A Curious Tale of the In-Between Read online

  Her breath was shuddering. She drew her knees to her chest.

  It was dark, and Clarence couldn’t see her tears, but he sensed them and he said, “Don’t cry. It’ll be all right.”

  She sniffed. “I’ve been stupid,” she said.

  “No more stupid than me looking for my mother’s ghost,” Clarence said.

  He was in the crate next to hers and they were covered by thick blankets, in a caravan filled with folding chairs and boxes from Lady Savant’s show.

  Pram held her fingers before her face but could see nothing. She thought of Felix moving on, and she hoped there was something other than darkness waiting for him.

  “Do you think it’s true what Lady Savant said about Felix moving on?” she asked.

  “You know him better than I do,” Clarence said, “but it doesn’t sound right to me. Felix loves you. He wouldn’t leave without a proper good-bye. Could Lady Savant have forced him?”

  Pram frowned. “I don’t think anyone has that power. I think it has to be a choice. But I don’t know; I’ve never helped anyone move on before.”

  “We’ll find out soon,” Clarence said as the caravan moved forward through the night.

  “I think we’ll find out a lot of things,” Pram said.

  They hadn’t fought when Lady Savant and the man with thick arms guided them into the crates. Their silence might have been taken for fear, and while it was true that Pram and Clarence were afraid, the bigger truth was that they were curious. They knew Lady Savant was devious, but they also understood that she could show them a great many things about what comes after life. And both Pram and Clarence had someone dead they wanted to speak to.

  Pram wiped at her eyes. “I’m sorry for taking your seat that day,” she said. “And for getting you into this mess.”

  She could hear Clarence shifting in his crate. “I’ll never be sorry for that,” he said. “I’m glad we’re friends.”

  Pram rested her head against the wall of the crate and pretended it was his shoulder. “I’m glad for that, too.”

  After a pause, Clarence said, “Felix was trying to protect you. That’s why he didn’t seem to like me very much.”

  “He only gets jealous,” Pram said.

  “It was more than that,” Clarence said. “He knew how special you are. He thought the wrong sort of person would come along and cause trouble for you, if they knew about your ability to see ghosts. And he was right. I’m the one who led you to Lady Savant.”

  “This isn’t your fault,” Pram said.

  But she worried that at least some of what Clarence had said was true. Felix had been trying to protect her, and in terms of both the living and the spirit world, he was the only one who could. But now, suddenly, he was nowhere to be found.

  Pram slept and dreamed that she was adrift upon a dark sea. There were no stars, but she knew that she was moving away from home. There was something as heavy as a stone around her neck.

  She awoke clutching her father’s compass.

  The caravan jolted and creaked as it hit a dip in the road.

  “Clarence?” Pram said. When he didn’t immediately reply, she thought he had been swallowed by the darkness like Felix had been, and she began to panic. “Clarence!”

  Something rustled. “I’m here,” Clarence replied sleepily. And then, “I think we’ve stopped moving.”

  Had they? Pram couldn’t tell. She still felt like she was drifting in the waters she had dreamed.

  There was the sound of metal doors opening on their hinges, and Pram could see a bit of light stealing in around the blanket’s edges.

  Someone threw back the blanket. All the whiteness blinded Pram, and after a moment Lady Savant began to appear, her hair wild like the shadow of an angry flame.

  Pram could smell the chilly morning air. Her aunts were up before the sun, and they’d surely discovered she was missing by now. They would be looking for her, but they might not go to the police right away, Pram thought. They would think she’d done something silly, and they would hope to find her without attracting too much attention, so that another Ms. Appleworth wouldn’t come to take her away.

  Pram wondered how long it would take her aunts to realize that something was really wrong. But even that realization wouldn’t help them find her. She didn’t know where she was herself. She stiffened her shoulders and did her best to look brave.

  “Good morning, doll,” Lady Savant said. “So dreadfully sorry for the squalid accommodations. We were driving through a city famous for its thieves, and they love children. Do unspeakable things to them. It was much safer for you to blend in among the collection of a silly spirit show’s props.”

  The man with the thick arms climbed into the caravan. It shuddered under his weight, and the vibrations were in tandem with Pram’s pounding heart. But she felt a little better when the blanket was lifted over Clarence’s crate and a strip of sunlight illuminated his blue eyes. Something about his eyes always calmed her.

  She reached through the slats in her crate, and he did the same, and their hands touched for a moment before the man with the thick arms lifted Clarence’s crate and carried him away. Pram crawled after him, as though she could follow. “Where are you taking him?”

  “Not to worry,” Lady Savant said. She was wielding a crowbar, and Pram flinched, but Lady Savant used it only to pry away the lid of Pram’s prison.

  Even after the lid was gone, Pram hesitated.

  Lady Savant laughed. “Come out, silly girl,” she said. “You can ride up front with me now. If anyone asks, we’ll say you’re my niece; won’t that be fun?”

  The idea only made Pram lonely for her real aunts. Now that she was so far from that two-hundred-year-old colonial, she realized it was the only place in which she’d ever felt safe. That house and the pond where she’d met Felix.

  “If I come out, will you tell me more about where Felix has gone?” Pram asked.

  “There isn’t much to tell,” Lady Savant said. “He’s moved on. But I can tell you more about the spirit world if you wish.”

  It would have to do.

  Pram climbed from the crate on unsteady legs. Lady Savant took her hand. Her fingers were plump and soft, and she smelled like every perfume that would ever fit atop a woman’s vanity. Her hair and face were done up, but none of this could conceal the menacing edge in her stare. Pram had seen that edge for the first time the night before, and it couldn’t be unseen.

  As Pram hopped from the back of the caravan, she was greeted with a sky that was robin’s-egg blue and the sound of wind weaving through barren branches. Tire tracks sliced parallel lines through a dirt path that was hardly a proper road, and there was no evidence of a city nearby. There was only a lake, the sky’s reflection rippling on its surface.

  Felix? Pram called to him. She had never tried to summon him with her thoughts, but it was worth trying. He usually seemed to know when she wanted him around. The wind shifted, and the branches bowed away from her. No ghosts. Only air.

  The man with the thick arms held Clarence’s crate as though it weighed nothing. Clarence gripped the slats, and Pram could see anxiousness on his face. She took a step toward him, but Lady Savant gripped her by the elbows. “It’s best if you look away,” Lady Savant said.

  “What are you going to do with him?” Pram said, though her sweaty palms and chilled blood already knew the answer.

  “There’s no room for him,” Lady Savant said. “He has nothing to offer, and I’ve no interest in toting an ordinary boy with me.”

  “Then let him go.” Pram’s voice was shrill. “Just leave him here. He doesn’t have to come with us.”

  “Pram,” Clarence called to her. “Pram, run!”

  But she couldn’t. There was no escaping that caravan.

  “He knows quite a bit, doesn’t he?” Lady Savant said. “He knows about your gift, and he knows all about us.”

  “He won’t tell.” Pram looked at Clarence, who she could see was trembling. The cr
ate shook in its captor’s arms. “He’s known about me for months, and he’s never breathed a word.”

  “I need to know for certain that he won’t,” Lady Savant said, and nodded at the lake. With a swing of brute force, the man threw the crate into the water.

  “No!” Pram tried to run for the water, but Lady Savant’s grip was cruelly immovable.

  Pram struggled and screamed, but there weren’t even birds left in the trees to hear her. And for one awful moment, her body went still enough to watch the last corner of the crate disappear below the water’s edge. An eruption of bubbles replaced it.

  Her screams turned into hiccuping sobs, but in her head her voice was still screaming, Felix! Felix, please! Where are you?

  Lady Savant had to drag Pram, who was thrashing her legs, into the front of the caravan. The man with the thick arms sat at the wheel. Droplets of lake water freckled his face like gravedigger’s dirt.

  Pram knelt in her seat and watched the lake through the window as they drove away. They turned a corner and the lake was gone.

  She held her breath, trying to calculate how long it would take for Clarence to drown. She hoped that it would be painless and quick, but before long, her temples throbbed and her chest was burning.

  She gasped air back into her lungs and hated herself for it.

  Lady Savant played with Pram’s hair as they rode on. “Shall I tell you about the spirit world now?”

  Pram was too heartsick to speak. She’d tucked her father’s compass under her shirt, and her skin had warmed it so that it felt like a hard, still heart that had fallen out of her. She was a clock that had been disassembled. Even the dead couldn’t put her back together again.

  Felix . . . Her mind had been calling him for miles.

  A few times, feeling exceptionally desperate, she’d even tried calling her mother. Lily? Lily, it’s me. Your daughter. Did you know you had a girl before you died? But of course her mother didn’t answer. Had she been the one to tell Lady Savant to throw Clarence into the lake out of revenge, because Pram had taken her away from the living world?

  “For a living person to enter the spirit world would be like falling into a deep, deep sleep,” Lady Savant went on.

  Pram wondered if Clarence’s ghost would come to her. She worried he wouldn’t be able to find her, speeding down that non-road, miles from anywhere they knew.

  “As a living person who can see spirits, you can develop the strength to peer into the spirit world. You enter a trance and leave your body behind.”

  Pram didn’t want to listen to anything Lady Savant said; she despised this woman who had destroyed the only friends she had in the world. But she could see what was being described, as though she was being given directions down a road she’d forgotten she once traveled. She felt herself drifting away from the words, and away from the car, until she could no longer feel the weight of her bones.

  She could see the souls drifting on either side of her, curled up, asleep. Each one of them was a world of its own design. In their sleep the souls twitched or smiled or cried without sound.

  Pram forgot the traveling caravan. She forgot Lady Savant’s voice. She drifted into the spirit world without feet to carry her, or hands to touch, or skin to hold her together. But she could find no one she recognized. The faces were blurry, and some of the bodies were turned away from her. She saw notches in spines, and jutting shoulder blades, and she tasted smoke and water and fear.

  Felix? she called. Lily?

  Clarence? To call his name left an aching in her bodiless soul. He did not belong here. Not for years and years.

  No one heard her, and all the spirits were strangers.

  Pram felt herself flying backward. She fell into her body again with a force that rattled her bones. The caravan had stopped, and through smeared vision Pram could see Lady Savant sitting over her, feeling her neck for a pulse.

  “Did we kill her?” the man with the thick arms said. His voice was far away. He sounded afraid, which was odd, Pram thought. He had no trouble killing Clarence. Why should her life matter?

  “Of course not,” Lady Savant said. “She’s a strong thing. I could tell the moment I saw her. She has a defiant chin.”

  “She doesn’t look too good.”

  “Just drive.”

  Pram stared at the caravan’s ceiling. The leaves and sunlight put on a shadow show for her.

  “What did you see?” Lady Savant asked.

  Pram wouldn’t tell her. She would never tell her anything again.

  The sky turned cloudy; fat drops of rain hit the roof of the caravan, each one like a body falling down. Pram watched lightning draw a hard line into the horizon.

  For the dozenth time, Lady Savant touched Pram’s forehead and tsked. “Perhaps I’ve pushed you too far too soon.”

  Pram wondered how her aunts were getting on, and if they’d phoned the police by now.

  She thought of Clarence’s father, and the sadness she could feel in him when he rearranged his wife’s things that day she and Clarence hid under the daybed.

  Lady Savant prattled on about what a prodigy Pram was, and how prosperous they’d be, and how strong she would be when she was older, and Pram began to realize that Lady Savant was not going to help her find her father. That had only been a lie to lure her away from home. She would kill an innocent boy just to keep a girl who could talk to ghosts, as though she were a pet.

  Pram closed her eyes. She tried to return to the spirit world just to have a moment’s reprieve from this horrid caravan.

  Instead, she entered a dream that was not a dream. She was skating across a frozen pond, and she brought her hands to her face to smell the cold wool of her mittens. Her hair was long and red and braided. A woman called to her from somewhere beyond the pond’s edge. She tried to hear the name, but before she could, everything turned black and dreamless.

  CHAPTER

  17

  When she awoke, Pram saw ribbons of black cast iron over her head and around her like bony fingers. The ground tilted under her when she moved.

  She gasped and crawled backward until her back was pressed against the bars. She was in a cage, not unlike the one that had housed Frances, a canary that had belonged to one of the elders years ago.

  Her shallow, panicked breaths echoed in the blackness. Above her, the chain creaked and groaned.

  The cage was lined with a soft mattress made of silk. It smelled heavily of lavender.

  Am I in the spirit world? she asked, to no one in particular. She was too frightened to speak aloud.

  A flame lantern had been left in the cage, and by looking at the pool of melted wax, Pram knew she had been asleep for a long time.

  She hugged her knees to her chest. Her heart was beating double in her ears, and as she’d always done, Pram tried to tell herself that the extra heart belonged to her mother. But she realized now how silly that idea had been. She was alone. More alone than she ever thought possible.

  “Hello?” a voice said.

  Two hands grabbed the bars of Pram’s cage. She flinched and gripped at her skirt. “Don’t be afraid.” Between the two hands, a young man’s face came closer to the bars and brought itself into the light. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen.

  Pram swallowed hard. “Did you need me to help you with something?” she asked.

  “Why do you think I need your help?”

  “Because you’re dead,” Pram said. Slowly, she uncurled her limbs and sat up straighter.

  “Oh, that,” the young man said. “Sorry if it frightens you.”

  “It makes me feel better, actually,” Pram said. With ghosts she at least knew what to expect. The living were the ones still capable of harm. “What’s your name?”

  “I can’t remember,” he said.

  “What would you like to be called, then?” Pram asked.

  “Finley,” the young man said. “That’s what everyone around here calls me.”

  Everyone? Pram wondered but didn�
�t ask. She fanned out her skirt pleats into a curtsy. “I’m Pram.”

  Finley smiled, and Pram felt herself smiling back. There was something about him that calmed her, even though his left temple was blackened and bloody; a faint smell of smoke told Pram that he’d died in a fire. She couldn’t always tell how a ghost had died; sometimes they didn’t remember their deaths, and they appeared as they last remembered themselves to be, like Felix. Animals also came out unscathed. Pram once witnessed a badger get hit by a car. As its body lay damaged and red on the ground, its spirit arose and scurried off into the woods, wholly intact, as though a minor thing such as death couldn’t interrupt its plans.

  “Is there a reason you came to me?” Pram asked.

  “You asked a question,” Finley said. “I didn’t hear all of it. I’ve been busy with this falling star. I’ve been expecting it to drop for days now, and I wanted to be nearby when it finally came down. If I listen hard enough, I can hear the wishes people make. It’s nice to hear the living all at once.”

  It sounded wonderful, and also sad, Pram thought. “I asked if I was in the spirit world.”

  “You look alive to me,” Finley said. “Anyway, I don’t need help. You’re the one who looks like she needs help.”

  Pram willed herself not to cry. “A woman who calls herself Lady Savant brought me here. She told me she was going to help me find my father, but now I see she just wanted to lure me away from home.”

  “Oh, her,” Finley said. “She does like to take things that don’t belong to her.”

  “What does she want from me?” Pram said.

  Footsteps echoed on a hard floor. “You’re sure to find out,” Finley said. “Those are her heels clacking on the marble.”

  Pram paled with fear.

  Finley slipped between the bars of Pram’s cage and sat beside her. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “You seem like such a brave girl, talking to a ghost.”

  “She killed my friend,” Pram said. Saying the words aloud meant accepting what had happened. Her arms shook as she hugged her knees again. “She stood back and did nothing as he drowned.”