Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [5]
What does interest the Dead? For all my crossings, I still don’t know. Of course, I’m never here for very long, and only the elderly will talk to me. Yet I have the impression that the Dead are absorbed in something of which they never speak, not even to each other—unless words like Mrs. Humphries’s mean more than they seem. “Look at the white stones under the water. See how they seem to shift shape.”
The Dead will stare at stones for years. At trees, at flowers, at a single blade of grass. What is shifting in their minds, under what unimaginable waters?
Mrs. Humphries had forgotten me. I pinched her hard. If I went back to Hartah without information, my second beating would be worse than my first. My pinch didn’t hurt Mrs. Humphries—nothing hurts the Dead—but it did remind her that I was there.
She snapped, “What now, boy?”
“Tell me about when you were a girl.” And I held my breath.
Childhood is the one thing that will sometimes get the elderly Dead to talk. Their adult selves, their long lives, the families they left behind—these mean nothing to them now. But themselves as small children: that will sometimes animate them. Sometimes, anyway. Perhaps it is because little children, in their simplicity, are closer to what the Dead are now. I don’t know. None of the actual children here has ever talked to me, or even seemed to see me.
Mrs. Humphries gave her little cackle and her old eyes brightened. “I was a rapscallion, I was! You would scarcely credit it, boy, but I was a pretty child, with hair like new-minted gold. But I wanted black hair, like my friend Catherine Littlejohn, so I—”
A family story, undoubtedly told and retold many times. It led to other stories. A prize chicken had been stolen from the Littlejohns and slaughtered for the Feast of the Winter Solstice. A nobleman, one Lord William Digby, had once ridden through Stonegreen and given Ann, that pretty child, a coin as gold as her hair. I listened carefully, watching the stones shift shape under the water.
And all the while, rage built in my heart that Hartah made me do this thing, come to this place, note with such desperation these trivialities from a woman months in her grave. A woman I would never see again. A woman who was dead, when I was not. I only felt that I was. Here, and there.
3
I DELAYED CROSSING back over for as long as I could. Always I feared the dirt in my mouth, the flesh gone from my bones, the maggots and the cold and the darkness. What if one time, they didn’t pass? What if I became trapped in that terrible moment between life and death, forever awake in my rotting grave?
And I did not want to return to Hartah.
So I loitered by the mossy green boulder, and watched the Dead, and tried to get another one of them to talk with me. None would. They sat holding hands in their circles, or they sat alone, gazing at a blade of grass. One of them, a gentleman or even a lord in his velvet breeches and doublet, a short sword on his hip, lay full length on the grass. He stared straight up at the gray, featureless sky. He never even blinked. I wanted to kick him, but what if this should be the one time when a kick aroused a younger Dead? That sword was as real and solid as everything else here.
Some of the Dead wear strange dress, clothing I have never seen on my travels with Hartah. Crude fur tunics. Armor with red plumes on odd-shaped helmets. Long white robes. The old ones speak languages I don’t know, when they speak at all. But wherever or whenever their lost lives, they all behave the same.
Listening.
Watching.
Waiting with unimaginable patience. I don’t know what they wait for, what their calm gazes see. And they do not, or cannot, tell me.
When I had lingered as long as I dared, I took a sharp stone from my pocket.