Oddest of All (10 page)

It was empty.

Somehow she had known it would be. Even so, a chill crept over her. Where was Auntie Alma? Or, to be more specific: Where had her ghost gone? Margaret had read enough ghost stories to have some idea of how this might work. She feared that the discovery of the tombstone had driven the ghost away.

Leaving her here alone.

Why was she here alone?

It grew darker. Margaret thought about getting something to eat, but her stomach was too tight for that.

And then the calling began again.

Margaret. Mar-gar-et. Come to me. Please, please come to me.

Was it Auntie Alma calling?

No. It wasn't her voice.

But if not her, then who?

Or what?

The house was too dark and lonely to protect her. The call had grown too strong to resist. Margaret began to weep—not great sobs, just a slow, gentle flow of tears down her cheeks. Against her will, she drifted through the door. With no light save that of the pale moon, she walked through the backyard, past the grape arbor, along the overgrown path, over the ridge to the pond.

Fireflies drifted above the dew-soaked grass, their brief, pale lights flashing on and off. But the crickets had fallen silent, as if waiting for something. No breeze stirred the surface of the water. The moon's reflection in the pond seemed that of a ghost moon floating, waiting.

And on the other side of the water, standing among the willows, was Auntie Alma.

Pale, translucent Auntie Alma, her color the same as that of the moon in the water, who held out her hands longingly to Margaret, imploring the child to come to her.

“I can't!” wailed Margaret. “I can't! I can't!”

But inside her mind the voice—not Auntie Alma's, the other voice—was whispering urgently,
Margaret, please! Come to me. It's time to stop pretending
.

Unable to resist, she walked to the edge of the water, to the same place she had found herself standing again and again for the last few days. The horror was growing inside her, filling her so full it seemed as if she must burst with it.

“Margaret!” called Auntie Alma from across the pond. “Margaret, dear, the only way out is in.”

Margaret stood trembling in the darkness.

The only way out is in.

What was that supposed to mean? Actually, part of her knew exactly what it meant. Even so, she wanted to ask. But somehow she also knew that Auntie Alma couldn't tell her and had bent the rules to say even as much as she had.

She turned and ran, then stopped at the top of the rise and looked back. The pond lay black and still, the moon's reflection like a single enormous eye in its center.

The translucent woman still stood on the far side, waiting with open arms.

And from the water's depths came a call that she could no longer resist.

Slowly, Margaret walked down the hill, back to the edge of the water.

“The only way out is in,” whispered Auntie Alma, her words clear and distinct across the dark water.

Margaret stepped into the pond.

 

The water was shockingly cold. The bottom was slick and silty, just as she remembered from times her mother had walked her in when she was little, before she was strong enough to refuse. She could almost feel it through her shoes, feel the sliding, sucking mud that squeezed between her toes and tried to hold her down.

She took another step, and then another. She was close to the worst part, the drop-off where the pond plunged to unsuspected depths.

Three more steps and Margaret went over the edge. Down she sank through the cold black water. The moon's pale light could not pierce this darkness. And yet somehow she could see. Or perhaps she was guided by the voice, which was calling her more intensely than ever. Not Auntie Alma's voice. The other. She knew who it was, now. But she would not give it a name.

Not yet.

At the bottom of the pond, in darkness black and absolute, she found it. A low mound, features obscured by the silt that had drifted over it in the few days it had been here. She longed to flee. Terror throbbed within her, beating at the walls of her heart, screaming, “Get out, get out, get out!” But the call was too strong, the need of the voice too aching and desperate. Trapped between need and fear, Margaret hung in the freezing water, not certain how much longer she could last here.

The only way out is in.

The words tickled at the back of her mind. She knew they were true, knew they were the only answer.

Moving forward, Margaret reached out to brush the silt from the poor, cold thing at the bottom of the pond. A lock of hair floated free, and she saw it at last, the face she knew so well, the face she had looked at every morning in the mirror.

Her own face, pale and still in death.

Her wail of despair was lost in the dark water as memory flooded over her, pushing away the lies.

Her parents had not gone off and left her here with Auntie Alma. She had come here herself, running away, hoping to find . . . what? A place to escape, for a time, from the fights—and, even more, from the unbearable hope that they might end, that things might get better, that her mother and father might stop the endless war so they could be a family again.

She had taken the little boat out onto the water, thinking she would be safe, held above the pond, separate from it. Positioning herself in the center of the pond, she had tossed the anchor over the side of the boat. But in her anger and despair she had carelessly managed to tangle her foot in the rope.

The anchor had pulled her under and held her down. She had struggled frantically to free herself, but finally the water had filled her lungs and she had drowned here in the pond's cold, dark embrace.

Calmer now, Margaret studied the pale thing that had once been her, the body that was hers no longer, and realized that she must have gone backward at the moment of death, reaching desperately for the world of the living and refusing to acknowledge the truth of what had happened.

She had been lying to herself ever since, blocking out the memory of her death by trying to pretend that her parents had brought her here, even though she knew in her heart that the house was empty and that Auntie Alma had died earlier that year.

No wonder her parents hadn't come for her. How could they, not having any idea where she had gone?

And now Auntie Alma was waiting on the far shore . . . one ghost calling to another.

But why am I still trapped here in the water?

Auntie Alma's words sounded again in her head, and finally Margaret understood. “The only way out is in,” she whispered.

Beating back her fear, she reached down to embrace the cold, dead flesh of her body. Wrapping her ghostly arms around her own corpse, she pressed herself to herself, accepting the reality of her death, rejecting the lie she had fashioned in her attempt to cling to the world of the living.

This cold thing
was
her reality, who she was and where she was, and until she accepted that, she could never get through to the other side.

Hard—harder than the night she had tried to press herself into the mattress—she pressed herself back into herself . . .

. . . and burst through the other side.

Suddenly the cold was gone. She felt warm and safe, and light seemed to surround her as she shot to the top of the pond.

Auntie Alma, still waiting on the far side, laughed and applauded when she saw Margaret emerge from the water and climb onto the bank.

Margaret laughed, too—and laughed even harder to find herself warm and dry.

Auntie Alma held out her arms.

Margaret ran to them.

Together, the old woman and the girl walked out of the willows, up the hill, and into the deeper woods, ready to explore the undiscovered country that lay waiting for them on the other side.

T
HREE HUNDRED
years ago, when I was only twelve, I sat beside my father's deathbed in a stone cottage near the west coast of France.

I knew that he was absurdly old. Even so, I could not believe he would really die. That childish certainty was shattered when I heard the uncanny wailing outside the window, a heart-piercing keen of despair that seemed to twist and twine around the house, seeping under the doors, through the shutters, down the chimney, and into my very soul.

I burst into sobs and covered my ears. At the same time, my father started up in his bed, his face wild with fear and longing. “That's my mother!” he whispered, stretching out his arms as if to be embraced. A moment later he collapsed against the pillow. I grabbed his hand. He clenched mine back so tightly that I feared he might break my fingers.

The eerie wailing continued until I thought it would drive me mad. Mercifully, it ceased just before the first rays of the sun crept into the sky. For a time there was a blissful silence, not broken until the full gold of dawn slid across the stone sill and my father whispered, “I will be dead before nightfall, Geoffroi.”

I flung myself across his chest, begging him to stay, sobbing out my fear of being left alone in the world. But I could not hold him. By nightfall he was gone, just as he had predicted.

He left me three things: a modest fortune, a life that would be unnaturally long, and a story without an ending.

Of these three things, it was the story, which he told me during his last hour of life, that has most shaped me. In fact it laid hold of my imagination until it became the driving force in my own life for the next two hundred years. For with it came a sense of obligation, and an awareness of a task that I knew I alone was meant to perform.

The idea merely simmered inside me at first. Even when I began to see what I should do I felt helpless, because I had no idea where to start.

It took me longer than it should have to realize that an education would help—as would having enough years added to my face that people would take me seriously. Neither of these things was as simple as it might seem: The knowledge I sought was hidden, and my face did not age at a natural pace. Still, the time came at last when I felt I could begin. In the years that followed, my search led me to stranger places than I had ever thought existed—including, eventually, a small, dusty shop called
La Grenouille Grise
, which was nestled at the end of a narrow street in Paris.

Finding the shop was no accident. Fifteen years of dangerous questions and unlikely contacts had led me to a midnight-dark alley where a cold presence, standing beside me like a shadow, whispered a hint and then disappeared.

That hint was what led me to the shop, though it took another two years to find it.

The proprietress of
La Grenouille Grise
was a gray-haired, gray-eyed, gray-skinned woman who looked as if she, like the items on her shelves, had not been dusted in many years.

“I'm looking for something,” I said.

She gestured toward the displays with that attitude peculiar to Parisian shopkeepers, who seem to feel offended by your very presence. Without a word, she was clearly telling me, “Look if you must. But don't expect my help!”

Alas, her help was exactly what I needed, as I was fairly certain that the thing I sought was not on display. Risking a bolt of Parisian contempt, I refined my request. “It's something with wings.”

I braced myself for her sneer. But the veiled hint had worked. I had at least caught her interest, and she bestirred herself enough to actually point toward one of the shelves.

Turning, I saw a stuffed owl that looked as if it had once been left out in the rain. It was not what I wanted, and she almost certainly knew it.

I shook my head. “What I want would be smaller.”

Her expression didn't change.

“And older.”

Still no change.

I took my last, best shot. “And still alive.”

Her eyes widened by the tiniest degree. In a voice that sounded like the rustle of dry grass in the autumn wind, she spoke the first words she had uttered since I entered: “What is your name?”

“Geoffroi LeGrandent,” I said. Then, as if to defy the shame that even after all those years I was not able to entirely hide, I added boldly, “The same as my father.”

I caught the slightest flicker of surprise in those ancient gray eyes. She nodded and stood, so rickety and frail looking that I feared she might collapse before she could sell me what I wanted.

“Follow me,” she wheezed, and shuffled off in a cloud of dust.

I made my way around the counter—not an easy passage, given the store's clutter. By the time I had picked a path between the bronze elephant and the display of cracked pottery, trying to ignore the more grisly relics (there was something I would have sworn was a shriveled human hand) she had vanished behind a tattered gray curtain.

I hurried to catch up with her.

The room we entered was small, dingy, and even more cluttered than the store. A narrow bed—little more than a pallet covered by a thin blanket—stood tight against the far wall. Pointing to it, she said, “Under there.”

I knelt. Beneath the bed was a wooden box—oak, I guessed—held shut with a padlock. I pulled it out, then followed her back into the store. I placed the box on the counter.

The proprietress fumbled in her pocket, finally drawing forth a ring of keys. The smallest, needle thin and no longer than my thumbnail, opened the lock.

I was scarcely able to contain my impatience at her slow, deliberate movements. When she finally lifted the lid of the box I leaned forward eagerly.

Inside was a small glass cube, about four inches to a side. And within that vitrine prison, its ebony wings delicate as lace, fluttered the thing I had sought for so many years.

It was heavier than I had expected.

 

· · ·

 

Far away, at rest in her grotto, Melusine senses that something is happening. She doesn't know what it is, but she can feel it in her veins, the same way she always used to feel it when death was on the prowl for one of her family. She shakes her head, causing her golden tresses to slide over her bare shoulders. That was long ago. These days the bloodline is so thinned she rarely feels that acid premonition, and even then only as a faint, cold tingle.