by Alison Stine
The step beneath me, the last step, broke. But the wall at the top of the stairs had broken too. The trick wall collapsed beneath my shoulder, and I fell into the tower room with a scream.
Not my scream.
I was in the Builder’s tower. But I was not alone.
I had fallen on my hands and knees. I could see tall black shoes. Shaking, I raised my head. The shoes were attached to black-clad legs. I saw arms, trembling a little. A pale, set mouth.
My sister.
I spoke her name.
“Esmé?” she said. Then her arms were around me, suffocating me, hitting my face and neck until she could find me—because she still couldn’t see me—hugging me.
“Is it really you?” I asked.
“Is it really you?” she said, squeezing tighter.
I felt my limbs relax, felt myself fall into the hug. How long had it been since my sister had hugged me? I stayed in the hug for an instant longer than I ever would have in the past, then I glanced around.
The room looked small and very pink. There was a table with a pitcher of water, a daybed with rumpled blankets. One window was edged with colorful stained-glass squares. I had never seen the stained-glass window from the road, never seen this room at all.
“Have you been living here?” I asked my sister.
“Yes,” she said.
“We’ve been looking for you. We thought you were in trouble.”
“There was a man. He came in the house. He had a lantern. He was a ghost, wasn’t he?”
I nodded grimly.
“I could see the lantern. I saw it swing out of the air, but I couldn’t see him, so I knew what he was. I ran into the kitchen. My foot kicked the rug away by accident, and I found this door…”
“The tunnel,” I said.
“Yes. I got outside from the tunnel, but then I got scared. I thought the man was in the tunnel, coming after me. I went back toward the house and then I saw a hammer and I met this other man, this … other ghost.”
“The Builder,” I said.
“He was nice. He built this for me.” She gestured at the pink walls, the daybed, the pillows crimped in lace. “He misses his daughter, I guess. Anyway, he built it for me to hide in, to hide from the ghost.”
“But the work of the dead doesn’t last,” I said.
“No. So when the room collapsed, he built it again. And again.”
“He’s been building you rooms and shutting you up in them?”
“Something like that. And he covered my tracks, went back and locked the trapdoor in the kitchen, he said. The other man didn’t come. The ghost with the lantern didn’t come back. He can’t find me, I guess.”
“Nobody could.”
“Who’s the ghost with the lantern, Esmé? What does he want?”
I didn’t answer. I was glancing around the room. There were pictures taped to the pink walls, old images cut from magazines and vintage newspaper ads. I saw a picture of a girl in a white dress and parasol. Pears Soap it read above her head. Another ad featured girls in blue dresses dancing with the ribbons of a May Pole. It’s Easy to Dye with Peterson’s Dye, the ad read. The girls were all smiling.
“Listen,” I said to my sister. “Did the Builder ever say anything about the mail?”
“No. What do you mean?”
“The mail? Putting out the mail, or where the mail goes?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why? What’s going on, Esmé?”
We heard a crack, the sound of a board splitting. We both looked down to see a zigzag shape in the floor, a lightning-shaped rend, getting wider.
“When the room falls apart,” I said quickly, “what happens?”
“I don’t know. I’m gone by then. He moves me to another hiding place.”
“And you never found me or Grandma? You never told us you were okay?”
“I didn’t know where I was, Esmé. I didn’t even know if I was in the house still. My phone is dead. I didn’t know if I was okay. I saw lanterns and floating hammers and saws.”
Another crack. This one shook the room, and we stumbled, knocked to our knees.
“We have to get out of here,” I said.
“How?” My sister pointed to the wall.
There was the hole through which I had burst, a me-sized hole in the false paneling. But behind it, there was only air, empty space. No stairs anymore. The stairs had all broken and faded away. With a ripping sound, shingles began to fall from the roof above us.
“It’s breaking apart!” I said. “The room is collapsing.”
“Why does it do this?”
“Because the dead made it.”
The roof dissolved with a roaring sound. The sky was the roof now, open to the dark and windy night. We got down on our hands and knees. With a groan, the floor collapsed. The Firecracker screamed, and we sank, only to land on the roof, slanted and prickly with shingles. We clutched at them. The walls were disappearing above us. I raised my head, wincing at the wind, and watched the table in the room collapse like a cake. I watched the daybed vanish.
“The mail,” I said. “The thing about the mail—a spirit said it to me.” I moved my hand for a better hold. How much of the roof was built when the Builder was alive, and how much of it had he done when he was dead? Would his living work still last? I tried not to look down. “She said to remember the mail,” I said. “She said to remember to put out the mail.”
“She?” the Firecracker said.
I watched the pink walls get lower and lower. I watched the dye ad roll up and vanish. My arms were getting tired of holding on, my hands scratched from the climb up the stairs. I tried to look around, to spy a way off the roof, and almost lost my grip. “Grandma had a séance,” I said.
“What?”
“We were trying to find you, to call the ghost who was hunting you. If you had just come downstairs—”
The Firecracker said, “This is why I was nervous about you coming here. Grandma thinks these things are no big deal. She thinks you can just play with ghosts.”
“Why didn’t you warn me? Why didn’t you or Mom say anything?”
Now there were only two walls above us. Now my fingers had begun to shake.
“I thought there was something wrong with me,” the Firecracker said, adjusting her hold on the roof. “Mom never said it would happen. I thought I was going crazy. And I thought I could make it stop.”
“How?” I asked.
Now one wall was left of the tower room. Now the moon came out from behind a cloud, bone-white and full, casting the roof in silver.
“I stopped dancing,” the Firecracker said.
In spite of everything, I laughed.
The Firecracker turned her head to look at me, where she thought I was; she was almost right. “I saw Mom. That’s why I stopped. Because I saw Mom at a performance. My last show, the one The New York Times wrote up? She was there.”
I lost my grip and slid down the roof.
The Firecracker cried out, but she couldn’t save me; she couldn’t see me. Shingles snagged at my stomach. My feet fell over the edge of the roof. I kicked and felt air. I had nothing to hang onto, nothing to hold.
My legs fell over the roof. My stomach, my chest, my shoulders slipped. My chin hit the rain gutter. I clutched at it with one hand but with a groaning sound, the gutter ripped away from the roof. I dropped it. I saw a flash of the ground as it fell, the spot that awaited me. My feet kicked out.
And this time, they connected with something solid. I grasped the edge of the roof with both hands, and with my shoe found the solid footing. I wrapped my leg around it.
A ladder.
CHAPTER 20:
Dearest Annabelle
I stood on the ground, peering up in wonder. The roof of the house appeared flat, and the walls of the secret room were gone. There was no sign at all of the tower that had sheltered my sister. “We’ve got to figure this mail thing out,” I muttered.
The Firecracker looked up unsteadily. “Es
mé, there’s one ghost out there who’s trying to kill us. Why does it matter what another one said?”
“Because it’s important.”
“Why?”
“Because I trust her,” I said.
And then she knew. She knew without me telling her. My sister knew. I had seen our mother. I had talked with her.
The Firecracker stared into space for a second, and then she took her phone out of her pocket. Her movement had a slow purposefulness that frightened me. “I’m going to get this thing working,” she said. “The battery is dead. I’m going to get reception, somehow, even though it barely works here, and I’m going to call a cab—we are not taking a train—and then I’m going to get us the hell out of here, back to New York.”
“We don’t have a place in New York anymore. We don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“I’ll find somewhere to go. Just not here. We have to get out of here. Tonight.”
“Here is home.” As soon as I said it, I knew it was true. “Grandma lives here. Mom grew up here. Tom and Clara and Mr. Black and Martha and the Builder are here. They need us. Here.”
“They’re dead, Esmé,” my sister said. “They don’t need us.”
I became aware that Tom and the others had gathered and were behind us, watching. “They do,” I said. “They’re still here because they need something, and we can give it to them. We can help them. We can hear them. We’re the only ones.”
“I can’t help them,” my sister said.
“Yes, you can. We all can. And the living need us here too.”
“What living?” my sister said. “Grandma’s the only other real live person I’ve seen since I’ve been here.”
I told her about the runaways.
When I was finished, she crossed her arms. “There’s either a lot of unhappy kids out there who just left home, which is totally possible, or a real killer—and you want to chase after a ghost?”
“He came for you,” I said. “What do you think about him?”
She was silent, looking at her phone. “What do you want to do?”
“Listen to Mom,” I said. “Put out the mail.”
“Well, it’s night so the mail’s not going.”
Tom spoke up. “It is on the ghost train.” The trains delivered mail during his time, he said, all of them carrying letters from one town to the next. “Every station sent some out. Our train carried mail.”
“Maybe Mom wrote you a letter,” the Firecracker said. “Maybe she wants you to find the mail so you can read what she wrote.”
I shook my head. “No. She said she wanted me to put out the mail—like, send a letter. Not pick one up.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Little of what your mother did made any sense.” My grandmother stood on the hill. “Studying dance,” she said, walking toward us. “Going halfway around the world to do it, to France. Living there. Marrying a man I had never met, a non-Chinese man. Naming her daughters French names. Esmé and Collette. What kind of names are those? Turning her back on her family. Turning her back on her gift. When were you going to tell me you had seen your mother, Esmé?”
I spoke quietly, “It doesn’t make sense, what she said.”
“It never does,” my grandmother said. Her mouth tightened. “But you still need to do it.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, if we all take shifts, we can—”
“No,” my grandmother said. “You need to do it. She came to you. She spoke to you. Do you know how many times I looked for your mother? How many times I called to her? I wanted to ask her what to do for you two. I wanted to ask if she felt pain. I wanted to see her face, to tell her that I missed her, I missed her. But she never came to me. Not once.”
“She came to the Firecracker.”
“For like a second,” my sister said. “And she never said anything.”
“She came to you, Esmé,” my grandmother repeated. “She spoke to you. She trusts you to do what she asked of you, to complete it.”
“To send mail?” I said numbly. “What mail?”
Tom put his hand on my arm. “Let’s start at the station, start with the trains.”
So it was Tom who went with me. And Clara. And Mr. Black, Martha stepping up on tiptoe to peck him quickly on the cheek. “Be careful,” she whispered.
And all through our silent trek down the hill, the ghost of a blush, an almost color, burned high on his face where she had kissed him.
When we reached the station, I stood on the platform, peering into the waiting area inside. It was dark and empty behind padlocked doors. The Stationmaster was not there. I knew that. I felt that, and yet I found myself straining to listen, dreading and, at the same time, waiting for his whistle.
I had only looked away for a moment, but when I turned back to the platform, Tom and Mr. Black were gone. I saw Clara at the edge and called to her. She looked at me deliberately, then hopped off the platform onto the tracks. I ran to the edge and looked down.
Clara had joined Tom and Mr. Black on the ground. They made a line, shoulder to shoulder. They stood right on the tracks, facing the way the train would come.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Stopping the train,” Clara said.
“What? The ghost train won’t stop?”
“Not if you want it to,” Mr. Black said mournfully.
“Depends on the whims of the ghost conductor or whichever ghost is driving, if anyone is, and they’re awfully unpredictable,” Clara said. “Like me.”
“Anyway, the train doesn’t have to stop to get the mail, Ez,” Tom said.
“It doesn’t?” I asked.
He pointed. “Look.”
Beside the platform was a metal post I had never noticed before. It was spindly with two short horizontal poles branching off near the top and middle. In between the poles was a gap, like where a sign might go. But there was no sign. Only a burlap bag, hung on rings.
“The mail bag,” Tom said.
I slid ungracefully off the platform, landing onto the gravel beside Tom.
“No,” Tom said. “No, Ez. Get back on the platform.”
“Train’s coming,” Clara said.
I felt it, felt the rails quiver, the ground shake beneath us. There was a long deep moan in the distance.
“Get off the tracks,” Tom said to me. “Now.”
“I’m not saving your life again,” Mr. Black said.
“Oh, let her die,” Clara said. “She’s so boring alive. On second thought—she’d be a terrible bore as a ghost, and then we’d be stuck with her forever. Esmé, get out of here.”
Headlights splashed the tracks. It came around the corner then: glowing, huffing steam. I was surprised how real the ghost train looked. It moved slowly, steadily, but it was headed straight for the station.
“Go!” Tom said.
I scrambled back up the platform. “What’s the plan then?” I said.
Tom had turned back to face the engine. “We stop the train. You get on and look for more mail.”
“Maybe,” Clara said, “the train doesn’t stop for us.”
“Then what?” I said.
“Then you hop on. What’s the matter, Esmé? You’ve never hopped a running train before?”
The train blew its whistle, warning us to get out of the way.
“It’s easy,” Mr. Black said, his eyes glued to the approaching engine. “Just keep running. Jump when you’re at the same speed as the train.”
The train barreled at the ghosts now. It gave another chest-rattling blast. Someone applied an emergency brake, the wheels seizing up and shrieking, an ear-splitting sound that set my teeth on edge. Great orange sparks shot out from the wheels.
Tom, Clara, and Mr. Black didn’t move.
Tom looked up at me, his face lit with sparks. “Ez,” he said.
Clara licked her lips. She was grinning. Mr. Black looked pale and sick.
“You know whatever happens here, I’ll find you,�
� Tom said.
The train was not going to stop.
“Say you know,” he shouted above its roar.
“I know!” I said.
He smiled, and I turned away from him, away from the scene on the tracks. I squeezed my eyes shut and curled against the wall of the stationhouse. I didn’t hear any sound of collision, only the train’s wheels, its bleating horn and bellowing engine. There was a male voice, shouting. There might have been screaming.
Then the train stopped. I knew only because the sound stopped, the squealing and blaring. The wheels halted and locked with a sigh.
I opened my eyes.
I knew it couldn’t hurt them, the ghosts. I knew the train wasn’t real. I knew none of them had actually died that way: hit by a train. I knew how they had died. Still, I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to know the shapes their bodies made, even if they were not in pain, even if it was temporary.
But when I raised my head, I couldn’t see much of anything. White steam engulfed the platform. On the tracks, the train waited, panting like an animal, bleeding smoke and steam. The clouds cleared a bit, and I could see a door on the side of a train car close to me, a few cars down from the engine.
I lunged for it. There was a big iron hand rail I used to pull myself up. My feet found the two little steps that hung beneath the door, and I swung myself inside.
I had jumped into the first open car I could find. And, amazingly, it was the right one. Ash drifting in the open door stung my eyes, and the inside of the compartment was dim, but I could make out shelves in the train car, along the wall. Each shelf was the size of an apartment mailbox. My eyes watered. Through tears, I could see shapes on the floor beneath the shelves, lumpy white mounds, like piles of discarded sheets.
That was what I had thought ghosts looked like. That was what TV and movies and books and everything told me. And it was wrong. All of it was wrong. What everyone thought about ghosts—what I had believed my whole life—was wrong.