Not up round the corner—I couldn’t have seen that. Opposite me, a pale, thin shape, hovering just where the other passage crossed over, with the dark cave opening between it and me. My heart belted against my rib cage and my mouth opened to yell, but nothing came out. I stood there, stuck, staring.
So did the thing. It had a mouth, and eyes, in a white face, with a white sort of dress below. And then my mind took hold and I made out it was only a girl.
That’s when I’d sighed, the selfsame sigh I’d just given now, standing in the selfsame place. It had to be a girl Miss van Deering had staying, someone I hadn’t been told about. (No, my grandmother hadn’t cooked any extra supper, but I didn’t think of that right away.) What’s more, she was as scared as I was. It would be a bad place, that cave in the wall, whichever way round you came to it, specially if the house was strange to you. But at the same time it made it all right for me, having someone else there.
“It’s OK,” I said. “I’ll do the light. You wait there.”
I switched off the light behind me and let go of the door. That meant it was pitch dark so I couldn’t see her anymore, but I still didn’t mind. Using the rope and the wall, I felt my way up and round the corner and slid my hand about till I got to the switch. It was always a bit further than you thought. The light came on and she was still there, still sort of hovering.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Nothing nasty waiting. Come along.”
She didn’t seem to hear me so I went back and gave her my hand to hold. She took it and held it tight. Hers was small and skinny and colder than mine, but it was alive all right. I mean she wasn’t some kind of ghost, in case that’s what you’re thinking. I’d never thought she was, after those first couple of moments.
Soon as she was on the stairs she put out her other hand and groped around the switch as if she couldn’t see it and when she got it she tried to turn it on again, only the wrong way, side to side instead of up and down. And then she let go of my hand and hurried up the stairs. She took me by surprise so she was a bit ahead of me when I got to the top and she was already doing the switches. There were three of them on a sort of panel by the first door. The top one did the far end of the passage, the middle one did the place where the attic stairs went up, and the bottom one did the light on the stairs we’d just come up by. She did all three, side to side again, so the lights didn’t change of course. She didn’t seem to mind. She turned and said something to me, too quiet to hear but it looked like just thank you, and ran off down into the dark.
I switched the lights on to watch where she went to. She stopped halfway along to turn off the middle light, only it didn’t go out, and then ran on almost to the end. That light didn’t go out either when she switched it off. She paused, pulling herself together, put out her hand to open a door, and walked quietly through.
I was bothered by the business with the switches and the lights—not scared, exactly, but feeling there was something wrong, something that didn’t make sense—and I didn’t want to leave it like that so I kept the lights on and crept along to the end of the passage, which I wasn’t supposed to, and listened at the door she’d gone through. I knew it was the right one because it had the switches by it, and anyway it was the last door that side and there weren’t any others for some way back.
I couldn’t hear anything, and when I switched the light off I could see there wasn’t any light coming under the door, so with my heart starting to hammer again I slowly turned the handle and gave the door a push. It was locked, but when they did that they usually left the key somewhere handy, so I hunted around and found half a dozen keys in a china pot on a shelf back down the corridor. Most of the doors along here had numbers on them, like in a hotel, and the keys had labels to match, but the door I’d tried hadn’t got a number and there was just this one key labeled “Nursery.” I took that back and tried again. The lock made a sort of screech, but nobody called out or anything, so I carried on and opened the door a couple of inches. It was dark inside, and still no one said anything so I pushed it wide open, till I could see in by the light in the corridor.
There wasn’t anyone there. What’s more, there hadn’t been, not for a long time. It was a large L-shaped room with two windows over on the far side, which had never been blacked out. It was pretty well empty with just a huge old cupboard and a couple of chests. The floor was bare boards. The reason there’d not been more doors this side of the corridor was that this room had three other rooms opening off it, one in the bit left by the L and the other two on the other side, which was the end of the house so they could have windows of their own. They hadn’t been blacked out either, and there was still a last bit of daylight left, just enough to see by. With my heart still hammering away I crept in and looked around. One of the rooms was empty, and the second one had only an old bathtub hanging on the wall, the sort you have to fill out of jugs, but the one right in the corner had a child’s bed in it and a big old dolls’ house. The girl I’d seen wasn’t anywhere. I even looked in the cupboard, which had shelves on one side and a lot of old clothes hangers on a rail on the other. The chests were full of old blankets.
By now I was really bothered and pretty scared, but I still didn’t think the girl could have been any kind of ghost. I’d held her living hand in mine, hadn’t I? I’d felt how hard she’d gripped, still trembling a bit from being afraid of what might have been waiting for her on the stairs. I certainly wasn’t afraid of her. But anyway I knew I’d be in trouble if my grandmother came up and found me poking around where I wasn’t supposed to be, so I went back out and lit my candle and switched the lights out and went on up to bed.
It would have been school as usual next day, and I must have spent a bit of time working out what to do. My problem was getting to that place on the stairs at the right time, and the day before I must have been going to bed early—I don’t remember why. Anyway, come teatime I told my grandmother I’d got a headache, and after I’d done the dishes I made out it was worse and I wanted to go to bed. It meant her missing her crib, but to make up she could start her nightcap early, not having me in the room.
Mind you, I’d nothing to go on to tell me the girl was going to show up again same time, there on the stairs. It was only the way she’d hurried up the stairs and then run along the corridor, made me think she might be afraid of being late for something, and even then it could have been just that one night, not regular. I’d got to give it a try, though. There wasn’t anything else. So twenty past eight I was up at the red baize door waiting and hoping, and not too soon either, because it can’t have been a couple of minutes before she came creeping round the corner and stopped. And she must have been expecting me too, because she came along and put her hand in mine before I’d finished finding the switch. And yes, it was a real hand again, small, and somehow bony and pudgy together, but not shivering like it had the night before.
We both had to do the light again, but she wasn’t in a hurry this time and she hung on to my hand all the way up the stairs, so her arm was touching mine and it was as real as her hand. Maybe she was thinking about the same kind of thing because she gave me a squeeze as if she was making sure, and when I squeezed back she smiled. When I’d first seen her I’d thought she was some sort of ghost so I’d made her thin and spooky, but really she was a bit fat, and not what anyone would call pretty, with dark hair done into pigtails and a piggy sort of face.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
She looked puzzled and said something back, but so quiet I couldn’t hear she was making any sound at all, but I knew she’d been asking me what I’d said. OK, I’d whispered, but not that soft, so I tried putting my mouth right against her ear before I said it again. This time she jumped and looked really surprised, and then reached up and put her mouth right against my ear.
“Adalina,” she said. “It’s horrid, isn’t it?”
I jumped, like she had. It was weird, because I’d heard her all right, but not the usual way, in my ea
r—no, right inside my head somehow.
I pulled myself together. Really stupid, we must have looked, if anyone could have seen us, standing at the top of the stairs switching our heads to and fro to talk into each other’s ears.
“It’s not as bad as Cyril,” I told her.
“I have to go,” she said. “If I am late … You will be here tomorrow?”
“I’ll try,” I said.
We worked the top switches, both of us, and this time I went with her right along the corridor, waiting for her to turn the switches off again, though the lights stayed on even so. When we got to the nursery door she gave me a prim little smile and took hold of the handle and turned it and pushed, only the door didn’t open.
Instead, her hand went through the door when she pushed, just sliding in, like a spoon going into thick soup, and then the whole of her slid through and was gone.
6. Miss Tarrant
I wasn’t scared, like you’d have thought, seeing Adalina walk through the door like that, and I was sort of prepared for it by that business with the switches. I could see from that, without having to think about it, that things were happening for her that weren’t happening for me, and the other way round, and the same with going into the nursery after her the night before, and finding it all shut up and empty. But it was weird all the same, seeing her slide out of sight like that. I tried the door handle, but the door was locked, which was how I’d left it the night before, and the door was an ordinary hard door I couldn’t have slid into to save my life.
But like I say, I wasn’t scared, because Adalina just wasn’t scary. She was as ordinary as the door. I’d held her hand in mine and I knew she was real, and that was all there was to it. I didn’t bother unlocking the door and going in after her, because I knew I wouldn’t find anything different from the night before. Instead I went back along the corridor and lit my candle and switched off the lights and went up to my room and got into bed and blew out my candle and lay there in the dark, thinking about it.
You’ll have worked out by now, I daresay, that we came from different times, Adalina and me. I hadn’t, though I could see her dress was old-fashioned. But then you’ve probably read stories and seen stuff on TV about people from different times, and the only book I’d read like that was The Time Machine where it doesn’t go into this business about not being able to change anything in any time except your own. Besides, in stories and things you don’t have to believe it, it’s just an idea you go along with for the sake of the story. But when it’s happening to you you’re trying to think about something you just aren’t set up to believe in, and that’s difficult for anybody, leave alone a kid of twelve who doesn’t know much about anything.
In the end I decided there were two Theston Manors, just the same as each other, and in the same place, only two different lots of people lived there, and they couldn’t see each other or hear each other, so they didn’t know about each other and they couldn’t change anything at all in the other one’s Theston Manor. Only because both of us, Adalina and me, had been scared stiff by the same thing—what I called the cave—and at the same time in our two different Theston Manors, our fear had somehow sort of joined up and let us through to each other. But only as far as each other. We still couldn’t change anything in the other one’s Theston Manor. We couldn’t even hear each other, talking the usual sort of way, because voices are sounds and sound travels by moving the air around—I’d read about this in a Pears’ Cyclopedia back at the orphanage—and it was no use me stirring the air in my Theston Manor with my voice because it still didn’t stir anything in hers. Mind you, I didn’t get that far all at once, that second night, but that’s how I was thinking by the time, four or five nights after, when she was really late.
I’ll have to go back. You’ll have spotted I had a problem. I couldn’t go telling my grandmother night after night that I’d got a headache or she’d have decided I was sickening for something, and then she’d have started dosing me with Syrup of Figs, which was always the first thing she tried—she’d have given me Syrup of Figs if I’d broken my leg, most likely, just to be doing something till the doctor came. So around quarter past eight I made out I was getting sleepy. I don’t suppose I was much of an actor, because she just looked at me, sharp, and said, “All right, off you go, you great baby. It’s a heap better than coming up and finding you dithering on them stairs.”
So that was all right, and I was there before Adalina again and we went up together holding hands like before, and when we got to the top she trotted off into the dark. But next night I’d done the dishes early enough for my grandmother to get out the cards for crib, so all I could do when it was getting toward time was start yawning and playing all wrong until she lost patience—she’d a short temper at the best of times—and gave me a clip over the ear and sent me off. I really raced up the back stairs and Adalina was there already waiting so we ran on up together and it seemed she was just about on time. I managed it that way for the next few nights, hurrying through the dishes so as to get a few hands of crib in, and then running off, but it meant I couldn’t hang around on the stairs explaining to Adalina what the problem was or finding out about what was bothering her end, so I hadn’t got any further with working things out by the night she was really late.
A good ten minutes I must have hung about waiting before she showed up. Interesting point, come to think about it. I was there all that time, where I’d stood night after night scaring myself silly with ideas about what might be waiting for me round the corner, but now I wasn’t scared at all. I was just worried stiff about where Adalina had got to. After a bit I switched off the light on the back stairs and let go of the door and felt my way up and round and switched on the other light, no problem at all, and then I went on along round the corner where she used to show up from. This brought me out at the top of the main stairs, which I’ve already told you about, when I was sneaking down that evening to read Ivanhoe. I’d had my candle then, but they were even creepier now, with only a bit of light coming from round two corners behind me, where I’d left the top light on, a great hollow cavern of a place I couldn’t see much more of than just where I was standing and the bit of blackout sagging above my head, so I didn’t see Adalina coming until she’d pretty well reached the top.
Really like a ghost she looked now, coming up those last couple of steps so slow, so dragging in her long pale dress, and not a sound from her hard boots on the marble, or not that I could hear in my world. She was crying.
“What’s up?” I said in her ear.
“I’m going to kill myself,” she said. “I’m going to jump out of the linen room window.”
“What for?” I said. I knew where the linen room was, if it was the same one my grandmother and me went to get fresh sheets from when it was time for changing our old ones. I’d had a look out of the window, too. Being at the back of the house it was three storeys down to the paving of the back yard.
“She’ll put me in the cupboard and I’ll go mad, like Mamma did,” said Adalina. “Mamma killed herself, you know. She drank laudanum, but I haven’t got any.”
“Well, you’re not jumping out of any window,” I said. “I’m stronger than what you are, and I’ll stop you.”
“She’ll put me in the cupboard and I’ll go mad,” she said.
“No you won’t, because I’m coming with you,” I said.
“She won’t let you,” she said. “And she’ll tell Father about you.”
“She won’t know I’m there,” I said. “She can’t see me. You’re the only one who can see me.”
She stared at me, and I realized she hadn’t worked it out far as I had.
“You’re … you’re …,” she began, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“I’m as real as you are,” I said. “Real to you, like you are to me. Look, is that door open or shut?”
“Shut, of course,” she said. “You can’t go in there. That’s Father’s bathroom.”
�
�Just watch,” I said.
I opened the door and walked in. It was a bathroom, like she’d said, but bigger than my room in the attics and with a bath you could have washed a horse in, and shiny brass taps and fittings. I came out again and shut the door behind me. She was still staring, but just amazed, not scared.
“And you’re not going mad neither,” I said, “not unless both of us are. I tell you, she won’t see me any more than I’ll see her. She’ll never know I’m there, holding your hand. Come on, give it a go now.”
She let me take her hand and lead her on round the corner and up the stairs. She was in a sort of daze and I had to put her fingers on the switches so she could turn the lights on and off in her world. I stopped outside the door I’d seen her go through.
“I’ll go first,” I said in her ear. “Then you’ll know she can’t see me. You’re coming, though, aren’t you? You’re not going to chicken out on me, Adalina. And you’ve got to remember not to look at me direct, in case she spots something’s up. Right?”
She nodded and I opened the door and went in. I left it open with the light still on outside, so I could check she wasn’t going sneaking off to the linen room. This room—the nursery—wasn’t any different to how I’d seen it before, just the cupboard and the couple of chests and the bare boards. Like I said, there wasn’t any blackout up, and no bulb in the fitting, so I left the door open and the light on in the passage, for me to see what was happening. I didn’t think anyone would spot it from outside, because the windows were at the back of the house with just woods and fields beyond.
You’ve got to remember that as far as Adalina was concerned I’d just walked through a closed door, like I’d done with the bathroom down below, and now she couldn’t see me anymore. I watched her sort of brace herself and then she took a deep breath and put out her hand and took hold of a handle that wasn’t there in my world and pushed open a door I’d only just opened and walked in. She was pretty good, just one quick peek at me to check, and then looking up and over my shoulder at something else.
The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Page 5