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“What’s happening?” said Lyra.
The spies were looking through, puzzled. But it was more than puzzlement they felt. Just as the air had resisted the knife, so something in this opening resisted their going through. Will had to push against something invisible and then pull Lyra after him, and the Gallivespians could hardly make any headway at all. They had to perch the dragonflies on the children’s hands, and even then it was like pulling them against a pressure in the air; their filmy wings bent and twisted, and the little riders had to stroke their mounts’ heads and whisper to calm their fears.
But after a few seconds of struggle, they were all through, and Will found the edge of the window (though it was impossible to see) and closed it, shutting the sound of the soldiers away in their own world.
“Will,” said Lyra, and he turned to see that there was another figure in the kitchen with them.
His heart jolted. It was the man he’d seen not ten minutes before, stark dead in the bushes with his throat cut.
He was middle-aged, lean, with the look of a man who spent most of the time in the open air. But now he was looking almost crazed, or paralyzed, with shock. His eyes were so wide that the white showed all around the iris, and he was clutching the edge of the table with a trembling hand. His throat, Will was glad to see, was intact.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. All he could do was point at Will and Lyra.
Lyra said, “Excuse us for being in your house, but we had to escape from the men who were coming. I’m sorry if we startled you. I’m Lyra, and this is Will, and these are our friends, the Chevalier Tialys and the Lady Salmakia. Could you tell us your name and where we are?”
This normal-sounding request seemed to bring the man to his senses, and a shudder passed over him, as if he were waking from a dream.
“I’m dead,” he said. “I’m lying out there, dead. I know I am. You ain’t dead. What’s happening? God help me, they cut my throat. What’s happening?”
Lyra stepped closer to Will when the man said I’m dead, and Pantalaimon fled to her breast as a mouse. As for the Gallivespians, they were trying to control their dragonflies, because the great insects seemed to have an aversion for the man and darted here and there in the kitchen, looking for a way out.
But the man didn’t notice them. He was still trying to understand what had happened.
“Are you a ghost?” Will said cautiously.
The man reached out his hand, and Will tried to take it, but his fingers closed on the air. A tingle of cold was all he felt.
When he saw it happen, the man looked at his own hand, appalled. The numbness was beginning to wear off, and he could feel the pity of his state.
“Truly,” he said, “I am dead . . . I’m dead, and I’m going to Hell . . .”
“Hush,” said Lyra, “we’ll go together. What’s your name?”
“Dirk Jansen I was,” he said, “but already I . . . I don’t know what to do . . . Don’t know where to go . . .”
Will opened the door. The barnyard looked the same, the kitchen garden was unchanged, the same hazy sun shone down. And there was the man’s body, untouched.
A little groan broke from Dirk Jansen’s throat, as if there were no denying it anymore. The dragonflies darted out of the door and skimmed over the ground and then shot up high, faster than birds. The man was looking around helplessly, raising his hands, lowering them again, uttering little cries.
“I can’t stay here . . . Can’t stay,” he was saying. “But this ain’t the farm I knew. This is wrong. I got to go . . .”
“Where are you going, Mr. Jansen?” said Lyra.
“Down the road. Dunno. Got to go. Can’t stay here . . .”
Salmakia flew down to perch on Lyra’s hand. The dragonfly’s little claws pricked as the Lady said, “There are people walking from the village—people like this man—all walking in the same direction.”
“Then we’ll go with them,” said Will, and swung his rucksack over his shoulder.
Dirk Jansen was already passing his own body, averting his eyes. He looked almost as if he were drunk, stopping, moving on, wandering to left and right, stumbling over little ruts and stones on the path his living feet had known so well.
Lyra came after Will, and Pantalaimon became a kestrel and flew up as high as he could, making Lyra gasp.
“They’re right,” he said when he came down. “There’s lines of people all coming from the village. Dead people . . .”
And soon they saw them, too: twenty or so men, women, and children, all moving as Dirk Jansen had done, uncertain and shocked. The village was half a mile away, and the people were coming toward them, close together in the middle of the road. When Dirk Jansen saw the other ghosts, he broke into a stumbling run, and they held out their hands to greet him.
“Even if they don’t know where they’re going, they’re all going there together,” Lyra said. “We better just go with them.”
“D’you think they had dæmons in this world?” said Will.
“Can’t tell. If you saw one of ’em in your world, would you know he was a ghost?”
“It’s hard to say. They don’t look normal, exactly . . . There was a man I used to see in my town, and he used to walk about outside the shops always holding the same old plastic bag, and he never spoke to anyone or went inside. And no one ever looked at him. I used to pretend he was a ghost. They look a bit like him. Maybe my world’s full of ghosts and I never knew.”
“I don’t think mine is,” said Lyra doubtfully.
“Anyway, this must be the world of the dead. These people have just been killed—those soldiers must’ve done it—and here they are, and it’s just like the world they were alive in. I thought it’d be a lot different . . .”
“Will, it’s fading,” she said. “Look!”
She was clutching his arm. He stopped and looked around, and she was right. Not long before he had found the window in Oxford and stepped through into the other world of Cittàgazze, there had been an eclipse of the sun, and like millions of others Will had stood outside at midday and watched as the bright daylight faded and dimmed until a sort of eerie twilight covered the houses, the trees, the park. Everything was just as clear as in full daylight, but there was less light to see it by, as if all the strength were draining out of a dying sun.
What was happening now was like that, but odder, because the edges of things were losing their definition as well and becoming blurred.
“It’s not like going blind, even,” said Lyra, frightened, “because it’s not that we can’t see things, it’s like the things themselves are fading . . .”
The color was slowly seeping out of the world. A dim green gray for the bright green of the trees and the grass, a dim sand gray for the vivid yellow of a field of corn, a dim blood gray for the red bricks of a neat farmhouse . . .
The people themselves, closer now, had begun to notice, too, and were pointing and holding one another’s arms for reassurance.
The only bright things in the whole landscape were the brilliant red-and-yellow and electric blue of the dragonflies, and their little riders, and Will and Lyra, and Pantalaimon, who was hovering kestrel-shaped close above.
They were close to the first of the people now, and it was clear: they were all ghosts. Will and Lyra took a step toward each other, but there was nothing to fear, for the ghosts were far more afraid of them and were hanging back, unwilling to approach.
Will called out, “Don’t be afraid. We’re not going to hurt you. Where are you going?”
They looked at the oldest man among them, as if he were their guide.
“We’re going where all the others go,” he said. “Seems as if I know, but I can’t remember learning it. Seems as if it’s along the road. We’ll know it when we get there.”
“Mama,” said a child, “why’s it getting dark in the daytime?”
“Hush, dear, don’t fret,” the mother said. “Can’t make anything better by fretting. We’re dead, I expect.”
“But where are we going?” the child said. “I don’t want to be dead, Mama!”
“We’re going to see Grandpa,” the mother said desperately.
