by Lily Markova
Slowly, it all came back to Saskia. She’d been torn out of her home. She was in a foreign, hostile place fortified with moats and high walls. Where were they being taken now? What was going to happen to her? Saskia clung to the Skeleton’s flimsy arm.
It soon became apparent that what they were being taken to was another door, which was different from the rest of them in that there was a sign on it.
Saskia heard a chattering of teeth and gave the Skeleton’s hand a squeeze. It was her turn to reassure him.
“It doesn’t look too bad,” she whispered.
One of their guards knocked.
“Just a moment!”
“Must be hiding away the evidence of some unthinkable crime or assuming a human form,” thought Saskia, but she decided not to share her guess with anyone, for the sound of rattling bones on her right was loud enough as it was.
“Come in!”
Four hasty hands shoved Saskia inside, the Skeleton at her heels. The uniformed people explained something briefly to the woman at the desk, but Saskia barely heard them because she was focused on eye-searching the interior of the room for anything suspicious. It was a cramped office with a plenitude of potted plants and stuffed toys on the desk and the windowsill. Identical, floor-to-ceiling file cabinets dominating the walls were bursting with signed and stamped papers. Saskia had never seen a villain’s lair quite as underwhelming.
“Hello, Saskia,” said the woman behind the desk, shifting papers in front of her, when the other two adults had left. “Have a seat.”
Face a nauseous green, hair colorless and dry-looking, cheeks so flabby they seemed to be dribbling down like a dough mask—she looked as though she hadn’t slept all night, which was sketchy. From what Saskia had gathered, this was—
“You’re a wicked hag!” the girl voiced her conclusion.
The woman arched an eyebrow. “Now, now! I’d rather you addressed me as ‘Madam Horridan.’ Sit, please.” She nodded to a wooden chair across the desk from her and consulted her papers.
The Skeleton wasn’t offered a seat, so Saskia didn’t oblige, either. Instead, she imagined that she was someone much bolder and blurted out, “Iwannagohome!”
Madam Horridan seemed not taken aback or annoyed by that in the slightest, as if she was accustomed to children being disobedient and wanting to go home. She simply nodded, her lips compressed together so hard they sort of disappeared into her mouth.
“Make no mistake: We want that for you, too. However, even more, we want you to be safe. Things at your house—” Madam Horridan ran a finger down the topmost paper on her desk, shaking her head. “Things at your house have to change.”
The only time Saskia had seen things change at her house was when she had been flying backward away from it on the proper people’s arms. She had been so scared then that she’d almost believed them. She’d almost let them convince her that her castle was an eyesore, her Princess was crazy, her friends weren’t real—that she had nothing at all.
“But I love the way things are at my house!” Saskia said hotly. “I want to go home!”
Madam Horridan’s expression remained unperturbed, which was starting to irk the girl, but the look on the woman’s face was not even remotely as infuriating as her tone when she spoke again: She talked down to Saskia, sympathetically, as the teachers at Bastilly’s did, as though Saskia were terminally stupid.
“Saskia, your mother—let’s say, she needs some rest. She can’t take proper care of you now.”
Upon hearing the word “proper,” Saskia opened her mouth to protest. Madam Horridan motioned for her not to interrupt, which Saskia was determined to ignore until—
“We will send you back home,” Madam Horridan said, raising her voice a little.
Saskia had not expected the wicked hag to concede so easily, so she closed her mouth. She didn’t understand. What was the point of kidnapping children and then just sending them back home? Proper people were so confusing. The Skeleton, too, scraped his skull.
“As soon as your mother gets well,” added Madam Horridan.
“But—”
“Until then, I’m afraid, you will have to stay here. It will be a nightmare, of course: We’ll give you a warm bed, good food to make your stronger, clean clothes—I hear you’re not much used to those.”
Because Saskia wasn’t terminally stupid, she understood what the wicked hag was implying—that the Princess’s treatment of her had been lax.
“We were happy that way,” said Saskia quietly. “We were happy before you came. The Princess took the greatest care of me.”
“Oh, your mom loves you, all right,” agreed Madam Horridan, puzzling Saskia once more. “I’m sure she’ll do whatever it takes to have you back. Although—”
Saskia’s heart sank. The wicked hag wasn’t going to let her go home. She’d only said that to appease her.
“—there’s something you could do to help the process.”
Saskia’s heart soared back up, shoving around inside her chest as it settled itself in its usual station. “Anything!”
Madam Horridan smiled. “See? We can cooperate. The thing is, Saskia, I am worried. I am worried that, with your being around your mother in her condition, you could pick up some dangerous ideas. I was informed you’d brought along a friend. Is that so?”
Saskia didn’t like where this was going at all, but she decided to be patient with Madam Horridan so that she would let her leave the Prison.
“I did, Madam. He’s right in front of you.”
“Saskia,” called Madam Horridan, and there was a mild reproach in her smile now. “At this house, we will not tolerate any behavior that might. . . corrupt other children. It is very important that you be earnest with me. No tricks, no lies, no fooling around. Now tell me, do you really think there is someone else in this room, other than me and you, or are you just being naughty?”
Saskia glanced at the Skeleton. His free arm was pressed over his chest, protecting his bird, and he refused to look Madam Horridan’s way.
“Maybe he doesn’t want you to see him,” said Saskia, trying not to sound rude. “Maybe he only shows himself to the people he likes. The Princess could see him,” she added hastily, so that Madam Horridan would understand she wasn’t making him up. “So could Franz!”
“Franz,” repeated Madam Horridan, checking her papers again. “Franz, I believe, is your cat?”
“Yes, only he’s not a cat anymore, Madam, he—”
“I see,” said Madam Horridan, and she stopped smiling. “A very treacherous thing it is, Saskia, to take refuge in your fantasies. Look what it did to you. Imaginary friends won’t help you out if you’re in trouble. I have an idea—why don’t you try and make some friends here? Some proper friends.”
The Skeleton’s bird gave a stifled chirrup, and Saskia knew at that moment that the Prison was going to be a nightmare.
Chapter Seven. Charlie
The playroom where Madam Horridan took Saskia was buzzing with voices, but there wasn’t nearly as much noise as one would expect from about two dozen kids locked up in the same room. As Madam Horridan had explained to Saskia on their way here, toddlers were kept separately in the nursery, as were teenagers, who had to spend more time in the study room than Saskia’s peers. That Saskia found slightly heartening; she’d never seen a toddler up close and was afraid of accidentally breaking one. As for teenagers—well, suffice it to say that if Saskia saw one sitting on the fallen tree in her woods, she wouldn’t think twice about veering off the trail into monsters’ grabby paws.
All the children were dressed in ghost’s clothes, the same shapeless, unadorned pajamas as Saskia’s. They didn’t seem to her like proper children at all—not like the ones that went to Bastilly’s, anyway. Most of them played alone, humming to themselves, keeping as far away from one another as the playroom allowed. When Saskia had walked in, hardly anyone had looked up from their toys or books.
“Good morning, children!” said Mada
m Horridan. Few voices replied, and those without enthusiasm. “This is Saskia. She’ll be staying with us for a while. Like all of you, she misses home and could use a friend. Be nice to her, please, even though she. . . may not look like the rest of you.”
Only now that Madam Horridan had brought this up, Saskia remembered she had scars and an eyepatch. With everything going on, she had completely forgotten to worry about them. And only now, she became aware that, as withdrawn and plainly dressed as these children were, their faces were perfectly scar-free.
Madam Horridan whispered something about arrangements to a woman in the gray uniform, who was sitting by the door and watching over the children. Both women left the playroom, and the door clicked closed behind them.
The moment the grown-ups were out of sight, the playroom livened up, buzzing louder, closing in, crawling toward Saskia from every side. She and the Skeleton began to back away, holding hands and shivering. Wherever Saskia glanced, eyes were leering at her, but unlike those at Bastilly’s, these eyes weren’t hiding, weren’t turning away. Saskia looked around at the closed door, wishing, to her bewilderment, that the wicked hag hadn’t left.
But she and the Skeleton were on their own now. Saskia held her breath, counted to three, imagined herself a little wolf once more, and faced the playroom, meeting the unpleasant stares with a threatening glare of her own.
Freak!
A drop of blood splashed onto Saskia’s sock. She lowered her eye. And then, another sock, with a hole in the toe, came shuffling into view.
“Here,” said a clear voice.
Saskia’s gaze flew up. Standing before her, holding out a handkerchief, was a boy a couple of years younger than she, and his must be the most porcelain skin in the world—more porcelain than Elizabeth’s, or even the Princess’s.
“Well, go on,” said the boy. “You have blood on your face. We don’t want monsters to smell it.”
Saskia gaped at him. Not only did the boy have such wonderful skin, but his rye-colored hair, while ear-length like Saskia’s, was cut and combed more neatly than hers had ever been.
Apparently tired of brandishing the handkerchief at Saskia to no effect, the boy thrust it into her hand. With his other hand, he was hugging a battered stuffed dog to his chest.
“You don’t—you don’t think I’m a freak?” said Saskia, wiping the blood from under her nose.
The boy frowned. “Nobody thinks you’re a freak.”
“They do.” Saskia lowered her voice. “I can hear them whispering. I can feel them staring.”
“Nobody’s whispering,” said the boy, looking around at the other kids. “You probably expect them to whisper, and that’s why you think they are. As for staring—well, have you seen your face?”
Nobody had ever pointed out her scars to her this openly before, and Saskia, who had just begun to cheer up, felt as though the boy had spat at her in front of everyone.
But he didn’t seem to notice Saskia’s humiliated expression and continued, in a matter-of-fact tone, “You have this angry look about you, like you’re a wolf or something. You’re scaring them—of course they will stare. They sense that you dislike them, so they want to dislike you first.”
There was something familiar in the way he had said it, and Saskia couldn’t help smiling. “You speak just like the Princess.”
The boy jerked his head and dropped his eyes to the floor, as though she had caught him pretending. “It’s what my mom used to tell me when I scowled at my classmates,” he admitted.
“Oh, did they take you away from your princess, too?”
“No, she—”
Something clattered in a corner, and the boy broke off.
“The weirdo got himself a weirdo friend,” muttered a girl from that corner. She was twice as tall as Saskia and four times the width of the Skeleton, which in itself wasn’t too big a deal but together with her shaven head made the word “skedaddle” swim across Saskia’s mind as if printed on the banner towed along by a rattling red airplane. The girl was glowering at the wooden blocks scattered around her, which must have been the source of the clattering noise, and which apparently had been a carefully constructed castle just a few moments ago.
At about the same time that the shaven-headed girl’s castle had tumbled down, there had also been the sound of a pencil tip snapping off, coming from the opposite corner. There, a boy who might be her identical twin, save for the slightly longer stubble covering the top of his head, was peering at the torn page in his coloring book. With an unsettling simultaneousness, they squinted up at Saskia and the boy beside her, as though both the castle and pencil accidents had been their fault.
Everyone else seemed to have completely lost interest in their solitary games, too. Throats were cleared, conspiring looks exchanged, and somehow, the kids appeared to have huddled tighter together while Saskia had been looking the other way.
“Do we really have to beat somebody up again?” drawled a sturdy boy, who alone looked as if he wasn’t eager to abandon his toy train, but he got up and waddled over to the others just the same.
“Hey, new girl!” shouted the girl with shaved-off hair from the ruins of her wooden castle. “Have you seen his leg?”
The rest of the children joined in. “Yes, have you seen his leg, new girl?”
“Show her your leg, Charlie, go on!”
The Skeleton dodged behind Saskia and the boy who was clutching his stuffed dog, because pencils and plastic building blocks came pelting at the three of them.
“All right, all right!” Charlie raised an open hand in a “stop” gesture, and when the fire subsided, he sighed and rolled up the right leg of his pajamas.
Saskia, who had just started to feel intrigued, was disappointed. She’d expected to behold something exciting, or at least horrible, but this was a perfectly ordinary, boring leg. She wondered why the kids had wanted her to see it. Proper children were so strange—she would never get their ways.
“Uh, that’s a nice leg,” she said cautiously, trying to be polite. No one would like to hear that their legs were boring.
“It’s wooden! Are you blind?” yelled an indignant voice out of the throng.
“Of course she’s blind, are you blind?” yelled another voice, sounding even more offended by the first yeller’s stupidity.
“Shut up!”
While the proper kids were busy elbowing and shushing one another and calling one another idiots, Saskia leaned closer to examine Charlie’s leg.
“Oh, it is wooden,” she said, mildly surprised that she had missed that on the first take. “If they hadn’t told me, I never would’ve noticed.”
“Neither would I,” sighed Charlie, pulling the leg of his trousers down. “Uh-oh, we should run.”
Charlie ducked; the toy train went choe-choeing over his head, narrowly missed the Skeleton crouched behind him, and smashed into the wall.
“They never remember to lock it,” Charlie shouted to Saskia, reaching for the handle and poking his head around the door. “There’s nobody there, let’s go!”
Something whirring caught Saskia on the back. With a moment’s hesitation, she and the Skeleton looked at each other, shrugged, and dashed after Charlie, bombarded with clockwork cars and ragdolls.
Whooping, the rest of the children followed them into the corridor. Running on the smooth wooden floorboards with only socks on her feet was tricky; Saskia found herself now pattering, now skidding, struggling not to slip or lose sight of Charlie, who was zigzagging ahead like a hare. She could barely keep up with him. Even if she hadn’t had a skeleton to drag along and slow her down, she would have probably still been lagging compared to Charlie—which was incredible, because Saskia had always thought herself to be pretty quick.
Charlie certainly seemed to be no stranger to running away from the other kids, and they certainly seemed no strangers to chasing after him. It was a mystery to Saskia how Charlie chose which faceless door to go through next, but he clearly knew where each
of them led to, for he never faltered or darted the wrong way, and the spaces behind those doors turned out to be corridors, and not, say, bathrooms or offices, without fail.
Gradually, most of the proper children fell behind; some were scooped up by people in the gray uniform, who kept jumping out of the rooms at all the noise. Finally, the shaven-headed girl, the last of their chasers, stumbled to a halt, bending double and shaking her fist at their backs. Charlie turned a corner, wrenched open another door, and beckoned Saskia inside. He closed the door quietly behind them.
“This is my bedroom,” he said, panting. “It’ll be a while before Madam Horridan thinks to look for me here.”
Charlie sat on one of the five beds and put his stuffed dog on the nearest of the five nightstands. Saskia flopped down on another bed, clutching a stitch in her side and wiping the sweat off her forehead. The Skeleton simply slid down the wall, his eye-flowers crossed.
“How—how come you can run so fast?” Saskia said, still breathing heavily.
Charlie shrugged with one shoulder. “I keep forgetting I have a wooden leg.”
Saskia pondered that, while her insides cooled off. She didn’t see how she could apply the secret of Charlie’s speed to her own running ability, so she sounded a little aggrieved when she spoke again. “I thought you said they were just scared, but the kids here are really mean.”
“I know,” sighed Charlie. He sighed a lot, Saskia noticed—perhaps even more than Franz, who was hard to compete with when it came to the amount of sighing. “I said that because I thought that’s what would have made Mom proud of me. She would say they are scared, and they attack anyone whose shortcomings are easier to spot, so no one would suspect their own.”
Saskia smiled again. “The Princess would say so, too.” Then she remembered how Charlie had almost been run over by a flying train, and stopped smiling. “To be fair, I think they’re just jerks.”
