Liesl & Po (17 page)

“They’re not at all dangerous,” the girl said, turning to Will. “Bundle’s quite friendly.”

As if to prove it, at that moment Will felt a softening around him. He looked down in his lap and saw a pair of coal-black, eye-shaped shadows blinking up at him. Bundle went,
Mwark
. Will lifted his hand tentatively and stroked the air where it was, for lack of a better word, different—more drape-y and shape-y.

“See?” The girl nodded her approval. “And Po is wonderful—when it’s not being a grouch,” she added a little louder, and Po muttered something Will could not make out.

He had noticed, however, that the girl called Po “it,” and he wondered about that. “Isn’t Po a boy or a girl?”

“Neither. And both. Those things lose meaning on the Other Side. Just like Bundle is both a dog and a cat, and also neither.”

Will found it all very strange. “But they must have been one or the other at some time. When they were, um, on this side?”

“Oh, yes, I suppose so.” The girl seemed unconcerned. “But they can hardly be expected to remember. They’ve been on the Other Side for a very long time. So now they are just Bundle and Po, and my friends.” She leaned closer. “They helped me run away from the attic. That’s where I’d been living.”

At the mention of the attic, Will’s heart jumped a little. He thought of saying,
I know
, and telling her how he used to stand on the street corner and watch her, but was too shy to do so. Instead he asked, “Why did you run away?”

The girl squirmed and appeared, for the first time, uncomfortable. “It was time,” she said vaguely, her hand skating over the wooden box in her lap. Will wondered what it contained. He thought, too, of the wooden box he was supposed to have delivered to the Lady Premiere, the one that had started all his troubles: It had looked very much like Liesl’s box. No doubt it was being used by Mr. Gray for some disgusting purpose, for storing frogs’ legs or newt eyeballs or something. “What about you?” she asked. “What’s your story?”

Will did not want to appear incompetent by telling her about the mix-up with the alchemist’s magic, so instead he said, “Oh, I just wanted to explore a bit. Get off to see the world, and so on.”

In the corner, Po coughed. Will wondered if the ghost could somehow tell he was lying. He pressed on quickly, “I headed to the train station and jumped on the first train I could find. Hid out in the bathroom while the ticket collector came along, so I wouldn’t get in trouble for riding without a ticket.”

“That was very clever of you,” the girl said, and Will glowed with pleasure. As far as he knew, no one had ever thought him clever before. “We had to hide out with the luggage. It was very dusty.”

“Yes, well, I’ve done it loads of times,” Will said again, with a bit of swagger. He was enjoying the girl’s attention. “I’m always on the move.”

Po coughed again.

The girl, at least, seemed to believe him. Her eyes grew wide. “Don’t your parents miss you?”

Now it was Will’s turn to squirm. “I don’t—er—I don’t have any parents. I’m an orphan.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl said. She was quiet for a moment. “I’m an orphan too. Both of my parents are dead.”

“Oh,” Will said. “I’m sorry.”

“My father is on the Other Side now,” the girl said. “That’s why we’re heading west. So we can bring his ashes back to the willow tree, and he can rest, and go Beyond.” She gestured to the box in her lap.

“I see,” Will said, even though he didn’t, exactly. The girl was weirder than he’d imagined she would be. But he wasn’t sure he minded.

“Perhaps your parents are on the Other Side too.”

“Perhaps,” Will said doubtfully. He had never given it much thought. They had died when he was only a newborn, during an influenza outbreak, and he had no memories of them.

Suddenly the girl began to laugh. “Two homeless orphans,” she said, “and two ghosts. We make a funny team, don’t we?”

Will said, “I guess so.”

Po grumbled, “Some team.”

Bundle went,
Mwark
.

The girl put out her small, pale hand. “I’m Liesl,” she said.

Will’s heart gave another jump. Liesl. All this time he had desperately wanted to know her name, and there it was, and as soon as he knew it, he saw it fitted her exactly. “I’m William,” he said. “But you can call me Will.”

He took her hand, and they smiled at each other across the dark, as the cart carrying coffins and four stowaways rattled west.

Part III
Reversals & Reunions

Chapter Nineteen

IT HAD BEEN A VERY DIFFICULT YEAR FOR MRS.
Snout, owner of Snout’s Inn and Restaurant, which stood on Crooked Street in Gainsville. Gainsville was the last populated town for forty-seven miles: After Gainsville, the road wound up through the ruddy hills, and then down again, and all around there was nothing but fields and fields and the occasional farmhouse.

For this reason, Snout’s Inn and Restaurant had never been particularly successful. There simply weren’t enough travelers on the road: only the occasional trapper headed north, or vagrant farmhands looking for work. Still, if a traveler did come to Gainsville, he or she was bound to stop at Snout’s Inn, as there was simply nowhere else to go. And so Mrs. Snout had watered down her stews, and rarely changed the linens, and hired for an assistant a small, rather dull boy who had lost an eye in a mining accident, and wildly underpaid him, and fed her guests scraps of feet and brain instead of nice cuts of meat without their knowledge, and so she had always squeaked by.

But this year had been hard—very, very hard.

That was why she had consented to take on the black-haired man who had shown up on her doorstep earlier in the day, growling that he needed a room and a meal, even though she could tell that he was as crooked as the street the inn was standing on—a robber, no question, and perhaps a murderer, too. But he had offered her two solid silver pieces—very dirty pieces of silver, and no doubt stolen, but money was money—and she had been unable to refuse.

Now she watched him greedily slurping up his third bowl of potato soup, whitish liquid dribbling appallingly down his long and filthy beard, and sighed to herself. There had been a time—long ago, it seemed, when the sun had still shone—when the farms had flourished, and she had hosted at her table good, honest workers, plowmen and reapers and apple pickers and cattle ranchers, and they had drunk her weak wine, and overpaid for it gladly, and laughed long and loud and stayed up to sing songs and tell stories around the fire.

When she heard a soft but insistent knocking at her front door, for a moment she had a wild fantasy that she would open her door to find a whole group of red-faced, smiling men, who would greet her with a great “Hullo, there!” and fill the house with noise and laughter.

She was therefore highly disappointed when she opened the door and saw only a small, shivering girl and a very thin boy with extremely large, and very pink, ears. It had started to rain. Both of the children were soaking wet.

“Excuse me,” the boy said, and Mrs. Snout saw at once he was trying to act brave for the girl’s sake. “We were hoping we might have a room for the night.”

“We’ve come a long way,” the girl said. Her voice was soft and gentle. “And we’re very tired.” And Mrs. Snout saw that she was. The girl’s eyelids kept fluttering as though desperate to close.

“Rooms are a dollar and twenty pence a night,” Mrs. Snout said.

The children exchanged a glance. “We—we have no money,” the boy said, his voice faltering.

“Then I have no rooms,” Mrs. Snout replied, and began to shut the door.

“Please!” the girl piped up. “Please, we can work. We’ll do dishes, or the sweeping.”

Mrs. Snout peered closely at them. The little girl was wearing a coat that, although worn and threadbare in places, looked as though it might once have been expensive, and she was carrying a large, polished wooden box. Outside, it was gray and gloomy and dark. The streets were very still. “How did you get here?” Mrs. Snout asked suspiciously. “And where are you coming from?”

Again, the small, pale children exchanged glances. Mrs. Snout could not put her finger on it—no, she couldn’t say for certain—but she almost had the impression that both of them paused momentarily, as though listening to the wind.

And indeed, both Will and Liesl had been waiting while Po said, “I don’t see the harm in telling her.”

“We came from Cloverstown,” the boy said after a moment. “We came by, um, coach.”

“Then you must have some money,” Mrs. Snout said. “Coaches aren’t free.”

“We—we used it up,” the boy stuttered. He seemed to be growing desperate.

Mrs. Snout nodded to the box in the girl’s arms. “And what’s that, eh? You won’t pretend you’re carting around an empty jewelry box. What do you have? Out with it.” Behind her, something clattered to the floor: The black-haired man had dropped his spoon.

The girl clutched the box tightly to her chest. “Nothing!” she said emphatically. “There is nothing at all inside.”

“I cannot help you if you will not be honest with me.” Mrs. Snout again started to close the door.

“Please!” Will stuck his foot in the door just as Mrs. Snout was swinging it shut, to prevent it from closing all the way. He was exhausted and freezing; his clothes were damp; the long and bumpy ride in the cart had left his legs numb. “We’ll stay only one night. In the morning we head west, beyond the hills.”

“Maybe you know it,” Liesl put in eagerly. “We’re going to the Red House.”

The door, which was open only a small crack, barely enough to admit Will’s foot, swung open a little wider. Mrs. Snout’s mood shifted.

“The Red House, hmmm?” She looked Will and Liesl over more closely, and seemed to come to a decision. “Wait here.”

Then she disappeared into the house. Liesl got a quick view of an ugly, black-haired man staring intently at her from a room farther into the house before the door clicked shut in her face.

They waited. Po asked, “What’s taking her so long?” and flitted about impatiently, but neither Liesl nor Will had the energy to answer.

Then Mrs. Snout was back. She was carrying two hot potatoes wrapped in a tea towel.

“Here,” she said, passing the potatoes to Will, who felt tears of gratitude spring to his eyes. He had to blink them away quickly, so Liesl would not see. “I can’t let you have a room if you’ve got no money to pay. But the barn around back will be warm and dry. You can sleep there tonight.”

“Thank you,” Liesl said fervently. The smell of the potato made her stomach growl.

“Mmmm,” Mrs. Snout grunted. Again she watched them closely, through narrow eyes. “The walk to the Red House is long. Do you know the way?”

“I—I think I’ll remember,” Liesl said. Will thought she sounded uncertain.

“You will come to a green house after you’ve climbed the foothills,” Mrs. Snout said. “That is Evergreen Manor. You must stop there. Tell Mrs. Evergreen I sent you. She will give you food and water and point you in the right direction.”

Liesl would have hugged Mrs. Snout, except that Mrs. Snout did not seem like the kind of person who liked to be hugged. So instead she just said, “Thank you,” once again.