The Swallow (18 page)

Polly

Nobody seemed to notice that I was late for supper. There was some big discussion going on about the twins and the library. Apparently Mrs. Gardner had called Mum to complain about them being in the adults’ section yesterday. I grinned at them as Dad was reaming them out, and they both scowled back at me. I scarfed down my dinner, for once happy not to be noticed.

After dinner I thought maybe I’d go to the attic and see if Rose was around. But just as I had one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder to the luggage loft, I heard the twins at my door.

“Polly?” called Mark. “We want to talk to you!”

There was no use going up. They’d just come after me. I poked my head out of the closet.

“What?”

They were crowded together in the doorway, shuffling their feet and looking worried. What was with those two? Matthew clutched a picture book.

“Can we come in?” said Mark.

“What do you want?”

“Just let us come in for a minute to talk,” said Matthew. “We want to show you something.”

“Oh, all right,” I said and flounced down on the bed. “What’s bugging you guys? You’re acting really weird, even for you.”

They exchanged looks and then came and sat beside me. Matthew laid the book carefully on his knees.

“We want to show you this book, Pol,” he said. “We got it from the library yesterday. We’ve had it out before. It’s about ghosts.”

“Oh?” I said, taking a look at it for the first time. It was called
The Ghost Girl and Other Tales from China
. It had a dark-red cover with a picture of a girl standing beside a Chinese pagoda. She had long black hair and a pale face. I took the book from Matthew and looked more closely at it. The twins watched me.

“She looks like Rose,” I said. The girl’s hair was straight, not curly, and she was Chinese, but there was something about the way she stood, the way her head was tilted, her sharp little chin that reminded me of Rose. The most striking thing was the girl’s expression: her eyes, smudged with dark shadows, had that same haunted, desperately sad look I’d seen so many times.

“We thought so too,” said Mark. “We think Rose is the Ghost Girl.”

Rose

I turned back to Winnie, who was staring at the boy, her face twisted as if she were in terrible pain.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” said Winnie in a broken voice. “I never wanted to hurt him. I didn’t mean to, no matter what Father said.” Tears rolled down her cheeks.

I looked over my shoulder. The boy was motionless, still staring at her, his face blank. A few cars whizzed by.

I turned back to Winnie. “What do you mean, ‘hurt him’? What did your father say?”

“He said I was a danger to Willie. A danger to all of them. But it wasn’t my fault!”

“Then whose fault was it?” I demanded.

She grabbed me by the arms and gave me a shake.

“It was the ghosts! You know! You’ve seen them!”

I tried to break loose, but her grip was strong. Strong and icy cold.

“You know what it’s like! They never, ever left me alone. Day and night, everywhere I went. I didn’t have a minute’s peace. They taunted me. I screamed, I threw things at them. But nothing worked. It got worse and worse. I got so angry, everything went black. I hurt … people. Mother. Willie. Kendrick. When I threw things.”

I finally shook her off and took a couple of steps away from her.

“So they knew?” I asked. “Your parents. They knew you saw ghosts?”

“No!” she yelled. “They didn’t believe me! They thought it was all in my mind. Father was ashamed of me. He didn’t want any of his doctor friends to know he had a child who saw things that weren’t there. That’s why he arranged to send me away. Forever.”

“So what happened?” I asked. “That night? What happened to you and what happened to my father?” I glanced over at him.

The figure of the little boy still stood there motionless, as if frozen in time, staring at his sister.

She took a step towards me, her eyes gleaming in the light from the lamppost.

“It was an accident,” she said. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know he would follow me!”

“What happened?” I insisted.

Her eyes were fixed on mine, boring into me. “I had to get out of there. I was scared. I didn’t want to be sent to Montreal. I couldn’t breathe. I felt the walls closing in on me. I had to get out …”

Just the way I’d felt tonight.

“I ran. I didn’t know where I was going, I just ran. It was cold. It started to snow.”

Just like tonight.

“I got on the bridge here and I couldn’t see anything. It was all white with snow. And there was a road barrier, for some construction work being done on the bridge, and I walked around it, and a car came sliding towards me and—” She stopped, staring at me, her dark eyes huge in her white face.

“It hit me,” she whispered, “and knocked me through the barrier … and … and I fell.”

The thump. The long free-fall through the air, tumbling over and over. The scream.

I could feel it. I could see it, just the same as if it were happening to me. The same way I felt it in the cemetery, and in my house, and here on the bridge a few moments ago. I gasped for breath and felt suddenly dizzy. I flung out my arm to steady myself against the parapet. The darkness beyond the bridge dropped away, into nothing.

I looked over at the boy. His face was a mask of horror. A scream formed on his lips but he made no sound. The snow kept falling, blanketing him in thick white flakes.

Winnie grabbed me again, her icy fingers digging deep into my arms.

“You’ve got to help me,” she begged in a hoarse voice. “You’ve got to help Willie.”

MAKE IT STOP

Polly

“Is that why you call her Ghost Girl?” I asked. “Because of this book?”

Matthew nodded. “She
IS
the Ghost Girl, Polly. She looks just like her, and she floats around haunting people and—”

I opened the book. “What’s the story about?”

“It’s about this girl,” said Mark. “She lives with her family, and everyone thinks she is alive but really she is dead. She lives like that for years and years and nobody ever figures out. But all the kids she makes friends with—they—they—”

“She steals their souls!” said Mark. “She feeds on their souls and makes them dead like her. Then those kids are ghost girls too, and ghost boys, walking around the world, and everyone thinks they’re alive but really they’re dead.”

“It’s horrible, Polly! We don’t want that to happen to you. Don’t talk to her!” said Matthew. “She’s too dangerous.”

I turned the pages and looked at the pictures. They showed the girl playing with one child after another in lonely spots. Then there were pictures of the children back with their families,
eating dinner, being tucked into bed, going to school—but now they all had the same haunted, mournful eyes of the Ghost Girl. I shivered.

“It’s just a story,” I said. “It’s not real. Rose is not a Ghost Girl.”

Mark shook his head.

“That’s what we thought at first, Polly, when we got this book out from the library a few weeks ago. We thought it was just a really cool fairy tale. But then when we noticed Rose one day, she has the same eyes, right? So we went back and got the book again and read it all over again. She’s a Ghost Girl, Polly.”

I started to laugh but it didn’t come out right.

“Rose is nice, really she is. She just looks a little … strange. But she cares about me. She doesn’t want to hurt me.”

“That’s how the Ghost Girl tricks you,” said Matthew, pulling at my sleeve. “She makes you think you’re her friend. Then she steals your soul. You gotta stay away from her, Polly!”

“I think this book is too scary for you,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to tell Mum that you shouldn’t be allowed to take it out of the library anymore.”

“No! No!” they both said at once, reaching for the book and pulling it away from me.

“Don’t tell Mum,” said Matthew. “She’ll ruin everything.”

“Look, you guys are really scared,” I said. “Mum should know.”

They looked at each other and some kind of silent twin communication took place. Mark turned to me.

“If you tell Mum about the book,” he said, “we’ll tell her you’ve been in the attic.”

Rose

“Let me go!” I yelled, and with an enormous effort I pulled myself away from Winnie’s grasping hands. I took a couple of steps away from her, until my back was up against the stone cold wall. Willie stood to my left, still staring at his sister. His face was blank again.

I stood panting, watching her. She was looking at Willie as if her heart would break. For some reason I noticed that she had the same lock of hair falling loose in front of her face that I had, the one that refused to stay behind my ear.

She turned back to me. “Please,” she said in a strangled voice, as if it caused her physical pain to say that word. “You’re the only one who can help.”

And there it was. Her eyes had that same beseeching, sorrow-drenched look I had seen on countless ghosts through-out the years.

“What can I do?” I cried. “Why do you even ask me? You know I can’t help you. You’re dead. There’s nothing to be done.”

“You can help,” she replied. “You can make it stop.”

“Make what stop?”

She took a step nearer, reaching out her arms in a gesture that took in the heavily falling snow, the sky, the bridge and Willie.

“This! Me! Everything! The ghosts. Me going on and on in that house, endlessly trapped in misery! I can’t get out, Rose. I’m stuck there, in that place, in that time, in that night. It never ends for me, Rose.”

She began to cry, great wracking sobs.

“I can’t leave. Willie can’t leave. My mother and father can’t leave. We’re all stuck in that awful night, that accident.”

The image of my grandfather sitting in his study, tears rolling down his cheeks, came to me. And the sigh and the smell of roses in my grandmother’s bedroom. And the pictures she took of me every Christmas, making me look like Winnie. I took a deep breath.

“My father can leave. He leaves all the time. He’s never home.”

“Look at him!” she said, pointing to her little brother, who stood frozen like a statue, only his eyes alive, staring at her. “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter how far he goes, that night is always inside him. He’s here on the bridge in that nightmare with me. Our whole family is locked in that night. It never got fixed. None of us can go until … until …” She stopped.

“Until what?”

“Until you go to Willie and tell him I’m sorry, that it wasn’t his fault I fell, that he couldn’t have saved me. Get him to let go of it and let go of me.”

I stared at her.

“Go to my father? Tell him I saw his dead sister on a bridge and she wants me to tell him she’s sorry? Are you crazy?”

“You have to tell him,” she replied. “It’s the only way to make it stop.”

“Why do I have to tell him? What’s it got to do with me?”

“You can see me. He can’t.”

She wanted the impossible.

“What do you think is going to happen once I tell him?”

“He’ll forgive me. He’ll let me go.”

“
NO
!” I yelled. “He won’t believe me. If I tell my father that his dead sister has a message for him, there’s only one thing that’s going to happen. Don’t you see, Winnie? I’m just like you! As soon as they find out I see ghosts they’ll lock me up!”

“Make it stop,” she said. “Tell Willie. Then I can rest.”

“You don’t get it,” I said fiercely. “I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you’re trapped in that house. I don’t feel sorry for you. When I look at you I see …”

What did I see? Myself. Everything I hated about myself. The hair, the pale face, the twisted features, the weirdness, the no-friends, the loneliness and the ghosts.

“Make it stop,” she said again and blinked out. One second she and Willie were there and the next they were gone. I was staring into empty space.

FADING AWAY

Polly

It figured they knew about the attic. They were such sneaky, creepy, snooping little brats. If they told Mum, that would be it for me and Rose. At least, it would be the end of her being my secret friend. If our parents let us play together, we could still be friends. That is—I looked back at the Ghost Girl on the cover of the book—that is, if Rose was not a ghost. If she was—well, then how would I see her or talk to her if I couldn’t get into the attic?