Liesl & Po

by Lauren Oliver

  At the gates a guard halted their progress. The alchemist could barely announce himself, he was so excited.

  “And who’s that?” the guard asked, nodding toward Will.

  “Nobody,” the alchemist said. “He’s just my apprentice.” He was annoyed that the guard had reminded him of the boy’s existence—he had almost managed to forget him entirely. It was necessary that someone be there to witness and record his meeting with the Lady Premiere, but the alchemist wished it could have been otherwise.

  There was a curious, rattling sound coming from the boy now. The alchemist frowned. The boy’s teeth were chattering—that was it—bouncing off each other with a noise like a bunch of dice rolling around in a wooden box. The alchemist squeezed his fists together and breathed heavily through his nose, trying to stay calm. When he became Official, he would get a real assistant, not some scrimp of a shrimp of a boy who couldn’t even keep his teeth from knocking together in public.

  “It’s awfully late for the boy to be out,” the guard said thoughtfully. The alchemist could tell he was slow.

  “He’s fine,” the alchemist snapped.

  “He looks cold.” The guard now sounded reproachful. “He should have a hat, at least. His ears is as purple as a rib steak.”

  “He’s no concern of yours.” The alchemist was losing his temper. “Your concern is to announce us, and escort us inside. We are expected, and we are already late, and I doubt you can afford to upset the Lady Premiere.”

  The guard shot one more look at Will, who was trying very hard to keep his teeth from bouncing together, having stuffed a corner of his coat sleeve in his mouth, and then stepped back inside the small stone guard hut. He began cranking a lever; slowly, the iron gates groaned open.

  “Go on, then,” the guard called out to them, and the alchemist and his apprentice passed into the mistenshrouded courtyard.

  Chapter Six

  THE GUARD’S NAME WAS MO, SHORT FOR MOLASSES, as in slow as molasses or thick as molasses. The nickname had been his since he was so young he no longer remembered what his real name was. And it was true that from his earliest infancy, although his heart was as big and as warm and as generous as an open hand, his brain had seemed just a tiny bit small.

  Once Mo had closed the gates, he returned to his little stone hut, and his half-eaten sandwich of butter and canned sardines, and his mug of thick hot chocolate, which every night he poured carefully into a thermos labeled COFFEE. The other guards had made fun of him for preferring hot chocolate to coffee, and called him a wimp and a child, and so this was his solution: He had become a secret sipper.

  There was a slapping sound, and then a low mewling in the corner. Lefty, Mo’s black-and-white-striped tabby cat, had just come swinging through the large cat door Mo had fitted carefully into the back wall of the guard hut, so the cat could go directly out into an alley where she could play and sniff and roam at will.

  “Hiya, Lefty,” Mo cooed. Two fluorescent green eyes blinked back at him. He removed a sardine from his sandwich and held it out to her. Lefty materialized from the shadows and took the sardine from Mo’s hand, afterward licking each of Mo’s fingers with a rough pink tongue. “Thatta girl,” Mo said fondly.

  Lefty mewled again, then turned and shot once more out the cat door, which banged and shuddered in the cat’s wake.

  When Mo was finished with his sandwich and had taken a last, satisfied slurp of his hot chocolate, he settled his hat more firmly over his ears, slumped down a bit in his chair, and promptly fell asleep. He dreamed of many strange things—at one point he was standing at the fishmonger, but the fishmonger was a sardine, and refusing to wait on him—and then, as so often happened, he dreamed of his sister.

  In his dream she was wearing her pink-and-blue-striped pajamas, as she had been the last time he had seen her. She had her favorite stuffed animal in her lap: a ratty lamb with one eye missing and stuffing coming out of its socket.

  She was cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, except the bedroom was not the bedroom of his childhood but his bedroom now, with its bare stone floor (he had had to take up the carpet, after the fleas) and its plain whitewashed walls and its single mattress, as hard as a chair.

  “Hi,” she said to Mo quite casually, as though she had not been missing for nearly twenty years, and as always in his dreams, Mo was at first too overwhelmed to speak. His gigantic heart seemed to be having some sort of convulsion. He was flooded with emotions, all tugging at him from different sides, like wrestlers grappling somewhere deep inside his chest. Relief that she was alive; joy at finding her again; anger that she had stayed away so long; despair that he was so much older now, and she was still so young, and they had missed so much time together.

  “Where have you been all this time?” he managed finally. “We searched everywhere for you.”

  “Under the bed,” his sister said. She had a nickname just like he did, except that hers, Bella, meant beautiful, and she had earned it by being the most beautiful child in a three-mile radius, and possibly everywhere.

  “Under the bed?” Mo felt tremendously confused. A small corner of his brain said, That’s impossible and You must be dreaming, but he swatted that part away like a fly. He did not want Bella to be a dream. He wanted her to be real. “All this time? How did you eat?”

  “Lefty brought me food,” Bella said, laughing, as though it was obvious, and just then Mo’s cat streaked by, a blur of fur.

  “Look, I’ll show you.” She tugged his hand and made him kneel down and peer under the bed. He felt awkward—he was so much bigger than her now! They had been almost exactly the same size before she had disappeared. He felt he must seem like a clumsy giant to her.

  “Come on.” Bella scampered into the space under the bed, then turned around and held out a hand. “There’s plenty of room.”

  “I’ll never fit,” Mo said shyly. Bella’s eyes winked out at him from the dark space under the bed. “You were really here all this time?”

  At that moment, Mo began to hear muffled shouts from below. His parents. His mother and father were calling them down to dinner.

  “It wasn’t that bad.” Bella shrugged. “The only problem was how cold it got.” The shouting grew louder, more insistent. They must hurry. His mother hated it when they were late to dinner.

  “You were cold?” Mo asked.

  “So cold,” Bella said, and now her breath came out in little clouds, and Mo could see she was shivering. It was cold under the bed, he realized: It was absolutely freezing. Bella’s teeth were clattering together.

  The voices from below, sharper, sounding angry: “Where are you? Where have you gone? We need you for dinner!”

  “You should have a hat, Bella-Bee,” Mo said, and just then he woke up, and found himself staring not at the darkness under the bed of his dream, but into the darkness of the space under his desk, and into the pale and terrified face of the hatless boy from earlier that night. His teeth were clattering together, just as Bella’s had been in the dream.

  Still groggy from his nap, Mo could not even be surprised. “Why, hello,” he said, rubbing his eyes and yawning. “What on earth are you—”

  The boy made a frantic no-no-no gesture with his head and then lifted his fingers to his lips. At that moment Mo realized that the shouting he had heard in his dreams was, in fact, real shouting from outside.

  From the courtyard he heard a man calling out, “Where are you, you useless, worthless shrivel-head? When I find you, I swear, I’ll cook you for dinner and turn your innards to meat loaf!” He recognized the man’s voice: It was the one with the dripping nose, the man who had introduced himself as the alchemist.

  Hmph, thought Mo. Not nearly so nice as being called down for dinner—being turned into dinner.

  “He won’t come out if you threaten him,” he heard the Lady Premiere say sharply. Then her voice, crooning softly, “Come on, dear. It’s all right. Everybody makes mistakes. Just come on out and tell us where the real magic i
s, and we’ll give you a nice present. Maybe something hot to drink, or a new pair of mittens.”

  There was something very disturbing about hearing the Lady Premiere’s voice so soft and slippery sounding. It was off, somehow, like seeing a bunch of roses laid over a rotting corpse.

  “I’ll give him a poker in his stomach,” the alchemist ranted. “I’ll give him slugs in his eye sockets!”

  “Would you shut up!” the Lady Premiere snapped.

  Mo swung his legs off the desk and stood up, smashing his hat down on his forehead.

  “You see?” he whispered to the boy, pointing to his head. “You need one of these. Would keep you nice and toasty, that’s for sure. Heat goes right out your head, see, if you don’t have a hat to keep it all swirly and whirly warm.”

  The boy pointed toward the courtyard, then pointed to himself, then made another frantic no-no-no gesture.

  “Don’t worry,” Mo said, winking. “Your secret’s safe with me.” He made a little X over his chest, directly above the place where his enormous heart was thumping, and clomped out into the courtyard to see what all the fuss was about.

  The Lady Premiere and the alchemist were standing in the middle of the swirling mist. Mo felt a little colder as he approached the Lady Premiere. It was no wonder she wore those enormous fur coats with all the animal tails, Mo thought, coats that reached from the nape of her neck to the cobblestones. Privately he suspected she had ice running through her veins instead of blood.

  But he forced himself to say cheerfully, “Evening, boss. Can I help you with something?”

  The Lady Premiere turned her large violet eyes on him: eyes that were rumored to be the most beautiful in all the city. “We are looking for a boy,” she said coldly. “Have you seen one?”

  “A boy?” Mo repeated. He dug a nail under the band of his hat and scratched his head. It was at times like these that the reputation for being an idiot was quite useful.

  “Yes, a boy,” the alchemist exploded. “The boy who was with me earlier. The useless, treacherous, evil . . .” Then he trailed off and began to moan. “He’s trying to ruin me. That’s what he wants. He wants to keep me unofficial forever. After all I’ve done for him . . . raised him like my own son . . .”

  “Stop your moaning,” the Lady Premiere said sharply. “I can’t stand it. Besides, perhaps it’s true what the boy said. Perhaps there really was a mix-up. We must go to Mr. Gray at once and retrieve the magic.”

  “There was no mix-up,” the alchemist muttered darkly. “He stole the magic and intends to pass it off as his own. He means to ruin me. After all I’ve done! When I find him, I’ll skin him from the toes up! No—from the ears down! No, from the fingers—”

  “Enough!” the Lady Premiere thundered. Her voice sounded through the courtyard, loud as a rifle shot. Even Mo jumped a little.

  The Lady Premiere took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and counted to three. As always, when she felt her anger bubbling and rising inside of her like a hot, dark dust, the smell of cabbage and damp socks seemed to rise up too. It was the terrible, choking smell of the house in Howard’s Glen, floating out of the past to torture her. . . .

  She pushed the thought quickly out of her mind. Those days were over, dead, buried. She had made sure of that. Instead she imagined her closets lined in deep purple velvet, and all the beautiful jewels glittering on her shelves, and the ninety-two pairs of shoes she had lined up neatly on beautiful oak shoe racks, and it calmed her down somewhat. Her things—her rooms—the whisper of silk sheets and the murmurings of an attentive staff—protected her from the trials and idiocies of the outside world.

  “Do you have the counterfeit box?” the Lady Premiere asked more calmly, opening her eyes.

  The alchemist nodded.

  “Give it here.”

  He hesitated for only a second, then passed over Mr. Gray’s mother’s wooden jewelry box, which Will had accidentally taken from the table.

  The Lady Premiere said to Mo, “Guard, open the gate.”

  Mo moved obediently to the hand crank and began slowly winding open the gate. The Lady Premiere strode quickly toward the street, then paused, turning back to the alchemist, who was still shaking his head and muttering something about “unofficial” and “ruined.”

  “Well?” she said. “Come along.”

  “Me? You want me to go with you?” The alchemist forced a laugh. He would never admit it, but he had always been a little bit afraid of the tall, thin, somber Mr. Gray, who kept company with the dead and knew all their secrets. “But I couldn’t possibly—at this late hour—quite out of the question—the demands of my profession—”

  The Lady Premiere fixed him with such an evil stare that he stopped short and shrank further into his large coat. She returned to the courtyard, walking so slowly and deliberately she reminded Mo of an enormous cat.

  “Perhaps you don’t understand,” she said softly, and Mo shivered. The gentleness in her voice was the most terrifying of all. “I am the Lady Premiere in this city, and I asked you to deliver me the most powerful magic in the world. Instead you deliver me this—this—this—” She held up the wooden jewelry box and whipped open its lid. A little bit of gray ash floated off in the wind. “This dirt. This worthlessness.” She snapped the lid closed again, so close to the alchemist’s nose that he flinched.

  “Until you find me my magic,” she said, leaning closer to the alchemist, “you will not be leaving my sight. Not for one second. And if I find out that this is all part of some big plan—if I find out that there is no magic . . .” She laughed humorlessly, her eyes glittering. “Then there is certainly no magic strong enough to help you. Do we understand each other?”

  “There is magic,” the alchemist squeaked. “I swear. The greatest I have yet produced.”

  “Good.” The Lady Premiere pulled away. “Then we go to find it.”

  “But what about the boy?” the alchemist said. “Do we just let him go?”

  The Lady Premiere had already turned and started for the street again, her long fur coat swirling around her ankles. “Do not trouble yourself about the boy,” she said. “I have spies and guards and friends all over this city. He will be found. And when he is found, he will be . . . handled.”

  The way she said the word made the hair on the back of Mo’s neck stand up, as though he had been tickled there by a dozen insect legs.

  “Now come!” the Lady Premiere commanded, without looking back, and the alchemist scurried after her. Mo could hear their footsteps long after they vanished into the fog and he had closed the gates behind them, breathing a sigh of relief.

  “All clear,” he whispered, stepping back into the stone hut and ducking down to peer under his desk. But the little dark space was just that—dark, and totally empty. Mo straightened up, scratching his head again.

  “Where on earth . . . ?” he started to say, out loud, before noticing that the cat door was rocking slightly on its hinges with a tap-tap-tap-ing sound.

  Mo got down clumsily on his hands and knees, lifted open the cat door, and squinted out.

  He looked just in time to see the boy with no hat round the corner at the end of the alley, and then disappear from view.

  Chapter Seven

  IT WAS WITH A SENSE OF RELIEF THAT PO SLIPPED back into the Other Side after its conversation with Liesl. Bundle seemed relieved too: The ghostly animal skipped happily in front of Po, flickering in and out of other objects they encountered, exploring, turning flips in the air, expanding suddenly into a shapeless black cloud and then re-forming itself, trying to make Po laugh.

  But Po was still thinking about Liesl. The ghost had not meant to lie to her, but the lie had come, and with it, the stirrings of feelings and attachments long forgotten. Even after Po was back on the Other Side, feeling the dark pulse of the endless starry night all around it, slipping away on the gentle sighings of the wind and floating between black valleys and cold dark stars, the ghost could not shake the memory of Liesl’s fac
e, or the way she had trembled ever so slightly when she said, Tell him I miss him, or the look she had given Po after it had lied to her: a naked, happy look, like the face of the dew-coated moonflower that grew in abundance on the Other Side, white and crescent-shaped. Something about the girl moved something in Po, twisted the airy tendrils of its being in a way that had long become unfamiliar.

  We mustn’t go back to the Living Side anymore, Bundle, Po thought to Bundle, and felt Bundle’s animal mind think back a simple agreement. Bundle agreed with everything Po thought. It was a very loyal pet.

  It’s just not right, Po said. It’s not natural. We are dead, after all. We don’t belong there.

  Mwark, came the noise from Bundle’s mind, which Po knew meant, Okay, yes, you’re right.

  And the live girl will be fine, Po thought. She was fine without us before; and she will be fine now.

  Mwark. Whatever you say; of course.

  I’ll miss the drawings, though, Po thought.

  Bundle was silent, turning floaty flips ahead.

  Whether Bundle had once been a dog or a cat was, at this point, impossible to say. Sometimes, in the natural inquisitive tilt of its head, and the twitchiness of its tail, and the prick of its ears, it seemed very cat. Other times, due to its tendency to follow Po around everywhere and yelp excitedly at every shooting star or wisp of cloud dust, it seemed much more dog.

  But whatever it was, one thing was clear: Bundle was a natural explorer. It liked nothing better than to discover some new and twisted corner of the universe, and then, suddenly, to disperse—blending momentarily into the new place, the new space, whatever it was, and returning to its loose and shaggy shape whenever its curiosity about the new thing had been satisfied. Since it could no longer smell or look or touch, it could learn only in this way: by blending.