A Curious Tale of the In-Between (16 page)

“You’ve always been a meddlesome ghost,” Lady Savant said.

“Pram, run,” Finley said.

“I can’t,” Pram said.

“
This is no time to be stubborn.”

Pram looked at the iron gate that had confined her when she was a part of the living world. Even if she could break through it now as a spirit, what good would it do? No one in the living world would be able to hear her.

The needle of the compass spun around and around. It didn’t know where to go, either, Pram thought.

Lady Savant grabbed Pram’s shoulders. She had the burly hands of a man, and then the hands of an infant, and then a pianist’s fingers, but her grasp never weakened.

Pram had never felt pain like this. Though her body and its skin and bones lay in the snow before her, she could feel a stinging in her blood like bees. Lady Savant opened her mouth and it became as wide as a cave, and it was filled with howling winds.

This is it
, Pram thought.
She’s going to swallow me whole.
But she couldn’t move, not even to catch the jar as it fell from her hands.

Adelaide sang. Her voice was harried and loud and desperate, but Lady Savant could not be lulled to sleep this time.

Pram’s eyes began to close, and her feet faded from under her. Her body, in the snow, let out a wounded whimper as her lungs started to slow.

She knew that her soul was being stolen and she was disappearing, and with her remaining strength, her mind
could
only muster one word; it was the first thing she ever said when she was afraid.

Felix . . .

Heat lapped at her skin, and Pram opened her eyes to find that Lady Savant and the snowy field were gone. She was standing in smoke and flames. No, crawling. She was a boy and she had spilled the lantern in the hay and couldn’t find the way to the door. She knew that the horses were dying. She could hear them stomping and screaming as they burned.

“I’ve got you,” a voice said. Hands under her arms pulling her through the hay and dirt.

“Finley.” She coughed. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t want to remember this day,” Finley said. His jaw was tight, and Pram, as a boy, knew that she was his brother. She knew her name, too.

Felix. This was the memory of his death. She and Finley were playing it out.

A burning rafter fell from the ceiling, and it was meant to kill her, but Finley had lived this day once before, and this time he was prepared. He pulled Pram the boy out of the way and kicked the barn door open.

Finley and Pram spilled out into the snow. Finley was still a spirit, but Pram was a living girl, and she crawled onto her hands and knees, spluttering frozen air.

Lady Savant was gone.

“
What happened?” Pram was shivering now.

“Finley dived in after you,” Adelaide said. “Lady Savant was forced back into the living world. But you have to leave before she comes for you. Can you walk?”

Pram wanted to leave more than anything, but her eyes wouldn’t stay open, and as much as she tried to cling to her body, she fell back into the spirit world.

CHAPTER

24

T
he police car stopped at the iron gate that surrounded the abandoned building. The officer couldn’t be sure what had persuaded him to turn down this icy back road; he could only be sure that the notion had been so strong it was as though a pair of hands had turned his steering wheel for him. He couldn’t know that notion was really the ghost of a boy who had died decades before.

There was nothing here, save for an old institution that had closed more than a century ago and was rumored to be haunted. The police in this town encouraged these rumors because it kept children from sneaking onto the property to play or to damage it.

Which was why it was especially surprising when the officer saw a girl lying in the snow.

Adelaide clutched her typewriter key and looked like she was trying not to cry. She had sung until Lady Savant’s snoring rattled the floorboards; she wanted to be sure the police would hear the snores.

“Are you going back to the living world?” Adelaide asked.

“I hope so,” Pram said, watching as the officer felt for her body’s pulse and wrapped her body in his coat.

“We’ll miss you,” Finley said. “I suppose you won’t be back to visit us.”

“You can visit me,” Pram said. Her voice felt softer, like it was fading.

“How will we know where to find you?” Adelaide said.

“Yes, we’re ghosts, not psychics,” Finley said.

Pram smiled at the pair of them and wrapped them in a hug. “It’s a two-hundred-year-old colonial. It’s white. There’s a tree and a pond in front.” She thought of Felix when she mentioned his tree, and a bit of that old pain returned. “Come and haunt me anytime you like.”

Adelaide turned the typewriter key over and over in her fingers. “I have a lot of thinking to do,” she said. “Now that I remember my parents, I miss them, and I’m sure they’re waiting for me. Jacob and Madeleine Pierce.” She
said
their names a few more times, handling them like precious things that had been stolen and returned to her.

“Would you like me to help you?” Pram said. “I’m not sure how it works, but I could try.”

Adelaide hesitated.

“What would be the point in moving on?” Finley said. “Everything is perfect right here.”

Pram’s head was light, and she felt very weak. She knew that her time in the spirit world was ending.

She grabbed Finley’s hands. “Follow me back home if you’d like to see Felix again. I don’t know for sure whether he’s moved on. He hasn’t answered me in a long time. But if he turns up again, I’m sure he’d remember if he saw you.”

Finley shook his head. “He’s forgotten what happened. It’s for the best that I go back to forgetting, too.” He tried to smile. “But you’ll look after him?”

“I promise,” Pram said.

Adelaide waved. She was so far away. “Bye,” she and Finley were saying. “Bye, Pram, we’ll miss you!”

The jar that held Pram’s soul shattered and then disappeared.

Miles and miles away, in a two-hundred-year-old colonial house, a phone rang just as the teakettle whistled. In the
past
week, Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan had become afraid of the phone and what sort of news might be on the other end of its line. One of the aunts answered while the other stood twisting its cord in her anxious fingers. Even the elders went silent.

And then Aunt Dee sagged with relief. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we’ll be right there.”

As Pram drifted somewhere between the spirit and the living worlds, she entered another memory.

This time she was Lady Savant. She wore a nurse’s uniform and pushed a cart full of little cups that held pills—yellow, red, blue. There were dozens of institutions like this, and Lady Savant had seen many of them. They were the perfect place to find extraordinary souls hiding among the hopeless and the delusional.

Lily was both hopeless and delusional, and not at all what Lady Savant needed. Lily was plain and Lily could not see ghosts, and she spent her days sitting by the window, staring out at the dogwood tree as though it was her precious sailor who had left her behind.

And now, Lily was pregnant. Her spinster sisters had brought her here in hopes that the rest would do her some good. And undoubtedly the baby she birthed would be equally plain and equally hopeless, Lady Savant thought.

“
Would you like something to drink?” Lady Savant asked her.

“I think I’d like to take a walk,” Lily said.

“Too hot for a walk in your condition,” Lady Savant said.

Lily stared at her stomach as though she’d forgotten the baby was there at all. Her sadness tasted like rusted metal on Lady Savant’s tongue. And though Lily was ordinary, that sadness was profound.

“You’re not a real nurse. You can’t stop me,” Lily said, and went back to staring at the dogwood tree.

Pram felt the memory ending, no matter how she fought to hang on to it.

“Wake up,” a voice said. “You’ve been gone for too long already, you silly girl.”

The voice filled her with so much hope that it pushed her back into the living world, where hope was more precious than gold. It was a voice she hadn’t heard in a very long time, and one she had missed desperately.

“Felix,” she answered him. It was little more than a whisper. She felt a hand stroking her cheek, and she opened her eyes expecting to see Felix. But Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan were the ones standing over her.

“Pram?” they said.

Pram’s
voice was hoarse. “Where am I?” she said.

Aunt Nan kissed Pram’s hand. There were tears in her eyes. “You’re in a hospital, but you’re all right now. The Blue boy told the police everything. The whole town’s been looking for you.”

Pram’s heart was beating in both her ears. “Clarence?” she said. “He’s okay?”

“You’ve gotten her too excited,” Aunt Dee said.

Pram tried to sit upright, but they held her shoulders. “There will be time for all that later,” Aunt Dee said. “You’re recovering from pneumonia.”

“I feel all right now,” Pram said, which was only a little bit true. “Tell me about Clarence? Please?”

“He’s been by to see you every day,” Aunt Nan said, and sighed like she thought this was romantic. “He told us about that madwoman who kidnapped the two of you.”

“The police can deal with her now,” Aunt Dee said. “Her and that man she was with. Lord knows what was going through their minds, living in an abandoned asylum.”

“She was a spiritualist,” Pram said.

“We don’t have to talk about this now,” Aunt Dee said, tucking Pram’s hair behind her ears. “You just worry about getting well.”

“She said she’d spoken with my mother,” Pram said. The aunts paled. “So you see, it’s all my fault,” Pram said. “I believed her.”

“
What did she say about your mother?” Aunt Nan asked. Aunt Dee elbowed her and glared.

“She said my mother could tell me where my father is,” Pram said. She had kept it a secret that she wanted to find her father, but now she was tired of holding on to secrets.

The aunts exchanged hesitant expressions. And then Aunt Dee said, “You never asked about your father before.”