Thornghost

by Tone Almhjell

  Niklas rubbed his eyes. They still felt puffy from the smoke last night. He wanted to tell Grandma Alma about the fire, but he couldn’t, not without admitting he had been out late. “Slept badly,” he said into the fridge, where no quick and obvious breakfast appeared, just vegetables, white fish steeping in salt for dinner, and age-old marmalade.

  “Hm.” She granted him a small smile, the first since their conversation in the bird room. “As a very old lady, I feel I should tell you that grief is a natural part of life. So is guilt. There is no getting around them. But there is one thing that will ease the weight somewhat.”

  Niklas closed the fridge door. “Making amends?”

  “Oh sure, when that’s an option.” Grandma Alma slurped her tea. “Most often it’s not. I was going to say chocolate cake.”

  Niklas gaped at her. “For breakfast?”

  “It’s in the tin in the hallway. If anyone would like some.”

  The chocolate cake waited for him where she had promised, rippled on top and cut into generous squares. Grandma Alma must be feeling very sorry for him when she let him have this for breakfast. Not only did it not fit into her idea of what was good for a growing lad, she only ever made it for special occasions.

  She claimed this was because the secret ingredient cost so much, but Niklas and Lin had investigated the cupboards many times without ever finding anything fancy-looking. They suspected she said it to keep the legend strong. It was a well-known tale in Willodale, even among those who had never sampled it, that Alma Summerhill’s chocolate cake was the finest of the land.

  Niklas made no argument there. In the cool of the hallway the cake had set so he could eat it with his hands, no plate or spoon required, just dense mouthfuls of not-too-dark, frosting-covered magic. It had never tasted better.

  He finished six pieces, downed a glass of milk, and as usual, his grandmother was right. It did help a little. He felt almost ready for his first task of the day: acorns. His shirt pocket was all empty, but he had an idea where he could go to get more.

  • • •

  Niklas hadn’t been inside Morello House since the Rosenquists left.

  He took off his boots and climbed the stairs. Despite the decent summer, the timber walls felt raw against his fingers. The second floor seemed stuffy, as if all the loneliness had drifted up and gathered under the low ceiling.

  Lin’s room contained nothing but abandoned furniture. The desk where she used to draw her maps, the bed with star constellations on the headboard. But no casket, no papers, and sadly, no acorns. She had taken the troll-hunting gear with her to the city.

  It took him a while to find the exception: a piece of paper that had slipped behind Lin’s desk. It was an unfinished sketch of a Summerhill map that had been smudged by a teacup before she could finish it. Oak Bridge was marked in green on the map, as were the two other oak trees in the valley, both on the western edge of the Summerhill lands. But those two trees had caught the oak blight last June and had to be chopped down. He hadn’t thought much of it back then, but he wondered now if the trolls were behind it. If they could set a tree on fire with nothing but a carved rock, maybe they could give it oak blight, too?

  Niklas sat down on the bed. If Lin had been here, he would have climbed the morello tree and knocked on her window last night, to tell her about the impossible things that were going on. Or even signaled from his windowsill, because they did have a code for this: Two blinks meant danger, troll nearby.

  But she wasn’t.

  He should call her. The last time they spoke on the phone, everything had been so weird. Lin sounded curt and distant, as if she had all sorts of secrets and worries she wouldn’t share with him. Niklas just wasn’t very good at phone conversations, or writing, for that matter. It would be different if they could just meet in person.

  He had been invited to come visit last winter, had even bought a ticket. But the day he was supposed to leave, Grandma Alma’s cold had turned into pneumonia, and Uncle Anders had to take her to the hospital in Willomouth, and Niklas had to stay and take care of the cattle. He had stood at the bottom of the snow-covered netherfield and watched the bus pass by without stopping, as always. The Rosenquists hadn’t invited him again.

  Still, he should call.

  On his way back through the hallway, he passed by Anne Rosenquist’s study. The door stood ajar and he peeked in at a tape player and a set of boxes. Lin’s mother collected old songs. That was how she and Uncle Anders had become friends all those years ago. She liked recording and playing the old way, so she had thousands of taped songs, all labeled and contained in boxes just like that. Apparently she hadn’t taken them all.

  Something Uncle Anders had said suddenly struck him. We made a tape of it, but I don’t know where she put it. Niklas had been too rattled to think clearly, so he had thought Uncle Anders meant Erika. But if anyone made and disposed of a tape, it wouldn’t be his mother. It would be Anne.

  Niklas sidled through the door and pulled out the three boxes. The first contained loose notes, copied down snippets of the Lindelin ballads. Lin was named for this medieval maiden, who always traveled into great danger and used her wit and magic to save every prince she met.

  It suited her well.

  He opened the second box and struck gold. Tapes. All of them were dated and labeled with place, musician, and songs.

  Except one, which simply said ERIKA.

  Niklas slapped his forehead. Anne Rosenquist had nearly told him about this tape last summer, while he was waiting for Lin to feed Rufus so they could go troll hunting. Anne had sat with him for a moment, looking out on the morello garden where Uncle Anders was watering the strawberries.

  “So, you’re Summerknight,” she had said, which had annoyed Niklas a little. No one was supposed to know about the code names, least of all a grown-up. Anne must have seen it on one of Lin’s maps. He had nodded anyway.

  “It sounds like a proper knight’s name,” she had said. “Your mother would have liked that. She loved heroic songs, especially if they contained death and impossible tasks. Did you know she even wrote one herself?”

  She had smiled at him. “I actually have a . . .” And then she had stopped and looked over at Uncle Anders, and Niklas was sure she wished she could take it back. Lin had come out with Rufus concealed in her pocket, and that was the end of that. Later, both he and Lin had tried asking about it, but Anne had brushed them off. The week after, they left for the city.

  He bet his entire collection of comic books that she had been about to say “tape.” Had she left this here for him?

  He shoved it into the player and pushed the button.

  At first he heard only muffled voices, fuzzy laughter, a fiddle being tuned.

  Then the recorder must have been moved into a better position, because he heard Uncle Anders say, “You should sing it.” He sounded so different. Light, almost crisp. “I’ll play, if I can remember the tune.”

  “Yes, sing it,” Anne Rosenquist chimed in. “It ought to be preserved for future generations.”

  A third voice sounded, echoing from rooms at the very back of Niklas’s mind. “It’s not worth preserving,” said his mother. “It’s not traditional.”

  “Who cares,” Anne said. “Every legend begins somewhere. Why not with you?”

  Silence followed, and through the scratchy, wheezy filter of the tape, Niklas could almost hear them hold their breaths. Then his mother said, “Because it didn’t.”

  But she sang anyway.

  Wake now, little rose,

  The night grows dark and old.

  Your feet must find the trail tonight,

  To Sorrowdeep the cold.

  Wait now, little dog,

  Your voice will carry through.

  The key lies in her hand tonight,

  Sebastifer the true.

  Stay then,
ghost of thorns,

  If you can’t play the part.

  The key will lead you nowhere when

  It’s locked inside your heart.

  The recording ended.

  Ghost of thorns. Even if Grandma Alma insisted he had dreamt it, Niklas had always believed that the last word he heard his mother speak was Thornghost. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  His skin prickled, but he listened to the tape again, then jotted down the lyrics and tucked it away for evidence.

  The third box contained a framed photograph, taken in the yard. His mother with her white locks tossed back and an intense, uneasy look in her eyes. The dark twist of the Willodalers’ gossip, captured for anyone to see. And next to her a miniature building that Niklas knew well.

  The bird castle. Except it wasn’t mounted outside the east window, it sat on a workbench beneath the elm tree. The tower lacked its dome, and the drawbridge dangled by its chains, unfastened. But that was about to change, because in her hands Erika held a carving iron and a tiny screwdriver.

  His mother had made the castle. She was the unknown master carver.

  Niklas pried open the clips behind the frame and removed the cardboard. Anne Rosenquist had written something on the back of the photo.

  Erika and her nightmare castle.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A flock of sparrows fluttered up when Niklas turned the east corner of the main house, hauling a stepladder. The birds circled for a bit before settling on the roof to watch.

  “Sorry, guys,” Niklas said, tugging the ladder into position. “You’ll get your place back after. I just need to examine it first.”

  He had looked at the bird castle plenty of times. He often put crumbs and sunflower seeds inside the parapets of the walls, a task he did by leaning out of the bird room window with a slim, long-handled spade. But he never got truly close that way, and the angle meant he couldn’t see the whole castle properly.

  From the outside, there was always the danger of falling bird poop. “Don’t get any ideas, now,” he said up to the sparrows. They shuffled sideways on the eaves, making no promises.

  The grass beneath the castle wore a constant, filthy halo of droppings and husks. The castle itself did not, because Uncle Anders cleaned it every week. Niklas had always assumed he did it on Grandma Alma’s order. But he realized now it had nothing to do with having the finest birdfeeder in all of Willodale, and everything to do with the person who had created it. Uncle Anders couldn’t keep his shirt neat if he tried, but he would not allow so much as a breath of dust on Erika’s portraits, or a spot of lichen on her headstone.

  Up close, the castle almost took Niklas’s breath away. The doors had pinprick keyholes. The pillars were carved with miniature climbing roses. The wraparound balcony at the top of the tower had a toothpick-thin railing, and the drawbridge could be opened and closed with a tiny wrench hidden inside an archway in the courtyard. Niklas turned the handle. Hardly a squeak. Maybe Uncle Anders oiled the hinges, too.

  Nightmare castle, the photo had said. There was an unsettling edge to many of the details. The vines that crept up the tower walls bristled with sharp thorns. The roof tiles had ridges that made them look like fingernails. And the tall tower had a ring of windows behind which stood a lone figure.

  Niklas squinted through the opening. The figure had its back turned, but he thought it might be a man with a big cloak. He shifted his grip to see better, and the dome moved under his fingers. With a firm twist, it came off completely, flooding the tower chamber with light.

  A chorus of tiny screeches went up from the roof as the sparrows all took to the sky, flapping toward the barn in a chaotic cloud. Niklas took a shaky step down the ladder, heart thudding.

  The cloaked man was not a man at all: He had a bird skull for a head. The beak made him look like a plague doctor from Harald Rosenquist’s history books. He was not alone. Behind the billowing cloak stood a cage overgrown with roses. Trapped inside that cage was a child.

  The skull man reached for the cage with skeletal fingers that had been fitted to the wood. They looked nearly human, but Niklas guessed they had belonged to a field mouse. The child had no features except for shallow dents where the eyes and an open mouth would be.

  If his mother had dreamt this, Niklas knew who had given him his talent for nightmares. Sometimes he, too, dreamt of beaked skulls that pecked at his eyes. He thought of the photo and the skittish, pleading expression in his mother’s face and suddenly wondered what he looked like when he woke up in the middle of the night. He screwed the tower roof back on, hiding the skull-man and the child.

  Instead he examined the castle for more concealed surprises, tugging and pulling every ledge and part. At last he found something, trapped under a round flagstone in the courtyard. It bore a faint mark that resembled a thorn. When he turned it, the flagstone came loose to reveal a tiny dog, curled up like it was sleeping.

  Unlike the skull-man and the cage, this figurine could be removed. Niklas lifted it out and held it up in the sunlight. On the bottom, there was a name carved.

  Sebastifer.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Uncle Anders was gone.

  Niklas searched everywhere. The loft, the barn, the netherfield, and Dokka’s enclosure by the morello garden. He even went down to the graveyard, where Rag’s still unmarked grave made a brown scar outside the fence.

  He stalked the forest edge above the screaming stone, too, but Secret hadn’t come. Maybe she slept the day away somewhere in the shade.

  Finally he settled under the yard tree. As elm seeds rustled across the sunbaked dirt and the Summerchild sang in the east, he studied the scribbled notes of the lullaby, the photo of his mother, and the dog figurine. Just like Uncle Anders had said, Sebastifer looked like a true mutt with his floppy ears and curled-up tail. But he was so thin, like he was sick.

  It was late in the afternoon when his uncle came walking up the path from the hallowfield. Where had he been hiding? The shrubs around the graveyard were thorny and near impossible to pass through without getting cut. Niklas must have been too quick to look properly.

  Uncle Anders stopped in the middle of the yard, gazing up at the strip of clear sky between the snowy mountaintops. Niklas put his things back in the satchel and got up to join him, but someone beat him to it.

  Tobis came sauntering out from behind Morello House, making his way toward Uncle Anders like a cat king inspecting his lands. Uncle Anders stooped down to stroke him, and Tobis rolled over to show his big belly, smirking and wiggling.

  “So that’s your game today?” said his uncle. “Trying to trick me into rubbing your belly so you can bite my hand? You won’t fool me, old friend.” He scratched Tobis’s head instead until the cat waddled off to the barn to stalk a mouse hole. Uncle Anders chuckled as he watched him go.

  His grin looked so different from the sobbing mask he had worn in the bird room yesterday that Niklas leaned back against the elm tree. He couldn’t talk to his uncle about this now, not when he was having a good day. There was someone else he should be confronting anyway, and he had wasted a whole afternoon putting it off.

  It wouldn’t do to be a coward.

  He left Uncle Anders in the yard and hurried up the front steps.

  • • •

  He found her in the cupboard, a tiny room that used to be a pantry at the back of the kitchen, but which now served as Grandma Alma’s bedchamber since she felt too poorly to climb the stairs anymore.

  Under the window, Uncle Anders had fitted a bed. It would be too short for most grown-ups, but for Grandma Alma, it was just right. She lay propped up by thick pillows, papery lids closed over restless eyes.

  At the creak of the door, they opened. “There you are. I was just waiting for someone young and able to come wake me.”

  “At your service.” Niklas eased her forward, searching h
er face as he slipped another pillow behind her back. Grandma Alma never slept during the day. “Are you ill?”

  She swatted the words away with weak hands. “No, no. Can’t an old queen have a nap?”

  “Of course,” Niklas said quickly. “Queens can do whatever they like.”

  He looked away from her swollen knuckles. Above her head hung a yellowed snapshot of his mother balancing Niklas on her lap. He had always hated that photo because he squirmed to get away, like he didn’t care that she would be gone in less than a year. But his mother didn’t seem to mind. Her calm expression was miles away from the wild stare in the bird castle photo.

  Maybe there would never really be a good time for this. He took the photo out of his satchel and held the evidence in the light from the window, watching his grandmother’s face turn from tired to sad.

  “Where did you find this picture?”

  “In Anne’s office.”

  A smile brushed past Grandma Alma’s face. “Well, that woman never could leave the past alone, even when she was asked to.” She picked the frame out of his hands. “Your mother carved that thing in less than a summer. Day and night, she worked. She hardly stopped to sleep.”

  “She doesn’t look well,” Niklas said.

  “I tried to tell her she needed to rest, that her lungs weren’t strong enough for that kind of fervor. She wouldn’t listen.” Grandma Alma ran a trembling finger over his mother’s curls. “You’re very much like her, you know.”

  “What do you mean?” A worm of worry stirred in his belly. He smoothed down his hair where it stuck up in the front, as dark as his mother’s was pale.

  “I mean in most ways that matter. Bull stubborn, the both of you, can’t be talked out of anything. Take the castle, for instance. Before she died, Erika suddenly got it into her head that we had to remove all the beautiful things she had carved, including this.”