Thornghost (8 page)

G
randma Alma lay on the kitchen floor next to the kettle. Her long white locks spread over her face, and her nightgown was splotched with tea. Niklas threw himself to the floor beside her and lifted her hair aside. “Grandma! Are you all right?”

“Niklas?” She stared at him.

He helped her sit up. “What happened?”

“I was making tea.” Her eyes flicked to the north window and the trail, then to Uncle Anders, who hovered on the threshold, puffy-faced with tears. “I must have fallen asleep somehow, because I thought I saw . . .” She licked her lips in confusion. “It was an old night fright, that's all.”

They all crammed into her bedroom. Even Tobis came out of the tree to curl up at her feet, glaring at anyone who came near. As they fussed about, fetching pain­killers
and the last of the chocolate cake and extra blankets, Grandma Alma settled back against the pillows, limp and pale. “Dreaming while standing on my own two legs,” she mumbled. “It doesn't make sense.”

No,
Niklas thought.
It did not.
But then, she hadn't been dreaming. Erika really had walked up the trail.
An old night fright,
his grandmother had called it.
The bad dream is back,
his uncle had said. It sounded like they also were familiar with Niklas's nightmare.

Uncle Anders sat in a chair sipping his tea with solemn gratitude. Unlike Grandma Alma, he hadn't seen the nightmare, and Niklas hadn't told him what happened on the trail. He didn't want to ask either of them any questions until they had recovered.

Outside in the yard, he heard a soft bark. Niklas peered out into the elm tree and saw a pair of purple eyes up among the leaves. He felt almost dizzy with relief. Secret was out there, watching over them.

He took Grandma Alma's empty mug. “I'll just make you a fresh cup,” he said, and slipped out into the night.

• • •

S
ecret stretched out along a branch with a view of the bedchamber window and the barn bridge. Niklas set the mug down and climbed up next to her. “Are you okay?”

Secret swished her tail. “It wasn't interested in me. It just walked straight past me up the hill from the bone field.”

It.
Niklas shuddered.

“Your grandmother is unhurt?”

He pulled his shoulders up. “On the outside. But both she and Uncle Anders are pretty shaken up. My mother . . . I mean,
it
 . . . came from the hallowfield?”

“Yes, but not out of the ground, I think,” Secret said. “It didn't smell like dirt.”

“It looked at me,” Niklas said. “I asked what it wanted, and I could have sworn it heard me. It pointed up the mountainside.”

“Toward Sorrowdeep?”

“I think so. What else could it be?”

But why? Twenty-five years ago Sebastifer had died there, and later two horses had been killed. The line from the journal entry played over and over in Niklas's head.
My games are dangerous.
Mr. Molyk said the attacks—troll attacks, most likely—had suddenly stopped back then. Maybe his mother's decision to end the game had helped? But Niklas hadn't even played the troll hunt since Lin left. There was no game to end, no book to lock up, not so much as a jar of acorns to destroy. And now the nightmare was real, too? He couldn't control his dreams, much as he would like to.

Through the golden squares of the window, he could see Uncle Anders holding Grandma Alma's hand. It was hard to tell who was comforting whom. “We have to fix this, Secret,” he said. “This magic taint, we have to find
out where it comes from. It must have a source. Can you track it somehow?”

Secret thought for a moment. “I sniffed the stains where the nightmare fell apart, but they just smelled like wet roots and stones. Like the stream.”

“Like the Summerchild?” Niklas frowned. Didn't Uncle Anders say he heard Erika's voice in the stream? The troll first showed up near the old ford, then near Oak Bridge. And the nightmare had turned into liquid. There was only one magical creature that didn't seem connected with water: a certain talking lynx who was just now licking her paws.

He sat up straight. “Secret, when you sheltered from that spring storm, what did you do?”

“I hid in a cave near Buttertop. It's deep, mostly empty, and it has—”

“Water.” Niklas could hardly keep his voice down. “I think we got it wrong. Willodale didn't change while you were in there. You did.”

Secret crinkled her nose. “I don't understand.”

“Think about it. All the strange things that have happened have one thing in common: Water. I think you changed when you drank in that cave.”

As Niklas explained his theory, Secret's tail began to thump against the branch. “The only water inside the cave is a spring,” she said. “It's where the Summerchild begins.”

Niklas whistled softly. “If I'm right, that means the
entire stream is tainted by magic. All of Summerhill's water supply.”

He curled his fist. “You have to show me where that cave is. We have to find a way to un-taint the spring. Although we should wait until tomorrow so the trolls will be hiding from the sun.”

“The sun won't help us,” Secret said. “Look.”

Heavy clouds rolled up Willodale. It would be a foggy and wet morning. The trolls would be a danger no matter when they left. “Well, that settles it.” Niklas swung his legs down from the branch. They felt light and ready for danger. “We'll go now, before the rain makes the path slippery.”

• • •

W
hen he returned inside, Grandma Alma slept silently and Uncle Anders snored in his chair. Niklas wondered if he should wake them and tell them what was happening. But they would never let him leave. They would call for help, and the Willodalers would have even more reasons to call his uncle crazy. Actually, they'd call everyone at Summerhill crazy, and he bet none of them would listen to theories about a magic taint in the water.

He left a note on the nightstand instead.

I'll be back soon. Don't let anyone go into the woods. Don't drink the water, not even in tea. N.

“You take care of them,” he whispered to Tobis, and closed the door.

He ate two cheese sandwiches and stuffed another into his satchel. He also brought a flask of apple juice, his flashlight, a folding knife, and the things he had taken from the chapel crypt: the bottle of acorn dust, his mother's book of troll runes, and the shriveled twig he had found inside her heart.

Last of all, he added the dog figurine from the castle. They were going up to Sorrowdeep tonight, and Sebastifer had saved his mother there. Maybe he would do it again.

For a moment he weighed Uncle Anders's phone in his hand. There was no reception up the mountainside, so there was no point in bringing it. But he needed to make a call.

His fingers shook as he dialed the number.

Lin didn't answer. Of course she didn't, it was past midnight. Niklas still tried two more times before he gave up and wrote her a message. He hoped it would make sense to her, but no one else.

“If this message were a flashlight, it would blink twice. I'll try to fix this, but if I can't, at least you know what's going on. Be careful. Bring acorns. Bye.”

He left a lamp on in the kitchen, not so much for his sleeping family, but so it would shine for him up the hill.

E
ven on the most brilliant of days, Sorrowdeep showed black, studded with water lilies and disturbed only by fish that slid between the stems. Tonight, under the gathering clouds, it looked like a hole into nothing.

Niklas turned away from the water and found Secret watching him.

The lynx sat beside him, closer, he thought, than she had done before. If he stretched out his arm, he could almost reach her. She nodded at the broken face of Buttertop across the lake. “Do you see that cut in the rock?”

Niklas's night vision couldn't match Secret's, but he thought he saw a line of black snaking down the mountain wall. “The tall one in the middle?”

“That's the entrance to the cave.”

Niklas felt his eyebrows rise. He had thought the cave would be farther up the trail to Buttertop, somewhere
along the lip of the avalanche. The pond lapped against the sheer wall, except for a narrow beach below the cut. It would be impossible to reach it by dry land. He managed a brittle laugh. “I didn't know we would have to swim. I should have brought a towel.”

“I only ever use the cave when the lake is frozen,” Secret said. “But we don't have to swim. There's a boat over there.”

A finger of rock poked into the pond, and on the other side bobbed a tiny rowing boat. Just the thought of crossing Sorrowdeep in that little husk made Niklas's belly churn. Images pushed their way into his head. Children swimming for their lives. Horses dead on the shore, cut by runes. A green-eyed monster rising from the water to grab Rag by the leg, while Edith and the other lambs scattered in panic. “Could the trolls be down there?”

“No. Their smell is stronger than any creature I've met. I would know if they were close.”

“I wonder where they are tonight? Full moon, a storm coming in. You'd think they'd be on the prowl.” He hesitated. “Do you smell any wet roots?”

“You mean the nightmare? No again. Sorrowdeep smells like always. Still water and silt.”

Even so, Niklas couldn't help thinking of the nightmare pointing, commanding him to come here. He had told it no, but here he was, all the same. “All right,” he said. “But if you can bear it, you should come in the boat with me. Just in case.”

He took out the Sebastifer figurine and put it in his shirt pocket, near his heart. Somehow he trusted the dog to mean him well.

They climbed into the boat and pushed out between the water lilies. Secret crouched down on the bottom boards, ears turned out and tail tucked in. She must be very scared, but she didn't complain. Niklas decided to stop complaining, too. It wouldn't do to be a coward.

He dug the oars into the lake. Rings reached out over the surface.

Mostly he saw his own reflection in the water. But sometimes he thought he glimpsed things in the deep; hair that wafted in the currents, a nightgown billowing like a sail snagged on the bottom. Pale bones.
They're not hers,
he reminded himself
. No matter what Sorrowdeep wants me to believe, her bones are in the hallowfield.

As the first raindrops plinked down around them, they crunched against the pebble beach. Niklas pulled the boat up on shore, almost nauseous with relief.

But Secret shook her fur out and stared into the darkness of the cave, nostrils flaring.

“Still no troll stench?”

“Nothing.” Her good ear stood tall. “And not as much as the scratch of a bat.”

“That's great.” Niklas patted the Sebastifer figurine in his pocket. “Bats are annoying.”

“Yes,” Secret said. “But I don't like that they're gone.”

The cave floor felt odd under their feet, spongy and gnarled. Niklas suspected it had been forest floor once, before the avalanche. Secret insisted on going first so the flashlight wouldn't ruin her vision. “Do you know what we are looking for, cub?”

“Not really.” Niklas stepped around a sharp outcrop in the wall. Secret's so-called cave was more of a tunnel so far.

“But you know how to get rid of a magic taint,” Secret said. “Or you wouldn't come up here on a troll night with no plan and no acorns.”

Niklas grinned. That was something Lin could have said. “Let's get there, and we'll see what we'll see. When a dead deer poisons the stream, you need to get it out of the water. I figure it works the same way with magic.”

Secret slipped under a huge splinter where a tree had once been crushed. The wood was so rotten, it came apart under Niklas's fingers.

Secret returned to sniff it. “Something is wrong. I don't know what it is. Nothing smells off, but there's this not-sound. It bounces wrong off the walls.” She gave a soft growl. “I will go ahead and check.”

“And I'm supposed to wait here? On a troll night with no acorns?” Niklas crossed his arms.

She turned back to glare at him. “I can't see as well with your flashlight making all the wrong things bright. And I can't hear anything over your clumsy tread.”

“Rubbish. I'm stealthy as a cat,” Niklas said. He was
only half joking, too. But he slid his satchel off his shoulder and leaned against the wall. “Fine, I'll wait. But don't do anything without me.”

Secret melted into the darkness without a sound.

Niklas shone his flashlight on the wall, from rock to wood to dead roots. How stable was this tunnel anyway? After the great avalanche, they never got the dead out for fear of disturbing the masses, but that was a long time ago. Secret had been here many times, so she should know if it was safe. Except something had her creeped out. What if it was her lynx sense telling her that the roof was about to collapse?

And that's when he pointed the flashlight at the skull.

He bolted to his feet. Two yards above him, someone had wedged a dead bird's head into a crack in the wall. The skull was carved with two jagged lines that crossed like an X.

A troll rune.

So they
were
here. He got his mother's notebook out of his bag and leafed through the pages with one hand, holding the flashlight with the other. Two crossing lines . . . meant
hide.

There was something up there the trolls didn't want anyone to see.

He shone the light after Secret, but decided not to yell. She might not be the only one to hear.

Instead he put his flashlight in his mouth and climbed up to investigate.

He found nothing out of the ordinary around the skull, so whatever it hid, it hid well. He thought the lines of the rune had been first painted, then carved into the bone. The black liquid was smudged and worn, as if it had been rubbed or touched many times.

Niklas put the tip of his finger on the rune.

The X lit up red.

Immediately, the troll stench fell upon him like a smothering blanket.

He lost his grip and tumbled backward, dropping hard to the ground. The flashlight fell, too. The glass cracked, but the light didn't go out. It shone on the tunnel wall where a gap had opened to form a giant doorway.

In that doorway, baring all his saw teeth, stood the three-eared troll.