Liesl & Po (18 page)

“Mmmm.” Mrs. Snout jerked her chin in the direction of the barn. “Now go on with you. It’s late and you should be sleeping.” And with that she shut the door again. This time Will and Liesl heard the latch sliding into place.

The black-haired man was not in the dining room when Mrs. Snout returned to it. He had left his bowl sitting in a small pool of spilled soup. She shook her head. No manners. Well, at least he had gone to bed. It made her distinctly uncomfortable to have him hanging around. His very presence gave her an itchy, evaluated feeling, as though every time he looked at her he was only trying to determine how much he could get for prying out her fillings and selling them, or chopping her body into neat cuts of meat for the butcher.

Mrs. Snout passed into the kitchen, where her half-blind assistant was squatting in the corner playing with a ball of string, like a cat.

“You,” Mrs. Snout said, and the boy scrambled to his feet. One eye blinked guiltily at her. The other was a mere hole, a bit of scratched skin. Mrs. Snout never got used to looking at it. Instead she focused on the tip of his nose.

“You are to take Benny”—that was the mule, a skinny, bad-tempered thing—“and ride at once to Evergreen Manor.”

“Yes’m.”

She fished the trim white card from her apron pocket. It had been given her in the morning by a woman with a long fur coat. The script across its front was elegant, and it smelled vaguely of expensive perfume. She checked the name on the card briefly. “You are to find the Lady Premiere and tell her we have news of the runaway children. Tell her that they are on their way to the Red House. Say it back to me.”

“They are on their way to the Red House,” the boy repeated dutifully.

Mrs. Snout nodded. “They should reach Evergreen by tomorrow evening. Tell the Lady Premiere to be prepared.”

“Yes’m.” The boy mashed his hat on his head determinedly and prepared to set off.

“Not so fast!” Mrs. Snout glared fixedly at his nose. “This is most important. You must demand the reward she offered. Two whole gold pieces, and no less. Do not return without the money.”

Mrs. Snout sighed as the boy scrambled out the back door. She passed her fingers once more along the little white card, then slipped it back into her apron.

Desperate times, she thought, called for desperate measures.

Chapter Twenty

LIESL AND WILL ATE THEIR POTATOES GREEDILY
even before they reached the old barn—so quickly they barely tasted them, and burned their tongues and fingers in the process. The potatoes made only the tiniest, barest dent in their hunger, but they were better than nothing.

In the corner of the barn—which was, as the innkeeper had said, dry and relatively warm, and which smelled only the very smallest bit like animal droppings—they found a single wool blanket.

“We’ll have to share,” Liesl said, yawning, and placed the wooden box carefully on the floor. Then she and Will lay down beside it and pulled the blanket up to their chins. “You’ll keep watch, won’t you, Po?” she said drowsily.

“Yes,” Po said. “I’ll wake you at dawn.”

Neither Will nor Liesl said thank you. Under the blanket, both of their small chests rose in unison, like swells in the ocean, and after only a minute the barn was filled with the quiet sounds of snoring.

Po, watching them, felt a twinge, as though a large hand had reached out and pinched its Essence. The ghost was startled and bothered by the feeling. Distant memories tugged at Po: a ring of children, chanting something (
game
, the word appeared to Po suddenly), and Po standing on the outside, left out.

Left out
: two more words the ghost had not thought of for the longest of long times. What did belonging mean to a ghost? What did it matter? A ghost belonged to nothing but the Other Side, and the air, and the deep, dark tunnel of time that has no walls or ceiling or floor, but only goes on forever.

We’ve been too long on the Living Side
, Po thought to Bundle, and as usual Bundle
mwark
ed his approval. “We don’t belong here.”

Mwark.

“Come on. We must go back to our place and get away for a bit.” And Po felt the living world—with all its corners and boundaries and hard, sharp edges—disappearing as it crossed back into the Other Side.

Po only intended to stay away a minute or two. No harm would come to Liesl, the ghost was sure of it.

But time is not easy to measure on the Other Side, where infinity is the only boundary, and seconds do not exist, nor minutes nor hours nor years: only space and distance. And so on the Living Side, Liesl and Will slept soundly, and minutes added up to an hour, and just after midnight the door creaked open and the black-haired man slipped silently into the barn.

He was, as Mrs. Snout had guessed, a career criminal. His nickname was Sticky, and he was a thief. He would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down: money from church collection plates, candy from a baby, the shirt off the back of a beggar. The reputation of his long, pale fingers, which attracted wallets, coins, and earrings like a magnet attracts steel filings, had earned him his nickname.

He had seen the little girl clutching the wooden box protectively to her chest and, like Mrs. Snout, suspected she was lying when she had claimed there was nothing inside.

Why would she be carrying an empty box with her?

And not just any box, Sticky thought: a jewelry box. Standing in the dark, listening to the two children snoring, he allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction, imagining the beautiful jewels he would find winking in its rich velvet interior, the gold and silver, the tiny flashing stones.

It would be, he fantasized, the payload he had been waiting for his whole life, since he had lain in his narrow cot as a young boy in Howard’s Glen, next to his pushy and pinchy older sister, and dreamed of someday having money to buy an enormous house of his own, and money to bathe in, and money to roll between his fingers. Money to burn and waste and hoard and love!

He moved silently across the barn. Not even the bats, sleeping in the rafters, were disturbed by his progress. As always, his heart was beating rapidly—not from nerves, because he had years of practice and was excellent at what he did—but from pleasure and excitement.

Closer, closer, closer. Finally he stood just beside the two slumbering forms, each folded like twin commas. Slowly—moving inch by inch now—he knelt to the ground and removed from his overcoat the small rectangular wooden box he had stolen from Mrs. Snout’s pantry, which contained a load of potato flour. He allowed himself another small smile. It was, as he expected, almost exactly the same dimensions as the girl’s box, and roughly the same weight, which meant that with any luck he would be miles and miles away before she noticed the substitution.

He tucked the jewelry box carefully under his arm and left the box filled with flour in its place, barely concealing a chuckle of glee. It was really so easy . . . almost
too
easy. . . .

Then Sticky slipped back across the barn and out into the night. Liesl slept; Will slept; the bats slept. Everyone slept, it seemed, but for the black-haired thief who moved through the streets of Gainsville quickly and with purpose, carrying (though he did not know it, of course) the greatest magic in all the world.

Some time later, Po and Bundle squeezed through a narrow opening in the folds between worlds and re-entered the Living Side. Po was surprised to find that outside, the edges of the sky were lightening. They had been gone for longer than the ghost had anticipated.

At that moment, Liesl stirred. She sat up, rubbing her eyes and blinking.

“Is it time to get up?” she asked, her voice still thick with sleep. Next to her, Will groaned.

“Yes,” Po said.

Liesl yawned broadly. “Poor Po,” she said. “You must get so bored, just sitting there watching us all night.”

Po felt another foreign twinge (
guilt
was the word, only recovered that instant). “It’s not too bad,” the ghost said vaguely.

“Po can’t sit down, anyway,” Will said, raising himself onto both elbows. His hair was sticking up most ridiculously. “Can you, Po? You don’t have legs to fold or a bottom to sit on.”

Po did not dignify Will’s comment with a response. Instead it just flitted to the window and said, “We should go.”

Po had debated telling Liesl it had gone to the Other Side, but Will’s comment made the ghost decide firmly against it.

Besides, Po thought, the box was clearly sitting right next to her, and no harm had been done.

In its mind, Bundle went,
Mwark
.

Chapter Twenty-One

THE WAY OUT OF GAINSVILLE WAS BARE AND
bleak, though it must once have been less so. On either side of the narrow dirt road, bald brown fields extended toward the horizon. Most of the farms had been abandoned years ago, and nothing looked familiar to Liesl.

The rain, at least, had stopped, and it was slightly warmer than it had been for some time, so both Liesl and Will were able to unbutton their coats. Still, it was slow going, especially when the road began to wind up into the foothills. Here the path became less clear. For long stretches it disappeared altogether, and Bundle and Po had to float on ahead and come back and report the correct way, so that Liesl and Will would not exhaust themselves tracing and retracing their steps.

Everyone’s temper ran short.

“I swear,” Liesl said for the hundredth time, pausing to wipe sweat off her brow, “this box is heavier than it was yesterday.”

“If you would let me carry it . . . ,” Will said, also for the hundredth time.

“No!” Liesl said sharply.

Will muttered something under his breath and went on ahead.

“What did you say?” Liesl’s heart was beating very fast.

“I said it’s loony!” Will cried out, turning back to her. “This whole trip is loony!” And then, frustrated, he kicked a very large stone to his left. Pain shot through his toes and he began hopping up and down. “We’ve been walking all day and we’re not getting anywhere. I’ve passed this rock twenty times in the past two hours, I’d swear to it!”

“Are you questioning my capacity to navigate?” Po asked coldly, and Bundle made a noise somewhere between a growl and a hiss.

“I’m sorry if I’m not particularly inclined to believe a ghost. Probably just bringing us out here to kill us.”

“So I could spend eternity in your delightful company? I don’t think so.”

“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Liesl cried out, so loudly that Will and Po did, in fact, stop it. She sank to the ground. “It’s no use,” she said. “We’ll never make it. We don’t know where we are; we don’t know the way. And you two are fighting. It’s horrible. I can’t stand it.” A tear slid down her cheek to the very tip of her chin.

Will forced a laugh. “Me and Po weren’t fighting. We were just, um, joking around. Weren’t we, Po?”

“What is joking?” Po asked, but seeing the way Will glared, quickly said, “Oh, yes. Yes. Joking.”

Liesl wiped her nose on the cuff of her jacket. “Really?” She sniffed.