May Bird Among the Stars Read online

  “Well.” Bea smoothed her skirt and tried to look reassuring. “You’re our leader. I’m sure it’ll come to you.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” May said halfheartedly.

  Back home May had always dreamed of being an Amazon princess, leading a brave group of warriors through the forest behind her house. Now she surveyed her loyal band: a foolish house ghost who jumped at the word “boo”; an Italian air force pilot with a bad sense of direction; a bookish girl specter; and a courageous but melancholy cat with no fur. And May, shortest of anyone except for Kitty, knobby kneed and bashful, was supposed to lead these four to an unknown farm, in an unknown land far to the north, to talk to an unknown Lady.

  And this Lady, if they ever made it to her, would do one of two things: something extremely kind or something equally nasty.

  Deep in the recesses of South Place, a holo-vision set cast a blue light along the walls of a small, dark room.

  On the screen a blob of a ghost, wearing a moth-eaten suit, addressed the camera: “And in other celebrity news, this Wednesday several eyewitnesses saw the Ever After’s most fearsome henchman, the Bogey, floating across the desert, flat as a pancake and without any pants. Many question whether this had anything to do with the mysterious occurrences at the Eternal Edifice on Tuesday Others wonder, if the Bogey isn’t wearing his pants, who is?”

  One gleaming white eyeball watched the screen from the shadows, and its owner gave out a low, raspy growl. One flat arm, clad in a black sleeve, shot forward and clicked the channel button on the remote with its suction-cup-tipped fingers.

  A letter lay on a nearby table, shining in the glow of the screen. The deadly fingers laid down the remote, and drummed on the paper….

  B.—

  Received your telep-a-gram explaining the strange news coming out of Ether. That a house ghost, three specters, and a living girl could find admittance to the Eternal Edifice gives me great pause. But since you swear to me you have made them into nothing, I will let you slide. A little girl and a house ghost are merely a joke. But take care that this kind of breach does not happen twice.

  Bogey, the time has arrived. You know what I mean. From now on, you will need to put all of your energy into preparing a meeting of every Dark Spirit in the realm. Let’s shoot for October thirty-first. 1 will arrive at midnight.

  Sincerely,

  B.C.

  The holo-vision flickered.

  “Do you sometimes feel lost, afraid, hopeless?”

  In the shadows the white eye widened.

  “Are you evil but not quite evil enough to get the job done? Do you need someone vicious enough to take care of your enemies but wily enough to keep it confidential? A hunter with a sly mind and killer instincts?”

  The face moved forward into the light—long, white, flat, with sunken cheeks, a pointy chin, and razorlike white teeth—and nodded.

  “Call Commander Berzerko!”

  The face sank. The Bogey touched his empty eye socket ruefully. The missing eye had gotten stuck in the flip-flop of an Egyptian spirit and disappeared, never to be seen again by anyone except itself. He thought of his poor Black Shuck dogs whom—in a rash moment of anger—he’d banished to the Swamp of Swallowed Souls.

  He wanted the girl destroyed. The girl and her friends. And it certainly had to to be kept secret.

  But even the Bogey knew better than to unleash a spirit like Commander Berzerko. She had not been let out of her pen for over a hundred years … and that was probably best for everyone involved.

  Still, the Bogey’s white eyeball gleamed with a thought. There was another option.

  He reached for the skull-o-phone.

  For a moment he hesitated, his suction-cup-tipped fingers poised over the teeth. And then he began to tap the teeth with his fingers, dialing someone—a group of someones—who would surely take care of the girl.

  He called the Wild Hunters.

  • • •

  That night May and the others camped far from the town, in case whoever had taken the residents of Everville returned. They used the classified section of the newspaper to build their fire. Because of this, they missed a few things that might have been of some interest to them.

  They had not seen the ad for Fast-Forward Motion Potion, for example, nor had they scanned the lonely spirits listed in the personals section (Is It You-hoooo? Lost Soul Seeking Same). They also missed the announcement for the gathering of a group called STARD (Spirits Totally Against Realm Domination) at an undisclosed location due south of the Scrap Mountains. The truth was, May and her friends were too concerned with their immediate futures to notice.

  Tomorrow, they decided after talking long into the night, they would head north—back into the emptiness of the Hideous Highlands.

  Chapter Three

  Something’s Gone Bad at the Snack Shack.

  Can you carry me?” Pumpkin asked.

  May rolled her eyes at Pumpkin. “I’m already carrying Kitty.” Pumpkin scowled.

  Somber Kitty stirred in his papoose, which May had fashioned out of some curtains she’d pulled from the train. He peered over May’s shoulder and waved his tail at Pumpkin contentedly.

  After two days of traveling, they were still following the train tracks due north. As the telep-a-gram had promised, May had felt neither hungry nor thirsty.

  “Look.” Beatrice pointed to a circular building up ahead and to the left. It was the long-promised Poltergeist Corral. It looked like someone—or something—fierce had shattered a hole right through the front wall, which was enormously high and at least three feet thick. They stuck to the tracks, studying the corral curiously as they floated and walked by. It looked like it had been abandoned for a hundred years, but flashing signs still hung crookedly from the walls:

  POLTERGEIST CORRAL

  POLTERGEIST TRICKS!

  THROW THINGS AT POLTERGEISTS

  PET THE poltergeists!

  Somber Kitty let out a low growl.

  “Poor poltergeists,” May said.

  The captain made a loud clicking sound with his mouth. “Poor poltergeists! Pah! Horrible creatures.”

  They kept moving, and soon the corral was far behind them.

  When they tired, the group camped alongside the deserted tracks, in the dusky shadow of a crumbling billboard advertising the Carnival at the Edge of the World. In the picture an enormous spiked black Ferris wheel soared above a park full of lights and attractions, countless specters and ghosts smiling at one another as they tried their luck at games or as their vaporous forms blew out of shape on the rides. The billboard was torn and peeling in many places but still displayed the words RIDE THE TUNNEL OF TERROR! VIEW THE KNOWN UNIVERSE!

  For some reason, it reminded May of Lucius. All those spirits smiling and laughing made her think of the horrible fate he was probably enduring under the sea.

  “Why so sad?” Captain Fabbio asked, staring hard at May. May squirmed. Out of her group of new travel mates, she felt the most shy with Fabbio.

  “I was just thinking of someone. A boy.”

  “Ohhh, your boyfriend?” Fabbio oozed, raising his eyebrows and twirling his mustache knowingly.

  “No. He was a boy I met in the Ever After, before I met you and Beatrice. A specter.”

  Captain Fabbio and Beatrice both looked at her expectantly.

  “I sort of got him … sent to South Place.”

  “Ay, Dio mio!” Fabbio exclaimed.

  Beatrice gasped.

  “She didn’t really get him sent there,” Pumpkin said defensively, twirling the half of the NEVER TO BE DEARLY DEPARTED necklace he and May shared. “It just happened. He got hit by seawater.”

  May gave Pumpkin a grateful grimace of a smile.

  Fabbio twirled his mustache and cocked an eyebrow at Beatrice. Anyone who touched a drop of seawater was sent immediately to South Place, the realm of Dark Spirits far under the sea. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to,” Beatrice offered to May She looked to Captain Fabbio
to confirm this.

  “Eternal torment by ghouls and goblins eees … not so bad,” Fabbio said. “Could be worse.”

  “How?” Pumpkin asked, biting his finger, curious.

  Fabbio searched the sky above his head. “Errrrr …” Then he scowled and threw up his hands. “I will think of it later.”

  May tried to feel reassured, but later that night all her mistakes stuck to her mind like a briar on a pair of tights. If she had never talked Lucius into coming out of the Catacombs, where he’d been hidden safely for so long, he would have never been hit by seawater. And it made her wonder what other mistakes lay ahead.

  She looked at her companions, all asleep but for Somber Kitty, who stared at her drowsily, purring softly and keeping watch. Kitty only blinked at her and whispered, “Meay.” May didn’t understand what he’d said, but it amounted to something like he believed in her—much more than she believed in herself. May tried to picture herself as the hero The Book of the Dead had described:

  MAY ELLEN BIRD: Known far and wide as the girl who destroyed Evil Bo Cleevil’s reign of terror Resides in Briery Swamp, West Virginia.

  But in her mind’s eye, all she could see was the patchwork blanket on her bed back home. The crack on the inside wall of her closet that looked like a question mark. The gathering of four pine trees by the trail in the woods, where she used to lie on the pine needles, pretending it was the warrior queen’s bed. She dared not think of her mom right then. It would have made the ache too big for such a small body She thought only of these little things that she missed.

  She reached out and stroked Somber Kitty. She recalled, proudly, his surprising victory against both the Bogey and his horrible dogs, the Black Shucks. If May knew one thing, it was that no danger, at that moment, would have surprised her.

  Ellen Bird sat poised over the pile of laundry in May’s closet, holding a pair of May’s black overalls. Today was the day she had gotten up the courage to do her missing daughters laundry.

  What had made her pause were the tiny green bits embedded all over the overalls, from the knee to the ankle. Curious, she dug one out with her nail.

  A briar

  Ellen rubbed the briar between her thumb and forefinger.

  Abruptly, she stood and approached May’s bedroom window, peering out at the tops of the trees.

  She was thinking of a night May had come home from the woods, saying there had been something bad there. Ellen remembered the sight of May, curled up in her blankets like a caterpillar, her overalls discarded on the floor.

  It had been her daughter’s wild imagination. Hadn’t it.

  Ellen rubbed the briar a minute longer And then, heaving a long-suffering breath, she dropped it into the wastebasket by the door and walked out.

  “If she’s not in the mountains, there are lots of other places my mother could be,” Bea said hopefully, looking behind her to make sure May was there. They had gotten an early start that morning, but the mountains only teased them from the horizon, and it was hard to tell how much progress they’d actually made.

  “She could be in one of the coastal towns or even in one of the cities. The Ever After is a big place.” Her eyelashes fluttered thoughtfully. “Even if I did put up signs all over the City of Ether and send telep-a-grams to the Board of Spirits with Unsightly Diseases in all the major cities and stop at every typhoid sanitarium in the south …”

  Beatrice had been looking for her mother for more than eighty years, and she had covered a lot of ground.

  “But I do hope that she’s in the mountains.”

  Beatrice had not stopped thinking out loud since they had left Cleevilville. Her mind wandered from all the strategies she had used to locate her mother to where she might have gone wrong or missed something and how she might fix it. “I’m sure she must be somewhere I haven’t checked yet.”

  Pumpkin, not paying attention, hummed to himself happily as he drifted along up ahead, occasionally falling behind when he thought he saw something shiny or interesting, then zipping to take the lead once he ascertained it was nothing of interest after all.

  Fabbio licked his thumb and thrust it in the air. “This good Italian trick to find how long we have to go,” he said, holding his thumb against the wind. Then his shoulders slumped. “It is telling me there is long way to go.”

  “Isn’t that a trick to find out if it’s going to rain?” Beatrice asked.

  Fabbio stiffened, as if realizing, with a start, that she was right. Then he swatted at an imaginary fly, pretending not to have heard her.

  When Bea didn’t fill in the silence, he cleared his throat and interjected a poem.

  “The plains is like my lover’s eye

  She makes a good’a pizza pie.”

  “I didn’t know you liked poetry, Captain,” May said kindly.

  “Yes.” Fabbio stood erect. “What you are wondering is true. I was born with heart of poet. The genius words, they come from inside, I know not how. I no have girlfriend.” He added with a wink, by way of explanation, “This about the lover is not a true story All up here.” He tapped his head.

  “Astounding,” Beatrice said. The girls grinned at each other as Fabbio cleared his throat and began another one, this time comparing the endlessness of the plains to the endlessness of his love for his dear uncle Bonino, who played the flute.

  As he listened, Somber Kitty let out a low, pensive meow. He regretted at that moment that he understood more English than he spoke. May thought, as Fabbio finished his poem, that they may have discovered what was worse than being tormented by ghouls and goblins for all eternity.

  By the end of the day there were more worrisome things on everyone’s minds. The mountains didn’t seem to be any closer, despite their long day of traveling.

  “Maybe we should turn back,” Beatrice said uncertainly The highlands rolled along in every direction with no sign of change. “It’s not too late to head back to Ether. At least we know how far back it is.”

  May considered this as she looked around at the empty, rolling landscape. She shoved her hand into her pocket and grasped the manila envelope. It seemed the Lady should be sending her some kind of signal of what to do. But there had been nothing.

  They moved on in silence, each thinking their own thoughts. The mountains were specks in the distance. Or, from the mountains’ perspective, May imagined, she was a speck in the distance. Her hope faltered inside her, realizing this.

  “I made my room into Hawaii once,” May said, trying to distract herself with warmer thoughts. “I made a lagoon and pasted paper trees on the walls. But the inflatable pool I was using for the lagoon popped, and it flooded the room. She got so mad!”

  Beatrice smiled appreciatively at May’s story “I went to a cotillion with a purple bow instead of the pink one that matched my dress. Mother was very displeased.”

  May grinned. “One time I slept with my Halloween candy, and it melted into my hair and Mom had to cut it.” That was how she’d ended up with her short black bob. Before that, May’s hair had been long and lustrous and down to her waist, like a wild forest child.

  They recounted other times they’d made their moms angry Like when May flushed her toothbrush down the toilet, pretending it was a submarine, and the old pipes burst. Like all the times she’d been sent outside dressed and combed and had returned with muddy quartz rocks gathered in her shirt, thinking they were as valuable as diamonds and hoping to spend them in Hog Wallow. Mrs. Bird had built a special shelf in May’s room to keep them all safe.

  It made them almost forget. It made them almost feel as if their moms were just behind them, catching up, and not impossibly far away

  NECROMANCY NANCY’S SNACK SHOPPE, a sign ahead announced. A shell of a house perched on the rocky hill beyond it, its doors all long fallen in and its frame sagging to the left. Shingles had slid off its sides and lay in piles at its base. Somber Kitty gave the air a thoughtful sniff from his papoose as they passed the sign and turned toward the shop.


  “If I get home, I am going to behave better,” May said, her eyes on the horizon ahead, where the faintest shadows of mountains formed.

  “If I see my mother again,” Bea mused, trying to pass the time, “I’m going to tat a lace handkerchief for her.”

  “If I see my men again, I never ever gonna let them go,” Fabbio blurted out with emotion, then cleared his throat and tugged at the medals on his uniform self-consciously.

  “Something smells terrible,” May croaked, pinching her nose with her fingers.

  Beatrice drifted to the front doorway and wrinkled her nose.

  Pumpkin raised his nostrils to the air. Sniff, sniff sniff. “Smells like bananas.”

  Whoosh!

  May flinched just as a teapot flew past her head.

  She stared after it as it went tumbling across the dirt. It had come out of one of the windows of Necromancy Nancy’s.

  “Oh no!” Beatrice said, casting a look at Fabbio. Pumpkin whimpered.

  “Ay, Dio mio,” Fabbio said, backing up, his eyes pinned to the shack. Somber Kitty leaped from his papoose and hissed at the empty, gaping doorway.

  “What is it?”

  “Shhh,” Beatrice hissed, taking May by the strap of her bathing suit and yanking her backward. Pumpkin zipped backward too.

  Bea’s eyelashes fluttered wildly as she quickly scanned the area around them. “They’re here,” she whispered.

  Fabbio grasped the hilt of his sword. “We are to being very still. They may be surrounding us.”

  “Who?” May turned to stare at Bea quizzically at the very same moment that a pie plate came shooting through the doorway, just missing her ear. Her hands flew to her face as a shrill cry rang in her ears.

  And then they saw it. A something appeared in the doorway of the snack shack. It didn’t have a shape, really—it was just a glowing, lopsided orb of hazy light. In its hazy arms it held a jumble of plates, bowls, and candlesticks.