The Ghost Box (2 page)

A Shadow

Sarah screamed and sat up in bed.

Matt jumped back. “Whoa! What's wrong with you?”

For a moment she had no idea where she was. Then she saw her bedroom, quiet and normal, the windows full of morning sun-light.

“What are you doing in my room?” she snapped.

Matt shrugged. “Waking you up. Your mom called, but you were dead to the world. It's nearly 9 o'clock.”

He wore black jeans and a black t-shirt. He was always in black, she thought, a creeping shadow in the bright house. Now he said, “I won't bother next time.”

“No. Don't. Get lost.”

Half-way to the door he said, “Where did that come from?”

She looked where he was looking.

The silver box stood on the bedside table, next to the lamp. It looked heavy and expensive. She stared at it, astonished, and the dream of the tree came back to her in all its brilliant color.

Matt reached out his hand to it but she snapped, “Don't touch it! It's mine!”

The cry was so sharp she even shocked herself. Matt stood very still. She could sense his anger. His eyes were dark and bitter.

Suddenly he said, “Look, Sarah, l didn't want our parents to get together either. Dad and I had a good place of our own – we didn't need to come to this classy dump. But don't worry. I won't be sticking around to mess up your pretty life. Next year, when I go to college, you won't see me here ever again.”

He slammed the door as he went out and her bathrobe fell off the hook on the back.

Sarah stared at it lying in a heap on the floor. Just for a moment she felt bad about being spiteful to him. Then she swung her legs out of bed and picked up the box.

It was real. Silver, by the look of it, and very old, its lid made of silver leaves overlapping each other. Oak leaves. Around its rim were words in a strange language. She couldn't read them.

She ran her fingers over them, feeling the cold metal. How could she have brought the box out of a dream? Or had Mom put it here last night, perhaps from the gallery, and forgotten about it, and Sarah had dreamed of it? It didn't seem possible.

There was a key-hole but no key. She tried to open the lid but the box was firmly locked. Feeling let down, she shook it.

Something rolled and rattled inside.

She held it still, afraid what was inside it might break. From downstairs her mother called “Sarah! Breakfast!”

There was no school because it was fall break. Gareth had gone to work and she didn't know about Matt. In the kitchen the dogs, Jack and Jess, lay sprawled on the mat by the door, looking in hope at their empty food bowls. They sat up as Sarah came in but she shook her head at them. “You've already been fed.”

“Let them out, will you?” her mom said.

As she opened the door a gust of wind blew wet leaves against her feet. Drops of rain spattered from the gutter. “It's autumn,” she said, surprised, because the storm of the night had stripped the trees, and a new carpet of leaves clotted the lawn.

Mom smiled, and turned as the phone rang.

“Go on,” Sarah said to the dogs.

Jack growled. The sound came from deep inside him. He bared his teeth, and Jess barked, two sharp, worried barks. They were looking at the corner of the barn towards her bedroom, but there was nothing there apart from the leaves, whipping up in the wind.

“Oh go on!” Sarah pushed them out.

Then, after a moment, she walked down the path and stared at the glassy corner of the building. The windows here were floor-toceiling. Through them she could see Mom on the phone, talking and laughing. She could see her own reflection too, looking cold and puzzled.

And there was a shadow.

It lay on the grass behind her, and it wasn't hers.

It was small, and close, and for a moment she felt a chill at her back, and turned quickly.

The lawn was empty.

Inside, Mom said, “I have to run over to Marston. Will you be all right?”

“Fine. No problem.”

“I don't know where Matt's gone.”

Sarah plugged her ear-phones in. “Who cares!”

She read and then went on-line, and then phoned her friend Olly and ate some cheese and apples and chips, but by the afternoon she was bored and fed up with being on her own. At two Mom rang.

“I'll be another hour. Has Matt come back?”

Sarah shrugged. “No.”

“Well, you're not scared there, all on your own, are you?”

“Of course not.”

Putting the phone down, she wished her mother hadn't said that. She hadn't been scared, but now the house seemed dim and gloomy, with the rain pattering on the windows and the early October gloom closing in. She went around turning all the lights on. Then she stopped.

A door had closed upstairs.

Standing still, she listened, her heart thudding.

A floor-board creaked.

Then she was sure.

Someone was walking across the floor of her room.

Chapter 4

Broken Nails

“Matt?” she said.

The foot-steps stopped.

The silence was worse than anything. “Matt? Are you up there?”

The silence waited for her. The silence listened to her fear.

Slowly, she began to climb the stairs. They were old, and they went up in a long curve. She could see rain on the sky-light in the roof. It made strange rippling shadows down the walls.

Her foot crunched something and she leaned down and picked it up, its wetness a shock. A dead leaf. She turned and looked down at the front door, but it was closed firmly. Had Matt come in? She hadn't heard him.

She dropped the leaf and climbed another three steps. As she came closer to the landing her heart-beat seemed louder. She was sweating and her hand on the rail was cold.

All the bedroom doors were closed, apart from hers.

Her door was ajar.

She could see the corner of her bed, the side of her wardrobe.

He was in there. It had to be Matt. He had to be looking for the silver box.

She crept closer. There were wind chimes hanging from her ceiling, small metal chimes of elephants and tigers. She could see them spinning, hear the faint silvery tinkle they made in the breeze.

She grabbed the door handle and took a deep breath. Then she flung the door open and stormed in.

No one was there.

The curtains moved in the stillness. The belt of her bathrobe swung softly to and fro.

She let out her breath.

There was a smell.

A wet, cloying smell, like something rotten.

And the bottom drawer of her wardrobe had been opened, because a trail of purple shirt hung out of it, the old purple shirt she didn't wear any more, that she had used to wrap the silver box in.

With a gasp of anger she knelt and tugged at it. If he'd ...

But the box was still there, still locked.

Still rattling when she shook it.

*********

Later, after dinner, Matt was lying on the couch watching TV. She walked in and stood in front of the screen.

He twisted his neck to look around at her. “What's up now?”

“Don't you even try that again. Or I'll speak to Gareth.”

“Try what, drama queen?” Matt said.

“That box is mine. Stay out of my things, creep.”

One black-lined eye flickered at her. “Don't have a clue what you're talking about.”

“Yeah. Right.”

In the kitchen she said to Gareth, “Where do you get keys made?”

“You need a key?”

“Oh, not for a door or anything big. Just ... I have an old jewelry box and I'd like to be able to lock it. My dad gave it to me.”

She knew he wouldn't ask any more questions about it if she said that, and he didn't. “Oh, right. Well, a cobbler, I suppose, or a jewelers if it's really old. There's a shop in Marston, down that little side street by the stream. I could take it for you, if you – ”

“No.” She shook her head. “That's OK. I'll take it myself.”

*********

She woke up late in the night.

She was lying on her side, with her face to the wall. All she could see were the blurred, close-up sneakers of a band on a poster that she was already bored with. But her eyes were wide, her back prickling with sweat.

Someone was sitting on her bed.

It wasn't a dream.

She could feel a weight dipping the mattress, smell that odd, leafy smell.

She kept very still, listening to the rattle of the box in his hands, feeling terror ice her skin. Then she sat up and turned her head.

A boy was sitting next to her.

He was small and had dirty, tangled dark hair and a thin, frail face. He had one earring, and when he looked up his eyes were lit with a faint green glimmer. For a moment he just looked at her, and then he turned back to the box.

She stared at his hands.

He was tugging at the box, trying to force it open with his broken nails, smearing it with dirt. He worked at it, getting more and more desperate. Then he said, “I can't do it. I just can't.”

There was a sadness in his voice that chilled her. She sat up, slowly.

“Who are you?”

He shot her a glance. “I need the key. Do you have the key?”

She shook her head. He wasn't real. He couldn't be real, because his was the face she had seen in the painting, and in her dream.

“I gave the box to you,” he said. “Because I knew you could bring it out.”

“Out?”

“Of the tree.”

She drew her knees up under her. “How did you get in here?”

He threw the box on the bed in despair and looked at her. Then he lifted his hand and pushed it through her, through the poster, through the wall.

“It was easy,” he said in a whisper.

Chapter 5

The Shop by the Stream

Sarah almost screamed.

But the boy just shrugged. He tapped the box with one dirty finger. “I need the key. I need you to get me the key.”

She huddled herself up, pulling the bedclothes tight around her. She wanted to shiver and shiver, to back away from those fingers that had moved right into her skin. She asked in a hushed voice, “Where is it?”

“Lost.” He looked at her. “Some trees grow keys. Ash does. But not oak.”

It meant nothing to her. Perhaps the boy sensed that, because he shrank back and leaned against the wall, his head dropped as if in misery. Locking his long dirty fingers together, he said, “I'm trapped here.”

“Trapped?”

He turned his eyes sideways. They were dark and bitter. “I was a thief once. I picked pockets, stole purses, snatched watches. Do people still do that?”

“Cell phones,” she said, thinking of Matt's anger when his had been stolen.

The boy's gaze flickered. “This is what happened to me. I stole a package from a man in the street. I pushed him and he fell, and I ran away with it. I felt gleeful, and proud. But he called after me, strange words in a foreign language, and I looked back and saw he was pointing at me, a long bony finger. He was calling down a curse on me.”

He rubbed his hands together. She saw how the thin wrists stuck out from the ragged sleeves, how his shoes were a web of holes.

“He killed me,” he said in a whisper.

Sarah's lips were dry, so she licked them and murmured, “How?”

“Sickness. The town was always full of sickness. I opened the package but it only contained a box. This box. And it was empty. Weakness came over me. I hadn't eaten for days. I felt feverish and hot. So I slipped away, out here into the hills. It was a freezing night and I knew I wouldn't see the end of it. I lay down in the leaves at the foot of the tree, made a hollow in them, curled up shivering. And I died, holding the box.”

Sarah didn't want to think about that. So she said, “But the box isn't empty.”

“Not now.” He turned his dark gaze on her. “Don't you see? He cursed me for all time. He has locked my soul into the box.”

She stared at him. Outside the wind was rising. She heard it thrash in the bare branches, heard it whip along the corner of the house.