May Bird Among the Stars (17 page)

May grinned, thinking of living people arriving in the Ever After amid the spirits and ghosts.

“How'd
you
end up here?” May inquired.

“Oh, that old water demon.” Bertha let out a wistful sigh so smelly that it made May's eyes cross.

“I bet you wish we had that Ghouly Gum,” Pumpkin whispered into May's ear. May elbowed him in the arm.

Bertha stretched her way into her story It sounded as if she'd told it a hundred times before, and each time it became more interesting to her than the last. “I'm out foraging, and I find this lake, beyond the tangle of briars. You know the one I'm talking about, honey. Well, I was never a swimmer anyway So the demon appears, looking all pretty at first—you've seen how she does.” May nodded. “Well, I look over thinking I'm looking at an angel, and then
slap!
” Bertha clapped her hand on the table, making Somber Kitty do an aerial somersault off the lap where he'd been sitting. “She pulls me in. You'd think I was a goner for sure. Except suddenly, I'm getting spit up onto the shore. Only it's the
wrong
shore.” Bertha leaned in ominously. “Honey, it was the
dead
shore.”

May tried to cover her nose casually.

Bertha straightened up and sniffed. “Dunno why the demon spat me up like that. I reckon I taste as good as anyone else. Wouldn't you reckon, handsome?” She winked at Fabbio, grinning to reveal her garlic-encrusted teeth. Fabbio shuddered, twirled his mustache, and pretended to be studying the ceiling.

After May had filled Bertha and the others in on the changes to Briery Swamp and to Earth in general, Bertha filled her in on the undead.

“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 halfway 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.