The Swallow (26 page)

Rose

How was it possible? I’d hugged her, I’d felt her warm hand on mine, I’d seen her devouring shortbread, I’d heard her laughing. How could Polly be dead?

But then I remembered the sight of her pale white hand on the floor of the attic after Winnie attacked her, and her pale face, and Winnie screaming at me, “She’s dead!”

The very first time I met her, when I heard her voice in the attic, I did think she was a ghost. An invisible ghost who was trying to trick me. But she had also tricked herself, because there was no way Polly knew she was dead. She was going to school, eating dinner, talking to her brothers and sisters. But were they talking back?

I tried to think, sitting there in the dark with my world spinning out of control, tried to remember if I had ever seen anyone talking to Polly. Mrs. Gardner at the library? No, she had just yelled at the twins and ignored Polly and me when we were there. The kids at her school? No, Polly had walked behind them, all by herself. The twins? I’d never seen Polly and the twins together, but they always talked about her to me as if she were alive.

Or did they? What if they could see ghosts, the way I could? That would explain why they were so worried about me spending
time with Polly. They thought I was a ghost, and they were afraid I would tell her she was dead, and then she would disappear.

It was true. Polly was dead.

I couldn’t bear it. I felt a scream of “
NO
!” rising inside me, but nothing could come past the huge lump stopping up my throat.

I slipped off the chair to the floor and curled into a ball. Everything hurt, but my throat worst of all. It felt as if a bird were trapped in there, struggling to get out, and every time it flapped its wings they scraped against the inside of my throat, cutting me.

A swallow.

I could feel the scratch of the dusty floorboards against my cheek. The pain was beating inside me like a pulse. Not Polly. Not her. It should have been me who was a ghost.

Finally, finally, the swallow wrenched its way out, tearing at my throat, and I began to cry—huge, jerky sobs that sounded like they came from someone else.

NO REPLY

Polly

“Come on,” said Matthew. “Back to the attic. You’ll be safe there, Polly.”

I let them pull me along the path and onto the street, then up the stairs and into our house. I could hear faint noises from the kitchen—voices—but they sounded very far away. I walked up the stairs, Mark in front and Matthew behind, as if I were their captive. I was feeling very tired, and with every step my feet felt heavier than the step before, but I let them lead me to my closet.

“Go on,” said Mark. “Go up.”

I could see the edge of Susie’s crib through the doorway. I could see my bed and the bookshelf above it with my old dolls sitting in a row. The boys looked up at me, worried.

“You’ll be okay,” said Matthew. “Have a nap, and when you wake up everything will be back to normal, just like before.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll do that.”

They looked uncertainly at me, but I turned away and climbed up into my loft, then pushed open the trapdoor and heaved myself into the attic.

It was dark. I crawled over to the wall and burrowed under the blankets.

Rose

I lay on the floor in the dark. It could have been a few minutes or a few hours. Eventually I stopped crying and the world stopped spinning. The house and the people in it slowly dropped down to the ground. I sat up.

I tried to call her. “Polly.” It came out as a faint whisper.

I tried again. “Polly.” A little louder. “Polly, come back.”

There was no reply.

My voice was too faint. She probably couldn’t hear it through the wall. I stood up, picked up the flashlight from beside my chair and pushed through the boxes to the hidden door.

It was dark and narrow. I remembered the last time I had come through the passage, after the walls of Polly’s attic had closed in on me, how narrow and airless it had felt, how I swore I would never go back.

I bent down and crawled in. If anything, it was worse than before. It seemed smaller, and I dragged myself along, picking up splinters on my elbows and knees. I went as fast as I could and burst through the door at Polly’s end, taking deep breaths of the stale attic air.

I flashed the light around. It was empty, except for the pile of blankets by the wall.

“Polly?” I whispered. I expected the blankets to heave up at any minute and reveal her, tousled from sleep perhaps, grinning at me, glasses askew.

The blankets didn’t move. But the lump in the middle was just the shape it would be if a girl Polly’s size was curled up underneath.

I walked over and poked it gently.

“Polly?”

I poked a little harder. The lump collapsed beneath my hand. I pulled the blankets back but there was nothing there—

Except a lingering warmth, as if someone had just left.

I sat down among the blankets, stunned. She was gone. She was really gone.

TWINS

Rose

I put my head in my hands. The swallow fluttered in my chest now, beating sharply against my ribs, and the world began to spin again.

A long time later it stopped. I heard a scrambling from the other end of the attic. Mice? I groped for the flashlight.

The bar of light revealed a small, scared face full of freckles, sticking up through the trapdoor. One of the Horrors. I didn’t know which.

“Polly?” said the boy, shielding his eyes against the light in his face.

“No, it’s Rose,” I replied, my voice a hoarse whisper. He ducked back down out of sight for a consultation with his brother.

“Oh, come on up,” I said. “I won’t bite you.”

Slowly the head came back up, followed by the rest of him, and then the other one. They huddled together at the opposite end of the attic.

“Where’s Polly?” said the first one. “What have you done with her?”

“I didn’t do anything. But she’s gone,” I answered.

Whispers again.

“We know you’re twins,” said the first one. “We saw the two of you through the window.”

“What window?”

“Your house,” said the other one. “A while ago. Polly was with us. And we saw Mum come in and start crying. And then Polly started acting really weird, and we brought her back here to keep her safe. Where is she?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

Silence. Then the first one said, with a tremble in his voice, “We know you’re the Ghost Girl.”

“You want to steal her soul,” said the other.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not the Ghost Girl. That’s Winnie. She looks like me … but she’s not me. I didn’t want to hurt Polly.”

They inched closer, and I handed the first one the flashlight.

“Look at me,” I said. “I’m not dead.”

They held the light on me for a long time.

“You look like a ghost,” said the first one finally.

“But I’m not. I was Polly’s friend. You don’t have to be scared of me.”

They looked at each other. Some kind of communication was going on between them. Whatever it was, they seemed to come to an agreement.

“Okay,” said the first one. “Maybe you’re not a ghost.”

“But if you’re not a ghost,” said the other one, “then how did you get into our attic?”

I grinned at them. “Secret passage,” I said.

“
WOW
!” they breathed in unison.

I reached over and took the flashlight back, shining it into their pale faces.

“Which of you is which?”

“I’m Mark,” said the first one.

“I’m Matthew,” said the second.

“Okay. So you guys can see ghosts, right? How long have you been able to see them?”

Mark shrugged. “Not that long.”

“Just since Polly—Polly—” said Matthew.

“Since Polly got sick and died,” whispered Mark. “We thought it was our fault. We told Mum she was pretending, but she wasn’t, she was really sick, and then the next day she … she … died in the hospital, and we thought it was our fault. Then at the funeral we started to see ghosts in the cemetery, and when we got home Polly was in her room, reading, just like usual.”

“But nobody else could see her,” said Matthew. “Just us. So we played along with her. She didn’t know she was dead. We thought we could keep her.”

“She wasn’t always there,” said Mark. “She came and went, and she didn’t seem to understand that days and weeks were
passing. She was all mixed up. But she thought everything was normal. She went to school, she did her homework, ate dinner. And she never seemed to notice that no one was talking to her except us.”

“How did she eat dinner? I mean, there wasn’t a place set for her or food or a chair, was there?”

The boys looked at each other and shrugged.

“She just would appear at the table, like normal, eating,” said Mark. “She’d have a plate of food just like she was alive, and she’d eat away and listen to the conversation and laugh and talk and somehow …”

“And somehow she never realized,” continued Matthew. “Like she was in a bubble. But then we started seeing the Ghost Girl around your house.”

“And she was really scary, like the one in the book,” said Mark.

“And we knew she was going to tell Polly that she was dead and steal her soul away, and then Polly would go.”

“But was the Ghost Girl me or the other one?” I asked.

They exchanged glances.

“We can’t tell the difference. We thought there was only one.”

A muffled voice came from a long, long way below.

“Mark! Matthew!”

They jumped.

“It’s Dad,” said Mark.

“We gotta go,” said Matthew. They popped down through the trapdoor and drew it shut behind them.

I sat there for a while, thinking about what they had said. A bubble. She was living in a bubble, where she was still alive. She wasn’t ready to die, so she stayed. And found me.

I shook my head. I still couldn’t believe it. How was she a ghost, and I didn’t recognize it? She seemed so alive. How was she warm? How did she eat? How did she … breathe? After Winnie had tried to kill her in my attic I’d breathed life into her. I could feel it. I felt her heart beating under her skin.

What was it that made her a ghost? What was it that made her dead? Just … believing it?

I shook my head. No. There had to be more to it than that.

I took one last look around her attic. She wasn’t there anymore.

“Good-bye, Polly,” I whispered and crawled back through the passage, and home.

OLD ENOUGH

Rose

Mother came up later to see if I wanted any supper. I didn’t.

She sat on the edge of my bed. I had been crying again, and I lay curled up with my back to her, so she couldn’t see my face.

“Rose,” she said.

“I didn’t steal that stuff,” I mumbled. “I didn’t go in their house.”

“I know,” she said. “Don’t worry about that now. It’s some misunderstanding. Mrs. Lacey is very upset. Poor thing. Your father and I—” She stopped, swallowed, and then started again. “She told us what happened. It was just the same as with you. Meningitis. Only—only they didn’t catch it in time and their girl died. Very sad. Her little boys have had trouble accepting it, she says. They keep playing games as if their sister were alive. They’ve been playing tricks, and they must have slipped that book into your schoolbag, or something like that. It’s all over, Rose, you don’t need to worry about it.” She fell silent for a moment.