City of Ghosts

by Victoria Schwab

  It was this.

  The ribbon crumbles in my palm, and so does the man—to ash, and then to nothing.

  Jacob and Lara and I stand together, silent in the narrow room. Jacob’s the first to move. He comes forward and crouches at the foot of the chair, running his fingers through the last of the dust.

  And then the room around us begins to thin, like a photo worn by time, the details wiped away. Of course. The ghost is gone now. It makes sense that his Veil is fading, too.

  I feel Lara’s hand on my shoulder. “We should go.”

  Once we’re safely on the living side of things again, the three of us walk back to the Lane’s End.

  Jacob and Lara are a few steps ahead, Jacob peppering her with questions. They seem to be warming to each other. Or at least, reaching a sort of truce.

  I hang back. My hand is still prickling strangely from where I held the ribbon of the man’s life. His death. It was sad, sending him on, but there was a kind of relief, too, like letting out a breath you’ve been holding too long. Setting it free.

  And afterward, the tap-tap-tap was gone.

  Not just softer, but vanished, leaving a stretch of quiet, of peace, behind.

  It felt … right.

  I quicken my pace to catch up with Jacob and Lara.

  “What’s the scariest ghost you’ve ever faced?” Jacob is asking.

  Lara taps her finger to her lips. “Couldn’t say. It’s between William Burke—”

  “The—the corpse robber turned serial killer?” stammers Jacob.

  “That’s the one,” says Lara. “It’s between him and this little girl in petticoats I found in one of the plague vaults.”

  Jacob snorts. “A tie between a mass murderer and a girl in a dress?”

  Lara shrugs. “Children give me the creeps.”

  Children. That reminds me.

  “Lara,” I say, quickening my step even more. “Have you ever seen a woman in a red cloak?”

  The humor bleeds from Lara’s face, her mouth drawn tight. “Are you talking about the Raven in Red?”

  I nod. “Have you ever seen her?”

  “Once,” she says tightly. “Last winter. I was visiting for the holidays, hunting in the in-between, when I heard her singing. And the next thing I knew, I was walking straight toward her outstretched hand.” Lara shakes her head. “It was a near thing.”

  “But you got away.”

  “I got lucky. Aunt Alice was nearby, I heard her calling, and it broke the spell. I had just enough sense to twist free and leave the in-between. And I’ve been very, very careful ever since.” Lara’s dark eyes narrow. “Why? Have you seen her, Cassidy?”

  I nod, and Lara’s hand shoots out, stopping me in my tracks. “You have to stay away from her, do you understand?” There’s an urgency in her voice. It’s wrong on her, out of place. “Remember what I said about our lives?” Her hand goes to her chest, to the place where the light shone through in the Veil. “About the ghosts who want them? The Raven is one of those. She feeds on the threads of the children she steals. But those threads are small and thin. She has to eat a lot of them just to be what she is. But if she got ahold of a life like yours, or mine—something bright—it would be disastrous.”

  I shudder at the thought.

  Lara looks to Jacob. “Do your job, ghost. Keep her safe.”

  Jacob snorts. “Easier said than done.”

  We climb the hill that leads back to the Lane’s End.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Lara says, half to herself. “It isn’t the right time of year.”

  “I know.” It’s been bothering me, too. What was it Findley said? She comes with the cold. I think of the river, my fall into the icy stream. The way the cold reaches for me every time I cross the Veil. The bluish edge to the light in my chest.

  “Maybe it has something to do with the way I …” It’s still hard to say out loud, even now, even with someone like Lara. I change course. “What does the Veil feel like, when you step through it?” I ask her.

  Lara thinks. “Like a fog. A fever. I was ill once, really ill. It was touch and go for a bit,” she adds briskly. “And I couldn’t stay awake. It feels like that. Dreamy, but not in a good way.”

  I nod. “For me, it feels like falling into a frozen river. It feels like bitter cold. If the Raven is drawn to cold, then maybe she’s drawn to me.”

  “Maybe,” says Lara. “Well, that’s even more reason to stay away from her. If you do see her, cover your ears, get out of the Veil, and for goodness’ sake,” she adds, nodding at my camera, “get yourself a proper mirror.”

  We’re nearly back to the Lane’s End, when I recognize the man ambling toward us, his crown of red hair catching the sun. I slam to a stop at the sight.

  “Uh-oh,” says Jacob.

  “What have we here?” says Findley. He looks at Lara. “Miss Chowdhury. I never took you for a rule breaker.”

  Lara straightens. “I haven’t broken any rules,” she says, once again the picture of primness. The wind has blown my brown curls all over the place. How is it her black braid is still perfectly in order?

  “What are you doing here?” I squeak at Findley.

  “Funny thing, that,” he says. “Your parents sent me to check on you. Only you weren’t there.”

  I glance at Lara. “I might have promised my parents I would stay inside,” I tell her. I swivel back to Findley. “We were just getting some fresh air.”

  “Is that so?” he says, a glimmer in his eye. I know that spark. I’ve seen it on Mom’s face a hundred times.

  “I’m not in trouble, am I?”

  “Och,” he says amiably, “a little wandering never hurt anyone.”

  Which I’m pretty sure isn’t true, especially when it comes to young people and foreign cities full of child-snatching ghosts, but I appreciate the sentiment.

  “Tell you what.” He holds up a meaty finger. “I won’t tell your folks on one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well,” he says, “your mom and dad sent me to see if you were feeling brave enough to join them up at the castle.”

  “I wasn’t scared,” I snap.

  “No shame in being scared,” he counters. “But there’s a difference between being scared and being scared away. Come with, and I’ll look like a right champion for changing your mind. You’re welcome to come, too, Miss Chowdhury.”

  I glance at Lara, who shrugs. “I’ll pass,” she says. “The castle is a fascinating site,” she adds with a weighted look. It flicks from me to Jacob and back. “Just remember what I told you.”

  “Or,” says Jacob, “we could just go back up to the nice, warm place with comic books and tea cakes.”

  “Look now,” says Findley, seeing me hesitate. “You can’t come to Edinburgh and not see the castle.”

  “We can see it from here,” says Jacob, pointing at the building on the cliff.

  “Aren’t you just a wee bit curious?” continues Findley.

  Of course I’m curious. I’ve never been inside a castle. Plus, my head’s full of Lara’s talk about purpose, and my hands are still warm from sending on the man in the house.

  “Well?” prompts Findley. “What do you say?”

  I look at Jacob.

  I want to see the castle, but I don’t want to go without him, and not just because I might get stuck in the Veil. It was weird, him not being there this morning. I felt like someone had cut my shadow away.

  But Jacob’s not just my shadow.

  He’s my partner in crime.

  The sidekick to my hero (or hero to my sidekick, I amend when he looks at me aghast). And he should have a say.

  It’s up to you, I think. If you don’t want to go, we don’t have to go.

  And maybe he just wanted to be given the choice, because he rolls his eyes and flashes me a grin. “Well,” he says, “I’ve read all the comics, and I can’t eat the cakes.”

  I smile and turn to Findley.

  “All
right. Let’s go to the castle.”

  Edinburgh Castle sits on its high rock cliff, looming over everything. As we start up the broad stone steps, it stares back at us, a dark gray shadow against a pale gray sky.

  As we climb, Findley rambles about the castle’s many famous ghosts. His eyes grow brighter with every story. There’s the piper who went missing in the tunnels, and the soldiers lost during a siege, and a headless drummer, and the prisoners left in the vaults, and a woman accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake. The Veil is growing heavier with every story and with each upward step. The weight of history, of memories. Of things no longer here, but not gone, either.

  Findley leads us over an empty moat and through the front gate onto the castle grounds.

  The word castle has always made me think of a giant house.

  But this is more like a miniature city.

  We’re still outdoors, surrounded by high stone walls and a network of lower buildings, some steepled and others flat, all of it like something out of a medieval fantasy.

  “Cool,” whispers Jacob.

  The Veil’s gray curtain flutters at the edges of my sight. If I crossed over here, what would I see? Curiosity blooms inside my chest. But I know now that it’s not just curiosity. It’s the pull of purpose. My heart picks up. My fingers curl around the camera.

  I don’t realize I’ve stopped walking until Findley glances back.

  “This way!” he shouts. He leads us through what he calls a “portcullis”—it’s a gate like the top half of a mouth, full of sharp steel teeth.

  We go up, and up, and up, all the way to the top, to a courtyard ringed with cannons and studded with tourists. The producers clearly couldn’t shut down a place this popular to film my parents.

  “I don’t see them,” says Jacob, but Findley is already beelining for the edge of the battlements. I don’t know what he’s looking at, not until I get close enough to see the view beyond the stone wall.

  View doesn’t do it justice. We’re so high up, with the castle buildings at our backs and the steep drop-off of the cliff. All of Edinburgh rolls away like a carpet beneath us.

  “Wow,” says Jacob.

  “Wow,” I echo.

  “See?” says Findley, beaming. “I told you it was worth the trip.”

  He’s right.

  This place is breathtaking. For once, I can’t bring myself to take a picture, because I know a photo could never really capture what I’m seeing. So I lean on the ramparts and simply take it all in. The Veil shudders and ripples, and I close my eyes, imagining I can hear the distant thud of soldiers’ boots, the thunder of cannons, the mournful song of a bagpipe, and …

  Singing.

  I shiver.

  Do you hear that? I ask Jacob silently, but when he answers, he sounds distracted.

  “It’s probably the wind.”

  But it’s not the wind. Way up here, the air whistles around us, but there’s more than air to that sound I heard.

  That voice.

  I know it by the way the music echoes in my bones. I try to remember Lara’s words, her warnings, but my own thoughts keep unraveling, and I have to hold on tight just to keep them from floating away.

  “Cass?” Jacob waves a translucent hand in front of my face.

  I blink, and the singing fades, replaced by only the high, thin breeze. Maybe Jacob was right. Maybe it was just a trick of the air.

  I step away from the rampart, just as something goes BOOM.

  I jump, lurching back, but it’s clear I’m not the only one who heard that. A plume of smoke goes up nearby, and the air shakes with the sound. Findley only smiles.

  “One o’clock cannon,” he says, as if it’s perfectly normal for people to fire heavy artillery in the middle of the day. “Come on,” he adds. “We’d best go find your parents.”

  I pull the show’s filming schedule from my pocket, but all it says is CASTLE. Not incredibly helpful, considering this castle takes up a whole mountaintop.

  “Do you have any idea where they are?” I ask Findley.

  “No,” he admits. “But it shouldn’t be that hard to find them. I’m guessing the barracks or the prison cells.”

  Right. Makes sense. My parents aren’t here for the crown jewels, or the kitchens, or St. Margaret’s Chapel—each site proudly advertised by a placard or sign. No, they’ll be knee-deep in the darker part of the castle’s history.

  We cut through the nearest building, which, according to the banner on the wall, is the Great Hall. My first thought is that it looks like the dining hall straight out of Harry Potter.

  “Pigworts!” announces Jacob triumphantly. “Broom ball! Crowpuff!”

  He’s never actually read the books, which he knows drives me crazy, but he also knows I don’t have time to sit and turn ten thousand pages for him, so I broke down and showed him the movies.

  “It’s like that scene with Tumbledore and the Magic Hat!” he exclaims gleefully.

  He clearly wasn’t paying that much attention.

  We make our way from the Great Hall out into another, smaller courtyard. Here, the spell is broken by signs for public restrooms, and a little touristy café.

  “Kind of kills the mood, doesn’t it?” says Jacob.

  Findley stops to grab a paper cup of strong black tea. I look around, trying to figure out why the castle feels so different from Mary King’s Close. Maybe it’s the number of tourists, or the open air … According to Findley, this place is definitely haunted. And I can feel the Veil, but it doesn’t feel menacing. There’s a low and steady tap-tap-tap of ghosts, but it’s like a light drizzle, not a downpour.

  Is it just me, I think, or is this place way less scary than Mary King’s Close?

  “Shhh!” hisses Jacob. “Don’t say that!”

  Why not?

  “You’ll jinx us.”

  I roll my eyes.

  And then we step out of the courtyard and down into the prisons, and all that nice not-so-haunted feeling goes away, sucked out like heat through an open window.

  I shiver, the air around me suddenly cold. The ceilings are low, the walls broken by iron bars, messages scrawled on the backs of cells like fingernails dug into wood. All the hairs on my arm stand up in warning.

  Jacob scowls at me. “You did this.”

  “I didn’t jinx us,” I whisper out loud. “The castle was already haunted.”

  “Maybe.” He glowers. “But you definitely made it more haunted.”

  I want to tell him that’s not how it works, but the Veil is already wrapping itself around me, trying to drag me down, under. The tap-tap-tap turns to hammering. I retreat a few steps toward the safety of the courtyard. Then I hear Dad’s voice, the one he uses when he’s teaching a class.

  “We’ve moved from a buried town to a looming fortress. The Edinburgh Castle sits on a shelf of jagged stone, standing guard for nearly fourteen hundred years …”

  “With that much history,” chimes in Mom, “it’s no wonder the castle is home to so many ghosts …”

  Of course their voices aren’t coming from the airy, ghost-free courtyard at our backs, but from down the hall, deeper within the prison.

  As if Findley can tell I’m about to bolt, he plants a large hand on my back and urges me forward into the dark. We find my parents standing in a cell, the light from the camera crew casting jagged shadows through the bars.

  “Prisoners of war were kept in these very cells,” says Mom, “and if you look closely, you can see their scrawled and desperate messages. Of course, these aren’t the only things they left behind.”

  I hear a dull knocking, like a fist against iron bars.

  No one else seems to notice.

  I grip my camera.

  “And cut!” calls one of the crew.

  Mom sees Findley and then me, and her face breaks into a smile.

  “Cassidy!”

  “There’s our girl,” says Dad. “Well done, Findley, coaxing her out.”

  “Wasn’t
hard,” he says, shooting me a conspiratorial look. “I think she was getting restless.”

  “You missed the South Bridge Vaults,” says Mom, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. I try to look disappointed, even though I’m just relieved.

  And I’m even more relieved when they wrap filming and we get out of the prisons. We head back into the open air of the courtyard. The crew heads for their next location, the castle barracks, but my steps slow. Not because I’m scared, but because there’s music on the air again, high and sweet and haunting.

  “That’s because there’s a bagpiper,” says Jacob. And he’s right. It’s just a man in a kilt standing on the battlements above, the instrument wailing softly in his hands.

  There’s nothing strange about the bagpiper—so why do I have such a strange feeling? Maybe I’m just borrowing trouble, as Mom would say. Looking for monsters in the closet. Shapes in the dark. I’m probably still on edge after what happened with the man in the house. Shaken up by the whole sending-ghosts-on.

  It was pretty intense.

  Dad glances back from where he stands at a set of doors. “Cass? You coming?”

  “I’ll be right behind you,” I say, nodding at a restroom sign. Jacob waits outside while I duck in. I snap the cap back on my camera lens and set it on the counter, splashing a little water on my face. My nerves settle, and I sigh, take up the camera again, and head back outside.

  But Jacob’s not there.

  Jacob? I call for him, inside my head, and then out loud. “Jacob?”

  No answer.

  It’s like he just disappeared. Only, he wouldn’t do that again, not after this morning.

  “Jacob?” I call again, louder.

  And then there’s a lull in the bagpiper’s song.

  Jacob’s voice reaches me, but it’s thin, wispy. “Cassidy …”

  I turn, scanning the courtyard. Where are you?

  Why can’t I see him? Why does his voice sound so far away?

  And then it hits me. The Veil.

  But why would he cross over without me?

  I’m coming! I think, reaching for the gray curtain.

  “Stay ba—” he starts, but his voice cuts off suddenly, and I’m already tearing the fabric aside, tumbling out of one world and into another.