Unseen, Po strained to hold open the entrance between sides.
And then the ghosts came howling through the tunnel, with the whirling, swirling energy of a thousand winds, and everything was chaos.
Chapter Thirty
PO HAD SEEN THE NEED FOR A DISTRACTION EVEN before Will had suggested it. And so at the first opportunity, the ghost had slipped back to the Other Side.
Plan, Bundle, the ghost had thought to its companion. What we need is a plan.
Mwark, Bundle thought back, even more emphatically than usual.
They were in a place of towering skyscrapers built out of sheer black rock. Souls drifted around them, a dark mist. Po saw a line of the newly dead approaching from a distance: dozens of them, looking bewildered, speaking out loud in grating, almost human voices.
“Where are we?”
“I don’t understand. I just went out to the store to get some butter.”
“Aunt Carol always said that cities were dangerous. . . .”
Poor, lost new souls. As Po watched them get closer, it was filled with a sensation that felt like dispersing but was emptier and bigger, somehow: as though its Essence was evaporating into nothing.
Po knew what Liesl would call it. She would call it sadness. The voices, the new souls, came closer.
“This isn’t like any place I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s New York? I hear they have big buildings in New York.”
All those new ghosts: All they wanted was to go back to the Living Side, and back, too, in time—back to health and happiness, or even pain and sickness and poverty, so long as they were alive.
Then, suddenly, Po had an idea.
It had opened a door for Liesl, so that she could cross to the Other Side.
It would open one now, so that the ghosts could cross back.
Po focused its thoughts into sound.
“Hello!” it called out, against the black expanse of space. “Hello! You there!”
The new ghosts stopped marching. They squinted at Po, confused, and their voices became low murmurs.
“Now who is that, do you think?”
“I can’t seem to make him out. Or is it a her?”
“Everything looks a bit fuzzy. Does it look fuzzy to you? My doctor did say my eyes were going. . . .”
The Living Side was folded up against the place where Po was standing, separated by only a very thin membrane of existence, and from it Po could feel Liesl’s pulsing desperation, her need for escape. From it, too, he could hear a distant chanting, and see a glowing warm ball of light—no, of fire—which grew larger and larger, and filled Po’s Essence with a sense of heat and urgency.
Po did not know how many laws of the universe it was about to break, but the ghost put the thought out of its mind.
“Here,” Po said. “The path you are looking for is this way.”
The new souls murmured and rustled, repeating the word path to themselves in confusion. Po thought for a moment it would not be able to go through with the dishonesty, with the tearing—but then Liesl’s need came pulsing through the tissue-thin layers between worlds again, and the ball of fire burned like a beacon.
For the second time in the long, long course of its death, Po lied.
“This way,” the ghost said, “will take you home.”
And on the final word, he pulled. He strained and dug and stretched, and the space between the Other Side and the Living Side became a huge, yawning hole.
And the ghosts, responding to the promise of that simple word home—which carried inside of it as much magic, certainly, as the Lady Premiere could ever wish for—began streaming and tumbling out.
Because the ghosts were very new ghosts, they had not started to blend yet, and so were quite visible. And yet they were very clearly ghosts: Some had holes in their faces, or were missing arms or legs, where their physical selves had begun to dissipate and merge with the rest of the universe. As Will watched in wonder and horror, an old man came apart in front of his very eyes, like a drawing of a person being smudged into an indistinct blob of color.
It was not clear who was more confused, the ghosts or the living people. Already, they were not used to the Living Side, and its confusion of light and color and heavy smells and textures and feelings, and they found themselves even more disoriented than they had been a moment before. They were like wild animals pushed into a pen; they whirled and bumped one another and shrieked.
The old woman began screaming, which brought on another sneezing fit. The policeman tried to climb out a window, which was unfortunately stuck. Augusta toppled out of her chair and lay on her back, pedaling the air with her legs and beating at the ghosts with her hands and crying, “Mercy! Have mercy on us!”