Chapter 8 Lady of the Dead
THEY STEPPED THROUGH THE unlocked front door of the hall, and immediately Christopher understood why this place was called the Halls of the Dead when everything else they’d seen up to this point had been so blazingly, brutally alive.
There was a mausoleum stillness in the air, like nothing had disturbed it in a hundred years, and the marble walls were softened by velvet draperies that swallowed the sounds of their footsteps so completely that they effectively became silence.
The ceiling was so high that it felt like walking into a vault, and like the space should have been as full of echoes as it was of light.
Their absence was jarring enough to make itself noticeable.
Plinths studded the round room around them, one every four or five feet, all of them polished white marble …
and all of them empty. Christopher peered closer, then recoiled as he spotted a dot of reddish brown on one of the plinths.
As soon as he saw that first one, more appeared, blossoming out of the whiteness like terrible flowers.
Dried blood. All of the plinths had been lightly misted with blood at some point, and whoever had cleaned them hadn’t been able to get it all.
Still, the group walked forward, Talia allowing the door to slam shut behind her. Even that sound, large as it was, was no match for the silence: it was swallowed down as quickly as everything else, vanishing into the maw of the stillness.
Talia walked a little faster, drawing level to Christopher. One of the moths was perched at her temple, fanning its wings like a strange, living hair clip.
“I don’t think I like it here,” she said. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be here.”
“It always feels like that when you go to a world that didn’t call you,” he said. “It’s fine. Nancy wouldn’t have brought us here if it weren’t safe.”
“And it is safe, most of the time,” said a voice from behind them.
The four travelers who had accompanied Nancy whipped around, all of them moving fast and fluid and terrified. Nancy turned more slowly, with engrained elegance, and was already smiling as she began the long process of bowing to the speaker.
The silence had swallowed more than just their arrival: it had also taken the approach of the woman now standing in the middle of the room, smiling indulgently at them, like they were adorable children who had wandered somewhere they weren’t supposed to be.
She was short, taller only than Sumi, and lushly curved, with skin a few shades darker than Christopher’s and long, dark hair that fell in curls down her back. Her eyes were the same red as the pomegranate seeds, an impossibly deep color that had no business appearing in human eyes.
But Christopher looked at her and knew that she wasn’t human, just like the Skeleton Girl wasn’t human; she was the closest thing he’d seen to his beloved since leaving Mariposa.
He didn’t know how that could be true, when this woman had skin and fat and muscle and organs, but he knew that it was true, and that truth would have told him at once who she was, even if he hadn’t met her once before.
“My Lady,” he said, and bowed. Kade did the same, and after a puzzled beat, Sumi and Talia followed suit.
When they straightened, the Lady of the Dead was still smiling, although the expression had become tempered by a sliver of concern. “Nancy, you’re back,” she said. “Are these the people you brought to help you quiet the dead?”
“They are,” said Nancy. “I used to go to school with them, and they volunteered their aid. No one is here against their will, and they understand the depth of the danger they’re subjecting themselves to by coming.”
“But they’re that willing to take the risk if it means they can help a friend? You inspired loyalty while you walked among the living, my Nancy,” said the Lady of the Dead.
Sumi frowned, looking oddly shy. “I … know you,” she said. “Why do I know you?”
“Because, little ghost, this is where you came when your first body died. I met you in the pomegranate grove, and plucked you from the air, and brought you here, brought you home, so you could rest and recover yourself before you went onward to another life. But it seems you’ve chosen to continue the life you had before.
An unusual selection, if not unheard-of. ”
“Oh,” said Sumi.
“All of you need to come with me,” said the Lady. “You’re in great danger if you linger in the open. Our private chambers have been sealed against the disembodied, and that should hold for a time—long enough for a solution to be found, we hope.”
“Have all the others gone back to their original worlds?” asked Nancy.
The Lady of the Dead frowned, lips drawing delicately downward. “No, my love. You were the only one who made it to their door.”
Nancy blinked, but gave no other outward sign of her distress.
“Come,” said the Lady, and began to walk. The group followed her, through the silent halls, toward the promise of safety.
IT WASN’T A LONG JOURNEY, but the quiet, combined with the invisible threat from all around, made it feel longer than the walk from the pomegranate grove to the gardens.
The Lady of the Dead walked with quiet confidence, never pausing, never looking back.
Nancy walked with the same economy of motion she had been demonstrating since her arrival at the school, like she was only allowed so much movement during any given day and didn’t want to run out in the middle of a step, one foot lifted in preparation of a descent that would never come.
The rest of them simply walked, clustering closely together, even Sumi holding back the urge to skip or circle or roam ahead. Instead, she stayed at Kade’s side, slightly behind him, eyes flicking constantly from place to place as she tried to watch the entire hallway at the same time.
As they reached a junction in the hall, another corridor crossing over theirs, she abruptly stiffened, grabbing Kade’s arm.
“Kade,” she said, in a tightly controlled voice, “you know how sometimes I say things just for the sake of saying them, and they don’t mean anything at all, really, except that I’m here and I have a voice and I can say whatever I like? ”
“Yes?” he replied.
“This isn’t one of those times. Run.”
She broke away from him then, running forward until she was trotting alongside the Lady of the Dead. “I hope we’re close to where we’re going, because we need to get there now,” she said.
The Lady of the Dead frowned at her, and began to turn, clearly intending to ask Kade what she was on about.
The motion brought her, briefly, into position to look down the crossing corridor, and her own eyes widened.
She reached back, grabbing Nancy by the hand.
“Run,” she said, with less panic and more authority than Sumi, and began running down the hallway, hauling Nancy along with her.
The rest of the travelers followed, not sure what they were running for, only sure that anything capable of putting that look on the Lady’s face was something they didn’t want to play around with. Sumi looked back as she ran, the color draining from her face with every backward glance.
Christopher looked back, trying to see if he could figure out what they were running from, and saw nothing but a slight haziness in the air, like the distortion that sometimes appeared above asphalt on a hot summer’s day.
But the hall wasn’t hot. It wasn’t cold, either.
It was perfectly temperate, like standing inside a well-designed and climate-controlled shopping mall.
Too much heat or cold would have been hard on the statues, making it impossible for them to hold their places.
So he kept running, and the others ran with him. Some of Talia’s moths were dislodged by her flight along the hall, fluttering behind the group as they worked to catch up. As Christopher glanced back again, he saw the rearmost moths beginning to dissolve.
It wasn’t an instantaneous process. The moths were flying, flapping their wings in their effort to catch back up to Talia, and then they were gone, the dissolution moving from the backs of their bodies up to the feathers of their antennae.
In less than a second, each moth caught this way had been reduced to nothing but a thin cloud of ashy-looking dust that floated in the air for a moment before drifting, lifeless, to the marble floor.
It was easier to run when he knew that was behind them, and the others seemed to feel similarly, because they surged forward, a united group, approaching a pair of ornately graven double doors patterned in pomegranate boughs and long, elegant stalks of grain, with roe deer hidden in the background, almost lost among the greenery.
The Lady of the Dead surged forward, pressing her hands against the double doors, which swung open easily, offering no resistance. “In!” she shouted, and it was an obscenity, to hear her raise her voice so; nothing in this world should have been able to make the Lady yell. “Get inside!”
The others didn’t need to be told twice.
They rushed through the open doors, even Nancy, who moved almost as quickly as Kade did, getting the others inside.
Once they were all through, the Lady of the Dead stepped over the threshold into the room and stopped, panting.
She didn’t close the doors, only turned to glare defiantly out into the hall.
“Nothing in these Halls can cross my threshold without permission, and I do not grant it,” she said.
There was a rushing sound, like some terrible wind was blowing through the halls, and then there was silence.
“I know you’re there. If you’re finally coming so close to my private chambers, you must be ready to issue your demands. So speak to me, unquiet spirits. Speak to your Lady, and tell me why you wreak such havoc in my Halls. I would prefer that it be ended.”
The rushing of the wind returned, louder now, pressing right up against the threshold while the Lady stood there, expression patient and neutral.
Sumi inched forward, standing at the Lady’s side. The Lady glanced at her, lifting an eyebrow. “I can see them,” said Sumi. “Not very clearly-clearly, but enough to know they’re there. I saw them before. That was how I knew to run.”
“Sumi, you can see the dead people?” asked Kade.
“I was one of the dead people who haunt this place,” said Sumi. “I guess it makes sense that I can still see them.”
“None of the rest of us can,” said Talia, after a quick glance around at the others.
Nancy was panting, one hand pressed to her chest and an expression of dismay on her face as she failed to make the involuntarily hard breathing stop.
Kade and Christopher were standing close together, both looking blankly at the door, eyes slightly unfocused in the way of people who weren’t looking at anything, only staring in the direction of least resistance.
“I see nothing, my Lady,” said Nancy, words broken up by her attempts to catch her breath.
As if she had invoked them, glimmering points of light began to appear in the hall in front of the open doors to the Lady’s chambers. They sparkled silver, first hanging motionless and then beginning to dart from place to place, swirling around one another, filling the air with their shine.
Christopher’s eyes widened, and he raised his flute. “I’m going to try something,” he said, before he lifted it to his lips and began to play.
“Lovely music, dear,” said the Lady of the Dead into the silence. “Perhaps something a trifle faster would be a good idea?”
Christopher nodded, unaccustomed to people commenting on his playing, and his fingers picked up speed, gliding across the bone with preternatural smoothness, never slowing or stilling.
The motes of light swirled faster, more and more of them appearing, until they began to coalesce directly in front of the doors.
Bit by bit, they formed the figure of a translucent teenage girl, sketched in starlight and stripped of substance.
She was almost the same height as Kade, with long pale hair gathered over one shoulder by a darker ribbon, arranged into a perfect cascade of soup-can curls.
Her dress was long and flowing, an elegant Victorian confection that fell to her feet in a waterfall of ruffles and lace.
She had no color beyond the silver that comprised it, and even in monochrome, densities of color were apparent: her hair was light, her ribbon dark, her dress lighter than her hair, and probably white.
A dark choker circled her throat, and if that hadn’t been enough proof of her identity, the stains on her spectral fingers would have been. It looked almost like she had dipped her hands in paint before rendering them in silver, covering her natural skin tone in something deeper, something darker.
She was smiling, meeting the eyes of the Lady of the Dead with a calm, unflinching gaze, like she had every right, like they were equals.
“Hello,” she said, and her voice was hollow as a jack-o’-lantern, scooped clean of every scrap of its original vitality.
Still, she was audible, and the air around her was full of dancing silver, and maybe vitality was overrated.
The Lady of the Dead scowled. “Go back to your rooms. You shame the dead with your behavior. You shame this house.”
“How can I shame anything when I didn’t do anything wrong?” asked the girl. “I was a child, and I died, and it wasn’t fair, and if I want to fill my throat with life until my spirit remembers how to live, I should be allowed to do exactly that.”
“My statues are not for you to slaughter.”
“They die so easy, though,” said the girl, and giggled girlishly, hiding her mouth behind her hand. “If they were worth preserving, they wouldn’t die so easily. They wouldn’t taste so amazing. Is this what it’s always like? Swallowing life? Why doesn’t everyone do it?”
“Because if the dead consume the living, the living run out,” said the Lady. “That isn’t how things are meant to work, not here, and not anywhere else.”
“Oh don’t be dull,” said the shade. “There are so many worlds, and so many ways for things to go properly, you can’t honestly tell me that there are no worlds where the dead are allowed to feast on the living to their hearts’ desire.
Let us in. Open your invisible door and let us in. I promise we’ll be good.”
“Hello, Jill,” said Kade.