Picking the Ballad's Bones (12 page)

The imposing front doors of
Abbotsford's hall swung open and Gussie stood framed in the
doorway, asking in an offended tenor with a broad burr, "Who in the
world would so besmirch my honor as to accuse me of such a thing?
It was that Ritson, wasn't it? Brilliant man but frightfully
literal-minded."

And to their surprise, Gussie strode
forward in a lordly manner, knelt gallantly before Torchy Burns,
took her hand and kissed it. "Your Majesty. I can't tell you how
honored my home is by your visit."

Before the nonplussed Torchy could do
more than nod majestically, Gussie had likewise kissed Julianne's
hand. "I'm so sorry for your recent tragedy, my dear," Gussie said,
still in the tenor that was much lighter and more quavery than her
own husky alto.

Julianne stared down at her. "Gussie?"
she asked, then stared hard at her friend as Gussie's image blurred
and her white hair rearranged itself, her hazel eyes brightened to
blue, her sweat suit took on a more formal and tailored cut and her
bosom seemed to be merely the ruffling of a shirtfront.

"I'm in here too, Juli," Gussie's
voice called, and the image wavered so that they saw Gussie through
the blur. "But I'm sort of giving somebody a lift. I know you may
find this a little hard to believe, but—"

The banjo keened the chords to "The
Unquiet Grave."

"Well, hell, if you can accept that
Sam Hawthorne is influencing that banjo, maybe you can accept that
Walter Scott wants me to get you to take us to Melrose Abbey to see
if we can't have a powwow with another spook who's not only a
relative of his but a wizard."

"Oh, well, if that's all he wants,
darlin', we should humor him by all means," Willie said with a hard
glare at Gussie/Scott. "I was just a little concerned there that he
was going to make you throw up pea soup or some weird shit like
that."

* * *

Willie drove the van this time and
Gussie huddled in the passenger seat. Brose, Anna Mae, Julianne,
Ellie, and Faron were in the back. "Ah, my worrud, this carriage is
a marvel," Sir Walter's ghost said of the van. "And I can only
hope, my dear Mrs. Turner," Gussie said to herself in her tenor
voice, "that the personal nature of my intrusion isn't causing you
discomfort or embarrassment."

"Oh, no, sir," Gussie's alto voice
assured him, "no trouble at all. You just come on in and make
yourself at home. If you got any questions at all, just
ask."

"Most magnanimous of you," the ghost
voice said.

"Shucks," Gussie's voice said. "We're
in a state of emergency. They used to teach me in Sunday school
that the body is the temple of the holy spirit—well—usually my own
holy spirit—but since your holy spirit needs a place to light while
you try to help us out with this thing, I figure my body just got
requisitioned for a while."

"Very sensible. Now then, would you
care to explain the nature of your difficulty to me?"

It was a long story to squeeze into a
short van ride, but fortunately with the ghost's mind and Gussie's
so close, she found she was able to sort of silently fill him in as
the others talked.

He heaved a sigh as three of them
stopped talking simultaneously and said, "Ah well, then, I see now
why the skirlin' of yon instrument called to me. 'Tis a verra
dangerous matter when foreign folk seek to destroy a people's
spirit by taking their songs—did you know that in Scotland it was
once as forbidden to play the pipes as it was to wear the tartan
because it spoke of Scottish pride? And in Ireland the English
burned not only harps but harpers who were the living memories of
Ireland. You folk stand in the stead of those pipers and harpers in
your own country and this instrument is a wise and powerful thing
indeed to lead you here to win back your songs. But how to do it,
eh? It may well be that the trip to Melrose Abbey will avail us
nothing, the Wizard Michael being dead more years than I and so,
perhaps, deader, ye ken?"

"Oh, uh-huh," Brose said, not having
the foggiest idea what he said. "That makes sense."

The banjo had been playing "The
Unquiet Grave" over and over for the last thirty minutes.
"Sometimes I wish there was a way to turn that thing off," Willie
said.

"At least it keeps time with the
windshield wipers," Ellie said philosophically.

"Makes it sound like a martial tune,
doesn't it?" Faron said. "As if the lover died in
battle."

Willie switched on the lights and two
moon-pale beams gleamed through the raindrops to illuminate
rain-slicked cement. Fog rolled across the road in gauzy swaths.
Julianne sneezed and huddled back, smashing into the shattered
instrument cases.

"Lovely night, isn't it?" Sir Walter's
ghost said conversationally.

"Not very," Ellie said. The banjo
played "Cold Haily Windy Night" again.

A patch of fog completely enveloped
them and Gussie thought, 'Here we go. Back into the Twilight Zone
again. As if what's happening now is what you might call
normal.'

And Sir Walter answered her thought,
'Ah, yes. Thrilling, isn't it? Haven't had such fun since I was a
bairn. Would you mind terribly sticking your arm out the window so
I might feel the rain?'

She was starting to comply when the
van plowed through the fog and emerged in front of the spires,
arches, towers, and ruined walls of Melrose Abbey silhouetted
against the dark and roiling night.

"Do we have to get out of the car?"
Julianne asked plaintively. "It's so cold."

The ghost offered to lend her his
jacket until Gussie reminded him that he didn't have one anymore
and neither did she.

Willie was slamming the door to the
van after everyone had emerged before any of them realized Torchy
was no longer with them.

"I thought she was right behind me,"
Ellie said.

"All I need is that redhead mad at me
for leavin' her behind," Willie said.

"It's her responsibility to mention it
if she needed to go to the bathroom or whatever," Anna Mae said.
"We have more important things to do than wait around for
her."

Ellie craned her neck looking up.
"This place is BIG!"

Faron shrugged. "Mostly it's old. The
Oral Roberts Power of Prayer building in Tulsa is bigger. This is
more impressive though. This feels real."

"Wh-where do you think this guy is,
Gussie—I mean, Sir—?" Ellie asked.

"In his grave as he's been lo these
last four—excuse me, madame," the ghost said to Gussie. "Can you
inform me of the century?"

"Twentieth," Gussie said. "At least,
it was when we left Tacoma."

"Lo these seven centuries," Sir Walter
said.

"Then, excuse me," Brose said, "but
unless it's the Scotch version of Memorial Day and you want to put
a boo-kay on his grave, what the hell are we doin'
here?"

"Easy, Brose," Anna Mae said. "We've
had pretty good luck with ghosts so far and maybe this relative of
Sir Walter's ghost can help."

"Well, so what, we wait another
century or two for him to get around to seeing us or do we go hunt
him up?"

"The Wizard Michael Scott was a man of
muckle importance," Sir Walter said. "He was in high courts and the
counselor to kings. I'd rather imagine he stands on the formalities
and will rise at midnight in the customary way. At least, that's
what the stories all say. I myself have nevair met a speerit
before, except for me, that is, and I don't seem to have done the
thing conventionally."

"What time is it, Anna Mae?" Willie
asked.

"Ten-thirty."

"Let's look around," Faron
suggested.

"Do we climb over a gate or
something?" Willie asked.

But Julianne, who had wandered ahead
of the rest of them, walking in widening circles to keep warm,
stood shivering by the abbey door. "It's unlocked," she called in a
voice growing ever more toneless and nasal as her deafness
alienated her from the sound of her own utterances.

"Aha," Sir Walter's ghost said. "As I
supposed, we're expected."

CHAPTER 11

The cook got to that point
in the story just as all of the lights in the restaurant came on
again. The dishwasher, waitresses, and two of the regular customers
groaned with disappointment. But just then, thunder cracked as if a
piece of the skyscraper above them had broken off, the lights died
again, and the cook continued her tale.

* * *

As if a night like that with the wind
and fog and rain in an ancient monastery looking for a long-dead
wizard wasn't Halloweenish enough for everybody, Gussie was trying
to get used to sharing her body with a ghost. Hell, she hadn't
shared it with a man on a regular basis for close to twenty years
except for a one-night stand once in a blue moon. And this was a
whole lot closer than being in bed together—it was like being
pregnant with somebody else's homemade film, full of voices and
pictures that weren't hers, even when Sir Walter wasn't talking. It
made her giddy. Not that he wasn't as polite as he could be. It
simply didn't give a lady much privacy. She had never been quite so
close to anyone even before she ran her old man off.

She felt a little like a ghost herself
with her cold wet feet and her stringing hair trailing water all
down her back and face, her eyes wide from trying to see in the
dark.

As she passed through the gate,
reminding Sir Walter that they had to physically open the gate and
go between the doors, not through them as he had been used to
doing, she saw Julianne wafting ahead of them, like something out
of a Wilkie Collins novel.

At Willie MacKai's back, the banjo was
still playing that song and now more than ever the words came
back—Gussie realized Sir Walter was feeding them to her.

"Cold blows the wind o'er
my true love

And gently falls the
rain

I never had but one true
love

And in greenwood he lies
slain

I'll do as much for my
true love

As any young girl
may

I'll sit and mourn all on
his grave

For twelvemonth and a
day."

But as they crept farther into the
abbey, the song changed to a major key and the tune became the one
that urged them to "Take it to its Root," the song that the banjo
had taught Willie and Juli to write during the traffic jam from
hell on the Oregon Trail. Willie stopped, listened, then continued
on, stalking silent and wary, looking all around him like the
soldiers on patrol in the war movies did. Anna Mae Gunn walked a
little to his left as if she were on tippy-toe and if she were a
cat her ears would have been swiveling all different directions.
Brose Fairchild pitty-patted beside her with little reluctant
steps, the irises of his eyes all surrounded by whites and his wiry
red-gray hair seeming to stand on end more than ever.

"You seem ill at ease, good woman,"
Sir Walter's ghost intruded on Gussie's thoughts.

"I am," she muttered—no need to speak
loud enough to wake the dead, so to speak, when the dead was right
here inside her head, cozy as another pea in a one-pea pod. "I can
understand how the atmosphere wouldn't especially impress you but
it scares the bejeezus out of me. And I can't help wondering where
that red-haired woman got herself to."

"Oh, as to that, who knows about such
as she," he said, dotingly, Gussie thought.

"You evidently know her better than we
do if you think she's worth bowin' over and so on," Gussie
said.

"Aye. I know her," he said. Though he
hadn't quite recognized her in the long-distance visions he'd had
when he first arose from the grave, the moment he met her he'd
known her for what and who she was. He had been a sheriff and a
lawman in life and he had seen a lot of deviltry—enough to knock
sense into any ordinary man. But he was also the biggest romantic
of his age and lived more in his head than he did in the real world
most of the time and a little thing like dying hadn't changed that.
Gussie did not know what to make of the image he showed her of
Torchy Burns with her red hair blazing under a golden crown with
stars all over it and wearing a gown of velvet green decorated with
silver trim and little silver bells. She just supposed that he
liked redheads, which figured, him being Scottish and all, and that
he was having the kind of fantasies about her that if he were a
modern man, he would have dressed her up in a slinky evening dress
and diamonds and maybe a mink coat. (Well, maybe not a mink coat
what with the way people were reacting to those things these days.
But most men having fantasies about redheaded women didn't worry
about animal rights politics or much of anything else at the
time.)

"Here it is," Julianne's toneless
voice floated back to them, an echo that didn't repeat itself. "I
found it," she said. "Michael Scott."

"Is he—uh—up?" Brose asked in such a
small voice he had to repeat himself.

Faron and Ellie had been inspecting
everything around them with interest but now that Julianne had
found the tomb Ellie's eyes were big as saucers and Faron's Adam's
apple traveled up and down, up and down. They had already
encountered several ghosts in the course of their journeys but the
ghost of a wizard was surely something special. Both of them were
big fans of fantasy novels and they knew that the quintessential
question when it came to wizards was a paraphrase of the one Glenda
the Good had asked Dorothy Gale, "Are you a good wizard or a bad
wizard?"