A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online

said. “You mean the ghosts.”

    Nita stared.

    “Welcome to Ireland,” said her aunt.

2: Cill Cumhaid / Kilquade

    Nita sat back and blinked.

    Her aunt stirred her tea and said, “Do ghosts bother you?”

    “Not particularly,” Nita said, wondering just how to deal with this line of inquiry. Wizards knew that very few ghosts had anything to do with people’s souls hanging around somewhere. Most apparitions, especially ones that repeated, tended to be caused by a kind of recording that violent emotion could leave on matter in certain circumstances, impressing its energy directly into the molecular structure of physical things. Over long periods of time the recording would fade, but in the meantime it would replay every now and then, for good reasons or no reason, and upset the people who happened to see it. And if they happened to believe that such a thing was caused by human souls, the effects would get steadily worse, fed by the emotions of the living.

    Nita knew all this, certainly. But how much of it could she safely tell her aunt? And how to get it across without sounding like she knew more than a fourteen-year-old should?

    “Good,” her aunt was saying. She drank her tea and looked at Nita across the table with those cool blue-grey eyes. “Did you hear the church bells, earlier?”

    “Uh, no. I must have been asleep.”

    “We have a little church down the road,” Aunt Annie said. “About three hundred years ago, after the English killed their King—Charles the First, it was—his ‘replacement,’ a man named Oliver Cromwell, came through here.” Her aunt took another long drink of tea. “He and his army went up and down this country throwing out the Irish landowners and installing English ones in their places. He sacked cities and burned houses, and got himself quite a name for unnecessary cruelty.” Aunt Annie looked out the kitchen window, into the near-dark, watching the apple trees in the back yard move slightly in the wind. “I think what you heard was, well, a reminder of some of his people, who were camped here on guard late at night. You can hear the horses, and you can hear the soldiers talking, though you usually can’t make out what they’re saying.”

    “Like they were in the next room,” Nita said.

    “That’s right. The memory just reasserts itself every now and then; other people have heard it happening. It’s usually pretty low-key.” She looked at Nita keenly.

    Nita shrugged in agreement. “They didn’t bother me. They didn’t seem particularly, well, ‘ghostly.’ No going ‘ooooooo’ or trying to scare anyone.”

    “That’s right,” her aunt said, sounding relieved. “Are you hungry?”

    “I could eat a cow,” Nita said, suspecting that in this household it would be wiser not to offer to eat horses, not that she was big on the concept anyway.

    “I’ve got some hamburger,” her aunt said, getting up, “and some chicken...”

    Nita got up to help, and poked around the kitchen a bit. All the appliances were about half the size she was used to. She wondered whether this was her aunt’s preference, or whether most of the stoves and refrigerators sold here were like that, for on the drive in she had kept getting a feeling that everything was smaller than usual, had been scaled down somewhat. The rooms in her aunt’s house were smaller than she was used to, as well, reinforcing the impression. “So have you got other ghosts,” Nita said, “or are those all?”

    “Nope, that’s it.” Her aunt chuckled and pulled out a frying pan. “You want more, though, you won’t have far to go. This country is thick with them. Old memories. Everything here has a long memory... longer than it should have, maybe.” She sighed and went rooting in a drawer for a few moments. “A lot of history in Ireland,” Aunt Annie said, “a lot of bad experiences and bad feelings. It’s a pain in the butt sometimes.” She came up with a spatula. “Do you want