Breathe: A Ghost Story (Fiction - Middle Grade)

by Cliff McNish

  Yet he could hear them. He heard their screams only too well. The Nightmare Passage made sure of that. It wasn’t about to leave Jack alone, now that it knew about him. It forced him to listen. Following his return to the house, day and night it made him hear the screams of all its souls.

  When those screams were too many, Jack found that he could do only one thing to make them bearable. He would focus on a single set that bothered him less than the others—the screams of the Ghost Mother. Peering from time to time into the Nightmare Passage, he even saw her occasionally, and every time he saw her she was being dragged across a featureless plain. The plain relentlessly grinded into and smashed up her body, and though she put out her hands for assistance no other soul came to her aid. Jack felt cold, watching her. He felt no pity; he felt nothing. He simply watched her being slowly torn to pieces. Only once did something happening to the Ghost Mother stir an emotion in him. It occurred when she swept past Ann and another person—someone Jack did not recognize—a boy with blue, heavily wrinkled eyes. Until that moment, Jack had seen the Ghost Mother beg for help from everyone she passed. But when she saw the boy she no longer did that. She stopped pleading altogether, stopped doing anything. She didn’t even protect herself. She just closed her eyes and let the wind take her anywhere it willed.

  The third morning after his return to the farmhouse, following another nearly sleepless night, Jack rose early and made his way to the kitchen. It was quiet and peaceful downstairs. His mum wasn’t up yet. Each day since they’d gotten back Sarah had slept in late, still recovering from what the Ghost Mother had done to her.

  Jack noticed a couple of sparrows flitting busily between the branches of the big garden tree. He watched them intently, trying to shut the Nightmare Passage out of his mind. It was impossible.

  “Help me,” he said aloud to anyone on the Other Side who might be listening. “I don’t know what to do. Please. You have to show me how to get the souls out of the Nightmare Passage.”

  He heard nothing in reply.

  Silence from the Other Side.

  Or was it silence?

  Jack thought about Isabella. The last time he’d summoned her, he hadn’t needed the touch of the rocking chair to help him to it. Intriguingly, his gift alone had managed it. And now that he’d spent so much time observing the Nightmare Passage, closer to all those desperate souls, he sensed his gift could do more, that it was even stronger than it had been. How strong?

  Narrowing his eyes, Jack cautiously reached out. He let his mind find the Other Side. He felt the presence of Isabella there, and her father, William. Then his attention alighted amongst the rest of the souls, and in doing so he learned that it wasn’t nearly so tranquil there on the Other Side as he had supposed. In fact, it wasn’t tranquil at all. All the souls who had lost friends and family members to the Nightmare Passage were calling frantically. They couldn’t bear to be separated from them. They wanted to be able to soar down to that dark place and fetch their loved ones away.

  And, Jack realized, it was to him that the souls of the Other Side were calling. They were begging him to help them reach those they loved in the Nightmare Passage.

  Could he do it? Could his gift reach so many, across such a divide?

  Trembling, still afraid to get too close to the Nightmare Passage, Jack reached out with his mind toward it and a narrow crack, the slenderest of bridges, appeared momentarily between the Other Side and the Nightmare Passage. At the same moment, Jack felt the Nightmare Passage itself slowly uncoil from the edges of the darkness. It knew what he was doing. It took an interest and, opening a wild eye, shrieked at him.

  Jack stayed calm, making the bridge wider. It was hard, but not as hard as it might have been because the Nightmare Passage itself had inadvertently made it easier. Jack knew its layout now, its vast dimensions. The Nightmare Passage, thinking itself impregnable, had let his gaze roam freely. Now, though, sensing the danger, it instead tried to shut him out. It resisted him. Gathering the souls inside its long reach, it readied itself.

  Jack withdrew his gaze. For a few minutes, breathing unsteadily, he looked out of the kitchen window. When he heard his mum go to the bathroom, he brewed her a coffee and kept it hot until she wandered downstairs.

  She entered, still toweling her showered hair, and smiled as he handed the coffee across the table to her. Sitting opposite him, she drank it slowly. It was a cloudy morning, slightly chilly.

  “Come with me,” Jack said, once she’d finished.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He led her to Isabella’s old room, and for a while they simply sat together next to the window. Jack let his gaze hover out over the fields, the horizon, the edge of the wood. At last he asked hesitantly, “Do you remember anything? I mean, about when the Ghost Mother was inside you?”

  It was the first time they’d spoken about it properly, and Sarah was caught by surprise.

  “Remember anything?” She lowered her eyes. “Jack, I remember everything. All the things she did to you. Her nestled against your hip, her mouth . . . and the children, those poor, beautiful children . . .” She reached out, felt Jack’s cheek. “But mainly you, resisting her. That’s what I remember. You kept me alive in there, don’t you realize that? You kept me sane.” She stared at the floor. “Jack, I tried to stop her. . . .”

  “Mum, I know. I could tell—”

  “No, Jack. You’ll never know how hard I tried. But in the end, when I had nothing left, and she knelt down and lowered that pillow over your face, I found . . . I don’t know how, but I found . . . something. I couldn’t let her use these.” Sarah raised her hands toward the light of the window.

  They lapsed into silence, staring out into the garden.

  Jack turned back to her and said unflinchingly, “Mum, are you afraid of death?”

  Sarah leaned closer. “I’m afraid of the thought of your death,” she murmured. “I don’t want that happening anytime soon. Not while I’m on this earth, anyway. Don’t rush away from me the way Isabella did from her mother, Jack. Promise me you won’t do that.”

  Jack didn’t promise. He couldn’t promise her that. No one could promise anyone that.

  He reached out with his gift to the Other Side. He sensed all the souls there, haunted by loved ones lost to the Nightmare Passage. The Nightmare Passage itself drew in a sharp breath—as if waiting for him.

  Downstairs, the grandfather clock chimed.

  “I can’t pull the souls out of the Nightmare Passage,” Jack said quietly. “I can’t reach them there, Mum. I just can’t.”

  “I know, you told me—”

  “Wait. Let me finish. I can’t reach those in the Nightmare Passage, but I can reach those on the Other Side.”

  Sarah glanced up, seeing the glint in his eye.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying, Mum? Many of those on the Other Side are calling to me. They’re calling me now. They’re pleading. I know what they want me to do. They want me to bring them down from the Other Side. I realize that now. And I can. I can reach the souls there, all those who’ve lost people to the Nightmare Passage.”

  “All of them?”

  Jack nodded.

  There was a break in the clouds. Sunshine lit up the room, falling across the walls.

  “Do you think the Ghost Mother deserves to be in the Nightmare Passage?” Jack asked.

  “Yes,” Sarah replied at once, then glanced at him. “But do you think she should stay there forever?”

  Jack considered that. Part of him wanted it; another part thought of Isabella and what she might want.

  “The things Mary Eloise did . . .” Sarah shook her head. “But all her hope went with her daughter, Jack. She didn’t believe that love could survive death. She convinced herself that death conquers everything.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Jack nodded, peering out of the window. A breeze threaded through the gard
en, and out into the wheat fields beyond.

  “I’m wondering,” Jack said, having trouble keeping the tension out of his voice, “if maybe . . . maybe the Ghost Mother’s loved ones could decide. You know. Isabella. Her husband, William. We should let them decide. What do you think?”

  “Let them decide what, Jack?”

  “If the Ghost Mother deserves to stay in the Nightmare Passage, or if they want to take her to the Other Side. Mum, maybe all those on the Other Side with people left in the Nightmare Passage could choose. If I summon them all, the loved ones themselves can decide.”

  Sarah stared at him, her eyes widening.

  “Jack, what on earth are you going to do?”

  The first wave that struck Gwyneth dragged her body for miles across the icy plain. By the time Ann and Daniel reached her she was in a pitiful state, and the only thing to be grateful for was that her wailing could barely be heard over the wind. Only Daniel’s experience and skill found Gwyneth at all, and then he had to use all his strength just to keep her high and out of danger as the next wave struck, and the next, and the next.

  Ann did what she could to tend Gwyneth’s injuries and cover her up in the intervals. Oliver was gone. Charlie was gone. Ann had been forced to make a choice about who to tell Daniel to go after, and she chose Gwyneth, because she couldn’t have lived with herself if she had made any other choice. But it meant that she would probably never see Charlie and Oliver again. Daniel had explained that to her: the Nightmare Passage was so immense that the souls, once divided from each other, rarely saw each other, and even then it was usually at some teasing distance just too far away to reach, as if the Nightmare Passage had deliberately arranged for that to happen.

  Ann lost sight of Oliver as soon as the first big wave struck. The last she’d seen of him was a screaming red blur being tossed through the air. A hundred or more waves had struck since then, and a new one was forming now, behind her.

  The wind picked up. Ann roused herself. She made sure Gwyneth was secure, then glanced at Daniel. Better get ready, his look said.

  Gwyneth peered up. A strange, smiling boy with terrify-ingly white teeth lifted her onto his shoulders as he’d done so many times already. Not for the first time, she wondered who he was; then the pains all over her body took over again and she began screaming as the wind stiffened.

  Charlie was more badly hurt than Gwyneth. He was so terribly injured that he barely realized what was happening around him at all. The waves came and went, shadows and more darkness, and pain, but it was all a blur, a madness. As his face slid across the ice, he occasionally saw other oddly dressed people, but he didn’t understand what they were doing, lining themselves up whenever a new wave arrived. One or two of them had tried to help Charlie, but he was too far gone, and they couldn’t hold him up forever against the biggest waves, so now he was just a piece of debris, landing and falling and being hurled and ripped on the wind. The darkness came again: another wave. For a moment, before it arrived, the wind ceased, and Charlie could hear himself crying.

  Oliver, in another part of the Nightmare Passage, saw the same wave. He didn’t know how many of them had crashed into him since the first, but he’d seen the horror-shapes of enough discarded people blowing across the plain to understand that if he didn’t learn to ride the waves quickly he would soon be too weak to do so. But learning to survive here was hard. The Nightmare Passage made it hard. Oliver didn’t have anyone like Daniel to show him. He had to work it out on his own, with a body already half wrecked.

  Sheer willpower got him to stand up again on the ice as the latest set of storm-clouds massed in the sky above. He faced the wave they brought, cursing it. The wind momentarily abated, then picked up again, blowing ahead of the wave, trying to drive his legs from under him. Oliver took a breath, preparing for the impact.

  But the impact never came. The wave never reached him. There was a voice in his ear, a voice he had not heard for eleven years, and suddenly damaged throats were shouting from all across the Nightmare Passage as nearly everyone there, even the broken bodies with no hope left, found some hope now.

  The Nightmare Passage tried to hold on to its souls. It did everything in its power to do so, but the loved ones, so long denied, streamed across the sky in their millions. Daniel’s teeth flashed with joy. Ann clutched him tightly. And though Charlie, Oliver, and Gwyneth were too tired to raise their arms it did not matter, for their mothers lifted them anyway, drew them from the

  DEAL AFTER REAP KEEPER

  WANT ANOTHER VIVID EAT

  ALTERNATE NO DREAD UNDER PLACES

  USED PURE INSIDE NIGHT TWILIGHT ONLY

  TRYING HONORED END

  CLEANSING LOVE EACH AND ROSY

  WAFT ARMED REAL MEANING

  LOVE IGNITING GREAT HAPPY TIMES

  BE EVER YOURS OFTEN NOW DREAMED.

  Born in northeastern England, Cliff McNish began to write as a way of making up stories for his daughter, Rachel. His fiction, including Th e Silver Child and Silver City, has been published worldwide in nineteen languages. Fans can find out more about Cliff McNish and his books at www.cliffmcnish.com.