“Here and here,” he said. “Thus and thus.” My hand reached out, but it was Dorn who pointed the finger at the grass, Dorn who called the dust and bones within to rise. Mandor had not been long dead. The ground cracked and horror came forth, little by little, the worms dropping from it as it rose. I heard Riddle on the hill behind me choking back a gasp, whether awe or fear I could not tell.
“Thus and thus,” Dorn went on. “So and so.”
The bones became clad in flesh, the flesh in robes of state. The head became more than a skull, then was crowned once more, until at last what had been so horrible at the end of Mandor’s life became the beauty I had known in Schooltown, bright and lovely as the sun, graceful as grass, and looking at me from death’s eyes. From this uncanny fetch came a cry of such eerie gladness that my heart chilled. “Whole,” it cried in a spectral voice. “Oh, I am risen whole again.”
I could have wept. This wholeness was not an intended gift, and yet … it was one I would have made him during life if I had known how. “So and so,” said with Dorn within me. “You could not have made him so or kept him so in life for any length of time.”
Riddle called from the hillside, reminding me of our purpose there. So I asked it, or Dorn did, of those strange crystalline contrivances which Riddle was so concerned about. The phantom seemed not to understand.
“These are not things which Mandor knew. These are things of Huld. Playthings for Huld. Magicians made them. Huld understood them, not Mandor. Oh, Mandor, whole, whole again …”
I heard Riddle cursing, then he called to me, “I’m sorry, Peter. Let the pathetic thing go back to its grave.”
But I was not ready to do that. I had remembered Mertyn’s words concerning those who had vanished.
“Mandor, do you speak with others where you are? Do the dead talk together?”
The fetch stared at me with dead eyes, eyes in which a brief, horrible flame flickered, a firefly awareness, a last kindling.
“In Hell’s Maw,” it screamed at me. “They speak, the dead who linger speak, before they fall to dust, in the pits. When all is dust, we go, we go.”
“Have you spoken to Himaggery?” I asked. “To Windlow the Seer?” I remembered the names of others Riddle had told me of and asked for them, but the apparition sighed no, no, none of these.
Then it drew itself up and that brief flame lit the empty eyes once more. “Words come where Mandor is … troubling all … seeking those you seek … not there … not in the place … Peter … let me be whole, whole, whole.”
I sobbed to Dorn. “Let him be whole, Dorn, as he goes to rest.” And so it was the phantom sank into the earth in the guise he had once worn, the kingly crown disappearing at last, in appearance as whole as he had been in Schooltown before his own treachery maimed him.
And I was left alone, Dorn gone, Mandor gone, only Riddle standing high upon the rim as the wind sighed through the black firs and the grasses waved endless farewell on Mandor’s grave. Inside me a small dam seemed to break, a place of swampy fear drained away, and I could turn to Riddle with my face almost calm to go with him back to the millhouse. He was no more given to talk than I, and we had a silent breakfast, both of us thinking thoughts of old anguish and, I believe, new understanding.
When we had eaten he said, “Peter, I will go with you a way north. I have an errand in that general direction, and it is better never to travel alone. That is, if I am welcome and my own attributes will not inhibit your … business.”
I laughed a little. “Riddle, my business is a simple one. I am going in search of my mother who has … left word of her whereabouts in a place known as ‘a city which fears the unborn.’ All I know of the place is that it is north of here.”