Chapter 2. Early Years

May 1998, London, Sheltered Home for the Aged.

The snow continued to fall and a very thin layer covered the street as could be seen from Mrs Cole's window. She rocked back and worth, humming a sweet toned song and remembering. In her memories she returned back to Wool's Orphanage where she had raised no ordinary boy.

"It had started when you were two", Mrs Cole said and continued watching the twirling snow. "You made such weird things happen, Tom." She closed her eyes and gave a deep sigh. "But the older you got, the weirder the things became. You wanted to have control, over yourself, and over the others…"

Mrs Cole opened her glazy eyes. "What did I do wrong in raising you?"

The descending snowflakes didn't grant her the answer.

"The things didn't turn to be better, nor did they turn to worse", Mrs Cole continued with a sigh. "Not until that one summer when Martha and I took you to the sea… I still can't understand what you did to them, Tom."

August 1929, London, Wool's Orphanage.

We had just had a dinner and Louisa and Martha had gone to put the children down for a nap. I had then retreated to the kitchen where the piles of dishes were waiting for someone to do the washing-up. I was drying the last ones and putting them away when I corner of my eye saw the raven-haired boy.

I held back a scream and dropped the plate, making it break into pieces. Tom stood few meters away from me. The child didn't even flinch from the sound of the breaking porcelain. I took a deep breath to recover from his sudden appearing.

"Tom, you should be sleeping." I crouched to clean up the pieces. "Did Louisa take you from the crib?"

I looked at Tom. He just shook his head a little and observed me with his wide dark eyes. I gave him a little displeased, suspicious, smile. This wasn't the first time when Tom appeared out of nowhere during the naptime. And it wasn't the all. I had paid attention on how things seemed to move from their places whenever Tom was near; I was sure of it even though I hadn't yet really seen it with my own eyes. How else would Tom get his hands on everything I place out of his reach? Of course I never said anything like that to Louisa; she wouldn't have taken me seriously.

I moved the pieces with dustpan and brush from the floor and smiled at the child. "What about I'll take you back to bed now, Tom?"

"No." Tom stared at me straight in the eye. "Please."

I didn't dare to say no to him if he didn't want to sleep. Tom had, after all, been always such a good boy. As a baby he almost never cried. He always ate everything given to him. He was so easy I wondered how it was even possible. I didn't know how I had grown up to be so attached to that little boy. It was unnatural; I didn't try so hard with the other orphans.

It was like… Tom was somehow special to me.

February 1931, London, Wool's Orphanage.

We had gotten a piano and what a delight it was to the children. Louisa, as old as she was anyway, played well. The children enjoyed listening to the music she made and sometimes, when Louisa felt energetic enough, she sung with them.

Few weeks after the piano had regularised its place in the living room, Tom yanked the hem of my skirt and stopped me to listen what he had to say. He had never liked to wait me to finish what I was doing if he needed me to listen. If I did, which had happened few times in the past, he would have retreated to his room to, most probably, sulk.

"I can't get it off my head", he said in his annoyed, little boy's tone. "That song Mrs Barton plays."

I blinked few times. "You mean Für Elise?" I whistled few tunes of the Beethoven's piano concerto, Louisa's favourite, and Tom nodded firmly. I chuckled and ruffled Tom's hair. "Well, it sounds like you have gotten an earworm."

He shot me a look. "I don't like it", he said. "Make it stop."

"Oh, Tom", I sighed and descended to the boy's level. "That's something I can't do."

It took couple days when Louisa attempted to play the instrument after the dinner. After the first, out of tune tones of a song the piano made a cracking sound. She barely had time to retreat from the piano before it loudly crumpled into pieces. Louisa gasped but regained her composure and turned to calm down the children. She blamed termites of the saddening fate of the instrument.

But I raked my eyes through the pairs of eyes of disappointed, sad, and shocked children before I found, from the very back of the room the pair of dark eyes I had been looking for.

Tom stood there, a small smile curling up his lips.

June 1932, London, Wool's Orphanage.

"Mrs Cole! Mrs Cole!"

I hurried upstairs after hearing the cries of children, Martha following me. Lovely old Louisa Barton had passed away in the end of the last year, and I had run the orphanage with Martha since then. It had begun to take its toll. The children – Mary, Dennis, Timothy, and Eric – had gathered the corridor and they all looked scared, shocked even. Billy, who had been hiding in the corner, instead was crying and when I asked him what was wrong he pointed at the ceiling with a shaky hand.

"It was Tom…!" he sobbed and wiped his nose to the sleeve of his sweater. "I know it was him…!"

My breath hitched when I looked upwards and found out why the children were so upset. Billy's pet rabbit was hanging from the rafters, completely motionless.

It was dead.

Martha drove the children downstairs and I went to get the ladders from the storage room to get the poor animal down. I had my suspicions that Tom may have had something to do with it. After all I had seen Tom and Billy quarrelling about something yesterday, but I couldn't explain how the rabbit had gotten to the rafters. None of the children was tall enough to reach the ceiling, not even Tom who was rather tall for his age. Even I couldn't without the ladders. I heard the stairs creak as someone went upstairs.

It was Tom. He glanced at me, not showing any kind of emotion when he saw the dead animal I was holding. He just went to his room and closed the door.

I wanted to believe Tom had nothing to do with this. How could he have?

July 1935, the Seaside Site.

Summer of the year 1935 had been nice and warm and Martha and I felt like we should give the children some sort of reward for their good behaviour. So we planned a trip, a picnic, to the seaside. I was sure that getting a fresh breeze of sea air and change for the ordinary routines would gladden them. Martha had agreed with me.

And so, in one particularly beautiful Saturday morning, we had travelled all the way to the friendly town by the sea where we would stay for the day. I let the children explore the nearby grounds but I told them to stay out the water and forbad them from going too far from the place Martha was placing their picnic supplies.

But as the time passed and the lunchtime came I became eventually worried. I looked around and I couldn't find Tom anywhere. Dennis and Amy were also missing.

For two hours Martha and I searched from the grounds nearby with no success. I was starting to panic. What if they went too close to the sea and drowned? What if they got lost? What if someone had taken them?

"There they are!" Martha exclaimed suddenly. I turned at the direction she was pointing at. The three familiar children were walking from the shore back to where we were.

Few tears of happiness trickled down my cheek. Thank goodness, they were alright.

"Tom! Amy, Dennis!" I hugged each of the children. "Where have you been?"

It was like the usually two so talkative children weren't here at all. Amy and Dennis kept mostly silent, just mumbling something about a cave once in a while, and looked like something horrible had happened; scared looks on their round faces, trembling hands. I turned to the third child; I was worried.

"Tom?" Tom didn't show any kind of trauma unlike Amy and Dennis did. "Tom, tell me what happened?"

I looked at the third child but as a response a gained only a nonchalant shrug with the smallest of smiles and few words I didn't truly believe in the fullest of matter.

"We were just exploring in the cave nearby."

Whatever had happened, Tom would never tell me what it was really about. That was the first time I remembered punishing him.

You can't understand how coldly he glared at me.