Thornghost (2 page)

T
he night was not black.

Sometime in late spring, all darkness bled out of the Willodale sky and settled in the trees below, leaving everything blue. The white long house, the red barn, the little cottage in the morello garden where Lin and her family used to live: all glowed ghostly pale around the yard. The elm tree stretched inky branches across the grass.

Niklas waited. He didn't worry about Uncle Anders, who had gone to bed early, even for him. But a patch of yellow fell from Grandma Alma's bedroom and onto the grass, and Niklas sat quietly until the light winked out. Then he snuck down the stairs. The hunters may have found the sheep already; he hoped they had. But unlike the hunters, Niklas knew where Edith and the lambs had been heading. He wanted to be sure.

The air felt chill as he slipped under the fence. The
electrical wire was supposed to mark the line between outlying fields and the farm, but Niklas knew better. The fence was not the border.

The true border ran through the screaming stone.

The Summerhill woods were dotted with boulders and rocks fallen from Buttertop. Some were huge, like the very tips of mountains. Others were standing stones that sometimes, when the light slanted in just so, scowled at anyone who passed.

Niklas had scaled each and every one of the bigger stones and leaned against the scowlers. But there was one stone he never touched. A ways up the trail, so close to Summerhill that Niklas could see it from his bedroom, stood the six-foot-tall screaming stone. It had a narrow hole through the middle, and when the wind blew through the slit, it made a sound like a thin wail.

The Willodalers had all sorts of stories to explain why the stone screamed. Most said it keened for the dead, and those doomed to die.

“That's everyone, then.” Lin had shrugged, and this was true. But Niklas still kept to the other side of the track when he passed that stone. Lin had asked him why once, but he hadn't told her. He didn't want to invite the nightmare back by talking about it. So he made up a new explanation.

“This . . .” he had said, poking a finger as close to the stone as he could bear. “. . . is the border.”

“Which border?” Lin had asked.

“Between the farms and the forest. Between our world and theirs. Right through this troll heart.”

“Aha! This is a petrified troll,” Lin had said, because she was good with words like that.

“Turned to stone by sunlight,” Niklas had said. “Like all the other scowlers. But that's not what killed it. See the hole? That's what troll's bane does. It melts through their flesh. One perfect hit and they're dead.”

This night and every night, as Niklas passed the stone, he patted his shirt pocket. Even if they didn't play the game anymore, he always carried some acorns with him into the woods.

From Edith's impatient pace, Niklas guessed she had headed for one of the two perfect spots for grazing on the Buttertop trail. The first was Oldmeadow, a sloping field no more than half a mile up the mountainside. He found it deserted. But he discovered two pebbly piles of dung where the trail curved back into the woods.

That left only one place to look.

Sorrowdeep.

Niklas stared up at the snowcapped peak of Buttertop. To get past it and up into the grassy mountain vales, you had to climb a ragged trail along a lip of cliff, left shattered by the big avalanche almost two hundred years ago. The herds of Willodale rarely went up that path except when their humans made them at the beginning of every summer. But before the trail, on a wide shelf just above
the tree line, cradled by slopes of lush mountain grass, lay the black pond of Sorrowdeep.

In the entire valley, it was the place where Niklas least liked to go. Because in those waters lived a darkness that wanted to pull you down. Or so Grandma Alma had told him countless times. It was her favorite scary story. “Stay away from that pond, my boy. It's made of death and sorrow. If you try to swim in it, it will freeze your limbs and still your breath. It will weigh you down with every wrong you've ever done. It will drag you to the bottom and keep you in a cage of regret.”

The problem was, sheep didn't care about stories, and neither did predators.

Niklas ducked his head and kept climbing, following the path as it carved its way from ledge to ledge through ever-thinning woods. On the final shelf before Sorrow­deep, the wind came down to meet him, setting the ferns to shivering.

He stopped and wrinkled his nose. The wind carried a faint stench. He left the path and made his way to the end of the ledge, where the Summerchild flew off a cliff. Probably a dead deer, but he should look. If the carcass was in the water, it would poison Summerhill's water supply.

At the top of the waterfall, flat stones formed a dotted line across the stream, like worn-down teeth. Once, before the big avalanche changed the face of Buttertop, the path
had crossed over here. But no one used this ford anymore, and the track was nearly lost under roots and dry twigs.

Niklas stepped out on the first stone. The Summerchild rushed past him, misting the air where it fell. He saw no deer, but he heard a rumble, so soft his ears strained to pick it up under the splashing of the stream. He felt it too, a tremor under his feet that brought out goose bumps on his arms.

A howl cut through the mist. Niklas froze, stunned by how strange it sounded. Sharp like the scream of a fox, but so dark it had to come from the throat of a much bigger creature. On the far bank, behind some slender rowans, a single light appeared. Round and big like a flashlight, except there was no beam, and it looked somehow . . . hungry.

Twigs began to snap, the rowan trunks creaked and yielded, and suddenly there were two lights instead of one.

Eyes.

Niklas Summerhill was no coward, but neither was he a complete idiot.

He turned and fled.

T
he beast ran faster than him.

Niklas took all the shortcuts he knew, pivoting around the right branches as the path jackknifed down through the woods. The creature behind him was not so limber. For every turn it made, he heard it crash into a tree or thump against a stone. Even so, it gained on him.

When they emerged onto the Oldmeadow, the path looped through the grass in a wide curve with nothing to slow the beast down. Niklas had to think of something, now, or it would catch him.

He veered right and plunged into the thigh-high grass. Nettles licked at his hands as he cut across the field, dodging stones and grooves in the ground. The wind made the grass hiss, bringing the foul smell with it. The bear—it had to be a bear; Niklas couldn't think of any other animal this big and heavy—must be very sick or hurt. He felt a cold
tug in his belly. There was nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal.

The beast howled behind him, the same eerie, distorted scream, and so close now. Niklas wanted to look over his shoulder, but he couldn't afford it. The beast came closer for every step. He needed to hide.

They were coming up on the southwest corner of the Oldmeadow, where the path crossed the Summerchild over Oak Bridge.

Niklas knew he wouldn't make it to the bridge. He broke right again, down into the streambed, hurtling into the water. On the far bank, he slammed down on his belly and scrambled under a dense mass of juniper brambles. Dry needles crackled as he crawled in between the bushes.

The beast splashed into the water and stopped. Niklas couldn't see it, but he could smell it, and he could hear it, snorting and wheezing, sniffing at the shrub.

It could smell him, too.

A slithering breath gusted under the juniper. Under the branches, the eyes appeared again, pale green discs, broken into pieces by the twigs. The beast grunted and began pulling the bushes out of the ground, roots and all.

Niklas pushed himself up the bank, squeezing deeper and deeper into the shrub, until he rolled out between two knobby juniper limbs and saw a latticed canopy far above. The oak tree!

He stumbled across the path and clawed his way up the gnarled trunk until he got high enough for the branches to thin. Only then dared he to look down.

A bare wedge of ravaged earth cut into the shrub, reaching almost to the other side. The far bank of the stream was strewn with torn and tossed junipers. But there was no hulking shape, no green eyes. The beast had disappeared.

Niklas tried to keep his gulps of air quiet. This didn't make any sense. A wounded animal would attack; maybe give chase if it felt threatened. But this thing didn't act like a creature crazed by pain. It was hunting him. And bears did not have green eyes that glowed in the dark.

His hands shook too hard to hold on properly, so he slid down a few yards and settled where three branches met to form a chair of sorts. Lin used to call it his throne. He had sat in it hundreds of times because the oak tree was their troll-hunting headquarters.

“Best place to get acorns for the troll's bane,” Niklas had pointed out. Oak trees rarely grew this far north, and there were only three in all of Willodale. But that wasn't the only reason they had chosen it. The oak tree had branches that stretched over the stream, and reached out beyond the cliff upon which the tree perched. If you moved around in the canopy, you had as good a view of the Summerhill lands as you'd ever get.

The wind shifted, and hushed voices blew across the
stream from Oldmeadow. Niklas eased out of his throne and moved a notch up the trunk to see better.

The hunting party. They approached quickly along the trail, flashlight beams roving over the grass. “I swear I heard a scream,” said a voice, and Niklas winced. Mr. Molyk.

“You're sure it wasn't young Master Summerhill trying to pull our legs?” another voice said. Mrs. Ottem. “He's always lurking around this neck of the woods.”

“Well, if it was, maybe I should give him a taste of my peppercorns.” Molyk patted his shotgun as he stepped onto Oak Bridge. “He deserves it tonight, that's for sure.”

Mrs. Ottem grunted. “It was a shame with his mother, but it's past time everyone stopped coddling him.”

“They're just pranks,” a third man said, joining them on the bridge. Niklas recognized the voice of one of the Fale brothers.

“Tell that to your wife,” Mrs. Ottem said. “It's her plum jam that keeps vanishing.”

“Oh, we don't know it's him,” Mr. Fale said. “We keep our jam behind locked doors, and Niklas is just a lad. I hardly think—”

“Tell that to my sheep,” Mr. Molyk cut him off. “You saw Edith, half-mad with fear, and the lambs, too. We're lucky we got them before they fell off the mountain trail.”

Up in the tree, Niklas leaned his forehead against the trunk. The Willodalers didn't get it at all. He might fill their boots with muck when they deserved it, but he would
never hurt an animal on purpose. He felt tingly with relief that the sheep were safe. But then Mr. Molyk added, “And that's not even mentioning the last poor wretch. Or was that just a prank, too?”

Niklas's tingles went cold. What had happened to the last poor wretch?

But he didn't find out, because instead Mr. Fale gave a cry. He leaned over the side of the bridge, pointing his flashlight up the stream. The hunters filed down to the water and out of Niklas's line of sight. He heard them arguing over the torn shrubs and whether or not they could have anything to do with the beast. Then they all fell silent.

Niklas craned his neck, but he couldn't see anything. When the hunters started speaking again, the words were harsh hisses that he couldn't make out over the Summerchild. He eased out on a branch that leaned over the stream.

“I'm telling you, it's warped,” Mrs. Ottem said.

“No it isn't,” Mr. Molyk said. “It's clear as day. It's just too big to be possible.”

What were they looking at? Niklas needed to get closer, but the branch he perched on was on the slim side and yielded slightly every time he shifted his weight. He glanced behind himself to gauge how far he could go, and just like that, he forgot all about the hunters' discovery.

There was something in the tree with him.

It sat crouched and tense in his throne, watching him with slanted eyes that were rimmed in black and white.

A lynx.

For a long moment, they stared at each other, boy and cat. Below them, the hunters came clambering up the bank under Niklas's branch. He only had to call out and the men would have both him and the lynx at close range.

But Mr. Molyk spoke first. “If I catch this thing, I'm going to make it pay for my lamb.”

The lynx turned away, looking out over the valley. It had paws as big as saucers. Even a male that size would be reckoned as large, but Niklas was sure this one was female. He took in her long whiskers and white chin fur, the elegant curve of the flecked back and the tall tuft that crowned the right ear. The left ear had a split down the middle, a nasty old wound that had robbed her of the tuft.

Huge or no, this could not be the same creature that had chased him. She wouldn't crash into trees on the path. She didn't stink. And though he had no idea how or why, Niklas had the strangest feeling she felt sorry for the lamb.

So he didn't call out. He stayed still until the hunters had passed under them and disappeared down the trail.

When their voices had completely drowned in the Summerchild's noise, Niklas edged farther out on his branch, until it creaked under his weight. If it snapped, he would probably break his neck, but he wanted to put whatever
distance he could between and himself and the giant cat. One thing was certain: The lynx had to leave first. Niklas could not climb down until she was gone. He didn't want to be pounced from above.

The lynx didn't make him wait. She slid out of the tree, melting from limb to limb and onto the path without ever snapping a twig or shaking a leaf. Before the woods swallowed her, she turned and looked up at Niklas one last time.

She opened her mouth and a voice came out, slurred and rough, but clear enough to almost send Niklas tumbling from the branch.

“Thhhhank you.”