Thornghost (6 page)

A
flock of sparrows fluttered up when Niklas turned the east corner of the main house, hauling a stepladder. The birds circled for a bit before settling on the roof to watch.

“Sorry, guys,” Niklas said, tugging the ladder into position. “You'll get your place back after. I just need to examine it first.”

He had looked at the bird castle plenty of times. He often put crumbs and sunflower seeds inside the parapets of the walls, a task he did by leaning out of the bird room window with a slim, long-handled spade. But he never got truly close that way, and the angle meant he couldn't see the whole castle properly.

From the outside, there was always the danger of falling bird poop. “Don't get any ideas, now,” he said up to
the sparrows. They shuffled sideways on the eaves, making no promises.

The grass beneath the castle wore a constant, filthy halo of droppings and husks. The castle itself did not, because Uncle Anders cleaned it every week. Niklas had always assumed he did it on Grandma Alma's order. But he realized now it had nothing to do with having the finest birdfeeder in all of Willodale, and everything to do with the person who had created it. Uncle Anders couldn't keep his shirt neat if he tried, but he would not allow so much as a breath of dust on Erika's portraits, or a spot of lichen on her headstone.

Up close, the castle almost took Niklas's breath away. The doors had pinprick keyholes. The pillars were carved with miniature climbing roses. The wraparound balcony at the top of the tower had a toothpick-thin railing, and the drawbridge could be opened and closed with a tiny wrench hidden inside an archway in the courtyard. Niklas turned the handle. Hardly a squeak. Maybe Uncle Anders oiled the hinges, too.

Nightmare castle, the photo had said. There was an unsettling edge to many of the details. The vines that crept up the tower walls bristled with sharp thorns. The roof tiles had ridges that made them look like fingernails. And the tall tower had a ring of windows behind which stood a lone figure.

Niklas squinted through the opening. The figure had
its back turned, but he thought it might be a man with a big cloak. He shifted his grip to see better, and the dome moved under his fingers. With a firm twist, it came off completely, flooding the tower chamber with light.

A chorus of tiny screeches went up from the roof as the sparrows all took to the sky, flapping toward the barn in a chaotic cloud. Niklas took a shaky step down the ladder, heart thudding.

The cloaked man was not a man at all: He had a bird skull for a head. The beak made him look like a plague doctor from Harald Rosenquist's history books. He was not alone. Behind the billowing cloak stood a cage overgrown with roses. Trapped inside that cage was a child.

The skull man reached for the cage with skeletal fingers that had been fitted to the wood. They looked nearly human, but Niklas guessed they had belonged to a field mouse. The child had no features except for shallow dents where the eyes and an open mouth would be.

If his mother had dreamt this, Niklas knew who had given him his talent for nightmares. Sometimes he, too, dreamt of beaked skulls that pecked at his eyes. He thought of the photo and the skittish, pleading expression in his mother's face and suddenly wondered what he looked like when he woke up in the middle of the night. He screwed the tower roof back on, hiding the skull-man and the child.

Instead he examined the castle for more concealed
surprises, tugging and pulling every ledge and part. At last he found something, trapped under a round flagstone in the courtyard. It bore a faint mark that resembled a thorn. When he turned it, the flagstone came loose to reveal a tiny dog, curled up like it was sleeping.

Unlike the skull-man and the cage, this figurine could be removed. Niklas lifted it out and held it up in the sunlight. On the bottom, there was a name carved.

Sebastifer.

U
ncle Anders was gone.

Niklas searched everywhere. The loft, the barn, the netherfield, and Dokka's enclosure by the morello garden. He even went down to the graveyard, where Rag's still unmarked grave made a brown scar outside the fence.

He stalked the forest edge above the screaming stone, too, but Secret hadn't come. Maybe she slept the day away somewhere in the shade.

Finally he settled under the yard tree. As elm seeds rustled across the sunbaked dirt and the Summerchild sang in the east, he studied the scribbled notes of the lullaby, the photo of his mother, and the dog figurine. Just like Uncle Anders had said, Sebastifer looked like a true mutt with his floppy ears and curled-up tail. But he was so thin, like he was sick.

It was late in the afternoon when his uncle came
walking up the path from the hallowfield. Where had he been hiding? The shrubs around the graveyard were thorny and near impossible to pass through without getting cut. Niklas must have been too quick to look properly.

Uncle Anders stopped in the middle of the yard, gazing up at the strip of clear sky between the snowy mountaintops. Niklas put his things back in the satchel and got up to join him, but someone beat him to it.

Tobis came sauntering out from behind Morello House, making his way toward Uncle Anders like a cat king inspecting his lands. Uncle Anders stooped down to stroke him, and Tobis rolled over to show his big belly, smirking and wiggling.

“So that's your game today?” said his uncle. “Trying to trick me into rubbing your belly so you can bite my hand? You won't fool me, old friend.” He scratched Tobis's head instead until the cat waddled off to the barn to stalk a mouse hole. Uncle Anders chuckled as he watched him go.

His grin looked so different from the sobbing mask he had worn in the bird room yesterday that Niklas leaned back against the elm tree. He couldn't talk to his uncle about this now, not when he was having a good day. There was someone else he should be confronting anyway, and he had wasted a whole afternoon putting it off.

It wouldn't do to be a coward.

He left Uncle Anders in the yard and hurried up the front steps.

• • •

H
e found her in the cupboard, a tiny room that used to be a pantry at the back of the kitchen, but which now served as Grandma Alma's bedchamber since she felt too poorly to climb the stairs anymore.

Under the window, Uncle Anders had fitted a bed. It would be too short for most grown-ups, but for Grandma Alma, it was just right. She lay propped up by thick pillows, papery lids closed over restless eyes.

At the creak of the door, they opened. “There you are. I was just waiting for someone young and able to come wake me.”

“At your service.” Niklas eased her forward, searching her face as he slipped another pillow behind her back. Grandma Alma never slept during the day. “Are you ill?”

She swatted the words away with weak hands. “No, no. Can't an old queen have a nap?”

“Of course,” Niklas said quickly. “Queens can do whatever they like.”

He looked away from her swollen knuckles. Above her head hung a yellowed snapshot of his mother balancing Niklas on her lap. He had always hated that photo because he squirmed to get away, like he didn't care that she would be gone in less than a year. But his mother didn't seem to mind. Her calm expression was miles away from the wild stare in the bird castle photo.

Maybe there would never really be a good time for this. He took the photo out of his satchel and held the evidence
in the light from the window, watching his grandmother's face turn from tired to sad.

“Where did you find this picture?”

“In Anne's office.”

A smile brushed past Grandma Alma's face. “Well, that woman never could leave the past alone, even when she was asked to.” She picked the frame out of his hands. “Your mother carved that thing in less than a summer. Day and night, she worked. She hardly stopped to sleep.”

“She doesn't look well,” Niklas said.

“I tried to tell her she needed to rest, that her lungs weren't strong enough for that kind of fervor. She wouldn't listen.” Grandma Alma ran a trembling finger over his mother's curls. “You're very much like her, you know.”

“What do you mean?” A worm of worry stirred in his belly. He smoothed down his hair where it stuck up in the front, as dark as his mother's was pale.

“I mean in most ways that matter. Bull stubborn, the both of you, can't be talked out of anything. Take the castle, for instance. Before she died, Erika suddenly got it into her head that we had to remove all the beautiful things she had carved, including this.”

“Why?”

“I'm not sure.” Grandma Alma put the photo on her nightstand, facedown. “I said you were alike, and you were, to begin with. But your mother changed. She had an accident when she was your age.”

“At Sorrowdeep.”

Grandma Alma frowned, and Niklas added, “You're always telling me to stay away from the pond. I thought that must be why.”

“You thought right, then. That accident was hard on all of us. Afterward, the nightmares began. Dead birds and evil fogs and I don't know what. My guess is she had another dream about this castle and tried to work it out of her head. She did that sometimes. The dreams got stronger toward the end when she couldn't carve. I think her mind . . . slipped a little.”

Niklas swallowed. “But you put the castle back up when she died?”

“It seemed such a harmless thing, when we kept to her wishes in all other matters.” Grandma Alma's eyes filled with tears. “Even when the instructions seemed a little cruel. It is only natural for a young man to ask about his mother, but she wanted you to know as little as possible.”

Niklas bit his lip. It was her, his mother, all along. The secrecy and half-told stories had been her wish. “She didn't want me to know her?”

Grandma Alma sighed. “I don't know why she wanted it so, my boy. But I don't believe she would have asked this of us if she didn't think it very important.”

She pushed the photo toward him. “Well done for finding this, but now I must tell you to let the story rest. I know you won't want to, but . . .”

“What about Sebastifer?”

“Sebastifer?” Grandma Alma folded her hands. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

A hard knot weighed Niklas's chest down. He could have said that he already knew, that Uncle Anders had told him, but something in the set of her mouth stopped him. Instead, he placed the figurine of the dog on top of the photo. “I found this in the castle. It says
Sebastifer
on the bottom.”

She stared at the dog, lower lids tight. “Strange.”

Very calmly, Niklas said, “One more thing. The afternoon Mom died, when you said I could come and say good-bye. I remember her saying that I should stay away from her, that she was dangerous. That she was a
Thornghost.
But you said I had just imagined it. Are you sure about that?”

After, as he sat on the steps and let the sun warm him up, he realized that he didn't ask because he wanted the truth, or because Grandma Alma's gentle patting of his arm would reassure him.

He asked because he now knew exactly what she looked like when she lied. And his mother's last words had been no dream.

S
ecret?” Niklas stood under the ash tree all fidgety with worry. Dusk had eased up from the river, pushing the red-gold sunset all the way to the snowcaps above. Time for nocturnal creatures of the woods to stir, but still no lynx turned up at the border. What if she had left now that she had warned him about the trolls? Or what if the troll had gotten her? He climbed deeper into the thicket. “Secret? Are you here?”

She dropped out of the ash and landed behind him.

Niklas whirled around. “Finally!”

But Secret didn't seem quite so thrilled to see him. “I told you not to cross the border. But since you don't listen, you can see for yourself. Under the worm ferns by the screaming stone.”

Stubby tail whipping, she climbed back up into the ash to wait.

Not Niklas's favorite thing, coming so close to the screaming stone, especially after last night's nightmare. But he couldn't let Secret see that, so he brushed aside the green fronds. In a crescent around the stone, half-buried in the spongy moss, there were animal skulls. Small ones that might belong to squirrels, big ones that could be deer. They had all been carved with a rectangle sliced in half by a slanted line. Though the mark had a different shape, it didn't take a master riddle solver to recognize the style from the leather stone last night. Troll magic.

“They put these here?”

“They both came while you slept. The nasty one with scars put those into the ground. I think she's trying to destroy the stone.” Secret looked straight at Niklas. “Are you scared enough now?”

Niklas didn't reply. It had occurred to him that maybe he was in over his head. Last night the oak tree had burst into flames at the touch of one of the troll marks. He had no idea if these skulls had the power to break the border. “Did you see her cross the path?”

“No,” Secret said. “But she said they would return,
after.
”

“After what?”

“I don't know. Did you find more acorns?”

“I didn't. But I found . . .” Niklas hesitated. Usually, he didn't discuss his mother with anyone. Secret flicked her good ear toward him to say she was listening. And
maybe it was because she didn't stare at him with pity the way everyone always did, or because she just waited instead of filling the silence to cover the awkwardness. But he found himself telling her everything he had discovered that day.

As he explained about the song, the photo, the castle, how everyone had kept the truth from him after she had died, Secret sat in the tall worm grass and groomed herself, never looking in his direction. When he was done, she didn't offer any of the poor-orphan phrases. She said, “My mother also died. Killed by hunters.”

Her paw came up to clean the split ear. Suddenly Niklas saw how the tear looked way too smooth to have been made by teeth. It was a gun wound. No wonder Secret looked so lost up in the tree the night of Rag's death. “They almost got you, too?”

Secret yawned, which Niklas thought was cat-speak for a shrug. She turned to him to say something, but instead she jumped to her feet, crouched low on her hind legs, ear tuft trembling.

“What is it?” Niklas searched the tree line for green eyes. “Are the trolls coming?”

But Secret's ears didn't point toward the mountain trail. They pointed toward the farm. “Music, I think you call it. In the bone field by the stream.”

“You mean the graveyard?” Niklas strained to hear it. The hallowfield was just inside the gate and down a short
hill, but still the Summerchild almost drowned out the noise. It took him a moment to pick out the sad, lilting tune of his mother's lullaby over the rushing stream. “It must be Uncle Anders playing again.” Niklas winced. “I'm worried about him. When my mother died, he got so sad, it made him sick. He's been all better for years, but lately he's thinking about her.”

“He speaks the same word over and over: Erika.” Secret whipped around to study him. “What does it mean, this word?”

“It's my mother's name.” Niklas swallowed. “I have to see if Uncle Anders needs help.”

“You're scared,” Secret said. It wasn't a question. “More than when I showed you the skulls. Why?”

“Hey now,” he said quickly. “I don't do scared.” Even he could feel the smile he tried wasn't a very good rascal-face. Secret just stared at him without stirring a whisker. He adjusted the shoulder strap of his satchel. “I get nightmares sometimes. About her, coming from that field. They're just dreams . . .” He trailed off. Just dreams, yes. But the normal rules didn't apply in Summerhill. Not anymore.

Secret looked away for a moment. “Then I'll come.”

“Not a good idea,” Niklas said. “What if Uncle Anders sees you? Or the hunters come?”

But she tossed her head and slipped forward.

At the fence, she turned and flicked her tail at him.

“I know,” Niklas muttered, hurrying after. “Not so slow.”

• • •

T
hey found the hallowfield pooled with darkness, out of reach from the last rays of the sun. The naked roof beams of the chapel jutted up like folded hands. Secret had called it the bone field, but in fact it was mostly empty. Most of the headstones belonged to people who died in the great avalanche, but their bodies lay somewhere under the mountain. The only grave with bones in it was the one marked
Erika Summerhill
.

The notes of the Thornghost song floated through the air, but Niklas couldn't see Uncle Anders.

“The music comes from the ground,” Secret said. When Niklas stiffened, she added, “Not from under the headstones. There's a cave below the house.”

Niklas had never heard of any cave below the chapel.

They edged around to the east side of the chapel, where the wall had tumbled so they could see inside the ruin like a stage. Secret was right, there was a cave beneath the house. Or a cellar. Light seeped up between the floorboards together with the music and Uncle Anders's muffled voice. He wasn't singing. He was holding a conversation.

“Please don't come back. Please don't be angry,” he pleaded.

Niklas's skin prickled. “Is someone else down there with him?”

“No,” Secret said. “Or, if so, they are silent.”

The music died, then the light. Moments later, Uncle Anders rose out of the floor like a wraith, clutching his violin in one hand and a bucket in the other. His back seemed stooped as he closed a hatch in the floor, pushed an old pew over the opening, and shuffled out of the chapel without noticing he was being watched. “A nice cup of tea,” he muttered, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “That's what is needed now.” His face was gray and tired, but the dark mood seemed to have lightened for now.

So Niklas let him trudge back toward the house and the tea without stopping him. When he had disappeared up the hill, Niklas snuck into the chapel and undid Uncle Anders's covering up. The hatch groaned when he lifted it. Cellars below chapels were called crypts, he seemed to remember. And crypts were for the dead.

“I'll wait here,” Secret said from the shrubs behind him.

“You're not coming?” Niklas heard his voice go squeaky and cleared his throat. “I thought you said no one was down there.”

“No one is,” she said, turning her ear low. “But to me human houses are like cages.”

“Oh.” Niklas tried hard not to think about the cage his mother had carried in his last nightmare. “I can understand that. I'll go then.” A ladder led down to the crypt. He tested it for sturdiness once, twice. Secret didn't comment, but she tilted her head as if there was something she didn't quite understand.

Niklas plastered a smile on his face. “I'm going. I'm just waiting for my eyes to get used to the darkness.” He gave her a brief nod and climbed down.

He had expected the cellar to reek of mildew, but instead it smelled sweet like dry wood. A small lantern sat on the bottom rung of the ladder. He lit it.

“Secret,” he called out softly as the light crept into the corners of the crypt. “You should see this! There are creatures down here!”

Positioned along the walls, there were carved statues.

On one side there were animals. Wolves howling at the sky, horses rearing up to strike. On the other side, there were monsters, skeleton birds fitted with tarp for wings, like the creature inside the nightmare castle. All his mother's work.

How had she fit the blocks through the hatch? Maybe she had added the outstretched limbs afterward. Niklas could picture her moving between these creatures, filling the crypt with wood chips, face screwed up with madness.

At the farthest end of the cellar stood a cloaked figure. This statue was smaller, more straight-backed, and turned toward the wall. Niklas's pulse whooshed in his head, louder than the Summerchild. But he had to look.

He walked to the end of the crypt on watery legs. Holding his breath, he turned the statue by its shoulders. It came around smoothly, grazing him with its outstretched arms.

It was a girl his age. The carver had made no effort to catch her in a pretty moment, but with the gathered mouth under the stubborn curls, she looked exactly like herself.

“Mom,” Niklas whispered.