The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross (24 page)

“We must do the opposite,” I said. “The play wants to live again. It’s like Frankenstein, assembling itself out of the dead. We must give it a helping hand.”

“I think all your recent deaths may have made you mad,” Morgana said, staring at me.

I looked out over the empty seats. “If we can bring the play back from the Forgotten Library, then maybe it will no longer be a ghost,” I said. “And if it is not a ghost, then perhaps it will release the dead it has now.”

“And just how do we do that if the play has already been lost forever?” she asked.

I looked back at the Scholar. “You remember what you take from books, right?” I asked him.

He snorted as if the question was an insult. “I remember every word I’ve ever read,” he said. “I am a Scholar, not some half-witted student.”

“Find a few ancient books that have been forgotten in libraries,” I said. “Books that are meaningless for scholarship. And write the words from this book in them. On blank pages or in the margins. Wherever you can. Just make it look as if those words have been there all along. Then leave the books somewhere they will be easily discovered.”

“I am also not some mindless scribe,” the Scholar grumbled, glaring at me as he consumed another page.

“Do it and I’ll let you finish reading the book,” I said, nodding at the text in his hands.

He scowled at me in a less disagreeable fashion than usual. I took that to be a sign of his assent. “It will be the find of the century for some lucky academics,” he said. “The original
Hamlet
discovered.”

“Scholars everywhere will want to read it,” I said. “Actors everywhere will want to perform it.”

“I’m the only Scholar of worth,” the Scholar muttered, but I did my best to ignore him.

“We will bring the play back to true life,” I said, stepping to the front of the stage and looking out into the auditorium. “And when it lives again, the haunting will stop because it won’t be a ghost anymore.” I turned back to Morgana. “Just try not to put on any more productions of the play until that happens. We don’t need it to keep spreading in the meantime.”

“I swear we will never stage that play again,” she said.

Then she stepped up to me and kissed me, and I felt warmth and peace fill me at her touch.

“I swear it on your soul,” she said, breaking away from me. And that feeling of peace stayed with me even though she no longer touched me. For the first time in a long while, I felt whole again. And I realized then from her words that she had given me back possession of my soul.

She stepped over to Amelia and looked at her for a moment. She took her by the hands and smiled, but it wasn’t that usual cruel, mocking smile. It was something else entirely. I’d never seen it on Morgana’s face before.

“If you need me, I will always respond to your call,” she said.

Then she drew her hands away, and I saw her slip the black ring off Amelia’s finger.

She turned from Amelia and gave me that same strange, unfamiliar smile. Then she went down the steps at the side of the stage and up the aisle to the exit. Mustardseed gave us a grin and followed after her, still carrying the unconscious Cobweb.

Amelia didn’t follow them. She stayed with the Scholar and me, watching Morgana and the others go.

“I guess you’re free now,” I said. I could barely believe it. I never actually thought Morgana would release Amelia.

“So are you,” Amelia said.

It took me a second to understand what she meant. I looked down at my hand and saw the black ring was loose on my finger now instead of fused to it. I slipped it off and stared at it in my palm. Morgana had freed me as well. So why did I still feel such a longing for her?

It had to be an after-effect of the ring, I decided. Some sort of emotional residue that would take time to fade. I thought about throwing the ring off into the shadows, but I didn’t. I slipped it into my pocket instead for safekeeping. I didn’t want someone else to find it and cause problems for themselves. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

Now it was just the four of us in the theatre: Alice, the Scholar, Amelia and me.

“It’s a long journey back to the library, isn’t it?” the Scholar said with a sigh. “And I’ll have to ride in one of those horseless carriages again, won’t I?”

“What are you talking about, you silly old man?” Alice said to him. “You’re holding a library in your hand.”

“I don’t know your children’s tricks,” the Scholar grumbled, clutching the book to his chest protectively.

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Alice said, folding her arms across her chest and pouting.

“Ha! I’ve
forgotten
more about books than you’ll ever know,” the Scholar said.

Alice cocked her head at him. “I thought you didn’t forget anything you read,” she said.

The Scholar spluttered and I looked away to hide my smile. The pages on the floor suddenly sprang up around us in another whirlwind. This time they did all crumble into dust. When the dust blew away and settled into the corners of the stage, Alice and the Scholar were gone, and the book with them. Alice had done me a huge favour by taking the Scholar with her. I’m sure it would cost me dearly in the future. But for now, it was just Amelia and me alone on the stage.

I shook my head. “Those two are either going to kill each other or become best friends,” I said.

“Maybe they’ll do both,” Amelia said.

I nodded and looked around some more, but there was nothing else to see in the theatre. Finally I had to look back at her. She smiled at me.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” I admitted.

“Tell me about your life,” she said.

“My life,” I said. I mulled that over. Where to begin? I felt a great heaviness start to weigh down my body. Maybe it was the exhaustion from the battle finally catching up to me. Maybe it was something else.

“I’ve never had a father before,” she said. “I’d like to know all about you.”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Several long stories, in fact.”

“I think I have the time,” she said.

She reached out her hand and I took it. She was still cold with death, but I swore to myself then that I would do everything I could to warm her with life.

“Let me tell you about when I met your mother,” I said, and we walked off the stage together.

1. The idea of a ghost play was inspired by the scholarly notion of an Ur-
   Hamlet
   —a play that existed before
   Hamlet
   and informed Shakespeare’s classic. Some believe the Ur-
   Hamlet
   was an earlier play written by another playwright, perhaps Thomas Kyd. Others believe the Ur-
   Hamlet
   was simply an earlier draft of
   Hamlet
   written by Shakespeare. Obviously, I took the idea and ran with it.
   
2. There are a number of references to John Webster in this book. If you haven’t experienced a Webster play, I suggest you seek one out in your local library. You’ll probably have a hard time finding one staged near you. He was that kind of playwright. Very few of his plays have survived to this day, unless traces of them linger in other plays.
   
3. The song Frankenstein sings is “I Remember I Remember” by Thomas Hood (1828).
   
4. The sonnet Cross finds in Spenser’s tomb is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55. It is about immortality, among other things.
   

I’d like to extend thanks to my agents, Anne McDermid and Monica Pacheco, for continuing to believe in me, no matter what crazy thing I do.

I’d also like to express my appreciation for Kelsi Morris, the editor of
The Dead Hamlets
and
The Mona Lisa Sacrifice
, for her keen eye and patience. The successes of the Cross books can largely be attributed to her, while any failures are mine and mine alone.

While I’m at it, I’d like to thank all the good people at ChiZine for publishing the Nameless Books of our time. The world is a far more interesting place thanks to ChiZine, even if it is a less safe place to live.

I must of course thank my family for continuing to put up with my frequent absences and prolonged arguments with imaginary people. While you may not always come first when it comes to time in the day, rest assured you always come first in my heart.

Finally, I wish to thank you, the reader of this book, for continuing to follow the adventures of Cross. Without you, this book would be nothing but the ghost of an idea.

Turn the page
to read an excerpt from
the next exciting book
in the Cross series,
The Apocalypse Ark
!
Out in January 2016 from ChiZine Publications.

The one and only time I met Noah in person was when he wrecked the Spanish Armada back in the 1600s trying to capture me. He nearly succeeded.

I’d hired myself out as a mercenary to the Spaniards during one of their many misadventures on the continent. I wasn’t a sailor, just a soldier in the Spanish army when they were happily sacking places like Flanders and Antwerp. Like most good soldiers, I didn’t really care about the politics behind it all. The Spanish paid more than their rivals, and that was all the reason I needed. Also, they had the best wine. If you don’t think that’s important, then you’ve probably never been a soldier in the 1600s. When the Spanish decided to invade England, I was so drunk I barely registered the news.

I sobered up quickly when the British caught our fleet at anchor in a port I can’t even remember the name of now. They sent in the fire ships, blazing wrecks designed to light our own vessels on fire. Most of our captains panicked and cut themselves free of their anchors to escape. Hard to blame them. There’s little more terrifying to a seaman than watching a burning ship bearing down on his own ship—except, perhaps, for that burning ship to be loaded with gunpowder. And just like that, we were scattered and on the run.

A good admiral like Nelson might have been able to turn the tide. Hell, a good captain like Drake probably could have done it. He did it against us on more than one occasion, after all. But we were led by some duke or another who had probably never set foot on a ship before this particular misadventure. Things went from bad to worse faster than I could sober up. As a wiser man than me once said, so it goes.

Somehow our ship and a few others wound up sailing along the coast of Ireland to get home to Spain. Don’t ask me how that came about. Maybe it was some tactical decision, or maybe it had something to do with ocean currents. I don’t really know. I wasn’t any more of a sailor then than I am now. I can’t even recall the name of the ship I sailed on, which is a major form of heresy among the sailors I’ve known. It’s like not remembering the name of your mother. In fact, I imagine more sailors know the names of their ships than the names of their mothers.

It was off Ireland that Noah came for us. The first sign was the clouds on the horizon. We thought them only a storm, and we weren’t too worried. The worst a storm could do to us was scatter the fleet and sink a few ships, and we were already scattered and missing a few ships.

But the clouds came at us with unnatural speed, and our ship started to rise and fall on the waves. And then the lookout shouted down that he saw other vessels hiding in the clouds. When the captain called up to ask if they were galleons or merchant ships, the lookout didn’t say anything else, just crossed himself several times. Like that has ever helped anything.

We crowded the gunwales and watched the storm come. As it neared us, we saw the clouds stretched all the way down to the waves themselves. They were black as night, and lightning flashed in the constantly rolling mass. The water in front of the storm churned and swelled in directions that didn’t make sense, as if something massive was twisting and writhing just under the surface. It was unlike any other storm I’d ever seen.

And the ships within it were unlike any vessels I’d ever seen.

Or rather, I’d seen them all before, but never like this.

There were English men of war ships much like the ones that had been harrying us along the coast. There were also Roman triremes and Chinese junks. There were longboats and fishing boats. There were even wooden rafts. They were all clustered in a large mass, tied together with ropes or joined with suspension bridges that ran between them. One giant vessel that bent and warped in many directions as it rode the waves.

And in the centre was the ark.

It was a vast wooden ship, only the bow emerging out of the churning clouds. It towered above the largest galleons in what was left of our armada, but it was covered with barnacles and starfish all the way up to the deck, as if the ship spent most of the time underwater.

Barnacles and starfish and bones. Skeletons hung from the bow like forgotten decorations. It was the sort of thing you saw on pirate ships from time to time, but on pirate ships the skeletons tended to be human in nature. Not so on the ark. There was something that looked like the shell and bones of a giant crab, only it had long arms like tentacles instead of claws. There was a man’s skeleton that ended in what looked like fins at the hands and feet, and a skull that looked more like a frog’s than a man’s. And there was the skeleton of a man with wings, which I took to be an angel. I wasn’t sure, though, as angels normally just faded away to wherever it is dead angels go when I killed them. But there was nothing normal about the vision in front of me.

I didn’t dwell on the bones anyway. I was too distracted by the living crew of the ships.

They were unlike anything I’d ever seen, and most of them I haven’t seen since. A creature like a black octopus with mouths all over its body that swung from rope to rope in the torn rigging of a galleon. A woman with six arms and no legs who scuttled along the gunwales of the ark like a spider, stopping every now and then to wave a pair of swords at us. A half dozen men who looked like Vikings with horned helmets, until the ark drew near enough we could see the horns grew from their heads.

“What manner of abomination is this?” one of the soldiers beside me said, as the captain of our ship shouted the orders for us to turn and ready our cannons for a full broadside. I would have shouted the same orders in the captain’s place, but I suspected they wouldn’t make a difference.

“It is the worst of abominations,” I said to the other soldier. “It’s Noah and his ark.”

I didn’t bother to tell him how I knew. We weren’t that close, after all. Besides, men on ships were always telling each other outrageous things. You had to do something to pass the time.

“Has it come to save us from the British?” the other soldier asked.

I didn’t answer him. I knew what Noah wanted. He was hunting for abominations, and he must have sensed me.

The captain shouted the order to fire, and our gunners delivered a full broadside into the ark itself. Shattered pieces of wood and bone flew from it, and our crew gave a cheer. A cheer that quickly died in our throats when the six-armed woman scurried to the bow and waved her swords at us.

Then Noah himself came out on deck.

He was a giant the size of three men. He wore a white robe stained with blood. His long beard was also white and just as stained. Despite the distance, I could see his eyes were as black as the clouds. He dragged a trio of angels along behind him with a chain he had wrapped around one hand. The chain ran through collars on the angels’ necks. The three of them carried a bound book, struggling with its weight even though it was no larger than any other bound book of the time. Its colour was perhaps black, but that’s not quite right either. It seemed to have no colour at all. I had to look away from it, for it made my mind uneasy.

“Find the thing that should not be and bring it back to the ark,” he bellowed, raking our ship with his gaze. “The one who delivers it I will reward with death!”

The captain shouted at the gunners to reload, his voice barely audible over the sounds of the rain hammering down on us, but I knew another broadside wouldn’t do any good. The ark was too large, and too close. I looked around for some escape, but we were on a ship at sea, and the water didn’t strike me as much safer than the ship, given the present circumstances.

There was, of course, the coast in the distance. We had turned in its general direction to deliver the broadside, but we were too far away to reach it before the ark fully overtook us. The monstrous vessel moved too quickly. But perhaps with a little help. . . .

I expended a breath of grace to change the direction of the wind and fill our sails. The ship surged toward shore.

And then the rain came down even harder. It fell upon us like the very sky had collapsed, like we had sailed into a waterfall. It battered us and knocked men to the deck. I caught sight of the lookout falling past, into the sea, and then he was gone. The rain tore open the sails and the ship slowed, and men who were veterans of many a bloody battle cried out in fear at the madness engulfing us.

And then the madness really began.

Noah roared something unintelligible, at least to my ears, and yanked the angels forward on their chains. They stumbled past him and to the bow of the ark. They moved like they had been broken in every possible way. They opened the book as one and began to chant words they read in it, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Something heard them, though.

Tentacles lashed out from under the waves and caught on to our ship. The limbs of some great beast whose body remained out of sight. I knew what it was from the legends anyway. The kraken. I didn’t really want to see the rest of it, given the horrors of the tentacles themselves. There were things stuck in them. Bits of wood and rope from other ships. Swords and axes that must have once been used in a vain attempt to repel boarders. And the bodies of men. They were half buried in the tentacles, like they were being absorbed into them. And then I saw they weren’t bodies at all. The men were still alive. They turned their faces to us as the tentacles smashed down onto our ship, seizing it, and they cried out in different tongues. English, Spanish, Greek, Mayan. They all screamed the same thing.

“Kill me!”

The tentacles curled around the mast, caught on to the sides of the ship, even the wheel itself, knocking the man there aside. And then they pulled us toward the ark.

The captain of our ship didn’t need to shout orders. The soldiers and sailors around me drew their weapons and hacked away at the tentacles. The limbs of the great creature bled like any other being cut open with a sword, but they bled black sludge. The men caught in the tentacles wailed like an unholy choir.

I looked around to see if the other ships of our battered armada were in the same plight as us, but they were lost in the deluge. I couldn’t see them, and I couldn’t see the shore anymore. All I could see was the ark and its fleet closing in on us.

And the boarders.

They came along the tentacles to our ship. The spider woman running down one thrashing limb like it wasn’t even moving. The men with horns in their heads swinging along another, chopping handholds into the tentacle with their axes to stop from falling into the sea below. A jellyfish thing on bone stilts running across the water. I knew we could no more repel these creatures than we could repel nightmares in our sleep.

I laid my hand on the shoulder of the man beside me. “I’m sorry, but they seek you,” I said.

He stared at me. “What madness do you speak of?” he asked.

“You’re dead anyway,” I said. “At least I will have a chance to escape.”

I let some of my grace flow through my hand and into him. Enough that Noah would be able to sense it, if the grace was how he had found us. The other man’s eyes widened as he tasted Heaven for the first time in his life. And the last.

And then I performed a couple of quick sleights. One to make me look like him. And one to make him look like me, just in case Noah somehow had my description. I even added a bit of glow to the other man’s skin to attract attention.

Then I ran for the bow of the ship and threw myself into the water.

I dove under and swam as far as I could, kicking against the strange and sudden surges that threw me one way and then another under the surface. The water was colder than I had expected. It was colder than I had ever remembered it. I waited for one of those tentacles to grab on to me, but they never did.

When I finally came up for air, the ship was a good three lengths behind me and barely visible through the rain. I saw the impossible shapes of Noah’s crew swarm onto it and converge on the glowing figure on the deck. I tried not to listen to the cries of the men and other things.

I dove back under and swam as hard as I could for land. When I reached it some time later, staggering up onto a rocky shore, the storm covered the sea behind me. More lightning flashed within the clouds here and there. And then a roar rent the clouds themselves, opening them up to reveal the ark once more. I caught sight of Noah again, standing on the deck of the ark. He held something glowing in his hands, something that he tore into little pieces and then tossed aside.

I ran when he turned to look in my direction. I ran from the beach and up into the green hills of Ireland beyond. I ran until I could no longer see the ocean and the ocean could no longer see me.