The door burst open and the wickermen entered. "What business do you have here?" said one. He took a step towards Twelve. The flaming torch in his long, spindly fingers danced merrily as the metal weapon in his other hand glinted in the firelight.

Twelve towered over the wickermen. They were strange looking things. Each stood about six feet tall. Some larger, others less so. They were crudely manufactured from branches, roots, twine and sticks. Held together with a cross-hatching of kindling, knotted grass and dried mud.

Some had adorned themselves with man-made items such as belts, climbing rope, and chains. Others had made clothing from the forest.

One wore a headdress of leaves and bracken.

Another, a flowing cape of dark feathers slung around its shoulders.

"We are here looking for food, for answers," Twelve began. "For Erin's brother Clyde. For my sisters. A family of scarecrows."

"Scarecrows?" said the wickerman wearing the headdress. His voice was higher than the first, yet edged with menace and anger. Two rows of sharpened rocks had been inserted where his gums should be. He gnashed them together, adding, "We'll have no talk of scarecrows here."

"But—" Twelve began.

"Silence," he said, moving closer still. The wickermens faces were simply made: rocks and conkers and snubs of twig for eyes and noses, cavernous mouths hollowed out in the middle of their faces. A peculiar smell accompanied them: grass cuttings, damp and spent fireworks.

Twelve gestured towards Five. "Who is she, if not a scarecrow?"

"Ha!" the other wickerman spat. "She is a wretch. A monstrous ruin. Crippled by the voices. They call to her day and night. They fester inside, destroying one another, creating new ones over and over and over...or so it seems."

"That's why we keep her in the lodge," said the wickerman in the feathered cape.

His eyes zeroed on Erin who had slunk into the shadows. She found the wickermen strange and creepy. They had no right to be alive and wandering around this island, but then neither did Twelve or Five for that matter.

Erin fingers curled into Twelve's pirate jacket, her eyes slipping shut.

She remembered building Number Five. After the sharp learning curve of the first four scarecrows she'd finally found her groove. Hammers and nails and rusty machine parts were becoming familiar in her hands. Erin would sculpt and build and create her scarecrows after homework was done, and all weekend long. And when she was meant to be sleeping, she would sit in bed sketching outfits and costumes into her Book of Scarecrows. Her imagination bubbled over as she stitched the edges of Five's eyes and added the zipper mouth to the battered basketball. Initially, Five was going to wear Pa's old Wellington Boots, but when Erin came across a pair of good-as-new rollerblades on one of her reconnaissance missions at the local charity shop, everything changed. Five had been positioned in one of the lower fields of Coldharbour Farm, her cross fitted to a circular wooden base that allowed Five to spin on her rollerblades under the whim of the wind. How had the scarecrow come to travel this far across the Endless Blue and remain in one piece?

Erin felt light-headed. Surely, this was all a dream: the scarecrows, and the wickermen, and Lazarus, and the Patchwork Woman. Any moment now her eyes were going to spring open and she'd find herself nestle in the hayloft on Coldharbour Farm, the rain hammering down, her Books of Scarecrows open across her chest. But when she opened her eyes again the wickerman in the feathered cape was standing over her.

"My name's Jack," he said. "At least, that's what I think I was called. Before I was...this."

He looked down at the filthy weave of brown and green that was his body.

"Always with the past is our Jack," sighed the other. "I'm Tomas. And you are our prisoners."

Erin's heart thudded in her chest as all nine wickermen rushed forward, arms outstretched, gnarled wooden fingers snapping. Six of them piled on top of Twelve while the remaining three pulled Erin out of the shadows.

Twelve fought bravely, but she could not contend with so many. Three perhaps. She could definitely take three of them on. Erin was sure of it.

She could feel something cold and hard being fastened around her arms. Yanking her wrists apart, Erin discovered that she was locked in chains, her hands bound tightly behind her back.

"I'm sorry," Tomas said, straightening his headdress and readjusting the odd clump of dislodged earth from his torso. "You must come with us now. Out of the lodge. Before she changes."

Leaving the climber's lodge, two wickermen busied themselves barricading the door as they secured Twelve and Erin to a gigantic oak tree.

"What's going on?" Twelve asked. "What do you want with us?"

"Personally?" said Jack, circling the tree, checking their fastenings. "Nothing. We have no interest in you or—"

"—the human girl," Tomas said, his voice ripe with demented glee.

"But somebody does," Erin said, her eyes thinning.

"Pretty and clever," said Tomas, creeping around the edge of the semi-circle and hunkering down in front of her. "There is...someone...who covets you. But she is not here, you'll be happy to know. As are we. She is not the sort of visitor we'd welcome back to our island."

"She has power," said Jack, his feathered cape swirling behind him as he moved. "A dark, malevolent force. Strange...and consuming."

"Yes, yes, yes," Tomas said, irritably. "She came with an offer."

"They do not need to know this," Jack said.

"They came looking for answers," Tomas said. "I'm simply giving them what they desire."

"The Patchwork Woman," Erin said.

"So, you've heard of her," Tomas said, his leafy headdress rustling. "She is darkness, and turmoil, and malice, and every bad thing that you ever dreamed or dared to imagine."

Erin snorted defiantly.

"And she is looking for a human girl...or woman, I don't think it matters. Probably wants a companion all the way out there on BootHill."

"What did she offer you?" Erin grumbled.

Tomas trilled, rubbing his stick hands together excitedly. He seemed to recall the memory for a moment. Relishing it, perhaps.

"She told us that if we were to stumble upon a human girl—to which we all laughed, as such a thing has long since vanished from this world—then she would fulfil any wish we desired."

"Any wish?" Erin said.

"Anything?" Twelve added.

"Anything."

The faces of her family flooded her mind.

Could The Patchwork Woman really grant wishes, like the Djinn's and Genie's her brother always read about? No. Erin shook her head, clearing those impossible thoughts.

"And what would a wickermen wish for?" Twelve asked.

Tomas ran a finger down his badly pruned body.

"Obviously, we cannot go on like this." He approached the scarecrow. "We want our original bodies. We want The Patchwork Woman to bring us back to life."

"And?" Erin said, an essence of hope lingering. "What did The Patchwork Woman say?"

"She agreed, as if it were no more effort to her than breathing."

"How could she do that?"

"Dark power and magic—" Tomas began.

"Yes, so we've heard," Erin frowned.

"Of course, you're a non-believer."

Tomas paced back and forth in front of the oak tree.

"Take a look around. The world is different now. People are gone—well, almost—new creatures have arisen. Scarecrows and wickermen and The Patchwork Woman and her golems, and who knows what else."

"Golems?"

Tomas laughed.

"You know nothing of this world."

"I know enough."

"Our human bodies our gone," Jack said interjecting. "No matter what The Patchwork Woman says, there's no getting them back."

Tomas sighed.

"So little faith in you, Jack."

"Human bodies?" said Erin.

"You're human?" added Twelve. "But you're made of trees and—"

"We're wickermen," said Jack, turning his eyes to his friend in the headdress. "But Tomas here believes that we once lived inside humans. As spirits, or parts thereof, or some such nonsense. And now we're here, in these bodies. Others are in mannequins, or statues, or—"

"—scarecrows!" Twelve gasped, then added quietly, "You think we're made of human spirits. We're made of...ghosts?"

"You're up and walking about, aren't you?" said Tomas. "How else would you explain it?"

"I don't know."

"What's a human body without its soul?" Tomas laughed at Twelve, his mouth quirking mischievously. "A corpse. A cadaver. Meat and bone and nothing more."

Twelve flexed her fingers and rocked back on her feet.

"I am alive," she said, ignoring the wickerman's cackle. "I can see, and feel, and smell. I can make things, and row a boat, and protect Erin, and search for Clyde and my sisters. I cannot explain how or why."

She stopped for a moment. An eerie silence hung in the trees.

"Perhaps you are right."

"What do you mean perhaps? Of course I'm right!"

"He's not," said Jack.

"I am," Tomas insisted.

The other wickermen rumbled, muttering opinions to one another.

"And what about Five?" Twelve said, her head nodding towards the lodge. "Do you blame spirits for her condition?"

Tomas nodded.

"Something happened to her. Something...extraordinary."

Erin shuddered. She looked across at Twelve, but the scarecrow's expression was impossible to decipher.

"What happened?" Erin asked. "What did you do to her?"

"Do?" Jack cried. "We did nothing. She's the one with all the spirits inside her."

"There's thousands of them swimming around in that huge head of hers," Tomas said, taking over. "We were all in there once. I fought hard to get out, to find my way into this body. I don't know why I made it and others didn't. Jack was the same. We all were."

The wickermen nodded slowly.

"It's the human form," Tomas explained. "We could jump into dead rabbits or deer or birds, but we didn't. We looked for human shapes. I guess Five knew this. That's why she made these bodies for us."

Erin looked at the climber's lodge. It was quiet inside. Wickermen stood guard, iron bars and flames flickering in their hands.

Her head spun with Jack and Tomas' crazy theory. Human spirits? That made sense, didn't it? How else could she explain Twelve coming to life, and building a boat, and sailing it across the Endless Blue?

But whose spirits were they?

Twelve was being awfully quiet.

Erin shuffled around the tree. The chains bit into her wrists.

"It doesn't matter," she told the scarecrow.

"What doesn't?" Twelve said, bending her vile head towards the girl.

"All the things you're worrying about. It doesn't matter if you're powered by human spirits. Or magic, or divine intervention, or clockwork, or anything else for that matter. It's the same with the way you look. I made you terrifying and abysmal on purpose. And you're perfect. Just the way you are."

The scarecrow tried to lower herself to meet Erin's eye line, her monstrous eyes wriggling with bugs and critters.

The bison's skull vanished.

Erin saw the faces of her family, morphing from one into another, sitting above the scarecrow's broad shoulders and red pirate jacket. They smiled lovingly at her, their eyes filled with a lonely sadness.

But Erin's daydream was chased away as a new, more terrible noise rose from the climber's lodge.