The Swallow

  A swallow.

  I could feel the scratch of the dusty floorboards against my cheek. The pain was beating inside me like a pulse. Not Polly. Not her. It should have been me who was a ghost.

  Finally, finally, the swallow wrenched its way out, tearing at my throat, and I began to cry—huge, jerky sobs that sounded like they came from someone else.

  NO REPLY

  Polly

  “Come on,” said Matthew. “Back to the attic. You’ll be safe there, Polly.”

  I let them pull me along the path and onto the street, then up the stairs and into our house. I could hear faint noises from the kitchen—voices—but they sounded very far away. I walked up the stairs, Mark in front and Matthew behind, as if I were their captive. I was feeling very tired, and with every step my feet felt heavier than the step before, but I let them lead me to my closet.

  “Go on,” said Mark. “Go up.”

  I could see the edge of Susie’s crib through the doorway. I could see my bed and the bookshelf above it with my old dolls sitting in a row. The boys looked up at me, worried.

  “You’ll be okay,” said Matthew. “Have a nap, and when you wake up everything will be back to normal, just like before.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll do that.”

  They looked uncertainly at me, but I turned away and climbed up into my loft, then pushed open the trapdoor and heaved myself into the attic.

  It was dark. I crawled over to the wall and burrowed under the blankets.

  Rose

  I lay on the floor in the dark. It could have been a few minutes or a few hours. Eventually I stopped crying and the world stopped spinning. The house and the people in it slowly dropped down to the ground. I sat up.

  I tried to call her. “Polly.” It came out as a faint whisper.

  I tried again. “Polly.” A little louder. “Polly, come back.”

  There was no reply.

  My voice was too faint. She probably couldn’t hear it through the wall. I stood up, picked up the flashlight from beside my chair and pushed through the boxes to the hidden door.

  It was dark and narrow. I remembered the last time I had come through the passage, after the walls of Polly’s attic had closed in on me, how narrow and airless it had felt, how I swore I would never go back.

  I bent down and crawled in. If anything, it was worse than before. It seemed smaller, and I dragged myself along, picking up splinters on my elbows and knees. I went as fast as I could and burst through the door at Polly’s end, taking deep breaths of the stale attic air.

  I flashed the light around. It was empty, except for the pile of blankets by the wall.

  “Polly?” I whispered. I expected the blankets to heave up at any minute and reveal her, tousled from sleep perhaps, grinning at me, glasses askew.

  The blankets didn’t move. But the lump in the middle was just the shape it would be if a girl Polly’s size was curled up underneath.

  I walked over and poked it gently.

  “Polly?”

  I poked a little harder. The lump collapsed beneath my hand. I pulled the blankets back but there was nothing there—

  Except a lingering warmth, as if someone had just left.

  I sat down among the blankets, stunned. She was gone. She was really gone.

  TWINS

  Rose

  I put my head in my hands. The swallow fluttered in my chest now, beating sharply against my ribs, and the world began to spin again.

  A long time later it stopped. I heard a scrambling from the other end of the attic. Mice? I groped for the flashlight.

  The bar of light revealed a small, scared face full of freckles, sticking up through the trapdoor. One of the Horrors. I didn’t know which.

  “Polly?” said the boy, shielding his eyes against the light in his face.

  “No, it’s Rose,” I replied, my voice a hoarse whisper. He ducked back down out of sight for a consultation with his brother.

  “Oh, come on up,” I said. “I won’t bite you.”

  Slowly the head came back up, followed by the rest of him, and then the other one. They huddled together at the opposite end of the attic.

  “Where’s Polly?” said the first one. “What have you done with her?”

  “I didn’t do anything. But she’s gone,” I answered.

  Whispers again.

  “We know you’re twins,” said the first one. “We saw the two of you through the window.”

  “What window?”

  “Your house,” said the other one. “A while ago. Polly was with us. And we saw Mum come in and start crying. And then Polly started acting really weird, and we brought her back here to keep her safe. Where is she?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  Silence. Then the first one said, with a tremble in his voice, “We know you’re the Ghost Girl.”

  “You want to steal her soul,” said the other.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not the Ghost Girl. That’s Winnie. She looks like me … but she’s not me. I didn’t want to hurt Polly.”

  They inched closer, and I handed the first one the flashlight.

  “Look at me,” I said. “I’m not dead.”

  They held the light on me for a long time.

  “You look like a ghost,” said the first one finally.

  “But I’m not. I was Polly’s friend. You don’t have to be scared of me.”

  They looked at each other. Some kind of communication was going on between them. Whatever it was, they seemed to come to an agreement.

  “Okay,” said the first one. “Maybe you’re not a ghost.”

  “But if you’re not a ghost,” said the other one, “then how did you get into our attic?”

  I grinned at them. “Secret passage,” I said.

  “WOW!” they breathed in unison.

  I reached over and took the flashlight back, shining it into their pale faces.

  “Which of you is which?”

  “I’m Mark,” said the first one.

  “I’m Matthew,” said the second.

  “Okay. So you guys can see ghosts, right? How long have you been able to see them?”

  Mark shrugged. “Not that long.”

  “Just since Polly—Polly—” said Matthew.

  “Since Polly got sick and died,” whispered Mark. “We thought it was our fault. We told Mum she was pretending, but she wasn’t, she was really sick, and then the next day she … she … died in the hospital, and we thought it was our fault. Then at the funeral we started to see ghosts in the cemetery, and when we got home Polly was in her room, reading, just like usual.”

  “But nobody else could see her,” said Matthew. “Just us. So we played along with her. She didn’t know she was dead. We thought we could keep her.”

  “She wasn’t always there,” said Mark. “She came and went, and she didn’t seem to understand that days and weeks were passing. She was all mixed up. But she thought everything was normal. She went to school, she did her homework, ate dinner. And she never seemed to notice that no one was talking to her except us.”

  “How did she eat dinner? I mean, there wasn’t a place set for her or food or a chair, was there?”

  The boys looked at each other and shrugged.

  “She just would appear at the table, like normal, eating,” said Mark. “She’d have a plate of food just like she was alive, and she’d eat away and listen to the conversation and laugh and talk and somehow …”

  “And somehow she never realized,” continued Matthew. “Like she was in a bubble. But then we started seeing the Ghost Girl around your house.”

  “And she was really scary, like the one in the book,” said Mark.

  “And we knew she was going to tell Polly that she was dead and steal her soul away, and then Polly would go.”

  “But was the Ghost Girl me or the other one?” I asked.

  They exchanged glances.

  “We can’t tell the difference. We thought the
re was only one.”

  A muffled voice came from a long, long way below.

  “Mark! Matthew!”

  They jumped.

  “It’s Dad,” said Mark.

  “We gotta go,” said Matthew. They popped down through the trapdoor and drew it shut behind them.

  I sat there for a while, thinking about what they had said. A bubble. She was living in a bubble, where she was still alive. She wasn’t ready to die, so she stayed. And found me.

  I shook my head. I still couldn’t believe it. How was she a ghost, and I didn’t recognize it? She seemed so alive. How was she warm? How did she eat? How did she … breathe? After Winnie had tried to kill her in my attic I’d breathed life into her. I could feel it. I felt her heart beating under her skin.

  What was it that made her a ghost? What was it that made her dead? Just … believing it?

  I shook my head. No. There had to be more to it than that.

  I took one last look around her attic. She wasn’t there anymore.

  “Good-bye, Polly,” I whispered and crawled back through the passage, and home.

  OLD ENOUGH

  Rose

  Mother came up later to see if I wanted any supper. I didn’t.

  She sat on the edge of my bed. I had been crying again, and I lay curled up with my back to her, so she couldn’t see my face.

  “Rose,” she said.

  “I didn’t steal that stuff,” I mumbled. “I didn’t go in their house.”

  “I know,” she said. “Don’t worry about that now. It’s some misunderstanding. Mrs. Lacey is very upset. Poor thing. Your father and I—” She stopped, swallowed, and then started again. “She told us what happened. It was just the same as with you. Meningitis. Only—only they didn’t catch it in time and their girl died. Very sad. Her little boys have had trouble accepting it, she says. They keep playing games as if their sister were alive. They’ve been playing tricks, and they must have slipped that book into your schoolbag, or something like that. It’s all over, Rose, you don’t need to worry about it.” She fell silent for a moment.

  “About the baby,” she finally said, softly.

  I turned over and looked at her. She had both hands on her lap and was fiddling with her wedding ring. She looked over at me.

  “You’re right. We should have told you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I knew something was wrong and it worried me, Mother. I didn’t know why you were so sad.”

  She took a deep breath. “We realized we needed to leave my parents’ house and be on our own. Your father hasn’t been happy at work, and he’s thinking about going back to teaching. Your grandfather doesn’t understand, and—well, we needed to get away. Losing the baby, and Granny McPherson … it’s been difficult.” Her voice broke.

  I reached out and touched her arm.

  “Mother,” was all I could say.

  She smiled, shaking her head, and the tears spilled out of her eyes.

  “We thought we were going to lose you too,” she said. “Last summer, when you were so sick. You could so easily have gone, like that little girl next door. Poor Mrs. Lacey.”

  She produced a clean handkerchief from her suit pocket and wiped her eyes. She looked up at me again.

  “Rose, we do love you. Very much. I don’t suppose we show you enough. I’m so sorry that you’ve been so lonely, and so sad.”

  I crept forward and she put her arms around me. We sat like that for a long time, with the house very still and quiet around us.

  THE PURPLE SHAWL

  Rose

  When I woke up on Saturday morning, I thought I was sick. All my limbs felt heavy and I could barely sit up. The house was quiet. A dull gray light filtered in through the curtains, and when I pulled them back I saw the sky was filled with a thick blanket of clouds.

  Every step I took felt like an effort, and my throat was tight, as if I was about to start crying again. I hauled myself across the hall, into my grandmother’s room, and stood at the closet door looking at the ladder that led to the attic. What was the point? Polly wasn’t up there.

  But I went up anyway, one rung at a time. I wondered if I had caught some kind of flu. My head throbbed. I crawled across the floor and leaned against the chair, without even the strength to lift myself into it.

  Polly. The weight in my chest shifted, and I began to cry again. It seemed like I had been crying all night, in my sleep, and here I was at it again.

  Memories of Polly started jostling through my mind, one after another.

  Polly as I had first seen her, in the cemetery, in her too-tight coat and her cat’s-eye glasses. Polly running down the street after me, out of breath. Her expression whenever she got excited about ghosts. Stuffing her face full of cookies. Lying white and still on the attic floor after Winnie attacked her. Lying white and still.

  I laid my face against the arm of the chair and closed my eyes.

  “Come back,” I whispered. “Please come back.”

  A hand gently stroked my hair. I turned my head.

  It wasn’t Polly. It was the old lady. She didn’t have her knitting this time. She looked at me kindly and stroked my hair again.

  “There, there,” she said softly. “Such a lovely girl. There, there.”

  I let my head sink back against the chair and closed my eyes. She gave my back a little pat. Her hand was warm. It felt good to sit there feeling nothing for a while. After a long time, I sat up and turned to her again.

  “What happened to your knitting?” I asked.

  That wasn’t what I’d meant to ask. I’d wanted to ask about Polly, how she could be a ghost and still breathe and eat, and why the old lady’s hand was warm, and whether I would ever see Polly again, and a dozen other questions, but what came out of my mouth was the question about her knitting.

  She smiled at me. I noticed then that she had blue eyes, like my mother’s.

  “I’ve finished,” she said with some satisfaction. She reached down beside the chair and her hand came up full of soft, pale purple wool, all knitted into a shawl. She draped it around my shoulders.

  “There you go, Rose,” she said. “That will keep you warm.”

  I looked down at the delicate pattern, like rows of little scallop shells, and I drew it tight. It was light, but wonderfully warm.

  “Thank you,” I said, turning back to her.

  The chair was empty.

  TWO BREAKFASTS

  Rose

  I wore the shawl all weekend. All day over my clothes. All night over my pajamas. And when I went outside, I wore it as a big scarf, under my cloak.

  My mother noticed it right away.

  “Wherever did you get that, Rose?” she asked when I appeared in the kitchen Saturday morning, looking for breakfast.

  “I … ummm … found it,” I said. I still felt tired and heavy, but I was suddenly ravenous.

  My mother gave me a searching look. “Go and sit down and I’ll bring you some porridge.”

  Eww. Gooey porridge. Not exactly what I had in mind.

  “Could— could I have bacon and eggs instead?” I asked. “And pancakes?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Whatever’s got into you, Rose? You don’t usually eat a big breakfast.”

  “I’m just … hungry,” I replied. I didn’t know myself what had got into me. One minute I was feeling like death warmed over and now suddenly I could eat two breakfasts.

  Kendrick trekked in from the pantry and gave me the usual dirty look.

  “Kendrick, would you be a dear and cook up some bacon and eggs for Rose? And some of your delicious buckwheat pancakes? She’s woken up hungry.”

  Kendrick looked affronted but mumbled something, and my mother ushered me through the swinging door to the dining room.

  She sat down beside me and took up the end of the shawl.

  “I haven’t seen this shawl for years,” she mused. “Not since my mother packed it away when I was a girl. Where did you find it?”

  “In—in—the a
ttic,” I said, dumbfounded.

  “Well, however did it get there?” said my mother, stroking the soft wool. “My granny knit that shawl for me, before I was born. It was my baby shawl, and I always had it on my bed when I was little. But then it got packed away at some point and I never saw it again. I looked for it when you were a baby, but I couldn’t find it. Fancy you coming across it, after all these years.”

  She sighed and put it down.

  “My granny was a great knitter. She died when I was eight. I’m sure I’ve got a picture of her somewhere. I’ll have to show you.”

  “Oh,” was all I could say.

  “She taught me to knit, when I was only six. I’d sit by her chair and she’d show me how to hold the needles, and how to wind the wool around. She was very patient, as I recall, because I kept forgetting how and she had to show me again and again.” A smile played around my mother’s lips, and she had a faraway look in her eyes. “You would have liked her, Rose. She was a very sweet old lady. No matter what was going on in our house, all the bustle and carry-on, Granny was always in her chair by the living room fire, knitting. I spent a lot of time just sitting with her.”

  My mother gave herself a shake.

  “Enough of all that. I’m glad you have it now, however it turned up. On to business.”

  LEAVING SOCKS

  Rose

  My mother folded her hands together on the dining table and leaned towards me, much as if she were in a board meeting. She had that brisk air of organization that meant things were going to be accomplished quickly.

  “Your father and I have been talking. He’s decided to leave socks and go back to teaching. I support him completely, but it won’t be easy. He has a lot of responsibilities at the company, and I’ll have to find a replacement for him.”

  Kendrick chose that moment to bang through the door with the first part of my breakfast. I fell upon the eggs and toast while my mother watched me in silence for a moment.