Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 142

                ‘There are some of us that did,’ Windermere says. ‘It’s so hard to keep a track on people who are immaterial.’

                ‘Why are you here though?’ Yates asks.

                ‘We’d better sit down,’ she says.

                ‘We’re not in trouble are we?’ I ask.

                ‘Not trouble, no,’ Windermere says. ‘Come.’ She directs us towards the living room. We follow in a line like ducks following their mother.

                We sit down in a row on the sofa. I can only imagine where Graham’s gone.

                ‘Basically we need you to come in,’ she says. ‘We need you to talk to Teague.’

                ‘What makes you think he’ll listen to us?’ I ask. I have no great desire to ever see the man again.

                ‘We have to try,’ Windermere says. ‘There are some in my council who wants you to receive the same treatment. You followed him around, causing trouble and bridging gaps between the living and the dead. We generally discourage such things.’

                ‘Who’s we?’ Elle asks. ‘And we did nothing wrong. Unless wrong is stopping a maniac. In which case you’re welcome to string me up.’

                I nod in unison. ‘We didn’t know what we were doing, we thought we were doing good.’

                ‘You did do good,’ Windermere says. ‘But this side of the tracks, as it were, is seen as sacred by a lot of people. Some of us see us a utopian society that doesn’t want to mix with the living.’

                ‘Any people who tend to segregate themselves from others aren’t historically proven to be great company,’ Yates observes.

                Windermere smiles, like she’s talking to a child. I wonder if she knows that Yates, for all his teenage appearance, is actually well into his thirties.

                ‘Who are ‘we’?’ I explore. She’s being very vague about some things and I’m not sure I like it.

                ‘The Council,’ she begins, ‘are a group of scientists, academics and scholars who found each other a long time ago. We’re not that hard to find, we tend to cluster around libraries.’ She pauses, looking at Yates. ‘Another thing, we’d like the Thacker book back.’

                ‘What right do you have to it?’ Yates raises his voice, darting his eyes upwards to where the book is undoubtedly stowed.

                ‘No more than you,’ she rebuts. ‘The Alchemist belongs to the living. Thacker is something of a legend to us and though his annotations are vitally important and help us understand a lot about the afterlife, we use his book in conjunction with our rules. It stays in the Thacker museum.’