Thieves of Weirdwood

by Christian McKay Heidicker

  It was a spooky sight. Even for a ghost.

  Breeth turned her ashen eyes to the rooftop. Arthur sat on the edge, staring at his garish hat. Funny, Breeth could have sworn the daffodil in the brim had been shriveled when he’d arrived. Now it was in full bloom.

  “I was this close,” Arthur said, making an inch with his finger and thumb. “I could see the title in my head: The Adventures of Arthur Benton and His Merry Skeletons.”

  “I’m sure it would’ve been a bestseller,” Wally said, clearly annoyed.

  “More than a bestseller!” Arthur said, leaping to his feet. “A best life! Garnett Lacroix is real, Cooper! A little cobwebbed maybe, but he and I had a conversation and everything!”

  Wally did not look impressed. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “If you want to go back to the Manor for protection, you should follow Amelia.”

  “Where are you gonna go?” Arthur asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  “To Greyridge to save your brother?”

  Wally’s jaw set. “How do you know about my brother?”

  “I, um, met him when I visited Harry. Well, I met his hand anyway.” Arthur mimicked a puppet. “I might have laughed if I hadn’t been so nervous.”

  Wally’s expression softened. “You just described my entire childhood.” He gazed toward Greyridge. “Harry’s really in there too?”

  Arthur nodded. “The Rook’s holding him ransom until I pay off his debt.”

  Wally headed to the fire escape ladder. “Let’s go get them.”

  “Now?” Arthur said, staring at the tentacle-infested port. “How will we get through?”

  Wally quirked an eyebrow at Breeth. “We’ll figure something out.” He stepped down a rung. “Aren’t you the one who throws himself into adventure, no matter how dangerous?”

  Arthur looked lost, like he was trying to remember how to be brave. And then he slapped his forehead. “Cooper! So much has happened, I almost forgot! Your brother isn’t in Greyridge!”

  Wally froze, hands on the top rung. “What?”

  “He’s in Mirror Kingsport! I saw him there when I was with Sekhmet. He was putting on a puppet show in the Slopping District. His story needed a little work, but it wasn’t shabby.”

  Wally shook his head. “There’s no way Graham could have escaped his cell, made it all the way across the city, through the Manor, and into the Mirror.”

  “I’m as confused as you are,” Arthur said. “But he’s there.”

  Wally narrowed his eyes. “I’m not falling for this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is what you do, Arthur. You use stories to manipulate people’s emotions and then you take advantage of them.”

  “Why would I lie about this?” Arthur asked.

  “Hmm,” Wally said sarcastically. “Maybe so you can get me to go back to the Manor and help you replace all the gold you just lost?”

  Arthur looked hurt. Breeth could sense both boys’ heartbeats pounding in the ash swirling around them.

  “I’m not lying this time, Wally,” Arthur said. He pointed at the tentacles that had stolen his gold. “I was going to share half of that take with you. I owed you after what happened on our last heist.”

  Breeth’s ash rippled with sympathy. This was the first time she’d heard Arthur use Wally’s first name. Maybe she hadn’t given this Arthur a fair shake.

  Wally searched Arthur’s face and then sighed. “I have to go see for myself.”

  “Then I’m coming with you,” Arthur said, refitting his garish hat. “I have to make sure the old man’s still alive anyway.” He stepped to the roof’s edge and stared at the sea of tentacles. “But how do we get through?”

  Breeth took that as her cue to creak down the side of the fish factory and into the destroyed port. Flexing as hard as she could, she curled the broken boards around the few tentacles closest to them, clawing them aside. The tentacles struggled against her, thrashing and flexing, but Breeth curled more boards, managing to pin the tentacles to the beach. Maybe she was good at arm wrestling after all.

  Arthur’s mouth dropped open. “No fair!” he said to Wally. “Did that Huamei guy teach you magic? Sekhmet wouldn’t even let me hold one of her swords!”

  Wally only shrugged. “The tentacles must be afraid of us since we defeated the Corvidians.”

  The boys climbed down from the roof, and Breeth continued to clear a path for them up the cliffs, using whatever organic material she could to sweep the tentacles aside. Back in port, Pyra laughed maniacally as she sprayed a potion that made the tentacles retreat like slugs touched with salt.

  “This is so weird,” Arthur said, kicking a restrained tentacle. “The doll, the ravens, and now this giant tentacle monster.”

  “I’ll say,” Wally said.

  “I mean it’s weird other than the obvious reasons. These monsters are all straight out of Garnett Lacroix adventures. The Case of the Doll with the Sapphire Eyes. The Night of the Ravens. And now The Thing from the Belly of the Sea.”

  “Okay,” Wally admitted. “That is weird. What do you think it means?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Arthur said in an embarrassingly heroic voice.

  They reached the top of the cliffs, and Greyridge’s outer fence came into sight. They strained under the tentacles’ pull.

  “Harry’s safe, right?” Arthur asked. “Those gates are impenetrable … right?”

  More tentacles slithered out of the ocean and coiled around the fence. They jerked once, then twice, then a third time until the fence buckled with a shriek. The tentacles slithered in, wrenched open the portcullis, and then squeezed through the entrance with a great squelching sound.

  Arthur winced. “Maybe not.”

  Wally’s panicked eyes sought Breeth’s face in the moss. She could tell he was asking her to zip ahead and check on her brother. But before she could ooze so much as an inch, something strange happened. The tentacles slurped out of the hospital and fell limp.

  “Huh,” Breeth said, using Greyridge’s hedges to sweep the tentacles aside as easy as cooked noodles. “They aren’t fighting against me anymore.”

  The boys climbed over Greyridge’s collapsed fence and made their way past the broken portcullis. The foyer was in darkness, its electrics fizzling. Paperwork and glass littered the floor, and the walls glistened with slime. The broken carriage lay in the corner, and a man lay beside it, blood trickling from a gash on the side of his head.

  “That’s Graham’s doctor,” Wally said, his voice shaking.

  Arthur looked like he might be sick.

  “They just slithered in,” a voice said. “They slithered in and—” The nurse at the front desk stared blankly, a wisp of hair standing up directly from the top of her head.

  Wally ran to her desk. “Is my brother okay?”

  She gave him a dazed look. “Brother?”

  “Graham Cooper!” Wally said.

  Breeth winced in the broken portcullis.

  The nurse mindlessly rustled her paperwork. “I don’t think we have a … Gran Copper.”

  Breeth grew impatient. She seeped into the floor’s moss and oozed to the door leading to the cells. Feeling inside her wooden self, she found the lock and twisted it.

  “I unlocked it, Wally!” she said, creaking open.

  Wally sprinted down the hallway. Arthur followed slowly, eyes still fixed on the wounded doctor. Breeth was about to follow them, but then she heard a voice.

  “Oh. Oh my.”

  But this wasn’t just any voice. It had a certain resonance to it, felt through the hospital’s wood and moss. It clearly belonged to a woman. And yet instead of echoing down the hallways, it carried through the materials of the hospital.

  The voice was like Breeth’s.

  Breeth followed the resonance, seeping down a tunnel clogged with a lifeless tentacle, and arrived at a cell that had been wrenched open. Inside was a ghost. The woman was blue as a candle flame. She floated in the middle
of the air and stared at something on the floor.

  Breeth seeped up the mossy wall to get a better look.

  Oh, she thought, piecing together the gruesome scene.

  The ghost lady was staring at her own dead body.

  The ghost and her body were slim, with silvery hair and liver spots on their hands. The only difference between them was that the ghost was still in one piece, while the body … Well, it didn’t take much detective work to realize that the tentacles had slithered into the hospital, broken into this cell, and then pulled this woman apart.

  Breeth gulped, and the ghost woman’s pearly eyes shot up in fear.

  “Are you the angel of death?” the woman whispered.

  “Um, no?” Breeth said. She doubted her moss looked very deathly. Or angelic.

  The woman sighed, relaxing a bit. Her pearly eyes studied her own dead body. Then she scoffed. “I’ve heard of artists sacrificing their lives for their work, but this is ridiculous.”

  “You’re an artist?”

  The ghost woman nodded. “An author. Or I was, at least.” She shook her head and laughed without humor. “Killed by my own pen name.”

  Breeth’s mossy nose wrinkled in confusion. She knew pen names were something authors made up when they didn’t want to use their real ones. But how could someone be killed by a made-up name?

  The ghost lady’s pearly eyes flashed to the hallway. “I warned them he was coming for me. The nurse tried to assure me that I was safe in this cell. But I knew better. He would bend heaven and earth to finish the job.”

  “Who’s he?” Breeth asked.

  “Alfred Moore,” the woman said.

  Breeth’s moss bristled in recognition. That was the author Arthur was obsessed with.

  “The guy who writes those adventure books?” Breeth asked.

  “I wrote those books,” the ghost lady said, annoyed. “I never was able to sell my work under my real name. My publishers claimed the public wouldn’t be interested in stories by a female writer.” She cleared her throat and did an impression of a male voice. “We simply can’t sell adventure tales bearing a woman’s name. But with a pen name…” She sighed. “What choice did I have? If I wanted The Adventures of Garnett Lacroix to be read by the masses, then I would have to adopt a male nom de plume.” She stared at her body. “Little did I realize the monster I created the day I came up with Alfred Moore.”

  Breeth’s thoughts were all in a tangle. A pen name was nothing more than a name, right? As harmless as ink on paper.

  “Wait, how did a guy you came up with kill you?” she asked.

  The ghost lady opened her hand and stared through her ghostly fingers. “I was sick of writing those silly adventures. And I was sick of writing as a man, not receiving the credit I was due for my work. So I shut my quill away in a drawer, swearing never to write as Alfred Moore again.” She closed her ghostly fingers into a fist. “But Alfred didn’t want the stories to end.”

  Breeth felt a tingle of understanding. Of course. Whenever someone imagined something in the Real, it appeared in the Fae: a unicorn. A goblin screamatorium. Even a male pen name …

  “I never met my pen name,” the ghost lady continued. “Not in person. But after I retired Alfred, stories started to appear on my desk. Stories I had not written. It seemed Alfred had learned of my existence—the woman who created him—and was convinced that the only way to take control of his destiny was to kill me.” Her form flickered with fear. “Someone had given him a Quill. To use his somewhat flowery description, ‘a magical Quill of black bone, veined red, and as gnarled as an old knuckle.’ Alfred started to write monstrous stories with this Quill, and those stories appeared on my pages.” The ghost lady sought Breeth’s eyes. “But words cannot harm us, right?”

  Breeth nodded her moss uncertainly.

  The ghost lady’s voice grew haunted. “That’s what I’d hoped. But then Alfred’s stories started to come true. His words described objects coming to life in my apartment. And that’s just what happened. My bedsheets tried to strangle me. My letter opener tried to stab me. One night, I found the arsenic pouring itself into my soup.”

  Breeth’s mossy eyes widened. That was almost as scary as her own death.

  The ghost continued. “I narrowly managed to survive Alfred’s attacks. I carried his stories with me, reading wherever I went. Whenever they described something ghastly, I was ready. I dodged the letter opener that flew at my heart. I took the bedsheets to the cleaner’s and never picked them up again. I never sipped the soup.”

  Breeth looked at the body on the ground. “How did you end up in Greyridge?”

  The woman sighed. “I made the mistake of telling my cousin that I suspected my pen name was trying to murder me.” Her pearly gaze drifted around the cell. “Naturally, he had me committed.”

  Where she could no longer avoid danger, Breeth realized.

  The ghost lady continued. “Alfred managed to reach me in this hospital by pulling monsters from my own Garnett Lacroix adventures. I heard whispers of the doll after its porcelain victims were committed here. Next came the ravens. And finally the tentacles.” She frowned at her own dead body. “Third time’s a charm, I suppose.”

  “I’m sorry you were killed,” Breeth said. “It’s not fun.”

  “No,” the woman said, her pearly eyes shining on Breeth’s. “It isn’t, is it?”

  Breeth was about to ask more questions—about the author and the monsters and whether the ghost lady wanted to be friends—but then a crack formed in the cell’s ceiling, as luminous as an exploding star. Breeth recognized the light, soft and cool on her moss. She’d seen it the moment after she was killed, right before she was absorbed into the knife hilt.

  The ceiling continued to peel open like burning paper, catching the ghost lady’s attention.

  “I guess this is it,” she said. She hugged herself and looked at Breeth. “Please, do me a favor? Check on my cat? I had to leave her when I was committed.”

  An invisible force drew the ghost lady upward, like a tissue lifted by the wind.

  “Wait!” Breeth said. “I want to come with you! My parents are up there!”

  She tried to leap from the moss into the open air, so she too could be drawn upward … but the light didn’t seem to want her.

  “My name is Valerie Lucas!” the ghost lady called. “I live on the corner of River Road and Will—”

  And then she was gone—absorbed into the light. The bright tear in the ceiling closed like a zipper, and the cell fell dark and empty, save the dead body all in pieces.

  Breeth oozed miserably between the stones, feeling as helpless as the moss she inhabited.

  * * *

  After taking a few moments to herself, Breeth seeped into the hallway, listening for familiar voices.

  “Stop arguing and grab the bloody guard’s keys!” a man snarled.

  Breeth followed the voice and found Arthur standing outside of a cell, staring at a man through the barred window. The flower on Arthur’s hat was wilted again.

  “Last time, you told me to leave you in here,” Arthur said.

  “That was before the guards was attacked by ravens and giant squids! You can’t buy luck like that!”

  “If a tentacle doesn’t grab you on your way through port, the Rook’s men will kill you the moment you set foot in the city!”

  The man scoffed. “I never thought I’d see the day when my son wanted to be more Black Feathers and less Garnett Lacrotch.”

  This was Arthur’s dad? Breeth thought. They sure didn’t act like father and son.

  “You’re safer in here!” Arthur shouted. “All right? I’ve never felt so relaxed knowing you were behind bars!”

  This was too complicated for Breeth. She saw another figure at the end of the hallway and seeped up to Wally.

  “Holy cow,” she said. “Do I have something to tell you.”

  “Not now,” Wally said.

  “Uh,” Breeth said, “you’re really go
nna want to hear this.”

  Wally stared through the bars. “He was right.”

  “Who was right?”

  “Arthur. My brother’s not here.”

  Breeth seeped through the moss and under the door. Moonlight streamed cold and pale through the cell’s window onto an empty bed and a strange drawing on the wall.

  “Every time I’ve walked down this hall,” Wally said through the bars, “Graham has stuck his hand out to greet me with a smile and a riddle. This is the first time that hasn’t happened.”

  Breeth searched for clues. How could a person just disappear from a locked cell? She examined the drawing. Parts looked quite realistic, as if she could float right through it into the Mirror. But the middle had been smeared with an X.

  Out of curiosity, Breeth seeped into the cobwebs of the drawing … and every bit of her ignited with dark flame. An explosion of power and magma coursed through her, howling with the darkness between the stars, twisting and contorting her spirit like she was caught in a black hole—

  Breeth wrenched herself free, fleeing back to the moss. If she’d had breath she would have panted. “So, um,” she said, “I think he went through that weird drawing.”

  Wally stared at it. “Practicing his portals,” he whispered. His eyes leapt to Breeth. “Can you help me get to the Mirror?”

  Breeth was all too familiar with the look on his face. It was the ache of a missing family. But she’d already helped Wally so much. She’d died as a mouse thing and been pecked in the brain by a flock of bird monsters and fought off a slippery swath of tentacles. What if it took weeks or even months for her to help Wally chase after his brother? How long would it be before they could find her killer?

  “Wally,” she said. “I think I may have sensed my parents a few minutes ago. A patient died in another cell, and I watched her ascend into this light. I felt them in there. I need to find a way back to them.”

  Wally stared into her knotted eyes. “You’ve been so helpful, Breeth. I don’t know how I’ll ever thank you.” He looked at the painting on the wall. “But my brother might be in trouble. Once he’s safe and sound, I promise I’ll help you find your killer.”