The Poe Estate

by Polly Shulman

  The sky went dark, and I couldn’t breathe. I put the whistle on the rock beside me, picked up a jagged stone, and smashed it down.

  Shards of bright blue plastic flew in all directions. The hard little ball from inside the whistle lay on the stone, shining like a drop of mercury. It grew brighter and brighter until it devoured my vision, and for a long moment, it was all I could see.

  Then, quietly, it blinked out. The air cleared, and the day came back: fillips of wind, high clouds, bare trees, crows squabbling like siblings. I reached out to touch the little ball, but it wasn’t there.

  Neither was my sister, and I knew she never would be again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  My True Self

  Back at the house, Cousin Hepzibah explained her plan. “The New-York Circulating Material Repository has offered to take this house on a long-term loan. I’m going to sell the land to that unpleasant real-estate man and use some of the money to build a new house—or rather, hire your father to build it. Your family can live there and take care of it for me, and I’ll leave it to you in my will.”

  “Will you live there with us?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m staying in the Thorne Mansion for as long as I live. Longer, probably, if our ancestors are any indication.”

  “In the Poe Annex, you mean?”

  “That’s right. I like it there. It reminds me of my childhood.”

  “But will you be okay there, all alone?” I couldn’t imagine explaining about the Poe Annex to my parents. But without Mom, who would help Cousin Hepzibah get dressed and navigate the stairs?

  “Don’t worry, I won’t be alone,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Several of the retired repositorians live in the annex. I met a very nice man there, Stan Mauskopf—he was Elizabeth’s high school teacher. He’s close friends with Griffin. He’s been living in one of the Henry James houses.”

  “But who will help you with your bath and keeping the house clean?”

  “Elizabeth is lending me some elves from the Grimm Collection. They like old houses, and they love housework. It will be fun.”

  That sounded all right. “I’ll miss you so much! Will the Thorne Mansion stay in the Poe Annex forever?” It hurt to think of losing it along with her. The Thornes were my family, too—it was my ancestral home, just like hers. But I understood. The mansion was falling apart, and none of us could afford to keep it up.

  “That’s up to you,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “I’m lending it to the repository for the rest of my life. It’s yours after that—you can decide what to do with it then. You’ll come visit me there, won’t you?”

  “Of course! All the time. It will be a good excuse to use the family broom.”

  “Good.” She squeezed my hand with her thin, cold hand and smiled her birch-tree smile.

  “Thank you, Cousin Hepzibah! A new house—I can’t even believe it! I don’t know what we would do without you.”

  “Or what I would do without you. It’s a great relief to me to have found a true Thorne before I’m a ghost myself.”

  “Do you think you will be? A ghost, I mean. The house feels a little empty without its ghosts.” My sister certainly was gone. I hadn’t felt anyone over my shoulder since I’d smashed the whistle. The emptiness was almost eerie.

  Cousin Hepzibah smiled wryly. “Yes, I miss Windy and Phinny now that they’re at peace. But they were never the only ghosts here. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens. In any case, I promise you—” She stopped. “No, I think I won’t make any post-animate promises after all.”

  “Good plan,” I said. I had learned my lesson about ghosts making promises. “But, Cousin Hepzibah . . .”

  “Yes, child?”

  “Try to stick around for a while, okay?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  • • •

  I avoided Cole all that week. For once, he took the hint and left me alone on the bus. Maybe I should have worried that I’d lost a friend. But I couldn’t make myself think about it. I didn’t want to think about the two of us at all.

  But I also couldn’t stop thinking about the two of us.

  Had that kiss been real, or only an echo of Phineas’s kisses for Hepzibah Toogood? What had Cole meant by it? Were we just being controlled by the dead hand of Laetitia Flint, who had invented our ancestors?

  Cole was right about one thing: If Flint had ever finished her novel, she would have made a Thorne girl marry a Toogood boy. Rereading the unfinished book, I had no trouble figuring out which ones, either: bland, simpering, virtuous Hepzibah Thorne—the 1840s Hepzibah—and kind, earnest, stout-hearted Robert Toogood, the pair who meet on the cliff walk, where the ghost of Japhet Thorne startles Hepzibah so that she almost tumbles to her death—except, luckily, Robert catches her.

  That made me roll my eyes. Laetitia Flint couldn’t get enough of ghosts startling people at the edges of cliffs.

  But the manuscript stops short, before the couple has time to marry. And now here we were, me and Cole. Were we doomed to fulfill dead Laetitia’s vision? Was that what Cole wanted? What about me—did I want that?

  I sneaked a glance at Cole, who was sitting a few seats ahead of me on the bus, staring out the window with his back toward me. My sister was wrong about him—had been wrong about him, I corrected myself. Cole might be obnoxious, but underneath he was as kind and stout-hearted as any Flint hero. I liked him. And I’d liked that kiss.

  But I hadn’t thought of him that way, as someone you kiss. I hadn’t really thought of anyone that way—anyone living, that is. If I had to pick, out of all the guys I knew, would I pick Cole? Over Andre, for example? Or all the guys I hadn’t even met yet? Would I pick Cole over all of them? It was too soon to say.

  • • •

  When I got home—I’d started thinking of the Thorne Mansion as home, I noticed—Elizabeth Rew was in the parlor, drinking tea with Cousin Hepzibah.

  “Come in, child,” said my cousin. “Elizabeth and I were just discussing the arrangements for moving the house.”

  “Doc and I have been playing with ideas for more efficient ways to transport the annex buildings,” said Elizabeth. “I thought maybe a jinni. Some of the jinn in The Arabian Nights can move palaces around by snapping their fingers. Like that palace in Aladdin.”

  “Aren’t jinn hard to handle?” asked Cousin Hepzibah.

  “Yes, they can be a pain—they hate going back into their lamps. Maybe we can borrow a nut instead. There’s a hazelnut that holds a palace, in one of the German collections. Or was it a walnut in the Paris repository? I’ll have to look into that.”

  “So Andre didn’t come with you?” I asked.

  “No, not this time. He has a chess meet.”

  I thought about asking Andre’s advice about Cole. A year ago I might have asked my sister’s advice. To my surprise, her loss no longer felt like a bitter wound—mostly I just felt wistful and relieved. My choices now really were my own.

  A little while later, Cousin Hepzibah asked, “What do you think, child?”

  “About what? I’m sorry—I was daydreaming,” I said.

  The old woman and the young one smiled at each other, as if I’d confirmed a joke between them. I blushed.

  “Elizabeth,” I asked, “you know that mirror you showed Feathertop? The one that showed him his true self?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think . . . if I looked in it, would it show me my true self, too?”

  “Try it and see.” She hunted in her purse, took out a small mirror, and handed it to me.

  I walked over to the window, where the afternoon sky was pearly-pink from the early spring sunset. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and looked in the mirror.

  The face I saw was different from how I imagined myself. The girl in the mirror looked older, more sure of herself. Both less wei
rd and, paradoxically, less average. Not everyone might consider her attractive, I thought, with her long face and light eyebrows and lashes, but some people would. Most of all, she no longer looked doomed or damaged. That’s what I’d always expected to see when I looked in the mirror, I realized, and what I’d always seen. I searched, but I couldn’t find a trace of it now.

  The future lay open in front of me, undecided, uncursed. Laetitia Flint may have meant to give my story a particular ending, but that didn’t mean I had to.

  I gave Elizabeth back her mirror. “Where is it from?” I asked.

  “What, this? The El Dorado Pharmacy.”

  “What story is that in?”

  “Hm? Oh, I see what you’re asking. None—it’s not fictional. It’s just a mirror I bought in a drugstore near home.”

  How was that possible? “So that wasn’t my true self I was looking at?”

  “Of course it was, child,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Who else’s would it be?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The Cursed Development

  The next morning, I beckoned Cole over on the bus. “You’ve been avoiding me,” I said. I noticed he was still wearing Phineas Toogood’s ring. I slid over to make room for him.

  He sat down beside me. “No, you’ve been avoiding me.”

  “Well, maybe. But I always did, and that never stopped you from pestering me before.”

  He smiled. “You’re kind of hard to resist, Spooky.”

  “I’m really sorry about my sister,” I said. “You don’t have to worry. She’s gone now.”

  “That’s okay, Spooky. It wasn’t that . . . I mean, your sister was scary, and she did push me off a cliff. But it’s not about her. It’s you. I guess I’m not sure what you want.”

  “I’m not, either. But now I want you to not avoid me,” I said. “Deal?”

  “Deal. Is that all you want?” He glanced at my hand, where I was wearing Windy’s ring.

  “Well, pirate treasure would be nice, but that’s not going to happen.”

  Cole laughed. “Don’t be too sure, Spooky. Pirate Toogood’s Treasure can’t be the only novel with pirate gold buried in it.”

  “You’re right. Hey, want to come down to the repository with me this weekend? I bet Andre has some ideas about where to start looking. Maybe we can bring Lola and Amanda, too.”

  “Sure, but it’s going to be hard to fit all four of us on one broomstick. I wonder if my family has any broomsticks, or anything else like that?”

  “Maybe Cousin Hepzibah can help you find them, if you do,” I said.

  “Yes, or maybe we could borrow that flying carpet from the repository,” said Cole.

  “Good idea! We totally need to check out those other collections in the basement! I bet there’s a ton of amazing stuff.”

  “You know, Spooky,” said Cole, “I knew things were going to be interesting that day I sat next to you on the bus. You have to admit, I’m kind of a genius.”

  “You’re kind of a lot of things, Cole, I’ll give you credit for that. And you’re right. I may have underestimated you just a little.”

  • • •

  In the months after I said good-bye to Kitty, spring came early, and everything changed. Sometimes I can’t believe I’m the same person I was a year ago.

  I often go up to the top of Thorne Hill Road, where the old Thorne Mansion used to stand, to visit the grave of Windy, little Jack, and Phinny’s left hand. It’s peaceful up there, with the smell of the roses and the view of the water.

  The developers have had a terrible time getting their resort off the ground: first permit problems, then union disputes, then a fire tore through the architect’s office, destroying the blueprints. They’re saying the project is cursed.

  My parents rented an apartment over a laundromat in North Harbor for my family to stay in while Dad’s building the new house. It feels strange living with Internet and central heating again. Sometimes ghostly tremors make the glasses click together in the kitchen cabinets, but it’s only the big clothes dryers shaking the floor downstairs.

  We haven’t found any pirate treasure yet, but I was right—Andre has lots of good leads. Lola and Amanda Pereira are helping us look, too. At first Andre wasn’t so crazy about us telling other kids about the repository, but Elizabeth brought them to meet Dr. Rust, who gave them some kind of test, which they passed. Now Amanda turns pink and giggles whenever she sees Andre. I think she has a crush.

  The repositorians didn’t use a jinni or a walnut to transport the Thorne Mansion to the Poe Annex after all. Instead, they opened a portal in the graveyard and used a machine Leo Novikov had built to sort of twist the mansion through it. I was worried all the walls and furniture would shatter into toothpicks, but I should have trusted the repositorians. Whenever I visit Cousin Hepzibah—not with Leo’s machine, just the ordinary way, by flying down on a broomstick and passing through the creeping horror of the Lovecraft Corpus—the mansion stands as tall and crooked in the Poe Annex moonlight as if it’s been there for three hundred years, with every table and hearthrug exactly where it should be. Even the crows are still there.

  And sometimes, when I shut my eyes, I can almost feel a ghost of an echo of Kitty.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Laetitia Flint exists (so far) only in this novel, and her books can be found only in libraries of fictional fiction. To read them, consult a spectral librarian.

  My favorite spectral librarians are in the novel Lilith, by George Macdonald (Mr. Raven); various stories by Jorge Luis Borges, especially “The Library of Babel”; and “The Tractate Middoth,” by M. R. James (Dr. Rant).

  All the other authors and books mentioned in this story are real. If you read them, you’ll find many beautiful descriptions, heart-pounding adventures, and chilling visions. You’ll also encounter attitudes that may jar today’s sensibilities. Supernatural fiction from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often reflected the writers’ anxieties, especially about women and people from other cultures, in ways that can seem ugly and shocking today.

  I hope that won’t scare you off. There’s a lot to be learned—about the past, the present, and ourselves—from reading books we don’t agree with. Take them with a spoonful of salt, and remember that our own great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandnieces and -grandnephews will probably need a dose of salt when they read our stories.

  A few more details:

  New York City’s flea markets exist, though I moved them around and populated them with fictional characters. Some of the best markets are gone now, victims of the city’s ravenous appetite for real estate. But perhaps new ones will spring up.

  People often ask me why the New-York Circulating Material Repository has a hyphen in its name. That’s how New York used to be spelled until about one hundred fifty years ago; the repository was founded when everyone hyphenated the city’s name. The New-York Historical Society, a wonderful place to visit, still uses the hyphen too.

  Readers sometimes ask me if the New-York Circulating Material Repository really exists. Not in this universe, as far as I know. If you ever find it, please tell me!

  In case you do want to try reading the books referred to in this one, here’s a not completely comprehensive list of the authors and their works. Except for Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci series and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (both of which I highly recommend for readers of all ages), none of them were written for children, so younger readers who find them hard going may want to try again after a few years.

  Willa Cather: Various short stories, including “Consequences” and “Paul’s Case”

  Robert W. Chambers: Stories from The King in Yellow, especially the title story

  Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories from The Conjure Woman, especially “The Goophered Grapevine” and “Po’ Sandy”

  James Fenimore Coo
per: Various novels, especially The Red Rover and The Water-Witch

  Mary Wilkins Freeman: Various stories from The Wind in the Rose-bush, especially “The Southwest Chamber” and the title story

  Nathaniel Hawthorne: Various novels, novellas, romances, and short stories, including “Beneath an Umbrella,” “The Celestial Railroad,” Fanshawe, “Feathertop,” The House of the Seven Gables, “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure,” The Scarlet Letter, Septimus Felton, Twice-Told Tales, “Young Goodman Brown”

  Washington Irving: Various tales, especially from A History of New-York and The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

  Henry James: Novellas and short stories, including The Turn of the Screw

  H. P. Lovecraft: The Necronomicon and innumerable, unutterable other works

  Thomas Moore: “The Flying Dutchman”

  Edgar Allan Poe: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and many short stories, including “The Assignation,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”

  Sir Walter Scott: Rokeby

  Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and various short stories in Oldtown Fireside Stories, especially “The Ghost in the Cap’n Browne House,” “Captain Kidd’s Money,” and “The Sullivan Looking Glass”

  Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome; various short stories, especially from Tales of Men and Ghosts, including “Afterward” and “The Eyes”

  Herman Melville: Moby-Dick

  Tales from The Arabian Nights

  Finally, the Poe Annex’s Spectral Library contains (among many others) fictional books that appear in the following works:

  Hilaire Belloc: Cautionary Verses

  A. S. Byatt: Possession

  George Eliot: Middlemarch

  Diana Wynne Jones: The Chrestomanci series