The Swallow (15 page)

BREATH

Polly

Everything was blank. Empty. I was very, very cold. But I couldn’t see anything. I tried to lift my hand up in front of my face, but for some reason I couldn’t move. I felt frozen. I tried to call out, but no words formed. Why couldn’t I see? Was this a dream? Was I sick? I remembered a headache, a cool hand on my forehead.

I wanted my mother. A wave of longing for her swept over me. Why didn’t she come?

Far away, someone was calling my name. I felt a whisper of something warm tickling inside my chest. Then pain shot through me as I took a breath.

Rose

I felt her start to breathe again. A tiny shudder. Then she was coughing and spluttering and trying to sit up. She looked scared.

I sat back on my heels.

“You’re okay, Polly,” I said. But she was looking at something over my shoulder.

I whirled around.

“I tell you,” said the furious ghost in the black buttoned dress. “She is dead.”

“No, she isn’t,” I spat at her. “You are! You get out of here and never come back. You’re not wanted, you never were. Nobody loves you and nobody ever will. Don’t you ever attack my friend again. If you do, I swear I’ll—”

“What?” sneered the ghost. “Kill me?”

“
YES
!” I screamed and rushed towards her. She vanished.

MIRROR IMAGE

Polly

It was so weird. I woke up in the attic, coughing, and there was Rose with a white face leaning over me, and behind her I could see another girl who looked just like her, all dressed in black, and then Rose leaped to her feet and the two of them were arguing back and forth. It was like watching someone fighting with their image in a mirror. Then Rose screamed and the other girl disappeared.

I tried to get up but I was all wobbly. Rose came over and knelt down beside me.

“Are you okay, Polly?” she whispered.

“Yes, but—”

“She tried to kill you,” Rose went on. “How did you get up here? I told you it was dangerous. Did you sneak in the front door?”

I tried to tell her about the passage, but I had another fit of coughing and so I just waved at the wall. The little door hung open, revealing a small black square.

Rose crawled over and peered into the darkness, then turned to me with shining eyes.

“You know what this means, Polly? Now I can get into your house too!”

Rose

The attic felt quite empty. Winnie had gone. For good, I hoped, but I doubted it. I went downstairs and got Polly a glass of water from the bathroom. It was funny that Kendrick hadn’t appeared to investigate the screaming or running up the stairs. She must have heard the commotion, but I suppose she was doing her best to stick to her “Ignore Rose” policy.

Polly looked better after she drank some water. I held the glass for her because her hands were shaking.

“I saw her, Rose,” she whispered. “This time I saw her.”

“Your first ghost,” I said, and my voice trembled. “What do you think of them now?”

“I see what you mean,” said Polly, smiling a crooked little smile. “She wasn’t much fun.”

I smiled back, and a sudden sweet feeling of relief flooded through me. Polly was okay.

“Did you find the key to the box?” she asked, taking the glass in both hands and having another drink.

I shook my head. “No. I don’t know where else to look.” I didn’t mention what had happened with my grandfather’s ghost in the study. I would tell her, but not now. She still looked pale, and her hands shook when she held the water glass.

“Polly, why did you come? I told you to wait in your attic. I would have come soon.”

She looked sheepish. “I know, Rose. I guess I just forgot everything else when I saw the secret passage. I couldn’t resist! Could you, if you had found it?”

“Maybe not. But you can’t come back here again.”

She grinned weakly at me. “I won’t argue with you.”

“You’d better go home now. We can meet tomorrow and figure out what to do next, but I think we’ve had enough for today.”

“Okay.”

She turned to crawl into the passageway, then hesitated and looked back at me.

“Rose?” she said. “Would you mind coming along behind me? It’s so dark.”

“No, of course not. Just wait a minute while I get a flashlight.”

I went silently down the stairs and into the kitchen. Kendrick’s television was still droning from the basement. The flashlight was kept in the bottom drawer beside the sink. I slipped it out, tested it and went back upstairs.

Polly was sitting against the wall looking very tired. I waved the flashlight at her.

“Got it!” I said. “Let’s go.”

I followed her into the passageway. It was cramped but not too bad. Harder for Polly because she was bigger than me.

She stopped once, about halfway through.

“Polly?” I asked. “You okay?”

She was still for a minute.

“Polly!” I said more sharply, giving her ankle a shake. She roused herself then, apologized and continued to wiggle along.

I squeezed through the little door into her attic and looked around curiously. Just like mine, only empty and backwards. The trapdoor was at the opposite side.

Polly returned the flashlight to me and lowered herself through the door into a loft full of suitcases. I would have loved to go down and see her room, and maybe the baby, but not this time. Polly needed to rest. She looked up at me to say good-bye, her face pale and serious.

“Thank you, Rose,” she said quietly. “For saving me. For a while I thought no one would ever come.”

POOR GHOST

Polly

For a moment in the passageway I blanked out again. I felt heavy and sleepy and everything started to fade until I felt Rose behind me, shaking my foot. I took a deep breath and then I was okay.

After I said good-bye to Rose I got into my pajamas and fell into bed. I was so very tired. No wonder. That awful Ghost Girl had tried to choke me to death. I even wondered if I had been dead for a while, when everything was so white and I couldn’t move. But Rose brought me back.

Rose. Her face swam into my mind, the way dream images do when you’re just falling asleep. Her shadowed eyes, her crazy hair. She looked so much like that Ghost Girl. They could have been twins. But they felt like opposites.

Why did Winnifred hate me so much? The only reason I could think of was that she was jealous. I had Rose, but Winnifred had no one. I could understand that. I knew all about jealous.

It ate you up. It poisoned everything. It made me hate Susie, with her baby smell and her pink PJs, who never hurt anyone. It
made me hate my brothers, because my parents paid more attention to them than to me. It made me hate Lu, because she was so much smarter and prettier than I’d ever be, and it made me hate Moo and Goo, because they took my father away from me. And finally, it made me hate myself for being so unpleasant and petty.

Yes, I knew all about jealous. Poor ghost.

Rose

After I shut the trapdoor on Polly I hesitated a minute or two. I knew I should get back home, but I wanted to have a look around her attic.

I walked over to a heap of blankets and pillows by the wall. That must have been where she was sitting the day she heard me singing.

I laughed. She must have been terrified. I’m not surprised she thought I was a ghost. This attic was spooky—way more spooky than mine. Because it was empty, I guess. My foot nudged something half-hidden in the blankets and I bent to pick it up.

It was a book:
The Ghastly Ghost at My Gate
. I sat down among the blankets and turned the flashlight on it. It had a creepy picture on the front of a house outlined against a moonlit sky, with a tall iron gate in the foreground and a beautiful girl in a long cloak with a misty phantom swirling around her. I opened it up to a bookmarked page. I’d read a few books by Philomena Faraday and they were all similar. Her ghosts were
usually the predictable Hollywood version who go about moaning and trying to kill the clueless heroine. Not at all like the ghosts I had met, although …

I sat up and skimmed the pages. This Gate Ghost did bear an uncanny resemblance to the Door Jumper. On a page where Polly had turned down the corner to mark her place, there was a description of the ghost jumping out from behind the gate and trying to strangle Amanda in much the same way that the Door Jumper had attacked Polly. Similar methodology, as my science teacher would say. Maybe the author did know a thing or two about ghosts. I turned to the back flap to see if there was anything interesting written about Philomena Faraday. Nothing much, just a few lines telling me she lived in New Hampshire with seven cats.

I noticed the little cardboard pocket glued inside the back cover, where libraries stick their cards. I glanced at the due date stamped there: April 10, 1963. Evidently Polly had squirreled this one away and never returned it. Polly must have had special privileges at that library.

I put the book down. Time to get home. I didn’t like Polly’s attic half so much as mine. It had an abandoned feeling. Sad. Almost as if there was a ghost here. I flicked the light around the four corners of the room, just to make sure, but there was nothing. I crawled into the wall and wiggled my way back to my own attic. As I straightened up and looked around at my cozy chair, books and the stacked cardboard cartons, I experienced a very unusual feeling: I felt like I was coming home.

SHORTBREAD

Polly

The next day after school Rose and I met in my attic. She brought an extra flashlight, a tin of Scottish shortbread and the box.

We turned both our lights on the box. It was certainly mysterious. The wood was smooth and worn. It must have been very old. It had a familiar smell. I bent down and breathed it in.

“Rose, it smells like roses. Don’t you think that means something?”

“Nothing spooky about that,” said Rose firmly. “It was in a box with my grandmother’s shawl. All of her stuff smells like roses. It was her favorite perfume.”

That was Rose’s story. She had an answer for everything, but I wasn’t convinced.

I munched on a shortbread (they were delicious!) while she told me about seeing her grandfather’s ghost the day before. I nearly choked when she said, “And then I turned around and
SOMEONE
was sitting in the armchair.” When Rose described how he had called out to his daughter, calling her Winnie and asking her to forgive him, I felt so bad for the poor old guy.