“What do they have as stomachs? Cement mixers?”
“Could well be,” he said humorlessly. “They eat anything. They’ve taken three pairs of false teeth from me. I saw an octopus wearing ’em the other day, smirking like a cat in a sardine factory.”
With that he disappeared, and Sophie fell out of bed while trying to untangle herself from her old, damp clothes. There was a crate in the corner overflowing with bits of tattered material. She pulled them out: dozens of old outfits belonging to people of every shape and size, a litany of the things left behind by other visitors to Catacomb Hill. There were no trousers that fit her, so she tore the lace off a yellowing, salt-crusted dress and put it on with a camel hair coat. The only shoes she could find pinched and had a hole in the toe.
She followed Scree’s wet footprints out of the catacombs and emerged in the house, where he was waiting with a bowl of porridge so thick the spoon was standing upright. Her stomach growled, but when she reached out for it he lifted it over his head.
“There’s three rules in this house,” he said. “One: Don’t go knocking on closed doors.”
“Right,” she said, knowing that she wasn’t going to follow any of his rules.
“Two: Don’t talk to anyone. Not the twins, ’cause they’ll play you like a fiddle, and not the Battleship, ’cause she’ll pull your head off and use it as a doorstop. Got it?”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Are you actually listening?”
“Yes!”
“Three: Don’t be late for the Bone Snatching. I’ll feed the monsters breakfast today, but you can help me with their lunch, and after that you’re on your own. I’ll be waitin’ on the oyster beach for you. As soon as the bell rings, leg it down here. Understand?”
Sophie nodded, and he grudgingly gave her the gray porridge. It looked like there were a couple of fish bones in it. Her stomach screwed itself up, and she had to turn her head so she couldn’t smell it. Maybe she could go a bit longer without food.
“What happens if I’m late?” she said.
“I’ll unscrew your ears and use ’em as fish bait,” he said. “Any questions?”
“Yes. When I’m not feeding the monsters, what am I supposed to do?”
“None of my business,” Scree said. “All I do is fish ’n’ make the dinner. You just sit in a corner somewhere until you’re needed.”
“A corner,” Sophie said. “Brilliant.”
“You don’t want to go pokin’ around. You’ll regret it. This place is full of deep ’n’ terrible secrets.”
“Mister Scree, that’s enough to make anyone want to go poking around.”
“Ain’t none of my business,” he repeated, and stalked away with an unreadable scowl.
* * *
There was a courtyard in the middle of the house, shaded and dank with trapped rainwater. Sophie ended up there like a marble rolling toward the center of a bowl. No matter where she turned she was facing the courtyard again, looking at the paved square through a hundred different windows. It was like the house was always shrugging, tipping her where it wanted her to go. Again she thought it: alive, and the people inside were doing its bidding.
The fifth time she circled back to the courtyard she heard a great clanging and crashing and peered out the window to see the twins at play. They were fencing with stage swords, one of which had a red stain up to the hilt.
“I’ll skewer you through the eye socket!” roared Ralf, lunging at his brother. Gail fumbled with his sword and nearly dropped it.
“Never, you . . . you . . . stinking haddock!”
“You know that’s not the line,” Ralf snapped.
“Well, if you won’t let me read the script—”
Ralf lurched at Gail, who turned tail and ran. Ralf chased him around the courtyard with the sword.
Sophie turned away, disgusted, and tried to find her way back to the grand entrance hall. Instead she found herself at a dead end crowded with dismantled machinery and whistles from fairground rides. A mechanical horse glared at her, and when she reached out to touch it, its jaw dropped open, revealing nutcracker teeth.
As she turned she heard huge, wracking sobs that bubbled out of the walls like ghosts. Disturbed, she looked around. It was coming from somewhere above her, drifting through layers of plaster and thickened to a muffled bleat.
Sophie drifted toward the crying, losing and picking the sound up again like a thread. The house was riddled with unused rooms. Some were crawling with slugs and snails, and others hid birds’ nests and families of mice. The air was strung with the constant clamor of seagulls and the breaking of waves, and the occasional unearthly moan from the water below. Sometimes it felt like she was bypassing whole floors, the stairs not matching the number of windows visible from the outside. The house was an unmapped world, and she felt like the first human to land there.
Apart from the sobbing, which had stopped again, Sophie had no idea what she was looking for. She scanned every inch of the walls as she climbed, trying to grab the weird sensation of familiarity she’d felt when she saw the stair banisters last night.
At the very end of the last hallway was a door with a polished handle. The carpet outside it was red, the algae trodden away by ceaseless pacing. The handle turned easily, and Sophie stepped inside.
She walked into a treasure trove—a cave of tapestries and clothes and jewelry, of bronze lamps and heavy furniture. The ceiling dripped with expensive scarves and moth-eaten furs. The smell of perfume was so heavy it made Sophie’s nose ache. She glanced around, then buried her face in a polar bear coat.
It was clear that someone lived here. It felt like the room was waiting for them to come back. She went to the dressing table, which was covered in bottles and unraveling doilies. She hesitatingly touched the mirror, leaving deep, dusty fingerprints.
On the dressing table was a stack of paper, held down by a lump of rock. Each piece seemed to have been torn from the front of a book, or was part of a ripped-up flour bag or ancient newspaper. She slid a handful out and began to read.
“I am running away. I am going to London to make my fortune. I hope you rot here.”
She frowned and flipped to the next one which said, in a different hand:
“Good-bye. By the time you read this, I will be gone. I have left to start a better life.”
Another: “I’m leaving now. Say good-bye to the twins for me. Worst wishes.”
And the next. And the next. All of them short, written in a cramped hand, scribbled fast.
Sophie reasoned they must be from the other servants the twins mentioned. She felt a quick burst of hope. There were people here before her, and they got away! Or they tried to, a nasty voice said in the back of her head. There’s nothing to say they actually made it.
She pushed her doubt away and looked around the room. A hanging scarf brushed the top of her head like a hand and made her shudder.
With the notes still in her grasp she slid open the drawers under the dresser. But the back of her neck tingled. She felt like someone was breathing behind her.
Sophie turned around in time to see a mound of white detach itself from the wall. It sailed across the room with a huge, terrifying face, and roared so loudly the papers went flying. Sophie dodged away from the creature and saw a mountain of red hair, eyes puffed up from weeping, and a dress so voluminous it must have had scaffolding beneath to support it. This thing—this woman—had tiny, slippered feet which despite her apparent weight were noiseless. Sophie’s memory connected with the thing in front of her. The Battleship.
She tried to gather the papers that had fled across the carpet, but the woman’s doughy hand grabbed the back of her neck and hauled her up.
“Who are you? Are you spying on me?”
Sophie shook her head, hanging two inches above the floor. The Battleship’s face filled h
er vision.
“Can’t breathe . . .” she said.
“Well?”
“I’m . . . the new . . . girl.”
“Another one? They keep sending me servants with no manners. What were you going to take?”
“Nothing,” she gasped. “I got lost.” The woman dropped her.
“And you thought looking at my things would help you.” The Battleship glanced at the papers, then ground one under her foot. “You’re an abysmal thief. They’re not worth anything.”
Sophie winced, waiting for the slippered foot to jab her in the ribs. But nothing happened. “Who wrote them?”
“The twittering girls and boys that come to help the General,” the Battleship said. “They get everything they need, food and a bed, and what do they do? They run away in the night and leave their stupid little notes—‘I’m going to be famous.’” Her voice wavered in mockery. “I blame it on Cartwright. It always seems to happen after his visits.”
The woman turned to her dresser and unscrewed a tube of mauve lipstick.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Battl—your ladyship,” Sophie said.
“You’re not sorry,” the woman said, not looking away. “What do you want, if you’re not going to steal anything?”
“I was looking for . . . I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Then go away.”
Sophie opened the door to slip out, but before she did curiosity got the better of her.
“Why were you crying?” she asked.
The Battleship only stared at her, lipstick hovering halfway to her face, like Sophie had spoken in a different language. Perhaps nobody had asked her that before.
“Why is your hair white?” she asked back.
“I was left in the snow when I was a baby,” said Sophie, then closed the door and fled.
Chapter 5
Cartwright Is Coming
Sophie stood on the flat, gray beach at the back of the house, hidden in the shadow of a fifty-foot cliff. The house stood on top of it, leering with its glassy eyes, spitting bits of rubble as the sound of the lunchtime feeding bell slowly died away.
Scree crunched through pebbles and sea glass and soft pieces of driftwood to thrust a sack into her hand, but Sophie was too preoccupied with the view to notice.
“I remember now,” she said. “This house was famous when I was younger. I knew I’d seen the carvings before.”
Scree grunted in affirmation. She looked at the hundreds upon hundreds of wooden frames sticking out of the water. They looked like dining tables on long legs. Age had turned them gray and black and green, and they stretched for miles through the water, with holes in the spindly forest where a creature had broken through. It was an oyster farm, left to rack and ruin.
“We were rich once,” said Scree. “We had fifty people working for us. Everyone ate our oysters.”
“We had them for tea,” Sophie remembered. Gray, slimy things like blobs of phlegm. She would hide them in the potted palm at dinner. Her parents thought eating tinned oysters was a sign of good breeding, but she’d quickly decided that they were only pretending to like them.
“The oyster farm was a stroke of genius on his lordship’s part, rest his creaking old soul,” said Scree. “Nobody wanted the old island, but the oysters loved it, and people love oysters. So he bought it and made his fortune selling tinned shellfish.”
Sophie remembered that there had been a picture on the tin—an oyster leaping over a rainbow-covered island, apples hanging from trees. She’d made a slingshot and used the tins for target practice.
“What happened to them?” she asked.
“They ran out. The monsters sniffed ’em from miles away and used it like a buffet table. When the oysters disappeared the monsters stayed, then they started tearing up the island until I had the idea of feeding ’em. It’s a partnership.”
“The man in the portrait. He was the twins’ dad, wasn’t he? Oyster farm man.”
“His name was Laurel,” Scree said, frowning at her. “He was nearly as good an oyster farmer as he was an inventor. You see that?” He pointed at a large, rusty machine facedown on the beach. “It shells oysters, that does. Nearly took my fingers off once.”
“What happened to Laurel?”
“He got depressed when the oyster business went under. He was never a happy soul. I discovered him on the beach one day, drowned and frozen solid with icicles hanging from his nose. Right where you’re standing now, in fact.”
Sophie took a step to the right.
“Anyway,” said Scree, “when the water froths, throw the food as hard as you can. All at once. Then run.”
He hurried back to the catacombs. Sophie untied the sack, trying not to look inside. She heard a distant rumbling and gritted her teeth.
“Come and get it,” she said, mostly to herself.
There was a deep roar and water rolled over the beach, making every stone tremble. She flung the bag toward the sea and its contents flew out, landing across the water in an arc. But instead of running she found herself rooted to the spot, watching the waves slapping at the oyster racks, and it wasn’t until something long and green heaved from the water that she sprinted away.
A tentacle hit the ground behind her with such force that she fell over. She saw Scree pick up his grab-claw contraption, presumably to chase the creature away, but the tentacle grabbed her foot and flipped her onto her back.
“Don’t you dare!” she yelled, and grabbing a stone brought it down on the tentacle as hard as she could. She opened her mouth to scream, but all the breath was knocked from her lungs and she rattled over the beach like she was being dragged by a car.
Suddenly the monster let her go with a snap of its tentacle. Seizing her chance, Sophie scrambled back up the beach on her hands and knees, waiting for it to come back and get a better grip on her. But it didn’t. She heard a low, sonorous moan from under the water, and an answering cry, then the creature reared up, sniffed like a dog, and dived so fast a wave crashed over her head.
“What was that?” she cried, swerving into the entrance of the catacombs.
“That was your lucky break,” said Scree, not looking remotely concerned about her welfare. “They found something better to have a go at.”
“Oh, goody,” she said, wringing her hair out.
“There’s only one thing they’d give up fresh meat for, and it’s the one thing they’ve never been able to catch. The flea in the proverbial earhole.”
“The what?”
“Cartwright is coming,” he said darkly.
“Cartwright,” she repeated. The person she’d been waiting for. She was curious to know just how this person was going to reach the island despite there being no path and a pack of furious monsters between him and the shore.
* * *
The twins and the Battleship stood in front of the house, waiting, almost invisible in the gloom. Ralf and Gail were pinching each other. Their mother wasn’t blinking, and may as well have been stuffed for display except that her nostrils flared every so often.
Sophie stood behind them, deep in the Battleship’s shadow.
“Who’s Cartwright?” she asked Scree, who was gripping his pocket watch like a talisman.
Scree pressed his lips together.
“I know you can hear me. I’ll keep asking until you answer.”
Scree sucked his teeth and cracked his lips open, just slightly.
“Cartwright is the Battleship’s nephew. He was taken in five years ago, ’cause his parents died of the Sea Fever.”
“They died of it?”
“They went mad and threw themselves off a cliff. Thought they were being chased by a crab. Turns out it was the neighbor’s Border terrier. Then he came here. Really took to Laurel. Didn’t get on with anyone else, though.”
“Surprising,”
Sophie said drily, looking at the twins. “And . . . he just left again?”
“Joined the army when Laurel died. He was only twelve. They must’ve been desperate.”
“Clearly.”
The Battleship swung her body around, like a boat pulling into the harbor, to scowl at Sophie.
Sophie shut her mouth and fixed her gaze on the sea. When the Battleship’s eyes glazed over again she whispered, “Would he have contacts on the New Continent?”
“Prob’ly.”
“What does he do in the army?”
“How should I know?” Scree muttered, irritated, and plucked an errant snail from the wall of the house.
The twins, bored of tormenting each other, were now staring into the middle distance with their mouths faintly twitching like they were solving equations. Sophie noticed that Gail had a nervous tic, his fingers curling and uncurling like they were on strings. His brother, though—
“Stop thinking about us,” Ralf said.
Sophie’s head jerked back toward the sea.
Silence fell. The sea changed color as the night eased in. The sea creatures must have smelled Cartwright coming from a long way off, unless they’d already eaten him. Still, better him than her, Sophie thought.
A chill began to set in, and her fingers slowly turned numb. She wondered if they’d be out there all night.
“Right at the last minute,” Scree muttered scornfully, pointing a crooked finger at the sea.
And there he was.
A dot on the horizon, plowing toward them through sheets of foam. The drumming of hoofs against rock, a spray of gulls and squawks and feathers.
There was a boy on a horse, and the horse was running over the sea.
Leaping over the waves, legs skittering and bending like pieces of rubber, the horse and its rider galloped toward them. There was a monstrous roar that made Scree wince, and another, and another, merging into a cacophony of noise until the water was a thrashing, heaving mess of black slime and saucer-shaped eyes.
The dot grew into blue and red and gold, and all of that turned into a body and a face, and suddenly Cartwright was upon them.
The Bone Snatcher Page 4
