Picking the Ballad's Bones (4 page)

The Chairdevil puffed himself up like
a cobra snake and said, "What I can't understand, DD, is how you
came to be among these people anyway."

"I thought someone should keep an eye
on them," she said vaguely, bouncing the high-heeled shoe on her
left foot up and down on her toe. "Keep them in
trouble."

"Hmph," he said. "It wouldn't have
anything to do with the sneaking admiration you have for that
Willie MacKai, now, would it?"

"A mortal? Boss! My interest is purely
professional, I assure you."

"Well, as long as you're on the job, I
think we'll just have to make it your responsibility," the
Chairdevil said, eliciting groans and moans from the other
devils.

"I object," said the Expediency Devil.
"You know very well, boss, that if there's anything DD is not, it's
responsible."

"Yeah," she grinned.
"Being irresponsible is part of what I do. But what did you have in
mind? I thought you didn't want to deal with the MacKai group
directly anyway because of the banjo. I thought I'd just get old
Willie drunk enough to shed the banjo along with his pants
and
then we could work our evil will on
them all." She smacked her lips lasciviously.

"Aw, just let the cops get them," the
Stupidity and Ignorance Devil said. "They'll throw 'em in the pokey
for the mess that mick made of the airport."

"How many times do I have to tell you,
I don't want them in jail?" the Chairdevil said.

"We know, we know," the other devils
said. "They enjoy jail."

"But, boss, I don't see how else we're
going to control them," the Superstition Devil said, whining a
little. "That blasted banjo defeats all of our schemes and I just
got a report that my ghoul minion has had to leave one library of
that—well, you know, that material we don't talk about—untouched
because one of the dead actually rose up to protect it. I don't
like it when dead people I don't control start
interfering."

"It's that banjo again, I'll bet you
anything," the Expediency Devil said. "Old Wizard Hawthorne
reaching out from the grave to foil us again with that spell on
that blasted instrument. We have to destroy it and all of those
songs but we're spreading ourselves pretty thin as it is. There's
still work to be done in the United States, and Canada is
presenting a real problem. The bureaucracy and big business aren't
as firmly entrenched there and so the minions aren't as helpful.
More amateur singing goes on up there too, so the resistance to us
is stronger."

"And it's not," said the Doom and
Destruction Devil, sometimes called D&D but more familiarly
known as Threedee, "as if we didn't have more important matters to
attend to. I'm at my wit's end trying to keep peace from breaking
out and all you people can do is worry about these silly
songs."

"What do you think was
responsible for the first peace threats?" the Chairdevil snapped.
"But I see your point. Which brings me to mine. Basically, DD,
since you volunteered, I think we'll leave the British end of the
operation up to you. Contain these people and destroy them—or at
least destroy that
thing
they've been using against us. We've already used
the minions to take out the libraries and collections and the major
living receptacles of the material and it made so little difference
to the living it didn't even create a stir. But the dead may cause
you some problems."

"Maybe," she said. "But then, maybe I
can talk to the lab and promote better dying through chemistry too.
Trust me, boss," she said with a wolfish grin and another large
bubble that grew and grew and grew until it obscured her whole
form, which seemed to shrink as the bubble grew larger until, when
the bubble popped, DD was no longer behind it.

Back in the sleeping
compartment, Torchy Burns stretched. Oh, well, maybe she'd have to
forgo most of the fun and wrap this up more quickly than she'd
planned. That would require minions. She sent out feelers into the
ether and way up at Abbotsford Walter Scott's ghost felt her
sending. She'd overdone it a little, however. It just so happened
she had the
most
appropriate people nearby. Use show business to fight show
business, she chuckled to herself, and wrapped her arms around
Willie MacKai, running the open neck of a flask under his nose.
"Wake up, Willie, luv. Time for your medicine," she said. The
banjo, abandoned in a corner, twanged "Whiskey in the
Jar."

CHAPTER 4

The train made a short sighing stop
and hooked on to three private cars gaudily decorated like Gypsy
wagons. One held the machinery of carousels and tilt-a-whirls, one
held tents and caravans, and from one boxcar came the roars of big
cats and the trumpeting of elephants. A sign on the side of the car
proclaimed it Circus Rom.

In Carlisle the train stopped again.
Emerging from the WC, in the back of the car, Juli looked out the
window and saw uniformed policemen lurking near every car, trying
hard to look nonchalant. Hurrying back to her own compartment, she
pointed out the trap to the others. Anna Mae swore roundly and
pounded on the wall separating their compartment from the one
containing Willie and Torchy.

She was too slow. Willie and Torchy
flashed by the compartment door, heading toward the back of the
train. The banjo alone could have been arrested for disturbing the
peace, so loudly did it continue to twang "Whiskey in the
Jar."

"Where's he goin' now?" Gussie
mumbled, waking from a fitful sleep crammed up against the window
casing.

"The police are waiting for us,"
Julianne said, pointing out the window.

"Well, nice of Willie to let the rest
of us know," Gussie said angrily. "I've got a notion to go give
that young man a piece of my mind."

"You go right ahead and do that little
thing," Brose said. "But as for me, I got an urgent appointment
anyplace else but here."

* * *

Although he had been dead for a couple
hundred years (which was long experience compared to that of the
living and a mere trifle compared to others he had encountered),
Walter Scott had been a pretty good man and so he had not hung
around in the ghost realm much before but had gone straight to
heaven. He was a little baffled to find himself back in the ghost
realm now. He was fairly sure heaven had been where he'd been
keeping himself these last few years, and thought that probably the
rumors were true that said paradise was so wonderful that nobody
was ever granted memory of it for fear their other existences would
be so filled with longing for it that they wouldn't be able to do
what was necessary elsewhere.

He didn't find it difficult to
determine the current date, because there was a guest book in the
front hall where the Trust set up its information booth. He was
very pleased with how they'd kept his home, approved of the minor
alterations they had made to turn it into a visitors' attraction.
He had promised Abbotsford to the trustees when he died, in
expiation of that last bundle of debt he'd been trying to work his
way out of. Curious to learn how long he'd been away, he decided to
go see how the outside world had changed. The moment he set foot
outside the door however, he found himself back in his grave, which
was a very dreary place for a conscious entity, even one with no
body. No notepad or pen or books for company. Totally
unsatisfactory.

He tried to rise from the grave once
more and found himself back at Abbotsford. So. He could come and go
between two points—that which most concerned him while he lived and
that which most concerned him while dead, but no other points in
between. A nuisance, of course, but he supposed it made sense.
Couldn't have a lot of dead folk indiscriminately disturbing the
living. The thought of it made him feel very lonely, a condition
remedied as soon as day broke, the custodians opened the hall, and
tourists came pouring in, clutching maps and guidebooks, wearing
extremely strange and sometimes indecorous garments, and chattering
among themselves with varying degrees of interest or boredom. The
energy of the most road-weary among them made him feel drained and
diminished, and a part of him understood that this was probably why
ghosts were not seen by day. The vitality of the living was such a
contrast that he was like the moon in broad daylight, of no use or
consequence and scarcely noticeable.

He also found, to his interest, that
the spirit world was not quite like the world of the living. It
bore some resemblance to life underwater, or what he imagined that
must be like. He felt intimations of persons and events and
fluctuations in the—ether, he supposed some would call it—a great
confusing babble of stuff from the very old to the very new. It was
somewhat like the inside of his head, bits of history, biographies
of personages, scraps of legend, glimpses of places he had not
visited but which preoccupied his imagination. Underlying it all he
sensed the continuous babble of sad stories, cries for help,
emanations of anguish and anxiety and resignation and anger. And
dominating every other impression was a compulsion for urgency as
demanding as the tattoo of a war drum.

And this puzzled Walter Scott most of
all, for he was not sure what on earth had called him back to it.
The attempted desecration of his library, of course, had caught his
otherworldly attention. But that thug was well and truly driven
away, as he thought, for good, and the urgency remained, crying for
attention. The resident border collie whined up at him, and the
custodian, thinking the animal wished to relieve itself, put it
out.

And so the only other
being, besides the ghoul, who seemed to perceive Sir Walter
departed for a time, and the ghost sorely wished he had chains to
rattle or some other supernatural occupation, since it seemed the
natural ones were denied him. Really, he had always fancied the
supernatural without being particularly good at invoking or
explaining it in his own literature. Everyone
said his ghosts were quite thin though not as thin as he
himself felt at the moment. He wished he had someone to advise him,
someone knowledgeable in the ways of otherwordly activity. Now, his
ancestor, Michael Scott the Wizard, would be an admirable advisor,
but unfortunately, even if the old necromancer was still cavorting
about on the plane nearest earth (and Walter had never particularly
fancied that the Wizard had been around even during Walter's own
lifetime), he was presumably under the same geographical-spiritual
restrictions that bound Sir Walter and could not go beyond his
grave and perhaps the tower where he had spent much of his life in
Scotland. Unfortunately, Sir Walter's Haliburton blood had entitled
him to be buried at the ruin of Dryburgh Abbey while his ancestor's
resting place was Melrose. Bloody inconvenient.

The night returned and with it a
growing sense of what occurred around him, though he still had
great trouble telling if the occurrences were in the living world
or the other. One fairly persistent noise that came to his ear was
the keening of some musical instrument, playing now one tune, then
another. He wished he could hear the words. He dearly loved music
and it had always been a great disappointment to him that he was
virtually tone-deaf, though that had never spoiled his enjoyment of
a good song. He was, of course, a word man basically, and it was
lyrics that spoke to him most, though a catchy tune never hurt. He
caught familiar snatches of some of the tunes the instrument
played, although he didn't recognize other pieces. Focusing his
attention on the sound, he seemed to have a waking dream of a band
of weary and desperate people, among them a beautiful melancholy
lady, a woman with golden hair like so many damsels in distress he
on whose behalf he had once agitated his heroes. Her sadness
particularly caught his attention, but whether she was near or far
he could not tell and he passed the day in a state of perturbation.
What was the point of coming back to watch strangely dressed people
making rude remarks about the home he had built with such love and
care if he was to be impotent to do anything, or even to discover
what it was he was supposed to do? Or had his anger at finding his
library disturbed been somehow a test, his pride having called him
from heaven to intervene on behalf of his books and, having called
him forth, trapped him in this realm? What a sad pass that would
be!

For the last two nights now, the
living music that haunted him from afar had kept him company, first
with a mournful tune, then with a wild and reckless one. He dimly
envisioned the band of travelers again, and tried to pay special
attention to the fair-tressed lady, thinking that if he could
perceive her and the music near her, perhaps she could perceive him
and the otherworldly comfort he had to offer, which he imagined
might possibly be somehow more potent than comfort of the worldly
kind, since when he was living, people always had seemed to set
great store by anything that came from beyond the pale.

But instead of the woman he sought,
suddenly, as if someone had lit a fire, another image came to him,
of a flame-haired woman with a strumpet's laugh and a wild eye. She
wore trousers and a loose shirt, like many of the women who invaded
his home during the day, but he held her image longer than any of
the others. She seemed to be searching for something, calling
something, and once her questing intelligence caused her, he could
have sworn, to look directly into his mind's eye and wink. And at
that moment he saw that her hair was not the orange color he had
first perceived, but the red-gold of autumn, and noticed that her
trousers were of a subtle cut that sometimes appeared to be a long,
gray-green skirt, and that the loose shirt was of a velvet
material. When she at last seemed to find what she sought, she
laughed, and her laugh was not purely whorish but contained merry
undertones like the ringing of silver bells as the mighty steed on
which she rode carried her, the damsel, and others he had not yet
differentiated from the ether toward something that amused
her.