The Year of Shadows

by Claire Legrand

  His expression made me nervous, but I slid my sketchpad forward anyway. “This is my sketchpad. It’s where I keep all my drawings. I take it everywhere I go.”

  “And?”

  And Mom gave it to me and told me it was important to dream. Dreaming tells us who we are and scrubs away the bad days. I glared at Joan. “And nothing. That’s it.”

  Joan sighed. “Henry?”

  Henry slid forward a glass jar brown with age and dust and dirt and who knows what else. It rattled, but the glass was too dark to see inside.

  “This is my . . . my jar,” he said. “I keep important things in there, things that mean a lot to me. And . . . well, yeah.”

  “That’s all you’re going to say?” said Joan.

  Henry nodded.

  “Look, I hope you two are committed to this and have open minds,” Joan said. “Otherwise it won’t work.”

  “Joan, we’re committed, we’ve got open minds, we’re full of sunshine,” I said. “Let’s just do this, okay?”

  “Fine.” Joan thrust out her arms. “Grab my hands and bow your heads.”

  “Sunshine, Joan,” Henry said, soothingly. “Sunshine, remember?”

  Joan closed her eyes. “Yes. Positive energy. Positive . . .” She breathed in. “Energy.” She breathed out.

  We joined hands. We closed our eyes. Then Joan began to speak.

  “Spirits,” Joan called out, throwing back her head. She almost jerked my arm out of its socket. “We are here tonight to speak with you, and to offer our help, if you need it. Can you hear us? Are you there?”

  Nothing. Complete stillness, except for the dancing fire and its shadows. I squeaked open one eye to look around and saw Henry doing the same thing. I shut my eyes before he could see me looking, and tried to concentrate.

  “Spirits?” Joan called out again. “We are here. We wish to speak with you. Can you hear us?”

  After a minute, Joan let go, sighing. “This isn’t working.”

  Henry raised his eyebrows. “Shouldn’t we try for a little longer than that? It’s only been—”

  “Listen, I know all about séances, and you don’t want to linger too long in any one position. You have to rotate your methods.” She spun her hand around.

  “Whatever you say.”

  Joan pulled out her homemade Ouija board and started rearranging everything. Igor perched on the edge of the stage and looked out over the empty Hall, into the shadows. His ears pricked forward; his tail stood straight out behind him.

  He meowed softly. Curiouser and curiouser.

  I looked out into the Hall too, but all I could see was the red exit signs. One of them flickered on and off, buzzing. Had it been doing that before? And the coldness settling into the Hall like an invisible fog, scraping goosebumps across my skin—how long had that been going on?

  Slowly, Igor stood up. The hair on the back of his neck poofed. Curiousest of all.

  “Come on, Olivia,” Joan was saying. “We need your hands.” She shoved our hands together onto the Ouija board’s pointer, a piece of cardboard with a hole in the middle and plastic wrap stretched across the bottom of the hole. It distorted the letters, wrinkling them.

  “Don’t press down too hard,” Joan whispered. “Just barely touch the cardboard. Close your eyes. Let out a long breath.”

  After I exhaled, the only sounds I could hear were my own racing heartbeat and the distant buzzing of the exit sign. Beside me, Henry pressed his knee against mine.

  “Spirits,” Joan called out once more. “Tell us—are you here with us?”

  Beneath our fingers, the pointer began to move. Henry cried out, and I bit down hard on my tongue to keep from doing the same.

  “Don’t stop,” she hissed. “We’re getting somewhere. Watch.”

  We did, staring at the pointer as it moved across the board—but what letter was it heading for? First N, and then Y, and then Z. That didn’t make any sense.

  I imagined stretching out my brain into the corners of the room, like tendrils. Please let this be real.

  “Joan?” Henry whispered. “What’s happening?”

  “She’s moving it herself, is what,” said a voice from somewhere across the stage, a scratchy, dirty-sounding voice, like it had been scraped off the inside of a chimney.

  We all froze, including the pointer. Joan stared past us. Her face went rigid.

  “Olivia?” Henry’s fingers dug into my knee. “What is it?”

  I swallowed down the buzz of panic. Whatever it was behind us stood there, waiting. I wanted to run away and not look back; I wanted to turn around and face whatever it was.

  I turned around.

  It was the gray man, tall and thin, with black-hole eyes and a black-hole mouth. He was made of smoke and shifting light and patches of dark nothingness. His head was too large, and then it was too small. A nose flickered across his smoky face and was gone. He had feet, and then he didn’t.

  Igor batted at the gray man’s wavering fingertips with his front paws. What a delightful new toy! I must have it.

  “You know,” said the gray man, his mouth stretching into a horrible smile, “you really don’t need all that rubbish to talk to ghosts.”

  PART TWO

  JOAN MADE THAT sound like when you wake up from a nightmare and try to scream, but your voice gets stuck and instead comes out this terrified, whimpering whisper. Then she ran for the nearest exit.

  That left me and Henry onstage. And Igor, and the tall, gray man made of smoke, and three more smoky figures behind him, emerging from the shadows.

  Henry and I watched them come. Henry was shaking so badly, I thought he’d get up and follow Joan any second now, but I stayed put, even though my heart raced so fast I thought it would explode from my chest. We’d done what we wanted to; we’d contacted ghosts. I wasn’t going to waste this opportunity.

  Besides, Igor didn’t seem too concerned with the fact that there were now four ghosts onstage. In fact, he collapsed in front of the gray man and showed him his belly.

  “There’s no need to be afraid,” said the gray man. His smile gaped crookedly, and his stomach was a big patch of black. He put out one arm, his smoke-fingers curling eloquently. He had a strange, old-fashioned accent. “I am not here to hurt you, nor your cat. Nor you, Henry.”

  Henry made a tiny, scared sound. “You know me?”

  The gray man cocked his head like a bird. “One does not spend years in a place without getting to know the people in it. We’ve been watching both of you for a long time.”

  Something clicked inside my head. “That cold air! That was you, wasn’t it?”

  The gray man’s smile widened. “Precisely. And I think we’re ready to trust you now. After all, you went through all this trouble. The least we can do is say hello.”

  The gray man turned his head around 180 degrees to look at the other gray figures behind him. “Wouldn’t you agree, friends?”

  The other three ghosts nodded, the smoke of their bodies rippling.

  “I would,” said one of the two smaller ghosts—a boy, maybe a couple of years younger than me. His gray had a bluish tint, his smoke-skin covered with dark, glowing patches. They looked almost like burns.

  “And I think Tillie would agree too,” the boy ghost continued. When he smiled, half his jaw fell away in a chunk of smoke and then came back together. “Of course, I only think.”

  “I agree,” said the other small ghost—a bluish-gray girl with braids floating around her head. Smoke rose from her body as though she were on fire. “And I bet Jax does too.”

  The gray man nodded. “Tillie and Jax, they cannot see each other, you see. Or hear each other. It’s quite tragic, really.”

  Jax, the boy, crossed his arms over his chest, and the girl, Tillie, spat a glob of churning black smoke onto the stage. It melted right through the floor.

  “Don’t be melodramatic, Frederick,” said Tillie.

  The gray man said, “Forgive me, I tend to do that. The resul
t of working in the arts, I suppose. At least . . .” He frowned. “Maybe it was the arts. Or perhaps it was politics. Or perhaps agriculture. It’s all rather fuzzy.”

  “The arts?” I whispered, trying to keep everything straight in my head.

  The gray man, Frederick, nodded. He bowed, and then crumpled into a gray-and-black puddle on the floor, and then came back together again. Henry and I backed away, but the gray man only smiled.

  “I apologize. Sometimes it is difficult to keep things together.” He patted the remaining smoky bits of himself back into his body, straightening his smoke-jacket. “My name is Frederick van der Burg, and this is Tillie and Jax.” He stretched his fingers out to the girl and boy ghosts. “And this”—he pointed to the fourth ghost—“is Mr. Worthington.”

  Mr. Worthington stared. His eyes and mouth were the largest, hanging open like gateways to some secret, dark place. His head didn’t hang quite right, like someone had screwed it on wrong, and he was skinny as a bundle of twigs. His shape was the hardest to make out in the shadows; he was mostly darkness.

  “He’s a businessman,” Tillie said. “But he doesn’t speak much.”

  I picked out a smoky fedora and business suit in Mr. Worthington’s driftiness. It was strangely reassuring to see a ghost wearing a business suit.

  “If he doesn’t speak,” Henry said faintly, “how do you know his name?”

  Jax shrugged. So did Tillie. They started speaking over each other, but I could pick out most of it: “We’ve known him for a while. Besides, he’s a ghost and we’re ghosts. So we just . . . know.”

  “We only know some things, though,” said Tillie.

  “We don’t know everything, though,” said Jax.

  “Just enough to get by,” they both said, their words lining up almost exactly.

  “Such interesting children, aren’t they?” Frederick said. “If I had to be stuck with others, I’m awfully glad it’s such interesting others.”

  “Children?” Tillie and Jax said. “We’ve seen more than you have, I’ll bet.”

  Frederick laughed, a terrible sound that screeched down my spine.

  “And what shall you bet, young ones? Eternity?” He held out one hand in a swirl of smoke. “Or eternity?” He held out his other hand. “As that’s really all we have.”

  “Olivia,” Henry whispered, inching closer. “Let’s get out of here. Please.”

  “If we run, they’ll just follow us.”

  “That’s true,” Frederick said. “But we wouldn’t hurt you. I bet that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” In a whirl of wind, he rushed down to sit across from us and propped his head in his hands. “I remember loving ghost stories when I was a boy. How silly they were—harmless, I suppose, but silly and wrong.”

  “Why won’t you hurt us?” I said.

  Henry pinched my hand. “Don’t ask him that!”

  “Why would I want to hurt you? Why would any of us?”

  I shook off Henry’s hand. “Don’t ghosts do that?”

  Tillie and Jax settled in smoky pools on either side of Frederick. “Some do,” they whispered in chorus.

  “But there’s no need to be frightened around us.” Darkness dripped from where Frederick’s teeth should have been. “You have my word.”

  He stretched out his hand—or smoke and darkness in the vague shape of a hand.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “How I am supposed to trust your handshake if you don’t really have a hand?”

  All of them laughed, except for Mr. Worthington—croaking, creaking sounds like rusty doors.

  “Oh, I like her,” said Jax, nodding.

  “She’s all right,” said Tillie, smiling.

  “How blunt of you, how charmingly forthright.” Frederick straightened the clump of smoky bowtie at his throat. “Let me just say that, once, I had a hand. Once, I had a lot of things. And I swear on all those things, those realnesses that were once mine, that none of us will hurt you. Ever.”

  He held out his hand once more. I glared at it.

  “We are lonely,” he said, quietly. “It is nicer than I can say, to talk to a real person and remember what it was like.”

  I examined Frederick’s face for a few seconds, but it was hard to read a face that wouldn’t stop drifting around.

  “Look,” Henry said, shoving past me, “why don’t you just get out of here? You say you won’t hurt us, so don’t. Just leave.”

  “Henry, stop it,” I hissed. “You wanted to find them.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Well, here they are!” I put my hands on my hips. “Frederick, I’ve got some questions.”

  “Oh, I do love questions.” Frederick, trembling, drifted away into pieces, like a pile of leaves blown apart by wind.

  Tillie and Jax tugged at the pieces of him. Even Mr. Worthington helped. They patted Frederick back together, drawing the smoke-shape of him in the air with their smoke-fingers. I felt hypnotized; Henry’s mouth hung open.

  Whole again, Frederick muttered, “Thank you, friends, thank you most kindly. Now. By all means. Your questions, Olivia: Ask them.”

  “First, why are you here?” I said.

  “We are here because we can’t leave.”

  “We’re stuck,” said Tillie.

  “We’re bound to this place,” said Jax at the same time.

  “What place, exactly?” Henry asked.

  “Emerson Hall.” Frederick looked around at the Hall, his eyes lingering on the organ and the vaulted ceilings with their murals of crumbling paint. “It is our haunt. It was beautiful once. At least, I think it was. I seem to remember it once being beautiful.”

  “It’s beautiful now,” Henry said defensively.

  I elbowed him. “Why here?”

  “We left things behind, before,” Frederick said. “Important things. And we left them here, somewhere on these grounds. And without them, we cannot move on. Without them, our souls are incomplete. They are our anchors. They represent things we did not finish, things that keep us from becoming whole, from moving on. They keep us here, in the world of the Living.”

  “Before?” I asked.

  Frederick hung his head. Tillie and Jax looked away and, unknowingly, right at each other. Mr. Worthington stared.

  “Before we—before we . . .” Frederick sighed. “Forgive me, the word can be difficult to say.”

  “Oh, come on, Frederick,” said Tillie. “Before we died.”

  “It’s hard for Frederick,” said Jax, patting Frederick’s shoulder with tiny puffs of smoke. “He’s new. He hasn’t been around as long as we have.”

  “Frederick’s new,” Tillie explained, at the same time as Jax. “It’s harder for him. We’ve been around longer, but not as long as Mr. Worthington.”

  So Mr. Worthington was the oldest of the group. That made a strange kind of sense. I did not let myself meet his dark, unblinking eyes.

  “What did you leave behind?” I asked. “What are these anchors?”

  “We don’t know,” said Frederick.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “We can’t remember what they are.”

  “When we died,” Tillie said, “we forgot a lot of things.”

  “Dying makes you forget things about living,” said Jax.

  “So,” I said slowly, “these anchors are keeping you here in the Hall.”

  They nodded.

  “But you don’t remember what they are, and I guess you don’t know where they are either?”

  They nodded again.

  Henry cleared his throat. “What happens if you don’t ever find them?”

  “Then we will remain here forever,” said Frederick.

  “We’ll never move on,” said Tillie and Jax.

  “On?” Henry said. “On to where?”

  The world of Death, I thought, remembering Mrs. Barsky’s spooked face.

  “The world of Death,” Frederick said.

  “That’s where the Dead go,” said Til
lie. “But we’re not quite Dead yet, not all the way.”

  “Only the Dead can enter Death,” said Jax. “Those with complete souls. But we’re only halfway there. Our souls are damaged, incomplete without our anchors. We’re not quite Dead. We’re in between.”

  “We’re in between,” whispered Tillie.

  I tried to imagine being stuck in the Hall forever, never being able to leave. Or worse, if we did run completely out of money, being forced to leave. Living on the streets. Building a bed of newspapers for me and Nonnie under the East River Bridge.

  It wasn’t a nice thought, and for all I knew, it could happen.

  I forced myself to feel braver than I wanted to. I didn’t know what would happen to me—to Nonnie, to the Maestro and his orchestra—but maybe I could do something about these ghosts. Maybe I could help them.

  “I have a question,” Henry said. “You say you’ve been here for years. Why are we just now seeing you?”

  “People only see ghosts when we allow them to see us,” Frederick said. “It’s a sort of built-in safety precaution, if you will.”

  “Why did you let us see you? We saw you a few weeks ago in the lobby, with those shadow things, and now today.”

  The ghosts looked at each other. Then Frederick chuckled sheepishly. “Oh, in the lobby. Yes, that was a . . . how shall I say it? A preliminary test. We had to show ourselves to you, see how you responded. Congratulations! You passed, and now here we are today.”

  “And these burns on our skin?” I held up my arm.

  “An unfortunate side effect of communicating with ghosts, I’m afraid,” Frederick said apologetically. “They should fade in time.”

  “Okay, so we’re all talking now. What do you want from us?”

  The ghosts seemed suddenly shy, their cheeks darkening. Were they blushing?

  “We thought maybe you could help us,” Jax said softly.

  “We thought it was time to ask you,” Tillie said.

  “To find our anchors,” they said together.

  I frowned. “And how would we do that, exactly?”

  “I’m afraid there’s only one way for us to move on,” Frederick began slowly. “We must first remember what our anchors are. Then we must remember where they are. And finally, we must find them and reunite with them. Then, and only then, can we enter Death.”