Char’s face twisted in thought. “It’s a nice problem to have, to have to choose between a king that wants to hire you, and a mother to coddle you and a father to yell at you.”
He looked out in the distance for a moment, then, seeing nothing, sat down next to Ven. “You make me crazy sometimes, Ven. You’re like your beard—you ain’t had any cause to grow. You’ve had more of everything than a lot of folks, more family, more schooling—”
“More good friends to watch out for me,” Ven added. “I guess I’m being selfish—you have it a lot worse than I do.”
Char stared at him through the low-lying fog. “You know, that’s the first time since we’ve met that you’ve actually called me a friend,” he said. “You think I’ve only gone through this with you ’cause the captain told me to watch out for you. You feel so guilty about stupid things. You didn’t have any choice but to sink those ships—once the Fire Pirates struck, you and those sailors were all dead men anyway. But you still feel bad about it, instead of glad you lived.
“You can’t bring my parents back, can’t find me new parents, can’t seem to understand that some things can’t be replaced. You wonder what you can do to make my life better, as if paying for my candy helps. It doesn’t. There’s some things you just can’t do anything about. Stop feeling sorry for me. This is my life, just as that is yours. You have a family, but people pick on you because you’re Nain. I have none, and nobody bothers me. We each have our blessings and our curses. In the end it makes us equals. Live with yours, and let me live with mine.”
Ven thought for a moment. “You’re right,” he said finally.
“O’ course I’m right,” Char said smugly. “In case you haven’t noticed, I usually am. It probably comes from living so fast.” His face lost its grin. “Lives like mine go quick, Ven. Are you really fifty?”
“Yup.”
“Fifty years old? Real years?”
“Yes.”
Char sighed. “Not to be insulting, but why aren’t you more grown-up? Why aren’t you as smart as the captain, or any other fifty-year-old person? Are all Nain treated like babies until they’re fifty or something?”
“I don’t know,” Ven said quietly. “This is just what fifty looks like on a Nain.”
“Well, I can understand that you don’t grow as fast, and that you live longer,” Char continued. “What I don’t understand is how, if you’ve had all that time, you’re still like me. I mean, you’ve had fifty years to learn about the world, but it hasn’t made you any more, well, old. Why haven’t you grown up?”
The breeze picked up, twisting curls of fog around the trees, and rustling their sweaty hair.
Over the wind, or through it, they heard a distinctive SSHHH!
The boys froze.
At first they saw nothing in the misty graveyard but low-lying fog. Then in the beat of a heart they saw a form approaching, growing clearer, before their eyes.
It was a tall boy, a little older than they were, lean and long-faced, his eyes gazing at them as the haze swirled and parted around him.
At first they thought it might be Cadwalder on his way home from work in the mist, but he was taller, slightly stooped at the shoulder. And he wasn’t really coming toward them, he was thickening from the darkness, solidifying, as if he had been there all the time, but invisible.
“The answer to your question,” said the tall boy, “is that he hasn’t had to.” His voice was soft like the wind, and it alternated between being high and low, as if it was just beginning to change. “Nain, Lirin, Gwadd, merrows, and all those races take a much longer view of life than humans do. They age more slowly, grow more slowly. That’s because there are so few of them compared to humans. They have to live long enough to pass along all that they’ve learned of their parts of the world. You might want to lie down now.”
Ven looked quickly back over his shoulder.
Out of the mist, wolf-like shapes were approaching, low to the ground, growling threateningly, tracking their scent. The wind carried the weird noise he had heard his first night in Hare Warren.
He lay down on his stomach quickly. Char was already flat on the ground, his arm covering Nicholas’s head.
“You’d best get down, too,” he whispered to the tall boy.
The young man smiled. “They won’t harm me,” he said, looking into the fog. “They are afraid of me.”
Ven raised his head up enough to be able to see. The beasts were scouring the ground, tracking their scent. They were coming nearer with each passing moment.
A drop of rain fell on his nose, spattering into mist in the summer heat. Ven blinked as more drops fell on his lashes.
“Great,” he muttered. “I can barely see them as it is—now we’ll be almost blind in the rain.”
The tall boy smiled. “Some blind people see far better than those whose eyes work,” he said. “The rain may help you see better, not worse.”
“Who are you?” Ven whispered. “Do you live near here?”
The boy turned at looked at him thoughtfully. “This is my home,” he said simply. “But I don’t live anywhere. My name is Gregory Snodgrass.”
24
The Cemetery Guardian
“IT’S ALL RIGHT,” THE SHADOWY BOY SAID AFTER A MOMENT. HE smiled wanly at the shock and horror on Ven’s face. Char’s face was planted into the grass, but his body was trembling like a leaf in the wind.
“You’re—you’re dead, aren’t you?” Ven asked, trying to keep his voice from shaking like Char’s.
“Well, yes,” said Gregory. “But you don’t need to get all quavery about it, as if it were a bad thing.”
He turned his head toward the road, in the direction of the beasts. “Try and be as quiet as you can,” he said.
A moment later he seemed to grow dimmer in the mist, then to expand, as if his body was made of fog itself. Ven’s fear turned to amazement as the boy’s lanky frame thinned out and spread to almost the size of the cemetery. He opened his now-enormous arms, filmy as haze over the sea, and wrapped them around the small graveyard over which he towered like a cloudy giant.
The sniffing and growling sounds grew louder as the beasts approached. Their milky white forms flickered in and out of the mist as they came nearer, the harsh shrieking growing louder as they picked up speed along with the scent of the boys.
They came to the center of the crossroads, slowing, and as they did, the strange noise became softer. The ghostly wolves stopped in front of the cemetery in the rain, which had grown heavier.
Ven held his breath, hoping that Char’s shivering or Nicholas’s occasional moaning would not give them away.
A deep chorus of growls filled the wet air.
“Look closer,” said Gregory. His voice was softer, more airy, than it had been a moment before, perhaps because he was stretched so thin.
* * *
Then I remembered what Gregory had said about the rain helping me see better, not worse.
The first rule of good puzzling: See things as they really are, and not as they seem, the king had said.
I took out my jack-rule and slowly, carefully as I could, extended the far-viewing lens.
Then I looked through it.
The phantom wolves were standing in the rain, the hair on the backs of their necks standing straight up, as if they were frightened.
Their faces were unholy, skeletal, I thought. They looked almost as if they were melting in the rain.
And then I realized they were melting in the rain.
At first, black spots appeared on their milky coats and foreheads. Then those spots began running in great streaks down their sides. The ghostly white color of their bodies ran off the sides and onto the muddy ground of the crossroads, leaving shiny black and brown fur, slick in the rain.
* * *
“They’re dogs,” Ven whispered hoarsely. “Whiting’s bloody dogs!”
Char’s muddy face popped up like a jack-in-the-box.
“Dogs?” he as
ked in disbelief. “Gah! They sound like demons. Dogs don’t make noise like that.”
Ven wiped the raindrops from the jack-rule and looked closer.
“They have collars on,” he said quietly after a moment. “Metal collars—skinny tubes with holes in them—like that sculpture in the square in Kingston! That noise must be the sound of the wind rushing through them when they move.”
“All right—so they’re not ghost wolves, they’re livin’ dogs,” Char whispered back. “Killer guard dogs—they can still tear us to pieces. Like they did to Nicholas.”
Through the jack-rule Ven could see that the animals, now black with a chalky film on their coats, were still looking around nervously, as if they could still smell their prey but could not see it through the haze.
The haze that was the shimmering body of the ghost boy.
Gregory’s large head floated above them. Ven could almost swear he saw the spirit wink.
Then it leaned out over the road, hovering over the dogs.
“Boo,” Gregory said.
The animals reared back, yelping, and dashed off in the direction of the White Fern Inn.
The mist thickened, and the spirit’s filmy form shrank back into itself again. He shook his head and sighed.
“That was trite, I know,” he said. “But it’s such a fun thing to say.”
Ven sat up slowly, trying not to notice the terror on Char’s face. His curiosity was rumbling inside him again.
“Thank you, Gregory,” he said gratefully.
“You’re welcome,” said the ghost. “You should go now; your friend needs a healer.”
Ven reached over and tried to shake Char our of his frightened stupor. “Come on, we have to get Nick back to the inn.”
As they gathered Nicholas’s limp body, Gregory Snodgrass began to fade into the misty rain. “How is my mother?” he asked, his outline barely visible.
“Better,” Ven said. “Your father sent her some of the Living Water a few days ago, so she is looking well again.”
The boy spirit looked sad. “Too bad it’s only temporary,” he said, his voice hollow.
Char wriggled closer to Ven. “Why?” he asked, his voice still trembling.
Ven swallowed hard to allowed the words to come out. “Is it because—because she’s a Revenant?”
The ghost appeared suddenly more solid, as if the question had shocked him.
“My mother—a Revenant?” he demanded, offense in his voice. “Please. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m the only Revenant in the family, thank you very much. Wherever did you get that idea?”
Char looked blankly at Ven, who coughed in embarrassment.
“Er—Mr. Whiting said that,” he admitted. “He told me you and your mother died on the same day.”
Gregory was silent for a moment. “Well, I suppose that is true in a way,” he said quietly, his voice hollow on the wind. “Certainly a piece of her died when she found out what happened to me—any mother who lost a child would feel that way, wouldn’t she?”
Ven could only nod, his jaw clenched. He was imagining his own mother’s reaction to hearing the news of the Fire Pirates, as he had done every day since his birthday.
“Maurice Whiting lies through his teeth,” Gregory went on. “He always did when I was alive. He doesn’t believe in Revenants, or ghosts, or anything else. If he did, he would never come near here at night to send his dogs out to scare the residents at the inn. He has no idea what is going on here. If he knew that the tales of the Revenants buried at the crossroads—as well as me, the one buried in the cemetery—were true, he’d turn his sorry tail and run away as fast as his legs could carry him.”
Ven and Char looked nervously at each other.
“If Mrs. Snodgrass isn’t a Revenant, then why is she sick?” Char asked.
“Because her heart is here, with me,” Gregory said. “And with the rest of the family buried here, and in the inn—she loves that place, and the people she takes care of. And because so much of her heart and soul are invested in this ground, this earth, she is being withered by what is poisoning it.”
“Poisoning it?” Ven asked, suddenly nervous again. “I thought it was just Whiting’s dogs that were haunting the crossroads.”
Gregory shook his translucent head. “If that was it, you never would have seen me,” he said, his voice light on the wind. “I’d be resting peacefully, but I’m not. The dogs are just a distraction. There is something terrible here, something that I try to stand guard against, to protect my family’s inn and the people there. My father always told me when he went to sea to look out for my mother, and that’s what I’m doing.”
Char poked Ven. “See?” he whispered. “Everyone obeys the captain’s orders. You can’t escape ’em even when you die.”
Ven felt sadness overwhelm him. “Does she know?” he asked. “Does your mother know that you’re here, and what you are doing?”
The spirit shook its head. “No. That would only make her sadder than she already is. My father doesn’t know, either. He spends his time at sea looking for more of the Living Water, but it’s his being away from her that really saves her—the last piece of her heart is with him, away from this place, and that piece is safe as long as he’s gone.”
“I know I’m gonna be sorry I asked this,” said Char, “but safe from what?”
The spirit that once was Gregory seemed to grow paler between the drops of rain. “Long ago, something evil was buried here. It was before there was an inn, or a town, just a crossroads. I don’t know where, exactly, and I cannot do anything to stop it. It’s an old evil, and whatever form it takes, it only comes out at night. It seems to be able to call to the real Revenants buried in the crossroads, terrible ones, with angry, destructive natures. That evil draws power from this place, this warm, safe place where the star Seren first shone on the island.” He pointed above into the cloudy mist. “If the sky was clear, the star would be right over the inn at midnight. That first starshine made this land magical, gave it special power—and whatever is buried here draws on that power. It sucks the life out of flowers, plants, the wind, people—”
Gregory suddenly stopped and looked straight ahead of him toward the road.
“It walks the earth at night—and you had best be on your way, because it is coming. And it has friends.”
Ven’s heart flew into his throat and gagged there. He and Char scrambled over to Nicholas and seized him by the shoulders, then wrapped his arms around their necks. They dragged him over to the gate in the little graveyard and pulled him through. Ven looked back over his shoulder.
“Thank you,” he called, but there was nothing behind him but swirling mist and dark rain.
“Come on, Nick, wake up,” Char urged as they pulled him along the road toward the inn.
Ven said nothing, but continued to haul Nicholas with all his might, hurrying as fast as he could in the direction of the warm lights in the distance.
Over the wet grass to the muddy road they ran, trying to keep from slipping. The tiny hairs on the back of Ven’s neck were bristling, and he thought he could feel the breath of something behind him. Whatever it was moved very quickly over the stony road that cut through the dark fields. It’s just the wind, he thought as the breeze whipped over them. Just the wind. Please let it just be the wind.
“Let’s not—go through the middle—of the crossroads,” puffed Char.
“I’m with you on that,” Ven replied, still tugging on Nicholas.
They stepped into the roadway north of where the two roads met, dragging their unconscious Warren-mate. They were almost to the field on the other side, almost to the outskirts of the inn, when Ven stumbled. Then he felt something brush the back of his leg.
He looked down.
An arm, gray and withered, had risen up from the mud of the roadway and was clutching at him.
And then another. And another.
Char screamed as one grabbed his foot and pulled him back.
“Ven!??
?
A dozen more skeletal arms shot up, grasping wildly at them. Five of them seized Nicholas and almost pulled him from their grasp.
A gust of wind kicked up, blowing Ven’s wet hair into his eyes. He thought of the first time he had crossed this road with Clemency, remembering with sudden clarity the words of the blessing she spoke before they stepped into the road.
What does the blessing do?
Makes me feel safe, I guess. Don’t know what else it can do.
He chanted the words loudly into the wind.
For a second, the grasping hands froze.
“Come on!” he shouted to Char, kicking wildly at the clutching arms.
Char was struggling to break free of a sea of hands that had wrapped around his ankles.
“I’m trying,” he gasped.
For a moment, panic gripped Ven even more tightly than the hands had. Then he wrapped his arms around Nicholas’s waist and pulled with all his might.
“Hold on!” he shouted to Char.
With a mighty heave, he threw himself, and Nicholas, and Char, out of the road and into the damp grass alongside the roadway. He and Char scrambled to their feet and grabbed Nicholas, dragging him toward the hazy lights, not stopping until they were in front of the door with the golden griffin painted on it.
Char banged on the door. “Let us in! Blimey, let us in!” he shrieked.
The door swung open.
“Good heavens,” Mrs. Snodgrass gasped, standing aside to let the boys in. “The inn door’s always unlocked—what happened? What are you boys doing out at night?”
“We got locked out of Hare Warren,” Ven said, lugging Nicholas to the fireplace with Char and laying him on the longest bench there. McLean, who had been playing when the door opened, stopped immediately. A chorus of tiny upset voices began to whisper and squeak all at once, and the Singer made hushing sounds in a language Ven had never heard to get them to settle down again.