We dodged through a gap into a dead end to hide.
The bones in the sack rattled of their own accord. We hugged it tightly, smothering the sound. Then Keenen went “Ugh!” as something writhed inside the bag. We flung it from us. It hit the ground with a dry crunch, then began to squirm as if something alive was inside, fluttering, pushing, clawing to get out. I kicked it back against the wall where Keenen and I stood on it, hearing bones snap. It was only then that I realized there was the sound of birds in my head, getting closer.
We lay down with our faces to the wall, making ourselves small and silent with our arms wrapped around the bag. The bird sounds and the desert dryness grew, seemed to beat against the wall we hid behind, then faded. We waited a minute, maybe two, but heard, felt smelled no more.
We did the bone-bag shuffle back into the main alley. Keenen, while wed been digging up Birdfellow’s grave, told me he’d had Mrs. Winton coaching him on the ins and outs of the maze from the library diagram since the night of my arrival (an unsurprising revelation), so I followed on blind faith. He took what he explained was the roundabout way out as the ghost would be stalking the more direct route, at least at first. Both of us wanted to carry the sack by its extreme edges, but we knew it would only rattle again. So we held it close, all the time afraid of sudden squirmings.
We had torches, but didn’t dare use them. There was half a moon out, which helped sometimes. But a lot of the alleys were still in deep shadow.
A kookaburra’s laugh, a strident oooohahahaaaoooorrrr of mental noise right between the ears, no telling direction or how close. We froze.
“It’s trying to psych us, make us panic,” I said, not admitting how good a job it was doing on me. “It’s probably reached the entrance and now knows we’re still here.”
Keenen wet his lips. “If it’s at the entrance, we’re trapped. It can just sit there and wait.”
“Yeah, that’s a thought.” It’s what I would’ve done if I were the ghost. But then… I wasn’t the ghost.
We were huddling in the shadows of a five-way junction of alleys, looking this way and that and over our shoulders when it happened. The bag wriggled and a skeletal arm ripped out, thrusting into the air, wavered a moment, then clutched at Keenen’s throat.
The old man yelled—and the arm fell back into the sack with a laugh of clattering bones.
“No more!” Keenen yelled. He threw the sack from him. “No more! No more!”
He ran.
And so did I, because panic is contagious.
A blur of walls, of benches and statues. A blaze of stars as I ran headlong into a dead end.
I collapsed, dazed and shaking, eyes watering from the blow to my nose. And in all this, the raucous cawing of crows heard with the mind and a human scream heard with the ears.
Then silence.
For a long time only silence.
Something was scraping along the pavement outside in the main alley, coming nearer. A scrape, a pause. A scrape, a pause, coming on, coming near. I tried not to imagine what it was. I wished I had a stick to smash its bones to dust.
The only moonlight in this alley was far up one wall. All else was dark. I felt for the torch in my pocket. I had to will my hand to switch it on.
It was almost at my feet, that one arm, bones white in the light, dragging the bag behind it. The bag reared up as I stood there, staring stupidly. The bony fingers spread and struck.
The torch went spinning, hit the wall, went out. Finger bones, cold and clicking, smelling of the grave, dug into my face. The bones in the bag knifed through the sacking, into my leg, into my side.
I pulled away, bringing my head against the wall, smashing the hand against stone. Its grip loosened. I wrenched it from me. But the finger bones closed about my hand, trying to crush it, make me cry out so the spirit of these bones stalking the alleys would come.
I pushed to my knees with all my strength, swinging the arm, bringing the bag around after it in a half circle, smashing it against the wall. Bones splintered with a lovely crack! But the grip was still there. I swung the bag again and again. “Goddamn it! I’m trying to help you!” Finally the arm itself snapped and the bag sagged to the ground like a K.O.ed fighter, the skeletal hand dead in mine.
As quick as I could, I shoved all the bones I could find back in the sack. There were noises in my head like tinkling bells, the bush chimes of the bellbird getting louder and louder. I limped from the dead end alley, dragging the bag behind me.
“Now where?” I asked myself. I had no idea which way I’d run, not even which way was in and out. Birds were singing, chiming in my head, louder than before. I struggled off as fast as my leg and side allowed, leaving a trail of blood old blind Harry could’ve followed. I was trying to find a familiar statue or flowerbed. But everything looked so unfamiliar. Behind me the maze pushed back into angles of darkness where a form, a shape glided and flitted. Parrots screeched. I’m dead, I thought.
But a long moment passed and nothing happened.
Something white lying on the path back down the alley caught my eye. It was a bone fallen from the sack, and it occurred to me then that maybe other bones had fallen out of rips in the bag, and that the thing tracking me had been stopping to pick them up with an exalting cry of parrots.
Hoping this was true I dropped a rib here, a collar bone there to keep it busy as I worked my way through the maze. I was beginning to feel the loss of blood, starting to get cold, dizzy, and tired. It wouldn’t be long, I knew, before I’d get to the point where I’d throw down all the bones, sink down into sleep, and never wake up.
The most useless thing in the world is a sundial at midnight.
But the moment I stumbled up to it I hugged its pedestal, knowing now there was a fighting chance. It was a landmark I remembered. Nearby was one of my dirt mounds from yesterday, farther along another and another. Across this dead oblong garden and through that gap, over to the right and round to the left, a back-track here and—
I dropped an ankle bone at the gate, hoping it would slow it down just that little bit more. It was still some distance to the southeast lawn and I was in no condition to sprint.
There were lights on in the house, far away. The grounds were moonlit, except for the slim sticks of tree shadows.
“Hello!” said someone from a distance. I stared behind me, disoriented, saw the gate to the maze swinging wide.
The next thing I knew I was being picked up off the grass where I’d collapsed. Someone said, “Quick!” and someone else said, “For Gawd’s sake don’t look back!”
They carried me and the bones between them like so much hand luggage toward a waiting smell of petrol. I must’ve been holding on to the bag with a death-grip as they didn’t even try to take it from me. They just ripped open the bag, and I saw as if from a long way away the two groundsmen tumbling bones into the newly hollowed out gum tree.
There was just one more thing to be done—and damnit!—it should’ve been done already.
Mrs. Winton, hands fluttering with nerves, stepped back from the painting of Birdfellow, an old black man with a mysterious pouch tied into his stringy gray beard. Beside the painting, face up and open, was the diary.
Mrs. Winton looked down at them, shook her head sorrowfully.
“It has to be,” I said, surprised at the croak my voice had become. “No images, no record of name, nothing of the dead must be allowed to exist after death. It’s their way of life. It’s that portrait and his name in that diary that’s keeping him earthbound and angry just as much as not giving him a proper tree burial in 1823.”
From the direction of the maze came the sound of something big galloping across the manor grounds toward us.