Picking the Ballad's Bones (13 page)

Neither of the Randolphs had shown
less courage than any of the others when faced with actual ghosts,
but then they hadn't had time to be afraid of the ones they'd seen
before. The other ghosts may have appeared on atmospheric nights
too but they didn't have the fanfare of being announced by a
descendant who was possessing a friend of the Randolphs'. The
Wizard Michael Scott might have been a great philosopher,
scientist, and scholar but he was also, like all competent
magicians, enough of a ham to know how to make an
entrance.

Ellie scooted closer to Gussie. She
was shivering so hard her rain-wet goose bumps stood up like white
caps. "Gussie, ask Sir Walter what this Mike guy is
like."

"He doesn't know. He never met
him."

"But he's going to wait until
midnight, huh?" she asked.

"It's only eleven," Anna Mae said.
"God, I'm freezing."

"Me too," Ellie said, jumping up and
down vigorously to demonstrate her point.

"Maybe there'd be time to go back to
Abbotsford for blankets or something," Gussie said. "I didn't lock
up, Walt, did you? You don't mind if I call you Walt, do you? And
you call me Gussie. Seeing as how we're getting so close and
all."

"Seems imminently practical to me,
dear lady. I doot mah dear wife would mind even were she alive, and
would join me in begging you to call me what you will. Walter or
Wat, as you would have it."

But his pleasant speech broke off
abruptly and Gussie felt him stiffen and freeze within her, before
with even more alarming abruptness she found herself turning and
tearing back for the gate.

"Sir Walt—Wat, simmer down. What is
it? Where are we going? You don't have to return to the grave at
midnight do you?"

In her mind an anguished howl let rip.
"The swine! The dirty swine have returned. They're after my bukes,
Gussie. We maun save my bukes."

He headed her straight for the gate.
"Whoa, Walt, if you're going that way you have to leave me behind.
Even if we don't go through walls I can't run all the way back to
your place."

"We must!" he cried. "I canna bide
here trapped while they destroy m'life's work!"

Gussie was too involved with the
distraught ghost to notice what the others were up to, but Ellie,
who had been close by, grabbed Faron. "Come on, we'll drive you
back."

"What about the wizard?"

"There's an hour. The others can stay
here. Once we get back to Abbotsford Sir Walter can un-possess you
and haunt the vandals into submission if we make it in time. Brose,
you got the keys?"

He tossed them and there was a clink
as they hit the paving stones, then Ellie, Faron, and Gussie/Sir
Walter piled into the van and drove like bats out of hell for
Abbotsford.

A diesel eighteen-wheeler with the
legend Circus Rom on the side was parked outside Abbotsford and the
front door stood wide open.

"Oh, my God, Wat, I'm sorry. I should
have locked up," Gussie said. "Might as well have printed an
invitation."

But she was only able to aim the
thoughts at him as she ran for the house. Sir Walter forgot that
she was no longer young and he had been dead more than a hundred
and fifty years. He took the walk up to the house like a sprinter
and Gussie passed Ellie and Faron, and did not hear the scuffling
from behind her when the young couple came abreast of the circus
truck. But Sir Walter carried her along so fast she did make it to
the door before something came down on her head and she crumpled on
the threshold just as a bright orange light blossomed from the open
doorway to the library.

CHAPTER 12

As midnight approached by the luminous
phosphorescent-green hands of Anna Mae's watch, the air in the
abbey's confines grew even more dank and chill. Anna Mae and Brose
draped their arms around Julianne, knotted with cold in her flimsy
T-shirt, and Willie paced furiously. The banjo had played only
softly for some time but as the second hand swept once, twice, and
thrice around into the last second of the last minute of midnight,
the instrument struck such a chord as it once did when its dead
owner Sam Hawthorne would leap onto stage and, with that chord,
announce to the audience that he was about to begin a song and that
they were by damn expected to sing along.

"They're not back yet," Anna Mae said.
"Where can they be?"

"I sure hope we don't need no formal
introduction from his Sirship to meet this dead guy," Brose said.
"'Cause it feels to me like we're about to."

Julianne didn't say a thing but all of
a sudden she opened her mouth and commenced singing along with the
banjo, just like she could hear it, the "Take It to Its Root" song.
Willie stopped in midpace, hoisted the banjo up to help it along
with his fingers, and sang as if trying to overpower the noisiest
bar in West Texas, "And take it to its root," and Anna Mae joined
in with her strong alto with the vibrato quavery as a ghost's voice
is supposed to be but generally wasn't, "Take it to its root" and
Brose Fairchild joined in with his bluesy, boozy baritone as if he
was singing a Gospel harmony, "Take it to its root."

And on the lid of the tomb, a lichen
as luminous as the hands on Anna Mae's watch commenced to growing
and growing, trailing here and trailing there, clasped to the
stone, filling in its runners beside other runners, bulking up on
top of itself. Like no lichen ever seen before, it bore tiny leaves
that grew larger as the organism grew, leaves that looked now like
rose leaves, now like birch leaves, now like the leaves of some
brier, all intertwined and growing quick as poison ivy or kudzu or
wild blackberry vines. The people watching this growth overtake the
stone tomb lid might have thought they were watching a Disney
fast-forward nature movie except that the leaves shed actual light,
and in time, not to anybody's great surprise, these leaves began
taking on the shape of a man wearing a long gown and some kind of a
hat or helmet and clutching a big old book to his breast where
lilies usually went on the breasts of less learned dead.

Pretty soon, though no one could have
said exactly how long it was, everybody being too mesmerized to
check their watches, they saw that eyes and a nose and a mouth had
dented into this mass of foliage, and that you could tell the head
from the helmet and the book from the breast and the hands from the
book and each individual foot from the other and if he had been
wearing argyle socks under his gown, you could have seen the
pattern.

After a while the thing's shoulders
began to rise, separating from the lid of the tomb out of which
they seemed to grow, though some trailers still attached like long
streamers behind the leafy form. The knees bent and the whole thing
scooted forward until it was sitting on the edge of the tomb lid,
its feet swinging back and forth like tree limbs blowing in the
wind. The leaves seemed to melt all together and Willie and his
friends could see then that the glow was coming from inside of them
and taking them over, the same way Sir Walter's form had sometimes
shone through and over Gussie's own self, and the stems of the
leaves took on the appearance of veins in the hands, neck, and
breast, and some roots seemed to be the Wizard's hair flowing
beneath that funny hat he wore, as if someone had stuck an old
funnel on top of a topiary rosebush.

The foliage parted of its own accord
where the mouth should be and rows of thorns turned into teeth and
a pair of roots turned into lips as the creature from the tomb of
the Wizard Michael Scott spoke.

"Ah suppose," it said, "ye'll be
wonderin' why ah've cawed ye aw here t' nicht."

* * *

The wailing of banshees, Gussie knew,
foretold death—her death? Heavy feet thudded past her and she
thought they must be the feet of firemen, but she thought firemen
would remove a corpse rather than just walk over it, wouldn't
they?

The wailing must be of fire trucks
then. Did they have fire trucks out in the country like this? They
could get water from the Tweed, no doubt.

She struggled to waken and another
shrill scream brought her alert.

Her eyes flew open and the fluttering
of her lashes caused her head to roar with pain. Her eyes shut
tight again against the blaze of light pouring from the far end of
the hallway. She still lay crumpled on the threshold of
Abbotsford.

Another shrill scream, followed by an
emphatic "Damn!" in a female voice.

My God, Gussie thought, the place is
on fire and someone is still in there. She tried to rise, pulling
her legs over the threshold and into the hallway where her head and
shoulders had lain. As she gathered herself inside, a familiar
presence flooded her mind and a gentle burr told her, "Your wound
wasna mortal, auld lass."

"Someone's in there, Wat.
Gotta—"

"Not unarmed,” the ghost said and as
they stood together reached her hand up and drew down a long dirk
from the weapons displayed in the entry hall along with the armor
and carvings.

The scream came again. In the
distance, Gussie heard the bells and sirens of fire trucks, but
they might be too late to save whoever it was. Pulling up her
sweatshirt to cover her mouth, she and her ghostly hitchhiker
plunged forward into the billows of smoke and flame, past the
library, with the flames licking the books to death on every shelf
on both levels, spurting through the windows, devouring the carpet,
running along the grooves in the hardwood floor into the study,
where the screams were turning to shrieks.

Torchy Burns was sitting on the marble
mantelpiece over the fireplace. Her ankles were bound.

"My God, when the fire gets this far
that chimney will be like a candlewick," Gussie cried.

"Thanks for the cheery thought, ducks.
Get me out of here."

"I can free her," Sir Walter's ghost
said. "'Tis nearly midnight, and we spirits are strongest noo." Sir
Walter's ghost didn't really know that for a fact exactly, but
romantic that he was he believed that it was true of all haunts
worthy of the name, so with spectral dignity his silhouette cut
through the flames and bearing aloft the fire-burnished dirk
advanced to free the captive lady.

The knife had no sooner sliced through
Torchy's bonds than she yelled, "Stand back!" and Gussie retreated
into the hall toward the nearest door, where the air was somewhat
clearer.

Before it seemed quite possible that
Torchy could have won her way clear, the redhead ran past Gussie
and out into the courtyard. The ghost reentered Gussie as she
sprinted after Torchy.

"What happened?" Gussie asked as the
first fire trucks pulled up and started drawing water from the
Tweed.

"No time to talk. We have to get out
of here," Torchy said.

"Aye," the ghost agreed wearily. "The
Wizard Michael will have arisen and I'll not be there to meet
him."

The diesel truck was no longer in the
parking lot, but the van was, keys still in the ignition. Torchy
jumped into the driver's seat and didn't quite wait until Gussie
was seated to make a wide U-turn and roar down the driveway, taking
little detours into sheep pasture to avoid the three fire trucks
coming the other way, the Selkirk one, which boasted only a bell,
the Galashiels one, which had a hook, ladder, and a proper siren,
and a pickup truck from the town of Melrose equipped with a garden
hose and six volunteer fire fighters, most of whom looked to be
well over seventy-five, in the rear. There was also a little car
with a light on the top, the driver of which seemed to take no
notice of them. By the time Torchy had dodged all of these and was
back out on the road again, a few bicycles and cars were also
headed into the driveway toward Abbotsford. Gussie was sure
somebody was taking down their license plate number and that they
were already tagged as arsonists.

With every fire truck that they passed
she felt a swell of anguish and when she heard the ghost moan she
realized it was coming from him rather than from herself. "Oh,
God," she said. "Wat, I'm so sorry. Your beautiful house—all your
books."

When the ghost sighed in response, the
sigh escaped through her lips mournful and puzzled.

"At least you're okay, Torchy." Gussie
only said this because she was a southern woman and this was the
polite thing to say, even if it was insincere, since she wasn't
sure if she had been given the choice whether she would have saved
Torchy or Sir Walter's library. Then she remembered. "Oh, Lord,
Faron and Ellie! Where are they? Stop, Torchy, turn this thing
around. They might still be in there."

"Sorry, ducks," Torchy said and drove
on like a bat out of hell.

"Wat, make her stop."

The ghost was within her but was less
communicative than before. "Eh? No need. They're not in Abbotsford,
your friends."

Torchy screeched to a halt outside the
abbey, which appeared as empty as it had when first Gussie had seen
it.

Gussie was barely out of the van when
Torchy disappeared into the building.

Once more Sir Walter's ghost almost
ran Gussie into walls as he tried to go through them in his haste
to reach the tomb.