CHAPTER FIVE.
ZACH WOKE IN THE DARKNESS OF HIS BEDROOM. HE wasn"t sure why, but his heart raced, adrenaline pumping through his body, as though something had activated his body"s fight-or-flight response. He blinked in the dark, letting his eyes adjust. The moon was high enough to give the room an eerie silvery glow. He could make out the familiar shapes of his furniture. His black cat was uncurling and stretching her long sleek body, claws digging into the coverlet. She padded up to him, her yellow eyes full of reflected light.
"What"s up?" he whispered to The Party, reaching out to pet her soft triangular head and press his thumb against her ear, folding it down and rubbing it. She b.u.t.ted against him and started to purr.
Tap.
He jumped. The cat hissed, her white teeth flashing in the moonlight, and she jumped off the bed. Something small and hard had struck the window.
This was no echo of a dream, no made-up story. Something really had hit the gla.s.s, smacking against one of the panes he couldn"t see, one of the lower ones, hidden behind blue half-curtains.
A sudden gust of wind made the branches outside shake and jitter. He couldn"t help imagining the long, bony fingers of the trees sc.r.a.ping against the gla.s.s.
When he was a little kid, he"d had a firm belief in universally observed monster rules. He"d been sure, for example, that if he kept all parts of himself on the mattress and shrouded beneath blankets, if he kept his eyes closed, and if he pretended to be asleep, then he"d be safe. He didn"t know where he"d gotten the idea from. He did remember his mother saying he"d smother himself if he kept sleeping with his head under the comforter. Then one nighta"quite randomlya"he fell asleep with his head above the covers like a normal person, and no monster got him. Over time he got spottier about observing his safety precautions, until he routinely slept with an arm dangling off the side of his bed and his feet kicked free of the sheets.
But right then, at the sound of the wind, for one panicky moment, all he wanted was to burrow under the blankets and never come out.
Tap. Tap.
The thing hitting the window was just a branch, he told himself.
Or an insomniac squirrel rattling around in the gutters.
Or a neighbor cat trying to pick a fight with The Party.
Tap.
He was never going to be able to go back to sleep if he didn"t look. Zach slid out of bed, his bare feet padding over the carpet. Steeling himself and taking a deep breath, he pushed aside the curtain.
There were a few scattered pebbles on the roof tiles in front of his window. That was the first thing he noticed. The second was that when he looked past the roof, he saw two dark figures looking up at him from the moonlit lawn. He was too surprised to shout. They had windblown hair and upturned faces and, for a moment, he didn"t know them. But then he realized it was only Poppy and Alice, not zombie girls or witches or ghosts. Alice lifted her hand in a shy wave. Poppy had another handful of pebbles and looked ready to throw them at him.
He let out his breath and waved back a little unsteadily. His hammering heart started to slow.
Poppy beckoned to him. Come down, she was signaling.
He thought of the note that Alice had pa.s.sed him and the way she"d underlined important, but he couldn"t think of anything so important that it would lead them to sneak out of their houses on a Friday night. Alice"s grandmother would ground her for the rest of forever if she found out.
Zach backed away from the window. Quietly he went to the closet and pushed his feet into a pair of sneakers. He pulled a sweater over his T-shirt and crept downstairs in his alligator pajama bottoms.
The Party followed, mewling plaintively, probably hoping to be fed.
The under-cabinet lights in the kitchen were bright enough to stumble through by, and he managed to find his coat on a hook in the entranceway. The microwave showed the time in blinking green numbers: three minutes past midnight. Zach shouldered his coat on and went outside, closing the door before the cat could slip through.
Poppy and Alice were waiting for him.
"Hey," he whispered into the dark. "What"s going on? What happened?"
"Shhhhh," Poppy said. "You"ll wake up everyone. Come on."
"Where to?" he asked, looking back at his house. There was a light on in his parents" bedroom upstairs. Sometimes his mother stayed up late to read; sometimes she fell asleep with the light on. If she was still awake, the sound of them talking might carry up to her, but he wanted to know something before he just followed Alice and Poppy into the night.
"The Silver Hills," Alice said.
That was a junkyard that specialized in metal about half a mile from their houses. The owner bought everything from car parts to tin cans and, although no one was sure what he did with them other than let them rust in huge mounds on his property, they were a pretty impressive sight. The stripped rods, machine parts, and batteries gleamed like mountains of silver, so that"s why they"d started calling it the Silver Hills. They"d come up with a whole story line, including dwarves and trolls and a princess doll that Poppy had painted silver.
Zach jogged behind Poppy and Alice, the wind cutting through his thin pajamas, making him feel both cold and sort of ridiculous. After a few minutes Poppy pulled a flashlight out of her jacket and clicked it on. It illuminated only a narrow patch of gra.s.s and dirt, so she had to swing it back and forth to see much.
There was the same old high chain-link fence around the property that Zach remembered. And there was the same old abandoned shed that they"d found a few summers ago and used as a clubhouse until Alice"s grandmother had found out about it and given them a speech about teta.n.u.s and how it led to something she called lockjaw. Zach wasn"t sure lockjaw was a real thing, but he thought about it every time his neck felt stiff.
They hadn"t been there sincea"or at least, he hadn"t. He wondered if Poppy and Alice snuck out to the shed without him. They seemed full of secrets tonight. The only secret he had was one he wished he didn"t.
Alice opened the creaky old door and went inside. He followed nervously.
Poppy sat down on the splintery floor, cross-legged, setting the flashlight against her sneakers, so it lit her face. Then she unhooked her backpack from one shoulder, pulling it around onto her lap.
"So are you going to tell me what"s going on?" Zach asked, sitting down across from Poppy. The wood planks were cold under his pajama pants, and he shifted, trying to get comfortable.
She unzipped her bag. "You"re going to laugh," she said. "But you shouldn"t."
He glanced over at Alice. She was leaning against one wall of the shed. "Poppy saw a ghost," she said.
He tried to suppress a shudder. Ghosts weren"t something you talked about in an abandoned shed at night. "You"re just trying to freak me out. This is some kind of stupida""
Poppy carefully took the bone china doll from her backpack. Zach drew in his breath and went silent. The Queen"s dull black eyes were open, her gaze boring into his own. He"d always thought she was creepy-looking, but in the reflected beam of the flashlight, she seemed demonic.
Poppy touched the doll"s face. It was pure white, like a dinner plate. Hair, dry as brush bristles, was threaded into her scalp, and her cheeks and lips were rouged a faint pink. When she was tilted onto her back, her eyes stayed open instead of closing the way they should have, as though she was still watching Zach. There was a tear at the shoulder of her thin, brittle gown and tiny pinholes through the discolored fabric. It hadn"t aged as well as the rest of the dolla"and the ride in Poppy"s backpack probably hadn"t helped.
"The Queen," Zach said unsteadily, forcing a sneer into his voice to cover his rising fear. "So what? You brought me all the way out here to see a doll ?"
"Just listen," Alice said. "Try not to be the huge jerk you"ve turned into."
Alice never said stuff like that, especially not to him. It stung.
"I know you told us you weren"t going to come over the other day, but I thought you might anyway," Poppy said, talking fast. "And I couldn"t just go in the cabinet and get the Queen if Mom was there. So I took the doll out of the case that night when we had the argument and moved around some of Mom"s other stuff to hide what I"d done. But that nighta"well, I saw the dead girl."
"You mean you had a nightmare," Zach said.
"Just shut up a minute," said Alice.
"It wasn"t like a regular dream," Poppy said, her fingers smoothing back the Queen"s curls and her voice changing, going soft and chill as the night air. It reminded Zach of the way Poppy talked when she played villains or even the Queen herself. "It wasn"t like dreaming at all. She was sitting on the end of my bed. Her hair was blond, like the doll"s, but it was tangled and dirty. She was wearing a nightdress smeared with mud. She told me I had to bury her. She said she couldn"t rest until her bones were in her own grave, and if I didn"t help her, she would make me sorry."
Poppy paused, as though she was expecting him to say something sarcastic. Alice shifted uncomfortably. Zach was silent for a long moment, arrested by the images Poppy had conjured. He could almost see the girl in her stained nightgown.
"Her bones?" he finally echoed.
"Did you know that bone china has real bones in it?" Poppy said, tapping a porcelain cheek. "Her clay was made from human bones. Little-girl bones. That hair threaded through the scalp is the little girl"s hair. And the body of the doll is filled with her leftover ashes."
A shiver ran up his spine. He closed his eyes to keep from looking at the doll in Poppy"s lap. "Okay, this is your idea of a funny prank. I get it. You"re mad at me for not playing the game anymore, so you made up this story to scare me. What"s the punch line? Did one of you rig a sheet outside to flutter from a tree or something?"
"I told you," Alice said to Poppy, under her breath.
"You really did rig a sheet?" Zach frowned, looking out at the trees and the mounds of cans and metal.
"No, idiot," said Alice. "I told her that you wouldn"t believe us and that you wouldn"t want to help."
He threw up his hands in confusion. "Help with what? Help you bury a doll ? Why would you need to wake me up in the middle of the night to help you do that?"
Poppy pulled the doll to her chest, and one of the eyes closed and opened, as though it was winking at him. "Eleanor Kerchner is real. That"s the doll-girl"s name. She told me about herself. Her father was some kind of worker for a china manufacturer, designing and decorating pottery, and when Eleanor died, her dad went totally crazy. He couldn"t bear to put her in the ground, so he took her body back to the kilns at his job, chopped her up, and cremated her. He ground up her burnt bones and used them to make a batch of bone china, then poured it into a mold cast from one of Eleanor"s favorite dolls. So her grave stayed empty."
Zach tried to swallow, although his throat suddenly felt very dry. It was too easy to imagine the doll moving on her own, fluttering her painted eyelids and turning toward him. Maybe opening her tiny rosebud of a mouth to scream. "She told you that?"
"Each night she told me a little bit more of her story." Illuminated by the flashlight, Poppy"s face had become strange. "She"s not going to rest until we bury her. And she"s not going to let us rest either. She promised to make us miserable unless we help her."
He looked at Alice. "And you believe it? You believe all of this?"
"I never believed in ghosts, so not at first," Alice said. "No offense, Poppy, but it"s a crazy story. And I"m still not totally sure, but show him the thing. It"s pretty convincing."
"Show me what?"
Poppy pulled the doll"s head sharply up from the body. Zach gasped at the sudden violence of it, but all that it revealed was a string-and-rusty-metal-hook apparatus. With a twist, the Queen"s head came entirely off, leaving the hook still attached to the neck, hanging from the cord. Poppy slid her fingers into the body of the doll, feeling around like she was trying to reach something.
"What are you doing?" He stared at the disembodied head resting on Poppy"s knee. The eyes were closed now.
Poppy drew out an old burlap bag from the neck cavity. "Here, take this and look inside."
He took the rough cloth as she turned the beam of the flashlight on it, revealing letters and a date in blocky print. The bag was full, but Zach couldn"t tell what it was full with.
"Liverpool?" he read out loud. He had a vague memory of the place from some late-night British rock doc.u.mentary his mom had been watching. "That"s where the Beatles are froma"in England. There"s no way we can go there. I guess we"re going to have to find out if ghost girls really can curse people, becausea""
"That"s what I thought at first," Alice said, and pointed to the markings. "But look again. It says East Liverpool. In Ohio. So we could get on a bus and be there by morning." She paused. "And we are. We"re going. Tonight. Well, technically, it"s morning, so we"re going in the morning."
He looked from the doll to Alice and then to Poppy. "This is why you brought me out here?"
"We tried to explain yesterday," Alice said. "I told you it was important."
Poppy reached down and turned the flashlight beam on her watch, then shone it at him. "There"s a bus stopping in town at two fifteen in the morning. It"s coming from Philadelphia and going to Youngstown. One of the stops is East Liverpool. Alice said she"d come if you would too."
Zach thought about the ghost story that Poppy had told on their last walk home, the one about holding your breath when you pa.s.sed a cemetery. Was she trying to play a different kind of game? A game that she was making out of their real lives? But Poppy didn"t look gleeful, the way she did when she had a thrilling idea. She looked pale and nervous, like she hadn"t been sleeping well.
"You"ll really go?" he asked finally, looking at Alice. Her grandmother wouldn"t like a single thing about this: not the ghost, not the bus, definitely not Alice being out at two in the morning with a boya"even if the boy was just him.
Alice shrugged.
Zach"s parents wouldn"t like him going either, but that was a point in favor of the plan, as far as he was concerned. And if he decided that he never wanted to come back, well, at least he"d have some company while he figured out where he was going. In stories, orphan boys became a.s.sistant pig keepers and magician"s apprentices. In real life, he wasn"t sure there were any equivalent jobs.
"You still haven"t looked in the bag," Alice said, pointing to the burlap sack he was holding. "It"s pretty weird."
With trepidation, he pulled the drawstrings so that he could peer inside. Poppy handed Alice the flashlight. She held it up high, pointing it down at him.
For a moment, Zach didn"t know what he was seeing. The bag seemed to be full of something that looked a little bit like dark sand with chunks of sh.e.l.ls in it. Then he realized that the bag was full of gray ash, and what he"d thought were sh.e.l.ls were actually sharp, pale pieces of bone.
Of course. The leftover ashes. The remains of a ghost. Of a girl. Of the Queen.
A nameless primal terror washed over him. He wanted to drop the bag, wanted to race out of the shed and go back to bed where he could shiver under his own covers. But he didn"t move. His hands started to shake, and he drew the strings tight so he didn"t have to look anymore.
"Poppy thinks we can catch a bus back in the afternoon and be home by dinnertime. It"s only a three-hour ride, but there aren"t a lot of buses from here to therea"just this one early in the morning, and another in the afternoon that gets in too late for us to ride back in time. We left a note for her parents." Despite her words, Alice"s voice grew a little uncertain. Zach wondered if she"d balked at first, before she"d apparently promised Poppy that if he went, she would go too.
"If these bones are real," he began, "shouldn"t we tell someone? A girl died. Maybe Eleanor"s father murdered her. Maybe it"s some kind of cold-case file."
"No one"s going to care about some old story," Poppy said. "And even if they did, they"d just take the doll away from usa"put her in a museum or display her somewherea"and then her spirit would be angry."
He paused, considering everything she"d said and also what she hadn"t said. "Did you find the ashes before or after you dreamed about Eleanor Kerchner?"
"I"m going whether you both come or not," Poppy said, s.n.a.t.c.hing the burlap bag out of his hand. He guessed that meant she"d found the ashes first. "Whether you believe me or not, I"m going to bury her like she wants."
Getting on a bus in the middle of the night to a place they"d never been was daunting. It also seemed a little bit like an adventure.
"Okay," he said. "Fine. I"ll come."
Alice looked at him in wide-eyed surprise. He wondered for the first time if she"d been planning on him saying no and hadn"t considered the possibility that he"d say yes. If so, she probably should have told him.
"I"ll come," he continued, "so long as you both promise not to ask me about the game or why I don"t want to play. Okay? No more ha.s.sling me about it."
"Okay," said Poppy.
"Okay," said Alice.
"Okay," said Zach.
"You need to get ready fast," Poppy said. "And leave a note so your parents don"t freak out. Just tell them you got up early and that you"ll be back tonight."
"And you"re sure the bus will get us back in time?" Alice asked. "You"re positive?"
"Yes," Poppy said. "I planned it all out. Just bring food and supplies, okay, Zach? We"ll meet at the mailbox in twenty minutes."
She switched off the flashlight and, for a moment, the shed was plunged into darkness.
Zach blinked, willing his eyes to adjust. By the time they did, Poppy had put away the Queen, so at least her terrible head with its winking eye was hidden.
Zach walked home through the hushed streets, his sneakers wet with dew from the frosted gra.s.s. There was a kind of quiet that hung over the world in the middle of the night, as though there was no one else awake anywhere. It felt ripe with magic and endless possibility.
He snuck back into his house and stood for a long moment in the dark kitchen, a feeling of great daring swelling his heart. When he finally went to the cabinets, he felt as though he was provisioning himself for one of those epic fantasy questsa"the kind that required a lot of jerky or something called hardtack that he"d read about soldiers eating during the Civil War and which he thought might be a kind of bread. His mother didn"t have either of those things, nor did she have elven lembas, which had kept Frodo and Sam from starving on the way to Mount Doom and always made him think of matzoh (which his mom also didn"t have). He did find a can of orange soda, a package of saltine crackers, three oranges, red Twizzlers, and a jar of peanut b.u.t.ter, all of which he stuffed into his backpack.