The Wrong Grave (23 page)

Claire weaves in and out between the chimneys, chasing Samantha and the babysitter. Samantha is slow, turning to look behind. As Claire approaches, she keeps one hand on the handlebars and stretches the other hand out towards Samantha. Just as she is about to grab Samantha, the babysitter turns back and plucks the hat off Claire's head.

“Shit!” the babysitter says, and drops it. There is a drop of blood forming on the fleshy part of the babysitter's hand, black in the moonlight, where the Specialist's hat has bitten her.

Claire dismounts, giggling. Samantha watches as the Specialist's hat rolls away. It picks up speed, veering across the attic floor, and disappears, thumping down the stairs. “Go get it,” Claire says. “You can be the Specialist this time.”

“No,” the babysitter says, sucking at her palm. “It's time for bed.”

When they go down the stairs, there is no sign of the Specialist's hat. They brush their teeth, climb into the ship-bed, and pull the covers up to their necks. The babysitter sits between their feet. “When you're Dead,” Samantha says, “do you still get tired and have to go to sleep? Do you have dreams?”

“When you're Dead,” the babysitter says, “everything's a lot easier. You don't have to do anything that you don't want to. You don't have to have a name, you don't have to remember. You don't even have to breathe.”

She shows them exactly what she means.

When she has time to think about it (and now she has all the time in the world to think), Samantha realizes with a small pang that she is now stuck indefinitely between ten and eleven years old, stuck with Claire and the babysitter. She considers this. The number 10 is pleasing and round, like a beach ball, but all in all, it hasn't been an easy year. She wonders what 11 would have been like. Sharper, like needles maybe. She has chosen to be Dead, instead. She hopes that she's made the right decision. She wonders if her mother would have decided to be Dead, instead of dead, if she could have.

Last year they were learning fractions in school, when her mother died. Fractions remind Samantha of herds of wild horses, piebalds and pintos and palominos. There are so many of them, and they are, well, fractious and unruly. Just when you think you have one under control, it throws up its head and tosses you off. Claire's favorite number is 4, which she says is a tall, skinny boy. Samantha doesn't care for boys that much. She likes numbers. Take the number 8 for instance, which can be more than one thing at once. Looked at one way, 8 looks like a bent woman with curvy hair. But if you lay it down on its side, it looks like a snake curled with its tail in its mouth. This is sort of like the difference between being Dead, and being dead. Maybe when Samantha is tired of one, she will try the other.

On the lawn, under the oak trees, she hears someone calling her name. Samantha climbs out of bed and goes to the nursery window. She looks out through the wavy glass. It's Mr. Coeslak. “Samantha, Claire!” he calls up to her. “Are you all right? Is your father there?” Samantha can almost see the moonlight shining through him. “They're always locking me in the tool room. Goddamn spooky things,” he says. “Are you there, Samantha? Claire? Girls?”

The babysitter comes and stands beside Samantha. The babysitter puts her finger to her lip. Claire's eyes glitter at them from the dark bed. Samantha doesn't say anything, but she waves at Mr. Coeslak. The babysitter waves too. Maybe he can see them waving, because after a little while he stops shouting and goes away. “Be careful,” the babysitter says. “
He'll
be coming soon. It will be coming soon.”

She takes Samantha's hand and leads her back to the bed, where Claire is waiting. They sit and wait. Time passes, but they don't get tired, they don't get any older.

Who's there?

Just air
.

The front door opens on the first floor, and Samantha, Claire, and the babysitter can hear someone creeping, creeping up the stairs. “Be quiet,” the babysitter says. “It's the Specialist.”

Samantha and Claire are quiet. The nursery is dark and the wind crackles like a fire in the fireplace.

“Claire, Samantha, Samantha, Claire?” The Specialist's voice is blurry and wet. It sounds like their father's voice, but that's because the hat can imitate any noise, any voice. “Are you still awake?”

“Quick,” the babysitter says. “It's time to go up to the attic and hide.”

Claire and Samantha slip out from under the covers and dress quickly and silently. They follow her. Without speech, without breathing, she pulls them into the safety of the chimney. It is too dark to see, but they understand the babysitter perfectly when she mouths the word,
Up
. She goes first, so they can see where the finger-holds are, the bricks that jut out for their feet. Then Claire. Samantha watches her sister's foot ascend like smoke, the shoelace still untied.

“Claire? Samantha? Goddammit, you're scaring me. Where are you?” The Specialist is standing just outside the half-open door. “Samantha? I think I've been bitten by something. I think I've been bitten by a goddamn snake.” Samantha hesitates for only a second. Then she is climbing up, up, up the nursery chimney.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my funny, forgiving, and unfailingly inspirational family— especially my cousin Bryan Jones who told me to write him into a story, my sister Holly Link who read many of these in early drafts, and my mother, Annabel Jones Link, who was my co-worker at B. Dolphin, a children's bookstore run by Mimi Levin and Janis Fields. Thanks to Elke and Penelope, who aren't old enough to read these yet. Thanks to the editors who originally published these stories: Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Jonathan Strahan, Eli Horowitz, Deborah Noyes, and, finally, my editor at Viking, Sharyn November, for her sharp eyes, her patience, her persistence. Inadequate thanks to Holly Black, Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Leslie What, Betty Husted, Cassandra Clare, Gwenda Bond, Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Sarah Smith, Jedediah Berry, Walter Jon Williams and the Rio Hondo Workshop, Richard Butner and John Kessel and the Sycamore Hill Workshop. Eternal thanks to my agent, Renee Zuckerbrot, and to Whitney Lee and Jenny Meyer. Thanks to Jim Hoover, for designing such a beautiful book. Thanks to Shaun Tan, whose illustrations have let me see some of these stories for the first time. Partial inspiration for “The Specialist's Hat” came from an exhibit at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, MA: the longest poem in that story begins with a passage stuck up beside an empty exhibit case. Also adapted, for the same story, is a passage about snake whiskey from an outdoor folklore exhibit I visited in Raleigh, North Carolina. While working on this collection, I was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The stories in this collection owe a particular debt to the short stories and novels of Joan Aiken, Diana Wynne Jones, Robert Westall, Ursula K. Le Guin, and to the anthologies of Helen Hoke. Finally, thanks to my husband, Gavin, for the window display and everything since then.