The Sacrifice Box

by Martin Stewart

  Mack.

  Hadley.

  The box.

  And he realized there was only one way of throwing light on the situation – something that would have been unthinkable even an hour earlier.

  ‘That was quick,’ said Lamb, starting the engine and grinding the truck into gear. ‘Right, if we take the forestry road, we should be –’

  ‘We can’t go to yours yet,’ said Sep, closing his door with a thump.

  ‘What? Look, we can hide there and figure out what we –’

  ‘No, that’s just it: we won’t figure this out on our own. We need help – we have to go to the hospital.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Hadley, her tears dried in splotches around her eyes.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ said Sep, strapping himself in. ‘It’s visiting time.’

  41

  Guidance

  Maguire opened gummy eyes. The room was hot, and she felt her back damp with sweat. She coughed, brought something jellyish and salty into her mouth, and turned her head to spit.

  Sep was sitting at the side of her bed.

  She coughed again and went to roll her eyes – but they felt like boulders, and it hurt.

  ‘Hope?’ she croaked. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘I said you were my gran,’ said Sep. ‘I’m sorry, miss. I had to see you.’

  She gestured at the steel water jug. Sep lifted it carefully, handed her the little cup and felt her skin on his. She was cold, even though her face glistened with the room’s plasticky, clinical warmth.

  She drank, little runnels falling from the sides of her mouth, then held out the cup for more.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  He flicked his eyes nervously at her as he poured.

  ‘I wanted to ask about what happened to you.’

  She scowled.

  ‘This isn’t the Hardy Boys. The police –’ She broke off to cough and Sep steadied her shoulder, awkwardly supporting her bony joint as her eyes closed. ‘The police are doing their jobs.’

  ‘I’m not investigating, miss, I just –’

  ‘Go,’ she said, settling into her pillows and nodding painfully at the door. ‘You shouldn’t be in here and I don’t want to have to call the nurse. Nice girl, I used to teach her. Very respectful.’

  ‘I’m sorry, miss,’ said Sep more firmly, ‘but I know what happened to you.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ she said, and reached for the alarm.

  Sep snatched it from her hand.

  ‘Hey!’ she said, grabbing his arm. ‘Don’t you –’

  ‘Sadie,’ Sep hissed urgently, his eyes bulging. ‘Sadie.’

  She stopped pushing him away and her grip tightened.

  ‘How can you possibly know that name?’

  ‘Thom Roxburgh told us. She tried to strangle you. Well, my teddy bear tried to kill me – his name is Barnaby. I put him in the sacrifice box four years ago – but now he’s back and we don’t know what to do about it, so I need your help.’

  They looked at each other for a long moment, and Sep didn’t look away. Maguire’s face – the same one that had glowered at him a thousand times, unyielding as a battleship – looked different, the skin around her eyes soft without the teacher’s stare.

  He nodded to show he was serious, then handed her another cup of water.

  She drank it, still looking at him.

  ‘What else did Thom say?’ she said eventually.

  ‘He told us this is worse than what happened to you, when you were kids,’ said Sep. ‘Sadie chased us today – she bit a chunk out of Thom’s leg, then he shot her. And he said he saved you from her.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I knew it was him – that tobacco he chews. Did you say she bit him?’

  ‘Yeah. And she tried to kill us too.’

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ she whispered. ‘I assume someone broke the rules?’

  ‘Mack,’ said Sep, blushing as though he was grassing someone up in class. ‘He broke, like … all of them.’

  Maguire closed her eyes.

  ‘He said he was lonely,’ said Sep.

  Maguire thought of the shade in the chair at home.

  ‘Yes,’ was all she said.

  Sep wiped his face on his T-shirt, scraping the sweat from his eyes.

  ‘Who did they choose?’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘The rules. Who did they come to?’

  Sep met her stare. He felt like he could cry.

  ‘Me,’ he said, thinking back to the moment in his bedroom when the words had appeared without warning, like petals falling on his head. ‘They just … came to me. It was weird.’

  Maguire smiled.

  ‘Like a dream?’ She saw his face, and went on. ‘They came to me too. We didn’t know they really meant anything, of course.’

  She took another drink, then set down her cup.

  ‘What happens when you break a promise?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘People are hurt. Misery, pain, upset. That’s what happens when you break a promise. Childhood is a powerful thing – there aren’t many things in life as fierce as the bond between children. Between friends, who love each other.’

  Sep remembered the vivid threads that had connected them that summer, how they had felt the connection. Each of them close. Each of them happy.

  ‘Why didn’t it keep us together then? If it’s so powerful, how come we didn’t stay friends?’

  ‘Because you broke your promise,’ said Maguire, ‘and then you broke the rules. They are one and the same: the rules are your promise, to each other – and to the box. You gave it all that power, then corrupted it. And now you’ve taken the lid off it’s returning that broken promise – all that misery and pain – to you.’

  ‘I knew it,’ said Sep, moving closer to the bed. ‘Everything we gave it when we made our sacrifices is coming back and hurting us: me, Lamb, Darren, Hadley, everyone except –’

  It’ll always show the time of this perfect moment.

  ‘– Mack.’

  Sep pictured him stopping his watch, freezing time at the moment they all swore to be friends forever.

  Mack.

  It was his turn today, but nothing had come back from the box to cause him pain.

  And, Sep realized, nothing would.

  Because Mack had put his happiness in the box.

  His watch was working again, now they were all back together. Sep pictured the big athlete snacking in the background, lonely every day since that summer – and himself, isolated behind his studies, rejecting Mack and the others and focusing only on escaping the island.

  ‘That last time,’ said Maguire, interrupting his thoughts, ‘we knew we had to do it properly –’

  ‘That’s what Roxburgh said! What does that even mean, properly?’

  A nurse looked over at his raised voice.

  ‘The first time we made an offering,’ Maguire whispered, ‘we did it wrong. It was meant to be about our friendship, same as yours, but the others … didn’t take it seriously. Only Thom and me. The other three took their sacrifices back straight away – so our promise was broken. It was bad. Morgan developed a lung infection. Lizzie couldn’t eat properly. Shelley lost her hair.’

  ‘Shelley who died in New York?’

  She gave him a strange look.

  ‘Aren’t you sharp?’ she said. ‘That was Shelley, yes. Caught her hair in a subway train. Terrible business. I’d forgotten all about the offerings until Morgan died a few years ago. A crow came to the window that night, and I knew. Two came when Lizzie died; another yesterday, when Shelley …’ She trailed off and nodded at the window.

  Two crows were staring through the glass. One was badly injured, white bone jutting through torn flesh, and they watched the third join them in a flutter of wings – the pellet shining in its eye.

  ‘And now it’s my turn,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why it’s so much worse this time. Nobody died when we broke the rule
s. What offerings did you make?’

  ‘My teddy; Darren put in some dragonflies; a watch; a mirror; a diary. And today we tried to put in new versions of the same stuff – like a new teddy, and Hadley put in the pen she wrote the diary with – but it didn’t work!’

  ‘That’s it?’ she said. ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘No,’ said Sep, ‘only –’

  ‘Only what?’

  ‘Blood,’ said Sep.

  ‘What?’ shouted Maguire, smiling calmly when the nurse looked up sharply from her desk. She dropped her voice to a hiss. ‘You put something alive in the –’

  ‘No! It was Hadley – she dropped the lid and cut her hand; it was just a tiny bit.’

  ‘Of her blood? Human blood?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sep. ‘What does that mean?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I have no idea. But I don’t like it.’

  Sep edged closer to the bed.

  ‘I can hear it now,’ he said. ‘And I can feel its noise.’

  ‘Feel it? How?’

  ‘I’ve got a toothache,’ said Sep, touching his jaw, ‘and the box’s noise hits it like a drill. It’s agony. Why is that happening?’

  Maguire nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘Have you smelled the things that come back from it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sep, remembering Barnaby’s stink. ‘They’re all damp, and old, and –’

  ‘Rotten. Rot, corruption, decay: these are what it sends into the world, how it controls things.’

  Sep bit down, thinking of how the pain clawed and pulled at him.

  ‘So rot is the box’s frequency, and my tooth’s like … an aerial?’

  She smiled, pleased.

  ‘Such a bright boy,’ she said.

  ‘But how do we stop it?’ said Sep urgently. ‘The others are waiting outside and we need to do something. Roxburgh won’t help us – he told us to stay away – but we can’t just hide and hope it stops. It won’t stop. Sadie, Barnaby – people could get hurt. Your friend’s already dead! We can’t go to the police; my mum wouldn’t –’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t,’ said Maguire, her face grim.

  She took his wrist in her little hand.

  ‘You have to focus, September. Think about why you made the sacrifice in the first place – why the box chose you five to make the sacrifice. Because it did choose you, make no mistake about that.’

  ‘But I don’t know why it –’

  ‘– It’s because you loved each other so strongly! Now you need to make a new promise to each other, another offering: of things that bond you together.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Items you’ve given each other, tokens that make you think of your friendship. Give those to the box and you’ll be giving it all the love you have for each other.’

  ‘The love?’ said Sep. ‘I don’t think we – we’re not exactly close any more.’

  ‘You are. You must be. It chose you all, just like it chose us.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sep, understanding dawning. ‘Roxburgh told us to forgive each other.’

  ‘Right,’ said Maguire. ‘Forgive. Love. Make new offerings – offerings that show your love for one another. Thom will help you, but you must do what you can.’

  Maguire smiled at him, and she looked in that moment like a completely different person to the corridor-stomping terror he’d known.

  ‘We will,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, miss. I’m so sorry.’

  She nodded, and leaned forward to cup his face in her hands. They were warm now, and incredibly soft. Sep wanted to hug her – to let himself be held and kept safe.

  ‘I know you can do this, September. You’re a brilliant boy. Go. Be brave. And be careful.’

  Sep nodded, then ran down the corridor.

  Maguire gripped the edges of the bedclothes as his footsteps faded. She lay back as the daylight ebbed into pinkening clouds, and watched the crows outside her window.

  -3

  Love: 1941

  The light on Aileen’s skin dimmed as their fire died. The forest leaned in towards them with clawing thorns and the foliage rustled in the wind. The day was almost gone, and dusk’s gloom was gathering around them.

  Aileen looked down at the box.

  ‘You all right, lass?’ said Thom.

  The others were watching her, their hats rain-flat to their heads, blinking drops from their eyes. Black feathers glittered in the trees, and the five felt their blood chill at the chatter of the birds’ beaks.

  Aileen straightened her back.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Have you brought another offering?’

  ‘The way you looked at me when I opened my door, I’d have brought my own mother in a bag,’ said Thom. ‘It’s the ticket stub from the school play, that time they did Hamlet.’

  She looked quickly at him.

  ‘You kept that?’

  He nodded.

  ‘One of the best times we ever had, wasn’t it?’

  ‘But we didn’t go to the play – we went to the pier and drank a bottle of cooking sherry.’

  Thom nodded again.

  ‘That’s what I’m talkin’ about.’

  She smiled at him and squeezed his hand.

  ‘We give these with love. Those other things were spoiled by our squabbling. We broke our vow – now we can do it properly.’

  Morgan took a small object from his pocket, then turned it in his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry about before,’ he said. ‘If I’d known it would –’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Aileen, giving him a soft, grateful smile. ‘You’re here. It’s all this was ever meant to be – us together again, like we were before.’

  Shelley, a sodden shawl wrapped tightly round her head, leaned down and dropped a cardigan into the box’s shadows.

  ‘This is one of the things Aileen brought me when our house flooded and my clothes got ruined. I’m glad to be here with you all, and glad to show it. I love you all. I’m sorry I ever forgot it.’

  Morgan barked a loud sob and coughed into his hands.

  ‘This was the hatpin Lizzie gave me to mend my bike, that time when I fell,’ he said, a thick wheeze on his breath. He leaned down and dropped the pin inside. A few crows rose from their perches and fluttered through the clearing. ‘You’re my best friends,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to give this.’

  Thom clapped a hand on his back as he straightened up.

  Lizzie gripped her parcel with taut knuckles and shrunken skin. Her eyes, deep-set in black circles, burned with tears, and her face was set and firm.

  ‘I did wrong,’ she said. ‘I curse nobody. I love my aunt. She took me in and she’s kept me well. I’m giving this for her as well as you. It’s the book Thom gave me when I moved here – it brought me comfort on lonely nights, and I’m grateful.’

  Thom stepped forward and hefted the shovel on to his shoulder.

  ‘Given for all of you,’ he said, dropping the ticket on top of the rest, ‘and for all of yours, hopin’ they’re safe until the end of this damn war, an’ beyond.’

  Aileen allowed a small cry to escape her lips as she went to her pocket and took out the little cross-stitch. Rain landed on the threads, spotting the image with dark wrinkles, and she held it against her chest. Behind her, the treelines skittered with animal feet, and she sensed the night-time forest waking up around them.

  ‘I made this for all of you,’ she said, laying it inside and stepping back, reaching for the others, ‘and for everyone who needs it, even the Germans – they’ve got children and mothers and fathers too. If we could just love each other, maybe everything would be all right.’

  They held hands and said the rules. Thom dragged the lid back into place and Lizzie hunched forward, shoulders heaving. Morgan wrapped her in one of his rangy arms and she buried her face in his side.

  Aileen looked up, peering through the rain as the crows melted into the night sky, the gleam of their terrible eyes vanishing into the scattered
stars.

  Thom squeezed her hand.

  ‘Well done, lass,’ he said quietly.

  Aileen breathed in the fresh green air, and smiled.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ she said.

  42

  Bonding

  ‘Hurry up, Sep!’ said Arkle, leaning out of the window.

  The truck was hidden in the trees at the edge of the hospital car park, its paintwork sticky with sap and seeds – and covered in the scratches of taloned feet.

  ‘I’m coming!’

  Sep jumped in beside Arkle. The truck stank even more strongly of mushrooms, and he wondered if they were growing under the carpet.

  ‘Hi, Sep,’ said Mack, twisting round in the front seat.

  ‘Hi, Mack. You all right?’

  Mack smiled shyly.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They nodded at each other.

  ‘Good talk, guys – real deep stuff,’ said Arkle.

  ‘What did Magpie say?’ said Lamb.

  ‘That we need to make another sacrifice.’

  Lamb nodded and took a deep, wobbling breath. ‘I thought so. It didn’t work last time – there’s something we weren’t doing right. I can’t believe I gave it my mum’s … and it didn’t even work!’

  Hadley squeezed her arm, and she shook her head. Then pointed at Mack.

  ‘Did she say anything about why this asshole’s had nothing happen to him, even though it was him who opened the damn thing?’

  Mack bowed his head.

  ‘Kind of,’ said Sep.

  ‘And?’

  Sep looked at Mack, at the sorrow in his big, honest face.

  ‘It’s because we all accidentally gave it things that were hurting us, or that –’ he saw Lamb’s eyes flick up – ‘had hurt us in the past. But Mack didn’t do that. He stopped his watch because he was so happy that summer – just purely happy, and he put nothing in there but that happiness. Nothing’s coming for him,’ he finished as Mack turned to him with tear-filled eyes, ‘because there’s nothing there to come.’

  Mack reached over to hold Sep’s shoulder, then dropped his hand.

  ‘That’s what Maguire told me: the most powerful thing we did is make a promise to each other. That’s what Roxburgh was talking about when he said to do it “properly”. This time we’ve got to make sacrifices for each other. Maguire said we had to give it love. That’s what they did last time.’