The Swallow

by Charis Cotter

  Rose crawled over and peered into the darkness, then turned to me with shining eyes.

  “You know what this means, Polly? Now I can get into your house too!”

  Rose

  The attic felt quite empty. Winnie had gone. For good, I hoped, but I doubted it. I went downstairs and got Polly a glass of water from the bathroom. It was funny that Kendrick hadn’t appeared to investigate the screaming or running up the stairs. She must have heard the commotion, but I suppose she was doing her best to stick to her “Ignore Rose” policy.

  Polly looked better after she drank some water. I held the glass for her because her hands were shaking.

  “I saw her, Rose,” she whispered. “This time I saw her.”

  “Your first ghost,” I said, and my voice trembled. “What do you think of them now?”

  “I see what you mean,” said Polly, smiling a crooked little smile. “She wasn’t much fun.”

  I smiled back, and a sudden sweet feeling of relief flooded through me. Polly was okay.

  “Did you find the key to the box?” she asked, taking the glass in both hands and having another drink.

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t know where else to look.” I didn’t mention what had happened with my grandfather’s ghost in the study. I would tell her, but not now. She still looked pale, and her hands shook when she held the water glass.

  “Polly, why did you come? I told you to wait in your attic. I would have come soon.”

  She looked sheepish. “I know, Rose. I guess I just forgot everything else when I saw the secret passage. I couldn’t resist! Could you, if you had found it?”

  “Maybe not. But you can’t come back here again.”

  She grinned weakly at me. “I won’t argue with you.”

  “You’d better go home now. We can meet tomorrow and figure out what to do next, but I think we’ve had enough for today.”

  “Okay.”

  She turned to crawl into the passageway, then hesitated and looked back at me.

  “Rose?” she said. “Would you mind coming along behind me? It’s so dark.”

  “No, of course not. Just wait a minute while I get a flashlight.”

  I went silently down the stairs and into the kitchen. Kendrick’s television was still droning from the basement. The flashlight was kept in the bottom drawer beside the sink. I slipped it out, tested it and went back upstairs.

  Polly was sitting against the wall looking very tired. I waved the flashlight at her.

  “Got it!” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I followed her into the passageway. It was cramped but not too bad. Harder for Polly because she was bigger than me.

  She stopped once, about halfway through.

  “Polly?” I asked. “You okay?”

  She was still for a minute.

  “Polly!” I said more sharply, giving her ankle a shake. She roused herself then, apologized and continued to wiggle along.

  I squeezed through the little door into her attic and looked around curiously. Just like mine, only empty and backwards. The trapdoor was at the opposite side.

  Polly returned the flashlight to me and lowered herself through the door into a loft full of suitcases. I would have loved to go down and see her room, and maybe the baby, but not this time. Polly needed to rest. She looked up at me to say good-bye, her face pale and serious.

  “Thank you, Rose,” she said quietly. “For saving me. For a while I thought no one would ever come.”

  POOR GHOST

  Polly

  For a moment in the passageway I blanked out again. I felt heavy and sleepy and everything started to fade until I felt Rose behind me, shaking my foot. I took a deep breath and then I was okay.

  After I said good-bye to Rose I got into my pajamas and fell into bed. I was so very tired. No wonder. That awful Ghost Girl had tried to choke me to death. I even wondered if I had been dead for a while, when everything was so white and I couldn’t move. But Rose brought me back.

  Rose. Her face swam into my mind, the way dream images do when you’re just falling asleep. Her shadowed eyes, her crazy hair. She looked so much like that Ghost Girl. They could have been twins. But they felt like opposites.

  Why did Winnifred hate me so much? The only reason I could think of was that she was jealous. I had Rose, but Winnifred had no one. I could understand that. I knew all about jealous.

  It ate you up. It poisoned everything. It made me hate Susie, with her baby smell and her pink PJs, who never hurt anyone. It made me hate my brothers, because my parents paid more attention to them than to me. It made me hate Lu, because she was so much smarter and prettier than I’d ever be, and it made me hate Moo and Goo, because they took my father away from me. And finally, it made me hate myself for being so unpleasant and petty.

  Yes, I knew all about jealous. Poor ghost.

  Rose

  After I shut the trapdoor on Polly I hesitated a minute or two. I knew I should get back home, but I wanted to have a look around her attic.

  I walked over to a heap of blankets and pillows by the wall. That must have been where she was sitting the day she heard me singing.

  I laughed. She must have been terrified. I’m not surprised she thought I was a ghost. This attic was spooky—way more spooky than mine. Because it was empty, I guess. My foot nudged something half-hidden in the blankets and I bent to pick it up.

  It was a book: The Ghastly Ghost at My Gate. I sat down among the blankets and turned the flashlight on it. It had a creepy picture on the front of a house outlined against a moonlit sky, with a tall iron gate in the foreground and a beautiful girl in a long cloak with a misty phantom swirling around her. I opened it up to a bookmarked page. I’d read a few books by Philomena Faraday and they were all similar. Her ghosts were usually the predictable Hollywood version who go about moaning and trying to kill the clueless heroine. Not at all like the ghosts I had met, although …

  I sat up and skimmed the pages. This Gate Ghost did bear an uncanny resemblance to the Door Jumper. On a page where Polly had turned down the corner to mark her place, there was a description of the ghost jumping out from behind the gate and trying to strangle Amanda in much the same way that the Door Jumper had attacked Polly. Similar methodology, as my science teacher would say. Maybe the author did know a thing or two about ghosts. I turned to the back flap to see if there was anything interesting written about Philomena Faraday. Nothing much, just a few lines telling me she lived in New Hampshire with seven cats.

  I noticed the little cardboard pocket glued inside the back cover, where libraries stick their cards. I glanced at the due date stamped there: April 10, 1963. Evidently Polly had squirreled this one away and never returned it. Polly must have had special privileges at that library.

  I put the book down. Time to get home. I didn’t like Polly’s attic half so much as mine. It had an abandoned feeling. Sad. Almost as if there was a ghost here. I flicked the light around the four corners of the room, just to make sure, but there was nothing. I crawled into the wall and wiggled my way back to my own attic. As I straightened up and looked around at my cozy chair, books and the stacked cardboard cartons, I experienced a very unusual feeling: I felt like I was coming home.

  SHORTBREAD

  Polly

  The next day after school Rose and I met in my attic. She brought an extra flashlight, a tin of Scottish shortbread and the box.

  We turned both our lights on the box. It was certainly mysterious. The wood was smooth and worn. It must have been very old. It had a familiar smell. I bent down and breathed it in.

  “Rose, it smells like roses. Don’t you think that means something?”

  “Nothing spooky about that,” said Rose firmly. “It was in a box with my grandmother’s shawl. All of her stuff smells like roses. It was her favorite perfume.”

  That was Rose’s story. She had an answer for everything, but I wasn’t convinced.

  I munched on a shortbread (they were delicious!) while she told me ab
out seeing her grandfather’s ghost the day before. I nearly choked when she said, “And then I turned around and SOMEONE was sitting in the armchair.” When Rose described how he had called out to his daughter, calling her Winnie and asking her to forgive him, I felt so bad for the poor old guy.

  “We’ve got to help him,” I said. “We’ve got to help him, and Winnie too.”

  Rose stared at me, and her mouth twisted a little in disapproval.

  “She tried to kill you, Polly,” she said. “Why do you want to help her?”

  I shrugged. “She’s not going anywhere. She’ll be back, haunting you and trying to keep me out of your house. If we can figure out what happened to her, maybe we can help her stop being so mad.”

  Rose was silent, watching me. She looked like a ghost again, her face half lit by the glow from the flashlights, her hair fluffing out around her head.

  “Don’t you want to help her?” I asked finally.

  Rose shook her head. “She wants me to. They all want me to help. All the ghosts. They never leave me alone, Polly.”

  “But your grandfather,” I said softly. “You want to help him, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Another long silence. Despite the brighter light, the shadows of the attic seemed to close around us. I imagined the darkness full of Rose’s ghosts, clamoring for help, plucking at her hair. Plucking at my hair. I gave a little jump and then shook myself briefly, like a dog shaking off a drift of snowflakes.

  “It must be awful,” I said. “All those ghosts. All wanting something. Have you never helped any of them?”

  Rose leaned towards me and spoke in a quick, fierce voice that I’d never heard before.

  “What am I supposed to do?” she hissed at me. “I can’t bring them back to life! I can’t make anything right for them! I can’t DO anything! But they still ask me. I just wish they’d all go away forever. I just wish I was normal, like you. With a normal family, like you. And no Door Jumpers and dead grandfathers and ghostly perfumes sighing in haunted rooms!”

  Her face was twisted with fury, and she looked more like Winnifred than ever. I felt a cold shiver crawling up my spine. But I reached out and covered one of her shaking hands with mine.

  “I’ll help you, Rose. It’ll be easier with two of us. We’ll find the key and get Winnifred sorted out somehow, and then maybe we can find a way to get the ghosts to leave you alone.”

  She looked at me and started to laugh.

  Rose

  Polly looked so sweet as she reached out to me, blindly swearing to do the impossible. Even now, after being attacked by the Door Jumper and nearly dying, she still didn’t have a clue. You can’t just “fix” things. You can’t just change the way the world is because you want to. She was such a child compared to me.

  But that’s why I liked her. She didn’t know what might be lurking in the dark but she jumped in anyway, and she actually believed she could make a difference. So I laughed.

  “All right,” she said, dropping my hand and looking relieved that I wasn’t raving anymore. “So, how are we going to find this key? Is there anywhere you haven’t looked?”

  “All kinds of places,” I responded. “My parents’ bedroom, the books in the living room, the dining room cupboards. The kitchen. Kendrick’s flat. But it would take me hours to search the whole house.”

  “We have to use logic,” said Polly with a little frown. “It’s just a matter of elimination and logic. That’s how the detectives figure things out in murder mysteries.”

  I rolled my eyes. Polly saw but chose to ignore it. She picked up the box and slowly turned it, examining each side.

  “Okay,” she said, peering at the strip of carved wood. “Okay. So if it was your box, what would you do with the key?”

  “Put it in a drawer, a jewelry box, an envelope …”

  “Right. And you’ve looked in your grandmother’s dresser and her jewelry boxes?” asked Polly, shining her flashlight at the keyhole.

  “Yes,” I said impatiently. “Yes, I looked everywhere in her room.”

  “It must be a very small key,” said Polly slowly. “Do you think maybe it was put on a chain?”

  “There were no keys on chains in her jewelry box,” I said impatiently. “I would have noticed.”

  “I wonder …” said Polly. “Would you have noticed if it was on a bracelet? A charm bracelet? My mum has one, and it has a little golden key on it. A bit too small for this box, but—”

  I stopped frowning. “She did have a charm bracelet! She used to take it off and let me play with it when I was little. There was a silver book, and a musical note, and a little man … I don’t remember a key.”

  Polly met my eyes. “Was it in the jewelry box?”

  “I … I don’t remember. There was a pile of chains and stuff, but no keys, so I didn’t go through them all.”

  “Go!” said Polly.

  THE CHRISTMAS PICTURE

  Polly

  There was no question of me going with Rose to look for the key. I didn’t want to risk another encounter with Winnie. I listened as Rose bumped along the passage. Then there was silence. I tried to picture her scooting down the ladder into her grandmother’s room, over to the dresser, opening the jewelry box. Either it was there or it wasn’t. She’d be back soon.

  It was funny how you really couldn’t hear anything in the attic. Just that faraway hum, of traffic, maybe, or the city. It was soothing to lie back in the quiet and let my mind drift away.

  “Got it!” said Rose, bursting through the little door. I must have fallen asleep for a minute because I hadn’t heard her coming.

  She held out a clinky silver charm bracelet to me. Sure enough, there was a little silver key. Trembling, she fitted it into the box. With a couple of twists, the box was open.

  Rose

  It was weird, the way Polly figured out where the key would be. Sometimes I wondered if she was psychic, after all. Even if she didn’t see ghosts the way I did. Or maybe she was right and it is possible to live life as if it were all a game, or a story in a book. Whatever the reason, she knew exactly where to find that key.

  As I lifted the lid of the box, a breath of my grandmother’s rose perfume wafted out, and then it was gone. Polly and I leaned over the box, shining our flashlights on the contents.

  The first thing we saw was a picture of me.

  I picked it up. It was taken last Christmas, I thought. I was wearing a black velvet dress with buttons down the front and I was staring at the camera, unsmiling, my hair a dark cloud around my face. I was standing in front of my grandmother’s sitting-room mantel, which was decorated with pine boughs and candles. The date printed on the bottom of the photograph read “December 1962.”

  The next thing in the box was a picture of Winnifred. It, too, was taken at Christmas, and she was wearing a black velvet dress much like mine, standing in front of the same decorated mantel. This photograph was undated, but she looked about my age.

  “Wow,” said Polly. “You two look like twins!”

  She was right. I stared at the picture. I knew it wasn’t me, because the dress was more old-fashioned and the photograph was yellow and faded with age, but otherwise we looked exactly the same. Our faces were the same shape and our noses, mouths and eyes were identical. Even our hair looked the same: wild and curly. But Winnie had a strange, haunted expression in her eyes.

  “Polly, do my eyes look like that?” I whispered.

  “Uh … sometimes,” she said.

  “Can you tell us apart?” I asked.

  “Hmmm,” she said, looking at the photographs again. “Not really. Except she looks kind of angry.”

  There were more pictures of Winnie and me at different ages, all taken at Christmas in front of that mantelpiece that never seemed to change.

  “These are so weird,” said Polly. “Do you remember your grandmother taking them?”

  The Christmas photograph. Grandmother always made a big deal about it, after
we opened our presents. I had to put on the new Christmas dress she gave me every year and stand in front of the fireplace. She tottered a bit the last few years, when it was hard for her to stand without support, but she still took the picture.

  Afterwards she would smile gently at me and say, “Thank you, Rose. You look just lovely.”

  They were all here, matched up with identical photographs of Winnifred. I felt sick.

  LOCK HER UP

  Polly

  “Why do you think she took them?” I asked Rose.

  Rose sat very still, staring at the photographs.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Maybe to show how much we were alike? But she never said anything, not a word. I didn’t even know I had an aunt.”

  “Do you think maybe she thought you WERE Winnifred, that you were reincarnated?”

  Rose slapped the photos down on the floor and turned back to the box.

  “Don’t start that weird stuff again, Polly. I’m not Winnifred, all right? I’m me.” She fished some papers out of the box and started going through them.

  “Winnifred’s birth certificate, birth notice in the paper …” she said.

  “But what if your grandmother thought you were?” I insisted. “Winnifred, I mean. Since you looked so much alike?”

  “My grandmother was a Presbyterian,” Rose retorted. “They don’t believe in reincarnation. Hey, look at this.”

  She handed me a scrap of paper that had been cut out of a newspaper. It was a death notice. We read it together.

  DIED, Winnifred Rose McPherson, aged 13 years. Suddenly in Toronto, January 8, 1923. She is survived by her loving brother William, and parents Dr. and Mrs. Alastair McPherson. Funeral arrangements have not yet been made.

  “That doesn’t say much,” I began, but Rose had turned back to the box and pulled out a letter typed on paper that was so thin you could almost see through it. We bent over it together.