The girl bit her lip. She seemed to regret having spoken. “They,” she said. “Po and Bundle. Can’t you see them?”
Will had just about decided that the girl was definitely crazy when at the very edges of his vision he saw something flicker. He sat very still and focused on the dark. There was something moving there, just barely, a shape slowly asserting itself in the darkness, as though the air was water and something—no, two things—were moving underneath its surface. And then, all at once, he could see them: a child-shaped bit of shadow, or air, roughly his size, and another small, fuzzy thing that looked at first glance to be a dog. Or maybe a cat. Difficult to say: Its outlines were not particularly clear.
Will let out a sharp gasp. “What—what are they?”
“What do we look like?” The voice was sharp and irritable.
The girl pointed. “That’s Po,” she said. “You’ll have to forgive its manners. No one has any on the Other Side. And that’s Bundle.”
The shaggy thing made a noise somewhere between a bark and a meow.
Will gulped. “But they’re—are they—are they really ghosts?”
“You can speak to me directly,” Po said peevishly, and its outlines got a little brighter, as though they were catching fire. “I’m right here.”
The girl said, “Of course they’re ghosts. What else would they be?”
“But are they—are you—are they—” He felt foolish for stammering, and even more foolish for the question he was about to ask, but he couldn’t help it. He did not know whether to speak to Po or the girl, so he just closed his eyes and quickly blurted out, “Aren’t ghosts dangerous? I mean, don’t they hurt people?”
“If you don’t stop asking idiotic questions,” Po said, “I’ll give you a case of the shivers that’ll have your teeth dancing a jig.”
“Po,” the girl said reproachfully. “Be nice.”
Po became all at once a solid, squat mass of black. Will could only assume the ghost was sulking.
“They’re not at all dangerous,” the girl said, turning to Will. “Bundle’s quite friendly.”
As if to prove it, at that moment Will felt a softening around him. He looked down in his lap and saw a pair of coal-black, eye-shaped shadows blinking up at him. Bundle went, Mwark. Will lifted his hand tentatively and stroked the air where it was, for lack of a better word, different—more drape-y and shape-y.
“See?” The girl nodded her approval. “And Po is wonderful—when it’s not being a grouch,” she added a little louder, and Po muttered something Will could not make out.
He had noticed, however, that the girl called Po “it,” and he wondered about that. “Isn’t Po a boy or a girl?”
“Neither. And both. Those things lose meaning on the Other Side. Just like Bundle is both a dog and a cat, and also neither.”
Will found it all very strange. “But they must have been one or the other at some time. When they were, um, on this side?”
“Oh, yes, I suppose so.” The girl seemed unconcerned. “But they can hardly be expected to remember. They’ve been on the Other Side for a very long time. So now they are just Bundle and Po, and my friends.” She leaned closer. “They helped me run away from the attic. That’s where I’d been living.”
At the mention of the attic, Will’s heart jumped a little. He thought of saying, I know, and telling her how he used to stand on the street corner and watch her, but was too shy to do so. Instead he asked, “Why did you run away?”
The girl squirmed and appeared, for the first time, uncomfortable. “It was time,” she said vaguely, her hand skating over the wooden box in her lap. Will wondered what it contained. He thought, too, of the wooden box he was supposed to have delivered to the Lady Premiere, the one that had started all his troubles: It had looked very much like Liesl’s box. No doubt it was being used by Mr. Gray for some disgusting purpose, for storing frogs’ legs or newt eyeballs or something. “What about you?” she asked. “What’s your story?”
Will did not want to appear incompetent by telling her about the mix-up with the alchemist’s magic, so instead he said, “Oh, I just wanted to explore a bit. Get off to see the world, and so on.”
In the corner, Po coughed. Will wondered if the ghost could somehow tell he was lying. He pressed on quickly, “I headed to the train station and jumped on the first train I could find. Hid out in the bathroom while the ticket collector came along, so I wouldn’t get in trouble for riding without a ticket.”
“That was very clever of you,” the girl said, and Will glowed with pleasure. As far as he knew, no one had ever thought him clever before. “We had to hide out with the luggage. It was very dusty.”
“Yes, well, I’ve done it loads of times,” Will said again, with a bit of swagger. He was enjoying the girl’s attention. “I’m always on the move.”
Po coughed again.