Soon we came to a patch of gloom where shiny objects glinted around us—mirrors.
I peeked into one and screamed. A malicious face was staring back at me: an old lady, cruel and covetous, scowling with hatred and misery. “Who is that?” I choked. “That’s not me, is it?”
Everybody stopped. Elizabeth peeked into the mirror. “Oh, that’s just Aunt Harriet, from ‘The Southwest Chamber,’” she said. “By Mary Wilkins Freeman. Aunt Harriet won’t hurt you. She doesn’t like people messing with her stuff, that’s all. Even after she’s dead.”
I tore my eyes away from the scowling lady. “What a lot of mirrors,” I said.
“Yes, they’re very popular in supernatural fiction,” said Dr. Rust.
Griffin gave a low growl.
“Try not to look into them,” said Andre. “Some of them are portals to different dimensions. Or they can transform the viewer. You don’t want to get turned evil, or haunted.”
“I’m already haunted,” I pointed out. Again, I wondered where Kitty was. Still chasing those evil seagulls? The longer I didn’t see her, the more I worried. For years I had felt her presence hovering nearby, even when she didn’t manifest. Now, though . . . now I felt something, that was for sure. Something scary. But it didn’t feel like Kitty.
“Are all the mirrors dangerous?” asked Cole.
“This one’s okay—it just shows invisible spirits,” said Andre, pointing to a large mirror in a mahogany frame.
I edged around to peek in.
I was right. Something was following me—something both as familiar as my own hand and completely unknown. A vast, fiery shape stood behind me, hair and eyes blazing red. It looked as if some evil genius had sculpted Kitty out of smoke and flame.
“Kitty?” I cried, whipping around, but all I saw behind me was the sinister gloom of the Lovecraft Corpus.
“You okay?” asked Andre.
“Yeah, fine.” It was just the lighting, I told myself. Anything would look scary here, especially a ghost. Kitty was my sister. She was nothing to be afraid of.
I didn’t look in that mirror again, though.
“Where’s the Sullivan looking glass?” asked Cole.
“Here,” said Dr. Rust. “Sukie?”
I pulled myself together and turned. I saw a tall mirror, the kind the people at the flea market call Venetian, with a frame made out of pieces of mirror cut into fancy shapes and engraved with scrolled patterns. We could have gotten a lot of money for it, if we’d had it in our flea market booth. And if it hadn’t been haunted.
I stepped closer, peering into it in the dim light. I felt light-headed, and everything went dim and swimmy.
Then my vision cleared, and I saw myself in the mirror. My back, though, not my face, and I wasn’t in the creepy Corpus. I was in my cousin’s parlor, groping at the walls next to the fireplace, pressing and tapping at the panels.
The me in the mirror must have hit a spring, because suddenly one of the panels sprang away. I saw myself reach into a dark, cavernous opening and pull something out.
“Come on, Sukie! Come on, turn around!” I urged the girl in the mirror.
As if she’d heard me, she swiveled toward me. In her arms she was holding a chest—the same one Windy’s ghost had showed me. How could I have confused it with Red Tom’s empty chest? This one was much smaller, with more iron bands and no locks.
“It worked! We’ve got to go home!” I cried. “The treasure’s there! It’s been there all along!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Hepzibah Toogood’s Treasure
When we got back to the old Thorne Mansion, my parents’ truck was still gone. Judging by the sun, it was around noon. Andre glanced at the newspaper lying on our porch. “It’s still Sunday. Good, we got you back early.” he said.
“Sunday, as in the day after we left? But it felt like we were gone for days!” I said.
“Time’s funny in the annex,” said Andre. “Usually a lot longer than out here. Sometimes we even come back before we left, which can be a little inconvenient.” He ducked his head under the threshold, and we all trooped down the hallway to the parlor.
I felt the panels beside the fireplace, pressing and tapping. “I think it was on this side.”
“That sounded hollow,” said Cole. “Right there.”
I pushed on the panel. Nothing. I tapped again, pressing each corner separately. Then I tried with both hands, pushing up. I must have hit a spring, because the panel sprang away with a burst of dust.
Behind it was a dark opening.
I reached in and felt something hard and rectangular, soft with dust, and very, very cold. Carefully I pulled it out and turned to show my friends and my cousin.
For a moment, nobody could move.
“Put it down,” said Andre. “That thing’s got to be heavy if it’s gold.”
“It’s not. Not that heavy,” I said with a sinking feeling. I carried it over to the table and set it down gently.
We all looked at it. I think everyone else was thinking what I was thinking: another empty box.
“There’s no lock,” said Elizabeth.
A dank smell came from the dark hole beside the fireplace. Motes of dust rioted in a slanting sunbeam. I felt a strong presence all around me, something ghostly and concentrated. I recognized the fiery fury that I’d seen in my sister, but at a distance now. Nearer, much nearer and more urgent, something colder and older blasted out a longing so intense I thought my senses might break. Windy and Phinny.
But that wasn’t all. I also felt that hard, dark, ominous presence, the one that had haunted my dreams. It felt harder than my sister at her angriest. Colder, stronger. It felt as evil as the Yellow Sign. It made me want to jam the chest back in the wall and run.
Instead, I took a deep breath and lifted the lid.
It resisted for a few long moments, then opened with a creak. The chest was not empty. Not empty at all.
Inside lay curled a tiny skeleton.
• • •
Windy and Phinny let out an exhalation of sorrow and relief so intense that everyone in the room felt it. Cole and Elizabeth gasped.
I stepped back from the coffin as Windy and Phinny converged around it, glowing gold and white, blazing with love. Phineas looked so beautiful and strong, I felt a wave of longing. He and Windy leaned over the chest together and then seemed to sink into it, their glow dimming as an eclipse dims the moon.
The hard presence let out a blast of rage and frustration that felt as if it might tear my bones apart. I sank to my knees, covering my face, but I could see the ghost through my hands: A thin man, tall, colorless, with the features of my family, emitting so much fury I thought the house must collapse.
“No, Japhet!” someone cried—Cousin Hepzibah, her voice high and strong. “You don’t want to destroy your own home!”
The whole building shook. The plaster in the ceiling cracked. Bits of stone and mortar rained down in the hearth. And then the ghost was gone.
• • •
After a minute, Cole said, “So is the gold somewhere else? Do we have to start the search all over again now?”
“No, child,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Don’t you see? This is Windy’s treasure. It’s Jack Toogood. Her son.”
“If that’s really the treasure,” said Jonathan Rigby, “I relinquish my claim to a third of it.”
I closed the coffin.
“I don’t get it,” said Cole. “Why’s the baby in a box? What’s the box doing in the wall? Wasn’t he supposed to have drowned and been swept out to sea?”
“We’ll probably never know for sure,” said Elizabeth, “since Laetitia Flint never finished writing the novel. But I bet she meant to end the story something like this: When Japhet Thorne killed little Jack, he stabbed him or slit his throat, or something like that—someth
ing that left a mark on the body. He was afraid if anyone saw it, they would know what he’d done. So he hid Jack’s body and said it was swept away to sea.”
“That does sound like something Laetitia Flint would write,” I said. “She loved blood and melodrama.”
And I hated her for it. Instead of riches to rescue my parents from their problems, all we had was a bitter resolution to a sad, sad tale. If you thought about it, this whole miserable story was responsible for the Thorne family curse that killed my sister.
“What do we do with baby Jack now?” I asked. “We can’t just stick him back in the wall.”
“We’ll bury him with his parents,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Best to do it before your parents get home. I’d rather not remind them of dead children.”
• • •
For the second time that weekend, I found myself at the bottom of a pit at the top of a hill, throwing my weight behind a shovel. The ground was cold, wet, and heavy, but not frozen. My arms ached. So did the back of my throat, with tears hammering to get out. Crows watched us from a nearby weeping willow.
Griffin scrabbled in the grave, spraying dirt around. “Thanks, boy, but you’re not really helping,” said Andre.
“Here,” said Cole. “I hit something. I think it’s a coffin.”
With a loud caw, a crow flew down for a closer look. Griffin growled, and it flapped a wing at him disdainfully.
Elizabeth brushed dirt away from a plaque on the long box. “Yes, it’s Windy’s. Let’s put Jack over here, next to her.”
We widened the space beside Windy’s coffin, climbed out, and lowered the box into it.
“Should we say a prayer or something?” asked Cole.
We all said the Lord’s Prayer, and Cousin Hepzibah recited a psalm, the one about green pastures and still waters. Then we shoveled the dirt back in the grave. Jonathan brushed it smooth with his Hawthorne broom, and we covered it with leaves.
“Look!” said Cole.
Despite the winter cold, the rosebush next to Windy’s gravestone was sprouting a bud. It swelled as we watched, growing fuller and fatter until it burst into flower, red as blood, white as death. It smelled just like the Flint rose in the Poe Annex.
Then I saw Windy and Phineas standing beside the rosebush. Sunlight streamed through her, shadow through him; in her arms she held a little boy who glowed like dawn. She turned to me with what looked like my own eyes. “Thank you, Susannah,” she said.
Phineas bent down and kissed me. His kiss was cold, like the one in my dream, but quieter, sadder. That had been a kiss of passion. This was a kiss of farewell.
That was the last time I saw them.
• • •
I was weeping. I didn’t want to stay there beside the grave, so I scrambled up the hill behind the cemetery and sat down at the edge of the cliff, my tears blurring the distant line of the sea, which had retreated since Windy’s time, after the river changed its course.
I didn’t know why I was crying, exactly. Excitement, disappointment. Endings. Emptiness.
Windy and Phinny had found their lost child, but my family hadn’t. My sister was still lost, more lost than ever, and in some ways so was I. Where did I belong? In my parents’ long-gone house, where my feet knew every inch of the floor? In this tall, uncomfortable mansion, with my strange new friends straight out of some gothic novel? In the arms of a vanished ghost who loved a vanished ghost who wasn’t me? Nowhere at all?
Someone sat down beside me. “Hey, Spooky. Don’t cry. It’s okay.” It was Cole. “We’ll figure out some way to help your parents, even without the treasure.”
“That’s not what I’m crying about,” I said.
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know. It’s just all so sad.”
“The baby, you mean? Yes. But it was hundreds of years ago. He would be dead by now anyway.”
“No, just . . . the whole sad story. Everything’s so empty. Even the ghosts are dead. Windy and Phinny . . . they’re gone now.”
Cole put his arm around my shoulder. “Hey, I’m here. If this was a real Laetitia Flint novel, you know how it would end? With the two of us breaking the curse by marrying each other. I bet that’s how she would have ended Pirate Toogood’s Treasure, if she’d ever finished it—with a descendant of the Thornes marrying a descendent of the Toogoods.”
“Are you asking me to marry you or something?”
He laughed. “I think we’re a little young for that, don’t you, Spooky? But admit it. You’ve always been crazy about me.”
“Me? You?!” I looked at him. I saw the bully’s best friend who had made my life miserable for a while. I saw the not-so-bad guy who had spent the past few weeks persistently making himself into my friend. And I saw the silky black hair, high cheekbones, and urgent eyes of his ancestor, Pirate Phineas Toogood.
He leaned forward and kissed me.
It wasn’t a cold kiss, like Phineas’s. It was warm and soft and real—and that made it scary. My first living kiss.
Then suddenly it was over.
With a scream I’d never heard her make before, living or dead, my sister came plummeting toward us like a train off its rails. The cliff edge gave way under Cole, and he fell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Setting Kitty Free
I screamed too, I’m not sure what. “Help!” or “Cole!” or “Kitty!” maybe—or something incoherent.
Whatever it was, someone heard it. Two figures streaked out from behind me and plunged over the cliff after Cole. They reached him just seconds before he crashed on the rocks.
I lay at the edge of the cliff, staring down and trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Andre and Griffin were holding Cole between them in midair, lowering him to the ground. Andre was riding a broomstick—he must have grabbed Jonathan’s—and Griffin . . . Griffin, it seemed, had wings.
My sister was still screaming overhead, but someone was screaming back at her in a voice that somehow overshadowed hers. It was me. “Kitty, go! Just GO!”
For a moment I thought she would bring the cliff down under me too—would bring the house down, and all the trees, and the hills, and the graves, and the whole planet. I braced myself for the fall. But instead, like a sound that gets higher and higher without getting any softer, until it’s too high to hear, Kitty disappeared.
I lay shaking, my cheek pressed into the grass.
“Sukie, it’s okay. Cole’s safe. You’re okay.” Elizabeth kneeled beside me.
I curled on my side and sat up.
“We’re all safe, for now,” said Dr. Rust. “But, listen, Sukie. You have to do something about your sister. She’ll be back, and she’s too dangerous.”
“But how? I can’t control her! She never did anything like that before—she’s getting worse and worse.”
“I know. You’re growing, and she can’t. Ghosts hate that.”
“And she was summoned with hell-smoke, back on Broken Isle, which can’t have helped,” said Elizabeth.
The hell-smoke—that must be what gave Kitty that scream, and that awful strength. She’d been getting angrier for months before it, though. Stronger, and less human. “But what can I do?”
“You have a way to summon her, don’t you?” asked Dr. Rust.
“Yes, she gave me her whistle. She promised to come whenever I blew it. She promised to protect me.”
“Call her, then, and release her from her promise.”
“You’re the only one who can,” said Elizabeth.
“The sooner, the better,” said Dr. Rust. “Do it now. We’ll wait for you by Windy’s grave.”
• • •
I sat on a rock and stared at the horizon where Kitty had disappeared. I saw her in my mind’s eye at the top of our hill, her red curls flying out as she spun around for an impatient moment to call, �
�Hurry up, Sukie!”
I remembered the watermelon smell of her favorite soap and how, when I came in from playing in the dirt, she would pull me to the bathroom and lather my hands under the cold tap. Then I would smell like Kitty for a little while.
I remembered sharing a bedroom with Kitty when we were really little. After Mom had kissed us good night and shut the door, I would beg her in whispers to read to me until at last Kitty would hiss, “All right, but just this once.” We would climb out of our twin beds to kneel by the window, and she would murmur the words of whatever picture book was my favorite that week, turning the pages by the light of the orange streetlight, while I stumbled along, part reading, part remembering.
I remembered wrenching myself out of nightmares to crawl into her bed. “Ice-cube feet,” she would mutter, but she would pull the blanket around me and fold me into her arms.
I remembered her freckles. I remembered the sunset on her hair, that red-orange color I had never seen since.
I remembered the emptiness after she died—the emptiness of the whole world and every individual thing in it.
I put the whistle to my lips and blew.
• • •
A film of the hell-smoke clung to the whistle. It tasted like death. Its sound was no longer my sister’s urgent and familiar proxy, but a scream of pain.
Kitty answered the whistle, darkening the air. She had become a jagged shape with eyes the flame-red of her hair.
“Kitty,” I said, “I’m sorry. I love you. I love you so much! But you have to go now.”
She couldn’t, she told me. I was letting myself get drawn into danger. She had to protect me. Evil people were threatening me. They were hurting me!
“They aren’t hurting me. They aren’t evil,” I told her. I didn’t add, But you are, now. “They’re my friends. You have to stop!”
She couldn’t. She had promised to protect me.
“I release you from your promise.”
The edges of her shape jittered like dark lightning.
“I release you. I don’t need you to protect me. I can take care of myself.” I was crying now, choking on the words. “I love you, Kitty, but I don’t need you anymore.”
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