May smiled a lot at everyone, like a good host, but it was like wearing a mask. She was dying to tell someone the truth. But she had learned from experience that she was the last thing they wanted to hear. Mrs. Bird had cooked May’s favorite homemade lasagna, and they all gathered around the table to eat, laughing and honking at one another happily. May sat at the head of the table, feeling almost like an observer instead of the guest of honor. Her mother set the casserole dish on the table, beaming at her proudly as if they had reached the pinnacle of happiness.
May smiled back, but her eyes drifted beyond the table to the snow outside. She sat on her hands and tried to contain her excitement. She kicked her feet back and forth against the linoleum, her coltish legs too long for the chair. Finally she couldn’t sit another minute. “I’ll be right back.” She popped up from the table and headed up the narrow old stairway to the upstairs hall. She walked into the bathroom, closed the door, and stood in front of the sink. She washed her face. She straightened up, looking at herself in the mirror, smiling hopefully.
The lights flickered.
May jumped, turned her back to the mirror, and looked around. Fear, absent a moment before, sent shivers racing up her spine. She stood still for a moment, breathing fast, staring about the room. She strained her ears for a moment, then, hearing nothing, reached for the handle and slowly tiptoed out into the hall.
For a moment the hallway lights glowed extra bright, and then they flickered again. The next moment they were out completely.
May swallowed, taking a few more slow steps down the hall and listening hard. “Pumpkin?” she whispered. She could hear the sound of her own heart beating. But nothing else. “Is it”—she gulped loudly—“is it you?”
She stepped toward the stairs and …
“Ah!”
Somber Kitty leaped out of the shadows, flapping his tail at her. “Meay?” he asked, tapping her shin with his paw, clearly wanting to be carried.
May shook her head at him, silently chiding him for scaring her, and then scooped him up into her arms and held him tight. Together they drifted down the stairs.
When they appeared in the doorway of the kitchen a few moments later, they must have been a sight. May was as pale as a ghost. Somber Kitty had crawled around her neck, his tail straight as a pencil, his fuzz sticking straight up, a worried look on his face. The table, which had been full of chatter a moment before, fell silent as everyone turned to look at them.
“May, are you okay?” Claire asked. May looked at her mom, who was leaning against the kitchen counter. Their eyes met.
At that moment the phone rang.
Mrs. Bird looked at the phone, then at May. She reached for the phone and picked it up, staring at May curiously, clearly not hearing anything on the other end of the line.
May swallowed. “It’s the ghosts, Mom,” she said, looking around the room, embarrassed that every face was intent on hers. She cleared her throat and went on. “They’re trying to reach me from the other side.” She straightened her shoulders. “They’re coming for me.”
The screams that issued from White Moss Manor were the loudest in Briery Swamp history. May’s friends exploded out of the house like fireworks, in a wave of high-pitched squeals, pouring onto the front lawn, scattering to the farthest reaches of the yard and screaming for their parents, shivering wildly without their coats and hats.
The party ended in record time. Within half an hour, the parents of Hog Wallow had descended on White Moss Manor, taken their children, and left.
The last person to depart the premises was Claire Arneson. May stood on the porch to say good-bye, but Claire, her ponytail bouncing frantically as she ducked into her dad’s SUV, didn’t look back once. May watched her go, her hand up in the air in an unseen wave. She was pretty sure it was her last birthday party.
Inside, her mom sat in the kitchen with a cup of tea, surrounded by plates full of the half-eaten lasagna she’d made, the balloons she’d taped to the walls, the piles of uneaten cookies she and May had baked. The look on her face as May walked in was enough to fill May with shame.
“I’m sorry, Mom, but—”
Mrs. Bird held up her hand in a “stop” motion. “Not now, May.”
May stomped up the stairs, Somber Kitty trailing behind her with his tail between his legs. It wasn’t fair. She was only telling the truth. Once they were tucked in her room, she pulled the box out her closet. She pulled out her bathing suit and her death shroud, rebelliously shedding her party clothes in one smooth motion and shrugging into the others in the next. The bathing suit stretched to fit. Feeling cold, she pulled on her warm fuzzy pajama pants and her sneakers and turned to look in the mirror. She looked like a girl playing dress-up. But she also looked ready.
May put Kitty’s shroud on him, too, and then she waited. And waited. The minutes ticked by, and nothing happened. It began to get dark outside.
When the phone rang at nine, May nearly jumped out of her skin. She ran to her doorway and listened as her mom picked it up. A few minutes later Mrs. Bird appeared at the stairway. She stopped halfway up when she saw May watching her.
“What are you wearing?” she asked, staring at the shroud and the bathing suit.
May looked down at herself. “Just … um … messing around?”
Ellen sighed, sounding exhausted. “It was the phone company. Apparently our line’s been spliced for a week with someone’s in Hog Wallow. A pizza delivery place …”
May stood, transfixed. We need you … to bring us a large pepperoni? Her heart nearly sank through the floor.
“Sounds like people all over Hog Wallow have lost power because of the storm too.”
May was quiet as a stone. Had she imagined it all? Pumpkin’s voice? Did that mean she had imagined the words at the top of the newspaper, too? Ellen gave her a searching look, then walked up the rest of the stairs to May. “Let’s forget about this and go back to normal in the morning, okay, honey?”
She bent over and kissed May’s cheek, engulfing her in her warm, familiar jasmine smell. May sank into her hug.
“I want you to go straight to bed.”
“Okay, Mom.” May felt very small.
“Hey.” Ellen touched her cheek. “You’re my girl, no matter what. Don’t forget that. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
May nodded. She watched as her mom walked down the hall and disappeared into her room.
Could it be? Could it be that it was nothing? Would she stay here in Briery Swamp with most of her heart tucked into shadows?
Standing in the hallway, with her mind light-years away, in a snowy forest at the northern edge of the world of ghosts, she was a sort of May-shaped hole. It seemed that for all her life, she would feel like she belonged in neither one place nor the other.
She would only ever belong somewhere in between.
Chapter Four
Widow’s Walk
Meay.” In the dark, later that night, Somber Kitty crawled onto May’s lap. The shutters banged with the storm outside. The trees swayed, lit dimly by the moon behind the clouds. The snow pattered against the windows in great diagonal specks.
May listened to the sounds of her mom getting ready for bed and then closing her bedroom door. She stood up and crept into the hallway, to the door that led to the attic. Slowly, carefully, she pulled it open and climbed the stairs.
The attic of White Moss Manor was narrow, dark, and dusty. May tiptoed across the slatted wooden floor and sank next to her telescope, which was covered in a fine layer of dust from years of neglect. She stared out the window at the woods. The trees swayed back and forth in the snowy breeze.
On one side of the room was a ladder that led to a widow’s walk—a sort of thin, railed walkway that crossed the roof of the house. May looked at it. She hesitated only a moment.
The hatch was rusty, but with a great push, May managed to push it up, and it swung open with a clatter. She paused, listening for any sounds of her mom below. The wor
ld above was muffled with snow.
“Yow!” she hissed. Kitty had tapped her heel with his paws, not wanting to be forgotten. She scooped him up, stuffing him under her shroud.
May rose gingerly, trembling, until she was fully outside, enveloped in the cold air. The wind felt like it was blowing right through her bones. She stepped carefully along the widow’s walk, all the way to the edge of the roof where it ended, and peered down at her front yard and the woods beyond. They looked so far below that May, who was scared of heights, got a little woozy. She looked up at the sky instead. Her heart began to tear and ache.
And then all the thoughts she’d been ignoring for so long flooded in on her. Were they okay? Were her friends in the Ever After okay? Had she let them down? Had they forgotten her?
“Where are you?” she said to the sky. Tears gathered in her eyes, and the wind blew them sideways.
The clouds roiled. The sky blew. The snow on the lawn lifted in clouds and blew here and there in tiny, tornado-like swirls. In the clouds of white May thought she could see ghosts, faces and shapes of the dead all around her. She held Kitty tight in her arms and kept her face turned up to the sky, as if waiting for someone to descend from the storm clouds and lift her away.
And then a strong gust blew against her, and her feet slipped just slightly. She jerked forward against the railing, ever so softly. But, rotten, it crumbled like paper, and May and Kitty went sliding forward, right through it. May scrambled to stop herself, but it was too late.
They slid a few more feet, then fell off the edge of the roof.
They looked like blackbirds falling through the sky.
Part Two
Bo Cleevil Is Number One!
Chapter Five
An Empty Shore
Meow.”
May sat up, rubbing the back of her head.
“Mew.”
Kitty must be lost in the snow. She scooted onto her knees to look for him, and then discovered that there was no snow. She looked up. There was no front lawn. There was no White Moss Manor.
Where was she? She peered around. They were in the woods. They were in the clearing where the lake used to be. Where the lake … was!
The lake was there, in front of her. May gaped at it, its dark water glimmering.
“Meay.”
May whipped around to see Kitty, sitting by an open doorway that stood in the middle of thin air. He was floating, and eerily translucent.
“Kitty, your death shroud’s work—” May stopped short as she looked down at herself. Her death shroud was working too. She had the thin, ghostly glow of the dead.
A firefly landed on her cheek, and she brushed it away, dazed. She stared back at the door again. They weren’t in the woods behind her house. They were in the woods on the other side!
Slowly May got to her feet and almost lost her balance as they floated out from under her. She threw out her arms to steady herself, letting her legs dangle loosely, trying to get used to the feeling of levitating. She floated toward the door, her heart thudding wildly in her chest. Were they really here? Could it be real?
The door stood open, just a crack. May looked behind her to the lake, which used to hold a vicious water demon lurking in its depths. But now nothing stirred. She looked back at the door, which used to be locked, only to be opened by a secret knock. She bit her thumbnail.
Uncertain, she lifted Kitty into her arms and tucked him underneath her shroud, knowing how dangerous it could be for him, since all animals had been banished from the Ever After, to nobody knew where. She pulled the door a little wider and drifted inside.
The hallway ahead flickered with blue light coming from a doorway a few feet away. May drifted to it—she knew it was an old movie theater that welcomed all recently deceased spirits to the world of the dead. She hovered in the doorway, peering inside, surprised to see that all the seats were empty. On the screen, instead of the morbid specter who’d appeared there last time, orienting spirits to the afterlife, there was a goblin, its big ears waggling, its teeth glinting, wearing a strapless evening gown and Gucci sunglasses.
“Hgglblblebe,” it said. “Blugglebleebgg Hllbggguu.” Translations in several languages ran across the bottom of the screen. “Welcome to Planet Cleevil,” May read breathlessly, “where everything is very organized, and you never have to worry about anything, because nothing means very much.” May watched in shock as the goblin went on to explain that there were many places to go shopping.
Finally the movie ended with a great flapping of the film projector somewhere above. May hesitated a moment, composing herself, and then floated farther down the hall, pushing—with some dread—through the door marked EXIT.
Here she felt her stomach flop sickly. The immense beach, butted along the far side by the dark waters of the Styx Streamway, was the same as she remembered. It was an endless stretch of sandy shore, with rowboats docked along its edges waiting to take the newly dead to far-off destinations all over the realm. Streams stretched out from the river’s mouth, marked with signs such as SOUTHERN TERRITORIES, NOTHING PLATTE AND THE FAR WEST, DEATH KNELLS, NEW EGYPT, PIT OF DESPAIR AMUSEMENT PARK.
But the beach no longer bustled with thousands of newly dead souls being ushered to various destinations all over the realm. There was not a soul in sight. The shore was deserted.
“Meay?” Kitty whispered through May’s collar.
“Shhh,” May whispered. There was something else different that she couldn’t put her finger on. And then she looked up. There were no stars zipping through the sky above at lightning speed, like comets. The stars were gone. No, the sky was gone. There was only a low, dark cloud where the sky used to be.
May turned to look back at where she’d come from, but now there was only a brick wall where the exit had been, marked with the glowing letters SPECTROPLEX. A sign up near the top announced in neon: YOU’LL NEVER GET OUT AGAIN. HAVE A NICE DAY. Beside it, in big, bright red letters, was scrawled “BO CLEEVIL IS NUMBER ONE!”
May turned back to look at the Streamway, grasping her situation.
She knew from experience that there was no way to go backward. But she didn’t know which way to go forward, either. The last time she had seen her friends had been in South Place, thousands of miles away, with a horde of goblins, ghouls, and zombies—all of the realm’s dark spirits—at their heels. She was certain that Lucius—a luminous and wily boy—had made sure they escaped. But to where?
And … how had she gotten here, anyway?
No one had appeared before her on the roof of White Moss Manor. She had seen neither hide nor hair of a spirit coming to show her the way.
“It’s the Lady,” she whispered. The Lady had somehow brought her back. And now she just needed to wait for a sign to point her in the right direction.
May stood still, examining the clouds, the brick wall behind her, the sand, the water, waiting for a message.
“Hblbglblgbgl.” She whipped around. The sound was coming from the Spectroplex. The sound of ghouls.
“Hglbelblbeeee.”
In her shroud, Kitty began to shiver. Well, she couldn’t stay here.
May could really think of only one place to go. It was the one place she was sure that, if he could, Pumpkin would go. She turned and hurried toward one of the boats bobbing in the shallows of the Styx and laid Kitty gently on its floor. She then took a good look across the water, squinted, and grasped the stern, giving it a running shove and then leaping inside.
Kitty stood to watch as the boat moved away from the shore, his paws up on the bow, meowing a protest against the water. On the beach, the dark figures of about ten ghouls appeared, and May pulled him down to duck. They stayed like that for several minutes, until the shore was gone from sight.
As they drifted into the shadows, the area around them seemed to have gone completely silent. In fact, it felt like they were the only two creatures left in the world.
They floated past a sign that hung overhead. It read, in drippy lette
rs, BELLE MORTE, 1,300,017 MILES.
Chapter Six
Back to Belle Morte
From the water, Belle Morte reminded one of a sleepy old miser, perched up ahead on either side of the stream, its gray stone houses curvy and slumped as if they had used up all their energy just being built at all. In the gloom, dim lights glowed in the yellowed windows of the old stone halls and shops and reflected on the dark water of the stream. May pulled Kitty under her shroud.
The boat drifted under a small stone bridge, steering itself toward the right-hand side, where it bumped gently against the dock.
May climbed ashore, keeping her face lowered. The last time she had been seen in Belle Morte, the whole town had gone into an uproar over a Live One being in their midst. May hoped that this time, wearing a handmade death shroud from North Farm itself that made her look as ghostly as any spirit one might see in a graveyard on a Saturday night, no one would recognize her. She peered left and right. To either side of her, stone houses cozied up against the walkway, tilting overhead with their drippy, triangular roofs. But not a spirit occupied the paths along the banks of the river. It felt as if it could be early morning, before anyone had risen. May felt the rumblings of worry, but she tried to ignore her unease.
The shops along the Streamway were deserted. Chains and souvenirs had been left lying on the road. Doors hung crookedly ajar, OPEN signs still dangling in their windows: Coffin Coffees, Mortician’s Magic Beauty Parlor, Chokey’s Chocolates—its window still full of delectable treats such as tiny chocolate coffins opened to reveal tiny chocolate skeletons inside. Hearses and carriages stood empty, their doors wide open. And above it all stretched the same dark cloud she had seen at the Spectroplex.