Liesl & Po (21 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Po said. The ghost was starting to get irritated. It did not like riddles.

“I’m talking about
the Other Side
.” Liesl sprang from the bed, eyes shining. “Don’t you see? I can follow you there. I can cross. And then we’ll cross back to the Living Side somewhere different—somewhere safe.”

For a moment there was perfect silence. Liesl held her breath. Even Bundle was uncharacteristically still.

Then Po said, “Impossible.”

“Why?” Liesl demanded. “Why is it impossible?”

“Living people cannot cross to the Other Side. It is unheard of. It can’t be done.”

“It
can’t
be done or it
isn’t
done?”

“Either. Both.” Po was having trouble keeping its thoughts together. “It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t possibly work.”

“When you go to the Other Side, you must slip back through some kind of opening, don’t you?”

“Places where the universe is stretched thin, yes . . .”

“And you can choose where to cross back
from
the Other Side, can’t you? You can find your way here through different tunnels and pathways?”

“Yes, within certain limits . . .”

“So why can’t I do those things? Why can’t you just lead me, in and out?” Liesl turned very serious. She lowered her voice. “Either way I’ll end up on the Other Side, Po. If I don’t find a way to get out of here, I’ll be there soon enough.”

Po was quiet again. The ghost had not thought of it that way.

Finally Po said, “I suppose I could try and . . . enlarge the opening somewhat. So that you could fit through with a body.”

Liesl clapped her hands and bounced up and down excitedly. “I knew it! I knew we could do it.”

“We don’t know if we can do it at all,” Po said sharply. “I said we could
try
. Once we’re on the Other Side, you’ll have to stick closely to me. It is vast, and some of its places are very strange.”

“Okay,” Liesl said, with a slight catch in her voice.

“I will lead you as quickly as I can to a different opening between the worlds, and we will cross back. I don’t know what would happen to a living one who stayed too long on the Other Side. Nothing good, I imagine.”

Liesl nodded. Her heart was beating very fast, and all of a sudden her throat felt desperately dry.

“Are you ready?” Po asked.

“Now?”

“I don’t see any point in waiting,” Po said. “Do you?”

Liesl shook her head. Her excitement had been replaced with fear. She regretted, now, having made the suggestion in the first place. But she knew, in her heart of hearts, that there was no other way.

“All right,” Po said. “I will try to open a door for you.” At the last second the ghost said, “I don’t know how the Other Side will seem to you. It’s possible you’ll be frightened. It’s probable you’ll be confused. Perhaps it is better if you close your eyes. Follow the sound of my voice, and I will lead you through.”

Liesl nodded. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly.

She thought she heard the smallest ripping sound, like a sheet of tissue paper being torn in two. Then she felt a cold wind on her face.

“Hurry,” Po said, and Liesl could tell from the ghost’s voice that it was straining. “Step forward.”

Liesl stepped.

Suddenly all around her was howling, rushing confusion: the sensation of a thousand winds tearing at her from every side. The breath left her in an instant and she felt she was suffocating. She couldn’t move; she couldn’t breathe; her whole body felt like a scream.

And then she heard Po’s voice, but somehow its voice was
inside
of her: like one part of her mind was speaking to the other part.

“Go quickly,” the voice said. “Straight ahead. Don’t open your eyes. Listen to me. Listen only to me.”

Slowly, painfully, feeling as though she was moving through molasses, Liesl inched forward. The shrieking all around her grew worse; the wind tore at her skin and she felt her head would explode.

But she was aware of the sensation of Po inside of her, urging her forward: a comforting presence, but strange, too, like suddenly feeling a division down your middle and being two people. Bundle was there too, a wet and shaggy presence in her mind, all panting excitement and forward, forward, forward.

Liesl, carrying her ghostly friends inside of her Essence, walked the strange and twisted paths of the Other Side.

After what seemed like an eternity to Liesl—and was in fact both forever and the tiny, barest space between seconds at the same time, for those things have no meaning on the Other Side—Po spoke. Again its voice was strained.

“All right,” it said. “It is safe to cross back now.”

Liesl still had her eyes squeezed tightly shut. She was too scared to open them. She tried to move forward but hit a solid wall, directly in front of her.

“Come on!” Po urged her. “I cannot keep the door open forever.”

“I can’t!” Liesl cried out. “Something’s blocking me.”

“Nothing’s blocking you. You have to trust me.”

“I can feel it!” A sob was building in Liesl’s throat. “There’s a wall.”

“Liesl.” Po was speaking quietly, but she could feel the panic in its voice. “Liesl, the Other Side has started to take you. You are beginning to blur.”

Liesl felt she would cry. Her body was filled with an impossible, heavy weight, as though she had been filled from head to toe with sand.

Po continued speaking. Its voice was shaking; it could not keep the space between sides open forever. “When I tell you to, you must jump. Okay? You must throw yourself forward.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Po said sharply. “Just do it.”

“Okay,” Liesl said, though she knew it was impossible. She could no longer move. She was frozen, paralyzed; she would be picked apart by winds like a dead animal by vultures.

Suddenly Po’s voice was screaming in her mind. “Now, Liesl! Jump!”

Liesl willed her muscles to jump. She focused on the word with every single dark and dusty corner of her mind. She thought of the sparrows soaring off the roof of 31 Highland Avenue. She thought of air. She thought of her father.

And even though she moved only a tiny bit—just a mere fraction of an inch—it was enough. The bonds of the Other Side released her. She had the impression of an enormous tumble through space. She was in free fall; she wanted to scream. The shrieking winds around her reached a howling crescendo.

And then the winds and the shrieking stopped, and she was landing on her knees on damp, hard ground.

“You’re safe,” Po said. Its voice was outside of her again. “You can open your eyes.”

They were standing at the edge of a dark forest. Evergreen Manor was several hundred feet behind them. Liesl could see the oil lamp burning in the room in which she had been confined, from this distance no more than a small square of pale light.

Po was barely visible. The ghost was exhausted from the effort of expanding the opening between sides of existence. It was a thin, bare outline in the dark.

“We did it.” Liesl climbed to her feet. She was tremb-ling a bit. She, too, was exhausted from her journey to the Other Side.

“Yes,” Po said simply.

“Thank you.”

“Yes,” Po said.

It was strange to think that only a minute earlier she had been carrying the ghost inside of her. Liesl did not know whether to feel embarrassed or exhilarated or sad, so she felt everything at once. For the first time it struck her as a strange thing, to have such careful boundaries around the self, and to be your own person and only your own person, always when you were alive.

Then Liesl began to giggle. She did not know why, exactly, but all of a sudden it seemed to her absurd: A ghost had just saved her life by leading her through the land of the dead. Once she started giggling, she couldn’t stop, and soon she had to double over and her stomach hurt from laughing.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Po said. Its outlines began to reassert themselves more clearly.

“Oh, Po.” Liesl wiped tears from the corner of her eyes and let out another bark of laughter. “You wouldn’t.”

Bundle went,
Mwark
.

“Well, come on,” Po said. “Will is alone in the forest. We’d better find him.” Again, the ghost sounded faintly regretful. And in fact Po would have liked nothing more than to leave Will languishing in the dark and cold on his own.

“I really don’t know what I would do without you,” Liesl said, with a rush of gratitude, as they set off into the forest. “I don’t know what I
did
without you. Now that we’ve found each other, you’ll never leave, will you?”

Po did not answer, but Liesl took his silence for agreement, and was happy.

Chapter Twenty-Six

WILL HEARD A TWIG SNAP BEHIND HIM. HE
whirled around, brandishing a stick like a sword, and cried out, “Who’s there?”

“It’s all right, Will.” Liesl stepped out from behind a tree, followed by Po and Bundle. “It’s just us.”

Will lowered the stick, feeling slightly foolish. “I thought you might be the alchemist or the Lady Premiere.”

“The alchemist?” Liesl wrinkled her nose. “The one you used to work with?” While they were traveling from Cloverstown, Will had told her, in broad terms, about his work with the alchemist, although he had not confessed to being a lowly apprentice.

Will explained, “The alchemist and the Lady Premiere are after me, for losing a box of magic. The Lady Premiere was in disguise at Evergreen; she’s the one who dragged you into the house. I’m afraid I started this whole thing.” It was the first time Will had admitted to Liesl the real reason he had run away, and he hung his head.

Liesl rushed to reassure him. “It’s not your fault. My stepmother’s after me. She wants me dead.” Liesl bit her lip, puzzling it out. “I wonder how they knew where to find us. I wonder how they knew we were together. . . .”

“The Lady Premiere knows everything, I expect,” Will said glumly.

“She can’t know
everything
,” Liesl said. “She doesn’t know I escaped, for example. Is the box safe?”

Will nodded. “I hid it.” He stood on his tiptoes, reached into the large hollow of a massive oak tree, and extracted the box. “My plan was to . . .”

He trailed off, embarrassed. His plan was to hide the box and come to Liesl’s rescue, and before she arrived, he had been working on building a ladder out of twigs and whatever else he could find, but he had not gotten very far. He shuffled a little closer to the clumsy beginnings of his construction, hoping she would not notice.

But it was too late.

“What on earth,” Po demanded, “is
that
?” The ghost, recovered from its earlier exertion, showed quite clearly against the heavy black darkness of the forest. Now it flitted around the pile of sticks Will had begun to assemble and tie together, painstakingly, with hanging vines.

“Nothing,” Will said quickly, trying to block Liesl’s view. But she sidestepped him.

“Is that”—she wrinkled her nose—“is that a ladder?”

Will decided there was no point in pretending otherwise. “Yes,” he said miserably. “Po told me they had you up in one of the high rooms.”

“And you were going to rescue me?” Liesl asked.

“Yes,” Will mumbled. “Or try to, at least.” His face was burning hot. He had never been so embarrassed in his life; he saw now how stupid the idea was. And obviously she didn’t need rescuing—she had gotten out all on her own. The alchemist had, perhaps, been right all along. He
was
useless.

Suddenly Liesl threw her arms around him with such force that he stumbled backward. Will had never been hugged in all his life, and he did not know what to do. Liesl’s hair tickled his cheek, and he could feel her little heart, beating hard through layers of cloth and clothing. He stood perfectly still, praying that she would let him go, feeling even more embarrassed than he had been just a moment earlier.

“Thank you,” she said. “I think you’re very brave.”

“You do?”

“Yes. And clever.”

“Oh.” When Liesl released him at last, Will found that his head felt strange and fuzzy, as though he had just been spinning in a circle. He repeated, “Oh.”

Po made a loud sniffing sound.

Liesl was feeling hopeful again. “Come,” she said. “We can’t be far from the Red House now. But it won’t be long before they discover I’m missing and come looking for us.”

“If they’re not
already
looking for us,” Will said.

“All the more reason to get moving,” Po said, and as usual, it took the lead with Bundle.

The wind was a strange one that night: It blew strong, and smelled of difference and change. It sent shivers snaking up people’s backs; it made old women tug their shawls closer, and babies cry, and maids rise from their beds to check that the shutters were definitely latched.

Will and Liesl felt it. Pausing to rest for a bit, they had to huddle together in the shelter of a maple, and still they felt deeply chilled, as though the wind wanted something from them and had reached inside to get it.

Augusta felt it creeping through the floorboards of Evergreen Manor, seeping in through the walls and past the windowsills, and it filled her with nameless terror, and made her rush upstairs to check on Liesl, who was, of course, no longer there. . . .