by Lee Nichols
“Ack! Warn a person, would you?” I scolded.
The man looked not at all chastened. He gestured toward a closed door nearby, asking me to head inside. In the dark room, there was a stack of broken chairs, boxes of chalk, and rolls of toilet paper. Wooden shelves lined two walls, and one of those retractable world maps hung in the back. Great. The ghost had led me into a storage closet. Now what?
The man in the brown suit wove silently through the cluttered room to the back wall, and pointed at the Indian Ocean.
“Um,” I said. “The Indian Ocean. Okay. Thanks?”
He seemed to sigh, shaking his head at me in despair.
“Oh, everyone’s a critic. You’re a ghost. You’re not even alive.”
He pushed his hand through the map, and mimed opening a doorknob behind it.
“Fine,” I said.
I tugged at the map, trying to ravel it back into the bar at the top. It didn’t move, and when I looked closer I saw that it’d been permanently stuck in the down position. I glanced at the ghost, and he pretended to squeeze into the eight-inch gap between the map and the wall. Which was a little disturbing, because he didn’t squeeze well. Half his body still appeared on my side of the map.
Still, I got the idea. I scooched between the map and the wall, and felt a doorknob back there. The door opened with a theatrical squeak, and I shoved a little harder at the map to squeeze through.
Then I thought: What am I doing?
Apparently squeezing through a long-forgotten door into a dark, empty hallway that a ghost revealed to me. I didn’t know what else to do. It was time I stopped running from my visions of ghosts and confronted them. I needed answers. And I sensed this ghost was trying to help me.
Still, that hallway was really dark and really empty. I looked to the man in the brown suit for reassurance—which, I know, wasn’t my most rational moment—and saw him closing the door behind us.
“Wait,” I said. “You can do that? Move things?”
He waggled his eyebrows at me. Some reassurance.
I took a breath and started walking. The farther I went, the darker the hallway grew. Just when I decided there wasn’t enough light, the man in the brown suit began to glow.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
He grinned in his luminescent way. The glow touched both sides of the narrow corridor, exposing the dust accumulating on the floor and cobwebs hanging from the exposed beams.
I’ve never been what you’d call brave. I wasn’t the first girl to jump off the high dive, I’ve never sat all the way through a Wes Craven film—heck, I was still worrying about cutting class. But I didn’t have the luxury of cowardice right now. I saw ghosts and I was hoping this one was trying to help me figure out why. So I said, “All right. Lead on.”
Twenty paces down, we came to a staircase, and a tingle started in my spine. I flashed to someone else’s memories. I knew this place. In busier days, it had bustled with activity: boots for polishing, linen to launder, trays of food carried from the kitchen—
“This leads to the servants’ quarters,” I said.
The man nodded.
We climbed until we reached a door with an old-fashioned latch. Beyond, I found an enormous attic, with light streaming through tiny windows in the slanted roof. Dozens of old bed frames were stacked against one wall and there were wooden crates everywhere. Two massive brick chimneys straddled the room from floor to ceiling. I smelled mothballs and cedar and straw. Dust bunnies had quite the little neighborhood going on, and I waded through their grimy warren looking for any clue as to why the man in the brown suit brought me here. Speaking of which, where was he?
I turned circles in the room, but he’d disappeared. And that’s when I caught sight of myself in the mirror.
Only it wasn’t a mirror. It was a painting leaning against the far wall, with a white sheet pooled around its base.
And the woman in the painting looked exactly like me.
She wore a French blue dress with tiny buttons down the front and a corseted bodice: the dress I’d worn during my first flashback on campus. She looked a little older—stronger and more confident, her features were sharper and her eyes both steely and amused. Her hair looked darker, too. Guess they didn’t have highlights back in the eighteenth century.
For a long moment, I just stared. My brain couldn’t make sense of this: a picture of me—well, not me, but someone who looked exactly like me—in the attic of a prep school in Massachusetts.
I knelt before the painting and found a plaque attached to the bottom of the gold frame.
Emma Vaile, 1773–1801.
I gasped and stumbled backward and fell across one of the old cots. A cloud of dust puffed around me.
What was my name doing on that painting? Was this all some elaborate hoax? Yeah. Someone was drugging me so I’d have psychotic flashbacks into dead people’s memories and see imaginary people hovering everywhere.
Sure, I was so important, there was a conspiracy after me.
I wished. Because I knew the more logical answer. Nobody was trying to drive me crazy. I already was crazy. They hadn’t fixed my insanity in the children’s psychiatric hospital—they’d just driven it below the surface.
“No,” I said. “No.”
I didn’t believe that. I knew what I really believed, what I’d long suspected and finally felt in my heart to be true.
And, suddenly, I also knew that I needed to get out of here. Now. Before my mind spontaneously combusted. Because while I’d been telling myself I could see ghosts, I hadn’t really believed it. I’d still hoped there was some logical explanation.
I wiped the dust from my face and shoved through the door, then stumbled down the staircase and fled along the dark hallway, which was a lot scarier without the glow-in-the-dark man in the brown suit. I stopped at the door with the deadbolt, imagining myself trapped here in this nightmare.
But the bolt moved easily, and I squeezed from behind the map and caught my breath. I stepped back into the hall, and a minute later bumped into Coby.
“Hey!” He shot me a quick smile. “There you are.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“I was looking for you,” he said. “The nurse said you never showed.”
“Oh. No. I felt … better.”
“Is that why you skipped Fencing?” he asked. “So you’d keep feeling better?”
His sheer normalcy soothed me. “Are you calling me a coward?”
“Well, you’re obviously not a germaphobe.”
“What do you—” I glanced down and found myself covered in dust bunnies. I sighed. “Do you ever get the feeling that maybe you’re not who you always thought you were?”
“Emma, are you sure you’re okay?” He looked at me with so much concern that I felt my eyes watering.
“Um.” I blinked a few times. “I might’ve passed out again.”
“That’s not good.”
“Maybe it really is a brain tumor.” I started giggling, slightly hysterically. “That’d be brilliant. I could really go for a tumor about now.”
“Emma,” Coby said. “You should see my dad.”
I stopped laughing. “Do you think—” I glanced up at him: solid, gorgeous, kindhearted Coby. “Do you think you could just take me home?”
He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t complain about skipping class. Didn’t worry about leaving campus or missing lunch. He walked me home and didn’t even talk on the way, just let me be alone with my thoughts.
We stopped at the gate. “Don’t make me wish I’d called my dad,” he told me. “If you’re in real trouble …”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I promise.”
“You’re alone here?”
“Bennett will be home soon.”
He showed me a crooked grin. “Way to reassure me.”
“What?”
“Nothing. You take care of yourself.”
“I will. Now go—you’ll be late for clas
s. I bet you have a perfect attendance record, too.”
His cheeks turned pink. It was adorable.
“Go!” I said.
“I’ll call you later then.” And he turned and jogged back to school, his uniform jacket fluttering in the wind.
13
I went straight to the ballroom as though drawn by some magnetic force. It felt not unlike arriving at the dean’s office, my feet leading me there unconsciously. I tossed my books onto the grand piano and sat on the bench, then ran my fingers over the keys, playing a simple Mendelssohn melody I’d learned long ago in piano lessons. As the last note faded, I saw a man standing just inside the French doors.
I didn’t have it in me to be scared, despite his commanding presence. He wore a blue dress uniform, had windswept dark hair, a carefully groomed mustache, and a saber at his hip.
He strode forward like he owned the place, his dark eyes boring into me. I finally understood what they meant in old books when they wrote about a rake: he was the dashing seducer, a fallen angel.
At the grand piano, he stopped and glowered at me. He stared for a long time, and I met his gaze—the two of us a motionless tableau at the piano. Finally, he nodded curtly.
“I’m glad I meet your approval,” I said, and patted the seat next to me.
Ignoring me, he leafed through the sheet music and turned to the opening of a piece.
“Oh, I don’t play,” I told him.
He scowled and gestured to the sheet music again.
“No, I really don’t. I just know that one melody.”
He rose and stalked toward the French doors, clearly disgusted.
“Wait!” I said. “I don’t understand what you want! Don’t leave!”
After a moment, he turned, with a chilly correctness.
“You’re a ghost, aren’t you?” I said. “I see ghosts.”
There was a sense of sadness in his eyes, and he inclined his head.
“Well, nice to meet you.” I looked through the window at the treetops. “I mean, it’s not like I want to see ghosts. Better than going crazy, though, right? Except maybe it’s the same thing.” I looked back to him. “Am I insane? Is this all in my head?”
A hint of a smile appeared on his stern face as he shook his head.
“I’m asking an imaginary rake if I’m crazy,” I told him. “I think that’s the definition.” I plunked a few piano keys. “I only wish—I wish they hadn’t all left me. My brother, my mom and dad. I wish they’d cared enough to stay. I wish I had someone to tell, someone to trust. But I don’t. Not my friends, not Bennett.” I felt tears on my cheek. “I’m all alone.”
He crossed the ballroom floor and knelt beside me, like a man proposing. His face looked so strong and so sad. He put one hand over his heart, and bowed his head, the gesture unmistakable: pledging himself to me.
“Thank you.” I turned away, blinking back tears at his kindness. A complete stranger, a ghost, offering me the support I so badly needed. It was wonderful and terrifying at the same time.
When I finally turned back, he was gone.
I swallowed. Ghosts. I saw ghosts.
The man in the brown suit. The dashing, tragic rake. The woman from the death mask. And the other Emma Vaile, whose life I lived from the inside: her stolen kiss in the gazebo and her pretty blue gown with the stifling corset.
Ghosts.
For a long time, I sat there fiddling with piano keys. Then I stood. Might as well get this over with. I started toward the kitchen to find whomever—or whatever—was cooking my meals and lighting the fires.
But when I turned toward the door, I found that they’d come to me.
Three of them standing in line by the door, as if awaiting my inspection. A man, a woman, and a boy.
I stepped cautiously forward. A shock of white hair rose above the man’s ruddy face, and he had a curly mustache of impressive proportions. He wore chef’s whites and held his floppy hat in his hand. Beside him stood a flirty-looking redhead in a black dress and white apron, with a little white cap pinned to her luxuriant hair. I recognized the hair from that early morning in my room, when she stoked the fire in the hearth. And I knew the boy, too—the kid with the clay marbles and slingshot, dressed basically as Oliver Twist, with a pale face and big mischievous eyes. Frankly, seen in the light, they all looked like some low-budget period piece from Masterpiece Theatre.
I stared at them, from one to the next and back again, and they stood with gazes lowered. They clearly wanted something from me, but I didn’t know what.
“Thank you,” I said, finally.
The boy raised his head and grinned at me, and the maid elbowed him softly. He lowered his gaze to the patched cap he was wringing in his hands, then stuck his tongue out.
For some reason, this gave me the courage to continue. “You were there for me when nobody else was.” I looked to the chef. “You’re the one cooking dinner and packing me those lunches? I don’t know what you put in the cookies, but they ought to be illegal.” At his expression, I quickly added, “That’s a compliment!”
The chef bowed slightly, beaming under his mustache.
“Setting out my clothes for me every morning and looking after my room,” I told the woman, “you’ve made me feel at home here, thank you.” I looked at the boy. “And you! I don’t even know what you do, sweep the chimneys?” Smiles blossomed on their faces, and the boy mimed something to me. “Oh! You fixed the furnace?”
The boy nodded shyly.
“Then you’re my hero. Thank you all. I, um, I’m new to this and—” I stopped, catching sight of myself in the reflection of the big window, alone in the empty ballroom. “Hoo boy. I’m in for a long stay in a padded room.”
My footsteps echoed as I crossed the ballroom to the window. Maybe the ghosts didn’t appear in the reflection, but I did—and nothing confused me more than myself. Nothing alarmed me more.
I saw ghosts.
Every day, here in Echo Point, I saw them more easily, and more clearly. The harmless, helpful ones, like the man in the brown suit, the maid, the chef, and the urchin.
And the others. The looming figure braided together from burial ashes, the whispering shadows in the village that had ached with hunger and crept toward me with malicious intent. Neossss. The man in the storefront, who’d cut me all those years ago.
I turned back to the room and the three ghosts were gone. Very discreet, leaving me alone with my feelings. Like good servants, they’d been trained to remain in the background.
Grabbing my backpack from the piano, I headed to the front door—I needed to get out of here.
I stopped short in the the hallway.
Another ghost stood at the bottom of the stairs, surrounded by antique luggage, an old steamer trunk, and a capacious velvet bag. She looked like Mary Poppins, with a white ruffled shirt peeping from under a trim black jacket that brought the word bombazine to mind. Her steel gray hair was pinned into a soft French twist.
Her face caught my attention, because her expression was so sweet and kind that I wanted to throw myself into her arms for a comforting cuddle. Except I’d probably pass right through her ghostly form and smash into the wall.
So I just smiled. “Glad to meet you.”
“You must be Emma,” she said warmly. “I’m so happy to—”
“You talk !” I squeaked.
“One of my many talents.” She laughed. She even had a Mary Poppins accent that was faintly English.
“Really? What else can you do?”
“Well, my dear, I’ve been known to coddle, tease, manage, advise, and—I’m sorry to say—even gossip.” Her eyes twinkled at me. “I’ve run households and raised children. Never my own, though.”
I goggled at her, amazed to meet a talkative ghost.
“For you,” she continued, “I’ll manage the staff and perhaps even teach you a few things. And, I dearly hope, be a friend to you in this difficult time.”
“Who—who are you?”
“I’m Martha,” she said. “Did Bennett not tell you I was coming?”
“Oh! Oh, he did, but he didn’t—”
“Well, he’s distracted these days, poor boy.” Her eyes creased with concern. “Still mourning his loss, and—”
“Wait!” I said. “You’re real.”
“Pardon?” she said.
“You’re not a gh—not a—I mean, you’re really here. Finally.” I squeezed her arm, and yes—she was flesh and blood. “I’m so glad to meet you.”
She inspected me, and behind her sweet face I sensed a keen intelligence. “I’m struck by an uncomfortable feeling that we owe you an apology,” she said. “In any case, I’m sorry I’m so late in arriving—everything’s at sixes and sevens back home.”
I had no idea what that meant. “Well, you’re here now. Can I help with your bags?”
“Relax,” she said. “Nicholas will do it.”
“Nicholas?” I asked. “Who’s—?”
But there he was, the urchin, carrying her sea chest upstairs, his back bowed under the weight … grinning happily.
“Oh,” I said. “Um.”
“Surely you’ve met the staff?” Martha asked me.
“Um,” I repeated. She saw him, too? So he wasn’t a ghost?
“Better with a footman, of course, but the Sterns prefer a small staff.” She beckoned me toward the kitchen. “Well, they did when they were in residence.”
“Are the Sterns gone? I mean, for good?”
“For the foreseeable future,” she said, filling the teakettle with water. “The whole family is still in shock.”
“What happened?”
She sighed and bustled around with the tea bags and honey. “Nothing good, I’m afraid. A few months ago—”
The front door slammed open, and Bennett called, “Martha?”
A warm smile rose on her face. “In the kitchen!”
A moment later, he strode in and, without a glance at me, wrapped Martha in a fierce hug. “You look beautiful,” he said.
“I look the same as always,” she said, stepping back to eye him. “You look pale and exhausted. And too skinny.” She turned to me. “Is he not eating?”
