The Bone Snatcher

by Charlotte Salter

  She could see right inside the house now. Into the twins’ junk room, and the dining room, and the clock room, the huge bell swinging under the weight of the attack. Manic was trampling monsters with decreasing effectiveness, and Cartwright had his sword out, swinging it wildly at anything that got too close. Sophie ducked her head and looked at the seething ground. The Monster Box bobbed to the surface, still screeching, and Sophie had an idea that would probably but not definitely get her killed. It was, she considered, better than nothing.

  She jumped down from the horse and plunged toward the box.

  * * *

  The first thing Sophie did when she hit the ground was fall over. Everything was wet and covered in a sheet of slime, and the chaos around her was so all-consuming that her senses shut down and for a moment all she could see was blurred, moving shapes. The box was swamped by something fleshy, its noise descending into a low, strangled whine. The noise that she could hear over it was stomach-churning: slurping, chopping, sucking, and the sporadic ripping sound of curtains or carpet or please no skin. She searched for the box on her hands and knees, rolling to the side as a purple limb swept over her head. Cartwright, only just realizing that she wasn’t behind him anymore, struggled to turn Manic around.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted, or she thought he shouted as he skewered a stingray.

  “I don’t know,” she said to herself, and managed to grab the open box as it was flung aside. The siren picked up again.

  The house was a wreck. It rose on one side, only the far wall of the left wing completely intact, trailing down into half-chewed, shredded floors and furniture. The insides of the house had never been exposed to this much daylight, and they looked sad and broken and dead. The demikraken on her right sniffed the air, looking for a moment just like the Battleship, its huge nostrils flaring, and swooped down on her.

  Whomp.

  A thick tail fin flew over her head, its serrated edges glinting in the sun, just missing her scalp. Cartwright struggled over and swung his sword at it, severing the tip of the tail and prompting an anguished shriek.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t hurt any of them!”

  “Are you joking?” he yelled as a huge leech attempted to attach itself to his leg. “They’re going to eat us!”

  Sophie wedged the open box under her arm and began to climb through the fray, pushing her way through the fat tentacles and slippery entrails of creatures that had got in the way of something else’s teeth. Her ears screamed for her to stop. She got to where the door used to be, narrowly avoiding a lump of falling ceiling, and entered into the carcass of the house. The main stairs reached into nowhere, but she took them anyway, and when they broke off she climbed along the beams sticking out of the exposed inner wall. They bent beneath her, and she suspected she had nothing to prevent her from falling but blind luck. Up one set of beams, along a tilting floor, and onto the next bits of wood which stuck out like pegs. Already she was dizzyingly high, and a tentacle tried to slap her away, so hard she almost dropped the box.

  When she was as high as she could go she dropped onto the next floor, which was open to the air and leaned sharply to the side, and ran. Her foot went through the floor twice, and as she moved the whole structure groaned. The portraits and ornamental swords shook with the house. And then she was in the clock room, and she grasped a stone column and began to climb, toward the highest point she could get to. The box started to slide from under her arm. She wedged it between herself and the wall, scraping it against the stone, her foot continually slipping and knocking bits of plaster to the faraway ground, until she reached the top and pulled herself over.

  Up here she could see and be seen by everything. She could see the shape of the storm on the horizon, which had arms and legs like a monster and crackled with hunger. It slowly spread toward them, feeling its way through the sky with its dark, ropy limbs, flashing and snapping as the creatures beneath it continued to feed.

  The world looked very small, but she felt even smaller. The creatures slammed themselves against the wall she was balanced on, trying to knock her down into their mouths. She stumbled. Cartwright was down there, but she couldn’t see the expression on his face, only that he was seconds away from being eaten.

  “Hey!” she screamed. “Monsters! Look at me! Do you recognize me? I’m the Bone Snatcher!”

  The creatures slammed against the wall again, and stones slipped from under her knees.

  “You’re mine!” she screamed. “You will not hurt anyone else on this island!”

  She held the Monster Box aloft, gathering all her strength. Then she threw the box away from her and it fell, screeching that inhuman, painfully high sound. It did what she wanted; it got the creatures’ attention, and for a moment they were all looking hungrily toward her. Then the box hit the ground below the bell and shattered.

  The wailing cut off, leaving a huge gap in the air, a hole where the noise had been. The silence was horrendous. Sophie drew herself to her full height and opened her mouth to call off the creatures.

  Then the demikraken, with a pained shriek, slammed its entire body against the column she was standing on.

  Sophie dropped to her knees and yelped. The creatures, seeing the demikraken, screamed and went back to their meal, writhing and twisting through the ruins of the house. That wasn’t meant to happen. It was meant to break the frenzy. They were meant to snap out of it.

  Knees buckling, she looked down at the bell. It was almost the only thing left. How else were they going to recognize her, all of them at once, as the person who fed them and looked after them? She needed to knock them back to their senses. She needed to make them remember who she was so they’d let her go.

  The demikraken slammed against the wall again. Something shifted below her and the wall began to lean, settling at a horrible angle. She pried a stone from under her feet, one as big as her head, and heaved it into her arms. Then she threw it down as hard as she could.

  It fell into the depths of the bell’s machinery, and for a second it looked like nothing would happen, that this was the end and she was about to be finished. Then there was movement—a cog knocked loose, a lever released. Something mechanical groaned, and there was the slow sliding of levers, and the pent-up, quickening spin of a hundred wheels.

  The feeding bell was struck for the last time.

  * * *

  The sound of the bell, which the creatures had not heard in days, did something incredible to them. They fell down, blinking like fish pulled out of the water, exhausted by their frenzy. The monsters from farther afield, the ancient ones who had never heard the bell through their deep-sea slumber, crumpled up as though the noise hurt them and plopped back into the water, one by one.

  The sheer size and weight of the bell, the deep, brassy sound that turned the air thick with shaking, dislodged its own foundations. Slowly, slowly, the struts it hung from bent. The bell was ripped from its chain and fell, landing with an almighty clang that cracked the rock beneath it.

  For a moment Sophie was still in the air, looking down. The fuzz in her head from the Monster Box and the bell, from injury and exhaustion, made her wonder how real everything was. But there, on the ground and piled up the sides of the building, her creatures were stretching toward her, opening their mouths and howling with something that sounded like delight.

  She heard Scree’s voice drift up through the ruins, thin and proud:

  “She’s bloody gone and done it. She’s got them under her thumb. They’ll make her their queen!”

  And then the wall she was on slipped forward, and Sophie fell.

  Chapter 30

  The Crowning

  Sophie Seacove might have been dead.

  She wasn’t sure, but it was a distinct possibility. Everything was black, and heavy, and smelled of fish. She hoped the afterlife didn’t always smell of fish. Unless the sea creat
ures had followed her here, in which case she would put up with anything.

  She remembered the looks on their faces as she fell, if they could be called looks at all. They were very happy to see her. It wasn’t their fault that the sound of the Monster Box had driven them mad; it tapped into some faulty wiring that made them into crazed animals, just like a few carefully placed words could make Sophie turn her fists on someone or cause water to leak out of her eyes. Water was leaking out of her eyes now, in fact, joining with the sea.

  She grimaced, and in that moment realized that she had a mouth, and that it still moved even though she was dead. She moved her fingers and became instantly aware of small parts of her body, her cheek and her elbows, all of the bits pressed against the ground. Because there was a ground, and it was sharp and gravelly.

  This was not what the afterlife was supposed to be like.

  She opened her eyes. She was on the shore of Catacomb Hill, right by the water. She was surrounded by bits of rubble. The water was slapping against itself, but there were other things, too. Things in the sea, their eyes raised just above the water. They were watching her, blinking slowly, flicking their tentacles like cats’ tails.

  “Told you she’d wake up,” said Scree.

  Sophie touched the side of her head, which was damp with blood. She imagined her skull cracked open like an egg, the yolk of her brain spilling out, but she squeezed her eyes shut and told herself not to be so stupid. All the same, the air felt thick and heavy, and she couldn’t breathe too well. It felt like there was a stone pressing on her lungs.

  “I fell down,” she said stupidly.

  “All faculties intact, apparently,” said Cartwright from somewhere to her left. “Including her amazing ability to state the obvious.”

  Feeling sick, Sophie rolled over and dislodged an octopus sitting on her chest. It looked at her mournfully until she scrabbled around in the wreckage by her head and found a damp biscuit, which she threw into the sea, much to its delight.

  “You could have moved it,” she said to Cartwright, who had cuts all over his face. She couldn’t bring herself to feel annoyed. All she felt was a deep, almost painful relief, now that the world was quiet again. Manic stood behind him, chewing lumps of brick.

  “It refused,” he said. “It just sat there making squelching noises and spraying ink. It’s all over you, by the way.”

  She looked at her blood-covered hand again, which wasn’t covered in blood but the strange misery of the octopus. She climbed to her feet, wincing at the pain in her shoulder, and turned to view the island. It was flat, and gray, and faded into the sea like someone had stamped on it and pushed it into the water. Everything had a burned-out look, and she felt a deep, unexpected pang of sorrow.

  “We’re not going to cure the Sea Fever, are we?” she asked, feeling empty.

  “It was a stupid idea,” said Cartwright. “There’s no magic vial of medicine.”

  “That’s ’cause there’s no such thing as Sea Fever,” said Scree.

  Sophie and Cartwright stared at him.

  “That’s not true,” said Sophie as a toe-tentacled squid flopped over her ankles, squelching. Her head was beginning to clear. “Something drove everyone mad.”

  “It wasn’t a disease,” countered Scree.

  “I don’t understand,” said Cartwright.

  “It’s just people being scared,” said Scree. “Mebbe someone got eaten by a sea creature one day, or a man drowned, but nobody put it down to bad luck. It got bigger till we didn’t trust the water, or anything in it. The fear got out of control, and everyone thought it was a fever.

  “It’s called mass hysteria,” added Scree. “Before the sea, it was fear of machines. Before machines, it was fear of the dark. ’Course, most times nobody made up a magical island for everyone to go to.”

  Cartwright briefly looked like he wanted to jump into the sea.

  “Mister Scree,” Sophie said, “what are we supposed to do now?”

  “What happens,” he said, “is you get out of this place. You go to the mainland and get that shoulder seen to, then you go into the world and do whatever young people do.”

  “What about you?” she said. “I’m not running off and leaving you alone!”

  “I’m staying here, girl, in the catacombs and caves. I’m too old to leave them, and this rock is in my blood. I’ll eat glowfish and silverbugs and make a house from the rubble.”

  “It’ll be lonely,” said Sophie.

  “But we’re used to that here, aren’t we?” he said, his crooked smile cracking his usually sour face. “I’m not going anywhere. I’d disintegrate and blow about like dust if I left.”

  “If the creatures get hungry—”

  “You seen them?” he said, pointing at the water. “They’re not staying here. They’ll go wherever you go. They’re yours now.”

  And there they were, hundreds of them, lined up in the water like an audience, watching her without moving, their heads poking up out of the waves. She got up and walked slowly to the fringe of the beach, and when she entered the water they still didn’t do a thing. Not one creature opened its mouth.

  She looked at Scree nervously.

  “You understand them,” he said. “And you’re not scared. They like that.”

  “Shoes,” she said to her uncomprehending audience. They stared at her with their thousands of eyes. “When I came here, I lost my shoes in the water. I need some more. Come on, there must be tons of stuff floating around down there . . .”

  Still nothing.

  “Shoes,” she repeated, and lifted a foot out of the water, wriggling her toes.

  “She’s gone nuts,” Cartwright said behind her. Out in the sea, a barnacle-covered head sank like a periscope, and a minute later reemerged in front of her, pushing a mass of creatures out of its way. Sophie stepped back as it belched. A pair of leather shoes landed at her feet. The laces were knotted together in a slimy mess, the soles peeling away, holes in the toes, bloated and gray—but they were hers. They had to be. Her old boots had been rescued from the sea.

  “They like me,” she said, shocked, turning to Scree and Cartwright. “I think they’re beginning to understand me.”

  “Aye,” said Scree. “They’re head over heels with you. Use ’em wisely.”

  “I will,” she said.

  He gave her a crafty look. His knees creaked as he sat down on a lump of fallen building. “I reckon you ought to tell a story on an occasion like this.”

  Sophie, touched, sat down, too, with the boots in her hand. She tried to think of a way to start. Then she looked into the wreckage of the building and began.

  * * *

  The Caretaker’s Ghost

  In Which We Find That an End Is a Beginning

  Once there was an island, and the island was at the end of its life.

  It was surrounded by a trembling black sea and a freezing sky. There was nothing left on it but weeds and bones and a few luminescent glowfish trapped in its underground tunnels. The sea creatures that used to live there were hibernating deep under the waves. It was as quiet and lonely as the inside of a clam.

  Deep down in the heart of the island there was a ghost, the island’s caretaker. He had been a man, and a glowfish, and a drop of water, and now he was in the very fabric of the rock. He had slept for hundreds of years, dreaming of the house he used to look after and the wonderful stories he used to tell. Only now, at the end of all things, was he waking up.

  He didn’t recognize the place in front of him. The grand old house had crumbled. The trees were bent over with cold, and the ground was choked with shaggy moss and cruel-looking weeds. Everything was gray and miserable.

  The ghost rose from the catacombs. He had an idea. He would start again.

  He called to the glowfish that lurked sadly in the depths of the tunnels and showed them the
way into the sea. They jumped to life and swam rapidly away. The caretaker turned over every stone and chased away the shadows living beneath them. He pulled the thorny weeds out of the ground, then coaxed the trees back to life. He found a beautiful red stone abandoned by the shore, and after polishing it, he tossed it into the water as a gift for the queen of the sea.

  That night, the queen received her gift. She picked the red stone up, and its warmth melted the ice at the tips of her fingers. As she held it, the frost around her heart began to drip away as well.

  While the caretaker was sleeping, the queen traveled to the island and started to rebuild the house. When she finished she roused the sea monsters, so that the caretaker would never be lonely.

  The caretaker woke to find the island exactly as it had been years before, with the beautiful house standing tall and the monsters playing in the sea. The garden was thick with greenery, and for the first time in years snow-white gulls circled overhead. Smiling, the caretaker resurrected an old deck chair. He opened it, sat down, put his hands behind his head, and yawned.

  Years later, on the shore of the island, oysters began to grow.

  * * *

  Sophie and Cartwright were on the beach facing the mainland, hanging from Manic, who was chomping his jaws at the sea with horrible enthusiasm. Scree stood behind them on a pile of stone, his hand raised in a salute.