The Girl With the Ghost Machine

by Lauren DeStefano

  There was a figure standing hunched over the machine, bathed in its light. The figure was poking at the gears and knobs, as though trying to find the button that would make the machine work.

  Emmaline blinked at the figure several times, trying to convince herself that she was dreaming, for this was surely too strange to be real. But seconds passed, and she didn’t wake.

  “Mademoiselle Allemand?” she said.

  The figure at the machine started and turned around to face her. It was undoubtedly Mademoiselle Allemand.

  “What are you doing here?” the old woman rasped.

  “I live here,” Emmaline said. “Remember?”

  “But you should be in bed,” Mademoiselle Allemand replied. “Children should be asleep at this hour.”

  “You should be next door,” Emmaline said. She had reached the bottom of the stairs, and she held out a cautious hand. “I can walk you back.” Mademoiselle Allemand was old, and old people got confused sometimes, she knew. If she was lucky, that was all this was.

  Mademoiselle Allemand muttered something about children being inconsequential and returned to prodding at the machine.

  Emmaline knew a great deal about manners. Manners had been very important to her mother. And once to her father, before the machine came about. She knew that it would be rude to pry her neighbor away from the machine. She also knew that if her father returned home and discovered Mademoiselle Allemand in his basement, no good would come of it.

  “Please stop that,” Emmaline said. “You aren’t going to make it work. It’s just gears and metal. You’re wasting your time.”

  “You’re a fibber,” Mademoiselle Allemand said. “I heard that dog barking. Woke me out of a sound sleep, it did. I looked in through the window, and I saw that dog disappear like a ghost.”

  Emmaline’s stomach twisted. There was a strip of cardboard barricading the tiny window, but upon closer inspection, there was a tiny sliver through which someone could spy. Hastily, Emmaline fitted it back in place, but the damage had already been done.

  Mademoiselle Allemand hit the side of the machine with her fist. “Granville?” she said. “Gran, are you in there?”

  Emmaline lurched forward and grabbed her arm. “Please,” she said. “My father will be very angry if his machine is damaged.”

  “Don’t be greedy!” Mademoiselle Allemand cried, and Emmaline thought she heard the threat of tears in the words. “You’re only a little girl. You haven’t been around for many years. You don’t know what it feels like to have lost someone a very long time ago.”

  At that, Emmaline took a step back, and her voice softened. “Who did you lose?” she asked.

  Mademoiselle Allemand looked at her, considering. Some of her silver hair had come loose from its bun, making her appear somewhat wild. Her eyes were made bluer by the machine’s glow, and in those eyes Emmaline could see that Mademoiselle Allemand had once been young, like her.

  “My older brother,” Mademoiselle Allemand finally said, with great hesitation. “He died long before you were born.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother,” Emmaline said.

  “Yes,” Mademoiselle Allemand replied brusquely. “You don’t know a great many things.”

  Emmaline ignored that. The Sisters Allemand were not known for their kindness. They would shout from their windows for children to get off their lawn—even though no child with any sense would actually set foot on their lawn, and they no doubt had a closet stuffed with the discuses and stray balls and kites that had landed in their yard.

  “Tell me then, since I don’t know,” Emmaline said. “If you could see your brother again, what is it you would want to say to him?”

  Mademoiselle Allemand looked startled by the question, as though she hadn’t expected a child to ask her such a thing. And once, it wouldn’t have been a question Emmaline would have thought to ask. But two years without a mother had given her time to wonder all sorts of things that children with living parents didn’t.

  For a moment, Mademoiselle Allemand didn’t answer. She looked very fatigued, in the way sadness caused, and Emmaline dragged a chair from the dusty recesses of the basement and brought it to her. It had a short leg and it wobbled, but Mademoiselle Allemand didn’t seem to mind that as she sat down. She stared at the gaping mouth of the machine as though it were a window into her thoughts. “Lots of things,” she whispered at last. “I would want to tell him lots of things.”

  Emmaline frowned. “Mademoiselle Allemand,” she began. “You must tell me one thing you would want from your brother, if you were to have only one more moment with him. One moment that would cost you something you could never get back.”

  Mademoiselle Allemand took a deep breath, but she didn’t appear to be considering the question. She appeared to already know what it was she wanted to say—it was just a matter of whether she trusted Emmaline enough to say it.

  “What is it you want from me, child?” is what she did say. “Money? You would extort the coins from an old woman’s piggy bank?”

  “No.” Emmaline placed her hand on Mademoiselle Allemand’s shoulder. Her voice was soft. “If you promise to keep it a secret, I will show you how to use the machine. But only once. And before I do, I’d like you to think about whether this is something you really want.”

  “Of course I want—”

  “Just listen,” Emmaline said. “I don’t want your money. The price to see your brother again is a memory. You must go home, and find something that reminds you of him, and feed it to the machine. Once you’ve done this, it’s gone forever, and you’ll have your brother’s ghost for a few moments.”

  Mademoiselle Allemand stared into the machine. Her eyes grew more and more youthful. Perhaps she was afraid.

  “Think about it,” Emmaline said again, more pointedly this time. “Come and find me if you still want to do it.”

  The old woman looked at her, and worse than the sadness on her face was the hope. She had lived such a long life, Emmaline thought, and she had many memories. So many she could dive into them the way Emmaline and the twins dove from their tire swing into the shimmering lake. In that way, she was very rich. But each of those memories was still irreplaceable. Even in an ocean of them, a drop was a lot to spare.

  After Mademoiselle Allemand went home, Emmaline lay awake in the dark, listening to the clocks volleying seconds back and forth. She had not thought death had plucked so many people from so many lives. Even Gully and Oliver, the happiest, most wonderful friends she knew, were left conflicted and hurt by the death of small things. Even her neighbors, who chased after their cat and slammed doors and blared brass music in the afternoons, had mourned for someone.

  The neighbors whispered that her father had been driven mad by grief. Perhaps grief made everyone a little bit mad. Perhaps her father was only the first one to do something about it.

  CHAPTER 8

  On the walk home from school, Oliver stopped to pluck the dandelions that sprouted wild between the cracks in the sidewalk. Gully was growing progressively more impatient with him. He kept steady count of how many seconds it took to walk each square in the sidewalk, and Oliver was slowing them down.

  “Why are you doing that?” he finally asked.

  “It’s getting cold,” Oliver replied. “Soon winter is going to come and kill them. I don’t want them to go to waste.”

  Gully rolled his eyes, but Emmaline smiled.

  It had been a week since the twins had used the machine. Emmaline had not told them about Mademoiselle Allemand, who hadn’t come around since. It would only cause Gully to worry, and Oliver to take pity on the woman and perhaps even implore Emmaline to help her.

  Instead, it was nice to talk about something normal. Something that living people tended to, like flowers.

  It was the first day of December, and December certainly made its presence known with roaring gusts of icy wind.

  Gully dug his hands into his coat pockets. “Let’s go to the café,” h
e said.

  Emmaline was grateful for this. She wasn’t ready yet to return home. Her father was spending more time out of his basement now. He was keeping the house tidy and asking Emmaline how her day was. But Emmaline knew he was visiting with her mother’s ghost while she was at school. She knew he was still trying to find a way to make the machine work without erasing his memories. And she still wished he would stop, while at the same time hoping he would succeed. The whole ordeal left an uneasy feeling in her stomach, and she’d begun spending more time away.

  At the café, they ordered cocoa and picked a table by the window. Oliver hardly touched his drink, though, too busy slitting the flower stems with his thumbnail so that he could string them together. Emmaline and Gully talked about their lessons, and the countries they would choose as the subject for their upcoming essays.

  These were things living people cared about, Emmaline thought. And just as she smiled about that, a shadow moved over her. Gully stopped talking midsentence. When Emmaline looked up, she saw the Sisters Allemand standing over her. They matched one another like different figurines in a porcelain set, of varying heights and wearing lipsticks in varying shades of neon pink. The shortest sister was the one who had crept into Emmaline’s house several nights before, but now it was the tallest sister who spoke.

  “We’ve come to talk to you about your father’s machine.” All three sisters looked to Gully, who was studying them warily, and to Oliver, who had limp dandelions dangling from his fingers. “Is there somewhere we can go to talk?”

  “Here is fine, if you would lower your voice,” Emmaline said, and she couldn’t help the angry bite to her words. When Mademoiselle Allemand did not return after their conversation, Emmaline had hoped she’d thought better of her decision to summon her brother’s ghost.

  The sisters looked among one another, having some kind of conversation with their glances. It was peculiar how well they could reach one another, Emmaline thought. Even Gully and Oliver, who were identical twins, didn’t seem as attuned to each other as the Sisters Allemand. Emmaline wondered what it had been like when their brother was alive, and if he’d been the same way. Or if he’d felt like an outsider, the way the Sisters Allemand made everyone in the world feel like an outsider.

  After a moment, they pulled three chairs from an adjoining table and joined Emmaline and the twins.

  Emmaline shifted uneasily as Gully stared at her, his eyes trying to ask her a question. She had not told him about Mademoiselle Allemand’s unusual late-night visit to the ghost machine. Foolishly, Emmaline had hoped she could forget the incident and give the appearance of being a normal girl.

  The tallest sister nudged the shortest. The shortest sister reached into the pocket of her very fuzzy leopard print sweater. She extracted something hidden by her closed fist, and then she set her fist on the table. When she opened her fist, Emmaline saw a silver pin, glinting as it caught the afternoon light. It was of a biplane, with a propeller that spun just slightly from the motion of Mademoiselle Allemand’s hand.

  “This belonged to Granville,” the shortest sister said.

  “He was a pilot,” the medium-height sister added, and Emmaline was stricken by the youthful melody of her voice, each syllable like a song. “Long, long ago.”

  Emmaline looked among the three of them. “If you feed this to the machine, you can never get it back,” she said. “And you’ll lose a memory associated with it.”

  “We have dozens of planes,” the tallest sister said. “Plenty of memories.”

  Emmaline reached out and tentatively touched the plane with her fingertip. It looked freshly polished and well cared for.

  “Tell me a little bit about why you’d like to see your brother’s ghost,” Emmaline said. “A reason beyond missing him.”

  Oliver reached across the table for the plane, and the tallest sister smacked his hand away. “Granville never believed in banks,” she said. “He made lots of money, and he hid it away for his children. The problem is, he hid it so well, even his widow doesn’t know where it is. She has lived in their house for thirty years since his death, afraid to sell it because she’s sure it’s hidden in there somewhere.”

  “Didn’t you look for it?” Oliver said. “Check under the floorboards?”

  “Of course we did, child, don’t be dense,” the shortest sister said. “But he was a clever one, Gran was. The only way to find it is to ask him ourselves.”

  “He has a granddaughter he never had the chance to meet,” the middle sister said. She didn’t smile, but her voice was sweet like a smile, anyway. “She’s getting married in a few days. We’d like her to have the money, to start her life.”

  “We know it’s what he’d want,” the tallest sister said.

  Oliver looked at Emmaline. “That’s a good reason, Emmy.”

  Gully nudged him. “Hush.”

  Emmaline picked up the plane. It felt warm and smooth in her palm. “All right,” she said. “I’ll help you, on the condition that you don’t tell anyone about it.”

  “We have no one to tell,” the tallest sister said.

  “I need your word.”

  “We promise,” the Sisters Allemand said in unison.

  “Three a.m.,” Emmaline said. She knew for certain her father would be asleep by then.

  “Three a.m.,” the sisters agreed.

  They left together, their arms linked, a sweet perfume trailing the air behind them. They looked rather like one large creature with three heads, Emmaline thought.

  Gully leaned forward, watching as Emmaline tucked the plane into her coat pocket. “You didn’t tell me that they’d asked about the machine,” he said.

  “I told Mademoiselle Allemand to think about it carefully,” Emmaline said. “I had hoped she wouldn’t be back.”

  “What will you tell your father?” Oliver said.

  “Nothing. He can’t know about this.” A horrible knot had formed in Emmaline’s stomach. She stared at her cocoa with disinterest.

  Gully frowned, mirroring her expression. “Oh, Emmaline.” He sighed. “This is becoming something too big.”

  “I know,” she said sullenly. “But after this, no more. No one else knows about it.”

  “Maybe it will cheer them up,” Oliver said. “Seeing Tidbit cheered me up. Once was all we needed, wasn’t it, Gully?”

  “Once was too much,” Gully corrected. Oliver ignored him. He got up from his chair and walked to Emmaline, and placed the crown of dandelions on her head.

  The petals looked like little stars in her honey-colored hair.

  “I think it’s the right thing to do,” Oliver said, sitting in the chair beside Emmaline.

  “And why’s that?” she asked him.

  “Because when we’re very old like the Mademoiselles Allemand, I hope that we can use the machine.” Gully opened his mouth to speak, but Oliver spoke quickly before Gully could interrupt him. “Once we’re so old we can barely even walk without canes, I want us to use the machine again. I want us to have a long life filled with good-byes, all the while knowing that one day we’ll get to say hello again. I think that would be nice.”

  Emmaline smiled. That did sound nice. But then, Oliver had a way of making her see the good in things. He even made her hate the machine a little less, for a moment.

  “We’ll come with you tonight,” Gully offered. “To make sure they don’t do anything strange.”

  What they were doing was already strange, Emmaline thought.

  By the time the clock struck three, Emmaline’s father was asleep. Emmaline tiptoed out of bed and went to the front door. Gully and Oliver were already waiting on the front step in their heavy wool coats and their scarves—Oliver’s red and Gully’s bright green.

  “Emmaline,” Gully said, whispering as she led them into the house, “you don’t have to do this. You don’t know much about your neighbors. It feels like a bad idea.”

  She was looking anxiously through the open doorway. “You heard what they sai
d,” she told him. “They just want to ask one question, and then it’ll be over. They won’t tell anyone. They don’t talk to anyone besides their cat.”

  “I think it’s kind of you,” Oliver said. But even his sweetness didn’t appease Emmaline’s worry. Gully was probably right about this being a bad idea. He was always right.

  The Sisters Allemand swept across the street in a soundless flutter of fur coats. They didn’t say a word as Emmaline led them into the basement, Gully and Oliver in tow, and closed the door behind them.

  Standing before the machine, Emmaline took the silver plane from her pocket and held it out to the sisters.

  “How much time will this buy us?” the middle sister asked.

  “It depends on the strength of the memory, I think,” Emmaline said. When she had poured the tea into the machine, her mother’s ghost lasted only as long as it would take her to sit and drink a cup of it. But her father’s memories had been stronger. She was certain her mother had stayed with him for a long time, perhaps hours.

  The tallest sister took the plane, and after the three of them exchanged a look, she dropped it into the machine.

  As it fell, the propeller spun, and Emmaline could swear the plane began to fly into the depths of the purple light, until it was gone.

  Nothing happened at first, as usual. “Give it a few seconds,” Emmaline said. “And then it’ll start to rattle.” She began climbing the steps, both to afford the sisters some privacy and to make sure her father hadn’t woken.

  Oliver sat on the bottom step to watch the reunion, but Gully followed her. “Are you all right?” Gully asked, as they stepped into the living room. “I mean, with all of this.”

  “I still wish my father would destroy the thing,” she admitted.

  A male voice coming from the basement made them both turn their heads. They couldn’t make out the words being spoken, but Emmaline supposed that was the late Granville Allemand.

  “I hope they get what they want out of this,” Emmaline said.