Whichwood(38)

Laylee would not die.

She would not be alive, exactly—at least not for a while, but she would not die, not yet, and the news was a great comfort to them all. The night was beginning to look up, and the three friends felt their spirits soar . . . alongside thirty others.

The wind had changed.

Ice cracked up the windows. The lanterns flickered in their shells. What had been a soft, whistling breeze not moments before was transformed into a bellowing howl in mere seconds, bringing with it the strange and terrifying chill of something more than winter cold.




The dead, dear friends, had come knocking.





IT’S ALL TERRIBLY EXCITING, ISN’T IT?





Actually, I should clarify: Ghosts cannot knock. They don’t have knuckles or skin (or fleshy bits of any kind), so they’re really only good for rattling things, toppling things over, and making loud, frightening noises. They would’ve liked to have knocked, but the simple fact of their being ghosts made those human courtesies impossible. So it was despite their best efforts to be polite that they shook the door off its hinges.

Now, let us take a moment to remember something important: Regular people could not see ghosts. Laylee (and Baba, wherever he was), were the only ones who could see the spirits, so, when the front door had simply fallen out of its frame for (what appeared to be) no apparent reason, Benyamin and his companions had no way of knowing what had happened. Their little heads had popped up, startled and afraid, searching for the culprit and finding none.

The ghosts took great offense to this.

They were tired of being so soundly ignored by man and mordeshoor, and even though they knew better than to expect regular humans to recognize them, they were feeling sensitive as of late, and so took the slight personally. This did not help the situation.

As you might recall, the last we heard of the ghosts was that they’d been angry about Laylee having abandoned them, and that they’d broken free of their shackles and set off at once to see about getting new skins. But you might also remember my mentioning that it was their respect for Laylee that had kept them so obedient in the first place. Well, this was true. And once they’d finally broken free of her hallowed home and begun to roam the earth (a thing no ghosts had done before in all the history of Whichwood), they began to have second thoughts about their plans to steal skins from living humans. After all, the ghosts knew many of these humans—some were their living relatives—and they’d grown a conscience in the last few hours. So they reconvened.

They decided it would be best to try and speak with Laylee first—to figure out what had happened to make her abandon them so completely—and only then, once she’d had a chance to speak with them, would they make their final decision. They had hoped to be reasonable; the mordeshoor had tended to them—perhaps imperfectly—but they knew that she worked alone, and though on occasion they liked to have fun at her expense, they quietly respected the young girl for her unwavering dedication to a thankless occupation. After all, there were many ghosts who wanted to cross over to the Otherwhere, and without Laylee, they had no means of doing so.

If they were able to find the mordeshoor—and if her words were convincing enough—they would agree to go back to the castle and have their spirits and dead selves be shipped off to the Otherwhere (with Laylee’s assistance) at once. But if her answers were somehow unacceptable, they would have no choice but to spear some flesh and take it as their own, because they were running out of options in the mortal world. They had little time left in the grace period before their spirits would simply disintegrate, and that, of course, was the least favorable outcome of all.

So they’d done their due diligence, searching high and low, on train and terrain to find the young mordeshoor, all to no avail. They were certain she would be at the festivities tonight, and still, they were unable to find her. Frustrated, the last of their patience quickly fraying, they returned to the castle for one last look around, when one of the ghosts, a young boy who’d noticed the light coming from Benyamin’s little home, pointed out that the lone cottage was the one place they’d yet to look.

This was how they found themselves, all forty ghostly bodies, crowded cheek by jowl (figuratively, of course) in the cramped home of Benyamin Felankasak, where they had finally found their mordeshoor. Now, had Laylee been awake, she might’ve been able to tell someone that Benyamin’s small home had been infiltrated by a large group of angry ghosts, but as it happened, she was not. And so there was no one at all to explain the sudden drop in temperature or the unexpected departure of the door from its frame.

The humans in Benyamin’s home could only wonder at what had happened, and it wasn’t until Haftpa spoke quietly in the boy’s ear that anyone could understand enough to be afraid.




The ghosts had been waiting around for at least five minutes, shouting their frustrations for anyone to listen (and not understanding why Laylee would not look at them) when Benyamin’s sentinel finally offered to act as liaison between the dead and the living.

Animals and insects had no problems interacting with the unseen; they spoke a common language that humans were only occasionally made privy to, as their worlds were run with more order and compassion than ours: Namely, the nonhuman world did not hunt the creatures they feared; they simply stayed away from them. And now, though Haftpa had never had much to discuss with a ghost, he was willing to act as a neutral party in order to facilitate some kind of goodwill. He quickly recognized the head of the group—a tall, brooding ghost-woman named Roksana—and explained the situation: Laylee was dying; the other children were trying to resuscitate her; they didn’t know how long it would be until she woke.