Ghostheart (7 page)

So, in the long twilight of the following day we swayed along the bodgeways into willow country where moonworts glow in the sod and every step bothers some small creature into showing itself. You can’t really call it
ground,
what the bodgeways pass over. It’s really just a skim of water over black mud. Up there the trees stretch out of the slime on reaching footings. Their bark folds like skin, they huddle together and they sound like a whispering choir. That’s where the speckle-moths live.

Speckle-moths are a pet lesson of my mother’s.

Or they used to be, before Boson.

Speckle-moths only live in dappled thickets. Their speckling is like light falling through trees, falling on the thicket floor in a mess of gold and black. As you walk through, the moths flutter up and beat in your hair and crawl down your neck. If you stand still long enough they will try to settle in the folds of your body.

When they do settle you can’t see them. They are speckled like the thicket and they disappear into it. Then the birds can’t find them to eat.

Sometimes, though, there’s a moth born who is speckled otherwise. Maybe it has red wing-spots, or a blue head, or maybe no specks at all. Those otherwise moths can’t find a hide in the thicket and so the birds eat them.

Moo says God made it this way. He made it so every good, true creature was fitted to its home-place. When I first heard about them I wondered why God let the otherwise moths be born at all. It seemed a cruel sort of thing to me. Moo said they were born to be lessons for the rest of us. It’s not for us to stand out in the world, and to learn from the monstrous unspeckled speckle-moths what happens to those who do.

Pa and me reached the end of the home-thicket and queached out into the twilight bog. As we stepped into the late light, we were whelmed in waves of bog-bean, sweet and strong. We stopped and stood like Mungo scenting the hare.

There was a heavy stream in the air; a stream of figs and pears, a stream of honey, a stream of hopefulness. It smelt of a good night coming on. Me and Pa both felt it at the same time. Pa only stopped to take the hedge-pig from our snare set at the thicket edge, then he took off into the rolling bog. I followed him.

We ran like hounds, panting over all the red and green and blue spreading before us. We went lightfooted across the fancy-work bog-moss with the mountains pinking up nicely just beyond. Pa was soon far ahead. I watched him running like he was a boy, like he wasn’t worried about falling. Like he would keep right on running.

I felt of a sudden to be a frightful small thing beetling about in the huge moaney.

‘Wait for me,’ I called to him. He didn’t. Maybe he wanted to get away awhile.

‘
What are you going to do about it?’
said the inside-voice in a small sulky tone.

‘Leave me alone,’ I told it and took off again, running harder, closing in on my father. I wanted to leave that voice far behind.

Pa leapt back onto the bodgeway. He looked over his shoulder, his face lightclad. There was a shiny forgetfulness about him that frighted me. He looked like he was happy.

And there was another thing. We weren’t alone. That lost crane was there too.

It was right out of the thicket this time; the only thing to be holding its own colours in the changeable twilight. It was black and white.

I wondered if it was following me.

The crane was standing on one leg just as Boson used to. I saw him in my mind-eye doing just that. He was standing with his manky hair like feathers down his back, knobbled knees like that bird’s, one leg tucked up under his arse.

‘
Don’t say arse anymore
,’ said the inside-voice.

‘I didn’t say it,’ I thought back at it straight-up. ‘I only thought it. Anyway, what’s it to you?’

‘
Moo doesn’t like the language
,’ it said.

‘Well, that’s true. She doesn’t like any of it anymore,’ I said under my breath. It was hard to talk with somebody inside your own head and keep it quiet from those outside it. Thinking my talk gave me a head-ague. I had to speak my words into the world. But the trouble with that was then other folk could hear.

‘
Stop being so smart
,’ it went on. ‘
You didn’t used to be like this.’

‘How do you know what I was like?’ I asked, somewhat stung. I’m not soft to folks and their teases, but what do you do if all the bile-talk is coming from inside your own head? ‘Who are you anyway?’

‘
I know you, Fermion Quirk,
’ said the voice. ‘
You and me have business.
Do you still have the book?’

Only us Quirks knew about the book of beasts. My heart filled to its core. I felt myself drift into stormy fogs.

‘Boson?’ I whispered.

‘
Well, what are you going to do
?’ the voice said again.

‘Fermion?’ Pa’s voice cut through the storm in my head, and the light dwindled to regular.

The crane picked its way back into the dappled thickets.

I turned to see my father’s eyes hidden in folds of questions.

‘All right there?’ is the only one he asked.

I nodded.

‘Faraway,’ I said. Pa sighed. He was relieved I wasn’t talking to the crane. I could tell.

We reached the cut after dark and before moonrise. Pa said we could have planned that better and set himself to kindle a flame, but I wasn’t bothered. I’m not frighted of the dark like some folk. By the end of some of the days we’ve had this summer, I was aching for the dark.

Moo always says it’s wilful and unwomanly for me not to be frighted, but Pa says that’s because she comes from Merton. Those townfolk are able to hold to all that rigmarole due to being crammed in together with lights and warmth and other folk just a few steps from their own thresholds. How would it be, he says, if the Quirks had been frighted of things that can’t be helped, like night?

Pa and me lit the fire. The moon rose soon after and the night came bright and still. We rolled our hedge-pig in the flames, and threw handfuls of nuts into the embers to get them good and smoky. The sky was dabbled with stars, and my belly full of hedge-pig. My teeth cracked the smoky hazels, and my mouth filled with a kind of content.

Then we laid ourselves back under the deep spread of night sky. The stars looked to be lamps, flickering faraway and all around. Up here there’s more sky than anything else.

‘They’re like little suns,’ I said, holding up my hands in a circle and squinting to look up through it. One bright star gleamed in the black circle of my hands. It made me sad.

‘They’re too small to be like the sun,’ said Pa. He built up the turf up over the embers and coughed. ‘Actually, they’re holes in the floor of Heaven.’

This was what Moo had told us when Boson and I had been children.

‘I thought Heaven was
perfect
,’ I said, smirky-like.

Pa was baffled. I often baffled him lately. I liked it.

‘If the floor of Heaven has holes, see,’ I pointed out slowly and clearly, like he was an Ancient-one or a baby. ‘It can hardly be perfect, can it?’

I threw the last hazels into my mouth and crunched at them loud and lip-smacking.

‘
Heishan!
’ said Pa but he was smiling. ‘Maybe that is what’s perfect in Heaven, brain-ague! If you didn’t have the holes, you wouldn’t have the stars.
See
.’

Plainly, a bit of the humour from the twilight bog still hung about us. I watched the glow off the turf, the glow off the stars. I watched the glow off the moon.

‘Where do you think he’s gone?’ I asked Pa at last.

My father pretended to be sleeping. His chest rose and fell, and he made that noise like a bellows. We commonly let him be when he did that.

‘Do you think he went out there?’

‘Where?’ said Pa.

‘That Dead-isle,’ I said.

He sighed and rolled onto his back. ‘Do you think he was the sort to go there?’ he asked me. Like I might really know.

I shrugged. ‘What is it, that island?’ I sat up, wideawake of a sudden. ‘Why doesn’t it just stay put? What’s it for? Do folk live out there? Why doesn’t anybody go out to see? What is it?’

‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Pa with a big sigh. ‘But I know what it isn’t. It isn’t safe, it isn’t natural, and it isn’t somewhere I’d want to go. Those who have gone and come back, say when you get out there, there’s nothing.’

‘But there must be something,’ I insisted.

‘Look, I’ll tell you what’s really something,’ he said. ‘And that’s the sea-journey you’d need to take to get out there. That island is nothing to the waters that lie between us and it. The sea is not tame, Fermion, and it’s brimful with wild things that’d have you in one easy gobful.’

He seemed to think that would do it, and he yawned and snugged himself down into his sheep-bag. I just folded my arms and looked at him quiet-like until he started shifting and itching. He can’t bide being stared at.

‘That sea is full of tricks and various deaths,’ he went on from inside the sheep-bag. ‘If the kelp doesn’t strangle you, the merrow-men will have the skin off you. They say some of the younger ones have taken to filing their teeth to razors, the more personally to do the flaying, and that their maids have armed themselves with sea-squirts that can blind a man with the horrible stuff they carry in them.

‘If you manage the merrows, you’ll have to sail through the drag-waters of the kraken. His whirlpool can open at any moment, and then down you’ll fall into his crouch-pit. He is a master of patience and will wait as long as you like for a meal. And he is compassed by his followers, sea-things of such monstrousness that one look can kill you.’

His voice rose hard and he sat up.

‘There’s no point looking at me like that. It’s true,’ he said. ‘They have the eyes of death in their heads; they shoot every distemper and flux and once you’re struck, then it’s quicksmart with all the other nasty things. Plagues follow the first shot through the wound and pool in your flesh. You’re for it before you even reach the middle of that little bit of water between the islands.

‘Then, if you’re lucky and you do get through the middle, you want to pray to any god you choose that when you arrive the island is expecting you. Because if it’s not, if it doesn’t want you — it just disappears again. It goes back wherever it came from and leaves you drifting there. There’s no coming back.’

‘How do the fishermen come back, then?’ I said.

‘Those sea-folk who’ve come back have secret knowledge of sea-going particulars,’ he said, and added in case I hadn’t taken his point, ‘Quirks are not sea-going folk. We do not go to sea.’

I didn’t want to pain him so I didn’t say it but I thought, well, Boson was bog-folk. Secret knowledge of bog-going particulars didn’t save him. He died in his own bog, only a walk from his own threshold.

The night was coming damp now, and snaky mist-ribbons were invading the cut-camp. One icy lip-pincher forced us to snug right down into the sheep-bag. I kept my eyes above the wool, watching the creep of fogs around the banks. All the things I didn’t know hung about me. All the things I couldn’t remember.

‘Was he always like that?’ I asked Pa.

‘Don’t you remember?’ Pa asked me.

I shook my head.

‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Pa and he seemed done-in of a sudden. ‘He wasn’t always like that.’

He turned his back and pretended to be sleeping again, and I knew enough this time to let him pretend.

FROM THE TIME PA BROUGHT BOSON home tucked whittering in his winter cloak, nothing had been any good. I was the first to see he was changed. We lay in the bed we’d shared since being born, and night after night I’d watch my brother not sleep. He gave up on blinking and I made myself grit-eyed trying to catch him doing so. His eyes were like tunnels with a person at each end; a shrinking person, fading and waving.

By spring he was walking the nights. Walking the yard, walking the mires. Sometimes something lit on me in my sleep, and I’d wake to find him sitting on the bed watching me.

‘Fermion,’ he’d say as soon as he saw my eyelids move, and then he’d go on saying it until I sat up and faced him. ‘
Fermion, Fermion, Fermion
—’

‘What?’ I’d ask. ‘
What? What? What?’

One night he said, ‘Fer, I had a dream’.

‘Tell me,’ I said.

‘I dreamed I was just pretending to be a turfcutter’s son. I lived in a stolchy, stinking place and the birds there were all rageful. They were roosting all over, and everywhere I went they were screaming at me to stop it.
Stop it
.’ He tapped his brow over and over with his forefinger and dwindled to a mutter.

‘Stop what?’ I asked him.

‘Stop pretending,’ he said like I should know. ‘Stop pretending not to know.’

‘Know what?’

‘What I know,’ he whispered.

I told him it was only a dream. I told him he’d eaten too much and it was boiling his brain. I told him he was just maudlin again from growing up. He didn’t even blink.

He climbed into my parent’s bed, covered as much of himself as he could manage in Moo’s hair, and he lay there trembling all night. I watched him curve into Moo, displacing Gilpin who just rolled over them both and lay spread out across Pa. Through it all they stayed sleeping. I learned to sleep alone.

By fall he had sickened to a twig with knothole eyes.

It was the end of Moo and me together at home.

It was up the cut for me.

My mother darned Boson’s old hose for me, and she stitched me a calf-hide cloak just like Pa’s. It came to my feet and still dragged its tails behind as I went about the hearth. Moo and me didn’t know then that this was to be my life, so we made fun of my turnout as I thumped about being a boy, demanding grub and pretending to know everything. On my first day she bound my feet in rags so thick I couldn’t feel the earth under them. I kept falling and had to unwrap them before I even reached the skybog.

Pa said not to fret, the clay would be our shoes. He was right.

I learned to work the cut sleet-skinned in the panting cold when to breathe is to send out icelings. I worked through the swoony heat, and even the earthshakes that brought clods raining down on us and had us on our backs in the pit. My feet rotted in the standing water and sometimes there were toads but I just kept working.