The children at Shanti Bhavan Orphanage were not supposed to talk about Crescent House.
This was not an official rule, not the kind that was written on the board beside the breakfast schedule or recited at morning assembly. It was the other kind of rule - the kind that lives in the silence between one sentence and the next, in the way an adult's expression changes when a certain subject is approached, in the quality of the air that falls over a room when someone says a name that should not be said.
The orphanage stood in the town of Nainpur, a small and mostly unremarkable town in the foothills of central India, where the road curved away from the plains and began the long climb toward the mountains. Nainpur had a market, a temple, two schools, a clinic run by a doctor who came on Thursdays, and a reputation for producing nothing of note except a particular variety of very sour tamarind. It was the kind of town that people passed through on their way to somewhere else, and the orphanage was the kind of institution that people knew about without knowing about - present in their peripheral vision, acknowledged with the vague guilt of the comfortable when they thought of it at all, which was not often.
The orphanage was run by a man named Suresh Lal, who was not unkind but was not warm either. He was competent in the way that administrators are competent - he kept the books balanced and the building in reasonable repair and the children fed and clothed and educated to the degree the budget permitted. He had been doing this for twenty-two years. He had stopped seeing individual children somewhere around year eight and now saw instead a rolling population, a flow, an administrative challenge that renewed itself each year with new arrivals and depleted itself each year with adoptions and departures.
The children he did not see - not really see - were five boys who had come to Shanti Bhavan within a year of one another, all under the age of four, all without names that anyone could reliably attach to them.
The first had been found on the steps of the orphanage itself, wrapped in a piece of blue cloth, with no note. He was perhaps two years old and had a small scar on his left hand in the shape of a crescent moon, though no one noticed this until much later.
The second had been brought by a constable from a village sixty kilometers north, where he had been found wandering on the road after some unspecified family catastrophe. He was perhaps three years old and did not speak when he arrived, and when he began to speak again it was in words that the staff had trouble placing - not quite the local dialect, not quite anything they recognized.
The third and fourth arrived together, six months apart but with such similar faces that people often assumed they were twins. They were not, as far as anyone could determine. They had both been left at the clinic on the same Thursday, and the Thursday-doctor had brought them to the orphanage wrapped in his own coat.
The fifth came last - a small boy, the youngest, barely past infancy, who arrived on a night of thunderstorms in the arms of an old woman who would not give her name. She had walked, it appeared, a very long distance. She set the boy down on the threshold, said something in a language no one at the orphanage could identify, and walked back out into the rain. They sent someone after her, of course, but she was already gone - dissolved, it seemed, into the dark and the downpour.
Five boys without names. Or rather, five boys with names that no one knew, called only by numbers in the early administrative records, then by descriptions - the quiet one, the restless one, the one with the scar, the ones who might be twins - until the day, three years after the last of them arrived, when a volunteer came to the orphanage and changed everything.
But before that, there was the house.
Every child at Shanti Bhavan knew about Crescent House. It was impossible not to know. The house was visible on clear days from the roof of the dormitory - a dark shape in the trees at the far end of the lake, three kilometers south, barely distinguishable from the surrounding forest but distinguishable enough. The older children pointed it out to the younger ones the way older children always transmit the important, frightening knowledge: in whispers, after lights-out, with an emphasis on the most terrible details.
The house was haunted. Everyone knew this. A family had disappeared there. Everyone knew this too, though the details varied with each telling - sometimes the family had been three people, sometimes eight, sometimes just a woman and a child. The house made sounds at night. The lake around it was deeper than it looked and colder than it should be and something lived in it that was not a fish. People who went too close to the house came back wrong, if they came back at all.
The five boys, sleeping in their corner of the dormitory, heard these stories like all the others. But the five boys - who had not yet been given names, who were still in those years a loose constellation of shared space and shared meals and the particular closeness that comes from having no one else - the five boys felt something different when they heard the stories.
Not fear. Or not only fear.
Something more like recognition.
This was not something they could have articulated. They were children. They did not have the words for what they felt when someone said the name of the house, or pointed to its dark shape in the trees, or described the sound it made on still nights when the lake was quiet and the air was cool enough to carry sounds a long distance.
What they felt was the particular sensation of a door standing open that should be closed. A wrongness that had the quality not of something new but of something remembered. As if the house were not a strange place but a familiar one - as if they had been there before, or as if some part of them had never quite left.
They did not speak of this to each other. Not yet. They were too young, and the feeling was too formless, and the world they lived in was already strange enough without adding to its strangeness.
But at night, in the dormitory, when the others slept, the five boys lay awake and listened to the house three kilometers away, and the house listened back, and in the space between them the darkness held its breath.
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*End of Chapter One*