The Ghost in the Glass House (7 page)

“I don't know about that,” Denby said.

“Yeah,” Bram insisted. “I couldn't see the sun then, but I can still see the moon from here.”

Clare glanced back. The glimmer oflight was faint but clear on the ocean beyond.

“Follow the wall,” Bram said. “That's all we did last time.”

Denby set off again, reluctant, his upraised palm brushing the stone beside him. A few steps later, they came to the turn that Bram and Denby must have taken on their earlier visit: a slit in the stone, perhaps half as wide as a proper door. Denby raised the torch, but all it revealed was a cramped passage, not what lay beyond.

“That's it!” Bram exclaimed. “Where does it go?” He scrambled over the rocks and craned his neck to see in.

Not to be outdone, Denby pushed past him into the passage. Bram dove after. Bridget followed Bram. The light of the torch vanished with them.

Teddy brushed past Clare, but she didn't budge. She wouldn't have hesitated on the threshold of the world's finest hotel, but the cave was so dark and strange that she had no way to guess what might happen next—and so she couldn't act. She couldn't bring herself to step through the stone gap. She couldn't imagine walking back down the ledge to the beach on her own. And if she waited any longer, she'd be left in the dark by the pond, alone.

In the stone gap, Teddy turned back. He held out his hand. “Clare,” he said.

She took it and followed him.

The passage proved to be little more than a few steps, a sharp turn, and a few more steps. Then it let out into a giant cavern. This ceiling was even higher than the one over the pond, festooned with pale tapered columns of rock that dropped down from the ceiling like the pendants of a gigantic chandelier. Below them, the floor was covered with the same weird white stone, but on the ground it lay in overlapping pools, like wax that had dropped from huge candles far above.

In the center of the room, Denby held the torch up, over his head. Bram was halfway across it, catching up to him. Bridget gamely picked her way along behind them. Clare tried to pull her hand from Teddy's, but he slid his arm around her waist. His lips found her face just under her eye.

Clare's skin crawled as if a spider had just run over it. She yanked free. But inside she had another feeling, as if warm caramel had just spilled in her rib cage.

At the sound, Denby turned.

“Hey!” he shouted. “What are you two doing?”

“Nothing,” Teddy called as he strode forward. “Clare's just getting used to the dark, is all.”

C
LARE GLANCED AROUND THE
glass house, looking for a heat shimmer or a stray shadow that might give Jack away.

No books sailed from the buffet. No trinkets levitated from their place.

In the few days since she made the wax key, Clare had carried it with her everywhere she went. But this was the first time she had returned to the glass house with it.

Despite the civilized veneer of Bridget's mother's mediums, Clare had never been able to forget the fact that ghosts were dead. They had something to do with the stench of jellyfish rotting on sand, and the glossy coffin that held her father underground. It wasn't that she was afraid of death. The loss of her father had robbed death of its mystery. She knew how it looked and felt, so it could no longer terrorize her the way it did other children. But she didn't want to share it.

Her father had never returned to talk with her the way Jack talked to her. Despite all the times she'd longed for him, she'd never felt her father's presence as she walked down another lonely hall or tried to will herself to sleep on another speeding train. But death was where she would find him again, a secret world that belonged only to the two of them. It had become a retreat for her: an escape and a shelter like the glass house, where she and her father could watch the world go by with all the sound cut off.

So to speak with someone from the other side now carried the threat of truth. It reminded her that death was not her private retreat, but everyone's common fate, vast and unknown, like the moment she'd been left in the cave alone, multiplied forever.

Several days had passed before her curiosity about Jack had overcome her reluctance to face this. On the way down the hill, she'd steeled herself against fear, and braced for a prank.

But the thought that she might return to find Jack gone had never crossed her mind.

She folded her arms against a wave of disappointment. Wind in the leaves above made the shadows on the furniture ripple like shallows at the water's edge. Jack hadn't terrified her when he was there, but now that he was gone, the glass house seemed truly haunted by the other world where he belonged.

She went over to the divan and sat down.

Before her father's death, on some Sunday mornings, they had crossed the park their house stood on to visit the small stone church on the other side. Among the garble of ideas Clare collected there, she had gleaned that God knew everything. This made her cautious. Life, as far as she could tell, was an elaborate dance that turned on knowing when to tell the truth and when to keep it secret. In her experience, the truth could only be tolerated sparingly. If people knew what she thought of them, or if she actually did whatever she wanted, she and her mother would never be invited anywhere again. So if God knew all these things, could he be trusted to keep them secret? More important, what must he think? Better, she thought, to give him wide berth, like a man at a party who has had too much to drink and is temporarily capable of saying anything.

But now, when she wanted an answer that nobody else knew, God's omniscience suddenly seemed useful. And from what she remembered, God also held sway in the other world that Jack belonged to.

She bowed her head and tried to remember whether or not to close her eyes. After some hesitation, she left them open.

Dear God
, she began.

A shower of shreds of turquoise and white paper rained down on her upturned hands.

Clare's head snapped up.

Jack laughed.

Clare's hands flew from her lap. The scraps scattered on the carpet. An instant later, she was on her feet, her fists clenched.

“You look just like an Apache brave!” Jack crowed, his voice delighted.

His admiration seemed genuine, but Clare didn't take it as a compliment. She shook off her fighting posture and brought her heels together in a more ladylike stance.

“No one else ever jumped up to fight like that,” Jack said. “Usually they're scared out of their wits.”

“Do you drop paper on everyone?” Clare demanded.

“No,” Jack said, with a note of pride. “They're the endpapers from a romance of the sea. It took me days to tear them up.”

His voice came from overhead, as if he were inside the glass chandelier that hung from the central peak of the roof.

Clare's curiosity edged her fury aside. “Can you fly?” she asked the chandelier.

“Nope,” Jack said cheerfully. The chandelier began to sway. Its crystal drops chimed and clinked. “But it doesn't hurt when I fall, so I can climb just about anything.”

Clare scanned the panes of the glass ceiling that sloped over the chandelier. There was nothing a child could have gotten purchase on to reach the fixture. “How did you get up there?” she asked.

“The joints,” Jack said. “You see? The metal beams.”

The copper bones of the structure, which had gone green from exposure outdoors, still retained their pink and brown sheen inside the glass house. But they were hardly ideal for climbing: just half-moon tubes, less than a hand's-breadth wide.

Jack must have caught the doubt on Clare's face. “I don't need much,” he said. “It's like swimming, when you push yourself from rock to rock.”

“Like flying,” Clare insisted.

“No,” Jack said. “Because if I don't have something to hold on to, I fall.”

The chandelier gave a loud rattle, and then Jack's voice drifted down, at about the same speed a feather might drop to the ground. “But I don't . . . fall . . . very fast.”

Clare lurched back, out of his trajectory.

A moment later, his voice came from a spot that would have put them face to face if Clare had been able to see him. “So there's nothing to be afraid of,” he said, cheerful again.

At Clare's feet, the scattered tissue began to arrange itself in a neat pile.

Clare took a seat in one of the wine-colored wing chairs and drew her feet up under her. The sight of the scraps of tissue, rising one by one from the carpet or sometimes blown about by short gusts from an unseen wind, was hypnotic. And it gave her a clue as to how much effort it must have taken him to tear each tiny piece.

“When other people come here,” she asked, “what do you do with them?”

“It depends,” he said. “I play with the books or the matches. Sometimes I laugh.”

“Why?” Clare asked.

“At the things people do when they think they're alone.”

“Do you talk with them?”

A scrap of turquoise hung suspended over the blue rug. It flared in the shifting sun. Then it dropped among the others.

“They pretend not to hear,” Jack said, his voice subdued.

“They don't answer?” Clare asked.

“No.”

“Never?”

“If it's a woman and a man, she might take his arm and ask ‘What's that?'” Jack told her. “But if I talk to anyone who comes alone, they just look around. Or up at the sky.”

A white flake of paper rose and dropped into the pile.

“Am I the only one to talk to you?” Clare asked.

“Tilda says goodbye,” Jack told her. “Before she leaves.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A while,” he said.

Clare picked up a warning note: she had stumbled onto a topic he didn't want to talk about. It was rude to talk to people about death, she knew. Was it rude to talk with ghosts about it, too?

“Have you ever seen a tiger?” Jack asked.

Clare had. In Italy last year, one of her mother's friends had bought them tickets to a traveling menagerie, with a special party before the show to meet the animals, uncaged but well chained: a sleepy elephant with sequins pasted around his eyes, an ostrich whose long neck and bare legs had been daubed with red, green, and blue greasepaint, and a contemptuous tiger in a gaudy collar of paste sapphires. The elephant was bound with chain thick enough to anchor a ship. The ostrich fretted at the end of a length of red silk. But the tiger was held in place by a trio of stakes hammered into the ground at his feet, connected to his collar by taut ropes like the ones that supported the tent overhead. The configuration rendered him almost completely immobile, unless he wanted to bow his head. He never did, and he reserved another small measure of dignity: despite the stares and taunts of the curious crowd, he never glanced at them. Clare had watched the show that followed, where he snarled and pawed as he was forced to jump through a series of silver hoops and bat at a rubber ball, with a sense of outrage that had dissolved into tears as the crowd broke into their final applause.

She nodded.

“In Africa,” Jack told her, “there's a lake guarded by tigers.”

This wasn't true, Clare knew. Mr. Pedersen had devoted an entire lunch once to popular misconceptions concerning big cats. Zoos liked to install them together, he'd told her, but nature hadn't. Lions roamed the African savanna and parts of India. Tigers were only found in India and China and the Indochine.

“And at the bottom of the lake, there's a palace made of gold,” Jack went on. “It used to stand on an island, but the water rose over it. The tigers were tamed by the palace guard, and even after the palace sank, they stayed.”

“Have you been to Africa?” Clare asked.

“Not yet,” Jack said. “It's the first place I'm going to go. I'll take a diving bell to loot the palace. And then I'll have enough gold to go anywhere else I want.”

Despite the fact that the tigers couldn't be real, a defensive note crept into Clare's voice on behalf of the loyal beasts. “How will you get past the tigers?” Clare asked. “Are you going to shoot them?”

“Of course not,” Jack said. “I'll go at night, with a torch. Tigers are afraid of fire. And once I get on the water, they won't come after me.”

Clare remembered one of the stories Mr. Pedersen had used to illustrate his luncheon lecture on big cats, about a tiger who had chewed through the wooden bars of his cage and escaped into a duchess's party, where, startled by the lights and noise, he'd dived into her bathing pool and swum the length of it, scattering terrified, half-drunk guests all along the way. This memory was followed closely by an image of a boy rowing across a dark lake by torchlight as the pale faces of half a dozen big cats cut toward him through the water from every side.

“Are you sure about that?” she asked.

“Of course,” Jack said. “Have you ever tried to get a cat to take a bath?”

Clare shifted, unsure if she should encourage the dream, which he obviously treasured, or inform him of the realities, for his own good.

When she didn't answer at once, he tried another tack. “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

Clare knew what kind of answer he wanted, some kind of trade for his underwater palace: a civilization where all the people lived in treehouses and told time by bird song; a tribe of hermits who never came down from their mountaintops but visited each other by dirigible. Even if her powers of invention had failed her, she had years of experience with the wonders of the world, any of which might have suited him. But the truth rose up in her so powerfully that it swept away all possible lies.

“Home,” she said.

“Home?” he repeated, incredulous. “But you could go
anywhere
,” he added, as if she might not have understood the question.