Suitcase of Stars

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  That’s when I realized that the blond guy wasn’t actually walking on the road. His legs weren’t even moving, yet he was traveling quite quickly. In fact, you couldn’t even see his feet because his pants were so long that they covered his shoes. The closer he got, the more it looked like his pants were doing the walking for him, as weird as that sounds.

  I felt like I was in shock. Patches looked just as confused as I was. We continued to watch the man come closer while hiding behind the stone. As he finally passed by us, I could clearly see that his pants were carrying him toward the village. I blinked hard, then looked again. His pants were definitely moving for him!

  “You saw it too, didn’t you, Patches?” I whispered as soon as the man was out of earshot. “And why is he holding a bunch of flowers?”

  Any other person would have just run home, locked himself in his bedroom, and hid under the covers. But not me, and not my dog. In fact, I’m the last person who would flee from scary stuff.

  I scratched my head. I didn’t know what to believe at that point. I decided the best course of action was to keep my mind open to all possibilities, as strange as some of them were.

  Patches whimpered. “Don’t worry,” I said, trying to reassure my dog. “We won’t let him get away without making him answer a few of our questions.”

  I straddled the bicycle while the blond man and his magical pants glided farther away. I looked down again at Patches and noticed for the first time how tired my dog looked from following me around all day.

  “Okay,” I said. I shook off my backpack and opened it up in front of Patches. “Hop in. But when I put you back on my shoulders, don’t wiggle around and act all crazy like you usually do. Got it?”

  So, with Patches on my shoulders and the pedals beneath my feet, I chased after the blond pizza thief and his self-propelling pants.

  The strange blond man floated through the deserted village. The shop lights were off, as were the lamps in the houses, but the luminous pants somehow bathed the street in a phosphorescent glow. The only other light was an intermittent bright flash from Seamus’s garage. It looked like a torch flame was being used, meaning Seamus was probably working on one of his many satellite television devices.

  The floating stranger turned toward the center of the village and, to my surprise, stopped a few paces from the church. I hid myself behind the corner of a narrow alleyway so that I could watch him undetected.

  Not even a sliver of light emanated from the church. The building was enveloped in mist, which was unusual for that time of year.

  Patches growled softly toward the end of the alleyway. I turned around to see what he’d growled at, but nothing was there. Then someone closed a door. I heard the sound of distant footsteps. A cough echoed through the deserted streets. I wasn’t able to locate the source of any of the sounds.

  When I finally turned back to the floating man, he had disappeared.

  “Patches, he’s gone!” I said.

  I leaned the bicycle against a wall and slowly approached the church. As we walked, I kept my eyes on the courtyard and Patches covered the rear.

  When I passed the front door of the parsonage, I could hear loud snoring coming from the top floor. I figured it was Reverend Prospero, but after walking a few more steps I heard a similar noise and realized that snoring was also coming from Ms. Finla’s room. I found their simultaneous snoring to be sort of reassuring, so I continued onward.

  As I turned the corner, I saw the man in the self-propelling pants hovering over the damp grass where the gravestones were. I watched him from a safe distance, trying to fight back the shivers from seeing a magical man wandering a cemetery at night.

  The moon had disappeared behind some clouds, making the pants’ glow the only source of light. As the eerie light flickered among the dark graves, my courage began to desert me. After all the strange things that had happened to me that day, you’d think I’d be ready for anything. But you’d be wrong. I kept my distance.

  The man seemed to be searching for something around the gravestones. He searched through the weeds that covered the cemetery. He read some of the half-eroded epitaphs on the stones.

  When he proceeded deeper into the cemetery, I walked along the wall so that I could keep him in sight without him seeing me. The man just continued to scan the ground for something.

  At that moment, Aiby’s words about messages in bottles popped into my head: “My dad likes that kind of thing,” she had said. Weird, I thought. Why did I think of that just now?

  When I finally snapped back to focus, I saw that the floating man had disappeared again! I swore under my breath, then quickly moved along the wall to see if I could find him again. Just then, I heard a voice in the distance. As I moved toward the sound, I heard the rustling of paper. It sounded just like the tissue that you wrap around flowers.

  That must be him, I thought. But before I could move any closer, a loud cracking sound rang out through the cemetery, illuminating the area with a brilliant blue-white light. As my eyes came back into focus, I saw a blue flame was burning directly above a gravestone. It looked like the head of a giant match. The thought made me feel dizzy. I leaned against a nearby gravestone and tried to understand what I was seeing.

  Patches was trying to wriggle out of my backpack, so I reached over my shoulder and gently stroked his ears to calm him down. Then I gathered my courage and took a few cautious first steps, trying not to walk over the graves that were closest to me.

  As soon as I could see the blue light again, I hid myself behind an imposing stone cross. Atop the cross was an even more imposing angel with outspread wings. I felt a cold surge of panic crawl up my spine, but I somehow managed to ignore it.

  The strange man was standing before two crooked gravestones adjacent to each other. The blue light flickered above them. The man had placed the bouquet of flowers on the ground in front of the graves. He had his hands clasped together as he murmured some strange words. Despite the silence of the night, I still couldn’t make out a word from where I hid.

  Rigid as a statue, I tiptoed past a few more graves to get even closer. A twig snapped under my shoe. I froze, certain that the man had heard me. But he just continued to stare at the tombstones and murmur quietly.

  When I reached a second cross, I could hear a few of the words the man was speaking. “You can’t remember where you placed it?” he said. And then, “No, it isn’t in the cellar. I already checked there. Twice.”

  Who was this nutcase talking to in a cemetery in the middle of the night? I wondered. The thought that he might be talking to himself didn’t make me feel any better.

  I could feel Patches’s claws scratching against the inside of my backpack in an attempt to free himself. I slipped the backpack off my shoulders and carefully set it on the ground, but he continued to wiggle around inside the bag.

  “The chimney, you say?” the strange man muttered. “Where in the chimney?”

  I dug my nails into the moss-covered cross and slowly raised my eyes over its base to get a better view of the action.

  Once I saw what was happening, I froze from my fingers all the way down to my toes. The blue flame that fluttered above the graves had taken the form of a face. It had empty sockets for eyes, and its enormous mouth expanded and contracted as though the face was talking. I didn’t hear a voice coming from the mouth, but the floating man seemed to be able to hear and understand it just fine.

  While I was paralyzed with fear, Patches managed to free himself from the backpack. With a burst of energy, he dashed toward the man, howling what sounded like a doggy battle cry.

  While my dog was far from intimidating, and always a major pain, I had to admire his courage. In the relative darkness, Patches seemed quite a bit bigger than he actually was.

  As Patches neared the blue flame, it quickly melted away. Just as rapidly, the mysterious stranger vanished into thin air. One moment the man was standing in front of the two, crooked gravestones, and the next he had disa
ppeared.

  Patches landed on top of the bouquet of flowers that lay on the grass. He looked up in confusion for a moment, then promptly began to tear the flowers to shreds.

  My knuckles ached from clutching the cross during the ghostly encounter, or whatever it had been. I ran over to Patches to find that he’d scattered flowers all over the cemetery.

  “Congratulations, Patches,” I said. “You defeated the deadly bouquet of flowers.” He continued to growl even after I lifted him off the ground.

  One of the clouds shifted, allowing a sliver of moonlight to fall across the cemetery. That was when I saw the names that were engraved on the two gravestones in front of me: Charlotte and Reginald Lily.

  That was the exact moment I realized that there’s no such thing as a coincidence. I ran away from the graveyard in a mad sprint toward home.

  I didn’t stop running until the farmhouse door slammed behind me. I secured every single bolt and chain, then ran up to my bedroom and locked that door, too.

  I jumped into bed still fully dressed and yanked the covers over myself with Patches curled up in a ball near my feet. I spent most of the rest of the night waiting for my hands and feet to warm up, but no matter what I did they still felt like big blocks of ice.

  I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

  I went to see Reverend Prospero the next morning. I found him in the choir room, where he was working on the score for that evening’s rehearsal.

  “McPhee, what a pleasant surprise!” he said in his booming voice. “How are we doing?”

  I muttered that everything was going fine at the post office.

  “I must say, I’ve never seen Jules happier since he sprained his ankle!” the reverend said.

  I wasn’t surprised. Ever since I’d taken over his mail route, Jules had finally been able to dedicate himself to his favorite hobby: village gossip.

  I helped the reverend sort through the hymnals and the sheet music. He played a few notes on the organ to make sure it was in tune, and then read through the order of hymns prepared by the choirmaster. He grumbled when he saw the last piece. “I think I need to have a word with Mr. Fionnir,” he said. “This really is too much. Has anyone ever heard of a church choir singing ‘The Giants of the Sea?’ It’s bad enough that we sing about Oberon and Puck and all the rest of those pagan creatures!”

  The reverend seemed angry, but he really wasn’t. Like all good Scots, he’d long ago learned to be accepting of belief and superstition, religion and legend. Finding a balance between these spiritual differences came naturally to us.

  When I finally managed to get a word in, I said, “Reverend, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Have you ever heard of the Lily family in Applecross?”

  “What’s that you say?”

  “The Lily family,” I repeated, my voice shaking a little.

  “Lily?” the reverend repeated. He seemed genuinely surprised to hear the name. “I have heard the family name before, but if memory serves me, there hasn’t been a Lily living here for over a hundred years. Perhaps even longer.”

  The reverend raised a bushy eyebrow in my direction. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious,” I said.

  “Well, the Lily family’s story is an old one,” the reverend said. “Come with me, I’ll show you.”

  I followed him to the parsonage. He opened the door using an enormous iron key. Something was bubbling in a pot on the stove. The smell of garlic and vegetable broth filled my nostrils as we walked toward the reverend’s study. It was a small room with black wooden cupboards lining the walls. He opened one of the cupboards, closed it, opened the next one, closed that one, and then opened a third cupboard. After a brief search, he pulled out a heavy book.

  “Here it is,” he said. He laid the book on a table and carefully opened it. He fingered through the pages and stopped at a particular entry. “According to my records, the last of the Lily line, Reginald’s son, Abton, left Applecross back in 1801. There have been no other entries since then.”

  “Is he the same Reginald who is buried in the Applecross cemetery?” I asked.

  “Captain Reginald Lily, yes,” the reverend said. “The one with the red ship. Or so the legend claims.”

  Just like the Eggstones house, I thought.

  “A handsome man, so they said,” the reverend continued. “And well liked in the village.”

  The Reverend told me how Reginald Lily’s famous red ship had crashed into the coast in the first half of the eighteenth century. “I think that shipwreck was the most exciting event that happened in Applecross for several centuries!” he concluded with a hearty laugh.

  I sighed. My dad had already told me the story about the red boat. I needed to know more than the simple tales the villagers told.

  “What kind of people were the Lilys?” I asked. “I mean, what exactly were they doing in Applecross?”

  “They were seen as benefactors,” the reverend said.

  “What kind of benefactors?” I asked.

  “I think they were the kind of people who did a lot to help others,” he said. “The type who were more interested in doing good deeds than receiving recognition or an award.”

  I smirked. “So they were wealthy?”

  “I imagine so,” the reverend said, grinning at my cynicism. “I’m probably not the most knowledgeable person on the subject, but I think they were traders.”

  “Traders?” I asked. “What did they trade?”

  “I have no idea,” the reverend said. “I know that they often took their ship out to sea so they could trade with the nearby islands.”

  That made me remember Aiby’s comment about being able to spot the red house from the sea.

  “Do you know anything about where they used to live?” I asked.

  “Two centuries ago, they lived in the castle before it fell to ruin,” the reverend said. “I believe they bought it from an aristocratic family.”

  I tilted my head. “They lived at the ruins?” I asked. “Really?”

  “They were the last to ever reside there,” the reverend said. “The castle has remained empty ever since Abton Lily, Reginald’s son, left.”

  “Is it . . . haunted?” I asked.

  The reverend boomed out a laugh. Normally I would have laughed at the idea, as well, but last night’s events had me questioning everything. “Finley McPhee, please tell me you don’t believe in ghosts at your age!”

  I looked the reverend in the eyes. Just last night, I’d seen a blue flame that looked like a face floating atop Reginald Lily’s grave. But I couldn’t tell the reverend that. So I said nothing.

  Reverend Prospero laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. “No one wanted to live at the castle because it was too big and too damp,” he said. “That’s all. And can you imagine how expensive it would be to heat all of those rooms in the winter? Believe me, its abandonment had nothing to do with ghosts!”

  His answer didn’t convince me, but I really couldn’t argue with him, either. “Have you heard of a red house near Reginald Bay?” I asked.

  The reverend pursed his lips. “A red house?” he said. “No, I can’t say that I have.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Why all these questions about the Lily family, McPhee? What is it you really want to know?”

  I could feel pins and needles in my hands. I knew I had to get out of there as quickly as I could. Thankfully, someone knocked loudly on the door. I walked over to answer it.

  “McPhee, get back here!” the reverend shouted, pretending to be annoyed. “We haven’t finished this discussion.”

  I put on my best fake smile. “I have to get back to work, Reverend,” I said.

  “Why are you taking such an interest in the Lily family?” he asked.

  I put my hand on the door’s handle. “I’m not taking an interest in the Lily family,” I said. “But I think they’ve come back to Applecross.”

  To make sure the reverend couldn’t respo
nd, I opened the door. Mr. Everett stood in the doorway. As always, he was carrying his little black book.

  “Finley, wait a minute —” the reverend started, but I didn’t answer. I was already out the door and on my way back to the post office.

  When I arrived at the post office, I found Patches diligently guarding my mailbag. Inside the bag, I found another letter addressed to the Lily family. This time the envelope was wrapped in brown packing paper, and the lettering of the address was red and jagged. It seemed to be etched into the envelope rather than simply written on it. No sender was listed, but the destination was clearly written:

  The Lily Heirs

  Enchanted Emporium

  36 Eggstones Heaven

  Reginald Bay, Applecross (Scotland)

  This envelope referenced the Enchanted Emporium, which I’d completely forgotten to ask Aiby and the Reverend about. In fact, the only useful information I’d found so far was that the Lily family had been traders of some kind.

  I grabbed my mailbag, jumped on Jules’s bike, and sped around for the next few hours, delivering the mail.

  By noon, Patches and I had made it to Burnt Beach. The surroundings seemed so different this time that I wondered if I was even on the same path. The strange sign with the crooked arrow was still there, but the rocks and blackened trunks from the day before were gone. In their place was a flourishing shrubbery and a few young trees. Green grass blanketed the ground and only the larger standing rocks were still visible. The rest of the barren landscape was gone.

  “Patches, does anything seem strange to you?” I asked. He sniffed one of the young saplings, trotted around it, and then raised his leg over it. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Feeling a little overwhelmed, I climbed off the bicycle and pushed it along the path. Apart from the new growth and vegetation, everything else seemed to be the same as before.

  “Good morning,” I said to a cranky-looking seagull. For some reason, I knew that it was the same seagull I’d seen the day before. Patches barked at it once, then kept walking behind me.