Hollow Chest

by Brita Sandstrom

  “What were we talking about, lad?”

  “Um, Hollow Chest?” Charlie said.

  Grandpa Fitz looked up and squinted at Charlie across the table. “About . . . what?”

  “Hollow Chest,” Charlie said quietly, glancing over his shoulder at the stairs. “You were saying that’s what’s wrong with Theo?”

  “I don’t know what ‘Hollow Chest’ is. . . .” He looked at Charlie askance. “What I do know is that what’s ailing your brother isn’t something you nor I can fix for him. It’s not a broken bone that you can set right.”

  “But just now—just now you said that Theo had ‘Hollow Chest,’ and that you didn’t because of Grandma Lily—”

  “Oh, Charlie boy, you know I talk nonsense some days.” Grandpa Fitz straightened and ran his hand through his short gray hair. “I wish there was a simple explanation for what’s going on inside Theo as much you do. But it’s a swirling mess in there that we can’t get at. All we can do is be here for him until we can’t.”

  Charlie’s neck went cold. “What do you mean, ‘until we can’t’?”

  “All I mean is that we all have to realize our limitations. We can only try to meet him where he is.”

  “Meet who where he is?” Theo asked. He was on the stairs, dressed in his new work clothes, his hair combed and gleaming like a new penny.

  “You, at that fish and chips stand near your work,” Grandpa Fitz said without missing a beat. “For lunch.”

  “I won’t have time, Charlie,” Theo said with a sigh, pulling on his coat. “It’s too far to bloody walk with my leg, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Mind how you talk to your brother,” Grandpa Fitz said, straightening his shoulders so he seemed to take up the whole room. Theo ducked his head and became very interested in the buttons on his coat. The silence stretched out between them all.

  “Do you want me to make you a lunch, Theo?” Charlie called just as he was walking out the door.

  “No, I’ll buy something on the way,” Theo said over his shoulder.

  “Okay, bye!” But the door closed on his voice.

  Biscuits was mewling next to her food dish, demanding breakfast and attention.

  “There’s nothing for you until I make lunch, I’m sorry,” he crooned, stroking her soft ears and under her chin. Biscuits nipped painlessly at his shin, unconvinced, then got up to stretch her paws as high up the wall towards the icebox and the container of her food as she could.

  “There’s nothing up there, Biscuits, I swear to you.”

  Biscuits made a sound like a baby crying, a sound Charlie hadn’t heard before, and he scooped her up into his arms, feeling her all over for cuts or scrapes. But she squirmed loose and landed on the floor with a thunk, then scrambled over to paw at her empty food dish. She made the baby cry again, and flung herself belly-up on the floorboards.

  “What is it? Are you hurt? Did you step on something? Did you fall?”

  She flipped back onto her feet and screamed at the icebox again.

  “There’s nothing in there, Biscuits, look,” and he took out the jar and opened it to show her—a single portion’s worth of scraps at the very bottom of her ceramic food jar.

  But that had been last night’s dinner for her. He’d been careful, he’d checked. The only reason it would still be there was if she hadn’t eaten last night. If no one had fed her—

  Theo. He’d promised, he’d said that he would feed her. A spike of pain shot through Charlie, an echo of what Biscuits must be feeling, a hand that had grabbed his stomach and twisted into a fist. He turned on his heel, frustration churning in his guts so hot it burned like acid.

  “Theo!” Charlie opened the door and chased after him, his toes going cold and then numb as his stocking feet were instantly sodden with slush. The buildings loomed up on either side of the street, like they were leaning in to get a better view. “Theo, did you feed Biscuits dinner last night?”

  “Charlie, I can’t be late for work, shove off.”

  “No!” Charlie grabbed Theo’s arm and spun him around.

  “Don’t bloody sneak up on me like that,” Theo said, his voice a snarl that might as well have dripped gore for how deeply it cut. How could Theo have forgotten about Biscuits? He knew that she had been there with Charlie when Mum started going away to work at the phone company, when Grandpa Fitz started going away to the fog of memories in his brain, and, finally, when Theo went away to war. How could he know that and treat her like she didn’t matter?

  “She can’t tell anyone when she’s hungry, it’s our job to take care of her—”

  “You haven’t got a job, Charlie.”

  “You said—” Charlie’s breath was coming in a thin, trembling gasp, his throat burning, his eyes burning, too. He would not cry. “You told me that it was my job to take care of everyone, and I did, I was good at it. Now you’re back, and you can’t even—”

  Theo started stalking away. And before he could even think about what he was doing, Charlie had scooped up a wet handful of slushy snow and lobbed it at the back of Theo’s head.

  Charlie was braced for Theo to scream and curse and shove Charlie into the snowbank, to shove slush down the back of his shirt, like he might have done before the war. He was not prepared for Theo to crumple with a choked-off wail. He was not prepared for him to clap his hands over his ears, to curl into himself like a piece of paper in a fire. His good knee buckled, but his bad knee couldn’t; it stayed locked and slid out from under him. Theo tilted horribly, and tried to catch himself with his cane, but it slid on the ice and out of his hand. Theo fell like a tree, his legs smacking hard into the sidewalk while his elbow caught in the snowbank.

  He pressed his face into the ground and began rocking.

  “No,” Theo moaned, his fingers digging hard into his own shoulders. “No no no no no nononononono.”

  “Shh, Theo,” Charlie said, his eyes flicking up and down the street. Neighbors were starting to peek out of windows. A couple on the other side of the street hurried past, the man wrapping his arm around the woman as if afraid Theo was going to launch himself across the street at them. An animal somewhere had started a low, eerie howl, as if in reply to Theo. Charlie wanted to shout at them that it was his fault, not Theo’s, to just mind their own business, but Theo just started rocking faster.

  “Theo, it’s okay, just come inside, I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry, Theo—”

  A strong, wiry hand grabbed hold of Charlie’s shoulder and yanked him backwards. “Theodore,” Grandpa Fitz said in a firm voice. “Theodore, can you hear me? I’m right here with you, Theodore. You’re home. You’re safe.”

  Grandpa Fitz crouched down next to Theo, not quite touching him, his voice low and soothing, like it had been the time the Mortons’ pony had gotten spooked and bolted into the street, getting her reins hopelessly tangled in the fence.

  “You’re home,” he kept repeating. “You’re safe. Is it all right if I take your hand?”

  Theo made a strange groaning sound, but seemed to nod his head, his eyes still squeezed shut. Grandpa Fitz took careful hold of Theo’s fingers, gently prying them loose from his shirt. The old man swayed a bit without his arm to balance him; looking up, he jerked his head towards Charlie, who rushed over to steady him from his other side.

  “Charlie and I are going to help you up now, and we’ll go inside and get a nice cup of tea. Does that sound all right, Theodore?”

  Theo nodded mutely. Grandpa Fitz kept a tight grip on Theo’s hand as Theo slowly uncurled and laboriously got to his feet. He hobbled like an old man back down the walk and inside, Charlie and Grandpa Fitz balancing him on either side.

  As Charlie turned to close the door, he caught sight of the dog that had been howling. It was a couple of streets away, silhouetted against the graying snow. Somehow, even from so far away, Charlie could still see every one of its teeth.

  Grandpa Fitz half carried Theo up the stairs and into bed, and called in to Theo’s work to
tell the overseer he was ill. Charlie fed Biscuits, and made pot after pot of tea. When he couldn’t stand the heavy, stifling quiet that had fallen over the house a moment longer, he hopped on his bicycle and rode to the shops. He would buy biscuits, the real kind, made by someone else with too much sugar and milk, he didn’t care if it took all of his pocket money. He would get something special for Theo, and Theo would know that Charlie was sorry, that he hadn’t meant it, that he would never do it again.

  The only shop where he could get the special kind he liked was quite far away, and he had to make a large sort of square around the worst of the bomb-damaged neighborhoods, skirting around the cratered streets and the great heaps of brick and timber and ice. It looked like giant children had been playing with blocks and dirt, gotten frustrated halfway through the game, and begun throwing things. Whole swaths of streets had simply been upended, and had to be avoided or else his bicycle would either run into a ditch or wind up with glass and nails stuck in the tires.

  So he had to go out of his way, past the hospital again.

  And if he hadn’t, he might not have seen the wolf.

  A man—a soldier, surely, his trouser legs hanging loose and empty just below the knees—was being pushed along the sidewalk by a woman, who was talking in a nonstop stream of cheerful babble. She either didn’t notice he wasn’t talking back, or was choosing not to notice. She did not seem to notice the monster slinking along behind her, either.

  It was as if the last two weeks finally slipped into focus in his memory, and he knew that he had seen it before, so many times. The dog at the train station, twining between the soldiers. Outside his house, an hour ago, watching his brother cry. That great yellow eye, burning and burning. None of those half-glimpsed shadows could have prepared him to see it with his waking eyes, with the protective layers of sleep and distractedness stripped away.

  Hysterical laughter bubbled up in his throat. Not only was he a monster who hurt his injured brother, but he was also apparently having nightmares during the day. The wolf—that, Charlie decided, was what it had to be—was all wrong, too big and too skinny, almost as tall at the shoulder as the man in the wheelchair, its hips and ribs sticking out at jagged angles to its body. It looked almost as if it had been broken and reassembled by someone more concerned with speed than precision. It was barely a wolf. How could he ever have mistaken it for a dog? How could he have ever seen it and not known it for a monster?

  It kept pace with the woman pushing the wheelchair, its feet leaving deep paw prints in the snow. And even though Charlie could not accept that what he was seeing was real, he could not deny that whatever it was, was getting much too close to the woman and the soldier. And before he could stop himself, he was crying out.

  “Hey!” Charlie shouted, his fingers so tight around his handlebars that he could feel his pulse in his fingertips. “Behind you! Look!”

  The woman paused, glanced over her shoulder in alarm, then shot Charlie a dirty look.

  There was nothing there.

  Charlie gawped like a fish. It had been there, he had seen it—but now, there was nothing. It didn’t matter that it had been more real than ever this time; the monster had, once again, winked out of existence as neatly as a bad dream.

  “You’re a nasty little boy, did you know that?” the woman was yelling at him. “You ought be ashamed of yourself, trying to make fun of a war hero.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “I would be ashamed to call you mine,” she continued, and Charlie was alarmed to see thick, glassy tears welling up in her eyes. The man in the wheelchair said nothing. He did not seem to be fully awake, even though his eyes were open and he was sitting upright. It was as though something essential were simply absent. “What if this was your father? Who raised you to be so cruel?”

  Charlie wanted to tell her that his brother was a war hero, that he would never be cruel to a soldier. But that wasn’t exactly true, was it? Wasn’t his brother the war hero curled up in bed because Charlie had thrown something at him and made him think he was back in a trench? Hadn’t Charlie done that?

  “But there’s—it was there!” He looked around frantically to the people around on the street, who all avoided his eyes and scurried around him. A flash of grinning fang and dark fur sliced through the corner of his eye, and he whipped around back to the woman and the soldier, pointing. But there was nothing.

  There was nothing.

  The woman shoved at her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffed loudly, then quickly pushed the soldier in the wheelchair away down the sidewalk.

  “Don’t mind that horrid boy, darling,” she said to the man, smoothing his hair with one gloved hand. She didn’t glance behind her again.

  A man in a smart suit and a felt hat bumped into Charlie, making him startle so badly he almost tipped over his bicycle. Then there was an odd snuffling noise, like a wolfish snicker, right next to Charlie’s ear. He whipped around in a panic, but it was gone.

  The man glared down at Charlie before joining the flow of people on the sidewalk, none of whom, clearly, had seen any wolf.

  I’m going completely mad, Charlie realized. Seeing things that aren’t there, that’s what mad people do. He was breathing too fast and too shallow; black spots seemed to be flashing across his eyes. He couldn’t be mad, he wouldn’t allow it. Who would help Mum? Who would look after Grandpa Fitz? Who would help Theo remember who he was and make their family whole?

  Charlie dug his hands into his hair, looking around helplessly for—what? For a wolf that was well and truly there, to prove to himself he hadn’t gone mad? He caught his reflection in the wide hospital window, a small figure in a too-tight jacket.

  And, just behind him, a hulking furred shape.

  The wolf smiled, wet and white.

  Cold washed over every inch of him. He could smell it, a heady, acrid smell that almost made him light-headed.

  Another soldier was sitting on the steps of the hospital a few yards away from him, smoking a cigarette. He caught Charlie’s gaze and shook his head once, the movement small but very deliberate. He looked at Charlie with dull, hollow eyes, and held a finger to his lips.

  Hush, his eyes seemed to whisper. Don’t let it know you see it.

  Charlie dragged his eyes over to the wolf and then back to the soldier. You can see it, too?

  The man nodded slowly, then took a long drag on his cigarette.

  Charlie dropped his hands to his sides. He forced his shoulders to relax, and the scant inch of skin at back of his neck felt so exposed that he had to bite down on his cheek, hard, to keep from cowering into a ball. Keeping his eyes locked on the soldier, Charlie reached blindly for his bicycle. He had to look down for a moment to get on, and when he looked up again the soldier just flicked his cigarette away, got onto his feet, and walked away in the opposite direction.

  Charlie rode home so fast, the streets seemed to blur. And as he pedaled, the strangest thing began to happen: with each block, the wolf seemed to vanish from his memory. He remembered that he thought he had seen a wolf. He remembered the woman crying, and that there had been nothing behind her. But why would he have seen something that wasn’t there? And he remembered, he remembered the certainty that he had seen something. But there could not possibly have been a wolf, and he didn’t remember seeing the wolf, only that he had believed that it was there.

  The other soldier, the one with the cigarette, he could have just been telling Charlie to hush, that he was upsetting people, that he was causing a scene, that he needed to leave.

  By the time he got home, he was shaking with cold, and he could not decide if it was comforting or terrifying that he couldn’t remember anything about the wolf—not its shape, its size, its color, what it had done. He remembered being terrified of it, but not why.

  Charlie dumped two meals’ worth of scraps into Biscuits’s bowl and waited by the fire for Mum to get home. He sat so close to the flames he almost set his jumper alight, and still he never seem
ed to get warm. His eyes burned. The dust of hopes and memories that had covered everything had turned to ash. They had been ash all along, really, Charlie just hadn’t been able to see.

  He saw now.

  He was seeing far too much.

  It wasn’t until much later that he realized he had never gotten the biscuits.

  13

  THE NEXT DAY, CHARLIE COULDN’T SEEM TO shake himself loose from the treacly haze of dread. It was as if he was trapped in that moment between sleeping and waking when he couldn’t yet remember what was real and what was a dream. Had he gone past the hospital and seen a wolf? Or had he gone past the hospital and had a momentary hallucination and accidentally played a joke that was taken badly?

  He had gone past the hospital and there had been—

  But maybe there had been nothing. Just sad people outside a hospital. He was tired, he wasn’t sleeping well, he had fought with his brother, he had gotten confused; that dark thread of worry, again, of fear, was just getting tangled into a new shape—

  But there had been a wolf.

  There had been. Hadn’t there? What could he possibly have confused for that?

  He could not talk to Theo about the wolf. He would not upset Reggie again. He refused to tell Mum about the shame of the snowball. He might have asked Grandpa Fitz, but Charlie found he could not bear the thought of his grandpa responding with blank incomprehension, or worse, patient indulgence. So, after Theo had left for work without incident, and after Biscuits had been fed, the soft, wet plap of scraps against the bowl as loud as breaking glass in the silent kitchen, Charlie poured two portions of tea into a thermos, squeezed into two jumpers, put on a hat and mittens, and went out into the morning to try and find some answers.

  Leaving his bicycle leaning against the side of the porch, he walked down the street, careful to avoid the deeper piles of slush and the slick patches of ice. The icing-sugar snow of a few days earlier had been dirtied and melted into a grimy, wet wool blanket that clung to everything with a gritty, oily sheen. Charlie felt grubbier just walking about in it. There were so many things—buildings, streets, people—that should have been in their proper place and simply weren’t. They weren’t anywhere. They were just gone, scraped out, a missing tooth he couldn’t seem to help worrying.