by Alison Stine
And then I heard whistling.
Every muscle in my body tensed. It was twilight. The dogcatcher was not coming back this late. And I had heard only one other person whistle in this town. One ghost.
There was the door at the back of the kitchen, the locked door that led to nothing, only the sharp drop-off of the hill outside—one of the Builder’s follies, I knew now. The door to nowhere was always locked. And through its window, I saw the Stationmaster walking up the hill.
“Shh.”
I turned, my heart thudding. A man stood in the doorway of the kitchen, a man I had never seen before. He was plump, wearing a suit that threatened to burst its buttons. He had a thick brown mustache that turned up on the ends, twisted with wax. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, and something poked up from his breast pocket, some kind of a tool, a ruler or plane. The man reached into his vest pocket, and took out a watch on a long gold chain.
“You’re the Builder,” I said.
He shushed me again. He raised a finger to his lips, then pointed at the door that led to nowhere.
I didn’t look at it. “He’s not supposed to come in the house,” I said. “He’s not allowed. Mr. Black said he never lived here in life, so he’s not allowed.”
The Builder shook his head. He was pointing at the fireplace now. “Up,” he said.
The fireplace was cold and dark. I had never really noticed it before, beside the big stove, which I also never gave a second glance to (my grandmother had a microwave, after all). There was a wide, empty hearth, the chimney blackened by years of soot.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I can’t go up there. I’m not a ghost.”
The whistling sounded louder now; he was right under the door. Was he floating? Could he fly?
“Up,” the Builder whispered.
The knob was rattling, starting to turn. The door to nowhere wasn’t locked anymore.
I went in the chimney. I went first, ducking under the mantle and stepping into the hearth. The dark sides of the chimney closed in around me. I tried not to breathe the ash and soot and spider webs. I remembered the tunnel, the secret passageway under the kiln. Then the Builder was beside me, in the way that ghosts were, pointing.
“Up,” he said.
My eyes adjusted. Above me, I could see bricks jutting out, making holds for my feet and hands. At the very top of the chimney burned a small square of light. I hesitated.
But then I heard the sound of a door creaking, a door that hadn’t been opened in years.
A voice called out into the kitchen, “Little girl? Little girl?”
Bits of ash broke from the brick, crumbling under my fingers as I climbed. The soot stung my eyes so I closed them and began to rise by feel. I became aware that the Builder had passed me somehow; he was at the top. Then we both were. It was light again, a fading light, and he was pulling me out of the chimney, heaving me out onto the roof, onto a flat, wide expanse, hemmed by a railing. The widow’s walk. The air felt clear and cold. I coughed and breathed in. I stood and could see the green tops of trees, the road, the empty yard in twilight. I couldn’t see Tom or Clara. They must have been sitting on the porch right below us.
My arms were gray with soot. I held them out before me, and realized I was shaking. “How did he do that?” I asked. “How could the Stationmaster come into the house? Mr. Black said he couldn’t.”
“He couldn’t come into the house in life,” the Builder said, standing politely beside me. “He had no place here, no reason to come inside. We would have called the constable had he just waltzed into our home then.” He chuckled. “But that was in life, of course. The dead may do as they wish.”
“What do you mean?”
“The dead may come and go. The dead have no timetable, no restrictions, no rules, though many hold fast to the ones they had in life.”
Always building, Mr. Black had said.
“What if the Stationmaster comes up here? What if he climbs the chimney?”
But the Builder shook his head. “He won’t come up here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t hear him whistling anymore. Do you? And you, my dear,” he smiled at me. “You should be getting down as well.”
“Esmé Wong!”
I inched to the railing and looked down.
Martha stood in the yard, glaring up at me, her hands on her hips. “Get down here this instant! What did I tell you about the roof!”
The Builder came to stand beside me. “Miss Moore,” he said, dipping his head. If he had been wearing a hat, he would have removed it. Instead, he took the pocket watch out from his vest, looped on a long gold chain.
In the yard, Martha dropped her hands. Her face looked strange.
“It’s early evening,” the Builder said, studying the watch. “Not my usual time. And I like to be punctual. I like to keep a schedule, whenever possible. The house will be done soon, you know. Because we’ve stuck to a schedule.”
“I’ve heard that,” I said.
“She’ll be a beauty. You’ll see.” He put his watch back in his pocket. He smiled at me. And then he fell off the roof.
It was Tom who found the way down, found the ladder propped on the side of the house. The Builder was always leaving ladders around, Tom said; you could never tell where you were going to find one.
By the time I reached the last rung, the Builder was gone, but everyone still stood around in a circle, looking down, as if he lay crumpled in the grass before them. Even Clara was quiet. Martha cried soundlessly.
He wanted to finish the house. That was what the Builder wanted. I knew that without having to ask.
“Avoid the place of your death,” Mr. Black said. “Avoid it at all costs.”
“I know,” I said, as though it applied to me. “So why did he do it then? Why did he go on the roof? Why didn’t he just send me up by myself? Why go with me?”
“It’s a pull,” Tom said. “An irresistible pull. You want it—and you think it will be different this time. You think you can make it better.”
Martha looked at me. Her face was puffy, and her eyes had turned to slits. “I would if I could have, wouldn’t I? If I had known, wouldn’t I have done something?”
“Martha,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
She turned without another word and ran into the house. We watched her go. She disappeared around the corner and I heard a door slam.
“I don’t understand. What did I do?”
“Martha feels bad,” Tom said. “About the—” He indicated the ground, the ground where nothing lay. “About him.”
“Still? She feels bad after a century?”
“Martha feels a lot of things,” Clara said. “A lot.”
“Quit it, you,” Mr. Black said.
But Clara kept going. “Love, for instance. Martha feels love.”
I stared at her. Clara had never smiled at me quite like that before, her upper lip curling over her teeth. Except when she had lied to me about Tom.
“Jealousy,” Clara said, her eyes dancing. “Envy. Lust.” She looked at me like I was in on a secret, a secret she wanted to share with me, and keep from the others.
But the others all knew.
“I said, quit,” Mr. Black said.
“Clara,” Tom said.
“What is it?” I asked. “Who does Martha love? What are you talking about?”
Clara grinned and bit her lip. Her eyes moved ever so slightly to the ladder.
“The Builder? Martha is in love with the Builder?”
“Was in love,” Mr. Black said.
“But he’s old,” I said.
“Not that old,” Tom said.
“He has a mustache.” I thought of his checkered vest, his pocket watch. “He’s a buffoon.”
“Thank you,” Mr. Black said.
“And he’s married.” I looked up at the ladder, as if Xavier Vale still stood there, hammering, as if I could hold him accountable. “Did he ever …?”
“No,” Tom said.
“No, no, no,” Mr. Black said.
“But she wanted to,” Clara said.
I wanted to go after Martha, but I knew I wouldn’t find her, not if she didn’t want to be found. In my head, I traced the path Martha had run. I pictured her rounding the corner of the house, pictured the door that went into … “The kitchen!” I said. “Martha went in the kitchen. She never goes there.”
“She did,” Clara said, “when she died.”
CHAPTER 13:
Dance or Die
That night, Mr. Black sat with me in my darkened bedroom, watching over me while I pretended to sleep. But I was wide awake. I wanted to talk with him about Martha, but he wouldn’t say anything more. In the darkness, I heard sips and gulps and sloshing.
At midnight, Clara came to relieve Mr. Black. I couldn’t sleep with her there, leering at me from the shadows. I didn’t even pretend to. She hummed as she skirted my room, touching things. I heard the sound of my closet door opening. I heard the slide of hangers as she looked through my clothes.
Finally I said, “I’d sleep better if you left.”
She did. I dreamed that Martha came and sat on the end of my bed like she used to. I dreamed that she smoothed my hair and said to me, “It’s not your fight. It’s not your death.”
But it was my fight. And it would—it might be—my death too.
The Stationmaster would hurt me if I didn’t stop him. He would hunt me. He could come into my grandmother’s house. He was following me, looking for me. He could kill me.
“Why him?” I said aloud in my sleep.
“Ez?” And then Tom was peering over me. “Ez, did you say something?”
I sat up. Tom sat on the edge of the bed, leaning over me. I pulled the covers up, over my thin white T-shirt. What was I wearing? Some ridiculous cast-off of my sister’s.
And Tom was looking at it. “Are you a dancer?” he asked.
I looked down at my T-shirt. DANCE OR DIE it read in flaking, red letters. Great. “No. My sister is. Was. She quit. It’s a long story, but she has a real job now, making real money, and she seems to be happy about it. So.”
“You have a sister? Is she invisible too?”
“Not that I know of.” I smiled a little to think of the Firecracker invisible, barreling down subway platforms and sidewalks, pushing surprised people out of the way. She would take advantage of being invisible, in the way Clara said I should have.
“Why isn’t she here?” Tom said. “Why doesn’t she live here with you?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Everything is complicated,” Tom said.
“She doesn’t want to live here, I guess. She doesn’t want to be a mom to me on top of everything else she has to do. She did it when our mom and dad died. She held everything together then. But I guess it got to be too much. I guess I got to be too much.”
Tom nodded. “My father didn’t want to be a father after my mother died. He was a decent man. Was. After she died, he was like Mr. Black, though.” He reached to the floor beside the bed, and held up a bottle, one of the empties Mr. Black left in his wake like breadcrumbs.
“Oh,” I said.
“He drank like Mr. Black. But worse.”
“Worse?” I was always tripping over those empties, pitching them into the recycling, only to find, the next time I passed the bin, the bottles were gone. They had vanished, like Martha’s stitches.
The work of the dead.
“Mr. Black is ashamed of himself,” Tom said. “My father wasn’t. And when he drank, he got angry. He drank more and more, got angrier and angrier. He lost his job. So I got a job: selling papers in the street in the morning, and shining shoes at night. Stealing a little. I stole, Ez. I stole food.”
I remembered the apple. “I know,” I said.
“Then a woman from a charity came up to me in the street one day, and asked if I would like to go to California. They grew oranges there, she said.”
“But you didn’t go to California.”
“We went west. That much was true. We went west and left New York.”
“Only to Pennsylvania.”
“The woman was nice,” he insisted. “She bought a paper from me. She didn’t know then who would adopt me, that he would be worse than my real father. No one did. And they wouldn’t have let him take us if they had known.”
“What was it like with the Stationmaster?” I asked.
“We hardly saw anyone, all those years. He made us stay inside or on the property, close to the shack. We didn’t go to school, even. Clara can’t read. I learned before, but she never did.” Tom was sitting close to me, close enough so I could smell the earth on him. It didn’t scare me away. “Ez,” Tom said, “what Clara said before about me—it isn’t true. It isn’t. What I want is revenge. I want to stop the Stationmaster.”
“I know,” I said.
“I would never do anything to hurt you. Or take advantage of you, or …”
“I know. I know that now.”
“I want revenge for myself, and now that he hurt you—Ez, I want revenge for you too.”
Tom was so close I could see myself in his eyes, a girl in an old T-shirt. I was visible. I was alive in his eyes.
I was dreaming.
I had slept in snatches, dreaming the old dream: my mother dancing on a dark stage. The sun streamed over my bed when I finally woke, well into mid-morning. The sheets were swirled, my legs pulled free of covers, bare and exposed. And the chair across from the bed looked rumpled, dented, as though still holding the shape of the one who had left it. Tom. I pictured him sitting there, awake all night.
Instinctively, I pulled my T-shirt down over my knees. The light through the windows was bright, but I yawned and stretched and would have pulled the quilt up and gone back to sleep, except a voice drifted in from the front doors and up the stairs.
“Esmé!”
I knew that voice. That voice got me out of bed on a regular basis, and told me I was going to be late, and reprimanded me when I was; I always was.
That voice belonged to my sister.
“Esmé Wong, where the heck are you?”
I heard the crash of the front doors slamming, the thud of something heavy being set down. The Firecracker was here. The Firecracker had come to Wellstone, Pennsylvania, to our grandmother’s house. The Firecracker was downstairs.
I raced into the closet, and fumbled for clothes. I was wearing my sister’s shirt, which I had probably stolen. She was going to kill me for that. I yanked jeans over my legs, pausing as I realized: my sister wasn’t going to be able to see my shirt. She wasn’t going to be able to see anything about me.
I had bigger problems.
“Esmé!”
I darted into the hallway, and leaned over the banister. I saw the top of a head, glossy black hair. My sister paced the downstairs hall, hands on her hips, a huge suitcase slumped at her side. I tiptoed down the stairs, one step at a time.
I had learned to be almost soundless—my grandmother never seemed to hear me, anyway. But a stair squeaked and my sister said, “What was that?”
Had she heard my footstep, actually heard me?
She was swatting at something, a Manx. “Stupid cat. Get off my bag, you stupid cat. Esmé! Where the heck?” She looked up. She met my eyes, looked right at me.
“Hi,” I said.
She looked away, toward the sitting room. “Esmé?”
“I’m right here.”
She tilted her head the other way, toward the dining room. “Esmé? Seriously, this is a huge house. You have to come down here and get me.”
“I am here,” I said. “I’m right in front of you. I’m on the staircase.”
She turned her head slowly, her eyes scanning the steps. I saw her look for me and not see me. I saw her frown and scan the hall. Then I reached out and touched her arm.
She flinched, flinging me off. “Spider web! Cat!”
“No. It’s me. It’s E
smé. I’m here. I’m right here. You can hear me.”
“But I can’t see you. Where are you?” She stuck her arm out wildly and slapped me in the stomach.
“Ow,” I said.
She brought her hand back around. She connected with me, feeling my arms, my shoulders. “It’s you,” she said.
“I’ve been trying and trying to tell you.”
“What happened to you?”
“I told you. I told you on the phone.” I took a deep breath. “I’m invisible.”
My sister yanked her arm in, as if I had bitten her. She spoke to the air, to a spot beside my head. “That’s not funny, Esmé. I don’t know how you’re doing this. I don’t know what Grandma taught you.”
“What Grandma taught me?”
“But you need to quit this right now.”
“I’d love to,” I said. “I would really love to. I really wish I could stop doing this.” I kicked her suitcase. “And this.” I pulled her ponytail, her head dipping back. She swatted at me and missed. “I wish I didn’t look like this.” I caught the Manx still sniffing around the Firecracker’s suitcase, and picked it up, rocking the cat in my arms.
The Firecracker backed up until she hit the wall, staring at the floating cat. “What have you done?” she whispered.
“Nothing. When I got off the train from New York, I was like this. I was invisible. No one saw me at school. Grandma didn’t see me at the station. She hasn’t seen me once.”
“But she knows,” the Firecracker said. “She knows something is wrong. She said something happened, but she wouldn’t tell me on the phone. Why aren’t you talking to her?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve been calling her name, leaving her messages. I can’t make her hear me. So far, you’re the only living person that can.”
“Living person? What do you mean? Oh!” She brought her hands up to her mouth. “Oh Esmé, are you dead?”
