(That was the kind of world they lived in: When people were afraid, they did not always do what they knew to be right. They turned away. They closed their eyes. They said, Tomorrow. Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll do something about it. And they said that until they died.)
Privately, Karen suspected that Liesl was a ghost, as she was very superstitious. Everyone was superstitious in those times of grayness and dark, when the sun had long ago stopped shining, and the color had slowly drained from the world.
True, Karen did not know of any ghosts who ate, and Liesl was always cleaning her plate of whatever food was placed there, no matter how disgusting or half-rotten. And true, too, that on the few occasions when Karen had been forced to touch the girl (twice when she had caught a fever; once when some of the fish Milly had sent up had been spoiled, and the girl had been ragingly sick for a whole day), Liesl had felt solid enough. But all in all, seeing Liesl gave Karen an uncomfortable, prickly feeling she could not quite identify: a feeling that reminded her of the time she had been caught by the nuns at her school stealing a chocolate chip cookie from Valerie Kimble’s lunch basket—a feeling of being watched, and judged.
That was why she so dreaded her twice-daily trips up the narrow attic stairs, and why, as much as possible, she tried to come only when she knew the girl would be sleeping.
It was just after five thirty in the morning when she began making her way carefully up the stairs, balancing the tray, which today contained a bit of bread mixed with hot water to form a pasty porridge, and the usual few sips of milk. The house was even quieter than usual, and the shadows seemed to Karen particularly strange and black and huge. Suddenly she felt something brush her ankle and she jumped, nearly dropping the tray; a cat meowed in the darkness and she heard the scrabbling of paws on the wood, moving past her down the stairs. She exhaled. It was only Tuna, the mangy cat who had been informally adopted by the kitchen staff and who occasionally roamed the house at night, when Augusta wasn’t around to give him a swift kick in the belly.
“Nothing but a kitty,” Karen muttered to herself. “A little bitty kitty.” But her heart was hammering, and she felt sweat pricking up under her arms. Something was wrong in the house this morning. She felt it; she knew it.
It was the ashes, she realized: that pile of ashes sitting in the wooden box on the mantel. It wasn’t right; it wasn’t natural. Like having a dead person propped up in the living room. And didn’t ghosts always hover around their bodies? Even now, the master of the house could be watching her, tiptoeing up the stairs, ready to wrap his dark and ghostly fingers around her exposed neck. . . .
Something brushed against her cheek, and she cried out. But it was just a draft, just a draft.
“No such thing as ghosts,” she whispered out loud. “No such thing as ghosts.”
But it was with a feeling of dread and terror that she climbed the last three steps to the attic and carefully unlocked the door with the large skeleton key she kept in her apron pocket.
Several things happened quickly, one right after the other.
Liesl, who was sitting up in bed, not lying down with her eyes closed as she should have been, said, “Hello.”
Po, standing directly next to her in the darkness, concentrated with all its might on distant memories of something vast and white burning high up in the sky, and its outline began to glow like a star peeking out against the darkness: faintly at first, then clearer and clearer, the outline of a child whose body was all made of blackness and air.
Po said, “Boo.”
Bundle went, Grrr.
Then:
Karen dropped her tray.
Karen cried, “God help us!”
Karen turned and went running down the attic stairs as quickly as she could, a little noise of utter terror bubbling from her throat.
And:
In her haste, Karen forgot to lock the door behind her.
“Quickly,” Po said to Liesl. Liesl flung away her covers and stood up. She was not dressed in her thin nightshirt, but in trousers, a large, moth-eaten sweater, an old purple velvet jacket, and regular shoes. She had not worn anything but slippers in so long, she had difficulty walking at first.
“We don’t have much time,” Po said, skating silently in front of her. The effort of appearing to the servant girl had been tiring, and Po allowed itself to ebb back to its normal shadowed state. “Hurry, hurry.” Bundle zipped back and forth, materializing in various corners, and then briefly on the ceiling, in its excitement.