A Curious Tale of the In-Between

by Lauren DeStefano

  Inside, it was too dark to see. She didn’t know what to do now; she was lost, and she wouldn’t be able to find her way back to Lady Savant’s building in this storm.

  A sliver of light worked its way through. The firefly hovered an inch in front of Pram’s face, and its light began to spread out until it reached all the corners of the shed. It had a dirt floor, and it was quite large for a shed. Pram thought it peculiar that she had never seen it, and that it didn’t have a lock. Lady Savant’s caravan sat square in the middle like a statue.

  Finley appeared beside Pram. “Hello,” he said.

  “You left me,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t lead you here. You had to find it yourself.”

  “Why?” Pram asked.

  “Because it’s hidden,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t, silly,” Pram said. “It’s right out in the open.” She stepped forward and climbed into the back of the caravan. There were boxes and crates and trinkets that were covered by thick blankets.

  Everything in this little caravan pulsed with the lives of those who had left them behind. “The dead hide pieces of themselves in the living world,” Pram said to the firefly as it fluttered around her. “Did you know that?”

  Pram dug through a box of things that clattered.

  “What is it you said you were looking for?” Finley knelt beside her. “I’ll help you find it.”

  Pram stopped rifling and blinked. What had she come here for? The image was just out of reach. “I can’t remember.”

  “Can’t have been too important,” Finley said.

  “No,” she said. “It was very important.”

  She held up a necklace with a teddy bear charm, and then set it back down. She found an old lampshade with torn lace trim, and a gold wristwatch and a little doll with blue button eyes.

  Something about that shade of blue filled her with pain.

  She set the doll down and lifted a heavy blanket that had been covering a typewriter. She pressed down on one of its keys, and it sank below the other keys with a clicking sound, and then sprang back up. Pram pressed another key, and another. Clickety-tap, clickety-tap.

  “I think this memory belongs to Adelaide,” Pram said. One of the letter keys was loose—the A—and Pram put it in her pocket. She would give it to Adelaide when she returned. Maybe it would help her find her memories.

  “Really?” Finley said, pushing one of the keys. “I wonder if anything here belongs to me.”

  They searched and searched, and Finley couldn’t find anything that belonged to him, although he did find a Jacob’s ladder that amused him.

  “Did Lady Savant put this typewriter here?” Pram asked.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Finley said. “When memories get abandoned, they have a way of drifting about until they accumulate with other memories. They don’t like being lonely any more than people do, I guess.”

  Pram sat back and looked at the pile of things. She still hadn’t found what ever she’d come here for, and they were out of places to look.

  But then something caught Pram’s eye. There was an empty crate resting against the caravan wall that she hadn’t bothered to search. But now the firefly was hovering around it, and Pram caught a glint of metal between its slats. She reached for it.

  “Did you find it?” Finley asked.

  The glint of metal was attached to a chain. It was some kind of necklace. She dangled it before her face to get a better look. A compass.

  Pram’s mouth went dry. Time seemed to slow.

  And then she was drifting away from the shore on a large ship. There was a girl at the water’s edge with white-blond hair, standing on her tiptoes and waving to a sailor who watched her as the water pulled him back. She was beautiful, even in the distance. She was a piece of the sun.

  Pram gasped. “My father,” she said, more to herself than to Finley or the firefly. “This belonged to my father. I found it in a box under the floorboards in my bedroom. I have—I have to get back home. My aunts will be worried about me.”

  Finley stopped playing with the Jacob’s ladder and regarded Pram sadly. “It’s too late for that,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Pram said. “Why would you say that?” She hooked the compass around her neck and ran for the exit. When she threw open the door, the wind and snow were still raging, but the wind didn’t disturb her hair or her clothes.

  She looked straight ahead, and saw her body lying in the snow.

  CHAPTER

  23

  “Wake up, wake up, wake up.” Pram tried to jostle her lifeless body, but her hands moved right through it.

  “It’s too late,” Finley said again. “I tried to tell you. Lady Savant hides her caravan where the living would never find it: in the spirit world.”

  “Don’t say that!” Pram’s voice cracked. “Look—I’m still breathing.” She watched her own chest rise and fall. Her fingers and cheeks were blue.

  “Barely breathing,” Finley said.

  “How do I go back to the living world?” Pram said.

  “You can’t,” Finley said.

  “I have to get Lady Savant,” she said. “She won’t let me die. She needs me. She says I’m her protégé.”

  “You wanted to run away from her,” Finley said.

  “Yes, well, I can’t run anywhere if I’m frozen to death,” Pram said. “I need for her to find me.”

  Pram ran through the snow with the firefly ever at her side, looking for the very building from which she’d run away just moments earlier. Or had it been hours? The wind was beginning to calm. Early-morning light crept between tree branches, turning them to veins against the gray sky.

  “Being a ghost isn’t so bad,” Finley said, running alongside her. “I promise. We could be friends.”

  “We can be friends if I’m still alive,” Pram said. “One of my best friends was a ghost.”

  Felix. His name returned to her, and it was as tangible as the compass around her neck. Felix, she thought with as much force as she could. I won’t forget you this time.

  They reached the building, and Pram stopped. “This isn’t the right place,” she said. The bricks were no longer weatherworn, but new and bright red. The snow was gone and there were flowers lining the perimeter.

  She turned to Finley, but he was gone. Pram was distracted by a man who held a dying boy in his arms. “There was a fire a half mile up the road,” the man called to another man in the building’s doorway.

  “You can’t bring him in here,” said the man in the doorway. “This is a hospital for the mentally unstable.”

  The men began to argue while the boy lay dying.

  It was Finley.

  “I’m in the past,” Pram muttered to herself. But how far into the past?

  She stepped through the hospital’s front doors. The wallpaper was the same, but brighter and newer. And there were still screams coming from some of the rooms. To the left, in a room that Pram remembered to be closed off, there were people in wheelchairs or foldout chairs, some staring blankly and others sullenly playing games at foldout tables.

  They muttered words that Pram couldn’t understand. Were they speaking English? She moved closer to listen. None of them noticed. None of them looked up, and Pram could see that, even though some interacted with one another, they were each in their own little world.

  Except for one nurse, that is, who knelt before a young woman’s chair. Pram was drawn to the nurse like a moth to a flame, and when she got closer, she could see that the nurse was Lady Savant. But Lady Savant did not see Pram. Lady Savant was very focused on the woman in the chair.

  “No one believes me,” the woman in the chair whispered.

  “I believe you,” Lady Savant said. “I believe you do see the ghost in your coffee cup, and I’d like to help you.”

  Finley appeared beside Pram. “I remember that woman now,” he said. “Shortly after I died, they closed this place down, but Lady Savant kept her here.” As Finl
ey spoke, the murmurs died down, and the bodies became transparent and then disappeared, and then the room was empty and covered in dust, and the wallpaper was old and faded.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t remember,” Finley said.

  “Why must ghosts be so forgetful?” Pram said, more impatient than she’d ever been in her life. She was dying out in the snow and as she sought help, all she found were more mysteries.

  “Why must the living worry about the past so?” Finley countered.

  “Because it all means something when you’re alive,” Pram said, and ran past him, down the hall.

  Adelaide came out of the bedroom and smiled brightly. “Oh, you’re one of us now.” She clapped. “Are you going to stay with Finley and me forever?”

  “Adelaide, I’ve brought you something important,” Pram said. She pulled the typewriter key from her pocket and held it out.

  Adelaide squinted. “What is it?”

  “It’s a memory of yours,” Pram said. “Clickety-tap.”

  Adelaide looked skeptical as she took the key and turned it in her hands. But then her eyes brightened, and she hugged her cupped hands to her chest and said, “My father.”

  “Yes?” Pram said.

  “He was writing a novel,” Adelaide said. “Oh, I remember now. He used to work on it after I’d gone to bed. And when I died, I was too afraid to move on, and so I stayed in my old bedroom for a long time. I wanted to wait at least until he’d finished it, so I could read how it ended. But he stopped writing after I died.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. Pram didn’t know ghosts were able to cry.

  “Thank you,” Adelaide said. “I’d forgotten.”

  “You’re welcome,” Pram said. “I want to hear all about it later, but for now I have to find a way to wake Lady Savant. I’m going to die if she doesn’t find my body.”

  Adelaide’s teary eyes turned serious. Her mouth formed a nervous O. “What?” Pram said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve just remembered something else,” Adelaide said, and took Pram’s hand. “Come on.”

  “There isn’t time,” Pram insisted.

  “I know,” Adelaide said. “But you don’t want her to help you. I’ve just remembered that she did something terrible to the others.” She tugged on Pram’s wrist, and Pram had to run to keep up with her.

  As they raced down the hall, the images in the wallpaper rattled. The screams in the empty rooms intensified; the wind picked up and pushed the tree branches against the windows. “What’s happening?” Pram said.

  “You’re haunting the place,” Adelaide said. “Your fear is doing it.”

  “How?” Pram said.

  Adelaide stopped running and took Pram’s hands. “In the living world, everything stays put until someone moves it,” Adelaide said. “This is the spirit world. It changes from one moment to the next. Things happen here that the living can’t see.”

  So this was Felix’s world, Pram thought. He had tried to tell her that the spirit world was different from the living world, but he hadn’t been able to describe it. Now she understood. No wonder he was afraid of leaving his tree by the pond.

  “It’s scary sometimes,” Adelaide said sympathetically. She had her hand on a doorknob, and Pram found that she was dreading what ever awaited them on the other side of that door. Pram had never seen that door, and she suspected that Lady Savant had hidden it in the spirit world, just as she’d hidden her caravan, so that the living could never find it. “Stay close to me,” Adelaide said, and opened the door.

  There was a staircase that descended into a darkness that deepened with each step. “I haven’t been here in a very long time,” Adelaide said. “It scared me, so I forgot about it as quickly as I could. In the spirit world, if you forget about something, it’s as though it never existed in your own mind.”

  “Until something reminds you,” Pram said. “Like the typewriter key, or my father’s compass.”

  “Yes,” Adelaide said.

  Finley had a terrible memory. There must have been a great many things he’d left behind, Pram supposed.

  This staircase seemed to go on forever. By the time they reached the bottom, the smell of mold was overwhelming. In the spirit world, everything was intensified. “Where are we?” Pram asked.

  “In the basement,” Adelaide said.

  The floor was dirt, and the walls were made of stones that were covered in grime. Somewhere, a pipe was drip, drip, dripping.

  It felt as though they were walking forever. Pram worried about her body freezing to death out in the snow. “Adelaide, please, I don’t have much time,” she said.

  “We’re here,” Adelaide said. “Look.” She pointed to an old wooden shelf that was filled with mason jars. And though they resembled the ones Aunt Nan used to store her preserves, these were not ordinary jars, for each of them held ground dust in an array of colors that Pram had never seen. So strange were these colors that she didn’t even have words for them.

  “What is that stuff?” Pram asked.

  “Ashes,” Adelaide said. “That’s what happens to souls when they’re dying. Soon they’ll be nothing.”

  Pram leaned close enough for the glow coming from the strange colors to touch her skin. “Lady Savant collects souls,” she said, beginning to understand. She looked at Adelaide. “Is that what she wanted from me? My soul?”

  “Not just any soul,” Adelaide said. “All the souls she collected were from people who were like you and could see ghosts.”

  Pram was not in her living body, and therefore had no blood, but she was still sure she felt it go cold with fear. “What would she want with souls?”

  “She uses them to stay young forever and to keep her powers,” Adelaide said. “She drains them until they fade away to nothing, and then she finds more.”

  Pram looked at the jars with pity. She understood now what had been happening to her; she hadn’t just been losing her memories the longer she stayed here; she had been losing her soul bit by bit as Lady Savant took it for herself.

  “I think she stole my powers by getting me to talk to her,” Pram said. “The more I said, the more she knew to take.”

  Pram ran her fingers over the lids. “Does one of these jars belong to me?” she asked. As though in answer, the jar she touched flashed with brightness. The color was not quite blue. It wasn’t nearly as full as the others.

  “That must be yours,” Adelaide said. “Lady Savant has only managed to take a little bit so far.”

  Pram held the jar in her hands, and it beat like a heart, and it was very warm. She ran for the stairs, and Adelaide chased after her. “Pram! Where are you going?”

  “To take this to my body,” Pram said. “To wake myself up.”

  “How do you know that will work?” Adelaide said.

  “I don’t, but it’s all I have,” Pram said. “It has to work.”

  Finley was waiting for her at the top of the stairs, and he ran on one side of her while Adelaide ran on the other. “I didn’t want to face that I was dead, either,” he said.

  “I’m not dead yet,” Pram said.

  “The living think the worst of death,” Finley said. “But it isn’t a punishment. It’s just what comes next.”

  Pram stopped at the door. “Adelaide, can you keep singing to Lady Savant and make sure she stays asleep?”

  “Will it help you save your soul?” Adelaide asked.

  “Yes,” Pram said. “It would help very much.”

  Adelaide smiled. She liked the idea that she could be useful. “Good,” she said. “You have such a nice soul. It would be a shame for you to lose it.”

  Outside, gray-yellow sunlight was coming through the trees. Pram found her body easily—it was the only thing that dared to make a bed of this bitterly cold snow. She laid the jar beside her sleeping face, closed her eyes, and waited.

  She opened one eye, and then the other.

  “You’re still a spirit,” Finley said.

&nbs
p; “Yes, thank you,” Pram said.

  Her sleeping face looked troubled, and Pram thought how frightening such a sight would seem to a living person who would find her that way. But from the spirit world, it didn’t seem so troubling. The living world felt very far away and unimportant. Dying might not be as awful as she’d made it out to be.

  No. She wasn’t going to accept that. The spirit world had a way of making life seem trivial and distant, but she wouldn’t succumb.

  “Wake up!” she said.

  Finley frowned. The way he stared down at her body was much like the way Pram’s aunts stared at her mother’s photo over the stairs, Pram thought, as though they were looking at a lost cause.

  The sky began to growl, and the wind blew a dusting of snow right through Pram, who would have given anything to feel it on her skin. But her grief for the living world was cut short by the sight of Adelaide running toward her. Her hair flew behind her and her eyes were wide. “Lady Savant is coming for you,” she cried.

  “I thought your singing could make anyone sleep,” Finley said.

  “It can,” Adelaide said. “Her body’s asleep, but her spirit entered the spirit world.”

  If Pram had been able to haunt that hallway with her fears, Lady Savant had grown powerful enough to haunt the whole building and the space that surrounded it. The trees were bowing furiously, and the sun was drowning in black clouds. Lightning flashed. Pram felt a chill in her bodiless soul.

  “Run,” Adelaide and Finley said.

  But Pram didn’t.

  “I remember now,” Finley said. “Once Lady Savant has gathered enough power from a new soul, she gets stronger. She was beginning to weaken until she found you. You’ve been replenishing her.”

  The ghostly wind was blowing their hair from their eyes. “Yes, I know that now,” Pram said. “I wish you’d remembered that much sooner.”

  Lady Savant’s spirit broke through the closed doors of the building, and the way she ran was unnatural, floating above the ground as she was. She was twice as tall and surrounded by whispers and screams.

  Pram forced herself to stand up straight, fists clenched at her sides.