The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Two - GHOST ROADS

by Christopher Golden

  Something very cold touched his shoulder, like ice running over his bare skin, and he turned to find the Captain standing behind him. Giles was afraid that if he looked closely into its face, he would completely lose control. So he turned on his heel and cut an old-fashioned bow, which was probably out of date even when the Dutchman had originally been commissioned, and a living captain and crew sailed her.

  “Captain, Everett Morris at your service,” Giles said. There was nothing to be gained by telling this creature his real name.

  Giles could feel the figure’s gaze on him. It was enough to make his knees wobble.

  “Welcome aboard, Rupert Giles,” it replied.

  “Ah.” Giles sighed. “I should have known better, sir, than to dissemble.”

  “Indeed.”

  The figure gestured for Giles to follow. It did not exactly float over the deck, but its strange, gliding gait was unlike that of any of the crew. It did not seem to be actually present, rather like a projection of something from somewhere else.

  It led Giles up the poop deck and waited regally while one of its dead sailors opened a large wooden door. Then it turned to go down a steep ladderway, gazing up at Giles and saying, “Custom aboard this vessel dictates that I lead the way.”

  “Of course, Captain.”

  Giles watched it descend. With every fiber of his being, he did not want to follow after. His mind was screaming at him to jump overboard and swim as fast as he could, no matter the illogic of flinging himself into the ocean far from shore.

  With supreme effort, he turned around and started down the ladder.

  The hatch above slammed shut, throwing him into utter darkness.

  He went down another rung.

  Something furry skittered over his hand, squeaking. Rat. Slowly he lowered himself to the next rung. He smelled something rotten, and his stomach rolled. He closed his mouth against his gag reaction, took a deep breath, and went down another rung.

  Mister Giles, it’s a long way down, the Captain said. It’s almost like going to Hell.

  “How delightful,” Giles bit off.

  He continued on, his muscles aching, his mouth dry as dust. After a time he felt disoriented, as the ship rocked and the ladder stretched for what seemed like forever. They couldn’t possibly still be inside the ship. Yet in the darkness, he had no idea where else he could be.

  He lowered his foot for the next rung, and touched something solid instead. Carefully, he lowered his other foot and stood on a hard surface.

  He held on to the ladder for a moment, getting his bearings.

  As he turned, a light gleamed dully at the end of what appeared to be a short corridor. The door was cracked open.

  He took a breath and tried to remember the lyrics to old sea songs he had learned in Boy Scouts. Everything had fled. He searched his memory for a few melodies, but all he could hear was the clattering of the bones as the three fresh bodies swayed from the yards.

  He walked down the corridor and pushed open the door. Inside, candlelight flickered, revealing a once-palatial cabin now covered with dust and draped with spiderwebs. The cabin ceiling flared toward the rear, leaving plenty of space for the rotted velvet canopy above a large, carved bed. A large leaded-glass window was propped open, admitting the sea breeze.

  On a table, which apparently had been recently cleared of maps and charts, now haphazardly piled at one end, two pewter tankards gleamed in the yellow light. Behind one of them, facing the door, sat the Captain.

  Giles made himself acknowledge the figure, trembling as he did so. It inclined its head in turn and gestured for Giles to be seated.

  Giles sat and picked up the tankard. There was liquid inside, giving off a smell that reminded him of the hot buttered rum one of the teachers had mixed for the faculty Christmas party.

  “Cheers,” Giles said, and sipped. He nearly choked; it was extremely potent, very heavy on the gin.

  The figure picked up its own tankard and raised it toward Giles. Then it drank in silence, draining the contents. With a contented sigh, it put the tankard down.

  Giles picked his up again. As he took another drink, he realized his thirst was becoming unmanageable This was only going to make it worse.

  “If I might,” he began, then started when a small, heavy glass appeared beside his right elbow. He sniffed the liquid and tasted it. It was water.

  “Thank you,” he said. He drank it greedily. As he began to put down the glass, it refilled. He drank that too. It refilled.

  “Well, that’s convenient,” he said.

  The Captain chuckled. There are compensations to being damned for all eternity.

  “I see,” Giles said. “Your glass is half full.”

  The Captain laughed delightedly. I have missed wit. I have missed companionship. Here, I am only feared.

  “One might venture to say that hanging anyone who comes aboard may have something to do with that,” Giles said boldly.

  The figure shrugged. Not all. Currently, three mortals including you draw breath upon this vessel.

  “I see,” Giles said, his heart skipping a beat. Who else besides Vinnie, he wondered. He would have to find them both.

  No need to concern yourself with them. They’ll die eventually, even if I do not kill them.

  “Indeed?”

  Flowers cannot grow in salt. Mortals cannot live aboard a ghost ship. The Captain leaned forward. You promised me some songs.

  “Yes, I did,” Giles said firmly, and to his surprise and great relief, an old British chantey sprang fullblown into his mind, about blowing winds and harpoons and all manner of nautical things.

  Excellent, said the specter, sitting back to listen. I knew you would not disappoint me.

  Giles smiled and sang.

  Screaming would have suited him far better.

  “Well, he’s not going poof, either,” Buffy said, as she, Oz, and Angel stood over dead Albert in the forest. She wanted very badly to bury him. They were starting to leave a trail of bodies. And frankly, it bothered her to think of him rotting here, all alone, after he’d turned to the good side of the force.

  “Let’s have a quick shovel detail,” she said.

  “Too bad we don’t actually have a shovel,” Oz said. “Maybe there’s something else in the van we could use.”

  As he turned to go, Albert’s body shifted on the ground. Buffy glanced at Angel. Maybe the man wasn’t dead after all

  “Albert?” she said softly.

  Then the body rose into the air as if someone had lifted it. It hovered just above their heads for a moment, then continued to rise. Blood dripped from the wounds like scattered raindrops.

  “Did that other guy do that?”

  Angel shrugged. “Not that I know of.”

  The body floated higher, out of sight.

  “Tell me that’s the way we all go to heaven,” Oz murmured.

  “I hope so.” Buffy looked up at the stars. “Rest in peace.”

  Angel replied stonily, “Somehow I doubt he will.”

  Giles was a hit.

  He was also fairly drunk, which made him an even bigger hit.

  The Captain had led him back to the main deck, where Giles had entertained the crew for what seemed like hours, never mind their agreement about spending one watch aboard the Dutchman. But Giles’s mind was on more than sea chanteys, grog, and his own life.

  He had seen where they kept Vinnie and a man who, by the looks of him, was some kind of dock worker. Chillingly, they were imprisoned in the galley, where Giles had been escorted when the Captain determined it was time to decant a very old bottle of port. The shadowy figure made a great show of opening a cabinet above several barrels of desiccated apples and extracting a flask coated with aged grime.

  On the other side of the cabinet, the two were literally caged in a lean-to made of planks and rope, and both had been gagged. The Captain made a comment about tiring of “the caterwauling.”

  When Giles walked into the galley, the
eyes of both prisoners bulged above their gags. Their wrists were bound in front of them very tightly, yet as they rushed forward they tried to push them through the slats. He tried to signal them to be quiet, his concern for them increasing as he watched them struggle to conceal their soaring hopes that this nightmare was over. For it was not over yet, and Giles wasn’t certain he could end it.

  Now, staggering from the effects of the stress and the drink, Giles lifted his voice in song yet again, leading the crew in a rousing rendition of “A Maid from Nantucket,” accompanied by a hellish accordion.

  The dead grouped around him as the wind picked up, rocking the ship and making the bones overhead clack furiously. Some sang in an eerie, empty monotone, as if their souls had been so consumed that the intangible beauty of music was lost to them. Others were slightly more lively, although Giles could detect no sense of good humor or particular enthusiasm, as if the best they could manage was a respite from suffering, rather than actually enjoying the moment.

  After a time, he began to feel rather like a desperate court jester playing to a crowd that would prefer an execution to a song and dance. But it was when he took the bottle of port and drank deeply of it that inspiration hit, for the Captain said, “Drink up, my lad. There’s more where that came from.”

  More. In the galley. Where the prisoners were.

  With grim determination, Giles polished off the bottle, then volunteered to get another bottle. The Captain consented, and Giles worked furiously to keep his thinking clear as he staggered into the galley, pretending to search for the bottle in the cabinet when in reality he flung himself against the cage and muttered, “I’ll get you out. Don’t panic. Have you seen a knife anywhere? Any kind of weapon?”

  His questions were answered by frantic gesturing by the two prisoners.

  Giles said again, “Don’t panic.”

  Vinnie Navarro shook his head and moaned through his gag.

  Slowly Giles turned around, the galley spinning as he did so.

  The Captain stood in the doorway, its blank face shadowed. Its stance spoke volumes about its fury.

  “I should have known,” was all it said. “Ye’ll be walking the plank, then, Rupert Giles. And our big ugly lady shall have you for her supper. ‘Tis a shame, too. Ye’ve got a wonderful ear for music.”

  The Captain laughed at that.

  Chapter 9

  WILLOW THOUGHT SHE WOULD NEVER MAKE IT through the school day. When she finally got to her room, she collapsed in a heap and nodded off almost immediately.

  In her dream, the Ghost of College Applications Past Due sat at the foot of her bed. He was very sad because she had missed the cutoff date . . . because there were no nice Jewish boys at his college . . . because she was missing so much school that her conditional status at Bryn Mawr was being revoked . . .

  “Little Willow.”

  Her eyes flickered open.

  “Spellcaster, awaken now, for you are needed.”

  She bolted upright to find a man in her room, sitting at the edge of the bed. He was an old man, stooped and shaking, and at first she wasn’t sure he was really there.

  “Um,” she said.

  “Jean-Marc Regnier,” he said, stooping lower. Bowing, she realized.

  “The Gatekeeper?” Of all of them, Willow had never actually met the Gatekeeper. She stared in shock. He looked terrible. He looked like he was a thousand years old.

  “Not for much longer.” He smiled sadly.

  “They’re hurrying,” Willow earnestly assured him. “They’re trying really hard.”

  “I have a task for you, little Willow.” He wheezed, coughing. He seemed to dim. She blinked rapidly. Her heart was pounding. She’d seen a lot of weird things in her life, and this was not the weirdest, but it was the weirdest thing that had ever happened in her bedroom. So far.

  “Task, okay,” she said, sitting up. She looked worriedly at her door. “But please, um, with the coughing, my parents might hear you. No offense.”

  A smile flickered across his face, to be replaced by a look of such dead seriousness that she bit her lip.

  “A breach,” he said shakily, “of such immense proportions even I can scarcely imagine it.”

  “At Buffy’s house?” she asked shrilly, then remembered her own admonition and lowered her voice. “Where?”

  “In the sea. Beneath the surface. The Dutchman caused it.”

  “The what?”

  “The sailing ship. The Flying Dutchman. I bound her and her crew over a century ago. Now they are free, and my runestones tell me she has flown to your skies.” He sighed, looking defeated. “First the Kra ken, and then that infernal vessel. The breach is wide, and it is growing.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes got huge. “She flies?”

  Giles. Hang-gliding.

  “You must bind that breach. I will help you,” he said. “But it must be done at once. There’s no time to spare.”

  “But I need time to spare,” she said anxiously. “I need to find Giles. Buffy’s Watcher.”

  He shook his head. “Impossible,” he said. “You must get up from your bed and aid me. Now.”

  At the top of his lungs, Xander sang, “‘It never rains in Southern California!’”

  But, of course, it was raining.

  It wasn’t much, really—a light but persistent shower that had been coming down since early afternoon. They had waited in high anxiety for night to hide them. That would be dangerous enough for three unseasoned seafarers to go boating in. But with the unbelievable fog that seemed to have enveloped the entire town, what they were doing seemed something on the verge of suicide.

  With Willow and Cordelia in tow, Xander had sneaked back down to the wharf and retrieved the little red boat he had so conveniently borrowed and hidden away. They were in waters that had been declared off limits by the Coast Guard, at least for now. Their boat was tiny, in comparison to the fishing trawlers that had been torn apart by the Kraken already. But they didn’t have much choice. They had to find Giles. They had to seal the breach that the Gatekeeper had come to warn Willow about.

  “Hey, Will,” Xander said tentatively. “I just had a good thought. A happy. If the Gatekeeper was able to go walkabout and come see you, he must be feeling better, right?”

  Willow grimaced, and Xander wished he had never asked.

  “Not right,” Willow replied. “He’s still dying, Xand. It’s almost like he’s in this weird cycle now, powering up and then draining back down again.”

  She made a face. “Pretty soon, he won’t be able to power up anymore. Used to be, he would have come and closed this breach himself, instead of just giving me the pep talk and saying ‘yay, team.’ Yeah. Go, Willow, go, but if you don’t close this breach before it gets too big, we may not have to worry about the Sons of Entropy because, guess what, it’s gonna happen anyway.

  “Nothing like a little pressure to relieve the stress, right?”

  Cordelia patted Willow’s head lightly, smiled wanly, and said, “Yay, team.”

  Xander frowned at her. “Cor, you’re taking this rather well.”

  “I’m past the whole rational thought stage,” Cordelia said. “Monsterama overload. Wake me up when it’s over.”

  “Will do,” Xander replied. “But I wish you’d stop saying that to me.”

  Even Willow smiled at that one.

  The waves lapped at the sides of the boat. The rain fell even more lightly now, almost a mist, and Cordelia stopped complaining about being damp. After a while, Xander thought, even she seemed to realize there was little point.

  “This is bad,” Willow said, gazing around them into the nothingness, the ocean rocking the boat. “We’ve got to find the Flying Dutchman. I can bind the breach all right—at least, I think I can—but we can’t do that until we find Giles.”

  “So we find Giles. It may take a while, but . . .” Xander offered.

  Willow shook her head. “You haven’t been listening, Xander,” she snapped. “We don’t have
a while. The Gatekeeper said that if we can’t free Giles really fast, he and I will have to bind the breach anyway, or it’ll get too big. Giles will be trapped onboard the Flying Dutchman forever.”

  Xander didn’t have a snappy comeback for that one. Instead, he simply sat in the rear of the boat, using the tiller to steer and wiping the engine dry from time to time. He didn’t know a thing about boats, not really. But he suspected that keeping the condensation from the fog from building up on the outboard was a good idea. And if it didn’t matter, well, at least it gave him something to concentrate on besides, well, life.

  He was sitting in a boat off the coast of his hometown with two of the three women who made his emotional life a circus. Just being alone with them made him uncomfortable. But it seemed like things had been pretty much that way since Buffy had come into his life. It was only really through her that he came to realize, or at least, to admit to himself, that Willow cared for him.

  Xander loved Buffy, Buffy loved Angel, Willow loved Xander. Then Xander fell into whatever this was with Cordelia—not love, at least he didn’t think so—and Willow was in love with Oz. And that was how it was supposed to be, right? What the hell was wrong with the lot of them, that’s what he wanted to know.

  What was worse—and this was a question he had tried desperately not to consider—was that he had to wonder if this insanity would continue into adulthood. Or did people start to get some kind of handle on their emotions as they grew up? He was afraid he wouldn’t like the answer.

  Willow shivered, and without even thinking about it, Xander slipped out of his jacket and handed it to her. Gratefully, she accepted it and pulled it around her shoulders.

  “I’m cold, too, y’know,” Cordelia huffed.

  Xander raised an eyebrow. “And that’s new?”

  She rolled her eyes and moved closer to Willow, who seemed content to share her warmth. They went on like that for quite some time until, at long last, the fog seemed to disperse around them. It took Xander a moment to realize that he’d been mistaken. The fog was not going away. Rather, they had come to some kind of clearing in the fog, like the eye of a hurricane.