A Curious Tale of the In-Between

by Lauren DeStefano

  No, that wasn’t right—

  “Try the tea,” Lady Savant said.

  Pram took a sip. It tasted like hot blackberry cobbler, unlike anything she’d ever experienced. She finished it in seconds.

  “You’ve been seeing ghosts for as long as you can remember,” Lady Savant said. “But it began with the insects, yes? And then people much later?”

  Pram nodded. When she was eight years old, one of the elders read a chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to her each night before bed, and Pram had especially loved the Cheshire Cat, who was sometimes embodied as a mischievous grin. It had reminded her of the boy by the pond. Felix, she made herself remember.

  “Seeing ghosts is only a small part of it,” Lady Savant said. “As my protégé you’ll learn how powerful you truly are.”

  Pram thought about the caravan ride a few days back, when she began to see the spirit world. “Can I go there?” Pram asked. “To where the ghosts are, I mean.” She bit into a lemon scone.

  “You can’t stay there for a very long time,” Lady Savant said. “Only for as long as you’re able to hold your breath, and then you’ll be pushed back into the living world. The spirit world knows who does and does not yet belong there.”

  Pram finished her scone and reached for another. She had never in her life been so hungry, and food had never been so delicious. She was sure she could never go back to regular oatmeal again without being disappointed.

  Lady Savant smiled in a fond way, unlike the exasperated, worried smiles of Pram’s aunts. And Pram wondered if this might be how a mother smiled at her child. She had no way of knowing.

  “If I can’t stay long, then what’s the point?” Pram asked.

  “It’s a gift,” Lady Savant said. “Don’t you want it?”

  Gift. Hadn’t there once been a boy who told her she had a gift? She could no longer remember. “I’ve never thought of it as a gift,” Pram said. “No one gave it to me. It’s just the way I am.”

  “Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong,” Lady Savant said. “You may have been an ordinary girl if only things had gone differently the day you were born.”

  “If my mother hadn’t died, you mean?” Pram said.

  “Yes,” Lady Savant said. “Life and fate are fragile. Once things have happened, it’s almost impossible to appreciate how easily they could have never happened.”

  Pram had thought about this. She wondered what it would have been like to have been born someone else entirely, or born a hundred years ago, or never born at all.

  But there was one thing she wondered about more than all the rest. “Was my mother like this?”

  Lady Savant’s smile turned sad. “No, Pram. I’m sure she was ordinary. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t give you this gift.”

  Pram lowered one eyebrow in confusion. “I don’t understand.”

  “No one has ever told you about your mother?” Lady Savant asked.

  “Not very much,” Pram said. “Her name was Lily and she liked to swim, and she died because of me. And she’s unhappy with me for that.”

  “Is that what you think?” Lady Savant said.

  “She must be,” Pram said. “Why else would she come to you and not me?”

  Pram could no longer remember what it was that Lady Savant had said about her mother’s ghost. Her memory of that night was blurry. Many of her memories were blurry. She tried to think about the boy with the blue eyes (or were they brown?) and the ghost by the pond (or was he a fish that used to swim to her?), but the more she spoke to Lady Savant, the more distant these things seemed. The two-hundred-year-old colonial seemed farther away when she remembered looking at it from the tree by the pond. Had it been white? Yellow? Light blue? She had another sip of tea.

  “Let’s talk about something happier,” Lady Savant said. “Have you ever been inside a memory before?”

  Pram looked confused.

  Lady Savant chuckled and took a bite of toast slathered with purple jam. She swallowed and said, “You can enter the memories of the dead. They don’t mind. They’ve abandoned them. These memories float around in the air like balloons, not attached to anyone.”

  Pram looked up at the sky. The edges of clouds were illuminated gold with sun. To know that the winter air was ripe with memories made her see the clouds differently, like flowers wanting to be picked.

  “How?” Pram said.

  “The more time you spend in the spirit world, the more they begin to appear.”

  Pram thought of the strange not-dream she’d had in the caravan after she entered the spirit world. She had been a girl with red hair, and someone had been calling her name, but she hadn’t stayed long enough to hear what it was.

  Was that someone’s memory?

  The idea delighted and worried Pram. “What if I got stuck?” she said.

  “You can’t,” Lady Savant said. “If you were to enter the spirit world, it would be very possible to get lost. But you’re entering a memory, and you can only stay for as long as you can hold your breath. Then you’re forced back into the living world by your own desire to breathe.”

  Pram had had her fill of scones and tea, and now she drew a tree with jagged and bare branches in the snow. Trees had always saddened her, and at the same time reminded her of her mother, which was strange. Her mother spent time in the water, not in branches.

  “How do I go back to the spirit world?” Pram asked.

  Lady Savant was brushing the crumbs from the plates and stacking them neatly in the basket. “All you have to do is want it,” she said. “Anything you want is yours.”

  Pram was dimly aware of her body falling against the snow, her arms and legs crumpled like those of an abandoned marionette. And then in a second she forgot about her body entirely, and Pram disappeared.

  She was a man in a hot air balloon, looking down at all the perfect green. From up high, the man thought, the world seemed so planned. Hunks of property fit together like puzzle pieces. The balloon drifted over a farm whose dirt had been combed by a giant rake, a red barn sitting to its left.

  How very organized, the man thought. We really do belong here after all.

  Pram awoke from the man’s memory, gasping for air. Her eyes were watering as though she’d been in the kitchen while Aunt Dee was dicing onions.

  Lady Savant wrapped the picnic blanket around Pram’s shoulders. “Here,” she said. “Your body is cold from the shock.”

  Pram felt dizzy, and it took nearly a minute for her to understand that her own body had never left the ground. Astonished, all she could say was, “I was floating.”

  Lady Savant looked worried.

  But Pram wasn’t worried at all. She could feel sweat pooling on her back and under her arms; her face was hot, and it was as if a light had just been turned on inside her, she thought.

  She looked at the sky again. She had lived all her life never knowing what more she was capable of. Now that she knew, all she could think about was going back.

  CHAPTER

  21

  For the next several nights, Pram lay in the gilded cage and concentrated on entering the spirit world.

  Adelaide hopped around the room. “Come out and play,” she said one night, after Pram had been still for a long while.

  Pram opened her eyes. Without Lady Savant’s help, she hadn’t been successful in reaching the spirit world, and her head was beginning to hurt. “Adelaide,” she said. “Why didn’t you move on?”

  Adelaide twirled and lifted up into the air before her skirt fanned out as she descended. “I was scared,” she said. “I didn’t think anyone would be waiting for me. I thought I could wait until my parents grew old and died, and then I’d go.”

  “So did they?” Pram said.

  “I don’t know,” Adelaide said. “I don’t remember them now. Or I guess I do, a little, but they’re shadows.” She pirouetted.

  “Do you remember anything about being alive?” Pram asked. “Maybe I can find one of your memories. So
far they’ve been random, but if I concentrate very hard, I might be able to find one that belongs to you.”

  Adelaide thought. She was quiet for such a long time that Pram sat up and looked for her to be sure she hadn’t disappeared.

  “Clickety-tapping,” Adelaide said.

  “Clickety-tapping?” Pram repeated.

  “Yes,” Adelaide said. “That sound.” Her pale cheeks filled up with pink, and she smiled and continued twirling about the room, singing “clickety-tap, clickety-tap” and clucking her teeth.

  Pram closed her eyes.

  “You’ve worn yourself out,” Finley said.

  She gasped. He was forever appearing places, scaring her out of her wits. He clung to the outside of her cage and caused it to sway. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

  “Have you? When?” she said. She already knew his answer and she said it with him: “I can’t remember.”

  “Well, I can’t,” he said.

  “It was the others, silly,” Adelaide told him. “All the others who lived in this room. Pram is just like them.”

  “I am not like them,” Pram said. “I’m still here.”

  Adelaide said, “I hope you stay. I like you.”

  Stay. There was something wrong with that word, Pram thought, like the moment in her dream when she realized nothing she was seeing was real. “No,” she said. “I can’t stay. I have to go eventually.”

  “Go where?” Finley asked.

  The door to the cage was open, and Pram stared through the space. She didn’t answer right away, because she needed to concentrate so that she could remember. There was a feeling in her chest all of a sudden, a sense of urgency that was painful. Someone was waiting. A boy with blue eyes.

  The hurt was unbearable, and Pram immediately forgot it.

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “Play with me,” Adelaide said, holding out her hands and curling and uncurling her fingers.

  “Okay,” Pram said.

  “Concentrate,” Lady Savant said after an enormous dinner of candied yams and a turkey that was honey-glazed and almost too perfect to eat.

  Pram concentrated.

  “Think of something you want,” Lady Savant said. She was forever asking Pram for things she wanted, as though she could store a little girl’s silly desires in glass bottles on a shelf.

  But Pram didn’t know what she wanted this evening. Dinner had been delicious, and she’d spent her afternoon playing in feather-soft snow and her nose hadn’t run at all.

  But when Finley tried to get her to climb a tree, she’d refused, and the feeling of fear was vaguely familiar. It wasn’t the tree she had feared, but rather having to face the sadness those dead branches made her feel.

  I want to know why I don’t like trees, she thought, and closed her eyes.

  She was a tall woman, and she was running, and sorrow was a heavy thing that she had swallowed. In her mind a compass was spinning. It was dizzyingly hot, and the woman had decided that the heat didn’t matter. She no longer wished to dive into the cool ocean.

  The woman did not think in words at all, but in broken kaleidoscope images. A boy’s sweet grin, a crumpled letter, purple-pink lines like veins on stretching skin. It was furious and maddening and scary. It was exhausting, and it had been nineteen years like this. She didn’t want to wait anymore. She was born waiting. A loop of a rope, a climb that scratched her palms as she went up the dogwood tree.

  Her sisters would be livid if they saw her sitting up so high.

  There was no need to take a deep breath. She dropped for the ground, knowing her feet wouldn’t touch.

  And then there was silence.

  Pram did not open her eyes.

  The man with the thick arms carried her to the cage.

  Lady Savant paced and worried deep into the night. Adelaide and Finley paced behind her like ducklings. Lady Savant could not see them, but she sensed them. Every day, she could sense them a little more than the day prior. As Pram’s memories began to fade, Lady Savant’s began to return. Pram was exceptional, and far more powerful than the others had been. But she was the youngest yet, and now Lady Savant worried that she had pushed her too far too soon.

  Pram was bright red with fever. Lady Savant reached into the cage and carefully, carefully pried one of her eyes open. As she had suspected, it was dull and dilated; her soul was not in the living world.

  The man with the thick arms stood in the doorway, and the ghosts stopped pacing and watched him. “Is she dead?” he asked.

  “No,” Lady Savant said. “But I’ve never seen a living soul stay in the spirit world for so long before.”

  “I told you that you were pushing her too far,” he said.

  “She can stay in the spirit world longer than anyone I’ve seen. It’s as though she has the ability to be living and dead at the same time. Miraculous.”

  Lady Savant brushed her fingertips across the child’s sweaty forehead. Pram was her favorite, she’d decided. Not at all what she had suspected.

  “I felt this one from the moment she stepped into the room, you know,” Lady Savant said to the man with the thick arms. “I knew she was Lily’s daughter. I followed her for a while just to be certain, and I was right. That ghost friend of hers made a tree fall right in front of me to scare me off, and that’s when I knew she was something that even a ghost boy could see needed to be protected. I never would have guessed that hopeless girl could have such a remarkable child.”

  “Lily,” Pram whispered, too softly for anyone to hear.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Pram awoke with a feeling that her skin was too heavy. The moon was sliced into quarters by the bars on the window.

  She took a deep breath just to be certain she was alive.

  Adelaide was kneeling beside her. She had been petting Pram’s cheek and whispering songs to her for most of the night. “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” Pram said. Her voice was hoarse.

  “Careful,” Adelaide said. “You’ll wake her.”

  Pram sat up and followed where Adelaide was pointing. Lady Savant slept at the bottom of the steps, her face in her arms.

  “Has she been like that all night?” Pram asked.

  Adelaide nodded. “She thought you were going to die. You haven’t moved in a very long time.”

  “I’m scared,” Pram whispered. “I think she’s stealing my memories.”

  “She does like to take things,” Adelaide said, and sighed. “I wish she wouldn’t. It isn’t right.”

  “I’d like to take them back,” Pram said.

  “You can’t,” Adelaide said.

  Pram stared at the sleeping Lady Savant, and suddenly a feeling of anger returned to her. This woman had taken too much away. Pram didn’t remember what those things were, but she still felt the loss.

  “Maybe there is something I can get back,” Pram said. “I entered a woman’s memories before everything went dark, and in her mind there was a compass. I’m sure I remember it. If Lady Savant took it from me, I can reclaim it.”

  “A compass?” Finley said, appearing and sitting beside Adelaide. “Is that all you want?”

  “It’s the only thing I can think of,” Pram said.

  “If she took it from you, it’s out in her caravan,” Finley said. “That’s where she keeps her treasures.”

  Pram stood as slowly as she could, trying not to make the cage’s chain creak. This was the first time Lady Savant had left the bedroom door unlocked, and there would never be another chance. By morning, Pram knew she’d have forgotten about the compass.

  She tiptoed down the steps and over Lady Savant’s sleeping form. Lady Savant stirred and muttered something, and her eyelashes fluttered. Pram froze.

  Adelaide knelt beside Lady Savant and sang:

  While the moon her watch is keeping,

  All through the night;

  While the weary world is sleeping,

  All through the night . . .
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  Lady Savant settled back into sleep. Adelaide kept singing.

  “This way,” Finley said. Pram opened the door just enough to slip through, and then she closed it.

  “Can she hear Adelaide singing?” Pram asked.

  “No,” Finley said. “From what I’ve seen, Adelaide’s singing just makes the living sleepy and they don’t know why.”

  “I’m living and I can hear it,” Pram said.

  “Yes, but she likes you, so she lets you hear.”

  The hallway was full of screams and whispers. Nobody in this place could remember how they got here or what they were afraid of, but the building itself seemed to remember.

  A firefly from the wallpaper in Pram’s room had followed her, and as she walked it flitted and fluttered.

  “Quiet,” Finley warned. “Brutus is surely nearby.”

  They reached the end of the hallway, and there were two heavy-looking doors. Pram struggled to push one of them open, working against the cold that resisted her from the outside, as though it was warning her to stay.

  Pram grunted and gave a final shove that opened the door. Flurries of snow were curling and swirling around the night air, and Pram had to run into them before the door closed behind her with a slam.

  “I said ‘quiet,’” Finley scolded.

  “I couldn’t help it,” Pram said.

  The poor firefly was trying to keep up with Pram, but the wind was knocking it about, making it fly in crooked circles.

  “Where’s the caravan?” Pram asked. Her voice was stolen by the wind. Her hair whipped to the left, as white as the snow itself, and Pram had a funny thought that she was disappearing. The wind was screaming a warning she couldn’t understand.

  Finley ran ahead of her. “Wait!” She chased after him. “Finley, wait!” She lost him in an instant, but she nearly ran headfirst into a building that appeared through the snow. She fell and picked herself back up and kept running.

  At first she thought she had made her way back to Lady Savant’s building, but no, this was some kind of a shed made of rickety wood. She felt along the wall until she found a door.