CHAPTER 18

 

"Wat, are you still there?" Gussie asked. She felt lonesome, after weeks and months of being surrounded by people, to be driving down an empty road in a borrowed van in a foreign country all by herself.

"Aye," the ghost said as mournfully as ghosts are supposed to sound.

"What do we do now?"

"What ye will," the ghost said indifferently.

"Wat, come on. Give me a break. You've got to help me. This is your country, you're the ballad expert, and all of this supernatural business is a lot more your kind of thing than mine."

With great effort a faint voice inside her replied, "I'm no the man by day I am at night, lass. Leave me be. Return me to my grave for I maun rest me."

"Oh, no, you don't, buddy," Gussie said, gunning the engine and heading for Abbotsford. "You're not going to pull that poor-dead-me cop-out on Augusta Turner. You helped get us into this and you have to help get us out."

Abbotsford did not look very much different than it had when she first saw it, except that the doors were ajar and the windows were broken. The stone roof and the slate tile roof were still intact. The lawn and gardens and the front courtyard/parking lot looked like a giant garage sale. Some of the furnishings hardly appeared to be damaged, but when Sir Walter groaned Gussie saw the remains of the Spanish Armada desk. The docent from the day before and two men were there, ignoring the waterlogged upholstered chairs, the charred dining-room table, to paw through a sodden, smoking mass of books and papers. Swirling smoke veiled the house, as the fog had done last night.

Gussie watched from the van. Was it safe to go up to the house or might someone have reported spotting the van driving away from the fire last night? She didn't know. She didn't care. She wished she too had a place to rest—though preferably not a grave. It had been a long night.

Sir Walter spoke softly. "Did you know that the walls of my study were covered with hand-painted silk? Oh, yes, a present from my publisher. Blue, of a Chinese design. Charlotte, my wife, was delighted. She would have liked it for the parlor but I liked to rest my eyes by looking at the pattern. Is the dog anywhere out there? I'd hate to think something happened to it. I have grown fond of it."

"Oh, Wat."

"I think it rather sad that things don't seem to have spirits after all. Some would think that sacrilegious I suppose, but many of the old peoples were animists, you know. They believed that things did have a life. Swords and such."

The banjo, tucked in Gussie's basket bag, had been noodling to itself, and changed tunes suddenly to the line in the hymn that went, "Some glad morning when this life is o'er, I'll fly away."

"Oh, aye. There's you, of course. But some people thought there was no special enchantment needed. That all things had lives of their own. If so, mine have been murdered. Better that they had been divided up among my creditors than this."

"Do you want to go to the house and see what the damage is?" she asked.

"I do not."

"Okay, then I'll take you back to your grave. You—uh—you can get in this time of day, can't you?"

"Aye, that I can."

"Fine." She started the motor again.

"But, on reflection, I'd prefair to bide with you. I've been dead a lang time and it seems obvious there is some reason for me to be active in the affairs of the living noo."

"Blast that Torchy anyway for what she did to your home. Wat, I don't know what fairy stories you've heard, but that is not a nice woman."

"Of course not. She's not supposed to be a nice woman. Even human queens seldom are, as you'll ken frae your history. As for Abbotsford, there's naught to be done aboot it. What else might we do?"

"I think we'd better start by trying to find the Randolphs. We can go to the police if all else fails but if Torchy kidnapped those kids, the police either wouldn't know anything or would deny they knew anything or were, who knows, responsible for it. And we're going to have to do something about latching onto some work visas or else find a way to hide and a way to get by over here for seven years. I haven't been a saint most of my life, but I never figured on becoming an outlaw at my age."

"I was always on the other side of the law myself," Sir Walter said. "But I canna say as much for my ancestors. I'm not acquainted with the laws we'll be breakin', lass, but I do hope we can do it with style."

"I hope we can get away with it, period," Gussie said. "I think now, though, what we have to find is that Circus Rom truck. The circus stopped in Edinburgh. I'm going to head up that way."

 

* * *

 

"Whoa!" said the man sitting next to the storyteller. He wore an ancient tie-dye tee, baggy jeans, and a beard that hung in two braids to his waist. He was probably about twenty-five, too young for the sixties the first time around, not a "productive citizen." Other nonproductive citizens or at least not-productive-enough citizens were also stretched out over the carpeted floor of the gutted bus known throughout the Sound area as the Silver Snail. Six people at the far end were playing cards, one couple was necking, and across from the group an artist tried to sketch between jolts. The jolts were to remind the passengers that the cheap transportation and the room to stretch out the Silver Snail provided were accompanied by such no-frills features as no-shock-absorbers-either.

Most of the twenty-seven other passengers, however, had gradually found themselves drawn into the group surrounding the little curly-headed granny type in the pink jogging suit. She had been saddened to notice that these days no one brought a guitar, a banjo, or even a harmonica with them. Only ten years before, such things would have been an expected part of the trip. She had a hard time understanding why people chose to do without instruments now, and then it occurred to her that maybe it was because so many of the songs were still forgotten. Even people who had once been interested in folk music wouldn't remember anything to play. It wasn't only the old ballads gone now, it seemed, but pop music that had passed into the hands of ordinary people who liked to entertain themselves—that too had somehow vanished. Now these people were content to sit passively and let her entertain them with no participation on their parts except the occasional remark or bit of discussion. Sad. If they took in what she was saying, however, if it made them curious, maybe this state of affairs wouldn't continue much longer.

The man with the braided beard said, "So the dude ended up in some woman's mind, huh? And then she died and meanwhile old Sir Walter is running around in that lady's mind and they're looking for those other folks and all of this is for a few tunes? Why don't they just, you know, turn on the radio?"

"Get real, man! You can't play that stuff on the radio anymore. Any deejay caught spinning some song with stuff about guys wanting to boff their sisters or fathers hitting their daughters or guys killing other guys because of some babe, not to mention the woman miscarrying right there at the end of the song, shit, man, anybody played a song like that or sold it to some kid in a store would do a hell of a lot more time than guys who actually do go around boffing and beating their nearest and dearest, not to mention murderers."

"I guess that's right. At least then they didn't have all this censorship stuff."

"Unless you count getting beheaded if you made a joke about royalty or singing a derogatory song about the Douglases in their castle, forgetting to change the clan to some other clan like Kerr," the storyteller said. "Censorship in those days was often fatal."

"You sound like you know all about it from personal experience," a young mother nursing her baby said. "Like you were alive back then."

"In a manner of speaking, I suppose you might say I was."

 

* * *

 

Faron came awake with a jolt inside a dark room full of rattling things. The room was freezing cold and seemed to be moving. When his eyes adjusted to the lack of light he saw that he was lying with his nose pointing up at the nose of a wooden horse. He seemed to be lying on a merry-go-round platform.

Something warm bumped him and he surmised, correctly, that it was his wife.

"Ellie, you okay, babe?"

"Hell of a headache, about to freeze to death, otherwise fine. What hit us?"

"The arsonists, I guess. Gussie? You here?"

After a long moment with no answer Faron shrugged, then realized Ellie couldn't see the shrug, and said, "Guess not. There's a merry-go-round here."

"The truck said something about a circus. Must be the kind right out of a Ray Bradbury story, huh? Like 'Something Wicked This Way Comes.' Wish we could ride this painted pony out of here. Oh, shit."

"What?"

"We missed the ghost. The Wizard's ghost. I bet it's already up and everything's all over and we missed it all."

"Well, not quite everything. If everything was over and solved, how come we're still here? You wouldn't happen to have a match or a lighter or anything, would you?"

"No, but I've got my combination flashlight and key chain in my pocket," she said, and with a click a thin beam of light pierced the gloom like a laser sword.

"They don't seem to have been all that serious about holding us here," Faron observed. "Didn't even tie us up. Let's see if there's anything we can use to escape. A crowbar would be handy."

"And maybe a motorbike so we could just zoom out of here. Got the time?"

"Yeah—about one a.m. Say, you don't happen to have a compass on that key chain do you?"

"No, that's on my Swiss Army knife. I'll bet we're heading for Edinburgh though, what do you think?"

"How do you figure that?"

"It's the nearest city. Easier to get lost in a big city than out on the roads someplace. Hey, what's this?" Her foot had bumped against a smallish, curved-sided object. She reached down and touched it with her hands, feeling along its sides, which bulged, drew in and bulged again, followed by an elongated piece. The flashlight beam bounced off of something black.

Faron was crawling under a tarp over some other piece of equipment and called back in a muffled voice, "Well, what is it?"

"A fiddle."

"Yeah?" He stumbled back toward the beam of light.

She had already opened the case and held the fiddle in one hand, the bow in the other. "Why don't you play it? Maybe it's haunted by the ghost of Stradivari. The way this trip's been going, I wouldn't be surprised at anything."

"I don't think Stradivari's ghost would be much help to us. Probably has the attitude of the symphony musicians: if it ain't classical, it ain't music. Feels nice though." He lifted the fiddle to his chin and the bow to the fiddle and sounded a note, tuned, sounded another note. "Gorgeous tone, huh?"

"So play something."

Faron hemmed and hawed and sawed around for a few minutes, then launched into a Cajun tune he'd gotten off an old Doug Kershaw record, "Diggy Diggy Lo." In between choruses he took proper breaks and sang, Ellie pitching in with harmonies and an occasional "Ahh eee!" for atmosphere.

"That warmed me up. Play something else." He started "Louisianna Man," which he remembered just fine since, to the best of his knowledge, Doug Kershaw was still alive and, the last Faron had heard, was traveling around Australia. One chorus and one verse and one bridge into the song, the truck sighed to a halt and Faron halted too. "Look, they might come back here and try to stop us," he told Ellie. "If they do, I'll try to distract them and you make a break for it. Now's our best time, before they decide to tie us up or take us someplace else."

"Okay," Ellie whispered.

Footsteps crunched across gravel outside while they held their breath. Voices speaking in some foreign language were raised and then one of them said something that had the tone of "Yeah, yeah, sure" and the argument stopped while more crunchy footsteps grew gradually fainter, then died away altogether.

Faron exhaled the breath he had been holding since the truck stopped, and at that moment there was a scrabbling near the rear of the truck and the doors swung open, the night air rushing in upon them.

"Out with you, you two," a voice said. It sounded old, anxious, and with a northern English or Scottish accent with an overlay of another, more exotic, accent.

"Okay, okay," Faron said, and scrambled for the doorway. "Where to?"

"Hide in the woods. Run! Giorgio, he's gone to piss but he'll be back soon. Go!"

"Okay, thanks."

"Wait."

"What?"

"My violin. My wonderful nephew-in-law no longer lets me make her sing. He tells me to burn her but I don't do it and now, hearing you play her, he says he'll break her in half. Take her and keep her safe. Now, go!"

They went, hoping that Giorgio had a very full bladder.