May Bird Among the Stars

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  “One way or another, we all ended up in the Afterlife by accident. Amelia got lost over the ocean in her plane.” She nodded her head toward the woman in the flight suit, then thumbed at another in a cancan skirt, red bustier, and high-heeled black boots. “Lawless Lexy here was a knife thrower for the traveling circus. Fell into the Bermuda Triangle on her way to Indonesia. Fought her way past the water demon…. Plucky.”

  May nodded. She knew the Bermuda Triangle was one of the four doorways between Earth and the Afterlife.

  “But look at me, will ya? Running on and on. I reckon everybody has things they want to ask you.” She turned over her shoulder, to where the colonists perched on various stools and benches, listening to every word. Now they all scrambled to talk to May at once.

  “Do you really breathe fire?” one man in a business suit asked.

  “I heard you ride Black Shuck dogs bareback.”

  “Didn’t you throw the Bogey out of the Eternal Edifice with your bare hands?”

  “How do you plan to get Bo Cleevil?”

  “All right now, cool your muffins,” Bertha said, looking around sternly. “This girl’s just had a long journey. Don’t everybody hog her at once.” She eyed May. “Maybe we should just take a little walk first, get you acclimatized. Whaddya think? How ’bout a tour?”

  Pumpkin and May looked at each other across the table excitedly. “Sure,” May replied. While the others rested, Bertha led May, Kitty, and Pumpkin through a vast network of tunnels winding their way up inside the Scrap Mountains.

  “Spirits think it’s just a solid pile of junk, but we been hollowing out the inside for years. Making a place of our own, where no one won’t blow their Bogey whistle on us.”

  As they pushed through doorways made of car parts, soda cans full of old rusty nails announced their arrival. Everywhere, ropes suspended from the ceiling dangled potbellied stoves, refrigerators, large rocks, even chandeliers. “In case we get intruded,” Bertha said, nodding to the precariously hung items. “You can bet how happy the baddies would be to catch a pile of Live Ones like us. That’s why 1 had to net you…. Careful” Bertha dodged levers sticking out of the walls and stepped over tiny strings that crossed the walkway, guiding the others along behind her to avoid the booby traps. “You get to know it like the back of your hand, eventually,” she assured them.

  Bertha led them upward through one garbage-walled corridor after another, along bridges made from abandoned shackles that could be unhooked at a moment’s notice, sending their occupants into the crevices below Deeper inside, there were large cavernlike areas stockpiled with food, bars of silver, and onyx. “Helps to ward off spirits,” Bertha said. “But I’m sure you know all that.”

  One enormous room had shelves up to the ceiling, packed to the gills with books, many of the jackets ripped off, none of them showing titles till you looked right at them and the letters drifted into view. “We get these at half price from Crawl-Mart.”

  Bertha turned to a stack to the right and pulled a few volumes off the shelf: I Was a Teenage Goblin, Potty Training Your Black Shuck Hound Puppy, So You Want to Be an Evil Ruler. She showed the books to May, then reshelved them.

  “Pays to know the enemy,” Bertha breathed at Pumpkin, who winced and swayed as if he might faint.

  Other rooms had no ceilings but were exposed completely to the stars above, and, to May’s shock, gardens brimming with vegetables, fruits, and flowers grew inside.

  Bertha explained, “Got the seeds from a guy called O’Harris. A botanist, wouldn’t you know? Went down with his ship in the triangle. Lucky day for us, I reckon. We gotta live on something. We can’t count on food sacrifices these days. So many people on Earth have stopped doing that kind of thing, because they’ve stopped believing in ghosts and spirits. Only believe in what they can see. Think ghosts are just in stories. What a bunch of ninnies.” She shook her head. “Tsk-tsk-tsk. We can only count on ourselves now.”

  Bertha turned to another door. “Here’s the bank.” On a table sat stacks upon stacks of shining coins. “All the tele-tokens we’ll ever need,” Bertha continued. “We got our own teleporter so we can transport ourselves to any booth in the realm, at any time.”

  May gasped. “Was it you? Were you the ones who took all the tele-tokens? I saw that in the newspaper!”

  A proud grin crept diagonally across Bertha’s face. “You saw that too, huh? We keep a copy of every single newspaper in the archives, if you want to look at it again. We got Live Ones hidden all over the realm, honey, fighting for the cause. We got all these little ways to stick it to the big guy, even though we never even seen him. And now we got you. We knew about that whole Eternal Edifice fiasco before the Bogey was done peeling himself off the sand. Some ghouls leaked the news about The Book of the Dead and what it said about you. I plumb just about fell over when I heard. Ha!” Bertha patted her gray puff of hair as they made their way up, up, up, until they reached a circular door in the ceiling, made out of a hubcap.

  “This is my favorite,” she said, giving the hubcap a shove. It flipped open to reveal a ladder. Bertha started climbing up it and motioned the others to follow.

  They emerged into the night air—and to a breathtaking sight. Half of the Ever After lay stretched out before them. They could see clear to the Dead Sea. There, indeed, was the dark lighthouse of Hocus Pocus. Dark clouds swirled above it, filling May with dread.

  Pumpkin gripped May’s hand. She looked back at him gratefully

  “Meow.”

  May directed her gaze at Kitty, who was looking at her bathing suit. Its zipping stars and supernovas caught the light and reflected it in tiny bursts, though the bursts of lightning they could see must have been miles and miles away.

  “It’s a great location, huh?” Bertha gushed. “It’s so isolated that hardly anybody comes up here sniffing around. And we can just teleport down to the shore towns to spy on the Dark Spirits when we get a hankerin’. We been needing to do that a lot lately They been on the move. Something big on the horizon. You can just feel it.”

  May scanned the view nervously, then looked at Bertha. “What are you going to do?”

  Bertha shrugged. “What are we gonna do? Something. Anything. When we started hearing about you, our spirits rose.” Bertha seemed to get choked up, but it turned out she was just wincing from a bit of garlic pricking the inside of her cheek. She stuck a finger in her mouth and moved it to where she could suck on it. “A girl who can fly outta the Eternal Edifice is sure someone we gotta have on our side, book or no book.” She looked May up and down, sizing her up. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be so tiny, though. You look like a feather could knock you over.”

  “Bertha …,” May began.

  “Come on,” Bertha interrupted, leading them back down the ladder. “There’s more.”

  Bertha was all business as she directed them down the next set of corridors. “How’d you manage to get through the portal, Miss May Bird?” she asked.

  “Um …”

  “It was mostly thanks to me,” Pumpkin replied, stifling a fake yawn and looking to see if Bertha was impressed. But she already seemed distracted.

  “We offer lots of classes,” Bertha said, tapping her finger to her chin, hobbling ahead purposefully as she waved at this and that cavern full of neatly lined desks. A chalkboard hung on one of the hallway walls, announcing the classes scheduled for that day:

  Cleevilology: 9:00 a.m.

  Combat with Ultimate Evil: 12:00

  Coping with Life When Everyone Around You Is Dead: 1:00 p.m.

  Ready, Set, Exorcise! 2:00 p.m.

  “Of course, we spend most of our time training, getting ready for the day when it’s time to go up against Bo Cleevil for good.”

  Bertha entered one of the cave classrooms, pulled a newspaper off a shelf, and flipped to the back. “We been running an ad ever since we got the reports about you coming out of Ether.” She flattened the paper against a desk, pointing to a passage about half
way down the last page. SPIRITS TOTALLY against realm domination, the headline read. Her breath bounced off the desk and flooded May’s nostrils. “We were hopin’ you’d lead us to our goal.”

  May gazed at the words on the page. “How many of you are there?”

  Bertha calculated quickly, counting on her fingers. “About forty here, and we’re in contact with about ten more through the mail. Oh, and telep-a-grams. We smuggled a booth from Hocus Pocus. Between the telep-a-booth and the teleporter, we got things covered.” She winked. “Anyway, about fifty altogether. Though we’re sure there are a lot of other Live Ones in the realm who just don’t know where to find us.”

  May thought back to the globe she had seen in Arista’s study back in Belle Morte, which had listed the various populations in the Ever After. “But the Dark Spirits. There are so many….”

  Bertha nodded. “Plus, Bo Cleevil is probably worth about a thousand of them put together. And, of course, there’s the Bogey.”

  May felt a lump in her throat, but Bertha tilted her chin up. “What we got in our favor is that they’re still pretty scattered, those Dark Spirits. They control most of the City of Ether, that’s certain. For a while they were just kinda layin’ low. Like I said, though, things have picked up. The ghouls’ve been raiding towns and remaking ‘em into what they call Cleevilvilles. That’s cause Cleevil likes to have everything just so, you swan-nee. Everything orderly. Kinda clean and dull. And everything named after him, of course.” Her gray eyes twitched with disdain.

  She led them into the hallway again, right past the recreation hall, where Fabbio had dug out a pack of cards and was playing a game of Old Hag with himself while Beatrice was flipping through a book. “Pumpkin, you can stay here with the cat. C’mon, May.”

  She led May to another doorway and stepped inside. “Here’s our archery range.” She nodded to a figure across the range. It was a cardboard cutout of a ghoul with snarling teeth. Somebody had drawn cross-eyes over where his real eyes had been and a curled mustache under his snout. They had scrawled Ghouls smell! across his chest.

  Bertha studied May, her eyes drifting to her quiver of arrows. “I wonder if I could see them arrows?”

  May pulled her bow and quiver from her back and held them out.

  Bertha pulled the string taut, shutting one eye tight. “This one’s special. A real beaut. A North Farm original, I’ll swannee. Very rare.”

  “It doesn’t work very well,” May said, quietly.

  Bertha looked at her askance, then handed the bow back. “There’s your target.” She nodded toward the ghoul.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” May murmured.

  “It’s a ghoul! You’ve got to do it.” Bertha held the quiver of arrows out to her. She gave May that look again, like she was daring her.

  Obediently, May took the bow, strung an arrow, drew it back, aimed—then let it go.

  Instead of soaring toward the target, or even across the range, the arrow drifted through the air like a feather once again, making it only a few feet before landing gently on the ground, as if it had fallen fast asleep.

  May looked at Bertha Brettwaller, and Bertha Brettwaller looked at May.

  “Try again.”

  May tried. Again, the arrow drifted to the ground, lifeless.

  “There’s nothing wrong with them arrows,” Bertha said. “The problem is with you. Your heart’s not in it.” She studied May for a long, long moment. “Otherwise, they’d fly straight.”

  Bertha chewed on her lips for a moment, one eyebrow descending over one eye. “You ain’t planning to help us, are ya?”

  May’s face heated up desperately The only thing she could think to say in response was, “I have a mom.”

  Bertha stared at her for another long moment.

  May felt the need to say more. “The Lady says the way back to Briery Swamp is under the Bogey’s bed.”

  Bertha was silent for a few moments more as she sucked on her garlic clove, moving it around in her mouth, ruminating. “Well, we’ll take you,” she finally said.

  It was the last thing May had expected to hear. “Why?”

  Bertha leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “Well, shoot. I know what you left behind.” She looked at May again, seriously, and a hundred years of sadness seemed to shine there behind her eyes. Then she smiled her garlicky smile. “But I also got a better reason.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We need you. So I’ve gotta believe in you.”

  May stared at Bertha with a heavy lump in her throat, but Bertha only stared back at her evenly, clasping her hands together. “I believe you’ll come back.”

  • • •

  Zombies, fortunately, are the stupidest of all the Dark Spirits, even stupider than ghouls, who have an IQ of -36. So when May and the others vanished into the trunk of the hearse, the zombies were left discombobulated and lost, staggering back and forth across the Nothing Platte.

  Eventually, they bumped into the goblins, who were making the slow journey home, show tunes still ringing in their ears.

  When the two groups converged and saw that neither of them had captured their prey, they argued bitterly The goblins blamed the zombies, saying they wouldn’t know a Live One if it bit them on the severed limb. The zombies countered this with a resentful “Eeeeeuuuuugh,” which was the only word in the zombie vocabulary.

  And then, although they were headed to the exact same place, the two groups went their separate ways.

  As the goblins made their slow way south, choosing the route with the best malls, the story of Pumpkin’s singing went with them. In every cafÉ, morgue, and boutique, the goblins stopped to share tales of a singer with the voice of an angel and the head of a rather large squash.

  And from Stabby Eye to Fiery Fork, among all the murmurings about a living girl who had escaped the City of Ether and a living cat with little to no fur roaming the desert, a new rumor emerged.

  Unbeknownst to him, Pumpkin was becoming a legend.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  A Message to Isabella

  Commander Berzerko floated through the cat door of the Hocus Pocus lighthouse and followed it all the way to the depths. She burst into the Bogey’s room, where the Bogey was poised over a handwritten invitation to the water demons.

  All Dark Spirits Must Attend!

  Big Announcement at Midnight!

  The Bogey jerked, smearing the last exclamation point. He listened nervously to the commander. Through her enraged meowings, the Bogey understood that the goblins and zombies had come back empty-handed. They had let the girl and her friends get away.

  “Meow, meow, meow!” Commander Berzerko spat. Though she had searched the edges of the Petrified Pass and the Nothing Platte, she hadn’t been able to catch a scent anywhere. Where were they?! Where were they hiding? And where were they headed next?

  She coughed a hair ball onto the Bogey’s desk for emphasis. She met his eyes so that he knew she meant business. Then she stalked out of the room.

  A map lay spread on the table of the colony’s strategy room.

  “Now, how were you plannin’ to get into South Place?” Bertha asked.

  May glanced at Beatrice, then back at Bertha. “Um, I guess we were going to go through the Hocus Pocus lighthouse.”

  Several people in the room let out a groan, Bertha’s groan causing those around her to sway Everyone waggled their hands in front of their noses.

  Bertha shook her head. “A dangerous route. Isn’t that right, Harley?” The man she had spoken to only twitched in the corner, muttering something about dust in the wind. May and Beatrice looked at Bertha questioningly.

  “That’s all he’s done since he got back,” she explained, “and that was twenty years ago. He had some kind of trauma down there in the dungeons.” Bertha shrugged and shook her head. “Been absolutely hopeless ever since.”

  May gulped. There was something else weighing on her, and she needed to bring it up now or never.


  “There’s a boy in South Place. Lucius. I want to—”

  “Out of the question,” Bertha said, making a decisive chopping gesture with her hand.

  “But—”

  “We have a mess of undead risking their lives for this, and, honey, if you haven’t noticed, life is precious in the Afterlife. A lot of us have lost spirits we love to the Dark Spirits. But you gotta be strong. Think of the big picture. We gotta get into the city, park ourselves somewhere.” She thought, her upper lip twitching. “Hocus Pocus Horror Huts, most likely. Then we gotta get you into South Place fast—and get out fast once we get you in.” She looked up at Pumpkin, who had started wearing a handkerchief over his mouth and nose to ward off Bertha’s breath. Pumpkin whistled and looked off into the distance.

  After ruminating a bit, Bertha let out a raggedy sigh. “The lighthouse is plumb dangerous. But it’s probably the only option we have. A small group of us’ll take you in.”

  She stuck her thumb on the place on the map where the lighthouse appeared and smiled gamely, a few bits of garlic plunking out and sticking on her wet lips. “Well, shoot. Down we go.”

  That night Bertha, May and her friends, and a select group of undead worked and reworked their plans for entering Hocus Pocus and South Place. Afterward Beatrice insisted on poring over the many newspapers, books, and magazines in the library She and May read anything they could find on the city and its residents, just in case Bea’s mother might be among them. “You never know,” Bea said. “Every town is an opportunity.”

  A bottle of glowing ink perched on top of her papers, Bea carefully used her feather pen to copy any notes that seemed like they might be helpful. May sat beside her, trying to read up too, but fading fast. She rested her chin on her crossed arms and tried to stay awake. Somber Kitty curled into her lap and occasionally looked at her curiously, wondering when they were going to bed. He didn’t dare venture away Everywhere he walked, some eager colony member wanted to squeeze him tight or scratch his chin or—worse—talk to him in the goofy, high-pitched voice that humans sometimes used with animals as if they were complete dummies.