After a few moments, they let each other go, each studying the other eagerly. Those who are awake watch the reunion with shocked, happy faces, their despair momentarily forgotten.
“What happened?” Finnegan says excitedly. “One moment you were there, and then you were gone. We thought they’d gotten you!”
Jonathan, smiling grandly, shakes his head. “Nah, I fought them off, Finn. Slipped right through ’em and ran like the devil. Ended up hiding in the dining hall, underneath one of the tables. They come through a few times, one or two of ’em, calling out like. But I lay still, didn’t move.”
He looks around now at Peter, Andrew and the others. “Glad to see you lot are okay.”
Andrew puts a hand on the boy’s head. “You’re hurt.”
“Nah, it’s nothing, Father. Scratches is all.”
And then they’re gone, Finnegan and Jonathan, the twins. They’re talking too fast for anyone else to understand, and walking toward their old cots, side by side, as if nothing happened, as if nothing else matters.
“Jonathan,” Peter calls out, and the boy turns impatiently. “What about the others? Did you see them? Earlier, we thought we heard screaming, but it’s hard to know with the wind. Are they still out there?”
Jonathan’s cheer is swallowed by fear or, possibly, shame. He looks around at all the faces, all the sleeping boys. “Well, I don’t know for sure, Peter, but yeah, they’re still here. I heard ’em when I snuck through the foyer, down by the priest’s rooms. I heard voices.”
David steps forward, sensing the boy is holding something back. “Voices?”
Jonathan looks at David, almost guardedly. He exchanges a glance with Finnegan before dropping his eyes to the floor. “I can’t be a hundred percent sure,” he says.
“What is it, Jonathan?” Andrew says patiently. Coaxing. “It’s important we know as much as we can if we’re all to get through this. You can tell us anything. This is a safe place.”
Jonathan nods. “Like I said, there were voices. Other kids. And Poole, screaming. Like they was hurting him. I heard one of ’em, Bartholomew I think, talking. Right when I snuck by. He was talking to someone. I heard it clear.”
They all look at him, waiting. Letting him get it out in his own way.
“He was talking to Brother Johnson,” Jonathan says. “And not in a bad way, but like they were telling him stuff. Like . . .”
Jonathan trails off, looks at Finnegan, who nods. Go on.
“Like what?” Peter says softly, and David feels his skin tingle with dread.
“Well, you know,” he says, wringing his hands. “Like he was one of ’em.”
48
THE CHAPEL IS CHARRED. IT REEKS OF SMOKE, AND DECAY.
Basil’s coffin lies on its side where it fell, forgotten. The wood is scorched black and there are gaps where his corpse lies visible. The linen wrapped around the body is completely burned away, the exposed skin beneath a mixture of pale white and blood red, where the flesh had been licked by fire.
Johnson is transfixed by the sight of it.
He’s been told to carry Father Poole from his bed into the chapel, which the boys have made their makeshift headquarters. A rallying point.
Poole now lies atop the altar from which Basil’s coffin was so rudely dismissed, knocked down in the tumult to rot and stink on the chapel floor.
Johnson is surprised, as much as he is still capable of thinking or feeling anything, that Poole is alive. Alive, and very much alert. Babbling prayers in a thick tongue, motioning in the air with his long pale fingers. He can’t walk, or at least not well. Johnson figures he could hobble if he needed to, but not far, and not fast.
He can’t see, of course.
Johnson tilts his head away from Poole and back toward Basil’s coffin. Through the hazy sound of the flies infesting his mind, he recalls when he first found him in the chapel, hung by the cross. He remembers how light the body was when he took it down.
“Teddy, are you listening?”
Johnson grunts as the swarm intensifies.
He wants to laugh, because it doesn’t hurt like it used to. Not the way it did at first. His brain is dulled now. Numb. Whatever the bugs are doing in there, building a nest to house their multitude, or biting and piercing him as punishment for not obeying, or thinking stray thoughts, it doesn’t affect him like it did before.
He hardly cares.
He still obeys, however. He listens to the instructions when they come. He lets the waves of noise rush through him, push him and torture him, because he can stand it now.
He can stand it quite well.
In a dark, secret closet of his mind, a place where the flies can’t enter, a piece of him hides. Like the closet from his childhood, except now, instead of fearing the dark, he welcomes it. The dark means safety. It means that there is a thread of will that remains to him. A thread of sanity.
That part of him hiding in the dark closet, in the form of the child he once was, who hears the swarming insects outside the thin door, wonders if perhaps this new immunity is part of their plan. Or if Bartholomew and his minions know that the closet, and the hiding child within, even exists.
He thinks not.
Bartholomew, he notices, is watching him strangely, his eyes critical. Johnson swallows hard and, momentarily, absorbs the swarm, and leaves the child be. Hidden. Waiting.
“I’m listening,” he mumbles, not sure if the words are understandable through his burned lips and engorged tongue.
Bartholomew holds his eyes on him a beat longer, then nods. “Good.”
The rest of the boys sit together on the smoke-blackened benches. Bartholomew stands at the front, preaching darkness. The candelabras have been straightened, relit. Johnson stands to the side, the body of a moaning, babbling Poole a bizarre centerpiece behind the place where Bartholomew stands. “When the time is right,” he says, orating loudly and clearly, like a Sunday pastor delivering a fiery sermon of redemption, “we will leave this place. There are other places we can go that are not far, where we can travel easily. Where we can stop and rest. Feed.”
“The Hill farm for one. We all know about that,” Simon says, his voice happy and sane, as if they’re not discussing murder at all, but a friendly afternoon visit. “And those kitchen folks have cabins nearby, don’t they Johnson?”
Johnson says nothing, but the children don’t care. They ignore him and Poole, these former adults who have been turned into playthings.
“Exactly right, Simon,” Bartholomew says. He studies each of the faces in the room, his followers. “But we’ll live here for a while, I think. Thankfully there are plenty of supplies, enough to get us through the storm and the worst of the winter.”
“Aren’t as many mouths to feed as before,” Samuel yells, and the others laugh.
Bartholomew smiles. “But when the time is right,” he continues, raising his voice, demanding their attention. “We will leave. There is much we have to do.”
“The city?” Jonah asks, tapping a butcher knife against his chin, the blade crusted with dried blood.
“Yes,” Bartholomew says. “The city. But!” He raises a finger and, from one moment to the next, Johnson doesn’t think the boys look like boys at all.