“Huh.” Fiona’s frown deepened, trying to think of who might do something like that. You did get the occasional artistic kid, the child who savored the role of being the one to do something shocking or different. But then, in all honesty, very few of them ended up in an A-Level PE class. They were all doing Art or Drama.

In the end, she lined up the cards along the front of her desk, and set the pebble down next to them, scratched side facing the class. And then she went home.

CHAPTER

7

BEFORE

THE MAN TOOK the boy to his house, although it was not a house in the sense he knew. It was a vast, sprawling place with shining floors and old, dark furniture, warm with polish. It was clean and cold and silent, with no marks on the walls or dirty cutlery lying around. The big black dog trotted across the wooden floor briskly, its claws clattering the quiet into pieces, and the man came in behind them, taking off his hat and hanging it on a hat stand.

“You can stay here now, Michael. It is Michael, isn’t it?”

The boy didn’t reply. He was watching the dog, which had passed in front of a tall mirror on the wall, and briefly there were two black dogs, eyes like amber fires. The boy followed the animal and saw another creature in the mirror—a filthy stick figure with a shock of black hair, a dark thing smeared with dark matter. Abruptly, he could smell himself, and the thought of being in this clean place and making it dirty forced a noise of distress from his throat. His skin felt hot and prickly.

“Nuh. Unh …”

“Come on. I’ll run you a bath.” The man came up beside him and looked down, and for the first time the boy saw that one of his eyes was wrong—the white was a little too white, the brown of his iris too smooth. “You’ll feel better, lad.”

The man left him alone in a bathroom with a bathtub filled with hot, soapy water. He circled it for a time, unnerved by the slippery white enamel and all the unfilled space in the room. Crisp, yellow light filtered in through a frosted window, and he felt exposed. He did not look in the mirror over the sink. Eventually, after listening at the door for a time, he peeled off his sodden shirt and shorts—chucked in a pile on the floor, they didn’t look like clothes at all—and sank into the bath, making small huffing noises as the hot water inched up over his chest. He stayed there until the water was utterly cold, and a thick brownish film had ringed the sides.

Later, he sat at a long table in a set of pajamas that were slightly too big for him, while the man put plates of food in front of him. Soft white bread and pink bacon, crispy brown at the edges; a pat of yellow butter, a jar of pickles, half empty and filled with mysterious murky shadows. A tall glass of milk.