May Bird Among the Stars
Read May Bird Among the Stars Online
Authors: Jodi Lynn Anderson,Peter Ferguson,Sammy Yuen Jr.,Christopher Grassi
Mayâ¦Bird
AMONG THE STARS
A
LSO BY
J
ODI
L
YNN
A
NDERSON
May Bird and the Ever After: Book One
Atheneum Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Jodi Lynn Anderson
Map on pp. x-xi by Peter Ferguson
Images on pp. 102 and 137 by Sammy Yuen Jr.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Book design by Christopher Grassi
The text for this book is set in Berkeley Old Style.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10Â Â 9Â Â 8Â Â 7Â Â 6Â Â 5Â Â 4Â Â 3Â Â 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anderson, Jodi Lynn.
May Bird among the stars: book two â Jodi Lynn Andersonâ1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Still trapped in the Ever After, ten-year-old May Bird struggles to decide whether to save the world of her ghostly friends from the evil Bo Cleevil or to return to her West Virginia home.
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-86924-2
ISBN-10: 0-689-86924-X
eISBN: 978-1-439-10701-0
[1. Future lifeâFiction. 2. Self-confidenceâFiction. 3. GhostsâFiction. 4. Fantasy]
1. Title.
PZ7.A53675 May 2006
[Fic]âdc22Â Â Â 2005028832
For a few of my girl heroes: Amanda Clair, Emma McClintic, Emily Jo-An, and Kaiherine Mary
P
ART
O
NE:
A
CROSS THE
H
IDEOUS
H
IGHLANDS
Chapter One: The World's Largest Demon Toenail and Other Wonders
Chapter Two: Cleevilville #135
Chapter Three: Something's Gone Bad at the Snack Shack
Chapter Four: The Edge of Paradise
Chapter Seven: The Forgetting Lagoon
Chapter Nine: The Carnival at the Edge of the World
Chapter Twelve: The Petrified Pass
Chapter Thirteen: Petrified, Period
Chapter Fifteen: The Beekeeper
Chapter Sixteen: The Lady at the Top of the Tree
Chapter Seventeen: The Letter in the Leaf
Chapter Nineteen: Walk of the Zombies
Chapter Twenty: The Colony of the Undead
Chapter Twenty-one: A Message to Isabella
Chapter Twenty-two: Who's Afraid of Hocus Pocus?
Chapter Twenty-three: A Gambling Town, a Rambling Town
Chapter Twenty-four: A Long-lost Mother
Chapter Twenty-five: Going Down
Chapter Twenty-six: The Dark Spirit Capital of the Universe
Chapter Twenty-seven: A Luminous Boy
Chapter Twenty-eight: The Rescue of Lucius
Chapter Twenty-nine: The Dungeons of Abandoned Hope
Chapter Thirty: A Sack of Dust
Chapter Thirty-one: The Dastardly Disco
Chapter Thirty-two: Somber Kitty Dances at Midnight
Chapter Thirty-three: The Guest of Honor
Chapter Thirty-four: Dust in the Wind
Chapter Thirty-five: The Bogey's Closet
Chapter Thirty-six: Under the Night
I
would like to acknowledge Rosemary Ellen Guiley and I her book
The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits
for provid-Ting such extensive information on the folklore of spirits, spooks, and specters. I also wish to acknowledge Professor Verlyn Fleiger for introducing me to North Farm and its mysterious mistress.
In addition to the usual suspects, I would like to thank Bertrand Comet-Barthe for his many kindnesses. I would also like to thank my niece Amanda Anderson Van DerSluys for being my first young editor. Her encouragement has been much cherished.
Finally, I want to acknowledge
all
of my nieces for inspiring any part of May Ellen Bird that is worthy, and special, and true.
T
rees are not supposed to have favorites. But they had always been slightly partial to May Bird.
Over the ten years since she'd been born, the woods of Briery Swamp, West Virginia, had peered through May's window night after night. They had watched over her thoughtful brown eyes, the imaginative crook of her head, the strong character of her knobby knees. The trees had laughed at the jokes May told to her cat. Their leaves had whispered over her wild inventions, her colorful stories, her drawings.
But since May had been missing, the trees had watched over her mom instead.
Ellen Bird was like and unlike her daughter. They both had the same thoughtful eyes and the same dark hair, the same sweet, quiet ways. But while May had always run wild through the trees in her sparkly black bathing suit, sticking feathers she found behind her ears and tucking flowers into the pockets of her shorts, Ellen had always liked to sit and work. Now, she only sat ⦠and waited.
The day May and her cat had gone missing, the police had rolled up to the house like an overturned bushel of apples, crisscrossing the rambling white walls of White Moss Manor with red and blue lights. May's classmates had followed shortly after with cards and cakes and flashlights, whispering phrases of regret to one another:
Maribeth Stuller: “I teased her for wearing black rubber boots on Mondays.”
Claire Arneson: “I never traded my fruit squishes for her peanut butter balls.”
Finny Elway: “I laughed at her for playing badminton with her cat.”
The truth was, none of them had been very nice to May Bird.
For weeks the residents of Hog Wallow, Little Yellow Church, and Droop Mountain had combed the woods in the fine-tooth way But when they had called May's name, only the crickets and the trees had talked back.
And so, but for a forbidding and vast stretch of briars that simply couldn't be crossed, they had covered Briery Swamp and turned up nothing but bad cases of poison ivy.
Ellen Bird had remained on the porch wrapped in an old quilt and a new sorrow.
And the woods, unable to speak in words she could hear, kept their secretsâabout the night May had wandered into the trees in the dark, about the strange glow that had taken her away, and about the lake, where a glowing figure swam night after night, waiting for the next person who might wander her way.
A person who might come looking beyond the briars. A person, perhaps, like a sad, brown-eyed mother, searching for her girl.
Across The Hideous Highlands
Chapter One
The World's Largest Demon Toenail and Other Wonder
O
n a train hurtling past a black sea, on a star far above the earth, a hairless cat lifted his nose to the air, sniffed, and let out a tiny howl. Even Somber Kitty didn't know why he did it. Instincts were weird that way.
He stared across train car 178 and let out a frustrated sigh. May, sitting at one of the car's windows, appeared to be lost in her own thoughts. Somber Kitty let his chin sink down onto his paws again.
May gently twirled the pendant Pumpkin had given her in the City of Etherâone half of a tiny silver coffin that, when placed with its other half, showed the engraving:
NEVER TO BE DEARLY DEPARTED.
She hardly blinked as she stared at the sight that had appeared on the horizon a few moments before.
Far above the vast, dark, oily Dead Sea that, May knew, held even darker things beneath its surface, dark clouds swirled. Strokes of lightning occasionally threaded their way across the sky, seeming to tie it in crooked bows. It looked like the world's worst thunderstorm was going on somewhere across the sea. Despite the distance, the sight fell over May's heart like a shadow.
May shivered and reached for Somber Kitty. Only too happy to oblige, the hairless catâwho was considered very cute by some, very ugly by many othersâleaped into her lap, placed a paw on each of her shoulders, and licked her cheek with his sandpapery pink tongue. May scrunched up her face in disgust, but she smiled.
As she and Kitty peered out the window together, she thought of her mom, and the many strange and mysterious things that had happened to her since she had fallen into the lake in the West Virginia woods and come out on the wrong side of life, into the world of ghosts. The train slowly veered west, pulling away from the dark, glistening seashore, back into the Hideous Highlands, blanketed in dusk. In the Ever After, it was always dusk and the stars zipped through the sky as if they were meteors.
Decrepit old billboardsâlike the ones they'd been seeing for the last few daysâzoomed past:
WORLD'S LARGEST DEMON TOENAIL, NEXT EXIT
PETEY'S PIRANHA SHACK: OUR PRICES CAN'T BE BEATEN, EVEN IF YOU'VE BEEN EATEN
THE HAIR STILL THERE SALON: DREAD LOCKS, SHRUNKEN HEAD MASSAGES, SCALP REATTACHMENT AVAILABLE
(DISCOUNT FOR THE FIRST 100 HOMESTEADERS TO MENTION THIS AD!)
They'd already passed the World's Largest Tombstone, the World's Longest String of Ectoplasm, several billboards
promising a good time at the Poltergeist Corral, and several more announcing something called “The Carnival at the Edge of the World.”
Sighing, May stood and moved forward through the opulent but decayed train car. In the first cabin she came to, Captain Fabbio's long, ghostly frame sprawled across two beds pushed together, neatly tucked under the sheets and snoring under his mustache.
Beatrice, in the cabin beyond, lay with one dainty, transparent arm splayed over a pile of books, the top of which was
Baedekers Most Popular Destinations for Typhoid Victims.
May took the books, carefully marked their open pages, and put them on the bedside table, then quietly slid a pillow under her friend. Kitty, dangling rather close to Bea's face as May did this, touched her spectral cheek gently with his paw, then pulled back gingerly and licked his paw pads to warm them up.