Liesl & Po

  “A criminal disguise! Didn’t you hear what the—ACHOO!—Lady Premiere said? In possession of stolen property! ACHOO! And fugitives to boot! ACHOO!”

  “I don’t know,” Mo said doubtfully.

  The door of the room banged open, admitting a gust of old, cold air. The Lady Premiere swept regally in from the hallway, followed by the alchemist.

  “We will perform the ceremony here,” she said, gesturing to the old dining room table. “I will see it work with my own eyes. There will be no mistakes this time.”

  “No, no,” the alchemist hastened to assure her. “Absolutely none.”

  “We will wait for Augusta,” the Lady Premiere said sharply, “since she has been so instrumental to us.”

  Next to Will, Liesl began to tremble. “Augusta’s here,” she whispered. “She means to kill me, I’m sure of it.”

  “I won’t let her,” Will said, with a confidence he did not feel. “Don’t worry, Liesl. We’ll figure out a way to escape.”

  “How?” Po flickered. “Do you intend to faint them into submission?”

  “What we need is time.” Liesl strained against the handcuffs, then quickly gave up as the metal cut into her wrists. But perhaps if she could somehow get her legs free . . . “We need time to plan. Time to think.”

  “We need a distraction,” Will said, remembering how he and the other orphans had sometimes set firecrackers off just outside the warden’s window, whenever the warden was supposed to be paddling one of the boys for misbehavior, so the warden would be prevented from delivering the full forty swings.

  “A distraction!” Liesl seized on the idea. “Po, do you think you might . . . ?”

  But Po had disappeared, taking Bundle with it.

  “Great.” Will rolled his eyes. “Very brave.”

  “I’m sure Po will be back,” Liesl said, but she sounded uneasy.

  Footsteps rang sharply down the hall. Then Augusta swept into the room. She cast a withering glance around her, at the faded wallpaper that hung in patches and tatters, and the uneven wooden floor, and the old dining room table, and the insect-eaten cushions on the high-backed chairs, and wrinkled her nose in distaste.

  “I had hoped never to return to this place,” Augusta said. “It is just as hideous as I remembered.”

  “Hello, Augusta,” the Lady Premiere said. “You’re just in time. The alchemist is about to perform the magic.”

  “Magic!” the old lady from the train repeated. “Bah!” Then she sneezed.

  “Magic!” Mo shook his head wonderingly. “Who’dve thought.”

  “Magic!” In spite of herself, Liesl was curious.

  Augusta swiveled her head in Liesl’s direction. “There you are, my pet. Safe and sound.” She came across the room, her long skirts rustling against the wooden floor with a hissing sound that reminded Liesl of a snake. She placed a hand heavily on Liesl’s shoulder and said in a low voice, “For the time being, at least. It will be a long journey back to Dirge, and these roads are very dangerous. I fear you will not make it.”

  Liesl jerked away from her stepmother’s grasp and nearly toppled off her chair. Augusta laughed meanly.

  “We are ready,” the alchemist announced. “Where is the magic?”

  “The only magic I’d like to see—ACHOO!—is the delivery of these two troublemakers to jail.”

  “Quiet!” the Lady Premiere thundered. She directed her fierce stare at the old woman and her two traveling companions. “I will permit you to stay because of your role in bringing these two thieves to justice. Especially you, sir. It is a credit to your loyalty.” She nodded at Mo, who blushed bright red all the way up to his hair and cast a desperate glance at Will. Will refused to look at him, feeling he had been terribly betrayed.

  “But,” the Lady Premiere continued emphatically, “I must insist on absolute and total silence. If I hear so much as a peep from any of you, I can assure you, you will regret it.”

  The old lady sneezed surreptitiously into the sleeve of her coat. Mo went rapidly from red to white. Even the policeman seemed to shrink guiltily backward, like a young boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

  The Lady Premiere smiled tightly. “Much better.” She lowered herself into a chair at the head of the table.

  “The potion, if you please,” said the alchemist. His hands were trembling slightly. It was time! Time, at last, to prove what he was capable of.

  With great ceremony, the Lady Premiere withdrew the wooden box she had confiscated from Liesl and placed it carefully on the table in front of the alchemist.

  Liesl gave a small cry of surprise. “That isn’t magic,” she said, startled into speaking out. “You’ve got everything mixed up. That’s my father. We carried him here, to bury him next to the willow tree.”

  “Your father?” The Lady Premiere narrowed her eyes. She believed Liesl to be the servant girl Vera, as Augusta had claimed.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Augusta jumped in. “The girl is full of lies. She conspired with the boy to steal the potion; she is only pretending to be confused, thinking you will spare her.”

  “Then she does not know me,” the Lady Premiere said coldly. “There is no point in playing innocent with me, you poisonous wretch. You know as well as I do that the boxes were switched. What you’ve had with you all this time is nothing less than the greatest magic in the world.”

  “In the universe!” the alchemist piped up.

  Will was filled with a sense of wonder as the meaning of everything that had happened became clear. He remembered the two wooden boxes sitting side by side on Mr. Gray’s table, and how sleepy he was when he confused them. All at once, Will realized his error: He had taken Liesl’s father’s ashes to the Lady Premiere, and he and Liesl had been in possession of the real magic all along.

  “It was an accident,” Will squeaked.

  “It was treasonous!” the alchemist hissed.

  “I don’t understand,” Liesl murmured. She was truly and hopelessly confused. “Where are my father’s ashes?”

  “I have taken care of them.” Augusta bent down to speak quietly in Liesl’s ear. “Do not trouble your pretty little head about that.”

  Liesl turned pale. “What did you do?” she whispered fiercely.

  Augusta’s smile was like the wide grin of a piranha: humorless, and all teeth. “I have shored him up tightly behind a downstairs wall, where he can keep company with the slick and the slime and the deep and the damp and the creepy, crawly things, and where he will be always and forever in the dark.”

  “You’re a monster.” Liesl could barely get the words out. The room underneath her chair seemed to be swinging wildly from side to side. She worried for a moment that she might be dying—and then for another terrible moment, felt she wouldn’t care if she were.

  “Enough dawdling!” the Lady Premiere barked. She gestured to a chair on her left. “Augusta, if you please.”

  Augusta inclined her head graciously and swept to the Lady Premiere’s side. “My pleasure,” she cooed, settling her massive girth into the narrow chair, which creaked and moaned under her weight.

  “And now . . .” The Lady Premiere folded her hands in her lap. But she was anything but calm; she eyed the wooden box with the greed of a cat eyeing an injured mouse. “The magic, if you please.”

  The room was utterly silent.

  The old lady stopped sneezing.

  Will and Liesl held their breath.

  And the alchemist opened the box.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  A FUNNY THING HAPPENED WHEN THE ALCHEMIST saw, instead of the missing magic that had been the start of all his trouble—magic made from summer afternoons, from laughter and snowflakes, magic distilled from the sun!—a mound of worthless powder that looked suspiciously like potato flour: He felt in that moment as though his insides, too, had been turned to flour, all dry and crumbly. For a second he worried he would disintegrate into a pile on the floor. Then, feeling the weight of the Lady Premiere
’s eyes on him, he almost wished he would.

  “Well?” the Lady Premiere demanded eagerly. “How does it look?”

  “Oh—all in order. Yes, absolutely. Very magic,” the alchemist stammered, angling his body slightly so that the contents of the box were concealed from the Lady’s view. His mind was cycling furiously. He knew without doubt that if he were to admit to the Lady Premiere that the magic had once again been lost, it would be very, very bad for him. She had already threatened several times to consign him to the darkest, dampest corners of her dungeons, and provide him free lodgings among her rats, should he fail to recover the magic that had been promised her.

  “Are you going to get on with it or what?” the Lady Premiere prodded him.

  “Patience, dear Lady,” the alchemist said, licking sweat from his upper lip. “Magic is a very finicky thing. It cannot be rushed.”

  The Lady Premiere settled back in her chair, grumbling. The alchemist mopped his forehead with his sleeve.

  Time. What he needed was time.

  Across the room, Liesl was thinking exactly the same thing. Moving her ankles continuously back and forth, she felt a slight loosening of the ropes. She had to move ever so slowly: Periodically, Augusta swiveled to fix her with a terrible stare, and she could feel the old woman’s eyes on her as well. If only Po would come back! Perhaps it could make itself visible, as it had just before they escaped from the attic. How long ago that seemed.

  The alchemist began muttering to himself. It sounded to Liesl’s ears as though he were reciting a spell or incantation. At least, she thought, the attention was now firmly on him. If she could somehow manage to swing her body around toward Will, perhaps he could help her jimmy the handcuffs. . . .

  A small blue flame appeared in the air, hovering just above the alchemist’s outstretched palm. He continued murmuring under his breath, and it swelled to a melon-sized ball of flame.

  The Lady Premiere half rose from her seat; a small gasp went around the room. Even Liesl stopped fidgeting and stared.

  It was real. The alchemist was doing magic.

  “Now,” the Lady Premiere said, and her eyes reflected twin orange balls of fire. “Call up the dead.”

  This was what the alchemist had feared. He had hoped to keep the Lady Premiere distracted with a simple fire charm. He always carried some flame-wood and a small quantity of sparking potion with him when he traveled, and he had prayed that this little display would buy him some time to think.

  Now, he knew, he could no longer pretend. He would have to tell the truth.

  The ball of fire floating in the air flared, as the alchemist opened his mouth. “The magic . . . ,” he started to say. The magic is lost.

  But he did not finish his sentence.

  All of a sudden, the room seemed to blink. The empty air shivered, and flexed, and then opened like a mouth, revealing a long, dark throat.

  Liesl recognized the dark space at once: It was a tunnel to the Other Side.

  The Lady Premiere stood up all the way, so quickly she overturned her chair, which fell to the ground with a clatter.

  The alchemist gaped.

  The old woman sneezed.

  Unseen, Po strained to hold open the entrance between sides.

  And then the ghosts came howling through the tunnel, with the whirling, swirling energy of a thousand winds, and everything was chaos.

  Chapter Thirty

  PO HAD SEEN THE NEED FOR A DISTRACTION EVEN before Will had suggested it. And so at the first opportunity, the ghost had slipped back to the Other Side.

  Plan, Bundle, the ghost had thought to its companion. What we need is a plan.

  Mwark, Bundle thought back, even more emphatically than usual.

  They were in a place of towering skyscrapers built out of sheer black rock. Souls drifted around them, a dark mist. Po saw a line of the newly dead approaching from a distance: dozens of them, looking bewildered, speaking out loud in grating, almost human voices.

  “Where are we?”

  “I don’t understand. I just went out to the store to get some butter.”

  “Aunt Carol always said that cities were dangerous. . . .”

  Poor, lost new souls. As Po watched them get closer, it was filled with a sensation that felt like dispersing but was emptier and bigger, somehow: as though its Essence was evaporating into nothing.

  Po knew what Liesl would call it. She would call it sadness. The voices, the new souls, came closer.

  “This isn’t like any place I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s New York? I hear they have big buildings in New York.”

  All those new ghosts: All they wanted was to go back to the Living Side, and back, too, in time—back to health and happiness, or even pain and sickness and poverty, so long as they were alive.

  Then, suddenly, Po had an idea.

  It had opened a door for Liesl, so that she could cross to the Other Side.

  It would open one now, so that the ghosts could cross back.

  Po focused its thoughts into sound.

  “Hello!” it called out, against the black expanse of space. “Hello! You there!”

  The new ghosts stopped marching. They squinted at Po, confused, and their voices became low murmurs.

  “Now who is that, do you think?”

  “I can’t seem to make him out. Or is it a her?”

  “Everything looks a bit fuzzy. Does it look fuzzy to you? My doctor did say my eyes were going. . . .”

  The Living Side was folded up against the place where Po was standing, separated by only a very thin membrane of existence, and from it Po could feel Liesl’s pulsing desperation, her need for escape. From it, too, he could hear a distant chanting, and see a glowing warm ball of light—no, of fire—which grew larger and larger, and filled Po’s Essence with a sense of heat and urgency.

  Po did not know how many laws of the universe it was about to break, but the ghost put the thought out of its mind.

  “Here,” Po said. “The path you are looking for is this way.”

  The new souls murmured and rustled, repeating the word path to themselves in confusion. Po thought for a moment it would not be able to go through with the dishonesty, with the tearing—but then Liesl’s need came pulsing through the tissue-thin layers between worlds again, and the ball of fire burned like a beacon.

  For the second time in the long, long course of its death, Po lied.

  “This way,” the ghost said, “will take you home.”

  And on the final word, he pulled. He strained and dug and stretched, and the space between the Other Side and the Living Side became a huge, yawning hole.

  And the ghosts, responding to the promise of that simple word home—which carried inside of it as much magic, certainly, as the Lady Premiere could ever wish for—began streaming and tumbling out.

  Because the ghosts were very new ghosts, they had not started to blend yet, and so were quite visible. And yet they were very clearly ghosts: Some had holes in their faces, or were missing arms or legs, where their physical selves had begun to dissipate and merge with the rest of the universe. As Will watched in wonder and horror, an old man came apart in front of his very eyes, like a drawing of a person being smudged into an indistinct blob of color.

  It was not clear who was more confused, the ghosts or the living people. Already, they were not used to the Living Side, and its confusion of light and color and heavy smells and textures and feelings, and they found themselves even more disoriented than they had been a moment before. They were like wild animals pushed into a pen; they whirled and bumped one another and shrieked.

  The old woman began screaming, which brought on another sneezing fit. The policeman tried to climb out a window, which was unfortunately stuck. Augusta toppled out of her chair and lay on her back, pedaling the air with her legs and beating at the ghosts with her hands and crying, “Mercy! Have mercy on us!”

  Only the Lady Premiere stood stock-still in the middle of the room, her hands pressed to her sides, he
r face glowing with emotion. “It works,” she whispered. “The magic works.”

  The alchemist was so startled he lost control of the fire. Whipped from his hands by the tremendous tumult of moving ghosts, it shot across the room and exploded. Suddenly one whole wall was covered in flames. Fire tore up the old wallpaper toward the ceiling; flames raced down toward the wooden floor, hungry, burning higher and higher, fed by the rush of air and motion. Ghosts became flame and then people again. Then they were merely shapes.

  The heat made Liesl’s eyes water, and her mouth was filled with the taste of ash.

  “We have to get out of here!” she screamed to Will, bouncing her chair closer to his. “We’ll be cooked like dumplings!”

  Will rattled his handcuffs in frustration and kicked as hard as he could, trying to detach his ankles from the chair legs to which they had been bound. The chair teetered and fell over, and Will lay coughing and choking on the floor, as flames raced along the wooden boards toward his face. Already, he could hardly see. The room was full of dark, thick, roiling smoke, and smoky shapes moving within it.

  “Will!” Liesl screamed. Her voice sounded very distant.

  Then there was another voice, closer, and the feeling of something pulling at his legs.

  “Hang on a second,” the voice was saying. “Just a few little snips and you’ll be all right.” It was the Lady Premiere’s guard; Will looked down and saw him sawing with a pocketknife at the ropes binding Will’s ankles. Then, just like that, the ropes snapped and Will was free. Or at least, he could walk. The handcuffs were still cutting into his wrists.

  The guard helped Will to his feet, then knelt and freed Liesl’s ankles with a few slashes of his knife. Her head was slumped forward on her chest. The whole room was consumed with flame.

  Will could no longer see the alchemist or the Lady Premiere or Augusta or the policeman—all he saw was burning, burning, burning. The fire was out of control. It was in the cellar, and racing into the second floor, and licking into the attic.

  “No time to stand around gaping,” Mo said, and Will felt himself roughly dragged forward by the collar. “Too hot for my tastes.”