Then we did as Aunt Doll had asked. I swept under the beds, making sure the candle in its holder was pushed way back against the wall under my bed. Ruby dusted around the dresser and the bedside table.
“What’s this for?” she said, picking up my sketchbook and Newfoundland wildflowers book.
“Oh, just a little project my dad asked me to do while I’m here,” I answered. “He thought it would be fun for me to do some sketches and identification of Newfoundland wildflowers…”
Ruby opened up the sketchbook.
“Doesn’t look like wildflowers to me,” she said, looking at the drawing I’d made of the family tree. She flipped over the page and looked at the one I’d made starting with Ireland and the shipwreck, then went back to the first page.
“Hey, this isn’t bad,” she said, sitting down on my bed to look at it more closely. “But you’ve left a few people out.”
I went over and sat down beside her.
“I just put in all the people I could remember that Aunt Doll mentioned.”
“We can add more now,” said Ruby, picking up my pencil and knotting her eyebrows for a moment.
“My brothers, for a start,” she said, “and Wendy.” She joined a box to her dad’s and put Wendy’s name in it, then added three little boxes coming out from theirs and wrote “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” inside them, with a little snort of laughter.
“I guess if you add Wendy, I’ll have to add Awful Gwen,” I said, taking the pencil from her and adding a box joined up to my dad’s for Gwen.
“And Aunt Doll has two other sisters, besides Daphne, and three brothers,” said Ruby, taking the pencil back and adding them to the diagram. “Effie, Jane, Ernie, Tom and Samuel,” she murmured. “But there’s not room for all their names.”
“You remember them all?” I asked.
She nodded. “Aunt Doll is always talking about them, telling stories about when they were little. And I’ve met them. Ernie and Jane live in St. John’s, but the others are on the mainland. They all came back for the Buckle Come Home Year two summers ago.” She peered at the sketchbook again. “Daphne’s husband’s name was Bob Duggan.” She wrote that in. “Now who else can we add?”
“Daphne and Doll’s mother and father,” I said, taking the pencil back. “Lily and—”
“Clarence,” supplied Ruby.
“And Lily’s twin sister, Lucy was it?”
“Yup,” said Ruby. “And we should put in my Uncle Jack, Meg and Molly’s brother.”
I made a box for him, and then added Fiona and Fenella to the first page and joined Lucy’s and Lily’s boxes to Fiona, their mother.
“What were the names of the twins that died in the flood?” I asked. “The ones on the tombstone?”
Ruby thought a minute. “Caitlin and Catriona. Catriona was a Duggan, so she was the one who married Boyd Duggan and she was Fenella and Fiona’s mother.”
I wrote them down under Fenella and Fiona, joining Catriona’s. Then I sat back and looked at it for a moment.
“Oh, one more thing,” I said, and then darkened all the borders around the boxes who were twins and drew a little T above them. “Twins.”
We sat there, looking at it.
“Five sets of twins,” said Ruby softly. “Four of them died young. Plus Daphne.”
I turned and looked at her.
“The curse,” we both whispered together.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE FLAME
Aunt Doll called us down to supper just after we finished the family tree, and we didn’t get another chance to talk alone until we went up to bed. We got into our pajamas in the lamplight, and then Ruby got down on the floor and crawled under my bed.
“What—?”
I could hear her rummaging around and then she made a little “aha” of satisfaction and came back, the candle in the candleholder in hand. She lit the candle, blew out the lamp, and got into bed with me, holding the candle carefully.
“Eldred said to tell you about the candle. It’s for protection, so you don’t get all freaked out about the Sight and ghosts and stuff.”
“Okay,” I said, swallowing. The room suddenly seemed full of shadows.
“This is something Eldred showed me a long time ago, when I used to get scared about all the ghost stories he told me. It really works. Don’t worry!” she said, grinning. I guess she could see how scared I was just by looking at me.
“Just look into the flame,” she said.
I did so. It was a bright gold triangle, with a shadow of black at its base. It kept changing shape, just a little, first narrowing and then widening. Beside me I could hear Ruby breathing softly.
“Feel anything?” she whispered.
At first I didn’t think I did. But the more I looked at it, the more I wanted to. The gentle movement of the flame was hypnotic. I blinked and looked at Ruby. “What’s happening?”
“It’s okay,” she said, touching my arm. “Just keep looking at it.”
I turned back to the candle flame. I felt my breath slowing down, and I felt sleepy.
“Now imagine,” said Ruby. “Imagine you’re inside that flame. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just warm, golden light all around you. Feel it from the top of your head to the tips of your toes.”
It felt a little silly. But I tried. And soon my breath seemed to be going in and out in rhythm with the wavering flame, and a delicious feeling of warmth started to spread through me.
“Nothing can hurt you,” said Ruby in a low voice. “You are the flame and the flame is you. You are filled with light, and you are protected.”
My eyes started to close.
“Just go to sleep, Ruthie,” said Ruby, and the last thing I remembered was the sound of a quick breath blowing out the candle.
* * *
A long time later I woke up. The candle was lit again, but for some reason it was up in the air. I blinked. I could see Ruby with her head on the pillow beside me, fast asleep. The candle was hovering above us. Then I became aware, all at once, that someone was standing there, holding the candle. I heard a soft laugh, and the person moved the candle closer to their face, and I saw who it was.
The ghost. My mother, but as a teenager. Meg. Her long blonde hair gleamed in the candlelight. Her eyes were alight with mischief.
“Shhhh,” she said, a finger to her lips, motioning toward Ruby. Then she beckoned me to follow her and moved slowly toward the closet.
I wasn’t scared. I knew she was a ghost, but I wasn’t scared. Maybe it was the golden flame she carried and how safe it made me feel just to see it, or maybe it was her conspiratorial grin. I knew I wasn’t dreaming, but nonetheless I felt like I was in some golden bubble with this girl who would become my mother, and nothing bad could happen.
I climbed carefully out of bed. Ruby murmured and stirred, but then was still. The floor was freezing on my bare feet.
The candle flickered ahead, and I could see the girl’s long white nightgown, almost touching the floor, and her hair that reached down her back. She parted the hanging clothes and went into the middle of the closet. I was so close behind her I could have touched her, but I didn’t want to. She felt more like light than substance, and I didn’t want to see my hand pass through her.
She turned to the wainscoting and pushed something, then leaned over and pushed something at the bottom, then part of the wall wasn’t there anymore and she bent over to go through. I didn’t hesitate, but went through after her.
She turned, then, and looked at me. She was right in front of me. Her blue eyes were filling with tears, and she looked happy and sad at the same time. She opened her mouth to speak.
“Break it,” she said softly. Then she kissed her fingertips and blew me a little kiss, her eyes shining. And then the candle went out.
I was alone. And completely in the dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE DARK
“Break it”? What did she mean, “Break it”?
“Mom?”
I whispered. “Meg?”
But there was no answer. She was gone.
The dark closed in around me. When I breathed in, I felt it pouring into me. Pressing down on me. Black. Thick. There was a bitter, burnt smell in the air.
I had to get out. I tried to calm the panic. All I had to do was find the door. I tried to focus on that one thought. Find the door.
I turned to feel my way back to the opening in the wall, and tripped over something on the floor. I bent down and groped around. My fingers closed on something hard, made of metal with a curved handle—the candleholder, without the candle. I picked it up so I wouldn’t trip over it again in the dark, and took tiny steps till I touched the wall. It was solid. No doorway.
I put the candleholder on the floor and then felt along with both my hands till I hit another wall, at right angles to the first. I thought I must have missed the opening, so I went slowly back, each step tentative, but there was no opening. The dark pressed closer.
Then I hit another wall.
I stopped and took a deep, raggedy breath. There was no door. I couldn’t get out.
I took another breath and squeezed my eyes shut. “You are in control,” I said, trying to concentrate on my breathing. “You are in control.”
But I wasn’t. I was afraid to move, unsure of what might be in the room with me. Something else on the floor that I could trip over? Or something, something…the memory of the breathless, cloying feeling when they talked about the curse came back, and the horrible whispering voice on the wind, and I felt a scream starting deep inside…
And then suddenly I remembered the candle flame, and Ruby, warm and sleepy in the bed beside me, her voice rising and falling, the flame flickering gently, and I tried to see it. I tried to imagine it, golden and bright, filling me up, lighting up the room. And then I remembered my mother’s eyes, blue and steady, looking at me with love.
My breathing slowed, and the urge to scream died away.
I had to be logical about this. I came in through a door, so I could get out through a door. I just had to find it. Yes, it was dark, but that was just the absence of light. Nothing bad was there. My mother wouldn’t have brought me into a place where there was danger.
I knew the door had to be somewhere on that wall. I moved back the way I had come, my hands running slowly over the surface. This time I took time to try to understand what my hands were feeling.
I felt rough wood boards, each about ten inches wide, fitted closely together. I pushed in different places along the wall, but it was solid.
When the ghost had led me in, she’d pushed something at the top of the wainscoting in the closet, about the height of my waist, and then she’d leaned lower down, near the floor. Unfastening something?
Starting at the corner, I felt carefully along the board that was about the right height, trying to see it with my fingertips. Trying to find something that was different.
About halfway along, something snagged my finger. A sliver? I ran my fingers slowly by it. It felt like a narrow crack.
I moved my fingers straight down, but nothing felt different until just a few inches above the floor. Another crack, a little wider this time.
I tried to pry it open, using my fingernails, but it didn’t budge.
I sat back on my heels and tried to think. When the ghost had led me in, the door seemed to disappear. It must have swung inside the room. So it didn’t open into the closet, but into this room.
Maybe…maybe you could only get in from the closet. And once you were in, you couldn’t get out.
The fear came again, and this time it hit me full on. I was trapped. I couldn’t get out. I’d seen a movie once where a man had been holed up in the wall of a castle and left to die, and the image had haunted me ever since. Nobody could hear him, nobody could let him out. He died there, in a small, airless space, just like this one—
Suddenly feeling like I couldn’t breathe, I took a shuddering breath. The air that came into my lungs was cold. Cold and stale. It had the faint, musty smell of a place that hadn’t had any fresh air for a long, long time, overlaid with a lingering whiff of burned wood, like there had been a fire here a long time ago.
I had to get a hold of myself. I wasn’t in a castle. Ruby lay asleep in the next room, a few feet away. If I yelled loud enough, I’d wake her up and she could come and get me out. But chances were I’d wake up Aunt Doll as well, and I didn’t want that.
I had to figure out another way to get out that didn’t involve loud noises. Maybe there was another opening into our room? I had to explore this space. This dark space.
I stood up. I followed the closet wall to the wall adjoining our bedroom and slowly started making my way along it, my left hand running along the wall and my right held out in front to detect if there were any obstacles. I shuffled my feet along the floor, hoping not to stub my toes on anything that lay in my way.
This wall had the same rough boards. Partway along my fingers dipped into nothing. A hole. About three fingers wide. A whisper of fresher air trickled in. I wiggled my fingers and felt something hard on the other side. The wall of our bedroom? I pushed and something gave way. There was a loud crash as something fell to the floor on the other side.
“Where’s the fire?” said Ruby, and I could hear her jumping out of bed. “Ruth! What? Where are you?” Her voice had a frantic but sleepy edge, like she wasn’t properly awake.
“Over here,” I said softly. “In the wall.”
“In the—what?”
“The wall where the dresser is. Come over.”
I heard her stumbling across the room. Then she tripped over something.
“OW!”
“Sshhh!” I said. “We don’t want to wake Aunt Doll.”
“What’s this picture doing on the floor?” she said groggily. “I can’t see you, Ruth. Why are you in the wall?”
I stifled a giggle. “Wake up! Listen to me. I got into the secret room and I can’t get out.”
“Ruby? Ruth?” called Aunt Doll from the hallway. “Are you okay?”
“Stop her!” I whispered. “She can’t find me in here!”
Ruby stumbled from the room and then called out, “It’s okay, Aunt Doll, the picture just fell off the wall and woke us up. We’re fine.” I could hear her footsteps going down the hall to meet Aunt Doll.
“Well, for goodness’ sake,” said Aunt Doll. “It woke me from a deep sleep. Are you sure you’re okay? What about Ruth?”
“She’s fine.”
“I should come and take a look at it. That’s very strange. It’s never happened before. They say when a picture falls off the wall it means…” She faltered. “Oh never mind.”
“Look at it in the morning,” said Ruby with a huge yawn. “I just want to go back to sleep.”
Aunt Doll yawned in response. “Well, if you’re sure. Good night, dear.” And her footsteps retreated into the other part of the house.
Ruby was back to me in a flash, giggling.
“That was close,” she said.
“You’re quite the actress,” I said.
“You mean I’m a good liar,” she said. “Lots of practice. Now how on earth did you get in there?” she asked.
“More important, how on earth am I going to get out?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE HIDDEN ROOM
“Well, how did you get in?” asked Ruby.
“The ghost. My mother. She led me in through the closet.”
“You saw the ghost?” squeaked Ruby. “Again?”
“Yes. And she brought me in here and disappeared. And then I couldn’t get out. But I found this little hole in the wall. It must have been hidden behind the picture.”
“Ooo,” breathed Ruby. “That’s so weird. Someone must have put the picture up to hide the hole so the room would stay secret.”
“Can we talk about that later? Help me get out of here! There’s some kind of door in the wainscoting. Meg unlocked something at the top and at the bottom. Come in
to the closet and I’ll try to guide you.”
I followed the wall over to the place where I had found the tiny crack. It took me a while to find it, because I was so disoriented in the dark. I could hear Ruby’s muffled voice coming from the other side and her fingers running along the wood.
“I can’t feel anything,” said Ruby.
“Wait a minute…There!” I found it. I tapped on the wall. “Try to put your hand where I’m tapping. On the ridge that runs along the top of the paneling. There has to be something there, something that unlatches the door.”
I tapped softly and I could hear her fingers on the other side.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s smooth.”
“Keep looking,” I urged. “It’s got to be there somewhere.”
More scrabbling against the wall. Then, “Oh! Here’s something,” she said. “A tiny crack, oh, and here’s another a little way along.”
“Try pushing it or pulling it or sliding it,” I said.
“I can’t budge it,” she said, and then as something clicked, “Hey, Ruth, something happened.”
“Okay, now go straight down to the floor and try along the baseboard. There’s got to be another latch down there.”
“I found it!” she said, and then there was more pushing and pulling, and then another click and I felt the wall give way and a beam of white light from the flashlight poured into the room.
Above the light I could see Ruby’s grinning face. I threw my arms around her.
“I am so glad to see you, Ruby, you have no idea.”
“I guess you are,” she said, hugging me back. “Stuck in here in the dark? How scary is that?”
“Scary,” I said.
She shone the flashlight into the room.
“Wow,” she whispered. She took a step, and then I grabbed for the door, which had started to close behind her. We stared at each other, realizing what had nearly happened.
“There doesn’t seem to be a way out, once you’re in,” I said shakily. “We need something to prop it open.”
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