CHAPTER 4

 

The train made a short sighing stop and hooked on to three private cars gaudily decorated like Gypsy wagons. One held the machinery of carousels and tilt-a-whirls, one held tents and caravans, and from one boxcar came the roars of big cats and the trumpeting of elephants. A sign on the side of the car proclaimed it Circus Rom.

In Carlisle the train stopped again. Emerging from the WC, in the back of the car, Juli looked out the window and saw uniformed policemen lurking near every car, trying hard to look nonchalant. Hurrying back to her own compartment, she pointed out the trap to the others. Anna Mae swore roundly and pounded on the wall separating their compartment from the one containing Willie and Torchy.

She was too slow. Willie and Torchy flashed by the compartment door, heading toward the back of the train. The banjo alone could have been arrested for disturbing the peace, so loudly did it continue to twang "Whiskey in the Jar."

"Where's he goin' now?" Gussie mumbled, waking from a fitful sleep crammed up against the window casing.

"The police are waiting for us," Julianne said, pointing out the window.

"Well, nice of Willie to let the rest of us know," Gussie said angrily. "I've got a notion to go give that young man a piece of my mind."

"You go right ahead and do that little thing," Brose said. "But as for me, I got an urgent appointment anyplace else but here."

 

* * *

 

Although he had been dead for a couple hundred years (which was long experience compared to that of the living and a mere trifle compared to others he had encountered), Walter Scott had been a pretty good man and so he had not hung around in the ghost realm much before but had gone straight to heaven. He was a little baffled to find himself back in the ghost realm now. He was fairly sure heaven had been where he'd been keeping himself these last few years, and thought that probably the rumors were true that said paradise was so wonderful that nobody was ever granted memory of it for fear their other existences would be so filled with longing for it that they wouldn't be able to do what was necessary elsewhere.

He didn't find it difficult to determine the current date, because there was a guest book in the front hall where the Trust set up its information booth. He was very pleased with how they'd kept his home, approved of the minor alterations they had made to turn it into a visitors' attraction. He had promised Abbotsford to the trustees when he died, in expiation of that last bundle of debt he'd been trying to work his way out of. Curious to learn how long he'd been away, he decided to go see how the outside world had changed. The moment he set foot outside the door however, he found himself back in his grave, which was a very dreary place for a conscious entity, even one with no body. No notepad or pen or books for company. Totally unsatisfactory.

He tried to rise from the grave once more and found himself back at Abbotsford. So. He could come and go between two points—that which most concerned him while he lived and that which most concerned him while dead, but no other points in between. A nuisance, of course, but he supposed it made sense. Couldn't have a lot of dead folk indiscriminately disturbing the living. The thought of it made him feel very lonely, a condition remedied as soon as day broke, the custodians opened the hall, and tourists came pouring in, clutching maps and guidebooks, wearing extremely strange and sometimes indecorous garments, and chattering among themselves with varying degrees of interest or boredom. The energy of the most road-weary among them made him feel drained and diminished, and a part of him understood that this was probably why ghosts were not seen by day. The vitality of the living was such a contrast that he was like the moon in broad daylight, of no use or consequence and scarcely noticeable.

He also found, to his interest, that the spirit world was not quite like the world of the living. It bore some resemblance to life underwater, or what he imagined that must be like. He felt intimations of persons and events and fluctuations in the—ether, he supposed some would call it—a great confusing babble of stuff from the very old to the very new. It was somewhat like the inside of his head, bits of history, biographies of personages, scraps of legend, glimpses of places he had not visited but which preoccupied his imagination. Underlying it all he sensed the continuous babble of sad stories, cries for help, emanations of anguish and anxiety and resignation and anger. And dominating every other impression was a compulsion for urgency as demanding as the tattoo of a war drum.

And this puzzled Walter Scott most of all, for he was not sure what on earth had called him back to it. The attempted desecration of his library, of course, had caught his otherworldly attention. But that thug was well and truly driven away, as he thought, for good, and the urgency remained, crying for attention. The resident border collie whined up at him, and the custodian, thinking the animal wished to relieve itself, put it out.

And so the only other being, besides the ghoul, who seemed to perceive Sir Walter departed for a time, and the ghost sorely wished he had chains to rattle or some other supernatural occupation, since it seemed the natural ones were denied him. Really, he had always fancied the supernatural without being particularly good at invoking or explaining it in his own literature. Everyone said his ghosts were quite thin though not as thin as he himself felt at the moment. He wished he had someone to advise him, someone knowledgeable in the ways of otherwordly activity. Now, his ancestor, Michael Scott the Wizard, would be an admirable advisor, but unfortunately, even if the old necromancer was still cavorting about on the plane nearest earth (and Walter had never particularly fancied that the Wizard had been around even during Walter's own lifetime), he was presumably under the same geographical-spiritual restrictions that bound Sir Walter and could not go beyond his grave and perhaps the tower where he had spent much of his life in Scotland. Unfortunately, Sir Walter's Haliburton blood had entitled him to be buried at the ruin of Dryburgh Abbey while his ancestor's resting place was Melrose. Bloody inconvenient.

The night returned and with it a growing sense of what occurred around him, though he still had great trouble telling if the occurrences were in the living world or the other. One fairly persistent noise that came to his ear was the keening of some musical instrument, playing now one tune, then another. He wished he could hear the words. He dearly loved music and it had always been a great disappointment to him that he was virtually tone-deaf, though that had never spoiled his enjoyment of a good song. He was, of course, a word man basically, and it was lyrics that spoke to him most, though a catchy tune never hurt. He caught familiar snatches of some of the tunes the instrument played, although he didn't recognize other pieces. Focusing his attention on the sound, he seemed to have a waking dream of a band of weary and desperate people, among them a beautiful melancholy lady, a woman with golden hair like so many damsels in distress he on whose behalf he had once agitated his heroes. Her sadness particularly caught his attention, but whether she was near or far he could not tell and he passed the day in a state of perturbation. What was the point of coming back to watch strangely dressed people making rude remarks about the home he had built with such love and care if he was to be impotent to do anything, or even to discover what it was he was supposed to do? Or had his anger at finding his library disturbed been somehow a test, his pride having called him from heaven to intervene on behalf of his books and, having called him forth, trapped him in this realm? What a sad pass that would be!

For the last two nights now, the living music that haunted him from afar had kept him company, first with a mournful tune, then with a wild and reckless one. He dimly envisioned the band of travelers again, and tried to pay special attention to the fair-tressed lady, thinking that if he could perceive her and the music near her, perhaps she could perceive him and the otherworldly comfort he had to offer, which he imagined might possibly be somehow more potent than comfort of the worldly kind, since when he was living, people always had seemed to set great store by anything that came from beyond the pale.

But instead of the woman he sought, suddenly, as if someone had lit a fire, another image came to him, of a flame-haired woman with a strumpet's laugh and a wild eye. She wore trousers and a loose shirt, like many of the women who invaded his home during the day, but he held her image longer than any of the others. She seemed to be searching for something, calling something, and once her questing intelligence caused her, he could have sworn, to look directly into his mind's eye and wink. And at that moment he saw that her hair was not the orange color he had first perceived, but the red-gold of autumn, and noticed that her trousers were of a subtle cut that sometimes appeared to be a long, gray-green skirt, and that the loose shirt was of a velvet material. When she at last seemed to find what she sought, she laughed, and her laugh was not purely whorish but contained merry undertones like the ringing of silver bells as the mighty steed on which she rode carried her, the damsel, and others he had not yet differentiated from the ether toward something that amused her.