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He was starving.
Well, more so than usual.
Wilson rubbed at his aching stomach as he tried to warm himself by the meek fire he’d managed to build. He hadn’t intended on staying the night, but he’d lost track of time, and the seeds and jerky he’d brought with him on his small escapade had been consumed hours ago. Thankfully, the sun (or whatever it was) had started to peak out over the horizon, and he wouldn't have to linger in the dark suspense for much longer.
He got to his feet, and brushed the dust and creases out of his worn-through pants as best as he could. After slinging his backpack over his shoulder, he stomped out the last dwindling embers, and began making his way back to his scratchy tent and gurgling crockpot.
He paid no mind to the hisses and shrieks of the catcoons in the birchnut tree forest (that housed the peculiar insectoid rock statue, which he desired to investigate further), and, to little avail, attempted to ignore the horrible screams from deep within his gut. He nearly burst into tears when he happened upon a berry bush that still had a great deal of fruit left on its thorny branches. His mouth was a desert as he choked them down, but the relief was unparalleled, and he resisted the urge to gorge on all of them as he placed the remainder carefully in his pocket. His stomach hated him for it, but he knew it would thank him if worse came to worse.
It was when Wilson was finally nearing his beloved Garden of Eden (threadbare tent) that he happened upon it.
Or, rather, her.
She was splayed out on her stomach, her blonde pigtails well kept, her white blouse pristine and pressed, her shoes still shiny. The coals of a small campfire still smouldered not far from where she lay. She was small—she couldn’t have been more than eight, maybe nine—and clutched tightly in the fist of her right hand was a strikingly pink lotus flower that matched the hue of her striped socks. His heart caught in his throat.
Was the first person he’d seen in weeks the corpse of a little girl?
He dropped to his knees, and carefully laid a hand on her back, feeling the slight rises and falls of shallow breath. His blood pressure lowered, and carefully, he placed his hands on her shoulders and carefully rolled her over onto her stomach.
“Are you alright? Please, if you can hear me, answer!” He didn’t realise how frantic he sounded as the words left his mouth. The child stirred, but did not wake, and Wilson nearly gasped at the dark circles that framed her doll-like eyes.
He leaned in closer, retrieving a scrap of fabric from his backpack and slightly dampening it with water from his canteen. He pressed it to her pale brow, pushing back the golden strands so they didn’t stick to her face. She didn’t respond, the only movements she produced being the slight heaves of her small chest and her tiny hands twitching around her floral companion.
She wasn’t going to wake up anytime soon, that was evident. She would be an extra burden on his shoulders—he could scarcely feed himself on a good day, let alone another person, and he didn’t know the first thing about children, and his stomach was screeching at him, and—
It was then that she started to whimper.
Tears budded in the child’s eyes, streaming down her cheeks as she began to curl up into a small ball, holding her flower close to her chest. “Abby! Abby! Abby!” She croaked the name again and again, her voice barely a whisper.
Wilson felt a blow to his stomach that was not caused by his undernourishment. Soon after she started, the girl settled again, her breath a wheezing rasp. Despite the limpness of the rest of her form, her hand remained locked around the lotus, clenched so tightly he could see the veins throb in her frail hands.
He couldn’t leave her, even if he wanted to.
Though his belly continued to groan, and his legs could barely hold his own weight, he carefully picked up the child, holding her close to his chest as he continued the rest of the way back to camp. She was lighter than he’d expected, and she shivered uncontrollably, the skin on her arms raised in prickly goosebumps. His mind wandered in dull horror and fascination as he pondered how such a sweet, innocent, small thing could end up in a place as brutal and unforgiving as The Constant. Maxwell had a sick sense of humour for throwing a girl who barely knew arithmetic into a world where hounds came for blood every few days.
When he finally reached his camp, Wilson crawled inside his tent, the girl with him, so weak from hunger his vision blurred at the edges. She shivered more profusely than before, so he carefully placed her inside of his bedroll, pulling the fur lined fabric up to her chin. He smoothed her hair back from her face, and left her alone in the tent to tend to another important matter: his lunch.
The crockpot had been stewing meatballs when he had last left, and though they were cold, they were still edible. He stuffed his face so quickly he thought he was going to burst his stomach, but at that moment, he didn’t care. His mind didn’t even wander to the little girl whose name he did not know who was sleeping in his bed.
The day trickled away quickly as he rested and tried to recuperate his strength, checking in on the child ever so often. There was something eerily familiar about her—but what, he could not place. She stirred in her sleep, fitful and frightful dreams taking hold of her every hour or so, and she’d cry and writhe and bury her face in her hands, still clutching the lotus flower so tightly that he was surprised it was even still intact. He managed to catch a few fish from the pond nearby, and collected the rabbits from their traps, yet even while having to put a dog sized mosquito out of its misery, the most peculiar thing he’d seen in his time in the isolated hell hole was her. She was a new mystery unto herself; maybe he wasn’t going insane after all, and The Constant wasn’t just a prison of his mind’s own making—she offered evidence enough that that could be the case. He briefly considered the possibility that she might be a fever dream spawned from small memories of his older brother’s daughter, but that theory fell flat after he recalled that he’d never actually met her.
Dusk faded into twilight, and while he retrieved another batch of meatballs from the crockpot, the fabric of the tent began to rustle, and the girl stared at him with glassy blue eyes, the flower still clutched firmly at her side. One of the scratchy blankets was wrapped around her shoulders, the woolly mass comically large on her small frame.
“You’re finally awake, I know it’s all still very scary, but I’m here if you need me.” He tried to sound reassuring, but he felt the warble in his voice. He could barely look after himself, let alone a child.
“You should have left me to die.” She walked towards the fire, and took a seat next to him, gazing blankly into the flames. “It would’ve been simpler if the night had consumed me.”
Peculiar. A peculiar child, but he expected no less from a world strewn with such horrors.
“What’s your name?”
“Gwendolyn, Gwendolyn Carter”, but everyone just calls me Wendy.” She held out her flower to him. “And this is Abigail.”
He smiled at her.
“I’m Wilson Percival Higgsbury, but everyone just calls me Wilson. I’m a scientist.”
She nodded. “I’m a nine year old.”
He chuckled weakly. Maybe the new company wasn’t so bad after all.
“A very respectable profession, truly. Why’d you name that flower Abigail?”
This time, she laughed, a bitter snivel.
“The flower isn’t Abigail. She’s in the flower. She stays there when she isn’t with me. Or, at least, that’s what he said.”
Bile rose in his throat. He knew too well what this place could do to the dwindling shreds of his sanity—he loathed to think of the hands that reached from the night, and the beasts that stalked him when he was pushed too far over the edge. Of course she was frightened. Of course she was delusional. The Constant could do that to a person.
“Oh.” He noticed the crockpot in the periphery of his vision, and couldn’t imagine how famished little Wendy must’ve been. “Would you like something to eat? Something warm?”
She nodded, gently stroking the petals of the flower where Abigail allegedly resided. He spooned out a generous serving of warm broth and meatballs into a bowl for her, and she took it eagerly, chewing slowly as she ate. They exchanged no words as the last lights withered away, leaving them in darkness save for the roaring flames before them.
“Would you like to go into the tent again, little one? The night can be scary sometimes.”
She set her empty bowl down beside her. “Don’t patronise me.” She realised the harshness of her tone, and corrected herself. “I mean, I’m not afraid of the dark, or monsters. That which is truly frightening already walks among us.” She rubbed her hands together, and pulled the blanket tighter around herself before continuing.
“He promised me I could see her again. He promised. He promised. He said we could be together again here, that things could be like they were before. Mother would stop muttering to herself, and Father would stop drinking. He lied. He lied to me, Mister Wilson. He lied.” Her eyes welled with tears, and she buried her face in her knees, rocking slightly to soothe herself. His heart ached for this poor, forsaken child. What had Maxwell offered her?
And he saw the flower, and the matching one in her hair, and he understood.
A monster. Maxwell is a monster.
“I’m sorry, Wendy. Was Abigail…”
She peaked at him from between her arms. “She’s nothing now. She’s here, I can feel her, her soul is bound to this flower, but she’s still nothing. That’s all any of us are, really. From the dust we come, to the dust we return. That is the way this damning pendulum of mortality swings.”
He lacked the words to respond, to articulate anything, to tell this grieving child that she is not alone. But he can’t. He doesn’t understand. How could he?
Maxwell offered him knowledge, and offered her salvation.
She was the more deceived.
He opted to wrap a tentative arm around her, holding her close to him. She was still shivering, and though she was reluctant at first, she rested her head against his shoulder, lightening the burden it carried.
“You should have left me to die. You should have let me see her again.”
“If I did that, I’d be no different from Maxwell.”
“If you did that, you would’ve done the both of us a favour.”
Wilson’s stomach grumbled again, and he groaned when he realised that the jerky he’d left out hadn’t dried yet. Grumbling, he retrieved a rabbit from one of the chests he’d managed to assemble, and bit his lip as he motioned to snap its neck.
“Wait!” Wendy cut in, and Wilson grimaced. He was about to murder a rabbit in front of a little girl.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be doing it in front of you.” He got up to move away from the camp, but she shook her head.
“No,” she said, “I want to do it myself.”
He gaped at her, the rabbit squirming in his hands. She’d set her flower down in front of her, its dewy petals spun gossamer under the feeble light from the flames. Her eyes locked with his, and there was no hint of fear, nor depravity.
“Things seem to work differently around here. I have an idea, I want to put it to the test.”
Despite Wilson’s affinity for the scientific method, he was apprehensive. “I don’t want to traumatise you, it’s barely been a day since you’ve been here—”
Wendy smiled wryly. “It’s a little late for that.” She reached out a small hand, and reluctantly, Wilson passed the rabbit to her by the scruff of its neck. She stood up, and after looking down at her flower, she closed her eyes, and held her breath, and snapped its neck with a dreadful pop.
Wendy’s eyes shot open, her head thrown back as a horrible cold began to settle in the air around them. She collapsed to her knees, her small chest heaving as the petals of the lotus began to twitch and shudder. From its pistil, translucent waves traced their way through the black sky, conjoining to form the ghastly—no, ghostly—figure of a young girl who was identical to Wendy in appearance, with the lotus flower now pinned in her hair just as it was in Wendy’s.
Abigail. Perhaps she wasn’t mad after all.
Wendy stared at the thing in silent awe, her eyes as wide as saucers. It loomed before her, not moving, not speaking, only observing. The apparition’s blank eyes shifted to him, and he felt a chill seep into his bones.
Madness. This was madness.
“This… is impossible. This is not possible.” Wilson felt his face drain of colour. He looked over at Wendy, who did not smile, and did not cower.
She lifted a hand to its wispy visage, and the phantom hovered backward, eluding the small girl’s touch. It shook its head, and raised a hand to the flower pinned in its hair, the other where its heart once was.
Tears welled in Wendy’s eyes as she reached for the thing that resembled her sister again, and nearly wept with defeat when it shifted away, just as it had before.
“Please, Abby. Please.” She bites her lip to keep it from trembling. “I’ve missed you.”
Abigail—that’s what she was, a ghost, but still a little girl. Perhaps Maxwell hadn’t lied to her after all.
Or, perhaps, she was a demon sent to wreak havoc on all he had managed to build.
“How do we know she isn’t another one of his elaborate tricks? A mirage, or even more insidiously, something to bring us harm. To bring you harm. Please, you are a smart girl, consider the absurdity of what we are seeing before you do anything rash.”
“She’s my sister, she just happens to be a ghost. That’s all.” Wendy wiped the tears from her cheeks, and the hints of a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.
He pursed his lips. “Ghosts defy every law of science that man is aware of—”
“Have you seen the birds here? The big ones, with the long legs and the singular eye? This world defies the laws of science. Everything here is a twisted, fiendish abomination.” Wendy retrieved her blanket again, and wrapped it around her shoulders. For a moment, he’d forgotten how young she was, and though she was hardy and worldly, her eyes held the fear of a frightened child.
“I wasn’t here long before you found me. An automaton of a chess piece was chasing me, even though I’d only just managed to escape the brutal beak and talons of one of those tall birds. When I finally got it off my tail, I was so hungry, and the only thing I could find to eat was a weird little rutabaga protruding from the earth. It screamed when I plucked it, and just as I’d finally cobbled together a small campfire to roast it, I passed out.” She fished a hand into her pocket, and retrieved a slightly charred vegetable. “It had a face on it when I picked it. Nothing is normal here; nothing is sacred.” She set it down beside her, pulling the blanket closer as she looked up at her sister.
Wilson contemplated her words, and poked at the fire. He wearily eyed the phantom presence that had settled to Wendy’s right, her vacant eyes gazing out into the darkness. The living twin’s teeth were chattering.
“You should go inside the tent, Wendy, get more rest, and sleep through the night. Proper sleep during your childhood years is essential to healthy development.”
She shook her head. “It’s your bedroll. You’ve no obligation to give it up again. Don’t you need to sleep too?”
He grinned. “There’s a terrific invention I have up my sleeve to solve that problem. Such an innovative way of sleeping will boggle your mind, I guarantee it. It will make Abigail pale—well, er, you know, no pun intended—but it is rather remarkable.”
The ghost of Abigail silently giggled, and Wendy’s eyes lit up.
“What is this novel sleeping device?”
“The ground.” He’d intended for it to be funny, but she only frowned, averting her eyes.
“Oh, Wendy, don’t look so glum. I’ll live. It’s about a tier above my old bed at home, anyhow, and you need it more than I do.”
She didn’t respond, and instead shifted away from him, resting her head back against the log they were leaning against. “I’m not going to become someone else’s burden. I’ll watch the fire, you should sleep. I’ve my sister now.”
Wilson huffed. “You’re clever, Wendy. Surely you don’t think that I, in good conscience, can leave a little girl out at night all by herself. It’s getting very late. Get some sleep, child, and I will get some too. The tent is plenty spacious.”
Wendy prodded at the fire with a stick. “I’m not going to sleep. You’re not my father, you don’t set my bedtime.”
He snorted. She had spunk, he had to give her credit. He was similar at that age—defiant in any area he couldn’t be controlled. He felt his heart twinge as she drew her knees towards her chest, rocking slightly in the warmth of the fire.
“I need to sleep, Wendy. You’d be much safer in the tent, please. Don’t make this difficult.”
She scowled at him. “Everyone seems to care about my safety except for me. I’m not bothered. Let death claim me! It would do everyone a favour, namely myself. Go to the tent, and sleep, and leave me here to atrophy. May He pass the final judgement.”
The “He” in question was not God, Wilson knew that well enough. He also realised that a full night’s sleep was becoming more and more improbable.
“You’re so young, Wendy. What could you know of the slings and arrows of this mortal coil?” His eyes drifted to Abigail, and he immediately regretted the statement.
“Do you know what it’s like to watch the person you love best in the entire world get impaled on a rock at the bottom of a cliff, and see her blood stain the ocean red?” She tossed another tuft of grass into the fire, changing the topic. “He looks like my father, you know. The resemblance is striking, and very unsettling, only Father has a moustache, and glasses.” After adjusting the flower in her hair, she anxiously traced over the scratchy surface of one of the logs he’d set aside for firewood.
Wilson sighed. “He’s no man, Wendy. He’s a demon. An evil, spiteful creature who seeks to antagonise us. I wonder if he took on the form of your father to torment you in a unique way.”
“No, I don’t think so. I think there is something far more ludicrous at play here. He may be evil, sure, that is verifiable based on all that we’ve gathered, but this situation is far more ornate than you are giving it credit for, Mister Wilson. Science cannot explain everything.”
“Science can explain everything. That’s why it’s science.” Wilson yawned, and glanced back at the tent. “I need to sleep, or monsters are going to start dancing in front of my eyes. I seem to have arrived at the conclusion that I cannot persuade you to use common sense and get some well deserved rest.”
“Common sense is not so common, Mister Wilson.” She focused on the fire again. “This place is not so common, either. Pain and suffering are the only constants here. Go to sleep. I’ll be fine, and if I’m not, I’ll be even better.”
Reluctantly, Wilson crawled into the tent alone, leaving the bereaved little girl by the fire with the ghost of her dead twin sister. He unfolded his bedroll and slipped inside, grateful to finally rid his conscious mind of its persistent aching.
But once he shut his eyes, he knew sleep would be elusive.
He remained in that half awake limbo for what must’ve been hours (as skewed as his perception of time was), listening to the crackles and spits from the fire that Wendy was tending to. Just as the quiet bliss seemed to finally settle upon him, he was rudely awakened by a glowing light that had burst into the tent. His eyes shot open, and his brow furrowed when he realised the presence was that of Abigail.
“You’re scientifically impossible, and I can’t think about you for very long without my brain hurting. You bother me more than most of the things that tread through this place, and now you’re disrupting my slumber.” He whined, and Abigail only shrugged, her mouth a hard line. She cocked her head towards the flap of the tent, and out of curiosity, Wilson peaked out into the dim light from the fire, and he felt a twinge of guilt when he saw the golden head of hair lying in the grass. He stepped out of the tent, lifted the shivering, asleep Wendy from where she was curled up by the fire, and carried her back inside, setting her down on his bedroll. She awoke, her teeth chattering and her forehead covered with a film of cold sweat. Tears bit at her eyes, and Wilson’s heart was cleft in twain.
“She was gone again, Mister Wilson. She was falling, and I couldn’t catch her.” She murmured, half conscious, still shivering. “But this time, she didn’t just hit the water. These horrible, shadowy hands pulled her away, and then they were grabbing me, and then—”
“Shh. I told you, you need rest. Bedtime exists for a reason.” He smiled sadly. “See? The ground is a perfectly acceptable place for a gentleman to sleep.”
“It is absolutely not.” She shimmied over inside the bedroll, and patted beside her. “I’m cold, anyway. When the nightmares came at home, I’d always curl up with Father, and he would help me through the dark depths of my mind. I’m also very cold. Did I mention that? I think I did.”
He nodded, and laid down beside her, pulling the blanket up to his neck. She rested her head on his chest, still whimpering, and he hushed her again, trying to be soothing. Perhaps he wasn’t totally bereft of paternal instincts. They had scientific basis, after all; the biological urge to ensure the progress of one’s species was no small force. But Wilson had thought himself incapable of such tenderness. He fared better when there was no one’s skin but his own on the line, and besides that, he liked being alone. He thrived in solitude, actually, and it was much better for him and everyone else that he be by his lonesome.
Was it, though? Or was it something he told himself to make the isolation more bearable?
He realised he had no desire to learn the answer.
She continued to mewl, and Wilson decided to take a new approach.
“Did your parents ever sing to you, Wendy? To make sleep come more easily?”
“Sometimes. My father would. Mother was a husk after Abby died, but in flashes of sobriety, Father could still sometimes manage a couple of tunes.”
He considered this, and remembered an old folk song his mother would sing to him and his siblings when they were small. It was Scottish, if he recalled correctly, which was funny, considering they were about as Londonite as it came. He took a deep breath, and began, his voice raspy from lack of use.
“There was a man who lived in the moon, in the moon, the moon. There was a man who lived in the moon, and his name was Aiken Drum.” He strained to remember the next lyrics, since they seemed to change every time his mother sang it.
“He played upon a ladle, a ladle, a ladle. He played upon a ladle, and his name was Aiken Drum.”
Wendy let out a deep breath, and seemed to calm slightly at his inexpert singing. When he continued with the next verses, he remembered they were all about food, and he was forced to stop when his belly began to growl. Fortunately, Wendy was already asleep by that time.
He glanced outside the tent, and met Abigail’s gaze, the pale figure nodding slightly. He’d unravel the spectral conundrum another time—God only knew how much of it he had to spare. The Constant was doing peculiar things to him: this morbid, ghost summoning little girl he’d known for less than two days had already managed to unlock a sort of fierce protectiveness that he hadn’t thought himself capable of. It would require further research, that was for certain.
But for the time being, he was safe and warm, and so was she. The nuances of survival theory (and accidental adoption?) could wait for morning. Before sleep finally claimed him, he gently kissed the top of her head, and discovered he didn’t want to be alone ever again, even if it meant being relegated to the role of a caretaker to a disturbed little girl who’d snapped a rabbit’s neck to summon the ghost of her dead twin sister.
He decided he could live with that.