David turned back to the very first page of the book and saw what was written there. It read: Jonathan Tulvey. His Book.

David closed the book with a snap and hastily stepped away from it. Jonathan Tulvey: Rose's great-uncle who had disappeared along with his little adopted sister and had never been seen again. This was Jonathan's book, a relic of his life. He remembered the old king, and the loving way in which he had touched the book.

"The book has value to me."

Jonathan was the king. He had made a bargain with the Crooked Man, and in return he had become the ruler of this land. Perhaps he had even pa.s.sed through the same portal that David had used to come here. But what was the arrangement, and what had happened to the little girl? Whatever bargain he had made with the Crooked Man had cost him dearly in the end. The old king, pleading to be allowed to die, was living proof of this.

A sound came from above. David shrank back against the wall as the figure of a guard appeared on the gallery, resuming his position now that the chamber was empty once again. There was no way David could get back to his room without being seen. He looked around and tried to find another way out. He could take the doorway the king had used, but that would almost certainly mean being confronted by guards. There was also the tapestry on the wall behind the throne. Somehow, the Crooked Man had found a way out through there, and David doubted that there would be guards where the Crooked Man had gone. David was also curious. For the first time, he felt that he knew more than the Crooked Man or the king thought he knew. It was time to try to use that knowledge.

Silently, he made his way to the tapestry and lifted it back from the wall. Behind it was a door. David pushed down on the door handle, and it opened without a sound. Beyond lay a low-ceilinged pa.s.sageway, lit by candles set in alcoves in the stonework. The roof of the pa.s.sage was so low that it almost touched David's hair as he entered. He closed the door behind him and followed the pa.s.sageway down, down, deep into the cold, dark places that lay beneath the castle. He pa.s.sed disused dungeons, some still littered with bones, and a chamber that was filled with instruments of pain and torture: racks upon which to stretch prisoners until they screamed; thumbscrews with which to break their bones; spikes and spears and blades to pierce the flesh; and, in a far corner, an iron maiden, shaped like the mummies' coffins that David had seen in museums but with nails set into its lid so that anyone placed inside would face an agonizing death. It made David feel queasy, and he pa.s.sed through the chamber as quickly as he could.

At last he came to an enormous room dominated by a great hourgla.s.s. Each bulb of the gla.s.s was as tall as a house, but the top bulb was almost empty. The wood and gla.s.s from which the hourgla.s.s had been constructed looked very old. Time, for someone or something, was draining away, and now it was almost gone.

Beside the hourgla.s.s room was a small chamber furnished with a simple bed, a stained mattress, and an old blanket resting upon it. On the wall across from the bed was an array of bladed weapons, daggers and swords and knives, all arranged in descending order of length. Another wall held a shelf covered in gla.s.s jars of different shapes and sizes. One of them seemed to glow faintly.

David's nose wrinkled at an unpleasant smell from close by. He turned to find the source and almost b.u.mped his head against a garland of wolves' muzzles hanging by a rope from the ceiling above, twenty or thirty in all, some still damp with blood.

"Who are you?" said a voice, and David's heart came close to stopping from the shock of hearing it. He tried to find the source of the sound, but there was n.o.body there.

"Does he know you're here?" said the voice again. It was the voice of a girl.

"I can't see you," said David.

"But I can see you."

"Where are you?"

"I'm over here, on the shelf."

David followed the sound of the voice to the shelf of jars. There, in a green jar close to the edge, he saw a tiny little girl. Her hair was long and blond, and her eyes were blue. She shone with a pale light, and wore a simple white nightdress. There was a hole in the gown at her left breast, with a large chocolate-colored stain around it.

"You shouldn't be here," said the little girl. "If he finds you, he'll hurt you, just like he hurt me."

"What did he do to you?" asked David.

But the little girl only shook her head and clenched her lips tightly, as though trying not to cry.

"What's your name?" asked David, trying to change the subject.

"My name is Anna," said the little girl.

Anna.

"I'm David. How can I get you out of there?"

"You can't," said the girl. "You see, I'm dead."

David leaned in a little closer to the jar. He could see the girl's small hands touching against the gla.s.s, but they left no fingerprints upon it. Her face was white and her lips were purple, and dark rings surrounded her eyes. The hole in her nightdress was clearer now, and David thought that the stains surrounding it might be dried blood.

"How long have you been here?" he said.

"I've lost count of the years," she said. "I was very young when I came here. There was another little boy in this room when I arrived. I dream of him sometimes. He was like I am now, but he was very frail. He faded away when I was brought to this room, and I never saw him again. I've been growing weak, though. I'm afraid. I'm scared that what happened to him is going to happen to me. I'll disappear, and then no one will ever know what became of me."

She began to cry, but no tears fell, for the dead can no longer weep or bleed.

David placed his little finger against the jar, just where the girl's hand was touching it from the inside, so that only the gla.s.s 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 I saw trees and flowers, and smelled apple blossom and pine. Jonathan was standing in a clearing, dancing around in circles, laughing and calling to me to join him.

"So I did."

She fell silent for a moment. David waited for her to continue.

"There was a man waiting: the Crooked Man. He was sitting on a rock. He stared at me and licked his lips, then spoke to Jonathan.

" 'Tell me,' he said.

" 'Her name is Anna,' said Jonathan.

" 'Anna,' said the Crooked Man, as if he was trying my name out to see if he liked how it tasted. 'Welcome, Anna.'

"And then he leaped from the rock and wrapped me in his arms, and he began spinning round and round, just as Jonathan had done, but he spun so hard that he dug a hole in the ground and he dragged me down with him, through roots and dirt, past worms and beetles, into the tunnels that run beneath this world. He carried me for miles and miles, even though I cried and cried, until at last we came to these rooms.

"And then-"

She stopped.

"And then?" prompted David.

"He ate my heart," she whispered.

David felt himself grow pale. He was so sickened that he thought he might faint.

"He put his hand inside me, tearing at me with his nails, then pulled it out and ate it in front of me," she said. "And it hurt, it hurt so much. I was in such pain that I left my own body to escape it. I could see myself dying on the floor, and I was being lifted up, and there were lights and voices. Then gla.s.s closed around me, and I was trapped in this jar and placed on this shelf, and I've been here ever since. The next time I saw Jonathan, he had a crown on his head and he called himself the king, but he didn't look happy. He looked frightened and miserable, and he's stayed that way ever since. As for me, I never sleep because I am never tired. I never eat because I am never hungry. I never drink because I never feel thirst. I just stay here, with no way to tell how many days or years have pa.s.sed, except when Jonathan comes and I see the ravages of time on his face. Mostly, though, he comes. He looks older now too. He's sick. As I fade, he grows weaker. I hear him talking in his sleep. He is looking for another now, someone to take Jonathan's place and someone to take mine."

David saw, once again, that hourgla.s.s in the room beyond, its top half nearly empty of grains. Was it counting down the days, the minutes, the hours, until the end of the Crooked Man's life? If he was allowed to take another child, would the hourgla.s.s be turned upside down so that the great count of his life could begin again? How many times had that gla.s.s been turned? There were many jars on the shelf, most of them thick with dust and mold. Had each one, at some point, held the spirit of some lost child?

A bargain: by naming the child to him, you doomed yourself. You became a ruler without power, haunted always by the betrayal of someone smaller and weaker than yourself, a brother, a sister, a friend whom you should have protected, someone who trusted you to stand up for them, who looked up to you, and who would, in turn, have been there for you as the years went by and childhood became adulthood. And once you had struck the bargain there was no way back, for who could return to their old life knowing the terrible thing that they had done?

"You're coming with me," said David. "I'm not leaving you alone here for a minute longer."

He lifted the jar from the shelf. There was a cork in the top, but David could not release it, no matter how hard he tried. His face grew puce from the effort, but all was in vain. He looked around and found an old sack in a corner.

"I'm going to put you in here," he said, "just in case someone sees us."

"That's all right," said Anna. "I'm not afraid."

David placed the jar carefully in the sack, then put the sack over his shoulder. Just as he was about to leave, something caught his eye in a corner of the room. It was his pajamas, his dressing gown, and a single slipper, the clothing discarded by the Woodsman before they had set out for the king. It seemed so long ago now, but here were tokens of the life that he had left behind. He did not like to think of them down here in the Crooked Man's lair. He gathered them up, went to the doorway, and listened carefully. There was no sound to be heard. David took a deep breath to calm himself, then started to run.

XXIX.

Of the Crooked Man's Hidden Kingdom and the Treasures That He Kept There

THE CROOKED MAN'S LAIR was much larger, and much deeper, than David could have known. It ran far beneath the castle, and there were rooms that contained things much more terrifying than a collection of rusty torture implements or the ghost of a dead girl trapped in a jar. This was the heart of the Crooked Man's world, the place where all things were born and all things died. He was there when the first men came into the world, erupting into being along with them. In a way, they gave him life and purpose, and in return he gave them stories to tell, for the Crooked Man remembered every tale. He even had a story of his own, although he had changed its details in crucial ways before it could be told. In his tale it was the Crooked Man's name that had to be guessed, but that was his little joke. In truth, the Crooked Man had no name. Others could call him what they wished, but he was a being so old that the names given to him by men had no meaning for him: Trickster; the Crooked Man; Rumple- Oh, but what was that name again? Never mind, never mind...

Only the names of children mattered to him, for there was a truth in the tale that the Crooked Man had given the world about himself: names did have a power, if they were used in the right way, and the Crooked Man had learned how to use them very well indeed. One enormous room in his lair was a testament to all that the Crooked Man knew: it was filled entirely with small skulls, each one bearing the name of a lost child, for the Crooked Man had struck many bargains for the lives of children. He could remember the faces and voices of every one, and sometimes, when he stood among their remains, he conjured up the memory of them so that the room was filled with their shades, a chorus of lost boys and girls weeping for their mummies and their daddies, a gathering of the forgotten and the betrayed.

The Crooked Man had treasures upon treasures, relics of stories told and stories yet to be told. A long crypt was used to store an array of thick gla.s.s cases, and in each case a body was suspended in yellowish liquid so that it would not decay. Come, look over here. Peer closely at this case, so close that your breath creates a little cloud of moisture upon the gla.s.s and you can stare into the milky eyes of the fat, bald man within. It's as if he himself is breathing, although he has not taken or released a breath in a very long time. See how his skin is burst and burned? See how his mouth and throat, his belly and lungs, are swollen and distended? Do you want to know his tale, for it is one of the Crooked Man's favorite stories. It is a nasty tale, a very nasty tale...

You see, the fat man's name was Manius, and he was very greedy. He owned so much land that a bird could take off from his first field and fly for a day and a night, yet still not reach the limits of Manius's property. He charged heavy rents to those who worked his fields and who lived in his villages. Even to set foot on his land was to invite a charge, and in this way he became very wealthy, but he never had enough and was always seeking new ways to increase his wealth. If he could have charged a bee to take pollen from a flower, or a tree to grow roots in his soil, then he would have done so.

One day, while Manius walked in the largest of his orchards, he saw a disturbance in the ground and out popped the Crooked Man, who was busy extending his network of tunnels under the earth. Manius challenged him, for he saw that the Crooked Man's clothes, although dirtied by the soil, had gold b.u.t.tons and gold trim, and the dagger at his belt gleamed with rubies and diamonds.

"This is my land," he said. "All that is above it and all that is below belongs to me, and you must pay me for the right of pa.s.sage beneath it."

The Crooked Man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "That seems only fair," he said. "I will pay you a reasonable price."

Manius smiled and said, "I have ordered a banquet to be prepared for myself tonight. We will weigh all the food on the table before I eat, and all that is left when I am done. You will pay me in gold the weight of all that I have eaten."

"A bellyful of gold," said the Crooked Man. "It is agreed. I will come to you tonight, and I will give you all you can eat in gold."

They shook hands on the deal and parted. That night, the Crooked Man sat and watched as Manius ate and ate. He consumed two whole turkeys and a full ham, bowl upon bowl of potatoes and vegetables, whole tureens of soup, great plates of fruits and cakes and cream, and gla.s.s after gla.s.s of the finest wines. The Crooked Man carefully weighed it all before the meal began, and weighed the meager remains when the meal was over. The difference amounted to many, many pounds, or enough gold to purchase a thousand fields.

Manius belched. He felt very tired, so tired that he could barely keep his eyes open.

"Now where is my gold?" he asked, but the Crooked Man was growing blurry, and the room was spinning, and before he could hear the answer he was asleep.

When he awoke, he was chained to a wooden chair in a dark dungeon. His mouth was held open by a metal vise, and a bubbling cauldron was suspended above his head.

The Crooked Man appeared beside him. "I am a man of my word," he said. "Prepare to receive your bellyful of gold."

The cauldron tipped, and molten gold spilled into Manius's mouth and poured down his throat, scalding his flesh and burning his bones. The pain was beyond imagining, but he did not die, not immediately, for the Crooked Man had ways of delaying death to make his tortures last. The Crooked Man would pour a little gold, then allow it to cool before pouring a little more, and thus he continued until he had filled Manius so full of gold that it bubbled behind his back teeth. By then, of course, Manius was very dead indeed, for even the Crooked Man could not keep him alive indefinitely. Eventually, Manius took his place in the room full of gla.s.s cases, and the Crooked Man would come to look at him sometimes, and he would smile as he remembered this most splendid of tricks.

There were many such stories in the Crooked Man's lair: a thousand rooms, and a thousand stories for every room. One chamber housed a collection of telepathic spiders, very old, very wise, and very, very large, each one more than four feet across, with fangs so poisonous that a single drop of their venom, placed in a well, had once killed an entire village. The Crooked Man often used them to hunt those who strayed into his tunnels, and when the trespa.s.sers were found, the spiders would wrap them in silk and carry them back to their cobwebbed room, and there they would die very slowly as the spiders fed upon them, draining them drop by drop.

In one of the dressing rooms a woman sat facing a blank wall, endlessly combing her long, silver hair. Sometimes, the Crooked Man would take those who had angered him to visit the woman, and when she turned to look at them, they would see themselves reflected in her eyes, for her eyes were made of mirrored gla.s.s. And in those eyes they would be allowed to witness the moment of their deaths, so that they would know exactly when and how they would die. You might think that such knowledge would not be so terrible, and you would be wrong. We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal). Those who were given that knowledge found that they could not sleep or eat or enjoy any of the pleasures life had to offer them, so tormented were they by what they had seen. Their lives became a kind of living death, devoid of joy, and all that was left to them was fear and sadness, so that when at last the end came they were almost grateful for it.

A bedchamber contained a naked woman and a naked man, and the Crooked Man would bring children to them (not the special ones, the ones who gave him life, but the others, the ones he stole from villages or those who strayed from the path and became lost in the forest), and the man and the woman would whisper things to them in the darkness of their chamber, telling them things that children should not know, dark tales of what adults did together in the depths of the night while their sons and daughters were sleeping. In this way the children died inside. Forced into adulthood before they were ready, they had their innocence taken from them, and their minds collapsed under the weight of poisonous thoughts. Many grew up to become evil men and women, and so the corruption was spread.

One small, bright room was decorated only with a mirror, plain and unadorned. The Crooked Man would steal husbands or wives from their marriage beds, leaving their spouses sleeping, and force the captives to sit before the mirror, and the mirror would reveal all of the bad secrets that their spouses kept hidden from them: all of the sins they had committed and all of the sins they wanted to commit; all of the betrayals already on their consciences and all of the betrayals that they might yet perpetrate. Then the captives would be returned to their beds, and when they awoke they would not remember the chamber, or the mirror, or their abduction by the Crooked Man. All they would recall was the knowledge that those whom they loved, and whom they thought loved them in return, were not as they had believed them to be, and in this way lives were ruined by suspicion and the fear of treachery.

There was a hall filled entirely with pools of what looked like clear water, and each pool showed a different part of the kingdom, so that little happened in the land beyond the castle that was not known to the Crooked Man. By diving into a pool, the Crooked Man could materialize in the place reflected in it. The air would ripple and shimmer, and suddenly an arm would appear, then a leg, and finally the face and hunched back of the Crooked Man, transported instantly from the depths beneath the castle to a room or a field far away. The Crooked Man's favorite torture was to take men or women, preferably those with large families, and hang them from chains in the room of pools. Then, while they watched, he would hunt down and kill their families before them, one by one. After each murder he would return to the room and listen to the pleas of his captives, but no matter how loudly they screamed and cried and begged for him to be merciful, he would not spare a single life. Finally, when all were dead, he would take the desolate men or women to his deepest, darkest dungeon, and there he would leave them to go mad with loneliness and grief.

Little evils, big evils, all were b.u.t.ter to the Crooked Man's bread. Through his network of tunnels and his room of pools, he knew more about his world than anyone else, and this knowledge gave him the power he required to rule the kingdom in secret. And all the time he haunted the shadows of another world, our world, and he made kings and queens of boys and girls and bound them to him by destroying their spirits and forcing them to betray children whom they should have protected. To those who threatened to rebel against him, he made promises that, someday, he would release them and the children they had sacrificed to him from their bargains, claiming that he could restore the frail figures in the jars to life if he chose (for most, like Jonathan Tulvey, very quickly realized their mistake in striking a bargain with the Crooked Man).

But there were some things that were beyond the Crooked Man's control. Bringing outsiders into the land changed it. They carried their fears with them, their dreams and their nightmares, and the land made them real. That was how the Loups had come into being. They were Jonathan's worst fear: from his earliest childhood, he had hated stories of wolves and of beasts that walked and talked like men. When the Crooked Man finally transported him into the kingdom, that fear followed, and the wolves began to transform. They alone did not fear the Crooked Man, as if some of Jonathan's secret hatred of the Crooked Man had found form in them. Now they presented the greatest threat to the kingdom, although it was one of which the Crooked Man hoped he could yet make use.

The boy called David was different from the others whom the Crooked Man had tempted. He had helped to destroy the Beast, and the woman who dwelled in the Fortress of Thorns. David did not realize it, but in a way they were his his fears, and he had brought aspects of them into being. What had surprised the Crooked Man was the way in which the boy had dealt with them. His anger and grief had enabled him to do what older men had not managed to achieve. The boy was strong, strong enough to conquer his fears. He was also beginning to master his hatreds and jealousies. Such a boy, if he could be controlled, would make a great king. fears, and he had brought aspects of them into being. What had surprised the Crooked Man was the way in which the boy had dealt with them. His anger and grief had enabled him to do what older men had not managed to achieve. The boy was strong, strong enough to conquer his fears. He was also beginning to master his hatreds and jealousies. Such a boy, if he could be controlled, would make a great king.

But time was running out for the Crooked Man. He needed another child's life to drain. If he ate Georgie's heart, the infant's life span would become the Crooked Man's. If Georgie was destined to live to be one hundred years old, then the Crooked Man would be granted that hundred years instead and Georgie's spirit would remain trapped in one of the Crooked Man's jars, and he would absorb its light as he slept in his hard, narrow bed. All that was necessary was for the boy David to say the child's name aloud, to indulge his hatred and thus to d.a.m.n them both.

The Crooked Man had less than one day of life left in his hourgla.s.s. He needed David to betray his half brother before midnight. Now, as he sat in his chamber of pools, he saw shapes appear on the hills around the castle, and for the first time in many decades he felt real fear, even as he put the finishing touches to his last, desperate plan.

For the wolves were gathering, and soon they would descend upon the castle.

While the Crooked Man was distracted by the approaching army, David, carrying Anna in her jar, made his way back through the warren of tunnels to the throne room. As they approached the door concealed by the tapestry, David could hear men shouting, and the running of feet and the clanking of weapons and armor. He wondered if his disappearance was the reason for the activity and tried to come up with the best way to explain his absence. He peered from behind the tapestry and saw Duncan standing nearby as he ordered men to the battlements and told others to make sure all entrances to the castle were secure. While the captain's back was turned, David slipped out and ran as quickly as he could to the stairs leading up to the gallery. If anyone saw him, they paid him no attention, and he knew then that he was not the cause of all this trouble. Once he was back in his bedroom, he closed the door and removed from his sack the jar containing Anna's ghost. Her light seemed to have grown dimmer in the short trip from the Crooked Man's lair to the castle itself, and she was slumped at the base of the gla.s.s, her face even paler than before.

"What's wrong?" David asked.

Anna held up her right hand, and David saw that it had faded to near-transparency.

"I feel weak," said Anna. "And I'm changing. I seem to be growing fainter."

David did not know what to say to console her. He tried to find somewhere to hide her, and decided eventually upon a shadowy corner of an enormous wardrobe, populated only by the husks of dead insects trapped in an ancient web.

But Anna cried out to him as he was about to place the jar in his chosen hiding place. "No," she said. "Please, not there. I've been trapped alone in the darkness for so many years, and I don't think I'm going to be in this world for much longer. Put me on the windowsill, so that I may look out and see trees and people. I'll be quiet, and no one will think of searching for me there."

So David opened one of the windows and saw that outside was a small, wrought-iron balcony. It was rusted in places and rattled when he touched it, but it would safely support the weight of the jar. He placed it carefully in one corner, and Anna moved forward and leaned against the gla.s.s.