Who'll dig the brambles?
I, said the mole.
I'll dig the brambles in the wood.
Let him rest under the sleeping knoll
Beyond the last bell's toll.

—

Heather McNamara thought that this was kind of what she had wanted, all along. Wasn't it? She'd be more popular if people knew for sure that her powers were real. She'd pretended that ghosts possessed her and she did all sorts of weird rituals, hoping that a real ghost would come to her one day.

Now Heather was really possessed by a honest-really-truly ghost, the dead spirit of a girl who killed herself.

A fat and ugly girl who killed herself. Heather McNamara hoped people wouldn't laugh at her because of that.

God, she remembered Martha Dumptruck. Heather McNamara's mom and dad had both yelled at her after the suicide, one of the rare times they teamed up to scream at her rather than at each other. It wasn't her fault. She'd just gone along with her friend Heather. She'd never meant for it to be serious and stuff.

And now Heather was dead.

Heather McNamara had been miserable ever since. She wished she wasn't failing math. She wished she was captain of the cheerleading team. She wished her parents didn't fight all the time and weren't divorcing and stuff. Heather Duke and Veronica should have been the same as always, but she felt like both her friends hated her now and she didn't understand why. She hoped Ram would be sweet to her like he could be sometimes, but he wasn't. Veronica left her behind on the night of the funeral, in the mud with Ram and Kurt, and Heather tried so hard not to get mad at her. It was probably her own fault.

Heather just wished not to be left behind. She felt so alone all the time.

She'd never be alone again if Martha stayed inside her. She could just let Martha tell her what to do, not have to make any decisions. She rode along helplessly, a prisoner in her own body with a vengeful ghost in command.

Heather McNamara was walking through a place she didn't know, not normal Sherwood or where she was a little kid in Cincinnati, but it felt familiar nonetheless. It was a forest, like from an old movie, a wood with thick grasses and thorns and brambles like a folk story. The ground was muddy and Heather's feet sank into it. She couldn't feel her own body any more, couldn't feel anything Martha was doing. It was like she was in a dream.

Heather didn't really mind. She stepped further and further into the woods. She felt more and more tired as she went on. Everything could just pass over her and it didn't matter. Each step made her feel more and more sleepy. She walked on, falling deeper into the dream. She went on into thickets of soft brambles that moved to hold her in that place. She couldn't care whether she would wake or not. Maybe it would be better if she didn't wake up.

—

Fiery darts of impatient annoyance, grey messes of boredom, rusty-nails-twisting of worry, pressure-cookers of stress and uncontrollable wellsprings of laughter and biting anxieties and honking horns and skidding wheels -

He could still feel everyone, and he didn't like it.

J.D. had no idea where he was going on the bike. Only get out get out get out. He could feel every driver on the roads, every flutter as he passed a house or jogger or light in the darkness. Fifty different presences screamed inside him and he couldn't get away from them.

Since the moment he shot that prick, he'd felt it. Even felt something like Ram's last dying agony, tearing him apart as well. Fuck. J.D. sped on the bike, trying to get away from everyone, let him finally be alone. Kurt's sadistic rage, blind terror from Why-Is-Veronica-So-Suprised-When-She-Digests-Food Heather, shock from Veronica. Then the white-hot anger and command blazing from Chandler, burning him, forcing him to run. Martha. The murdered girl in the cheerleader's body. Fuck, she had every right to seek revenge on those who'd killed her. J.D. had seen what Chandler did to that other girl in the cafeteria, had seen Kurt and Ram go after some poor geek just because they could. They deserved to die.

The problem was that J.D. couldn't stop other people's emotions battering him with every breath he took. He couldn't hurt anyone without hurting himself. And every alien feeling forced on him seemed like pain.

His head was burning. Migraine. If he passed out he'd welcome it. There were fewer people on this road now. It almost felt like a relief. The lights of a truck flared behind him. He was steering badly enough that the driver rammed the horn and veered dangerously close to him, just to teach him a lesson. J.D. felt the guy's irritation, a hint of dark-satisfaction like he'd made someone else's day as crappy as his own and was happy in a twisted way -

J.D. rode over the bridge and turned into what felt like a more deserted piece of road. His head was slightly clearer, getting away from people, but he still felt a throbbing pain. His vision was blurring. He slowed the bike to a crawl and then even slower than that, feeling weaker and weaker. Soon he'd stop. Soon.

He barely felt it when the bike tipped off the road. He was lying on wet grass on the curb strip, more numb than in actual pain. He felt the bike wheels still spinning. He passed out.

J.D. woke to the first signs of dawn outside, pale blue light filtered through truck windows. A seatbelt held him in place. His head was mercifully quiet again, though his body ached all over. There was nothing and no one he could see out the window. Just trees running past. He knew this pickup truck. Roomy for its size, good for hauling suitcases and equipment. The radio was murmuring, soft enough that you couldn't make out individual words unless you tried. J.D. snuck a look across at his father's hands on the wheel.

Interesting. Restful. He wasn't feeling any strange emotions from his dad, not like he'd done with Chandler and the others. He tried to remember what he'd felt from Martha. The ghost. A genuinely decent person who didn't want to hurt anyone - though she had. Maybe she was the only decent person in Sherwood. The layers of misery and despair couldn't hide her fundamental kindness. He wondered if he'd ever be near her again.

Hell, maybe it was all temporary and over. That would be good. He didn't believe that; never believe an optimist.

"What did you get?" his father said. J.D. sat up, wincing as he moved.

"Groceries," he said. "Don't worry, I remembered the protein shakes." He had no idea if his father had picked up the shopping bag when he'd taken him. Or even the bike. It didn't matter.

"Don't be a fool, son. You know that wasn't what I was asking," his father said. J.D. rubbed his head. His skull felt bruised, the inside of his head shaken and stirred like a hangover multiplied by a car accident then fried in the consistency of scrambled egg. He wasn't sure if even trying to talk coherently was beyond him, or whether he should try it at all. He wanted to throw up again.

"Shit. If you have to do that here, do it in a bag," his dad said.

He dry-heaved, his stomach already empty at the graveyard. J.D. supposed the cops might take him in sooner or later. Problem for later. He'd kill himself rather than go to jail.

"Hurts," he muttered, wiping a sleeve across his face. It did.

It occurred to J.D. for the first time that he should wonder exactly where his father was driving. Country road in the middle of nowhere, perhaps. The truck was going too fast to jump out.

"What power did you get?" his father spelt out for him. "It came over the police band at four-thirty. Two more dead classmates of yours, messing around in a cemetery with a gun. Your gun, I assume."

J.D. still wasn't thinking clearly. His father knew; this was very bad. Something Martha had said came back to him: two blood sacrifices granted Chandler power.

"Doesn't look like much, or else you'd try to use it on me," his father said. "What does that undead girlfriend of yours have? Regeneration?"

J.D. thought of ragged fingernails and glass cuts. No; Chandler's power was much worse than that. She'd murdered Martha by giving a command, convinced the entire town to believe her dead on her will. It was possible to resist her, but maybe she'd master her powers even more now she knew about them. "How?" was all J.D. said. How the hell did Bud Dean know all this?

"If you're going to hide a girl in the house, clean up used makeup pads in the bathroom. Now, son, I'd not be terribly surprised if it was yours, but Occam's Razor and all that shit. Does she have a regeneration power?"

"Yes," J.D. lied.

The truck turned off the road, jolting and slowing over dirt. They were in some clearing in the middle of nowhere. The engine stopped. No sounds but faint birds and leaves rustling, no buildings or signs or feelings of nearby people.

Bud left the truck. He crossed to the other side, opened the passenger door, and dragged J.D. with him. It was a rough clearing in the middle of nowhere, a sharp downward slope off the dirt track.

"You know I killed someone," J.D. tried experimentally, "and you're not - "

"Why did you think I gave you that gun?" his father said. In half a push and half a stumble, J.D. found himself on the ground.

It wasn't the first time. He'd learnt that fighting back was useless. J.D. wasn't hurt so badly that he couldn't rise to his feet, so he did. "Should have used it on you," he said. He reached for a cigarette. The smoking typically pissed off his father.

His father snorted. "Knew you wouldn't. No guts."

"You ever seen any ghosts? Real ones, not the makeup-wearing kind," J.D. said. If his dad knew about this stuff, maybe he'd let some useful information slip.

He'd thought of it, almost since the first moment he'd felt Martha Dunnstock's emotions. If ghosts were real, if Martha was here, then maybe the dead could come back in general. No. Martha was murdered, but Mom chose to walk into that library. She knew what she was doing. She chose to leave me behind. She'd never come back.

Maybe those jock assholes would do some haunting instead.

"Don't try to distract me with stupidity, Jason," his father said. "There are two ways this can go. You want to hear your future?"

J.D. had never given much thought to his future, not after a certain point. He was seventeen. In one of the two paths he saw, he'd be eighteen or a few days out from it. He'd come from school to find his stuff out on the lawn, thrown out, left alone to go where he would. In the other path, his father didn't kick him out.

That second one seemed like the far worse option of the two.

"Gee, I don't know about that, son, I'm not some fluffy bleeding-heart guidance counsellor who thinks the world's problems can be solved with enough tie-dye and hugging," J.D. said.

"Pity. Dad, my body's been going through some changes lately and could really use some manly guidance," Bud said.

J.D. took a drag of his cigarette. Last smoke, perhaps.

He knew that Bud Dean wouldn't trust anyone else with a power that he didn't think he could control. That meant his father had some gift of his own.

And the cost of an ability was paid in other people's blood.

"You knew what you were doing when you pulled the trigger on Mom," J.D. said. "It wasn't an accident for you. Good to have that cleared up. And here I thought you hated all that mystical shit from Grandad Dean."

J.D. didn't have many memories of his grandfather, but they weren't good ones. His mother had considered Grandad Dean a sick old man who needed help, no matter all the shit he'd flung at her, in exciting variations both literal and metaphorical - dirty Jew, filthy woman. Grandad migrated from some small town in Germany no one had ever heard of after the war and brought old occult books and toxic bullshit with him. Bud's attitude of neglect and mockery had on the whole been more sensible, J.D. thought.

His father hit him on the shoulder for that line, hard enough to make J.D. spin and fall to his knees. But he felt no anger coming from his father. Just maybe an edge of calculation, as if Bud knew exactly what he wanted and only considered this the best way to obtain it.

"Let's say I learnt there was more to it than I thought," his father said. "I haven't needed explosives to blow up a building in years."

Then J.D.'s world erupted with fire. A ring of flames burned around him but didn't touch him. The heat was real. He put out a hand then quickly withdrew it when it burnt. Real fire, not illusion or hallucination.

It didn't prove anything. Anyone could have poured petrol in a ring in advance, then thrown down a lighter or match while attention was directed elsewhere. A silly sleight-of-hand trick designed to provoke fear.

But J.D. didn't want to lie to himself.

"You could disappear," Bud Dean said. "At your age, you're not a runaway. You're not even a missing person, because there's no one to miss you. Remember that fucking oak tree in Texas."

Save the Memorial Oak Tree protest. J.D. hadn't been there, but the local news had featured it nonstop for all the remaining time they'd spent in that town. A fundraising barbecue; a gas explosion; no more oak tree - and several dead protesters. The cops had talked to his father about it, the same for all the other witnesses, seen in broad daylight, no one visibly doing anything untoward.

Now, with smoke stinging his eyes, filling the back of his throat, it turned into a real and burning threat.

"The other way this goes supposes you have an ability that's useful to me, and that you're willing to use it," his father said. "It's up to you. Can you tell me what it is, Jason?"

There wasn't a choice. J.D. had known he would give in, sooner or later, and gasping for breath made it sooner. "It doesn't work on you," he said. "I don't know much. Open to experiment, I guess. It's touchy-feely crap." He hadn't said enough. The flames grew hotter. "I think I can feel what other people feel. I could help you read people. Guess at stuff."

"You're right. That is a crap power," Bud said.

But the fire abruptly stopped. The grass was scorched in a careful, narrow ring.

"Get up, Jason. Time to go home."

A wall of fire at his back could have forced him if he didn't go. There'd be later chances to run, J.D. thought. He walked up the slope ahead of his father. Let this be over and done. He reached for the passenger door again.

Then the flames hit him from behind. This time they burnt skin. J.D. heard himself screaming, trying to put them out with bare hands. It didn't work. He felt himself flung into the back of the trunk, no longer on fire, lying next to his broken bike and a spilt egg carton.

Made sense, he thought, trying to grasp and clutch at anything but the burn in his side. No evidence left behind.

"You've not given me enough answers," his father said. "I suggest better ones."

Questions about exactly what he'd done and felt that night. Questions about Chandler. He stuck to the lie about what she could do, but otherwise told the truth. Doubt she's stronger than him. No idea which of them might be worse, if she got more time and practice.

"I'm guessing a hospital's out of the question?" J.D. managed. The pain came in anguishing waves, a tunnel of agony briefly narrowing to a trickle, then widening unbearably to a burning ocean once more.

"Good guessing, but I can offer sleeping pills and water," his father said. "You're almost there. Well done, son."

"Just give it to me." He'd do or agree to anything for that, right now. It came across clearly enough to his father.

Cool water, bitter medicine taste. He gulped it down, almost grateful. It didn't take a long time to pass out.

—

The girl in the cheerleader's dress knocked on the one door she wanted to visit, needed to visit. Actually, she'd already knocked on the old door she remembered, only to be told they'd moved. She'd had to knock on many different doors. She had walked a long way, her feet bruised by the roads, but it didn't matter.

Nothing else mattered.

"What - Are you okay, honey?" the woman asked her, opening the door in her old fawn dressing gown, confusion changed to concern for the young girl knocking on doors in the middle of the night. "Who are you?"

"I'm Heather," Martha Dunnstock said. "I go to Westerburg. I'm a cheerleader."

"It can't possibly be safe for you to be outside at this hour. Come in, I'll call your parents, your mom must be worried sick - " the woman said.

"Speaking of moms," Martha said. "Your daughter loved you and her dad so much. I thought you should know that."

She started to cry. So did her mother. Maybe this was all she wanted, not some dumb revenge. Maybe she'd just wanted to see her parents again.