Dreamwood

by Heather Mackey

  • • •

  It was dark by the time they reached their destination.

  Even before Lucy saw the house, she smelled roses. A rambling garden was spread before them, full of rosebushes. Behind the roses, coming into view in the gray twilight, was a large Victorian house, leaning a bit tipsily under its spiky decorations, quite like one of Lucy’s fearsome dowager aunts back in Boston.

  Able Dodd helped her down and began to untie her trunk from the back of the wagon. Lucy stood, squinting up at what must be the home of the mysterious Knightly.

  The front door opened and a man and a woman came out standing rather protectively like a barrier at the top of the steps.

  “Hello,” the man said down to her. He was stout, with round pink cheeks and shiny flaxen hair, which was arranged in timid wavelets. His soberly cut dark suit gave the impression of dull respectability. “You made it here, at least. The roads aren’t safe at night. We’ve had some troubles.”

  “Thieving and banditry,” the woman clarified. She was tall and pinched, with hair a fading flame color and slightly protuberant blue-gray eyes. She had the startled, nervous look of an exotic bird. One hand clutched compulsively at the neckline of her dress, as if she were constantly recovering from a state of shock.

  He inclined his head to her, perhaps hoping that between the two of them they would eventually arrive at an accurate statement. “Many of the men are unemployed, and—”

  “They turn to crime,” she broke in.

  “Yes.” The man nodded. He appeared quite used to this funny way of speaking and turned to his wife, waiting for her next interruption.

  “It’s getting harder and harder for decent folks,” she pronounced. Her eyes widened even more, sweeping around the porch to make clear who the decent folks were.

  Lucy stood on the bottom step and looked between the two in confusion. It was almost as if they blamed her for the thievery and unsafe roads. “Excuse me, I’m Lucy Darrington and I’m looking for my father, William.” She bit her lip. “I thought he’d be at the station to meet me.”

  “I am Gordon Knightly,” the man said, with obvious fondness for his own name.

  “And I’m Dorothea. Though you may call me Dot. Everyone does,” the woman added quickly, making it clear this was not a special invitation to friendship. “Welcome,” she said, pursing her mouth in a way that wasn’t welcoming at all.

  Lucy was beginning to feel that something was terribly wrong. “And my father, is he here?”

  Gordon rocked on his toes. “Well now, this, you see . . .” He looked at his wife for help.

  “He’s gone,” she said starkly, her fingers clutching at her chest.

  “But . . .” Lucy blinked, trying to make sense of this. “I wrote him I was coming.”

  “And that’s the only reason I knew to send Able Dodd to pick you up,” Gordon said, as if he deserved congratulations for sending a terrifying giant to kidnap her. “I’ve been collecting his mail. I don’t know what else to do with it. He left some papers here as well.”

  “Piles of notebooks,” Dot sniffed. “They make an unsightly clutter.”

  This was too much to take in. Lucy grasped the banister. Her father had left?

  “He must have been working a job,” she said, half to herself. “Someone must have hired him to investigate a haunting, clear a ghost. Did you?”

  “What?” Gordon looked affronted. “Me? No. Certainly not. Nobody hired him, not that I know. He just appeared in town one day. I rented a room to him. He said he would be working on something in the woods, away from people.”

  “Odd,” Dot said with a worried look at her husband. “A bit suspicious if you ask me.”

  “But he would have to have a clearing job here.” Lucy twisted her gloves into tourniquets around her fingers. If he stayed in Outer Saarthe there had to have been a reason. And his last letter hinted at something extraordinary.

  “Clearing? I don’t know.” Gordon puffed out his chest, as if needing a bulwark against her questions.

  “How long has he been away?” Lucy asked. She looked at Able Dodd, who was standing motionless in the darkness, his mouth a grim arch of disapproval.

  Dot’s large eyes blinked rapidly. “Perhaps three weeks. Maybe more.”

  So long? Lucy looked from Gordon to Dot with a sudden feeling that she could not get enough air. “And when did you expect him back?”

  “Well, that’s what makes this so, erm, awkward,” Gordon said, and Lucy realized that the terrible expression on his face was pity. “He didn’t say he was coming back.”

  • • •

  Lucy sat on the lumpy mattress in the tiny third-story bedroom, crammed with three-legged chairs, a collection of moth-eaten taxidermy, chipped crockery—and now, her.

  A half-full teacup sat precariously near the edge of the bed, sloshing when she brought her boots up to sit cross-legged. Already a good deal of weak tea had splashed out of the saucer and onto the ugly, itchy blanket.

  Earlier, Dot had brought up the tea and a few pieces of cake, and Lucy had been too miserable to mumble more than a few words of thanks.

  But now, wiping crumbs of spice cake from her mouth, Lucy realized she needed to make arrangements. She couldn’t stay here, in this stuffy room, with its sloping floor, peeling wallpaper, and spare furniture draped in dust cloths. She had already seen the room her father had rented: slightly larger, equally depressing. But very few of his personal items remained. He’d left behind the notebooks Dot had complained about (full of numbers and random notes in her father’s cramped script—Lucy had flipped through them quickly), a pair of slippers, and the old plaid shirt she was wearing now. Apparently he’d sold or given away everything else.

  She needed to go into town, she had to make an investigation, get people involved. Should she go to the police? No . . . not yet. But a man couldn’t simply disappear.

  Lucy drank the rest of her tea and with her skirt blotted dry a few of the drops she’d scattered over the bedspread. On the pillow, gazing at her blankly, was a chipped and ragged doll, too stupid to know it had been abandoned. She picked the horrid thing up and shoved it into the depths of a gloomy armoire that hulked against the wall.

  Then she went downstairs in search of Gordon or Dot. Or (she hoped it wouldn’t come to this) Able Dodd.

  The stairway was steep and dark. A grandfather clock the size of a coffin was at the bottom. Lucy stepped quietly down the hall.

  There was light coming from the room on her left, and she opened the door onto a high-ceilinged parlor. A boy sat in one of the dainty chairs, whittling, his feet up on a table. A pile of wood shavings had fallen on the ground around him. He was tall, perhaps a year older than she was, solid looking. His hair flew about in auburn jags and his gray-green eyes were narrowed, all the fury of his being concentrated in his carving knife. Mounted on the wall behind him was a gloomy crowd of antlered animal heads; they looked as if long ago they’d resigned themselves to watching the boy whittle as their only entertainment.

  He didn’t look up as she came in, so she coughed and planted herself in front of him. “Hello,” she said, leaning forward.

  “Ah,” he cried in frustration as his knife slipped, “you made me nick it!” He cast the piece of wood to the floor.

  Lucy didn’t think this was her fault. Any number of things could have startled him. That old grandfather clock could have chimed or a spider fallen from one of the stuffed heads above him. “I was just looking for Dot or Gordon.”

  “They’ve gone to bed.” He twisted in his chair, grinding the pile of wood shavings into the carpet as he did so.

  He was careless and coddled and full of himself, she concluded, and Lucy saw no need to be polite. “Who are you?”

  “Me?” The boy put his knife down. He had straight, dark brows, and his snub nose was absolutely covered with freckl
es. He wasn’t bad-looking, she supposed. “I’m Pete Knightly. Who are you?”

  “Lucy Darrington.” Because Pete showed no reaction—and because she was proud of her escape from school—she added, for his benefit, “I came up by myself on the train.”

  But Pete had retrieved the piece of wood he’d been working on and was now studying it, frowning.

  “It was very dangerous,” she added, pulling awkwardly at her father’s old shirt as she stepped closer. “Some of the men could have been outlaws.”

  “Uh-huh.” Pete gathered up his knife and carving wood. “I guess some of the lumberjacks up here must look pretty frightening to a schoolgirl.”

  Lucy was aware of her Miss Bentley’s School uniform, her untidy hair, and her round face with the disappointing eyebrows (no character whatsoever). Her father’s oversize shirt didn’t help—it probably made her look even more like a little girl. “I don’t frighten easily.” She thrust her shoulders back and faced him. She was not going to have him get the wrong idea about her.

  Pete nodded gravely, as if he would be the judge of that. “You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?”

  “No.”

  Pete grinned. It wasn’t a mean grin—she’d seen plenty of those. In Wickham, there’d been boys who followed her home from school and called her “ghost girl” before pulling her braids. Pete’s grin transformed his face and made him appear . . . well, not so bad.

  “Good. I’m going up. If you’re not afraid of the dark I’ll let you turn off the light. That’s the switch there.” He pointed carefully to a switch on the lamp, as if still a bit amazed by it. “It’s electric, you know,” he said with pride.

  “I know all about electricity,” she said at once, for when it came to science and technology she had a bit of a competitive streak. “I came from San Francisco, where my school had electricity, and I’ve ridden on trolley cars and automobiles and spoken on the telephone.”

  She was bragging, and she hated people who did that, especially about city things. Her awful Boston cousins did that all the time. Abruptly she stopped.

  “Well, good for you,” Pete said. He wasn’t grinning anymore. He brushed past her, taking up space and standing very straight. Second to braggers she hated people who deliberately made it obvious they were much taller than she was. “Good night.”

  “Night,” she said sullenly.

  And then he was gone.

  She flipped the switch with a sigh. It wasn’t all that dark, not with the moonlight coming in. And not scary at all. If anything, she thought with a sigh, the dead deer on the wall seemed to regard her with sympathy.

  • • •

  Lucy changed into her nightclothes and sat in bed hugging her knees. She would just have to find her father, that was it. There was no other thing she could do.

  Her mother had died before Lucy could remember her. And her mother’s family—the thin, elvish Stepwaiths—had died out as well, like an ancient race that had found itself too fragile for the modern world.

  Her father’s family, back in Boston, was robust and well-to-do. She thought of her formidable grandmother, dressed in black and reigning in her mansion filled with Chinese porcelain, gloomy antiques, and tiny lapdogs. There was her spinster great-aunt who lived alone, except for servants, surrounded by the portraits that had been painted of her seventy years ago when she had been a renowned beauty. She had two uncles, one in steel and one in railroads, and their children were insufferable brats.

  At one time, her father had been a promising young man. He’d gone to the best schools, been taken up by a community of respected scientists, and published several articles about energy fields. But gradually he’d turned his back on all of it to pursue ever more eccentric research into the spirit world. And the world of science, publications, and universities had turned its back on him.

  “Ghostology is important, even if it’s not well respected,” her father told her one evening after she came home complaining that her cousins had teased her for wearing old shoes. “We may not have fine things, but what we do we do for the glory of science.” Yet another reason Miss Bentley’s was all wrong for her—the only glory they cared about there was the glory of obedience.

  Lucy shifted on the uncomfortable bed. The little room, with its odd assortment of broken and unwanted things, was the perfect place for a ghost. And the third floor hadn’t been wired: The only light came from a hurricane lamp filled with a viscous oil that made the room smell like fish. If the Knightlys’ house had a ghost, Lucy bet it would show up here.

  Lucy slid off her bed onto the cold bare floor and went to where she’d propped her instrument case on a broken cane chair. The case opened up into three tiered drawers—each holding a collection of mechanical devices her father had made.

  She dug past the od-oculars, the energy dowsers, the vitometer (which had gone completely quiet after its fit of shaking on the train), and the archevisual spectrometer. These were all things her father had built in his pursuit of ghosts and spirits, and as such always gave Lucy an ache in her heart. He poured himself into his work, but with little result. Even his inventions hadn’t brought him the fame he deserved. He had labored on them many hours in his laboratory in Wickham, but he hadn’t the commercial knack to make a success of selling them, and so they remained personal tools—the only ones of their kind in the world.

  In the bottom drawer was a brass egg about six inches high. She lifted it out and placed it on the floor near her bed.

  It promptly fell over on its side.

  “Oh, come on!” she said.

  Lucy picked up the egg and shook it. Then she tapped it with her fingernail until with a slight whir, two spindly legs with broad flat feet extended from it. From its sides emerged two tubular arms with small hooks at each end. She set it on the floor again. Even though she’d outgrown her fear of ghosts, she still sometimes set the ghost sweeper out at night, like an old lovey she couldn’t part with.

  She’d climbed onto her bed again when the egg wobbled slightly and took a few steps.

  Lucy blinked. It hadn’t done that in ages.

  She waited, hardly daring to breathe in case it kept walking. But it stopped.

  Disappointed, Lucy turned her back on it and pulled up the covers.

  She’d been six years old when her father made it.

  “This, my dear, is a genuine ghost sweeper,” he’d told her that first night as he tucked her under her quilt. “Specially constructed—just for you—to rid the immediate premises of ghosts, haunts, and emanations.” His blue eyes twinkled as he said this. And on that first night, the little brass egg marched around the room like a busy soldier. It twittered and huffed, stopping occasionally to blast out a whistle of air.

  “Is it really sweeping them away?” she asked, shivering happily. It was the last evening in October, and a trickster wind made the skeletal branches scritch like fingernails against the window of her bedroom in Wickham.

  “Yes indeed,” her father replied, watching the sweeper go about its work. “My, my, this room needed a good sweeping out.”

  Inside the little sweeper was a miniature engine that shot out jets of ionized silver. This slight electrostatic charge dispersed ghosts—their subtle frequencies were sensitive to electricity and energy currents.

  Her father had discovered that emotions created energy fields, and even emotions of many years ago would leave a residue, an echo that the ghost could attach to. But this nearly imperceptible energy could be disrupted. Her father’s ghost-clearing bag was full of tools that scrambled these fields: electrostatic engines, voltaic batteries, even strong magnets.

  William Darrington used science to clear ghosts, unlike healers or folk doctors, who used remedies like herbs or protection stones. Her father always said there might be something to the stones—any dark stone was supposed to absorb negative energy, and in laboratory tests obs
idian had shown weak powers of disrupting etheric bodies—but he wasn’t willing to bet his life on them.

  So he made Lucy her very own ghost sweeper, and soon afterward he announced that she could go to work with him. For the next few years she followed along, going from gloomy mansion to sinister farmhouse, playing in poltergeist-guarded parlors or suicide-haunted broom closets, her ghost sweeper marching along at her side, like a friendly dog, chuffing and whistling if any spirits made the mistake of getting too close. And she helped her father clear lots of ghosts simply by holding magnets in just the right place or managing the battery rigs. He always said she was the best assistant anyone could hope for.

  Those had been good days. But it had been ages since he’d taken her along on one of his clearing jobs. And now the ghost sweeper was winding down, as if it, too, was leaving her behind.

  Lucy sighed and blew out the lamp. The light from the moon turned the floor to pale silver. The ghost sweeper stood guard, motionless but alert, its stubby body casting a long shadow across the floor. Within minutes she was asleep.

  Lucy awoke with a single-minded determination. She would go into town and ask everyone she encountered if they had seen her father.

  Last night Dot said he wanted a room, but his work was in the forest. That could be anywhere. So Lucy’s first task was to figure out who’d hired him.

  There was the question of how to get to Pentland—for she remembered traveling awhile by wagon with Able Dodd last night. But she was used to finding her way around places. She’d gotten lost in several cities, for her father often sent her on errands, typically mistaking one critical detail, such as turn left at the tomb of the pirate Jean Lafitte, not right, or knock twice at the shop with the dragon painting in the window (not the phoenix). She believed she could handle one tiny logging town.

  The more pressing matter was breakfast.

  Lucy put on her other scratchy blue wool Miss Bentley’s dress (she had two; they were identically awful), shimmied into her petticoat and pinafore, and passed a brush in the direction of her hair. Without the threat of Miss Bentley’s morning inspection, she saw no need to waste time on hair brushing.