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sir, if you think it a good
idea.”
    “I do.”
     
     
     

Dolls
     
    My sleep that evening was fitful at best. I
had been tucked away in one of the bunks formerly used by the boys
who had been hanged while Tom and I had escaped. I didn’t ask if
Charlie had been sleeping here, but something told me he had.
    I dreamed of them that night—the boys
sitting next to me while awaiting the hooded hangmen to come for
us. I remembered Charlie’s final questions about the pain he was
about to endure.
    Then we were standing in a row again. The
Noose was placed about our necks. The switch was thrown. Charlie
looked over at Tom. Tom flashed the boy a devilish grin as a tomato
flew past him, hitting me in the chest. Then the floor gave way.
Charlie and the other boy—I had never known his name—dropped
through. Tom and I disappeared from before his eyes along with the
nooses about our necks.
    Charlie hung there, wondering what had
happened to us. His neck burned—I could feel his pain radiating out
through his limbs. His head felt like a balloon about to pop as his
face turned blue. The boys dwelling beneath the gallows laughed and
jumped at his legs, fighting for a turn to add their weight to his.
Two boys latched on and his spine gave way with a sickening crack
that rang in his skull.
    After the deed was done, as the bodies were
being removed, no one questioned the absence of the other two boys
who had previously been strung up with these two corpses. Any
evidence of our existence had been erased. We were not even
remembered.
    The dream shifted, as dreams often do.
    I walked down the cobbled streets of London
now. Dark figures loomed all about me—unmoving—like statues.
Thousands of ravens, like the one that had spoken to Tom, flew
overhead. Many more were perched upon nearly every surface—the
buildings, rails, lampposts, everywhere. And they were watching me
with an intensity that made me very afraid. They looked hungry.
Their raucous chorus filled my ears until I thought my skull would
split open from it.
    One by one, the birds began to shake
themselves. Their feathers molted away as their bodies took new
forms. The ravens burst suddenly—the feathers, beaks and claws
swirling like living tar that became men.
    The one nearest me became Mr. Sinister
himself. He had the same predatory smile on his face, the same
hunger in his eyes. He wanted to kill me. Whether he said it or
not, I knew it was true.
    The other ravens transformed into men like
Sinister. They began to walk toward me, but I could not see
anything about their faces. Only their white teeth and devilish
eyes were visible in contrast to the darkness they had coalesced
from.
    I started to run, but quickly collided with
one of the statuesque people standing in the street. I backed away,
pleading for help. A doll’s burlap face and button eyes stared back
at me. I screamed as it reached out to grab me. The burlap mouth
opened, revealing a cord-like tongue that lashed out, ensnaring me.
I was pulled inside like a fly into the mouth of a toad.
    I screamed myself awake…only I wasn’t inside
the tenement with the other boys. I was mired in a pit full of
grayish mud. It stank like sewage and barely allowed me to move.
Thankfully the pit was not deep. I struggled to my hands and knees
against a sensation that the mud was sapping the very life out of
me.
    A giant’s hand wrapped itself around me,
plucking me from the pool of muck like a ripe berry. He laughed as
he brought me up to his huge head to inspect his handiwork. His
ears were the size of an elephant’s and his bulbous nose was like a
huge tortoise upon his face. He also had two prominent bottom teeth
that jutted out from under his bottom lip like tusks. “Another
little mud man to make sport for us,” he bellowed.
    He turned and strode through a waste
courtyard full of dead brush and rocks, carrying me like a
figurine. I saw a wall of rough stone blocks one hundred feet high
surrounding us on every