Ghostheart (11 page)

Straight-up Old Shambles went them with his heavy, knobbled stick and they yielded, abandoning each other and scattering, jumping over me in my ditch as they went.

Everything went quiet. Too quiet.

I didn’t want to come out of the ditch.

While Old Shambles was cosseting me out of the earth my brother threw off Lily Fell and made a dash for it. He ran like we were the enemy. His long white self passed into a stand of silver birch and disappeared into the thickening hawthorn beyond.

With Old Shambles holding me by the shoulder I climbed up onto the Bogward. My legs trembled like I’d run the whole of Carrick but I still hardened myself and trotted after Boson. I had to bring him home.

Nobody else would know what to say.

Nobody else would understand.

Nobody else could know where he went.

He would go down into Strangers’ Croft. He would watch the waves, to prove that time was still working and orderly. He would ramble along the pebbly beach to the Sorrow Place and sing out the names of the Old-ones, one-by-one in an encouraging sort of manner, so that they would know themselves loved. He would stay there until something made sense to him.

I went down to the Croft shore.

I went down to help him find the sense of this day, as I always had. I didn’t know what I was going to say. It hadn’t been a sensible sort of day.

Down the green-skimmed stone I limped. The shattered breakwater was empty and the Sorrow Place too. I hobbled around the low-tide cliff-base until the soft beach was behind me and the hard one spread out before in sharps and spines; a Gather Place for countless guillemots, shags, gannets and gulls. There I saw him, flocked in among them.

He’d wholly given up trying to be a person. He had no clothes on anymore. Except for the feather-hat that was somewhat manky now.

‘Well, there you are,’ I said, soft so he wouldn’t run.

‘Am I?’ he said.

The guillemot rocks were spread with such an amount of birdshit they were always fully whiteclad, and they gave off the kind of stench that closes your throat. Boson was crouched there right in the middle and he’d pasted himself in it. Into the thicker bits of paste he’d stuck molted black and white feathers; fledgling down stirred over his face. Only his eyes looked out bare and human. The rest of him snugged in feathers.

‘All right?’ I said.

‘I don’t think I am all right, Fer,’ said my brother, quiet. ‘My head hurts. There are insects. I can’t smile.’

He perched up on the spine of a long rock, above the sea-birds. All the flocks pressed in around him. I clambered up to him, slicing myself open here and there.

Taking a corner of my shift I wiped away the scabs and paste and down from around his eyes. Now he just looked like an owl. Was there to be no end to his birdishness? He seemed more high and light than the swifts, more darkly Otherwise than the ravens. His head was a Fever tree in which unknown wild birds roosted on every bough.

I patted at his shoulder and wished with my whole self that I could remember what he’d been before, so I’d know what to say to comfort him now. As he waited for the right moment to utter his world-saving word, I waited for the word to rise in me that would make him better.

‘You’re going to have to stop,’ I told him at last. ‘It’s impossible.’ He started up at me, all chatter and spit.

‘I’m not
made
for st-t-topping,’ he stuttered. ‘If I were, I’d have stopped by now. And it’s not imp-p-possible. I’m for rising. I have been the skylark and there’s no going back after that and I’ve been the nightingale and I’ve been the crane you know I have and I’ve been the skua in its salt and the molty guillemots. I have been the loon. It’s too late for me. You can’t un-know what you know.’

‘Well I used to know you,’ I told him. ‘Now I don’t.’

‘Forgetting’s not the same as un-knowing,’ my brother said. ‘We walked together once. Before. On the water. Remember?’

I didn’t remember. I just wanted to get him home to Moo. He was shivering and the bruises were blackening up.

‘I’m going there,’ he said next pointing into the sea. The other island floated in a pearly mist like the pictures of islands in the book of beasts. ‘I’m going there the lonely ones need me they’re starving they said I should come when I was ready they said nobody here could see me right not even Moo nobody here could see anybody right even themselves they said I should come out I should come they said I should—’

‘Quirks don’t go to sea,’ I said. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted him to stop blithering. ‘How will you get out there?’

‘I could go in the form of a gull?’ he whispered.

‘No, you couldn’t,’ I said. ‘You can’t go in the form of anything but what you are.’

‘What am I again?’ he whispered.

‘You’re my brother, Master Boson Quirk,’ I told him then as I always did. But this time he didn’t believe me.

‘
Tempus Fugit
,’ he twittered looking around at the nesting-rocks. ‘Everything is happening.’

‘Not everything,’ I said. My brother, the angel of time, looked confused. ‘Only
some
things are happening.’

The conversations I had with my distempered brother were like no conversations I ever had again. Sometimes I even thought I understood what we talked about. But this was to be our last day. From
Tempus Fugit
on he was lost to me.

‘There’s another way,’ he insisted and stood up. ‘I’ve seen it. I’ve seen them do it they fall up they just fall up to the sky the gate is open and they take the Upward path they fall up—’ He sat and stirred around in a sizeable and fresh birdshit for its augury but lost interest and started up again. ‘I’m expected Fer, I have to go,’ he whined. ‘Stuck they are the poor things stuck in the shape of cranes shape of squid shape of slugs stuck in the middle of shifting stuck and it’s time. They said I should come and they’d send word and I’m ready ready
ready
—’ He held his striped ribs.

‘I’m ready,’ he told me again and he started weeping, slow and light. ‘I want to go home.’

I knew he didn’t mean the moaney.

‘It’s going to be all right, Bose,’ I said, pulling him to his feet and leading him away from the guillemot rocks. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t going to be all right. It was just something I said.

Up at home, my parents and Lily Fell and Old Shambles waited in a wring-fret for us to turn up. When they saw me dragging my brother along they let out cries and rushed to get at us. Lily Fell was still telling the story as we moved him toward the threshold.

‘And then they’ve only turned to booting him, Moirrey, with Fermion here only part of the way up and breathing fire, you can see it in her. And then Mr Shambles is on them and oh! He was mighty, mighty like a Christian! All over them, weren’t you?’

Old Shambles reddened and muttered that it had been
His Honour
and he’d never liked that Craig boy anyhow.

‘He barks at folk,’ he said. ‘Gives dogs a bad name.’

In the late afternoon, Pa and I packed up the sheep-bags, we checked the footings and ricks and left the upland cut. We queached back across the high moaney and trudged along the bodgeway until we reached the home-thicket.

All the way home, the bog murmured and sighed, the evening birds whistled and called, and the inside-voice talked long and grave-like to me. In the home-thickets the Dead Lamps were sprightly. They pattered like they had feet. They muttered like old women. The willows drooped their heads and whispered.

Everybody had something to say but my mother.

Boson always understood people better than me. He had the knowledge of hearts and so forth. I was stymied by all the flying humours of folk; their silences and tears. Their broods and rages were like foreign talk to me. I had no answer for any of it.

My brother had always been our afflicted one. Now he was dead, I couldn’t help noticing that we were all somewhat afflicted. Before, we could always blame him for the mess; now he was gone, who was to blame for all the grogging and sulks? Neither of my parents would talk about it properly and decently, with sense. But I knew what they were thinking.

Moo blamed me for leaving him home alone the day of her penance. She blamed Pa for not teaching him to fight.

Pa blamed Moo for being shamed by him. He blamed me for not being my brother.

And I blamed everybody. For everything.

IT’S STRANGE HOW YOU CAN MOVE toward something without knowing you are. Some things happen blind, you feel your way. Some things happen pathless, you cut a path. They happen like water, falling drop-by-drop, gathering together in bright lines to run and fall. One day the drops are trembling at the waterline where there’s only one place left to go. One more drop and all the running and falling ends where it was moving all the while. At the sea.

That’s how it happened to me.

When Pa and me came down from the upland cut, Gilpin was digging. He’d been at it some time by the look of it. The hole dropped straight into the brown earth by the greenplots like a trap, and at first all we saw was the dirt flying up and out. When we leaned over the rim to look, he was squatted in the sog like a dirty little troll, digging at it with both hands and shovelling the loose earth out with the book of beasts like it was just some useful thing.

‘Oy! Sloughworm!’ I said and grabbed the book out of his filthy hands.

‘Pa!’ I said. ‘Tell him.’ But Pa just made a face like
What can you do?
and went to clean and store the tools.

Gilpin was digging like it was all one to him, and his face was closed to me like the face of a creature; like the face of all creatures, except dogs. You’d have thought he was some lost Old-one trying to dig himself back into the Under-halls. He was slick and stinking like Moo would never have let him before, and he looked overly-aged. Sharp and unnatural.

He wouldn’t let me take him up out of the hole. In fact, he thumped at me when I tried. ‘I’m
digging
,’ he told me.

‘I see that,’ I said.

‘It’ll be my hole.’ His voice was low. ‘I will do it myself.’ His eyes raised to me and his face looked forty. ‘And nobody can come in!’ He threw a clod at me.

‘
Brout!
Why would I want to come in your nasty old ditch?’ I said.

I opened the book of beasts and it fell to the pages of the merged folk, those that share bits of their bodies or even, use a common head. They’d been our favourite pages. Boson and me could never settle whether the folk whose heads were merged and bodies split, made one person or two. Whether they were one-in-two or two-in-one.

I brushed at the clods on the pages and they smeared.

What had been a page all blue and red, fine-wrought like dragonflies’ wings, was spoiled.

When I tried to turn the pages they came wet and piecemeal.

The whole thing was wholly rotted.

I left Gilpin, and went into the cold, lightless house.

Moo had let the fire burn out. In the corner where she sloped and faded, a spider had anchored its silk to one of her fingertips and was swinging wallward. There was to be no brew, no broth, no fuss or chat. I dropped my wet sheep-bag and muddy bundles right in the doorway where everybody was sure to fall over them. She didn’t even turn.

In spite of standing right up close, I couldn’t hear her breath. I laid my hand flat on her drooping neck and felt her blood still beating there. She was only pretending to be dead.

I took our spoiled book and curled up in my bed around it. Everything in me suffered. Head-agues, belly-agues and bone-deep Withers cramped me. I stretched out and tried to sleep.

I lay wakeful as the hours passed. The winds moaned outside, low to the ground and fast. They howled through the high mud-roots. One sang awhile like a girl alone. Everywhere, it was all slipping airs and humours. The moaney was up and on the move. And that’s not all.

Outside, the yard was all scuttle and hiss. I thought it must be Pa or Gilpin in a romp; I prayed it was, but it wasn’t. When I went out to see, Gilpin had pulled a plank over his hole and was asleep down there, damp, a hazelnut in each hand, and Pa was nowhere. I thought then there must be some new scuttling, hissing sort of wind about since our troubles started. Everything else was changing, learning to talk in new ways or forgetting they ever knew how. Why not the wind?