Doll Bones (3 page)

If the curse was lifted, would William really give up being a pirate? If he did, would he miss it?

Who does he think his father is?

Does he think that Lady Jaye likes him?

Does William ever have nightmares?

He started to scribble. He liked the way the story unfolded as he wrote, liked the way the answers just came to him sometimes, out of the blue, like they were true things just waiting to be discovered by him.

Sometimes William has dreams about being buried alive. He dreams that he’s woken up and everything is black. He only knows where he is because he feels a heavy pressure on his chest and it’s hard to get enough of a breath to scream. Usually, it’s the trying to scream that wakes him. He finds himself swinging in a hammock in his quarters, in a cold sweat, his green parrot peering at him suspiciously with her single black eye. And he tells himself that when he’s buried, he’s going to be buried at sea.

Even after he folded the questions back into the shape of a football and tucked it into the front pocket of his backpack, the feeling of the story being close stayed with him. Zach doodled pictures in the margins of his notebook, drawings of cutlasses and blast rifles and crowns next to geometry homework and facts about the Battle of Antietam.

That past summer, the mysterious thing that had stretched other boys like taffy had started to happen to Zach. He’d always been tall, but now he’d almost reached his father’s height, with hands so big that catching a basketball was a lot easier and legs so long that he could jump nearly high enough to touch the net. The year before, he’d hung back on the court, but now he was thundering down it.

Everyone at school looked at him differently all of a sudden. The guys were wanting to hang out more, slapping him on the back, and laughing louder at his jokes. And the girls had just gotten weird.

Even Alice acted strange around him sometimes. When she was with her school friends, instead of her talking to him like she usually did, the whole bunch of them giggled uncomfortably. That very afternoon, after practice, he passed by Alice and a few girls from the theater crew. They fled in a fit of shrieking laughter before he could ask Alice what had been so funny or whether she wanted to walk home with him.

So he walked home by himself, feeling a little bit lonely as he made his way through the early autumn evening, kicking the carpet of fallen leaves. He didn’t know how else to make things go back to normal. It wasn’t like he could
shrink
himself back into being the same as before.

An eerie wind sang through the untrimmed trees in front of Mr. Thompson’s old house at the end of the block. It sounded like someone shrieking from a long way off, but getting closer with every second. Zach sped up his pace, walking faster and faster, feeling foolish as he did it. He felt the tickle of the hairs on the back of his neck, as though whatever was coming was right behind him, as though he could feel its breath.

Suddenly he felt overwhelmed by a wash of terror. It was all-consuming and, despite feeling silly, he ran, racing across his lawn to the small brick house where he lived. He hit the front door, his palms slamming against it, and had to stumble back to jerk it open.

The kitchen smelled like spaghetti sauce and frying sausages, a warm, safe smell that drove away all thoughts of the night and the eerie wind.

His mother stuck her head out of the kitchen. She was wearing sweatpants, and her long brown hair was pulled back in a bunch of clips. She looked tired. “Dinner’s almost ready. Why don’t you start on your homework, and I’ll call you when it’s time to eat.”

“Okay,” Zach said. As he walked through the living room his dad was coming down the stairs. He clapped his hand heavily on Zach’s shoulder.

“You’re growing up,” he said, which seemed to be one of those weird things adults would say sometimes, stuff that was really obvious and to which there was no reply.

Since his dad had come back, he’d been really fond of saying that kind of thing.

“I guess.” Zach shrugged off his dad’s grip and went up to his room.

He dumped his backpack out on the bed and sprawled on his stomach, reaching for his social studies book. He read the chapter he was supposed to and then started on punctuation, toeing off his sneakers. It was hard to concentrate. His stomach gurgled with hunger, and the smell of dinner made waiting to eat even harder. He was tired from practice, and the last thing he wanted to do was more schoolwork. He wanted to sit in front of the television and watch the show about ghost-hunters or the one with the thief who worked for the government. Ideally, he’d be watching them from the couch, with a huge plate of spaghetti and sausage on his lap.

Mom probably wasn’t going to go for that, though. Ever since Dad was back, whenever he wasn’t working, she was all about the family sitting together at the table without phones or games or books. She kept quoting something she’d read in a magazine—some kind of study that having dinner together was supposed to make Zach a happier adult and make her lose weight. Why they did it only when Dad was at home, if it was so important, Zach wasn’t sure.

As all of this went through Zach’s mind, something struck him as odd. That morning when he’d left for school, William the Blade had been sitting on the edge of his desk along with a bunch of the other action figures who were the semi-expendable crew for the
Neptune’s Pearl.
But now none of them were there.

He glanced around the room. It wasn’t very clean, even though every Sunday his mother made him “straighten it up a little.” His dirty laundry was piled around his hamper more than in it. His bookshelf was stuffed with books on pirates, adventure novels, and textbooks that spilled onto the floor. His desk was crowded with magazines, his computer, LEGO pieces, and models of ships. But he knew the pattern of his mess. He knew where his guys should have been and where they were not.

He got up clumsily, half sliding off his mattress. Then he bent down to look under the bed. Their black cat, named “The Party,” would sometimes sneak into his room and knock things over. As Zach squatted on the rug, though, he didn’t see William the Blade anywhere on the floor.

He started to get anxious. William was his best character—the one he’d played the longest and the one that was still at the center of almost every one of his stories. Two weeks ago Poppy had introduced a fortune-teller who told William that she knew who his father was—and suddenly, while hunting down his past and trying to get the Queen’s curse removed, William had become more fun to play than ever.

Poppy was always doing that—improvising, jumping into the gaps in a story, creating something new and interesting and a little scary. Sometimes it annoyed him—William’s story was whatever Zach said it was, right?—but most of the time it was worth just giving in and trusting her.

It was important for William not to be missing. Because if William
was
missing, then there was no rest of the story, no more crazy ideas, no payoff, no ending, no more.

Maybe,
he thought, maybe he was making a mistake. Maybe he’d misremembered where he’d left the figures. Maybe William and the others were with the rest of his toys. He walked over to where his duffel of action figures should have been, just inside his closet. But the bag wasn’t there either.

He felt odd. Like something was pressing on his chest.

He stared at the spot, waiting for his brain to supply some explanation. Panic bloomed in him. He was sure the duffel had been resting on the floor that morning when he’d stumbled over it to get a T-shirt off a hanger.

But maybe he’d left it over at Poppy’s house? Except that he
remembered
seeing it the night before. And he wouldn’t have left it anywhere unless there was a reason—unless they were in the middle of an elaborate battle where everything had to stay exactly where it was. Which they were not.

He looked around helplessly.

“Mom!”
Zach shouted, walking to the door of his room and flinging it open, stalking out into the hall. “Mom! What did you do with my stuff? Did you take my bag?”

“Zachary?” she called up from downstairs. “That’s the second time you’ve slammed—”

He ran down the steps, cutting her off in mid-scold. “Where’s my bag? The action figures. The models and cars. All of them. They’re not upstairs.”

“I didn’t take anything out of your room. I bet it’s underneath one of the Kilimanjaro-size piles of laundry up there.” She smiled as she got down a stack of plates, but he didn’t smile back. “Clean your room and I bet the bag turns up.”

“No, Mom, they’re
gone
.” Zachary glanced over at his father and was surprised to see the expression on his dad’s face—an expression he wasn’t sure how to interpret.

She followed Zach’s gaze, turning to Zach’s father, her voice very quiet. “Liam?”

“He’s twelve years old, playing with a bunch of crap,” he said, getting up from the couch and raising his hands in a placating way. “He’s got to grow up. It was time he got rid of them. He should be concentrating on friends, listening to music, goofing off. Zach, trust me, you won’t miss them.”

“Where are they?” Zach asked, a dangerous edge to his voice.

“Forget it, they’re gone,” his father said. “There’s no point in throwing a tantrum.”

“Those figures were
mine
!” Zach was so angry he could barely think. His voice shook with anger. “They were mine.”

“Someone’s got to get you ready for the real world,” said his father, his face flushing red. “Be mad all you want, but it’s done. Done. Do you understand me? It’s time you grew up. End of discussion.”

“Liam, what were you thinking?” Zach’s mother demanded. “You can’t just go making decisions without talking—”

“Where are they?” Zach snarled. He had never talked to his father this way, never talked to any adult this way. “What did you do with them?”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” his dad said.

“Liam!” His mother’s voice was cautioning.

“GIVE THEM BACK!” Zach shouted. He was out of control and he didn’t care.

His father stopped for a moment, his expression suddenly uncertain. “I threw them out. I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d be this upset. They’re just plastic—”

“In the garbage?” Zachary rushed out the door and down the steps. Two big dented metal trash cans were at the end of the lawn, resting on the curb. He pulled off the lid of one with numb fingers and threw it against the road with a
clang
.

Please
, he thought.
Pleasepleaseplease.

But the inside of the can was empty. The trash truck had already come and gone.

It felt like a punch to the gut. William the Blade and Max Hunter and all the others were dead. Without them, all their stories would be dead too. He wiped his face against the sleeve of his shirt.

Then he turned back to the house. His father was silhouetted in the doorway.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t bother trying to be my father anymore,” Zach said, walking up the front steps and past him. “It’s too late for that. It was too late years ago.”

“Zachary,” his mother said, her hand reaching out to touch his shoulder, but he walked past her.

His father just stared at him, his face stricken.

In his room, Zachary looked up at the ceiling, trying to quiet the feelings inside him. He didn’t finish his homework. He didn’t eat dinner, even though his mother brought up a plate and set it down on his desk. He didn’t change out of his clothes into his pajamas. He didn’t cry.

Zachary tossed and turned, concentrating on the shadows moving across the ceiling and on the anger that seemed to grow instead of lessen. He was angry. At his father, for destroying the game. At his mother, for letting his father back into their lives. At Poppy and Alice, who hadn’t lost anything. And at himself, for acting like a little kid, just like his dad had said, and for caring about William the Blade and a bunch of plastic toys as though they were real people.

And that anger curdled inside his belly and crawled up his throat until it felt like it might choke him. Until he was sure that there was no way he could ever tell anyone what had happened without all of his anger spilling out and engulfing everything.

And the only way not to tell anyone was to end the game.

CHAPTER THREE