Ruined 2 - Dark Souls (14 page)

“I thought you said Sally won’t want to see you again.”

“Yeah, well.” Rob sounded dejected. “I have to return her phone.”

“What does the graffiti say, anyway?”

“It’s not like tagging or words or anything,” Rob said, sitting up so he could pull off his sweater.

“What, then?”

“Hard to explain.” He peeled off his socks and dropped them one by one onto the floor. “It’s just like someone’s gone crazy with a paintbrush.”

“Weird,” said Miranda, the word turning into a yawn. Rob looked tired, too, his eyes red.

“Everything is weird about this,” he muttered, flopping back onto his back. “And now Sally knows that I’m weird, too. So much for pretending to be someone else this week.”

“You should try to get some sleep,” Miranda told him. It was late and they were both exhausted. She whispered a quick good night, and then tiptoed back to her room and shut the door. She felt bad for Rob — she really did. But things would be better tomorrow. Sally didn’t seem the kind of girl who’d mock him about his claustrophobia, or decide to dump him because of it.

A sliver of light shone into Miranda’s room through the gap between the curtains. The moon hadn’t been visible a single night since they arrived in York, and it was too late for the Shambles holiday lights. Miranda drew back one of the curtains, feeling that familiar twinge of excitement, curiosity, and dread.

The handsome ghost sat in the attic window, a candle burning in its usual position on the sill. He was staring directly at Miranda’s window, as though he’d been waiting for her. Her heart was thumping. There was something so breathtaking about him, she thought, something sad, something magnetic. In her dream, she’d recoiled from his kiss. But was that what she’d really do? If somehow
she could leap across the chasm between their two windows — their two worlds — would she hesitate? What would it feel like to kiss someone that perfect?

Perhaps ghosts couldn’t kiss the living. Nick had kissed her to prove that he was real. Maybe if the ghost reached for her, pressed his face to hers, she’d feel nothing but a chill wind.

Or maybe it would feel like the most intense, exhilarating thrill she’d ever experienced.

The ghost started raising his hand to the window, as he did every time she saw him. Miranda pressed hers against the pane in anticipation of the jet of cold that would surge through glass and space and dimensions, the freezing shock that would tingle through her body. This time, she noticed, he was lifting his left hand. As he pressed it against the window, Miranda gasped, and not just because an icy tide was shuddering up her arm. The palm of his hand was dark with blood. Dried blood, a crude rainbow of it, as though someone had dragged their fingers through it when the blood was still flowing, swirling the blood in a wild, violent circle.

The ghost seemed pleased with her reaction. He gave her a slow smile, his top lip curling in a way that was almost cruel. The cold pulsing through Miranda rooted her to the spot. She couldn’t take her eyes off the ghost — his haughty, irresistible face, his bloodied hand.

A police car’s siren sounded in the distance, its wail breaking the silence of the night. Miranda tried to steady her breathing. The ghost had never appeared to her for
this long before. He’d never been waiting for her, either, the way he’d seemed to be doing tonight. She wondered why he was showing her the blood on his left hand for the first time. Ghosts reach out to us sometimes; that’s what Nick had told her. They think we can help them, he’d said, and sometimes we can. Was the ghost in the attic reaching out to her? How could she help him?

Another siren joined the chorus — this one higher and louder. The ghost smiled again. Then, carefully, with the thumb and finger of his right hand, he extinguished the candle.

“No,” Miranda whispered, the sharp cold of his touch draining from her hand. But he was gone, the attic window dark and empty. The second siren was getting closer. It wasn’t the only noise: Footsteps thumped along the hallway outside her room.

“Miranda.” It was Rob, on the other side of her door. She peeled her hand off the window. “Miranda!”

“What?” she said, opening the door. “Keep your voice down.”

“Sally just called,” he said, brandishing her cell phone as evidence. He was struggling to pull his jeans on with the other hand. “We have to go.”

“Where? Why?”

“Stonegate,” he said, out of breath. “The White Boar is on fire.”

T
en minutes later, all four members of the Tennant family — hastily dressed and wrapped up against the cold — were striding toward Stonegate. Miranda could tell the precise location of the White Boar from the plume of smoke drifting into the sky.

“Just one thing after another for those poor people,” Peggy was saying to Jeff, still pulling on her gloves as they hurried along Swinegate. Rob ran ahead, beckoning at them to hurry up. He was frantic with worry.

Stonegate smelled like a bonfire. The fire engine had pulled up on St. Helen’s Square, blocking off that end of the street. The firemen were shouting, running up to the White Boar, maneuvering the hoses into position. An ambulance reversed in jerks down Stonegate, its back doors already hanging open. The police, in their domed hats and dark uniforms, talked into their radios, waving people away to the Petergate end of the street. Miranda
couldn’t see flames — just smoke, billowing like smog from the chimney and the windows.

Rob stopped to make a call to Sally, who was using someone else’s cell phone. Miranda kept walking.

“Help me,” groaned a man’s voice, and she turned her head to look. He was sitting on the ground outside a bookstore. His head was crudely bandaged and he was wearing breeches of some kind, and rumpled leather boots. As soon as she caught his eye, cold radiated through her body. Not a victim of the fire, she realized — just another ghost. He groaned again, and reached out to her. Miranda recoiled, almost stepping on Rob’s foot. One of the man’s hands was simply a bloody stump.

“Come on,” said Rob impatiently, jabbing her in the back. “You can look at books tomorrow.”

Miranda walked on, staring back at the wounded man — a Cavalier from the English Civil War, maybe? — until she blinked, and he vanished. More people were out in the street now, stepping out of doorways, wandering down from Petergate. Jeff and Peggy had stopped outside a shop some distance from the pub.

“This is as close as we should get,” said Jeff, slinging a protective arm around Miranda.

“I have to find Sally,” said Rob. Peggy grabbed his arm.

“She and her parents are safe, remember?” she said, sounding both calm and stern — her specialty, thought Miranda. “When she called you, they were already outside.”

A wild lick of flame had darted through a window, flaring out into the street, and the watching crowd gave a collective cry. The firemen trained a steaming jet of water onto it, straining to keep the powerful hoses under control, and the orange flame disappeared as abruptly as the soldier ghost had, a thick cloud of smoke taking its place.

“If the White Boar goes, the whole street could go,” someone nearby said cheerily.

Jeff bent to mutter in Miranda’s ear. “I doubt that,” he said. “It looks as though the worst of it’s over. You can’t see any flames in the windows.”

Firemen were moving in through the inn’s front door now, bellowing and signaling to each other. The whole sky was misted with smoke. Miranda’s eyes were watering. Rob stood with Sally’s purple phone clamped to one ear, his hand pressed over the other ear to block the noise.

“We’re right outside the armor store,” he shouted. “Sal — can you hear me? Do you want me to … come to you? Where are you?”

“This is just awful,” Peg said, shaking her head. She pulled her coat tightly around her. “I feel so terrible for Sally’s parents. First the break-ins, now this.”

Sally was making her way toward them, pushing through the crowd. She was wearing some kind of foil blanket like a cape over her T-shirt and sweatpants.

“Rob!” she cried. She rushed up and hurled herself into his arms. Then Peggy hugged her, and Jeff stepped
forward to hug her as well, and Miranda wanted to hug her, too, because Sally was shaking so much and because she looked so distraught.

“It’s lucky that I was still awake,” she told them, her teeth chattering. She and Rob exchanged quick looks. Lucky, thought Miranda, that they weren’t still down in the cellar when the fire broke out. For once, Rob’s panic attack was a godsend.

“Very lucky,” Peggy said, rubbing Sally’s arm.

“As soon as the smoke alarm went off, I ran downstairs, but the fire was already — it was already behind the bar. Some of the bottles were broken, and … and there was this line of fire on the floor, and I thought that the whole place was going to explode. My father sprayed it all with the extinguisher, but it was spreading and … and we just had to get out.”

“And you’re all okay?” Peggy wanted to know, not sounding as certain as she did five minutes ago. “We saw the ambulance …”

“My parents — they inhaled smoke, and my father burned his hand. Nothing too bad, though. He’ll be okay. My mother, she’s just in a nightgown. That’s why they gave us these.” Sally flapped the foil cape. “My father didn’t even have his shoes on.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and Miranda felt herself welling up, too.

“Take this,” said Peggy, rapidly unwinding her scarf and draping it around Sally’s neck.

“Will your father fit in my shoes?” Jeff asked. He crouched down and started unlacing one of his sneakers. “I can run home and get another pair.”

“You’re all right,” Sally said, brushing away her tears. “Derek from the Punch Bowl gave him a pair of his. Everyone’s being so kind. The police got here really quickly. And the fireman — the one in charge …”

She turned around to point, but there were too many people in the way.

“He said …” Jeff prompted.

“He said it didn’t look too bad, all things considered. No danger of the roof coming down. It looked bad to us, though.”

The crowd was oohing now, the way they would at a fireworks display, because snow had started to fall. Sally lifted her face to the sky, and Miranda did the same thing, looking up at the flakes dropping through the cloud of dark smoke. They splattered onto her face, soft and wet. They were implausibly clean.

Rob was back on Sally’s phone, this time talking to her father.

“It’s out,” he reported. “Just downstairs that’s damaged. Just the bar in the front.”

“Just,” said Sally, shaking her head. She looked at Peggy and Jeff, whose faces were as worried as hers. “It’s our livelihood.”

“They’ll be closed for weeks,” Jeff murmured to Peggy as Sally walked away, hand in hand with Rob, to rejoin her parents. Snow splotched the paving stones around
them. “Come on, you two. There’s nothing we can do to help tonight. Let’s go back and try to get some sleep. This snow looks like it might be sticking.”

“What about Rob?” asked Peggy, looking around for him.

“He’ll be all right,” Jeff said, gently steering her away. “He’ll make his own way home when he’s ready. I gave him a spare key. The lady in that pie shop downstairs made a set of spares for us this morning — she thought it might be useful with four of us coming and going.” Jeff handed Miranda a key of her own.

So Rob had managed to get a key to the flat that night after all, Miranda thought, following her parents down Stonegate. This wasn’t quite the situation he’d imagined, though. It all could have been much worse, she realized, shuddering at the thought of it. Sally and her parents could have been trapped upstairs. Or Sally and Rob could have been trapped in the cellar. If anything had happened to him, her parents wouldn’t have been able to bear it. None of them would be able to bear it. It was silly, Miranda knew, to cry about something that hadn’t even happened, but she couldn’t help herself. She was glad her parents, walking arm in arm, couldn’t see her.

Miranda turned to look back at the smoldering pub, watching the smoke rise like mist. A dark-haired girl walked toward her, looking around wildly, as though she was searching for someone. She must be freezing, Miranda thought: Her long dress was gauzy and flowing, more like a summer party dress than something you’d
wear outside on a winter’s night. Strangest of all, she wasn’t wearing any shoes. As she overtook Miranda, weaving like some dark butterfly, Miranda felt a sudden blast of icy cold. The whoosh of it was so strong, Miranda felt herself falling, as though someone was pushing her out of the way. She staggered a few steps, reaching out a hand to stop herself from tumbling onto the cold cobbles. The girl in the floaty dress drifted on, still looking from side to side. This must be the ghost that Nick had talked about, the one he’d heard about but never spotted — the girl searching for her lover. “Women are the only ones who’ve ever seen her,” he’d said.

“Miranda!” Her father was calling for her, waving her down Little Stonegate, and she hurried to catch up. High above them, people leaned out their windows, calling to each other across the street. One person was asking if they should all evacuate, and another was shouting at them to turn on the radio for the latest report.

On Back Swinegate, in the narrow entrance to a snickelway, one person stood gazing up at the sky. A young guy, with tousled dark hair. He might have been watching the gray cloud of smoke billow and disperse in the wind. He might have been watching the snow, heavier now, pelting down on his upturned face. Whatever it was he was looking at, he was absorbed in it. The one thing he couldn’t see, Miranda realized, was her.

She squeezed between her parents, letting them each take hold of a gloved hand. They all quickened their
pace, scuffing through the snow, arms swinging. This time, she thought, just this once, she’d seen Nick first.

Yellow police tape blocked the front door and windows of the inn, but Rob led Miranda down the side alley, past the trapdoors to the cellar, and through the yard door. It was twelve hours since the fire. The police had declared it arson: Both the internal cellar door and the back door had broken locks.

“I don’t get it,” said Rob. They were all crammed in the doorway leading to the flat upstairs, peering through to the front bar. All the tables, stacked with upturned stools, were charred. The inn’s front windows had been boarded up. The ceiling was streaked with black, and the bar itself — doused with alcohol before being set alight — looked like a giant hunk of charcoal. “Someone broke in through the back door. Why did they need to get into the cellar, too? Nothing was taken or moved this time, right? And they set the fire behind the bar, not in the cellar at all.”

“That’s the million-dollar question,” said Sally. “I thought maybe whoever was setting the fire only broke the lock to the back door to make us
think
that was the point of entry.”

Sally wasn’t exactly cheerful this afternoon, but she was trying to be much more upbeat about everything — kind of like Jenna would have been, Miranda thought.
The inn would need to be closed for only a week, maximum, she’d said. They could even start doing business again in the back before the renovations on the front room were finished. They wouldn’t lose out on
all
the Christmas business.

“You mean, they had access to the cellar, like the vandals did?” Rob nodded slowly, as if he thought that made perfect sense. “Maybe through the trapdoors. And they used the cellar as a way in.”

“Did you tell the police?” Miranda asked.

“Oh yes,” Sally said. “And they asked me if I’d go and put the kettle on, to make them a cup of tea.”

“Don’t those guys watch, like,
Miss Marple?”
said Rob. “They should know that cops don’t always know best. Especially ones who don’t even carry guns, and wear helmets that look like upside-down sand pails with starfish stuck on them.”

“Can we help clear up?” Miranda asked. “We’re only here until Monday but …”

“I know,” said Sally, pouting, and she and Rob gave each other long looks. It was like a high school production of
West Side Story,
Miranda thought, except without the memorable songs. “I hope seeing this place doesn’t make you … doesn’t bring back memories of your accident.”

Miranda opened her mouth to put Sally straight, to tell her that on the night of the accident, the car hadn’t caught on fire. But she didn’t really want to talk about the accident. And neither — judging by the way he flinched a little at the mention of it — did Rob.

“It’s okay,” he said briskly. “Miranda, I’m going to be here helping today and probably tomorrow, too.”

Miranda didn’t think mooning around Sally would be very useful to her parents, but, hopefully, Rob would be better at cleaning up burnt furniture than he was at cleaning out the bathroom sink.

“I thought we had to go and hear Dad deliver his paper on Richard III,” she said. “That’s tomorrow afternoon, remember?”

“You can be the family representative.” He patted her on the head.

“Gee, thanks.” She glanced from Sally to Rob. The meaningful moment was continuing. They certainly didn’t need her around, getting in the way of their significant looks. “Well, let me know if you need an extra pair of hands tomorrow morning. I’m going back to the flat now — okay? Rob?”

“Later,” he said, punching her on the upper arm. He was trying to be affectionate, Miranda knew, so she tried not to rub her arm too ostentatiously as she made her way out through the pub kitchen and into the snowy yard.

Miranda decided to walk the long way home, past Bettys, down busy Davygate and along Parliament Street. Maybe she’d buy her mother some flowers in the market, to wish her luck for tomorrow night’s concert. Her mother had rehearsals all day in Victory Hall, even though its heating had been malfunctioning all week, they could hear mice running around inside the walls, and the singers were threatening a revolt unless something
called a Zip, used to make endless cups of tea, was fixed pronto.

At the flower stand, Miranda picked through buckets of cellophane bundles, finally choosing something aptly called, according to the flower seller, snowdrops. She wound her way past the stalls, careful not to slip on the snow-smeared cobbles.

It wasn’t a surprise, really, when she saw Nick in the market, leaning against the brick wall that framed one of the cut-throughs to the Shambles. He was chewing on a match, one leg bent so his boot rested on the wall. The light fixed to a post on a nearby stall caught his snow-dusted hair, and the sole glass button still dangling from his coat. Maybe he was waiting for her, she thought, approaching him; maybe it was coincidence. But at least he wasn’t leaping out from behind her, for a change.