Chapter 7 Locks and Unlocks
EVERY TIME NANCY HAD managed to find a Door to the Halls of the Dead, it had been located belowground.
The first had been in the basement of the house she’d shared with her parents; the second had been in her basement bedroom at the school.
Two wasn’t a large group to generalize from, but it was a better sample size than one.
The group that intended to travel with her packed themselves into the rarely used root cellar below the kitchen, where the air smelled of good, clean earth and the corners were thick with cobwebs, some of them years old.
Nancy approached the wall, where there was no door, not even a crack or outline of same, and lifted her hand, letting her fingertips rest gently against the hard-packed dirt.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,” she admitted.
“Just want,” Sumi advised. “Think back to when you were a kid and you wanted something with all your heart and all your thoughts at the same time, when the wanting was so big it ate the whole world. You need that wanting.”
“I don’t know if I can want that way anymore,” said Nancy. “I think once you start growing up, other things begin getting in the way of the wanting, the same way the older you are, the more things there are between you and being absolutely all-the-way sure.”
“But you are sure, aren’t you?” asked Kade.
Nancy closed her eyes, tucking her chin toward her chest. “I’m so sure,” she said.
“The Halls of the Dead are my home, and I want to go home more than anything. I want to find out why the ghosts are so angry that they’re hurting the living statues, that they’re tearing through all the rules and traditions we have to keep everyone safe.
There’s room for us all in the Halls, but the dead decided they should have more room than the living, and they started taking it.
That’s not right. It’s not the way things are supposed to be.
I’m sure I want to find a way to set things right again. ”
As she spoke, thin lines of light began to form on the wall, gradually coming together to form the glowing outline of a door.
It was smooth and elegantly drawn, like an architectural sketch.
Nancy finished talking and leaned forward until her forehead was resting against the dirt, eyes still closed.
She sighed, sounding weary beyond all measure.
And as her forehead made contact with the wall, the door that had appeared there creaked ever so slightly open. No more than a few inches, barely wide enough to let someone slip a hand inside, but for a door stitching together two worlds, that was more than enough.
The wind that whispered through the cracked door was cold and bright, and smelled of pomegranates. Nancy’s eyes snapped open, and she straightened, staring at the outlined door.
“Did you just emo your way into finding the Door home?” asked Sumi. “Because that’s a pretty good trick, if that’s what you did.”
Nancy ignored her, turning wide eyes on the top of the door, gaze running along the line of it to the point where a doorknob would have been, if there were going to be one at all.
Not seeing anything of the sort, she pressed her palm flat against the dirt wall, well within the outline, and pushed inward, hard.
The door swung open, and the pomegranate grove was revealed, dark-leafed trees reaching for the star-speckled sky like hungry hands.
The grass, green as ever, was dotted with fallen pomegranates.
Nancy took a step forward, until she was half over the threshold and half not, straddling the two worlds. She looked back at her companions.
“Are you coming?” she asked.
They moved forward, the four of them sticking close together. Even Sumi looked anxious, taking hold of the tail of Kade’s shirt and holding it fast as she allowed him to lead her onward to the threshold.
“You don’t have to,” said Nancy. “I can figure this out by myself if I have to. I’ll be okay.”
“You were not-okay enough to come looking for help,” said Kade. “But you’re still sure enough to open a door home. I think we need to come with you. I think we’d be rotten friends if we let you go and try to do this by yourself.”
Nancy smiled, a little wryly. “Like I was a rotten friend when I left you and didn’t even say goodbye? Sometimes we’re all rotten friends. Sometimes the right thing to do is to let people deal with their own mistakes.”
“Not this time,” said Kade, and when Nancy walked through the door into the moonlit grove on the other side, he was right behind her, dragging Sumi in his wake. Christopher and Talia came close behind them.
Only Talia seemed to hear the door in the root-cellar wall slamming closed again. She turned in time to see it disappear, the rectangle cut out of the air simply vanishing like it had never existed to begin with. She swallowed hard, and turned back to the others.
Too late to turn back now.
NANCY SPREAD HER ARMS, still moving with that stop-motion eeriness, and let her head drop back, eyes closing again as she breathed in the sweet, cold evening air.
Around her, the others performed their own examinations of the space.
Sumi moved to the nearest tree, giving it a solid shake, and squealed with delight when pomegranates showered down to thump into the grass, some of them splitting open at the point of impact and scattering garnet seeds in all directions.
The shaking knocked several moths loose at the same time, and they took to the air, gray upper wings lifting to show bright orange lower wings.
Talia laughed and spread her arms, and the moths fluttered down to land on them, antennae waving.
Christopher raised his flute and played a swift, silent arpeggio before he nodded, apparently satisfied. “I can feel my audience listening,” he said. “There are plenty of dead things here.”
“The ghosts and the statues share the pomegranate grove, when we have to,” said Nancy. “They don’t attack us here, and we don’t stand so still that we fool them into thinking we don’t matter. We just coexist.”
“If they’re attacking you in the halls, can we be sure they’ll follow the rules here?” asked Kade.
“The trees will enforce them,” said Nancy almost dreamily.
Sumi paused in the act of picking up a pomegranate from the ground, shooting a wary glance at the nearest tree. Its branches were gnarled and dark, like wrought iron sculptures decked in leaves and jeweled fruit. “Enforce them how?” she asked.
“They have their ways, and I’m not a garden statue. I never asked,” said Nancy. “Still, you’re right that we shouldn’t linger here. The other statues will be inside. We should go to them.”
“Yes,” said Kade without conviction. If Nancy had survived by fleeing to another world, he wasn’t sure any of her companions would still be in their places. Still, they were here to help her, and that meant letting her lead the way.
Nancy turned, and there, where the undefined edge of the grove had been a moment before, was a tall white stone wall, and a beautiful silver gateway leading to the manicured grounds of the hall beyond.
The hall was Grecian in design, but not as old-fashioned as he would have expected; there was something distinctly modern about its design, like it was made from all the dreams of the Grecian underworld spread thin across the centuries.
Nancy started toward the gate and the rest of them followed, even Talia’s moths, which had been joined by another dozen or so of their fellows.
Sumi skipped ahead, a pomegranate in either hand, and paced alongside Nancy. “Can I eat these?” she demanded. “Or will I owe your spooky Lord a month for every seed?”
“You’re not the Lady, and neither am I,” said Nancy.
“She was the only one he ever bartered for that way, and people forget how hard it is to break into a pomegranate that’s anything other than perfectly, skin-splittingly ripe.
She didn’t eat those seeds by accident, or without understanding what she was doing.
Eat whatever you like. It isn’t going to hold you here. ”
“Great,” said Sumi, and took a large bite out of the split fruit, seeds and pulp and skin. She crunched for a moment, then wrinkled her nose and began spitting bits of leathery pomegranate skin onto the grass, still crunching seeds between her teeth.
Nancy smiled indulgently at her. “It’s so nice to see you alive again,” she commented.
Talia, at the rear of the group, looked confused, turning to Christopher. “What?” she asked.
“Sumi was dead for a while,” he said.
“I thought that was metaphorical, or one of those things where someone has a heart attack and has to be shock-paddled back to life.”
“Nope. She was murdered by someone we thought was a friend of ours, and she died and stayed dead for a good while before we needed her to be alive again. I think that was really the first quest: getting Sumi back from the afterlife.” The girl in question was skipping circles around Nancy, still taking bites out of her pomegranate and spitting skin on the ground like this was perfectly normal.
“That’s … Wow.” Talia shook her head. “Sumi never stops talking. Like, I think she even talks in her sleep. How did I not know this?”
“Sumi tries to shy away from the serious stuff when she’s just talking to hear herself talk.
It’s too hard to be nonsensical and tragic at the same time, and she’s not taking any risks with her essential nature.
But yeah, she was dead, and she would have stayed dead if Nancy hadn’t helped us find her spirit. ”
“Oh,” said Talia, eyes wide as she looked at Nancy again. “Have any of the rest of you been dead?”
“Us? Nah. Kade’s a goblin prince, and I’m engaged to a skeleton, but neither of us have been dead. And Nancy never needed to die. She just needed to know that death loved her, and she knows that better than anyone else I know.”