The Swallow (10 page)

Then she started to laugh, a kind of crazy, high-pitched laugh that sounded like it would turn into tears any second.

“You’ll have to leave me if I’m dead, Polly. Unless I’m meant to just keep drifting around and haunting you and this house forever. I’ll have to cross over, I’ll have to go on to—to wherever, wherever they go, I don’t know—”

“Rose!” I said, giving her another shake. “Maybe Winnifred can help us. Maybe if you help her she can help you. At least tell you whether or not you’re a ghost.”

“No, no!” said Rose frantically, “You don’t understand. She’s evil. She wants to kill you, Polly. She won’t help. Ghosts don’t help. They’ve never helped. All they want is to suck the life out of me and feed on it. They want to devour me. You can’t ask them for help. They’ll kill you.”

“We can at least try,” I said. “This one might be different.”

Rose

Polly didn’t have a clue. She had no idea what we were dealing with. But I had to calm down. Panic wasn’t going to help. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I tried to picture the white light, spreading out from me, shining around Polly, protecting us, keeping us safe from the black anger of the Door Jumper and the steady clamoring of all the ghosts in the world.

It wasn’t working very well. The light was trembling and shaky, exactly how I felt inside. I took another deep breath and started murmuring “White light” again. If only Polly hadn’t half-convinced me that I was dead, I could have handled this. Like I always did. Somehow. Walked the line between the ghosts and the living, kept them at bay. But this time it was so much harder.

I opened my eyes.

“Have a cookie?” said Polly, holding the bag out to me.

To my surprise, I laughed. A real laugh this time, not a crazy one. Polly hesitated for a moment, then she grinned.

“What were you doing just now? Some kind of ghostie mumbo-jumbo?”

THE MISSING PHOTOGRAPHS

Polly

I’d never have told Rose this, but I really did wonder sometimes if she was a bit nuts. She was just so
WEIRD
. When she shut her eyes and started chanting and taking really deep breaths I thought maybe she was finally going crazy. Driven mad by ghosts! The very thing she was afraid of.

Whatever she was doing, it did calm her down. And she said I could do it too, if the Door Jumper came back. I should just say it over and over again and imagine the white light.

“Like an angel?” I suggested. “Like a guardian angel, all white?”

She looked doubtful. Obviously she hadn’t been to Sunday school as much as I had. But she said whatever worked for me.

The good thing was, the mumbo-jumbo made her feel better. She went downstairs to look for her grandmother’s photo album while I lay back on her bed and watched the shadows flickering on the far wall. They were made by the tree branches outside her window, swaying up and down in the cold November wind. What I really wanted to do was get my hands on her grandmother’s shoes, but a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt. I closed my eyes.

I must have drifted off because it seemed like the next minute Rose was back, dumping a big heavy book on the bed.

“What did you find?” I said, sitting up. “Any pictures of Winnifred?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

We opened the book together. It was a big, leather-covered album full of faded pictures of people in old-fashioned clothes: long summer dresses and fancy hairdos. The same people kept turning up: a little boy with a solemn expression, a man with thick curly hair, glasses, his mouth clamped firmly shut, and a small woman with a slight smile and eyes that looked out of focus.

“My grandmother,” said Rose. “And my grandfather. And my father. But no Winnifred.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, turning a page. “Look at this.”

Beside a picture of her father holding a bike that looked too big for him, I could see the faint outline of a square, half hidden behind the photograph.

“I think there was another picture here before,” I said.

We both peered at the page. The outline was quite clear. It looked as though there had been two photos side by side, then one had been taken away and the other one pasted back in the center of the page. Flipping back and forth through the album, we found the same light indentations beside several pictures.

Rose looked at me. “You think they were pictures of Winnifred?”

“Who else?” I said.

Rose

“Why would they get rid of her pictures?” I asked Polly.

“Because she died?” said Polly, slowly turning the pages of the album. “Look, here’s your dad when he was a teenager. He was cute!”

I looked over her shoulder. My father was definitely good-looking, with dark hair and eyes. But he wasn’t smiling in any of the pictures. He looked sad.

I shut the album.

“Okay, she died. But why take her pictures away?”

“Maybe they couldn’t bear to look at them,” said Polly. “Maybe they were so filled with pain and anguish they didn’t want to be reminded of her.”

“Well, yes, that’s a possibility. But it’s almost as if she never existed. Except for the note in the Bible, there’s no trace of her.”

“Maybe Winnifred did something so terrible they wanted to pretend she never existed,” said Polly, a faraway look in her eyes. “Maybe she murdered someone!”

“Polly! Stop being so dramatic! I don’t think my aunt went around killing people.”

Polly started counting on her fingers.

“Number one: you say the Door Jumper wants to kill me. Number two: you say the Door Jumper is Winnifred. Therefore Winnifred wants to kill me. If she succeeds, she will be a murderer. Maybe that’s how she became an entity—because she was so evil. An evil murderer.”

“Don’t act like that makes any sense, Polly! You’re just guessing.”

“How do you explain it, then? How come nobody ever talks about her? How come there are no photographs of her?”

I couldn’t.

ATTACK

Polly

Rose stuck her head out the door and listened.

“All clear,” she breathed, and we tiptoed across the hall and into the Haunted Room.

In the late-afternoon light the room looked spooky but not terrifying.

“Shoes …” I whispered.

“All right, but I’m looking for clues too. There’s got to be something in this room that will tell us more about Winnifred.”

She went to the closet and pulled out the boxes. No sign of the Door Jumper.

The shoes were amazing. Perfectly preserved, all wrapped in tissue paper. Some looked as though they hadn’t been worn.

“This is like Christmas,” I said as I opened up box after box of exquisite footwear. “All I ever get new is plain oxfords for school. The rest are hand-me-downs.” I touched the soft pink satin of a pair of pumps.

“Ooo, these are so soft,” I murmured, holding one against my cheek and closing my eyes dreamily.

Rose rolled her eyes and laughed.

“They’re just shoes, Polly!”

I don’t know why, but I’ve always loved shoes. I beg Mum to buy them for me but, “There’s no money in the budget to waste on shoes you don’t need,” she says. So I cut pictures of shoes out of magazines and draw outfits to go with them. If I were rich I’d have a closet full of shoes, just like Mrs. McPherson.

The next box contained black leather lace-ups, with pointy toes and two-inch heels. I tried them on. Just a little tight.

“My feet are bigger than yours and your grandma’s,” I said sadly.

Rose was admiring a pair of green suede slingbacks in the full-length mirror. They looked funny with her gray school uniform skirt.

“Did your grandma go to a lot of parties?” I asked, opening another box and reaching through the rustling tissue to pull out a pair of white satin dancing shoes with the cutest little pearl buttons you ever saw.

“I don’t think so,” said Rose distractedly. She had just dumped another four boxes on the floor. We had a lovely mess going, tissue paper and shoes littered all over the rose-covered carpet. Rose had turned on the lamp on the dressing table. It had a stained-glass shade of mauve and yellow and cast a soft glow.

“They must have had money, to buy all these shoes. What did your granddad do?”

“He was a doctor,” said Rose, rummaging in the closet for more boxes. “I think he was kind of strict, from things my father has told me.”

She plopped herself down on a scrap of empty carpet and opened another box. “My father said my grandmother never argued with him, always said, ‘Yes, dear, you know best.’ When my father finished university he wanted to be a journalist, but his father didn’t like the idea and that was the end of that. He didn’t think it was respectable, so my father went to teacher’s college instead.”

“But now he’s not a teacher, he works at your mother’s company, right?” I asked, running my finger along a smooth black velvet shoe.

“Yes,” said Rose. “And he travels all the time. I miss him.”

I looked at her. She looked sad again.

“I miss my dad too,” I said suddenly. I’d never thought of it that way before, but it was true.

“But your dad is home every night,” said Rose.

“Yes, but when I was little I spent more time with him, before Moo and Goo came, when the twins were younger. Mum would be busy with them, Lucy would be off doing her homework and Dad and I would have long talks in his study. I used to sit at a little table and pretend it was my desk, and he gave me paper and pens and I drew all these squiggly lines and pretended I was writing, just like he did. I used to be his special girl …” My voice faded away and I looked up, shocked at what I heard myself saying.

Rose was giving me an odd look.

“Baby stuff,” I said, trying to laugh. “Silly baby stuff.”

“What happened?” she asked quietly. “Why did it change?”

I felt the familiar anger rising up inside of me and I couldn’t help myself.

“Moo and Goo happened,” I said bitterly. “Apparently they’re a lot more fun than I am. They’re always bouncing around the place, giggling, whispering, teasing—my dad just switched over to them and forgot all about me.”

My voice was shaking and I guess I was talking way too loud, because Rose suddenly said, “Sshhhh!” and cocked her head, listening. Then she jumped to her feet.

“Come on, let’s go up to the attic,” she said and bundled me into the closet.

I was halfway up the ladder when the Door Jumper returned. I felt the breath knocked out of me as surely as if someone had walloped me with a baseball bat. But this time it didn’t knock me over. I clung to the rungs of the ladder and closed my eyes.

“
BEGONE, FOUL BEAST
!” roared Rose from behind me in a terrible voice. I could hardly believe it was hers, and I thought, Well, if old Kendrick didn’t hear us before, she’ll sure hear us now, and I scrambled up the rest of the way and heaved myself into the attic.

Rose didn’t come up right away. As I lay huddled in a heap by the open trapdoor, I could hear her opening the bedroom door.

Something strange was happening to me. I felt sick, like I wanted to throw up, and the room started to spin. I lay down on my back and the floor rocked. Rose’s white face appeared in the opening.

“Are you okay, Polly?” she asked, climbing up and sitting down beside me. She reached a hand out and touched my shoulder lightly. It was like the soft touch of a bird’s wing.

Rose

There was something wrong with Polly. She wasn’t getting up. The only light was filtering up from the bedroom through the trapdoor. I touched her shoulder.

She moved then, but it was small, the way a bird flutters when it’s hurt and can’t fly.

“Polly!” I said again, leaning in to look at her face. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. She looked frightened and very, very pale. “I feel sick.”

I laid my hand on her forehead. It felt cold and clammy.

“Can you sit up?” I asked her.

She made that small flutter again, her legs and arms twitching.

“No,” she breathed and shut her eyes.

I whirled over to the corner, turned on the light and grabbed the thick wool blanket from the chair to try to warm her up. She whimpered.

A feeling of dread was rising in my throat, making me sick. What had Winnifred done to her?