see? you havent written it yet—
“You said you found it . . . in a library?”
ive read things about your mom—i went to the public library and found her archive and there were letters and one of them was addressed to me—
Emily frowned. “Archive?”
you told me about your mother—and your sister—and emily—their tutor gasped, half terrified and half elated, as the pointer spelled out her name—you told me about the boy with the cat—and what he said to you about your mom not being for real—and later the cat came to your back door and you kept her for a little while—you named her selkie—
“How can you know these things? It’s as if you’ve reached into my head!”
“Shh,” said Emily. “He’s still talking.”
—you didnt know your mom was an actress so i guess i should tell you that too—when she was really young like 1-7—before she had her accident and got her—um—abilities—
“Alec.” Josie felt her pulse thudding in her fingertips. “You said you read about us in an archive. What is the year?”
Once more the pointer glided down to the row of numbers, and paused first on the two. Then it skipped over the one to stop on the zero. “I don’t believe it!” Emily breathed. Then it slid sideways. Two, zero, one. Again it pulled up over the row of numbers, and skimmed along above them.
The hall door creaked open, and the girls sprang back from the talking board. They watched as a set of long white fingers curled around and gripped the jamb, and they heard Merritt’s toneless voice before they saw his face. “What are you doing in here?”
The man stood staring at them with his glassy eyes. Josie glanced at the board and found the pointer motionless above the line of numbers. “This room is for your mother’s use only,” said Merritt. “You ought to have known better, Miss Jasper.”
Emily swallowed hard and rose from the table. “My apologies, sir. It will not happen again.”
He watched as Emily conveyed the board back to its drawer, with Cass on her heels proffering the glass piece with both hands. Josie, meanwhile, hid the notebook and pencil in her pocket. Merritt followed them upstairs and waited in the darkness until they were inside the nursery. Then they heard his slow and steady footsteps recede down the corridor, where he would resume his watch by Mrs. Clifford’s bedside.
“He never ever sleeps,” Cassie said as they unbuttoned their pinafores. “Mrs. Gubbins says so.”
The Name on the Stone
10.
A little lane to the side of Danny’s house led up to the graveyard, which was so old that no one living could remember anyone buried there. When Danny invited Alec, Harold, and the Wexler twins over to watch Nightmare on Elm Street on Halloween, there wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s head as to where the boys would end up that evening.
They decided they were too old for trick-or-treating, so Mrs. Penhallow brought out a glass punch bowl full of Snickers bars and Reese’s Pieces along with a box of Thin Mints. Once the lights were off, the movie on, and Mrs. Penhallow distracted by the ringing doorbell, the Wexler twins brought out their grandfather’s stash of souvenir whiskey bottles. Danny just rolled his eyes.
“Liquor is for losers,” Harold sniffed, and the twins didn’t argue, to Alec’s relief. The bottles were the size of his mother’s nail polish and looked just as unappetizing.
Harold turned to Alec. “Danny says you’re still using the board.”
Josh Wexler piped up before Alec could respond. “What board? You mean like a Ouija board?”
“He found an old one in his house. We had some . . . interesting results.” Harold smiled slyly, as if he were about to tell a joke at Alec’s expense.
“Like what?” cried the Wexler twins. “Tell us! Did you talk to any dead people?”
“Dead girls,” Harold said with satisfaction. “Three of them.”
Alec looked to Danny—you didn’t tell him about the letter, did you?—but Danny was rummaging through a box of old DVDs.
“That’s awesome!” Sam cried. “What did they say?”
“Were they murdered?” Josh asked. “Like, what if there was an Edwardstown serial killer?”
“Are we going to watch this movie, or what?” said Danny, and for a time the boys settled down in front of the TV. But all those chocolate bars and talk of Ouija boards had made them restless, and they only laughed at the scenes in Nightmare on Elm Street that were supposed to be scary. They put on their hoodies as Danny told his mom they were off to the Wexlers’ for a new DVD.
The evening was just right for the holiday, the dark clouds holding an empty threat of rain. The cemetery’s front gate wore a padlock so old that the chain wound around the wrought-iron slats was rusted through. The words inside the arch above the old gate read MOUNT HOPE CEMETERY, and in smaller letters beneath, est’d 1797.
One by one the boys hopped over the crumbling stone wall beside the gate. The tombs studding the hill were silhouetted against the dirty purple sky, the ground soggy and thickly carpeted with leaves. When the wind turned, Alec caught a whiff of something unpleasant—something rotting.
An owl hooted from high up in a sycamore. “Hey, Alec,” Harold called. “Don’t you have a date tonight?”
“A date? With who?” asked the Wexler twins in unison.
“With his dead girlfriend, of course.”
“Shut up, Harold,” Danny shouted back.
“Come on, let’s go find her. She’s got to be around here someplace.” Harold took off up the hill, using his iPhone flashlight on the tilted headstones ahead of him. The Wexlers went after him, asking what name they should be looking for, but Alec didn’t catch Harold’s answer.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Danny said as they walked side by side through the wet grass.
“He’s kind of hard to ignore.” Alec sighed. “Sometimes I really don’t get it, Danny.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why you and Harold are even friends.”
Danny didn’t answer, and Alec was afraid he’d said too much. He turned to the right for a closer look at a mourning figure several paces down the row, and his friend did not follow.
The stone maiden regarded him sorrowfully, and he thought of the last time they’d used the board. No sooner were the words “twenty-fifteen” out of his mouth when he remembered the letter. Sure enough, the pointer had not moved again.
There came a triumphant shout from higher up the hill. “Hey, look! I found her!”
Alec’s feet carried him through the tall grass up the hill to the place where Harold was aiming the flashlight on his phone. It can’t be! I never showed him her portrait. He doesn’t know her name.
It was a squat white stone, mottled with green and brown mold, and a dense thorny bush grew up from behind as if to swallow it. There was no first name on the stone, no dates of birth or death, only the one name:
CLIFFORD
It was small enough to mark the grave of a child. “Hope you brought your shovel!” Harold cried gleefully.
At first Alec was too startled to react. Danny was the only one who knew who the “spirits” were. Finally he opened his mouth, wanting to say something that would sting in return—but he hadn’t been quick enough, and what was the point? So he turned and made his way down the grassy slope, weaving between the crumbling headstones, and hurried past Danny without looking at him. “Hey, wait! Where you going?”
The clouds were clearing now, and the moon appeared—no longer full, but bright enough. The light made Alec’s escape much easier than the climb had been. A shadowy figure loomed by the front gate, but, a moment later, he saw it was only one of the Wexlers, struggling to twist the cap off one of the souvenir whiskey bottles. He hardly looked up as Alec vaulted himself over the crumbling stone wall and set off down the road.
“Alec!” Danny sh
outed from up the hill. “Alec, wait!”
As Alec ran, a horrible too-familiar feeling swept over him, hot and sour and squirming. He’s only asking me to wait because he doesn’t want his mother to find out we’ve been here. He couldn’t keep the secret, and he doesn’t even know I know. He wanted to be alone, to hide someplace where no one else could lie to him.
Mount Hope, Reprised
11.
Josie loved to wander among the headstones as the sun slowly withdrew its light, making her way to the section where Mr. Clifford and her father were buried to lay a fistful of violets at the base of each headstone. It was strange to think of their fathers asleep forever just a few yards apart. Josie had read enough romances to know that when two men have loved the same woman they can never be friends.
Her father’s stone was much smaller and plainer than Mr. Clifford’s; his marker merely said DAVID MALCOLM, 1874-1904. Mr. Clifford’s stone had an angel weeping over it, and a line from scripture: In the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: the dead shall be raised, and we shall all be changed.
Mr. Berringsley had built a mausoleum for his parents at the top of the hill. They’d died when he was very young, but he’d had their remains moved here. It looked like a tiny gray temple, and you could stand at the wrought-iron gate and admire a three-paneled window of Tiffany glass, a sunrise in cream and gold beyond a ring of mountains and a tranquil blue lake, and a vale of irises in the foreground. There were names etched on the marble walls, those of Mr. Berringsley’s parents as well as his sister’s and his own. It seemed wrong to mark a tomb with the names of people who would live on for many years.
A rust-spotted moth flitted to and fro in the cold air, and Cass laughed as she darted between the stones in pursuit of it. She propped Mrs. Gubbins atop one of the markers and ran downhill again, so that the doll appeared to be keeping an eye on its owner.
Josie stood near the Berringsley mausoleum, watching her sister amuse herself. Emily came over to join her. “I’ve been thinking,” her tutor said.
“What of?”
“The boy and the talking board.” Emily smiled absentmindedly as the little girl reached out in vain to capture the moth, but her eyes were troubled. “Doesn’t it give you the shivers? He could be standing on one of our graves at this very moment.” She paused to reconsider this remark. “At some point in the future, that is. Perhaps he’s already been there, and he’s too polite to say so.”
Josie sat down on a mottled gray headstone with a sigh. “I suppose I hadn’t wanted to think of that part.” That morning she had written a rather long letter, telling the boy—or man? He might very well be grown, she would have to ask him his age—about Cass and Emily and her mother, and of the blue tabby cat she had loved and lost. But she had no idea where to put the letter so he would receive it.
Cass scooped up her doll and came trotting over. “Mrs. Gubbins says when you’re dead long enough your headstone falls over and nobody remembers you anymore,” she said breathlessly. “Only it doesn’t matter then, because everyone else is dead too.”
“Don’t be morbid, dear,” Emily said lightly. She took Cassie’s hand and gazed at the doll cradled in the crook of the little girl’s arm. “I wonder—how old is Mrs. Gubbins?”
“I don’t know. I never asked her.” Cassie turned to the doll. “How old are you, Mrs. Gubbins?” She paused, as if listening to the answer. “She says she’s so old she’s lost count.”
“I believe it,” Emily replied, and Josie laughed. Cass let go of her tutor’s hand and ran up to the Berringsley mausoleum, where she sat herself on the steps and went on chattering away to her raggedy old plaything.
“I’ve been thinking, too, of our conversation the night of the rally,” Emily went on. “Do you intend to ask him?”
“About what will happen to us?” Emily nodded. “I don’t know,” Josie said slowly. “Couldn’t I ask for only the happy parts?”
“But what if knowing about the blessings could jeopardize their coming into existence? Perhaps it’s like ‘The Boy Who Kept a Secret.’ If the boy had told his mother he’d dreamed he was king of Hungary, then he never would have been.”
“You’re thinking too much.”
“Better than thinking too little,” her tutor retorted, though not unkindly.
“If you believe the future is fixed,” said Josie, “then there’s no fear of knowing, is there?”
Emily sighed. “All I know for certain is that I’m frightened by all this. I don’t want you girls getting mixed up in something you’ll never be free of.”
Josie looked up at her tutor, the hope and yearning plain on her face. “I don’t want to be afraid. I don’t want to run and hide whenever I meet a thing I can’t understand. And I think . . .” She hesitated. “I think there must be a reason why he’s permitted to speak to us.”
Emily regarded her tenderly. “I won’t ask you to promise you won’t use the board unless I’m with you, for I know that’s the sort of promise you’re bound to break.” Josie suppressed a smile. “All I ask,” Emily went on, “is that you use your good sense. For heaven’s sake, Josie, be careful. And don’t deceive your mother. If she ever asks if you’ve used the board, you must come clean at once.”
Josie considered this speech as she took her tutor’s hand and went down the hill in the early twilight. Emily was right, of course. There was far more reason to fear the living.
Bygones
12.
The next morning Alec could only manage a couple bites of the pumpkin pie pancakes his mother made for him. He had no friends at all. No friends. None.
He could tell his mother wanted to ask, to fix whatever had gone wrong, but there was no making this right. There was a tiny grave in the cemetery with Josie Clifford’s name on it, and if Danny had been a true friend Alec would never have known it was there.
It was November now, gray and gloomy—destined to be the sort of day with no satisfaction in it whatsoever. Alec sat on his window seat overlooking the big maple tree in the front yard, all the leaves now a vivid yellow, and his stomach turned over as he watched Danny round the corner and hurry up the front walk. The doorbell rang a moment later. Don’t let him in, he wanted to shout, but then he’d have to explain himself, wouldn’t he?
Alec heard his mother open the front door and welcome Danny inside, and then Danny’s footsteps thundering up the front stairs. The knock at his bedroom door was loud and elaborate, like a passcode for a secret society they hadn’t invented yet.
“Go away,” Alec said. He wished he could lock the door, but that key was missing too.
The knock came again, aggravatingly cheerful. A minute later Alec heard a jangling sound and a bunch of metallic things spilling onto the hallway carpet, then the creak of the spare-room door. Alec went to the adjoining door and opened it. Danny stood in front of the locked cupboard with two fistfuls of antique keys—just the kind that might finally unlock that little door.
He turned to Alec and grinned. “Are you going to help me open this thing or what?”
Alec folded his arms. “You can’t just come right in like you live here and act like everything’s okay.”
Danny sighed as he plopped himself down on the floor. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Alec. I thought if I told Harold about the letter that he’d have to believe us. I never thought he’d be such a jerk about it.”
Alec shot him a look: I could have TOLD you that would happen.
“I know, I know,” Danny said. “It was stupid, and I’m sorry, and I was up all night trying to think of a way to make it up to you.”
Alec scoffed. “All night, huh?”
“Well, it didn’t take me that long to remember my dad’s stash of keys,” Danny answered earnestly. “But I was wide awake feeling guilty until at least two.”
Something occurred to Alec then, as he sat down beside his friend and beg
an lining up the old keys along one of the planks of the hardwood floor: Danny had messed up, but he hadn’t done any harm. When had his father ever apologized for ruining what had always felt like a happy family? He hadn’t yet, and maybe he never would. Alec glanced up at Danny and felt a swell of something nice in his chest—a mixture of affection and relief.
Danny finished arranging the keys and handed the first to Alec. “Let’s switch off,” Alec said as he slid the tip of the key into the hole. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if one of these keys worked?”
But it didn’t fit. Danny tried the second key, and the fourth, and the sixth. He’d brought more than three dozen keys, but it didn’t take them long to try them all. Most didn’t fit into the keyhole, and the few that did fit refused to turn.
“That’s the last one,” Danny sighed as Alec began scooping up the keys to return to the antiques shop. “Now we’ve tried every stinkin’ key in town.”
“Is it possible this lock can only have one key?” Alec asked. If that were true they’d never be able to open it.
“Dunno. I’ll ask my dad.”
The boys launched themselves onto the spare room bed and regarded the little wooden door in the wall. “I wish I had X-ray vision,” Alec said. There was no way that cupboard was empty.
The Times Machine
13.
Merritt must have told their mother he’d found them using the board, yet she’d said nothing of it, and for days Josie mulled over what this might mean. It was impossible she’d changed her mind and given them permission, for she’d driven them out of the reading room a hundred times and would have been furious had she ever discovered Josie hiding in the back hall. No, Mrs. Clifford was likely waiting to catch them at it a second time, at which point she would deliver her punishment with even greater satisfaction.
Josie understood that her tutor could not be found using the board again. What if Emily were to lose her position? But she didn’t see why she couldn’t use the board on her own, so long as Emily knew nothing about it.
The Boy from Tomorrow Page 6