Whatever else I did, tonight I was going to have to brief Seawoll and Nightingale so they could take steps. I’d let Nightingale explain to the DPS about Lesley’s new astral projection thing.
I was finishing up when something started fluttering around the beacon stone. I might have thought it was a moth, if moths were invisible and the size of seagulls. It was a very faded ghost – what I would call a one on the ‘annie’ scale of spectral solidity. My brain was latching on to the sensation of movement and interpreting it into the flapping of wings. I made sure my phone was still off and cast another werelight, using a second forma, scindere, to fix it into place on the other side of the stile.
Instantly the fluttering movement darted over to the fresh source of magic and landed on the railing. It solidified, so quickly that if I’d blinked I would have missed it, into a large black bird. Beverley has taught me some basic bird stuff so I recognised it as a corvid – too big to be a crow, I thought, so probably a raven.
I stayed still and watched for a bit while it preened itself. Then, satisfied with its comfort, it lifted and turned its head to regard me first with one eye and then the other,
Animal ghosts are rare. Abigail insists that the foxes believe that animals are too sensible to hang around after their death.
‘They say that any animal ghost stupid enough to hang around will be gobbled up by evil vampire cats,’ she said.
The foxes tend to blame most of the ills of the world on cats.
According to Enoch Corkenhale’s equally unreliable An Animal Phantasmagoria (1857), ‘the spirits of animals are most often associated with the presences of man. As a faithful hound may refuse to leave its master’s grave, so may its ghost refuse to leave its master’s abode.’
‘Were you on one of the planes?’ I asked. ‘The debriefing is that way.’
I pointed down the hill – the raven continued to eye me suspiciously.
‘Geh den hügel runter,’ I said, and the raven reared up, spreading its wings and cawing at me.
‘Guten tag,’ I said when it settled, and it cawed again – twice.
Perhaps this had been in one of the German planes – a not so lucky mascot.
Just on the off-chance, I repeated the German for ‘follow the beacons’. The raven took off and, beating the air over my head, turned and flew down the valley.
I waited a couple of minutes and then, turning to look up the valley again, I shouted, ‘Last call for ghosts! Time, gentlemen, please!’
Then I turned back and followed the beacons down the hill.
It took me a whole hour, on account of having to go slowly down the rough side of the hill. Then along the A57 as it changed from Snake Pass and became the High Street. Past neat rows of modern semis with their televisions flickering and muttering behind net curtains. The front gardens shrank down to nothing as I reached the Victorian end of town, turned left at the roundabout, hopped a fence and pushed through the bushes until I reached the ruined courtyard of Volcrepe.
Where Dennis the Glossop had recreated the last scene from Casablanca. The cargo cult plane was up on its wheels and whatever scrap had gone into its making – it looked like a Dakota to me. And I’ve watched Band of Brothers and A Bridge Too Far so I know what I’m talking about.
The moon was down, and it should have been pitch-black, but the scene was lit by the silver shimmer that seemed to roll off the plane like mist. The same mist which covered the rubble and broken metal of the courtyard.
‘Play it again, Sam,’ I said.
‘That was a Lockheed L-12A,’ said Brook. ‘And this is a Dakota.’
‘How do you even know about Casablanca?’ I said. ‘I thought you were asleep.’
Brook shrugged.
‘Maybe I dreamt it,’ she said. ‘Or maybe I saw it on TV – after the first thousand years you stop worrying about these things.’
She slipped her hand into mine like I was her older brother.
‘Watch this,’ she said. ‘You might learn something.’
Brook began to sing, starting with the child’s soprano you’d expect for her apparent age. It was an old song, in a language that hadn’t been spoken for thousands of years, a sad song in a minor key full of loss and longing and the silence of the high places.
It swept me away, picked me up and whirled me into the sky so that I went pinwheeling south until I was high above my own modest little town. Where Beverley was shifting uncomfortably in her sleep, and Dad was dreaming of that time he played with Joe Harriott and Mum dreamt she was grooving in the audience.
Suddenly they were all below me. The good, the bad and the merchant bankers. The mob and the gentry, the Rivers and the foxes. And I saw the delicate intaglio of their lives traced in gold and silver and blue.
And for a moment I thought I saw a pattern – one I might understand if I could just lose myself in it first.
Brook squeezed my hand hard, much harder than a child should be able to.
‘Come back, Peter,’ she said. ‘Don’t get lost on me, lad.’
I was suddenly standing beside Brook with the Dakota in a wide flat field at dusk, the sun a bright line on the horizon, hangars behind me like shadowy caverns, and beyond the plane a tower, a squat two-storey block with its windowed control room blazing like a lighthouse.
I could see movement in the cockpit as the flight crew made their last-minute checks. At the rear, the young men in American, Commonwealth and German uniforms lined up patiently to board, and as they waited they sang the sad refrain of a people long lost in history. A raven flew low over my head, circled and cried out twice before settling on the nose. When I looked again, it had become a picture of itself painted below the cockpit window.
The last of the lost pilots boarded. The port and then the starboard engines stuttered into life and roared. The plane taxied around to face away from us; imaginary prop wash made my coat flap. Before he closed the rear door, one of the young men waved goodbye – I couldn’t tell which uniform he was wearing.
The engines revved, the Dakota picked up speed, the rear lifted, and then it was rising and banking towards the west. It levelled its wings and climbed out of sight.
The real world returned as darkness. I lit my hurricane lamp and its yellow light illuminated rubble, scrub and scrap metal.
‘Where did they go?’ I asked.
Brook looked up at me and gave me a lopsided smile.
‘How should I know,’ she said. ‘Perhaps they went nowhere.’
‘Are we done?’ I asked, because frankly I was knackered and wanted my dinner.
‘Yeah,’ said Brook, and we picked our way through the rubble to the gate and onto the road.
Brook gave me an address that I hoped meant something to Seawoll, and walked me out of the ruined factory and onto the old stone bridge over her river.
‘You want to watch yourself when you visit,’ said Brook. ‘They’re a right fearsome lot in that house.’
And with that unhelpful statement, she jumped over the parapet and vanished without a splash.
Sunday Hampstead wasn’t good enough for you …
10 Logistics
Seawoll’s dad turned out to be a painter. Quite a well-known one, if you listen to Radio 4 or hang around at the right kind of soirée. Obviously me and Danni had never heard of him, but this didn’t seem to worry him at all.