Breathe: A Ghost Story (Fiction - Middle Grade)

by Cliff McNish

  For tonight he’d best stay in his bedroom. He had no problem with that. The room was intriguing enough all by itself. He was sure now that an old woman had died here, no more than a few months ago. The impressions of her were clearer in the dark, and he sat back and let them sink in. To Jack, there was nothing strange about what he was doing. He’d noticed that nearly everyone else avoided thinking or talking about death. They’d certainly never have slept in a bed where a person had just died. But why not? To Jack, that didn’t make any sense. Living things died; that’s what happened. At least this way, with his back up against the cotton sheets, his hands in contact with the pine frame, he could be closer to that dead person. What was so wrong with doing that? Weren’t the dead worth remembering?

  He sat up, repositioned the picture of his dad so that he could see it clearly from the pillows, then lay still again. The curtains were slightly parted, letting in a splash of moonlight. It shone directly onto the wall behind his bed, picking out the sharp-edged shadow of a tree outside. The shadow ran back and forth across the ceiling like an animal, but Jack wasn’t nervous. It was just a shadow. The woman who died here must have fallen asleep sometimes watching that shadow, he thought. For some reason the thought comforted him. He lay on top of the bedclothes, wide awake for hours, mildly frightened by what he’d experienced that day, but also excited by it, and enjoying the mixture of darkness and moonlight in the room.

  He had nearly drifted off to sleep when he felt—a pressure. It came from the foot of the bed, as if someone had carefully sat down without wanting to disturb him. It was the slightest of pressures, almost nothing. Jack barely noticed it. And if he’d already fallen asleep perhaps he wouldn’t have noticed the sigh either—a long sigh against his right ear, followed by a caress that reached across his shoulders and down onto his throat.

  It was like a mother’s caress, but it was not his mother.

  Jack screamed. A small, thin woman, face as pale as a white candle, was draped across his bed. Her arm was extended tenderly toward him. Her eyes, in the moonlight, were black as a bird’s. Clearly startled that Jack could see her, she backed off. Her arms drifted, her body appearing to rise gradually up off the bed.

  Jack lunged for the door. Even before he reached it, he was struggling to find air. By the next breath he was hyperventilating—inhaling too rapidly for enough oxygen to enter his lungs. He knew the pattern only too well: an asthma attack, brought on by shock.

  Staggering to the door, he opened it, crawling into the corridor. “Mum! MUM!” he rasped. The words barely emerged. He fumbled in his pajama top pocket for his inhaler, but he’d left it on the table in his room. He couldn’t go back. The woman was there.

  As his air passages constricted, Jack felt the familiar tightening of his chest. His last bad asthma attack had been recent, which meant this one came on fast. He collapsed on the landing, howling with pain.

  Stop it, he thought. Stop it. You have to stop it without the inhaler.

  No longer pointlessly trying to shout, he went through his emergency action plan. It was something his mum had drilled into him since the first attack, when he was seven years old. Relax. First, relax. Give your lungs a chance to recover naturally. He heard her reassuring voice in his mind. If he’d been carrying his inhaler, he would have taken several carefully spaced metered dosages, and waited. He didn’t have his inhaler, so he crouched down, to take the pressure off his chest, bent over, and forced himself to breathe as steadily as possible. After half a minute the pain was worse, not better, and he realized with horror that it was already too late to stop the attack without medication.

  Knowing that, Jack couldn’t stay calm anymore. He arched his back, and managed to throw his arm feebly against his mum’s bedroom door. Sliding his knees forward, he glanced behind him.

  There was no sign of the thin woman.

  She had looked, he recalled, as if she was about to lean across the bed to kiss him. And it was the same woman he’d seen in the garden with the little girl. Definitely the same mother. Only this version was older, thinner, frailer.

  “Jack?” Sarah stood blinking on the landing, pulling a chocolate-brown robe around her. As soon as she saw his crouched-over shape she knew what was wrong, and ran back into her room, where she kept an extra beta-agonist supplemental inhaler.

  Seeing it, Jack reached up desperately.

  She allowed him four inhalations. He wanted to take more, but too much of the drug would be dangerous.

  “I’m here,” she said calmly. “It’s okay. Breathe. Come on. You know what to do. Follow my lead.” She got behind him, holding his head down at the proper angle, giving his air passages the room they needed to recover. “Now,” she said, taking a single, deep, exaggerated, breath. Another breath. Another, all the while keeping her hands on Jack’s shoulders, guiding and reassuring him with physical contact. Then she started to count. Methodically she counted out the precious breaths, one by one. Jack counted with her, and was finally allowed another burst from the inhaler. Not once did Sarah try to speak to him. She didn’t ask him what had happened. That didn’t matter right now. Speaking interrupted the rhythm. She focused only on his breathing. In and out. Gradually. With increasing slowness. To the sound of light rain falling outside, she silently held him and helped him breathe again.

  Long before the attack was fully over, Jack managed a few strangled words.

  “There . . . was . . . a woman.”

  “A woman?”

  “Next to me . . .” More agonized gasps. “On . . . my bed.”

  “Just now?” Sarah glanced in alarm toward his open bedroom door. She waited a few more seconds for Jack’s breathing to come under control, never taking her eyes off the entrance. Then she cleared her throat and shouted a warning to whoever might be in there. A thief? When there was no reply, she tied her robe firmly and looked inside. There was no one there. She searched Jack’s bedroom thoroughly, followed by every room in the house. It was only when she was sure there was no intruder that she began to relax a little. By the time she returned to Jack, the beta-agonist inhaler had done its job, and his breathing was more normal.

  “I’ve checked all over the house,” she told him. “There’s no one here, Jack.”

  “What about the cellar?”

  “I looked there, too. No one’s broken in. The doors are locked. So are all the windows. Either locked, or painted shut. The windows big enough to climb in and out of are stuck tight. Whoever lived here before was obviously concerned about being burgled.”

  “I’m not making this up, Mum.”

  “I know. I’m not saying that.”

  “You think I was dreaming?”

  Had he been? It was possible. He breathed in deeply, gripping his mum’s arm, still needing her support after the attack. “Come on,” he said, forcing himself to go back into his bedroom. Sarah turned on the light. Jack stood near his bed—not too close.

  “She was thinner than you,” he said. “I mean really thin. Starving thin. And she was moving weirdly, almost above the bed. She looked . . . I don’t know. . . .” He shuddered, coughing twice.

  Sarah made Jack go through his routine postattack breathing exercises, waiting until his respiration was more composed. Then she gave him the test for his peak flow number, to measure how well his lungs were performing. The result was a yellow warning light at first, but it turned to green—okay—within twenty minutes. When she was certain the asthma crisis was over, she helped him down the staircase into the living room.

  “I saw her before as well,” Jack said, feeling slightly foolish now about the way he’d reacted. “It was the same woman who was with the little girl. Except this woman’s face was white. No, wait. Maybe that was the effect of the moon. . . . ” Sarah sat beside him on the sofa. “I know what you’re thinking,” Jack said, making himself slow down. “Here we are, in this old place, and me with my whole past thing going on, and I’ve worked myself into a state, dreamed up a dead person.” Her silence told
him that was exactly what she thought. Well? Jack asked himself. Did you see a woman on the bed or not? Now, with the living room lights blazing away, he wasn’t quite so sure.

  Relieved to see Jack’s breathing back to something like normal, for the next hour or so Sarah stayed with him, assessing his mood. His voice was still hoarse—the aftereffects of the asthma attack. She didn’t mention the woman again. She didn’t want that on his mind before he fell asleep if she could avoid it. Jack gradually came to accept that he could have dreamed her up, and traipsed back to his room.

  “Why not come in with me for tonight?” Sarah suggested, seeing the way he hesitated to go inside. “Just bring your mattress in, and—”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “I don’t mind, Jack. In fact—”

  “Honestly, Mum, I’m all right.” He grinned sheepishly. “If I get scared, I’ll watch TV or something. You go back to bed. I know where my medicine is. I’ll be okay.”

  Seeing that he was embarrassed, Sarah nodded, quickly kissed him on the cheek, and left him alone. For the next few minutes she perched on the edge of her bed, simply listening to Jack breathe. She knew every tiny sound his throat made after an attack. She knew when to worry, when not to, when to phone for an ambulance. This was not one of those times. Even so, she eavesdropped for another hour or so, alert for any kind of unbalanced rhythm.

  Was the whole fixation with his dad about to begin again? She faced the possibility, steeling herself for it. Let’s just get through tonight, she thought, the same little mantra she’d told herself on all those other nights in the old house. One day at a time. Hearing nothing new from his room, she finally slipped into a fitful slumber.

  Sleep wouldn’t come for Jack. Finally he gave up trying, jumped out of bed, and swished the curtains wide. It had stopped raining. Dark clouds raced across the sky, with the moon a dim halo behind them. He considered switching on his bedroom light, but didn’t want to admit to himself that he needed to. He was uncomfortably aware that he was behaving like he had when his dad died, but this was different. He’d never actually seen his dad after he died. But he had seen the woman on the bed clearly. She’d scared him, too, and realizing that brought a thin smile to Jack’s lips. Wasn’t he supposed to be the one not afraid of dead people? Anyway, he’d dreamed her up, hadn’t he? Maybe. Probably. But I did see her in the garden with the little girl, he thought. I didn’t dream that up.

  Jack made himself lie down on top of the sheets, shuddering as he remembered the light, feathery feel of the woman’s hand. Then he sat up again, drawing the duvet over his knees. To distract himself, he read a little whenever the moon peeped out from behind the clouds, but left the light off. His breathing was still erratic. His nose remained blocked as well, and he kept sniffing. If his old attacks were anything to go by, the sniffing and occasional cough would last for days.

  It was as he eased over onto his left side that Jack sensed something outside the room. As he turned, a white, elongated hand appeared under the crack at the bottom of his door. The hand reached under the door, as if fumbling for a grip, and then pulled the rest of its body into the room.

  Jack stifled a shriek. It was her—definitely the ghost woman again.

  She rose rapidly up, drifting toward the ceiling, and it took all of Jack’s self-control not to run. Drawing closer, she glided across the ceiling until she loomed, hovering, directly over him. Then she rotated and lowered herself as slowly as a mote of dust toward the bed.

  Jack pulled in his legs, and she alighted next to him on the bed. If the ghost had made any kind of threatening gesture, Jack would have screamed. But she did not threaten him in any way. Her movements were serene, not hasty, the air currents in the room making her body flutter like a sheet in a languid breeze. Watching closely, Jack saw that she had to seize the mattress to keep herself from being blown away, she was so light.

  “Well,” she whispered, “an alarmed boy. Not alarmed by me, I trust?” She smiled uneasily. Her teeth were crooked, a few discolored, one entirely black.

  Jack jerked his knees up, clutching the sheets around him.

  It was recognizably the mother of the little girl he’d seen in the old garden, but how she’d changed: so much thinner, more haggard. A plain crêpe dress, down to her ankles, hugged her bony frame, and it was utterly black, as if she was still in mourning. There was something disturbing about the dress as well: it was ripped at the neck, torn violently open. Moonlight spilled across her throat.

  But one thing gave Jack a little more courage. She was clearly scared. She looked as scared of seeing him as he was of her. A great shiver passed through her body. Seeing it unfroze Jack’s voice enough to ask a question.

  “Are you . . . are you cold?”

  “I do not feel the cold,” she answered. “In any case, your room is far warmer than mine ever was, Jack.”

  “You know my name?”

  The ghost woman smiled. “Your mother says it tenderly and often enough.”

  Her voice was gentle, reassuring.

  Little by little she circled his bed, never quite touching the ground. Her light body was affected in bizarre ways by the slight breezes in the room. Her head, caught in a current of air from the window, blew backward, her hair flying straight out, the neck muscles forcefully straining. At the same time, the rest of her body was caught in a downdraft descending from the ceiling. No part of her was ever quite still. It was dizzying to watch her for long.

  “I am sorry I affrighted you earlier,” she said. “I did not mean for that to happen. But you also affrighted me. I never had a son, you know, though I often wished for one of my own. May I?”

  Jack realized that she wanted to touch his face.

  He hesitated, then said yes.

  She bent across and ran her fingers through his hair. Her touch, Jack was grateful to find, was warm, and so light that he could barely feel it. Her fingertips strayed onto his cheek and she smiled timidly. A breeze lifted the smile, pulling it upward before letting it go again.

  “Who are you?” Jack murmured.

  “Oh, but who are you?” she asked him back. “There has never been a one entering this house who could see me. More remarkable than a ghost: what nature of thing are you, Jack, that you can see and converse with the dead?”

  She sat tensely above the sheets, passing his hair gently between her thumb and forefinger. Then she dropped her head closer to his, and Jack flinched as her disarrayed black locks spilled across his face.

  “Oh, yes,” she whispered, looking him over thoroughly. “I think my beloved daughter Isabella would have liked you. . . .”

  Jack should have been able to feel her breath this close to him, but there was no breath. No odors from her, either. No smells at all.

  “Isabella?” Jack whispered. “Was that your daughter’s name? Were you her mother?”

  “Mother?” She seemed to turn that around in her mind. “Yes, I suppose. If a ghost can still call itself such a thing, I am, or was, though there is no one who calls me by that name now. A Ghost Mother. I like the sound of that. I . . . can be your Ghost Mother, perhaps. Would you like one of those?”

  Jack wasn’t quite sure what to reply.

  “What was . . . is your name?” he asked.

  “My name?” The Ghost Mother didn’t appear to be interested in this question, so Jack asked another.

  “Are you alone here?”

  “Indeed, I am nothing but an old dead mother, without a child these many past years.” The Ghost Mother plucked at her lower lip. “But here we are, talking like fast friends, when I have not yet introduced you to my beloved! Please forgive me.” She sighed, her expression suddenly emotional.

  “I am asking you to imagine a girl, Jack. She was twelve years old when Death took her from me. Is that your age, too?” Jack nodded and the Ghost Mother smiled. “Her name was Isabella Kate Rosewood, and she was a daughter of mine once upon a time, and a good one. I will not elevate her in your eyes, for I do not beli
eve that one child should be elevated above any other. In any case, she left us more than a century and a half past, since which time I have been alone in the world, with only memories of her to keep me comfort. Can I tell you some of them, Jack? Do you wish to hear more about her?”

  Jack swallowed. He could tell how much the Ghost Mother wanted to go on.

  “I’d . . . yes . . . like to hear more,” he said.

  The Ghost Mother put her hand on her heart. Jack could see her concentrating furiously.

  “I . . . I cannot recall everything, but . . . ” She stopped, licked her lips. “I recall that . . .” She clenched her fists, her voice suddenly trapped in her throat. Jack wanted to help her. At first he thought she was having difficulty because she was overwhelmed with emotion. Gradually he saw it was because she could not remember.

  She screamed then, so suddenly that Jack jerked back. Her hands covered her face. Between fingers clenched over her mouth, she rasped, “A terrible time Isabella had of it in that room, Jack. Long I prayed that my love would be enough, for the horror of her affliction to take me instead, but it would not. Love, and a dear heart? What are those compared with the Captain of Death? He took my husband and my daughter. He takes what he will. And all the hope and tears in the world cannot bring back those we cherish.”

  The Ghost Mother gripped the frame of the bed, to steady herself.

  Jack instinctively reached out his hand to her, thinking of his own dad. Hesitantly, he asked, “How did they die?”

  “Consumption.” She shot out a bitter laugh. “The beautiful disease, I have heard it called. And for a time the victims do have a rosy hue; the cheeks gleam prettily; a fever gilds the skin, makes it shine! Isabella had that, too, but in the end the only thing left is the cough. You should have seen her, Jack, like an angel the fierce way she struggled to stay alive. She never gave in to it. Never.”