"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts"--the Counting Crows

Films About Ghosts

Chapter One: The Tomb

Air.

At first she wasn't sure what it was that tickled her senses: cool, moist. She poked out her tongue and tested the something that hovered before her face. Something was definitely odd here. This was not where she'd gone to sleep. It was too dark here—she was afraid of the dark! In a panic, she sat up, her ribs expanding as she did so. Her chest rose and rose for a year, and then muscles long unused expelled the breath forcefully.

Air.

That was the word—she was sure of it. As she gasped, her ribs pumping and her stomach pushing, she knew that air had once been very important. Was important now—most important. She looked around in curiosity; her breaths grew steadier, her eyes adjusting to the near darkness. The overwhelming feeling of something being wrong was foremost in her mind. A white sheet lay crumpled around her waist, still over her feet. She grinned foolishly. That must be it—she was naked. How stupid of her.

Hitching the sheet up around her breasts, she knotted it. It took a few tries, because she was very stiff. Her fingers did not seem to want to cooperate. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed she was on, she dropped to the floor and fell over. Using the marble bed for support, she got to her feet once again. She was very woozy—all the blood was pounding in her head. Her brain seemed to be full of fog, wet and white and opaque.

Her name. That was what she'd been trying to remember. Musingly she ran her hands over her face as if that would provide the clue. She brushed her eyelashes against the palm of her hand, enjoying the feel. It tickled. For a second she studied a long white scar just above her left breast, but she could not remember when it had happened—or even if it had hurt. She prodded the smooth white of the scar, feeling the slight bump of it beneath the larger bump of her collarbone.

Her hair.

The thought came unbidden, popping through the fog. Immediately she put a hand to her head. The hair that met her fingers was not as short as she'd feared, but it seemed that way because it was bound back in a most uncomfortable and itchy style. Tucking her sheet under her elbow, she pulled and tugged clumsily at the mass of hair until it tumbled down over her shoulders and to her elbows in a mass of silver waves. Her brain presented her with the conviction that to have silver hair at her age was utterly absurd—but she wasn't sure how old she was. A peek under the sheet gave her no clues, but informed her that she was endowed with all the feminine charms of a young boy.

Where was she? She glanced up and around. It was a very big room, made of white marble. Her bed—if that's what it was—was in the center of the square room. The ceiling looked like a field of stars—a black matte rock set with crystal chips. This must be her room.

Then why did she have the definite feeling that she wasn't supposed to be here?

She vaulted off the bed, her knees wobbling. "Maybe there are some clothes here."

Looking around in shock, she realized that it was she who had said it. Well, her voice was a bit higher-pitched than she'd thought. Going over to one of the walls, she opened a trunk. Inside of it was what looked like a small child's playthings—a doll, a few round stones, and a long black feather? In the next trunk she opened, there were four paintings, each taller than she was. They seemed to be the life-size portraits of two men and two women. She pushed them aside—far too heavy to lift. The third trunk contained papers—thousands of them. In the very bottom there was a sketch of a tower, and the words 'So you shant forget us.'

The fourth trunk was nearly empty. A letter lay in the very bottom, on top of another portrait, a bottle of some unknown substance, and a flute. She lifted out the letter, puzzled, and reached for the portrait. It was a portrait of a cat, a sleek ebony beauty with green eyes and a white spot on its chest. Confused, she picked up the flute, admiring the sleek beauty of it. She placed her fingers over the holes and blew, delighting in the pure clear note.

She wasn't sure about some of these things. They all seemed familiar, in a distant kind of way, especially the flute and the picture of the tower. She held onto the flute as she moved to the very last trunk—which, to her relief, held clothing.

After she had dressed in a gray skirt, white blouse, and black bodice, she noticed a neckband in the bottom of the fifth trunk. She picked it up, gasping softly at the beauty of the piece. Five thin leather cords, dyed different shades of green, were woven into a single complicated braid. The pendant at the middle was round and covered in a spiral of words (written in a language she didn't know) that began at the middle and swirled outwards, getting smaller and smaller until they were just dots. She looped it around her neck, feeling the pendant settle into the hollow in her throat. Touching it with reverent fingers, she was certain that this was hers.

It was her birthday present.

She flipped over the pendant, tilting her chin to her chest to see what was on the backside. There was something on the back, she knew it! It had to be! She squinted down her nose.

To Ariane on her tenth birthday from her loving brother

Ariane was confused. Ten? She hardly felt ten. Her bones hurt—her joints ached. She was stiff all over—much more like an older person. Ariane shuddered; the sort of tremble makes you say, "Someone just walked over my grave". She glanced at the white marble walls, suddenly terribly suspicious. Skidding across the marble slabs in the floor, she ran to the door. Her worst fears were confirmed when she discovered that it was sealed. Her white hands scrabbled at the mortar around the door for a frantic minute, and then she succumbed to her horror.

She screamed.

It echoed horribly, like a thousand shrill voices shrieking and ten thousand nails scratching at marble, and the horror of the noise only made her cry and scream more. With an effort Ariane stopped her noise and waited until the echoes faded, concentrating on the breath in her stony lungs and on the cold sweat trickling down her face. "I must plan," she whispered. "Think of some way to get out of here."

A young man's voice echoed in her head from something long past. "There will always be another way out for us," he said confidently, brushing his overlong dark hair out of his eyes. "I won't let you get backed into a corner." Ariane focused on the voice and tried to see the face it belonged to, but couldn't quite find it. The only thing left in her head when the voice had faded was the memory of a smell. A smile crept across her features as she remembered the smell of cinnamon and something else that her confused and foggy brain could not quite place.

There would be another way out. Ariane was sure of it, sure that the boy she remembered would have left another door, even if he thought she were—dead. Another shiver dashed down her spine and she crossed to the opposite side of the room. It wasn't promising, just smooth white wall around the fourth trunk. With a sigh of irritation she bent over the trunk's contents once more, running her hands over the picture of the cat—which, no matter how hard she stared, did not seem familiar—and settled on the letter. It was rolled into a scroll and bound with a green leather cord like those that were looped around her neck. Clumsily Ariane unfolded the letter and began to read.

"Don't fret, little sister, for I've not forgotten you."

She stopped after the first sentence, her breath short. Little sister. Ariane's stiff fingers ran over the letter again, the letter that her brother had written, her link to the world outside her tomb. With another shaky breath, she focused on the precise, blocky handwriting.

"If you're reading this, it means that what I did worked. I won't bore you with the explanations, but what I've done is I've caught you right before you passed into Death. Think of it like this: a human being has two parts: a body, which can be killed, and a spirit, which exists forever. My spell for you is like a net that caught your spirit before you went where I couldn't follow, and brought you back to your body. I healed it the best I could, so that you wouldn't return to a broken home, but if your joints are a little stiff rub some clove oil into them. It should numb the pain until they get used to moving again.

"I'm also very sorry about the tomb: I couldn't tell the others what I'd done, because they frown upon tampering with Death. They insisted that you be buried with honors, so I built this for you. Consider it the largest present I've ever given you. They've mortared the front door shut, but there's another way out. I don't think anyone suspected what I'd done, but just in case I put an unlocking spell on it that only we can use.

"Just face the main entrance and say 'Death forgot me' and a door will open behind you and to your right. Remember to use our special language, or it won't work. It's just another safety precaution to keep us safe from the others. The tunnel comes out about halfway up the old stone quarry, on the north side.

"Remember that I love you, always have, and always will. Salazar."

Ariane lost her balance and sat down hard on the ground, the musty folds of her skirt caught under her heels. "Salazar," she whispered, and the room whispered it back to her: "Salazar—Salazar..."

A hand with rough fingertips brushed her hair out of her eyes. "Look here," said the confident young voice that had told her there would be another way out, "This—this plant is called hellebore. It's very useful." A cinnamon smell wafted past as dark hair swung by her face; Salazar's hand plucked a plant from the ground. "It's used in Invisibility Spells."

"It's poisonous," Ariane replied. The sun beating down on her neck was hot and her dress was scratching her and she had a cramp in her leg from crouching in the woods for too long. "And that's why no one ever drinks an invisibility potion, right?" She pushed her sweaty hair out of her eyes again. "Salazar, it's too hot. Can't we go home?"

"Not until we find enough belladonna to fill your basket," Salazar replied, smiling at the nearly empty basket lying forgotten by Ariane's knees. "And that may take some time." He turned him smile on her. "Especially if you keep fidgeting like that." Ariane, halfway through pushing her hair away of her eyes again, scowled.

"You do it just as much as I do!" she replied, grabbing her basket and letting her fair hair flop over her eyes as she stood up. "Probably even more."

Salazar stood up, head and shoulders taller than she was, and for a moment she regretted taunting him. "You're standing in my hellebore," he said in a low voice, his eyes twinkling behind his dark hair. Ariane looked down and saw the leaves crushed beneath her shoes, looked up and saw Salazar's mouth twitch, and for a gleeful five minutes they had laughed themselves sick.

The letter fell from her fingers, landing with a soft 'whiff' on the marble floor. Ariane blinked twice, shivered, and flexed her hands, trying to restore feeling to them. Without thought she reached for the bottle and let the liquid inside drip onto her fingertips, then rubbed it into her sore wrists and knuckles. It smelled like cinnamon.

Getting to her feet as clumsily as a newborn colt, she stumbled to her second trunk, which contained the four portraits, and pushed them all to the floor so that she could find the one she wanted. The top one was a man with thick, straw-colored hair and bright blue eyes; the second a woman who could have been his sister with red hair. The third was another woman with long brown hair and royalty-white skin, her heavy-lidded eyes turned away from the painter as though she were shy or uncomfortable or both. The fourth was Salazar.

He was standing in a doorway, his arms crossed across his chest and his lanky legs braced against the door. The dark hair that constantly got in his eyes was pulled back with a leather thong (something Ariane was sure the painter must have done, because Salazar refused to tend to his own hair), but had still managed to escape enough to hang over one his dark eyes, which were painted so realistically that Ariane felt them looking into her soul. They were not black but the darkest of violets, as smooth and rich as the velvet she had once seen on the casket of a king.

Someone had said that they had the same eyes.

Ariane was struck by another distant memory: standing with her brother in a tiny room that stank of pigs. Her feet were bare and the dirt floor of the hut was wet, and the mud squelched between her toes. One of his arms was resting firmly around her shoulders, one of her silvery curls coiled around his fingers.

"I'll not go anywhere without her," he was telling the others in the room, but Ariane couldn't remember what they looked like. She remembered the mud and how red it was, and how it welled up between her toes as though she were standing on the edge of a lake of blood. "She's got no one left but me."

"We cannot take children," said a man in a deep voice rich with wine. "We're going north, to build a great building of stone and teach those who are magical. She'll be in the way." Ariane clenched her toes and red mud ran over them, hiding them from view.

"She's incredibly intelligent," Salazar said staunchly. "She's nearly nine years old—that's only a few years from the age of reason. Ariane is my sister, and I'll go with her or not at all."

There was a sigh from the man, and a woman chimed in. "Salazar, it's not for your sake that we're talking right now. We don't want a small child getting hurt while the rest of us are building a building to rival Rome." The woman's voice was lyrical and fluid, and it appealed to Ariane even if her words did not.

"I'm not going to get hurt," Ariane spoke up, and Salazar's hand tightened on her shoulder. "I'm going to help." Her eyes focused on Salazar, and he shook his head in despair.

"I told you not to say anything," he told her, his dark eyes very serious.

The woman with the lyrical voice laughed. "You have the same eyes," she said, "but they're especially striking in such a fair little girl." She shook her loose hair back from her shoulders, the movements only just visible to Ariane's downcast gaze. "I'd let her stay, but there's still the question of her safety."

Salazar straightened, his bony teenage frame crackling with an effort to look mature. "I will keep her safe. As long as I'm here, nothing will harm her."

"What a dumb thing to promise," Ariane said aloud, her voice echoing and breaking the spell cast upon her by the portrait. "What a stupid, stupid thing to say."

She was angry and not sure why, kicking the portrait aside and stalking back towards the other end of the chamber to retrieve the letter from Salazar. With a snap she unfurled it, her skin tingling from the clove oil, and scanned down to the line she wanted. "...face the main entrance and say 'Death forgot me' and a door will open behind you and to your right. Remember to use our special language, or it won't work. It's just another safety precaution to keep us safe from the others...." Ariane paused in her recitation. Special language? She read it again, hoping her mercurial memory would throw something at her, but no inspiration came.

Silver hair swirling, she turned to the mortared door and drew in a deep breath. "Death forgot me," she whispered, the letter clenched tight in her fists. Nothing happened. With a frustrated cry she kicked the marble block that she'd slept on until recently. "Salazar!" Ariane yelled, her echoes rebounding. "I've forgotten everything and your words don't do me a damn bit of good!"

With a sound caught between a snarl and a sob, Ariane sat down against the marble block and cried again, the tears running down her face until she'd given herself a runny nose and a headache. She blew her nose on the hem of her skirt and massaged her temples, praying that this wasn't the start of a headache like the ones that had plagued Salazar...

She held her breath for a moment, expecting to be swept away by another burst of memory, but nothing happened. It was simply solid fact in her mind that Salazar had gotten the worst aches in his head, so terrible that they left him hiding from light, noise, and movement until they passed. Ariane's mind presented her with a vision of tightly closed eyes, dark eyelashes clumped together by tears of pain, a white hand gesturing for her to take away his uneaten meal. The candle in her hand was shielded to the point of being completely covered, but the light was still too much for him. It frightened her terribly to see her brother in this weakened state.

Gradually the pain in her head faded, and she lay against the stone, her stomach growling. Ariane tried to ignore the pains in her belly that had replaced the pains in her head, instead tracing the engraving at the foot of her 'bed'. It was a crest—it must be her brother's crest, since Ariane could not remember having one of her own—made up of a coiled serpent in the high right field, an herbalist's symbol in the lower left, and a tiny repeated pattern in the upper left and lower right that she didn't know the meaning of. The serpent didn't look as though it were about to strike as it did on other shields, but was slyly peeking at her from under its thick coils.

Salazar stared eye to eye with a grass snake as it wove through clumps of wheat towards him as he lay belly-down in the dirt. "Shh!" he said without taking his eyes off the snake. "Don't move, Ariane."

"What are you doing?" she whispered, not moving. The snake peered at her with curious eyes, alive with an earthy intelligence.

He made some hissing noises that she knew were utter rubbish, but somehow they made sense to her: "I'm talking to it." His black hair swung over his eyes, and he flicked it aside with a toss of his head, meeting her eyes for the first time. "You can understand me, right?"

"Yes..." she scratched the back of her leg with the toes of her other foot. "But I can't speak like you do."

"If you can understand me, you can," Salazar replied in English. "Just look at the snake—into his eyes—and talk to him."

Obediently she knelt down by the grass snake and peered into its strange, bright eyes. "Hello there." Her mouth folded around the hisses like they were candy, and she giggled in delight. The snake gave her an incredulous look.

Ariane's head jerked as her body fought to stay awake, banging the back of her skull against the marble. Though her silver curls cushioned it, it still stung.

"Remember to use our special language, or it won't work." She silently mouthed Salazar's words, then stood up and faced the main entrance. Squinting her dark violet eyes, she imagined the grass snake's cool intelligence among the wheat. "Death forgot me," she whispered in the weird, hissing language that she and her brother had shared. With a rasp of stone on stone, something behind her shifted. Ariane turned in a swirl of gray skirts and hair and laughed in delight as she saw the newly revealed passageway in the back corner of the room.

She scrambled inside and began to run, avoiding rocky protrusions with the ease of adrenaline. After awhile she had to slow down, not because she had become tired, but because water trickled over the rocks in a thin stream that was cool and sweet and made it far too dangerous to run in the dark. It was not so welcoming after it had soaked her skirt to the knees, and even less sweet when she was forced to crawl in it because the roof had dropped. Panting and sweating, Ariane crawled all the way to the bottom of the tunnel where it leveled out.

With a gasp she sat down in the brook, having discovered its source. She was looking at a huge underground lake, which reflected watery blue-green light up at her and made swirling shadows on the craggy roof. Ariane peered into the clear water, which became ominously dark in the distance and hinted at a source. An underground river, perhaps? Or maybe the lake was the source for the underground river. Ariane squinted at the distant flowing water and wondered what Salazar could have been thinking, sending her out this way. How stupid.

She ripped the hem of her skirt off and began braiding her hair with her clumsy, sore fingers (why had she left the bottle of clove oil in the tomb?), thinking all the while about what she was to do. Ariane was confident that she could swim, but saw no point in making the effort if she was only going to be lost in a watery underground labyrinth. To make sure that she hadn't missed a side passage, she crawled back up the stone passageway and ran her hands over the wall in the dark. There was no other way out.

Moving as though in a dream, Ariane kilted up her skirt so that it wouldn't tangle around her legs, checked to make sure the letter was rolled up safely inside the flute she had tucked into the top of her braid where it would stay mostly dry, and waded into the freezing underground lake. At first she thrashed around like a fat sheep, but eventually her body remembered the rhythm of strokes and her legs remembered how to kick like a frog, and she made her way to the other side of the lake.

Weariness stole up on her like a weighted cloak. She was nearly three- quarters of the way across the lake when her head went under for the first time, pulled by her sodden blouse and skirts. Treading water and sputtering frantically, Ariane ripped the sleeves from the blouse and shucked her bodice, letting them float down like strange jellyfish. Slightly lighter, she made better time to the edge of the lake, where she felt a cold force pull at her toes for the first time. It frightened her, and only the weighted feeling of her limbs could convince her to go on. Gasping for breath and trying desperately to stay above the surface, Ariane kicked herself forward one more time.

In an instant, all that was left of Ariane in the chamber of the lake was her short, surprised cry, ripped from her by the force of the current of the underground river.

Author's Note: Yes, I know I have about five stories in the works, but I love this one. I really, really do. It's going to be good, I promise. Now review so that I don't feel stupid posting my additional chapters.