Liesl & Po (4 page)

Mr. Gray disappeared into one of his other rooms, and Will heard the sounds of rattling and banging and soft exclamations of “Now where was . . . ?” and “I could have sworn I had . . .” Will did his best not to look around too much. On one of his first visits to Mr. Gray he had made the mistake of approaching a large glass jar, like the kind you store pickles in, and had found it to be full of eyeballs. Since then he was careful to avoid exploring Mr. Gray’s rooms. Instead he kept his eyes fixed on the flames dancing in the enormous furnace in the corner, which sent strange shadows skating and leaping over the walls.

Will knew that the furnace was used for burning bodies, but still, he found it kind of pretty . . . ribbons of blue and red and white, twisting beyond the grate . . . colors you never saw anymore. . . . His eyes became heavy and his head began to nod forward on his neck. It had been a long night.

Then Will was climbing up a long silk braid of hair, woven with multicolored strands. He was climbing into the sky, where a steam-engine train was waiting, engine chugging, puffing out smoke that blended with the clouds. Strangely, the train had wings—great big feathery wings, like the wings of an enormous bird. The train was painted in bright colors, many of which Will did not have a name for; and in one of the windows he saw the girl from 31 Highland Avenue, looking out at him and waving. She was saying something to him—she was calling his name? No. She was telling him her name . . . Amanda . . . or Amen . . . or . . .

“Ahem.”

Will woke with a start and found Mr. Gray looking at him, holding a small canvas sack from which various paper-wrapped objects were protruding.

“Here.” Mr. Gray extended the sack to Will. “I did the best I could. Tell Merv”—that was the alchemist’s name, which no one but Mr. Gray ever used—“that I had absolutely no chicken heads to give him. Mrs. Finnegan came by yesterday and cleaned me out entirely. She was making soup.”

“Mmmkay.” Will got clumsily to his feet. His body felt heavy all over, and he was groggy from sleep and the sudden, rude awakening from his dream. He took the bag from Mr. Gray and slung it over one shoulder. From its depths came the smell of dried fish and other sour things. He took the wooden box from the table. It felt even heavier than it had earlier in the night. “Thank you.”

“Until next time,” Mr. Gray said, and was relieved when the boy tottered out of the door with his bag and his box. Really, just like a jellyfish, he thought disapprovingly; all pale and wiggly-looking, like he could squirm away from you quickly. Children in general, Mr. Gray thought, were incredibly inconvenient. Someday he hoped the world could be rid of them altogether. Perhaps he could ask the mayor . . . ?

Another shake of his head, and a sigh. No, no. It wouldn’t do. That was life: You were born, you were a child, then you grew and you died. Even Mr. Gray had been a child once, though he hardly remembered it—and even then he had always worn the same somber black suits, and neckties every day. Even his first-grade teacher had called him Mr. Gray.

The alchemist’s assistant’s visit had distracted him, and for a moment he stood in the middle of the room, trying to recall what he had been doing before the interruption. Oh, yes! Looking for a suitable container for Mr. Smith’s remains. He went back to rummaging under the sink and eventually came out with an empty canister of coffee.

It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee container.

“Ah, well,” he said out loud quietly. “That’s just the way things are. Life’s a funny business.” Death, he supposed, was the punch line.

On the cramped wooden table the very powerful magic sitting in a small wooden chest that looked almost exactly like the late Mrs. Gray’s jewelry box let off a sparkle, a minute flash of light. But Mr. Gray had his back toward the table and did not see.

And outside, in the dark maze of sleeping streets, the alchemist’s assistant scuttled off toward the Lady Premiere carrying a wooden jewelry box filled with the mortal remains of Liesl Morbower’s father.

Coincidences; mix-ups; harmless mistakes and switches. And so a story is born.

What Mr. Gray had said was true: Life is a very funny business indeed.

Chapter Four

THE NIGHT AFTER LIESL FIRST SAW THE GHOST
and the ghost-pet, they appeared again. But this time she was waiting for them.

“Did you find out? Did you see him? Is he on the Other Side?” she asked breathlessly, as soon as she saw Po flickering in the corner of the room.

“Turn off the light, please,” Po said. Po liked the light—it craved the light, to be honest, since the Other Side was in darkness all the time—but it was no longer used to it. And it was one thing to see the bright glow of the lamp from the Other Side. By the time it reached Po there, it had been filtered through layers and layers of existence, like sunlight getting bent and pale through water.

It was quite another thing to step into the Living Side, and see the light full-on, with its blare and glare.

Po did not really have eyes anymore, nor did it really have a head to host a headache; but standing in the light made something tremble and ache inside of it.

Liesl was impatient to hear news of her father, but she stood up and moved to the lamp and extinguished it. Strangely, she could see Po and Bundle better in the dark. Their forms seemed clearer and more solid. In the light they had looked like skating shadows at the edges of her vision; when she tried to focus on them, they dissolved.

“Well?” Liesl demanded. Her hands were shaking, and she heard her heart go
womp-womp-womp
painfully in her chest as she waited for the ghost’s answer.

“You didn’t say hello,” Po said.

“What?”

“You said that people on the Living Side always say hello to each other,” Po said, and Liesl could tell from the way it faded that it had been offended. “But you didn’t say it.”

“I forgot,” Liesl said sharply. She would have strangled the ghost, if it had had a head or neck or body. “We had a deal, remember? You promised you would look for my father.”

“I remember,” Po said, and didn’t say anything more.

Liesl took a deep breath. She realized if she lost her temper, the ghost might simply go away. She tried to start again, from the beginning. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” Po said.

“How are you?”

“Tired,” Po said. It had been across incredible distances; it had covered vast, unimaginable tracts of time since it had last spoken with Liesl the night before. It had been across eons that stretched like deserts across the universe: places where time was as water in the Sahara—gone, drifting to dust. It had been into cold, black seas where souls huddled together, and into dark tunnels burned straight into the center of existence, which led forever away, away, away.

But it could tell none of this to Liesl, so it just repeated, “Very, very tired.”

“Oh?” Liesl dug her fingernails into her palms. She was itching to ask about her father again, but she forced herself to remember her manners. “Did you have a long day?”

For a second she swore the ghost laughed. Then she thought the wind had only blown in through the attic window for a second, rustling the papers on her desk. “Longer than long. It took forever.”

Liesl did not know that Po meant this literally, and thought it was a stupid thing to say. But she stopped herself from saying so. “I’m very sorry to hear you are tired,” she said stiffly, her inside voice screaming:
Tell me what you know about my dad! Tell me now or I’ll kill you again! I’ll make you a double-ghost!

“What does that mean? What does it mean to say you’re sorry?”

Liesl groped for words to describe it. “It means—it means what it means. It means that I feel bad. It means that I wish I could make you untired.”

Po flipped upside down and then righted itself, still obviously confused. “But why should you wish anything for me?”

“It’s an expression,” Liesl said. Then she thought hard for a minute. “People need other people to feel things for them,” she said. “It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.”

Po appeared next to her. And suddenly she felt Bundle around her, a pile in her lap, a bare outline in the dark. The ghost-pet had no warmth or weight, but still she could
sense
it. It was hard to describe: as though the darkness beside her had texture, suddenly, like a deep drift of velvet.

Po asked, “Did you remember the drawing?”

Liesl had drawn Po a train with wings attached to its side: great big feathery wings, like those of the sparrows she saw perched on the rooftops directly across from her window. She passed the drawing to the ghost before remembering that the ghost had no hands with which to grab the sheet of paper. Instead she held it out, and the ghost looked at it thoughtfully for a minute or two.

At last the ghost seemed satisfied and said, “I’ve found your father for you. He is on the Other Side.” Bundle made a mewing noise in the back of its throat.

Liesl did not know whether to be relieved or unhappy, so she felt both at the same time: a terrible feeling, like two sharp blades running through her in different directions. “Are you—are you sure? Is it definitely him?”

“I’m sure,” Po said, and stood again, drifting like a mist to the middle of the room.

“Did you—did you speak to him? Did you speak to him about me?” Liesl’s voice was a bare squeak. “Did you tell him I miss him? And did you tell him good-bye?”

“There was no time,” Po said, and Liesl thought she heard something in its voice. A sadness, perhaps.

Po
was
sad, because the ghost knew that in the vast oceans of time that surrounded it endlessly on either side, somehow there was never enough time for the very things you needed to say and do. But it would not tell Liesl that.

Liesl’s eyes were bright. Even when she was sad, she seemed full of hope. You could see the hope shining off her: It made its own glow, as though inside of her a lamp was illuminated.

Liesl was silent for a minute. “What does it mean?” she said finally. “That he is there, on the Other Side? I mean, why hasn’t he . . . gone Beyond?”

Po shrugged. “It depends. It could mean lots of things. He is still—
attached
to the Living Side. Waiting for something, maybe.”

“Waiting for
what
?” Liesl could hardly stand it. She couldn’t stand not to know; she couldn’t stand not to be able to speak to him, and ask. The heaviness pressed down on her chest, and she felt like curling up in a ball, and closing her eyes, and sleeping. But Po was there, watching her, and Bundle was still a soft fold of darkness in her lap, so she didn’t.

Po thought about the man who had shuffled by him in the endless line of new souls, shaking his head, with his hair sticking up every which way as though he had just been rudely and suddenly awakened from a nap. He had been speaking to a soul coming along directly behind him, repeating the same story over and over. That was a thing about the recently dead. They still spoke to one another out loud. They had not yet learned to communicate without words. They had not learned the language of the deepest pools of the universe; the high, unvoiced rhythms of the planets in orbit; the language of being and breath.

“He spoke of a willow tree,” Po said. “The willow tree stood next to a lake, and he spoke of wanting to go there again.”

Liesl’s heart tightened in her chest. For a moment she couldn’t say anything at all. Then she burst out, “So you aren’t lying. You did see him after all.”

“Of course I’m not lying.” Po’s edges flared. “Ghosts never lie. We have no reason to.”

Liesl did not notice that Po had been offended. “I remem-ber the willow tree, and the lake. That’s where my mother was buried. We used to go there, before—before—” At the last second Liesl couldn’t say
before my dad met Augusta
or
before we moved to Dirge
or
before he got sick
or
before Augusta locked me in the attic
. She had almost forgotten there
was
a Before.

Now she remembered. And so she squeezed her eyes tight and climbed down the tower of months she had been in the attic, reaching back and back into the rooms of her memory that were dusty and so dim she could catch only little, flickering glances of things. There! Her father leading her into the shade of the great willow tree, patterns of green dancing across his cheeks. And there! Liesl laying her cheek on the velvety soft moss that grew above her mother’s grave. And there! If she turned to the left—if she concentrated hard enough—flaring to life in front of her: her father’s kind blue eyes, the comforting roughness of his arms around her, his voice in her ear saying, “Someday I’ll come back here, to lie beside your mother again.”

“The sun still shined then,” Liesl said. It had been a long time since she had said the word
sun
. It had a strange, light taste in her mouth.

Liesl had long ago lost count, but the sun had not come out in 1,728 days. One day the clouds had come, as they often had before. Nobody was especially concerned. The clouds would surely break up tomorrow, or the next day, or certainly the day after that.