Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

At last the small, questing fingers nudged against one of the pins in the pincushion and closed around the white glass bobble of its head. Before Triss could react, it grasped the pin with both hands, tweaked it out of the cushion and drove it into the flesh of Triss’s thumb.

‘Ow!’ Triss jerked her hand, but managed not to drop the doll. It’s not real , she tried to tell herself, even as a bead of blood began to swell from the tiny puncture. This pain can’t be real, it can’t. A moment later she was suffering more unreal pain, as the half-doll raised the pin high and drove it into Triss’s thumb again. ‘Ow – stop it!’

In spite of all her resolutions, Triss found herself using her free hand to tweak the pin from her tiny attacker’s grasp. I shouldn’t have done that, it isn’t real, it isn’t real. But mind over matter had seemed much easier when the matter was not actually stabbing her.

Triss became aware that the half-doll was making a faint musical rattling noise, like the sound of cups tottering on saucers. Its jaw was moving rapidly up and down, but she could not tell whether it was cackling, gnashing its teeth or trying to talk. Its hands were now stroking over the surface of the pincushion, in search of another weapon.

‘Stop it!’ hissed Triss. She shook the doll, and her blood ran cold at the way its big-wigged head wobbled forwards and backwards. ‘Stop it, or…’ A flood of panic filled her, and with it the tide of hunger that had been driven back but not defeated. ‘Stop it, or I’ll… eat you!’

The little doll’s voice increased to a crockery snarl. A black well of terror swallowed Triss. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth wide, then wider.

The china slid over her tongue like ice cream. The pincushion was harder, and for an alarming moment it lodged in her mouth, filling it, the saggy velvet stale-tasting and dusty. Then Triss did something that sent a shiver through her throat, and next moment she was swallowing the cushion down. For a second or two she could feel the cold knobbly sensation of the pinheads grazing her insides as they travelled downward.

Afterwards Triss sat for a long minute, staring down at her empty hands.

I can’t have done that.

Coming to her senses, she slammed the wardrobe door with trembling hands. Then she rose unsteadily, walked over to her dresser and dropped into her chair. Staring into the mirror, she opened her mouth as wide as she could, closed it again, opened it, closed it.

Seeing dolls move was crazy. Swallowing dolls whole was impossible. There was no way that she could have opened her mouth wide enough to fit the entire doll inside it, let alone force it down her gullet. She watched her face in the reflection crumple with confusion, fear and misery, but tears did not come.

It was only slowly that she realized that the howling quicksand in her stomach was now silent. For now, she was no longer hungry.

Hours passed, and at last Triss admitted to herself that there was no hope of sleeping. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, while her thoughts traced out dark kaleidoscope patterns across it. I’m ill, I’m mad, I’m horrible, I have to get better.

What had the doctor said? Remembering his words, Triss felt a tiny sting of hope. What if he was right, and her illness was just caused by a memory that she had swallowed like a marble? What if all the strangeness really was just a ‘tummy ache of the mind’? What if she could get better just by remembering whatever it was that she had forgotten?

If so, then the ‘swallowed’ memory must be of the day that she had lost, the day she had fallen into the Grimmer. Before that day, everything had been normal, she was almost sure of it – no strange hallucinations, no terrible hunger. Triss focused all her energy on trying to remember the missing day, but in vain. She sat up and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyelids until red flowers starting exploding against the blackness. She tried to recapture the sense of certainty and imminent recollection that she had felt on the nocturnal banks of the Grimmer, the memory of icy cloudy water, but to no avail.

Triss knew next to nothing about the mysterious ‘he’ whom her parents had discussed, but she did know one thing. He had sent dozens of letters to the family, all of which had somehow found their way into the desk drawer in Sebastian’s room.

As quietly as possible, Triss rose from her bed. After taking a pair of tweezers from her dresser, she eased open her bedroom door and listened hard.

Houses breathe in their sleep as people do, and the only noises in the silence were such soft ticks and settling creaks. The rest of the family had long since gone to bed, and Triss could hear no sounds of movement from their rooms. There was nobody else in the house except Cook, whose room was down in the basement. Usually the Crescents’ governess would have a room near the family, but at the moment there was no governess.

Triss padded carefully across the landing, alert for any sound from the other rooms, any mattress creaks or waking murmurs. Sebastian’s door opened smoothly, and once again Triss crept into the forbidden room.

She did not dare light the gas, but her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dark and she made her way to the desk without bumping into anything. Dropping to her knees, she ran her fingers over the front faces of the drawers, their ornate metal handles cold to the touch. Yes, it was this one, and she knew it was full to bursting with letters, so many that some had been visible through the crack at the top of the drawer.

She found that her tweezers fitted through the gap only if she turned them sideways. Trying to grab the corner of an envelope by touch alone proved difficult and frustrating. Time and again she felt her tweezers tentatively grip a papery edge, only to slide off it again.

While she was busy with this, she heard the faint, tinny, self-important sound of the mantel clock downstairs counting out twelve chimes. The last note faded, but it seemed to Triss that it continued to hum out into the silence, as a tickle in the ear.

It was while this silent note was still hanging that Triss heard another sound out in the corridor. She acted reflexively, scooting on all fours back to her previous hiding place under the bed and rolling under it. Only when she was hunched behind the fringe of coverlet did she realize that the sound beyond the door was not a footstep at all.

It was a dry, wispy flutter-tap, like the noise a dying fly makes against a window, but louder. It drew closer and closer, until Triss was certain that whatever made it must be right outside the door and braced herself for the handle to rattle or turn. It remained motionless, however. Instead the stealthy sound abruptly became much clearer. The door had not opened, but the unseen intruder was no longer out on the landing. It was in the room with Triss.

Peering from beneath the hanging counterpane, Triss caught glimpses of the intruder, enough to be sure that it was definitely an ‘it’ and not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. It flitted in heavy, clumsy arcs around the room, grazing the walls with what she thought might be wings, bumping gently against furniture, halting now and then to perch.

The creature was hard to see, and not just because of the dark. Whenever it paused for a moment and she was able to stare at it directly, it seemed to melt away before her vision. When it flitted to and fro, however, it left dark, fleeting streaks across her sight.

At last it came to rest on the handle of the drawer full of letters, and Triss heard a papery rustling. From nowhere the creature produced a slim, pale oblong. As Triss squinted, the duskily unseeable something leaned back and smoothly slid the envelope in through the crack at the top of the drawer to join the other letters.