She resisted the urge to smooth his mussed hair. “Nicholas had a fright, and he’s going to come sleep in my room, and I wanted to let you know in case you woke up in the night and wondered what had happened to him.”
“No,” Nick said. “It’s okay now. I’ll stay here.”
He stared at the floor when she tried to look in his eyes, and she could hear the embarrassment in his voice. “Nicholas—”
“It’s fine, it’s all right, I just need to go back to sleep. Could you just leave the door open a bit and the hall light on?” He climbed into bed next to Jack Peter and rolled away from her. For a few minutes, she stood like a statue in the middle of the room, watching and listening as they settled themselves. Miniature men, desperate to be brave.
“What was it?” Jack Peter asked.
“Nothing. Just a dream like she said.”
She hoped that they would ask her to stay, but they had no more use for her, so she left the room and went back to her own bed. No more babies crying in the darkness, no more little boys curling in her arms.
ii.
Holly read the names of the dead. Names that had not been spoken in ages, whispering each spirit to herself. The archivist at the Maritime Museum had brought her a gray box filled with old letters and ledgers, reports of several shipwrecks off the coast of Maine, and she eventually found the list on a water-stained sheet of lined paper, the account written in the beautiful cursive hand of some anonymous nineteenth-century scribe:
Drowned on the Porthleven, 29 Dec. 1849
Very Rev. Thomas Vingoe 51 yrs and wife Mary
David, Thomas & Mary, children of T & M Vingoe
Bodies taken by Friends
James Chenoweth, 28 yrs, taken by Friends
Edward Conklin, 18 yrs old
Unknown Female child about 9 yrs old
Mathew Jones, wife & two infants (wife & 1 child not found)
Mr. Purcell (Captain)
Bodies not found
John Nance and his son, about 7 yrs old
Sir Charles Arundell
James Mayhew
T. Clark
Sailor (stranger) originating from Helston, about 30 yrs
Bodies not found. They could be out there still, she thought, just beyond our house, and that bone could be from one of those poor children. The tick of the big clock in the room filled her ears. Nobody else haunted the library that morning. She was tempted to slip the beautiful old page from the folder and into her purse as evidence to bear out her suspicions, but instead carefully wrote out each name on a small pad. Bodies taken by Friends.
The library was cold, as if they were conserving heat with so few patrons, and Holly blew on her fingers to bring some life back to her hands. She had been led to these files, she thought, from the moment she first saw the painting in the priest’s dining room, and the voices, the bones, even Tim’s phantoms in the night all pointed to the Porthleven. And maybe those ghosts had infected her son with this obsession with monsters. She thought of Jack’s strange detached look when she had gone in to check on the screams coming from his room. And Nicholas, that poor trembling child she had abandoned the night before. She should have insisted he sleep with them, Tim be damned, rather than let him spend the long dark hours with Jack and who knows what they might have conjured in their late-night whispers, all their constant monsters. They had been careful to hide their notebooks filled with creatures, but she had found them out. Pages of horrors from the movies and television, and Jack’s burnt skeleton. She would speak to them that afternoon, recommend a change of subject for their artistic endeavors. Still life or landscapes. Or cars, didn’t ten-year-old boys love to draw cars and tanks and airplanes? The kids had taken a wrong path that week, and she was determined to correct matters, if only so the Weller boy would agree to come back someday and not be so frightened that he would stay away forever, like a mind-blown visitor who flees screaming from a haunted house never to return. That would be a disaster for her son.