Breathe: A Ghost Story (Fiction - Middle Grade)

by Cliff McNish

  “Jack!” Sarah shouted up. “Where are you? Downstairs now! Food’s ready!”

  Jack didn’t dare take his eyes off the Ghost Mother.

  She sat immobile for a moment, the hatred draining from her face. Then she forced out a smile. After all the fury, the smile alarmed him more than anything else she might have done.

  “Help me, Jack,” she said softly. “Will you help me?”

  “Of . . . course,” Jack replied, anxious to pacify her. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing much. Go to your room and fetch a pillow. That is all.”

  “Why?”

  “Please do it, Jack.”

  Jack did. When he returned, he instinctively held the pillow between himself and the Ghost Mother.

  She gazed at him solemnly. “I used to hope—with all of my heart I used to hope—that I’d grow old before Isabella died. Can you imagine what the hope of a mother for a dying child might be like, Jack? How unyielding it would be? How resilient?”

  Jack couldn’t, but nodded to keep her calm.

  “So, this is what I would do sometimes,” the Ghost Mother went on. “I would daydream that when I looked in the mirror my hair had turned white. White, absolutely white. That I was grown old, yet my Isabella was still, somehow, alive. But death is stronger than love or dreams, Jack. Isabella was like a beautiful moon in wane, the slow way she faded from me, but she faded nonetheless. And toward the end, when I could no longer bear to see her suffering, I would often clutch a pillow to my chest much the way you are doing now, Jack. I would hold the fabric up to the light and consider what I might do with it, if I only had the courage. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “Jack!” Sarah called up again. “How much longer do I have to wait? Everything’s getting cold!”

  “Answer her,” the Ghost Mother snapped. “We don’t want any interruptions.”

  “One minute!” Jack managed to call down.

  “Not one minute! Now! I mean it!”

  The Ghost Mother glanced toward the staircase.

  “Indulge me, Jack,” she said. “This will not, after all, take more than a minute or so. Put the pillow against your face.”

  “Against my face?”

  “Yes. See what it feels like.”

  Jack coughed twice, his throat closing slightly.

  “Are you afraid, Jack?” the Ghost Mother said in an undertone. “I’m a ghost, but I’m also a mother, or was once upon a time. What harm could I possibly do to you? Put it against your nose and lips.”

  “No,” Jack said firmly.

  “No?”

  “No. I’m not going to do it. I won’t.”

  The Ghost Mother ran her hands across the pillow, as though she might force him to, then smiled and nodded. “It is not a pleasant prospect, is it? I once put such a pillow against my own mouth, fastening it with ropes. I wanted to know what it would feel like if the time ever came when I decided out of mercy to use it on my beloved.”

  “Jack?”

  Sarah stood in the open doorway. She’d come up to tell

  Jack off, but as soon as she noticed the way he held the pillow she forgot about that. She saw the rocking chair, and the way he seemed to be listening.

  “Jack, who are you talking to?”

  “Me! Me! Me!” the Ghost Mother screamed. She glared at Sarah with naked hostility, her hands writhing in her lap. “Is she truly a better parent than I was?” the Ghost Mother snarled. She turned angrily to Jack. “If you had to, which mother would you choose? Me or her?”

  “Her,” Jack said at once.

  The Ghost Mother stared at Sarah with contempt, then retreated backward out of the door, down the staircase and away.

  “Jack, what’s wrong?” Sarah asked.

  Seizing his inhaler, Jack took a dosage and launched into everything that had happened. He tried to slow down, to make it believable, but the story included pillows, ropes, and frightened, wispy children this time: it was wilder than ever. His attempts to reassure Sarah that it had nothing to do with his dad only made her more convinced it did. You idiot, he thought afterwards. You stupid, stupid idiot! Now look what you’ve done. You’ve really panicked her. She’s so freaked out she’s not even arguing with you.

  Sarah waited until Jack was calmer. Then she said, “We’re leaving this place. Tomorrow morning. As soon as the doctor’s examined you, and I’m sure it’s safe for you to travel. I know you don’t want to, Jack, but that’s just what’s got to happen. I’m sorry.”

  For the next hour or so, Sarah never let Jack out of her sight. Three times she tested his peak flow number. On each occasion it was only borderline okay. There was a guarded silence between them over lunch and, seeing her expression, Jack knew he’d never change her mind about leaving. Even if he shut up about the dead people in the house for the rest of the day, her mind was obviously made up. She’d force him to go, and once the front door was locked would never allow him back.

  In the afternoon, he asked if he could lie down, and she said yes, but insisted on staying with him until he fell asleep. Jack thought he wouldn’t get any rest at all, but he did—wrestling with his asthma always exhausted him. And it was lucky that he did sleep, because when Jack woke again, hours later, Sarah had gone back to her own room, and someone else was near him.

  It wasn’t the Ghost Mother. The bedroom curtains were slightly parted, and through the dappled late-afternoon sunshine, suspended in the air, there floated a boy.

  Jack saw him clearly this time: a boy about his own age, with short blond wavy hair, wearing a red T-shirt. Jack could distinctly see freckles on the bridge of his nose, and for a moment he couldn’t help thinking how comical freckles looked on a ghost. But when he looked more closely at the boy’s face, Jack’s smile faded.

  “Oliver?” he whispered.

  Overjoyed that Jack could see him, Oliver waved his arms. The waving motion lifted his body, buoying him up toward the window. The two boys stared at each other silently for a moment, only a few feet of sunshine and dust between them. Then Oliver started to shout at the top of his voice. Jack strained to hear, but couldn’t. The words were too weakly spoken. No, it’s not the boy’s voice that’s weak, Jack realized. It’s his spirit. It’s weaker than the Ghost Mother’s. My gift isn’t strong enough to pick it up yet.

  Oliver stopped shouting, working on another method to communicate. He kept one eye on Jack, the other on the open doorway.

  “The Ghost Mother?” Jack murmured. “You don’t want her seeing you? Is that why you’re looking that way?”

  Oliver nodded, and Jack closed the door. When he came back, Oliver had an idea and tried writing on the window with his finger.

  “Wait,” Jack said, when Oliver’s finger made no impression. “Try this.”

  Jack breathed on the windowpane. His breath misted up the glass. The condensation only lasted a few seconds before it evaporated, but that was enough for Oliver to hastily trace three words with his finger:

  GRILL EBONY TREE

  Jack shrugged. Was this supposed to be some sort of message? The words made no sense. “In code?” he mouthed.

  Oliver nodded. He wanted to write the words out plainly, but the risk that the Ghost Mother might slip in and see them was too great.

  “Okay, but what’s the code?” Jack said. “I don’t understand.”

  He breathed on the window again and Oliver wrote the same words. This time, though, he pointed at the first letter of each word:

  GRILL EBONY TREE

  Jack reached for a scrap of paper and a pen in his bedside drawer. Oliver waited impatiently, always keeping a close watch on the doorway, and when Jack was ready wrote one rapidly dissolving word after another. This time he only stopped to let Jack renew his breath on the windowpane:

  GRILL EBONY TREE OWN USE TANK

  OTHER FREE TONGUE HOUSE INTO SEA

  HILL OR US SHOOT EEL OGRE REAL

  SLEEP HALL EACH LOSS LOUSE

  TALL ROUND YOUNG
TIP OUT

  HORROR UNDER REAL TIE

  YELLOW OUTER UDDER

  Jack looked over the message. Afterward, he stared at Oliver and nodded bleakly. He didn’t understand why Oliver had such a frightening message to convey, but he had no doubt the subject of the message was meant to be the Ghost Mother.

  Oliver, elated at being understood, thumped his fists, though he still didn’t take his eyes off the doorway. Jack wondered what risk he was taking to get this message to him. Or was the boy lying? The Ghost Mother had said the children would lie. No, he didn’t think Oliver was lying.

  “Tell me more,” Jack said. “Your spirits aren’t meant to be here, are they? Where should you all be?”

  Oliver wrote:

  TERROR HERO END

  ORDINARY THINK HEAR EAT RED

  SMILE IDIOT DENT EAGLE

  Jack stared at the words. Some distant part of him knew about this place, recognized it. He didn’t want to wait for clumsy words on a window to find out more.

  “I’m going to try something,” he told Oliver. “Don’t be afraid. I’ve never done it before, but the Ghost Mother showed me. Stay where you are.”

  Jack put his hand out to Oliver’s face.

  Oliver was surprised, almost pulled away, but Jack coaxed him forward. He had no idea how to extract what he needed from Oliver’s mind, but he knew he had to find a memory that would tell him more about this house. It wasn’t easy. He wasn’t sure how much of Oliver he needed to touch. More than just his hand, he discovered. He had to press his whole body against Oliver. Uncomfortable, Oliver started to drift away—then their minds connected.

  It was a fairly recent memory. Somehow, even before it began, Jack knew it was going to be about the death of the old woman who had last been in the farmhouse.

  He saw this: her arthritic hands, holding a book. It was a cool, late June evening and she was in bed, the four ghost children, including Oliver, gathered beside her, reading with her as she turned the pages of a novel. She’d reached page 257 when she abruptly—stopped. She removed her reading glasses, and stared in an unfocused way out of the window. “Oh,” she murmured, almost laughing at a tiny pain shooting through her chest, it was so small.

  She put the book down. She did not mark the place as usual. She reached for the frame of the bed, but her trembling hand never made it there. Just for a moment her face twitched painfully, and then she lay still.

  The four ghost children huddled together to watch what occurred next. But it was no real surprise to them. It was no surprise at all. They knew exactly what would happen. They knew because it had happened to each of them when they died.

  The old woman’s loved ones came for her.

  There were many of them after such a long life: her deceased friends, departed family members, even a long-dead childhood companion who’d waited a whole lifetime to greet her again. All those who had known and cared about her before they died, came now. Just as the loved ones of Ann, Charlie, Gwyneth, and Oliver had reached for them at the instant of their death, so those of the old woman came to ease her away to the Other Side.

  And her spirit went with them. Willingly, easily, she raised her hands to the loved ones, and as she did so they swept her from her wizened body and carried her away. But, just before she passed beyond to the Other Side, she briefly saw the ghost children. All those years she had lived with them as intimate acquaintances, never suspecting they were with her. But now, a spirit herself, she saw them standing in their death clothes on her bed. And they were screaming.

  “Please! Let me go with you! I’m Gwyneth! Don’t you see me?”

  “Take me as well! Don’t leave me here!” cried Charlie, lifting his emaciated arms and shouting out his mother’s name.

  But it was Oliver’s reaction that was the most extreme. His own loved ones had come for him only eleven years before, and the memory was still like a fresh wound. Not caring what the other children thought of him, he rode the air currents up to the plaster on the ceiling, pressed his face there, and pleaded, promising anything, anything if only the old woman’s loved ones would take him with them as well.

  But the old woman was lifted up and away. Her loved ones could do nothing for the children: they had eyes only for the one they loved; they could not even see the other spirits in the house. And so the children were left behind again.

  Oliver, in Jack’s room, backed away, shaking.

  “There is only one chance for the loved ones to take you, isn’t there?” Jack said, beginning to understand. “At the instant of death. Only then. That is when it is meant to take place. If anything stops your loved ones from reaching you at that moment, they can’t come back.”

  Oliver nodded grimly.

  “Did the Ghost Mother stop them from carrying you away?”

  Another nod.

  “How? She’s done something to you, hasn’t she? She brought you to this house, and now she’s stopped you from leaving, hasn’t she?”

  SNAKE HATE

  Oliver stopped at the beginning of the sentence, and Jack sensed why: the Ghost Mother was nearby. They could both detect her, slinking up the staircase. Clearly anxious to leave, Oliver beckoned Jack to breathe on the window one last time, and delayed long enough to write the following words:

  SNAKE HATE EACH

  SILENT THIEF ON LOSE ENDED

  OWN UNDER RETURN

  SKIN OTHER UNDONE LEAF SHINE

  After Oliver left, Jack had an overwhelming desire to make sure his mum was safe. He checked her room and found her still asleep, breathing shallowly. To keep her safe meant leaving—Oliver’s first message had been clear enough. But what the Ghost Mother had done to the children sounded even more frightening. Jack couldn’t just leave in the morning without knowing what it meant. Of course, if it was true, the Ghost Mother would only deny it. She might even punish Oliver for telling him. The answers, he sensed, were somehow linked to Isabella’s death.

  Jack didn’t delay this time. He carried Isabella’s rocking chair back into his own bedroom and sat in it. Let the Ghost Mother erupt in anger if she wanted; he was better prepared now if she did.

  But as soon as he touched the hard wooden seat, all thoughts of the Ghost Mother were banished from Jack’s mind. Instead, another place murmured its existence—a distant place Jack had been on the verge of discovering since his dad passed away.

  “The Other Side,” he whispered, remembering Oliver’s words.

  It was real: he could feel it; in balance with the living world, a world of the dead; a dimension beyond; and it was a warm place, not cold or distant; an existence where the dead were welcomed. Jack gripped the chair, and as he did all the billions of souls on the Other Side began to open up to him. And, amongst them, one particular soul, special to Jack.

  “Dad,” he gasped. “Dad!”

  He could not hear or see his father, but he sensed him there, on the Other Side, waiting for him.

  Jack trembled, all thoughts of the Ghost Mother gone. Could he somehow make contact with his dad? Was it possible? Find a way to reach out to the Other Side, even find a way to bring him back?

  Even as the idea blossomed in his mind, some part of Jack recognized that he was not meant to—that souls should not be drawn from the Other Side, not even his dad.

  But Jack couldn’t help himself. If there was a possibility, he had to try. Nothing else mattered in that moment. I’ll only take one soul from there, he thought. And not for long. Just to say good-bye. Closing his eyes, easing back in the rocking chair, Jack willed his father back from the dead.

  But it was not his father who came.

  Jack did not notice the moment Isabella’s spirit appeared in our world. She arrived unseen, like a tranquil sound from a far place, and shivered behind Jack, getting used to the eeriness of being amongst the living again. Frightened, but recognizing that this was a room from her old house, she ran her hands down her torso. Her body was even more tenuous than those of the ghost children. It had no strength, and
just the surface appearance of flesh. Even so, no spiritualist armed with séances or other crafts had ever possessed a talent to summon the dead in quite the same way as Jack, and though Isabella should never have made it so fully back, she had. His gift had shattered all the rules. The boundaries between the worlds were only ever meant to be broken when a person died, and their loved ones arrived from the Other Side to take them away. But Jack alone had summoned Isabella. His gift was unique, and there were no precedents for what would happen next.

  Isabella stared wildly at him, afraid of Jack and of being here: what did it mean? A boy had summoned her! A boy no older than she had done this! Isabella knew little about boys. Throughout those few years she had been well enough to attend school during her short life, boys were rigidly segregated from girls. After that, she had only glimpsed them occasionally from her room.

  She glanced nervously at Jack, then took a moment to gaze out of the window. For years, from her rocking chair, she had stared out from this very window into the garden. In those days her mother had cultivated forget-me-nots, cowslip, foxgloves, and coltsfoot for her, scented blue violet and rambling rose. All were gone now, replaced by weeds. Yet the sun was in the sky, and trees swayed in a mild summer breeze. Seeing the distant ripening cornfields, Isabella held back a gasp.

  So beautiful, she thought. Oh, I’d forgotten. . . .

  How extraordinary it felt to be alive again, even this peculiar half-life! The Other Side had its own wonders and glories, but nothing like the sight of wind through corn. Isabella shuddered, spotting a mirror on one wall of the room. She wasn’t sure she wanted to look into it, but she did. It was her death-look she saw there, the final bitter expression. She spent some time pulling her face around, trying to improve it. Then she saw Jack staring at her.

  “Isabella!” he murmured.

  “Not what you expected, eh?” she replied, more boldly than she felt. “Meddling with death, without knowing what you are doing? Got more than you bargained for, boy?”