The Book of Lost Things [112]
David placed his little finger against the jar, just where the girl’s hand was touching it from the inside, so that only the glass separated them.
“Does anyone else know that you’re here?” asked David.
She nodded. “My brother sometimes comes, but he’s very old now. Well, I call him my brother, but he never was, not really. I just wanted him to be. He tells me that he’s sorry. I believe him. I think he is sorry.”
Suddenly, everything began to make awful sense to David.
“Jonathan brought you here, and he gave you to the Crooked Man,” he said. “That was the bargain he made.”
He sat down hard on the cold, uncomfortable bed.
“He was jealous of you,” he continued, speaking more softly now, talking as much to himself as to the girl in the jar, “and the Crooked Man offered him a way to be free of you. Jonathan became king, and the one who preceded him, the old queen, was allowed to die. Perhaps, many years before, she had made a similar bargain with the Crooked Man, and the boy you saw in the jar when you came was her brother, or cousin, or some little boy next door who annoyed her so much that she dreamed of getting rid of him.”
And the Crooked Man heard her dreams, because that was where he wandered. His place was the land of the imagination, the world where stories began. The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours. But with them came the Crooked Man, prowling between his world and ours, looking for stories of his own to create, hunting for children who dreamed bad dreams, who were jealous and angry and proud. And he made kings and queens of them, cursing them with a kind of power, even if the real power lay always in his hands. And in return they betrayed the objects of their jealousy to him, and he took them into his lair deep beneath the castle…
David stood and returned to the girl in the jar.
“I know it’s hard for you, but you have to tell me what happened to you when you came here. It’s very important. Please, try.”
Anna screwed her face up and shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “It hurt. I don’t want to remember it.”
“You must,” said David, and there was a new force to his voice. It sounded deeper, as though the man that he would become had briefly shown himself before his time. “If it’s not to happen again, you have to tell me what he did.”
Anna was trembling. Her lips were pressed as thin as paper, and her tiny fists were clenched so tightly that the bones threatened to break through her skin. At last, she released a moan of sorrow and anger and remembered pain, and the words poured out.
“We came through the sunken garden,” she began. “Jonathan was always being so mean to me. He would tease me, when he spoke to me at all. He would pinch me and pull my hair. He would take me into the forest and try to lose me there, until I started to cry and he had to come back for me in case his parents heard me. He told me that if I ever said anything to them, he would give me away to a stranger. He said that they wouldn’t believe me anyway because he was their real child and I wasn’t. I was just a little girl that they’d taken pity on, and if I disappeared then they wouldn’t be sad for very long.
“But sometimes he could be so kind and so sweet, as though he forgot that he was supposed to hate me and the real Jonathan shone through instead. Perhaps that was why I followed him down to the garden that night, because he’d been so nice to me that day. He’d bought me sweets with his own money, and he’d shared his pie with me after I dropped mine on the floor. He woke me in the night and told me that he had something to show me, something special and secret. Everyone else was asleep, and we sneaked down to the sunken garden, my hand in Jonathan’s. He showed me a hollow place. I was scared. I didn’t want to go inside. But Jonathan said that I’d see a strange land, a fabulous land, if I did. He went ahead, and I followed. At first, I couldn’t see anything. There was only darkness and spiders. Then