The Lost Girl

by Anne Ursu

  He grinned, eyes alight. “Spoonbridge and Cherry, you mean to say. That is a special piece of art indeed. Beloved by a whole city. I daresay it is the most valuable thing in all of Minneapolis, wouldn’t you? And now it’s mine. No ordinary collector could do that.”

  “But no one can see it now.”

  “Exactly.” He squatted down, looked her in the eye. “Miss Maguire, I told you power was out there for you. In fact, it’s right here.” He gestured around him.

  “What?”

  “This is my proposal for you. I have not been successful in finding my sister. The truth is, I fear her disappearance was her own doing. She did not always understand what was best for her. And she was so impulsive. I am afraid that she is not coming back because she thinks I will be angry at her for leaving. But . . . she always longed for a sister. A true companion, like you are for your sister. If I got her one, then maybe she’d come back. But it couldn’t be just any girl. We need a sensible girl, one who would be a good influence on our Alice.”

  Iris closed her eyes as the world crumpled around her.

  “Imagine, Miss Maguire,” he continued. “You could travel the world with Alice and me. We could show you wondrous things. We would listen to you, value you. And”—he leaned in—“then they’d all be sorry.”

  Iris buried her head in her hands. This was not happening. None of it. She’d gone to Camp Awesome like she was supposed to, biked home afterward, made everything up to Lark, and they were sitting on her floor making magic out of ordinary things. An infinite supply.

  “What do you say?” he asked, grinning as if her answer were obvious.

  Iris looked up. “No,” she whispered.

  “Pardon me?”

  “No. I don’t want to go with you. I want to stay here.”

  “Here? What is here for you? Remember, I have Spoonbridge and Cherry now.”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “There’s nothing for you here. You said no one listens to you. You feel powerless.”

  “That doesn’t mean I want to leave! Lark is here!”

  “But . . . you said yourself that you were bad for Lark. Everyone thinks so. Even Lark thinks so. Wouldn’t you be doing her a favor? She’d be better off in the long run, don’t you think?”

  “I have to go home,” Iris said, pushing herself up.

  “But this can be your home now. And then Alice will come back, and you’ll have another sister.”

  “No,” Iris said, backing away.

  He grabbed her arm. “Are you saying no to me?”

  Iris froze.

  A yowling sound—then Mr. Green yelled, “Ow!” Duchess was at his ankle, biting. Iris wrenched free from his grasp and ran forward, and then she heard another yowl, this time in pain. Mr. Green had kicked the cat. Then his hand wrapped around her shoulder again, and the next thing she knew, she was being thrown into the doorway marked Office.

  “I am going to keep you,” Mr. Green yelled as he pushed her inside. “One way or another.”

  Then he stalked away and the door closed behind Iris.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The Doll Maker

  Iris dove for the door, only to find there was no doorknob on her side, just a small keyhole. She tried to wedge her fingers in between the door and the frame, but they didn’t fit. Trying the crack under the door yielded the same results.

  It didn’t matter, though. The door had clearly locked behind her and was not going to budge unless someone opened it from the outside.

  This was no office. It was a storage room of some kind—gray cinder-block walls and a hard gray floor, metal shelving, ugly flickering light, and one tiny window up near the ceiling. Across from her was a big worktable filled with all kinds of small tools, paintbrushes and paints, scraps of fabric and lace.

  One wall of shelving was lined with wooden bins, and perched right in front of it was a big shiny black-and-gold sewing machine with a foot pedal. Another was filled with sealed jam jars of shimmering magic.

  And next to that stood a huge industrial sink brimming over with doll parts.

  They looked like pieces of the small dolls that Iris had seen earlier—same size, same faces. But those were finished dolls; these were just pieces, a great tangle of arms and torsos and bald heads. Hundreds of pieces.

  She backed away, her whole body buzzing and maybe even shaking, and then she bumped into something hard. She whirled around to see a small wooden chair with clamps on the arms and legs.

  And then Iris remembered what George had said about Alice. She’d been resting in his office when she disappeared.

  Alice was here when she disappeared. And this was no office.

  As horrifying as that was, Alice had gotten out somehow. There was a way out.

  Iris looked frantically around. There was no escape that she could see. Just the small window, locked from the inside. Even if Iris could scale the bookshelf, it wasn’t big enough for her to fit through. And Alice had been sixteen.

  Before she could investigate more, the door opened again. Iris whirled around. Mr. George Green was back, standing tall. He looked bigger than he had before, or maybe that was just Iris’s fear making him that way. But he didn’t look like a mole man anymore. He looked like a monster.

  “All right,” he said, his voice booming. “I have decided that you would be a terrible sister for Alice. A terrible influence. You are not welcome in our family.”

  He took a step closer, and Iris took three steps back. She could not breathe; she could not think.

  “But I am keeping you. I am keeping you because I want to. I am keeping you because I can. I am keeping you because I have the power to do so, do you understand, young lady? I am a great man. I have vision. I am a visionary.”

  That word. Ms. Messner had called Lark that.

  And there, underneath all the terror, Iris found a thread of anger. She pulled on it as hard as she could.

  “You’re not a visionary!” she snapped. “Visionary means you have imagination. You don’t have any imagination. All you do is steal stuff and copy stuff. This house looks just like you’re some dead rich guy from a hundred years ago trying to cover everything in gold so you look like you’re fancy. You stole everything else. You don’t even care about it or know why this stuff is important; you just stole it because someone else thinks it’s valuable. You’re just a pathetic copycat thief. You make nothing.”

  A storm of anger was gathering over his face as she talked, but at these last words the storm broke. A slow smile spread across his face. Iris shuddered.

  “I do make something,” he said, gesturing behind her. “I make dolls.”

  Iris turned. The hideous sink with the doll limbs. She hadn’t had time to realize what it was for, other than terrifying her.

  “But,” he said, taking a step closer to her, “I don’t just make them out of plastic. Though I do love doing that. The magic is hard to work with, but it does excel at one thing in particular.” His voice was low and soft now. “It excels at transformation. This is very useful when you need to walk out of a museum with a painting or take a sculpture the size of a semi-truck out of a public garden. It can also be useful in other ways. And I think, Miss Maguire, I know the best way to keep you. . . . Perhaps I can give you as a gift to Alice after all.”

  A doll.

  He was going to turn her into a doll.

  Unless she drowned in her own fear before he could.

  “You’re a monster,” she spat.

  His eyes narrowed. “There’s no need to be rude.”

  Was this it? Had this been his plan all along? Forget Alice. Had Iris wandered into his shop full of collectibles one day and he’d just decided to collect her?

  “Wait a minute. Did you take our stuff? Lark’s bracelet? The ogre figurine? Baby Thing?”

  His eyebrows went up. “A bracelet? A toy? What would I do with a girl’s things?” he sneered.

  “But . . .” No. There was a way to make this all make se
nse. There was a way to make everything fit. “This was the plan all along. You saw us, in August. The day the school letters came. You made all that happen. You took Lark away from me so I’d be all alone and I’d keep stuff from her and I’d be a mess and everything would fall apart. You did that.”

  His face twisted into a slow, horrible grin. And then he began to laugh.

  “Why would I go to all that trouble for a worthless little girl?”

  His laugh had sharp edges. It filled the room, and soon all the sharp parts were pointed right at Iris.

  She blinked rapidly.

  It is a horrible thing, to be laughed at.

  She was not going to cower in front of this man anymore, even if panic was eating away at her internal organs. She pushed herself up and stood as tall as she could, chin out, arms at her hips.

  Iris could barely breathe. There was no way out, no way around Mr. Green. He was a grown man and he knew how to use magic and he thought he was right and that she was nothing and that she could do nothing and he would go on traveling from magic well to magic well trapping girls and no one would ever be able to stop him.

  She felt like she was being swallowed by a boa constrictor.

  But she was not going down without a fight.

  She dove over to the shelves with the jars of magic, grabbed one, and hurled it at Mr. Green. He yelled and ducked out of the way. The jar exploded on the wall, and the magic inside splattered and oozed and steamed and hissed, and Mr. Green slapped his hands over his face and screamed.

  He screamed and screamed, and it was a terrible sound, like the sky ripping open. Iris threw her hands to her ears to stop the noise, but still it vibrated through her whole body.

  “I will get you for this!” he yelled, and then opened up the door and lumbered out. The door slammed behind him.

  With a choking gasp, Iris sank to the floor and watched the magic drip down the wall.

  At least she had hurt him. At least there was that.

  Maybe the magic would leave a scar.

  A really bad one.

  Maybe it would melt his face off.

  Iris sat next to the jars of magic, shaking, holding herself, trying to catch her breath. She had to catch them while she could. Who knew how many breaths she would have left?

  She was supposed to be the strong one.

  “I’m sorry, Lark,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The Pied Piper

  Iris had no idea how long it took to recover from a magic injury to the face. How long did she have left? Five minutes? Five hours? Five days? How long before Mr. Green came back and did . . . whatever it was he did?

  Was he really going to change her into a doll?

  Was it going to hurt?

  What had she done?

  Why had she kept coming back?

  Why had she ignored all the weirdness?

  He had told her what she wanted to hear. He’d told her about his sister and the crows. He’d told her she was sensible. He’d told her he understood what it was like to feel powerless. He’d told her he could help her feel powerful.

  He was a Pied Piper, playing a song just for her.

  Yes, he was powerful. There was great power in knowing just what song to play to get people to follow you off a cliff.

  And he’d done it.

  Magic has a cost. Mr. George Green said it didn’t for him, but it clearly did. The cost was his humanity. Which did not mean making yourself less human. It meant making yourself less humane.

  But . . . how much humanity could you have had in the first place if you wanted to sacrifice your humanity for magic?

  Yes. She’d wanted there to be magic. She would never have admitted it to anyone, even herself. But she’d wanted some kind of magic that would have made people listen to her, that would have made everything make sense, that would have just let her and Lark be. Be sisters, be twins, be best friends. Be themselves, without people poking at them all the time to be different. To be able to struggle and fail and pick each other up in the way they knew how without anyone thinking they understood the girls better than they’d understood each other.

  And wanting it had had a cost.

  But what they had, too, was magic. She’d always known that on some level, but now she really understood it. All the Awesome girls, none of them had twin sisters, so they all had to feel alone in their aloneness.

  But she’d been wrong about one thing: the cost of the magic of having Lark wasn’t that people would try to take it away. The cost was the desperate fear of losing Lark. And now she was here.

  Why hadn’t she told Lark where she had been going?

  No one knew where she was. All they would know was that she had been on the bus, but she hadn’t shown up at camp. No one would ever think to check the shop, because Iris hadn’t told anyone she’d been going there.

  She hadn’t told Lark.

  She hadn’t told Lark.

  She’d kept it from her sister. Because there was a crow flying around the house and a lie fell off her tongue. Because she was late coming home one day, and Lark was upset that she was late, and so another lie fell. And then she could not tell the truth because she didn’t want Lark to know she’d lied. Because she didn’t want Lark to think she’d betrayed her, even in some small way. She didn’t want Lark to think she wasn’t putting her first at every single minute. She didn’t want to think it.

  She wanted to be the perfect sister for Lark. And so she had failed her.

  Iris wrapped her arms around her chest and squeezed as tightly as she could. Oh, she missed her sister.

  She missed her for now, and for the future. She missed the rest of their lives, the way it was supposed to be. Iris and Lark.

  She missed her sister so much that it filled her whole body, that it pulled at her skin, threatened to rip it apart.

  She hugged herself even tighter, trying to contain that ache in her chest. She clenched her face, her hands, her legs, her whole body, and then with a gasping exhale let everything go.

  Her hand drifted to the floor, where she tapped three times—their code that meant I am here and I love you and Iris and Lark, and something like all three of those things together.

  There are differences between facts and truths. Facts are something you know in your brain; truths are things you know in your heart.

  The facts were that Mr. George Green was bigger and more powerful and she had little hope.

  The truth was that she was Lark’s sister, and she was going to fight.

  Lark had been training her for this for years. And then the girl fought back. And then the girl rewrote the story and stopped the monsters and saved everyone. She couldn’t quite do that. She couldn’t change the end of the story.

  But she could make it more exciting.

  Iris popped up and went over to take her place by the jars of magic.

  She would keep throwing magic at him as long as she could. Maybe she could get through him. Maybe she could incapacitate him. Maybe all she would do was cause him pain and skin melting. But that was something.

  She waited, a jar in her hand at the ready, aching and buzzing, feeling like a doll with jumbled-up parts.

  She waited, and waited.

  And then she heard the door opening.

  Her hands clenched around the jar.

  The door swung open.

  And right behind it stood Lark.

  And at her feet was Duchess.

  The magic jar slipped from Iris’s hand. Lark was frozen in the doorway, eyes like oceans. Then with a start she held her hand out. Iris grabbed it, and Lark pulled her sister into the hallway.

  “We have to be careful,” gasped Iris in what she hoped was a whisper. “There’s a man, Mr. Green, he’s a bad guy—”

  Shhh, Lark tapped.

  “How did you find me?”

  Later, she tapped. She squeezed her sister’s hand and crept forward, pulling Iris behind her. It seemed like Lark made no so
und at all as she moved, or maybe Iris’s whole brain was focused on listening for the sound of Mr. Green and she could hear nothing else. But her hand was in her sister’s, her hand was in her sister’s, it was going to be okay.

  But where was Mr. Green?

  Duchess seemed to want to know the same thing. She prowled around the gallery, weaving through the shadows, while Iris and Lark crept around the corner of the gallery into the entrance hall. Still, no noise. Nothing.

  The curtains were just ahead now. All they had to do was get through them and get out and then they could run away and never ever come back. Iris held her breath as Lark pulled her forward. Ten more steps. Eight. Six, and then—

  “MEOW!” yelled Duchess, as a hand clamped around Iris’s mouth. A voice next to her growled, “You must be Lark.” And Lark screamed.

  The girls huddled under the table of the office while George paced around the room in front of them. The right side of his face was red and swollen.

  “You escaped,” he ranted. “I don’t understand. How did you escape? How did you know she was here? Who is helping you?”

  He didn’t seem to want answers to these questions, and neither sister gave him any. Iris could barely think. She thought things had been as bad as they could possibly get, but Mr. Green had shown her that it could be far worse.

  He had Lark. He was going to turn Lark into a doll. Then he’d have a matching set. And it was all her fault.

  Iris was looking wildly around for a way out. The door? No, you couldn’t open the door without a key, so that wouldn’t work. The small window? No, it was too high. The magic? Well, there was always the magic. Iris tried to scoot herself over closer to the shelf.

  “I see you!” Mr. Green yelled, stomping toward her. “Go back over there! Do I need to tie you up? I had to tie Alice up. Always trying to escape. Me! She tried to escape from me! Her brother! All I wanted was what was best for her.”

  Lark grabbed Iris’s arm and held it tight. Mr. Green saw, and his eyes suddenly brightened. He turned to her.

  “So,” he said, voice suddenly sweet, “you’re little Lark. At long last we meet. I’ve heard so much about you!”