Picking the Ballad's Bones Read Online Free PDF

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