A Curious Tale of the In-Between

by Lauren DeStefano

  Lady Savant’s features changed from one instant to the next. Her hands belonged to a woman, and then a child, and then a woman again. Her eyes were dark and then light. Her hair was wild and streaked with silver. For a second her skull showed through her skin.

  When Lady Savant spoke, it came out as a windy howl. “What have you done?” she said.

  Pram had seen dozens of spirits, but none like this. Lady Savant was not an ordinary soul, but rather a revolving assortment of every soul she had ever stolen.

  “I’m dying,” Pram said, impressed with the bravery in her voice. “I was running, and I must have gotten tired and collapsed in the snow.”

  Lady Savant swirled around her. A voice in her billowing sleeves begged for help.

  “This won’t do,” Lady Savant said. “I needed you alive for much longer.” She stooped to pick up the jar with Pram’s glowing soul, but Pram grabbed it first. She hugged it to her chest and stepped back. It was beating like a heart against her. Thump-thump, thump-thump.

  Finley stepped in front of her.

  Lady Savant’s eyes flashed something dangerous. “You again,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I was able to see you. I’d hoped you and that peculiar little girl had moved on by now.”

  “I won’t let you take her soul,” Finley said. “It’s too good for you.”

  “You’ve always been a meddlesome ghost,” Lady Savant said.

  “Pram, run,” Finley said.

  “I can’t,” Pram said.

  “This is no time to be stubborn.”

  Pram looked at the iron gate that had confined her when she was a part of the living world. Even if she could break through it now as a spirit, what good would it do? No one in the living world would be able to hear her.

  The needle of the compass spun around and around. It didn’t know where to go, either, Pram thought.

  Lady Savant grabbed Pram’s shoulders. She had the burly hands of a man, and then the hands of an infant, and then a pianist’s fingers, but her grasp never weakened.

  Pram had never felt pain like this. Though her body and its skin and bones lay in the snow before her, she could feel a stinging in her blood like bees. Lady Savant opened her mouth and it became as wide as a cave, and it was filled with howling winds.

  This is it, Pram thought. She’s going to swallow me whole. But she couldn’t move, not even to catch the jar as it fell from her hands.

  Adelaide sang. Her voice was harried and loud and desperate, but Lady Savant could not be lulled to sleep this time.

  Pram’s eyes began to close, and her feet faded from under her. Her body, in the snow, let out a wounded whimper as her lungs started to slow.

  She knew that her soul was being stolen and she was disappearing, and with her remaining strength, her mind could only muster one word; it was the first thing she ever said when she was afraid.

  Felix . . .

  Heat lapped at her skin, and Pram opened her eyes to find that Lady Savant and the snowy field were gone. She was standing in smoke and flames. No, crawling. She was a boy and she had spilled the lantern in the hay and couldn’t find the way to the door. She knew that the horses were dying. She could hear them stomping and screaming as they burned.

  “I’ve got you,” a voice said. Hands under her arms pulling her through the hay and dirt.

  “Finley.” She coughed. “I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t want to remember this day,” Finley said. His jaw was tight, and Pram, as a boy, knew that she was his brother. She knew her name, too.

  Felix. This was the memory of his death. She and Finley were playing it out.

  A burning rafter fell from the ceiling, and it was meant to kill her, but Finley had lived this day once before, and this time he was prepared. He pulled Pram the boy out of the way and kicked the barn door open.

  Finley and Pram spilled out into the snow. Finley was still a spirit, but Pram was a living girl, and she crawled onto her hands and knees, spluttering frozen air.

  Lady Savant was gone.

  “What happened?” Pram was shivering now.

  “Finley dived in after you,” Adelaide said. “Lady Savant was forced back into the living world. But you have to leave before she comes for you. Can you walk?”

  Pram wanted to leave more than anything, but her eyes wouldn’t stay open, and as much as she tried to cling to her body, she fell back into the spirit world.

  CHAPTER

  24

  The police car stopped at the iron gate that surrounded the abandoned building. The officer couldn’t be sure what had persuaded him to turn down this icy back road; he could only be sure that the notion had been so strong it was as though a pair of hands had turned his steering wheel for him. He couldn’t know that notion was really the ghost of a boy who had died decades before.

  There was nothing here, save for an old institution that had closed more than a century ago and was rumored to be haunted. The police in this town encouraged these rumors because it kept children from sneaking onto the property to play or to damage it.

  Which was why it was especially surprising when the officer saw a girl lying in the snow.

  Adelaide clutched her typewriter key and looked like she was trying not to cry. She had sung until Lady Savant’s snoring rattled the floorboards; she wanted to be sure the police would hear the snores.

  “Are you going back to the living world?” Adelaide asked.

  “I hope so,” Pram said, watching as the officer felt for her body’s pulse and wrapped her body in his coat.

  “We’ll miss you,” Finley said. “I suppose you won’t be back to visit us.”

  “You can visit me,” Pram said. Her voice felt softer, like it was fading.

  “How will we know where to find you?” Adelaide said.

  “Yes, we’re ghosts, not psychics,” Finley said.

  Pram smiled at the pair of them and wrapped them in a hug. “It’s a two-hundred-year-old colonial. It’s white. There’s a tree and a pond in front.” She thought of Felix when she mentioned his tree, and a bit of that old pain returned. “Come and haunt me anytime you like.”

  Adelaide turned the typewriter key over and over in her fingers. “I have a lot of thinking to do,” she said. “Now that I remember my parents, I miss them, and I’m sure they’re waiting for me. Jacob and Madeleine Pierce.” She said their names a few more times, handling them like precious things that had been stolen and returned to her.

  “Would you like me to help you?” Pram said. “I’m not sure how it works, but I could try.”

  Adelaide hesitated.

  “What would be the point in moving on?” Finley said. “Everything is perfect right here.”

  Pram’s head was light, and she felt very weak. She knew that her time in the spirit world was ending.

  She grabbed Finley’s hands. “Follow me back home if you’d like to see Felix again. I don’t know for sure whether he’s moved on. He hasn’t answered me in a long time. But if he turns up again, I’m sure he’d remember if he saw you.”

  Finley shook his head. “He’s forgotten what happened. It’s for the best that I go back to forgetting, too.” He tried to smile. “But you’ll look after him?”

  “I promise,” Pram said.

  Adelaide waved. She was so far away. “Bye,” she and Finley were saying. “Bye, Pram, we’ll miss you!”

  The jar that held Pram’s soul shattered and then disappeared.

  Miles and miles away, in a two-hundred-year-old colonial house, a phone rang just as the teakettle whistled. In the past week, Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan had become afraid of the phone and what sort of news might be on the other end of its line. One of the aunts answered while the other stood twisting its cord in her anxious fingers. Even the elders went silent.

  And then Aunt Dee sagged with relief. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we’ll be right there.”

  As Pram drifted somewhere between the spirit and the living worlds, she entered another memory.r />
  This time she was Lady Savant. She wore a nurse’s uniform and pushed a cart full of little cups that held pills—yellow, red, blue. There were dozens of institutions like this, and Lady Savant had seen many of them. They were the perfect place to find extraordinary souls hiding among the hopeless and the delusional.

  Lily was both hopeless and delusional, and not at all what Lady Savant needed. Lily was plain and Lily could not see ghosts, and she spent her days sitting by the window, staring out at the dogwood tree as though it was her precious sailor who had left her behind.

  And now, Lily was pregnant. Her spinster sisters had brought her here in hopes that the rest would do her some good. And undoubtedly the baby she birthed would be equally plain and equally hopeless, Lady Savant thought.

  “Would you like something to drink?” Lady Savant asked her.

  “I think I’d like to take a walk,” Lily said.

  “Too hot for a walk in your condition,” Lady Savant said.

  Lily stared at her stomach as though she’d forgotten the baby was there at all. Her sadness tasted like rusted metal on Lady Savant’s tongue. And though Lily was ordinary, that sadness was profound.

  “You’re not a real nurse. You can’t stop me,” Lily said, and went back to staring at the dogwood tree.

  Pram felt the memory ending, no matter how she fought to hang on to it.

  “Wake up,” a voice said. “You’ve been gone for too long already, you silly girl.”

  The voice filled her with so much hope that it pushed her back into the living world, where hope was more precious than gold. It was a voice she hadn’t heard in a very long time, and one she had missed desperately.

  “Felix,” she answered him. It was little more than a whisper. She felt a hand stroking her cheek, and she opened her eyes expecting to see Felix. But Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan were the ones standing over her.

  “Pram?” they said.

  Pram’s voice was hoarse. “Where am I?” she said.

  Aunt Nan kissed Pram’s hand. There were tears in her eyes. “You’re in a hospital, but you’re all right now. The Blue boy told the police everything. The whole town’s been looking for you.”

  Pram’s heart was beating in both her ears. “Clarence?” she said. “He’s okay?”

  “You’ve gotten her too excited,” Aunt Dee said.

  Pram tried to sit upright, but they held her shoulders. “There will be time for all that later,” Aunt Dee said. “You’re recovering from pneumonia.”

  “I feel all right now,” Pram said, which was only a little bit true. “Tell me about Clarence? Please?”

  “He’s been by to see you every day,” Aunt Nan said, and sighed like she thought this was romantic. “He told us about that madwoman who kidnapped the two of you.”

  “The police can deal with her now,” Aunt Dee said. “Her and that man she was with. Lord knows what was going through their minds, living in an abandoned asylum.”

  “She was a spiritualist,” Pram said.

  “We don’t have to talk about this now,” Aunt Dee said, tucking Pram’s hair behind her ears. “You just worry about getting well.”

  “She said she’d spoken with my mother,” Pram said. The aunts paled. “So you see, it’s all my fault,” Pram said. “I believed her.”

  “What did she say about your mother?” Aunt Nan asked. Aunt Dee elbowed her and glared.

  “She said my mother could tell me where my father is,” Pram said. She had kept it a secret that she wanted to find her father, but now she was tired of holding on to secrets.

  The aunts exchanged hesitant expressions. And then Aunt Dee said, “You never asked about your father before.”

  Pram’s eyes began to fill with tears as she spoke. “Clarence’s mother died, so we went to a spiritualist to try to find her. Then we both thought that if his mother was lost forever, at least we could find my father because he was still out there somewhere.”

  “That’s an awful big undertaking for two children,” Aunt Dee said, wiping her misty eyes. “Honestly, Pram, we had no idea.”

  Pram sobbed. It wasn’t just that she hadn’t found her father, but also the memory of her mother sitting in that asylum while Lady Savant handed out pills, and Felix disappearing, and Clarence being left to drown in that lake, and all the souls that died in those jars. It was over now, all of it, and Pram very much needed a good cry.

  The aunts couldn’t bear it. They cried, too, and they held her hands and kissed her cheeks, and they thanked what ever god sat in the heavens that she had come back to them.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Pram wasn’t allowed to have a proper visit with Clarence as long as she was in the hospital. Every day for the rest of that week, he brought her a flower he’d folded in that day’s newspaper, and the aunts stayed in the room and made sure that Pram did not discuss The Madwoman Incident—as it had come to be called. So Clarence told her about what she was missing in school and how chilly it was outside, and Pram could see in his eyes that there was more he wanted to say. He could see it in her eyes, too.

  The first moment Clarence and Pram had alone was the day she returned home. She was sitting in her bed, rereading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he appeared in her doorway, holding a tray of soup and toast. “Your aunts asked me to bring you your lunch,” he said.

  The moment he set the tray on Pram’s desk, Pram threw her arms around him. “I thought you drowned,” she said.

  “I thought you were gone forever,” Clarence said, hugging back with just as much gratitude.

  After a very long time, Pram stepped back and looked at him. “How did you get out of the crate?”

  “I didn’t,” Clarence said. “I tried to open it, but it was nailed shut. The water was very murky and it was dark.”

  Pram’s chest felt tight.

  “And then a boy swam down to me, and the crate broke apart, as though it wasn’t nailed at all, and the boy brought me to the surface. I think I blacked out after that. He wasn’t there when I woke up.”

  “What did he look like?” Pram asked.

  Clarence thought. “It’s kind of fuzzy, but . . . he had dark hair. And he was wearing a ripped white shirt, and he was skinny, and I know this sounds silly, but he glared at me as though I was getting on his nerves.”

  Pram was smiling. “You saw Felix.”

  Clarence blinked. “I did?”

  “You must have been dying,” Pram said. “That’s the only explanation.”

  “I read about that happening,” Clarence said. “Sometimes a near-death experience can make one see a ghost. It had me considering some foolish things when I was looking for my mother’s ghost.”

  “Have you seen any other ghosts since?” Pram said.

  “Not a one,” Clarence said. “I’m back to being ordinary, I guess.”

  “I don’t think you’re ordinary at all,” Pram said. “And I’m glad you’re alive.”

  “I’m glad you’re alive, too,” he said. “I didn’t know what Lady Savant was planning. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  “You almost didn’t,” Pram said. She closed her door, and in a hushed tone, she told him everything.

  “And you haven’t heard from Felix except for that one time when you were waking up at the hospital?” Clarence said.

  “No.” Pram frowned. “And I don’t know if it was really even him, or just a dream.”

  “But I saw him in the lake,” Clarence said. “So that must mean Lady Savant didn’t help him to move on after all.”

  “Adelaide told me that no one can help a spirit move on,” Pram said. “It has to be their own idea. But Lady Savant must have done something to keep him from reaching me.”

  “To keep him from warning you about her,” Clarence said.

  Pram chewed on her bottom lip. “Maybe,” she said.

  “Clarence!” Aunt Dee called from the bottom of the stairs. “Your father is here to take you home.”

  Pram open
ed her door and looked out over the banister. “But he just got here,” she said.

  “You should be in bed eating your lunch,” Aunt Dee said. “Your friend can come and visit another time.”

  “It’s okay,” Clarence said. “Feel better, Pram. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Before he went downstairs, he whispered, “And Felix will turn up.”

  After Clarence had left, Pram ate her lunch and climbed back into bed to finish reading her play.

  Aunt Dee knocked on the open door. “May I come in?” she asked.

  It was strange of her to ask, Pram thought, but she set down her book and said, “Of course.”

  “I thought we could have a little talk, you and me,” Aunt Dee said, and sat on the edge of the bed. She was holding Pram’s father’s compass. “They found this in the snow beside you,” she said. “I’d like to know where you got it.”

  Pram hesitated. She had never told her aunts about the box of things her mother hid in the closet floorboard. “May I have it back, please?” is all she said.

  Aunt Dee stared at the compass as though it might speak to her. “It’s been twelve years since I’ve seen this,” she said. “Your mother wore it all around the house, as though it was the thing telling her where to go with every step. I thought it was lost for good.”

  Pram looked at the compass, too, wishing she could connect it to a real memory. Before Pram met Lady Savant, all the memories she’d had of her mother were make-believe, and no matter how real they might have seemed, her mother would always be a stranger who knew nothing about her at all.

  “Your aunt Nan and I have wanted to protect you from the truth about your parents,” she said. “But we may have done the wrong thing. Neither of us had any idea you gave them so much thought.”

  “I thought it would make you mad if I asked about my mother,” Pram said.

  “Why would we be mad?” Aunt Dee asked.

  “Because she died giving birth to me, and it’s all my fault,” Pram said, guilt knotting her stomach. “And you’ve both had to raise me. I thought that I was old enough to find out for myself where I really belonged.”