The Bone Snatcher

by Charlotte Salter

  As Sophie fell silent, exhausted and choked-up, she heard the Battleship stomping down the corridor.

  She shoved some of the tickets into her pocket, in case she needed them later, and cast around for a weapon. The bits of machinery were too heavy to lift, so she settled on a piece of broken picture frame and stood by the door, the light turned off again, the piece of wood raised above her head.

  In the dark, behind her eyes, her parents stepped onto a boat with their suitcases and hat boxes, and the gangplank drew up, and the ship pulled out of the harbor, and Laurel laughed.

  The floor creaked. The vision cleared. Outside a key turned in the lock, and the door swung open.

  “I’ll dash you against the floor for making such a racket,” the Battleship said, framed against the light.

  Without pausing to think Sophie swung around and whacked the Battleship in the chest with her weapon. The huge woman groped in the air for her invisible assailant, and Sophie shoved past her, throwing the wood aside and sprinting into the hallway. She’d been running so much that every piece of her ached like a broken instrument, untuned and ready to snap. But still she carried on, making no mistakes this time, trailing golden tickets like messages until she reached the main staircase and hurled herself down.

  The main doors in the entrance hall were ajar, and Cartwright sprung through when he heard her coming. She could hear Manic huffing behind him, kicking the ground and complaining.

  “Where were you?” he said. “You’ve been gone almost an hour! I thought there was something wrong!”

  In a split second she had to make a decision: trust that Cartwright was another victim, or throw him into the sea for lying about the New Continent. Her mouth opened and words got stuck in her throat. She just didn’t know. But she couldn’t steal the Monster Box back by herself.

  “Your aunt’s chasing me,” she said, clinging to the doorknob. “The box is in her room. She’s using it as her pillow. When she’s gone past, run up and get it—”

  An infuriated roar echoed through the house, shaking drops of water from the ceiling.

  “—while I keep her distracted. I’ll meet you out front. Be quick!”

  She pushed him out the door so he wouldn’t be seen, just as the Battleship started thundering down the stairs. Sophie took off again. There was no time to consider whether Cartwright would actually stop for her when he had the box; she just had to trust him. She pounded across the carpet and plunged into the black catacomb tunnels.

  The Battleship stopped at the throat of the caves and opened her mouth.

  “RALF! GAIL!” she screamed. “THE RAT IS ESCAPING! GET HER!”

  Sophie threw herself around the corner and pressed herself against the wall, trying to make room to think.

  “Don’t worry, Mother,” said Ralf, stepping out like he’d been waiting around the corner. “We’ll take it from here.”

  “Yes,” agreed Gail, sounding peculiarly unlike himself. “I think it’s time to end it all.”

  Sophie ran her hands over the rock beside her. Her scissors were hidden deep in a crevice, where she’d put them after Scree’s warning. It was like he knew that one day Sophie would be waiting in the tunnels, needing something sharp and dangerous. Her fingers touched a piece of cold metal, and she drew out the same silver blades she’d stabbed Cartwright with.

  Strange how she felt so calm now, like she was only heading, slowly and inevitably, toward whatever destiny Neptune had mapped out for her.

  She put the scissors up her sleeve. It was time for the final act.

  * * *

  The twins tapped past her, their footsteps echoing into the caves. Sophie was pressed into the rock, and the catacombs embraced her. She was a piece of stone, and she felt as cold as the heart of the Glowfish Pits. When the twins had gone past she removed herself, pulling her damp skin away from the sticky rocks, and followed.

  “Silverfish,” Ralf cooed in front of her. “Where are you, pretty Silverfish?”

  They padded deep into the throat of the largest tunnel. Ralf gestured to Gail to strike a match, and a sudden flare of light illuminated the catacombs. Gail swept the match around so the shadows of stalactites swung across the floor, then Ralf saw what he wanted. It wasn’t Sophie.

  Gail blew out the match and dropped it.

  “This way,” said Ralf, and they walked off.

  When they were a few yards ahead of her Sophie followed. The whisper of her boots was like a shout, the snick, snick of her heels as loud as a series of gunshots. Together with the twins their feet made a kind of hideous song. But they were focused only on what was in front of them. She fell into their pace, touched the cold blade under her sleeve, and waited for the right moment.

  “Again,” said Ralf. She drew back as Gail struck another match. “This way,” he said, and the match was dropped. Their heels ground as they turned ninety degrees, pivoting neatly on the spot, and continued down another tunnel. They were following something on the floor, but she couldn’t see what it was without a light.

  “Again,” said Ralf, and this time Sophie was caught by surprise and she was nearly too late. She pulled herself into a shallow nook just as the match flared. She was closer to them than she thought, and their shadows touched her feet. The smell of sulphur reached her nostrils. As the light dipped out she saw what the twins were following: a set of fresh, wet footprints.

  Something was wrong. Down here footprints stayed for two, maybe three minutes before they shrank and disappeared, and she knew she’d been the last one down here, over an hour ago. They didn’t look like any prints she’d seen before; she could only imagine that someone had dragged their feet, slowly and heavily, over the rock. They looked like draugr prints, the footsteps of the cannibalistic undead.

  The twins set off again, this time a little quicker. They worked silently, making no noise but for that of their footsteps. Down here they weren’t even arguing with each other. This, Sophie realized, is how they acted when they thought they were alone.

  “I heard something,” said Gail, and they stopped dead. This time they were too quick for her, and as Sophie’s feet scuffed the floor the twins took a sharp breath.

  “Silverfish,” Ralf cooed. “Come into our net, pretty little Silverfish.”

  There was nowhere to hide. Gail struck a match, and in the flash of light she saw them facing her with their larger-than-life smiles. They were now three feet away from her, watching her like a moth trapped against a pane of glass.

  “Gotcha,” said Ralf. Gail held the match between his thumb and forefinger, shrieking with laughter like a hyena.

  “When this match goes out,” said Ralf, “so do you. Won’t that be fun?”

  Sophie tried to slide away, but they started walking toward her, perfectly in time and smiling. She braced herself for a fight, letting the scissors slide down her sleeve and into her hand. Then she saw what was behind them, and a sickening chill ran down her spine.

  Something dark grew out of the rocks behind the twins. At first it looked like another shifting shadow, but it loomed up until it towered over the twins. Sophie managed another strangled sound, and Ralf laughed. A greenish hand reached from the darkness and closed on his shoulder.

  She had just enough time to see his eyes widen with fear, and then he was pulled back from the light. Sophie turned and ran. Ralf screamed, and so did Gail, but then he started running, too, leaving his brother howling, dropping the match which extinguished with a hiss.

  Blind again, Sophie stumbled toward where the house should be, but in the dark it was impossible to tell what she faced or was running into. There were gaping pits in the floor in some of those tunnels—old open graves and wide drains—rocks as sharp as needles that stuck out from the walls, and caves so fragile they rained great lumps of stone on whoever disturbed them. She could hear Gail behind her, and she knew he had no idea where he wa
s going either until he remembered the matches in his pockets.

  Another moment of light. He was alone with her, clutching the box of matches. For a brief second Sophie saw everything around her, and it burned itself onto her retinas like a photograph: three tunnels, a man-size crack in the floor, and a cluster of wetbugs hanging from the ceiling. And there, on the wall, a great whorl of silver, a scrubbed-out, glowing mess. Someone had destroyed the glowfish arrows, their directions back to the house.

  Gail saw it, too.

  “What have you done?” he hissed, then the match burned out and Sophie ran again. This time she knew where she was going, a fragment of memory pushing her legs toward the middle tunnel. She jumped over the crack in the floor, aimed for the space where the tunnel should have been, and entered another realm of darkness.

  The floor was angled up. She spread her arms like wings to feel her way through, and this time she didn’t hit anything. She ran and ran, and then she was in the chamber with the coffee machine, then out and by the stairs to the house, Ralf and Gail lost, howling in the catacombs behind her.

  Chapter 26

  Ralf and Gail, Gail and Ralf

  All the house was quiet. The front door was still open but Cartwright had disappeared. Manic was still pegged down outside, where he pounded the ground with his dinner-plate hooves and snorted through his huge, steam-engine nose. Sophie approached slowly, her lungs and throat aching with exhaustion. The goose pimples on her arm were only just starting to go down.

  “Where is he?” she asked softly. “Have you seen him, boy?”

  The sea answered her with a low, grating wail and a band of dark clouds bottled up on the horizon. She patted Manic on the head.

  “I’m going to find him,” she said. “Don’t you worry. We’ll be out of here soon.”

  Manic looked distinctly unconvinced, but she went inside anyway and trod softly up the stairs. The silence was disturbing. She had a horrible vision of Cartwright dead on the floor, and the Battleship swooping down on his body like a huge and insatiable vampire. Even though she knew they weren’t in there, she tiptoed past the twins’ room with the portrait of the horse, and nearly jumped when she caught its eye through the crack in the door.

  She thought she was alone, combing corridor after corridor until she got lost and had to turn back. For an endless five minutes she walked in circles, and at some point she felt another presence behind her like it had crept out of the walls. When she got back to the twins’ room the floor creaked. Her fingers twitched as she forced herself not to look back, but she quickened her pace as she walked into a moldy, white-paneled drawing room with a doorway at either end. Someone sneezed behind her, and she stopped.

  “I’m sick of chasing you,” Gail said bitterly. “I don’t see the point.”

  “Then stop,” she said. She leaned against the wall, drained, and looked at him. He was out of breath and covered in slime.

  “Can’t,” he said.

  “How long are you going to follow me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. His hair was sticking out at all angles, unbrushed and sad looking. “But I wish you’d stop talking to me like that.”

  “Like what?” she said despairingly.

  “In that reasonable voice. Like you’re nice. You’re only trying to get away from me.”

  “Of course I want to get away,” she said. “What do you expect?”

  “Ralf wants me to finish you off,” he said. “Ralf says I should pick you up and carry you over to the window and throw you out. You’ve caused so much trouble, and it isn’t fun anymore.”

  “That’s what Ralf says,” she replied, leaning away from him. “But what do you think? Do you want to throw me out of a window?”

  Gail took something small and sharp from his pocket: a letter knife with a bone handle and Laurel’s initials carved in it. His hand was shaking.

  “I think he’s right.”

  He moved toward her and she stepped back, raising her hands.

  “You don’t,” she said. “I can see it every time you’re together. You only do what he says because he’s louder than you, and a bit taller, and a little bit older. But it doesn’t mean he’s in charge.”

  They moved across the room until he had her backed against a toothpaste-striped settee.

  “What are you saying?” he asked, raising the letter knife to her eyes. Sophie tried to push the sofa out of the way, but it was nailed to the floor.

  “I’m saying you could let me go,” she said. “You don’t have to hurt me, which I know you don’t want to do, because underneath you’re actually all right. Ralf would never have to know. He might not even come back, if something got him down there. You could let me walk away right now, and we’d both be happy.”

  Gail stared at her. She nodded, and he lowered the knife.

  “You see?” she whispered. “Easy.”

  Gail hung his head. Then he snapped it up, laughing, and twirled the knife around in his fingers. He rolled his shoulders back, his spine cracking.

  “That was fun,” he said. “If this were a story, it would definitely have worked.”

  “What?” Sophie said, her heart jumping nervously. He stepped toward her and she fell into the sofa, which engulfed her like a wet sponge. “Gail?”

  “Not Gail,” he said. “Ralf this time. Ralf all the time, actually.”

  The floor creaked, and in the doorway they’d just come through Ralf appeared again, seaweed dripping from his hair. He looked green, like he’d just recovered from a scare.

  “That was a good trick, Silverfish,” he said, spitting out a piece of slime. “What was it? A machine? A hologram? You’ve been learning from us.”

  “Ralf?” she said.

  “That’s not Ralf,” said Gail.

  “Not fair,” said Ralf, stepping into the room. “You can’t just change your mind like that.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sophie snapped. They looked at her with something like irritation, then they smiled beautifully like the sun had risen over their faces.

  “I love it when we do this part,” said Gail. “It’s when I feel most clever.”

  “Poor Silverfish,” said Ralf, wandering over. “You had no idea, did you? Not even Cartwright has worked it out, although he gets suspicious sometimes. This is our greatest performance, and we’ve been doing it all for you.”

  “Explain,” she said, trying to stand up. She got her feet on the floor, but the twins were so close she was bending almost backward over the sofa.

  “Bit slow, aren’t you?” said Ralf.

  “And you thought we were terrible actors,” said Gail. “The fact is, we’re really quite brilliant. Even our mother is confused.”

  “Sometimes I wish someone would work it out, just once,” said Ralf. “I mean, I’m starting to feel like everyone around us is an idiot. Nobody appreciates the effort we put in.”

  “But that’s the curse of being a good actor.”

  “We’re so good nobody ever applauds.”

  “Stop gloating,” Sophie said, putting her hand to the cold metal under her sleeve. “I swear to Neptune, I don’t have any more patience.”

  “I do so like it when the servant appeals to Gail to save them,” said Gail, a hideous facsimile of his brother. “Go for the village idiot, they think. Save him from his terrible brother.”

  “As if it ever works,” said Ralf.

  “I suppose we’re doing them a favor,” added Gail. “I don’t want them to die believing in goodness.”

  “Who are you?” Sophie said, desperate to keep them talking. The twins looked annoyed by her interjection.

  “Oh, right,” said was-Gail. “We don’t know.”

  “We were definitely born Ralf and Gail,” said was-Ralf, “but we spent so long swapping we got confused. Now we just take turns. Good, isn’t it?”


  “It passes the time,” said was-Gail.

  “Well, it’s been fun, Silverfish,” said was-Ralf. “Sorry. We’re going to have to get rid of you now.”

  Sophie scrambled over the back of the sofa and used it as a barricade. They let her try, then moved toward her slowly, each stepping around a side of the sofa with incredibly bored expressions.

  “Is this always your plan?” she said. “A grand reveal?”

  “Yes,” they both said at once, then scowled at each other.

  “We have to give you some credit,” continued was-Gail. “You’re the only one who’s worked out where the box was. And getting out of the clock room—not many have done that, either.”

  “Must be why Cartwright likes you.”

  Sophie tripped backward over a chair, and they sniggered in unison.

  “You killed the other Bone Snatchers,” she said as she scrambled back up.

  “They died falling through the clock room or going through rotten floorboards. Getting trapped in locked rooms. Some of them really did vanish in the night, but I don’t fancy their chances much,” said was-Ralf.

  “You should have seen Cartwright’s face every time we polished one off,” said was-Gail.

  “It was tragic. He so wanted to believe they’d run away. He’s soft on the inside.”

  “We faked some notes. It kept Mother off our backs, too.”

  “Amazing how a piece of paper can allay guilt.”

  “Scree, though—that’s an interesting one.”

  Sophie grabbed a poker from the fireplace and swung it in front of her. The twin who had been Ralf caught it in his fist, and was-Gail bent it in half.

  “Tell me about Scree!” she blurted. If only she could think.