Chapter 14 Where the Living Meet the Dead
THE GOLDEN DOOR WAS on the other side of the building, what felt like almost a mile’s walk away from the silver door.
It made sense, to a degree, to keep the two types of ghost as far apart as possible—if some of them wished only for peace and the time to prepare for their own rebirth, while others wanted to fight the living for the chance of a return to their former state, they wouldn’t make good neighbors.
Still, it was a long walk, and Sumi started to whine before they were even halfway to their destination.
“—and then I’m going to eat a sundae with six kinds of ice cream and four kinds of sprinkles,” she was saying as they rounded a corner and saw the golden door waiting up ahead.
The Lord of the Dead didn’t even try to conceal his relief. “We’re here,” he said.
“Too bad,” said Talia. “I was hoping to hear more about Sumi’s perfect sundae.”
“I can keep going,” said Sumi.
“Please don’t,” said the Lord of the Dead. “I am begging you.”
Sumi smirked. “Okay,” she said easily enough, and skipped onward toward the door.
Kade frowned. “What do we do now?”
“We open the doors, and we hope Lundy keeps her word,” said the Lord of the Dead.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” said Christopher. “I’m really not in the mood to be taken apart today.”
“No one’s getting taken apart when we’re this close to finishing this whole thing,” said the Lord of the Dead. He strode toward the closed golden door, reaching out to push it gently inward. It swung open, revealing the endless void.
If the void behind the silver door had been warm and welcoming, this one was an endless scream, cold and terrible and filled with a chittering sound, like a thousand insects crawling across each other in the darkness. Flashes of light split the distance, the echoes of dying stars.
The Lord of the Dead stepped back from the door, clapping his hands. “We require your presence,” he said. “I wish to speak with you.”
The air flexed, visibly pulsing, and then the motes of light began to appear, coalescing into the transparent figure of Jill Wolcott.
She looked at the group of them with triumphant loathing before turning her full attention on the Lord of the Dead, smiling a small and poisonous smile. She curtseyed.
“Thank you, my lord, for your kind acknowledgment of our cause,” she said.
“I acknowledge nothing,” he said. “You asked Me for consideration, and I have considered. You are the dead. You have nothing to offer Me, and these people didn’t come here to ransom you, as they once came to ransom Sumiko.
They came because a friend asked for their help—a friend you have now threatened.
Return Nancy Whitman to us at once, unharmed, and I will not punish you for what you’ve done.
You acted only according to your natures.
You are the hungry dead, after all, and the dead desire to fill their throats with life.
The statues you’ve killed are gone. There’s no bringing them back.
They’ve joined your company or gone to rest with the waiting dead, and either way, they won’t be returned to us.
You are to return to your space, and stay there, and hunt these halls no longer.
When the time comes, you may pass from here into your next lives. That is all I offer you.”
“Then I refuse your offer,” said Jill. “I want what I deserve. I want my life back. I want to return to the Moors and taste the Moon on my tongue. I want what’s mine by right.”
“No,” said the Lord of the Dead.
Jill screamed—a high-pitched banshee’s wail—and flung herself at him. Before she could impact against his skin, Lundy was suddenly there, holding her back, hands wrapped around spectral wrists.
“No,” echoed Lundy.
Jill snarled, and the battle was joined.
More ghosts poured through the golden door, and were met with the dead of Lundy’s army, all of them swirling around one another in an angry cloud of flickering mist. Sumi inched forward.
The statue Iason who had started all of this met in the middle of the hall with the specter of another statue.
They didn’t fight. Instead, they wrapped their arms around each other and held fast, Iason pressing his face to the other figure’s shoulder and sobbing, body shaking from the force of phantom tears.
The fight went on around them, and neither seemed to notice, only clung to one another, lost in their grief.
Sumi kept inching toward the door, until she had reached it without being ripped apart, and stepped into the void.
Kade and Christopher followed her, leaving Talia and the Lord of the Dead behind.
Talia’s moths swooped through the open door.
On the other side, the moths took on the same pale glow as the rest of the living, and they darted through the births of stars like heralds of the worlds and lives yet to come, bright-winged and only strange because they had yet to be considered by an expanding universe.
“Ghostie-girl!” shouted Sumi. “Nancy!”
“So you do know my name,” said a wan voice from out of the darkness.
The group rushed toward it, and there was Nancy, sitting on the void, hands tucked between her knees and legs drawn up close to her chest, like she was trying to make herself as small as it was possible to be without giving up her physical body altogether.
“Come on, Nan, get it together,” said Christopher, grabbing hold of her arm and trying to pull her to her feet.
It was like trying to shift stone. There was no softness to her, no yielding. Kade looked at the scene in front of him and realized, with cold and growing horror, that she was barely glowing.
“Nancy…” he said.
She turned her head to look at him, moving just as slowly as she had been when she first stepped back into the school. Every bit of motion felt like it took infinitely long, unfolding by degrees.
“It’s cold here, Kade,” she said. “It’s really, really cold.”
“She’s been in the void for too long,” said the Lord of the Dead. “You can’t linger here. I can barely linger here. I will get her.”
He stepped forward then, brushing Christopher aside, and scooped Nancy from the void into his arms. When he turned back toward the exit, he was moving as quickly as he ever did, and he carried her quickly with him back out into the light.
The others followed, Talia’s moths fanning out around them in a protective cloud. Some of them vanished from the edges, picked off by ghosts that had been defeated outside and were retreating into their stronghold.
Still the group kept moving, until they stepped back into the thickened air of the hall, the two ghost armies clashing against each other.
Figures flickered in and out of focus, then blurred back into the foggy throng.
Sumi smiled a little as she spotted the shade of Lundy yanking on Jill’s hair, jerking her phantasmal face toward the floor.
The Lord of the Dead continued until he was clear of the cloud, then looked back at Lundy. “Can you finish this?” he asked.
Lundy nodded. She let go of Jill’s hair, and her ghosts swirled around her, the quiet dead gathering in both numbers and strength.
It was something of a relief to realize that they outnumbered the angry dead, not only because it meant they were all less likely to be devoured.
Most of the denizens of the Halls of the Dead were content with what their presence meant: they might not have wanted to die, but they were willing to wait patiently for their rebirth, not spend their days devouring the living and their nights considering worse.
Most of the dead were at peace, and that meant the universe was still, in some ways, essentially kind.
Lundy roared into the stillness, and her army pressed forward, shoving the unquiet dead back through the open door into the void. The Lord of the Dead, his arms full of Nancy, cleared his throat. “Can someone close that door?” he asked.
Christopher was the first to move. He rushed forward, slamming the door on the darkness.
Lundy drifted over to him, gathering as much substance as she could, until she was a shining outline of a woman who had looked like a little girl, who had died an unkind death but would have died a worse one had she lived, who still had regrets.
“If you ever meet another traveler to the Goblin Market, please, give them a message to deliver for me,” she said.
“Tell them to go to the Archivist—everyone knows who she is, everyone knows how to find her—and tell her that Lundy has been lost, that the girl she banished paid fair value in the end for her mistakes. Tell them to ask her to tell Moon that my story is over, truly ended, but my heart belongs to the Market, and when time allows, I’ll come back there to be reborn.
I’ll pay my own way, and I’ll never spread my wings again. ”
“I will,” said Christopher.
“The door must be sealed,” said the Lord of the Dead. “While the angry dead have enough substance to kidnap a statue, they have too much to pass through solid objects. A good seal will keep them where they are.”
“That sounds like us,” said Sumi to Talia, skipping over to the door. She peeled off the bracelet around her left wrist as she moved, popping it into her mouth and beginning to chew.
Kade made a face, revolted. “Sumi, have you been wearing a bracelet of used chewing gum this whole damn time?” he asked.
Sumi shrugged, unrepentant. “It wasn’t that used,” she said. “I wanted to save it.” She stuffed more bracelet into her mouth, chewing harder and harder as the gum reached choking density.
Finally, she pulled the gum out of her mouth and began stretching it out, before packing it along the bottom of the door. It still smelled faintly of strawberry. Kade turned away, clearly trying not to gag.