The Bagpiper’s Ghost (9 page)

Trembling, Peter shook his head. “Never!”

The piper's face got grim, but Jennifer cried, “Don't kill him. He's the only one who knows which stane the token is in.” She shook the hankie at them.

“I'll die first,” Peter said in Andrew MacFadden's voice.

“Ye coof, yer already dead,” the dog said.

“I'll find the stane,” Jennifer promised. “Let me try.” She handed the hankie back to Gran and, without another word, squeezed past the piper with his sword, past her possessed brother and her grandmother and the dog. “Stay here and make sure he doesn't hurt Peter. I'll find that token. I promise.” She pushed open the ironwork gate just a sliver and slipped through.

“I ken ye will, lass,” Gran cried. “This feels richt in my bones.”

“Ye have till midnight,” warned the piper. “That's all I'll offer ye.”

“But that's only minutes away,” Jennifer said.

“Midnight,” Gran repeated. “On solstice eve. O' course. O' course. A time o' power and the exact time ye first encountered these fey folk.”

“Don't worry, Gran. I know I can find it.” Jennifer turned to look at the graveyard behind her, and her heart sank.

There were stones everywhere. Gravestones and headstones, a stone wall, and stones in the church ruins as well. How would she ever find the one stone that was three from the bottom and four above?

“From the bottom of
what?
” she whispered. “And above what?” She shook her head miserably. “Mary MacFadden, your brother's a pig!”

As she spoke the name, a white mist rose from one particular gravestone. Slowly it formed into a woman's shape and came up behind Jennifer.

“Who calls me?” the Lady in White asked, her voice like a wisp of wind. “Who curses my ain?”

Jennifer whirled about. This close, Mary MacFadden was almost solid, though as white as a marble statue. She had regular features that didn't quite add up to beauty but certainly had charm. Only her eyes were dark, emitting no light.

Jennifer was surprised at how calm she felt in the ghost's presence. Not frightened at all.

“Who called?” the Lady in White said.

Suddenly Jennifer
was
frightened. Somehow the ghost had heard her. Her knees began to tremble.

“I suppose I called you,” she told the ghost. “And I meant it when I said your brother's a pig.” She wondered briefly if that was a smart thing to say. After all, she didn't want to make the ghost angry.
But it's the truth
, she thought.
Andrew MacFadden
is
a pig!
And just as suddenly, she wasn't afraid anymore.

“Your brother kept a message from you all those years ago, as you know, and he
still
won't give it up. But he told us the secret without meaning to, back at our house. He said, ‘In the stane a token of luv. Three from the bottom and four above.' Do you know what that means?”

It had been two hundred and fifty years, after all. Iain the piper had forgotten. What if Mary's memory hadn't lasted that long, either?

For a moment, a shadow passed over that shadow face, a quick flicker, and then gone. “Och, aye—I remember. The token in the stane wasna there. I looked at the time, but it wasna there.” She shook her head. “Nae, that's nae richt. There's something else troubling me.” She gave a sad little shadow smile.

“Where is the stane?” Jennifer asked again.

“Our stane,” Mary MacFadden whispered. Then she turned away and ran like the haar, like the sea mist, over the brown scrub grass to the back side of the little church, her feet never touching the ground.

Jennifer had a hard time keeping up. But she got to the church just as Mary MacFadden was counting the stones.

“One, two, three.” She was going left to right along the bottom of a set of stones that was all but hidden behind a small stand of broom. Then she counted four up from there and placed her white hand over that stone. The stone was covered with a fuzzing of green lichen and moss.

“Here.” Her hand was as insubstantial as the rest of her. She turned with a puzzled expression and said to Jennifer, “But I canna seem to open it.”

Jennifer gawped at her. “Open a stone?”

“Noo I recall it. On the day Iain went off wi'oot a word, I came here to find if he'd left me something in our stane. We always left things here. A rose. A ribbon. A white pebble. Tokens of our luv. But never luv notes. He couldna write, ye see. Or read. But I couldna slide the stane open. It had been harled over, and I couldna put my hand in.” Dark tears ran down her cheeks. “And then he was gone forever.”

Gone forever
.

The words burned in Jennifer's mind. If she didn't get the stone open in time, Peter would be gone forever, too.

“Let me try!” Jennifer's fingers scrabbled without success on the stone.

She could hear the piper and Peter quarreling outside the gate. She could hear Gran's voice trying to quiet them. The dog was suddenly howling. Only the horse was still.

And then the church bell began its inexorable toll.

Midnight had begun.

Fourteen

Midnight Magic

Jennifer pushed at the top of the stone and at the bottom. She hammered with the heel of her fist in the middle. She tried to pry around the edges—top, bottom, sides. Nothing worked. The harled stone wouldn't move.

Her fingers hurt from trying.

And the bell kept tolling.

Think
, she told herself.
Slow down, Jennifer, and think. This is magic, not stonemasonry
.

She hadn't a sledgehammer or a steel levering bar. And she doubted that the piper would lend her his ghostly sword.

“What else?” she whispered to herself. “What else beats stone?”

Meow
.

She looked down at her feet. The white cat was sitting there, slowly washing its back leg.

“How did you get in?” Then she remembered that she'd left the iron gate ajar just a sliver.

The cat left off washing its hind leg and looked into the distance, through the Lady in White. She put out a white paw.

Jennifer remembered the cat making just that motion earlier, when Molly and she had been playing Stone, Scissors, Paper. “Of course!”

Stone breaks scissors.

Scissors cut paper.

And paper …

“Covers stone,” she whispered. “I need paper.” Then she remembered the piece of notebook paper in her pocket, the one with all the notes about ghosts and green ladies and banshees scribbled on it.

“This had better work,” she told the cat, because she knew she didn't have time for anything else. The midnight toll was going relentlessly on.

Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the paper and placed it carefully over the stone—third from the bottom and four from above.

The paper fit exactly.

Then she leaned her weight against the paper, whispering passionately, “Paper covers stone. Paper covers stone. Paper covers …”

Her hand suddenly slipped into the stone as if the stone were made of not-quite-jelled Jell-O; cold Jell-O, two hundred or more years cold.

She gave herself no time to be amazed. She
had
no time for anything but action. The midnight bell was still tolling, though she'd lost count of how many chimes had actually rung.

Feeling around, her fingers touched something inside the stone, something that was hard and round. Carefully she drew the token out. When she was entirely free of the jelly-stone, she stepped away, wiping her hand on her shirt.

The paper floated to the ground.

She looked at what she held in her hand. It was a ring of gold, with an inscription encircling the outside. Holding the ring up toward the moonlight, she managed to read: “Even death will nae part us.”

“I think,” said Jennifer, turning, “that this belongs to you.” She held the ring out to the Lady in White.

Mary MacFadden took the ring, read the inscription, and for the first time smiled. “He said that often. He must hae told the goldsmith what to write.” Her eyes lost their black shroud look and reflected the moonlight.

Jennifer thought,
I was wrong about her. She's
very
beautiful
.

And then the bell rang again.

“Hurry,” Jennifer said to the ghost. “Oh, please, Mary MacFadden—hurry!”

The Lady in White turned and ran toward the piper, her small feet inches above the ground. Not a blade of grass moved as she passed over.

“Gran—open the gate!” Jennifer cried. “Open it. She's got the token, she's got the ring.”

Gran's head jerked up. She said something to the piper, spun about, and pushed open the gate. And all of them—piper, Peter, Gran, the dog, and the horse—raced into the graveyard.

Peter was fast, but the piper was faster. He met Mary MacFadden by her gravestone. Picking her up in his arms, he twirled her around and around till her skirts billowed out and made a soft
shusssh
ing. He kissed her brow and then her nose and then both her cheeks.

They broke apart and stared at each other and laughed, the sound suddenly louder and more perfect than any tolling bell.

Then the piper set the Lady in White down carefully, as if she were made of precious glass—
for surely
, Jennifer thought,
she's no longer flesh and bone
. He slipped the ring onto her finger.

“Even death,” he mouthed to her, “will nae part us.”

Mary MacFadden turned then and, glancing over her shoulder, addressed Peter.

“I fergive ye, Andrew,” she cried. “Yer my brother, my twin soul, and I fergive ye from the bottom o' my heart. Ye meant fer the best, but ye were wrong then. And yer wrong noo.” She turned back to Iain and raised her beautiful, shining face to him.

He bent down to her and kissed her again, though this time on the mouth, first lightly, and then with a great passion.

At the moment of the kiss, the two literally became one, their ghostly shapes coalescing into a white pillar of mist that rose higher and higher, until it was lost against the whiteness of the solstice moon.

Jennifer felt hot tears cascading down her cheeks as she watched them, and she cried out, “You're safe, Peter. Safe.”

Just then the horse whinnied, the dog howled, and Gran cried out, “No, Jennie lass. No.”

Jennifer turned then and saw that it was not Peter staring out at her but the furious eyes of Andrew MacFadden.

“What hae ye done, ye meddlesome lass? Ye've lost me my ain sister.” He raised a fist to strike her.

And the last bell of midnight tolled.

At that very moment, a hubbub began outside the gates, as if hundreds of people were suddenly gathering there. A mob of them.

Peter put his head back and laughed grimly. “As ye lost me my sister, so I'll tak yer brother frae yer side. The Sluagh is come, and I'll gae wi' them. Ye'll ne'er see me again.”

“The Sluagh?” It was one of the words on her piece of paper. Desperately she tried to remember what the Sluagh was.

“The grim parade o' the dead,” the dog shouted. “Jennifer lass—dinna let the madman oot.”

But Peter had already started for the gate, faster than Jennifer or Gran or the dog.

Only the horse could still get there in time. He barreled ahead of Peter, his mighty hooves gouging divots out of the brown grass. Then he slammed his great shoulder against the gate. As his shoulder touched the ironwork, he flung his head back and screamed. It was an awful, high-pitched sound that seemed so unlikely coming from such a large animal.

A magic creature can't touch cold iron
, Jennifer thought, remembering the burn mark on the dog's back.
Oh, horse, oh, Thunder, how badly have you been hurt?

Thunder limped away from the gate and stood, shuddering, by the wall. But he'd done what he'd set out to do, and the gate was closed.

Jennifer could smell the singed hair and burnt flesh all the way from where she stood.

“Lucky I've brought my unguent,” Gran said as she walked over to the horse. She opened her purse “There'll be a great need fer it this nicht.” The horse trembled slightly as she began to rub the oily stuff into his burnt skin.

Peter stopped by the ironwork gate, hands at his sides. He put his head back and howled. It was a worse sound than any the horse had made, and the little hairs on the back of Jennifer's neck stood straight up.

But that howl didn't stop the progress of the Sluagh, the doomed souls, who marched in a grim, shuffling line beyond the cemetery walls.

Fifteen

Forgiveness

By the time Jennifer got to the gate, half the Sluagh had passed by. But there were still plenty for her to see, a long twisting line of doomed souls slumping along.

There were soldiers in kilts with swords sticking out of their chests. A woman with a noose around her neck, eyes bulging wide. A mother and two children horribly burnt, the puckered scars still red and raw. Three men in long black coats and white collars, thin garrotes encircling their necks. Two women in ball gowns with broken bottles in their hands. A farmer in a slouched hat, a knife in his eye. A fisherman in a bright yellow slicker, half his face eaten away.

There were hundreds of others, all equally, horribly dead. As they marched along, they were accompanied by a strange babble, of which Jennifer could occasionally understand a word—of pain, of horror, of regret.

She turned away. Her stomach and chest were tight, the way she felt right before getting sick. She was afraid she might throw up, and she didn't dare. Not here. Not now.

Instead, she sought Gran's eyes.

“Look away, Jennifer, 'tis nae a sight fer a bairn,” Gran said, as she massaged the burn ointment into the horse's shoulder.

“Who are they, Gran?” Jennifer said in a whisper.

“They're the unshriven dead, the unburied, the unmourned and unloved. Those who killed themselves or were left to die alone, by accident or by design. Dinna look more, Jennie lass. If ye do, they can call ye oot, and then ye'll have to gae wi' them. And I couldna bear that.”