The Real Boy (16 page)

Oscar squeezed his eyes shut. He did not want to say the words. But if he did, then she would have a piece of the secret. It would be nice not to carry it all alone.

“He was going to transform it,” Oscar said, voice quieter than the air.

Callie’s head snapped up. “Transform it into
what
?”

“A boy.”

Callie froze. Her eyes locked on to Oscar’s in that way they had of trying to pull out all his secrets.

“A real boy,” Oscar said. “Almost. You would have barely been able to tell the difference. He was going to be a boy. But not anymore. Caleb died, so he won’t get to be a boy now. He’ll never get to know what it’s like, to be real.” Oscar could hear his voice shaking. “Almost real. And he wouldn’t have been alone. I could have helped him and taught him things and—”

“Oscar,
tell me what you’re talking about
.”

Oscar glanced up at her. She was holding the doll so carefully, keeping its head propped up, keeping its limbs folded into her arms. She was cradling it as if it was the most delicate, precious thing in the world.

“Caleb made me. I was like that.”

Callie’s head popped up. She looked at Oscar.

One moment.

Two.

Three.

“What?” she said finally. “Why do you think that? Oscar, why?”

He looked down. “I just know. You know something when it’s the truth. It explains everything. Why I am this way.”

Callie looked down at the boy thing in her arms. The tears were rolling down her cheeks now. Nothing in the room moved except for the tears on her face. Then she looked back at Oscar.

“I don’t care,” she whispered.

“What?”

Her head snapped up. “I don’t care if you’re made of wood,” she said, suddenly loud. “I don’t care what you were once, do you understand?” Fire flickered behind her eyes. “Even if this is true, I don’t care. Now you’re Oscar.”

She exhaled. Her face closed. And then she crouched down and gently set the doll back in its home. After giving it one more look, she closed the trapdoor and pulled the rug back over the hidden compartment. “Come on,” she said. “Oscar, come on; let’s get out of here. Oscar?”

He looked down at the rug. It had the strangest patterns on it, like some great tangle of birds. Like the birds had all been flying in different directions and their paths got entangled and now they were twisted around one another, and the birds pulled and pulled but could not get away.

He swallowed. He pressed his hands together, and then moved his eyes to Callie. “I am sorry about your brother,” he said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Bait

W
hen Oscar went out of the shop in the morning to collect some supplies from the forest, a barren marketplace greeted him. Four shops were closed for the day, and two had broken windows. No vendors were setting up stalls. Only two people were out, standing in front of the jeweler’s across the way, speaking intently to each other. Oscar stood as still as an empty stall, gaping. Maybe if he looked long enough, everything would go back to the way it was.

It didn’t.

Swallowing, Oscar headed into the forest. For now he would collect what he could in the mornings, and then spend the afternoons preparing herbs for the shop—back before any of this had happened many of his days looked this way. It was almost ordinary. It would be a while before he had enough stock to open the shop again.

A thought, caught:
Maybe Caleb will be back by then.

Caught, then dropped, like something burning.

Yes, it was almost ordinary. Except his master had died, except City kids were getting sick, except the earth was a monster. Oscar did not stray too far from the shop. It was his to mind now, for Caleb. He was loyal and hardworking. He picked flowers and took cuttings from plants and scraped off samples of bark and collected some mushrooms.

When Oscar got back to the shop, he parked the cart by the back door and began carrying his harvest inside. He’d just brought in the last of it when he heard someone clearing his throat

Oscar peeked out of the back room. There was a City gentleman standing in the front of the shop, looking like he couldn’t remember whether he’d put on his pantaloons that morning.

“Your front door is missing,” the gentleman announced when he saw Oscar.

“Your hat has a big feather on it,” Oscar said in reply.

The gentleman told Oscar he was looking for a necklace. The jeweler had carried necklaces made of diamonds that would cause any lady who received them to forgive the sins of the person who gave them to her. But the jeweler’s shop was closed, and he would not open it up, no matter how hard the gentleman banged on the door.

“We don’t have anything like that,” Oscar said.

“What about a ring?” the gentleman asked, adjusting his feather. “With the same magic. Nothing too engagement-y, if you know what I mean, but—”

“We don’t have anything like that, either.” Oscar blinked. He’d interrupted. “You could try apologizing,” he added.

The gentleman peered at Oscar, then shook his head. “I’ll try the perfumer.”

That morning, Oscar tried to work in the back room, where he could keep an eye on the shop, but people kept coming in. It turned out it was hard to close a shop with no door. So Oscar gave up on the kitchen and spread out the plants in the middle of the shop.

The villagers talked to him now like he was a person. They asked him how he was, if he needed anything; some even brought him food and explained it was for him to eat.

One by one they told him what had happened in the marketplace overnight. There had been more attacks. In the shoemaker’s shop, everything on the City-wares side had been torn apart. The jeweler had arrived to find every one of his enchanted jewels gone, and most of the shelves down as well. And in the back room of the tavern, where once there had been a great stack of barrels of Master Christopher’s special brew, only small wet wooden bits and a sticky floor remained.

“What about the healer’s? Madame Mariel’s?” Oscar asked.

No, the healer’s shop was fine.

Yesterday, while Oscar and Callie had been cleaning the shop, the magic smiths were out in the forest, searching for some sign of the creature, and though they had gone to every corner, even past the forest and the meadows up to the desolate wilds of the plaguelands, they had found nothing.

But they had set a trap. A large pile of meat, with smell-amplification charms spread out for half a mile around it, and a cage above that just waiting for something to fall upon. They were using all the magic at their disposal, they’d assured everyone.

“Do you think that’s enough?” a woman asked Oscar. “All the magic at their disposal?”

“Don’t you?” he asked. Everyone always had thought it was enough before.

Meanwhile, the City people seemed to have no idea what had passed, as if the walls that kept out intruders also kept out any news not directly concerned with their lives. As the villagers watched, a gentleman with a purple cloak and a perfectly trimmed beard swept in, took in the shop, and then waved his hands to indicate the marketplace outside.

“What’s happened down here?” he said, hands everywhere.

“Monster,” Oscar said.

The gentleman straightened. “What kind of a monster closes a haberdashery on a Saturday?”

Oscar squinted.

“No matter,” the gentleman said. “I need a luck charm. Your best one.”

Oscar cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “They were all eaten.”

The gentleman raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know what it is you’re saying, little boy, but I need a luck charm. Now. I have some very important business tonight.”

“That is too bad,” Oscar said, “because they have all been eaten.”

The gentleman’s face paled. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” Oscar said.

The man stiffened. “The marketplace better get itself back in order,” he said. “The duke will hear about this.”

“Like he’ll care,” muttered a villager.

“Must be nice to have those walls,” said another.

Finally the carpenter, Madame Sabine, came, and everyone left the shop. After a while the front was closed up with something resembling a wall. “This is my special wood, Oscar,” Sabine told him. “Even Master Thomas couldn’t make anything as strong as this. I can’t put in a door yet; after Master Thomas and the others get back from checking the trap, we’re going to put something up around the marketplace, Perhaps I can come back tomorrow—”

“Or even later,” Oscar said.

As soon as she left, Oscar sat in the middle of his very closed shop and exhaled. It was so quiet all of a sudden, a quiet you could wrap yourself up in. He cleaned the floor and moved things into the kitchen, then went downstairs to give Crow and Cat their remedies. They were still in Oscar’s room, and one of the other cats was always with them, though Oscar had not quite figured out the rotation. Cat, who could not move around yet, spent his time sitting on Oscar’s bed in a half fume, half sulk, and so Oscar made a point of filling him in on everything that had happened, the best he could. Oscar understood: Cat was in charge—that was what he was made for.

As he told Cat all about the trap the magic smiths had set, a picture appeared in his mind: A pile of meat, a cage hanging above. A trigger somewhere that would cause the cage to fall. And the smell enhancers radiating outward into the forest.

It should have been so simple: The smell lures the creature; the creature eats the bait; the bait triggers the cage; the cage falls on the creature; the creature is trapped. A perfect chain of events, a perfect system.

Still, Oscar couldn’t quite make it all fit. He held the monster in one side of his mind, and the picture of the meat and the cage in the other, and could not quite put them together for some reason.

And it wasn’t just because the monster had no nose.

He went back upstairs, trying to hold the whole plan in his head, trying to mash the pieces together. Eventually, Callie appeared at the back door.

“I have a patient soon, but I wanted to check on you,” she said as he opened the door. As she stepped inside, she looked around at the suddenly stocked counters. “Where did this food come from?”

“Some villagers,” Oscar said. “A few of them. They kept bringing me food. I’m not sure why.”

“Oh, Oscar,” Callie said, sad moon eyes shining a little. “Because they wanted to be kind. I know it might be hard to believe, but sometimes, people are kind.”

A week ago Oscar had not known that. And then Callie had crumpled the City lady’s card in her hand.

“Now, have you heard anything about the magic smiths?” she asked, taking off her cloak and setting it on the counter.

“They didn’t find anything,” he said. “They’re setting a trap, though.” He glanced up at Callie. “They say they are using all the magic at their disposal.”

Callie’s eyebrows went up. “I suppose that means Master Charles will attack it with perfume.”

A grin tickled at Oscar’s cheeks. “Or,” he said, “Master Julian could give it a really ugly haircut.”

Callie glanced at him. Her mouth twitched. “Oscar, you made a joke!”

Oscar felt his cheeks redden. He made jokes. He just didn’t usually say them out loud.

“Really, for all the magic smiths we have,” Callie said, “it doesn’t seem like any of them actually do anything.”

Oscar thought. There were magical ales, enchanted jewels, wear-proof boots. There were things for luck, things to sprinkle on money to make it grow, things to win disputes, slow aging, increase strength, enhance beauty. There were dresses that would never fray made of fabric of extraordinary colors, and hats that were simply extraordinary. There was Madame Lara, the soothsayer—though it seemed to Oscar that not predicting the monster attack was a large oversight on her part. There were so many pretty things—little statues of birds that sang when you asked them to, tapestries whose pictures shifted, flowers that never went out of bloom, delicate little eggs painted like shining worlds. There was silver that never got tarnished, and glass that never broke, and extrastrong wood, and, apparently, necklaces that made the recipient forgive the giver.

Small enchantments, all.

Callie exhaled and leaned back. “Do you remember the duchess’s son, who we met on the path? Ronald, who can’t remember anything?”

Oscar nodded. That was Ronald’s name in his head now: Ronald-who-can’t-remember.

“The duchess sent word. He’s worse. It’s like . . . his brain isn’t taking anything in. She said he’s talking very strangely, too, like he’s a clock that’s running slow.” Sighing heavily, Callie perched her elbow on the table and dropped her forehead into her hand. “I don’t understand,” she said, gritting her teeth. “With the plague, people had the same symptoms, but now . . . I don’t know how to help them. It just can’t be random, Oscar; there’s got to be a common thread. I’m reading every thing I can, but—”

“You should make a map,” Oscar said.

“A what?”

Oscar frowned and thought. He was making perfect sense to himself. “Um,” he said, searching his head for the right words, “it’s like . . . each child is a country, and you place them somewhere in your mind, like your mind is the world, and—”

Callie was staring at him like he’d turned into a bubble mushroom.

“Um, I’ll show you.” He opened one of the drawers and got paper and a pen. “A map.” He drew some blob children on a piece of paper. “How many are there?”

“Five. No, six. That we know about.”

“All right. So now, you do that in your head, but with each child and what’s wrong with them, and then look at the map and see if you notice anything.”

“The map in my head?”

“Yes.”

“Of each child and their disease, all at the same time, and I . . . look at it?”

“Yes.”

“Oscar, I can’t do that. I’m not even sure what you mean. Can you do that?”

Oscar scrunched his brow. “Yes.”

“Well,” Callie said, “what if I actually drew a . . . map?”

“I guess that could work,” Oscar said.

So Callie took the piece of paper and wrote the names of the children underneath the blobs. Oscar had pictured the children in different places, but he did not correct her. And then she wrote down their ailments, blob by blob.

Callie sat back, looking at the sheet in front of her, face set in concentration, while Oscar watched carefully.

After a while, she let out a long exhale and patted the map. “I have to go. I have a patient,” she said. “Let me know if you hear anything about the trap. And I’ll do the same.” She stood up and picked up the paper. “Thank you for this,” she said. And she left, taking her map with her.

And here was that lightness inside Oscar again. He put his hand to his chest, to keep it there.

The next knock on the back door was definitely not Callie—it came from someone much larger, much more insistent. It did not say,
Oscar, can you hear me?
It said,
Oscar, wherever you are, open this door right now.

The knock belonged to Master Thomas, who thudded his way into the room as soon as Oscar opened the door. Too loud, Master Thomas was too loud.

The blacksmith was accompanied by a rush of unsettled air, and his face looked like it was cast in iron. He looked Oscar in the eye, and oh, how Oscar wished he would not do that.

“Oscar,” Master Thomas said, “I need to know if you were telling me the truth.” His voice sounded careful and sharp at the same time, like a butcher slicing off a thin cut of meat. And still too loud. Oscar’s stomach hurt.

“Um”—Oscar could not think, not with all the thudding, but still he tried to run through everything he’d ever said to Master Thomas—“I’m sure I was.”