Liesl & Po

by Lauren Oliver

  The old woman and the cop had, in that time, recovered from the startling and curious sensation that had overwhelmed them all at once: a kind of velvet feeling that had wrapped itself around their throats, not frightening but totally unfamiliar, and had made them both think, separately and for no apparent reason, of pets they had had in their childhood.

  Bundle, feeling quite pleased with itself, thought itself back to Po’s side.

  The lady and the policeman looked up.

  The little girl with the imaginary friends and the large wooden box was gone.

  Will had hidden in the bathroom until he was sure the ticket collector had already come through. Then he had settled comfortably in a little window seat in one of the last passenger cars, and was quite enjoying the landscape streaming by his window: flat brown meadows and high, purple mountains, capped with snow. He had never been out of the city before. The only mountains he knew were mountains of brick, and he had never seen so much open space. And bare and brown and dead as it was (things had long ago stopped growing), all he could think of was the freedom of it, and how fun it would be to spread his arms and run, run, run in all that open space.

  He was so absorbed by the view that he did not notice the girl from the attic hurry past him holding a wooden box—the very wooden box that had started all his troubles, in fact, though he would surely not have recognized it, plain as it was.

  He was busy staring at the mountains.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE FIRST FREIGHT CAR WAS FULL OF THE SHARP, unpleasant smell of animal droppings, and packed with cages. On one side there were rows and rows of chickens; on the opposite side were dogs and cats, some in fancy carrying-cases with leather tags, some in bare little cages. The dogs swiped at the cats, the cats hissed at the chickens, and the whole car was filled with howling.

  “Let’s keep going,” Liesl said.

  The second freight car was dark and very cold and smelled like dust. It was crowded with boxes, trunks, crates, and suitcases, which were stacked every which way, in high, teetering towers that shook and swayed as the train rattled along. Liesl’s breath escaped in clouds when she exhaled. But at least it was quiet, and she would not be bothered by the woman with the cane, or the police officer, or the ticket collector.

  She scrunched down in the small space between two gigantic wooden trunks and brought her knees to her chest, placing the wooden box carefully on the ground just behind her feet. Po folded itself into the narrow space next to her, and Bundle hovered on top of a suitcase nearby, becoming a long black haze as it stretched out.

  Liesl yawned.

  “You must be tired,” Po said. It had only just occurred to the ghost that Liesl had barely slept at all.

  Liesl nodded. “Very,” she said, and rested her chin on her knees.

  The train rattled forward, and the ghost and the girl sat in silence for a few minutes. There was a single, high window above them. It let in a trickle of gray and murky light, and flashes of cloud-covered sky.

  “How will we know when we are where we need to be?” Po asked.

  Liesl thought. “I remember a city made of smoke and fire,” she said finally. “That’s where we must get off. From there, we take a long road out of the city. It goes west into the hills. Beyond the hills we’ll find the house, and the pond, and the willow tree.”

  “A city of smoke and fire?” Po’s edges flickered. “That sounds like a place on the Other Side.”

  Liesl tilted her head in Po’s direction. “Do you have cities on the Other Side?”

  “Great cities. Bigger than any here. Cities of water and dust; and cities made from flame; and cold, dark cities at the very heart of the planets, built into old stone.”

  Liesl considered this. “What is it like to be on the Other Side?”

  Po thought about saying, It is like being everything all at once, and holding the universe inside of you and being held inside of the universe. But it did not think Liesl would understand, so the ghost said, “It is hard to explain. Perhaps one day you will know.”

  Liesl chipped at the trunk in front of her knees with a fingernail. “Perhaps,” she said. She wasn’t sure if the idea excited or frightened her. “Do you miss being here, though? Do you miss the Living Side?”

  She could tell immediately that she had offended Po. Its outlines became much clearer in the dark, temporarily surrounded by a sharp white glow.

  “Of course not,” Po said. “It isn’t like that. It’s a different way of being, that’s all.”

  “But one is alive,” Liesl pointed out gently. “And one is not alive.” She knew Po must be lying, at least a little. Po was the one who had told her that ghosts who were not attached to the Living Side—at least a very little—went Beyond.

  Po swirled upward from where it had been sitting, and floated over to the window. “When you go swimming and you put your head under the water,” Po said, “and everything is strange and underwater-sounding, and strange and underwater-looking, you don’t miss the air, do you? You don’t miss the above-water sounds and the above-water look. It’s just different.”

  “True.” Liesl was quiet for a moment. Then she added, “But I bet you’d miss it if you were drowning. I bet you’d really miss the air then.”

  Po was silent for a bit. It flitted restlessly back and forth in the freight car: a flicker of dark here; a shadow on the ceiling there. Liesl was very sorry she had upset her friend and wished she could say something to make up for it, but her brain was fuzzy and sleep pressed at her eyelids and she couldn’t think.

  Then Po was next to her again.

  “Did you bring your drawing paper, as I asked you to?” Po asked.

  Liesl nodded.

  “Show me,” Po said. Its voice sounded strange to Liesl. Closer and also more alive, somehow, than it usually did. Feeling, Liesl thought. Po’s voice was full of feeling.

  She reached into her canvas bag and removed her sketch pad, and pencils, and the two drawings she had made for Po.

  Po was quiet for another few beats, staring down at the drawings and the blank page in Liesl’s lap.

  “I want you to draw me the sun,” Po said at last.

  “I can’t possibly,” Liesl said, stuttering. “I—I don’t remember what it looks like.”

  “Just try,” Po said. “Try and remember.”

  Liesl drew a circle, hesitantly. Then she erased it and drew a larger circle, floating in the center of the page. But still it didn’t seem right. It looked dull and stupid and empty sitting there, like an expressionless face. If only she could remember . . . It had been so long.

  She closed her eyes and let her pencil hover over her sketch pad. She wound herself back and down the stairways of memory, and felt her hand begin to move. The train jumped and lurched underneath her, and when she opened her eyes, she saw she’d covered her paper with nonsense: Squiggles and what looked like leaping flames stretched away from the circle in the center of the page, radiating all the way out to its edges.

  “I’ve ruined it,” Liesl said, and went to tear the picture in two.

  “No,” Po said sharply. Liesl jumped. Po went on, more quietly, “It’s good. It’s very good.” Then it floated to the window again.

  Liesl knew then that Po had been lying: The ghost did miss the Living Side. She understood then, too, that everyone drowns differently, and that for everyone—even ghosts—there is a different kind of air.

  Train 128 steamed past the blurry gray countryside, past cracked and blackened fields.

  Will pressed his nose to the window.

  Liesl tucked her chin to her knees and slept.

  Bundle watched over Liesl.

  Po was a shadow on the wall, unmoving.

  The old lady with the cane finished searching all the passenger cars, then berated the policeman for letting the crazy girl with the wooden box get away.

  Mo, drinking hot chocolate and reading the paper, sat contentedly on an express train to Cloverstown, where he intended t
o intercept train 128.

  Lefty licked dribbles of chocolate from Mo’s beard with a small pink tongue.

  The alchemist and the Lady Premiere arrived at the gates of 31 Highland Avenue, where they had determined the magic had been taken by mistake.

  A black-haired thief on his way to Gainsville stole two silver pieces from the grave of a dead man.

  Time ticked forward. Stars collided. Planets were born and died. Everywhere and in every fold and bend of the universe, strange and miraculous things happened.

  And so it was, just then.

  Chapter Sixteen

  JUST THEN, TOO, AUGUSTA HORTENSE VARICE-Morbower, second wife of the late Henry Morbower, and stepmother to Liesl Morbower, was rounding the corner of Highland Avenue in her carriage.

  Her daughter, Vera, sat across from her, pale and sickly-looking despite the powder on her face and rouge on her cheeks, which she never went anywhere without, looking a little bit like a wriggly tadpole clothed in fur and lace.

  “For the last time, stop your squirming!” Augusta barked at her daughter.

  “Sorry, Mama,” Vera mumbled. She couldn’t help it. She squirmed when she was uncomfortable, and her mother’s temper made her distinctly uncomfortable.

  She had been trying all morning to be as quiet and helpful as possible—since her mother had wrenched her out of her bed before dawn with the chilling words, “The little snot is gone! Fled! Disappeared!”

  But as they rattled through the city, watching the dawn bleed pale gray light through the streets without shedding any light whatsoever on where Liesl had run off to, her mother’s mood only got fouler and fouler. Augusta screamed, and ranted, and pulled her hair, and swore. Everything was ruined, and terrible, and disastrous. Even the warm potatoes that the cook had prepared, and carefully wrapped in wax paper, were inedible, and Augusta had hurled her breakfast out of the carriage window in a rage after taking only a single bite.

  Augusta could not have been more different from Vera: She was broad, and flat, and enormous, with a wide, coarse face and hands as thick as paddles. She, too, was dressed in fur and lace, but she gave the impression of a full-grown toad. It did not help that when she was angry, the two warts on her forehead seemed to swell in size, as though expressing indignation on her behalf.

  And oh, was Augusta angry! She was furious. She was enraged. The warts looked frighteningly large. Even Vera shrank away from the sight of them.

  Augusta feared that everything she had built—every single last shred of happiness and security, which she had had to wrestle and wrangle and tweak and pull and suck from life with all her strength—was on the verge of collapse. The big, lofty house at 31 Highland Avenue with all the obedient, silent, scurrying servants; the parties and the dresses; the fat feasts and the tables groaning under the weight of roasts and pies and puddings, when half the world starved; all of it would vanish, be snatched right from under her very feet were the girl not found.

  Her marriage to Liesl’s father had been a marriage of convenience. She had once been Liesl’s teacher. She had hated the ridiculous little drip even then, of course, although she had done her utmost to hide it, and Henry Morbower was hoping Augusta would prove to be a good and decent stepmother to his only daughter. Augusta had realized right away that he would never love her. His heart belonged fully and completely to his first wife (a woman, Augusta thought sneeringly, who must have been as silly as she was pretty, for in all her portraits she was laughing—as though there were anything in the world to laugh about!—and wearing the simplest cotton dresses, though of course she could have afforded the richest satin gowns).

  Augusta also knew, when she married Mr. Morbower, that he would never remake the will in her favor. Upon his death, the house and all the vast Morbower fortune—accumulated by Henry Morbower’s grandfather, a titan of the early railroads—would descend entirely on little Liesl Morbower, pale and strange and undeserving though she was. (A stupid one, like her mother; as a small girl she had danced in the rain! Actually danced in it! Ruining a pair of beautiful silk slippers in the process! Stupid.)

  It would have been simpler, of course, to kill both Henry and his daughter. But Augusta worried about arousing suspicion. The slow death of a middle-aged man is hardly likely to be attributed to poison, especially when the poison is administered teaspoon by teaspoon, a bit in the soup every day, over the course of a whole year. (Patience was one of Augusta’s many virtues.) But a little girl is different, quite different altogether.

  So Henry had gone to the hospital and, at long last, died, and Liesl had been locked in the attic, and for the sake of the lawyers and the bank managers, Vera Varice had become Liesl Morbower and taken control of a fortune so large that even Augusta would have trouble spending all of it in a lifetime.

  But now Liesl (the little monster!) had slipped away, and the whole beautiful plan—perfectly crafted and shaped, as delicately whittled as a sculpture made of ice—was in danger of collapse.

  The warts on Augusta’s forehead swelled like the throat of a puffer fish, and not for the first time that morning, she gave vent to her frustration with a low roar.

  “We must find her!” she cried.

  “Yes, Mama,” said Vera meekly.

  “She will ruin us!”

  “Of course, Mama.”

  “And stop agreeing with everything I say, you nitwit. You’re only making it worse.”

  “As you say, Mama.”

  Augusta rolled her eyes and muttered a curse under her breath, and Vera shrank back and turned an even more unattractive shade of pale green.

  “Stop!” Augusta bellowed suddenly to the driver, and the coach came to a shuddering halt in front of 31 Highland Avenue, where the Lady Premiere and the alchemist were standing with a very frightened-looking maid, who was speaking to them through the iron gates. With her head protruding from a gap in the iron latticework, the maid looked, thought Augusta, like a criminal who had been placed in the stocks.

  In fact just then the maid would rather have been a criminal in the stocks—or a fish in a casserole, or a potato in a skillet. Anything would have been preferable to being Karen McLaughlin, who had, in the course of one morning, seen a ghost, accidentally turned loose the girl in the attic, and received a stinging paddling by her mistress for the error.

  To make matters worse, there was now a very tall and very angry woman in a very long fur coat at the gates, screaming at her.

  As Augusta prepared to descend from the carriage, she heard her maid stammering out apologies.

  “I’m s-sorry, ma’am. Rules is the rules. And nobody—not even Lady Prematures—”

  “Lady Premiere. Premiere.” The Lady Premiere’s eyes were nearly bulging out of her head. “Meaning that there is only one!”

  “Right—er—not even a Lady Premiere can come in without Ms. Augusta’s permission—”

  “Permission that is most humbly granted,” Augusta interrupted, sweeping out of the carriage and curtsying deeply in front of the Lady Premiere. The alchemist, watching her, had the impression of a very squat boulder tumbling toward him, and he shuddered.

  Vera flitted uncertainly after her mother. Augusta elbowed her daughter sharply in the ribs, and Vera doubled forward in pain. The Lady Premiere mistook the gesture for a bow.

  “To what,” Augusta said, making her voice so sickeningly sweet it caused the coachman behind her to choke a little, “do we owe this enormous honor, Your Grace?”

  The Lady Premiere was still shaking with rage. “Never,” she sputtered and began again. “Never in my life have I been forced to wait outside. For anyone. At any time. Never have I been forced to stand on the street like a—like a—”

  Words failed her. She was overwhelmed by the smell of cabbages cooking, and she closed her eyes tightly against the memories of the dingy home in Howard’s Glen. Her ears filled with the distant sound of laughter and chanting: Gross and rotten, wretched Gretchen!

  She snapped her eyes open. Those days were o
ver!

  “Like a commoner?” one of the Lady Premiere’s servants, standing a little apart, suggested.

  “Yes, exactly. Like a commoner.” The Lady Premiere had, in fact, forgotten the word. Just pronouncing it brought back the taste of sour milk and poverty and spoiled things.

  “You’ll have to forgive her,” Augusta said smoothly, casting a withering glance at the maid—a glance in which the promise of another, even more serious, paddling was written. “She was dropped on her head quite frequently as a baby. Her mother was a hopeless drunk.”

  “Milly told me my mother was a good Christian woman,” Karen said, her bottom lip quivering.

  “She lied, obviously,” Augusta snapped. “Now get inside, where you belong.”

  Karen scurried into the house, whimpering.

  Augusta produced a large golden key from her purse, and with it unlocked the gates. She gestured grandly for the Lady Premiere to precede her into the yard. Inwardly, Augusta trembled with excitement. A visit! From the Lady Premiere! Who was a princess in her native Spain (or was it Portugal . . . ?)! It was outstanding! It was unheard of! The neighbors would seethe with jealousy.

  She hoped they were looking out of their windows right now. She thought she’d seen the corner of Susan Salway’s dining room curtains swishing. Good. Let Susan see her, Augusta Hortense Varice-Morbower, escorting the Lady Premiere into her home. It would serve Susan right, for forcing Augusta to suffer her endless monologues about the accomplishments of little Jeremy and Josephine—as though those two sallow-looking creatures with the faces like the bottom side of a waffle iron were anything to boast about!

  Augusta was slightly disappointed when she had to actually admit the Lady Premiere into the house, where the powerful woman could not be seen and admired.

  Then Augusta had a dark thought: a thought so black it wrapped her in a momentary fog. This—the visit from the Lady Premiere, the envious looks, the golden carriage parked just outside her gates—was exactly the kind of thing she would lose if Liesl, that sniveling snot, were not found quickly.