The Book Of Lost Things

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 glass, 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 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.