by Alison Stine
“Well, you made it,” I said, too brightly. “You’re free. You can go now. You can stop being a ghost.”
“Go?” the woman said.
“The war is over.”
“She might want more than freedom,” Tom said.
“Her name is Lucy,” the ghost said.
“Hi Lucy,” Tom said. “I’m Tom and this is Esmé.”
“We don’t have time for this,” I whispered. “My sister …”
He squeezed my hand. “What have you been doing all this time, Lucy?”
Lucy looked away from us, toward the darkness. Somewhere in the distance the tunnel ended in a ladder and a kiln, in a tree and a field, in sunlight. It seemed very far away. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for the others,” she said.
“The others?”
“My sister and her children. They’ll come soon, I expect. They were right behind me.”
Even in the shadows, I could feel Tom looking at me.
“Maybe they got out,” I said. “Maybe they’re already free. There were … are … lots of stops on the Railroad between here and Virginia, right?”
“That’s true,” Lucy said. “And we’ve got this.” She set her lantern down in order to hold something up, a big colorful sheet. A map, I thought, but bigger and brighter than any map I had ever seen.
I leaned closer and regarded it in the lantern light. I saw it was a blanket, a quilt. The colors were explosions in the darkness, blue and orange and green, half-lit by the flickering flame. I leaned closer and saw patterns, geometric shapes. I wanted to touch the quilt but stopped myself, my hand hovering over the squares. “It’s beautiful.”
“It gives hope,” Lucy said. “And advice. Reminders mostly. See here,” she pointed to a sunburst pattern. “That’s the North Star. This one, that’s the Drunkard’s Path. That reminds you to change your way, vary it up, move east and west, zigzag like a drunk.”
“Like Mr. Black,” I said.
“Important to keep moving. Important to follow the star. That’s what I told her.” She folded the quilt away and as she did so, lifted the lantern to peer into my face. “You look like her.”
“Your sister?” I asked, confused.
“No. The girl.”
“What girl?” I said.
“She came this way. Running from the house. Needing to get away fast. I don’t know why. She looked like she had seen a ghost.”
“Maybe she had,” Tom said.
“Which way did she go?” I asked.
“Well, she had trouble hearing me,” Lucy said. “But she needed a place to hide, and she seemed to understand my hands all right, so I pointed her on toward the other tunnel.”
“The other tunnel?” I said. “What other tunnel?”
“Why,” Lucy said, “the one for the train.”
“Tom?” I said.
“It’s not far. I don’t why I didn’t think of it before.”
“Wait,” Lucy said. “Be safe now. Follow the star.”
Tom was tugging on my arm, and we had to go. I had to find my sister. I wanted to go, but something held me in the tunnel: Lucy’s upturned face in the lantern light. She hugged her own shoulders: expectant, hopeful. She was waiting, still. How long had she been waiting?
“Thank you,” I said.
She smiled at me. “I just wanted to help someone else.”
And then she was gone. Even her lantern vanished. Without her light, the tunnel turned dim again, but I could make out a lumpy shape on the ground. The quilt.
“Wait a minute,” I said to Tom. I picked it up. I folded it under my arms, and we ran and ran, then climbed out the kiln’s secret entrance. The sun was glaring, welcome and hot.
I ran with Tom. Together, we passed the barn, the house, the driveway. We weren’t flying, not exactly, but then we were across the road. Then we had left the train station behind before I had even realized it. We were traveling farther than I had ever gone in Wellstone. Had my sister really run this far, even in panic, even with a ghost behind her?
As abruptly as we started, we stopped. Tom set me down in the grass. Railroad tracks stretched in front of me, long and rusted. We had followed them to a valley. On both sides of the tracks, big brick walls rose up, marking the entrance to a train tunnel. I turned to my left and saw it: the huge black hole of the tunnel, a gaping maw.
“The tunnel’s not that long,” Tom said. “It curves—that’s why you can’t see any light.” He reached for my hand and helped me up.
Together, we approached the mouth. We picked our way over the tracks, our shoes crunching over gravel and old, crackling leaves. Near the entrance, the tunnel walls were covered in graffiti, scarred with colors. I thought, for the first time in a long time, about the day I had gone into the subway tunnel in New York, the day everything had changed.
Was my gift already coming then? Had it already found me? Was I already starting to see ghosts—and was I already starting to fade?
I had gone into that tunnel for a boy, a boy I barely knew, a boy who didn’t return my calls, who didn’t know I was invisible now, who didn’t even know I was alive, who didn’t—I realized—know anything about me.
And he wasn’t alive.
The truth jolted me. No one ever spoke to Acid, no one ever talked about him but me; my old classmates looked at me like I was crazy when I did. His mother cried when I had tried to call. I was sent to the counselor who lectured me about my dream world; I was told about the dangers of lies.
It wasn’t a dream world. It was a dead world.
There had been an accident, the subway worker who had pulled me out of the tunnel had said. A boy had died in this very tunnel. A boy had died. A boy. Telling me that he loved me— telling someone that he had been alive, that he had loved—was that what he needed, all he wanted? Was that what had caused him to go?
Walking on the railroad tracks, I knew I would never see that ghost again. I went into the tunnel with another boy. How long before he too would disappear?
I squeezed his hand and he smiled down at me.
“Nothing to worry about, Ez,” he said, his voice reverberating.
We were inside the tunnel, the high sides rising up like a cathedral. We walked alongside the tracks, close to the wall—so close, brick brushed my shoulder. The walls curved around the bend. I looked back until the light from outside disappeared. We walked on in the darkness and cold.
“Kids come here a lot,” Tom was saying.
“And do what?”
He shrugged.
I stepped over a flattened beer can. “Oh.”
“There’s not a lot to do in Wellstone,” Tom said. “This place makes a nice dare.”
“Coming here? It’s not so bad.” I looked up at the arched ceiling, far away.
“Coming here when the trains come through,” Tom said. “That’s the dare.”
I dropped his hand. “Trains? Trains come through here? This track is active?”
There was a foot or two of space between the gravel path along the wall and the tracks. That was it. If a train came through, we would have to flatten ourselves against the wall to avoid being hit. Even then, I wasn’t sure we would make it.
Why would my sister come here?
“Look.” Tom beckoned me further along the track. He was running his hands over the wall, feeling for something. He turned back to smile at me, then he was gone; he was just gone.
“Tom!” I said. “Don’t do that ghost thing.”
“It’s not a ghost thing.” His voice was muffled. I heard a scratching, then his face appeared at knee level. I bent down. I saw a small brick alcove set into the bottom of the tunnel wall, barely big enough for one person to crouch inside, as Tom was doing.
“It’s a recess,” he said. “A bay set into the wall. For safety.”
I studied it. “I hid in one of these. It was a little bigger, though. In New York. When I hit my head.” It was not a pleasant memory, and I straightened quickly.
Tom crawled
out of the recess, dusting himself off. “They’re all over, every few feet on both sides of the tracks, these safety bays. In case a worker is trapped here when a train comes through, he can duck inside the bay and wait until the train passes. That’s what kids do when the train comes. That’s the dare: to wait out the train.”
“How do you know this?” I asked.
“I was a kid once. A real one. That was a dare, even then. It’s safe in the bay, but you have to wait out the train.”
“Wait it out,” I said blankly. “You think my sister is in one of these? You think that’s where she’s hiding? Can she hear us?”
“I don’t know. It’s an idea. I hid here a few times when … I needed to.”
I kept my voice steady. “Did he know? Did the Stationmaster know about your hiding place? Did he ever find you here?”
“Yes, he did,” Tom said.
I began to run, racing alongside the tracks, ducking to look in each of the safety bays as I passed. They were dark. They were all dark. I yelled my sister’s name. I slipped on a patch of gravel and slid, reaching out to catch myself, touching the track as I fell. I thought it was the third rail, the live rail. I pulled my hand back quickly.
But it wasn’t electricity that coursed through my bones. It was a sound, a deep rumbling bass.
Tom lifted me off the ground. “We have to get out of here. You have to get out of here.”
“What’s going on?”
“A train’s coming.”
Now I could feel it through my feet. The ground shook, and there was a roar, low and heavy. It vibrated in my chest. I heard a long blast.
“Come on!” Tom said.
“No!” I pulled back from him. “My sister. What if she’s here?”
“If she’s here, she’s hiding. She’ll be safe.”
But I found my footing, and ran away from Tom, away from our exit, back into the heart of the tunnel, shouting for her. I dashed around the curve—and I could see the light then. The light was yellow and powerful. It looked familiar.
It was the headlight of a train.
“Esmé!” Tom shouted.
I stopped dead still. A shadow stood in the middle of the light, out on the tracks ahead of me. It was moving—no. Dancing. She was dancing, lifting her slender arms, making graceful dips and bows. The light was so bright, the figure black and featureless, only a silhouette, but I recognized the hair in its high dark bun, the long curve of the neck.
My sister.
“What are you doing?” I shouted at her.
“What are you doing?” Tom said.
I just stared at my sister. Something was different, something was wrong. It was her, but it was not her. The way she moved was off. She kept dancing, not seeing me, unfazed by me. I stood frozen, watching her, and watching the light behind her grow bigger, closer.
“Move out of the way!” Tom said. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled.
We fell together into the gravel beside the tracks. I was fighting with him, trying to twist out of his arms. But he was stronger. Even or especially as a ghost, he was stronger. He dragged me to the wall, felt around blindly, then located the safety bay. He pushed me inside.
The train horn came again, so loud and close, I cried out. Plaster trickled from the walls. The safety bay was a tight space, barely big enough for me to crouch, my arms around my legs. I made myself into a ball. There was no door, just an archway for the opening, but Tom was not going to fit, I knew it.
I heard his voice, close to me. “Stay there!” he said.
I opened my eyes to see the entrance of the safety bay blocked by Tom. He had flattened himself against the wall, legs and arms spread. He was holding me in.
There was a blur of light and darkness and sound, a horn and a clanging and the growl of the motor, the groan of the tracks. The train passed. It took forever. Tom shook but did not move, shielding me. The tunnel seemed to shake too, trembling under the force of the train. Bits of the wall broke off and crumbled to the ground. I had dust in my hair and grit in my eyes. I squeezed them shut, and the sound of the train filled me—my lungs, my head, even my thoughts.
It was everything. It was death.
When it was over, the walls still shook, and the track hummed. No—it was my ears; my ears rang with the sound. I could breathe, I found, but I was choking, gasping, my throat and lips coated with a thick gray dust.
Tom unfroze. He reached into the safety bay and pulled me out, set me beside the tracks where I lay, coughing. He leaned over me.
I took a shuddering breath, and rolled over onto my side. I was eye level with grit and dust, the metal line of the tracks. “That’s a dare?” I said. I pulled myself onto my knees. The tunnel was spinning. Tom put his arms out to me but I shook my head. I managed to rise. I was woozy, and my ears still rang, as though they were full of water. “That was how the Stationmaster died?”
“Something like that.”
“Here? Was it here? Or somewhere else?”
“Here,” Tom said. “How did you know?”
“I just know.”
I took a stunned step. I looked around at the crumbling, graffitied walls. “This is an awful place,” I said. “The safety bay isn’t safe. It almost collapsed on me. The walls were falling in.” I felt pain and looked down. There was blood on my ankle, and a shiny pink knot, already starting to swell.
“We’ll take you to Martha,” Tom said. “Martha will fix you up, tell you what to do.”
I let him take my arm this time, and we hobbled together out of the tunnel. It was going to be a long trip back to the house, even if Tom carried me the whole way, even if he ran with me like the ghosts did. I wanted to sleep. When the sunlight hit my face, it was warm and sweet and hurt a little. I took a breath until my lungs rattled.
“Was that your sister?” Tom asked. “Did you see your sister back there, dancing in the light?”
“No,” I said. I shut my eyes in the sun. “That was my mom.”
CHAPTER 17:
The Gift at the Table
By the time we reached the house, my grandmother had returned with Martha and Mr. Black.
“Can’t even file a police report,” my grandmother said. “Too soon for her even to be counted as missing. Not that they can count that high.” Because the walls of the police station were full of posters, my grandmother said. Posters of missing children. Posters of runaways. Some of the posters were so old, they had turned yellow. Some were crumbling into bits. “I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before. So many children. But I never sensed that old man,” my grandmother said. “I heard stories—but children are always afraid of the woods. People in small towns always talk, and many stories are made up.”
“The Stationmaster isn’t interested in you,” I said, watching as Martha wound a long bolt of gauze around my ankle. My grandmother would have to help her, or the bandage wouldn’t stay. The bandages on my hand kept dissolving every morning, even though the lantern burns beneath were healing. Tom was wrong; I would always have a scar.
“Still, I should have known,” my grandmother said. She stood at the sink, shaking her head as she filled the kettle.
Tom and I had argued on the porch, before we went into the kitchen, argued about me seeing my mother’s ghost, about me telling my grandmother about it.
“Your grandmother could help,” he had said.
“It would only upset her.”
“It’s what she does. She talks to ghosts.”
“I talk to ghosts. And see them.”
“She has more experience than you.”
“Not with seeing her own daughter’s ghost she doesn’t. Not with talking to her own dead daughter. She doesn’t have experience with that. Besides, my mom didn’t even say anything.” I sighed. “Do you know what this means, seeing my mom in the tunnel like that today? It means the dreams I had of her weren’t dreams. All these years, they weren’t dreams. It was her ghost, trying to contact me, trying to tell me something. But
she never said anything.” My eyes filled with tears. “I never thought, when I was dreaming of my mother, to try and talk to her. I never knew to ask her anything. I never knew she was unhappy, that she wanted something. That she was a ghost.” My eyes stung, and then the world was hot, spilling over.
Tom’s arms went around me.
“Why is she a ghost?” I cried. “My dad isn’t a ghost. They died together. Why isn’t he a ghost with her? Why is she alone?”
“Did she die on a train?” Tom asked.
“No. A car. Someone ran a light and hit their car. It was raining.” I swiped at my face with the back of my hand.
“Maybe she isn’t alone,” Tom said. “Clara and Martha and Mr. Black and me—we found each other. Maybe your mother found someone.”
“Me,” I said. I looked at him. My eyes were drying. “She found me. She reached out to me. But I don’t understand what she wants.”
We decided to stay in the ballroom that night, all of us. Not even the ghosts wanted to be alone.
My grandmother and I would sleep, and the ghosts would take turns hunting for the Firecracker and keeping watch: pacing the big square room, looking over us. It would be easier to watch us if we were in the same place, my grandmother said. Secretly, I thought she wanted to be able to keep tabs on me.
She found two musty sleeping bags and a couple of air mattresses Mr. Black tried to blow up. He cursed when the mattresses deflated after a only few minutes, huffing and turning purple, kicking a mouse’s nest in the corner, until Martha gently took the mattresses from him, and I blew them up myself.
I hadn’t been in the ballroom since I was a child. I hadn’t remembered how high the ceilings were, how our voices bounced off the walls. The corners of the ballroom were strung with nests and cobwebs, the walls patchy with water damage. Still, it was lovely: wall moldings carved into arches, golden chandeliers only a little dark with burned-out bulbs. Every few feet, there was a mirror which made the room look even bigger, repeating itself a dozen times. Only a few of the mirrors were broken. The floors were hardwood, under the dust of years.