The Book Of Lost Things

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 butter 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 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 damn them both.