“We must hide,” Po said.
Bundle jumped and evaporated temporarily into the air with a small, excited mwark!
Liesl inched out of her seat, clutching the wooden box to her chest. The train lurched and bumped. She tightened her grip, swaying a little as she moved into the aisle. At the far end of the car she saw the old woman, coming toward her, the sharp metal tip at the end of her cane making a horrible clack-clack-clack noise with every step. Behind her was, as Po said, a very large and very mean-looking police officer wearing a bright blue uniform. To Liesl’s horror, he already had a pair of handcuffs out, hanging loosely in his massive fist.
“There she is,” Liesl heard the old woman say, in her high, lilting voice. “Quite off her rocker.”
“Come on,” Po said. The ghost was silent for a minute, and then it said, “Bundle will distract them.” And then Bundle was twirling past them, back toward the old woman and the cop.
Although Liesl was so terrified she thought she might faint, she got the sense that Bundle and Po had just had a conversation without words, and in the midst of her terror she thought very clearly, How strange. How strange and nice. To be able to always say what you mean without having to say anything.
“Follow me,” Po said, and began floating toward the back of the train.
Liesl moved quickly and carefully, desperate not to drop the wooden box, focusing on staying on her feet despite the jerky movements of the train. She did not dare look behind her, but she could feel the old woman and the cop bearing down on her, hear the clack-clack-clack of the steel-tipped cane moving ever closer. She imagined the cold feel of metal around her wrists, and she said a brief prayer in her mind to no one in particular: Please.
Just then the clack-clack-clack-ing stopped. Liesl heard the old woman let out a little cry of surprise, but she did not pause or look over her shoulder.
“Through here,” Po said. Liesl reached out and heaved open the doors that separated her car from the next one—hearing for one brief moment the deafening, clattering roar of the wheels on the track, feeling the whipping cold wind and watching the ground zoom by in the space between the two cars—and then stepped through.
The old woman and the cop had, in that time, recovered from the startling and curious sensation that had overwhelmed them all at once: a kind of velvet feeling that had wrapped itself around their throats, not frightening but totally unfamiliar, and had made them both think, separately and for no apparent reason, of pets they had had in their childhood.
Bundle, feeling quite pleased with itself, thought itself back to Po’s side.
The lady and the policeman looked up.
The little girl with the imaginary friends and the large wooden box was gone.
Will had hidden in the bathroom until he was sure the ticket collector had already come through. Then he had settled comfortably in a little window seat in one of the last passenger cars, and was quite enjoying the landscape streaming by his window: flat brown meadows and high, purple mountains, capped with snow. He had never been out of the city before. The only mountains he knew were mountains of brick, and he had never seen so much open space. And bare and brown and dead as it was (things had long ago stopped growing), all he could think of was the freedom of it, and how fun it would be to spread his arms and run, run, run in all that open space.
He was so absorbed by the view that he did not notice the girl from the attic hurry past him holding a wooden box—the very wooden box that had started all his troubles, in fact, though he would surely not have recognized it, plain as it was.
He was busy staring at the mountains.
Chapter Fifteen
THE FIRST FREIGHT CAR WAS FULL OF THE SHARP, unpleasant smell of animal droppings, and packed with cages. On one side there were rows and rows of chickens; on the opposite side were dogs and cats, some in fancy carrying-cases with leather tags, some in bare little cages. The dogs swiped at the cats, the cats hissed at the chickens, and the whole car was filled with howling.
“Let’s keep going,” Liesl said.
The second freight car was dark and very cold and smelled like dust. It was crowded with boxes, trunks, crates, and suitcases, which were stacked every which way, in high, teetering towers that shook and swayed as the train rattled along. Liesl’s breath escaped in clouds when she exhaled. But at least it was quiet, and she would not be bothered by the woman with the cane, or the police officer, or the ticket collector.
She scrunched down in the small space between two gigantic wooden trunks and brought her knees to her chest, placing the wooden box carefully on the ground just behind her feet. Po folded itself into the narrow space next to her, and Bundle hovered on top of a suitcase nearby, becoming a long black haze as it stretched out.
Liesl yawned.