by Alison Stine
“What’s going on?” my grandmother asked.
“It’s Mr. Black,” Tom said.
“You’re soaking,” Martha said.
“He’s getting footprints all over your floor,” Clara said.
Martha fussed at him, tucking in his collar, checking his hands for scratches.
“If I’d known I would get this kind of reception,” Mr. Black said, “I would have died again a long time ago.”
I was the only one who didn’t get up. Even my grandmother stood and smiled uncomfortably at nothing. But I didn’t. I didn’t even look at him. I lowered my head into the blanket that still wrapped me, and peered down at my teacup, its delicate handle and rose pattern. My grandmother had expensive, old china. I remembered being warned against breaking it—or even using it at all—when I was child.
I was warned against the balconies; warned against the barn, and the train, and the widow’s walk, and the road, and the door to nowhere, and the myriad ways she thought I could get hurt or get in trouble around the house.
But my grandmother had never said anything, never warned me at all, about the ghosts.
“Esmé, I’m fine,” Mr. Black said. He was right beside me, crouching down to my level. “Soaked but fine.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“I’ll dry off soon enough. One of the ghost advantages.”
“I’m sorry you had to save my life again.”
He looked at me through half-closed lids. “If you still have a life, you might as well keep it.”
Clara rolled her eyes. She toyed with her full cup of tea, in a way that seemed to indicate she was going to spill it soon. “I just don’t see what the fuss is. She’s alive—but she won’t be forever. No one will. It doesn’t make her special.”
“No.” Tom slipped his hand over mine. “It makes her capable.”
And then, he put our hands under the table, on my lap, and turned his over so that I alone could see the underside. I could see his palm. Burned into the skin—how could I never have noticed it before?—was a scar, a brand: the mark of the Stationmaster’s lantern, the sign of his hurt. Dietz.
I had a matching brand on my own palm, the letters new, red and raised.
“Yours will fade,” he whispered.
“Maybe she’s hiding,” I said. “My sister is smart. She ran and she’s hiding from him. She’s waiting him out.”
“We just have to find her before he does,” my grandmother said.
Martha stayed in the room with me that night, and Clara with my grandmother, while Tom and Mr. Black kept looking for my sister. Martha tucked me in, then sat on the end of the bed. I lay on my back, wide awake, watching the ceiling.
On the ceiling of the apartment in New York, my sister and I had glued stars, little florescent stickers that glowed at night in a way real stars never did. Still, it was comforting to look up there and see—not darkness—but neon spots. I couldn’t remember if I had been afraid of the dark as a child. I must have been. I couldn’t remember when the dreams about my mother had started. They were not a comfort, but a sad reminder. And why did I never dream of my father?
Here, on the ceiling at my grandmother’s house, there were no stars: only the ceiling, blank and white, flaking in parts. There were brown spots of water damage in the corners, too big for me to pretend they were stars.
I was never going to see the apartment in New York again, I realized, and just as quickly, I realized I wasn’t sad about it.
“Is Mr. Black going to be okay?” I whispered in the dark.
“Fine,” Martha said. “Ghosts are resilient.”
“Why is it so bad, reliving your death? Does it hurt?”
Martha was silent a moment. Then she said, “Yes. And more than that, it brings back feelings.”
“What kind of feelings?”
“The feelings you had when you died, what you were thinking, what you were worrying about. You forget that you’re a ghost and nothing worse can happen to you than what already happened. You panic. You go through it all over again, everything you felt the first time.”
“Is it lonely dying?”
“Yes,” she said.
We watched the ceiling for a while. With anyone else, at a slumber party maybe, I would have thought the other person in the room with me would have fallen asleep. But the other person in the room was a ghost, and she could not sleep, so I spoke, after a long silence, without fear of waking her. “Mr. Black is pretty okay,” I said. “He saved my life. Twice now, and the second time was really hard. I know he didn’t want to do it.”
“No,” Martha said.
“But he did. He’s really brave, once you get past the whining. And nice and funny, once you get past the booze. And he’s loyal.”
“Miss?”
“I don’t know. I just think he’s trustworthy, that’s all. I think you could trust him. You know, with your heart.”
The silence lasted longer. Outside the window, I heard a cat. I didn’t hear Tom or Mr. Black, but I knew they were out there, walking in the darkness of the yard or woods, searching.
Finally Martha said. “Yes, Miss. I suspect Mr. Black is. Trustworthy.”
And then I could sleep.
In the morning, my grandmother went to file a police report on my sister. Martha and Mr. Black went with her, even though Mr. Black said ghosts didn’t like cars. But I pushed him in the direction of the station wagon: “You and Martha sit in the back. Together.”
Martha shot me an alarmed look.
I watched the ghosts get into the backseat, Mr. Black holding the door open for Martha, my grandmother adjusting the rearview mirror and seeing nothing, I knew, but still pretending. They drove off, Mr. Black staring mournfully at me through the back window.
Tom and I kept researching, unearthing the last of my grandmother’s books. I felt like I had to keep searching for answers. I had to keep my fingers turning pages, my eyes scanning words; otherwise, they would well up with tears and I would not be able to get them to stop. “One week,” I muttered.
I hadn’t realized I had spoken aloud until Tom said, “What’s that?”
I looked up from the book I was paging through, something unhelpful on exorcisms. “Louise, the girl at school—she was missing for a week. That seems to be the pattern with the runaways. They were found after a week. Found dead.”
Tom frowned. “But that could have been just when they were discovered. They could have died earlier.”
“I know. But I don’t think so. The Stationmaster lured them to very public places, the train tracks usually. I think he wanted them to be found right away, for people to know what he had done, for some reason. People go to the train station every day. They would have noticed if the … the …” I couldn’t still say the word dead. Not when my sister was missing. “If the bodies were there earlier,” I said. “Where did the Stationmaster take you?”
“Nowhere,” Tom shrugged. “Our house.”
But their house had burned down.
Clara had torched it, years ago. I asked him to take me there anyway, and we stood together in the empty field. From here, my grandmother’s house looked like a thumb. I could see the silo, the barn in ruins, but much of the house was hidden by the hill. Only the top story and the widow’s walk were truly visible. We sat down in the overgrown grass. The field was a blank, beige space. There were no hiding places.
My sister was not here.
“There’s nothing,” I said. “No foundation. No trace of your shack at all.”
“No,” Tom said. “Not even ashes.”
“Does that make you sad?”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t a happy place, Ez. I wouldn’t want to remember it.”
“But you lived here.”
“To tell you the truth, I always felt like I lived at your grandmother’s house,” he said. “I could see it from my window at night, all lit up, and I used to dream about it, what it was like there, the fancy parties, the food they must have
had, what it was like to grow up in that house—Clara and I used to talk about it, to imagine. We would pretend to be invited to dinner parties there, these elaborate feasts. Clara was very good at it, especially imagining the sweets.”
I looked toward the house again. “From here, you could see the Builder fall.”
“Yes.”
I stood up. “The Builder,” I said. “If anyone would know hiding places, he would.”
Tom said just to follow the sound of hammering. It led us to the barn.
I had only been in the barn twice; once when Mr. Black had hid me from the Stationmaster in the hayloft, and again yesterday evening, looking for the Firecracker. I had searched in every corner, turned over moldy mounds of hay, finding nothing.
The barn looked different in daylight. We found the Builder on the first floor, and I saw why it seemed so sunny: light was streaming in through the sides of the barn. The Builder was prying boards off the wall with a hammer.
“What are you doing?” I asked. Sawdust sank beneath my feet as Tom and I approached him. The air stank of pigeons.
The Builder considered the board he had just wrenched from the side of the building. “Reclamation,” he said. “I’m putting this old lumber to use. It will give the house character.”
“Where are you going to put it?”
“I haven’t decided yet. Perhaps another staircase?”
I tried not to breathe in the pigeon-scented air of the barn. I felt my patience dissolving. “Look,” I said, “you might find you’re a lot happier if you just go ahead and finish the thing.”
He looked at me, startled. “Finish the house?”
I kept thinking of Martha running into the house, running into the kitchen, hiding her face. She had given up her life for this man, this man who was married, this man who didn’t notice anything that couldn’t be sanded, stained, or hammered. “The house is pretty good, already,” I said. “Just go ahead. Call it a day. Move on.”
“Ez,” Tom said. “Remember why we’re here.”
“We have a question for you,” I said flatly. “A question about the house.”
“Oh?” the Builder said. “A beauty, isn’t she?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I believe I shall call her the Lower Vale. Vale is my Christian name, as you may know, and one might imagine the Higher Vale would be more appropriate, but Emily thinks that is presumptuous, and also, we already have established a Higher Vale of sorts, a family plot to occupy the field above the pond. A lovely place, shaded. Again, my dear wife believes that is putting the cart before the horse, but I think it’s best to be prepared, to prepare ourselves, to have a comfortable place ready for us when we pass.”
“You’re buried in the family cemetery?” I asked.
He blinked at me, stroking his mustache. “I will be.”
I felt Tom’s hand on my arm: “He goes in and out of it. Knowing he’s a ghost. Remembering.”
The Builder was studying me. “I have a Chinese servant, you know,” he said. “Lovely young woman. Good with the children. Hardworking. A bit superstitious.”
“Right,” I said quickly. I didn’t care if he didn’t remember he was dead. I didn’t care if he had died a horrible, violent way. The Builder hurt Martha, and he talked too much, and he was starting to offend me. “We need to know where the hiding places are around the house,” I said. “Right now.”
“Hiding places?”
“Trick wall? Hidden staircase? Someone is missing.”
“Good heavens,” the Builder said. “You know, my wife Emily thought it unwise to move into the house before its completion, to allow the children to play there, but I think—”
“Now,” I said. And when Tom looked at me, I said, “Please.”
“There are the servant steps,” the Builder said. He looked up at the loft as he recalled. “There’s a loose board in the piano lid. My son hides his bug collection there. There’s a tunnel under the house. It predates the house, from the war between the states, and people said when I bought this land, there might be ghosts in the tunnel. My Chinese servant says—”
“Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been really helpful.” Tom took my hand, and we started quickly toward the barn door, but I looked over my shoulder. “Think about finishing the house,” I said to the Builder, who stood clutching his board. “It’s pretty good the way it is now. Think about just letting it go.”
“That’s not going to do any good,” Tom said when we were outside again.
“It’s what he wants. He wants to finish the house. If he thinks it’s done, if he decides it is, he can vanish, he can stop being a ghost. And then he can go on his way, and Martha can fall in love with Mr. Black.”
Tom looked startled. “Martha and Mr. Black?”
“Seriously, Tom, where have you been for a hundred years? They’re made for each other. Now, let’s check the tunnel.”
“Clara already checked the tunnel.”
“I know,” I said. “But she went in her entrance, right, through the kiln? The tunnel comes out into the kitchen. And when I ran into the Stationmaster after my sister disappeared, he was outside near the kitchen, like he had just been there.” I remembered the pond, his hands on my hair …
“Are you all right?” Tom asked.
I shook it off. “Fine.”
My sister had been good about closing doors, keeping the cats out. But my sister wasn’t here anymore, and in the kitchen, Manxes perched on the counter, a chorus of meows greeting us at the door.
I brushed the cats away, checking cabinets, behind the fridge. “Feel on the walls,” I said, opening the pantry door.
Tom kneeled and pushed on the wall beside the stove. “What am I feeling for?”
“I don’t know. Something that gives. Something that feels hollow.”
Tom pushed harder. The wall didn’t budge. I kneeled beside him and pushed so hard the force shot me backward, into the cabinet. A can of tomato sauce on the counter behind me fell and rolled onto the floor. It made a thud when it landed.
A hollow thud.
“What about a trapdoor?” I asked.
Tom was already beneath the kitchen table, pushing away the rag rug, and putting pressure on the boards.
I rolled the can away, and knelt beside him. “You’ve never come up this way before?”
“It’s Clara’s tunnel. She’s the one who found it. She’s the one who spends her time there. Clara likes secrets and passageways and tunnels. I don’t like to be underground so much. It reminds me.”
I thought of the dark place they had taken me that day: the kiln and the ladder made of bricks, the smell of earth and dust. Of course they had taken me there. Clara’s idea, apparently. What better place to tell someone she’s dead, to try and convince her, than underground?
“Tom,” I said, “what happened to Clara? I thought she was my friend, and then …”
“She is your friend,” he insisted. “She’s your friend the best way she can be.”
“Did something happen to her?”
“Yes,” Tom said. “The Stationmaster happened to her.”
“Here we go.” I dug with my hands in a crack between the boards. It was a square.
A door.
“It’s stuck,” Tom said.
“Just locked. There’s a latch.” I traced my fingers down the sides of the door until I found it: rusted metal. I slid it to the side. There was a click.
It took a while for my eyes to adjust. I thought it would be less scary this time, being in the tunnel, in part because I knew the one standing beside me in the shadows now. I had his hand in mine. I also knew where the tunnel ended. I knew where it came out, even if I couldn’t see the end yet.
But when we stood in the cool darkness, after Tom had pulled the trapdoor closed above us to prevent the cats from following, I felt a familiar panic. Yes, I had been here before. But that was before I had met the Stationmaster.
Slowly the pattern of the tunnel’s walls reve
aled itself. I could see Tom’s face beside me. “There’s just no place to hide down here,” he said. “There’s no crevice. There are no other tunnels branching out. Just this one, long and straight. And it’s empty.” We were traveling the length of the tunnel, slowly scanning it. “Wait,” he said. He stopped, and I crashed into him. He paused. “There’s someone here.”
“My sister!” I let go of his hand to reach into the shadows. I felt nothing, then my fingers grazed a shoulder. I grabbed it. “You’re all right!” I said. “You’re all right. Why aren’t you saying anything?”
A strange voice answered. “Because I don’t know who you are.”
CHAPTER 16:
A Nice Dare
I pulled my hand back.
“Who are you?” Tom said.
“I might ask the same of you,” the voice said. It was thick and low.
I began to back up. I raised my arms to the roof of the tunnel, blindly searching for the trapdoor. Where was the door? Why had we closed the door?
“Why haven’t I met you before?” Tom said.
“Been traveling,” the voice said.
There was another sound then, and a tear-shaped spark lit the darkness. The spark flared and brightened, growing bigger, the light skipping over a hand as it bent to the ground and lit something.
A lantern.
But the light flickered, brightening the tunnel and the hand, the arm, the face of the figure who had struck the match. The woman. It was a woman, as old as my grandmother and round, wearing a long dress and a holey blue shawl. Her skin was lined. A ghost, I knew. I knew right away. I tried to calm down, to slow the thrum that beat through my chest. My heart was thudding, and I felt tightness in my arms and legs. I kept my voice steady. “Where did you come from?” I asked.
“Virginia,” the ghost said.
I thought for a moment. “Virginia was a slave state.”
“Yes,” the ghost said. “And Pennsylvania is free.”
The tunnel. The tunnel was a part of the Underground Railroad, used to hide slaves as they escaped to freedom.
