SEP GRIPPED HIS pillow as the oily shadows gathered around him. Model aircraft twirled over die-cast figures, posters flapped in the breeze, and everywhere—on the floor and the desk and on top of the wardrobe—paperbacks leaned in soft yellow towers.
He closed his eyes, wishing for the release of a dreamless night, and for the darkness behind his lids to be empty and safe.
But the crows followed him into sleep—and he dreamed of them.
Cool moss was between his bare toes. Sep could almost hear the grass growing around him, almost feel the starlight on his skin.
He turned to the sea. The mainland was close, its windows glimmering like fragments of scattered diamond.
Sep reached out—but something moved in the darkness.
He peered through the bobbing leaves and saw a little patch of night flutter onto a branch. The crow shuffled its legs and rasped its bright tongue.
“Get!” said Sep. “Go on, get!”
He looked around for a stone to throw. But the crow was joined by another, then another and another, their moonlit feathers a boil of blacks and blues and purples that vanished the mainland completely. Blade-sharp beaks snapped until the air was solid with cries that did not come from living throats, overlapping and echoing until they came from everywhere and nowhere.
Sep realized that their shining eyes, countless as stars, were watching him.
“Go away!” he said.
He took a step away from them, and stumbled as he felt something loose and warm beneath his bare feet. And, although it moved like a piece of clothing, his guts knew it for what it was. He looked down.
A human skin, a woman’s skin—topped by mousy, lank hair—was splayed on the grass, empty and soft, like a blanket.
“Oh,” said Sep. He put out a hand.
And the crows screamed.
They came in a noisy cloud, wings beating his face, filling his lungs with their warm air and sour scent. He felt their claws on his scalp and their terrible beaks at his hands and face.
One bird landed on the empty skin and wriggled its head, then its wings, then its body between the lips and into the mouth.
“No!” screamed Sep, kicking, pushing, his forehead running with blood. “Stop! You can’t do this!”
Another crow pushed its way into the skin, then another and another and another until the skin began to tighten and rise from the ground.
Then the skin’s eyes opened: wide and shiny and black.
And, just as he felt himself yield, a voice called wordlessly from across the grass, from inside the darkness, and he felt the warmth of a human connection flood through his veins.
He woke with a shrug of limbs and a thump in his chest, his head stuck to the pillow.
His bedroom was still. Cold sweat covered his chest and face.
A soft noise moved through him. At first he thought there was a tap dripping somewhere in the house . . . but it sounded strange, as though it weren’t moving through the air—just arriving in his head, heavy and thick, like wet cloth swelling around his sore tooth.
Then pain—hot, searing pain—lanced into his skull like a blade. He turned his eyeballs to the window.
There was a shadow on the curtain—a silhouette in the streetlight orange. It was on the other side of the glass, not a crow this time, but something small and round—one circle atop another, flanked by rigid limbs.
And little round ears.
Barnaby.
The head turned. Eyes like burning green coals stared through the fabric.
Barnaby. The teddy he’d sacrificed, returned from the box—and walking on his stubby, cotton legs.
It’s my turn, thought Sep.
His breath stopped, and he shook his head, trying to dislodge the insistent, tap-dripping sound. . . . Then he realized two things.
It wasn’t a dripping noise. It was a whispering, breathy click, like phlegm catching in a wet throat.
And worse, so much worse . . .
He was hearing it with his deaf ear. It crackled strangely, like a dusty radio coaxed into life.
The blood turned cold and thick in his veins.
Barnaby took a small step, searching, flat paw smearing the glass with earth as he found the gap in the curtains—and Sep saw him, his unmistakable laced-up belly leaning on the window. His fur was muddy and wet, and thick with something, like a layer of snakeskin. He almost gleamed, unalive but . . . living.
A familiar smell came into Sep’s room: a smell of grass gone flat and white beneath untouched pots; of trapped water gone sour in the heat; of wet, wriggling soil.
Of hospital corridors.
The teddy walked a few more steps and, as Sep watched him move toward the open window, a gut-knot of animal instinct screamed the reason the bear had come.
Barnaby was here to kill him.
Sep’s heart stuck in his neck—and a stone ticked off the glass, inches from where Barnaby stood.
The teddy froze, the burning green light of his eyes flickering for an instant.
He blinked, thought Sep. He blinked.
Another stone, bigger and heavier, thudded against the wall, and Barnaby dropped out of sight, leaving nothing but the tension in Sep’s belly and a light rain that kissed the window with such gentle normalcy it took all his strength of mind to trust that the bear had been there, had visited him from beneath the ground, had not been some wakeful night terror.
Because he was awake: cold with sweat and seized with fear. Crumbs of mud clung to the glass, and that smell—that cold, dead stench—lingered in the air.
Another stone hit the window and, with all the courage he had, Sep threw open his curtains.
They were in his garden.