May Bird Among the Stars (6 page)

Zero levitated above the boulder beside them, as if he were presenting them for show-and-tell. “Listen up, y'all,” he bellowed. “I caught these spirits in the trees, spying on us.”

“We weren't really spying on you,” Beatrice offered helpfully. “We're trying to get north and—”

One of the spirits in the crowd waved his hands in the air. He was missing his lower half.

Zero pointed to him. “What's up?”

“Where's the pizza?”

“What pizza?” Zero asked, looking around hopefully.

“Dude, I thought they were delivering a pizza.” The lower-halfless spirit and a few others muttered among themselves disappointedly, then trickled away. May hadn't even known specters liked pizza, but she remembered what Pumpkin's master, Arista, had said about old habits and how specters liked to hold on to them after they were dead.

“I ain't got noboooody,”
Pumpkin nervously trilled. May nudged him hard in the arm.

“I caught these guys spying on us from the trees,” Zero repeated to the spirits who were left. “And you know how we changed our motto to ‘Members only.'”

One goateed spirit with a bungee cord wrapped around his neck spoke up. “Nah. You're thinking of those Members Only jackets we got from the thirdhand store in Dismal Hollow. We changed the motto to ‘The more the merrier,' remember?”

“That's right,” another spirit said, running her fingers through her long blond hair. She was missing part of her face. “It's ‘The more the merrier,' Zero.”

“Oh, yeah.” Zero scratched his head, thinking.

“I interrupted Spiky Death Ball for this?” somebody muttered. The group of specters began to scatter, some running up the stairs carved into the hill that led to the top of the falls, some running over to a trampoline and leaping on it, doing levitating tricks high in the air.

The group on the boulder began to fidget, realizing they weren't in as much trouble as they'd thought. Fabbio twirled his mustache impatiently.

Finally, Zero turned a winning, good-natured smile upon
them, his gaze resting longest on Bea. “Sorry about that, dudes. I got mixed up. We're happy to have you.”

“Well, we don't want to impose,” Bea said, blushing.

Zero waved a hand dismissively and shook his head. “No way. That's our motto here around Risk alls: ‘Come one, come all.'”

“But I thought—,” Pumpkin started, but May gave him a look that silenced him.

Zero tucked his hands deep into the pockets of his tropical shorts. “Actually, we don't have any rules here. But we
do
have parties. We're having one tonight. You should come.” He winked at Beatrice, then looked around. “You want the grand tour?”

They followed Zero onto the grass and toward the lagoon.

“What is this place?” May asked. “Why is everyone all …?”

“Mangled?” Zero laughed, his laughter bubbling out. “Risk Falls is the premier destination for thrill seekers in the Ever After. We all died in some kind of accident. That's how I got my name, in fact. I used to be called Arthur. Zero was my score at the surfing competition where I died. Total wipeout, man!” Zero gave the vale a sweeping, relaxed glance. “We have a bunch of people who died going over waterfalls in barrels. They're, like, the backbone of the community. But it was the surfers”—Zero winked and cleared his throat—“who founded the place. We also got skydivers, bungee jumpers, cliff divers, mountain climbers. Pretty mainstream stuff.” He shrugged, his broad shoulders rolling back. “Then you got the obscure stuff. Sword swallowers, fire-eaters, crocodile hunters …” He paused to watch a teenager paddle by with her barrel, and they nodded at each other. Zero turned back to them. “Man, everybody's got
a story.” They followed him up a steep footpath along the side of the waterfall until they were about halfway to the top. Zero stepped onto a ledge and drifted to the left, disappearing into a gap between the cliff and the waterfall. “This part's tricky for first timers.”

May looked at Bea, who was staring at the back of Zero's head. When she noticed May looking, she quickly looked away and then followed behind the curtain of water.

“Wow.” Pumpkin sighed.

Honeycombed throughout the rock face behind the cascading water were countless nooks, deeply scooped out of the slate gray surface as if they had been balls of ice cream. Many of the hollows shone with warm blue light; some were plastered with holo-posters of surfers coasting down three-dimensional waves or mountains or climbers scaling rock faces. There were tiki torches, enormous colorful flowers, and starlight sconces. Each entrance was hung with bamboo curtains, and many of them were tied open.

“These'll be your rooms if you decide to hang,” Zero said, motioning to the left.

In each room a hammock hung on either side of the hollow, with a small bamboo table on the floor in between and a skull lamp decorated with paper parasols. A tiny skull wearing a flowered headdress on the bureau opened and closed its mouth, crooning a lilting Hawaiian tune:
“Sweet Lelani, heavenly flower …”

They kept moving, following Zero to the top of the falls, which afforded a beautiful view of the stars crossing the sky, the Hideous Highlands, and the mountains in the Far North.
A telescope perched on the highest crag of rock was turned toward the view below.

“We like to see if there's any trouble we can get into,” Zero explained, nodding toward the telescope. “If, say, there's a band of ghouls we can sling ectoplasm balloons at or a pickup game of skull hockey. Here, take a look.”

Down to the south, May could just pick out the faintest hint of an absence of glow, a shadow hanging in the air. “That's where they've been destroying towns,” Zero commented, noticing the direction of her gaze. “First thing to go are the lights. Now they're putting up Cleevilvilles, which don't glow at all. It's gotten bad over the last few months.”

May and Bea looked at each other. It was just as they'd feared back at Everville.

Zero hummed a little song to himself. He looked perfectly at ease.

“Are you worried?” May asked.

Zero shrugged. “Why?”

“Well, what if they come for Risk Falls?” she ventured.

“Dude, what's there to worry about? We're already dead.”

“But the Bogey … he can turn you into nothing by sucking your spirit through his fingertips! And Bo Cleevil …” May didn't quite know what Bo Cleevil could do.

Zero concentrated for a moment. “I've heard of them.”

May stared at him in shock. He gave her a reassuring smile.

“Look, nobody's interested in Risk Falls. We're way at the edge of the world. And if they
were
interested, they wouldn't go through all the trouble of finding us. And if they did find us, well …” He thought for a moment. “We're not scared. We're
the risk takers, remember? We're the bravest, boldest spirits in the realm.”

He studied Beatrice as he said this, as if to see her reaction. Her fine eyebrows had settled low with worry.

May wanted to ask Zero about all the spirits who were being taken away Where were they going? Wasn't he scared for
them?
But Zero seemed so brave, so confident. Maybe he knew better.

She decided to keep her thoughts to herself.

That night, making sure no one was following her, May snuck back across the moat and spent a few hours stroking Somber Kitty so he wouldn't feel alone. She thought about the towns to the south, about all the spirits disappearing from them, and about
The Book of the Dead.

“Meow,” Kitty said, worried. Which meant:
Don't you get the feeling that something evil's on its way?

But May, not understanding, only sighed wistfully and rubbed under his chin.

When May returned to Risk Falls, Pumpkin was asleep in her bed, his long left arm lolling off one side. May smiled, covering him up with a blanket, though she supposed it didn't matter, since ghosts didn't feel cold.

The light was still on in Bea's nook. She was in bed, reading her book on typhoid victims by the glow of a star light.

“Don't you want to take a break?” May asked.

“I've just got to finish this one thing.”

The coolness of the water falling sent a nice breeze wafting in and out of the room. May fell back on a stool, kicked off her
shoes, and let the breeze soothe her aching, dirty feet. Then she crawled up to the bamboo curtain and looked down into the vale. She watched the inhabitants of Risk Falls singing and playing music, gathered around a bonfire in the green bowl of the grass.

Laughter drifted up, just barely audible above the sound of the crashing water, and finally it all dwindled until only the sound of a lone ukulele remained.

“Gosh, it's a nice place, isn't it?” May asked.

“What's that?” Bea said, looking up from her book.

“Nothing. It's just, it kind of feels like the rest of the world doesn't exist here. As if even the Lady can't see us here.”

Beatrice nodded distractedly, then turned the page of her book. May rested her chin on her hands, staring at the jolly spirits below. She was tempted to go down there with the others, to laugh and talk and listen to the drums.

But the outsider in May, the one from Briery Swamp who had never fit quite right, kept her tucked safely in her nook.

S
omber Kitty was curled underneath his bush, sound asleep, when he woke suddenly. He didn't know why, only he sensed something in the darkness. He sniffed the air, but whatever it was, it was far away. The tiniest vibrations in the rocky soil set his whiskers bristling.

“Meow,” he said softly.

In the dusky darkness he could not see what was on its way. But he knew it was coming.

When May rose the next morning, more rested than she had been in weeks, the rest of the vale was already awake.

Spirits were sailing into the lagoon from all directions. Some were swishing down the waterslides. A man in a wet suit scarred with the mark of a shark's teeth shot out of a cannon and went careening over the sparse treetops. One spirit floated on an inner tube in the water, bedecked in sunglasses and holding a giant beach ball. It took a second glance for May to realize it was Pumpkin.

He drifted up to the shoreline on his inner tube. “Hey, May, can we move here?”

May smiled at him, then scanned the area for Fabbio and Bea. Fabbio was star bathing on the grass in full uniform, his arms crossed behind his head. Bea was talking to some spirits near the water's edge. “Well, if you hear anything, or if you see a woman who looks like she
might
have typhoid, please let me know. Even if she looks just a little peaked. Here's my tomb number.” Beatrice whipped out a quill pen and a pad of parchment and scribbled down an address in Ether.

May kept walking up along the lip of the vale to a wide green field. Here, Zero and some others were playing hockey with a ball that looked like something out of a medieval torture chamber, all covered with spikes and shooting fire.

Zero ran after it like a gazelle, knocking it to one of his teammates just as he caught May's eye. He floated over.

“You wanna play? Spiky Death Ball's easy, especially if you get a good coach,” he said with a wink.

May shook her head. “Zero, the reason we came here is that we need to get to the Far North right away. We were taking the train, but—”

“Yeah, we saw from the lookout post. Tracks ripped up. Bummer.” Zero stuck his hands in his pockets and bobbed his head a few times.

“The poltergeists said you might help us.”

“Ah. Moody little dudes. But they keep things interesting. They're always throwing stuff over the moat at us—candlesticks, pots, you know—and trying to drag us off to the Dead Sea. Sometimes we'll invite them for football. But they're horrible cheaters.”

A group of spirits floated by chasing the spiky ball. They disappeared around the side of the hill. Zero hardly noticed.

“Sometimes the only thing to do when they're acting up is put 'em in a headlock. And then you give them a good noogie. They
hate
that.”

May wrinkled her nose. “A noogie?”

“Yeah, you know. You slip your arm around their neck, like this.”

“I know what a noogie is!” she said. But Zero slipped his frigid, ghostly arm around her neck, sending cold chills along her skin.

“Dude, there's an art to it. You really gotta lock your arms, like so, so they can't get out. Then take your fist, like this”—Zero balled up one fist—“and press hard, like this.” He rubbed his fist into the top of her head. “And you gotta yell. Yelling is the most important part. Noogie! Noogie! Noogie!”

“Ouch!” May squealed, slipping loose and giggling.

Zero grinned. “Noogies. They're totally underrated. The poltergeists hate them.”

May smiled, but heavier things weighed on her mind. “Anyway, about going north …”

Zero scratched his chin. “Well, we can't really take you there. None of us likes to leave Risk Falls…. It's kind of a drag out there.”

“Oh.” May tried not to look crestfallen. She gazed down at her feet.

“Hey. Don't stress,” Zero said brightly. “If it's that big a deal, we can just send you by balloon.”

“Balloon?”

Zero squinted. “Sure. I don't see why not. We have one to raid the poltergeists with sometimes. We got it from some French dude. Used to be a major balloonist when he was alive. He left us to do aerial stunts for the Shakespeare Song and Dance Revue.” May immediately thought of Pumpkin. His dearest dream was to be a singer in the Shakespeare Song and Dance Revue.

“And you know our motto here at Risk Falls,” Zero went on. “‘Share and share alike.'”

May stifled a grin.