The Time of the Ghost (3 page)

Oh good gracious, am I dead?
Sally cried out.
I'm not dead, am I?
she asked her sisters.

It did no good. Unaware that anyone was asking them anything, they all went back to their own concerns. Then all at once it became very important to Sally that they should know she was there. It was even more important to her than the reason why she was here. She was sure at least one of them could explain everything if only they knew she was here to be explained to.

Fenella!
she shouted. Fenella, after all, had almost known she was there.

But Fenella climbed from the draining board, through the open window, and jumped down outside. Sally fluttered after her, toward the sink. Oliver followed, whining uneasily, but gave up with a huge sigh when Sally sailed away through the window after Fenella.

Fenella was walking this way and that through the orchard when Sally caught up with her. She seemed to be making sure nobody else was there.

There is someone
, Sally said, coming to a halt in a clump of nettles in front of Fenella.
Look! There's me.

Fenella walked straight past her, frowning. Fenella's frown was the one thing about her that was like Phyllis. It gave Fenella the angel look too—a fallen angel. “Weaving spiders come not near,” Fenella said to the air beyond Sally, and walked on. She came to the hut made of old chairs and knelt down in front of the opening in the soggy carpet. At once she became a large-fronted dwarf again, with spindly arms. The spindly arms stretched toward the hut. “Come forth, Monigan. Come forth and meet thy worshiper,” Fenella intoned. “Thy worshiper kneeleth here with both arms outstretched. Come forth! She never does come forth, you know,” she remarked to the air above Sally.

I know
, Sally said impatiently. The Monigan game had gone on far too long, it seemed to her. She knew she had thought it was pretty boring when Cart first invented the Worship of Monigan a year ago.
Fenella, listen, look! Notice me!

“Monigan, thou hast but one worshiper these days,” Fenella intoned, unheeding. “Thou hadst better look out, Monigan, or I shall go away, too. Then where wouldst thou be? Come forth, I say to thee. Come forth!”

Fenella! Please!
said Sally.

But Fenella simply swayed around on her knees, intoning, “Come forth! Monigan, thou mightst do me a favor and come forth just this once. Canst thou not understand how boring thou art, just sitting there? Come forth!”

It would teach you if she did!
Sally said, unheard and soundless. Then she had an idea. If she could flip a latch and barge a door, she might be able to move something as light as a rag doll, if she tried very hard. Fenella would notice that at least. Sally drifted to the hut and ducked in through the old carpet.

She only had the part of her that seemed to be head and shoulders inside it, but even that was almost too much. It was dank and stifling in there. And it smelled. Sally had a moment's wonder that she should mind a smell so much when she seemed to have no real nose to smell with.
But I can hear and see, too
, she thought.
Mostly what I can't do is feel.
She could not feel the sopping carpet, though she could smell the mildew on it, and smell Monigan herself, leaning soggily against the table leg at the back of the hut. There was a sharp mushroom smell from the pale yellow grass. But the worst smell came from the four or five little dishes in front of Monigan. The stuff was too rotten for Sally to tell what it had once been, but it smelled worse than the school kitchen. In front of the dolls' plates someone had carefully planted three black feathers upright in the pale grass.

Hm
, said Sally.
I wonder if Fenella is the only worshiper. Or did she do that?

She leaned further in to push Monigan. She did not want to in the least. Monigan was hideous. A year in the wet hut had turned the rag face livid gray, and fungus had puckered it until it looked like a maggot. The rest of Monigan was misshapen before she went into the hut. One time Cart, Sally, Imogen, and Fenella had each seized an arm or a leg—Sally could not remember whether it had been a quarrel or a silly game—and pulled until Monigan came to pieces. Then Cart, in terrible guilt, had sewed her together again, as badly as she had sewed Fenella's green sack, and dressed her in a pink knitted doll's dress. The dress was now maggot gray. To make it up to Monigan for being torn apart, Cart had invented the Worship of Monigan.

Sally did not like to go near Monigan, but she made one halfhearted attempt to push her. But she had forgotten how a rag doll, sitting in the wet, soaks up moisture like a sponge. Monigan was too heavy to move. Gladly Sally came up out of the hut. It was unbearable in there.

“I shall go and check the hens now,” Fenella remarked to the air as Sally emerged.

No—notice me first!
Sally cried out.

Fenella simply unfolded her insect legs and went wandering off. “Spotted snakes with double tongue,” Sally heard her say. “I wonder, do goddesses know how boring they are?”

Sally left her to it and went to find Cart or Imogen. They were both in the living room. Sally drifted in there, with Oliver anxiously trudging behind her.

“Can't you play this piano?” Cart was saying. She had one hand keeping her place in her book and the other vaguely pointing to the old upright piano against the wall.

Imogen and Sally both looked at the piano, Imogen with contempt, Sally as if she had never seen it before. It was a cheap yellowish color and very battered. Its yellow keys looked like bad teeth. Sally could see nobody ever used it because of the heaps of papers, books, and magazines all over it. There was a box of paints on the bass end, with a pastepot full of painty water balanced crookedly among the black notes. A painting was propped on the yellow music stand—a surprisingly good painting of Fenella standing in a blackberry bush. Sally wondered who had done it.

“Play that!” Imogen said contemptuously. “I'd rather play a xylophone compounded of dead men's bones!” She collapsed her full yellow length on a dirty sofa, which gave off a loud twang of springs as she landed. “My career is in ruins,” she said. “Was Myra Hess ever tormented in this way? I think not.”

Why does she talk like a book all the time?
Sally wondered irritably. Cart seemed busy with her reading again. Since there seemed little chance of either of them noticing her, Sally roosted dejectedly on the back of an armchair. Oliver, seeing her settled, flopped down himself with a deep groan and lay like a heaped-up hearthrug. But he was not asleep. Every so often he whined and turned one morbid eye in Sally's direction.

“What's wrong with him?” said Cart, looking up. Her blurry look was stronger when she was reading. It was as if she had faded into her book.

“His lunch, probably,” said Imogen. “You're always fussing about that wretched animal.”

“Well, he's my dog—or supposed to be,” said Cart. “I show a natural concern.”

“You show total, besotted devotion,” declared Imogen.

“I don't! Why do you talk like a book all the time?” retorted Cart.

“It's you that does that,” said Imogen. “You're a walking dictionary.”

Cart went back to her book. Imogen stared stormily at the yellow piano. Sally tried to muster courage to attract their attention. She knew why she could not. They were both bigger than she was.
Though why it should matter to me in this state, I can't imagine
, she said to herself.

Cart looked up again. “Isn't it peaceful? I suppose it's because the boys are in lessons. It's hard on them breaking up a week after us, isn't it?”

“No,” said Imogen. “I could use the music room if School term was over.”

“No, you couldn't,” said Cart. “Mrs. Gill told me there's a Course for Disturbed Children as soon as term ends. They're coming to overrun the place on Tuesday.”

“Oh, my Lord!” Imogen looked up at the ceiling and twiddled her mauve beads, faster and faster, so that they clattered viciously. “I
hate
the way we never get any holidays! It's not fair!”

Oh
, thought Sally. Her bodiless mind became clearer. Her parents kept a school—or rather, she seemed to think, they kept School House of a large boys' boarding school. Yes, that was it. The girls went to quite a different school, some miles away.
Oh, dear!
said Sally. She had been very silly looking for her class in the boys' school. She was glad no one had known. Why had she not remembered she had broken up already? Because she had lived in the boys' school all her life, she supposed, and it was much more real to her than her own. And Cart had supplied another memory: School was never empty. Almost as soon as the boys went home, more children came for courses. There were, as Imogen said, never any holidays.

Next second Sally found herself jumping to attention. Her movement made Oliver raise his head and rumble unhappily. Cart said, “I feel really envious of Sally—a horrible yellow envy, like the color of that piano. Why did we agree it should be
her
? Why Sally?”

“That's why it's so quiet, of course,” said Imogen.

“So it is!” said Cart, sitting forward as if Imogen had made a truly exciting discovery. “No whining and grumbling.”

“No arguing and quarreling,” agreed Imogen, stretching as if she was suddenly very comfortable. “No stream of remarks about squalor. No tidying up.”

“No hysterics and crashing about,” said Cart. “No criticisms. I sometimes feel I could bear all the rest of Sally if she wasn't always going on about the way we speak and walk and dress and so on.”

“The thing about her that really annoys me,” said Imogen, “is her beastly career and the way she's always on about it. She's not the only one with a career to think of.”

There was a slight pause. “Well—no,” said Cart.

Sally looked from one to the other, wondering which she hated most. She had just decided it was Imogen when Cart started again.

“No—it's Sally's pose of being good and sweet that drives me up the wall, now I think. And, if I venture the slightest criticism of Phyllis or Himself, she springs to their defense. She can't seem to believe they're not the most perfect parents anyone could have.”

Well, I think they are!
Sally shouted. Neither of them heard her. Without question, it was Cart she hated most.

“That's not quite fair, Cart,” Imogen said. She exuded justice and fair-mindedness. Sally remembered she always wanted to hit Imogen when she went like this. “Sally,” Imogen explained seriously, “truly does think this family is perfect. She loves her father and mother, Cart.”

Imogen's saintly tone maddened Cart as well as Sally. Cart's large face took on a blur of pink. Her eyes glared like holes in a mask. She roared, louder than Fenella, so that the windows buzzed. “Don't you give me that nonsense!” and flung herself at Imogen. Oliver saw her coming just in time and lumbered to his feet to get out of the way. But Imogen, with the speed of long practice, catapulted off the sofa in front of him. Oliver was forced toward Sally, and he did not like that. He growled. But he also wagged his tail and lowered his head in Sally's direction as he growled, because he could not understand what made her so peculiar.

Imogen and Cart took no notice. They dodged round Oliver, howling insults. And Sally forgot this was not the usual threesome quarrel and screamed unheard insults also.
Talk about arguing and quarreling! Talk about hysterics! And you can talk about careers, Imogen! How dare you criticize me behind my back!

“I think Oliver's gone mad at last.” Fenella's largest voice boomed behind them. Fenella was standing in the doorway, looking portentous.

Cart and Imogen—and Sally, too—looked at the growling, wagging Oliver. “Well, he never did have any brain,” Imogen said.

“There really is something wrong with him, I think,” Cart said anxiously.

“I'll tell you something else wrong,” said Fenella. “The black hen is still missing. I counted all the hens and looked everywhere. It's gone.”

“There must be a fox,” said Cart. “I told you.”

“I didn't mean that,” Fenella said meaningly.

“Then what
did
you mean?” said Cart.

Imogen said, “Cart, she's tied her hair in knots. Look.”

Fenella dismissed this with magnificent scorn. “Of course Cart knows. It's all part of the Plan.” Imogen, at this, looked surprisingly humble. “I meant the hen and Oliver.”

“You mean Oliver's eaten it!” Cart exclaimed. She rushed to Oliver and tried anxiously to open his mouth. This was impossible. Oliver, as well as being very large, very strong, and utterly thick, was also rather more obstinate than a donkey. He never did anything he did not want to, and he did not want his mouth open just then.

“I don't think you'd be able to see the hen, even down Oliver,” Imogen objected.

“But he might have feathers on his teeth,” Cart gasped, wrenching at Oliver's muzzle. It could have held two hens easily. “Think of the row there'll be!”

“Then it's better not to know,” said Imogen.