PART I
THE GRAVITY OF THE MOMENT
HOME AGAIN
ELEANOR WEST WAS FOND of saying—inasmuch as she was fond of saying anything predictable, sensible, or more than once—that her school had no graduates, only students who found somewhere else to do their learning for a time. Once a wayward child, always a wayward child. The school’s doors would always be open; the lost and the lonely would always be welcome, whenever they wanted to come home.
When children were given into her keeping, the teachers she employed taught them about math and literature and science, according to the state’s curriculum, and Eleanor herself taught them other, equally important things. She taught them how to lie and dissemble, and how to recognize the difference between the two. She taught them how to pick a lock and how to break a window, and any number of other skills that could be useful to someone who might, at any moment, need to drop everything and run for an impossible door, an impossible future, an impossible dream.
And really, that was her true gift to them: she taught them how to keep hoping in the face of a world that told them their memories were delusions, their lived experiences were lies, and their dreams were never going to come true. Perhaps that was her secret for engendering loyalty in a student body that was otherwise disinclined to trust adults, listen to them, or answer when they called. She believed.
For people like her students—people like Eleanor herself—belief was the rarest gift of all.
The parents of those students called her many things, when they were asked. “Kind,” or “considerate,” or “eccentric, in a way that makes sense for someone who works with children.” Not many people asked. The children Eleanor sought for her school were, by and large, the sort whose parents wanted them swept away as quickly and quietly as possible. They had already disappeared once, only to come back … changed. So let them disappear again, this time with the proper paperwork in place. Let them go and hope that if they happened to come home a second time, they’d come back the way they’d been, and not the way that they’d become.
Hope is a vicious beast. It sinks in its claws and it doesn’t let go. But Eleanor loved all her children, however wild they became, and most of them—the ones who were still capable of loving anyone in the strange, cruel world where they’d been born, where they feared they’d eventually die—loved her. At Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, they could let themselves breathe. They could be protected, for a time.
No solicitation. No visitors.
No quests.
1 WRAPPED IN LIGHTNING, WEEPING THUNDER
IT WAS OBVIOUS to anyone with a discerning eye that the school had started out as the country home of a family with more money than sense. The shape of the original architecture was still there, buried under newer construction. It had been a modest three-story home, once upon a renovation, but it had been embellished over the course of generations by widows and widowers who had handled their grief and their inheritance in the same manner: by picking up a hammer and setting to work.
The house had grown like a garden, sprouting wings and tower rooms and greenhouses as if they were nothing more consequential than mushrooms after a rain. What it had been was gone, reduced to nothing but a faint echo in the shape of a door or the structure of an awning. Its replacement was a delightfully rambling sprawl of porches and doors, dormer windows and inexplicable chimneys. Some of the tower rooms stood higher than the attic; some of the lower windows had been painted shut to keep them from flooding the halls every time it rained.
Still, lights could be seen at all levels of the school, both day and night, and the rooms were often filled with laughter. There were worse things for a house to hold.
The school stood alone in the middle of a vast, rolling field, which was dotted with copses of trees; there were no neighbors for miles in any direction. Eleanor had inherited the property upon the deaths of her parents, and had immediately tasked the family accountant with managing the bulk of her assets, giving him strict instructions to watch the land around hers for any signs of a sale. When he found those signs, he was to step in whenever possible to keep that land from going to market. No price was too dear to pay for privacy. Sometimes even she wasn’t sure how much of the surrounding countryside she owned.
That still wasn’t enough for some of her students. They sought deeper shadows, darker spaces, more privacy and freedom from the outside world. For those children, the basement was the most coveted real estate in the house, and its occupants defended it fiercely from suggestion of roommates or relocation.
On the hot summer night where we begin, the basement’s occupant was a boy named Christopher. He was in his late teens and knew that, one way or another, his tenure at the school was nearing its natural end. Either he’d graduate and go home to parents who expected him to be interested in college, a career, what they called “the real world,” or he’d find a door of latticed bone and butterfly wings, interlaced with marigold petals, and he’d disappear for a second, and final, time. He knew which ending he wanted.
He knew he didn’t get to choose.
Maybe that’s why he was stretched out on his bed like a corpse prepared for autopsy, with his hands folded across his chest and his fingers wrapped loosely around a flute carved from a single bone. There were no holes, only indentations etched into its surface, but something about its shape made its purpose perfectly clear.
The single small basement window was open, letting a breeze whisper through. The glass was dark and leaded, letting little light inside. Christopher didn’t mind. He could always go outside when he wanted to feel the sun on his face. Most of his free time was spent in the grove behind the school, perched in the high branches and playing silent songs on his flute.
Sometimes the skeletal bodies of local wildlife—squirrels and rats and, on one surprising occasion, a deer—would rise from their unmarked graves and dance for him. When that happened, Christopher would lead them away from the school and pipe them to their final rest in a place no one would stumble across by mistake. It was weird how much some of his fellow students disliked bones, but whatever. He wouldn’t have liked their worlds either, and it wasn’t like they went out of their way to cover his clothes with glitter or rainbows or other reminders of their lost fairytale dreams. Keeping the grounds free of skeletal surprises seemed like the least he could do.
Sometimes being the last person on campus whose door had led to a world most of the student body dismissed as “creepy” really sucked. It hadn’t been like that when he’d first arrived. Back then he’d shared the “creepy” designation with the Wolcott twins, who’d traveled together to the Moors—a world arguably even creepier than his own Mariposa—and had gone back to their heart’s chosen home the same way.
Jack would have appreciated his skeleton dancers. Jack had appreciated his skeleton dancers, on the rare occasions when she’d been able to take her eyes off Jill long enough to see what he was doing. Jill had always been the more dangerous, less predictable Wolcott, for all that she was the one who dressed in pastel colors and lace and sometimes remembered that people liked it when you smiled. Something about the way she’d wrapped her horror movie heart in ribbons and bows had reminded him of a corpse that hadn’t been properly embalmed, like she was pretty on the outside and rotten on the inside. Terrifying and subtly wrong.