Ruined 2 - Dark Souls (4 page)

“The place,” the girl said. “I’ll show you where he locked them up.”

“No!” The word erupted from Miranda’s mouth. She was scared now — scared of this strange girl and her cold touch, scared of where she might be led. Miranda took a step back, and then another. She didn’t want the girl touching her anymore. She didn’t want to see where anyone was locked up. “Go … go away!”

The girl’s arm was still outstretched, but Miranda was free of her. She took another step away, too afraid to turn her back. She shouldn’t have wandered down here by herself. Just a few more steps, and then she’d run. Run back down the alley or snickelway or whatever it was, to the safety of lights and cars and other people.

“She won’t hurt you,” said a raspy voice behind her. A boy’s voice, with an English accent. Miranda spun around — her heart throbbing in her throat, practically choking her.

The guy in the black leather coat stood there, blocking the path to the alley. The expression on his face was part incredulous, part amused. He pulled a single match from a pack in his pocket and chewed on it as though it were a toothpick. Miranda stood dead still, not daring to move.

“How do you know?” she managed to say. He shrugged, throwing the gnawed match into the shadows.

“Stands to reason,” he said, his voice softer now. “After all, she’s only a ghost.”

“How do you know that?” Miranda asked him, trying to swallow down her nerves. A gust of wind blew a piece of litter along the ground. In the distance, there were car horns sounding and the Minster bell tolling the half hour. Even in the semidarkness, the eyes of the pale Goth seemed to bore right through her.

“How do I know she won’t hurt you? Or how do I know she’s a ghost?”

“Both.” Miranda shot a nervous glance to her left. The girl had disappeared.

“Well, I know that ghosts can’t hurt anyone. Spook us, maybe.” His mouth curled into a sardonic smile. “What’s she going to do — hit you? Her hand would just pass right through you.”
With his left arm he mimicked a slow-motion punch into the air.

“But I
felt
her,” argued Miranda. The guy looked surprised. And maybe, thought Miranda, a little impressed.

“Aren’t you special?” he said, his tone mocking.

“So maybe you’re wrong about her being a ghost.” Miranda wasn’t going to let him patronize her. “If I shouldn’t be able to
feel
anything.”

“Oh, you can feel things,” he said. There was only one button left on his coat, Miranda noticed for the first time. It was clear glass, and it was hanging by a thread: That was why the coat was always flapping open. “You’ll feel cold, for a start. Drawn in, maybe. But they need our help if they want to do any harm, to other people or to ourselves. Mary there, though, she’s not a troublesome one.”

“How do you know her name?” Miranda was still suspicious.

“I know your name,” he said. “Miranda, isn’t it?”

Miranda’s mind raced: Knowing about the icy touch of a ghost was one thing, but how could he possibly know
this?
Then she thought of the first time she saw him, when he was lurking in that doorway along the Shambles. Her mother had called for her, telling her to come in and meet Lord Poole….

“And I know your name,” she retorted. Two could play at this game. “It’s Nick.”

For the briefest of moments he looked rattled. Then he grinned at her and gave a sweeping theatrical bow.
“Nick Gant. At your service, milady.”

“Miranda Tennant,” she said. “But how do you know this … Mary’s name?”

“Asked her, didn’t I? When I was about fourteen, mucking around here with a spray can, looking for some trouble. Lots of people know about her. The ghost tours come this way every night. If you stand here long enough, you’ll hear one of the guides spinning a tale about her and the other kids. Rubbish, mostly. Some of the guides know what they’re talking about, but most of them are just actors. It’s all top hats and terror with them. Wouldn’t know a ghost if one tugged on their coats.”

“What?” Miranda was startled. Nick had heard her mother call her name in the street: That, she understood. But how did he know that Mary had tugged on the hem of her jacket? Miranda hadn’t told him that.

“It’s what Mary does,” he said, looking surprised that she was even asking. “And then she offers to show you where the bodies were left. No point in following her, though. I’ve tried it, and she just disappears.”

“Who is she?” Miranda asked.

“Went to a ragged school here,” he told her. “That’s what they called them — ragged schools for poor kids. Late 1840s, I think. It was a slum then. Bedern. That’s the street’s name.”

“Oh.” Miranda nodded. She must have looked as confused as she felt.

“I say ‘here,’ but the building’s gone. It was a place for kids nobody else wanted — you know, orphans or
runaways. The destitute. They’d get lessons and something to eat. People gave money to support it — the church, rich people. Some say the kids in this one were farmed out as slave labor around town as well, to clean chimneys, that kind of thing. I tried to ask Mary once about it, but she’s not much of a talker.” “I didn’t know ghosts
could
talk.”

“Some can, some can’t. Some you see only once in your life, and others’ll be hanging around every day.”

Miranda thought of Jenna. Miranda had been back to the cornfield dozens of times, but she’d never seen, or even sensed, Jenna ever again. No matter how hard she willed it, Miranda couldn’t make her best friend reappear.

“And why does Mary keep coming back to this street?” she asked.

“Why does she haunt it? The usual reasons.” Nick looked at her as though she were stupid. “Violent or unnatural death. Unfinished business, you know.”

Miranda shrugged, as though she knew all this already, when really she knew absolutely nothing about the ghost world. Meeting someone who understood all this, who could explain things to her — it was more than a relief. It was exciting.

“When any of the kids died, the man who was running the place didn’t report it. Didn’t want to lose the money for them, I’ve heard. Just piled up the bodies in some kind of cupboard, hoping the winter cold would keep the corpses from stinking.”
“Horrible.” Miranda shuddered. “And Mary was one of those poor kids?”

“Sounds like it,” said Nick. He pulled his coat tightly around him. His hands were bare. He had to be cold. “You hear all sorts of wild tales from the tour guides about how the stench of it finally drove him mad, and how he stabbed all the other children and got carted off to an asylum. But then this place would be crawling with ghosts, I reckon.”

“And it’s not?”

“Just Mary and a few others. There’s one over there, by the drainpipe — see him? The little boy?”

Miranda peered, but she couldn’t see a thing except the drain and the brick wall. She shook her head in frustration.

“Interesting,” said Nick. “You can see Mary, but not him. I expect he doesn’t want you to see him, or need you to see him. They’re funny things, ghosts. Temperamental.”

“So you’re saying … I can’t see
all
ghosts,” Miranda said, struggling to understand. “Just the ones who want me to see them?”

“Want you to see them, or don’t care one way or the other who does. There are some famous ghosts in York I’ve never seen, like the girl who’s supposed to wander down Stonegate in the middle of the night, looking for the lover who abandoned her. Women are the only ones who’ve ever seen her. People say she doesn’t trust men.”
“And this little boy doesn’t want me to see him.” Miranda kept staring at the blank patch of wall, not sure whether to believe Nick or not.

“Don’t take it personally,” he said, his tone mocking. “You got Mary to talk to you. She doesn’t talk to many people, you know. Maybe you
are
special.”

“I don’t know,” Miranda said, feeling as stupid as she sounded. Something about Nick’s gaze made her awkward and shy. “I don’t really understand much about seeing ghosts yet. It’s only … it’s only been the last six months,” she blurted. “Since my friend died. I saw her — once. Just the one time. But never again. I don’t know why. I mean, I don’t know why I saw her the night she died, and why I never saw her again. I’ve seen some other ghosts. Since then, I mean. But nobody I know. It’s weird.”

Miranda didn’t know why she was saying all this to a complete stranger. She never talked about ghosts; she hardly ever mentioned the accident. And now here she was, standing in a dark street in a foreign country, blabbing all her personal business to a weird guy. A weird guy with a cool accent — but still.

“World’s full of unhappy souls,” Nick observed. “People wanting to be seen, or heard, or helped. Think of it this way — you should be glad you’ve never seen your friend again. Maybe she doesn’t need to haunt anyone or anywhere. Perhaps she appeared to you that one time because she wanted to say good-bye. That was
her
unfinished business.”
Miranda bowed her head. She was glad it was dark so Nick wouldn’t be able to see that she was blinking back tears.

“I should be going,” she said, sniffing, trying to get a grip. “I should be getting back.”

“Are you … are you around tomorrow?” Nick’s tone had changed, and he was looking at her in a different way, as though he felt sorry for her. He’d seen her crying, Miranda realized. How embarrassing.

“Well, I’ll be doing some stuff with my family….”

“Monday?”

“I guess…. Sure. Monday’s fine,” Miranda said slowly. What was she getting herself into? Was he … asking her out?

“I’ll take you to hear something, okay?”

“A concert?” she asked, puzzled. Nick smiled, shaking his head.

“Not a concert. Something much more interesting. Meet me on High Petergate, by the city walls. Bootham Bar. Outside the green front door. You can’t miss it.”

Nick spun on his heel, his coat flapping open. Like a night bird about to take flight, Miranda thought, and disappearing into the darkness. Disappearing down the snickelway, at any rate.

“What time?” she called at his back.

“Dusk!” he shouted, without turning around. Miranda stood for a moment, talking herself through the confusing instructions. High Petergate. Bootham Bar. The green front door. And what did “dusk” mean?
“Dusk isn’t a time,” Miranda complained aloud, and then she remembered that Mary might still be hanging around. She’d had enough encounters with ghost children for one night. She took off, running down the snickelway back to the reassuring bustle of Goodramgate. Although Nick had walked that way less than a minute earlier, he was nowhere to be seen.

T
he Sunday afternoon walk to Clifford’s Tower was longer than Miranda thought it would be, but maybe her father’s confusing and circuitous route was to blame. Luckily, they could see the tower from a distance, because they ended up wandering through a packed, mazelike parking lot for the last ten minutes.

Everything seemed smaller here, Miranda thought — the cars, the parking spaces, the lanes the cars were expected to squeeze down. It was just as well that they hadn’t rented a car for their stay: They’d never manage to negotiate a Legoland parking lot like this.

“Day-trippers,” joked her father, with a dismissive wave, as they rounded the line of parked tour buses.

“ ‘York is … the second most visited city in England,’ ” her mother read from her guidebook, promptly bumping into a car’s side-view mirror. “After London, I guess.”

“Does the book say how we get up to
that?”
Rob pointed toward the tower. “Not that this parking lot tour isn’t fascinating. The fumes, the public restrooms, the trash cans, the arguments over handicapped spaces …”

Rising up in front of them, almost in the middle of the lot, was a deep-green hill, so perfectly smooth and conical that it looked fake. It
was
fake, Peggy told them, insisting on risking bodily harm by reading while walking.

“It’s not a hill, it’s a motte,” she said, squinting at the book. “An artificial earth mound. William the Conquerer again. The city’s too flat, and he needed a hill for his castle.”

“Little-known fact,” called Jeff, who was leading them toward the hill. “It’s named Clifford’s Tower in honor of Clifford the Big Red Dog.”

“ ‘Henry Clifford, fifth earl of Cumberland,’ actually,” Peggy read. “ ‘The Cliffords were hereditary constables of the’ … oh, whatever.”

She closed the book and stuffed it into her bag.

“Are we there yet?” asked Rob.

The only part of the castle that remained was a fat, rounded, roofless tower. It was perched like a stone crown on the top of the hill. The only way up was via a long, concrete staircase, slippery with icy damp. Apart from a pair of preoccupied geese pecking away at the grass at the top of the hill, and the ticket seller in the booth, the Tennants seemed to be the only ones there.

Inside the tower was an empty shell, a stone-flagged open space flecked with patches of moss. Miranda was pleased, in a way. She liked the idea of ruins. It was so much easier to imagine how things used to look hundreds of years ago if there weren’t parts changed or added on, or — even worse — turned into rooms of worthy but dull exhibits. Here the tower had been left carved out and skeletal. A snaking stone staircase led to what used to be the upper level, where the king would have had his apartments.

Now, in the absence of floors and walls and a roof, there was just the “wall walk,” where visitors could pace their way around the tower’s perimeter and look out across the city. Miranda’s parents, of course, went nuts at the prospect of a 360-degree view because — she’d often observed — anyone middle-aged thought that gazing at views and gardens and distant horizons was the most interesting thing in the world. But even Rob was eager to bound up the twisting staircase, despite its close confines, to reach the top of the tower.

Miranda lingered downstairs for a while, reading the information signs and trying to imagine what this level of the castle looked like hundreds of years ago. William the Conqueror had built the hill but not this stone tower, she read. The original tower was wooden, and known as York Castle. It was replaced by William’s descendants two hundred years after it had burned down twice.

The flagstones beneath Miranda’s feet weren’t exactly flat, and the uneven slope seemed to be giving her sea legs. She felt wobbly, and for a moment she worried she
was actually sliding backward toward the entry gate. This was strange. She’d been walking around York all day, along cobbled streets and uneven pavements: She should be used to this by now.

“What is wrong with you?” she muttered to herself. They were in York, not California; the ground couldn’t possibly be moving. It couldn’t possibly be … rumbling. The distant sound she heard couldn’t be coming from deep within the earth. It was probably a train, or a truck crossing the river.

“Come up, honey!” Her mother was leaning over the railings two stories above. “You get an amazing view of the Minster from here.”

Miranda stumbled rather than walked to the spiral staircase, annoyed with herself for being so clumsy. She also wished that the soles of her boots were thicker. Icy darts were prickling her feet.

At the top of the stairs, Miranda took a few tentative steps, all too aware that the wall walk sloped as well. It felt as though it was drooping toward the empty space in the center. There were railings, of course, but they seemed very insubstantial — flimsy, even — now that Miranda was up so high. The ground beneath her feet still felt weirdly fluid, not firm and stonelike at all. Rob and her parents were wandering around with no problem, leaning over the low outer wall, taking pictures. They weren’t sliding around or desperately gripping the railings, as Miranda was now. What was happening? Was this what people called vertigo?

With each step, Miranda felt as though she was about to be tipped into the abyss. The stones beneath her feet were alive, writhing and twisting out of place. Tendrils of frigid cold laced up her legs. Just a few steps away, the members of her family were pointing things out to each other; Rob was crouching to balance his camera on the outer wall. Miranda didn’t have the strength to cry out. All her energy was focused on staying upright, of not being jerked over the railings and down, down, down to the mossy stones below. Some force was tipping and dragging her, and she couldn’t stop it. With both her hands trembling on the slippery railings, she faced the pit of the tower, willing herself to stay upright.

“Don’t look down,” Miranda told herself in a cracked whisper, trying to ignore her rising panic. Her skin was pulsing, prickling with cold, even though she was wearing a woolen jacket, jeans, and thick socks under knee-high boots. She had to step away from the brink. She had to throw herself on the ground if necessary, and claw her way to safety, fingernails digging into the crevices between the stones. The one thing she should
not
do was look down.

But she was so dizzy now, so disoriented, Miranda couldn’t help it: She looked down. At first her head flopped and her eyes couldn’t focus. Rather than seeing anything at all, she heard the rumbling again, except now it didn’t sound at all like a train or anything mechanical. It was the sound of mumbling voices — lots of voices, rising up from the stones below. And there was
whispering, too, like the rustle of trees in a summer breeze. A whole forest of trees, swishing and shaking in the wind.

But there were no trees on this man-made hill. And below her, there weren’t treetops — or even stones. Where earlier there’d been a courtyard with a few signs and small gift shop, there were only faces. Dozens of faces. Hundreds of faces, all staring up at her. Gray faces attached to ashy bodies, crumbling, dissolving, and reforming in front of her eyes. Up they rose, a charcoal cloud of … what? Were these ghosts? If only Nick were here, to explain what on earth was going on.

They didn’t look like the ghosts she’d seen before, like the farmer, or the woman in white on the Shambles, or the little girl ghost from yesterday — no clothes, no wounds. They looked like creatures of ash and smoke, not real people.

Their hands stretched toward her, shooting cold beams into her body. All the faces looked stricken, as though
they
were the ones looking at a ghost. Maybe she
was
the ghost, Miranda thought, her mind racing. Maybe she’d died this summer in the cornfield, and everything after that had just been some grand delusion. But how could that be possible? How was any of this possible?

Miranda closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at them anymore. She was leaning, she knew it, stretching over the top of the railings, unable to keep her balance. Any second now she would topple over and fall into the
whooshing gray mass, that ashy pit of open mouths and reaching hands.

“Did you bring your camera?” Her mother took her arm, gently pulling her back from the brink. Wildly, Miranda grabbed at her, eyes still clenched shut. “What is it, honey — are you okay? Don’t you feel well? Jeff! Come here! Miranda, you look so pale.”

With her parents on either side of her, leading her away from the railings, Miranda opened her eyes. Walking was so easy when they were holding her. The mumbling and whispering faded away. One, two, three steps, and she was sitting on the ground, her back against the low outer wall. When her mother let go of her arm, Miranda grabbed her again, pulling her down.

“Don’t let go,” she whispered. Her legs were still tingling with cold, and she was shaking. Her father leaned over, pressing the back of his hand against her forehead and then her cheeks.

“You feel all clammy,” he said. “Maybe you’re coming down with something.”

Miranda nodded. That was the easiest thing to do. No point in trying to explain what she’d heard, and seen, and felt, because instinctively she knew that nobody else here would experience any of it. Rob was leaning over the railings at this very minute, taking a photo, not looking startled or appalled in any way.

“One of those geese has managed to infiltrate,” he called over. “Looks like it’s settling in for the winter. Hey, Dormouse — what’s up with you?”

“Nothing,” squeaked Miranda. Her parents had had enough to worry about the past six months without adding “daughter’s supernatural hallucinations” to the list.

“Maybe a touch of vertigo,” suggested her father. “The height might be bothering you. This wall is pretty low.”

“I wouldn’t have brought you two up here when you were small.” Peggy, crouching beside her, planted a soft kiss on Miranda’s hair. “Rob would have been headfirst over the wall by now. Or dangling from those railings.”

“Tired?” Rob sauntered up. He stood next to Miranda and nudged her with his knee.

“I’m okay,” Miranda said, reaching up for his arm so she could pull herself to her feet. All she wanted to do was get out of there before the ash people came swirling up for her again, with their terrible agonized faces and crumbling bodies of smoky cloud. “Walk me down the stairs?”

“Only a touch of vertigo,” her father said again, as though he were reassuring himself.

“Great,” Rob muttered, so only Miranda could hear. “Just what we need in this family — another basket case.”

Miranda’s father walked her back to the flat while Peggy and Rob set out for Little Bettys to wait in line for a table. She needed to sleep, she told her parents; she’d feel better after getting some rest.

Waiting for them at the flat was a very small brown-paper package. It had been pushed through the brass slot in the front door.

“It’s for you,” her father said, scooping it up and examining the faint spidery handwriting. “Miss Miranda Tennant.”

There was no address on the package and no stamps; it must have been delivered by hand. Miranda leaned against the wall to rip it open. Her legs still felt like Jell-O, though the cold darts shooting up from the soles of her feet had disappeared as soon as she got out of Clifford’s Tower.

By the size and shape of the package, Miranda could tell it contained a book. She slipped it out of the brown paper. It was as small as a notebook. Its faded cover was green, and some of the stitches in its spine had worked themselves loose. The words
Tales of Old York
were spelled out in Gothic gilt letters on the cover.

“No note?” asked her father, taking the book from her and running a finger over the indented lettering. Miranda shook her head. But they both knew, without having to say it, that this was the book Lord Poole had mentioned. It looked about as old as
he
was, Miranda thought, and when her father flicked through the opening chapter, Miranda could smell the pleasant mustiness of the pages.

“How nice off him to drop it off.” Jeff gave an appreciative sniff. “Look at these illustrations.”

The pictures in the book were drawings done in intricate detail with black ink. The caption of one read
The Timeless Shambles,
which was true: The street looked pretty much the same as it did now, minus the tourists and holiday decorations. Jeff flicked forward to a doublepage spread of small, almost fussy drawings of columns, a large stone basin, and some kind of stone plaque carved with demons pushing screaming people into a giant cauldron licked by flames.

“ ‘The Doomstone, from the crypt of York Minster,’ ” Jeff read aloud. Miranda shuddered, thinking of the desperate ashen faces at the tower, and her father snapped the book shut. “Sorry, Verandah. You’re supposed to be taking a nap. Sure you’ll be okay here by yourself?”

Miranda told him she would. Sleep would help, she thought. The ghoulish faces of the ash people would disappear when she fell asleep. With any luck, she’d be asleep for a long, long time.

When Miranda awoke, the flat was quiet. According to her cell phone, almost two hours had passed since she’d climbed into bed. The curtains were closed, something her father must have done before he went off to meet the others at Little Bettys. On the table next to her bed, he’d left
Tales of Old York.

Miranda picked up the book and flipped through, pausing at a full-page illustration of York Minster
engulfed in flames. Her mother had said something about a fire there, after the Minster was struck by lightning and badly damaged — but that had been relatively recent, some time in the 1980s. This book was over a hundred years old, according to the date on its copyright page. Even older than Lord Poole, she thought, smiling. T
HE
M
ADMAN’S
F
IRE,
1829, the picture’s caption read.

She noticed that another page was hanging loose from the binding, and she opened the book to tuck it back in. The heading at the top of that page read M
ASS
S
UICIDE IN
C
LIFFORD’S
T
OWER.
Miranda wriggled up into a seated position, jamming her pillows behind her and twisting to get as much light as possible.