I got up, grateful for the hat that turned sunlight into speckles instead of a blinding wall, and discarded my grass stem for another one to nibble on as I followed the laughter. Tir na nOg had brought laughter forth from the trees and earth itself, but I thought I was hearing ordinary kids. Whoever’s heaven this was, it didn’t seem like the kind of place peopled by the ethereal. When I got close enough to the house, I shouted, “Hello?” and had a sudden bemused hope that I wasn’t about to be greeted by a shotgun and a smile.
Three kids burst around the corner of the house instead, racing pell-mell after one another with the abandon of youth. The oldest was a boy of maybe fifteen, keeping well in the lead, with a girl of around eleven behind him and another boy, about eight years old, giving valiant chase to them both.
I knew the little girl.
She was the ghostly image who’d turned up in my garden a couple of days ago, so brief and unformed I hadn’t recognized her when I’d gotten a clearer look in the Dead Zone. It was the same hint of a ghost I’d seen hanging back and staying at Billy’s side during Sonata’s séance. She was all braided pigtails and smiles, with big brown eyes and strong fast legs, and as I watched, she gave up any hope of catching the older boy by turning to bellow, “Come on, Billy, we’ve almost got him!”
All the pieces fell into place.
Her name was Caroline Holliday, and she was Billy’s older sister. She’d died in a drowning accident when she was eleven, probably in the same creek I could hear burbling in the background. The red-cheeked little boy chasing her was Billy, and the older boy leading the game of tag was their officious big brother, Bradley, whom I’d met a few months earlier and had utterly failed to get along with.
This was Caroline’s heaven, or maybe Billy’s: a place and time when his family were all together, Caro safe and alive, Brad less uptight than the man he’d grown into being.
Brad skidded to a stop when he saw me, then spread his arms, keeping his younger siblings safe behind him as he thrust out his jaw in challenge. “Who’re you? What’re you doing here?”
“I came looking for Billy,” I said with maybe a little too much honesty. “He’s a friend of mine.”
“You’re a grown-up,” Brad said suspiciously. “And I don’t know you. How can you be his friend?”
Caroline crashed into Brad’s back, and Billy caught up with both of them, smacking Brad’s outstretched hand to yell, “You’re it!” in triumph. Then he grabbed that same hand and stared at me. “Who’s that?”
“She’s a bad guy,” Brad said with wonderful conviction.
“No,” Caroline said, and I could see all the excitement die in her eyes. “No, she’s not.”
The world changed around us.
I stood in a cemetery, but not a city-run or official one. It was a family plot littered with wooden grave markers and homemade crosses. Wildflowers grew up all over the place, richest on the low heaps of earth abutting the markers. Some of them were so old as to be barely there anymore, only scraps of wood that hadn’t quite melted back into the ground yet. Others were much newer, shellacked and gleaming against the elements. A fence like the one near the house surrounded the little graveyard, making it private and sacred, but still open and part of the world. It was a good place to be buried, better than almost anywhere I could think of.
Billy, an adult now, looking very like the man I knew, knelt by the freshest grave. Caroline Holliday, still eleven years old, still in pigtails and a solemn look, sat on the grave marker with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. She shouldn’t have been able to: it was headstone-shaped and too narrow for even a little girl to sit on like that, but the dead, I thought, didn’t have to conform to quite the same laws the living did.
“Your friend’s come to get you, Billy. See?” Caroline pushed a toe out and nudged Billy’s shoulder so he would look around toward me. “She came to take you away. You’re not supposed to be here yet.”
Caroline could no more move an unwilling Billy than she could’ve moved the moon, but he shifted with her touch and looked over his shoulder at me. Dismay cut lines into his face. “You’re not supposed to be here, Walker. The whole damn point of hitting you was to keep you out.”
I shrugged. “I’m not so good at letting my friends make dramatic sacrifices. What the hell am I supposed to tell Mel, huh? So either we’re both staying or we’re both going. I’m not letting this happen.”
“You have to. The only thing that’ll destroy the cauldron is a living body entering it willingly.”
“Yeah.” I squinted at Caroline, then at the sun, then around the graveyard. “Yeah, the problem with that is it didn’t break apart or anything when you jumped in, or I wouldn’t have been able to follow. Besides—” I shook my head and sat down, leaning against one of the headstones “—I mean, I get why you dove in. You were trying to save me. Thank you, by the way. But, Billy…why the hell did you dive in?”
He gave me a familiarly exasperated look, which made me happy. If I could still annoy him, there was hope for bringing him back. “You’re a hell of a lot more important in the grander scheme of things than I am. I wasn’t going to—”
I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “Overlooking the fact that I fundamentally doubt that, it’s not what I’m asking. It’s a death cauldron, Bill, and you’ve got four kids and another one due in a couple of days. Why on God’s little green earth would you do something like this?”
Silence rolled over the cemetery, Caroline looking between me and Billy and back again. It took a long time for him to say, with a note of uncertainty, “I had this idea it would be all right. That I could just…rest for a while. That it’d be comfortable.” Another few seconds passed before he admitted, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s the cauldron.” I tipped my head against the headstone and looked toward the sky again. Clear and blue and reassuring, an unmitigatedly beautiful day. “Every time I’ve gotten near it I’ve started wanting to climb in. I don’t know if it really offers peace, Billy, but it sure as hell talks a good game. The cauldron itself is seductive. It makes you want to get in it.”
“Well, how can that be? If living people just want to climb in—” His mouth worked and while I was pretty sure it wasn’t his original intention, his sentence ended with, “Shit.”
“Yeah. So I don’t know how we destroy it.”
Caroline’s foot thumped against her headstone. “You could ask the expert.” She sounded more like Billy than I’d expect a little girl to. They used the same inflections, though her voice was a couple octaves higher.
“Billy is my expert. What he don’t know, I don’t know. Only I don’t know a lot more than he don’t know.” I frowned and stopped talking, afraid I’d get myself stuck in a paradox or something.
“No,” Caroline said patiently. “I meant, you could ask the dead girl.”
She’d looked pretty normal, right up until then. She’d looked, you know. Alive. That trapping fell off, turning her into something unlike anything I’d ever seen. She was still generally little-girl shaped, still with braided pigtails and a solemn smile, but it was like the girl had been peeled away to reveal a pure bright soul beneath it. She wasn’t alive. She hadn’t been for a long time, but it hadn’t left the kind of mark on her that it had on Matilda Whitehead. Love had kept her from moving on, not vengeance, and over the years that had just kept building up.
Billy’s mortal form began to fall away, too. I didn’t like that: it suggested too strongly that he was dead, and that me diving after him into the cauldron hadn’t done any good, which was not an answer I was prepared to accept. But stripping away the human shell let me begin to understand just how tightly entwined his soul was with Caroline’s; how much she’d been informed who Billy had become. They’d been best friends in life, the big sister protective and proud of her little brother, the younger brother awed and admiring of the older sister. I could hardly imagine the intensity of their bond surviving into adulthood had she lived, and at the same time desperately hoped would have.