Ghostheart (2 page)

All through the night he died, my brother’s hound, Mungo, lay out with him. His silver fur was matted, his head wrung with black rush and one of his teeth was gone entirely. He’d plainly been trying to haul Boson out of that hole. When I found them, they were blackly compassed about with ravens. On just about every bough of the drooping willows, glossy feathers stirred and icy eyes blinked; knowing blinks like men just pretending to be birds.

And at first I thought they were both dead. Then Mungo whined and kicked his hind legs and rose up. Full of shock, I laughed. Boson’s hound gave me such a look, I stopped straight-up.

I knew what he was thinking.

He was thinking, where was I when my brother fell into that rank mud-bottom hollow. He was thinking I should have made him come away. I should have made him come away from the town, away from the nesting-rocks, away down the Homeward and safe to his bed.

Mungo had seen how I pinched him sometimes to make him come home with me. He’d heard the things I said to him when I was sent to fetch him home. He was thinking maybe I never really liked him.

After we brought him home Moo brooded by my brother’s body. She peeled his bloody clothing from him and burnt it. She bathed his mudclad skin and laid him out before the fire. All the while she talked to him in whispers. I don’t know what she was saying.

At last she sat by him and rocked, covering her face with her apron.

I wanted to sit by Boson myself, with my hand on Mungo’s soft head, and be left alone. I’d been lopped somehow. But there was no room for me by the body.

And there was something else too.

Now my brother had gone I didn’t know what to feel. He used to do all that for us. He’d had time for such things. I was too busy looking after him.

Pa crashed about like the house was too small for him. Like there was nowhere, anywhere, big and strong enough to hold what was in him. He put his fist into the wall. He scraped his brow on the stones until the blood came. He trembled over the shrunken thing that had been my brother, still shedding its brown muck from the pallet like the turf stacks shed their water.

Somebody had been at my brother with a careless blade and over his heart a wound opened in the shape of a ragged cross. My father traced the wound with his finger. I saw his heart crack like a nut.

‘If I ever get my fists on them who did this!’ His voice rose from regular to bellowing tones in one wave. His eyes were wild in their wiry nests. He was wax-faced and blood-eyed.

Gilpin ran to Moo and hid in her skirt.

‘Too loooouud,’ he wailed with his hands over his ears but Moo didn’t even drop her apron; she just rocked and rocked.

‘They’ll be made strangers to their own faces!’ Pa told me like I was somebody else. ‘Their own mothers won’t know them.’

I didn’t know what to say.

Moo looked over her apron with hot, sunken eyes.

‘Maybe their own mothers don’t know them already,’ she said in a fading sort of tone. ‘Offspring are tricky.’

‘Scrofulous,’ shouted Pa. ‘Pizzle-twangs! Maggoty and hag-ridden and—’ He sat and his face sort of fell inward like an unexpected sinkhole. He strained at a half-smile for my sake and my heart upswelled to him. I saw his big, scarred hands hanging feebled in his lap like they had never swung the scraw or hefted the stacks. His knuckles bled from thumping the wall. I gave him a cloth. The moaney winds swarmed around our place, singing the wide bog and trying to tear the stone and wood apart.

I nodded at the door, battering in its frame. ‘Shouldn’t we unlatch it to let him leave?’ I asked.

‘Maybe I don’t want him to leave,’ said Moo.

ON THE DAY OF BOSON’S BURYING, after the others had gone home, I lay pressed into the fresh-turned ground and wondered what other unknown things lay beneath me in this sog. Black beetles I could see, heaving through the moss, and if I dug I’d find any amount of fine slough-worms. Deeper than the worms I’d find the gembugs, tiny as river-pearls and living always stuck onto spreading slime-roots, glimmering in the dark for nobody.

My bones ached.

It was cold.

I was wet.

I rose from the mound of my brother’s grave. The sudden storms had passed and just a few wind-ribbons still trailed about Redcliff. It seemed a crumpled new world of a sudden. The faraway gulls sounded like some mob mourning. How could the sea still glitter like that? How could the sun shine?

I would run Redcliff to dry-out, warm-up and stop brooding. I knelt to put my mark by the Croftward and as I did I saw that lost reedswamp crane again. It had been wandering the moaney for days, looking for its way back home. It watched me with its mindless face, spreading its wings that opened broad as sails, and I turned away from it and ran.

Below the Cliffward the boomers rolled and broke. Beyond the boomers the kelp forests darkened. Beyond that, where the sky and water meet, rose the other island. Below me a small figure in black paced the waterline, and sometimes it settled with its hands shading its eyes as if hunting the sea for something.

It was a woman wrapped in shawls and carrying a broad hat. She sat down, still on the pebbly shore. She sat still for so long the sea-birds regrouped like she was just another one of the rocks. I’d never seen a living thing so still.

At the stone steps down into Strangers’ Croft I stopped to rest.

Streams flowed all about. The island was drooped like a wet cat. The raindrops had formed-up and become ripples, then brooks, then streams. Gathered altogether now, the water was dropping in silver sheets straight down into the dark ruin below.

The woman on the shore was fussing at her shawls. It was the old one, Lily Fell from Shipton-Cronk who takes our turf and pays us with wool. Halfway down the steps I called out to her and she waved back without even looking. I went down the steps like the rain, without a thought of not going.

A good strong rain brings clean water to the sinks and the rivers. Lost fishes wander into the marshes where we catch them with just our hands. Skylarks start up with rushes of song, otters bark again by the Blackwater and all of a sudden, there’s new greens at home, snipe and redshank out in the reedswamps, and frogs and bog-turtles all through the hummocks. Everything that’s gone away comes back. Pa says the rain shows us the truth of our country, and it’s good for folk to know the truth of their country.

A dried-out bog, now, is a whole other thing. It springs back as you walk and feels safe, but the crust can break under the load of you and when it does, you go straight down to your knees. Then knuckle-by-knuckle, slow enough to think about it as you go, you sink into the stinking clutch of the quaking-mire.

The truth is Quirks live in high-water country where earth flows and water stands still. Where water breathes fogs and fogs drip water. Where a body can be drowned just like that in dirt and duckwort.

Strangers’ Croft’s crumbling steps still led down safe enough right into the shadow-tumble cobbles of the old town. What was left of that ruined place was crumbling, and the old breakwater letting the sea in. Everybody said the Croft was lately suffering a low-to-middling infestation of ghosts. People heard them pattering about down there in the night. Though, why a ghost would be pattering anywhere was beyond me.

It made you somewhat jumpy. If I went by the Underway I might meet the Veiled-ones, covered crown-to-heel in their black cloths. If I took the Saltward I might meet with Moustaches, all six feet of him, with his head turbaned in at least a furlong of silk and his beard to his knees. And if I took Middlegate, that drowned and weedy low woman might draw aside her shrouds and show me her blue-faced baby. Plainly now, I wasn’t about to take any of those unquiet ways.

Instead I scuttled and stopped like a beetle, keeping to the wall-shadows, and shortly I broke into the twilight on the shore. There was Lily Fell, hunched over the hat that turned out to be a toy coracle. She’d woven its skeleton and stretched the hide tight. It rested sturdy on the pebbles, perfect and looking ready to sail the waves like a real boat. Just like the ones in Shipton’s harbour.

In the evening light her hair glowed in braids, its last red strands shining among the silver. The reddest tip dangled into the sea as she leaned forward, and her teeth, a marvel of the island, still glowed pearly in her old mouth.

‘They’re the last ones left,’ she said, giving me one of her sweet smiles over her shoulder. I thought she meant her teeth. I must’ve looked somewhat baffled because she shook her head.

‘The ghosts,’ she said, pointing back to the Croft. ‘The strangers all lived and died right in the Croft without leaving once. They didn’t believe in mixing.’

‘But who were they?’ I asked her.

‘Nobody knows anymore,’ shrugged Lily Fell. ‘But whoever they were, when they went they left their Dead-ones behind.’

‘Were they buried right?’ I asked. This is a reason for the dead up-and-walking, sometimes. Other reasons are loneliness and spite.

‘Well, they had their own ways with these things,’ she said. ‘So who knows?’

Lily Fell pulled the coracle toward her and started filling it with things from her shawl. Things wrapped in cloths, they were, small and precious. I could tell. Like traded glass she handled them; whatever she was doing, it was the very type of a secret.

Yet here she was, letting me see.

‘Mrs Fell?’ I said and my voice sounded too hard for that soft moment.

Her eyes sharpened but she kept to playing with her coracle and packages. ‘What?’ she asked.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, but it wasn’t. It was something.

‘So after the strangers went away,’ said Lily Fell. ‘Their left-behind ghosts start fussing, as you would. They start by making a lot of noise, and then they crawl up into Redcliff and fright the birds so that for months it was all you could do to come by one small egg. Nobody’s much bothered at first and the ghosts’ tricks are overlooked, until one day those ghosts get the deadly irrits. They’re sick of being alone, see, and they draw together all their wraithy trails and come right up and out of Strangers’ Croft.

‘They start by haunting the Southward. Sometimes it’s just a Mist Fellow or two. But other times it’s a clinging fog with its own face, and sometimes it’s a Dead-hand gripping at ankles on the paths. Then the ghosts gather themselves up into mobs of Following Sorrows. Their sobs and sighs follow some people all the way to their homes. They pass over folks’ thresholds, into their beds, and waylay them in their sleep.

‘And then they push it too far and the Father himself is accosted by a loose Wisp in Shipton-Cronk. A young and powerful man he was then, and full of his own fine self. Well, he’s just finished Mass when this windy little ghost gets all caught up in his robes and his hair, and up goes the Father, spinning and slapping at himself like he’s infested with fleas. Along the paths he kicks until the whole town has seen him and is laughing to split.’

She laughed but her face didn’t match her laughter. She looked more like somebody brave having a tooth pulled.

‘After that, the Father said he was through being pleasant while the whole island went hard to Hell. He said we were to go down altogether and expel those foreign ghosts. We would show a unified front, he said. For once.’

Lily Fell pushed the coracle from one hand to the other, back-and-forth a few times.

‘It sounded like a good idea,’ she said, and then sprang from her point like a breaking slane. ‘It wasn’t such a shock about your brother to me, you know. I knew your mother’s side and the male line was never quite regular. Not idiotic, you know, not wicked — not even sickly. Just not
regular
.’

She looked at me like I might know something about that, but nobody had ever mentioned irregular family to me. Not that they would.

Why would you want to talk about such people?

I felt my face shut up like a hinged box.

I could only think about my brother from a distance. From a distance he could be an idiot or a son-of-the-moon; from a distance but a different angle he could be a prophet and a Venerable. Right up close to him, though, he was just a mess of whittering and birdshit — and with my face, too.

He’d taken our face to town, into the market and the harbour, and he’d done and said such things as made folk stare at me slip-eyed and mutter. I’d learned to sit dumb as rock and deaf as bugs.

After a while longer I’d learned to hurl my mind-eye away.

Faraway. Into the clouds and out to where the sea and sky meet. Out there I could snug into the skytowers, see only my feet dangling, hear only the winds rushing. Faraway there was only the blue water spreading far below, my legs swinging above, between them just clouds and sea-birds.

Lily Fell saw that I had nothing to say.

‘Well, I’m sorry for your loss and tell your parents I said so, will you,’ she said, patting my hand, kind-sounding. Almost like a friend.

‘What about the ghosts?’ I said.

‘All right. So the Father is up to his dewlaps in it all,’ she went on. ‘He’s had enough of strangers and ghosts infesting the island like filthy sparrows. Enough of good people assaulted on the public ways by those as didn’t have the common-sense to lie quiet in proper graves. And more than enough of gods who left their very own Dead-ones rambling homeless all about the countryside.

‘In those days we were plaguey with signs. The moon would keep waxing red and Carrick was rocked in trembles until praying took up most of our time. Then one Sunday just after first bells, a flock of starlings comes, and it keeps on coming until the sky is black and we all have to go about with lamps. They pass over the island for the whole of that day without a gap in the blackness of them. Afterwards the earth underneath is all down and dung. Huddled together in the chapel and just about deaf from the din, we couldn’t pretend not to see what we were being plainly shown.

‘The towns were full of drunkenness, and the market was just a cheatery. It was a low time, entirely, and at the next Sunday’s sermon the Father said we were to spring-clean the home of our souls and not leave them to be scarred up in unholy wrigglework so they couldn’t go Home again.