I’m somewhere else now.
It’s quite dark in here. I can hardly see. In the corner of the room, a little girl sits bent over something. Her hands dance very well, quick movements, back and forth. She pauses now and then to check her work, and then bends low again over the thing in her hands.
I step closer, expecting the child to look up, but it seems I am a ghost in this place.
“Hello?” I call.
Nothing.
I look around, scanning the room for Gowan, and realize that I’m in La Baume again. The attic. The same room that Cath locked herself in for months and months. The same room where she was eaten alive by roots. As I think Cathy’s name, the child looks up, as though startled by a sound.
“Hello?”
She leans forward into a shaft of moonlight cast through the tiny sole window to her left, and I see that this child is Cath. She looks about twelve years old, or maybe older. Her eyes are pink and swollen, her lips cracked and bloody.
“Cath… Auntie Cath.”
The child frowns for a moment, and then shifts back into the shadows to continue her work.
I inch closer, aware of every step. I’m five feet away when I see what Cath is doing. In her hands: a limp and rather pathetic excuse for a doll. It is made of sacking cloth and strips of black material, long and thin with elongated limbs. It has no eyes, only a gaping mouth that has been roughly stitched closed again.
The sight of it sends a chill down my spine.
And when I realize what Cath is doing, I fall to my knees, dumbstruck.
“There,” little Cath says, her voice breaking. “Now you can give her back.”
Cath puts down her needle and takes up small sewing scissors instead. Carefully, she snips the black twine holding the doll’s mouth shut, and it falls open in a manic grin like the jaw is weighted down with stones.
The lack of eyes disturbs me. Look away.
But then Cath speaks again.
“Anne… can you hear me, Anne?”
Silence.
“Anne, it’s Catherine. It’s Catherine, Anne, can’t you hear me?”
Nothing.
“You took her,” she whispers at the doll now. “You crept up and you took her away.” A pause. “You’re a Creeper Man. An ugly Creeper Man. You were never our protector.”
I swallow.
“Come on, then!” Cath cries suddenly, throwing the doll into the moonlit strip of wood. She stands slowly, like a storm gathering the strength to surge.
“I dare you,” she spits at last. “I dare you to come here.”
The doll doesn’t move, but it seems to me that it is observing the child. Considering her.
“Creeper Man, Creeper Man, I dare you to come. Creeper Man, Creeper Man, you are the one. Creeper Man, Creeper Man, bring me my Anne. Creeper Man, Creeper Man, I curse you, be damned!”
Cath-the-child is hissing the final words, her eyes leaking tears that she doesn’t seem to notice.
I watch her fury with understanding. “You did this,” I whisper. “Auntie Cath, you did this.”
The image seems to freeze
and when I blink I am back in the cave and I finally, finally understand.
“He’s a demon.”
Gowan shakes his head. “What?”
“The Creeper Man. He’s a child-stealing demon. I saw Cath summon him. She thought he was a protector, but she was wrong. She probably had no idea what she was doing, but she dared him to come. She rhymed, like a spell or something, and I got the weirdest feeling he could hear.”
Gowan opens his mouth and then sighs into his fists. “Silla—”
“I saw it.”
“Where?”
“In the cave. It’s some kind of… I don’t know. Portal. I just… I saw it. And this is his weird lair or something. It sounds insane, but somehow this is all real. He took Nori here into this—place—but we found a way in, too. I don’t think he expected that. So we can save her.”
“I don’t know, Sill. This sounds too… out there.”
His casual use of my name like that—Sill—sends a jolt of uncomfortable familiarity through me. And I hate him.
“Well, look around,” I snap, gesturing. “Does any of this seem normal to you? You can either accept it and help me, or deny it and keep trying to find a rational and completely useless explanation. But I need your help.”
He sighs, long and low, taking me in. “What can I do?”
“I need to find out as much as I can about this demon. Cath had a doll. She made it when she and Mam were little. I know she still has it. She wouldn’t have thrown it away. It’s a doll of him… the Creeper Man. I think that if I could destroy it, it might kill him. Maybe it’s his vessel or something.”
“So we have to find our way back to the house.”
“Yeah.”
Gowan glances around. There is no straight path anymore. “We could try…”
“We have to leave a trail. Like Hansel and Gretel. We’ll find it eventually.”
Gowan doesn’t believe me, I can see that. But he follows me anyway.
We walk with purpose for the first time in… how long have we been here?
We walk straight, and reach the cave.