The door downstairs slammed. We both jumped.
“She’s back!” I said.
“Okay,” said Annie, with that wicked gleam in her eyes I knew so well. “Let’s start with some ghostly footsteps.”
I gave her arm a squeeze then headed downstairs.
Maisie was in the kitchen, pulling things out of the fridge to start supper.
“Maisie?” I said.
She turned and gave me a dirty look. “What?”
“Are you still mad at me?”
She gave a big, theatrical sigh and dumped some carrots and cabbage on the table. “I’m not mad at you, Claire, I’m just disappointed.”
“And by ‘disappointed’ you mean mad, right?”
“No,” she replied, taking a big knife and starting to chop the cabbage. “I mean disappointed. I’m disappointed that you talked this over with Mrs. Matchim without even mentioning it to me. And I’m disappointed that you feel you would be better off living with Nan in St. John’s than you are here with me.”
“It’s not about you, Maisie. It’s about me getting a better education.”
“You could do perfectly well at the high school in Lattice Harbour. You don’t need to be taking Latin and Greek and all that foolishness.”
“I do! I want to go to university and study English. I need all kinds of things I can’t get at Lattice Harbour and I can get at St. Brigid’s. You shouldn’t hold me back just because you don’t like the same things I do. What if Nan had told you that you couldn’t go to art school when you were young? How would you feel?”
“It’s not the same, Claire,” said Maisie, taking a carrot and starting to hack at it. “You’re going into grade nine, not university. There will be time for all that later.”
“I want it now. I don’t want to be stuck here and bored out of my head for the next three years. There’s nothing for me in Crooked Head.”
“Well, we’re not moving back to St. John’s. And you’re staying here with me whether you like it or not.”
Upstairs, a door slammed. Maisie gave a start. “The wind must be picking up. Can you go close the windows upstairs?”
I didn’t move.
“Claire? Don’t start sulking. Just do what I asked.”
Before I could move there was the clear sound of footsteps walking along the hall upstairs.
“Who’s that?” said Maisie. “Have you got a friend here?”
I glared at her. “I don’t have any friends, remember?”
“Well, who is it then?”
“Who is what? I didn’t hear anything.”
Maisie stopped chopping the vegetables and put her hands on her hips. “Claire, stop fooling around. Who is here? I heard footsteps.”
“There’s nobody here, Maisie. I didn’t hear footsteps.”
A door slammed again. “You heard that!”
“What?”
“Claire, I’m not in the mood for your nonsense.” She charged out the door and up the stairs.
ANNIE
I DUCKED INTO THE hall closet just as Maisie burst out of the kitchen door. I stood motionless, holding my breath, even though I could feel a giggle building up inside me.
I could hear her banging around, opening doors and muttering to herself. Then Claire’s voice, floating up the stairs, as she followed her mother up.
“I told you there was no one here, Maisie. You must be hearing things.”
“I am not hearing things,” said Maisie, right outside the closet door. “There were footsteps.”
Before I could move, she opened the door and stood looking in, right at me.
Maisie was taller than I thought she would be, with thick brown hair curling over her shoulders. Her eyes were the same blueberry-blue as Claire’s—and they looked right through me. I didn’t dare move a muscle. She shivered.
“There’s definitely a draft coming through here,” she said over her shoulder to Claire. “It’s freezing.” I pressed myself up against the wall as she came in. Maisie brushed by me and headed along to the door at the far end. Claire followed, making a funny face at me as she passed. I stayed in the corner. It felt weird to be invisible. Really weird. Like I could easily float away into nothing. I bit down on my thumb till it hurt. That made me feel more solid.
I could hear Maisie striding through the Mirror House, apparently looking in every room and every cupboard. “Well, that’s the strangest thing,” she said, as she ducked back into the closet and came toward me. “Not a window open. I wonder—” Then she stopped, right beside me. “It’s very cold, right here,” she said, shivering. Claire came up behind her. “Can you feel that, Claire? Like ice. There must be some air getting in from somewhere.”
“It doesn’t feel any different to me, Maisie,” said Claire. “And it’s warm outside. There’s no wind and the sun is shining.”
Maisie walked out into the hall and peered out the window.
“You’re right,” she muttered, then walked back into the closet, standing so close to me I could feel her breath. “But it’s freezing in here. Just in this one spot.”
“There is an explanation,” said Claire. “But you’re not going to like it.”
Maisie whirled around and shook her finger at Claire. “Don’t start with me again about ghosts, Claire. I’m going to finish supper.” She stalked down the stairs.
Claire came into the closet and silently closed the door behind her.
“How did you do that, Annie?” she whispered. “How did you make it cold?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you feel cold around me?”
She shook her head. “Never. If anything, I feel warm,” and then she gave me a big hug.
She felt warm to me too. I closed my eyes. She smelled just like Mom. Lavender soap. Then the floor in the closet tipped up and I was slipping down and then I was falling and falling, a long way down, through darkness, by myself. Claire was gone.
CLAIRE
ONE MINUTE I was hugging her and the next my arms were closed on nothing. Annie was gone.
I leaned my head up against the wall and shut my eyes. There was a dull kind of throbbing in my head. I wished Annie would just stay, and not keep coming and going.
“Claire!” Maisie’s voice echoed up the stairs “Can you come and give me a hand with dinner?”
“I’ll be right there,” I called back, going into my bedroom and getting the Are You Being Haunted? book from the chair where I left it. I tiptoed into Maisie’s bedroom and left the book on her bedside table, strategically placed just in front of the photograph of Annie. Then I went down to supper.
We had a quiet dinner. Maisie didn’t bring up the subjects of footsteps, cold spots or high school in St. John’s. Instead she started in on a long monologue about how she and Ed were going to fix up one of the sheds so she could keep chickens.
I tuned her out. I was trying to figure out how I could steal her keys and get into the studio. She usually kept her car keys and house keys in the pocket of her jacket. If she had put the studio key on that ring, I would have to steal them when she was asleep. Otherwise she would catch me.
That night I set my alarm for five o’clock the next morning. Maisie was dead to the world till at least nine o’clock, so I would have lots of time to get into the studio and look at the Annie paintings. I went to sleep and had a strange dream. I was sitting in a rocking chair holding a baby and rocking back and forth. The baby was sleeping. I was in a city, and there was the noise of cars outside the window. Sun streamed in. The baby woke up and looked at me, and smiled.
It was Annie.
ANNIE
I OPENED MY EYES. I was in my quiet corner of the library and there was no one else around. The book, open to the painting of Claire’s room, still lay on my lap.
I had to get back to Crooked Head. I stared at the painting for a couple of minutes, but nothing happened. I turned the page.
Little Annie grinned out at me. She was standing in front of a city house with a black Scottie
dog in her arms. It was the first painting Maisie did of Little Annie after she died. She was about five, bursting with life, laughing.
“Annie,” I whispered. “Can you take me to Crooked Head? Can you take me to Claire?”
Nothing happened. I tore my eyes away from hers and read the caption.
Annie I 1975. Acrylic on canvas. This is the first of the Annie series, based on King’s vision of how her daughter Annie would have grown up, if her life hadn’t been cut short by a terrible car accident when she was four. King never speaks about her daughter but lets her paintings tell the story of her great loss.
I glanced back at the painting. Funny how the black dog drew my eye away from all the other colors in the painting, away from Annie herself. Just like the toy dog in the other painting, his little black beady eyes seemed to fasten onto mine. Maisie had painted them like the others: spinning vortexes, drawing me in. My stomach lurched and then I was falling into the deep, dark whirlpool of the dog’s eyes, and I could hear him barking, far away, and the sound of squealing brakes.
I was on my knees on a rough wooden floor. It was dark. I could smell paint. I felt sick to my stomach, like I was going to throw up.
Slowly I got to my feet. I could see the dim outline of a window on the far wall. I groped around on a table and my hands closed on a box of matches. When I got one lit, I could see I was in Maisie’s studio, and there was a candlestick sitting on the table.
The painting of Annie when she was five stood on the floor, leaning against the wall, with the other Annie paintings propped up beside it. I brought the candle over to look at it more closely.
I was right about the dog. It was the focus of the painting, not Annie, a darkness at the center. I looked at the next picture, which was Annie standing at a kitchen table, making cookies. She grinned out at me, with a couple of gobs of cookie dough on her face. Behind her, on a windowsill, stood a black china Scottie dog with spinning eyes. Once I started looking at him, his dark presence seemed to cast a shadow on the rest of the painting. I moved closer and then my foot caught on the first painting, and it fell over with a loud thud.
“Hello?” called a sleepy voice from the next room. Maisie.
I looked around for somewhere to hide, then remembered she couldn’t see me. But could she touch me? I put the candle back on the table, blew it out, and then tucked myself into the corner near the window beside a tall dresser and stayed very still. I heard her fumbling with a key in the lock, and then the door opened.
“Claire?” she said. “Are you in here?”
I held my breath. Maisie stood there for a moment, then crossed to the table and lit the candle. She held it high, looking around the room.
“Claire!” she said sharply. Then she bent over and picked up the painting that had fallen over, setting it back in place against the wall. She stood there for a moment, looking down at it.
“Annie,” she whispered, with a big sigh. She began to walk slowly around the room with the candle, peering into the corners. I tried to shrink back against the wall but there was nowhere for me to go.
She stopped in front of me. She looked right through me. I got that strange feeling again, like maybe I wasn’t really there. Like maybe I really was a ghost.
Maisie shivered. The candle flickered, sending eerie shadows dancing over her face. She had a wide mouth and prominent cheekbones. She didn’t look like Claire at all, except for her blueberry eyes, which seemed to be boring into mine.
“Annie,” she whispered again, almost to herself.
And I felt suddenly that I knew this woman, inside and out. It was more than just her paintings—I knew her as well as I knew anybody.
“Maisie,” I whispered, without thinking.
She heard me. I could see it in her face as she jumped back, and dropped the candle.
“It’s always tea-time.”
The Mad Hatter, ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
CLAIRE
I DON’T KNOW WHAT woke me up. A voice, perhaps? I was suddenly wide awake, sitting up in my bed. It was mostly dark, except for a faint glow from the window that meant the sun would be up soon.
I heard Maisie’s door open and footsteps go along the hall to her studio. I slipped out of bed and eased my door open to peek. I could just make out Maisie in her white nightgown, on her tiptoes, reaching up to the lintel above the door to her studio. She groped around for a moment, found what she was looking for, then I could hear a key jiggle against the lock as she opened the door.
“HA!” I thought to myself. “Gotcha!”
She put the key back up on the lintel and went into the room. I crept along behind her and then froze as she called my name. I held my breath. But she didn’t come back into the hall, so I went up to the door and peered around the corner.
Maisie lit a candle and called my name again. She sounded cross. She started pacing through the room with the candle, looking for something. Then I saw Annie. She was pressed up against the wall beside the dresser, looking scared.
Maisie stopped in front of Annie. She whispered something I couldn’t hear, and Annie had the strangest look on her face, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Then Annie whispered something back, and Maisie jumped back and dropped the candle. The room was plunged into darkness.
I could feel someone pushing past me into the hall.
“Maisie?” I called out.
“I’m here,” she replied from inside the room. She fumbled around on the floor and then stumbled over to the table. I could hear her pushing things around, and then the sharp crack of a match striking as she relit the candle.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Maisie was looking at me warily. “Were you asleep?”
“Yes. I heard you get up and came out to see what was going on.”
“And you haven’t been in here tonight?”
“No. What happened?”
Maisie looked away. “I thought I heard a noise in here. Maybe a mouse.”
“Oh. Well, I’m going back to bed.” I turned quickly so she wouldn’t see the smile on my face. A mouse indeed. The haunting of Maisie was going very well.
There was a largish lump in my bed. I got in and wiggled my bare toes against Annie’s, the way we used to. She laughed softly and wiggled hers back.
“What happened?” I whispered. “Maisie is really spooked!”
“Yes. A painting fell over, and she came in and started searching around the room. She stopped right by me—I think that cold spot thing was happening again.”
“What were you whispering?”
“She said ‘Annie’ and I said ‘Maisie.’ ”
“Did you say anything about the paintings?”
“I didn’t have a chance. She dropped the candle.”
“Next time you gotta tell her. Tell her you’re back because of the paintings. You don’t want them to be shown.”
Annie didn’t say anything.
“Annie?” I said, giving her a poke. “Did you hear me? You have to tell her not to show the paintings.”
“I—I don’t know,” said Annie.
“What do you mean you don’t know? That was the plan.”
“I know, but that was before I saw her. It was just a game, getting her to believe she was haunted. But now that it’s starting to work—”
“Now that it’s starting to work is when you have to move in and deliver the goods, Annie! That was the whole point of haunting her.”
“I know. But now it seems…it seems kind of mean.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“It seems mean to play a trick on her. To make her think her dead daughter has come back to tell her not to show those paintings.”
“But you have come back! And you don’t want her to show the paintings, do you?”
Annie hesitated. “I don’t know. They’re so good.”
I jumped out of bed. “Annie, don’t do this to me. You said you would help.
”
“And I want to help, but I don’t feel right about tricking Maisie. She’s too sad.”
“She’s sad? What about what’s going to happen to me when those paintings get shown? I’ll be known all around the world as the girl who let her sister get killed!”
“It won’t be like that, Claire. I promise. Get Maisie just to leave you out of it, like she said, and it doesn’t have to come up.”
“NO!” I wanted to scream but I knew it would wake Maisie up again. I leaned in close to Annie and spoke very carefully.
“I don’t want those paintings shown. It’s a betrayal of me and you and everything that happened. It’s private. Maisie shouldn’t be opening it up like that so everyone can see. Are you going to help me or not?”
“I want to help you, Claire, but isn’t there another way? Besides the haunting?”
I closed my eyes and tried to think. My head was pounding again.
“There is one way,” I said. “But you might not like it.”
ANNIE
THE LIGHT FROM the window was slowly getting stronger. I could almost see Claire’s face.
“If the paintings aren’t here,” she said, “Maisie can’t show them.”
“What do you mean, ‘if they aren’t here’? Where would they be?”
“Hidden. If we took them away, and hid them where no one could find them—”
“Maisie would know you’d taken them.”
“So what is she going to do? Torture me?” Claire laughed.
I thought back to what I’d seen in Maisie’s face a little while ago in the studio. Strength. Determination. I shivered. “Hopefully not,” I said, and Claire laughed again.
“Look, I can hold out against her. She’ll be mad. But there won’t be anything she can do. Maybe she’ll be so mad she’ll want to get rid of me and let me go and live in St. John’s. Two birds—one stone.”
“I don’t know,” I said uncertainly. “She might just lock you in your room and throw away the key.”
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