by Alison Stine
It reminded me, more than anything, of a dance studio.
I finished with the air mattresses, and unrolled the sleeping bags out in the center of the room. They were tattered with moth holes and smelled of mushrooms. I studied the patchy flannel lining, and became aware of Tom beside me. “We never did this in Girl Scouts,” I said. “Not that I was ever in Girl Scouts.”
“It’s going to be okay, Ez,” Tom said. “He can’t get past the four of us. We don’t need to sleep so we’re the perfect guards.”
“I won’t be able to sleep,” I said.
But I did sleep. Something about the slow, barely discernible click of footsteps on the perimeter, and the knowledge that those footsteps belonged to friends, looking out for me; something about the single chandelier we had left on, like a nightlight, how it was reflected in the mirrors a dozen times, a dozen nightlights; and something about how my grandmother slept close to me, so close I could reach out and grab her hand if I needed to—it was comforting. It was enough. I slept.
I woke up to shouting.
Then, the smell. Acrid and ashy, like fall leaves. No, like wood smoke. I shifted in the sleeping bag, not yet fully awake. Was there a campfire? I coughed, struggling to breathe in the dry air. It reminded me of when I had hid inside the chimney.
I bolted upright. My grandmother’s sleeping bag beside me was empty. The ballroom looked dark. It was still night outside. I could see through the windows the deep black of well beyond midnight. And all the ghosts were gone, all except Mr. Black.
He leaned over me, jumping back when I sat up. “Stay there,” he said.
“Where is everyone?”
“Stay there.”
“What’s that smell?”
He shook his head. “You’re supposed to stay there. Your grandmother said. I’m supposed to watch you and keep you safe, keep you alive.”
“Forget that,” I said. I zipped down the sleeping bag. “Where’s my grandmother? Where’s Tom?”
Then I heard them: the low voice of Tom and my grandmother’s higher register. Someone was shouting. Someone was screaming. It was coming from beneath us. Downstairs.
I threw off the sleeping bag. Mr. Black moaned.
“It’s not your fault, Mr. Black. You’re a very good watchdog. Now, come on.”
I ran down the stairs, Mr. Black close behind. On the steps, the smell became choking. I gasped, my eyes stinging. Mr. Black was tugging on my arm, trying to get me to go back upstairs. I shook him off and pulled my T-shirt up over my mouth and nose. At the bottom of the stairs, I saw orange. The sitting room glowed, as if every light was turned on.
The room was on fire.
“No!” Mr. Black said, pulling me back.
“My grandmother’s in there,” I said. I had reached the doorway, but Mr. Black didn’t need to restrain me.
Flames held me back. They leapt from the curtain rods, tearing at the walls. The fire was orange and black, and it seemed to hang on the wall like long strips of burning wallpaper. But it moved like water, reaching out, lapping. It moved fast. Already, as I watched, it was spreading, jumping from spot to spot.
At the edge of the room stood three figures with their backs to me: Martha, Tom, and my grandmother. They were yelling at the fire. Tom was motioning with his hands while Martha put her apron to her face and cried. My grandmother was just standing there while the room burned down before her.
I stepped forward and grabbed my grandmother’s arm. She turned, her eyes searching, still not seeing me. “Grandma,” I said. “It’s Esmé. What do we do?”
But it was Tom who answered. “Clara’s in there.”
I stared into the room. Behind the couch with the crocheted back where my grandmother had lain and listened to my voice on the tape recorder, where she watched TV night after night with no sound, another figure stood, sobbing. The fire lit her white hair.
Clara.
“What’s she doing?” I asked.
“He’s in there too,” my grandmother said. “He’s in there with her. I heard him.”
He?
I dropped my grandmother’s arm. I could see nothing in the room beyond the flames and the burning furniture, the black windows and Clara. “Grandma,” I said. “Do you have a fire extinguisher?”
“Kitchen,” she said.
I looked at Mr. Black. He started running.
Tom was calling to Clara, coaxing her. “Come on, Clara. You don’t have to do this. Not again.”
There was a crash as a curtain rod fell to the floor, fire spreading up it like a ladder. As it fell, I saw the glimmer of fire on glass. A lantern.
“He’s by the window,” I said. “The Stationmaster.”
My grandmother nodded once and walked into the room.
“Grandma, no! What are you doing? He’s a ghost. Fire can’t hurt him.”
She shook her head. She might have been talking to herself. “This has gone on long enough,” she said. She raised her voice, like she had in the house of Kate’s ghost. “Spirit, leave this place.”
“Grandma!”
She was approaching the window, her arms outstretched.
“You can’t reason with him,” I said. “You can’t talk to him. Not him.”
“Come on, Clara,” Tom said.
My grandmother had reached the couch. A crash as the second curtain rod fell. Flames were spreading across the ceiling now, churning and boiling. Flames reached the couch and raced across the back of it. Clara’s face looked orange and red.
“Clara, not again!” Tom said. “Don’t do this to me again. Don’t leave me.”
“You left me first!” Clara said.
“Spirit!” my grandmother said.
A crash. But not another curtain rod: the window had been smashed. Someone had broken the window—and through it, the Stationmaster had escaped.
Cool air rushed into the room through the broken window. It seemed to give the fire strength. The flames on the ceiling poured across the whole of it now. The couch burst into fire with a scream, Clara’s scream, and I heard sirens in the distance. I heard the footsteps of Mr. Black running behind me, returning with the fire extinguisher he probably wouldn’t know how to work, and the work wouldn’t last, and I saw my grandmother take a step back as a flame sped across the carpet and licked the hem of her nightgown.
I didn’t think. Beside me, at the edge of the room, was the piano. And on top of the piano, folded where I had left it, was the quilt, the slave quilt the ghost Lucy had given me. I grabbed it and threw it over my grandmother, wrapping the sides around her in one quick motion. The fire had eaten the bottom of her nightgown. Pieces fell away like blackened paper. I held her in my arms, the quilt dampening the flames, and backed us out of the room.
We sat in the kitchen until the sun came up.
I made the tea. My grandmother, silent, sat in a chair at the table, and looked at her lap. Half of her nightgown had burned away. She smelled of smoke—the quilt did, her hair did, we all did.
Mr. Black had tried to put out the flames, but they seemed to dampen, all on their own, to just go out. The fire department came, and my grandmother had gone to the door, shuffling in her bare feet and quilt, to explain to them that she had fallen asleep with a candle, that everything was fine now. They told her candles were dangerous, and inspected the room, and went away again.
And everything was fine. No one had been hurt, and the room would return. I knew it would. The work of the dead did not last. In a few hours, the room would be restored. Even now, ash was disappearing from the walls and ceiling. Curtain rods were returning to the windows. The hole in the glass was healing itself, the couch stuffing itself back in. I knew it. And Clara would show up, stunned and ashamed, fine, or maybe—probably—just as crazy as ever.
I leaned against the kitchen counter and studied the people assembled around the table, the living and the dead. Mr. Black sat next to Martha. He had fire extinguisher foam in his hair. He put his hand on Martha’s and she didn’t
pull it back.
The water started boiling, steam ticking inside the kettle. Then the whistle: high-pitched and keening. The sound transfixed me, and I stood for a moment, staring at the white plume.
I thought of my mother, my mother in the train tunnel. All these years, when I dreamed about her dancing, I had dreamed about her in a black space with a bright light behind her. A stage, I had thought. A spotlight. But it wasn’t a spotlight at all. It was a train’s headlight. It had always been a headlight. I had always been dreaming, always without realizing it, of my mother in front of a train.
My grandmother turned and spoke to my stomach. “Hot chocolate,” she said blankly.
“What?”
“The girl will want hot chocolate.”
I sighed. “Grandma, she can’t taste it,” I said, and felt pressure on my arm.
My grandmother was touching my arm. My grandmother had found my arm, and touched it, and then she whispered: “With ghosts, it’s always the thought that counts.”
I wrapped the handle of the kettle in a tea towel. “Fine.”
My grandmother nodded and removed her hand. Then she said decisively: “We’ll find him.”
I was focused on the drinks, looking for a tin of hot chocolate in a cabinet above the stove. “What?”
“All this time, we’ve been waiting for him,” my grandmother said. “I have been waiting. And that was wrong. He came into my house. He threatened my granddaughter.”
I found the tin and set it down. “Grandma.”
“He took my other granddaughter.”
“Grandmother.”
“No,” she said. “No more waiting. I am tired of waiting and running and hiding from him. From a ghost! We fight him now.”
“You can’t fight him. I tried. You can’t hurt him unless you’re a train. That’s how he died.”
“We fight him on our terms,” my grandmother insisted. “We command him to speak.”
“How are we going to do that?” I asked.
“Simple,” my grandmother said. “Summon him.”
I collected items from the kitchen on my grandmother’s instructions: two shallow bowls, the saltshaker, a loaf of white bread. Tom took cinnamon sticks from a tin in the cabinet, rummaging around the spice shelves, looking for sandalwood.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” I said.
He reached his arm into the cabinet. “You’ve seen your grandmother at work. You’ve followed her. She’s good, isn’t she?”
I shrugged.
“She hears ghosts, right?”
“I hear better than she does.”
“She hears enough,” Tom said.
Silver tins and mason jars full of powders and leaves cluttered the cabinets of the kitchen. Green and brown bundles in various stages of drying clustered on the ceiling, lashed to all the beams—that was life with my grandmother. I had never known what the herbs were for, never known about the candles, never understood about the cats (though Martha swore the cats were just cats). I remembered bits and pieces of my life with my mother: how she had dressed in red shoes; how she would knock on the door of a room before entering it, every time, every door; how she never turned around when someone tapped her on the shoulder—never, even if it was me.
All these years I had thought these were her quirks, little things I missed about her, things that made her herself. But why did she do them? How had she been raised in this big haunted house with its tunnel, with its ghost work that undid itself in the night, with my grandmother? What would that do to you?
What was that doing to me?
My grandmother had removed the sleeping bags from the ballroom. Taking their place was a large round table over which she was smoothing a white tablecloth. She glanced quickly at us. No—at the floating items coming in through the door in our invisible arms. “On the table, please,” she said curtly.
This was the woman I had seen at Frank and Cindy’s house: brisk, commanding. Martha pushed chairs in while Mr. Black stood in a corner, looking at the table with suspicion. “I’m not going to do it,” he said.
“You’ll be fine,” my grandmother said.
“It’s not natural. Ghosts calling ghosts! It’s disgusting. Abysmal.”
My grandmother ignored him. “Tom, get water for us to fill the dish.”
Tom took one of the bowls away.
“Esmé, fill the other dish with salt.”
I untwisted the lid on the saltshaker. Absentmindedly, I had been counting the chairs. The table was one short. “Grandma, you’re missing a chair,” I said.
She had pulled out the white candles from her big black bag. Now she was taking out a long kitchen match. She seemed not to hear me.
“Grandma?” I repeated. “There are five chairs. And six of us. Tom, Martha, Mr. Black, Clara, you and me.”
My grandmother placed three candles at opposite points of the table, and bent to light them. I felt a shiver when I saw the flame from the match, remembering how the curtain rods had fallen, how the fire had torn across the ceiling. But my grandmother’s face showed nothing. If she was still impacted by Clara’s fire, she didn’t show it. And she had heard me. “You are not sitting in,” she said.
“What?” My hand jerked, knocking the shaker over. Salt spilled across the table.
“See?” she said. “You’re careless. Not ready. Not the right person to have here.”
“Grandma, that’s not true. And I’ll clean it up.” I dumped the salt back into the shaker. “See?”
“Throw some over your shoulder,” she said. “Please.”
I did. “Grandma.”
“No. You are not sitting in.”
“Why?”
“I told you why. Besides, you’re too young. Children should not be a part of this. Children are too susceptible. It’s not safe.”
“I’ve faced ghosts,” I said. “I’ve faced this ghost.”
“You have the gift,” Clara said.
She had appeared in the center of the ballroom.
She was the same. Not a single yellow hair on her head looked singed. Not a ribbon was blackened. Her dress looked clean and bright; her curls, perfect. She was smiling the same strange grin. “That’s what they say, anyway,” Clara said. “You have the gift like your grandmother. Maybe better than your grandmother.”
My grandmother’s face showed no expression. She didn’t look at Clara. I wondered if she had heard her. She finished lighting the candles, and blew out the match.
“Are you all right?” I asked Clara.
“Fine.” Her face changed a little. “Embarrassed.”
“You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about. Oh, and I made you hot chocolate. It’s downstairs.”
“I’m sure it’s cold.”
“We can make more.”
Her voice softened. “You can’t sit in, Esmé, because there can’t be two people with the gift at the table.”
I turned to my grandmother. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” she admitted. So she had heard. “It muddles things up. It could interfere.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But if you want this to work, I need you away from the table. You can watch us from the door.”
I looked at the doorway where Clara was now twirling absently. Nothing had changed about her, apparently. “Why the door?” I asked.
“So if something goes wrong, you can run.”
CHAPTER 18:
Red Shoes
My grandmother began with a prayer.
It was the same prayer she had recited in the kitchen with Frank and Cindy, the prayer to St. Michael, a prayer of protection. My grandmother said she believed in a place after death, and she believed—she knew—that some people got stuck in the middle, got trapped in the layers: not quite living, not quite dead.
“That makes it sound as if we’re in a cake,” Mr. Black said.
There were many layers, my grandmother thought, many planes, and she had been afraid, when she
could not find me at the train station that first day, that my gift had backfired and sent me to one of these shadowy levels, stuck among ghosts.
Or worse.
My grandmother held hands around the table with the ghosts. She asked them to close their eyes. From my position in the doorway, standing, with my arms crossed, I left my eyes open. I saw Mr. Black peeking at Martha beside him. I saw Clara open her eyes to cross them and stick out her tongue at my grandmother. I saw that only Tom and my grandmother were concentrating, eyes closed.
In the center of the table, my grandmother had arranged the bowl of salt, the bowl of water, now with a white feather floating in it, and the loaf of bread. After saying the prayer, she opened her eyes and pulled back her hands, motioning for Tom and Clara to join hands, completing the circle without her. My grandmother took a pinch of salt and sprinkled it in the water. Then, rising, she took the bowl and stepped a few feet away from the table.
I watched my grandmother kneel. She swept her wet fingers over the floor, tracing a circle with salty water. The floor was so dusty, you could see it, instantly. She crept around the table, ringing it.
“Spirit,” she said, her voice booming. “I summon you. Show yourself to us in this place. Move among us and communicate with us.” When the circle was complete, my grandmother stood and wiped her hands on her skirt. “No harm can come to us inside the circle,” she said in her normal, quieter voice. “The circle will protect us.”
I shifted in the doorway. I wasn’t in the circle.
What did that mean for my safety?
My grandmother seated herself again at the table, re-joining hands with Clara and Tom. “Close your eyes,” she said. “Clara, no peeking.” Her voice changed again, became sonorous, official. I thought if I were a ghost, I would listen. “Spirit of the air, spirit of the ground, spirit of the house: show yourself to us in this place. Move among us and communicate with us. This bread is an offering to you.”