Prodigal 5: Toumb of Lost Souls
<- 4) What Happened to the Potatoes ~0~ 6) Fencing With Fog ->
It was somewhat surprising how quickly things could become normal. My first morning at Leah’s family’s house I woke up to the sound of waves, and something falling over in the next room.
Naturally, the second noise was Leah, who had somehow managed to knock over her desk chair, doing who-knows-what at six thirty in the morning: most of the time, Leah is a morning person, and sometimes she is annoyingly so.
I went over to see if she was there, and found most of a drawing crumpled on the floor with her, and two other pieces trailing from the wall. She scrambled up from the floor when I knocked and popped the door open.
“What were you even trying to do?” I asked, surveying the ruin she’d made of one of her beautiful pictures.
“Move it,” she said ruefully, “I forgot that I used some sort of superglue on it when I put it up. You’d be surprised at what doesn’t stick to these walls.”
Considering that they were made of stone, I was surprised at how well the poster had stuck to them. Superglue indeed.
“Do you have tape or something?” I asked, surveying the bits of drawing that I could piece together. It looked like it once had been a drawing of a feathered serpent, but it was well and truly ruined now.
“Nah, it’s old,” she said, quickly wadding up the paper and throwing it in the trash, “And I was taking it down anyway. You going to be ready for the rest of the tour after breakfast?”
“There’s a rest of the tour?” I asked.
“Well, there’s a lot of rooms where we store boring stuff,” she said, “and the summoning room, and the tower, and that’s just in the house. Also, I know of one room that you’re guaranteed to love. Then there’s the ruins and the caves… I was planning to show you the rest of the island. Unless you know of something else you’d really like to see. It is a rather large island.”
I nodded. There was definitely enough of the island left to see. “Can I ask you a question, first?” I didn’t want my thought to come out of nowhere, because I’d been thinking about it all of last night but thought it might be rude to say. It was, after all, Leah’s sister… “Your sister, Tess… I don’t think she likes me much.”
If I had asked anyone else, I would have fully expected the answer to run along the lines of: Who, Tess? You must be kidding me. What makes you think that? But this was Leah, and white lies weren’t her style. She winced.
“Sorry about that,” she said, “Tess… Tess isn’t good with people. Never has been.”
I said absolutely nothing about that.
“I mean, I doubt she actually planned on being rude… Okay, well, to tell the truth, I don’t think she cares. Whether she’s rude to people or not, I mean.” Leah shrugged. “Though… you did get her to laugh. Sort of.”
“Sort of.”
Leah kicked her feet from where she was sitting on her bed. “I guess I’d forgotten… she usually doesn’t warm up to people very fast, if she ever does. When we were kids Rhian was always the popular one - you know, loud, athletic, liked to make everyone play the same game - but Tess really never played with anyone but us. Well, and she had a pet lizard once, but now that I think of it, that’s kind of sad.”
Yet another statement I was not replying to.
“The point being, Tess just isn’t good at socializing. She’ll get used to you eventually… I think.”
And with that vote of confidence, my day began.
I managed breakfast without finding anything pickled in the milk or orange juice. Contrary to my expectations, the toaster did not explode either. I began to think that perhaps the idea that normality was a little unusual in this house had been somewhat exaggerated for my benefit. After all, every family was a little odd in their own way.
Of course, Tess was not at breakfast, so that might have accounted for the relative peace. Rhian showed up about halfway through, having gone for a run on the beach.
“Disgusting,” Leah said of the voluntary exercise, and Rhian threw an orange at her head, which she fielded.
“You only say that because you can’t keep up,” Rhian said, and headed upstairs with a napkin full of breakfast, grumbling something about spoon-feeding Tess toast. “It wouldn’t hurt for you to take a turn reminding her to eat, Leah,” was the last thing I heard her say.
“Tess might have been up all night with that experiment,” Leah explained to me, “At least, I smelled roasting potatoes some time after midnight.”
I blinked at her.
“Don’t worry though, we have a lot of precautions in place to prevent fires. Especially near Tess’ room,” she said, “And it’s quite possible she fell asleep waiting for something to happen, or on her computer.”
I put milk in my coffee and decided that Tess was a little obsessed. Leah found the cocoa for me, and since I was finally looking and feeling something like a human being, we headed off to see the rest of the island.
There were two wings to the house, one of which, Leah told me, had apparently been broken before it was reconstructed, so the roof still leaked occasionally in one spot. That was where most of the odd stuff that had been pulled out of the void was stored, especially things that Leah’s family didn’t have any use for at the time. Or things that were already broken.
“You’d be surprised at how much identity broken things can have,” Leah told me as we looked in on a room full of sad old furniture that would not have looked out of place at a rummage sale. One of the chairs had legs in four different colors, none of which matched the seat and the back with its broken slats. “Especially if they’d been used for a long time before they got into the void. And it’s not as if we can throw them out…”
I had a sudden vision of the island overrun with the debris of three worlds - the one-eyed teddy bears, the broken mugs, the shoes with soles worn paper-thin and crumbling into little bits of black rubber, the stained curtains and popped soccer balls, and all the lost and empty pens. All the empty things which are left behind when the people are gone.
Perhaps the whole of the island was the tomb to lost souls.
We walked down one long hall full of storerooms, since Leah said that once you had seen two or three of them, you had seen them all.
“We used to make forts out of this stuff,” Leah said, fondly, nudging a pile of abandoned couch and chair cushions with her toe. No two of them matched. “I wonder if the ones we dragged up to the tree house are still there.”
The long wing of broken things stretched on, but Leah led me up two flights of stairs back towards the main wing, and I stared out of mismatched windows towards the water and the strange illusive horizon, even more protracted than the day before. I really wanted to see more of the island, but there was a mist this morning hanging low over everything, spreading the already diffuse light and banishing all shadows. I could see about twenty, maybe twenty five feet out, before the fog closed in and cut off the world.
“This is the room that I guarantee you’ll love,” Leah said, and I walked quickly up the last twist of steep, narrow stairs, coming into a hall that I recognized once more. She was standing near a door with a mischievous grin on her face. “You know how I told you that some things have more identity than others, right?”
“Yes?” I said, somewhat cautiously, unsure what Leah had in mind.
“Just this,” she said, and opened the door.”
My mouth dropped open when I stepped inside. The mists had parted and the light had finally grown strong enough to tumble in through the windows, highlighting shelf after shelf. I was prepared to swear that the whole room, even from where I was standing looking up at the shelves that lined the walls and stood rigidly in rows, smelled like paper and ink. There was so much here… it was easily one of the biggest rooms in the house.
I finally put my face back together and turned around to look incredulously at Leah.
“Turns out that one of the things that has the most identity is books,” she said, by way of explanation. “Theory has it that it’s because they make people think about them far more than almost any other item - because people use a chair all the time, but their feelings about it aren’t always conscious, and they don’t often distinguish it much from other chairs. But for books, even library books, there are people who go around smelling them.”
I blushed. “I do not…”
Leah grabbed a book off of a shelf and did a very stupid impression of me opening it up and, planting her nose so deep between the pages that I was surprised she didn’t manage to get paper cuts on her ears, gave a theatrical deep sniff. It would have been funny except for the absolutely stupid expression on her face when she did it. As soon as she was done she slammed the book shut on the shelf and smirked at me.
“Do too.”
“Not like that.”
“If you’ll notice, you’re the one who brought it up. I never accused you of smelling books, just said that there are people who do it. You confessed all on your own.”
I tried very hard to glare at Leah without admitting defeat. “And the fact that you spent a good half hour teasing me about it one day obviously had nothing to do with it.”
“Clearly.”
Finally, I had to laugh, which meant, of course, that Leah had won. I could hardly ever help laughing.
“Anyhow, there’s plenty more to see, you can sniff books later,” she said, earning herself a half-laughing glare, and we headed off to see the rest of the house and island. The tower was less interesting to me than it would have been on another day, because the view barely made it off the roof. And I understood very little about the summoning room, except that it had a distinct air of… well, not exactly of being haunted, but of being lived in, at some point, like you might expect at a run down castle or a ruin or other archaeological site, with just the weight of history and a thousand lives everywhere, like swimming through extra thick air. We spoke quietly and left quickly after that, and I was glad to get outside into the fresh air, where the mist still clung, but only in shreds. The whole island seemed bigger somehow, and quieter, and it was easy to believe that I might be standing in a place where no one else lived. It would be very easy to wander away into the mist and be lost.
I walked maybe a little closer to Leah than was strictly necessary, but she didn’t seem to mind my shoulder brushing her arm from time to time.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said as we walked through the fog, “In order to get you really warmed up to this exploring thing, we should start with places I already know. Ones that you’d like, naturally, not anyplace with giant centipedes or something like that. After that we could get around to really exploring new worlds, once you’d gotten used to the traveling and everything.”
“And what do we do then?” I asked, because her concept of exploring had always seemed like something of a vague concept to me. Then again, with the power to go literally anywhere she wanted, maybe things that a normal person would spend a lot of time planning for were really spur of the moment decisions. I had often noticed that Leah had very little conception of what it was like to lead a normal life.
“Well, you know… look at stuff, talk to people, poke about in caves… exploring stuff. It’ll be great. And there’s really a lot of time to do it in, because most of the time the void is pretty stable and when people have an unrelated problem, it’s really my mom or dad they want to have fix it, not me. We can go wherever we want and always be back for dinner.”
“Oh.” It sounded good, but far too simple. It sounded like the plans that an idle child would make for a life of daydreams, and totally alien to the world I knew, the idea of a regular job and responsibilities and memorizing a hundred numbers, your address, your phone, your identification and banking numbers. I wasn’t certain this new world could last a week, or if it was Leah spinning a tale for me again. “I meant, what do you… well, now that you’re home, what are you going to do the rest of your life?”
Leah shrugged. We had long since passed out of the gardens, and were heading away from the hill where we had made our appearance the afternoon before, trailing up a wide sandy path where she had managed to find a single pebble. Each kick sent it disappearing into the soupy grayness before us, not so much swallowed by the fog but hidden by the way the fog distorted color and shape before it cut off the eye entirely.
“Well, magic, I suppose,” she said, “Whenever it comes up and wherever it’s needed. I… well, to tell the truth, I haven’t thought about it a lot in a while. Years.”
“Well then, what did you want to do before you stopped thinking about it?” I asked reasonably. I supposed maybe there was a college of magic somewhere, but I had very little idea of what proper adult magicians did with their lives, at least outside of fairy tales. At home most of us knew very little about mages except that they were all filthy rich and that they mostly kept to themselves and messed around in business and politics. All the famous magical families were really their own community, and their actions didn’t affect anyone else most of the time, except when their constant feuding posed problems to the innocent bystanders.
Leah, surprisingly, didn’t answer me right away. She looked away and kicked her rock off into the gloom, where it disappeared entirely. The next few steps did not bring it to light again. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Of course it does, every kid has something they want to be when they grew up.”
“It was stupid anyway.”
“So? I wanted to be an airline pilot before I discovered that airplanes always make me sick. And before that I wanted to be a marine biologist and swim with dolphins. It doesn’t matter how stupid it was.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Ellie.”
I frowned at her evasions, but Leah was a stubborn nut to crack, and it was clear that if I continued to pester her, what had started out as an innocent conversation was going to turn into a day where she just shut down and didn’t say anything, so I tried a different track. She hadn’t won yet.
“All right then,” I said, backing up the conversation, “what am I going to do while you swan around doing… whatever you do with magic. Levitating boulders off of people? Rescuing cats out of trees? Rescuing trains from falling off their tracks? Fighting the minions of evil?” I was deliberately teasing her about the sort of stuff that wizards did in children’s stories, the stuff that any sane adult knew that mages didn’t do. Either they didn’t have the power, they didn’t have the versatility, or they just weren’t inclined to help out their neighboring commoners. But it was the kind of stuff that held some sort of appeal for Leah, with all her talk about how mages were supposed to protect ordinary people instead of ignoring or exploiting them. And, given that it was Leah, she just might be able to do any and all of the above.
“Nothing so exciting, I’m sorry to say,” she said, “but I promise to never let things get too boring. You can do whatever you want, naturally.”
I made a face. I was not going to be of any help to Leah in whatever magic she did - even if I had been a mage at all, I would be so laughably far below her class that it would be a pathetic effort, at best. “I meant that it’s just as easy for you to do all this on your own, so why chose to bring me along?” I asked, then regretted the way it sounded. “I mean, not that I’m not grateful or anything, because I am, but it’s a natural -”
“Ellie. You do babble quite a bit, you know.”
“Do not,” I objected instantly, though I knew that I had been.
“All right. It’s this simple, so don’t try to make things complicated. I like you enough to want you around, and you’re crazy enough that when I asked you to stay with me you said yes.”
I was doing a pretty decent impression of a fish - for someone who claims to reject all of the presumption and privilege of the other mages, Leah can do a pretty fine job of assuming that she can arrange the world in whatever way she likes - when I stumbled over a step and nearly fell headfirst into a depression in the ground. Ahead of me was a small, crumbling ruin in what appeared to be a miniature valley where the fog pooled in shredded snakes of mist above the moss.
“Watch your step,” Leah said, finally letting go of my elbow when we reached the solid ground six stairs beneath us. I glared at her, but it failed to make an impression. Probably because she was looking almost reverently at the little ruin, which I realized a moment later was our destination. The toumb of lost souls.
I never have liked graveyards. This is probably due to the combination of an overactive imagination, an older cousin who liked to tell ghost stories, and the fact that, as a constant new kid, I was never allowed to get comfortable with one set of legends and superstitions before heading on to the next. But there was something peaceful about the silence here, something which was very unlike the sad eeriness in other graveyards. If there were ghosts here, they were at peace.
“This is it?” I asked softly.
“Yeah. Keep in mind that it had been well over a hundred years - there wasn’t a lot left to bury, really, just bones - and they always did try to bury their predecessors decently. We’re pretty sure that at one time there was a small village of mages on the island, but eventually… Well.”
“They stopped coming.”
Leah nodded. “They all volunteered to stay, though.”
“What?” I asked, turning away from the ruin to look at her, “You just said that the void -”
“Sucked them in, yes, initially. I was talking about after, when my mom arrived. All of their souls volunteered to stay.”
At the look I was giving her, she continued. “There was some serious debate over whether or not their leaving would destabilize the void again, or harm the kernel. Mom could have let them out to… well, wherever souls go. She managed it for the captives of another Necromancer once. But they didn’t want to risk it, so they’re all still here.”
“Like Ghosts?” I asked, just to be sure, because I really didn’t want to wake up to a haunting one night. That might be a non-issue for the daughters of a necromancress, but my mother was a sales consultant and I did not like the idea of ghosts.
“Well, not quite exactly. They didn’t chose to be quite that… directed. After all, they were already here a long time, they’d gotten used to the state their shades were in, and they certainly didn’t want to pass hundreds of years more actually aware of the time passing… so they asked Mom to change them into forces.
“Some, I guess what made them happy was gardening. Before Mom and Dad knew it, flowers and vegetables and fruit started appearing on the island, weeded, watered, everything. Somebody else must have liked fishing, because we keep having to freeze more fish that turns up in the freezer in the cellar. The roast you saw last night means that mom and dad went to a store somewhere and got it for you - usually, there’s a lot of fish or chicken on the table, because there’s a force somewhere that has a bunch of chickens hidden on the island and keeps sending us eggs, and occasionally a whole chicken. There were some other forces that liked fixing things, so occasionally something in the broken wing will turn out not to be broken after all. Or something will be made of them that wasn’t there before.
“Finally, there were a few who liked wandering about in the woods, or minding small children, and we used to run into those from time to time as kids. Like mom said, the island is perfectly safe - if anything happens, the forces or shades or whatever either sort it out themselves or, for something that requires a little more direction, find a way to inform her. That’s why the summoning room, Ellie. She keeps very good memories there, so that she can call them back and they can tell her what’s going on.”
I looked out at the valley before me and could easily imagine ghosts popping out of every corner and every rag of mist. It wasn’t a good thought.
“They’re everywhere, aren’t they?”
“Well, it’s a big island,” Leah hedged, sensing my utter weirded-out-ness, “and chances are that you’ll never see one. Actually, I can’t see them, because necromancy is not among my extensive list of talents, and really, they don’t bother much with me. Or you, really. They just grow their vegetables and tinker about and generally all you ever see is what was left behind for you by them. They’re grateful to Mom and Dad, though they don’t exactly know why in their current state.”
“So one could be here, right now, and I wouldn’t know?” I asked, my voice rising a little.
“Same as in the world outside,” Leah replied with a shrug. Then she saw the look I gave her, which I’m sure must have edged towards panic. “There’s lots of lost souls out there that aren’t able to move on for some reason,” she explained, “and while Mom tries to help them, especially the ones that other necromancers have exploited, sometimes it’s just kinder to let them softly fall apart. There’s not really such a thing as ghosts, unless a necromancer’s been around, just a lot of… well, impressions of people. Kind of a little fingerprint left on a certain bend of light, a little draft under the door. Nothing more than that, certainly nothing like those horror stories you’re so fond of -”
“Seventeen Ghosts was not a horror story, and neither was the Curse of the Aberings, which was only about someone who thought there was a ghost -”
“All right, whatever, I always lose the argument about your love of books. But trust me, Ell, when I say that you have nothing to worry about, especially not here,” Leah said, and her voice suddenly got serious, “ever. Really, I’m scary enough myself that all of the bad things that go bump in the night pack up and head for the hills when they hear I’m in town.”
That got a smile from me. Yeah, Leah blew things up occasionally, but that was old hat by now and she was really about as intimidating as a big shaggy dog begging for scraps, at least if you actually knew her.
“So, you promise there’s no ghosts?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said, as we turned away from the valley and headed back up the stairs. Some of the fog had lifted, and I could see quite a distance away now. “No ghosts. Ever.”
“And no other strange monsters I should know about?” I asked, just to be sure.
She hesitated a moment. “Monsters?”
“Oh, you know, ghouls, goblins, zombies, vampires, mummies… things that go bump in the night.”
There was a moment’s thought on her part. “Monsters don’t exist, Ellie. There’s just us.”
And with that, we left the valley far behind us.