Ghostheart Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  logo

  Missing Things

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Glossary

  A Note On ‘Tantony’

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Other Books by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  We found my brother in the skybog.

  It was me that found him.

  Boson Quirk is dead, face-up in a bog of stars.

  Almost everyone in Carrick said that the boy

  was a monster, and now Fermion is sure that

  the townspeople are looking sideways at her,

  wondering if she’ll go the way of her cursed,

  mad twin. When a new voice rises inside her,

  Fermion begins to wonder the same thing.

  The voice tells her that the answer to Boson’s

  affliction lies on the other island, the one that

  everyone says is bristling with gods and monsters.

  But what waits for her there? Surely it is madness

  to pursue the answer?

  Missing Things

  WE FOUND MY BROTHER in the skybog.

  It was me that found him.

  His body upright in the black water of a boghole and his white face upturned to the dawn-pearl sky, like one moon watching another.

  Skybog ground is dabbled with sinks of standing water as flat and shining as looking-glasses. When the bog mists curl away the pools show only white cloud or silver moonrays, lightning or stars, like bits of the sky have fallen right into the black earth. Those sinks fill with falling rain or rising groundwater. Some are tiny, hardly big enough to hold even one star; some are deep as two men laid down end-to-end.

  If you step off the paths there’s no firm ground to walk on, no ropes to hold to, no bodge to hold you up. If you step off you’ll start churning in the slough, sure as mud. If you step off you’ll fall into one of the deep bogholes and you can stop there like a pillar until the end of days. Nobody will find you. Whether you are taking the Waterward or the Woodward, the Homeward or the Upward, Pa says to step off the bodge-ways means death.

  You never step off the paths.

  And really it’s not so hard to remember. Once you know what to look for, there are safe paths tramped all over. There’s bodge laid through the dark swamp-thickets, and rope-grips to keep you upright. There are alder bridges over hidden streams, and whitestones around the quaking-mires, all laid out by previous Quirks and well-tended by the generations.

  But on that morning, there was Boson, off the path and in the boghole, his face uplifted and the morning star winking in both his dead eyes. He’d forgotten what we all know. What all Quirks are born knowing.

  You never step off the paths.

  Pa says the bodge-ways are the only right ways to move through the mires — unless we can learn to walk on water. When we go alone into the bog, we each cut our mark into the earth by the path and that’s how we know to find the others. My mark is a circle and Pa’s mark is his hand. Moo’s is a sickle. At least she says it’s a sickle; it looks more like a worm to me. She can be very careless. Pa and me have had to talk to her about it a few times.

  Boson’s mark was an egg.

  Anyway, in spite of knowing as well as I do about the bodge-ways my brother had forgotten it all. He’d stepped off the path. To follow his talking birds and singing water, no doubt. To hear the news from the Otherworld, probably. And now here he was, soggy as a sponge and dead as a body can be. I stood over his lifted face and I wanted to slap it.

  We should have known.

  We should have known when those bees swarmed our chimney. They filled our place right up with their hum-din. Pa said to leave them, they’d find their own way out. And they did, but we still found dead bees in everything for weeks.

  We should have known when that owl bluthered over our threshold. It flapped around the hearth until Moo had to drop her shawl over its head to make it quiet. She put it out by the greenplots so it could pay us for its life by eating the longtails, but it just kept coming back. So then she carried it out into the moaney and left it there in her shawl. She said by the time it worked itself out of all that wool, it would’ve forgotten all about us.

  And then there was that magpie, all alone and pealing.

  We should have known.

  I should have known.

  Chapter One

  Moaney

  THE BOG TURNS UP SOME UNEXPECTED things. Pa and me are always digging something up. It’s just old stuff and mostly in pieces but sometimes we find a marvel. Like the time we dug up the book or what was left of it. Most of the outside pages were rotted but the middle was full of gold and scarlet wrigglework. Its little pictures gleamed by turf-light, but when I took it into the sun its glowing parts disappeared. None of us could read what the book said, but it didn’t matter. The pictures had a talk of their own, and they talked about beasts and monsters.

  Some of the monsters in that book are headless. They look at you out of eyes in their bellies. Or they have only one leg, and on the end of that leg a foot like a toadstool. They lie on their backs and their foot shelters them from sun or rain. There’s a bird with a man’s head, and a man with a bird’s head. Probably the words tell exactly what the monsters do and eat, where they live and so forth, but we only had the pictures to go on and so we stayed mostly astonished.

  That book and its beasts was the best thing we ever dug out of the mire.

  The worst thing we ever dug out was my brother.

  The thing is, we’d been too busy to look out for the signs of a coming death, even if they came in threes and sevens. Even if an archangel had trumpeted them right into our ears, we wouldn’t have noticed. Boson had been moony for years and we had all sorts of regular trouble upon us.

  We had thieving up the cut, and down at the yard. I was watching for signs of real folk. I forgot to watch for Other signs.

  Anyhow, signs are not such simple things to read. Owls and magpies and bees are just part of the world, in spite of how they act around chimneys and thresholds. They will turn up and hoot and buzz and build nests. They can’t all be here just so folk can see who’s to die, who’s to be born, and what-all. If I said the chantments I’m supposed to say every time I saw a snail-on-the-stone, there’d be no time for anything else.

  But then the sign of signs came, and still we were blind.

  The other island appeared off Redcliff again. Overnight, it punted into place like a giant’s own coracle. There’s meant to be one of those islands for every sort of Dead folk, though you can’t tell from looking which island is for who. Anyway, whatever its way of coming, it came. The Dead-isle rose from the sea-bed, or fell from the sky-towers or dropped its mist-veil, and in the morning it was just there. The chapel did a bustling trade in masses and candles. Folk hung about the shore and cliffs, just looking. It was quite the thing.

  It shames me to remember it now. That island had so plainly come for my brother.

  I should have known.

  I was the oldest.

  I came first.

  I was in a hurry even to be born. They had to wait another whole day before Boson came. That’s just how he was. Pa says I carried him everywhere in spite of us being the sa
me size. Moo told me we talked to each other before we talked to her or Pa. They said we always went about together and that we held secrets.

  Well I didn’t remember any of that. I couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t sick and blithering.

  As he sickened, he dwindled to useless for any real work. Pa said the ground needed more than Boson’s good intentions to give up its turf and he said I had to go instead. That’s when I started up the cuts.

  It was midwinter when I first went up. Pa said I had a strong arm, and a sharp eye for the sweet turf that doesn’t take your throat out with its smoke. He said we made a good team in spite of me being a girl.

  Boson stayed home with Moo. She said he was useless there too, even for fires and she’d never known a boy who didn’t care for fires. While Pa and me were working the cuts, Boson was at home spooking Moo. He was telling her to watch her step in the icy yard, it was fairly breaking out in ghosts. He was asking her plain, as if he did it every day, who all the Dead-ones were.

  ‘I don’t see any Dead ’uns,’ Moo was answering him. She was feeling his brow with her palm and tipping his head back by the chin to look at him eye-straight. He was smiling like her face was a blossoming meadow and he had all day to spend in it.

  She gripped him by the arms like he might float away and shook him.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said, sharp and loving both.

  Before that first distempered winter Boson never had any trouble eating but then he started up picky with his food. He wouldn’t eat flesh any longer; he said he couldn’t eat his brothers and sisters. He wouldn’t eat greens that had even touched flesh; the death in the meat was catching, he said, and then he started up about eggs and milk as if they were some filth we were forcing on him. At meals he picked and made faces until Moo sent him outside to eat.

  Then he stopped eating with us altogether and started eating with the birds.

  My brother was my parents’ favourite, their tantony, their cosset. He seemed made for bringing out the tenderness in my mother and the laughter in my father. I was the regular one. I seemed made only for good sense and work, and my parents left me to it. Whatever it was he had in him that made them croon or laugh, I didn’t have it. I knew I didn’t have it, but I always said they may have loved my brother but they couldn’t trust him.

  They could always trust me.

  I think maybe together we made one full person; him with his fiery mind and me with my cool one, him with his lofty mind-eye and earth-bound me, him making Pa laugh and me making him proud. Plainly, there’s no room for two flapping, excitable folk in any family. Pa said we were lucky I was such a practical sort of person.

  All through the night he died, my brother’s hound, Mungo, lay out with him. His silver fur was matted, his head wrung with black rush and one of his teeth was gone entirely. He’d plainly been trying to haul Boson out of that hole. When I found them, they were blackly compassed about with ravens. On just about every bough of the drooping willows, glossy feathers stirred and icy eyes blinked; knowing blinks like men just pretending to be birds.

  And at first I thought they were both dead. Then Mungo whined and kicked his hind legs and rose up. Full of shock, I laughed. Boson’s hound gave me such a look, I stopped straight-up.

  I knew what he was thinking.

  He was thinking, where was I when my brother fell into that rank mud-bottom hollow. He was thinking I should have made him come away. I should have made him come away from the town, away from the nesting-rocks, away down the Homeward and safe to his bed.

  Mungo had seen how I pinched him sometimes to make him come home with me. He’d heard the things I said to him when I was sent to fetch him home. He was thinking maybe I never really liked him.

  After we brought him home Moo brooded by my brother’s body. She peeled his bloody clothing from him and burnt it. She bathed his mudclad skin and laid him out before the fire. All the while she talked to him in whispers. I don’t know what she was saying.

  At last she sat by him and rocked, covering her face with her apron.

  I wanted to sit by Boson myself, with my hand on Mungo’s soft head, and be left alone. I’d been lopped somehow. But there was no room for me by the body.

  And there was something else too.

  Now my brother had gone I didn’t know what to feel. He used to do all that for us. He’d had time for such things. I was too busy looking after him.

  Pa crashed about like the house was too small for him. Like there was nowhere, anywhere, big and strong enough to hold what was in him. He put his fist into the wall. He scraped his brow on the stones until the blood came. He trembled over the shrunken thing that had been my brother, still shedding its brown muck from the pallet like the turf stacks shed their water.

  Somebody had been at my brother with a careless blade and over his heart a wound opened in the shape of a ragged cross. My father traced the wound with his finger. I saw his heart crack like a nut.

  ‘If I ever get my fists on them who did this!’ His voice rose from regular to bellowing tones in one wave. His eyes were wild in their wiry nests. He was wax-faced and blood-eyed.

  Gilpin ran to Moo and hid in her skirt.

  ‘Too loooouud,’ he wailed with his hands over his ears but Moo didn’t even drop her apron; she just rocked and rocked.

  ‘They’ll be made strangers to their own faces!’ Pa told me like I was somebody else. ‘Their own mothers won’t know them.’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Moo looked over her apron with hot, sunken eyes.

  ‘Maybe their own mothers don’t know them already,’ she said in a fading sort of tone. ‘Offspring are tricky.’

  ‘Scrofulous,’ shouted Pa. ‘Pizzle-twangs! Maggoty and hag-ridden and—’ He sat and his face sort of fell inward like an unexpected sinkhole. He strained at a half-smile for my sake and my heart upswelled to him. I saw his big, scarred hands hanging feebled in his lap like they had never swung the scraw or hefted the stacks. His knuckles bled from thumping the wall. I gave him a cloth. The moaney winds swarmed around our place, singing the wide bog and trying to tear the stone and wood apart.

  I nodded at the door, battering in its frame. ‘Shouldn’t we unlatch it to let him leave?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe I don’t want him to leave,’ said Moo.

  Chapter Two

  Breakwater

  ON THE DAY OF BOSON’S BURYING, after the others had gone home, I lay pressed into the fresh-turned ground and wondered what other unknown things lay beneath me in this sog. Black beetles I could see, heaving through the moss, and if I dug I’d find any amount of fine slough-worms. Deeper than the worms I’d find the gembugs, tiny as river-pearls and living always stuck onto spreading slime-roots, glimmering in the dark for nobody.

  My bones ached.

  It was cold.

  I was wet.

  I rose from the mound of my brother’s grave. The sudden storms had passed and just a few wind-ribbons still trailed about Redcliff. It seemed a crumpled new world of a sudden. The faraway gulls sounded like some mob mourning. How could the sea still glitter like that? How could the sun shine?

  I would run Redcliff to dry-out, warm-up and stop brooding. I knelt to put my mark by the Croftward and as I did I saw that lost reedswamp crane again. It had been wandering the moaney for days, looking for its way back home. It watched me with its mindless face, spreading its wings that opened broad as sails, and I turned away from it and ran.

  Below the Cliffward the boomers rolled and broke. Beyond the boomers the kelp forests darkened. Beyond that, where the sky and water meet, rose the other island. Below me a small figure in black paced the waterline, and sometimes it settled with its hands shading its eyes as if hunting the sea for something.

  It was a woman wrapped in shawls and carrying a broad hat. She sat down, still on the pebbly shore. She sat still for so long the sea-birds regrouped like she was just another one of the rocks. I’d never seen a living thing so still.

&n
bsp; At the stone steps down into Strangers’ Croft I stopped to rest.

  Streams flowed all about. The island was drooped like a wet cat. The raindrops had formed-up and become ripples, then brooks, then streams. Gathered altogether now, the water was dropping in silver sheets straight down into the dark ruin below.

  The woman on the shore was fussing at her shawls. It was the old one, Lily Fell from Shipton-Cronk who takes our turf and pays us with wool. Halfway down the steps I called out to her and she waved back without even looking. I went down the steps like the rain, without a thought of not going.

  A good strong rain brings clean water to the sinks and the rivers. Lost fishes wander into the marshes where we catch them with just our hands. Skylarks start up with rushes of song, otters bark again by the Blackwater and all of a sudden, there’s new greens at home, snipe and redshank out in the reedswamps, and frogs and bog-turtles all through the hummocks. Everything that’s gone away comes back. Pa says the rain shows us the truth of our country, and it’s good for folk to know the truth of their country.

  A dried-out bog, now, is a whole other thing. It springs back as you walk and feels safe, but the crust can break under the load of you and when it does, you go straight down to your knees. Then knuckle-by-knuckle, slow enough to think about it as you go, you sink into the stinking clutch of the quaking-mire.

  The truth is Quirks live in high-water country where earth flows and water stands still. Where water breathes fogs and fogs drip water. Where a body can be drowned just like that in dirt and duckwort.

  Strangers’ Croft’s crumbling steps still led down safe enough right into the shadow-tumble cobbles of the old town. What was left of that ruined place was crumbling, and the old breakwater letting the sea in. Everybody said the Croft was lately suffering a low-to-middling infestation of ghosts. People heard them pattering about down there in the night. Though, why a ghost would be pattering anywhere was beyond me.

  It made you somewhat jumpy. If I went by the Underway I might meet the Veiled-ones, covered crown-to-heel in their black cloths. If I took the Saltward I might meet with Moustaches, all six feet of him, with his head turbaned in at least a furlong of silk and his beard to his knees. And if I took Middlegate, that drowned and weedy low woman might draw aside her shrouds and show me her blue-faced baby. Plainly now, I wasn’t about to take any of those unquiet ways.