A Curious Tale of the In-Between (14 page)

“Concentrate,” Lady Savant said after an enormous dinner of candied yams and a turkey that was honey-glazed and almost too perfect to eat.

Pram concentrated.

“Think of something you want,” Lady Savant said.
She
was forever asking Pram for things she wanted, as though she could store a little girl’s silly desires in glass bottles on a shelf.

But Pram didn’t know what she wanted this evening. Dinner had been delicious, and she’d spent her afternoon playing in feather-soft snow and her nose hadn’t run at all.

But when Finley tried to get her to climb a tree, she’d refused, and the feeling of fear was vaguely familiar. It wasn’t the tree she had feared, but rather having to face the sadness those dead branches made her feel.

I want to know why I don’t like trees
, she thought, and closed her eyes.

She was a tall woman, and she was running, and sorrow was a heavy thing that she had swallowed. In her mind a compass was spinning. It was dizzyingly hot, and the woman had decided that the heat didn’t matter. She no longer wished to dive into the cool ocean.

The woman did not think in words at all, but in broken kaleidoscope images. A boy’s sweet grin, a crumpled letter, purple-pink lines like veins on stretching skin. It was furious and maddening and scary. It was exhausting, and it had been nineteen years like this. She didn’t want to wait anymore. She was born waiting. A loop of a rope, a climb that scratched her palms as she went up the dogwood tree.

Her
sisters would be livid if they saw her sitting up so high.

There was no need to take a deep breath. She dropped for the ground, knowing her feet wouldn’t touch.

And then there was silence.

Pram did not open her eyes.

The man with the thick arms carried her to the cage.

Lady Savant paced and worried deep into the night. Adelaide and Finley paced behind her like ducklings. Lady Savant could not see them, but she sensed them. Every day, she could sense them a little more than the day prior. As Pram’s memories began to fade, Lady Savant’s began to return. Pram was exceptional, and far more powerful than the others had been. But she was the youngest yet, and now Lady Savant worried that she had pushed her too far too soon.

Pram was bright red with fever. Lady Savant reached into the cage and carefully, carefully pried one of her eyes open. As she had suspected, it was dull and dilated; her soul was not in the living world.

The man with the thick arms stood in the doorway, and the ghosts stopped pacing and watched him. “Is she dead?” he asked.

“
No,” Lady Savant said. “But I’ve never seen a living soul stay in the spirit world for so long before.”

“I told you that you were pushing her too far,” he said.

“She can stay in the spirit world longer than anyone I’ve seen. It’s as though she has the ability to be living and dead at the same time. Miraculous.”

Lady Savant brushed her fingertips across the child’s sweaty forehead. Pram was her favorite, she’d decided. Not at all what she had suspected.

“I felt this one from the moment she stepped into the room, you know,” Lady Savant said to the man with the thick arms. “I knew she was Lily’s daughter. I followed her for a while just to be certain, and I was right. That ghost friend of hers made a tree fall right in front of me to scare me off, and that’s when I knew she was something that even a ghost boy could see needed to be protected. I never would have guessed that hopeless girl could have such a remarkable child.”

“Lily,” Pram whispered, too softly for anyone to hear.

CHAPTER

22

P
ram awoke with a feeling that her skin was too heavy. The moon was sliced into quarters by the bars on the window.

She took a deep breath just to be certain she was alive.

Adelaide was kneeling beside her. She had been petting Pram’s cheek and whispering songs to her for most of the night. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” Pram said. Her voice was hoarse.

“Careful,” Adelaide said. “You’ll wake her.”

Pram sat up and followed where Adelaide was pointing. Lady Savant slept at the bottom of the steps, her face in her arms.

“Has she been like that all night?” Pram asked.

Adelaide
nodded. “She thought you were going to die. You haven’t moved in a very long time.”

“I’m scared,” Pram whispered. “I think she’s stealing my memories.”

“She does like to take things,” Adelaide said, and sighed. “I wish she wouldn’t. It isn’t right.”

“I’d like to take them back,” Pram said.

“You can’t,” Adelaide said.

Pram stared at the sleeping Lady Savant, and suddenly a feeling of anger returned to her. This woman had taken too much away. Pram didn’t remember what those things were, but she still felt the loss.

“Maybe there is something I can get back,” Pram said. “I entered a woman’s memories before everything went dark, and in her mind there was a compass. I’m sure I remember it. If Lady Savant took it from me, I can reclaim it.”

“A compass?” Finley said, appearing and sitting beside Adelaide. “Is that all you want?”

“It’s the only thing I can think of,” Pram said.

“If she took it from you, it’s out in her caravan,” Finley said. “That’s where she keeps her treasures.”

Pram stood as slowly as she could, trying not to make the cage’s chain creak. This was the first time Lady Savant had left the bedroom door unlocked, and there would
never
be another chance. By morning, Pram knew she’d have forgotten about the compass.

She tiptoed down the steps and over Lady Savant’s sleeping form. Lady Savant stirred and muttered something, and her eyelashes fluttered. Pram froze.

Adelaide knelt beside Lady Savant and sang:

While the moon her watch is keeping,

All through the night;

While the weary world is sleeping,

All through the night . . .

Lady Savant settled back into sleep. Adelaide kept singing.

“This way,” Finley said. Pram opened the door just enough to slip through, and then she closed it.

“Can she hear Adelaide singing?” Pram asked.

“No,” Finley said. “From what I’ve seen, Adelaide’s singing just makes the living sleepy and they don’t know why.”

“I’m living and I can hear it,” Pram said.

“Yes, but she likes you, so she lets you hear.”

The hallway was full of screams and whispers. Nobody in this place could remember how they got here or what they were afraid of, but the building itself seemed to remember.

A
firefly from the wallpaper in Pram’s room had followed her, and as she walked it flitted and fluttered.

“Quiet,” Finley warned. “Brutus is surely nearby.”

They reached the end of the hallway, and there were two heavy-looking doors. Pram struggled to push one of them open, working against the cold that resisted her from the outside, as though it was warning her to stay.

Pram grunted and gave a final shove that opened the door. Flurries of snow were curling and swirling around the night air, and Pram had to run into them before the door closed behind her with a slam.

“I said ‘quiet,’” Finley scolded.

“I couldn’t help it,” Pram said.

The poor firefly was trying to keep up with Pram, but the wind was knocking it about, making it fly in crooked circles.

“Where’s the caravan?” Pram asked. Her voice was stolen by the wind. Her hair whipped to the left, as white as the snow itself, and Pram had a funny thought that she was disappearing. The wind was screaming a warning she couldn’t understand.

Finley ran ahead of her. “Wait!” She chased after him. “Finley, wait!” She lost him in an instant, but she nearly ran headfirst into a building that appeared through the snow. She fell and picked herself back up and kept running.

At
first she thought she had made her way back to Lady Savant’s building, but no, this was some kind of a shed made of rickety wood. She felt along the wall until she found a door.

Inside, it was too dark to see. She didn’t know what to do now; she was lost, and she wouldn’t be able to find her way back to Lady Savant’s building in this storm.

A sliver of light worked its way through. The firefly hovered an inch in front of Pram’s face, and its light began to spread out until it reached all the corners of the shed. It had a dirt floor, and it was quite large for a shed. Pram thought it peculiar that she had never seen it, and that it didn’t have a lock. Lady Savant’s caravan sat square in the middle like a statue.

Finley appeared beside Pram. “Hello,” he said.

“You left me,” she said.

He shook his head. “I couldn’t lead you here. You had to find it yourself.”

“Why?” Pram asked.

“Because it’s hidden,” he said.

“No, it isn’t, silly,” Pram said. “It’s right out in the open.” She stepped forward and climbed into the back of the caravan. There were boxes and crates and trinkets that were covered by thick blankets.

Everything in this little caravan pulsed with the lives of those who had left them behind. “The dead hide pieces
of
themselves in the living world,” Pram said to the firefly as it fluttered around her. “Did you know that?”

Pram dug through a box of things that clattered.

“What is it you said you were looking for?” Finley knelt beside her. “I’ll help you find it.”

Pram stopped rifling and blinked. What had she come here for? The image was just out of reach. “I can’t remember.”

“Can’t have been too important,” Finley said.

“No,” she said. “It was very important.”

She held up a necklace with a teddy bear charm, and then set it back down. She found an old lampshade with torn lace trim, and a gold wristwatch and a little doll with blue button eyes.

Something about that shade of blue filled her with pain.

She set the doll down and lifted a heavy blanket that had been covering a typewriter. She pressed down on one of its keys, and it sank below the other keys with a clicking sound, and then sprang back up. Pram pressed another key, and another.
Clickety-tap, clickety-tap.

“I think this memory belongs to Adelaide,” Pram said. One of the letter keys was loose—the
A
—and Pram put it in her pocket. She would give it to Adelaide when she returned. Maybe it would help her find her memories.

“Really?” Finley said, pushing one of the keys. “I wonder if anything here belongs to me.”

They
searched and searched, and Finley couldn’t find anything that belonged to him, although he did find a Jacob’s ladder that amused him.

“Did Lady Savant put this typewriter here?” Pram asked.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Finley said. “When memories get abandoned, they have a way of drifting about until they accumulate with other memories. They don’t like being lonely any more than people do, I guess.”

Pram sat back and looked at the pile of things. She still hadn’t found what ever she’d come here for, and they were out of places to look.

But then something caught Pram’s eye. There was an empty crate resting against the caravan wall that she hadn’t bothered to search. But now the firefly was hovering around it, and Pram caught a glint of metal between its slats. She reached for it.

“Did you find it?” Finley asked.

The glint of metal was attached to a chain. It was some kind of necklace. She dangled it before her face to get a better look. A compass.

Pram’s mouth went dry. Time seemed to slow.

And then she was drifting away from the shore on a large ship. There was a girl at the water’s edge with white-blond hair, standing on her tiptoes and waving to a sailor who watched her as the water pulled him back.
She
was beautiful, even in the distance. She was a piece of the sun.

Pram gasped. “My father,” she said, more to herself than to Finley or the firefly. “This belonged to my father. I found it in a box under the floorboards in my bedroom. I have—I have to get back home. My aunts will be worried about me.”

Finley stopped playing with the Jacob’s ladder and regarded Pram sadly. “It’s too late for that,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” Pram said. “Why would you say that?” She hooked the compass around her neck and ran for the exit. When she threw open the door, the wind and snow were still raging, but the wind didn’t disturb her hair or her clothes.

She looked straight ahead, and saw her body lying in the snow.

CHAPTER

23

“
W
ake up, wake up,
wake up
.” Pram tried to jostle her lifeless body, but her hands moved right through it.

“It’s too late,” Finley said again. “I tried to tell you. Lady Savant hides her caravan where the living would never find it: in the spirit world.”

“Don’t say that!” Pram’s voice cracked. “Look—I’m still breathing.” She watched her own chest rise and fall. Her fingers and cheeks were blue.

“Barely breathing,” Finley said.

“How do I go back to the living world?” Pram said.

“You can’t,” Finley said.