Ghostheart Read Online Free PDF Page A

at the stone.
    ‘You think it’s Miasmic?’ asked Mrs Slevin. She took Boson from the chair and stood him before her. She pushed her fingers hard and sudden into his middle. He started up laughing and so did she. They laughed right in each other’s faces, their mouths wide and red. She shouldn’t have been encouraging him, the old hedge-rat, and I told her so.
    ‘I think it’s more likely a moon-ague,’ she said to my mother. ‘Do you have peony to hand?’
    Even as Moo and Ma muttered over the leaves and barks, as they split each bundle into threes and nines and twenty-sevens, even as they turned Boson in spirals in the rue-smoke, my brother’s face was drooping. He turned eyes of such trouble to me that I went and stood by him. He beckoned me closer. I leaned in. He studied my face then gripped my hair on both sides of my head and shook me.
    ‘Fermion!’ he shouted in my face. ‘Fer! Where are you?’
    Everybody circled us.
    ‘I’m right here,’ I said, pulling my hair out of his fists. ‘Right here in your face, you big dollop.’
    He pulled my face about like he was searching for me in my own skin.
    ‘Tell my sister,’ he whispered loudly, nodding heavily like his head held weighty matter. ‘She’ll know what to do.’
    ‘Tell her what?’ asked Moo.
    Boson’s eyes rolled up until they were only whites. He lay down on the ground. His words rolled out of him like gravel, hard and fast.
    ‘Tell her if you roll back the sky there’s another sky,’ he said. ‘You roll back the sea and another comes. There are other countries inside-out, upside-down, and everywhere. Tell her things are, things are —
eggsackly
as they seeemmmm. Egggsackly.’ He smacked his ashy lips on the last words like they tasted good and we all took a small step back.
    He came at us with more.
    ‘There are singing waters in the other countries, and talking mud. Birds swim under the water like fish, you know, and fish fly in the air. Birds come and talk right at you. You
know
,’ he said to me. ‘You know in the inward parts I’m right. You know it
inside
.’
    ‘I don’t know anything like that,’ I told him straight-up. ‘What would I be doing with inward parts that know things I don’t?’
    He sat up and leaned blood-eyed and sweating against Moo’s big belly that had Gilpin in it. She crossed herself and started up with the
Pater Mary One
. Boson watched her and mouthed along with his arms wrapped around her middle.
    ‘Pater King
five, six, seven
and that’s all,’ he whispered to the new-made brother or sister in there. ‘That’s for the wicked ones. We’ve taken care of
them
haven’t we, Mammy?’ He’d taken to calling her the baby-name again.
    There was silence in the snug.
    ‘Ooh, he’s strong in it, isn’t he?’ said Mrs Slevin, impressed. ‘He’ll be a great one when he’s grown. You must look to it that he doesn’t get caught up in the towns.’
    ‘They’ll have him one way or the other,’ said Scully Slevin, quiet-like. It was the only thing he said and I remembered it later.
    The townies think there’s no life up here. They think it’s all toads and biting things, but they’re wrong. If any of them spent more than one afternoon in our spread of meadows and water they’d know. Instead, they sit nice and tidy below, warming themselves at our turf, and think of us as just types of mudskipper.
    But inside the moaney’s deeps of moss, its life floats and slides all about you. It’s even tucked into the pleats of its airs and vapours. You can never tell where it is, all this life that’s making the bog’s song, but there’s no denying it’s there. The hum-din just about does your head in. And if you lie still you’ll meet all of that life, all of it, eventually.
    If I hadn’t held the dragonflies, if I hadn’t found the gembugs or the slough-worms, I suppose I might find it all somewhat disgustful up here too. I might think nothing could live in all this slough and sod, or that