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.
But the child wouldn’t be consoled and wept bitterly. Others in the group looked at the mother with sympathy or annoyance, but there was nothing they could do to help, and they all walked on disconsolately through the fading landscape as the child’s thin cries went on, and on, and on.