by Alison Stine
I didn’t want to scare my grandmother, not like Clara had done with the eggs, but I hung around her, following her into rooms and lingering near doorways. I barely dared to speak to her, beyond calling her name. I had no idea what to say, how to even start to explain what was happening (what was happening?). Still, the evening that I hurt my arm, I tried.
I wrote her a letter.
I ripped a sheet of paper from a school notebook and found a pen. I sat cross-legged on my bed. Dear Grandma, I began. I’m here but something’s the matter. I’m sick or I’m … I couldn’t finish the next thought. I didn’t know what I was going to say, what excuse I was going to try to give.
But it didn’t matter. Because the words faded. They disappeared.
I shook the pen. I dug through my bag and found another. That one didn’t work either. Another pen, another. I tried a pencil. It wasn’t the ink, I realized. It wasn’t the lead.
It was me. I wasn’t going to be able to get the words out. Even if my grandmother had owned a computer and I could have typed her letter, I knew somehow it wouldn’t have worked. I couldn’t make myself be seen.
And I couldn’t make myself be heard. Or read.
I was trapped. Something had snared me. I willed my grandmother to notice me, just notice me, sense me. I waited for her to turn around, to turn off the TV, to see me.
She never did.
“I wanted that too,” Clara said, simply. We were sitting at the end of the driveway, in the grass by the mailbox. “I thought if I just shouted,” Clara said, “if I just made my voice loud enough, if I screamed.”
“It didn’t work?” I asked.
“I just screamed myself hoarse. I can make objects seem to float, and that’s entertaining, but no one sees my hand holding the candlestick.”
I looked away, down the road. Clara made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t seem to shake her; she could appear and disappear where she liked. “Where’s Tom today?”
She shrugged. “He had a hard night last night.”
“How can you have a hard night? You don’t sleep. What do you do all the time?”
Clara stood. “There are ways of entertaining oneself. Like this.” She nodded toward the road. “Here he comes. Just like I told you.”
The truck pulled to a halt in front of the mailbox. In the front seat, a man in glasses sorted through a stack of envelopes. I felt nervous, like I was about to get in trouble, about to get caught. I didn’t really trust Clara. But Clara said I couldn’t get caught.
She pushed me forward and I tripped against the truck, grasping at the open window frame to steady myself. The man in the truck—the mail carrier—didn’t notice. I said hello. He didn’t notice.
I stood right beside the truck. I took the letters when he stretched them toward the mailbox. I was shaking so hard, I knocked them out of his hands.
He looked up, but not at me. He looked past me, right through me. He didn’t retrieve the mail that had fallen. He didn’t even get out of his truck. “Haunted house!” he said, and yanked the truck into reverse, moving away from us, as fast as he could.
I watched the truck careen down the road, then I picked up the mail from the mud.
“Good work,” Clara said. “Now you know the post office can’t see you. Oh well for your pen pals.”
“You don’t have to be so mean, Clara,” a voice said—and Tom was there, at my side in the way that he and his sister and Martha had, appearing without warning.
I turned to him, and my smile at hearing his voice fell away. On his face, there was a bruise, a huge purple circle blackening his eye, bleeding darkly onto his skin.
Tom said it didn’t hurt, but he wouldn’t let me touch his face, or get an ice pack.
Or Martha. “It’ll fade,” he said. “I promise it will.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought you couldn’t bleed. I thought you couldn’t get hurt, couldn’t get bruised. I thought that’s how you knew I wasn’t dead.”
“We can’t get hurt,” Clara said. “Unless—”
“Clara,” Tom said.
She shrugged and turned, skipping back up the hill to the house.
“Tell me about the mailman,” Tom said.
I couldn’t look at Tom with his bruised eye. I looked at the ground instead. “He didn’t see me. He cursed and ran away, said my grandmother’s house was haunted. Do people know, about you and Clara and Martha? Does everyone in town know?”
“I don’t know. There have been stories about this house for a long time. People say it’s cursed.”
“Did you live here? Was Martha your maid?”
“Oh no. We lived down the hill.” He turned and pointed across the road, to an empty field. “There was a little shack there, by the railroad tracks. It was torn down, years and years ago. We had a view of the mansion on the hill, and at night, Clara and I talked about what it might be like to live there. But we didn’t see anything or hear anything strange around the house before…”
“Before you died.”
“Yes.” He faced me. “Is this too much for you?”
“That you’re dead, or that you’re talking to me? Or that I’m invisible? Or what?”
“All of it.” He took my hand. His touch was warm. His hand was warm.
Real, I thought. Alive.
This was happening. We couldn’t be figments or shadows or fades. We were real, and when he brought my face closer to his—that was real. And the fluttering in my stomach—that was real too. I felt true things. Everything was real except his breathing, which I couldn’t hear; a pulse in his wrist, which I would never find; a heart, which could never beat for anyone.
“Your bruise,” I said. The mark was already starting to fade. “What happened?”
“That must be nice.” A man stood at the top of the driveway, the man in black with his hands in his pockets and sticking-up black hair. “Ghostie love,” Mr. Black said.
I pulled away from Tom. “I’m not a ghost.”
“Isn’t it convenient, Tom, that a girl your age should die, just—what? A hundred or so years after your interment? Lucky you. You hardly waited at all.”
A hundred years?
“Esmé Wong,” Tom said. “Mr. Dylan Black. He’s a decent friend, when he isn’t tanked up.”
Mr. Black made a little flourish with his hand, and attempted a bow, nearly tripping. He smelled—like earth, as Tom and Clara and Martha did—and like something else too, something strong, medicinal.
Alcohol. Mr. Black was drunk.
But that wasn’t what worried me. “How old are you?” I asked Tom.
“Don’t scare her off now,” Mr. Black interrupted.
“When did you die?”
“Always an awkward question,” Mr. Black said.
“Tom,” I said.
He glanced at Mr. Black. “Isn’t there a hay loft that needs haunting?”
Mr. Black shuffled away, muttering. Tom waited until he had gone. When he turned back to me, his eyes were flashing. How could they do that? How could they change depth, and sparkle, and lighten and darken? How could he be so changeable? He was dead.
“When?” I asked. “When did you die?”
“Ez,” Tom said.
“If you won’t tell me how, at least tell me when. At least tell me how old you are.”
Tom said, not looking at me, “I died in 1903. I was seventeen.”
“You’ve been seventeen for over a hundred years?”
“It’s not that bad. It goes by quickly. You find things to do.”
“What? I scared the mail carrier today. That took two minutes. What else have you been doing?”
“Trying to find a reason.”
“A reason for what?” I said. Then I knew. His bruise was gone, had completely disappeared in the time we had been arguing, had healed itself—and his eyes had dulled too, hardening to a cold steel color. “Why are you haunting here?” I asked. “Is that it? Why are you a ghost, and not buried somewhere?”
“I am buried somewhere. Clara and I are next to each other. But no, I don’t know why I’m a ghost. I don’t know why I’m still here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. None of us do. I’ve been trying to figure that out for over a hundred years.”
“Who hit you?” I asked, staring at his eye, where the bruise had been. The skin there looked normal now. How could it heal so fast? How could the dead heal?
“Come with me,” Tom said.
Beyond the pond, hills rose above the cow pasture. On top of the first hill grew a few bent trees. The hill had a large amount of jagged stones, the overgrown grass brushing up to my knees.
“What are we looking at?” I asked.
“Look down.”
“So?” I said. “Rocks. No one mows here.”
“Look closer.”
I humored him, bending down to brush the weeds away from one of the stones. There were letters engraved on its surface. I shot up.
“It’s not mine!” Tom said quickly. “It’s the family plot.”
“Could use a bit of tending,” a mournful voice said and I looked behind me to see Mr. Black perched on a tilting gravestone, swinging his legs. “Your grandmother has almost forgotten the plot is here,” he said. “Perhaps she doesn’t want to remember. Upkeep really isn’t her specialty, anyway, is it?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in the hayloft?” I asked.
He held up a flat green bottle, which sloshed when he shook it. “I had some hidden about here.”
“Wait,” I said. “I thought ghosts couldn’t drink or eat?”
“We can,” Tom said. “It just doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t taste like anything. It doesn’t make us feel full or less thirsty or satisfied. We’re never satisfied.”
“And yet,” Mr. Black said, swigging from the bottle, “we do what we know, what’s familiar to us, what feels comforting. What we were doing when … well, you know.”
“You were drunk when you died?”
“I was,” Mr. Black said.
“So you’re drunk forever. You’re drunk as a ghost.” I wrinkled my nose. “That’s disgusting.”
Mr. Black lifted the bottle and drank.
“His grave is over there,” Tom said, pointing.
“You were family?”
“No,” Mr. Black said. “But the family was a kind one, and arranged for some of their favorite servants to be buried here. I was the gardener.”
“Martha’s buried here, too,” Tom said. “Beneath this tree.”
I found her small stone, the letters caked with black moss. “Martha Mary Moore,” I read. “Devoted and Faithful. November 14, 1881—January 1, 1900. She was just nineteen. And she died on New Year’s Day.”
“New Year’s Eve, actually,” Mr. Black corrected. “But they didn’t find her until the next morning.”
“How do you know?”
“Why do you think I started drinking?” He took another sip, grimacing at the harsh taste. He got no pleasure from it, I saw. He drank like it was medicine.
I walked in a circle around the graveyard. It was like wading through deep water, the grass was so thick. “Who are all these people?” I said. “The others buried here? Why haven’t I met them? Why aren’t they ghosts? Why isn’t the house full of ghosts?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “It’s just me and Clara and Mr. Black.”
“And Martha,” Mr. Black said.
“And the Builder,” Tom said.
“And—”
Tom looked at him sharply, and he drank.
“Why haven’t I met the Builder?” I asked. “Where is he?”
“Building, I imagine,” Mr. Black said. “Putting in some cupola, or a stairway that leads to nowhere.”
“He keeps busy,” Tom said. “He does what he knows. He built this house. And he keeps on building it.”
I gazed down at the house at the bottom of the field: the stained-glass fanlight above the doors, the boxy addition on the back. The house had been added onto over the years, and some pieces matched more than others. “Where are you buried?” I asked Tom.
He opened his mouth to speak, but his words were drowned out by a sound: a horn, blaring and close.
“The train,” Mr. Black said when the blast had ended.
“I came into town on that train,” I said.
Tom said, “Me too.” And then he began to run.
“Stop him!” Mr. Black said. He leapt from the headstone, the bottle crashing to the ground and breaking. Mr. Black didn’t even glance at it. “Go after him!”
But Tom was gone, halfway past the house already.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “Where’s he going?”
Mr. Black bounded through the weeds and extended his hand to me. Without even thinking, I took it and we ran down the hill, past the house, over the driveway and across the road. It was the first time I had run with a ghost. We didn’t fly, not exactly, but we seemed to reach the train station in the time it took me to blink, to breathe in and out. I think my feet touched the ground only twice, like a send-off, a moon-bounce. I felt Mr. Black’s hand, hard and strong, in my own. His black scarf flapped in the wind. Then we were on the platform outside the train station, Mr. Black resting with his arm against the wall; running with me appeared to have exhausted him.
“Where’s Tom?” I asked.
Mr. Black just pointed at the tracks. He seemed breathless, though he had no breath.
I crept to the edge of the platform, and saw Tom down below, stepping over the rails. Silver flashed in his hands. It was a wrench. “Tom, what are you doing?” I said.
He looked up at me briefly, then bent back to his work. He was twisting at something, trying to turn a lever on the ground. He didn’t seem to see me. No, he didn’t seem to know me.
A light sped toward the tracks, blinding even in daytime. The train, the Keystone. The Keystone was coming. I glanced back at Mr. Black, then hopped down from the platform. I landed on my feet, shaky but standing. “Tom, what are you doing?” I repeated. I reached him and tried to touch him, grabbing for the wrench, but he yanked it back.
“Stopping the train.” His hands kept moving. “Changing its path. I have to do this.”
“Why? Is there someone on the train? Tom, it’s a real train. There are people on it. Innocent living people.”
He looked at me. His face had more color. It was dirty, I realized, and through the dirt snaked pale, silvery tears. Tom was crying. “Living people matter more than me?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know.”
The train blasted its horn. The conductor couldn’t have seen us; no one saw us. It was just what the train did automatically when it approached a station. But the sound was so close, I felt it in my chest, felt it coming through the ground: the deep resonate bass of the engine. The train cleared the curve right before the station.
“Tom,” I said.
“Well, ho there.” Walking to us, picking his way across the tracks, swinging a lantern, was a man.
I felt arms. I felt myself being lifted. I felt weightless, my body pulled up and away from the tracks, the headlight, the roaring engine. I saw the man who had spoken was an old man.
I was dead. I had died in the subway tunnel in New York, and now I was repeating my death. Now I would do it again and again: hit my head, see the darkness; the worker would pull my body of out the tunnel.
So this was what being dead was like. I was floating above the scene, watching Tom and the old man with the lantern getting smaller. As I left the station behind, I saw the man look up at me. He wore a rumpled brown hat. His face was thin and gristly, his chin spotted with white. He smiled, but it was a cold smile. Sunlight glittered against his teeth. It made me shiver.
I smelled alcohol. I turned my face and met Mr. Black’s dark and smelly shirt. He was holding me, running with me. I pushed at him, but he held tight. “What are you doing?”
“Saving your life,” he said. “If you are
alive, as everyone says you are, you should stay that way, I guess.”
“But Tom’s back there.”
His jaw tensed. “Can’t be helped.”
“A train is coming.”
“He won’t stop it. He never does.” Mr. Black carried me in through the sloping doors of the barn, and up a ladder. He didn’t stop until we were in the hayloft, and he set me down on a mound of straw.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Stay here,” he said. “Be quiet.”
“Why?”
“Shh. For once.” He held up his hand, and I listened. At first I heard nothing, just the chatter of birds, pigeons or doves. The barn roof had so many holes, light filtered through, spotting my hands and Mr. Black’s face. Then I heard a horn, fainter now.
Mr. Black relaxed. “The train’s left. It’s over.”
“What is? What’s going on?”
He was rustling around in the straw. He got on his hands and knees and moved away from me, searching in the shadows.
“What about Tom?” I asked.
“Tom is dead. Now, where did I put that …?”
“What happened to him just now? Why did he act that way? Who was that man?”
“Ah!” Mr. Black lifted a bottle from the hay, brushed away the dust, and uncorked it with his teeth. “That was Tom’s death.” He spit the cork into the shadows. “You saw him die again, saw the start of it, anyway. You saw his death beginning.”
“And who was that man? That old man with the lantern?”
Mr. Black drank long and deep before answering. “That was the man who killed him.”
CHAPTER 6:
Sensitive One
I didn’t see Tom for days.
I was learning another thing about ghosts: they could make themselves scarce when they wanted to, and now, they wanted to. Or Tom did, anyway.
I tried to develop a routine. I did everything I would normally do, but I attempted to be more careful about it. I ate only when my grandmother was gone, and I always washed and dried my dishes and put them back in the cabinets right away. I knew I would terrify her—an invisible granddaughter—and what could she do about it, anyway? I didn’t know what to say to her; I had barely had anything to say to her when I was visible.