The Turtle Boy: Peregrine's Tale (4 page)

Still
dreaming
, Peregrine thought. It had to be a
fantasy, a nightmare from which he would soon awake. But would he
feel this much pain in a dream?

Across from where he lay, a man sat on
a felled tree, watching him.

"Who are you?"

"Who do you think?"

And now Peregrine knew it was a dream,
because only a miracle could have brought his father back to
him.

His father, who seemed to have been
crudely whittled from ember and swollen dark, and exuded the smell
of tobacco and earth. His father, a crooked question mark pressed
against the deadfall.

His father, who had died, but only for
a little while.

"Get up."

The boy rose, but only in his mind. A
whirlwind of pain kept his body nailed to the floor. "I can't," he
sobbed and was sure his tears were red. "It hurts." He became aware
that one of his hands was soaked in blood. "It hurts," he repeated,
and even his tears burned. His father clucked his tongue with the
sound of a twig snapping.

"Get up. We've got work to
do."

"I think I'm dying, Dad," he
whimpered, as the pain exploded across his skull. "I think she
killed me."

"Stop whining and get to your feet."
The words were flat, the tone murderous, and now the boy could feel
his father's cold hard eyes drilling through the back of his neck.
"We're gonna set this right."

"I can't."

"I said, get
up
."

"Help me."

"I aim to help us both, but the
getting up you have to do on your own."

It felt as if lead weights had been
tied to his face, dragging it back down to a promise of painless
sleep. He thought his brain might have been mashed to bits, but was
afraid to raise a hand—even if he could—to probe the damage there.
Angry hornets stung his skull, but every attempt to shake away
their assault threatened to send him spinning into oblivion.
Besides, his father was here, and he dare not disappoint him, not
when he'd gone to the trouble of raising himself from the dead to
come get him, not when he was all Peregrine had left. So he grit
his teeth, held a breath that tasted like copper-colored vomit, and
planted his hands on either side of him, palms sinking into the
moss.

"That's it…"

He grunted and tried to push the
carpet away into the gloom that lay beneath him. Twigs snapped and
pine needles stabbed his skin, but he ignored them. The fire turned
to molten lava in his head, lapping against the backs of his eyes,
sending hot rivers running from his nose, and in that moment, as he
rose unsteadily, the breath escaping between the gaps in his teeth
in a series of tortured hisses, he knew without a doubt that he was
not dead. There could never be this much pain after death, unless
you ended up in Hell, and he was pretty sure he hadn't done
anything wicked enough in his eleven years of life to deserve
that.

The air moved sluggishly
around him.
Where am I?

As if of their own volition,
Peregrine's elbows continued to straighten, levering him up ever so
slowly. The agony was unbearable, his body shuddering with the
strain as his heart drove fiery blood into his head. Sweat ran in
rivulets down his face. His eyes stung.

"Dad…" he whispered,
pleading.

"Keep going." There could be no
denying the voice came from his father, but the iciness was an
alien thing. It frightened him, led him to wonder what the grave
might have done to the man he'd loved.

"Why won't you help me?"

"It's not my place. Now do it, damn
you."

The boy closed his eyes and pushed,
pushed, pushed, imagining the world had tilted and made the forest
floor an immense chamber door he needed to open if he wanted to
escape the hurtful dark. His whole body vibrated as if electricity
had been shot through his veins and he moaned. The struggle seemed
to take hours, every moment marked by his father's tangible
impatience, but at last he was able to draw his knees under him,
relieving some of the strain from his trembling arms.

"Good boy."

He sat up and the world spun as fresh
searing agony battered his skull. He winced, wept anew and brought
his hands up to find the wound. His hair was stuck to his scalp,
hardened by old blood. Sobbing uncontrollably, he turned to look at
his father.

"Why'd she kill me?"

"She didn't," his father told him.
"But not for the want of trying."

"It was
him
, wasn't it? John."

"Yes it was. You were an
inconvenience."

"Did she…?"

"Enough questions. Time to find your
feet."

He did, though it took even
longer to stand than it had to get on his knees, and it left him
staggering, with nausea swirling through him. He was cold, and
quaking, and sweating profusely. More than anything he wanted to
sleep, in his own bed—the only place he could think of that might
end this dreadful nightmare and see him safely back to the sunshine
world: a place where a mother's love was pure and violence was
something that happened to everyone
else
.

"Good. Now we can go."

"Go where?"

His father rose. "To find your
mother."

The boy frowned, his legs like jelly,
and the words came out before he thought to stop them. "You're
dead."

"Yes."

"How can I see you?"

"Because you've been made
to."

Peregrine didn't understand, but
resisted saying so in case it made his father angry. So instead he
asked, "What are we going to do when we find her?"

His father stood motionless for a
moment. Then he turned and began to walk away. "We're going to set
things right," he called back over his shoulder. "Teach them that
people aren't houses. We're going to kill them."

The words were so wrong, so
blasphemous, and so terrible that Peregrine knew he should have
felt terror seizing his heart, panic playing his nerves like violin
strings. But he didn't. Instead he felt a disorientating sense
of
right
; that
whatever happened once he started on this path would be as it was
supposed to be. And while it scared him, he also realized he had no
choice. He could not stay here, or risk going back to the house
alone.

Father was here. Father would guide
him.

On unstable legs, he took a few
tentative steps. Every one shot thunder into his brain and he
narrowed his eyes, willing it away. Still disturbed by the cast of
this new reality, he nevertheless forced himself to quicken his
pace. But as he stepped wide to avoid the tentacles of a pine tree,
he stopped dead, startled to see that there were other people in
the woods, watching him. A legion of people, their pale faces
drawn, shadows leaking from their eyes as if their heads were
pillowcases stained with oil.

A chill rippled through him. "Who are
they?"

His father glanced sidelong at him,
and now, in the amber daylight, as an unnaturally slow wind tugged
at the trees and the crowd in the woods looked on, he saw that a
thick dark fissure bisected his father's face, forcing his eyes too
far apart. The eyes themselves were swollen with blood.

"Dad?"

"You brought them here, Peregrine,"
his father said. "You led all of us here."

He walked off, through the trees,
pausing once only to check that his son was following. Peregrine
trailed him at a distance, no longer sure he could trust this
ruined image of the man he'd once known, and as he approached the
watchers, they glared at him, as if he'd done something to draw
their ire. For the rest of the journey, he averted his gaze from
them, and tried to will away the pain that pulsed behind his
eyes.

He had awakened into a place
he didn't recognize, a place better suited to the fairytales—a
haunted forest. And who knew what else might be hiding in the
coiling dark? But no matter how frightening it was, it still didn't
feel wrong, and as silent tears rolled down his face, he wondered
what he would say when they found his mother; what
she
would say when she saw
who had brought him to her.

Worse, he couldn't stop imagining how
it was going to feel to watch her die.

CHAPTER FIVE

Here the new world ended.

Peregrine stood at the entrance to the
woods, the house standing a few feet away looking quiet and
unassuming, as if a madwoman hadn't betrayed and attempted to
murder her child here a few hours before.

But the boy was not looking at the
house. He stood with his back to it, despite the fear that his
mother might come shrieking out of it, poker raised, to finish what
she'd started. The fear could wait. For now, awe had possessed him,
as he watched the trees shift and bend and tremble in their dark
amber world, a world he had stepped out of as simply as stepping
over a crack in the pavement. It had tried to hold onto him, the
thick air rushing into his lungs, the lazy amorphous light
scrabbling at his back, but then he was free and gasping for breath
while his father looked on. Now that world stood before him, framed
by the trees, and it would only take a step to be immersed in its
darkness once more. It was incredible. He had ventured into these
woods hundreds of times, to play, or read, or play Robin Hood, and
not once had he sensed anything amiss about it. The trees were just
trees, the air sweet and clear. How could he have known that it was
a fragile picture, pasted over something terrible? How could he
ever have believed there was another world, another plane, waiting
for him to see it?

"Peregrine."

He turned to face his father, who
nodded pointedly at the house. "She's inside."

The boy looked at the house.
He had been born and raised here. The cedar walls glistened from
the recent rain. The lace curtains gave the windows a tired look.
As he watched, a squirrel ran across the roof, walnut in mouth, and
vanished behind the house. To anyone else, it would look like a
quiet, peaceful place, as it had been for many years. But now it
was a place of corruption, a poisoned, evil thing that had spat him
out as soon as it was done with him. As soon as
she
was done with him.

"She's sleeping," his father
said.

"What do I do?"

He watched an unconvincing smile
quarter his father's cloven mouth as he dropped to his haunches and
retrieved something long and black from where it had been hidden
among the leaves. He turned and held it out to
Peregrine.

The poker.

"Bring her into our world," he
said.

CHAPTER SIX

Let him run let him go let
him get away…

Debilitating pain brought Peregrine to
his knees, hands clutched to the sides of his head as if they might
keep it from shattering. His vision jolted and he shut his eyes.
The images came without warning, a stuttering film pulled through
his head almost too fast to see, but figures lingered and rose like
ghosts in his mind.

The boy again, and a railroad. It was
clearer this time than it had been in the dream. A blond-haired
boy, about Peregrine's age, running…

Not yours to keep we need
him let him go…

There was a dead man chasing
him.

And the whisper—

Don't touch him he's ours
leave him alone…

It's
my
voice
,
Peregrine realized, his confusion deepening.
I'm telling him to leave the boy alone. But who is
he?

A moment later, there was nothing but
darkness and the muttered jumble of his own thoughts. Gradually,
the pain began to ebb away, until only the discomfort from his head
wound remained. He opened his eyes, felt the weight of the poker in
his clammy hand.

"Do it." His father stood close by,
head bowed as if in prayer. "You won't be killing her, so quit
thinking that. You'll be releasing her, freeing her."

As angry as he was,
Peregrine didn't think he could do it. The mere thought of it
appalled him. And what if he went inside and she wasn't sleeping?
What if his father was wrong and she was waiting behind the door
with an ax in her hand? What if The Man—
John
—was there? Then it would all be
over.

Listen to
yourself
, said a voice he wasn't sure was
his own.
You're afraid of harming her but
you're worried she might kill you first. Sounds to me like you
already know what has to be done.

He gave a slight shake of his head.
"Why?" he moaned aloud, and his father was suddenly right there,
gruesomely bisected face shoved into Peregrine's own.

"Because she
murdered
me, you little
prick, and whether you like it or not, executing murderers is your
job now. Hers is only the first of many lives whose fate you'll
have to decide, and you'll get to like it, because you'll have to."
With a snarl, he grabbed Peregrine by the collar of his shirt and
flung him toward the door. "Now get to work. We have more visits to
make after this one."