Liesl & Po

  “I wasn’t with them,” Will said irritably.

  “Well, I thought you were,” the girl said. “That’s why I ran. They tried to have me arrested.” She squinted at him again and said suspiciously, “If you’re not with the police, then how come you’re following me?”

  “I’m not following you,” Will said, and then in his head added, not exactly. He thought the girl seemed sane enough, even if she did have imaginary friends, and decided to be honest. “I’m a runaway,” he said. “I’ve got nowhere to go.”

  The girl’s face lit up. “We’re runaways too! We’ve got no home at all anymore. Well, I suppose they’ve never really had a home—not for the longest time, anyway. I wouldn’t say the Other Side counts.”

  “The Other Side?” Will was confused again. “What are you talking about? And who’s ‘they’?”

  The girl bit her lip. She seemed to regret having spoken. “They,” she said. “Po and Bundle. Can’t you see them?”

  Will had just about decided that the girl was definitely crazy when at the very edges of his vision he saw something flicker. He sat very still and focused on the dark. There was something moving there, just barely, a shape slowly asserting itself in the darkness, as though the air was water and something—no, two things—were moving underneath its surface. And then, all at once, he could see them: a child-shaped bit of shadow, or air, roughly his size, and another small, fuzzy thing that looked at first glance to be a dog. Or maybe a cat. Difficult to say: Its outlines were not particularly clear.

  Will let out a sharp gasp. “What—what are they?”

  “What do we look like?” The voice was sharp and irritable.

  The girl pointed. “That’s Po,” she said. “You’ll have to forgive its manners. No one has any on the Other Side. And that’s Bundle.”

  The shaggy thing made a noise somewhere between a bark and a meow.

  Will gulped. “But they’re—are they—are they really ghosts?”

  “You can speak to me directly,” Po said peevishly, and its outlines got a little brighter, as though they were catching fire. “I’m right here.”

  The girl said, “Of course they’re ghosts. What else would they be?”

  “But are they—are you—are they—” He felt foolish for stammering, and even more foolish for the question he was about to ask, but he couldn’t help it. He did not know whether to speak to Po or the girl, so he just closed his eyes and quickly blurted out, “Aren’t ghosts dangerous? I mean, don’t they hurt people?”

  “If you don’t stop asking idiotic questions,” Po said, “I’ll give you a case of the shivers that’ll have your teeth dancing a jig.”

  “Po,” the girl said reproachfully. “Be nice.”

  Po became all at once a solid, squat mass of black. Will could only assume the ghost was sulking.

  “They’re not at all dangerous,” the girl said, turning to Will. “Bundle’s quite friendly.”

  As if to prove it, at that moment Will felt a softening around him. He looked down in his lap and saw a pair of coal-black, eye-shaped shadows blinking up at him. Bundle went, Mwark. Will lifted his hand tentatively and stroked the air where it was, for lack of a better word, different—more drape-y and shape-y.

  “See?” The girl nodded her approval. “And Po is wonderful—when it’s not being a grouch,” she added a little louder, and Po muttered something Will could not make out.

  He had noticed, however, that the girl called Po “it,” and he wondered about that. “Isn’t Po a boy or a girl?”

  “Neither. And both. Those things lose meaning on the Other Side. Just like Bundle is both a dog and a cat, and also neither.”

  Will found it all very strange. “But they must have been one or the other at some time. When they were, um, on this side?”

  “Oh, yes, I suppose so.” The girl seemed unconcerned. “But they can hardly be expected to remember. They’ve been on the Other Side for a very long time. So now they are just Bundle and Po, and my friends.” She leaned closer. “They helped me run away from the attic. That’s where I’d been living.”

  At the mention of the attic, Will’s heart jumped a little. He thought of saying, I know, and telling her how he used to stand on the street corner and watch her, but was too shy to do so. Instead he asked, “Why did you run away?”

  The girl squirmed and appeared, for the first time, uncomfortable. “It was time,” she said vaguely, her hand skating over the wooden box in her lap. Will wondered what it contained. He thought, too, of the wooden box he was supposed to have delivered to the Lady Premiere, the one that had started all his troubles: It had looked very much like Liesl’s box. No doubt it was being used by Mr. Gray for some disgusting purpose, for storing frogs’ legs or newt eyeballs or something. “What about you?” she asked. “What’s your story?”

  Will did not want to appear incompetent by telling her about the mix-up with the alchemist’s magic, so instead he said, “Oh, I just wanted to explore a bit. Get off to see the world, and so on.”

  In the corner, Po coughed. Will wondered if the ghost could somehow tell he was lying. He pressed on quickly, “I headed to the train station and jumped on the first train I could find. Hid out in the bathroom while the ticket collector came along, so I wouldn’t get in trouble for riding without a ticket.”

  “That was very clever of you,” the girl said, and Will glowed with pleasure. As far as he knew, no one had ever thought him clever before. “We had to hide out with the luggage. It was very dusty.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve done it loads of times,” Will said again, with a bit of swagger. He was enjoying the girl’s attention. “I’m always on the move.”

  Po coughed again.

  The girl, at least, seemed to believe him. Her eyes grew wide. “Don’t your parents miss you?”

  Now it was Will’s turn to squirm. “I don’t—er—I don’t have any parents. I’m an orphan.”

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said. She was quiet for a moment. “I’m an orphan too. Both of my parents are dead.”

  “Oh,” Will said. “I’m sorry.”

  “My father is on the Other Side now,” the girl said. “That’s why we’re heading west. So we can bring his ashes back to the willow tree, and he can rest, and go Beyond.” She gestured to the box in her lap.

  “I see,” Will said, even though he didn’t, exactly. The girl was weirder than he’d imagined she would be. But he wasn’t sure he minded.

  “Perhaps your parents are on the Other Side too.”

  “Perhaps,” Will said doubtfully. He had never given it much thought. They had died when he was only a newborn, during an influenza outbreak, and he had no memories of them.

  Suddenly the girl began to laugh. “Two homeless orphans,” she said, “and two ghosts. We make a funny team, don’t we?”

  Will said, “I guess so.”

  Po grumbled, “Some team.”

  Bundle went, Mwark.

  The girl put out her small, pale hand. “I’m Liesl,” she said.

  Will’s heart gave another jump. Liesl. All this time he had desperately wanted to know her name, and there it was, and as soon as he knew it, he saw it fitted her exactly. “I’m William,” he said. “But you can call me Will.”

  He took her hand, and they smiled at each other across the dark, as the cart carrying coffins and four stowaways rattled west.

  Part III

  Reversals & Reunions

  Chapter Nineteen

  IT HAD BEEN A VERY DIFFICULT YEAR FOR MRS. Snout, owner of Snout’s Inn and Restaurant, which stood on Crooked Street in Gainsville. Gainsville was the last populated town for forty-seven miles: After Gainsville, the road wound up through the ruddy hills, and then down again, and all around there was nothing but fields and fields and the occasional farmhouse.

  For this reason, Snout’s Inn and Restaurant had never been particularly successful. There simply weren’t enough travelers on the road: only the occasional trapper headed north, or vagrant
farmhands looking for work. Still, if a traveler did come to Gainsville, he or she was bound to stop at Snout’s Inn, as there was simply nowhere else to go. And so Mrs. Snout had watered down her stews, and rarely changed the linens, and hired for an assistant a small, rather dull boy who had lost an eye in a mining accident, and wildly underpaid him, and fed her guests scraps of feet and brain instead of nice cuts of meat without their knowledge, and so she had always squeaked by.

  But this year had been hard—very, very hard.

  That was why she had consented to take on the black-haired man who had shown up on her doorstep earlier in the day, growling that he needed a room and a meal, even though she could tell that he was as crooked as the street the inn was standing on—a robber, no question, and perhaps a murderer, too. But he had offered her two solid silver pieces—very dirty pieces of silver, and no doubt stolen, but money was money—and she had been unable to refuse.

  Now she watched him greedily slurping up his third bowl of potato soup, whitish liquid dribbling appallingly down his long and filthy beard, and sighed to herself. There had been a time—long ago, it seemed, when the sun had still shone—when the farms had flourished, and she had hosted at her table good, honest workers, plowmen and reapers and apple pickers and cattle ranchers, and they had drunk her weak wine, and overpaid for it gladly, and laughed long and loud and stayed up to sing songs and tell stories around the fire.

  When she heard a soft but insistent knocking at her front door, for a moment she had a wild fantasy that she would open her door to find a whole group of red-faced, smiling men, who would greet her with a great “Hullo, there!” and fill the house with noise and laughter.

  She was therefore highly disappointed when she opened the door and saw only a small, shivering girl and a very thin boy with extremely large, and very pink, ears. It had started to rain. Both of the children were soaking wet.

  “Excuse me,” the boy said, and Mrs. Snout saw at once he was trying to act brave for the girl’s sake. “We were hoping we might have a room for the night.”

  “We’ve come a long way,” the girl said. Her voice was soft and gentle. “And we’re very tired.” And Mrs. Snout saw that she was. The girl’s eyelids kept fluttering as though desperate to close.

  “Rooms are a dollar and twenty pence a night,” Mrs. Snout said.

  The children exchanged a glance. “We—we have no money,” the boy said, his voice faltering.

  “Then I have no rooms,” Mrs. Snout replied, and began to shut the door.

  “Please!” the girl piped up. “Please, we can work. We’ll do dishes, or the sweeping.”

  Mrs. Snout peered closely at them. The little girl was wearing a coat that, although worn and threadbare in places, looked as though it might once have been expensive, and she was carrying a large, polished wooden box. Outside, it was gray and gloomy and dark. The streets were very still. “How did you get here?” Mrs. Snout asked suspiciously. “And where are you coming from?”

  Again, the small, pale children exchanged glances. Mrs. Snout could not put her finger on it—no, she couldn’t say for certain—but she almost had the impression that both of them paused momentarily, as though listening to the wind.

  And indeed, both Will and Liesl had been waiting while Po said, “I don’t see the harm in telling her.”

  “We came from Cloverstown,” the boy said after a moment. “We came by, um, coach.”

  “Then you must have some money,” Mrs. Snout said. “Coaches aren’t free.”

  “We—we used it up,” the boy stuttered. He seemed to be growing desperate.

  Mrs. Snout nodded to the box in the girl’s arms. “And what’s that, eh? You won’t pretend you’re carting around an empty jewelry box. What do you have? Out with it.” Behind her, something clattered to the floor: The black-haired man had dropped his spoon.

  The girl clutched the box tightly to her chest. “Nothing!” she said emphatically. “There is nothing at all inside.”

  “I cannot help you if you will not be honest with me.” Mrs. Snout again started to close the door.

  “Please!” Will stuck his foot in the door just as Mrs. Snout was swinging it shut, to prevent it from closing all the way. He was exhausted and freezing; his clothes were damp; the long and bumpy ride in the cart had left his legs numb. “We’ll stay only one night. In the morning we head west, beyond the hills.”

  “Maybe you know it,” Liesl put in eagerly. “We’re going to the Red House.”

  The door, which was open only a small crack, barely enough to admit Will’s foot, swung open a little wider. Mrs. Snout’s mood shifted.

  “The Red House, hmmm?” She looked Will and Liesl over more closely, and seemed to come to a decision. “Wait here.”

  Then she disappeared into the house. Liesl got a quick view of an ugly, black-haired man staring intently at her from a room farther into the house before the door clicked shut in her face.

  They waited. Po asked, “What’s taking her so long?” and flitted about impatiently, but neither Liesl nor Will had the energy to answer.

  Then Mrs. Snout was back. She was carrying two hot potatoes wrapped in a tea towel.

  “Here,” she said, passing the potatoes to Will, who felt tears of gratitude spring to his eyes. He had to blink them away quickly, so Liesl would not see. “I can’t let you have a room if you’ve got no money to pay. But the barn around back will be warm and dry. You can sleep there tonight.”

  “Thank you,” Liesl said fervently. The smell of the potato made her stomach growl.

  “Mmmm,” Mrs. Snout grunted. Again she watched them closely, through narrow eyes. “The walk to the Red House is long. Do you know the way?”

  “I—I think I’ll remember,” Liesl said. Will thought she sounded uncertain.

  “You will come to a green house after you’ve climbed the foothills,” Mrs. Snout said. “That is Evergreen Manor. You must stop there. Tell Mrs. Evergreen I sent you. She will give you food and water and point you in the right direction.”

  Liesl would have hugged Mrs. Snout, except that Mrs. Snout did not seem like the kind of person who liked to be hugged. So instead she just said, “Thank you,” once again.

  “Mmmm.” Mrs. Snout jerked her chin in the direction of the barn. “Now go on with you. It’s late and you should be sleeping.” And with that she shut the door again. This time Will and Liesl heard the latch sliding into place.

  The black-haired man was not in the dining room when Mrs. Snout returned to it. He had left his bowl sitting in a small pool of spilled soup. She shook her head. No manners. Well, at least he had gone to bed. It made her distinctly uncomfortable to have him hanging around. His very presence gave her an itchy, evaluated feeling, as though every time he looked at her he was only trying to determine how much he could get for prying out her fillings and selling them, or chopping her body into neat cuts of meat for the butcher.

  Mrs. Snout passed into the kitchen, where her half-blind assistant was squatting in the corner playing with a ball of string, like a cat.

  “You,” Mrs. Snout said, and the boy scrambled to his feet. One eye blinked guiltily at her. The other was a mere hole, a bit of scratched skin. Mrs. Snout never got used to looking at it. Instead she focused on the tip of his nose.

  “You are to take Benny”—that was the mule, a skinny, bad-tempered thing—“and ride at once to Evergreen Manor.”

  “Yes’m.”

  She fished the trim white card from her apron pocket. It had been given her in the morning by a woman with a long fur coat. The script across its front was elegant, and it smelled vaguely of expensive perfume. She checked the name on the card briefly. “You are to find the Lady Premiere and tell her we have news of the runaway children. Tell her that they are on their way to the Red House. Say it back to me.”

  “They are on their way to the Red House,” the boy repeated dutifully.

  Mrs. Snout nodded. “They should reach Evergreen by tomorrow evening. Tell the Lady Premi
ere to be prepared.”

  “Yes’m.” The boy mashed his hat on his head determinedly and prepared to set off.

  “Not so fast!” Mrs. Snout glared fixedly at his nose. “This is most important. You must demand the reward she offered. Two whole gold pieces, and no less. Do not return without the money.”

  Mrs. Snout sighed as the boy scrambled out the back door. She passed her fingers once more along the little white card, then slipped it back into her apron.

  Desperate times, she thought, called for desperate measures.

  Chapter Twenty

  LIESL AND WILL ATE THEIR POTATOES GREEDILY even before they reached the old barn—so quickly they barely tasted them, and burned their tongues and fingers in the process. The potatoes made only the tiniest, barest dent in their hunger, but they were better than nothing.

  In the corner of the barn—which was, as the innkeeper had said, dry and relatively warm, and which smelled only the very smallest bit like animal droppings—they found a single wool blanket.

  “We’ll have to share,” Liesl said, yawning, and placed the wooden box carefully on the floor. Then she and Will lay down beside it and pulled the blanket up to their chins. “You’ll keep watch, won’t you, Po?” she said drowsily.

  “Yes,” Po said. “I’ll wake you at dawn.”

  Neither Will nor Liesl said thank you. Under the blanket, both of their small chests rose in unison, like swells in the ocean, and after only a minute the barn was filled with the quiet sounds of snoring.

  Po, watching them, felt a twinge, as though a large hand had reached out and pinched its Essence. The ghost was startled and bothered by the feeling. Distant memories tugged at Po: a ring of children, chanting something (game, the word appeared to Po suddenly), and Po standing on the outside, left out.

  Left out: two more words the ghost had not thought of for the longest of long times. What did belonging mean to a ghost? What did it matter? A ghost belonged to nothing but the Other Side, and the air, and the deep, dark tunnel of time that has no walls or ceiling or floor, but only goes on forever.