The Time of the Ghost (24 page)

“Oh, well, it was worth a try,” Sally said. She pretended to consider. It had plainly only been important to her to spend just that one night away. “Let's scrap the Plan,” she said. “I might as well come home.”

Behind her Audrey had heard. Her face showed nothing but plain relief. She smiled, and letting herself be caught up by Ned Jenkins and Will Howard, she cycled between them, talking in a polite, social sort of way. She had not met either of them often. “Have you got the afternoon off School?” she asked.

“No,” said Ned, who was annoyed by her social manner.

“'Fraid not,” said Howard, who did not mind it. “We'd got games this afternoon, and we sneaked off.”

“Won't you get into trouble?” Audrey asked Ned.

“Only if we're caught,” Howard answered cheerfully. “Then it'll be hours in detention at least, I suppose.”

Here everyone except Imogen and Fenella reached the top of the hill. Imogen and Fenella, pedaling furiously back and forth, tried to go faster in order not to be left behind. The result was that each zigged when the other zagged. And of course they collided. The chain of Imogen's bicycle, with the ease of long practice, promptly fell off. Imogen stood in the road, looking from the chain to the black oil on her trousers, and swore her strongest swearword.

“Oh!” she said.
“Bloody!”

Everyone stopped.

Julian Addiman laughed condescendingly. “Hey,” he said. “Let the expert.”

Imogen looked at him consideringly. In spite of what Cart had said seven years in the future, Imogen at least seemed quite immune to the charm of Julian Addiman. “Since you think yourself so superior,” she said, with considerable dislike, “I
defy
you to get this censored chain back on.”

“Easy,” said Julian Addiman. He leaned his beautiful cycle on the hedge and got down to work. The rest of them stood round and watched. The chain fell off as soon as it was on. And again. And yet again after that. Julian Addiman got steadily oilier and steadily more annoyed.

While Julian Addiman worked, Cart was standing on the bank where the hedge grew. “We're quite near Monigan's Place now,” she announced. “Down there, there's the Hole of Moldy Dough, and there's the Nasty Tree, with the Nasty Place underneath it.”

The ghost rose up there to see what Cart was pointing at. There was a dip in the field behind the hedge, where the ground was the color of putty. The other thing was a twisted oak tree growing in the hedge. The ghost looked at both with consternation. She had forgotten that Cart had this habit of enlivening the landscape by giving everything names. No doubt it showed Cart had a vivid imagination, but it was nothing at all to do with Monigan.
Have you dragged us all on a wild-goose chase?
she demanded.
I thought you were doing something real to help me!

At this the chain fell off Imogen's bike for the tenth time. Imogen tried not to laugh. “Oh, I give up!” Julian Addiman said disgustedly.

Fenella gave her most booming chuckle. “Let the expert,” she said.

Imogen knelt down beside Julian Addiman and took hold of the bicycle chain in both her large, clumsy-looking hands. She gave the chain two clumsy flicks and wound the pedal of the bicycle. The chain went on and stayed on. Everyone laughed.

Julian Addiman was viciously annoyed. He knelt and glared at Imogen. It was hardly a human look. It was more like the stare of a dangerous wild animal. The ghost backed away from it, behind Ned and Fenella. He had looked like that in the car, before he threw her out.

“The ghost's here,” Fenella remarked.

Imogen stood up and wiped the oil off her hands onto a gray handkerchief with little jerky, disgusted movements. “It's no good looking at me like that, Julian Addiman.
I'm
not one of your worshiping girlfriends!” She looked meaningly up the hill, where Sally and Cart were now leaning, with their elbows on their handlebars, talking quietly and eagerly together. They looked glad to see one another again.

Julian Addiman's face went deep red. He stood up, snatched his cycle from the hedge, and rode off.

Everybody else got on their bikes again and rode after him. The road dived down and round a corner.

“Here we are in the Dream Landscape,” Cart announced.

They saw what she meant. The road led through unreal-looking rounded hills—the sort of hills you might draw by penciling curves on paper. Each hill had a clump of trees somewhere on it. Some had a ring of trees right at the top. Some had the same sort of ring on one side. The rest had a line of wood precisely halfway up. The hay had just been cut here, so that each hill was striped gray and green, like corduroy, and the stripes made a swirl round each different clump of trees. As the procession of cycles came round the corner, the sun felt out in long fingers from behind the gray clouds and touched round knobs of green grass, which stood out of the cut hay on the lower slopes of every hill.

Sally said, “If I were to paint this, everyone would think I'd made it up.”

Audrey said to Cart, “How imaginative you are! It
is
just like a dream!”

Cart looked irritated, and more irritated still when Julian Addiman rode to and fro in front of the rest of them, cackling with laughter. “Dream Landscape!” he said. “I've never had a dream like this.”

“I have,” said Howard. “Often. Those clumps of trees.”

“Those,” said Julian Addiman scornfully, “are planted on purpose to act as windbreaks. They're called hangars.” And he continued to ride scornfully backward and forward, laughing rudely at anything anyone said.

Not that anyone spoke much. There was a curious stillness about the Dream Landscape, which no one liked to interrupt. Even Julian Addiman's laughter and the clanking of the Atomic Heavy Bike did not disturb the stillness much.

Behind the last hill the road just stopped. There was a white fence across the way and, behind that, a long wood standing against the sky. There was nothing behind the wood. It looked as if it was standing on the edge of the world.

“And this is the Back of Beyond,” said Cart.

“Very interesting,” laughed Julian Addiman. “Shall we go home now?”

“We have to leave the bikes and walk,” said Cart.

They laid their bikes down in a heap beside the notice on the white fence. Howard said nervously, “It says ‘Private.'”

“There's never anyone about,” Cart said, ducking under the fence with the Monigan doll clutched to her chest. There was a chalky path leading round the left edge of the wood, under the hillside. As they all followed Cart, the wood was beside them on their right, rustling and surging with a wind no one could feel.

“It sounds like the sea,” Ned Jenkins remarked, looking at the wood. This close, you could see nothing but leaves, tossing and rustling.

“All this land used to be under the sea at one time,” Cart said. “When the wind blows, it remembers.”

“Yeah, yeah!” said Julian Addiman.

“I find that boy very irritating,” Imogen said to Fenella. “Why did he come?”

“He always skives off games,” said Fenella. “Then he has to find something to do.”

Though it looked as if they were walking straight into the frowning gray sky, the path led them down a gentle slope beyond the wood. It was thick and still and hot there. On one side was a field with three bright chestnut horses in it. On the other, the ground was broken into more of those round grassy knobs—a whole crowd of them. Each one was a small hill higher than anyone's head. The ghost looked at them, terrified. Audrey gave an expert exclamation at the sight of the horses and loitered, staring.

“I think she's really a horse herself,” Sally whispered to Cart. Julian Addiman laughed loudly, but the sound seemed to get buried in the hot, heavy silence.

Howard was interested in the crowd of mounds. “What happened there? Giant moles?”

“Those are barrows,” said Cart. “Old graves from before history began. Every single person buried there was a mighty king once, but that was so long ago that they've all been forgotten.”

The ghost wondered how Cart knew. She knew. Because she was a ghost herself, she saw the invisible shadow over the mounds. In the shadow flickered thin wreaths of thicker shadow, and from them came whispers and sad snatches of things that had once been important. Occasionally she caught a murky glimmer that could have been a crown. The heat and the stillness centered on that shadow and horrified her so that she clung close to the crowd of living people. Something of the same fear fell on them, too. Audrey and Julian Addiman were the only ones who looked happy.

A lark went up. It rose out of the center of the mounds, fluttering and twittering. The song had no joy in it. It was like an alarm clock going off. The ghost jumped and stared. That looked like a warning to Monigan that she was coming. Sure enough, as the lark worked its way into the sky, fluttering as if every wing-beat was an effort, a second lark went up, from beyond the barrows, and a third beyond that. The alarm notes of their songs pattered down like drops of lead.

Monigan knows I'm coming
, she said.

Imogen tipped her head back to look at the larks. “They did that when we came before,” she said to Cart. “You'd almost thing they were warning someone.”

“You'd almost think,” Julian Addiman said, in jeering imitation, “they were up in the sky twittering!”

At this, Imogen's dislike of him came to a head. “I've had enough of you, you stupid, rude boy!” she said. “I refuse to stay near you one moment longer! I'm leaving this minute and going home!” And she set off running, back toward the wood.

Come back!
shouted the ghost. This was a disaster. Imogen had to be there when they came to Monigan's Place. But here she was, running away at top speed. Her sturdy legs were flashing as fast as they had flashed on the bicycle, and her yellow figure was getting smaller and smaller against the dark leaves of the Back of Beyond.
Get her back!
she shouted to the others.
She's me! I have to be here, too.

Sally and Fenella shouted after Imogen. But Imogen just kept running as if she had not heard.

“Leave her,” said Cart. “She didn't want to see Monigan, anyway.”

“You mean she was scared, so she made an excuse to leave,” Julian Addiman said, laughing.

He was probably right. Though nobody else laughed, they all seemed to think so. They stood uncomfortably beside the green mounds, while the larks twittered remorselessly overhead.

“These barrows make me depressed,” said Howard. “Let's go.”

To the ghost's relief, Cart led the way on again. She had been dreading Cart would lead them among the barrows. It seemed such a likely place for Cart to imagine Monigan living. But Monigan's Place proved to be a short way ahead, where the path tipped over the edge of the hillside and, like the road, stopped. Below them lay a big, bowl-like hollow. Round the bowl's rim there ran a green track of turf, carefully chained and fenced. A notice hanging on the chain said “
PRIVATE GALLOPS KEEP OUT.
”

“This is where they train those racehorses,” Audrey explained.

Inside the gallops the valley was an oval of rough grass. Monigan was there. Cart must have an instinct, the ghost thought. This had been truly Monigan's Place from time immemorial. She felt Monigan, first of all, filling the hollow like a pond of dense gas. Then, as the seven living ones slipped under the chains and crossed the bouncy turf of the gallops, she began to see things sliding and changing and dissolving in the gas. These were things which had been done in honor of Monigan. Dim blood flowed. An ax, and now a knife, glinted as it struck. Phantom mouths opened to scream. All these, and hundreds of others like them, melted and moved and reappeared as they went down the slope. Always there, melting and changing with the rest, were great wooden posts. Sometimes the posts stood in a line. More often they stood in a ring. But however they stood, the posts were where the victims of Monigan were put to be killed.

Cart's instinct did not lead her quite right. She stopped in the center of the bowl, where the ghost knew they were neither in one of the shifting rings of posts nor quite in front of any of the melting lines. But Monigan was there, anyway, all round them.

“Nothing to be scared of here,” said Julian Addiman, with his hands in his pockets. “Not a goddess in sight.”

“What do we do?” Fenella asked Cart.

“Speak the invocation,” Cart said. “It's very dangerous, but we have to do it.”

Cart raised the Monigan doll up in both hands and led the others in a ragged chorus. “O Monigan, mighty goddess, come forth and show thyself….” The ghost watched them all, trying not to see the phantasmagoric slaughter going on all round. Howard had forgotten most of the invocation. Ned remembered only about half, and Fenella kept going off into her own private version of it. “Spotted tongues,” she said several times. Much the same happened to Sally. Several times she said things like “Let thy bloodlust inflame—” and then caught herself up, looking guilty. Audrey, of course, did not know the invocation, but she stumbled on after Cart, trying to be polite, although she was beginning to giggle by the end. Luckily Cart had a good memory. It must have been a year since she had spoken the invocation, but she led them in a loud voice, word for word, and cut ruthlessly through their stumblings. The result was like being in church when nobody knows the hymn tune and everyone waits to hear what note the organ will play next.