The Swallow (12 page)

I don’t know why, but there among the shoes and tissue I began to cry. I felt lost, as though someone had died and the world wasn’t the place it was supposed to be.

“Never mind,” came a familiar voice from the corner. “Never mind, dear.”

I looked up. The old lady had appeared in the easy chair by the window, knitting. I hadn’t seen her since the summer, when I was so ill.

“Who are you?” I whispered, getting up and drawing closer to her. “Why do you come to me?” I was at her feet now. She looked as solid as the chair she was sitting in. She was very old, shrunken and wrinkly, but her thick, arthritic fingers moved quickly in rhythm, and the needles clacked industriously.

“What are you knitting?” I asked, examining the soft, mauve wool that puddled on her lap.

She smiled at me. “It’s for you, Rose,” she said in her soft, sweet voice. “To keep you warm. You’re going to need it.”

I laid my head down against her knees then. I could feel her thin bones against my cheek, and she was strangely warm, for a ghost.

“Can you help me?” I asked. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

The knitting needles stopped clicking and she stretched out her hand and stroked my hair.

“Yes, I can help you, Rose,” she said softly. “I’m watching over you. Always. You’ll figure it out soon. Don’t worry.”

Then she was gone and I was leaning against an empty chair.

BEFORE BREAKFAST

Polly

Somebody was sitting on my stomach. Somebody else was sitting on my legs. I tried to kick them off but they just rearranged themselves and settled on top of me again. I opened my eyes.

“We need to talk to you, Polly,” said Mark.

My bedside light had been switched on. Mark and Matthew were perched on top of me, wearing their matching Superman pajamas. Susie was sitting up in her crib, thumb in her mouth, staring at them. It was still pretty dark outside. The house was quiet.

“Okay, what?” I mumbled, trying to sit up and failing. They had me pinned to the bed.

“Don’t try to get away,” said Matthew. “This is serious.”

“What do you want?” I said a little more clearly. This was no way to wake up, especially after a bad dream.

“First of all,” said Mark, “quit stealing cookies. Mum blamed us.”

“You steal them too,” I said.

“Not yesterday,” said Matthew. “Why should we get in trouble when we didn’t even get to eat them?”

“All right, I’ll tell her it was me. Big deal.”

“Just—stop stealing them!” said Mark.

“Since when did you guys get so goody-goody? You can’t tell me what to do.”

“Okay, okay,” said Matthew, shifting his weight on my legs. “Tell her about the other thing, Mark.”

I tried to get up again, but Mark held my arms down and I didn’t get anywhere.

“Second of all,” said Mark, “we saw you with that Ghost Girl last night and we told her to leave you alone.”

“What? It’s none of your business who my friends are!”

“She’s dangerous, Polly,” said Matthew. A little frown creased his forehead. “She’s going to hurt you.”

This was too much. The twins were never this serious. They were always teasing and making fun of me. This had to be another trick. With an enormous heave I knocked them off and managed to sit up.

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” I asked furiously. “I don’t want to play your stupid game!”

They looked at each other. “We’re just trying to help, Pol,” mumbled Mark. He looked upset.

“You don’t realize,” began Matthew, “you don’t realize what she is. She can really, really hurt you. She wants to steal your soul. We don’t want that.”

“Yes,” added Mark, “and we’re not playing a trick, honest. That Ghost Girl is going to wreck everything.”

I pushed off the covers and jumped out of bed. I must have startled Susie because she jerked and I think she bit her thumb.

She let out a wail, and the boys exchanged a look of alarm and then scurried out of the room.

I bent over the railing of the crib and patted her little back. She was wearing pink flannel snap-up PJs with the feet in them. She was warm and soft. I picked her up and gave her a hug. She put her arms around my neck. She smelled good.

“Olly,” she gurgled.

I looked down at her in surprise. “Susie! You said my name! I didn’t know you could talk.”

She smiled at me and said it again. “Olly.”

I hugged her again. Suddenly I felt a surge of something in my chest—not sure what—but it kind of hurt and made my eyes tingle.

“Susie,” I whispered, putting her back in her crib. “You’re a good baby, aren’t you, Suze? No more crying?”

She shook her little head and put her thumb back in her mouth. She understood me! Weird! I know babies grow fast and learn things and change and all, but this was a first for Suze. Maybe she’d actually be a fun little sister one day. She seemed to like me, which was more than I could say for Lu, Moo or Goo.

I half expected my mother to appear after Susie’s outburst, but the house remained still. The clock beside my bed said 5:30. I had time to go up to the attic before breakfast.

Rose

I woke up early. Something had been troubling me all night as I slept, and finally I swam to the surface to find out what it was.

I turned on the lamp. The room had an unreal, sort of blank look. The books and wallpaper and curtains I’d been waking up to every day were suddenly unfamiliar.

I sat up and tried to focus on what was it that had kept me tossing all night. Something that had happened last night, something different. The twins? Why were they so scared of me? But that wasn’t it. The old lady? I’d seen her before.

But I’d never touched her. Last night was the first time I had ever touched a ghost. She didn’t feel dead. She felt as real as Polly, or Kendrick, or the Horrors. What was happening to me? First the Door Jumper/Winnifred, who had to be the scariest ghost I’d ever encountered. And the first one to actually do some harm, apart from frightening me.

I’d met up with scary ghosts before. Like the skeletal old lady whose fingers kept falling off. I’d seen her last spring in a department store with my mother. We had gone shopping for an Easter dress, and every time I found a dress I liked the ghost would howl like a banshee and stretch out a finger to touch it—and then one of her fingers would fall off. This went on through about six dresses and six fingers, and then I couldn’t bear it anymore and made my mother take me home.

And there were others, more terrifying. But although they frightened the wits out of me, they had never hurt me. The Door Jumper had done something to Polly, something serious.

I wondered if a ghost could actually kill a living person. In all the stories I’d read, if anyone died, it was from fear. Was that what the Door Jumper was trying to do? Scare Polly to death?

And then there was the old lady, so kind and so real. Who was she? How could I have actually touched her? Unless … unless Polly was right and I was a ghost myself.

No. I wasn’t going to think about that. I threw back the covers and hunted up my slippers from under the bed. I needed to find out more about Winnifred. There were still unopened boxes in my grandmother’s room.

SECRETS IN THE ATTIC

Polly

If anything, the attic was colder than usual. I was glad that I’d stopped to put on my woolly housecoat and warm slippers. I huddled under the blanket and put my head up against the wall, listening.

“Rose?” I called out. “Rose, are you there?”

It was all quiet next door. No creaking floorboards, no singing, no whirling Door Jumper. No earthquakes. My dream came back to me then, as clearly as when I was having it. I saw Rose with that awful look on her face, climbing out of the crack. I shuddered.

I wondered if the twins were right, that Rose was somehow dangerous and I wasn’t seeing her properly.

I remembered how she’d hugged me last night on the doorstep and the worried look on her face as she’d told me go to bed early. She was the first real friend I’d made in ages. I didn’t care if she was a girl or a ghost. Nobody was going to take her away from me. Not the twins, not the Door Jumper, not anybody.

Thinking about the Door Jumper—Winnifred—made me sit up. I flicked the flashlight around the corners. At least she
wasn’t in my attic. I wondered why she didn’t just jump through the wall to get me. Maybe there was some kind of ghost rule where she couldn’t leave the actual house she was haunting. Or maybe my house had something that kept her out.

I sank down again among the cushions and the blankets. I’d have to go down in a minute and start getting ready for school. I felt a curious heaviness, like I could stay there all day and snooze. The thought of getting to my feet and climbing down into my closet seemed like a tremendous effort … my eyes closed. It was very quiet.

The humming started very softly. I didn’t pay much attention until the words started to form.

I sat up, sleep dropping off me with the blanket.

“Rose?” I called out.

The singing stopped.

“Polly?” came her voice from behind the wall. “What are you doing up so early?”

“Uh … I had a bad dream …” I replied. I didn’t want to tell her what the twins had said about her.

“About Winnifred?” asked Rose.

I didn’t want to tell her about the dream, either.

“No, yes … oh, I don’t know. It was scary anyway, and I woke up. Why are you up in the attic?”

“Oh … I just wanted to sit and think for a while.”

“There’s no sign of the Door Jump—I mean, Winnifred?” I asked.

“No. All clear.”

We fell into silence.

“Polly?” said Rose finally.

“Yes?”

“Polly, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come back here. I think it’s dangerous for you.”

Dangerous. That’s what the twins had said.

“Yeah. I guess you’re right. But where can we meet? I can’t sneak you into my house. There are always people around. Always.”

Silence.

“Rose? Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Look, Rose, I gotta go get ready for school. What about the library?”

“The library? What library?”

“The one on Parliament Street. We could meet there. After school.”

“Oh. All right.”

“At four o’clock?”

She took a while to answer. And when she did, it was as if she was speaking from a long, long way off.

“Oh … that’s fine. Four. See you then.”

She fell into silence again. I climbed down out of the attic back into my everyday life and left all the ghosts behind.

Rose

What Polly couldn’t see through the wall that divided us was the wooden box that sat on the floor in front of me. I didn’t want to tell her what I’d found because I knew she would want to come charging over, and I was determined to keep her out of harm’s way.

I’d come across the box in one of the unopened cartons from my grandmother’s closet. They were filled with old clothes, scarves and a collection of purses. In the last one, under a big red angora shawl, I found the box.

Locked. It was about the size of two shoe boxes laid side by side, made of wood that had a slightly red tinge to it. It had a band of darker wood near the top, covered with decorative carving.

There was a little keyhole but no key. One corner of the box had been dented, and in places the wood was scratched or discolored.

I knew it was important. I could feel it.

I had hauled the box up to the attic where I wouldn’t be interrupted. And I’d been sitting looking at it, trying to figure out how to open it with no key, when Polly heard me singing. I hadn’t even realized I was singing until she spoke, as if she was breaking a spell.

I had found it hard to focus on what Polly was saying. All I could think of was the box and the strange feelings I had when I looked at it. As if I’d seen it before. As if it held something precious that would somehow explain everything. It was almost as if the box was hypnotizing me—making me feel dreamy and sleepy. I wanted to get into it so badly, I could almost see breaking it open—if only it hadn’t been so beautiful.