Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1)

by Rasmussen, Jen

  We walked a while in silence while I thought over Tom’s various excuses. Finally I said, “But that’s an awfully big coincidence.”

  “What is?”

  “I banished them almost five years ago. I never heard a peep out of that canteen. Then all the sudden I just happen to hear that laugh the day I banish you?”

  Tom looked at me, something dawning on his face. “Were you thinking about Roderick? Because of that gargoyle?”

  “Of course I was.”

  “When I first got here, Gemma warned me about them.”

  “Who is this Gemma?”

  “You’ll meet her shortly. That’s not the point. Don’t open yourself up to them, she told me, because they’re very good at working their will once they’re inside.”

  “What, like hypnosis?”

  “I guess so. But she made it sound like a prank, like they just played with people when they got bored. I don’t know, made them cluck like chickens maybe, isn’t that the hypnotist joke?”

  “And you think the gargoyle opened me up? Made some sort of connection that Roderick could exploit?”

  He shrugged. “Could be.”

  “Because if that’s it, it’s still your fault.”

  “Nope. Not my gargoyle.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But if that’s what they were doing in that swamp, what were you doing there? Doesn’t seem like such a fun place to hang out.”

  “It’s where I landed when you sent me here. It’s where everyone lands.”

  “So?”

  “So I was looking for something. Something I lost, thanks to you.”

  Great. Something else that was my fault. “Your pocket watch.”

  Tom nodded. “I’ve been looking for it since I got here.” He sighed and rubbed at the back of his neck. “And I’ve been trying to find a way out. Everyone here says it’s impossible, but I wanted to see for myself.”

  “And no luck with either, I take it?”

  “No. As far as the watch goes, I’m told the swamp has a way of hiding the things that come from the physical world. This place doesn’t welcome them.”

  He stopped walking and turned toward me. His lips twitched, like he was about to smile but then thought better of it. “But I did find this, just before I found you.” He pulled my locket out of his pocket and dangled it from two fingers, holding it up in the sunlight. For a second I thought he wouldn’t give it to me, but he handed it over without meeting my eyes.

  I opened it to the sight of Warren’s gap-toothed smile. That was the first tooth he’d lost. Would I be there when he lost his last? I touched his picture, then Nat’s on the other side. “How did you know it was mine?”

  “The one on the right looks like you,” Tom said. “Your brother?”

  I nodded. “The one Roderick killed.”

  “Is the other one your son?”

  “Sort of. It’s complicated.” I closed the locket and put it on, hoping he didn’t notice I was crying. “Thank you.”

  I guess he did notice, because his eyes weren’t as hard as usual when he looked at me. “I met Helen and Roderick shortly after I arrived here. For the first time. I’ve never helped them in any way. In fact, I’ve avoided them as much as I can. If you must know, that kid gives me the creeps.”

  I told myself it was stupid to believe him, but I did. Anyway it was a moot point. Even if he was only pretending to be my friend, he was the only one I had here. I nodded. “Sorry.”

  He raised an eyebrow at that, as if to question which of my multitude of sins I was apologizing for, but turned and started walking again before I could say any more.

  The ground had leveled off into a field of grass and thistle, and I could see it beginning to slope back down ahead. “So how is it that you can fly, exactly?” I asked.

  “The rules are different in a netherworld. Or that is to say, there are no rules. What you know as the laws of physics apply to our world, not this one.”

  “The Netherworld?” I frowned at him. “Hades lives in a canteen?”

  Tom shook his head. “I didn’t say the Netherworld, I said a netherworld. Not a proper noun, see? I’d be surprised if your canteen contained the only one.”

  The other side of the hill got steep quickly, and I had to watch my feet as we descended. At the bottom, a field of blue flowers stretched out to the lawn of a stately red brick house that might properly have been called a mansion.

  “Wow,” I said.

  Tom ignored me. He was waving to someone in a blue dress walking toward us. When she got close enough for details I saw that the dress was empire-waisted, and she wore a matching bonnet. I guessed her to be in her late teens, twenty at most. Her skin was pale and flawless, her eyes brown and gigantic. She looked like an actress in a Jane Austen adaptation, except not emaciated.

  Tom smiled at her, the first genuine, unguarded smile I’d seen, and for a second it took my breath away. It transformed him completely from Byronic Brooder to Good Natured Fun Guy. “Gemma Pierce,” he took the girl’s hand and kissed it, “allow me to introduce Lydia—” He turned toward me and frowned. (Ah, there’s the Byronic Brooder.) “I only heard Katie use your first name.”

  “It’s Lydia Trinket,” I muttered. Lord, how I hated my name. Nat had carried Trinket like a treasure, but on me it sat like a small, senseless thing.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” said Gemma. For a second I couldn’t understand why I was disturbed by her voice, then realized she sounded like Helen: their accents were the same. Old New England, I supposed.

  “This is a lovely, um, plot?” I glanced at Tom, who nodded. “A lovely plot you have here.”

  “Thank you.” Gemma’s smile was turned up more on one side than the other. I watched her adorable dimples deepen and thought I could have been charming too, if I’d gotten a name like Gemma Pierce. For Pete’s sake, do not be jealous of this child.

  “I had an affair with a man who owned a house just like this,” said Gemma. “There was such a scandal when we were found out. My family turned me out, but it didn’t matter in the end. His wife murdered me. I was carrying his child at the time.” She said all of this quite matter-of-factly.

  See? Now don’t you feel petty? “That’s terrible. I’m sorry.”

  The dimples got even deeper. You could have stored spare change in those things. “That’s all right. I made sure none of them had any more children either. Mrs. Kerr tricked me into coming to her house so she could kill me, you see. So after I died, I stayed there. I watched over John Kerr and his vicious little wife, and then later when their only son brought his new bride home, I watched over them too. There are ways to make sure a man is...” she held one finger up straight and then let it curl down, “unable to fulfill his duty.”

  Well, that wasn’t how girls talked in Austen novels. I decided I liked Gemma.

  “We need help,” Tom said. “Helen Turner is looking for us. Can we come inside?”

  “Helen?” Gemma laughed. “Well, that is bad.” She nodded toward me. “This is the one who banished her?”

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  Gemma turned and started walking toward the house as she answered. “Well, you’re obviously alive. So for you to get lost in the switchel ring you must have had it, and the only live people who have it are the ones who use it, I suppose. Did you get it from the woman who banished me?” She didn’t sound bitter or angry, only curious.

  “No,” I said. “I got it from a man. My brother and I.”

  “Oh. Your man must have owned it after my woman, then.” Gemma looked out over her lawn and a little vertical line appeared between her eyebrows, just at the top of her nose. “I think I’ve been here for quite a long time.”

  When we got inside, Gemma sat us in a parlor that I considered excessively turquoise, then disappeared and returned what seemed like less than a minute later carrying a tray of tea and cookies. There were a few squares of gauze piled beside the teapot.

  Tom helped himself
to tea and went to stand by the window. While he told Gemma everything that happened in the swamp (he moved back and forth between the window and the fireplace seven times during this story), she sat beside me and bandaged my face. But first she touched the wound, and closed her eyes. The soreness seeped away, and the thick, itchy feeling of the drying blood was immediately gone. I wondered whether she was a witch—a real one, not the crazy Martha Corey kind—but it seemed rude to ask.

  Besides, I had plenty of questions without getting into that. I took a cookie when Gemma offered it. It was gingery and very good, but I was thinking about what Tom had said, about this place not welcoming physical things. “Is this real?” Is any of it? Are you? Am I, anymore?

  “That depends on what you mean by real,” said Gemma. “Stop chewing while I get this bandage on.”

  “I mean is it an actual cookie?”

  “Hush,” Gemma said. She pressed the gauze in place, where it stayed without being taped. I had no idea how someone from the Regency era had managed to get her hands on adhesive bandages. Just one of many mysteries.

  “You can taste it, can’t you?” Tom gestured at my half-eaten cookie.

  “Of course I can taste it, but that doesn’t make it real.”

  “What does make it real then?”

  “I don’t know, can it make me fat?”

  Gemma chuckled at this. “You could use some plumping up.”

  While she dabbed at my jaw with a warm cloth, Tom said, “If what you’re asking is whether my decomposed body in Saint Philip’s Cemetery is drinking and digesting this tea, then I’d have to guess no.”

  “But what about my body? It’s right here.”

  “So it is.” His gaze flicked, just for an instant, down to my chest (such as it was). Then he caught himself and turned back toward the window again. “I have no idea how it works for a live person. Gemma?”

  Gemma shook her head. “She’s the only one I’ve ever seen here. There. Done.” She turned to Tom and gave him her lopsided smile as she accepted a cup of tea from him. “So, you’re going to try to keep away from Helen, and find a way out at the same time? That’ll be quite a trick, if you can manage it.”

  “But you can see we have to try,” Tom said. “Lydia’s probably our best chance of getting out, Gemma.”

  “Who wants to get out?” Gemma took a sip of tea. “Speak for yourself, dearest.”

  “How can you not want to leave?” Tom was pacing again. “You’re trapped here.”

  “I was trapped there too. At least here I’ve got lovely things.” She held up her teacup. “Look at this porcelain!”

  “And the cup is worth being stuck here forever?” Tom looked annoyed, but not surprised. The whole thing had the feel of a conversation they’d had before.

  “It’s not just the cup and you know it. I can have anything here, do anything.” Gemma flashed those dimples again. “And the company is good.”

  “Well if you mean me, it won’t be good for long, if I can help it,” Tom said.

  Gemma sighed. “Well then, you might start with Cyrus.”

  My insides went cold. I tried to swallow my tea and suppress a gasp and ask a question, all at the same time. The tea went down the wrong pipe, carrying a chunk of cookie with it. Gemma was still talking as I started to choke, and I didn’t catch the rest of what she said.

  “He’s already told me to go away three times.” Tom turned to frown at me, still coughing and sputtering.

  “Yes, but—” Gemma stopped talking as Tom leaned over and thumped my back. My eyes were watering now. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded. The coughing was starting to subside, but I still couldn’t talk.

  “But there’s a live person here now,” Gemma went on, still looking at me skeptically, “That is if she doesn’t choke to death first. You said yourself that her being here changes things.”

  I finally got control of my voice. “You did say Cyrus, right?”

  Gemma nodded.

  Tom seemed to notice, finally, the stunned look on my face that had nothing to do with the coughing fit. “Why?”

  I didn’t answer. My head was swimming. It made no sense, for Cyrus to be here. But then again, how many Cyruses could possibly be associated with the canteen? It wasn’t like it was Joe or Bill.

  “What?” Tom asked.

  “You need to take me to him,” I said. “He’ll help us.” If it was my Cyrus, he certainly owed me that much. He was the one who got me into this mess in the first place. And he always knew way more than he taught us. He’d probably known all along what the canteen really did. And lied to us about it. Cyrus had a lot to answer for.

  Tom’s frown deepened. “How do you know?”

  “Because I’ll make him if I have to.”

  Of course, I had no idea how I would do that, but you know. Details.

  SIX

  * * *

  For a while after our little tea party Tom and Gemma walked around her rose garden, talking about I didn’t know, or care, what. Making plans I suppose, and I should have been doing the same. But I didn’t have it in me. I sat on a little bench and looked at the paved pathways, the deep blue and bright turquoise roses (sure, why not) and thought mostly about how sad it was that there were no bees or birds to enjoy this garden.

  I don’t mind admitting that I was freaking out. The canteen a prison, me a prisoner, Charlie back home no doubt worried sick about me. He’d tell Warren I’d been called away on business, and probably get Amy Lin to watch him after school until I got back. Or until he figured I wasn’t coming back and got a nanny. But I was coming back. Cyrus was going to help me. Cyrus. Here. Which brought me back to the canteen. A prison. My thoughts went round and round until Tom and Gemma came over at last.

  Gemma sat down beside me and smiled. “We’ve been talking over your walk to Cyrus’s.”

  I looked up at Tom. “Couldn’t you just fly us?”

  He shook his head. “Too unreliable.”

  “Or Gemma?” I asked, although I had no idea how she’d carry two of us. Maybe she could come up with a hot air balloon.

  “Dear heavens no, I never learned to fly,” said Gemma. “I’m terrified of high places, and water for that matter.”

  “What’s water got to do with it?” I asked.

  “My feet stay on the ground at all times,” she said.

  “It’s not far,” Tom said. “Maybe a dozen plots or so between here and there. But not everyone’s is as easy to cross as Bob Taskin’s.”

  “Bob Taskin? I remember him!”

  “That was his plot we walked through on the way here,” Tom said. “He doesn’t mind if you go through as long as you don’t go near his house, which he almost never leaves.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “He wasn’t a malicious ghost, really, he just wanted everyone to get out and leave him alone.”

  “Well, he’s in paradise now, alone in his house with nobody to bother him,” said Tom. “Although I imagine he’d like a dog. If he had seen you, he probably would have thanked you.”

  “But as Tom said, not everyone will feel so grateful.” Gemma stood up and offered me a hand. I took it and stood up beside her. Tom took her other hand, then mine, closing the circle.

  “What are we doing?” I asked. I could feel a callus on Tom’s thumb and wondered how he got it.

  “Warding you, to help you get to Cyrus’s undetected,” Gemma said. “Focus on closing yourself off. Shielding yourself. You are alone, just you and Tom. Nobody else is welcome.”

  What, like honeymooners? I felt my face get hot. Rather than look Tom in the eye to see how he felt about us being an island unto ourselves, I bowed my head and closed my eyes. Wasn’t that what you did when you were in one of those hand-holding circles anyway? I tried to concentrate on closing and shielding myself, but I wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly. I pictured Tom and I (alone, nobody else is welcome) behind a great big wall.

  Then I felt something, a thought, a force, bumpin
g up against my mind. That’s really the only way I can explain it. It felt like Gemma, but I was reminded of Roderick laughing through the canteen. I recoiled, but she squeezed my hand, and I relaxed.

  That force of Gemma, whatever it was, wrapped itself around me, and then I really did feel closed and shielded. I felt untouchable. Gemma and Tom dropped my hands.

  “Was that a spell?” I asked. Maybe Gemma really was a witch.

  But she shook her head. “It’s dangerous to confuse this with magic. It can’t make you invisible.”

  “What then?”

  “Will.” Gemma gestured behind her. “This house is here because I willed it. My porcelain cups, my books, my flowers. Everything in the netherworld is made of will, do you understand?”

  “I think so,” I said, and I sort of did. If it wasn’t a physical world, then what else was there, but what your mind created?

  “But sometimes our wills oppose one another,” Gemma went on. “It may be your will to pass quietly from here to Cyrus’s, encountering no one, but Helen and her son are hunting you, and their will is very strong. It may also be somebody else’s will to detect intruders on their plot.”

  My stomach clenched at the word hunting, but I got what she was saying. “So what you just did is basically layer our wills on top of one another. To make ours stronger than theirs.”

  “Exactly,” Tom said. “No offense, but your will alone probably wouldn’t do much, if anything. You’re just not used to controlling things with it.”

  “No offense taken,” I said. “My will can barely control a seven-year-old boy.”

  “And I’m still learning myself,” Tom said. “But not so for Gemma. She may be the most powerful person here.”

  Gemma flashed those dimples. “You flatter me, Tom, but there are others with just as much power who don’t like you nearly so well. You’d be wise not to forget it.” I knew that warning was really for me more than Tom, so I nodded along with him.

  “Now go,” she said. “Unless you happen to meet someone directly on your path, you’ll pass undetected.”

  And so we did. For a while. We walked through a gaslit city street, cobblestoned and foggy, then another forest, then a beach. It was impossible to keep track of time in that world, but none of the plots felt like they took very long to walk through. Yet the weather, the season, the time of day were different in each one.