Ghostheart by Ananda Braxton-Smith Read Free Book Online

some tapers. As Pa clenched his jaw and muttered, the old ones wept and rocked and sang up into the night:
    Reckless lovely, joying boy

Hatching, fledging, taking flight;

Perch us in your Heart

Sing us in your Mouth

Return to us Rising, Rising.
    It was finished and they stood wavering and pitiful-like, not one under forty seasons.
    ‘How long’ve you been singing that about my boy?’ Pa asked. ‘You don’t make songs for those still living!’ The words seem to cram up the back of his throat and stop there. ‘You’ll have sung some of the life right out of him,’ he said.
    ‘We never sung it before, Mr Quirk!’ Lily Fell butted in. ‘Brother Skinner here made it just for this sad night. My word on it.’
    Moo had come out into the night. Her shawl trailed behind her and Ma fussed at it, trying to fix it to her and failing. Finally, it just fell into the dirt and they left it there.
    ‘ Si t en ,’ she whispered.
    ‘Scuse me?’ said Lily Fell.
    We all leant in to hear her.
    ‘ Sing it again ,’ she said again, and her voice was this wrung-out thing.
    But the little mob had something to say first. They pushed Mr Skinner forward and he said as how Boson was a saint and a healer and charmer, and a whole rigmarole of blather. They said as how he’d mended their hearts, and fixed their souls, and told them of what was to come.
    They said he was just like the other one, that’d been taken from them too young, too early, before they knew what he was
for
.
    ‘ What other one? ’ asked Moo, but mostly just with her lips and breath and nobody heard but me.
    ‘The lousy one from the monkhouse,’ I told her but now Mrs Slevin was pulling at her and saying as how we shouldn’t leave him in there all by himself, and so Moo let herself be led back inside.
    ‘Well,’ said Pa to Boson’s followers. ‘That’ll do, then. Goodnight.’ Nobody moved. ‘Thanks for the song,’ he added.
    ‘Can we come in?’ asked Mr Skinner. ‘Just to see.’
    I could see Pa didn’t want to let them but he could hardly say no, so we all traipsed back in and it wasn’t long before they were caught trying to get a piece of Boson for their old magic. At the sight of Old Shambles trying to take a bit of my brother’s dead finger Pa flew at them again and clouted them Cronkward.
    We sat to our meal in a gloomy circle around Boson. Even the Slevins seemed somewhat damped. Outside the yard, the Dead Lamps bluthered about the moaney like that owl had around our hearth, and sometimes they whispered and even engaged in scuffles. The Dead are mostly a quiet mob. My brother was plainly bothering everybody, even the Dead themselves. This notion uplifted me and I gave my mother a small smile.
    I may as well been a spit of turf.
    From that night on Moo brooded by the red glow of the fire and was unmoved by either softness or sharpness. At first Gilpin clung to her barnacle-like and screeched until he was purple and choking. After this he stood before her trembling and shouted at her to
Get Up
. He tried to swipe the moaney-fae off her and he told her, ‘Don’t talk to them, talk to meee!’
    At last he tottered outside by himself.
    He ate rindy cheese and uncooked meal and whatever else he found in the stores; he slept in with me or out with the cow. I tried to look to him but Pa and me had to stack as many ricks as we could before the rain.
    All Quirks are born knowing,
No turf, No living
.
    My mother’s voice had faded on the night of the wake, had been fading since Boson turned up in the skybog, and now she stopped talking altogether.
    I asked her what she thought she was at.
    I said she was not the only one who missed my brother.
    I told her she was a bad mother. It was all bootless.
    My mother was a mute.

Chapter Five
Awake
    THE DAY AFTER THE WAKE my parents weren’t hungry. Boson still lay-out and the house was filled with a devilish stink of brimstone. They kept to opposite corners of the snug with the fire smouldering between