The Bone Snatcher

by Charlotte Salter

  Chapter 28

  The Monster Box

  Laurel, newly raised from the dead, regarded Sophie with something like approval. She stepped toward him, mesmerized, and reached out to touch him. He shook his head, then did something completely un-ghostlike and coughed up a piece of seaweed.

  “Well?” he said in a voice she knew only too well. “Nothing to say?”

  The pain in her shoulder was radiating through her chest, and there were purple spots floating in front of her eyes, but Sophie cleared her head for long enough to see what was really in front of her. The ghost’s scythe wasn’t a scythe but a chewed-up fishing contraption; he wasn’t wearing the robes of the Grim Reaper, but his own torn and tattered clothing, gray and slimy after days of living underground.

  “I found your teeth!” she spluttered.

  “So?” said Mister Scree. “You think I don’t have spares? The creachers have a set off me every month.”

  He reached out to steady her as she swayed forward, clutching her shoulder.

  “How long were you down there?” she asked.

  “Long enough. I took sandwiches.”

  “You scrubbed the directions off the walls. . . .”

  “Didn’t want the twins catching you,” he said, his face settling in a well-practiced grimace.

  “It almost sounds like you care,” she said, smiling.

  “I don’t care about anyone,” he grumbled. “I’m too old for all that. The twins were getting too nasty, and I knew it’d all end in tears, and look, I was right—scissors and knives and blood everywhere! So I practiced being dead. Thought they’d get bored and I could come back when it was safe.”

  “You stopped them from killing me,” she said. She wanted to add more, but Scree was frowning with something like embarrassment. “Thank you,” Sophie said somberly.

  He grunted, flushing pink, and gestured for her to follow. They picked their way toward the shore, the old man and the bleeding girl, back to the house on the hill and the huge, deserted gardens.

  “Got something you ought to know,” Scree told her as they waded through the shallows. The creatures remained at a safe distance, watching carefully but satisfied for the moment by the twins. “It’s no excuse, but I should’ve told you what happened to all the servants. I wasn’t sure at first, but I reckon I was lying to myself when I didn’t realize they were dying. Didn’t think any son of his lordship’s could be so bad as to murder people.”

  “You warned me not to get involved,” she said. “You couldn’t stop me. And now it’s almost over. We’re going to open the Monster Box and see what’s inside.”

  Scree nodded, and she thought she saw a tear roll down his cheek. Her hand reached for his.

  “You loved him, didn’t you,” she said. “Laurel, I mean.”

  “Call it what you will,” he said, jerking his fingers away, but only after a second. “Her Battleshipness thought it was monstrous. She hated me and she hated him, but I stayed with him through thick and thin, even when he was moonstruck. And I stayed here after and looked after ’em all, ’cause I thought I owed it to ’em, even though they made this place miserable. I thought the best I could do was keep my nose out of their business, catch fish, and keep serving dinner. Those that were alive wanted to keep the box hidden, and him that was . . . dead . . . wanted young Cartwright to have it. How could I do everything right at once?”

  “You couldn’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. But you couldn’t.”

  “Aye,” he said as they reached the shore. “But now your young man has the Monster Box, the twins are fish food, and Laurel got his way.”

  “Cartwright’s not my—”

  “’Course not,” he said craftily.

  They climbed through the garden, the storm gathering at their backs like a pulled seam, the sea darkly chopped up and grumbling.

  “What do you think’s in it?” said Mister Scree. “You two seem pretty keen on getting it open.”

  “It’s a cure for Sea Fever,” she said. “Or we think it is. But just now the twins seemed to think it was something different. I don’t know if I want to open the box.”

  “Maybe you should do it anyway,” said Mister Scree, leaning on his fishing contraption. “Maybe it’s time to let the story run its course.”

  A loud whinnying bent around the corner of the island, and Manic blasted into view, clumps of earth scattering under his feet. Cartwright was clinging on for dear life, his clothes and hair in disarray, the Monster Box wedged under his arm. They slid to a halt in front of the house and he dropped the box, which despite its lightness buried itself in the earth with a thump.

  “What’s wrong?” Sophie asked as Cartwright slid off, landing in a pile on the floor. “She’s not still chasing you, is she?”

  Manic reared and thundered off by himself before Sophie could grab the reins.

  “She’s mad, too,” Cartwright gasped. “She’s phenomenally, unspeakably insane. She bit Manic! Like he was a steak! And I thought you were bad.”

  He saw Scree and stopped dead. Sophie was about to explain, but then the Battleship arrived, bursting out of the foliage, thistles gripped in each hand. Even Scree backed away, but Sophie was too busy staring to notice that Cartwright had also dodged and left the path between her and the Battleship clear.

  The Battleship obviously didn’t care who she got her hands on, only that she got them on someone. Everyone was her enemy now. She didn’t bat an eyelid when she passed Scree, whose absence she might even have forgotten.

  “I want all of you off my island!” she shouted, advancing like a tank. “It’s gone on for too long! I’ve put up with too much, and you’re not going to take it away from me now.”

  She glided over to Sophie, raising her hand to deliver a stinging slap across the face, then stopped and wavered. Two fat tears rolled down her cheeks, and her small mouth opened to deliver not a war cry but a small, hopeless sob.

  “Are they dead?” she asked. Sophie nodded. The Battleship sat down, her skirts sweeping to the sides like a gray mushroom. Suddenly she looked more human, her hair and clothes washed-out, her body shrinking into itself like a punctured balloon.

  Sophie sat down in front of the Battleship so the top of her head was level with the woman’s chin.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, because she knew that’s what you’re meant to say. “I didn’t mean for them to die.”

  The Battleship’s face scrunched up like a great handkerchief until it looked like it was going to swallow itself, then it flattened, leaving her tear-stained and red.

  “Disgusting magpie,” she said.

  “It’s over,” said Sophie. “We’ve got the Monster Box, and it’s us three against you. You just have to let it go.”

  “Little slug,” the Battleship growled, and halfheartedly swiped at Sophie, who stepped backward to avoid the blow. The bleeding in her shoulder had almost stopped, leaving a large, crusted patch of red on her shirt.

  She didn’t know why she was being nice to the mother of those monsters. She thought the Battleship was weak, and nasty, and was probably a terrible parent as well. But what did she know? How could she imagine what it was like to be under the thumbs of your children, or to have created your own personal hell?

  She dug the golden tickets out of her pocket where she had stuffed them earlier, now wet and clumped together. She threw them down at Cartwright’s feet, and it took a moment for him to understand what they were.

  “Your uncle made these,” she said shortly. “There are thousands of them in the house. He lied to you. He lied to everyone. He sent thousands of people to their deaths. My parents, too.”

  “I don’t under—”

  “The New Continent isn’t real. He made it up, Cartwright, and sold it to you and everyone else, posters and all, and now everyone’s at the bottom of the sea. The Sea Fever meant everyone w
as mad enough to believe him.”

  Cartwright looked, for a moment, as though he might draw his sword and hit her for being so blasphemous. But then he deflated. He knew she was telling the truth.

  “He would have told me,” he said halfheartedly.

  “He was going to, I think. But he died before he had the chance. He didn’t think the end would come so soon. Probably the twins pushed him into the water.”

  A strange thing happened then: she realized that everyone was looking at her, waiting to see what she would do next. Even the Battleship had quelled her sobs and was looking up like a child waiting for a story.

  She didn’t know what to do. She’d seen the twins die, watched Scree rise from the dead, and experienced the Battleship crumbling like a fortress made of biscuits. She was tired. She wanted everything to be over.

  “Aren’t you going to open the box?” she said to Cartwright.

  Cartwright untied the key from his neck. In this light its bronze tentacles seemed to dance and writhe, made worse by the fog in her head. He started to bend down, then stopped and tossed the key away from him. For a moment it glinted at the top of its arc; then it fell down, down, and down, and landed at Sophie’s feet.

  “It’s yours,” he said. “You deserve it.”

  So Sophie went to the box, and she opened it.

  Chapter 29

  The Last Meal

  The top of the box slid up and back on a delicate, complicated system of weights and levers. Inside was a small, gold horn attached to a glass music box, and inside the glass music box were wheels and saws and strings. Something began to turn, winding a silver thread tight around a spiked bobbin. A piece of yellowing paper stuck to the inside of the box flapped in the breeze, and Sophie read it before it skidded away.

  Laurel’s Patent Monster Box

  The world’s first Creature Caller.

  May the ones who open this box be forever damned!

  ~ Double bluffs a specialty ~

  “Oh, Neptune,” said Sophie.

  The box began to wheeze. And the creatures stirred.

  * * *

  The Battleship hiccupped as Sophie tried to slam the box shut, but it had latched itself open.

  At first there was only a whine, like the mechanism was broken, but then it started rising so fast that within seconds it was a scream. And still it kept going, past the point of any noise she had heard before, so loud it felt like her eardrums were going to burst. She threw it away from her and the noise wavered, pulsing like an emergency siren. Out at sea a long, nasal moan joined the noise and shook the foundations of the house.

  “What’s happening?” shouted Cartwright, stuffing his fingers in his ears. Sophie looked at Scree, but he was as surprised as her, tightly clutching his fishing pole.

  “What’s wrong?” Cartwright yelled. “Is it meant to be doing this?”

  She stumbled to him. Another moan rose from the sea, a sound like the kraken and all its friends having their teeth extracted. They rose and began to surge toward the shore. Not just the creatures that usually loitered around the island: they were coming from farther away, too, the horizon bending as the sea heaved itself up to vomit forth all its creatures.

  She grabbed Cartwright’s sleeve and yanked him away from the Monster Box. They plunged into the twisting greenery of the overgrown garden.

  When they could just about hear each other she grasped his collar.

  “We’re in trouble,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “The twins knew there was something bad in the Monster Box, but I didn’t listen!”

  “What is it?” he shouted. The expression on his face was one of dawning horror.

  “I saw some of Laurel’s diagrams in the Room of Remains. That shrieking from the box—it attracts the creatures, it riles them up and sends them into a feeding frenzy, but there aren’t any bones left for them. They’ll tear everything down, and then they’re going to smash us to pieces. We’re the last meal!”

  “You’re wrong,” he yelled through the siren and the screams of the approaching monsters. “My uncle wouldn’t give me something that could kill me!”

  Even now, she wanted to shake him for being so thick.

  “He only pretended to give it to you!”

  “I was there when he said—”

  “He knew what the twins were like,” she said. The first monsters were beginning to squirm up the banks. “That’s why he said he was leaving the Monster Box to you. He knew they’d get jealous and steal it—it was probably the only way he could get them to take it without them getting suspicious. He left the box in his workroom, right in the middle of the floor so they would find it, with the key so they could open it. Except they missed the key, and you found it, and it gave them enough time to work out what the box really was.”

  “But to have us eaten—”

  “He knew you’d leave the island after they stole the box. He didn’t know you’d keep coming back for it. Even if you did come back, you should have found nothing but a pile of rubble. But the twins realized it was dangerous. They haven’t just been taunting you, they’ve been trying to keep their freakish little world intact. The cure Laurel talked about wasn’t for Sea Fever. It was for this horrible place.”

  A tentacle slapped down on the ground beside them. Sophie dodged, and together they stumbled deeper into the garden, away from the oncoming army. Cartwright kept his head turned from her, and she knew it was so she couldn’t see his expression.

  When they stopped, Cartwright finally looked at her. His face dropped.

  “You stupid, obsessive idiot,” Sophie said. “It’s because you wouldn’t let go of the box. What are we meant to do now?”

  Cartwright looked at her. Sophie found herself leaning in, and so was he, and they kissed, briefly, on the mouth. As soon as she thought the word finally she realized she’d been waiting for it for a long time, even though Cartwright made her want to punch a wall, even though he was a coward and a liar and a total idiot. Although she wasn’t so great either, charging around and stabbing innocent people with scissors.

  Maybe he wasn’t that bad, in comparison.

  She pulled away, her stomach twisting itself into surprised but not unpleasant knots and said, “Gross.”

  “Too soon?”

  They heard the thudding of hooves. The chopping of gravestone teeth.

  “I meant what do we do? Now?”

  “I think our escape vehicle has arrived,” said Cartwright.

  They fought their way out of the undergrowth to see a wall of creatures rising out of the sea, advancing along the shore in an army, and there, thrashing madly in front of them, with a rubbery tentacle hanging out of his mouth like a piece of spaghetti, was Manic.

  They looked at each other.

  “It’s better than nothing,” Sophie suggested, and they ran toward him.

  * * *

  Cartwright swung himself onto Manic’s back as the first wave of creatures came down. The squid were knotted together in impossible shapes, caught up in the surge and thrown to shore still writhing, and behind them loomed one of the most monstrous creatures of the sea, the huge black demikraken with circles of teeth gleaming in its open mouth. The creatures hit the shore, bringing with them a sheet of salt water, and surged toward the shrieking Monster Box. A brown crab emerged from the fray and ran toward it, but was snatched back by something with too many legs.

  They brought with them the stench of seaweed and dredged sewers. Sophie gagged as Cartwright hauled her up after him. Manic gnashed his teeth and took a chunk out of a wobbling jellyfish which had decided to wrap itself around his head.

  “Away from the house,” Sophie called over the deafening scream, and Cartwright urged Manic forward. Sophie had hoped they’d be able to leap over the sea as Cartwright had done on his arrival, but the sky had been almost b
locked out by the creatures and they would only be throwing themselves into a mouth.

  “STOP!” she screamed at them, but her voice was lost in the chomping and gnashing. They didn’t even seem to recognize her and surged past with snapping jaws. Cartwright tried to gallop ahead of the creatures, but they were everywhere, and now that the first wave had arrived other things were heaving themselves out of the water: something gray from the bottom of the ocean that looked like a giant tapeworm, an ancient dragonfish, a barnacled griddle pan that had awoken from a decades-long sleep. An eel slapped down in front of them so they had to turn back. A tentacle went through a window in the house, spraying the ground with glass, and all hell that had not already happened broke loose.

  There were hundreds of them. Thousands even, she realized, more than she’d ever thought possible in all the world. The sea was thick with them and their viscous, blackish blood as they fought amongst themselves to get to the shore. Chunks of masonry fell off the side of the house, and soon things were climbing up it, suckering themselves to the damp stone and crushing roof tiles under their feelers. Despite herself, Sophie couldn’t help but watch as the front of the house was torn off, first the lower floors, then the top slipping after it like warm butter. The innards of the house were spread out, upholstery being sucked off moldering armchairs like loose skin from a plum, paintings snapped up like bits of cereal, suits of armor thrown around between the creatures until something with teeth like an industrial disposal unit managed to crush them up.

  Manic was struggling through knee-deep slime and blubber. None of the monsters were interested in them yet, but it was only a matter of time before they were caught in the fight and eaten themselves.

  “This way!” Cartwright shouted, or she thought he shouted, because she was almost deaf from the noise. He tried to steer them toward the back of the house, but she knew that it was useless. There were creatures around the other side already, still coming fast, trampling the remains of the oyster racks, and if they weren’t eaten they’d be crushed by the falling house. She looked around wildly for Scree and the Battleship. Scree was balanced precariously on a tall stack of rock, beating tentacles away with his fishing claw. The Battleship was still on the ground, batting things off with her elbows, and she had the Monster Box with her, which she was trying to bash to pieces with a brick. But the thing was indestructible, and she didn’t even make a dent in it before she disappeared. Within seconds all Sophie could see of the Battleship was a puff of white skirt slowly being sucked into a mass of writhing flesh. She reached out, wanting to pull her back out, but she was too far away. Her hand closed on air and the Battleship was lost.