The Swallow

by Charis Cotter

  I looked over at Rose, about to tell her about the dwarves, but one look at her face stopped me. She was gazing at the cemetery too, but her expression was anything but peaceful. She looked sad—so sad—as if all the unhappiness of the buried dead were washing over her. But she also looked scared, as if she wanted to get up and run but she knew it would be no use.

  I reached over and took her hand in mine and gave it a squeeze. Her eyes came back from the land of the dead and focused on me.

  “You heard Kendrick. You heard her talking to me. So that proves I’m not a ghost.”

  “Not if Kendrick’s a ghost too.”

  “Polly!” Rose pulled her hand away from mine. “Why can’t you believe me? You must have seen Kendrick before. She’s lived here forever. Are you telling me she was a ghost all that time?”

  I shrugged. “Okay, I’ve seen her around. But not for a long time. I don’t know, Rose. It’s just all really … fishy. And mysterious. You’ve got to admit it’s mysterious.”

  “Yes, but what you don’t understand is that I’ve been living with ghosts all my life. I know what they’re like, I see them every day. It’s not a game to me. Can’t you see how scary that Door Jumper is? Can’t you see that if there was any chance—any chance at all—that I was really dead, that it would be the worst possible thing that could happen to me? I already feel invisible, I already feel like a total misfit, but if I were dead …”

  She stopped and stared at me.

  “There’s nothing worse than being dead, Polly. Nothing.”

  She was right, of course. I felt really bad for getting her so worried. I reached out again and touched her arm.

  “I’m sorry, Rose. I don’t want you to be dead. I really don’t. And I’m sorry I act like it’s all a game. I can’t help myself. It’s my imagination. It always gets me in trouble. But now that I know ghosts are real, I think anything is possible, anything. And I want to solve the mystery, the Mystery of Rose, the Mystery of the Haunted House Next Door, the Mystery of the Ghost in the Closet—”

  Rose started to laugh.

  “That’s exactly what I mean, Polly! You’re talking like it’s a book, like it’s pretend, and it isn’t!”

  I smiled at her. “But isn’t it more fun this way?”

  Rose

  It was almost too easy, sneaking Polly out. After Kendrick called me to supper she tramped downstairs to her basement lair, and Polly crept downstairs beside me and slipped out, mouthing, SEE YOU TOMORROW as I closed the door silently behind her.

  Polly insisted she’d be coming back the next day to see the shoes. I knew if I could just figure out a way to keep Kendrick in the basement, we would be okay. To tell the truth, I was far more worried about the Door Jumper than Kendrick. I could handle Kendrick.

  After supper I went upstairs and stood silently for a moment at the door of my grandmother’s room. I was afraid to go in.

  But it was just as we left it, with the curtains pulled back. The moon was rising up over the cemetery, and despite the fear that clutched my stomach I found myself walking to the window. The view was lovely in the moonlight. The shadows of the trees and gravestones were clearly etched now: black on silver, silver on black. It was almost peaceful. I leaned my face against the cold window.

  That’s when it came back. The Door Jumper. One minute I was alone, looking out at the cemetery, and the next I was enveloped in darkness and the moonlight snapped out as if someone had turned off a light.

  It was different this time. I was in the center of a swirling blackness, as if someone had flung a huge black cloak around me, layers and layers of dark wool. But it didn’t feel like it wanted to kill me. It was more like it was trying to tell me something, trying to get a message through.

  “Winnifred?” I gasped. “Is it you?”

  Instantly the entity changed. A roar like a freight train thundering through a tunnel filled my ears. Then I saw lights again and felt that falling sensation I’d had in the graveyard. Only this time there was no thud. I just kept falling and falling.

  “STOP IT!” I screamed. “STOP TRYING TO SCARE ME!”

  Then it was gone. I was kneeling on the floor by the window, and a shaft of moonlight lit up one of the big pink roses on the carpet in front of me.

  COOKIES

  Polly

  I reached across Rose’s bed for my sixth chocolate-chip cookie. Rose was still on her first, nibbling along the edge like a mouse. They’d been cooling on cookie racks when I came home from school, so I’d helped myself to a paper-bagful. Okay, so I was only allowed to take two at a time, but they smelled so good and I thought I should get a few for Rose. Who knew she could make one last half an hour? With any luck the twins would get blamed for the missing cookies and I’d avoid the “Polly, that’s just greedy” lecture from Mum and the “Polly, you’re getting fat” remarks from Moo and Goo.

  “So, you really think the Door Jumper is Winnifred?” I asked through a mouthful of cookie.

  Rose frowned. “You’re getting cookie crumbs all over my bed, Polly. I’m not supposed to have food in my room.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said, trying to brush them off and instead sending them flying all over the place. “But what about Winnifred? Why did you think it was her?”

  “I don’t know. I just got a very strong feeling. You know what I think, Polly? I think that room used to be Winnifred’s bedroom. My grandparents probably slept in my parents’ bedroom when Winnifred was alive. It’s the biggest bedroom in the house and it has its own bathroom.”

  “You have two bathrooms? Wow,” I said. “I thought our houses were the same, only backwards. We only have one bathroom. Sometimes I have to wait so long for Moo and Goo …” I stopped. Rose was frowning at me again.

  “I guess the houses aren’t identical,” she said impatiently. “That’s not the point. You see, if my grandmother’s room was originally Winnifred’s, then Winnifred could get up to the attic through her closet. And that’s probably her stuff up there—the girls’ books and the ghost books and the little reading corner and—”

  “And she’s still there,” I breathed. “She’s haunting your attic and her old bedroom!”

  Rose

  Polly’s mother made good cookies. At least, they smelled delicious. But my stomach had been in knots since the night before and I could barely swallow.

  I felt trapped. I didn’t know how I was going to shield myself from this latest ghost. The white light didn’t seem to be working. Not only was it an entity, the most dangerous kind of ghost, but it was also a relative. This haunting was personal. It wanted something from me. But all I wanted to do was crawl under my bed and stay there forever.

  “You know what’s really weird?” said Polly, reaching for yet another cookie. “That falling thing. You said you felt it before, in the cemetery?”

  “Yes,” I replied, brushing some more crumbs off the bed. “When we were at her gravestone. It was awful. I felt like … I felt like I was going to die.”

  Finally Polly stopped chewing. She just sat there staring at me.

  “But you didn’t? I mean, you were falling but you didn’t hit the … the bottom?”

  “I did in the cemetery. There was a sort of thud.”

  “Wow. A thud.” Polly’s eyes were very round.

  “Yes, Polly, a thud. I hit the bottom. I died, okay? I’m dead, okay? That’s what you want, right?”

  “No, no, Rose, I don’t,” said Polly quickly, reaching out to me.

  I closed my eyes and clenched my fists. “White light, white light, white light,” I said over and over again.

  “What?” said Polly. Her hand felt warm through my sweater. Warm and alive. I opened my eyes.

  “I’m scared, Polly,” I said faintly. “I’m really, really scared.”

  MUMBO-JUMBO

  Polly

  At that moment she looked more like a ghost than ever. Okay, okay, I know I said that before, but this time it was uncanny. Her face was white, except for the
big black shadows under her eyes. She stared wildly at me and then started to sway back and forth, like she was going to keel over.

  I took her by both arms and gave her a little shake.

  “Rose!” I said urgently. “Pull yourself together! We’re going to figure it out. We’re going to go through it step-by-step and we’re going to get all the evidence together and we’re going to figure it out. I’ll help, no matter what. I won’t leave you.”

  Then she started to laugh, a kind of crazy, high-pitched laugh that sounded like it would turn into tears any second.

  “You’ll have to leave me if I’m dead, Polly. Unless I’m meant to just keep drifting around and haunting you and this house forever. I’ll have to cross over, I’ll have to go on to—to wherever, wherever they go, I don’t know—”

  “Rose!” I said, giving her another shake. “Maybe Winnifred can help us. Maybe if you help her she can help you. At least tell you whether or not you’re a ghost.”

  “No, no!” said Rose frantically, “You don’t understand. She’s evil. She wants to kill you, Polly. She won’t help. Ghosts don’t help. They’ve never helped. All they want is to suck the life out of me and feed on it. They want to devour me. You can’t ask them for help. They’ll kill you.”

  “We can at least try,” I said. “This one might be different.”

  Rose

  Polly didn’t have a clue. She had no idea what we were dealing with. But I had to calm down. Panic wasn’t going to help. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I tried to picture the white light, spreading out from me, shining around Polly, protecting us, keeping us safe from the black anger of the Door Jumper and the steady clamoring of all the ghosts in the world.

  It wasn’t working very well. The light was trembling and shaky, exactly how I felt inside. I took another deep breath and started murmuring “White light” again. If only Polly hadn’t half-convinced me that I was dead, I could have handled this. Like I always did. Somehow. Walked the line between the ghosts and the living, kept them at bay. But this time it was so much harder.

  I opened my eyes.

  “Have a cookie?” said Polly, holding the bag out to me.

  To my surprise, I laughed. A real laugh this time, not a crazy one. Polly hesitated for a moment, then she grinned.

  “What were you doing just now? Some kind of ghostie mumbo-jumbo?”

  THE MISSING PHOTOGRAPHS

  Polly

  I’d never have told Rose this, but I really did wonder sometimes if she was a bit nuts. She was just so WEIRD. When she shut her eyes and started chanting and taking really deep breaths I thought maybe she was finally going crazy. Driven mad by ghosts! The very thing she was afraid of.

  Whatever she was doing, it did calm her down. And she said I could do it too, if the Door Jumper came back. I should just say it over and over again and imagine the white light.

  “Like an angel?” I suggested. “Like a guardian angel, all white?”

  She looked doubtful. Obviously she hadn’t been to Sunday school as much as I had. But she said whatever worked for me.

  The good thing was, the mumbo-jumbo made her feel better. She went downstairs to look for her grandmother’s photo album while I lay back on her bed and watched the shadows flickering on the far wall. They were made by the tree branches outside her window, swaying up and down in the cold November wind. What I really wanted to do was get my hands on her grandmother’s shoes, but a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt. I closed my eyes.

  I must have drifted off because it seemed like the next minute Rose was back, dumping a big heavy book on the bed.

  “What did you find?” I said, sitting up. “Any pictures of Winnifred?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  We opened the book together. It was a big, leather-covered album full of faded pictures of people in old-fashioned clothes: long summer dresses and fancy hairdos. The same people kept turning up: a little boy with a solemn expression, a man with thick curly hair, glasses, his mouth clamped firmly shut, and a small woman with a slight smile and eyes that looked out of focus.

  “My grandmother,” said Rose. “And my grandfather. And my father. But no Winnifred.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, turning a page. “Look at this.”

  Beside a picture of her father holding a bike that looked too big for him, I could see the faint outline of a square, half hidden behind the photograph.

  “I think there was another picture here before,” I said.

  We both peered at the page. The outline was quite clear. It looked as though there had been two photos side by side, then one had been taken away and the other one pasted back in the center of the page. Flipping back and forth through the album, we found the same light indentations beside several pictures.

  Rose looked at me. “You think they were pictures of Winnifred?”

  “Who else?” I said.

  Rose

  “Why would they get rid of her pictures?” I asked Polly.

  “Because she died?” said Polly, slowly turning the pages of the album. “Look, here’s your dad when he was a teenager. He was cute!”

  I looked over her shoulder. My father was definitely good-looking, with dark hair and eyes. But he wasn’t smiling in any of the pictures. He looked sad.

  I shut the album.

  “Okay, she died. But why take her pictures away?”

  “Maybe they couldn’t bear to look at them,” said Polly. “Maybe they were so filled with pain and anguish they didn’t want to be reminded of her.”

  “Well, yes, that’s a possibility. But it’s almost as if she never existed. Except for the note in the Bible, there’s no trace of her.”

  “Maybe Winnifred did something so terrible they wanted to pretend she never existed,” said Polly, a faraway look in her eyes. “Maybe she murdered someone!”

  “Polly! Stop being so dramatic! I don’t think my aunt went around killing people.”

  Polly started counting on her fingers.

  “Number one: you say the Door Jumper wants to kill me. Number two: you say the Door Jumper is Winnifred. Therefore Winnifred wants to kill me. If she succeeds, she will be a murderer. Maybe that’s how she became an entity—because she was so evil. An evil murderer.”

  “Don’t act like that makes any sense, Polly! You’re just guessing.”

  “How do you explain it, then? How come nobody ever talks about her? How come there are no photographs of her?”

  I couldn’t.

  ATTACK

  Polly

  Rose stuck her head out the door and listened.

  “All clear,” she breathed, and we tiptoed across the hall and into the Haunted Room.

  In the late-afternoon light the room looked spooky but not terrifying.

  “Shoes …” I whispered.

  “All right, but I’m looking for clues too. There’s got to be something in this room that will tell us more about Winnifred.”

  She went to the closet and pulled out the boxes. No sign of the Door Jumper.

  The shoes were amazing. Perfectly preserved, all wrapped in tissue paper. Some looked as though they hadn’t been worn.

  “This is like Christmas,” I said as I opened up box after box of exquisite footwear. “All I ever get new is plain oxfords for school. The rest are hand-me-downs.” I touched the soft pink satin of a pair of pumps.

  “Ooo, these are so soft,” I murmured, holding one against my cheek and closing my eyes dreamily.

  Rose rolled her eyes and laughed.

  “They’re just shoes, Polly!”

  I don’t know why, but I’ve always loved shoes. I beg Mum to buy them for me but, “There’s no money in the budget to waste on shoes you don’t need,” she says. So I cut pictures of shoes out of magazines and draw outfits to go with them. If I were rich I’d have a closet full of shoes, just like Mrs. McPherson.

  The next box contained black leather lace-ups, with pointy toes and two-inch heels. I tried them on. Just a li
ttle tight.

  “My feet are bigger than yours and your grandma’s,” I said sadly.

  Rose was admiring a pair of green suede slingbacks in the full-length mirror. They looked funny with her gray school uniform skirt.

  “Did your grandma go to a lot of parties?” I asked, opening another box and reaching through the rustling tissue to pull out a pair of white satin dancing shoes with the cutest little pearl buttons you ever saw.

  “I don’t think so,” said Rose distractedly. She had just dumped another four boxes on the floor. We had a lovely mess going, tissue paper and shoes littered all over the rose-covered carpet. Rose had turned on the lamp on the dressing table. It had a stained-glass shade of mauve and yellow and cast a soft glow.

  “They must have had money, to buy all these shoes. What did your granddad do?”

  “He was a doctor,” said Rose, rummaging in the closet for more boxes. “I think he was kind of strict, from things my father has told me.”

  She plopped herself down on a scrap of empty carpet and opened another box. “My father said my grandmother never argued with him, always said, ‘Yes, dear, you know best.’ When my father finished university he wanted to be a journalist, but his father didn’t like the idea and that was the end of that. He didn’t think it was respectable, so my father went to teacher’s college instead.”

  “But now he’s not a teacher, he works at your mother’s company, right?” I asked, running my finger along a smooth black velvet shoe.

  “Yes,” said Rose. “And he travels all the time. I miss him.”

  I looked at her. She looked sad again.

  “I miss my dad too,” I said suddenly. I’d never thought of it that way before, but it was true.

  “But your dad is home every night,” said Rose.

  “Yes, but when I was little I spent more time with him, before Moo and Goo came, when the twins were younger. Mum would be busy with them, Lucy would be off doing her homework and Dad and I would have long talks in his study. I used to sit at a little table and pretend it was my desk, and he gave me paper and pens and I drew all these squiggly lines and pretended I was writing, just like he did. I used to be his special girl …” My voice faded away and I looked up, shocked at what I heard myself saying.