The Swallow (19 page)

The Horrors were watching me as all this went through my mind. Matthew still had that anxious look but Mark was smirking. He knew he had me.

“All right, all right,” I said. “But I’m keeping the book.”

Mark started to object but Matthew pulled at his sleeve.

“Let her,” he said. “She can read all about it, and then she’ll know she has to keep away from the Ghost Girl.”

I rolled my eyes. “Will you stop already?”

“She
IS
the Ghost Girl,” said Matthew. “We see her all the time at the window next door, in the back bedroom, just staring out at the graveyard. She sits there for hours, Polly. She’s a ghost, we know she is.”

“And we’ve heard you talking to her in the attic,” said Mark. “Lots of times. We’ve been in the loft, listening. That’s how we know you go up into the attic.”

“And we want to come up too,” put in Matthew. “We want to see it.”

This was quickly getting out of hand. My last refuge in the house, invaded by the Horrors.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said, standing up and shaking my fist at them. “You set one foot—one foot!—in that attic, or you breathe one word—one word!—of this to Mum, and I’ll set the Ghost Girl on you! I’ll help her get you and grab you and steal your miserable souls and then you’ll be dead,
DEAD, DEAD
!!!”

They yelped and ran out of the room. Then they yelped again as I heard my mother accost them in the hall.

“Mark?” She sounded really mad. “Matthew? What have I told you about playing in Polly’s room?”

“But Mum,” started Mark, “she—”

“No excuses! You are not to go in there. Ever.”

They grumbled and protested as she shepherded them downstairs. I grinned and flopped down on my bed. It was about time she came down on them for trespassing. I opened
The Ghost Girl
and began to read.

Rose

For a moment I stood, frozen, staring blankly at the empty place where Winnie and my father had been a second before.
Then, as I turned to look over the balustrade, the world exploded in sound around me. All the noises that had been silenced when I was in that strange, muffled place with Winnie suddenly clattered into life. Cars thundered by, horns tooted, the wind sighed, and I thought I heard a scream dying away in the distance—but it might have been a car screeching its brakes or a far-off ambulance siren. The snow had stopped.

I couldn’t see anything when I looked over the edge. It was deep black. The wind cut through my cloak. I was hungry and very, very tired. I turned away from the darkness beneath the bridge and headed home. As I walked slowly back along the bridge, I noted that the cars were normal 1960s cars, not the old-fashioned kind I’d seen in the snowstorm.

I did my best to push all thoughts of Winnie and my dad away. I told myself she was just another ghost wanting something from me that I couldn’t give.

When I finally got home, Kendrick stood in the hall with her arms folded, as if she’d been waiting for me.

“You’re late for dinner,” she said. “You’ve kept me from my programs, worrying about you.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, hanging up my cloak. I swayed with tiredness. Kendrick gave me a sharp look.

“Your mother called an hour ago. I couldn’t find you so she gave me a message.”

“What?” I said.

“She’s staying at your gran’s tonight. She’s going over figures with your granddad, she said, for some early meeting at
the factory tomorrow, so it’s easier for her to stay there.” I felt the familiar letdown. I hated it when she didn’t come home. It happened every couple of weeks. With Father still away, I’d be alone in the house, except for Kendrick snoring in the basement. Tonight of all nights.

I stumbled into the dining room and sat down at my place. Kendrick came in with a plate that had been in the oven. Pork chops and mashed potatoes, all kind of dried up at the edges. I pushed it aside and put my head down on my folded arms.

When was the last time my mother had hugged me? Or my father? When I was in the hospital in the summer? When I came home? I couldn’t honestly remember. They were fading away from me.

LET THE DEAD STAY DEAD

Polly

The story about the Ghost Girl was much as the twins had described it. She looked like a live girl and no one knew she was really a ghost. She lured children away from their parents and stole their souls. They became like her, leading normal lives on the outside, but inside they were dead. They, too, had the power to steal the souls of other children, and so it went, the world filling up with hundreds of these horrible little zombie-vampires.

The pictures were really creepy, and the more I looked at her, the more the Ghost Girl looked like Rose. It was strange that with all the ghost books I’d read I’d never seen this one.

I closed the book. Rose’s face stared up at me from the cover.

Rose

I heard someone come into the room behind me and I sat up quickly, brushing away my tears. Kendrick moved over to the table and looked down at the untouched dinner.

“You need to eat something,” she said gruffly, and she laid down a dish of custard and applesauce.

Usually Kendrick didn’t bother with whether or not I ate my dinner, beyond a dirty look now and then when I left the food untouched.

I took a bite of the custard. It was really good: the custard creamy and the applesauce tart. She stood and watched me as I ate it, making me nervous. But I enjoyed it anyway and ran my finger around the bowl and licked it to get the last bits out. I knew that would annoy her. I looked up.

As expected, she was frowning.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“Just out,” I replied. This was getting peculiar. She didn’t usually ask me anything, but then, I’d never been out this late before.

“You shouldn’t be out in the dark. Your mother wouldn’t like it.”

“My mother isn’t here.”

She picked up the plate of food and the empty bowl and started towards the kitchen.

“Kendrick?” I asked. She turned back to me.

“Were you here? The night Winnie died?”

The dishes clattered to the floor, the pork chops and mashed potatoes sliding off the plate with a splat. Kendrick ignored them and just stared at me.

“What happened?” I insisted. “Tell me.”

She swayed and then reached for a chair and sat down heavily.

“You know?” she said.

“Yes. I know. Please tell me what happened.”

Kendrick shook her head.

“It’s not my place. Your father should tell you.”

“My father isn’t here. He’s never here. I’ve got to know. Tell me!”

Kendrick took a long look at me, clenching and unclenching her fists in her lap.

“All right. But don’t you ever tell your father it was me who told you.”

“Why? Why is it such a secret?” I asked.

“Some things are better not talked about. They’re too hard. Nobody in this house ever talked about what happened that night to—to—Winnie.”

That was the first time she had spoken Winnie’s name, and she spat it out at the end of the sentence, almost against her will.

“Everything that girl did brought trouble to this house. She was cursed from the first day she took breath.”

“Cursed?” The custard was turning into a hard little brick in my stomach.

“Call it what you like. She was always uncanny. Caused her mother no end of grief, all her life. After she … died … I thought her mother would die from sorrow.”

“What happened?”

Kendrick gave a long sigh, thinking back. “We didn’t know they were gone. We thought they were both asleep in their beds. It was well after midnight when the police came to the door
with Willie. I’ve never seen a child look like that, before or since—white as a ghost, trembling, icy cold—and all he kept saying over and over was, ‘Winnie’s gone, she’s gone.’ ”

Her eyes had a far-off look, as if she’d traveled back in time to that dreadful night. She didn’t look at me while she talked, and she kept wringing her apron in her hands, the words tumbling out as if she’d held them in for a long, long time and now could finally let them go.

“The police told us there’d been a car accident and Winnie had been knocked off the bridge, and the boy had seen it all. He was in some kind of shock. We packed him off to bed with hot water bottles, but he fell sick anyway and we nearly lost him too.” She shook her head. “His mother was as white as he was, and for days she didn’t speak, just sat there beside his bed, holding his hand. His father was not much better. This house was as silent as the grave. It was as if they were all ghosts. I kept cooking meals for people who wouldn’t eat. That went on for months, even after Willie got better.”

She seemed to come back into the present and fixed me with a baleful look. “It was all her fault! She brought a curse down on this house. One more day and she would have been gone off to hospital and we could have lived a normal life. But not that one. She had to go running off into the night and taking Willie with her and then getting herself killed and—” Kendrick stopped and took a deep breath.

“Your father was never the same after that. And your grandmother was never quite right either. Your grandfather—he never
smiled again. It was bad before, with Winnie having fits and throwing things—”

Kendrick pushed her hair back from her forehead and leaned towards me. “See that?” she said, pointing to a thin scar along her hairline. “She did that. With a milk jug. She was wild. But it was worse, afterwards. Everyone was broken.”

“My father? Was he broken too?”

Kendrick nodded. “He went quiet. Everything was quiet. For years.”

She gave herself a shake and seemed to notice the broken plate and the food on the floor for the first time.

“And now you’ve come, stirring everything up again.”

She stood up and eyed me with a return of her usual disapproval.

“Let the dead stay dead,” she said. “Let them rest.”

PART FOUR

THE SECRET

So runs my dream: but what am I?

An infant crying in the night;

An infant crying for the light;

And with no language but a cry
.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON,
“
IN MEMORIAM
”

DREAMING

Polly

That night, after I read the Ghost Girl book, I was lying in bed after lights-out. I could hear the soft rumble of Mum and Dad downstairs talking by the fire in the living room. The sound of their conversation went up and down, up and down. I dreamed I was floating on the ocean, and their voices became part of the rocking, gentle waves that rolled me along on an endless sea. I felt all my worries about Rose and the Ghost Girl and Winnie float away into the dark sea below me and the blue sky above.

Then a bigger wave rolled me down deeper and my parents’ voices faded away. I thought I’d never reach the bottom of that wave, it was so very deep—and then somehow I must have, because I was moving upward again. This wave was so high I thought I would never reach the top—but suddenly I did, and for a moment I could see the ocean stretching on and on forever around me, and then I was heading down the other side of the steep, deep wave.