Ghostheart (18 page)

‘Well, what does you do with them stores but pile them up and gloat on them?’ he said, but I could see he was stung by what I’d said. ‘You is just asking for it. You doesn’t share like real people. All stuffed with sprite-bile, how could you? We takes what we need and no more, and why shouldn’t we? You is all wrong and don’t even know it.

‘Them sprites shoot about everywhere, small as seeds and stuffed with pure gall. The daytime is thick with them, none of you is free of it. If you didn’t take such pleasure in it all I’d feel sorry for you. Walking about with your earholes crawling and the green bile oozing until you can’t hear or see straight for it.’ He sat back. ‘We come at night so we don’t have to meet any of youse. You all think you is so special.’

‘You is
not
special, see,’ said Ginny, like explaining something to a small child. ‘You is just full of bile-sprites.’

‘I am not,’ I said.

‘You can’t help it,’ she said, like that would make a difference.

‘I do not think I’m special,’ I shouted. ‘I am a regular person.’ I nearly said
Like anybody Else
but then I remembered my inside-voice.

And looking at the pair of them the words stopped in my gullet. Were these dwindles the
anybody Else
I meant? Of everybody I knew, who was regular anymore?

‘See,’ Ginny said, sly. ‘Bile-sprites.’

‘Well, what about you lot?’ I asked.

‘Oh, we really is special,’ she said. ‘Specially me.’

Dorrin rolled his eyes skyward.

‘Why’s that, then?’ I asked.

This talk of
special
and
regular
was going awry. It was a tardle of birds in my head, flying apart.

‘Because she doesn’t have bile-sprites,’ said Dorrin, like I was simple.

I sat baffling a moment. Where did they get all this?

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I told them. ‘We think we’re special on account of having these sprites in our ears, but you think you’re special on account of not having them.’

They started bristling up somewhat, but I couldn’t stop the words.

‘Seems to me you’ve caught them and don’t know it,’ I said. Straight-up Dorrin set to trembling, and Ginny turned into the whinging dwindle I’d met in the dunes. Some inside-part of me crowed and was glad.

They couldn’t help me.

Nobody here could help.

I took a torch and turned to the downward path.

‘You take that back,’ Ginny said, low-toned behind me.

‘No,’ I said and I kept walking.

Of a sudden there was a rattle and a thump, and she was on me.

She was burly for such a small person and she was on my back. The surprise and burden of her threw me down the path. Her fists thumped me about the ears and head. We fell frenzying together onto the third ledge. I rolled onto my back, pinning her under me squealing in the dirt and stalks. She had my hair in her fists, just as she’d had Dorrin’s, and she was dragging it back like reins. My face stretched over its bones, it burned and stung like nettles. I reached behind to loose her grip and then I saw Dorrin overhead, just a spreadeagle shadow leaping.

I’d never hit anybody before. The most my brother and I had done was a bit of shoving. I had no knowledge of fighting and its particulars. But it was surprising how easy it came when it had to. I didn’t care if these folk were shrunken, with hands that would fit in my mouth. I wanted to flay them both and hang their pelts by my threshold, just like Pedder said all those from Carrick wanted. My heart was full of little murders. Just the right size for these two.

‘Come on then, shrunk,’ I heard myself say, and Dorrin did. He flew at me like a bat.

I put out my hands to welcome him with blows.

One of my fists caught him in mid-leap and there was a sound like when Pa slaughtered the fall calf. He sort of slumped in the air. Then he dropped like a little dead bird.

Straight-up I was panting-cold, all my rightfulness gone.

I sat up with Ginny still stuck on me, tight and close as my own skin. There was deadquiet, inside and out.

‘What has you done to him?’ she whispered, dropping off me like a spider.

I fetched the torch. We knelt over Dorrin. He was grey-faced and still.

His body looked small and sad.

‘You is some kind of monster!’ Ginny said.

‘He was going for me,’ I said. But she was right.

There was some monster hiding in me. I’d wanted with all my heart to hurt him. I’d wanted to break his bones, and hear the snap. I’d wanted to show him who was special and who wasn’t; to show him who was regular and who wasn’t. Now I couldn’t tell who was what and who wasn’t, and I didn’t care. I just wanted him to sit up and insult me.

He groaned and I put my hand to him.

Now I wanted to save him, not thump him anymore.

‘Why doesn’t he just go back to that place?’ I said to Ginny. ‘That bettermost place.’

‘He can’t,’ she said, kneeling by him and patting his face. ‘The drags aren’t right.’

Dorrin opened his eyes and blinked and she took his hand. ‘They’re never right for taking us home, are they Dorrie?’

He shook his head.

The dark blood smeared across his brow and stuck his eyelids together. All my rages had lifted and now it was like somebody else had done this thing to him. We helped him sit and leaned him against the cool earth of his greenplot banks. He rubbed the blood from his eyes and felt around his chin and ears, careful-like as if they might not be there; then he blew a stream of red and black out of his nose. It fell on the brown earth and glittered there in the new moonlight. They both looked like they’d never seen blood before.

I’d seen the beating of my brother, however. I knew how much blood could come from one small person.

Ginny bundled up a pile of herbs and dabbed at his face.

‘Why is you here, offlander?’ Dorrin said again, letting her dab and wipe.

It seemed the only thing he knew how to say to me.

Now, though, it didn’t seem an unfriendly or unreasonable question. It seemed full of good sense. A person should know why they do things, why they go places, why they stay or leave. The moon rose behind Carrick, and lit on us.

‘Well, I suppose I had to see about my brother,’ I told him and I didn’t know why I hadn’t just said it before. ‘I didn’t believe him, see. I thought he was just whittering again. Then I saw you lot in the Croft. There was a coracle right there. The drags did the rest.’

‘Oh,’ he said and nodded. ‘The drags. They’ve a lot to answer for,’ and that was that. He was content.

Me and the dwindles gathered ourselves and made for the upward path. I stopped at the monsters’ ridge and looked once over the sea to Carrick. Across the water, over the bog, through the mist-bands, I felt Pa looking back. I felt his warm, dark eyes on me. I felt them like a pair of quarrying foxes in a dark-moon thicket, looking for me. Hunting me.

‘Won’t your people be missing you?’ Ginny asked then.

‘Yes,’ I said, and couldn’t say anymore about that. ‘But I had to get out here, see. Before you disappeared again.’

Ginny and Dorrin swapped sidewise looks.

‘You lot just can’t help yourselves, can you?’ sniggered Ginny. ‘You thinks everything is all about you.’

‘We doesn’t disappear,’ said Dorrin. ‘You does.’

AS WE CLIMBED THE UPWARD PATH from Dorrin’s plots I heard the singing. It was the voice I’d heard across the water and through the great sea-fog. A clear, uprising voice cutting the night and filling me with some familiar warm stir. Just for one moment, down inside its nest of gristle and sinew, my heart ruffled. It was like some small bird on the edge, trying out its wings.

It was like something.

It was like happiness.

It was there, and then it was flown.

Up on the monsters’ ridge, in a half-circle lit about with yellow torches, they sprawled or hugged themselves outside their cavey snugs in the cooling dark. They each sat apart — except for the twins who had no choice in the matter — and their thoughts were all turned inward. Corr was back in the murk with only his shanks stretching out into the dim torchlight like fall’s long shadows. Pedder held the lolling body of his unsteady brother tight, and they swayed, songclad and moony. Cowel dribbled and hummed and watched me with his eyes like the whale.

It was Onnor that was singing, sat on a stone-seat at the top of the upward path. Her song swooped and circled in the sky, and struck out for other shores. Each of her four hands, and some of her three feet, too, flowed about her. They seemed some part of the singing, catching and shaping its tones and letting it fly again. The rest of her was still as a spider, except for her swaying hair.

What with all her sighings when she’d had to talk, I confess I’d thought her somewhat bloodless and feeble. And as I came up the path she did fade somewhat. She slipped from the stone-seat and scuttled back into her own shadowed threshold. But she was a changed thing to me now. The voice that’d come out of her hadn’t been bloodless. It’d been a living thing.

Caly rocked, cosseting Mungo, holding him so close to her that I couldn’t tell where she finished and he started. Just behind her neck and spreading down her shoulder, a terrible wen had risen, pink, wrinkled. She looked like some cat-shaped lump had grown there under her fur, and then been deftly shaved. But it was just a cat, and entirely hairless. It was like seeing something folk aren’t meant to; a naked grandmother, or the insides of a person. I didn’t know where to look. It stared at me in the way of all cats. Smirky. Like you’re nothing to them.

‘This is Higgs,’ Caly said. She made mouths at it and cooed into its wrinkled-up face. ‘Aren’t you, my tigerling?’ The cat yawned and turned around with its tail straight-up like a sapling, before settling down again with its back to us. Caly laughed.

‘I has told her and told her,’ she said. ‘But Higgs do not believe in manners.’

Ginny and Dorrin took one of my hands each and dragged me into the middle of the stone ledge, into the yellow wavery light. I looked down and they were both looking up at me like I was the hen on the shore all over again. I tried to pull my hands gently from them but they gripped tighter.

‘Fermion’s in with me tonight,’ said Ginny, snugging my arm. ‘We is sleeping in the summerbeds. Aren’t we, Fermion?’

She shook my hand right up my arm.

‘Why you?’ said Dorrin, and he tugged my arm just about out of my socket. ‘She can sleep just as good in with me.’

Ginny snorted and covered her mouth. ‘What is you saying, you rude man. She are a
girl
!’

Dorrin pulled himself up to his full height. ‘What is
you
saying, bile-sprite,’ he spat. ‘You has got such a nasty brain. How you lives with yourself, with all that Nasty sludging you up in there—’ He was his old high-toned self again.

‘I is not a bile-sprite, you great dollop,’ said Ginny in the tones I’d heard just before she went at me, down in the greenplots.

‘You sleep in with me, and you is a girl, I spose,’ Dorrin growled.

‘Yes, but I is only me,’ said Ginny, as if it that made the whole thing plain.

They stood there glaring at each other. Dorrin’s face went strange hues of white and red, and Ginny’s started to droop and tremble. Neither would back down, nor would they let me go.

‘I think she should sleep in with Cara tonight,’ said Corr, raising himself with cracks that echoed the length of his backbones and right around the ledge. ‘She can tell Miss Quirk the story.’

The dwindles let me go and Dorrin sloped off into the dark of his own snug. Straight-up Ginny followed him, all whimper and
Don’t go, don’t go; wait for Me.

‘I doesn’t know whether I remember it right,’ said Cara’s voice from somewhere in the rock-wall.

Corr brought a torch to the stone and there lay Cara in her summerbed.

The wall was cleft in a little vault, open to the breezes, and she was tucked-up in there like some eaveswarbler. Her body rested on reeds and feathers. She was all paunch and middle, and covered in soft red wool. I wanted to pick her up and cosset her but in spite of her child’s body she had the eyes of a grown woman, and a not very happy one at that.

I felt somewhat scolded and sheepish, though I’d done nothing but tell her what was true.

She lay looking out at me, and her face was no longer the untroubled face I’d seen on the shore. I felt sorry I’d brought such a change to her, and I didn’t know what I was going to do about it. I wished she’d just forget what I’d said about her mother, but I had to confess that was about as likely as talking birds had been.

I looked up the tower of the mount. As far up as I could see, the whole wall was marked with the shadows of the monsters’ summerbeds. Caly was helping Pedder and Cowel step up into theirs, and Onnor had already gone crabwise into her own.

‘Climb in then, Miss Quirk,’ Cara said, miserable.

‘Just tell it as you remembers it,’ Corr told her, making a hand-step for me. ‘And it will all come right in the end. It always do.’

I stepped into his clasped hands and scrambled up into the rock. It was cool in there, sweet-smelling from sage and balm. Cara made room by wriggling further back into the cleft and I laid myself down by her. She lay there for a moment staring at the stone above our heads, and her face was the face of Mungo the time Pa clouted him. I saw all her calm and trust baffled.

She looked like she’d like to fly away from me.

‘I’m sorry I fretted you,’ I said. ‘I never meant to.’

Cara turned, forgiving me straight-up as you could see she always would. You could see it wasn’t in her to hold grudges. But though I hadn’t meant to hurt her so badly, I had and there was no taking it back. There was more going on here than I understood. I could feel it in my waters. The tears prickled my eyes and ached in my throat, but all I could do for her now was shut my gob. So I did that.

‘This is the first place of the world,’ Cara started, closing her eyes. ‘Before this place, there was no place. Nothing. Even the places where the places would be, were not. All was as inside a closed fist.’