Liesl & Po

  When Bundle was tired, it liked to disperse into Po. Bundle could not climb into Po’s lap because Po had no lap, so instead it climbed inside: It curled up inside of Po’s Essence, and Po walked for a time with the secret knowledge of this other thing, this other being, glowing at Po’s very center like a star burning in the middle of darkness.

  Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this—the absorption of another, the carrying of it—was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had once left behind.

  Let’s go to our place, Po thought to Bundle.

  Mwark, Bundle thought back.

  Bundle and Po skimmed over the top of a glowing, moonlit hill and came to a place where black water ran between soft, pillowed, cloudy hills: a quiet, secluded place, and one both ghosts knew well, and came to often.

  There was another ghost sitting by the river, however, and Po stopped short. Bundle let out a small yelp of surprise. This was Bundle and Po’s secret spot, exactly one third of the way between the endless waterfall and star 6,789. Po had never seen another ghost there, not one single time.

  The new ghost had its back to Bundle and Po, and it was muttering something. It must have only recently crossed over, as even from the back its silhouette was very defined, and very clearly that of a man.

  As Po drifted closer, it heard the man saying, “If I could only get back to that willow tree. I’m sure then I could find my way home. Fifteen feet from the tree is the pond, and up the short little hill is the house, where little Lee-Lee will be waiting with her mother. . . .”

  Po was stunned. All the atoms of its being flipped simultaneously in a funny direction, so the ghost shivered from the inside out. Po had not been kidding when it told Liesl that the chances of seeing her father again were next to impossible: And yet, here her father was. In Bundle and Po’s secret place, no less.

  Po was so surprised it made a sharp whistling sound, and the ghost of Liesl’s father started, and turned around.

  “Oh, hello,” the ghost of Liesl’s father said. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

  Po refrained from pointing out that ghosts stepped soundlessly, since they did not have solid feet to walk with. The man was obviously brand-new, and confused. His contours were extraordinarily clear; there was only the tiniest bit of smudging around his hair, making him appear to be wearing a dark hat. He brought his hand to his cheek and swiped.

  Po had never seen a ghost cry before. There were no actual tears: just quivering little dark spots, like shadows, that pushed apart the atoms of Liesl’s father’s face, temporarily revealing the starry sky beyond. Ghosts, even the newest ones, just weren’t held together very tightly.

  “What are you doing here?” Po asked Liesl’s father. Bundle drifted forward cautiously. The ghost-animal did not fully blend with Liesl’s father, but it wrapped itself around the man’s feet, a kind of ghostly version of smelling.

  “I appear to have gotten lost.” Liesl’s father shook his head and looked down at the shaggy shadow-pet massed around his feet, and then up at the flowing black dust of the river, and the spinning planets beyond the massive white hill-clouds. “I seem to have been wandering forever, and I can’t find my way back. . . .” He trailed off, squinting at Po. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Po.”

  “I’m having trouble seeing you clearly. I must have left my glasses at home.” Liesl’s father patted the front pocket of his shirt, which was still there in silhouette, but barely. Clothes faded first on the Other Side. They had nothing to hold them together at all: no soul, no Essence, no Being. Clothes were just things, and things scattered into nothing quite easily. “My name is Henry Morbower. Perhaps if you came a little closer . . . ?”

  Po floated a little closer, knowing it would not help.

  “Ah, yes, that’s better,” Henry said, obviously lying, and then gave a little frustrated shake of his feet. “I seem to have stepped in some mud earlier,” he said.

  “That’s not mud,” Po said. “That’s Bundle.”

  Henry squinted. “What?”

  “Bundle. Bundle’s just gotten around your legs. Bundle’s an explorer. That’s why I think it might be more dog. On the other hand, it really likes the constellation Pisces—fish, you know. So maybe it’s a little more cat.”

  Henry said, “Er, yes—quite. Of course. I see.” Although of course he did not see. He kicked more emphatically with his feet. Bundle detached from around his legs and drifted back to Po.

  “That’s better now,” Henry said, and Po heard Bundle think Riff, which was a sound of disapproval. “Do you and, er, Bundle come this way a lot? Do you know this area well?”

  Po thought of a tree shaking its leaves in the wind, and as the ghost thought this, about the shaking tree, it managed to shrug. “About as well as anybody knows it, I guess.”

  Henry’s face lit up, and it was painful to see. It reminded Po of Liesl. “Wonderful! A native. Then you can help point me in the right direction. You can help me get home.”

  Po decided there was no point in beating around the bush. “You’re on the Other Side,” the ghost said firmly. “You are no longer with the living. You’ve crossed over.”

  Henry was quiet for a minute. Another little dark crease appeared in his forehead; through it, Po could see a spinning haze of planetary dust. Henry was falling apart, slowly but surely. He was blending. Soon he would be as Po was—part of the Everything. Po felt a strange mixture of sadness and relief. The ghost reminded itself that losing form was natural, and good, and the way things were in the universe. There could be no regret about it.

  At last Henry shook his head. “I understand all of that very well,” he said firmly. “I met the nicest woman—Carol, was it?—on my way over here. Explained everything to me; how she had died of the flu after going out in the middle of the night to scavenge for potatoes. The man behind her had been killed in a bar brawl. I never was a drinker myself, you know, for that reason. But all the same, I need to get home. I need to get back to the pond, and the willow tree, and my wife, and little Lee-Lee. They’ll be worried sick about me, I can tell you that.”

  Po did not know quite how to respond. Perhaps crossing over had shaken up the particles in Henry’s brain, the ghost thought. “I’m sorry,” Po began again, more slowly. “I don’t think you understand. You’ve died.”

  “I understand that perfectly well,” Henry said, a note of briskness creeping into his voice. “What did I just tell you?”

  “But—but—” Po struggled for the words it needed. It was not used to having to speak so much out loud, and for a second it regretted ever stepping foot in Liesl’s bedroom. “You can’t go home. Home is on the Living Side. There’s no way to cross back. Not really. Not for good.”

  Henry climbed to his feet. Or rather, Henry’s ghost simply unfolded and was standing. Despite being new, he was getting the hang of things. Bundle took refuge in Po’s Essence; Po felt the sudden presence of the little animal inside of him.

  “My dear boy,” Henry said, and then squinted again. “My dear girl—my dear—whatever you are—I may be dead, but home is wherever I built my life, and it is where I will go back in my death. Home is where my only child was born, and home is where my first wife, my love, was laid in the ground. She’s not here, after all—in this place you call the Other Side, because if she were, she would have found me already. She is not floating around in the darkness somewhere, and I will tell you why. She is not here, because she is home, and home is the pond with the willow tree standing next to it, and dead, alive, or in-between, I am going home. Do you understand me?”

  The whole time he had been speaking, his voice had gotten louder and sterner, and as a result, Po felt small and rather ashamed. Distant—so distant now!—memories returned to Po, the tiniest, vaguest memories of the smell of chalk and paper and the feel of its knees pressed under
a desk. And strangely, because Po had Bundle’s Essence inside of him, the ghost also felt other long-buried memories, of sharp voices and the shame of a puddle on the floor between its legs, a creeping, seeping puddle on a very nice carpet.

  But when the ghost tried to focus on the memories, they evaporated.

  “How do you intend to get there?” Po asked.

  “My daughter will take me,” Henry said. “She knows the way.”

  “She misses you,” Po said, remembering its promise. “She told me to tell you.”

  “I miss her, too.” Henry sighed, and at once all the sternness was gone from his voice. He shook his head mournfully, and then said in a whisper, “It was the soup, you know. I should never have eaten the soup.”

  “What?” Po was once again confused.

  “Never mind.” Henry refolded himself so he was once again sitting by the silent, swiftly moving river. Suddenly he looked defeated, and Po could see the darkness eating at the edges of his shoulders now, and down around his arms—could tell that the Everything was already starting to pull hard on Henry’s soul. “Leave me now,” Henry said. “I’m very tired.”

  “Okay,” Po said, and then, remembering the other thing Liesl had taught him, said, “I am sorry you are tired.”

  “That’s okay,” Henry said. He did not look again at Po. He stared off at the stars, at the sky, at the universe bending and unfolding. “Once Liesl brings me home, I will rest.”

  Chapter Eight

  MEANWHILE, IN THE DARK, TWISTED ALLEYS OF the Living Side, Will was running for his life.

  He ran without knowing where he was going. He ran blindly, impulsively, cutting left and right, down foul-smelling alleys and streets so close and shadowed he could hardly see.

  Plan, he thought. I need a plan. But his heart was beating so loudly in his ears he couldn’t think.

  He knew one thing for sure: He could not go back to the alchemist’s studio. He could never, ever go back to the alchemist’s studio for as long as he lived, because the alchemist would kill him, and that would be the End of that.

  Will was used to the alchemist’s temper. He had seen the alchemist scream many times, and go purple from fury, like he did the time that Will confused arrowroot for gingerroot in an extremely complex protection powder, thus rendering it completely useless except for the thickening of soups.

  But he had never, ever been so terrified of the alchemist as he had been tonight, when the Lady Premiere had swept into her private apartments and commanded her attendants to “Leave us,” seeming to bring to the room an arctic chill with those two words.

  It had been clear just from the tone of her voice and her dark, furious, glittering eyes, that she had not summoned the alchemist to congratulate him, or thank him, or make him Official, and the alchemist had turned to Will with a look of such withering anger and hatred that Will had felt the very center of his being quiver and go limp. And though there had been a fire blazing in the corner of the room, his teeth had started to chatter again.

  “Useless!” the Lady Premiere had thundered at the alchemist. Normally hearing the familiar insult turned against his master might have struck Will as amusing, but not at that moment. At that moment he knew only that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong, and that he would be blamed.

  “Excuse me?” the alchemist had spluttered, eyes bulging from his head.

  “I said, useless! I ask you to bring me the greatest, the most powerful magic of all, and instead you bring me a pile of ash.” And she had snapped open the wooden box and revealed the pale ashes inside, as dead of magic, as cold, as the coldest, deadest root in midwinter.

  That was when the alchemist had gone the white color of the very hottest part of a flame. For a moment he had been unable to speak. He had stood there and stared at the wooden box in her arms. Then he had turned to Will and pronounced a single syllable: “You.”

  And yet in that tiny, nothing word, five years’ worth of hatred and disappointment and dashed hopes and blame had been compressed, so Will had felt as though he had been hit with a physical force, as though the word were a fist straight to his gut. And he had known then that his life with the alchemist was finished. That he would never again sleep in the cold, narrow cot directly underneath the chimney, or get up in the half-light to feed the fish with tadpoles, or grind dried mullet into a powder under the alchemist’s watchful gaze, or measure a goat’s tears into a beaker and then add exactly two drops of moonlight, no more, no less, to make a cream that could cure even the biggest pimples.

  The alchemist had tried to explain: The Lady Premiere had received the wrong wooden box, obviously. The one she was holding was most certainly not the one he had sent her. And it had all come out—that Will had not gone straight to the Lady Premiere’s, as he had been commanded to do, but had instead gone to Mr. Gray’s first; that he had fallen asleep by the fire; and afterward, his dim and bleary recollection of the large sack pressed into his arms and the wooden box on the table (no—boxes—there had been two of them, almost identical), and how he had gone stumbling outside, eyes half-closed, without checking to see that he had the correct one.

  But it had not been enough. The Lady Premiere had screamed, the alchemist had cursed Will to damnation, and Will had known that if he stayed, he would most certainly be killed.

  So instead he had run, hiding in the little guard hut when he discovered that the front gates were shut and there was no possibility of climbing them, and then crawling out through the cat door at the first opportunity.

  Plan, plan, plan. The word bounced around in Will’s mind like a pinball. His breath tore at his throat. He was sweating now, and the collar of his shirt stuck to his neck. His heart throbbed painfully, and he knew he needed to rest. He ducked into a narrow alleyway to catch his breath and listened for sounds of shouting or the pounding of feet. But he heard nothing except the faint scrabbling of rats. Good. He had not been followed. Not yet, anyway.

  He needed to leave town. He needed to get as far away from the alchemist, and the Lady Premiere, and her assortment of servants and henchmen and sympathizers, as possible. Of course he had nowhere to go, but that hardly mattered.

  He was an orphan, taken on by the alchemist to be little better than a slave. Will had never, not once, had anywhere to go—not really.

  He realized this for the first time as he was crouching in the alleyway, but the realization, instead of making him feel unhappy, made him feel strangely free. It was like walking into a room and hearing everyone go silent and knowing yes, it was true, they were all talking about you; and they had been saying that your feet smelled like rotting fish; but also that you didn’t care.

  So he would leave town. So what? He would go wherever he found himself, and there he would be.

  He remembered, when he lived in the orphanage, how he and the other boys had sometimes sneaked down to the overpass to watch the trains chugging slowly into the train station. There had been a vagabond who lived by the tracks, Will remembered: Crazy Carl, who collected glass bottles. Carl had built a shelter out of a little rusted-out train car that had been abandoned by the tracks. It had kept him relatively safe from the wind and the rain and the cold. Will wondered whether it was still there. He wondered whether Carl was still there.

  There was, he knew, only one way to find out.

  When his heart had gone back to its normal rhythm, he stood up and started out in the direction of the train station and the overpass. Tonight he would sleep. Tomorrow he would catch a train.

  Chapter Nine

  LIESL HAD JUST FALLEN ASLEEP WHEN SHE FELT something stirring by the bed. She had the sensation of a long finger brushing her cheek, and for one confused second she believed herself a tiny child again, back at the pond by the willow tree, pressed facedown into the velvet-soft moss that grew above her mother’s grave. Then she opened her eyes and saw that she was, of course, in her little attic room, as she had been for ever so long. Bundle’s moonlight eyes were blinking at her, and L
iesl thought she heard a very soft mwark directed into her ear.

  Po was there as well, standing by her bed. For a dark piece of shadow, the ghost looked very pale.

  “Hello,” Liesl said, sitting up. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

  Po did not say that it had intended never to come back at all. “I saw your father again,” Po said. “I gave him your message.”

  In her excitement, Liesl went to seize the ghost’s hands. Her fingers passed through a soft place in the air, and Po seemed to shiver. “You did? You told him? How did he look? What did he say?”

  Po bobbed away from the bed a little bit. The touch had unnerved the ghost. Po could pass through brick walls without feeling a thing; it could disperse into currents of air without pain. But it had felt the girl’s hands, somehow, as though she’d been able to reach in and pull at Po’s Essence. Essence was not physical matter, Po knew. No one could touch it. No one could destroy it either; that was the nice thing about Essence.

  People could push and pull at you, and poke you, and probe as deep as they could go. They could even tear you apart, bit by bit. But at the heart and root and soul of you, something would remain untouched.

  Po had not known all this when he was alive, but the ghost knew it now.

  “He said that he should never have eaten the soup,” Po said, and waited to see whether this would mean anything to Liesl.

  She scrunched her mouth all the way to her nose. “The soup? What soup?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what he said, though.”

  “Did he say anything else?” Liesl asked impatiently. It was annoying that Po had crossed into the land of the dead, and back, only to deliver a message about an unsatis-factory meal.

  “Yes.” Po hesitated. “He said that he must go home. He must go back to the place of the willow tree. He said that he will be able to rest then. He said you would bring him there.”

  Liesl sat very still. For a moment she was so still and white Po was actually frightened, though he had never once been frightened of a living one before. They were too fragile, too easily broken and dismantled: They had bones that broke and skin that tore and hearts that gave up with a sigh and rolled over.