by Tim Lebbon
When the man was a dozen steps away he stopped and opened his mouth. Screaming Skulls, he said, and his voice, though a whisper, hurt like a sudden cold breeze.
Scott grimaced and went to put his hands to his ears, but the man’s empty eyes grew wider.
You seek them? he asked.
“Yes,” Scott said. The marks on the ghost’s face were reminiscent of the language of the Chord of Souls and some of the signs Papa had used in his letter. He could not tell whether any of them matched exactly, but they were too similar for it to be coincidence. “Who are you?”
Long dead. The ghost sighed. Long, long gone.
“The Skulls?”
Me. The eyeless ghost turned and looked up at the mountainside.
“Can you guide me?” Scott asked. “Tell me? The hidden valley is here. I need to know the way.”
I see you, the ghost said. I hear you. You know the words that will show you the way.
“I’m not sure. Will you tell me?”
And be more damned? The man turned and faced the mountain, drew his sword, and fell on it again.
Scott backed away as the wraith turned black and melted into the ground. His flesh disappeared, bones weathered until they sank down, and even the metal sigils on his tunic rusted away to nothing. For a moment the scene was part of the real world, but then the ghost came into being again and started walking back toward the mountain. He did not turn around. Perhaps he had already forgotten that Scott was there, or maybe he had yet to find out.
Scott walked on, thinking about what the ghost had said, and Papa’s strange singsong words came back to him once again. He muttered them as he walked. They had never sounded right coming from a human mouth, and here in the silent valley they were like stains on time itself.
As he walked, he felt the very real sensation of moving from one place to the next.
To the north, between two of the low hills, a valley appeared.
Scott paused and sank to his knees. Behind him the old ghost was killing himself again, and before him was the valley containing the House of Screaming Skulls. Scott could not help but connect the two.
He had those signs tattooed into his skin, he thought. Part of the ancient language used to write the Chord of Souls. Perhaps it spread. Maybe there always was more than just the book. He touched the papers in his pocket, stood and started walking again.
The real world watched him leave.
When he came to a point where things changed, he paused. The new valley lay before him. A few steps ahead a road began. It was as though it had heaved itself from the soil, pushing up out of the ground, birthed from rock and mud and roots to provide a raised, level surface into the valley. There were drainage ditches on both sides. No road markings, no cats’ eyes, no signs that it had ever been used. In places weeds had grown through, forcing open the compact surfacing and sprouting like hairy boils on an old woman’s face. It curled its way into the valley, seeking the lowest points like a river, and disappeared into a hazy distance. The valley sides were streaked purple, green, and brown with heather and bracken. Rocky outcrops on the western hillsides hid shadows from the morning sun, while the eastern slopes were still in darkness. Trees grew here and there, and at a couple of places Scott thought he saw the glitter of waterfalls. Perhaps the road bridged the streams, but he could not tell from here. A few birds fluttered about, and not far away he saw the throats of rabbit holes. There were no cattle; indeed, no signs at all of this place ever having been touched by man, apart from the curving, relatively smooth road.
Things looked normal. But they felt all wrong.
This valley had not been here moments before. Or rather, it had been here, but Scott had not muttered the words that would open up his perception and allow him access. This was a ghost road leading into a haunted valley, and he wondered why he could not yet see the dead.
He stepped forward a few paces until he stood on the road. Turning around, he suddenly expected to see that the true valley behind him had vanished, leaving only the blank paleness of the Wide. But he could still see the road perpendicular to this one, his car, and out in the field the sad shape of the wraith forever waiting. He was almost tempted to go back, climb into the car, and leave. For a moment even Helen felt distant, an old memory from three days before that he would eventually forget, like thirty-year-old dreams that occasionally came back to bite. But he could not go back; he knew that. Perhaps he never would. He had come so far and seen so much, and though he had yet to understand, he knew that he had changed forever.
He started walking. And it was as if taking his steps into this valley made it aware of his presence.
The first ghost appeared in a field to his left. It was far away, but it immediately started walking toward him. He quickened his pace but soon realized that he could not avoid a meeting; the ghost flowed, shifting position wherever necessary to make sure their paths would eventually cross.
A second ghost materialized on the road far ahead, and then a third. The farther he walked, the more shapes emerged from nothing, taking form and converging on him.
I could turn and run! But he had a feeling that once out of this valley, he would be unlikely ever to find it again.
His heart beat faster as he slowed his pace. Even though the morning sun warmed the side of his face and neck, a cold chill clasped his spine. The ghost nearest to him was already close enough for him to see the tattoos on its face.
He stopped in the middle of the road. At his feet a spread of poppies had broken through the road surface, their delicate stems and brittle flowers using time to triumph over the compacted layers. He moved forward, careful not to tread on any of the blooms, concentrating so hard that he noticed the ghost only when he stepped into its embrace.
Scott cried out. For an instant before he stumbled back he felt all the pain, the loss, the anguish of this wandering soul. His arms pinwheeled as he struggled to maintain balance. He looked down and saw that he’d stepped on some poppies, and when he looked up again more ghosts were joining the first.
There were men and women, a couple of children, and they all bore those strange tattoos on much of their exposed skin. Face, necks, bald heads, arms, hands, legs . . . images and sigils he recognized as the language of the Chord of Souls. Their appearance here gave him no more clues as to what they meant. They’re like a living book, he thought, but of course that was wrong. All these people were dead. Their bodies were probably long since rotted away, gone to dust and bone, all their experiences, loves, and losses faded with time. These sad echoes were all that was left, and Scott wondered how far each of them had made it across the Wide before becoming lost.
“Who are you?” he asked. The ghost near the car had spoken. A horrible sound, chilling, a voice from beyond the grave and between heaven and hell. But if they could tell him something that would take him one step closer to Helen, then he would suffer the fear. He would hear their words. “Tell me,” he said.
The ghosts spoke in unison. Go no farther. It was a hundred times worse than the first ghost’s voice, tearing into Scott’s core, crawling through veins and bones until it reached the heart of him and punched him there. His heart fluttered like a trapped bird. He gasped, coughed, and went to his knees, looking down at a crushed poppy bloom.
“The Chord of Souls,” Scott said.
Go no farther. The whispers combined to make a voice like a hurricane.
“I have to find it,” Scott said, his own whisper directed at the ground. He stared at the crushed poppy because he did not want to look upon the ghosts. They reminded him of what he might be, and perhaps what Helen already was. “I need it.”
The Chord is not for the living.
“Then who is it for?”
Not the dead.
“Not the living or the dead?” He wondered whether the poppy had a spirit of sorts, and if so, where he had sent it by stepping on the flower. Its crushed stem stained the road. The blooms were creased and ruined. If it was not already dead, the
n its potential for life had been wiped out.
No one . . . nothing . . .
“Who are you?” he asked, and then he looked up because he suddenly needed to know. The ghosts stood in a semicircle before him, several deep, blocking the road. There must have been forty of them. They wore a variety of clothes, from rough leather wraps to more modern garments. They were staring at him intently, never blinking. Some displayed wounds, others none. All of them had tattoos.
No one, they said.
“You have words from the book on your skin.”
They said nothing.
“Are you part of the book? A living part? Dead part?”
No part. We tried to steal, to translate, but . . . Their mouths hung open and moved, but the movements did not match the words. Each utterance seemed to freeze the air before them. Scott looked down and saw a fine frost on the road, dappling the crushed poppies white.
“I need to find the living book. I need to see it and know it. My wife is in the Wide and I must have her back.” A couple of the ghosts had seemed to flinch at the mention of the Wide, but they said nothing. They just stared. Perhaps they meant to be threatening. He stood. “Are you going to stop me?” He walked forward.
The wraiths closest to him raised their hands, palms out, as if to ward him off. Scott kept walking, looking down as a hand and arm passed into his chest. This is when I feel it clasp my heart, he thought, but there was no sensation at all. He pressed on, squinting as if to lessen the amount of pain and distress he saw on those lost souls’ faces. They did not move out of his way. If anything they bunched together, forming a barrier through which he would have to pass in order to continue. He paused, but only for a moment. They’re wisps of air, he thought, or even less. They’re not here. They don’t touch the world, don’t affect it. They’re just paintings on my imagination.
He walked on, coming close to one woman’s image, pressing face-to-face, pausing before passing right through.
Those ghosts back at the pub, holding Nina’s door closed, keeping her in . . .
He saw nothing unusual inside the ghost’s head, nothing but blankness. When he emerged he was faced with the head of another, and this time he did not pause.
They were holding the door closed, pushing through walls, and from the shouts it sounded as though they were restraining her. Holding her. Touching the world.
He passed through two more, and none of them moved aside. They started screaming. Each scream was timed with the next, so that it sounded like one massive cry emerging from a single source, misting the air with ice-cold condensation and forcing Scott to press his hands over his ears.
Someone must have been controlling them, just as Lewis controlled those ghosts outside my house. These . . . they’re not controlled by anyone. The only thing that controls these is death.
He passed the final ghost and hurried along the road. The scream stopped immediately, echoing away to nothing against the valley slopes. Scott glanced back, afraid that he would be pursued, but the ghosts were motionless. They had turned their heads to look at him, every single one. In their eyes sat an accusation that they could not voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what you lost, or when, but I can’t afford to lose any more. I have to find my wife.”
A little girl emerged from the group of phantoms. She walked quickly toward Scott and paused a few steps away. In life she must have been very pretty, but death gave her only coldness and a strange, unsettling hunger. If she’s in the Wide, she’s lost.
“No. She’s being held there. He knows where she is, the person holding her. And he’ll give her back to me.”
The Wide is the universe.
“Why have you got those tattoos on your skin?”
The girl looked sad. We thought they were part of the word.
“What word?”
The girl blinked and ghost tears fell.
“The word of God?”
She blinked again. Then she turned and walked back to the ghosts, disappearing between their legs and bodies, merging with them until she was nowhere to be seen.
“Why are you all trapped here?” Scott still did not understand. Why could one dead soul find its way across the Wide, and so many others become lost? Was it all to do with faith, or physics?
“Fuck this.” He turned his back on the ghosts and walked on.
Be warned, they said, a final stormy outburst that raised the hairs on his neck and set his balls crawling. He turned to ask them why, but he was just in time to see the spirits spreading out from the road, crossing the fields, and disappearing into sunlight or shadow.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
sigh in a hurricane
The ghost road was empty of ghosts, yet it was still haunted. Scott stayed to the center of the road, and with every step he sensed more and more that this entire place was redolent with the past. Trees looked real, but could also have been the image of every tree that had ever grown. The hills appeared timeless, yet there was something about the way the air smelled, the sunlight hit the ground, the breeze played with his hair, that set Scott thinking. If he had seen this place only after first muttering words from the Chord of Souls, then surely the two were irrevocably tied together? This was more than just a hiding place for that book.
This was its home.
The road curved around a rocky deposit in the center of the valley—a small hill topped with a sprouting of trees—and as he skirted the hill he saw the body beside the road.
He paused, waiting for it to stand and perform some sad, repetitive act of suicide. It did not move. He walked closer, picking his steps carefully through another spread of wild poppies growing across the road like spattered blood. When he reached the corpse, Scott stood still for a long time, staring down at its face and wondering what he was supposed to do.
The woman had been dead for some time, yet the dry, cold air here had held back the rot. Her clothes—modern leathers, belts, and clasps—had sunk around her as her flesh dried and shrank. Her face was drawn, eyes little more than pips in their sockets. Why hasn’t anything eaten her? Scott thought. He had seen birds and insects, and had heard larger things moving out in the fields. But nothing had planted eggs, taken bites out of her flesh, nibbled at her fingers, or pecked out her eyes.
“Go,” Scott said. “Fade away.” He reached out to touch her, drew back. She looked like no ghost he had ever seen. They usually seemed to represent the owner’s soul at the time of death, either directly before or straight after their time on earth had ended. Sometimes they repeated the final seconds of their life, as if trying to rectify a flawed performance. Other times they just wandered around being wretched.
He looked into her eyes, but there was nothing to see in those dried-up things.
He reached out again and touched her jacket. It was real. The leather was hard and dried by the wind, but it was solid beneath his fingers. He shoved, increasing the pressure until the body shifted with a crack and crackle. It had been here for a long time.
Scott looked around, wondering whether this woman’s soul was another lost one. “I hope you made it across the Wide,” he said. “I hope you found it and crossed over to whatever’s on the other side.” He touched the skin of her face, tracing one of the tattoos as though reading in Braille.
The ghost rose from its corpse, screaming.
Scott backed away, a small moan escaping him.
The wraith stood—feet still planted in corpse’s boots—turned around, and looked down at its dead self. It screamed again. Its hands went to its face and held it, covering its eyes and trying to shut out the light.
The scream was more real than anything Scott had yet heard from a ghost.
“Are you him?” she said, turning to look directly at Scott.
“No, no, I’m just . . .” He trailed off, and the ghost glared at him.
“You must be him. You’re here. Alive. You have to be.”
“I’m sorry,” Scott said.
“
Then why are you here?”
“Why do you seem alive?” Scott asked. “I’ve seen a hundred ghosts over the past couple of days, but you’re talking, asking questions. Reasoning.”
“Reasoning,” the ghost said, glancing back and down at the body it had once inhabited. “How reasonable is that?”
Scott shook his head, not knowing what to say.
“So, why are you here? This is a ghost road in a ghost valley. We’re locked away in here. We have to be. We can’t let just anyone—”
“I’m here looking for the House of Screaming Skulls,” Scott said.
“Why?”
“There’s something there I want.”
“Why do you want the Chord?”
“Then it is there!”
“Why?”
“To free my wife. And destroy it.”
The ghost lowered its head sadly, looking down at where its feet touched those slowly mummifying in their shoes. “A selfish act, as ever.”
“No, no. I want to destroy it. I’m told it has to be destroyed. I’ve already crushed part of it to dust.”
The ghost whirled on Scott, eschewing contact with its body to move across and stand face-to-face. “You found the Lost Pages?”
“I did.”
“And . . . ?”
“They’re gone.”
The ghostly woman stared at him, reached out, and placed her hand on his forehead. He almost felt her fingers touching him . . . almost. Perhaps it was subconscious.
She smiled. It was grotesque, a smile belonging to no human, dead or otherwise. Then she cackled. “You might really be the one,” she said.
“The one?”
“The one to touch the book. Come with me.”
“But—”
The woman grabbed him. Her right hand sank into the flesh of his arm; she grunted as she exerted great will, and then she turned and started running along the road. He ran with her because he had to; her hand had formed itself around his bicep, crushing the skin and clasping hard enough to cause instant bruising.
