The Girl With the Ghost Machine Read online

  For my mom.

  Sorry that this book made you sad.

  Also by Lauren DeStefano

  A Curious Tale of the In-Between

  The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart

  Lauren DeStefano

  When the rain falls and enters

  The earth, when a pearl drops into

  The depth of the sea, you can

  Dive in the sea and find the

  Pearl, you can dig in the earth

  And find the water. But no one

  Has ever come back from the

  Underground Springs.

  —Mei Yaochen

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  Emmaline Beaumont was ten and one quarter when her father started building the ghost machine. It was one month after her mother’s funeral exactly.

  To some, the pursuit of ghosts might have seemed greedy, given all that life had to offer. There was no shortage of living things in the world, to be sure. Even the rabbits that chewed through their vegetable garden, the chipmunks that left holes in the dirt, the Rousseau family across the alley whose records played at all hours and whose children drew pictures in the fog of their breath on every window from Saint Laurent street to the school.

  But when Emmaline’s mother, Margeaux Beaumont, died, it seemed as though everything else had died with her. Emmaline and her father could no longer see the colors in the trees. They could no longer hear the melody in music. The vegetable garden became overrun by weeds, and the carrots and the tomatoes turned gray and shriveled.

  Emmaline herself hardly spoke in the first month after her mother’s death, sustaining herself on the chocolate cherries her mother kept hidden under the sink, salting them with her tears.

  Every day since her mother’s death, Emmaline wore a single black lace glove on her left hand, closest to her heart.

  The curtains were always drawn, and the house was always dark.

  This was before Emmaline’s father got the idea for the ghost machine.

  One day, two months after Emmaline’s mother had died, and neither Emmaline nor her father had left the house but to retrieve the mail, Mademoiselle Chaveau, who taught at the school, hammered the iron knocker on the door until at last someone answered.

  “Enough of this now, enough,” Mademoiselle Chaveau had cried. “You can’t have that child living in a morgue. She needs to be in school.”

  And so Emmaline returned to her lessons, and when she came home in the afternoons, sunlight filled her light honey-colored hair. The smell of autumn burrowed in the fibers of her sweater. She was brimming with jokes and whispers and giggles she had collected all day like stones in her pockets.

  And it was then, just as life had begun to make sense to Emmaline again, that the ghost machine came about. She returned from school one afternoon to find her father in the basement, crouched over scraps of metal and foraging through jars of bolts and rusted nails.

  Soon thereafter, Julien became the subject of whispers and rumors on Saint Laurent street. He shuttered himself in the basement for hours each day, and all anyone heard was the clang and clatter of machinery and the occasional muttered curse.

  Some believed the loss of his wife had driven him mad. Neighbors would knock on the door, bearing covered dishes and freshly baked treats, all hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever he did in that gloomy house. But if he answered the door at all, it was never for more than a fleeting moment, just long enough to mutter a word of thanks.

  At ten and one quarter years old, Emmaline was old enough to know that a ghost machine wasn’t a very realistic idea. The world was filled with bolts and gears and flickering light bulbs, and if these things could somehow summon ghosts, it surely would have happened by now.

  But still, she had hoped, despite all reason, that it might work. The house was quiet and lonely without her mother to straighten its picture frames and draw its curtains and fill the rooms up with her humming. Now, dishes piled in the sink, and the kitchen table was littered with bills and cards expressing sympathy, and an uncapped jar of honey whose contents had dribbled out onto the week-old newspaper resting beneath it.

  And though the idea of summoning ghosts sounded rather odd, Emmaline knew also that there was nothing odd about her father. Rather, he had loved her mother very much. Margeaux Beaumont had left them quite suddenly, after a short and unexpected illness, and there simply hadn’t been time to prepare for such tremendous sorrow. When Margeaux died, her coffee cup was still in the sink, soaking in pink suds that shined and shimmered. Her slippers were neatly placed near the bathtub, and an oval nest of her fine gold hair was still caught in the brush beside the bathroom sink.

  And so, when her father began collecting pieces for the machine, Emmaline helped him. She brought him little rusted gears and nails—things she found on the side of the road mostly—and discarded paper clips that were bent out of shape. She collected and rinsed out empty marmalade jars and cans, all the while knowing that these mundane things could not possibly bring her mother back to her. Even so, that small bit of hope was what made her go on foraging for supplies.

  One afternoon she pushed an old deflated tire up the steps. Her father was so pleased by this offering that he hugged her until her feet left the ground and he twirled her across the kitchen and kissed the top of her hair.

  That was when she asked him, “Papa, what will this machine do?”

  His answer was simple. “It will summon ghosts.”

  “But how, Papa?”

  “Think of the puddles in the street after it rains,” her father said. “Where do they go?”

  “I suppose they disappear,” Emmaline answered.

  He tapped her nose. “They don’t disappear. They evaporate. The clouds gather them up, and when it’s time, they come back again as rain. Your mother is just like that.”

  “Mama is in a cloud?” Emmaline asked, skeptical.

  “She’s not in a cloud, exactly,” her father said. “But she’s somewhere out there, where things go when it seems like they’ve disappeared. She can’t come back and live with us because her body is gone now, but bodies aren’t the most important part of us. The special part, the true part, evaporates when we die. This machine will bring that part back. As to how it will work, that is a small matter to sort out.” Her father waved his hand as though swatting away a fly. “It will all make sense once it’s done. You’ll see.”

  At first, the machine was strictly off limits. Emmaline would hear her father tinkering and toiling—very rarely shouting, often grumbling—behind the closed door of the basement. Emmaline had never particularly liked the basement. It was dark and damp and full of spiders. But whenever she brought her father pieces for his machine, she found herself trying to peer into the dark stairwell over his shoulder, wanting to catch a glimpse of this thing that had come to consume him. But he always closed the door before she could see.

  With time, her father became as inaccessible as the machine. He stopped answering the door when she knocked. He was still in the basement when Emmaline returned from school in the afternoons. At 3:05 precisely, she would leave a sandwich on a plate at the top of the stairs. She would knock on the basement door only once, for she
knew her father would know what it meant.

  Sometimes her father would retrieve the sandwich promptly. But sometimes—in fact, most times—the sandwich was still there in the evening when Emmaline emerged from her bath and had begun to prepare for bed.

  “Good night, Papa,” Emmaline would say on such occasions.

  The only response would be the clatter and clamor of tools and gears.

  Faced with the quiet of an empty house, Emmaline began to grieve for her father as well. He was still alive, but he was as gone as the dead for as little as she saw of him.

  Late one night, kept awake by the thunking and banging in the basement, she climbed out of bed and made her way to the basement, and threw open the door.

  Her father didn’t notice at first, lost as he was in his work. He didn’t hear her until she had reached the bottom step.

  And just like that, Emmaline had her first look at the thing that had taken up all her father’s time. The thing into which he had poured all his hopes. The thing he believed would bring Margeaux back.

  Even though the thing did not work—had never worked—Emmaline was rendered speechless by the sight of it. It was a hulking thing, nearly as high as the ceiling. It was a great metal monster, with hundreds of bolts for eyes, and a rectangular mouth, into which Emmaline supposed something was meant to be deposited the way old clothes were deposited into a donation bin.

  The basement itself was dark, but the ghost machine created its own light once Emmaline reached the bottom step. A flickering, eerie purple glow that came through all the cracks and corners of the fused metal.

  It was unlike anything Emmaline had ever seen. She wouldn’t know how to describe such a thing, much less how to describe the way it made her feel betrayed by her own sense of logic. She knew what machines were supposed to look like. She knew what death meant, and that ghosts weren’t real. But this machine, frightening and amazing at the same time, made her feel as though anything was possible. It might even be possible for her mother’s ghost to emerge from that peculiar glow.

  She had expected her father to be angry with her for bursting into the basement, but when he saw the look of wonder on her face, he only smiled.

  CHAPTER 2

  It had been two years since the start of the ghost machine’s assembly now. Emmaline was twelve and one quarter, and half a foot taller, and the machine still did not work.

  Emmaline didn’t understand how it would ever work, or why it ate up so much electricity. She kept it a secret, fearing her father would be deemed mad and she would be taken from him.

  It had been two years since Emmaline first laid eyes on the ghost machine, and it hadn’t been much discussed with her father since. But it was always there, even if Emmaline rarely was able to go down to the basement and have a good look at it. The ghost machine had become sort of like a stepmother to her, Emmaline thought, the way her father lavished it with affection. The ghost machine took and took her father’s love, and offered nothing in return. Even the hope once implied by its presence was gone.

  It took two years for Emmaline to work up the nerve to say what she had been thinking for a very long time. She planned it very carefully, turning the words over and over in her head, and then whispering them to her bedroom mirror that morning, until they were smoothed and polished as a stone.

  She took a deep breath and then descended the stairs. Mornings were the only opportunity she would have to speak to her father. It was a very short window before he disappeared into the basement, where he would still be until long after she’d gone to bed.

  He was at the kitchen table, his elbow resting on a scant three inches of clear space amid the clutter, sipping tea and staring at the newspaper in his lap. The paper was a week old, but the fact that he was reading about the outside world at all was a good sign, Emmaline thought.

  “Papa,” she said, her voice strong and clear. She straightened the hemline of her jumper. “I have something to tell you.”

  Her father barely afforded her a glance. “You should have breakfast,” he said. “There are some bananas on the counter.”

  “They’ve gone bad,” Emmaline said. “Papa, it’s about the machine. I’d like you to unplug it.”

  At last, her father looked up from his paper. He set down his tea.

  “Unplug it?”

  Now that she had her father’s attention, Emmaline felt all the words she had planned escaping her. They flew right out of her head and fluttered away.

  She stood up straighter.

  “It would be for the best,” she said. “Mama is—gone—” That word caught in her throat. Even after two years, she would never be used to the idea that her mother wasn’t coming home, and it felt wrong to say. She went on, “And she wouldn’t want you to spend all your time in the basement trying to bring her back.”

  “She isn’t gone,” her father said, his voice soft and gentle, as if he were reading her a bedtime story. “She’s somewhere, but she can’t find her way back to us. That’s all. The machine will help her find a way, like a lighthouse beam.”

  Emmaline could feel herself shaking, deep down in her bones. Her head felt foggy, the way it always did when she was about to cry.

  Don’t cry, she told herself. Remember what you practiced. But she could no longer remember the words she had practiced. It was far easier to come up with a good argument when she was alone in her bedroom. But here, faced with her father’s stubbornness, she remembered all at once why she hadn’t brought this matter up at all in the past two years. It didn’t matter what she said. He would never listen.

  “Mama isn’t ‘somewhere,’ ” Emmaline said firmly. “She’s in the cemetery, with about a hundred other people, and none of them are going to come back. None of them are ever going to come back, Papa. Everyone in the world knows that’s what it means when people die. Everyone except for you.”

  “Everyone knew that light came from candles,” her father said, still in that dulcet tone. “If everyone had accepted that, we would never have light bulbs. We would never have electricity at all. The solution is there, Emmaline. It just takes someone brave enough to find it.”

  He frowned and reached for her hands, and that’s the moment Emmaline realized that she had started to cry. She knew that she had lost, that she would always lose when it came to that machine.

  “This isn’t like that.” Her voice cracked. She backed out of the kitchen and made her way to the door, roughly pulling her coat and satchel down from their hooks.

  “Emmaline, please,” her father said. “Stay and talk for a minute. I don’t want you to go to school upset.”

  Emmaline pulled the door open. “Why should it start to matter to you now?” she said. She slammed the door behind her.

  As she hurried down the sidewalk, she wiped away her tears and then stopped to compose herself. She would catch up with Gully and Oliver DePaul on the way to school, and she preferred not to discuss the ghost machine with her best friends. She would much rather leave that thing in the basement and out of her life.

  After two years of losing her father to his own invention, Emmaline was sure that she could never convince him to abandon his project. One of two things must happen. She would have to make the ghost machine work, or she would have to destroy it so terribly that all hope of repairing it would die as her mother had died, and her father would be forced to focus on the living again.

  CHAPTER 3

  At night, the November wind moved the trees so that it sounded as though they were breathing.

  Emmaline awoke to a branch rapping at her window, and for a sleepy moment she thought her father’s machine worked and that her mother’s ghost had come to visit.

  But then Emmaline saw the branch and was angry with herself for having hoped.

  It was late, but Emmaline found herself unable to fall back asleep. The scratching of branches and the howling of wind filled her with an odd sense of worry, and she got out of bed to fix a glass of tea and honey. It was something her mot
her used to fix for her at night, and even now the bittersweet taste made Emmaline feel safe and warm enough to go back to sleep on nights like these.

  Emmaline prepared her tea and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. She had to push aside a stack of books and brush away a cobweb just to have a spot to rest her tea on the table. Once, the kitchen table had been an important place, where she sat in the morning with her parents to eat toast and jam before school, and where she sat again in the evening and they all talked about their day.

  Now, the table had become a place to put things that had no proper place. Bills—some opened and some not—plates that attracted lines of ants, chocolate wrappers from the only meals her father sometimes ate for days, books about the psychology of grieving, which Emmaline’s aunt liked to send her father by post.

  But even though it was cluttered, Emmaline liked to sit at the table and drink her tea. She could still pretend that her mother and father would soon be downstairs to join her.

  The house wasn’t completely quiet. It never was. Even late at night, the machine continued to eat up the electricity. During the day, it made the lights flicker, but at night it hissed and plinked.

  It was especially loud tonight. Emmaline rose from the table and moved toward the basement to investigate. It was rare for her to have a good look at the machine—her father usually shooed her back up the stairs. But he had gone to bed for the night; Emmaline had heard him snoring.

  Cradling the teacup in her hands for warmth, Emmaline made her way down the basement steps. It was dark. Her father had removed most of the light bulbs after the ghost machine had shorted out the power circuit enough times.

  The engine was always running, and it had a whisper to it, as though it told tales in long-lost languages.

  Emmaline realized at once that she hated the machine. She’d once thought that building it would make her father happy, but it had instead consumed him. It caused him to skip meals, to lose sleep, to let the house fall into disrepair. He had even forgotten Emmaline’s twelfth birthday, and she hadn’t complained because she’d told herself that what he was doing down in this basement was important.