Wayward Children 01 - Every Heart a Doorway Read online

  Eleanor looked away. “Get to class,” she said. Her voice was soft, and suddenly old.

  She stood there, head bowed, as the students rose and filed out. Some were still crying. She would seek out the Nonsense children soon, tap them on their shoulders and lead them to her door. Some would be able to go through, she was sure. There were always a few for whom her world was close enough. Still not home, not the checkerboard sky or mirrored sea that they were dreaming of, but…close enough. Close enough for them to be happy, for them to start to live again. And who knew? Doors opened everywhere. Maybe one day, the children of this world who had gone to that world to save themselves would see a door that didn’t fit right with the walls around it, something with a doorknob made of a moon, or a knocker that winked. Maybe they could still go home.

  A hand touched her shoulder. She turned to find Kade behind her, a worried expression on his face. She glanced toward the seats, and there was Nancy, retreated once more into stillness. It didn’t matter. There were too many secrets here to be shy about revealing them. Eleanor turned to Kade once more and buried her face against his chest, weeping.

  “It’s all right, Aunt Ely, it’s all right,” said Kade, stroking her back with one hand. “We’re going to figure this out.”

  “My students are dying, Kade,” she said. “They’re dying, and I can get so few of them out of harm’s way. I can’t save you. When you found your door, I thought—”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s too bad for all of us that I have a Logical heart.” He kept stroking her back. “It’ll be okay. You’ll see. We’ll figure this out, we’ll find a way, and we’ll keep the doors open, no matter what.”

  Eleanor sighed, pulling away. “You’re a good boy, Kade. Your parents don’t know what they’re missing.”

  His smile in response was sad. “That’s the trouble, Auntie. They know exactly what they’re missing, and since she’s never going to be found again, they don’t know what to do with me.”

  “Silly child,” said Eleanor. “Now get to class.”

  “Getting,” he said, and walked toward the door. Nancy shook off her statue stillness and followed him.

  She waited until they were halfway down the hall before she said, “Eleanor is your…?”

  “Great-great-great-aunt,” said Kade. “She never married or had children. Her sister, on the other hand, had six. Since my great-great-great-grandma had a husband to take care of her, Eleanor inherited the entire estate. I’m the first of her nieces or nephews to find a door of my own. She was so happy thinking that I’d traveled into Nonsense that it took me almost a month to admit she was typing me wrong, and I’d been in a world of pure Logic. She loves me anyway. Someday, all this”—he gestured to the walls around them—“will be mine, and the school will stay open for another few decades. Assuming we don’t close in the next week.”

  “I’m sure we won’t,” said Nancy. “We’ll figure this out.”

  “Before the authorities get involved?”

  Nancy didn’t have an answer to that.

  * * *

  CLASSES WERE PERFUNCTORY and distracted, taught by instructors who could sense that the campus was uneasy, even if they didn’t—except for Lundy—know why. Dinner was equally rushed, the beef overcooked and dry, the fruit sliced so haphazardly that bits of peel and rind stuck to the outside when it was served. Students went off in threes and fours, arranging impromptu sleepovers with their friends. Nancy didn’t bat an eye when Kade and Christopher showed up at her room clutching sleeping bags and flipped a coin for the use of Sumi’s bed. Kade won and settled on the mattress, while Christopher rolled his bedding out on the floor. All three of them closed their eyes and pretended to sleep—a pretense that, for Nancy, became reality sometime after midnight.

  She dreamt of ghosts, and silent halls where the dead walked, untroubled.

  Christopher dreamt of dancing skeletons that gleamed like opals, and the unchanging, ever-welcoming smile of the Skeleton Girl.

  Kade dreamt a world in all the colors of the rainbow, a prism of a country, shattering itself into a thousand shards of light. He dreamt himself home and welcomed as he was, not as they had wanted him to be, and of the three, he was the one who cried into his pillow and woke, cheeks wet, to the sound of screaming.

  It was a far-off sound, coming from somewhere outside the window; Nancy and Christopher were still asleep, which only made sense. They had come from worlds where screams were more common, and less dangerous, than they were here. Kade sat up, wiping the sleep from his eyes, and waited for the screams to come again. They did not. He hesitated.

  Should he wake them, take them with him when he went to investigate? Nancy was already under suspicion by most of her peers, and Christopher would be too, if he kept getting involved. Kade could go alone. Most of the students liked him, since he was the one who kept the wardrobe in order, and they would forgive him for finding another body. But then he’d be alone, and if either Nancy or Christopher woke before he got back, they would worry. He didn’t want to worry them.

  Kade knelt and shook Christopher by the shoulder. The other boy groaned before opening his eyes and squinting up at Kade. “What is it?” he asked, voice heavy with sleep.

  “Somebody just screamed out near the trees,” said Kade. “We need to go see why.”

  Christopher sat up, seeming instantly awake. “Are we taking Nancy?”

  “Yes,” said Nancy, sliding out of her bed. Screams hadn’t been enough to wake her, but speech had: in the Halls of the Dead, no one spoke unless they wanted to be listened to. “I don’t want to stay here alone.”

  Neither of the boys argued. All of them shared the same fear of being left alone in this suddenly haunted house, where the ghosts were nothing they could understand.

  They walked quietly, but they didn’t creep, all of them secretly hoping someone would wake, come out of their room, and join the small processional. Instead, the doors stayed shut, and the trio found themselves walking alone toward the shadowy grove where Nancy and Jill had sought shelter from the unforgiving sun. There was no sunlight now: only the moon, looking down from between the patches in the clouds.

  Then they stepped into the trees, and the moonlight became too much to bear, for the moonlight was enough to show Lundy, lying small and silent on the ground, her eyes open and staring into the leaves. She still had her eyes and her hands, and seemed to have everything else. Her clothes were unbloodied, her limbs intact.

  “Lundy,” said Kade, and moved to kneel beside her, reaching for a pulse. The motion caused her head to roll to the side, revealing what had been taken.

  Kade scrabbled away, shambling to his feet, before running to the other side of the clearing and vomiting noisily into the bushes. Nancy and Christopher, who were less disturbed by gore, looked at the empty bowl of Lundy’s skull and stepped a little closer together, shivering despite the warmth of the night.

  “Why would someone take her brain?” asked Nancy.

  “I was about to ask you the same question,” snarled Angela.

  Nancy and Christopher turned. Angela was standing at the edge of the grove, a flashlight in her hand and several shadow-draped students behind her. Shining the light directly in Nancy’s eyes, she demanded, “Where is Seraphina?”

  “Who’s Seraphina?” asked Nancy, raising a hand to shade her eyes. She heard footsteps a moment before Kade’s hand settled on her shoulder. She took a half step back, letting him shelter her. “We came out here because we heard screaming.”

  “You came out here to hide the body,” snapped Angela. “Where is she?”

  “Seraphina is the prettiest girl in school, Nancy—you’ve seen her. She traveled to a Nonsense world, high Wicked, high Rhyme,” said Kade. “Pretty as a sunrise, mean as a snake. She ain’t here, Angela.” His Oklahoma accent was suddenly strong, dominating his words. “Go back to your room. I have to go wake Miss Eleanor. Odds are good she’s let Seraphina through her door.”

  “If she
hasn’t, you better give her back,” said Angela. “If you hurt her, I will kill you.”

  “We don’t have her,” said Christopher. “We were asleep up until five minutes ago.”

  “Who’s that with you?” asked Kade. “Have you just been roaming the campus looking for someone to accuse? You’re out here as much as we are. This could be your handiwork.”

  “We went to good, respectable worlds,” said Angela. “Moonbeams and rainbows and unicorn tears, not…not skeletons and dead people and deciding to be boys when we’re really girls!”

  Sudden silence fell over the grove. Even Angela’s supporters seemed stunned by her words. Angela paled.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said.

  “Oh, but I believe you did,” said Eleanor. She stepped around Angela and the others, walking slowly to where Lundy was sprawled in the dirt. She was leaning on a cane. That was new, as were some of the lines in her cheeks. She seemed to be aging by the day. “Ah, my poor Lundy. I suppose this may have been a kinder death than the one you were looking forward to, but I still wish you hadn’t gone.”

  “Ma’am—” began Kade.

  “All of you, go back to your rooms,” said Eleanor. “Angela, we’ll speak in the morning. For now, stay together and try to survive the night.” She braced both hands on her cane and stayed where she was, looking down at Lundy’s body. “My poor girl.”

  “But—”

  “I am still headmistress here, at least until I’m dead,” said Eleanor. “Go.”

  They went.

  Their tiny group managed to stay together until they had reached the front steps. Then Angela turned on Kade, and said, “I meant what I said. It’s sick, how you pretend like you’re something you’re not.”

  “I was about to say the same thing to you,” said Christopher. “I mean, you always did a pretty good job of pretending to be a decent human being. You had me fooled.”

  Angela gaped at him. Then she turned and stormed up the stairs, with her friends at her heels. Nancy turned to Kade, who shook his head.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  “I would prefer if you didn’t,” said Jack.

  The three of them turned. The usually dapper mad scientist was standing by the corner of the house, drenched in blood, clutching her left shoulder with her right hand. Blood trickled from between her fingers, bright enough to be visible in the gloom. Her tie was undone. Somehow, that was the worst part of all.

  “I seem to need assistance,” she said, and pitched forward in a dead faint.

  10

  BE STILL AS STONE, AND YOU MAY LIVE

  KADE AND CHRISTOPHER gathered Jack up; Kade and Christopher carried Jack away, while Nancy stood, frozen and temporarily forgotten, in the shadows on the porch. She knew, in an academic way, that she should hurry after them—that she shouldn’t stand out here alone, where anything could happen to her. But that seemed hasty, and dangerous. Stillness was safer. Stillness had saved her before, and it would save her now.

  She had forgotten how much like pomegranate juice a bloodstain could look, in the right light.

  She had forgotten how beautiful it was.

  So now: stand still, so still that she became one with the background, that she could feel her heart slowing, five beats becoming four, becoming three, until there was no more than one beat per minute, until she barely had to breathe. Maybe Jack was right; maybe her ability to be still was preternaturally honed. It didn’t feel like anything special. It just felt correct, as if this was what she should have been all the time, always.

  Her parents worried because she didn’t eat enough, and maybe that was something they needed to worry about when she was moving like a hot, fast thing, but they didn’t understand. She wasn’t going to stay here, in their hot, fast world. She wasn’t. And when she slowed her body down like this, when she was still, she didn’t need to eat any more than she already did. She could survive for a century on a spoonful of juice, a crumb of cake, and consider herself well-nourished. She didn’t have an eating disorder. She knew what she needed, and what she needed was to be still.

  Nancy breathed deeper into her stillness and felt her heart stop for the span of a minute, becoming as motionless as the rest of her, like a pomegranate seed nestled safe at the center of a fruit. She was preparing to take another breath, to let her heart enjoy another beat, when someone stepped around the corner of the house. Nancy would have said that she couldn’t become any more motionless. In that moment, she proved herself wrong. In that moment, she was as still and as inconsequential as stone.

  Jill walked past the porch, bloodstains on her hands and a parasol slung over one shoulder, blocking out any errant rays of moonlight that might dare caress her skin. There was a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth, like a spot of jam that her napkin had missed. As Nancy watched, motionless, Jill’s little pink tongue flicked out and wiped the blood away. Jill kept walking. Nancy didn’t move.

  Please, she thought. Please, my Lord, keep my heart from beating. Please, don’t let her see me.

  Nancy’s heart did not beat.

  Jill walked around the far corner of the house and was gone.

  Nancy breathed in. Her lungs ached at the invasion of air; her heart protested as it started to pound, going from stillness to a race in under a second. It took a few seconds more for the blood to resume circulating through her body, and then she spun and ran for the house, following the drops of blood on the floor until she reached the heretofore unseen kitchen and burst through the door.

  Kade whirled, a carving knife in his hand. Christopher stepped in front of Eleanor. Jack was lying motionless on the butcher’s block in the middle of the room, her shirt cut away and makeshift bandages covering the stab wound in her arm.

  “Nancy?” Kade lowered the knife. “What happened?”

  “I saw her,” gasped Nancy. “I saw Jill. She did this.”

  “Yes,” said Jack wearily. “She did.”

  11

  YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME

  JACK’S EYES WERE OPEN and fixed on the ceiling. Slowly, she used her uninjured arm to push herself upright. When Christopher stepped forward as if to help, she waved him off, muttering an irritated, “I am injured, not an invalid. Some things I must do myself.” He backed away. She finished sitting and held that position for a moment, head bowed, fighting to get her breath back.

  No one moved. Finally, Jack said, “I should have seen it sooner. I suppose I did, on some level, but I didn’t want to, so I refused it as best I could. She makes it out like it was my fault we had to leave the Moors, like the work I was doing with Dr. Bleak riled up the villagers. That’s not true. Dr. Bleak and I never killed anyone—not on purpose—and most of the locals left us their bodies when they died, because they knew we could use the bits they’d left behind to save lives. We were doctors. She’s the one who went and became beloved of a monster. She’s the one who wanted to be just. Like. Him.”

  “Jack…?” said Kade, warily.

  Nancy, who remembered the moonlight glittering off a speck of blood like jam, said nothing.

  “She would have made a beautiful monster, if she’d been a little smarter,” said Jack quietly. “She certainly had the appetite for it. Eventually, I suppose she would have learnt subtlety. But she didn’t learn fast enough, and they found out what she was doing, and they took up their torches and they marched, and Dr. Bleak knew she’d never be forgiven. He drugged her. He opened the door and went to throw her through. I couldn’t let her go alone. She’s my sister. I just didn’t know how hard it would be.”

  “Sweetheart, what are you saying?” asked Eleanor.

  Nancy, who remembered the way Jill had smiled when she talked about her Master, and how far she’d been willing to go to please him, said nothing.

  “It’s my sister.” Jack looked at Kade rather than Eleanor, like it was easier for her to say this to a peer. “She killed them all. She’s trying to build herself a key. We have
to stop her.” She slid off the butcher block, only wincing a little when the impact of her feet hitting the floor traveled up through her bad arm. “Seraphina is still alive.”

  “That’s why Loriel pointed next to you, but not at you,” said Christopher.

  Jack nodded. “I didn’t kill her. She knew it. Jill did.”

  “I saw her outside,” said Nancy. “She was walking like there was no hurry. Where would she go?”

  “She stabbed me in the basement, but she’ll be heading for the attic,” said Jack. She grimaced. “The skylights…it’s easier when there’s a storm. I tried to stop her. I tried.”

  “It’s all right,” said Kade. “We’ve got it from here.”

  “You’re not going without me,” said Jack. “She’s my sister.”

  “Can you keep up?”

  Jack’s smile was thin and strained. “Try to stop me.”

  Kade glanced to Eleanor, expression questioning. She closed her eyes.

  “Jack can keep up, but I can’t,” she said. “Don’t go if you’re not sure that you’ll come back to me.”

  They went.

  The four students ran through the house, fleet and angry. Jack was surprisingly steady on her feet, given the amount of blood she had lost. Nancy brought up the rear. Stillness and speed were diametrically opposed. But she did the best she could, and they all reached the attic door at roughly the same time. Kade slammed the door open.

  Jill was standing in an ocean of books with a knife in her hand. The table she had swept clear was now occupied by Seraphina—the most beautiful girl in the world—and an assortment of jars, each with its own, terrible burden. Jill raised her head as the door opened, and sighed. “Go away,” she said peevishly. “This is delicate work. I don’t have time for you.”

  Kade was the first to step into the room, his hands held out in front of him. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “I think I do,” Jill countered. “You don’t know me. None of you know me. Not even her.” She jerked her chin at Jack. “I’m going home. I’m going back to my Master. I figured out the way, and no one can stop me. If you try, they’ll have all died in vain, and I’ll just do it again. I’m going to build my skeleton key.”