“You didn’t know the wall was there, so you didn’t know it could stop you,” she said. “Perception rules our kind. That’s why—have you ever heard of people putting salt in their windows to repel spirits?”
“I … guess so?” I said.
“It works because there’s no ignoring salt when you’re a ghost. The smell is so strong that you can never forget it’s there long enough to get past it. We can’t even touch it.”
I sat back. There was so much I didn’t know about being dead—about “our kind.” It was basically relearning the rules of reality. “So I’m supposed to just … forget that the wall is there?”
Florence gazed thoughtfully off to the side. “It’s simpler than that. The key is not to try. Just go through, because you can. When you walk down a hallway, you don’t think, Oh, Lord, let me make it down the hall this time. You just go, right? That’s how this works, too. Doors and walls are only barriers because you let them be.”
I faced the wall. Then I closed my eyes and walked forward.
I’m just walking, I thought. Walking walking walking. Nothing to see here.
When I opened my eyes, I was back in the lobby. Maria was gone, her sheet now discarded on the threadbare sofa.
“Nice work!” Florence said, walking into the room. “You’re a quick study.”
I tried to suppress my goofy grin, but I couldn’t. It was the first time since I died that I felt a modicum of happiness.
“There you go,” Florence said. “See, it’s not so bad here.”
What else didn’t I know? I wanted to learn everything there was about being a ghost. Despite my failure at the gate, some part of me was sure that if I tried hard enough, I could find a way off the property. Away from the house. Back to my family.
“Do you want to hang out a little?” I asked Florence, and then I realized that in 1902, people probably didn’t hang out. “I mean, you know, spend time … together?” I felt awkward, like I was asking Florence on a friend date.
“Well, I was just going to—” Seeing my disappointment, Florence’s face froze slightly, and then her smile softened. “Tell you what, let’s go see what Eliza’s getting herself up to.”
* * *
Eliza, it turned out, was in the nurses’ dormitory, getting herself up to lying on one of the beds and gazing at the wall.
When we came in, she sat bolt upright.
“I believe you two have met,” Florence said. “Eliza Duncombe, Delia Piven.”
“Yes, we’ve met,” Eliza said, staring right at me. “Delia’s the new girl with the etiquette problem.”
I was about to apologize, but Florence went over and sat next to her. “Now, come on, Eliza. You don’t want to be one of those cranky old ghosts. Be gracious. We don’t get much company. It’ll be nice to have a new face to look at, won’t it?”
Eliza looked at me through narrowed eyes. “I’m perfectly content with the faces we’re used to.”
“Well, she’s not going anywhere, sugar, so you might as well get used to hers, too.”
I glanced around the dormitory. It was a simple room painted pale yellow, with four bunk beds in a neat line, separated from one another by plain white dressers. Every surface was bare except the farthest dresser, on which was a single figurine. I wandered over to look at it. It turned out to be a little clown with Xs for eyes, someone’s old toy. Creepy. Without thinking, I reached over to pick it up. My hand went right through it.
I looked back at Eliza and Florence, who were watching me.
“When do I learn to do that?” I asked them. “Pick things up?”
“It took me a year,” Eliza said briskly. “So don’t get your hopes too high.”
Florence was now curled up on one of the beds, her legs tucked under her. “Well, let’s see … I died in March, and in December I knocked over the wardress’s Christmas tree. So about nine months? ’Course, I didn’t spend six of those months lying in the front yard like you.”
I sighed at the thought of more helpless months stretching before me. “What’s the trick?” I asked.
Florence frowned. “I wouldn’t say there’s a trick. It’s kind of like going through the walls.”
Eliza tilted her head to one side. “My first time, I’d been sitting and thinking about something else, and I got distracted and reached for a handkerchief, meaning to wipe my nose. I don’t know who was more scared—me, or the living, breathing nurse whose handkerchief it was. She deserved it, though—she was a thoroughly horrid woman.”
There had still been living people here in the institute when Eliza and Florence had died. “You were both around when this place was still in business,” I said wonderingly. “I forgot that.”
“All of us were,” Eliza said. Her easy tone tightened a little. “Except for you.”
All of us. How many spirits were there? And how many were more like Maria than like Florence, Eliza, and Theo? “Is the whole world just, like, full of ghosts?” I wondered out loud.
“How would we know?” Eliza asked. “We can’t leave the house.”
“Why not?” I asked, remembering what Theo had said. “Why can I go outside but the rest of you can’t?”
They both looked baffled.
“Have you ever even tried to leave?” I asked.
Florence looked shocked by the mere suggestion. “Leave?” she repeated. “Why would we want to do that?”
Dread seemed to pour down my spine like cold water.
“You don’t want to leave this place?” I asked. “Not even to see your family?”
“Not particularly,” Florence said. “Our families have passed.”
“But before they died,” I said. “You never thought about getting out of here?”
They were both staring at me as if I’d suggested we all cut our hair into Mohawks and start a mosh pit.
“I tried to go out the front doors one time,” Eliza admitted. “I failed rather spectacularly. It was … unpleasant.”
I remembered being knocked to the ground outside, my strength completely drained, wondering if I’d ever be able to move again. “Unpleasant” was one word for it.
“Besides, why should we leave?” Eliza asked. “We don’t know what’s out there. We don’t know what would happen if we were to get off the property. Say we managed to go, and then we couldn’t come back. What then?”
“Then …” I looked around helplessly. “At least you wouldn’t be stuck anymore.”
Florence laughed quietly. “Sugar, this is our home. We don’t mind being ‘stuck’ here, as you say.”
“But …” I fell into silence, trying not to show how disconcerted I was by their quiet acquiescence to captivity. Was it really possible that they were content here? It was almost as if they’d been brainwashed, but I didn’t say so. First, because I doubted they even knew what that term meant, and second, because if I started criticizing them, I might find myself friendless for all eternity. “What about Maria? Are there others like her? Bad ghosts?”
Florence shrugged. “Sure, there must be a couple. But don’t you worry about that. Mostly everybody keeps to themselves. It feels more natural, you see, to stay in the part of the house where you died.”
“But I can go anywhere—and you said Maria is from the third floor. She came downstairs.”
Florence arched an eyebrow in disapproval. “Not everybody has the decorum to conduct themselves suitably. All we can do is avoid the unseemly elements and trust things will work out for the best.”
I tried not to take her comment personally—as a hint that, if I observed proper decorum, I wouldn’t be wandering all over the house and grounds just because I could.
“Oh, I don’t mean you,” Florence said. “But it’s for your own safety, hon. Look at us—we’ve been here forever and nothing evil has ever gotten to us.”
I shuddered. Evil. Suddenly, I remembered it—the creeping dark smoke that had overcome me in my room. Right before I fell out the window.
No. I
didn’t fall. I was pushed.
I was sure of it.
I glanced over at Eliza. I still wondered if she was behind it somehow—after all, she’d been the first ghost I’d seen … after. And there was something guarded about her that made me uneasy. She seemed to be hiding something.
“Maybe she’s different,” Eliza said to Florence, ignoring me. “Because she owns the place. Is that possible?”
Florence didn’t seem convinced. “Anything’s possible. But in my opinion she’d do well to confine herself to the known parts of the house.”
Known by whom? Now I was annoyed. “I don’t think I can accept being trapped here,” I said. “This is not a good place. I came here, and I saw all this dark smoke, and then—” I paused. “I was murdered.”
Florence jolted upright. “Murdered?”
“What could you possibly mean, murdered?” Eliza asked. “You jumped out that window.”
“I didn’t,” I insisted. “I would never have done that. And if I did—for some reason—then it wasn’t my doing. It was something in the house. I saw it.”
“What do you think you saw, honey?” Florence asked.
I nearly glared at her, but stopped myself. “Like I said, I saw … smoke. Coming out of the walls. It came over me and … it made me fall.”
“You’ve been through an awful lot,” Florence said, a careful slowness to her words, “and nobody can blame you if you went a little batty because of it all.”
A familiar old feeling flared up inside me. It took a moment before I recognized it as the feeling I’d had when my parents disregarded what I’d actually said and instead heard things as they expected them to be.
“How do you know I jumped?” I asked Eliza.
She drew back, offended. “Well, I didn’t push you, in case you plan to start accusing me again. I … I was in the room. I heard the commotion and came to see what was happening.”
“You saw me fall? And then you saw my ghost?”
She nodded.
I sat up. “Then … why was I still inside? If I died from falling? Shouldn’t my ghost have been outside?”
She blinked.
“I couldn’t breathe,” I said. With the memory, my throat tightened. “Right before I fell. I couldn’t get air in my lungs.”
Florence sighed. “Delia, nobody’s trying to tell you this place doesn’t operate in mysterious ways. There are plenty of unanswered questions around here. But say there is something in the house that could do that to you—wouldn’t it be best left alone?”
“Forget it.” I shook my head in frustration. “Anyway, there’s nothing stopping me from looking for a way to get back to my family.”
They didn’t reply.
“Is there?” I asked. I felt increasingly like the two of them were in some clique that I was being shut out of.
“I just think …” Florence glanced at Eliza. “I just think you’ll be happier—in the long run—if you don’t make such a fuss.”
“But I …” I couldn’t even find the words to express the fact that I was completely unable to tolerate the idea of a “long run” spent in this haunted old place. “I guess I’ll figure something out.”
Then the room was awkwardly silent, and I felt like I should just go find my own spot and leave Eliza and Florence to be BFFs without me. So I stood up and walked self-consciously out of the dormitory, basically reliving all the moments in my life when I’d proved too dorky or smart or unfashionable to hang with the popular girls.
Of all the things I would have guessed about being dead, I definitely didn’t expect that it would sometimes feel exactly like high school.
I spent the night sitting alone in the superintendent’s apartment. But by the time morning came, I was restless and antsy, and the low, dark ceilings seemed to be closing in on me. I passed into the lobby, headed for the double doors that led outside, and then felt a jolt of shock.
Two wide-eyed teenage girls stood directly in my path, shoulder to shoulder, both with messy hair and in matching long, flannel nightgowns.
More ghosts.
The girls stared in mute fascination until I slipped outside, at which point their shrill giggles echoed behind me.
I rolled my eyes and kept going. A soft snow fell, the kind of big, fluffy snowflakes that land on your clothes as tiny crystals. Except they fell right through me as I passed silently through the quiet morning.
I trudged down the hill to the west of the house, stopping when I came to a row of white marble protrusions sticking up through the snow.
Just as Theo had said—the graveyard.
A few feet away, there was another row of headstones, and another one after that. Those beyond were buried in a deeper bank of snow, which was a relief to me. I didn’t especially want to know how many women and girls had met lonely deaths here.
I turned around and nearly ran smack into Theo.
His mouth widened into an almost-smile. “I’d say it’s too cold to be outside, but you seem pretty comfortable,” he said.
So did he—he stood in a relaxed pose, his hands in his pockets. I realized how glad I was to see him again. After enduring Eliza and Florence’s prim politeness, I needed to be around someone who wasn’t studying and judging my every word and action.
“It’s suffocating inside,” I explained.
He nodded. “I can imagine. I like the fresh air, myself.”
Only I hadn’t just meant the air, or the temperature, or even the smallness and darkness of the rooms. It was the fact that there was no world outside of the Piven Institute—and the fact that that didn’t seem to bother the others at all.
“So … what have you been up to lately?” I asked Theo.
He laughed. “Well, let’s see. Every day I walk the perimeter of the property, and then I sit on a fallen tree over there, in that little patch of woods, and then I wait for it to get dark, and there are a few animals I’ve been watching since they were small, so … that’s pretty much the whole story.”
We were walking between the rows, basically on top of dead people. I wondered which grave corresponded with which ghost. Did the ghosts feel it when I passed over them? My seventh-grade teacher had told us once that when you shiver for no reason, that means someone’s walking over your grave. The class told her she was crazy, because we weren’t dead.
Joke’s on me, I guess.
“Do you ever think about trying to leave again?” I asked.
Theo shook his head. “Not anymore.”
“Why not?” I asked. “What would be the worst that could happen?”
“Oh, I’m not afraid,” he said. “I just … don’t care. It’s been a long time since I cared about anything.”
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s what’s keeping you here? Not caring?”
His tone was practiced and easy, but I remembered the way he’d choked up when we’d held hands last time. Now he seemed to be trying really hard not to let that happen again—by suppressing any trace of emotion. “I used to care about things. But that’s not going to do you any good when you’re just a ghost.”
I didn’t answer. As much as it hurt to miss my family and wish they hadn’t abandoned me, I wasn’t about to pretend they didn’t exist.
“Think about it,” he said. “Have you ever known anyone who died?”
“My grandmother,” I said. “She died when I was eight.”
“Did you love her?”
“Of course.”
“But do you think about her every day? Do you remember what she did, her life’s work, the things she said to you? We don’t do that. We let the memories go. All the moments that you thought were so important … it all starts to vanish, the day you die.”
There was a touch of bitterness in his voice, and part of me couldn’t deny the truth of his words. What was the point of getting all emotional about things and people who were only going to forget I ever existed? But at the same time, he was wrong. I still remembered how my grandmother smelled, and how
safe being at her house made me feel. Those things became part of who I was.
Theo made a frustrated sound. “I’m sorry, Delia. That’s a terrible way to talk. I don’t mean you shouldn’t care about people, or that your family—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t think I agree, but it’s okay.”
Still, my mood was undeniably gloomier than it had been a few minutes earlier. I kicked at a pile of snow and watched my foot go right through it.
Theo caught his breath. “Now I feel awful. I’ll make it up to you, if you like.”
“How?”
The smile that followed surprised me with its brightness—and I filed a mental note that his detachment was only a cloak for something that had happened. Something that had hurt him.
“Do you like ice-skating?” he asked.
“Um … I’m from Georgia. Not a lot of hard freezes down there. Also, I’m about as graceful as a swan with a broken leg. I’m not really the athletic type.”
“Well,” he said, taking me by the hand and starting to run, “the good news is, you’re not going to die out there.”
Keeping up with him was easier than I would have thought. In a couple of minutes we passed into a small stand of trees and reached the edge of a small, round pond. Its surface was a shell of pale-blue ice.
“I’ve never—” I started to say, but Theo was already pulling me onto the ice. I shrieked and started to slip, but he caught me and set me back upright.
“The other good news is that you don’t need skates,” he said, gliding past me. “No friction, see? Come on!”
I hesitated, and he circled back, executed a graceful spin, and then looked at me with that infectious smile.
“I thought you wanted more fresh air,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “But if I fall through, you have to dive in and save me.”
“You won’t fall,” he said. “But even if you do, you could walk out. This pond has a nice gentle slope, and it’s only about twenty feet deep at the center.”
I didn’t ask him how he knew that. The thought of sinking to the bottom of the frigid, dark water sent a chill up my spine.