“My sister told me to expect you,” said the wolf. “One never can tell with her, though. Half the things she remembers the most clearly never happened at all. The mind is a strange country.”
“Does that mean you’re . . . Regret?” Charlie asked.
“Oh, no. Hunger’s children, we are all of us brothers and sisters. Perhaps you’ll get to meet us all, eventually.”
Charlie wasn’t sure if he was supposed to say something in reply to this, so he just tried to make himself as small and unappetizing as possible. Someone behind him laughed at something, and the sound made him jolt with alarm.
“Come. Walk with me. Let us take the air.”
Charlie absolutely did not want to take the air with this latest monster, who had waited for him by appointment, but neither did he see an alternative. He trailed along behind the wolf, careful to keep enough distance that there was no chance of that great, shaggy tail brushing him by accident.
“Do you think it beautiful?”
“What?” Charlie did not think he had heard the war wolf correctly.
“The church. Is it beautiful to your eyes?”
“I guess.” Churches were churches.
“I came here because I heard there was stained glass.” The war wolf looked up at the cathedral, then sighed. “But none of the stains are interesting. Not enough reds.” The wolf pawed a bit at his face, as if wiping his eyes would reveal something different. “There was a church in France that I saw, as the bombs fell all around. Blue, like sorrow, were its windows. I liked those. They were honest. All this golden hope feels disingenuous.”
“It’s church,” Charlie said, a bit offended for some reason. “You’re supposed to be hopeful in church.”
“Why?” The wolf sounded only curious.
“Because church is about how things get better eventually.”
The war wolf cocked his head at Charlie. “I don’t understand this God and his hope. The only god I know is Hunger. Before there was anything, there was Hunger. Every war wolf knows that.”
Charlie thought about what Father MacIntosh said on Sundays, about the Before There Was Anything time in the Bible. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form; and void. “Void” meant “empty,” he knew. And empty things usually wanted filling—stomachs, shoes, teacups, arms for hugging.
“I guess that makes sense,” Charlie said, slow and cautious. He didn’t like agreeing with a war wolf. It seemed a very bad habit to get into.
“‘Hunger: to desire with longing, a need,’” sighed the wolf. “Do you know the roots of the word ‘need’ in your human English? It comes from an older word, in an older tongue. ‘Danger,’ that’s what ‘need’ was first.”
“How do you know that?” This wasn’t the question Charlie had intended to ask, but it was the only one his voice could shape around all the ice that had found its way into his throat again.
“As long as there has been war there have been war wolves. And there has always been war.”
“No, there hasn’t.” The words, once more, were out of Charlie’s mouth before he could think better of them.
“No? There have never been two humans in the world who never wanted to fight each other. Not ever. Where human hearts go, wolves cannot help but follow.” The war wolf sat down on his haunches and sighed, squinting his yellow eyes at the leering gargoyles on the roof of the church. “The work is never done.”
“No rest for the wicked,” Charlie said under his breath.
“Do you think me wicked, little human boy? Do you think me evil and cruel? Think of all the pain felt, and caused, by those hearts you cling to so greedily. Heartache, isn’t that what you call it? Wouldn’t it be better, kinder, just to do without? It is a mercy, what we do. One day, when your heart is eaten, or hardened beyond pain, you will realize this, and you will thank us.”
Charlie took a thick, shaky breath, licking lips that had gone dry and cold. He tasted salt. He didn’t remember when he had started crying.
The war wolf was agitated now, restless and fidgeting, lashing his thick tail back and forth as he paced. “Do you think that you alone have a monopoly on suffering? I have always been hungry,” the wolf moaned, pawing at his eyes again. “I cannot remember anything else. Hunger is never satisfied, the work is never done. So we can never stop hunting.” He let his great paw fall to the ground and fixed his bright yellow eyes on Charlie’s. “Insatiability is a kind of holiness.”
As quick as the strange fit of emotion had come upon the wolf, it passed, and he shook himself and started walking without looking back. “Come. Walk with me a little longer. I will show you how I worship.”
They were now on one of the streets that had been completely destroyed by the Blitz. Flattened, turned inside out like tilling soil in a garden. Charlie was startled to realize that he couldn’t quite remember what it had looked like before.
“This is my church,” the war wolf said, looking out at the ruinous crater where street and buildings and whole lives had been. “Carnage and Shrapnel and Blunt Force; these are my saints. I return to Hunger each day with new devotion, for it will never forsake me. Can these people say the same?”
“No one knows anything about God for sure,” Charlie repeated in his best Father Mac impression. “That’s why they call it faith.”
“I have no need for faith, boy. I have knowledge. My god is straightforward, and as plain as night.” The wolf’s yellow eyes were wide and saliva dripped from each great fang. “What would you give for such certainty, boy? I fancy a good deal more than you think.”
“What do you want?” When Charlie got scared, he usually froze up, like a rabbit in front of a truck’s headlights. But now he wanted to run, far and fast. He legs burned with unspent miles, and his breath was coming in fast, shallow laps.
“What was there before there was anything, boy?”
“Hunger,” Charlie whispered. Run, run, run, run, sang his blood.
“What do you think I want?”
“To eat.” His fingers clenched into fists and then stretched back out, over and over. Charlie had to concentrate to make them stop.
The mad look had returned to the war wolf’s eyes and his long red tongue lolled out of his mouth, dripping hot saliva onto the stones beneath them. The snow hissed and steamed where they fell.
“Then feed me.”
“I can’t give you my heart,” Charlie said, unable to look away from the gleam of those teeth catching the light. “I won’t. I need it.” Need, Charlie thought madly. Danger.
“A heart is a main course, little morsel. I’m only asking for you to present me with an appetizer. Something precious, if you want my help.” The wolf made a strange yawning gesture with his wide mouth, and snapped his jaws shut with a whine. Then he shook his head violently and pawed at his white mask again. “You have until tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Midnight, to be precise. Now run along, little morsel. You’ve work to attend to.”
Charlie’s legs propelled themselves into action and he was down the steps and heading for the street before he realized he was moving. But something bone deep made him pause and turn to look the wolf in his yellow eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Wrath.”
Charlie didn’t stop running for a very long time.
23
WHEN HE FINALLY GOT BACK TO HIS NEIGHBORHOOD, Charlie saw Mellie feeding her birds beside her usual bench. She waved at him, but he pretended he couldn’t see. He felt like he had grease or coal dust all over him, like he was contaminated. He needed to be quarantined until he was safe for other people to be around. He tried not to think about the way her face fell when he ignored her, or how small and frail she seemed in the empty, icy street.
If he could just get inside, lock himself in his room, and take a hot bath until he scrubbed away all the traces of Wrath on his skin . . . but there was something going on inside the house.
Grandpa Fit
z was running around the kitchen holding a towel in his hand and shouting. “I’d never begrudge anyone their war spoils, but that has to be for your outdoor horde, tiny hellion,” he boomed.
Biscuits zoomed between his legs as he made a grab for her, and leaped up onto the table to give a proud, muffled welcome to Charlie. “Oh, Charlie, excellent, she listens to you. Please tell your general to spit out her prize.”
“What—oh, Biscuits, that’s disgusting.” Biscuits had a long, snaky rat tail between her jaws like a gory earthworm. “Spit it out,” he said sternly, picking her up by her scruff.
Disgusted by his lack of gratitude, Biscuits dropped the tail to the ground with a soft plop. Grandpa Fitz snatched it up in the towel before she could change her mind and tossed it outside.
“Don’t know what’s got into her today, she’s not normally quite so bloodthirsty,” Grandpa Fitz said, running his hand under the tap. “Or at least she’s less obvious about it.” Biscuits routinely presented Mum with mice on the front mat, but all she really wanted was to be sufficiently praised and assured that she was an unparalleled huntress. This tail business was just ghoulish.
Charlie carried her up to his room to sequester her, shutting the door behind them after he set her down. “Biscuits . . . tell me you didn’t.”
Biscuits looked insufferably smug.
“You cannot be hunting war rats,” he ordered. “It’s not safe and it’s . . . sad. And disgusting,” he added, pointing at her. She ignored him and craned her neck to look very purposefully at the wall. She held this pose as if it was perfectly comfortable.
“I have a problem, anyway, and I need your help.”
Biscuits made a low, annoyed chirp.
“A war wolf needs me to find something ‘precious,’” Charlie continued, “and no, he did not mean a rat’s tail, I don’t want to hear it.”
With a great show of dignity, Biscuits swung her head back around to squint up at him.
“Come here, help me think.” He flopped onto his bed and Biscuits leaped up beside him obligingly. “Something precious. Something precious to Wrath . . .” he murmured.
He did not mean to fall asleep, but the next thing he knew, he was jerking awake. Biscuits was snoring, but had thankfully found no new, horrible gifts to leave around. Bleary and headachy with sleep, he lurched upright, and looked at his clock in a panic. Seven o’clock. Half the day was gone and he had nothing to show for it, no ideas, no help. Panic was wrapping itself around a spot right in the center of his chest. He wasn’t breathing exactly right; it was like he was trying to hold his breath without meaning to, taking big gulps of air and just holding them as pressure mounted inside him.
There was still time. He made himself let out a breath, slowly, and then another. And another. There was still time. Five hours. He would go out; maybe he could find Mellie. If Bertie and Pudge could help him find Remorse, surely they could help him find something precious to Wrath. Yes. Yes, he could find Mellie and the pigeons and they would suss out what to do.
He was almost at the bottom of the stairs when he heard Mum and Grandpa Fitz talking in hushed voices.
“I’m not discussing this with you.”
“Well, you need to discuss it with someone.”
“Dad, I have to be realistic. If they keep letting girls go from the phone company—”
When he walked in, the voices abruptly cut off.
“Charles, there you are,” Mum said. “Set two extra plates for dinner, please, our guests will be here any minute.” She glanced at the clock and fussed with a pin in her hair, looking fretful.
“Who’s coming?” he asked, trying to look as unsuspicious as possible.
“Mr. Cleaver’s son just returned to London, and I thought it would be nice to give them both a proper meal.”
“Was his son in France, too?”
“Oh, no, he was evacuated to the country. He’s your age.”
Some—most, probably—of the children in London had been sent out of the city when the bombing started, either to stay with family or with strangers who offered to take them in. They had been trickling back home in fits and starts. Eustace from church had stayed on his grandparents’ farm in a village so small Charlie couldn’t even find it on a map. He had said only that cows were scarier than they had any right to be and should be treated as hostile, should Charlie ever meet one, and had refused to speak further.
“Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Imagine how you’d feel, Charles, being away from home for so long, in a strange place where you don’t know anyone.”
“Yes, that must be simply awful,” Theo drawled. Charlie wasn’t sure whether he was meant to laugh to or not.
“Now I expect you all to be on your best behavior for our guests,” Mum went on as if Theo hadn’t spoken. Theo rolled his eyes at Charlie over her shoulder, and Charlie grinned in surprise.
But when a jaunty series of knocks came from the front door, the grin slid off Charlie’s face onto the floor like a wet snowball.
“Hullo, hullo!” Mr. Cleaver said in his stupid voice that was somehow nasally while also being far too loud for the space. “So lovely of you to have us over, Beth. Theodore, Charlie boy, how are you? Fitz! There’s a good man!” Mr. Cleaver went about in a whirling dervish of handshakes and shoulder slaps and “Call me Stuart”s through his rather thin mustache. The three of them muttered an unenthused chorus of “how do you do”s in response, as Mr. Cleaver shoved his son at them like some sort of prize ham.
“This is my boy Tommy; say hello to the Merriweathers, Tommy.”
“Hullo!” Tommy’s cap of blond hair gleamed in the light, like someone had taken a very well-polished bowl and stuck it on his head. His cheeks were a ruddy pink and his jumper didn’t have a single darning scar on it. Charlie disliked him immediately.
“Nice to meet you,” Charlie lied.
“Is that your cat? Here, kitty, kitty!” Tommy made a swipe for Biscuits as she wound round Charlie’s ankles to assess the newcomers. She hissed as Tommy’s grabby fingers reached for her, and then streaked up the stairs to safety.
“Let’s everyone sit down, before the food gets cold,” Mum said with an aggressive sort of cheerfulness.
The Cleavers kept up a bubbling stream of conversation, mostly about themselves, for the better part of an hour. Every time they slowed down a bit, Charlie was careful to shove a large portion of food into his mouth so as to discourage them from asking him to speak. It only worked sometimes.
“They sent us back for winter hols, but now that the war’s over with, we all went home,” Tommy barreled on, taking second helpings of everything. “Are you still on winter hols, Charlie? From school?”
Charlie blinked. He couldn’t tell if Tommy was trying to make fun of him, or if he was just stupid. He glanced nervously around the table. Both Grandpa Fitz and Theo looked as if they were imagining socially acceptable ways to throttle Tommy. Mr. Cleaver—Stuart—just looked politely curious, a bit like how Charlie imagined a cow would look if presented with a maths equation.
“I left school. To help with . . .” He glanced at Grandpa Fitz and decided that was none of the Cleavers’ business. “To help around the house while Mum works.”
“Oh, well you must be having loads of fun, then, running around with no schoolwork.”
Ah, so he was just dense, then. “Not particularly,” Charlie said, slicing up a piece of cabbage with medical precision.
“We’re hoping to send Charlie back to school in the spring,” Mum piped in with a bit too much forceful cheeriness.
“Well, that’ll be a real corker, won’t it, Charlie? Exciting to get back to normal, eh?” Tommy’s teeth gleamed white in the dim light. Charlie felt a sudden and intense urge to throw something at him. A plate, maybe, or Biscuits.
“Yes,” said Charlie, dead-eyed. “A real corker.” Theo made an odd choking sound. Grandpa Fitz rubbed at his temple.
Tommy didn’t even seem like a real person.
He was like one of those war posters of a boy, red-cheeked and smooth-haired and with stupid, perfect shiny teeth, telling everyone that Britain would prevail over the German Reich. Charlie half expected a Union Jack to unfurl behind him and Tommy to suggest he start a victory garden. He probably never jumped when he heard a car backfire, didn’t still keep his drapes drawn shut at night because it made him feel safe to know that no planes could see the light from his window as they flew overhead. Instead he just kept droning on about how nice the country was, how clean the air smelled, how delicious fresh food straight from the earth tasted. Meanwhile, Charlie ate his rations, which tasted like the memory of the food they were supposed to be, rather than the real thing. Something was coalescing inside Charlie, a hard little stone like a coal that was burning.
“Oh! Do you want to see something brilliant?” Tommy asked, bright eyes beaming.
“Sure,” said Charlie, who absolutely did not.
Tommy reached into his pocket and pulled out a wood-handled pocketknife. He snapped it open carefully, so it gleamed bright in the dim light. Charlie, who did not care for knives, especially near him, gripped the burning coal inside himself hard enough to almost hurt.
“I got it from my cousin in Surrey, who I was staying with. He says every young man ought to have a knife, at least in the country. And it’s ever so useful.”
“For what?”
“Oh, cutting things up and the like.”
Charlie watched the light play off the sharp edge of the knife, and thought of fangs, of things that sliced and tore. “You don’t say.”
“Yes! My cousin says it’s a family heirloom. He said people don’t make things like they used to anymore, and I should clean it with a special cloth and not get it in water, in case it rusts.”
Charlie wanted to dunk Tommy and his stupid knife in a mop bucket. “Amazing” was what he said, though, just as Theo said the same in perfect unison, their voices both dry as match paper. They stared at each other in startled silence for a moment before bursting out laughing. And it felt for just a moment like it had before—before the war, before they made each other angry all the time, before everything. When all they had to do was look at each other and know. Theo looked up at Mum with a lopsided grin, but there was something brittle and nasty in his voice when he said, “Mum, didn’t Dad grow up on a farm?”
Hollow Chest Page 17
