“It wants all its children to come home.”
A wind whipped around Finley, lifting her to her feet, and she saw them all, the faces of the lost ones. The Three Sisters, the victims of hatred and jealousy. A girl Finley knew as The Burning Girl and her sister, abused by their stepfather, then murdered by their own mother. Elsie, another little girl, drowned by her mother.
Finley staggered under the weight of a terrible sadness, pushing herself up against the wall for support. She saw, lived each horrible moment of abuse, neglect, and murder, flashing before her eyes like a stuttering horror reel. Not just those, but more, so many more. The gravity of each event sucked all the air from her lungs. And when it was over, the boy with the trains was gone, and Finley lay weak on the ground, shaking. She turned on her side and curled up and began to weep. Not for just the lost girls and all their sorrow, but for herself, the one who had to bear witness. She didn’t want to watch. She didn’t want to see how broken was the world, how flawed were its denizens. She didn’t want to see.
But then there was a horrible screaming. It filled the tunnel, the sound of a little girl in pure terror. Finley pulled herself together, got up, and started to run deeper into the tunnel toward the sound. She felt like she had been running forever when she turned a hard corner, and was nearly blinded by the sudden light.
The scene revealed itself in pieces. A lantern lit on the wall, its light weirdly bright. There was a wide dark hole in the ground, a gaping emptiness that seemed to pull at the energy in the room. A towering ghoul of a man struggled with a little girl who was fighting like a berserker as he tried to drag her toward the hole.
“Stop!” Finley screamed.
Her voice was a bolt of lightning, shocking and powerful, moving everything else to stillness and silence. The man stared at her a moment, stunned. She knew him, the gardener who cared for the grounds at her school. She remembered his searing, haunting stare. Now those eyes filled her with cold terror.
She lunged at him, her shoulder connecting with his skeletal middle and sending them both crashing back against the hard wall. The girl was knocked to the side, where she lay motionless. Finley scrambled to her feet, and when he tried to get up, she used the sole of her thick motorcycle boot to kick him in the face. She saw the girl stir.
“Run, Abbey,” she said. “Run!”
But the girl didn’t move. Abel Crawley tried to lift himself, then quickly lunged at Finley’s legs, knocking her to the ground hard. The hole yawned to her right. Rising from it was a foul odor, the breath of death so strong that Finley gagged.
“What is that?” she screamed at him. The horrible possibilities took shape in her mind. “What’s down there?”
He had a strong grip on her ankle, impossibly strong, and pulled her closer to the edge of the hole. But she flipped herself and sat up quickly to punch him in the face as hard as she could. Pain traveled white hot up her arm. She’d forgotten how much it hurt to hit someone. Her early years had been spent wrestling and play fighting with Alfie and all his stupid friends. They were afraid of her, not because she was strong but because she was so ferocious. When you were small, you learned to claw and bite and pinch to get away. It always ended up with one of the boys crying. Even if she had been hurt, she’d never let them see her cry.
She had developed a good right hook, and she used it now to bash Crawley in the face again, eliciting a roar of pain and a spray of blood. But then he was on top of her, his strength, his weight too much. She was pinned. Never let them pin you, never let it be a match of strength alone. That was the first rule of being a girl in a group of boys. His mouth twisted into a cruel bloody smile, and struggle as she could, she couldn’t get away.
“You can kill me,” she said. “But they know who you are and where you are. And they’ll find you. You’ll never hurt anyone again.”
The girl was a bullet shot from a gun. She flew over them screeching, dive-bombing into Crawley, knocking him back and off Finley. She heard the unsettling crack of skull against rock. He slumped against the wall. The girl went tumbling, and Finley dove for her, catching her by the arm just as her body went flying over the edge into the hole. Using all her strength, Finley pulled the girl back onto the ground. Both of them lay spent, panting with effort. Crawley started moving.
Finley pulled the girl to her feet. It was then that she saw her face for the first time and drew in a ragged breath of surprise. The girl blinked, her gaze glassy and confused.