A Curious Tale of the In-Between Page 14
It both comforted and worried Pram. She was not prepared for the day that Felix would lose interest in the living world and cross over completely.
“Have you thought about what you’re going to say?” Clarence said, bringing Pram back into the world of the living, as he so often did.
“I’d like to ask her about crossing over,” Pram said. “She taught me a lot about the spirit world, but not how to help a ghost move on.”
“I wouldn’t think ghosts need help crossing over,” Clarence said.
“Most don’t, from what I’ve seen,” Pram said. “Others have a harder time. One of the elders got himself trapped in the floorboards after he died. I could see his face in the wood grain, and he howled for days.”
“That’s awful,” Clarence said. “What did you do?”
“That’s just the thing,” Pram said. “I didn’t know what to do. One night I was lying in bed, listening to him howl, feeling sorry for him, and suddenly it got quiet and he was gone.”
She hugged her chest to ward off the chill the memory brought. “I think he was afraid to go alone. I could talk to him, but I didn’t know how to convince him it was safe to go on.”
Neither of them spoke for a while after that. They had each begun to think of their own mothers and were wondering what it had been like for them to cross over, and why they didn’t stay around long enough to say good-bye. At least tip a picture frame on the wall or flicker a light—something. To lose one’s mother was to lose the beginning of one’s life story.
The sun was melting into the horizon by the time they reached the county jail. Pram and Clarence stopped walking. They stood in a puddle of melted snow in the parking lot, staring at the yellow light coming from the wide windows.
The men inside wore dark blue uniforms and they were moving about like perfect wooden soldiers, Pram thought, with painted mouths and arched helmets. It didn’t seem real to her that she was standing in front of the jail, and that she had followed Lady Savant yet again.
She was sure Lady Savant had the answers she was looking for, but the question was whether she’d be willing to share them. The only thing Pram knew about her for certain was that she was not to be trusted.
“Only one way to find out,” she said, thinking aloud.
She balled her fists at her side and stepped forward.
“If you’re looking for her, she isn’t here,” a voice said. Pram looked up and saw Adelaide sitting on the roof, her legs dangling over the edge, her skirt rustling on its own breeze not of the living world. “She’s gone.”
“Gone?” Pram asked.
Clarence looked up as well, but all he saw were stars beginning to emerge as the sky darkened. “Is someone up there?” he asked.
Adelaide jumped to her feet. “You’ve brought a living boy,” she said excitedly.
“This is Clarence,” Pram said. “He can’t see you.”
“I’m used to that.” Adelaide sighed. “And if you’ve come here looking for Lady Savant, she’s gone. They’ve taken her away to a special sort of hospital.”
“An asylum?” Pram asked, her heart sinking. She was thinking of the memory she’d seen of Lady Savant as a girl, restrained by doctors who meant to take her gift away from her. Lady Savant had done many cruel things, but it all began with that memory, that feeling of powerlessness. Lady Savant collected souls and became the master of her own asylum just so she could be stronger than she had been that day. And now she was back in another place just like it.
Adelaide nodded. She had no reason to be fond of Lady Savant, but she did have an awful lot of sympathy for the living. She had been a very compassionate child when she was alive.
“If Lady Savant is gone, what are you doing here?” Pram asked.
Adelaide twisted back and forth so that her skirt swirled against her legs. “I followed her here, and I didn’t want to follow her where she was going, and I didn’t want to go back, either. It feels weird in that building with nobody living in it. Nobody lights candles or breathes. It made me feel like I was dead.”
Adelaide was dead, but Pram felt it would be rude to point that out now.
“So, after Lady Savant left, I just sort of stayed here, watching the policemen come and go, listening to them talk to each other and turn on their sirens. It makes me feel safe.”
Pram was beginning to feel pity for Adelaide. She was a ghost, and as such she was safe wherever she went. She could hop from the tops of buildings and sail in the sky using clouds as her boat. But she was, and forever would be, a little girl, not very much younger than Pram. And little girls need things like candlelight and people for company.
Pram thought about inviting Adelaide to follow her back to the two-hundred-year-old colonial house. It was cozy and safe, and she could even play with Felix if he wasn’t being a grump.
But that didn’t seem like a proper solution. Adelaide would not be truly happy to go on haunting this world. She wasn’t like Felix, who had no desire to remember who he had been when he was alive, or how he died. Now that she remembered her family, it seemed that she should be getting back to them.
“Adelaide,” Pram said, “maybe it’s time for you to move on.”
Being Pram’s friend had taught Clarence to listen for things he could not hear. He didn’t see Adelaide, and he didn’t know what she was saying, but he thought he could feel her presence. Just slightly. There was a difference in the air where a ghost stood. There was a change in Pram as well; her eyes dilated and her face was concentrated.
When Pram told the ghost it might be time to move on, Clarence could feel fear just then. He could taste it like copper and dirt on his lips.
Pram looked at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to ignore you.”
“No,” Clarence said. “What you’re doing is important. Maybe Lady Savant wasn’t the only one who could teach you how to help a spirit move on. Maybe Adelaide can teach you.”
Pram paused. Then she said, “Adelaide says she doesn’t know how to move on. She says that she’s tried before and it hasn’t felt right.”
“Maybe you can teach each other, then,” Clarence suggested.
Pram turned to look at Adelaide again and blinked. “She’s gone.”
“Gone as in she moved on?” Clarence asked.
“I don’t think so,” Pram said. “I think we frightened her.”
CHAPTER
28
After dinner, Pram spent the evening with the elders, playing a game whose rules they made up as they went along. They had an old game board whose pieces were missing, and they used cough drops and caramels as pawns. The game didn’t follow any logical set of rules, as was the case with most things the elders did, but Pram had fun anyway.
She very much liked the elders. They accepted her and did not ask many questions. They lived in their own worlds of make-believe. They did not care about dirty dishes or clean laundry or which bills needed to be paid, and they were not ghosts who might have needed her help. They were a warm, pleasant in-between, neither living nor dead.
One of the elders—Mrs. Marson—pinched Pram’s cheek and said, “I’ve won. I’ve won this game.”
Pram smiled. “You have,” she said. It wasn’t a game that made sense, and that was the best thing about it.
“Shall we have a rematch?” Mrs. Marson asked. Her eyes were very wide and dark, and Pram imagined that her eyes had looked that way when she was a child.
“No more games for Pram,” Aunt Nan said. “It’s time for her to go to bed.”
Pram went upstairs, and as she got ready for bed, she looked through her bedroom window and saw Felix climbing his tree.
She thought about Mr. Hesterson, whose spirit had been trapped in the floorboards after he died. She had been very young when it happened, and it was around the time she’d begun talking to Felix. It had frightened her, and the aunts gave her strange looks when she skipped over the floorboards on her way upstairs. She had wanted terribly to help him.
When morning came, Pram had slept very little. She opened her eyes at least an hour before her aunts would call upstairs for her to get ready for school. Even the elders were still sleeping, and the house was silent.
Pram was restless. During what little time she had slept, she dreamed of Lady Savant being driven to the very sort of place she feared the most. And she dreamed of Lady Savant when she was a girl named Claudette. If only she’d had people like Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan and Felix to love her, she might have used her gift for good things, Pram thought. She might be happy now.
I’ ll only do good things, Pram thought. She would learn to help spirits move on, and she would deliver their messages if they asked her to.
She stood at her bedroom window and watched Felix pace from the pond to the street and back again, as though he was working up the courage to go on another adventure.
“You care for him a lot, don’t you?” a voice said.
Pram turned to find Adelaide sitting on her desk.
“His name is Felix,” Pram said. “He was my first friend.”
Adelaide stood. She brushed her fingers over Pram’s things—sharpened pencils lined neatly beside a stack of papers, and a ceramic bluebird with a money slot in its back. “I’ve been thinking about what you said: that it’s time for me to move on.”
“Have you tried again?” Pram asked.
“Whenever I try, I feel myself getting stuck,” Adelaide said. “I almost got trapped in the shards of a broken vase the last time. I close my eyes, and I’m standing in front of a hallway, but when I try to walk down it, it’s too long and I lose track of which direction I’m supposed to go down.”
“I could try to go with you,” Pram said. The words came out before fear stopped them.
“How?” Adelaide said.
“Lady Savant showed me how to enter the memories of people who had died. Maybe I can enter your memory of the hallway and you could meet me there.”
Adelaide looked hopeful. “If you died, too, you could move on with me.”
“I’d like to live if I can help it,” Pram said. “But I can try to see you through.”
“Okay,” Adelaide said.
All I have to do is want it, Pram thought. Anything I want is mine.
Her bedroom disappeared.
CHAPTER
29
Adelaide’s memories were a kaleidoscope, each image incomplete but bright and moving too fast to be caught.
Pram focused on getting her feet to touch ground.
The memories hummed and then went quiet, like an audience as the curtains began to open.
“Is this the hallway you saw?” Pram asked as Adelaide stepped beside her.
It wasn’t a hallway so much as the notion of a hallway. They were nowhere in the living world. There were no real floors or walls, but it did seem to be a hallway, although one that Pram would have a hard time explaining to anyone in the living world.
“Yes,” Adelaide said. She was trying to sound brave, but Pram could see that she was frightened.
Pram took Adelaide’s hand, and they began walking in a direction they hoped was forward.
The sound of typewriter keys began to tap, from one of Adelaide’s memories. Adelaide skipped to the sound of them. It seemed to make her calm down.
But then another sound arose from a different memory—a loud splash. Even Pram could feel the memory of water filling up her mouth and nose. A scream nobody could hear.
Adelaide froze. The memory was in their way, and she couldn’t bring herself to push through it. “This is the part where I die,” she said. “I’d fallen into the ravine. I was trying to collect sparkly rocks and I fell in. Nobody could hear me.”
“It’s over now,” Pram said. “It’s only a memory. It can’t hurt you.”
Adelaide shook her head. “I’m never going to see my parents again. I’m going to drown.”
“You will see them again,” Pram insisted. “They’re right on the other side of the water. They’ve surely been waiting a long time for you.”
Adelaide whimpered. Her hair was wet now, her clothes muddy. She opened her fist, and it was full of small, sparkling rocks.
She looked at Pram. “Will you come with me?”
Pram could taste the dirt in the water. She could feel her body in the living world beginning to drown, as that was Adelaide’s last living memory. “I can’t,” she said. “It isn’t my time to go; it’s yours. But I’ll wait right here and I’ll help you if you get stuck.”
Adelaide’s feet were in a puddle that dripped from her clothes. She shivered from the cold of it, and her teeth chattered, and for a moment she was a living girl again. A living girl who was just about to die.
“Hold your breath,” Pram said. “It’ll be over quick.”
Adelaide took a deep breath.
And then she was gone.
Pram remained in place for as long as she could, in case Adelaide needed her help. But Adelaide didn’t return. The water, and the memory of water, disappeared.
CHAPTER
30
After school, Clarence and Pram walked to the library.
“What are we trying to find?” Clarence asked.
Pram opened a drawer in the card catalog. “Jacob Pierce,” she said. “He was Adelaide’s father. She said he was writing a novel when she died.”
Clarence watched her comb through the cards. “What was it like being in the spirit world?”
“I wasn’t there for very long,” Pram said. “It was scary at first, and then the longer I stayed, the less scary it felt. And I had to remind myself that I mustn’t get complacent. I still had living left to do.”
“I don’t know how you’re so brave,” Clarence said. “Death scares most people.”
“Death isn’t a punishment,” Pram said, repeating what Finley had told her. “It’s just what comes next.”
Clarence smiled at Pram while she was too busy looking through cards to notice. A girl who lived right on the verge of death had been the one to make him love life again.
“Oh!” Pram said. “I think I found it. ‘Pierce comma J.’”
They roamed the aisle until they found it, and Clarence stood on tiptoes to retrieve the thick book with the green spine. “‘The Third Bell,’” he read aloud, and flipped through it. “It’s over five hundred pages.”
Pram looked over his shoulder and turned to the front pages. “It was published forty-three years ago,” she said.
“So Adelaide had been haunting that place for all those years,” Clarence said. “Wow.”
“Time is different in the spirit world,” Pram said. “It’s like it doesn’t pass at all. The sky changes colors as the hours go on, but you hardly even notice. And you can just forget anything you don’t want to hold on to.”
She knew what Clarence was thinking. “Your mother will remember you,” she told him. “Just like you can let unpleasant things go, you hold on that much tighter to the things you love.”
“You think so?” he asked.
“I really do,” Pram said. “While Lady Savant held me captive, and I was beginning to forget the important things, thinking of you always reminded me who I was.”
His cheeks burned pink.
“It’s scary to think that she was powerful enough to steal memories like that,” he said.
“She wanted me to get stronger before she tried to take my soul,” Pram said. “I wonder if I would have been anywhere near as powerful as she was.”
“It wouldn’t matter if you were,” Clarence said. “You could grow up to be ten times more powerful than she was, and you still wouldn’t go around stealing memories, or tricking anyone into telling you th
eir secrets.”
“What happened to her was terrible,” Pram said. “It could have happened to me.”
“I would never let it,” Clarence said. “Neither would your aunts. And besides, if you feel like you’re forgetting who you are, I’ll be sure to remind you.”
“Even twenty years from now?” Pram asked.
“Even fifty years from now,” Clarence said. He could swear he heard Felix’s voice telling him, “You’d better.” His cheeks were turning pink again. He cleared his throat. “Do you want to check out this book?”
Pram took the book from him and read a bit from some pages, considering.
“No,” she said. “It seems like something I’ll understand better when I’m older.” Pram suspected there were a great many things she would understand better when she was older. “Let’s come back for it in a few years.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A couple of years back, after Thanksgiving dinner with my family, I sat on the kitchen floor with my nine-year-old cousin, drawing silly pictures. She asked me if I was writing anything new. At the time, I was dragging my feet with an early draft of this story, but my own uncertainty kept it on the back burner. I had never attempted to write for younger readers and wasn’t sure I could pull it off. Seeing this as an opportunity to test the waters, I told her, “I do have a story about a girl whose best friend is a ghost.”
As I told my story, she began to draw the things I described. From then on, she asked me about Pram and her ghost whenever we spoke. It was her enthusiasm that made me believe this story might have a place in the hearts of younger readers, which gave me the courage to finish it. For that, I owe a huge thank-you to my cousin Riley Victoria Fallon. Her insights and knowledge are vastly beyond her years, and someday the literary community and the world will know her name.
As always, a huge thank-you goes to my parents and my huge extended family, for indulging me with their support and love.