Haunted (6 page)

The hallway was still pulsing with my heart, a cavernous ache pounding in my head.
She isn't there, Phoebe.

She lifted a thin wrist dripping with diamond bracelets, and pointed behind me down the hall. I obeyed. Released from my paralysis, I backed up around the corner until I couldn't see her anymore. But I heard her skirts rustle. She was following to make sure I did what she bade.

There are no rules!
I screamed in my head.
She doesn't exist!

I continued backing up, hearing those skirts from around the corner. I wasn't imagining the sound. She was taking slow, paced steps in her profusion of silk skirts. I saw the halfway open door of Tabby's room come back into my peripheral vision.

My God. Tabby
.

We were isolated at the end of this hallway, my sister and I. Madame Arnaud stood between us and our parents.
Try to scream! Just do it!

I slipped inside. Tabby's sleeping form, breathing heavily, lay humped in the crib. The night-light gave off an intimate glow, made the room a stage set for a quiet lover's confession. Her crib created a massive shadow of bars on the wall.

I heard those skirts, those whispering skirts, turning the corner.

I clung to the crib rails.
I'll protect you,
I promised in my head, but I knew I had no power.

Tabby's face was buried in darkness, and I saw the new shadow on the wall, blocking the pattern of the crib. Silk rustled behind me. I fell to my knees.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Dozens of masons and hundreds of laborers worked two years
on the manor's construction. A parade of carriages carried the
workers back and forth each sunrise and sunset, as
idiosyncrasies of the property owners did not sanction the
customary temporary-workers' village. Glaziers sailed from the
continent to fashion the splendid glasswork features, such as a
conservatory and a rooftop tower. Tremendous efforts went
into the expansive and verdant lawns, with delightfully formed
topiaries, gushing fountains, and statuary to rival the finest
estates close or far-flung.

 

—From
England: Her Cities, Her Towns, Her Pride,
Vol. XII

I
still knelt on Tabby's floor. Hours had passed. I hadn't slept, but I'd been in some kind of paralyzed state. There had been a shadow show on the wall, as Madame Arnaud did whatever she did, but I sent my mind somewhere else and ignored the slow silhouette.

I hadn't been able to do a damn thing to help my sister.

My body had not belonged to me.

I had sat helpless in its husk.

Now sensation returned and I lifted myself to standing. Walked to the crib and stared down at the still-breathing soul there. Thank God.

I don't know how I could have done anything different.

I jumped, startled, when Tabby erupted into a hiccupping cry. This was her way of letting Mom know each morning that she was awake. Her eyes opened for a second, but her eyelids came down again to cover them as she sobbed.

“I'm so sorry, Tabby,” I said to her. “I
tried
.”

Mom came bustling into the room, cooing, agitated, “Sweetie, it's okay, it's okay.”

“Hi, Mom,” I said miserably.

“Good morning, darling.”

As soon as Tabby was in Mom's arms, she stopped crying. Mom carried her over to the changing table to change her diaper, throwing the wet one in the trash with a heavy thwack. It seemed like a perfectly normal morning. Mom squirted antibiotic cleanser on her hands, then wheeled around to set Tabby on the floor. Together they went to the dresser to pick out her outfit for the day.

“Mom, I have to tell you something . . .” My voice was so soft she didn't hear me over the loud squeal of the dresser drawer grinding open.

“Ow!” said Mom. She flicked her hand back and forth furiously, and paused to peel off the remnants of a broken nail. “That's what you get with a dresser that's sat for decades warping and swelling.”

“Okay, Mama?” asked Tabby.

“Yes, yes,” said Mom. “Things could be far worse.”

Oh yes, Mom, far worse indeed.
But I held my tongue, ashamed. I'd done nothing to help Tabby . . . and Mom wouldn't believe me anyway. She'd scorned me when I'd tried to tell her about Madame Arnaud before.

“I have a boo-boo, too,” said Tabby.

“Let me see,” said Mom. Tabby pulled up the sleeve of her Dora the Explorer pajamas to show the fairly deep puncture wound on her arm, surrounded by brown-blue bruising.

“My God!” said Mom. “How'd you do that? A nail on this goddamn crib?” She kissed the wound and instantly began investigating the crib for an exposed nail.

But I stayed crouched next to Tabby, staring into her eyes, terrified. “It was her, wasn't it?” I asked. While I'd crashed onto the floor in a faint or whatever it was, she'd hurt my sister somehow. I was
right there,
powerless.

“I should have gone over everything,” said Mom. She sounded on the verge of tears.

“It was Madame Arnaud,” I said. Mom continued to run her hands up and down the slats of the crib.

The wound was horrible, a strangely adult sight on such pristine skin. Tabby had never been blemished by anything. She was still too young for scraped knees and the assorted injuries of childhood. Cradle cap was about the worst thing her skin had ever experienced.

“I'm so sorry,” I whispered to my little sister. “This is my fault. I should have fought harder.”

Mom muttered to herself, as she kept looking the crib over. She even pulled out the mattress to look underneath, as if Tabby had the strength to lift a mattress her weight rested on.

“It's not the crib,” I said. “Stop looking. Listen to me. It's Madame Arnaud.”

I followed her hurried stride to the master bedroom, as Tabby did, where she rooted around for some Neosporin in her still-unpacked carry-on. “We'll have to find you a pediatrician here,” she said as she slathered it on Tabby's arm. “Thankfully, I know you're up to date on your tetanus shot.”

“Tell her, Tabby,” I urged. “A woman came in big, red skirts, right?”

But Tabby was absorbed in the Band-Aid Mom was putting on her.

“Tell her, Tabby!” I shouted. Was it just my imagination that nothing I said ever got heard?

Tabby asked for another Band-Aid and Mom put it on her other arm, a mirror, a bit of symmetry.

“Tell her!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

And then I got it.

This wasn't happening. I was in another hallucination: auditory, visual. Who knew where I really was: Asleep in my bed? Under supervision in a psychiatric hospital? Maybe the whole move to England was a long, extended delusion.

“I see,” I whispered to Mom, to Tabby, involved now in layering Band-Aids in cross-hatch patterns. “It's okay. You don't have to listen to me.”

Bethany had been the one to tell me about automatic writing, this thing they did in the 1800s that was kind of like Ouija, only without the laborious spelling out of every word. Basically, you sit with pen and paper and invoke a spirit . . . you invite them to use your body, and while you're in a trance, they write their messages as fast as they can.

Maybe it was a dangerous thing to do, to offer the dead the chance to borrow your body. A ghost might refuse to stop writing, and take up permanent residence in the furiously scratching—and alive—body.

Nonetheless, I headed for the den off the kitchen. Steven had set up his computer there, so I figured I could grab paper from his printer. I walked in, attracted to the sight of the giant desk with its warren of pigeonholes. I'd always wanted a desk like this, with a place for each and every secret. On the top, Steven had shoved a bunch of pens into the Yewscope mug he'd brought from home, to serve as a pencil cup. Yewscope's logo was a yew tree whose roots were flexible minicams. This was the company he worked for, headquartered in San Francisco.

Which pen to take?

It seemed like a big decision. It couldn't be just any pen. I hovered, looking at the Stabilos and uni-balls and simple BICs. Steven was a pen geek like me, so there were a lot of options. Calligraphy pens, even.

But I couldn't. It was so weird. I just stood there looking at them as though I were choosing which of several children would be permitted to live, and which would go to the ovens.

“Madame Arnaud, are you real or not?” I whispered up to the echoing ceiling.

I listened closely but the house brought no response.

I took a step closer to the pencil cup. I really needed to just grab one without thinking. It didn't matter.
A pen, Phoebe, any pen
.

“You can use my hand,” I said to the air. “You can write whatever you want.”

Why was I paralyzed? I looked behind me. I thought,
I should close the door behind me
. If Mom or Steven interrupted me while I was in the trance of automatic writing, it might startle my own spirit away permanently. I wanted to be able to get back inside when Madame Arnaud was done writing. I walked to the door and closed it.

Okay, time to start writing.

I'd aced Mr. Pelkey's creative writing class, and he was always reading my stuff out loud to the class without saying it was mine. I think everyone assumed he was reading different people's stories and poems each time, but he read only mine. He always wrote nice, complimentary stuff on the papers and one time wrote something for me to take home to my parents, telling them he thought I had genuine talent. That was nice to hear, and Mom and Steven had been impressed.

A memory.

I'd written a sad story, about a girl who can't relate to anybody and gets sadder and sadder throughout the story. The last scene has her standing for hours in the attic holding a length of rope. I never explicitly came out and said it, but the idea was that she was deciding whether to hang herself.

Mr. Pelkey had asked me to stay after class, and although I was supposed to be in trig at the other end of campus, I nodded and waited for everyone else to file out.

He sat me down at his big metal desk covered with piles of student stories, and essays since he was an English teacher, too, and asked me all these uncomfortable questions about my main character.

“She seems so real,” he'd said. “I was wondering how you'd known how to write the emotions and thoughts of someone so unhappy.”

“I don't know,” I said. His face looked way too serious.

“Did you base your character on anyone in real life?”

“No,” I said. “I don't think so.” Down the hall I could hear all the doors closing, as teachers started up their classes. I started to worry about trig, because sometimes we had a pop quiz right when we walked in. But Mr. Pelkey didn't seem to be in a hurry; apparently he had this next period free.

“Do you feel lonely like your character?” he asked. Behind his glasses, his ginger-colored eyebrows were raised in concern. A whole network of lines appeared on his forehead from this expression.

“Not really,” I said. “She's just someone I made up.”

I was sitting on one of those folding metal chairs he used for conferences at his desk, and it squeaked as I leaned back, away from his intensity. He was fiddling with a red pen, tapping one end of it against the top sheet of a tower of papers. He was a nice guy, one of the younger teachers who still thought their work was noble. There was chalk dust in his hair.

“She finds it hard to talk to people. Do you?” he asked.

Finally, something I could laugh at. “No! Most of the time I open my mouth and stuff comes out. Too much stuff. That's what my mom would say.”

He smiled, but he didn't look convinced. “Anyone would look at you and think there couldn't possibly be anything wrong in your life. But even the most outwardly happy people can struggle with their emotions,” he said.

I nodded. Nothing to argue with there.

He shifted in his chair, and I became aware of the loud ticking from the clock above the board. He let silence settle around us.

I was just about to say,
Look, I wrote a story about a character. It was fiction. I'm not about to kill myself!
but then something funny happened. My throat got clogged with tears. “I'm not sad,” I managed to say.

“Phoebe, it's okay to be sad. These years can be the hardest years of anyone's life. There's so much going on, and you're trying to figure out how to be an adult in a world that's increasingly confusing.”

That made me cry harder. I was so embarrassed, but his face showed nothing but concern and kindness. I wiped my eyes with my fingertips and tried to get control. But more tears seeped out.

“It's just . . . my family's changed. I have a little sister now,” I managed to say.

“And there's not much energy or time left over for you,” he said.

“I feel so stupid,” I said, blowing my nose into the Kleenex he handed me. “Who's jealous of a baby?”

“It's perfectly natural to miss the relationship you once had with your parents.”

He seemed like he wanted to listen, so I told him how it used to be when I'd get home from swim practice. Mom would come to meet me at the door and give a huge hug. We'd talk about our respective days while she'd walk me over to the fridge and pour me a big glass of Arrowhead water. I never had the heart to tell her I was already well hydrated and carried my own bottle . . . but it didn't matter, the water Mom poured tasted better anyway.

The way she looked at me just made me feel like she was intensely interested, that whatever I had to tell her was the most fascinating thing she'd heard all day. Her love for me radiated from her eyes.

But now that Tabby was born, sometimes she didn't even acknowledge my coming home. I'd walk through our house to find her. Sometimes she'd greet me with an eye roll, depending on how hard her day had been—not aimed at me, more sort of at Tabby, but it still hurt. Other times, she was laughing her head off at something cute Tabby had done; it felt like an inside joke that they shared, even when she described what it was.