The Book Of Lost Things

sat on a rock and dug in the snow for stones to throw upon the ice. The snow was deep, and soon his arm was buried in it. His fingers touched some pebbles—

And a hand shot out of the snow beside him and gripped him just above the elbow. It was white and thin, with long, jagged nails, and with enormous force it pulled him from the rock and into the snow. David opened his mouth to yell for help, but a second hand appeared and clamped itself across his lips. He was dragged beneath the drift, the snow falling on top of him so that he could no longer see the trees and sky above, the hands never loosening their hold upon him. He felt hard ground at his back and was overcome by a terrible sense of suffocation, and then the earth too collapsed and he found himself in a hollow of dirt and stone. The hands released him, and a light shone through the darkness. Tree roots hung down from above, gently caressing his face, and David saw the openings of three tunnels, their mouths converging on this one spot. Yellowing bones lay in one corner, the flesh that once covered them long since rotted or consumed. There were worms and beetles and spiders all around, scurrying and fighting and dying in the moist, cold earth.

And there was the Crooked Man. He squatted in a corner, one of those pale hands that had dragged David down now holding a lamp while the other gripped a huge black beetle. As David watched, the Crooked Man put the struggling insect into his mouth, head first, and bit it in half. He chewed on the beetle, all the time watching David. The bottom half of the insect kept moving for a few seconds, then stopped. The Crooked Man offered it to David. David could see part of its insides. They were white. He felt very sick.

“Help me!” he shouted. “Roland, please help me!”

But there was no reply. Instead, the vibrations of his cries merely dislodged dirt from the roof of the hollow. It fell on his head and into his mouth. David spit it out, then prepared to shout again.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” said the Crooked Man. He picked at his teeth and extracted a long, black beetle leg that had lodged close to his gums. “The ground here isn’t stable, and with all that snow above, well, I don’t like to think what would happen if it came down on top of you. You’d die, I expect, and not very pleasantly.”

David closed his mouth. He did not want to be buried alive down there with the insects and the worms and the Crooked Man.

The Crooked Man worked on the lower half of the beetle, removing its back to expose its innards entirely.

“Are you sure you don’t want any?” he asked. “They’re very good: crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. Sometimes, though, I find that I don’t want crunchy. I just want soft.”

He lifted the insect’s body to his mouth and sucked at its flesh, then threw the husk into a corner.

“I thought that you and I should have a talk,” he said, “without the risk of your, um, ‘friend’ up there interrupting us. I don’t think you’ve fully grasped the nature of your predicament. You still seem to think that allying yourself with every passing stranger will help you, but it won’t, you know. I’m the reason you’re still alive, not some ignorant Woodsman or disgraced knight.”

David couldn’t bear to hear the men who had helped him dismissed like that. “The Woodsman wasn’t ignorant,” he said. “And Roland argued with his father. He isn’t a disgrace to anyone.”

The Crooked Man grinned unpleasantly. “Is that what he told you? Tut, tut. Have you seen the picture he carries in his locket? Raphael, isn’t that the name of the one whom he seeks? Such a nice name for a young man. They were very close, you know. Oooh, very close.”

David didn’t know quite what the Crooked Man meant, but the way he spoke made David feel dirty and soiled.

“Perhaps he would like you to be his new friend,” continued the Crooked Man. “He looks at you in the night, you know, when you’re asleep. He thinks you’re beautiful. He wants to be close to you, and closer than close.”

“Don’t talk about him that way,” warned David. “Don’t you dare.”

The Crooked Man sprang from the corner, leaping like a frog, and landed in front of David. His bony hand grasped the boy’s jaw painfully, the nails digging into his skin.

“Don’t tell me what to do, child,” he said. “I could tear your head off if I chose, and use it to adorn my dinner table. I could bore a hole in your skull and stick a candle in it, once I’d eaten my fill of whatever was inside—which wouldn’t be much, I expect. You’re not a very bright boy, are you? You enter a world you don’t understand, chasing the voice of someone you know is dead. You can’t find your way back again, and you insult the only person who can help you return, namely me. You are a very rude, ungrateful, and ignorant little boy.”

With a snap of his fingers, the Crooked Man produced a long, sharp needle, threaded with coarse black string made from what looked like the knotted legs of dead beetles.

“Now why don’t you work on your manners before you force me to sew your lips shut?”

He released his grip on David’s face, then patted his cheek gently.

“Let me show you a proof of my good intentions,” he purred. He reached into the leather pouch upon his belt and drew from it the snout that he had severed from the wolf scout. He dangled it in front of David.

“It was following you, and it found you as you emerged from the church in the forest. It would have killed you, too, had I not intervened. Where it went, others will follow. They are on your trail, and growing ever greater in number. More and more of them are transforming now, and they cannot be stopped. Their time is coming. Even the king knows it, and he does not have the strength to stand in their way. It would be well for you to be back in your own world before they find you again, and I can help you. Tell me what I want to know and you will be safe in your bed before nightfall. All will be well in your house, and your problems will have been solved. Your father will love you, and you alone. This I can promise you if you answer just one question.”

David didn’t want to bargain with the Crooked Man. He couldn’t be trusted, and David felt certain that he was keeping many things from him. No deal made with him could ever be simple, or without cost. Yet David also knew that much of what he was saying was true: the wolves were coming, and they would not stop until they found David. Roland would not be able to kill them all. Then there was the Beast: terrible though she was, she was only one of the horrors that this land seemed to conceal. There would be others, perhaps worse than Loups or Beast. Wherever David’s mother now was, in this world or another, she seemed beyond his reach. He could not find her. He had been foolish ever to think he could, but he had wanted so badly for it to be true. He had wanted her to be alive again. He missed her. Sometimes he would forget her, but in forgetting he would remember her again, and the ache for her would return with a vengeance. Yet the answer to his loneliness did not lie in this place. It was time to go home.

And so David spoke. “What do you want to know?” he said.

The Crooked Man leaned toward him and whispered. “I want you to tell me the name of the child in your house,” he said. “I want you to name for me your half brother.”

David’s fear was replaced by puzzlement. “But why?” he said. If the Crooked Man was the same figure he had seen in his bedroom, then wasn’t it possible that he had been in other parts of the house too? David remembered how he had awoken at home with the unpleasant sensation that something or someone had touched his face while he was asleep. A strange smell had sometimes hung about Georgie’s bedroom (stranger, at least, than the smell that usually came from Georgie). Could that have been an indication of the Crooked Man’s presence? Was it possible that the Crooked Man had failed to hear Georgie’s name spoken during his incursions into their house, and why was it so important to him to know the name anyway?

“I just want to hear it from your lips,” said the Crooked Man. “It’s such a small thing, such a tiny, tiny favor. Tell me, and all this will be over.”

David swallowed hard. He so badly wanted to go home. All he had to do was speak Georgie’s name. What harm could that do? He opened his mouth to speak, but the next name spoken was not Georgie’s but his own.

“David! Where are you?”

It was Roland. David heard the sound of digging from above. The Crooked Man hissed his displeasure at the intrusion.

“Quickly!” he said to David. “The name! Tell me the name!”

Dirt fell on David’s head, and a spider scurried across his face.

“Tell me!” shrieked the Crooked Man, and then the ceiling of earth over David’s head fell in, blinding and burying him. Before his sight failed, he saw the Crooked Man scurry for one of the tunnels to escape the collapse. There was earth in David’s mouth and nose. He tried to breathe, but it caught in his throat. He was drowning in dirt. He felt strong hands grip his shoulders as he was pulled from the earth and into the clean, crisp air above. His vision cleared, but he was still choking on soil and bugs. Roland’s hands pumped at David’s body, forcing the earth