The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle (10 page)

Knives

S
OMETHING SLIDES THROUGH
the dark until it stands over the bed Kat shares with Amelie. It hovers, a dreadful monster made of metal and wheels and gears, like clockworks, a monster that buzzes and clicks and reflects the moonlight that streams in through the unshuttered window. Instead of proper arms and legs it has limbs that are thin and shiny like knives.

It stands over the bed, eyes bright in a half-eaten skull, and strokes Amelie's cheek with a thin metal finger that sticks out from its hand like a crooked claw.

The finger runs down Amelie's cheek, down to her throat, and then to Amelie's heart. Kat tries to scream, but it's as if she's under water, as the claw digs into Amelie's chest and pulls out her heart and holds it up in the moonlight.

Kat keeps trying to scream, trying to fight her way up from sleep, keeps fighting to stop this monster, wanting to save little Ame, but she is helpless, helpless and rigid in the grip of some dark magic, until the nightmare fades.

After that she sleeps like the very dead.

Lost Souls

O
H, THE
TERROR!

The villagers speak of it in hushed whispers. Of the sounds of chains and wheels and machines in need of oil that come in darkness; the cries and the calls and the soft tuneless songs. The lost.

“It were the bogeys,” say mams to their wide-eyed bairns. “You dinna go out at night, loveys, or your souls'll be snatched.”

“Like them others,” mutter the das. Among themselves, the das mutter their own thoughts about the castle and the things that go on there, but only among themselves.

No one knows for certain, and no one in the village is brave enough to ask.

The giant Hugo, who drives for the beautiful Lady newly
wed to Lord Craig, he sees. He sees the magister through the smoky glass window and has the vague memory that the magister does wonderful and terrible things. As he sits alone with his mug in the corner of the Rook, the giant is heard to say, “Those poor bairns. Whatever'll become . . .” He wishes he could help them, but something muddles his mind.

The wee ones, sleeping, hear it in their dreams—the mechanical whir, the clang and scrape, the soft cries—and they stir, restless and fearful.

Oh, the terror!

The charmed child Rose, who wears the small silver fish, has feelings, yes, but they're locked deep inside. And she has memories, too, of a small cottage with a mum who held her, and of the many sisters who scrabbled around fighting and bossing and laughing, but her memories are ghosts, wispy things.

Rose tries to catch her memories. The little pond in the garden is where she goes with a net she's fashioned from a tangle of wires and strings and strands of her long yellow hair. She sits at the edge of the pond and waits for a fish. A memory fish.

She is very patient, that Rose.

When she catches a fish and brings it up, she lays it on the stone edging and watches and waits. Will the fish give her back her past? What, little fish? You are opening and closing your
mouth, but Rose can't hear you. She turns her head but hears nothing. Speak up, little fish!

When the fish's eyes are gone blank and staring, Rose carries the fish with her, carries it until it falls away in her pocket, falls to rotting pieces, until she's forgotten its purpose as she's forgotten so many things.

Tim, the hunchback boy, wearing the hunchback charm, knows how to polish, yes. He can't recall his name or the old priest or the chapel or the offering or the fair. But he remembers the polishing. It makes him feel special, though now he can't remember why. So that's what he does. He polishes.

Oh, but he remembers the saint, yes. The beautiful saint who gave him the polishing cloth he is holding now and the charm he wears, the saint who was followed into the woods by dark wings beating overhead, so she must be a saint. Yes, he felt a momentary pain in her presence, but wasn't that the pain of love?

Tim is in his private place, the place he's found at the bottom of the bottom, the place where he lies neither dead nor alive next to the furnace on a bed of straw. On occasion, when he leaves his place, he polishes things in the castle, things like mirrors and faucets and handles, as he was when caught in a bathroom by those children, who frightened him so that he ran back to his dark hideaway and shook with fear.

Arrayed around him now are the lovely, shiny baubles he has collected over centuries in this drafty castle, candlesticks and bowls, platters and forks. He breathes a sigh and takes his polishing rag and goes to work.

The twin girls, Alice and Brigit, with their wordless tunes, find their way to the top of the high tower, the keep, from which they can see the wide gray ocean, and they sing to the water, Alice still clutching her one old boot and Brigit still clasping her locked treasure chest, and the things that mimic their relics are charms that hang round their necks on thin silver chains.

Alice and Brigit sing to the sea, sing for the loss of their parents and home, and their voices carry down the allée of trees to the ocean's edge, carry over the water and back, some trick of the land and seascape that brings their voices back like a bird returning to roost.

The villagers, hearing the sad melodies as if they come from the ocean itself, believe in selkies, selkies with the voices of angels.

Cat-boy John, with his charm of cats, with the cats that come and go and follow and mew, was the fifth to be taken.

He will not be the last.

Lessons

T
HE FIRST THING
Kat did when she opened her eyes in the early light was reach for her sister, taking her by the shoulder. Amelie grumped, “Quit it. Trying to sleep.”

Kat lay back and took long shuddering breaths.

While getting dressed, as she fished in her drawer for her uniform sweater, her fingers landed on the chatelaine, and she lifted it out. Dreadful monsters? Dark magic? If Great-Aunt Margaret hadn't planted this fantasy in Kat's head, would she even think such things?

Kat grew angry, with her aunt, with herself, with her fears, and with the ridiculous chatelaine, and she dropped it on top of the sweaters and slammed the drawer shut.

After that she was grateful for the distraction of school.
Classes fell into their regular rhythm, with English at the start of the day, followed by maths and then history. The only thing missing was Jorry.

“Yes, he's quite ill after all,” said the Lady, when they asked at lunch. “I've sent for the doctor. I think it might be a chill, and I'm hoping it's not influenza. Please do not disturb him; I can assure you he's being well tended, and I don't need his contagion spreading throughout the house.”

Contagion,
Kat thought.

English lessons were rigorous. Colin was not a model student: he fretted and worried, and Miss Gumble, though not mean, was not easy on him. Even Peter chewed his pencil and knitted his brows over her questions. Kat had to work hard to get all the readings done and the questions answered, and she wasn't looking forward to the long essay assignment that was due the following week.

In history Storm continued to query them on coastal geography, interspersing those “lessons” with recent history of the British Isles. Sometimes he would pause in the middle of some ramble as if he'd forgotten where he was. There were times when Kat wondered what he was playing at. He only mentioned the artifacts once in passing, and Kat swore Storm stared long and hard at her before he moved on to the geology of the Great Glen Fault.

Maths, of course, was Kat's favorite, and she quickly
discovered that MacLarren was impressed she was so skilled.

“Perhaps I should be giving you harder assignments, eh, lass?” And he tossed out a long list of problems for her to do that night. When she finished them by the next class, he raised his brows.

“Showing off a wee bit, are we? Maybe they're not done right, eh?”

But they were. He doubled her assignments for the rest of the week.

It bothered Peter more than it did Kat.

“Why does he pick on you?” Peter asked after supper midweek.

“Probably because it's easy for me,” she said. “Maybe he thinks I need a challenge.”

“Well, it's not fair.”

She shrugged. “I don't mind.” There were too many other things that weren't fair for her to worry over one mathematics teacher.

There was Jorry, for one thing. The Lady informed them that the doctor had visited and proclaimed him ill “but not in danger. But indeed contagious with influenza, and no one is to disturb him.” He was confined alone to his room for the duration.

Kat still hadn't been able to bring herself to tell Rob and Ame that Father was missing. She kept hoping he'd turn up and she wouldn't have to say a thing.

By the following Saturday, however, there still had been no news about Father. Kat chewed her lip as she stared out the window into the highland hills. Today she could see the sea, a flat gray sliver at the far edge of the grounds. The gray clouds hovered like a blanket over the land.

And then, as she stared aimlessly out . . . there was someone striding across the grounds toward the allée of trees and the sea.

Whoever it was, he was draped in a long oilcloth coat as he made his way toward the water. Kat pressed her hands to the glass of her window as the figure grew smaller and finally disappeared into the woods.

Was it the wireless operator? Her spy? Maybe it was even someone taking a message to a waiting U-boat?

She opened her door. She couldn't go to Peter; he wasn't interested in making waves. She didn't want to risk making him her enemy again.

But she had to do something.

The corridors were empty and silent. Kat remembered then that Miss Gumble had offered to conduct a Saturday study hall for extra credit, and the other students must have gone. Kat didn't need the extra credit. What she needed was to find answers.

Kat slipped down the stairs, pausing on every landing to listen. By this time she knew at least one way down, though
she almost wanted to tie a thread to her door in case she got lost. She most certainly didn't want the Lady to find her disobeying orders. She'd be punished for sure. Locked in her room with no supper, or worse.

As Kat passed by the secret room she paused, crept up to the hidden door, and placed her ear to the wall. Nothing. And then . . .

It began as a faint crackle. Then a voice hissing and spitting from over the wireless. She couldn't make out words; the volume was too low. Then a pause, and someone in the room was speaking back into the short-wave.

Drat this thick wall!
Kat plastered herself as flat as she could, her ear right against the narrow crack. Again she couldn't make out words, but there was one thing certain: the voice speaking back to the wireless in the room was definitely that of a man.

She straightened and stepped away. There were only four men in this castle: the giant, whom she hadn't seen since the day they arrived; Lord Craig, whom she'd never seen; Mr. MacLarren; and Mr. Storm. Only four men—unless there was someone else here, another man, in hiding. And whoever she'd seen outside and the wireless operator couldn't be one and the same.

Kat pondered this. The castle was huge and rambling—more than rambling, it was a maze—and had many rooms. It would be easy for someone to hide. Unless she searched
every corner—an impossible task—she'd never know.

It wasn't Lady Eleanor who operated the wireless. Kat pursed her lips. She still thought that the Lady could be using one of the men. Kat wouldn't let her off the hook. There was too much about her that Kat didn't like.

In fact, there was something odd about each one of the adults in this castle, except maybe—she hoped—Cook.

Now her little inner voice said,
Find Cook
.

Kat went down the stairs, but when she reached the lowest floor and started down the hallway, she promptly became lost.

“What is it about this place?” she muttered after a good ten minutes of wandering. The only thing to do was to make her way back upstairs and then find the kitchen from her room.

It was as if she was the only person in the entire castle and the castle itself was alive, with the moaning of the wind outside and the groans from the radiators. Kat climbed the stairs to her hall. She shivered as she peered back over her shoulder.

Which was why, when she turned the corner in the hallway to her room, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

“Miss Bateson!” Storm dabbed a handkerchief at his forehead, which was beaded with sweat. “Shouldn't you be in study hall?”

“It's—it's voluntary,” Kat said, stammering. Then, “But what are you doing here on our hallway?”

The fear left his face, and Storm's eyes betrayed a
glimmer of triumph. He stuck his hand in his pocket and drew up. “That's my business, Miss Bateson. Back to your room or to study hall at once, or I shall be forced to inform the Lady that you are wandering.”

Kat pressed her lips into a thin line as he marched away down the stairs, whistling.
Peculiar.

But she wasn't about to listen to Storm. Kat found her way past her room and down to the front entry. From there she made it to the great hall and, orienting herself, slid along the dark hallways to the kitchen at the back.

She made only a couple more wrong turns before she found the kitchen door. Comforting smells guided her.

She opened the door an inch at a time until she could peek inside. Cook bustled about the steamy room. Back and forth she walked, carrying great bowls and platters. She chattered as if the whole of London was there to hear her.

Kat pushed the door another inch, so that she could scan the room. No one. Nothing. Maybe Cook talked to herself. Maybe she was as odd as the others. Kat was about to push her way in when she saw them: a pair of feet in shoes with soles so thin, they were dotted with holes. She paused.

Someone was huddled on the floor by the stove, and Kat could see feet. Small feet. Someone young.

A cat trotted across the kitchen, and then another. The cats wrapped themselves around the feet, twining and mewing,
until one dropped to a hunch on the floor by the feet and began to groom.

Cook was talking to a child who sat on the floor with the cats. Well, that meant Cook really was to be trusted, so Kat walked on into the kitchen.

With that movement she startled the living daylights out of a boy, handsome and dark-haired though thin, wraith-thin, huddled by the stove. Kat startled him so that he sprang up, his dark eyes blank and staring, ghostly, and he bolted out the back door into the miserable weather, cats on his heels, slamming the door in his wake.