Ghost Knight

  He stayed silent and looked at me.

  I thought he was never going to speak. But his outline had become clearer again.

  “There is only one deed I could ask of you,” he said finally, “and that is probably impossible.”

  “What is it?” I so wanted to do something for him. I’d never wished for anything so desperately. I would’ve even bargained to keep The Beard in my life.

  Longspee hesitated.

  Then he said, “Do you dare to venture into my darkness once more?”

  I nodded.

  I stepped closer to him, until his coldness engulfed me again.

  I was in the cathedral. At a funeral. Hundreds of people—men, women, children—were crowded between the columns. I could see priests, and choristers in the same blue gowns Angus wore. Candles and torches shone their trembling light onto Longspee’s corpse. My corpse. I lay the same way his stone edifice did. A woman was standing next to me, very straight, and by her side were three boys and two girls. Ella. I felt how my lips wanted to say her name, but I no longer lived in this body. Everything was white. Everything was black. And suddenly I saw something else. A man was leaning over me. “I heard you asked your wife to take your heart into safekeeping,” he whispered into my dead ear. “Very touching. Were you hoping she might keep you safe for eternity, our oh-so-wise Ela of Salisbury? Well, you thought wrong. I did not poison you just so she could stay faithful to you even after your death. No. Your wife will be holding my servant’s heart. I had him culled just for that purpose. And he was such a good servant! Your heart has been put to rest between the old druid stones so that their poisonous shadows might kill your love as surely as my poison killed your body. You are forsaken, William Longspee. For I know well that you are nothing without your love. You will drown in your own guilt, and your soul will remain in the darkness, without any hope that your gallantry might yet cleanse it. You will not fulfill your foolish oath. Ela will wait in vain—here as well as in heaven. And your absurd loyalty will finally end.”

  Willam’s hatred choked me. I fought for breath. Such desperation! And I only became Jon Whitcroft again after Longspee had called me back a third time.

  “Who was that?” I muttered, still feeling his rage as my own.

  “My murderer,” Longspee answered. “Find my heart, Jon. Find it and bury it at my wife’s feet. Only that will give me the strength to fulfill my oath—and the hope that I may see her yet once more.”

  POISONOUS SHADOWS

  Alma must have heard something as I snuck back into the house. She came down the corridor just as I was getting out of my jeans, and I only just managed to shove Angus’s stuffed animals out of the bed and to crawl under my duvet before she appeared in the doorway. Luckily, Alma noticed neither my wet jeans nor the muddy sneakers under my bed. She quietly pulled the door shut again, and I stifled a sigh of relief with my pillow.

  That night I slept like a log, even though I had a horrible dream in which Stourton cut out my heart and buried it under a gallows. The next day I called Ella as soon as I woke up. She was with her parents, and her father didn’t sound happy about a previously unheard-of boy calling his daughter on a Sunday morning. But in the end he put Ella on the phone. She listened in silence to my report, and she stayed quiet even after I had finished. I’d begun to believe her father had sent her back to her room, when she cleared her throat and asked me, in her usual as if anything could ever shock me voice, “And? What are you going to do?”

  I’d really hoped she’d tell me. I’d so gotten used to her advice; it was no longer even embarrassing that it came from a girl (though it still confused me that she was so pretty). Ella was the best friend I’d ever had. And fighting demon hounds and murderous ghosts does tend to make you close.

  “Jon?” she asked again. “What are you going to do?”

  I stared at the telephone. At the other end of the corridor, Edward Popplewell was trying to put a nail into the wall. “Well…” I finally answered in a low voice, “first I have to find those druid stones.”

  “Find them? What are you talking about? His heart’s in Stonehenge, where else?”

  Stonehenge. Of course. The most famous druid stones in the world. Even my youngest sister could draw you a picture of them. I was an idiot. A pitiful, dim-witted idiot. And Ella was again generous enough to pretend she hadn’t noticed.

  “I’ll ask Zelda to take us there,” she said. “My parents would ask too many questions. They are always so worried. Drives me crazy.”

  Their daughter had been nearly torn apart by demonic hounds and put to death by the poisonous breath of a dead murderer. I thought they had enough reasons to be worried. Of course, I didn’t tell Ella that.

  When I asked the Popplewells whether I could postpone my detention to the following Sunday, they retreated to consider my request. I’d told them the Littlejohns had invited me to Stonehenge. My houseparents deliberated for nearly half an hour before granting their consent. They really were great parent substitutes. I would have loved to have given Edward some stubble in return.

  “Just be careful you don’t get trampled by the tourists,” he said when Ella came to pick me up. “Stonehenge is a dangerous place to visit on a Sunday.”

  Alma said nothing, but she gave Ella and me such a tearful oh, such young love look that I felt I had to quickly push Ella out the door.

  Zelda’s car looked older than the cathedral. Ella and I had to squeeze into the backseat because the passenger seat was taken up by a huge basket from which emanated some really strange sounds.

  The road leading out of Salisbury was still Sunday-sleepy and empty, and despite her bandaged foot, Zelda drove so fast that every bend in the road pushed me against Ella, which was quite embarrassing.

  “All right, then, I promised Ella not to ask any questions!” Zelda said, narrowly avoiding a cyclist who was struggling along the side of the road. “But I will say I think it’s a little strange for your teachers to be filling your heads with stories about Stonehenge and hidden treasure.”

  Ella shot me a warning glance, and I did my best to keep a straight face while Zelda kept muttering about how much more qualified the teachers had been in her time.

  Ella whispered to me, “I told her Bonapart claims there are mountains of Viking gold buried in Stonehenge. And we want to find it. Good treasure always gets Zelda going.”

  “What are you whispering?” Zelda asked over her shoulder. “Is there something I should know?”

  “No! What would that be?” Ella answered with a perfectly innocent face. “Tell Jon about your plan.”

  “Ah, the plan!” Zelda smiled into the mirror. “Jon, you probably know that nobody’s allowed near the stones because of all those druids who like to celebrate their rituals there?”

  “Sure,” I muttered, even though I had never heard of the druids or their rituals. But I definitely wasn’t going to risk a long lecture about the history of Stonehenge.

  “And to bypass that ban, we brought Wellington.” Zelda pointed at the basket.

  I gave Ella a puzzled look.

  “Wellington is a dog,” Ella explained with that stoic expression I’d already begun to find very reassuring. “A nice one,” she added, as if all other dogs were like the ones we’d recently encountered. “He belongs to my friend Alyce, and he’s really fast. Zelda will set him free to distract the guards, and we take the toad to the stones.”

  “The toad?” I repeated.

  “Yes, there’s one in the basket too,” Ella replied. “Zelda says toads can find hidden treasure.”

  “By hopping around?”

  “Exactly!” Ella said, tucking a trowel into her jacket.

  This was, by a wide margin, the craziest plan I’d ever heard, but since this was all in aid of my finding a heart that had been buried more than eight hundred years ago, I decided I’d better keep my mouth shut.

  It was cloudy again, and the wind tasted of early autumn, but that hadn’t kept the tourists away. The p
arking lot was already filled with row after row of parked cars and buses, and the line of people shuffling past the stones on the other side of the road looked like a caravan of pilgrims paying homage to a strange shrine. When Zelda hobbled, basket in hand, toward the ticket booth, the crowd parted like a class of first graders in front of Bonapart. Who’d stop a skinny old lady with a bandaged foot? And nobody asked her about the contents of her basket either. (Nor did anybody notice the white snout that poked out from under the cloth Zelda had carefully draped over the basket.)

  As we emerged from the tunnel that takes you from the parking lot to the stones, Ella’s hair was attacked by a gust of wind, and my first glimpse of Stonehenge was through a web of black strands. Maybe that’s why it looked as if the huge stones were performing some ancient dance.

  “They’re creepy, right?” Ella asked as we joined the procession moving past the stones.

  I wasn’t sure what they were. I tried hard to feel the poisonous shadows, but all I could see were some big gray stones that looked quite harmless compared to Stourton and his bloodless servants.

  We’d circled the stones halfway when Zelda put down her basket and looked around at the guards who were keeping up a rather bored watch by the tunnel.

  As soon as Zelda lifted the cloth, Wellington jumped out of the basket. It was probably no fun being stuck in a small basket with a toad. The dog dashed across the lawn surrounding the stones and performed a couple of perfect one-eighties before galloping toward the procession of slowly shuffling tourists.

  “My dog! My dog!” Zelda shrieked so loudly that her voice would’ve been heard throughout a football stadium. The result was perfect chaos.

  Wellington barked. The tourists stumbled against and over one another. The guards ran after Wellington… and Ella took the toad out of the basket and sauntered toward the stones as calmly as if she’d come for a picnic. I did my best to follow her with an equally bored expression on my face.

  It worked. Nobody took any notice of us.

  Zelda was still screaming, and Wellington kept running back and forth over the trampled lawn. He was obviously having the time of his life. Ella knelt down in the shadow of the largest stone and let the toad jump out of the basket.

  It made one uninterested hop and then stopped.

  “Go on!” Ella hissed, prodding it with her finger. “Find!”

  Nothing.

  The smug beast just sat there, an expression of deepest loathing on its wide-mouthed face.

  We tried near another stone. Nothing. Another half-hearted hop and the dumb toad again sat still, staring at the gray stones that reached toward the sky above it.

  “What a flop,” Ella said, giving the toad another nudge. The creature’s only reaction was an annoyed croak.

  I stared at the stones and tried to sense where the man I’d seen through Longspee’s eyes might have dug into the soil and buried the urn that held the knight’s heart. But all I saw was the road behind the stones, and the overcrowded parking lot.

  Hubert de Burgh. Ella claimed he had to be the one, even though it hadn’t been proved that he poisoned Longspee. But I knew better now. I’d heard it from his own mouth.

  Ella put a comforting arm around my shoulder. At least I no longer blushed when she did that.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll find that heart. You’ll see.”

  I stared over her shoulder. One of the guards was standing behind her.

  “Jon? Everything all right?” Ella asked, turning around.

  “And what are you two doing here?” the guard asked.

  His face was flushed. He’d probably been chasing Wellington. Seeing his huge belly, it really seemed amazing how he’d managed to sneak up on us like that. Damned stones! They were so huge, even grown-ups could play hide-and-seek among them.

  But Ella wasn’t at all intimidated. On the contrary, she frowned and gave the man a look as if it were he, not we, who had trespassed. That frown is one of Ella’s secret weapons. It immediately makes you feel like you just said or did something incredibly stupid, even if you have absolutely no idea what that something might’ve been.

  “Did you catch my gran’s dog?” she asked the guard, as if that was the only task that could possibly give some meaning to his otherwise pointless existence.

  “No… no, we haven’t,” he answered, obviously quite impressed. “That’s one fast little dog, that is.”

  “Well, then,” Ella said, slipping the toad back into the basket, “I think Jon and I had better take care of it. If you’ll excuse us.”

  With that, she strode past him as if she were the queen of England herself.

  The look with which the guard followed her was so puzzled, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d done a curtsy.

  We found Zelda surrounded by very agitated Russians, Chinese, and Canadians, who were all terribly concerned for the poor old lady who’d nearly lost her dog in Stonehenge. Somebody had even rustled up a chair for her. Wellington was panting on her lap, his tongue nearly hanging down to his paws, clearly enjoying all the attention.

  “And? Did the toad find anything?” Zelda asked as she hobbled with us back to the car.

  “No, it was quite a disappointment,” Ella answered.

  “Well, maybe there simply wasn’t anything for it to find!” Zelda retorted tartly. She gently put Wellington into the basket with the toad. “Viking treasure, indeed!” she muttered contemptuously. “What nonsense. Your teacher will have to explain himself to me.”

  On the drive back to Salisbury, I was so quiet that Ella kept giving me concerned looks.

  “Look, we can go back at night,” she finally whispered. “There won’t be any guards.”

  “And?” I whispered back. “Even if we dig around for a hundred years, our chances of finding that heart are one in a million.”

  Ella’s look said, Jon Whitcroft, pull yourself together. But all I could think about was that I’d let Longspee down!

  “Maybe it’s by the stones in Aylesbury,” Ella whispered. Up front, Zelda was trying to persuade Wellington to stay in the basket.

  “Forget it, okay?” I hissed at her. “I’ll find out myself. I was the one he asked to find his heart anyway.”

  I regretted those words as soon as they crossed my lips. But Ella had already turned her back toward me (at least as much as that was possible while belted in the backseat of a car). I think I never again got so close to losing her friendship.

  “Who asked you? Are you still talking about your teacher?” Zelda asked.

  “Yes, yes, exactly,” I mumbled, staring out of the window.

  Ella didn’t look at me again, even when Zelda dropped me off. And I couldn’t think of a single word that would’ve gotten me back into her good graces.

  No heart. And now Ella was mad at me as well.

  All I wanted to do was to bury myself in my bed. But Stu and Angus had returned from their weekends. They’d brought back new supplies for the illegal candy stash, and Stu wanted to hear about only one thing: why Ella Littlejohn and I had been caught by a priest in the cathedral on Saturday morning.

  “Why do you think?” I asked tetchily, throwing myself onto my bed. “We had a rendezvous with a ghost!” After that Angus left me alone. He put a new fluffy dog next to his other stuffed animals. But Stu wouldn’t let go so easily.

  “Oh, come on. Ella Littlejohn? I’m impressed!” he said. “How did you manage to get her to meet you? And then she even gets herself locked in with you?” Under any other circumstances, the admiration in Stu’s voice would have been flattering.

  “Stu! Leave Jon alone!” Angus growled.

  But Stu was on his favorite subject.

  “Did you kiss her?” He had a new tattoo, a pierced heart, right on his neck. “Go on, tell me.”

  “For God’s sake, leave me alone, Stu!” I barked at him. “Or I’ll ask Angus to give you one of his special Scottish Hugs!”

  I was in a miserable mood. I didn’t have the fa
intest idea how I was going to find Longspee’s heart, and I would’ve loved to cut out my tongue for what I’d said to Ella. I could still see her hurt face in front of me.

  Stu, of course, took my mood as proof of something else.

  “I knew it!” he said with a grin so broad that it barely fit on his scrawny face. “Nobody kisses Ella Littlejohn. Not a chance. I tried it myself.”

  “Me too,” said Angus. He was stuffing his fluffy raven with gummy bears. “Big-time humiliation.”

  I admit that did improve my mood a bit. I pulled the blanket over my head to hide my silly-happy smile.

  But Stu pulled the blanket off my face.

  “Wait,” he said. “We still don’t know how you even got her to stay in the cathedral with you—at night!”

  Yes, how, Jon?

  “She… she wanted to find out whether there really are ghosts,” I muttered. “For her grandmother.” At least that was only a fifty percent lie.

  “Yep, that sounds like Ella,” Stu said with more than a hint of envy in his voice. Then he fell into a very unusual silence. He was probably picturing how it would be to be locked in the cathedral with Ella Littlejohn.

  “And?” Angus was putting one of his T-shirts on his new fluffy dog.

  “And what?” I asked.

  “Are there ghosts in the cathedral?”

  He’d obviously been asking himself the same question. “Of course not,” I answered. “It’s complete bull.”

  LONGSPEE’S CASTLE AND A DEAD CHORISTER

  When I got to school the next morning, I immediately went to look for Ella, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. The old Bishop’s Palace is such a maze of corridors and staircases that you can easily not run into a person for days, so initially I didn’t think anything of it. During the first break Bonapart gathered us all for a bus excursion to Old Sarum to “give you an impression of how hard the life of your Anglo-Saxon forebears was on that hill, which has no water and enough wind to peel the skin off your faces.”