wonderful school was, but she lied through her teeth the whole time. In the end it had always gone wrong, and she ended up bursting and telling people what she really thought and embarrassing everyone, and feeling secretly glad about it. But now she wondered if her parents were right about her all along.

  She was angry at herself for being so self-centered and almost dooming Cartwright. She was angry at herself for not being more apologetic to him. She was angry that she didn’t even feel like being more apologetic to him.

  Selfish, selfish, selfish!

  No wonder her parents had run away without her. Maybe on the New Continent they’d have another child, and this one would be nice. And Sophie would be stuck here forever, left with nothing but the sea and a lingering sense of doom.

  She threw the sack down and strode around, then came back because she needed the bones to feed the sea creatures. Today they were playful and flicked water at her, but she wasn’t in the mood to forgive them for last night’s attack.

  All day she paced, ducking when she heard the twins’ footsteps or Scree’s creaky knees. She stood by a window and spent an hour watching the place where the tidal path used to be.

  Night fell, and the sea pounded the island in a frenzy. Sophie stayed awake, dreading a sudden wave or the caves collapsing. Water dripped through the ceiling, forming a puddle by her head, so that every time she turned over she got a mouthful of brine.

  When the storm was over the house began to settle, creaking and complaining in the dark. The catacombs breathed in, pulling damp air into the island’s lungs. Still she couldn’t sleep. Her hair skittered and slid toward the tunnels like she was being sucked in.

  Like a sleepwalker, Sophie got up and walked into the catacombs.

  In the blackness she took a candle from her pocket. She didn’t remember putting it there, nor the matches that he
r fingers groped for and struck. The death mask of the hulking coffee machine beast flared up in front of her. The shadows of its beverage-making arms crisscrossed on the walls, forming a cage. It now appeared to be grinning.

  The face startled her, and her fingers loosened so the candle slipped through and extinguished. She bent down and grabbed it, matches scattering from her pockets. She was alone in the dark.

  Even while her skin crawled at the thought of going any farther, Sophie knew that she had come here for a reason. Her mind was churning, and the only way she could distract herself was by searching the guts of this awful, weird house, which nagged her like an itch. Maybe then she would think of a way to escape it.

  As she was deciding where to go, the machine behind her moved. It groaned quietly, like it might just be settling, but then the noise grew and grew, like the machine’s arms were straining, and just as Sophie was about to flee it settled with a loud clonk. She swept her hands over the floor until she found one of the matches, lit the candle, and swinging it into the face of the beast found it exactly where it had been.

  She knew the noise must have been the wind, but the machine looked like a bug waiting to open its shell and scuttle forward. Her hands were shaking, but she gritted her teeth and moved quickly, sweeping the walls with her candle to look for the glowfish arrows, retracing the path she’d taken during the day. After an eternity of stumbling she emerged in the chamber of signs.

  There were directions and messages scrawled everywhere in glowing paint. The wall was dominated by a bad drawing of a squid with each of its tentacles pointing in a different direction: House. Potato garden. Sewer. And there was the sign from before: The Room of Remains, with a line trailing away from the last letter and snaking through a gap in the wall. The remains of what? Bodies? Inventions? Or was it a giant rubbish dump?

  Casting one last look behind her, fighting the strange feeling that the coffee machine might have trundled down after her, she squeezed through the gap in the wall and began to walk.

  The sounds of the house died behind her. The silvery line faded into a scratch that tripped and jolted over the wall, breaking and reappearing like an unsteady heartbeat. Shuddering, Sophie passed a green waterfall that fed a rotting pond and tripped over an abandoned glove that looked like a dismembered hand. The ceiling dropped until she had to bend over, then kept dropping until she was on her hands and knees, gravel scraping across her legs. For the first time ever Sophie felt claustrophobic. She could suffocate down here; if anything collapsed there wouldn’t be time to get out.

  She crawled around a bend and came up against a slab of rock. The dead end was a tiny stub of space, and the silvery arrow ended in a spatter, like its painter had run into the wall.

  There was no room to turn around, so to get out she’d have to crawl backward the way she came. Frustrated, she started shuffling back, moving inch by inch on her hands and knees until with a perfectly timed sputter the candle went out.

  “Come on,” she muttered desperately. All her matches were scattered on the floor of the cave farther back. With the darkness cramming in on her, the dead end felt like a coffin. There was a low, mechanical groan from somewhere far behind her, and the sound of—what? Wheels? Nonsense. It’s the house settling again. But it really did sound like the scraping of wheels. A pained screech, like grinding metal. Someone was behind her. Or something.

  A wet drop landed on her head, and for a moment she thought blood, and her whole body went cold. She looked up and saw a crack of light far above. Water was slowly trickling down from it. The dead end was a chimney.

  Sophie had never given much thought to the god of the sea before, but she immediately promised that she’d sacrifice as many mussels as he could eat if he got her out in one piece. Abandoning the candle, she felt the wall. If she sucked her stomach in, she could just about stand up. Something clattered at the other end of the tunnel, the sound ricocheting around its curves like a bullet. Cutting off a yelp, she began to climb.

  Her damp hands kept slipping, and she couldn’t bend her knees properly without getting stuck between the two walls. The chimney was tall, and she was certain that if she fell she would break her neck.

  Her hands finally met a ledge at the top. She could see the crack properly now, but that’s all it was: a hairline fracture of light. She pushed her fingers against it, hoping she could break the rock away.

  Her hand went through the ceiling like she’d plunged it into cake mix. The top of the chimney had been covered by nothing more than decaying carpet. She took a deep breath, felt for the edge of the hole, and grabbed it with both hands so she was swinging. She pulled herself up, legs pedaling the air, and wriggled through the hidden gap at the top of the cave.

  Her head pushed aside the dark swathe of carpet. She emerged in a corridor in the house, right beneath a grand, rotting table with the world’s most hideous mermaid-shaped vase on top, which fell off and landed in front of her nose with a damp thud that made her shudder. Both ends of the corridor were boarded up, although at one end the planks were split, as though someone had recently forced their way in.

  It didn’t look like anybody had lived in this part of the house for a while. The wallpaper sustained huge colonies of exotic-colored molds. There was a portrait of Laurel and the twins, a bit like the one she had seen before, except the man’s face had been scrawled on with black paint.

  In front of her was a locked door, and pinned to it was a damp piece of paper: NO ENTRY. WE MEAN IT.

  She placed the mermaid vase on the table and looked through the keyhole.

  She was met by a skeletal dinosaur on wires with its jaw hanging open, swooping toward her like it was about to snap the door handle off. Behind it there were stacks of crates with jars of starfish balanced on top. There were complex cabinets, a steam-powered wooden horse, books, and stacks of paper. There was half a piano and a gramophone with three horns. These must have been Laurel’s inventions.

  Whoever had collected this stuff was either a compulsive hoarder or looking for something. Sophie had the distinct impression that all this junk has been combed through, pulled apart, and shoved back together in the wrong order.

  I’m going in, she told herself. In the pause that followed, she swore she could hear the machine again. It felt like the house had turned to listen. There was a long, low creak, and something scraped across the floor at the other end of the corridor. She put her hands over her ears, but she could hear her pulse and the rush of her own blood, which was worse.

  Don’t stop to think. Just go!

  The door was locked, but that had never stopped her before, and she was good at breaking things. She only needed to kick the lock twice before the door around it splintered, and even though her shoes were as thin as paper she barely felt the impact.

  She shouldered her way through the door to stand in the middle of the chaos.

  She could see now how the dinosaur had been smashed to pieces and reassembled in the most unlikely way, its rib bones protruding through its eye sockets, its great spine twisted like a paper clip. There were toys that looked like they belonged in an asylum, dolls with legs for arms and a yellow crane with metal spider legs, a train with its insides gutted. And then there were machines. Tiny things with brass levers, and huge, hulking contraptions that looked like they could be used to move elephants. A slew of cogs lays across the floor as though thrown in a temper. The Room of Remains, indeed.

  Far away a door slammed shut and Sophie froze, panic beating against her chest like a trapped bird, but a minute later nobody came and she breathed out again. My name is Sophie Seacove, she told herself, trying to calm down. I am good at telling stories. I’m immune to Sea Fever, and I’m having an adventure.

  As she stepped forward sheets of paper crackled under her feet. She looked down at a sea of blotched and hurried notes, pictures of skeletons and monsters. There was a close-up of a sea monster’s ea
r, gnarled and explosively shaped like a cauliflower, and then another, and another. There were hundreds of pictures of ears. Each was exquisitely detailed, the lines so fine they must have been done under a microscope. Whoever drew these was very good. And very obsessed.

  She glanced over her shoulder, then bent down and read some of the notes scribbled in the margins of a diagram.

  Tear it down burn it down.

  J’fish did a dance in response to B’hoven was it the pitch or does it like it?

  Are they stupid? I was trying to help.

  He can never find out, poor boy.

  HELP ME!

  And, curling from the ear of a particularly ugly squid: My sandwich was moldy again. Scree says he made it for me weeks ago.

  Did the diagrams belong to Laurel? If these were his notes, then it sounded like he was very worried about something.

  As Sophie turned away, a red box caught her eye. She flicked the catch to see what was inside.

  The lid burst open and hit the wall so hard the hinges broke, and a huge clown, torso attached to a thick spring, fell forward. Heart hammering, Sophie picked the clown up, sweeping the red hair away from its face.

  It was Cartwright in every way, from its high cheekbones to its staring eyes and the slight curl of a smile. It would have been a normal toy once, but someone had skillfully mutilated it. She shuddered as it bobbed backward and forward.

  She pressed the clown back into the box and forced the lid down. She wanted to get out and pretend she was never in here.

  A red light flickered in the corridor. Sophie spun around, knees catching the splinters in the floorboards.

  “Poke, poke,” someone whispered.

  She wasn’t alone.

  She slid backward until she was pressed against a cabinet. She could hear her own body like a factory, bones creaking, eyelids closing and clicking open again. Every inch of movement was a cacophony of noise.