Liesl & Po (16 page)

FOR SEVERAL HOURS, WILL WANDERED THE
winding streets of Cloverstown aimlessly. He did not know whether he should be looking for the girl in the attic or not. It was possible that the old woman was correct: Perhaps she was off her rocker. But the idea was distressing to him, and Will did not want to believe it. Still, she
had
run from him. And the look on her face! The horror and fear! It made Will sick to think of it.

Then there was the fact of her appearance in Cloverstown at all. What, Will wondered, could she possibly be doing here? He hoped she had not been sent away to be a factory girl. Even more terrible than the memory of the horror on her face when she had seen him was the idea of that sweet, pale face bent over a sewing machine or a whirling cauldron of chemicals, those long, elegant fingers picked to bits by needles or scalded with hot liquids. He felt if she had been sent away to work, he must rescue her.

And so he walked, both looking and not looking, hopeful and fearful, and slowly moved farther and farther away from the train station, into the heart of the city, and then even farther, into its outskirts.

Eventually he came to an area that was very bad. All the buildings were rammed so close together it looked as though they were hugging for warmth, and the trash was piled in great heaps on either side of the narrow streets, which were full of beggars of all ages—old beggars, young beggars, blind beggars, lame beggars. The smells of people and waste were overwhelming. Will felt as though he would choke.

From all sides people pressed around him, pawing his jacket, touching his hair, murmuring, “Just a coin, just a coin, lad,” and “Have a heart, spare a little.”

“I’m sorry,” Will said. He had never seen such a sea of ragged and sad-looking people, walking bones, shadow-lives. It made his heart ache. “I have no money myself.” He hurried on, and silently said a prayer that the girl from the attic had not come this way.

He wondered if he should not, after all, return to the train station and continue north, as he had originally intended. But the idea of the girl tugged him on, just as she had drawn him back to that same street corner under her window, again and again, for months.

Then he left the people behind and came to an area at the far, far edges of Cloverstown. The buildings were long, low warehouses, and carts piled with goods came in and out, drawn by sad-looking animals whose ribs were showing. The air was so black and thick with grime that Will could taste it. Many of the warehouses were shuttered. In others, Will could make out thin, sad faces wavering behind cracked and dirt-encrusted windows, like pale flames. In others, service doors had been flung open to admit the carts and the animals, and Will could see men moving slowly in the vast, gloomy inner spaces.

He had, constantly, the prickly feeling of being watched, and he began to feel afraid without knowing exactly why. The warehouses became farther and farther apart, separated by long stretches of broken cobblestone and interspersed brown grasses. For a long time he passed no one. But still he felt eyes on him, and anxiety began to grow in the pit of his stomach—a gnawing, desperate feeling. It was not helped by the fact that his last meal had been the potato, nearly twenty-four hours earlier.

Will made a sudden resolution. He would ask the next person he came across for directions back to the train station. Then he would get on a train going north and forget all about the girl from the attic.

At that moment he was walking alongside an enormous building, built of black and moldering stone, and coated with white ash. It would have appeared to be abandoned, but for the black smoke churning from its four black chimneys. He thought he could detect the low murmur of conversation; and coming around the corner, he saw two men—both with filthy, knotted hair, and dirt-coated hands, and black and rotted teeth—standing in between several tarp-covered carts. Will could not see what the carts were holding. From the rectangular shapes outlined under the tarps, he thought boxes of some kind.

The men were deep in conversation, and arguing about something. Will did not like to interrupt them—they did not look particularly friendly—but he sucked in a deep breath and screwed up his courage and went closer.

As he approached, he could hear them better.

One of them was in the middle of jabbing his gnarled pointer finger into the middle of the other one’s chest. “I told you them round-saws was dangerous,” he was saying. “That’s the fourth boy what’s lost his arm messing around with one of those things, and it’s only been a month.”

The other man picked his teeth, unconcerned. “Hazards of the trade,” he drawled. “Saws is needed to cut wood. Wood is needed to make coffins.”

“Don’t tell me how to run my work,” the first one growled. “The problem is the boys. We’re running through ’em! We’re running out! Boys is losing limbs, fingers, toes. One of the boys had his head chopped off last month!”

“I can find you boys,” the second one said. “It shouldn’t be a problem to find you a boy.”

Will stopped, half-hidden behind a cart. He stood very, very still. His heart was beating loudly, and he willed it to be quiet.

“You better find me a boy!” cried the first one. “And right away, too, or it’s you what’s have to pay for the work I’m losing!”

Will began to back away, very carefully, from the two men, going as quickly as possible while still moving silently. He had no desire now to speak up—no desire at all. He was quite fond of his fingers, toes, limbs,
and
head; he did not particularly like the idea of losing them to a saw.

And then he stepped on a bit of broken glass. The glass went
CRUNCH!
very loudly under his boots.

Both men whipped their heads in his direction. Will dropped to a crouch behind one of the larger carts. This one was already hooked up to a donkey. The donkey sat, sadly pawing the dirt and nibbling at a single piece of frozen black grass.

“What was that?” growled the first man.

“Seems like we got ourselves a little spy,” said the second, and Will could
hear
him grinning. “Maybe a little boy, like? Wouldn’t
that
be nice? Suit yer needs just fine and dandy.”

The men began clomping heavily in Will’s direction. Any second now, they would see him, and Will would be dragged off to some factory, to be beaten and mistreated and probably told he was useless, just as he had been at the alchemist’s. In desperation, Will swung himself onto the cart, lifted the heavy canvas tarp that was covering its load, and slipped underneath, at precisely the moment the men once again came into view.

Underneath the tarp it was dark and warm. Will closed his eyes, lay very still, and prayed.

For a moment there was the sound of shuffling boots, and some confused murmurs. Then the first man said, “Well, I’ll be dagged. I coulda swore I heard somethin’.”

“Probably a rat.”

“Don’t be stupid. A rat’s got no footsteps.”

“I’ve seen rats in your factory so big, it’s a miracle they don’t got boots and a pocket watch.”

“Oh, yeah . . . ? At least my wife don’t put rats in the stew when meat’s running low. . . .”

“That’s cuz you don’t got a wife. . . .”

The men’s voices grew more remote. Will allowed himself a small sigh of relief. They were walking away. When he could no longer hear them, he opened his eyes.

And found himself staring at the girl from the attic.

He started to cry out, but she brought a finger quickly to her lips and shook her head, and he swallowed back the sound.

At that moment, the cart gave a tremendous, lurching movement forward, and Will heard someone saying, “Whoa, girl, whoa. Give me a second, give me a second. We’ll be on our way in no time.” Will assumed this was the driver, speaking to the donkey, and he was right. Boots scraped up at the front of the carriage; a leather whip slapped against the side of the cart; the man said, “Okay, thatta girl, nice and easy”; and the cart began lurching noisily forward.

Finally Will thought it safe to speak. “What—what—what are you doing here?”

“Stowing away,” the girl said placidly. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Stowaways are on boats,” Will couldn’t help but point out.

“Well, hitching a ride, then. We need to go west. This cart is going west. I heard the men saying so. So we got in.”

Will was not sure whether the girl from the attic had recognized him or not. She showed no signs of being inclined to run away. Of course, perhaps that was because she was trapped underneath a tarp, on a moving cart, surrounded by . . . Will squinted, trying to make out the wooden forms all around him, jostling in the darkness. His stomach squirmed. Coffins. They were surrounded by wooden coffins. Will hoped they were empty.

The girl-no-longer-in-the-attic was sitting in a narrow space between coffins, holding the box on her lap. It looked, Will thought, awfully like the kind of box the alchemist had used to transport magic, but he put the thought out of his mind. He would not think about the alchemist again, now or ever.

He lowered himself into the narrow space next to her. The girl’s eyes appeared to flit briefly to the empty air immediately to his left, and she stifled a giggle.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Nothing.” She bit her lip. “You nearly squashed them, that’s all. But I don’t suppose they can be squashed, really, so it’s all right.”

Will was confused. They were all alone in the cart; unless the coffins really were full of dead people, an idea that made him sick just to think of. “Squashed who?”

She opened her mouth, seemed about to say something, but instead just shook her head.

Perhaps it was as the woman with the cane said: Perhaps the girl really was mad as a hatter. He did not know whether the idea made him nervous or just sad. “Why did you run away from me before?” he asked, as a test.

The girl squinted at him for a second. Briefly, a look of alarm passed over her face. “You’re the boy I saw at the train station,” she said, recognizing him for the first time. “You were with the policeman and the old woman.”

“I wasn’t
with
them,” Will said irritably.

“Well,
I
thought you were,” the girl said. “That’s why I ran. They tried to have me arrested.” She squinted at him again and said suspiciously, “If you’re not with the police, then how come you’re following me?”

“I’m not following you,” Will said, and then in his head added,
not exactly
. He thought the girl seemed sane enough, even if she did have imaginary friends, and decided to be honest. “I’m a runaway,” he said. “I’ve got nowhere to go.”

The girl’s face lit up. “We’re runaways too! We’ve got no home at all anymore. Well, I suppose they’ve never really had a home—not for the longest time, anyway. I wouldn’t say the Other Side counts.”

“The Other Side?” Will was confused again. “What are you talking about? And who’s ‘they’?”

The girl bit her lip. She seemed to regret having spoken. “They,” she said. “Po and Bundle. Can’t you see them?”

Will had just about decided that the girl was definitely crazy when at the very edges of his vision he saw something flicker. He sat very still and focused on the dark. There was something moving there, just barely, a shape slowly asserting itself in the darkness, as though the air was water and something—no, two things—were moving underneath its surface. And then, all at once, he could see them: a child-shaped bit of shadow, or air, roughly his size, and another small, fuzzy thing that looked at first glance to be a dog. Or maybe a cat. Difficult to say: Its outlines were not particularly clear.

Will let out a sharp gasp. “What—what are they?”

“What do we look like?” The voice was sharp and irritable.

The girl pointed. “That’s Po,” she said. “You’ll have to forgive its manners. No one has any on the Other Side. And that’s Bundle.”

The shaggy thing made a noise somewhere between a bark and a meow.

Will gulped. “But they’re—are they—are they really ghosts?”

“You can speak to me directly,” Po said peevishly, and its outlines got a little brighter, as though they were catching fire. “I’m right here.”

The girl said, “Of course they’re ghosts. What else would they be?”

“But are they—are you—are they—” He felt foolish for stammering, and even more foolish for the question he was about to ask, but he couldn’t help it. He did not know whether to speak to Po or the girl, so he just closed his eyes and quickly blurted out, “Aren’t ghosts dangerous? I mean, don’t they hurt people?”

“If you don’t stop asking idiotic questions,” Po said, “I’ll give you a case of the shivers that’ll have your teeth dancing a jig.”

“Po,” the girl said reproachfully. “Be nice.”

Po became all at once a solid, squat mass of black. Will could only assume the ghost was sulking.