Secrets of Carrick: Ghostheart

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

Dolyn stopped to hold his belly. He pushed fingers deep in, under his ribs. That’s how you stop your insides wringing from the hunger.

  “My Brothers talk big,” he said. “They’re all about ridding decent folk of devils and suchlike. They’re big men all right, with sizeable gobs on them. Until it’s time to do something.”

  A dinning fart came from him and he rolled into a ball like a hedge-pig.

  “But when a man goes and takes care of it,” he went on, his mouth hid in the damp-worts. “Well. Then you see what all their talk amounts to.”

  “Why are you fasting on the Father though?” I said. “What did he do?”

  “He pretended,” said Dolyn Craig.

  I was baffled and Dolyn saw. He started up with slow-loud talking, the sort people do when they think you’re dense. He gave each word its action too, like I was not only dense but foreign.

  “When. That boy. Died. The Father. Made out. What I did. Was wrong,” he said.

  His eyes held mine tight, but I couldn’t read what was in them. There was everything in his gaze, every look and glance. Every feeling at once.

  “He made out to everybody he was shocked,” he went on. “Like he never wanted that boy sorted out. Like he’s shamed by it, and it hurts him to look on me now.”

  He sat and rolled his sleeves up and leaned over the water so that his black hair hung over his face. His arms were pale lines in the dim grove. The back of his neck curved like my brothers’ and it was clean under there, white as foam and blue with veins. His face looked out from the water, floating like the moon in Midwoodpool.

  “He made out it was all me. He said it was a sin, what I did,” said Dolyn. “And now look.”

  “What?” I said.

  “The Devil came,” he told me. “To sort me out.”

  I didn’t know what to say about his devil, but I knew what it was to be bone-deep scared of such things. I sat down by him. Not too close.

  “I thought the Father was strong,” said Dolyn, crawling to the pool and hanging his feet into it. “But turns out he’s not. He’s a little man, after all.”

  I lifted him a sod of softwort. I handed him the cool, clean leaves one after the other. Because hanging over the dark pool and hidden inside his hair, that Dolyn Craig was crying. I found myself brimming too, on the sight of it. He took each big soft leaf and tore it into rags and dropped each rag one-by-one in Midwoodpool.

  “Did he punish you?” I asked after a while.

  “Shut up,” Dolyn said. “Pig-girl.”

  “What did he do to you?” I asked again.

  “Abi dierecte,” he spat at me, and wiped his snot. “Lamia.”

  “Yes. But what did he do?”

  “Nothing,” said Dolyn Craig.

  But I knew what nothing meant.

  Chapter Eleven

  Warp

  YOU CAN’T SEE CHANGE HAPPENING. It’s like wind; you can’t see it blowing, you can only see what it does. The wind blows over the High Lakes on a beamy day, but you can’t see it – only the glister across the waters. The wind blows through Market-Shipton, but you can’t see it – only the froth lifting from mugs at Mr Owney’s and flying out into Shipton-Cross. By the time you see something, it’s too late. The wind has blown. The waters have moved. The froth has flown.

  Things change.

  When we came back from Midwoodpool, Lovelypig was a different pig. Less soft. Less doting. Like her time in Midwood and her brush with the pig-mob had reminded her of something. I was changed too, but it was Dolyn Craig that did it.

  Dolyn in tears by Midwoodpool.

  Weeping, just like he was a person with a heart in him after all. It wasn’t for long that he’d cried, but after I’d seen it I couldn’t think on him the same any more. Even when he’d got up, cursed and pushed me into the pool with the pigs, I wasn’t bothered. I’d just stood in the pool and watched him.

  He shouted Witch at me and leaped from log to stone to root, with no settling in him. He swung from the oaks and crawled in the wort, and barked, trying to fright me. But he didn’t. He didn’t fright me. Not since the tears.

  So in the end he stopped and saw me down in the pool, looking up at him. Not running away and with this new pity in me. And he backed into the undergrowth and bolted, shouting out the most hellish curses into the fresh green grove. Only monks can curse like that, with the proper name of every filth right to hand.

  It was a strange feeling; nobody had ever, ever run away from me.

  On the way out I heard him crashing through the undergrowth, tripping on the same roots and mudbanks that tripped me on the way in. I stayed in the quiet pool with the swimming pigs for some time. The sun started to set.

  The beams went from the pool. The dapples left the ground, and the stars faded from the water-drops. The light withdrew, lapping from the grove until there were only ripples. Me and Lovelypig left too, heading out the way we came in.

  Following the pig-mob.

  I made sure Shipton was right quiet before I crept back into town. I wanted the sibs to be sleeping, or at least too snugged up to tease or pry. You can’t keep a secret from my brothers and sisters. There’s no room. Lovelypig has to sleep on my chest. There’s no room in our bed for secrets, there’s only room for us.

  That night I snuck in after everybody was bedfast. By a small flame I worked awhile on the leftovers shawl. All that was left to do now was turn the edges good and tight. I’d do that tomorrow and it would be ready. I couldn’t wait to see Mam’s and Da’s faces when I fetched home whole sacks of meal, and maybe even a bit of honey.

  The shawl was beautiful in the way fall is beautiful, when everything is turning and dropping. It was messy but it glowed like low sun through cloud. It was a right soft web now, in the distaff council’s colours. Its lines of fire at hem and hood came from Mrs Fell’s red. They gave the shawl a right strong character.

  Then I thought it might please Breesh. That I might give it to her. That it might soften what I had to tell her.

  Because I was going to tell her. I didn’t want to play that scaaney any more. I was sick and tired of all the worms. I couldn’t remember why we started up in the first place. It never had anything useful to say, anything helpful.

  I climbed into our spread of grit and bedcover and bodies. My sisters lay in a row: Tosha and Ally, Coonie and Treen, Sula and Nessa. Each one sticky and sandy and even in their sleep talking too much. I shoved Nessa over and laid myself down at the end of the line. I tried not to fall off the edge into the woodash, rope and sleeping hens.

  As she did every night Lovelypig jumped tidy up onto my chest. It wasn’t just because there was no room on the floor that she still slept across my chest. It was also because she could smell the Fright on me and was waiting for my tears so she could drink them. Lovely started doing it when she was little, looking for the salt, and I liked it. The tears disappeared as soon as they fell. Like she was eating them for me. Like she was eating my trouble. And as she did every night, she gruntled at my chest. My heartbeat was commonly like a bad weave – full with gaps and noils. It raced and flopped. It skipped; it limped; it stopped altogether. It gave the beat to every waiting terror. Those outside the safe paths: the monsters and all the Otherwise things. Every night they crammed-in between me and my sisters and they whispered the sorts of things they might do.

  But that night was different. My heart was giving the beat to new things.

  This is all there is and ever will Be, my heart drummed.

  I felt the long years hard away ahead of me.

  This is all there Is.

  The long years, with me walking the mid-water.

  And all that ever will Be.

  I didn’t think I could stand it.

  I woke before dawn. Mam and Da were off, shouting something about the pot. Me and the sibs filled up on most of my pig-thieved grub raw, and chopped the rest into the pot. We were doomed to belly-ague from shovelling those cold, wet roots into us, but Mam always said it was bette
r to suffer agues from food than suffer agues for food.

  We left as the moon set.

  The sibs tumbled ahead in their pack, straight to the waterline, straight to the sea. I didn’t even bother to try. I cut straight across the Sands. Past the broken off whorl in the hurly of the waters and past the headless Spindlestone. Around the new rockpools and over the shattered stoneway.

  Breesh Dunnal came out to meet me.

  “All right?” I asked her.

  “I’m all right,” she said but she didn’t look right to me.

  She looked smaller. Her eyes had something in them more like embers than stars. Her face was white, her eyes red. I put my hand to her brow and it was clammy. She looked faded and wrung-out. But she took both my hands and dragged me inside, just as bossy and sure of herself as usual.

  “Stop fussing at me,” said Breesh, pushing my hand away. “She’s waiting.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Third Scaaney: See

  THE STONECHAMBER WAS GLOWING and the blossom-animals had shifted from one wall to the other. I noticed that the step down into it was clean and pale as a ghost-crab, and not as big as it looked the day before. Breesh led me to the scaaney ledge.

  “Breesh,” I said.

  She sat to the pool.

  “Breesh!” I said louder.

  “Ssssh,” she said, stirring the scaaney waters like she was in a hurry.

  I was going to tell her. I was. I almost said it. I don’t want to Play. The words were on the edge of my tongue, ready to drop. I don’t want to play any More. There was this moment I could have told her, but then she looked up at me with her bright face and she was saying the angels – and that moment was gone.

  She was moving her hands in the pool.

  She was looking beyond the waters.

  “This will be the last story,” she was saying.

  “Oh,” I said, like that would be a sad thing.

  “The Lady says enough time had passed,” Breesh said. “Outside the cave everything was changing and inside Her Majesty the Beloved Day-Bright Child and Princess-Royal of All the Beauty Realms was changing too. She’d lain quite still so long that the white slugs and wraithly worms of the secret dark had found her, sliming the foot of her stone bed with silver-trails. She’d watched them come and even given them names. They were her friends now.

  “At least that’s what she thought.

  “Because outside the cave her real friends were lighting candles. The singing birds were calling. The dancing fish were still holding firm, if increasingly downcast, vigils. And one silver dawn the noblest of the Glimmerings whispered in thrilling tones through a crack in the rock. In Heaven another being had been created; another Gilded One even finer than the King’s daughter. Everybody was singing it. Everybody was making stories. Everybody was waiting.

  “Did her Highness really not want to come out and see?

  “Her Highness The Star of Celestial Adoration waxed full with tempers. She wept rockpools and hid her face in the skirt of her now-mossy gown. But after she’d wept out all her starry tears, she settled in to be brave about what couldn’t be helped. Rising from her stony bower she stepped through the paling slugs and put her eye to the crack in the rock.

  “‘Who is it?’ she whispered.

  “‘Come and see,’ the singing birds sang.

  “‘I don’t want to,’ she sighed.

  “But she went anyway.

  “She rolled away the stone. Her friends shouted for joy then and they dragged her blinking out into the sunshine. Real friends are treasures and their bright eyes compassed her like crystals and like diamonds. She could see her face reflected in them. In fact, she could see her face reflected in all the looking-glass rockpools, in the puddles and the early dewgem. Even the stillest, smallest drop held her own face shining in its waters. And it was a new face, formed in the dark. She herself was Heaven’s new being. Even the King and Queen were a little shy of her now.

  “Later everybody asked why. Why go into the cave at all?

  “But that Her Majesty Uncommon One, the Blossoming Cave-Gem, went home to the palace by the sea and she never, never said. Why should she?”

  Breesh stopped and studied the scaaney. She coughed a bit.

  I didn’t trust myself to talk. I was just glad it was done. Her story was supposed to make me want to come out of the cave. To go into the stonechamber. To go outside the Fright-lines. I knew that. I may have been frighty and pitiful, but I wasn’t thick. I just didn’t know why now. We’d met in this cave for years. So long I didn’t know who I’d be without her. We were only somebody here with each other.

  “Do you want me to go?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said, sad. “I just don’t want you to not be able to go.”

  There was a loneliness between us then. She was different lately, and I suppose I was too. We’d never talked of leaving the cave, only of how soon we could come to it. We’d never been sharp with each other, but this summer was full with snap and bristle. We sat on either side of the loneliness and then of a sudden she growled and came playful at me. Shoving me backward, mashing my face into the sand. I spat and rolled away.

  “Let me be,” I said but I wanted to laugh.

  When Breesh teased me, it wasn’t like anybody else. It wasn’t shaming or hurtful. It was like a type of love. She took a fistful of sand and messed it into my hair. It trickled into my eyes. I tried to sit up. She pushed me down.

  “Ooooh I Can’t. Won’t. Look out,” she teased, pushing me down into the sand again and again.

  I laughed. I laughed until my belly turned to water and I couldn’t get up. Every time she pushed me down, I felt more feeble. It reminded me of Neven tumbling helpless, laughing in the sea. I laughed until the feebleness was all there was. Then I cried.

  It was that sort of day.

  Breesh Dunnal stopped pushing and patted me instead – somewhat over-firmly I thought.

  “You can’t stay in here forever,” she said.

  “Why not?” I asked and I meant it.

  “Because this is not all there is,” Breesh said. “Because if you don’t go, this is all there ever will be.”

  I hated it when she said things like that. My laughing disappeared. A person’s mind should be their own. Not some common thing.

  “Don’t you want to go in?” she asked, nodding over at the stonechamber. “Just to see.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  There were so many things I didn’t know. I didn’t know when the Frights took me entirely. They had not been there when I was little. Then Dodi Caillet had gone and slow, slow, I had turned into this gutted thing. And now I didn’t know when they would let me go. I was sick of myself.

  Of a sudden Breesh was sick of me too. She turned her back to me.

  I went to the stonechamber. The Otherway glittered dark on the far side. It led up into the cliff, away up into the mountain and then out. At the other end there must have been a threshold. A threshold to the outside. To the moaney. To the Cronks. To all of it.

  “What if you met one of those uplanders?” I said.

  “Well and what about it?” she said, turning back and wiping her face with both hands. She came and sat on the threshold.

  “They might want something from you,” I told her. “They might want you to stop there.”

  “Only if you’re lucky,” sighed Breesh to herself, in right thwarted and sighful tones.

  “Why don’t you go up, then?” I said. “If you’re so bored with me.”

  “I can’t,” she said, smiling up at me. “I can’t go without you.”

  She said it so simple. The edge of my anger blunted. I filled with love for her. She was my best friend, my home, my heart-snug. She belonged to me and me to her and that was that.

  Outside, Lovelypig had been gruntling crabs on the stoneway. Now she came scrambling backward into the sea-cave, dinning something frightful and blowing like bellows. She backed up quick and sat down hard at my f
eet.

  A shadow came to the threshold. A figure. A person.

  And there was Dolyn Craig, leaning on the rock. Looking in, squinting in the low light. The sea was green behind him. He looked round the cave, cool as burdock, and his eyes settled on me. Like flies.

  “All right, witch?” said Dolyn Craig. “Who are you talking to now?”

  “I don’t want to play any more,” Breesh Dunnal hissed in my ear – and just like that she was gone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Spring tide

  “NOTHING BETTER TO DO than talk to pigs and folk who aren’t there?” Dolyn Craig asked me.

  There are no answers to some questions.

  “Folk would like to know,” he said oily. “The Father, for instance.”

  “Oh,” I heard myself say, all sweet tones. “Are you friends again?”

  He came deeper into the cave, rolling his sleeves up. Lovelypig bristled in front of me, but Dolyn bared his teeth and growled like some dog and straightways she went him. She shouldered him, showing her teeth too, shoving him back toward the stoneway and sea. Dolyn kicked once at her head but missed and fell, and on his back he grabbed a stone and threw it hard. It hit her above the eye and drew blood. She started to cry.

  The sound of it filled my heart.

  “Toadspit!” I bawled one of the sibs’ curses, unexpected. “Let my pig be.”

  He turned such an eye on me; I wouldn’t have been surprised to wake with a plague the very next morning. We eyed each other across the cave and I waited to see what he’d do. Then the stone rumbled. Lovely stopped crying and groaned like an eggbound hen. We all listened. There was thunder somewhere.

  I thought it was a storm.

  But it wasn’t. It was a tumult of foam coming at us from outside. It was the water coming in a slow-boil. It was a wall of water coming green and white. The sea was pouring into the cave.

  A flood-wave.

  Dolyn Craig looked back over his shoulder. He had no time to move. The first wave picked him up from behind and hurled him right up the cave. He lay on his back with his mouth open. The wave ebbed and all was quiet. Then the stone rumbled again. Lower. Louder. And I knew what it was.