Secrets of Carrick: Ghostheart

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  I saw his face and he was scared. I hadn’t known then what he’d done. But now I did.

  That day Dolyn had been frighted. High-to-deadly. As he was frighted now, the same. He’d been frighted by Boson Quirk and look what he did to him. Now he was frighted by witches and he thought I might be one. I had to keep walking and get us out before his fright turned to fists.

  So I led us the last length of the Otherway and up into a big pale threshold cave. And as soon as the twilight reached us from outside, Dolyn was away. He bolted into the greenlight evening, leaping right over Lovelypig.

  Me and Lovely went together to the cave entrance, and she stepped outside. The evening was spreading across the hills, coming in like the tide. It would be some time before the moon. There was nothing in the whole world but our breath. But I stayed where I was, this side of the threshold.

  Out there the hairy bugganes went sprouting. And the women who have no use for men except as dinner. The people made of mud. The demon-birds. The fiddler changeling and the haunty Old-ones. All of that.

  I sat on the threshold, looking out.

  I sat on the threshold, looking back.

  Lovelypig waited just outside the cave. The salt hardened over me. My legs turned to stone; my mouth was full with spit. I retched on nothing. My heart went flopping like a toad. The salt washed away in my sweats.

  Lovelypig sighed.

  I couldn’t stand it but I stopped there.

  “Mally,” said a voice from behind.

  I turned and my heart swooped. It was Breesh Dunnal. She’d always been the sort to turn up, just like that, when you needed her most. I ran to her.

  “Where have you been?” I said. “Where did you go?”

  Lovelypig rolled her eyes and lay down on the threshold.

  “Nowhere,” she said. “Come with me. There’s not much time.”

  Breesh Dunnal always knew what to do and she wasn’t frighted by anything. She led me up a scree and down into a low chamber. This one was full with new gravel and old bones.

  “Do you see these bones?” said Breesh, and I nodded.

  “You have to go outside,” she said.

  “Please come with me,” I said and gripped her hand.

  If she came with me, I thought I could just about do it. But when I took her big hand, it fit into mine like Neven’s. And now that we stood side-by-side, I saw her head only reached to my chin. Her face was no broad spread any more. It was shrunk to regular, and her edges looked to be fading. When I looked straight at her, she ruffled like water under wind. Like the heat-wavy Midwoodward. Like the waters in the scaaney. Only her eyes were the same as they’d always been. Bright. Steady.

  It was just they looked up at me now, not down.

  “I don’t want to,” I told her.

  “You’ve got to, Mally,” she told me straight.

  “I don’t want to,” I told her again.

  “I know,” she said. “But that’s when you’ve got to do it most of all.”

  She pointed into the boneyard.

  “But Dolyn Craig says there’s monsters out there, for sure,” I said.

  Breesh looked at me right cool.

  “Dolyn Craig says plenty. He says the Quirk boy was a demon and that you are a witch,” she said. “Are you?”

  “He only says that because of you,” I told her. “So you can stop being so high about it.”

  “Well, you stop being so soft then,” said Breesh and she pushed me hard. “Go on.”

  She spread her hands flat on my shoulder blades, like wings, and pushed me. In spite of her being so shrunken and faded she’d stayed right strong. Back into the threshold cave she pushed me. The night was dark now and the ring of the moon just clearing the hills. I put my hand on the stone at the opening.

  It got caught in something sticky.

  There were cobwebs hanging there. Drops of water hung in the webs, from where Dolyn had bolted in showers of lightwater. The drops hung bright and hard. Like crystals. Like diamonds. My face shone back at me, one face in each drop.

  “Please,” I heard myself say to Breesh.

  “I can’t,” she said and she reached up to kiss me.

  Inside, I stooped to kiss her. She only reached my middle now but she smelled as she always did: salt and herself.

  Outside, Lovelypig scrambled up, hopeful.

  And so there I was, right on the edge. Behind me, bones, and ahead, a good chance of monsters. But the hilltop looked clear.

  At least up here there’d be no Wifeseeker or Cross-bone, no sea-Trow or soul-cage, no whalefish. And I thought a person covered in hair might not be so bad. Hair is a different thing to scales. You get different feelings off them.

  Anyway, there’s worse things than being covered in hair. Some of the folk in Shipton could’ve done with a coat of hair to mark them out. Those who beat other folk, for instance.

  And those who watch them.

  I leaned out. Dolyn Craig was nowhere. There was just the smooth green hilltop and the low yellow moon.

  I looked back. Breesh was going quick now. She was a shadow-girl fading back into the stone. I went to hold her fast here with me.

  “Breesh Dunnal,” I said quiet, to the rock.

  But her proud face was just a dab of light, her brave eyes just shadows, her honey-tongue mouth just a rock hollow.

  “Please,” I said quieter.

  “Ssssh,” said Breesh Dunnal, and it was the first and last thing she ever said to me.

  The last parts to go were her hands. They stirred the airs just as they’d stirred the scaaney, and then pulled back into the wall. I spread my hands on the cool stone and laid my hot cheek where she’d been. I felt like somebody had died.

  But there was no body. Nothing left to mourn.

  She was really gone now, I could tell. Because for the first time in a long time, I was more sad than scared. There was nothing left. So I did it.

  I took the step.

  The step that took me over the threshold.

  Outside, I looked to the right. It was just a hill in the night-time.

  I looked the other way.

  And there sat Pond-Averick. Cross-legged in the moonlight. Compassed in hares and rabbits.

  “Who are you talking to?” she said, petting my pig.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Spindrift

  IT WAS LIKE THIS.

  Me and the scaan Pond-Averick stared still as two cats at each other across the crown of that moon-silvered hilltop – and we both looked more-than-somewhat disappointed. I ran cold. Right to my feet. Right down into the smallest wishbone and sinew. I stood shivering in the hot night with the warm evening breezes blowing between us.

  And I saw straight that she was uglier than I’d thought. Honest, without the fog and lights she was all stringy gristle and mud-baked hide. Her feet in particular were terrible; so terrible I couldn’t stop looking. They didn’t even look to be feet any more. They were just black clods on the ends of her legs. I thought maybe that’s what happens if a Dead-one insists on its scaan-rights instead of leaving. Maybe dead feet couldn’t walk living ways – like freshwater things couldn’t abide salt. And she smelled worse than I’d thought a scaan would, or even could.

  My belly turned once but settled. My heart beat hard but stopped in its place. I stayed upright.

  “Who were you talking to?” she asked me again.

  “Nobody,” I said.

  Lovelypig had followed her nose, gruntling straight and true, to the reeky Pond-Averick and now she was face-deep in her wraithly hair and body, snorting and dinning happily. Scaans shouldn’t smell like that; alive and green.

  Something was wrong.

  Because Pond-Averick was wrestling with Lovelypig and laughing. And then she was taking up a stick and clouting a rabbit as it grazed by her side. And she was filthy. She stood up like something unearthed, just about black from weathering and her body cut about in sicklemoon scars.

  Scaans didn’t wrestle and the
y had no use for rabbits, dead or living. They didn’t shed dirt; they shed light. And their bodies didn’t weather, or suffer scars. Everybody knew that.

  She pulled a rough-weave sack over her head and covered herself. Lovelypig tried to get in the sack with her. She batted my pig off her and took up the limp rabbit.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  I was famished as ever – but it was all wrong.

  “Who are you?” I asked again.

  I stepped closer and her reek got stronger. I saw her hair was just a grizzle of noils and burrs right past her knees. The rabbit was dripping blood down into it. I stepped up right close and I poked her.

  She poked me back.

  “You’re no scaan,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said.

  “You’re a woman,” I said.

  “Thanks very much,” the hare-woman said, and she laughed like a crow. Drawn out. Gloomy.

  Up close she was nothing like the thing I’d seen step out from behind Spindlestone. I didn’t know how I could ever have thought she was a scaan. How I could have thought her so tall when she was such a spit-hag. How I could have thought she was gliding above the earth on those terrible clods of feet. Or thought that she was shedding light from that dark, tough little body. Her hare-lip made it look like she was sneering, even when she laughed. And she whistled through her teeth when she talked.

  I didn’t know where to start.

  All the trouble she’d given me. Rising from the sea all over starry lights and beams. Hanging about in the beamy mists. Making me so frighted. Making me believe. Making me sorry for her.

  “Who are you?” I said again but harder, and her smile set and fell.

  “I’m nobody if you’re going to be like that about it,” she said.

  “But what were you thinking?” I asked. “What were you doing?”

  The windblasted woman got a flighty look. She backed off a little.

  “Looking for you,” she said.

  “Me?” I said. “But why sneak around? Why not just say?”

  “I tried,” she said. “But you ran away.”

  She came and put her hand on my arm then. My skin crept and every hair stood tall and waved like dune-grass. She did have a fine coat of hair over her. And I thought I saw whiskers. Of a sudden it was the face of a longtail she upturned to me. Maybe Dolyn was right after all.

  “I thought you were a scaan,” I told her.

  “Oh, was that it? I thought he must have told you,” she said.

  “Told me what?”

  “Well,” she said slow and quiet and looking into my face. “Down there they call me a witch.”

  She made a face like Sorry, but what can you Do?

  I waited.

  “But,” I said at last. “Are you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s other folk who see such things.”

  “How can you not know if you’re a witch or not?” I asked with tears coming. They weren’t frighty tears, they were angry tears. Spitting out the corners of my eyes. I just wanted somebody to be one thing, to be one clear thing, instead of all this shapeshifting. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Elley,” she told me.

  “Elley of where?” I sighed. “Elley of who?”

  “Craig,” the harewitch said. “Of Shipton-Cronk.”

  There was a long quiet, with only the breezes. The harewitch’s black eyes, her sharp sidewise looks, even her knobs of knees said it. The way she crouched with her arms tight round her legs. The way she picked her thumbnails. The way she plainly wanted to bolt.

  “Any blood to Dolyn Craig?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I wished so hard Dolyn was there then. The things I would say about his mother, the witch. If I ever saw him again, that was.

  “What did you want me for?” I asked Elley Craig.

  I was sounding like Sula just before she fell asleep. I was right thirsty. My throat itched. I was famished. My whole skin hurt. I thought I might bust out in sobs and I rubbed my face until it prickled and the feeling passed.

  “You’re hungry,” she said, taking my arm and giving me a handful of dusty hazels to suck. “Come on.”

  There was no time to quarrel. Elley Craig the harewitch, blood to Dolyn and no scaan at all, bolted across the moonwort and was away. I wasn’t going to be left there by myself. I didn’t know what loitered in these hills, just out-of-sight. It might have been worse than this harewitch.

  There was no time to be frighted.

  I had to go right then or be left behind. And so I went. I ran, step-by-step, following the harewitch faraway into strange purpling hills. There was no time to think or fret; there was no time for anything but to run and keep running, to keep the harewitch in my sights or be lost. Soon there were only her heels, beating ahead, and the taste of the upland winds in my mouth.

  If I thought on the happenings of these last days, if I tried to make it sensible, my mind washed and crashed like boomers. It was only when I thought on it as a sort of history – one of the histories told by the old ones by the hearths – that I could think on it at all. Even then the whole thing was more warp than weft.

  I felt I’d cheated somehow.

  I should have walked upright through the palings or braved the Monkward right to its end. I should have stepped over the mid-waterline. I should have done it where everybody would see, instead of washing out of Shipton like so much driftwood.

  But the Cronks were rolling away all round, like a herd of whales. The upland ways were all cutting clear through the meadow-grass. Elley Craig went low and springing ahead and her hair trailing over her shoulders like long pale ears. And I felt myself to be some tiny fleck of foam hurled at the sky; a sanderling on the edge of the sea. A limpet unstuck. A holdfast, free-swimming.

  All the ways were open to me.

  All the upland ways and paths I only knew by name and story and song; they were mine. The Sky Road, the Northward, the Thwartway, even the Croftward: I could walk them all one-by-one. If I could sing, I’d have sung then. If I could dance, I’d have danced. But I couldn’t, so I just ran. Lovelypig ran too, neat and fast and happy. It was the best feeling in my life.

  So far, that is.

  And me and the harewitch ran side-by-side all night. She ran like there was only running. Like it was the world that ran and her that stopped still as it flew by. She turned once and smiled at me, and she was beautiful then. The moon followed us.

  My breath was tearing in-and-out and my shanks, cramping and gripping. Lovelypig was likewise done in. She made little creaking noises deep inside her.

  “Stop,” I panted at last.

  Elley Craig looked to me like she’d forgotten I was there. Her eyes were skyclad. Straightways she stopped running and crouched, already scratching inside her sack at the settling midges.

  “Dolyn ran from you,” I said to her after I’d caught my breath. “Soon as he saw you, he ran.”

  Elley Craig’s nose wrinkled and she made a face like she tasted something bad.

  “I know,” she said. “I saw.”

  “Why’d he run if you’re blood to him?” I asked.

  “Dolyn’s running from everything these days,” she said. “They all are down at his place.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because their Devil’s gotten out,” Elley Craig said.

  “Devil?” I said.

  She nodded like a devil was just some escaped cow.

  “The Devil?” I asked. “The one in the chapel stories?”

  “I don’t recall,” she sighed. “It was ages ago. You should know; you live down there. It’s the one they locked up. Down a hole was it? Or in a cave?”

  She sounded like the distaff council when they tried to remember the old days.

  “The one that was tight with their god,” she said. “But they fell out? Anyway. They let him out of wherever he was locked up.”

  I remembered that story now. It wasn’t one I’d liked much a
nd I hadn’t listened very close. There were better ones.

  “Let him out?” I asked. “Why?”

  It seemed to me senseless to let out devils somebody else had managed to catch.

  “They had to,” she said. “It’s only fair.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say about fairness and devils.

  “What will happen though?” I said. “What sorts of things does the Devil do?”

  “Well, Scully says their Devil told Brother Olloo he should sleep in instead of going to his prayers.”

  “Is that all?” It didn’t seem very devilish.

  “The Brothers take their prayers right serious,” she said.

  I thought on Dolyn. He wasn’t praying these days. Or eating. Maybe this devil took away his appetite for both these things.

  Elley Craig was plainly a person who didn’t talk much and our words were plaguing her. She wanted to be off but she had to wait for me. She took the biggest hare from the mob and dandled him. His shanks stuck out in front like tree roots and he lay there blinking in her lap.

  Lovelypig sat still and wanted to chase that hare. The hare watched my pig watch him. He was ready to bolt anytime she made a move.

  “Anyway,” the harewitch said, “What about you?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Who were you talking to?” she asked. “In the cave.”

  Her face was full with something that tapped me like I was a barrel. If there was anybody in the world who might understand about Breesh Dunnal, it was this woman. She looked to be somebody who’d met all-sorts. Maybe even the sorts of folk who aren’t entirely what you’d call real.

  You don’t get called a witch for nothing.

  But I didn’t want to think on Breesh yet.

  “Nobody,” I said, as usual.

  The harewitch wasn’t having any of that. She came close, too close, and she took my chin in her hand. And she studied me. Her gaze went in like sand-worms.

  “Not nobody,” she breathed.

  She looked into me like I was the scaaney. She was following something inside, some curling thread. When she was done she nodded and patted my arm, and then she let me go.

  “Somebody actually,” she said to herself. “Beloved. And lost. A secret.”