Thornghost (3 page)

A
ll the way down from Oak Bridge, Niklas fought to keep his eyes forward. He needed to watch where he stepped, but his back crawled with sneaking horror. He waited for the hunters to cock their rifles, for the smell of the green-eyed creature to catch up with him, for the lynx to attack. Had he imagined that she said those words? He must have, because it was impossible. Maybe it was just a desperate need to be right that she wasn't the killer beast. That she was somehow kind and gentle, even if she was a predator. Uncle Anders's warning churned in his head:
You be careful now. If the cat is big enough, it might consider you prey.

The cat was big enough, and she could very well be the lynx from this spring.
That sneaky lynx,
as Grandma Alma had put it. His grandmother was still angry about the roast, and she didn't understand when he tried to explain about Lin and Rufus.

Rufus was Lin's pet, a little redback vole that she had rescued in the mountains. Niklas had never had a pet, and he really wanted one. He had asked for a dog a hundred times, but Grandma Alma always answered with a
gruff “We don't keep dogs at Summerhill,” or “We have animals aplenty.” And sure, there was Tobis the cat, who hated kids and preferred the hayloft to humans anyway. There was Dokka, Uncle Anders's horse, who liked only him. There were the milk cows, who let him pat their foreheads, but only if he brought them salt. None of them loved Niklas, not like Rufus loved Lin.

Then the lynx turned up during a spell of heavy snows last March.

They had found her tracks near the edge of the thicket just above the screaming stone. Round four-toed footprints under the biggest ash tree, where she must have perched for a while, or so Uncle Anders reckoned. “That must be one hungry cat to come this close to the house,” he had said, shaking his head. So Niklas had an idea. He had taken the Sunday roast and strung it up in the branches.

“You have lost your mind, boy,” Grandma Alma had muttered as she served them a dinner of cabbage and potatoes. “Stealing food to feed killers on our doorstep!”

The next morning, the roast was gone. But it was snowing hard, and the tracks were gone, too. Niklas couldn't know for certain who had taken the meat. He believed it
was the lynx, but that could be because he wanted it to be her. He just wanted to save her, like Lin had saved Rufus.

He turned the final bend before Summerhill and stopped cold. The last lamb.

She lay draped over the screaming stone, belly down, limbs stretched down the side. The hunters must have put her there to keep the little body away from hungry mouths. There was a spot of black behind her ear, one that he had scratched only hours ago. The little straggler.

She had a single long gash in her side, where some of her pelt had been torn off. What creature did that? The lynx did have big paws and the claws to go with it. But he told himself that the cruel injury fit better with the green-eyed hunter. Not that it mattered to the lamb. Niklas stood beside her for a while, aching with regret. He wanted to lift her down and hug her, but what good would it do? She would still be dead, and his clothes would be stained for Grandma Alma to see in the morning. So he scratched the black spot gently and left her there for the hunters to bring home.

The wind blew the rest of the clouds from the sky, leaving it bleak and bare. It chased down from Sorrowdeep and swept over hill and trail, and as Niklas slunk home to his bed, the screaming stone whistled after him.

W
ith the nightmares it could go either way.

They could leave him alone or they could poke at him all night. Skeleton birds pecking at his eyes. Dark water rushing in to sweep him away. Giant rocks tumbling down toward the sleeping house. Or worse, much worse. Niklas sometimes thought it had to do with his room, which had windows facing both north, up the mountainside, and south, into the yard. One toward horror and one toward home.

He crept under the covers.
Don't think bad things,
he told himself.

It was no good, of course. Even with his eyes shut, he saw the lamb with the little spot on her neck, and the hungry lantern eyes shining in under the skirts of the juniper. But when he finally gave in and slept, the lamb didn't bother him, and neither did lynx nor beast. Instead the wail from the screaming stone found its way
into his ears, curling down his spine, squeezing his ribs good and tight. For the first time in a long while, Niklas dreamt of
her.

• • •

H
e woke in his bed and turned to the north. The moon lit the sandy path up the slope so it gleamed like a road of bones. He couldn't see her yet, but he knew she would come. The woods knew it, the stream knew it, every sleeping soul in Summerhill knew it.

His heart pounded louder and louder, and when it had him shaking like a drum, she stepped through the gate, wearing a white dress that brushed the ground as she floated up the path. Her face was half turned away, but he could see her high cheekbones and the silver-blond curls.

His mother, going to Sorrowdeep.

At the screaming stone she halted as always. Slowly, surely, she turned, until he could see her gaunt face. She stared straight at him with eyes as black as the pond, silenced by the water that poured from her mouth. But the screaming stone spoke. It wailed and wailed, crying for the dead.

Niklas woke, bolting upright in his bed. The cover dropped to the floor with a whisper. He forced himself to look out the north window at the trail lightening in the gray of dawn.

Empty. It was always empty.

• • •

T
hat wasn't at all how his mother died.

The dream must come from Grandma Alma's story, because Niklas had no recollection of his mother even mentioning Sorrowdeep, let alone walking up the trail. By the time he was old enough to remember, she didn't have the strength to trek up the mountainside anyway. Still, he had this nightmare every night from the day his mother died and until Lin and her family moved in.

He sank back on the pillow. His throat felt parched. Uncle Anders had left a glass of water for him right next to the bed, but Niklas didn't touch it. He never could drink water without thinking of the liquid gushing out of his mother's mouth.

Which was stupid, because Erika Summerhill didn't drown. She was eaten up by a sickness that was there before Niklas was born and got much worse after, until there was nothing left of her.

His memories were patchy now. Just scenes, feelings, and colors, like the sunny yellow of the room they shared when he was little. But when his mother couldn't get out of bed anymore, she had moved to the dimness of the room at the other end of the house, where the only sunshine that crept across her covers was red and fading.

Niklas had taken to hiding in the closet across the corridor, tucked behind Grandma Alma's old winter coats. Whenever the door opened, he got a glimpse of rosy light
and sad-masked grown-ups who paused on the threshold. One afternoon, Grandma Alma had appeared in the doorway and said, “Erika is leaving now. If someone would like to say good-bye.”

Niklas had crawled out from the closet, and peered through the crack. The drapes were pulled back to reveal a bony arm with a white tube stuck to the hand. It looked like it belonged to one of the skeleton birds in the bird room. He thought he heard a whisper then, faint behind the curtain. “Keep him away from me.” The fingers twitched, the tube rattled. “I'm dangerous. I'm a Thornghost!”

And Niklas had turned and run, down the stairs and out the door, across the yard and into the woods. That evening, as he sat under the oak tree, he had promised himself: He wouldn't be a coward anymore.

To prove his point, he had stayed until dark and walked home without running. And when the nightmares began, he hadn't once gone crying to Grandma Alma, or anyone.

T
he next morning, Mr. Molyk showed up with two shovels. Niklas followed him down to the hallowfield to dig a hole for the lamb.

The graveyard lay at the eastern edge of the farm, where the Summerchild curved around a meadow of buttercups and headstones.

Back before the big avalanche, Summerhill had been considered the most important farm in Willodale. When the rocks came down and took half the farm, they made this meadow a place of memory for all those that disappeared, and built a small but handsome chapel in the middle to anchor their souls.

But that was many years ago. All that remained of the chapel now was a few winter-gnawed beams that stuck up from a square of tumbling walls. Niklas was instructed to stay away from the ruins so he wouldn't get his head
knocked in by a falling stone, and in this case, he actually did as he was told. Mostly he stayed away from the graveyard altogether, because one of the headstones belonged to his mother.

Everyone in the village said it was a shame that Erika had been put to rest there and not by the Willodale church. Many said the hallowfield could hardly be reckoned as hallowed anymore, now that the chapel had fallen into disrepair. Some told Niklas he should be glad that headstone was heavy. “That lady had a dark twist in her head,” they muttered, eyebrows arched with pity.

These last ones could always count on their apples mysteriously disappearing in the fall. Gossip-mongers. But Niklas still didn't like visiting his mother's grave. He couldn't bear to look at her name and know that her bones were down there, in the ground. He couldn't bear the thought that the gossip might be true.

Mr. Molyk had no doubt chosen to bury the lamb right outside the graveyard fence to torment him. But Niklas didn't need the graveyard for that. The little lamb was torment enough. She resembled a white rag all mussed and matted. “I'm so sorry this happened to you, little rag,” he whispered when Mr. Molyk had his back turned. “I don't even know what your name was.”

Mr. Molyk stepped out of the thigh-deep hole. “No name. That's best for these that leave at summer's end. But it was a nasty fate even so.”

Uncle Anders said Peder Molyk was a decent man. That he had shut down his father's mink business as soon as he took over the farm, and that he loved his sheep. Niklas had his own opinion on the matter, though, and Mr. Molyk confirmed it when he stuck his shovel in the ground and said, “All right. You can toss her in.”

There would be no tossing if Niklas could help it. He lifted the lamb and climbed in with her, laid her down as if she were sleeping, and scratched the ear spot one final time. As he filled the dirt back in, Mr. Molyk watched under heavy lids. “My whole life I've seen lambs come and go. Only once I've seen wounds like these we've had this summer.”

“Grandma says it's a bear,” Niklas muttered. She had said lynx, too, but he didn't want to give Mr. Molyk any ideas.

“Bears bite and tear,” Mr. Molyk said. “They don't slice.”

“Then what was it?”

“Good question.” The farmer tugged his shovel free of the ground and wandered in amongst the graves. He stopped in front of Erika's headstone. “See you stay out of the woods at night, young Summerhill. For your own sake.”

“You said you'd seen this once before,” Niklas said, staying put by the fence. “When?”

Molyk turned back to face him. “Twenty-five years ago. Two horses killed at Sorrowdeep.”

Horses. A predator would have to be pretty big to take down horses. Niklas squinted. Wouldn't do to look daunted in front of Mr. Molyk of all people. “Did you catch the beast that did it?”

“No. The killings just stopped. Most people agreed the creature, whatever it was, had gone back into the Trollheim Mountains.” He fixed Niklas with dark eyes that burned. “There's something I've been wondering about. I've talked to the other farmers in the area. They've all lost livestock this year. All except for you.”

Niklas met his gaze. Was he expecting some sort of confession? As if Niklas snuck around at night with a kitchen knife? “We keep a close watch on our flock.”

“Any particular reason you didn't send them up to the mountain vales for summer grazing this year? Maybe the fiddler thought the early meadows would be enough for once?”

“We didn't like the look of the trail after the snowmelt,” Niklas said, which wasn't entirely true. It was Uncle Anders who didn't like the look of the trail, and Niklas figured it had more to do with Grandma Alma not being able to manage without Uncle Anders if he spent the summer up in the shieling. But that was none of Mr. Molyk's business, and Niklas hated it when people called his uncle the fiddler.

When Uncle Anders was young, he had been a fiddler of renown. He would play at weddings and dances, and
he knew most old tunes the valley folk requested. People used to say you could tell the Summerhill cows from others because of the dance in their steps.

But when Niklas's mother passed away, Uncle Anders had put down his violin for good. If people called him the fiddler now, it was just to make fun of how soft-minded he had become, the twin who was left behind, the useless half of a pair.

Mr. Molyk took a step closer. “Here's another strange thing. Up at Oak Bridge last night, we found . . .”

A bird flapped out of the raspberry bushes. Mr. Molyk glanced over his shoulder and cleared his throat. Uncle Anders came trudging down the path with a shovel over his shoulder.

“Done already,” Uncle Anders said when he saw the fresh mound.

“I named her Rag,” Niklas said.

His uncle nodded, as if he had expected as much. “Better come back up to the house, lad. Your grandmother wants you.”

Mr. Molyk watched them leave without another word.