Secrets of Carrick: Ghostheart

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  The waters in the scaaney were always clear and still. Its bowl was always full and its water-blooms always flowering. You could see yourself clear-as-real in its water. Sometimes even clearer-than-real. Because the scaaney shows what lies behind the regular world. It is for Seeing.

  The scaaney pool shows your face but it’s the face of some shifty stranger with moonglazey eyes; its lips set around what looks to be a mouthful of dirt. It shows you angels but they never look like you think angels should. It shows you your heart but not straight or simple. If you want to See, you have to follow the scaaney’s circling ways, not the straight ways of the regular world.

  When you first look into the pool, your shadow frights the crabs. They kick away and slide into slits, and the clear pool glooms up. The water fills with their tiny sand-wakes. The blossom-animals withdraw into their tubes, leaving clouds and murk. If you wait though, the waters will clear and only the seastars will be left, tangling away into the hollow rock. By the time you’ve sat and waited for the pool to settle, the waters and yourself will be peaceable and ready to see.

  Breesh stepped to the scaaney. She looked down at me like Ready?

  I sighed.

  “All right,” I said, but my inside-parts sank.

  I didn’t know how to tell her but I was only playing for her sake these days. The scaaney had showed me nothing but worms since the start of spring. I was right downhearted about it.

  There’d been earthworms and sandworms. There’d been shipworms, woodworms, belly-worms. There’d even been a long worm struggling in the sand of the midwater. There’d been so many of them, they wriggled in my blood now. When I saw them, they made me want to run. They made me want to keep running.

  But I never said No to Breesh Dunnal so I drew the weirding circle around us, and we sat to the scaaney. Breesh held out her hand and I hooked my smallest finger in hers. We drew our hands, joined like wings, across the water. Then she called the angels.

  Breesh said she called on Archangel Gabriel for right Seeing. Without his protection, we might be delivered to some split-tongued demon pretending to be safe. Then she called on Remiel for true understanding. It’s all very well Seeing clear if afterwards you don’t understand what you Saw. She called on Kalmiya to lift the veil, and Seraph to bring the snake-fire to the pool. Irin and Gadiel and even Saint Brigit herself were called.

  It was what we always did.

  We made room for the angels at the scaaney. Then she called on the Old-ones too. Breesh said you don’t want to offend anybody.

  “Come, Ushtey Doo,” said Breesh, loud and important.

  “Away from the Blackwater, come down where we are,” I added, that being my part to say.

  My call wasn’t quick enough for Breesh and she gave me a look. I felt childish by the pool now, calling out such things. But I felt Breesh’s scouring look more.

  “And bless our scaaney,” I bawled.

  Lovely jumped awake and came to me straightways, like Is it time to Go? I patted her back down into the sand.

  “Come, Mary,” Breesh Dunnal said then, straight-up like the Mother-of-the-god was a friend of hers.

  “Away from the chapel, come down where we are.” My voice was still too small next to Breesh’s.

  I wanted our voices to fill First Cave like they used to in the beginning. It was all too small now. I wanted the words to fill me to the brim with thrill again. But I wasn’t sure about all this rigmarole any more. Ever since there was nothing but worms in the pool, I didn’t see the point.

  “And bless our Looking,” I added as Breesh gave me her Hurry Up eye.

  Nobody had ever told us what to say to open the scaaney; me and Breesh just made it up. We made it up so long ago I couldn’t even remember the first time. It was like we’d always been looking into that scaaney. But what if we were saying words that were bound to end in worms and other trouble?

  “You go first,” I said.

  Breesh stirred the waters. She blew over it. Three times, three times. And three times more.

  “Scaaney,” she said. “Open.”

  When you’re trying to See, you don’t just look into the water, you squint and Look beyond it. You can’t make the Sights come. They come by themselves, shimmering or shady, split into forms or unformed entirely. They walk about beyond the water, like you don’t matter at all.

  “What do you see?” I asked Breesh, after a time.

  “I see the Lady,” she said.

  “What does she look like?” I said.

  “She’s got red hair today,” said Breesh Dunnal. “And a big chest.”

  It was Breesh’s Lady. She always came lately and she always looked different. You’d think there was nobody else back there.

  “Do you want me to tell what she’s saying?” Breesh said, and I saw myself again in her eyes.

  Small. Sulky. A faithless spit, full with doubt.

  I was sorry about the doubt. Then my sorriness made me sad. Then the sadness gave me the irrits.

  Then I was just wrung-out by it all.

  “All right,” I said. “Go on.”

  “The Lady is saying that the world was sad,” said Breesh, bent over the pool with its lights moving over her face, “because beauty was gone from it. The King’s daughter, the Jewel of the Bright Young Ones and Loveliest of All Possible Things, had left the palace and gone away alone. She had crept on her belly into a low cave, and now she stayed there refusing to come out, even for her friends the singing birds. Her father, the King, and her mother, the Queen, called out for her and missed her.

  “She used to walk in the sunshine, chatting with her hand-maidens, the gentle and helpful Glimmerings. Now she went in darkness and never came into the daylight. She used to sing in the groves with the tree-women, the Dappled Ones, whose windsongs are only heard by the most sensitive and Otherwise of mortals. Now she slumped among the moonsnails, mute as a stone and cold. Soon even the rock grumbled about her.

  “Then the cliff fell in lumps and hid her entirely.

  “For many, many seasons she stayed.

  “Outside the world carried on. Inside she sat and glowed in gentle malice so that the rock was lit up in beautiful, cold rays and rainbow-slime. A garden of rockpool plants sprang up around her and she rested in the mossy softness, like in a good bed.”

  Breesh stopped and stirred the waters again, and listened closer to the pool. I thought I could hear it too – the voice beyond the lapping.

  “She’s saying that the Favoured One was never restful though,” she said. “No matter the bed or the quiet or the dim light. Nobody knew why she went into the cave and nobody knew what would bring her out. Her Augustness, the Beam of Glory and Light of All Heavens, just sat there and she never said.”

  Breesh stopped and patted the pool. The cave was filling with the cluck and gurgle of the returning waters. We didn’t have long before the cave filled with the sea.

  “Your turn,” Breesh said and grabbed my wrist so that it hurt somewhat.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  She let go but her eyes still held mine.

  “Sorry,” she said and bit her lip.

  I got up to leave.

  For the first time I saw Breesh Dunnal frighted. Her face looked unsure on its bones, like it might slide away. She looked smaller. It was there and then it wasn’t.

  I sat down again.

  “Go on,” she said.

  I stirred the waters. I blew over them three times. It was enough.

  “Scaaney,” I said. “Open.”

  I leaned to the pool. I squinted until my eyes hurt. I saw my own face, the stranger in the pool – and then the waters opened.

  “What do you see?” Breesh asked.

  “Nothing,” I told her.

  Because that pool was all worms, just like I knew it would be.

  Chapter Four

  Saltwort

  THE SALT IN MARKET-SHIPTON covers everything that stops still, and also some things that don’t. Up-and-down th
e Sands it lies, like bleachy sheets over the rocks. It lies on deadwood and bones, crabshells and feathers, and it even salts the wrecks. The salt falls on their spars and beams, and drips down into their rotting holds. It sets under the beams so thick that it makes walls. The walls rise slow and then one day there are rimy rooms big enough for children to play in. The salt is so thick in the air your breath stings, and on high-salt days people get nosebleeds. Everybody has something to say everyday about the salt.

  It’s like the weather.

  The whole lower town looks to be snowed in, so heavy has it fallen and for so long. We mostly just let it lie. It’s a long time since anybody tried to scour it from their roofs or eaves. Some houses right on the breakwater are white as the Sands themselves. And the old ones shed it wherever they sit. The oldest ones could sell at market in an hour the salt that drops from them in a day.

  And Shenn Cooley was the oldest one. Most old ones look the same to me but Mr Cooley didn’t look like anybody else.

  His skin was a stretched leather bag hanging loose and he only had the one eye, the other being taken by a maw-worm. But his one eye was green as the sea in his folded up face, and his droops of skin were brown as the oldest oak benches. And he was soft. He was the softest thing on the seashore. And he had a catching sort of smile.

  I loved him.

  That morning, the morning of the scaan, Mr Cooley saw me coming up-and-over the Backdunes with Lovelypig and he hurried slowly to meet us.

  “Hoy, Mally Crowal there,” he called out and I could tell he was cheered to see me coming.

  He was always cheered to see me coming, in spite of the trouble that had brought us together. To my mind it had been a good sort of trouble, a lucky sort, that brought me and Shenn Cooley together. The sort of trouble everybody could do with sometimes.

  At the end of winter Mr Cooley had been down at the breakwater, gathering his bit of sweetweed when the sibs came. They came as they always did, in a pack and like they were the only creatures in the world. They didn’t see the old man until they were on him and then it was too late.

  It doesn’t take much to startle an old one, and Mr Cooley was as old as a person could get and still be called alive. He fell into the rock and weed and couldn’t get up. Flaxney ran to fetch Da, and Da had to fetch Mr Cooley back to his shack.

  Mr Cooley said it was nothing, but the Elders met about it and they said we had to pay the Fee for damaging him. They set us to tending him until he was strong again. Da and Mam, and Tosha and Flaxney and Treen being too busy, I was bound to the old man until he could do for himself.

  Every morning since I’d tramped out there with Lovelypig. Up the Backdunes windwards and down their slipfaces, we went to his place out by the saltmarsh to bring him dinner. I could have done more, like fix up his old shack somewhat, or replant his sea-worts, but he wouldn’t have it. He said it was all returning to the sea soon enough. He said he’d be dying with the end of summer and couldn’t wait to be away. It would all do as it was until then, he said.

  It was the middle of summer when he had told me, and we were now getting to the end. But Mr Cooley didn’t seem frighted. He just looked sort of surprised every morning to be still here.

  I didn’t think his shack would stand until the end of summer and I secretly bodged up some of the bigger gaps anyway. When he went to fetch the honey one day, I dragged a new stone to his threshold. That’s all I could do though. Old ones can get quite high-toned if you help them when they haven’t asked.

  They think you’re saying they’re old.

  Shenn Cooley took my hands and drew me close to his face that squinted all the time. I couldn’t meet his green eye straight. That Spindlestone scaan was hanging inside me like bats, and the scaaney-worms leaving their trails through my blood.

  “All right, Mally Crowal?” he said and touched my brow with his like the oldest ones still do.

  “I am, Mr Cooley,” I said, and then he made a fuss of Lovely with a lot of grunting and scratching.

  Up close you could smell the age on him; it was a mix of tang and old dinner.

  “I’ve been down the shore,” I told him. “For your dinner.”

  I showed him my pockets full with sizeable limpets and fresh rockweed. He arched his eyebrows at the sight and the salt rained down. He smiled up at me and straightways he saw the shadow of the scaan on me.

  “What’s happened?” he said. “You look like that sainted woman at the chapel. Her body’s there for anybody to see but her head’s at an entirely other place.”

  “What do you think about scaans?” I said straight-up.

  I thought he might be old enough to know something real about such things. Something true. Something useful.

  “What do you mean, what do I think about them?” said Mr Cooley.

  We started up the dune together. My feet sank deep in the sand as I went, but Mr Cooley just went over it light as a bird on his craney legs. Lovelypig almost sand-drowned and had to be carried.

  “I suppose I mean do you believe in them?” I asked him.

  My voice dried up somewhat as I talked. Nobody asked other folk if they believed. I’d never heard anybody ask such a question. It seemed rude somehow. And the words seemed impossible to say even as I said them.

  “I believe in hauntings,” he said quiet-like, taking his small and lopsided steps up the dune.

  Mr Cooley is a great one for the splitting of hairs. He could split them so fine sometimes they disappeared altogether. Not this time though.

  “What’s the difference between a scaan and a haunting?” I said.

  “Well, clearly one is,” said Mr Cooley. “And one isn’t.”

  I was panting too hard to insist he make sense, and anyway when he said such things, I’d learned to leave it alone. If I wrung him on such matters, he would just talk more and more shambles until my brains itched. You had to let him get where he was going by his own daylights and at his own pace. So I let it be for the time, heaved Lovelypig up onto my shoulder and dragged my feet the last few steps to the shack.

  Shenn Cooley turned into his yard and looked to walk straight into a dune.

  From outside, his shack was part of the beach now. The dunes shift with the longshore winds and one dune, travelling bit-by-bit like a missionary, had found Mr Cooley’s shack. At the start of summer it had started settling around the wind-silvered planks. Now all you could see was a bodgy door farback in the flour-soft sand.

  Inside, any wind-bluster was muffled by the dune. Mr Cooley had already laid out the hearth. We tipped the weedy limpets and their brine into his pot that was so scoured there was hardly any of it left. I lit the fire. You could see the glow through the pot’s shot sides and it spat and hissed. I hoped the broth would cook before entirely leaking away.

  “What is the difference then, Mr Cooley?” I tried again, gentler so as not to startle him.

  The truth is sometimes he forgot I was there. Old ones forget all-sorts. They forget what they’ve told you. And they forget what you’ve told them. Everything’s news to them.

  “The difference between what?” he said.

  “Between a scaan and a haunting. You said there’s a difference?”

  “That’s right!” said Shenn Cooley, looking well-pleased. “I did.”

  That was all he had to say. I didn’t like to insist on more. We sat on the threshold and he watched the horizon with one watery eye while I watched him sidewise. I thought I might as well tell him. He’d likely forget anyway.

  “Anyway, I saw one,” I told him.

  “One what?” said Mr Cooley.

  “A scaan,” I said.

  “Where did you see one of them?” he asked and turned back to me.

  “Under Spindlestone,” I said. “It came up out of the water and went dripping off into the rocks.”

  “Dripping,” was all he said.

  “Yes, dripping,” I said. “It dripped. There were puddles. And the water lit up all round it, and its hair was down t
o here, and it had a right twisted mouth. And specklings on its skin.”

  “Puddles?” he said.

  “Yes. Shiny puddles. It was,” I said, “a scaan.”

  “Well, aren’t you the clever one?” said Mr Cooley. “To know so sure.”

  “I know what I saw,” I told him.

  “Is that right?” said Shenn Cooley.

  His eye shifted from my face to the dunes.

  “In a way,” he went on, “it would be simpler if it was a scaan.”

  I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I stayed quiet but I wanted to tell him straight; there is nothing simple about seeing scaan.

  “All the places where folk have lived and died are haunted places,” Shenn Cooley said, “and it’s hardly ever by real scaan. It’s a curious thing, isn’t it, that scaan and such only walk where living folk go in sorrow. Or in fear. Cheerful folk don’t see scaan. Only folk in trouble.”

  I felt my face fill with contrariness.

  “The way I see it,” he told me quickly, “every generation leaves behind its own mountain of trouble and sorrow. Bloodlettings and betrayals and so forth. It’s just the way of things. Then a new generation comes and everybody thinks those troubles are longaway with the Ancient-ones. But they’re not. The old troubles show themselves again and again – and the new folk think they’re new troubles. But they’re just the same old sorrows and troubles, only with new faces. The same old hating, the same old fear, but with folk seeing it new every time.

  “Everybody thinks they’ve laid those troubles away, see? But they still walk. They walk in folks’ stories. In their hearts. They walk right into the next generation.

  “And those old troubles with their new faces are what folk call the hauntings.”

  Shenn Cooley put his hand to Lovelypig and she licked it very gentle, very dainty.

  “Carrick is a right unquiet place and always has been. It’s full with old troubles and haunting. And Shipton being right on the sea doesn’t help. It’s the boats. Boats bring all-sorts to a place. Once upon a time they even brought us. The Sands now; there’s terrible sorrowful things happened down there.”