Ink and Bone(93)

She started screaming then, a squeal of rage and fear, the loudest sound she’d ever made. She clawed at the ground, looking for a hold.

Scream, make as much noise as you can. And whatever you do, don’t let him take you. Don’t let him.

“Bobo!” she cried. “Help me!”

But Bobo was gone, as if he’d never been there at all.





THIRTY


The boy with the trains knelt over the wooden tracks and moved the engine back and forth clumsily.

Choo-choo, he said, as happy and content with his toy as any child had ever been. Finley sat beside him, but he didn’t look up at her, kept moving his train along the imaginary track on the ground. Choo-choo. Of all of them—Faith Good, Abigail, the squeak-clink, he’d been the quiet one, the least demanding.

“Where is she?” Finley asked.

The boy looked up at her, his face a pale, grim mask. “Penny’s gone.”

“Not Penny. Abbey,” she said gently. She reached out to touch his golden hair. Of course, there was nothing there, but still he lifted his eyes from the train on the ground. Old eyes, a fathomless mineral green. Once she started staring, she found she couldn’t look away.

“They’re the same.” He did not speak like a little boy.

“No,” she said.

“We’re all the same,” he said. “Lost, broken, the victims of our parents’ evils and mistakes. The Three Sisters, Penny, Bobo, Abbey, Elsie, even Momma . . .”

He went on listing names, and Finley listened until finally he stopped. The dark around them seemed to expand.

The last time she’d been with Agatha, Finley had asked, What is this place?

A vortex, Agatha had answered, an energy center certainly.

But it was more than that. It had intelligence, didn’t it? It was running some kind of agenda.

What does it want? What does The Hollows want?

It’s too soon to tell.

“What does it want?” she asked the boy with the trains, now. Joshua, she realized now. She recognized him from the photos in his mother’s house. He appeared older now than when she had first seen him.

The boy cocked his head at her and frowned. “Don’t you know?”

“I don’t,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“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.