A Curious Tale of the In-Between Read online

  Pram looked at him. “A daughter.”

  Felix had left his heart buried in the ground years and years ago, but he felt it crack apart.

  “Don’t you see, Felix?” Pram said. “Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan had no choice but to take me in. It wasn’t their plan. It just happened. And somewhere out there is the place I was meant to be. I just want to know where that is.”

  “How do you know you weren’t meant to be here?” Felix asked.

  “Because my parents aren’t here. Isn’t that the way it goes? You’re born and your parents have a plan for where you should be.”

  The living were never happy where they were, Felix thought. But he wouldn’t know how to explain this to Pram. “What will happen once you find this place?” he asked.

  She smiled at that, but the smile quickly faded. “Felix, I worry about you living all alone in that tree. Or not living, I suppose. Once I’ve found my father, there won’t be anyone to keep you company.”

  It was one of Felix’s greatest fears, but he said, “I’ll manage.”

  “If I’m going to be moving on,” Pram said, “maybe it’s time for you to think about moving on, too.”

  “To where?” Felix said.

  “You know where,” Pram said. “On.”

  “I wouldn’t know how,” Felix said. This wasn’t entirely true. He had never tried to leave, but he had always felt that the exit would be easy to find if he’d only wanted to find it. The whole truth was that he was afraid.

  “I could help you,” Pram said. “Clarence will help, too.” She ran the tap and flicked a bit of water at him. “Think about it.”

  Felix did think about it, especially as he sat on the counter, watching Pram and the elders having dinner. It was unusually quiet at the table, Pram being lost in thought as she was.

  Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan were quiet, too, and their worried glances at Pram suggested they’d heard her talking to herself when she was in the bathroom. They loved her, Felix knew, or else they wouldn’t worry at all, and they would be sad if she left them. But Felix also knew that Pram was right—her aunts had inherited her. Already, at almost twelve, Pram had the bravery to conquer what ever seas stood between her and where she might have been.

  Felix could only hope that what ever awaited her would be enough. The idea of Pram’s father turning out to be a disinterested nomad sailor was too much to think about. Pram was special; she was the most special thing in the living world, and if her father wasn’t able to see that, Felix would want to punch him in the nose.

  After dinner, Felix followed Pram to her attic. He blew at the flowers in her wallpaper, and the petals spun around her and settled in her lap. “Thank you,” she said.

  “If I were to move on, would you ever find another ghost to amuse you as much as I do?” Felix asked.

  “No,” she said. “Never. But I would think about you all the time. When I was grown up, I would name my first child Felix, even if it was a girl.”

  “That seems strange, a girl named Felix,” Felix said.

  “Yes,” Pram said. “I’ve decided strange isn’t a bad thing.”

  She turned out the light and climbed into bed.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Sometimes Felix was a presence in Pram’s dreams. She didn’t see him, but she felt that he was responsible for the things she did see. She didn’t think that he did this on purpose; she dreamed of his thoughts as he wandered around the pond at night. Sometimes they were nice things—women in ruffled crème dresses and manicured poodles on leashes—and sometimes they were not nice things, and Pram would awaken suddenly and the dream would leave her, as though Felix was unconsciously trying to protect her from some awful truth that occurred a century before she was born.

  But that night, she had a dream that Felix wasn’t responsible for. She dreamed of her mother and a sailor dancing in a circle, on the pedestal of a music box, and a breeze that smelled like burnt autumn air.

  Pram thought she was still dreaming when she pulled back the covers, descended the creaky stairs, and went outside. In the haze of sleep, the street lamps were filled with siren songs, each one a bit louder than the last, and she felt certain that something lovely awaited her.

  Felix was practicing his bravery by wandering as far as he dared from his tree. He’d made it to the small wooden bridge over the running stream when he saw Pram approaching.

  He knew right away that something wasn’t right. She was wearing her nightgown and slippers without a coat, and when he ran to her, she didn’t say hello. Her eyes were sleepy, a moon reflected in both of them.

  “Where are you going so late at night?” he said.

  “Shh,” she said, and walked around him.

  “Can I go with you?”

  “Shh.”

  Worriedly, he followed a pace behind her. She walked in the center of the road, putting one foot squarely ahead of the other, and it was as though she were a marionette, Felix thought. When he tried to steer her away, his hands went through her. They could usually touch each other, but only if they both wanted to at the same time. The dead had no control over the desires of the living, and no way to inhibit them.

  Right now, Pram would not allow him. Felix found this especially worrisome.

  They walked for what was surely an hour, until they reached the center of town. All the shop windows had the empty quality of Pram’s stare, and for the first time in all his years as a ghost, Felix thought he was the one being haunted.

  Pram turned down an alleyway, beyond the reach of the street lamps.

  “It isn’t safe here,” Felix said.

  She stopped walking, and Felix thought that at last he’d broken through her trance. But then she knocked on a door that was so cleverly hidden by shadows that Felix hadn’t realized there was a door there at all. A faded sign read, LADY SAVANT’S SPIRIT SHOW.

  A man opened the door. The muscles of his arms were as thick as Felix’s tree. The man stepped aside and let Pram enter. He didn’t ask for her name and didn’t seem unnerved that she was in a trance; he looked up and down the alleyway and closed the door. Felix pushed through it.

  They were inside a small room, lit by candles that sat on crates and boxes. In the shadows there were chairs folded and propped against the wall.

  Pram, who thought she was dreaming, remembered this place from the evening she’d spent with Clarence. She could taste chocolate-raspberry ice cream. “I don’t have my ticket,” she said.

  “It’s all right, doll,” a woman said. The woman was sitting on a cushion on the floor. Felix recognized her as the woman who had been staring at Pram that afternoon.

  Pram recognized her as Lady Savant. Without her makeup, Lady Savant was most ordinary, and Pram preferred her this way.

  Pram curtsied and said, “Hello.”

  “Come and sit,” the woman said, patting an empty cushion, which had been fashioned from a burlap sack that still smelled like coffee beans. “You may call me Claudette if you prefer the name my mother gave me. What shall I call you?”

  “Pram,” Pram said.

  “What an unusual name.” Lady Savant cupped Pram’s chin, looked into her vacant eyes. “But then, you’re an unusual girl.”

  Felix paced around them. The woman looked his way, and Felix thought she saw him, but then she looked at Pram again.

  “Do you know what you’re doing here, Pram?” she asked.

  Pram shook her head.

  “Ever since the night we met, I’ve had dreams,” Lady Savant said. “Dreams and visitations from a woman with freckles and white hair like yours. She has asked me to help you.”

  “Why?” Pram asked.

  “She says that she owes you a favor. She says that she’s your mother,” Lady Savant said.

  Pram shook her head again. “My mother’s dead,” she said. “I think her spirit left because she was angry that I killed her when I was born.”

  Felix tried to pull Pram’s hair to wake her. She sat upright and her eyes
were open, but this Lady Savant woman had put her under a spell, for Pram would never tell anyone these things. But his fingers went through her, and her hair remained undisturbed.

  “Is that so?” Lady Savant said. “She has been a bit murky on the details. I can’t see her very clearly, you understand. But I think you can.”

  “I’ve never seen my mother,” Pram said. “Only in pictures. My aunts don’t like it if I ask about her. They say what’s done is done.”

  “But you see other spirits, don’t you?” Lady Savant said.

  “Sometimes,” Pram said.

  “Pram!” Felix said. He stomped and clapped.

  “Is there a spirit here now?” Lady Savant asked.

  Pram hesitated. Even from deep within her trance, she knew that Felix was someone she was meant to protect. He was hers.

  “It’s all right, doll,” Lady Savant said. “We’ve only just met. It’s smart of you to be skeptical. I’m the one who invited you; I should be the one doing the explaining.”

  Felix scowled at the woman, and from the way she arched her shoulders, he could swear she felt it. Good. He wanted her to feel him there. He wanted her to know that Pram belonged to him, and that anyone who messed with her mind was asking for trouble. If he had to haunt the earth for a hundred more years, he would find a way to make her pay for this.

  “When I was a young girl like you,” Lady Savant said, “I would see spirits everywhere, as plain as if they were standing before me. But then I made a mistake. I told my parents what I was seeing, and they sent me to a special place that stripped me of my ability.”

  A bit of fear ebbed its way through Pram’s trance. She had thought the worst thing that could happen to a girl like her would be the circus. And even the circus didn’t seem too terrible. But she had never thought someone could take her ability away. She wouldn’t know how to look at the world if she saw only the living.

  Felix thought he saw a flash of life in Pram’s eyes again. But it was gone quickly.

  “My ability has returned a bit over the years,” Lady Savant said. “But it isn’t as strong as it was. That’s why I can hear only a little of what your mother has to say, and why she’s clearest in my dreams.”

  “What does she say?” Pram asked.

  “She says that she’s sorry,” Lady Savant said. “And that she knows where your father is.”

  “Where?” Pram asked.

  “Far,” Lady Savant said. “It would cost a lot of money to get there. More money than a little girl could have. Which is why I’ve come up with a way to help you. Think of how powerful we would be.” She waved her hand across the air as though she were holding the headline on a silver tray: “‘Lady Savant and the Child Extraordinaire.’ A woman who can hear spirits, and a girl who can see them. We would travel the country, and pay our way with nightly shows.”

  Pram shrank into herself. She was beginning to awaken, and with consciousness came fear. What ever hold Lady Savant had over her was waning.

  Lady Savant knew it. “You must go home now,” she said. “A young girl needs her rest. Tomorrow morning when you awaken, you will remember this dream, and you’ll come and see me.”

  “I’ll . . . see you?” Pram said.

  “Because you want to find your father,” Lady Savant said.

  “I want to find my father,” Pram echoed. She had no trouble with that part, because it was true.

  The man with the muscular arms opened the door. The breeze moved Pram’s hair. She stood to leave.

  “You’ll come back tomorrow,” Lady Savant called after her.

  Pram walked slowly through the town. Her eyelids were drooping, her feet dragging. Felix wished he were alive so that he could carry her the rest of the way home.

  “Pram?” he said, walking circles around her.

  She stopped walking and looked at him. “Felix?” she said. And her eyes fluttered and went white, and she collapsed.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Felix was sure he’d entered every Tudor house in the town before he found Clarence, who was sleeping. “You have to wake up,” Felix pleaded. “You’re the only hope I have.” He reached through Clarence’s curly head again and again. “You stupid boy.”

  Normally Felix took comfort in being invisible, but now for the first time he hated it. He hated himself for being dead, and for being helpless. He’d left Pram alone and without a coat, breathing clouds into the chilly air. Deep in her unconsciousness, Pram remembered who Felix was and that she trusted him, and he’d managed to drag her to the sidewalk before her body fell through him again.

  In his dream, Clarence saw her there. He dreamed that the howling wind carried a voice telling him that he had to wake up. He knitted his eyebrows together and pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulder.

  Felix balled his fists. He thought of hurricanes and willed himself to have the power of one. He’d been able to make the tree fall that afternoon, and he could surely summon a commotion now.

  The top drawer of Clarence’s dresser slid from its hinge and hit the ground with a thud. Pram disappeared from his dream and he sat up.

  “Yes, good,” Felix said. “Now go and find her.”

  But Clarence of course didn’t hear him. In the moonlight he saw the drawer on the ground, and he knew that something was amiss. Drawers did not fall on their own. He thought of his dream, which had been unusually vivid, and had the horrible idea that it might be real.

  “Hello?” Clarence said. “Felix, is that you?”

  Clarence couldn’t know that Felix stood beside the bed, shouting and gesturing for the door.

  Felix did have to give the boy credit. It was instinct, not a special ability, that made Clarence get out of bed and put on his coat and shoes. There might have been a little bit of love to it, as well, though Felix would never acknowledge as much.

  Clarence ran through the house, and just before he reached the front door, a voice called out, “Where are you going?”

  One of the maids stood in the doorway of her bedroom, her hair disheveled.

  “To the center of town,” Clarence said. “It’s an emergency.”

  “What kind of emergency could require a boy to be out alone this late at night?”

  “I don’t have time to explain,” Clarence said, opening the door.

  “If you leave, I’ll have to tell your father,” the maid said.

  “Yes, thank you,” Clarence said. “He wouldn’t believe it coming from me.”

  With that, he was out the door. He was an excellent runner; before his mother died, he’d run nearly every day, and now even without the practice, he was fast as ever. He felt a wind at his back that wasn’t entirely normal, and he knew that Felix was steering him in the right direction.

  “Where is she?” Clarence asked. And then, as though Felix could answer, he saw Pram in her nightgown, lying just outside a street lamp’s glow.

  “Pram!”

  He knelt at her side, gasping and flushed.

  She was in a deep sleep and shivering from the cold. He tried to wake her, but her shoulders fell heavily against his arm when he lifted her, and her head rolled back.

  She was exactly as she had been in his dream, and now Clarence felt that he must have been dreaming still. He had never seen Pram look so gray, as though she were a machine that had been turned off. It was with disbelief that he took off his coat and wrapped it around Pram’s shoulders.

  He touched her cold cheek. “What’s happened to you?” he said.

  The headlights of a car shone in Clarence’s eyes.

  The doorbell rang several times, followed by a knock that held all the authority one would expect from a man of Mr. Blue’s status. It was the authority of that knock that got Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan from their beds. They hurried down the stairs, complaining and fussing about the commotion.

  The aunts opened the door and gasped. They had been certain Pram was safe in her bed, and yet there she was, sleeping in a strange man’s arms. They
might have screamed for the police, except that Clarence Blue was there, and from the man’s curly hair it was obvious the strange man must be his father.

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Blue said. “When I drove by, she was sleeping on the sidewalk. I’m not sure what happened. Clarence insists she’s a friend of his, and that she belongs to you.”

  As Aunt Nan retrieved Pram from Mr. Blue’s arms, Pram opened her eyes just long enough to get a look at Mr. Blue and whisper, “Are you my father?”

  If Mr. Blue had a response to this, it was buried in the nervous laughter of the aunts. “The poor thing is a sleepwalker,” Aunt Dee said.

  “Been happening for as long as she could walk,” Aunt Nan said, furthering the lie. After eleven years of caring for Pram, they’d developed a sense of creativity so they could conceal her eccentricities.

  “We used to find her in the pantry some mornings, hugging the flour like it was a little teddy bear,” Aunt Dee said. “And always muttering nonsense.”

  “Thank you again, and so sorry for the trouble.” Aunt Nan closed the door on Mr. Blue’s startled expression and Clarence’s worried eyes.

  The aunts stared at Pram, still wearing Clarence’s coat, and then they stared at each other.

  Pram had always been a peculiar child. She had imaginary friends, and she wasn’t frightened of the things little girls ought to be frightened of. But nothing like this had ever happened. The aunts had believed that with enough patience and their best efforts, they could keep Pram safe from a world that would be cruel to her. The world had been crueler to Pram’s mother than Pram would ever know.

  But now they weren’t so sure they could protect her.

  They carried her to bed and tucked the blankets to her chin. They made certain the windows were locked and the door downstairs was latched. Aunt Nan took a bear from the shelf and placed it on Pram’s bed.

  She looked like a normal girl for the moment, Aunt Nan thought. A normal girl who was safe and asleep and dreaming of ribbons.

  She looked like her mother, Aunt Dee thought.

  Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan didn’t speak of their younger sister, or the cruel manner of her death, and especially not the part where she nearly took Pram with her. They didn’t speak of the sailor who’d told her nice things and then left. Or the sadness in her eyes and in her heart, or how for the last months of her life she didn’t speak a word.