Will bush's Arc

Chapter 1 of 26

Will Bush had been dead for three years, and his sister was walking toward the north pass without knowing he was there. He stood at the edge of the Fen where the trees thinned into wet grass. He could see Kate through the mist. She wore the same red shoes she used to dance in on the kitchen tiles, back when he was small enough to sit on the counter and watch. The shoes were mud-spattered now. She carried a lantern and a folded map. She was looking for him, still, and she would walk right past him. Will tried to lift his hand. It came up pale and thin, like breath on cold glass. He pushed harder. His fingers blurred at the edges. A living eye would slide over him the way it slid over fog. He had learned this the hard way, standing at their mother's door for a full year while she wept into a dish towel and never once turned her head. Under a cherry tree near the path, a collie lay watching him. It was the missing dog people had been searching for. Its ears were up. It could see him. Animals always could. Will crouched and whispered, "Bark. Please. Bark at her." The dog only tilted its head. A cold weight settled behind him. He turned. A tall pale woman drifted between the trunks, hair moving without wind, a dark ring behind her head like a bruised moon. The hill ghosts spoke of her. She was the one who kept the dead thin. She looked at Will the way a hawk looks at a mouse it has already decided about. "You cannot be seen," she said. Her voice was quiet and certain. "That is the rule of the peak. Come back with me and be still." Will looked at Kate. She was almost at the pass. In a minute she would cross it and be gone into the shifting ground where no tracker worked. He thought of her at the kitchen table the night before he died, cutting his sandwich into triangles because he liked them that way. He turned to the collie. He pointed at his sister and said, "Go. Go to her. Bring her here." The dog stood. It ran. It barked once, sharp and bright, and Kate stopped walking and turned toward the sound. The collie circled her legs and pulled at her sleeve with its teeth, dragging her off the path, toward the cherry tree, toward Will. Kate followed, calling the dog's name she did not know. The pale woman's hand closed on Will's shoulder before he could see his sister's face. The grip was cold enough to burn. "Then you come with me now," she said, and the Fen tilted, and the mist rose up to swallow him.