Drozde was no stranger to ghosts. She’d lived with them since before she was even old enough to know what they were. Once she did, it was far too late for her to fear them. She associated them with many things, some of them melancholy and some merely curious, but none terrible. And they caused no confusion, because for the most part they were easy to tell from the living. They were paler, the colours of their bodies and their garments washed out to a near-uniform grey. In fact, so many of the details that would have identified them as human were missing, and so seldom did they move or speak, that it was easier for the young Drozde to see them as features of the landscape—outcrops of mist or cloud in the same way that mountains displayed outcrops of rock or bushes in summer outcrops of leaves and branches.
When they did speak, the sounds most often failed to come together into words. Or else they did, but the words made no sense or merely repeated themselves. In the kitchen of her parents’ house in Trej there had been a ghost that looked something like a woman. It was silent mostly, but two or three times in a month would say in a low voice, “Let it sit by the door a while, it won’t harm.” The words were always accompanied by the same gesture, a hoisting of the shoulders and a ducking of the head as though she was trying to hide her face. But she had no face to hide, only a stipple of near-translucent grey, like the film of ice on a water barrel on a winter morning.
Once, when she had maybe ten years on her back, Drozde had made the mistake of asking her parents about the dead who stood or sat with them wherever they went. She was even reckless enough to speculate on their possible identities. Since they rarely strayed far from a single spot, perhaps they were the ghosts of people who’d died in those self-same places and now were doomed to spend eternity there, like markers for their own graves.
Her father had beaten her for being fanciful, and her mother all over again for her lack of respect for the dead. The dead looked on, never asking for respect or acknowledging it. Drozde learned her lesson, and though it was probably not the one her parents wanted to impart, it was nonetheless of great value. She learned to keep her own counsel.
Since then she had had many lovers and more than a few friends, but she had never indicated to any of them that her sight went beyond theirs. Perhaps it didn’t. For all she knew, there might be many like her. It might even be the rule, rather than the exception, to see dead and living alike. It didn’t matter. She had taken the habit of silence, and it agreed with her. She needed no reassurance that her situation was common. She suspected that everyone’s experience, in the end, was unique. That each lived alone in the world of their own flesh, their own thoughts, looking out from time to time through their eyes but never stepping across the threshold.
But this strange dead child did frighten her. She was anomalous in too many ways. Her expression was lively, her voice vivid and inflected. The colours of her clothes were brighter than Drozde had seen on most living people, not at all like the bleached uniformity of the dead. And she had used Drozde’s name, although Drozde was certain they’d never met before.
The first question that came to her lips was both banal and unanswerable. “Who are you?” There was no point in expecting a ghost to answer that. Who were you? would be more to the point, and even then most could not say—could not turn air into sound, memories into words, the past into the now. They were trapped in their death like flies in spilled beer.
She tried again. “How do you know me?”
The girl laughed delightedly, as though Drozde was playing a clever trick on her. Placing her hands over her eyes, she first covered them and then exposed them again—the game which all mothers play with their children before the children can even talk, usually accompanied by the cry: Peepo!
“I’m serious,” Drozde said sternly. “How do you know me?”
“You’re my friend,” the girl said. Her joyous enthusiasm waned just a little, a note of doubt creeping into her voice as she added, “You’re my Drozde.”
“I’m my own Drozde, not yours. Where have we met before?”
The girl looked around her, very expressively, and pointed. “Here.”
“I’ve never been here before,” Drozde said. “You’re mistaking me for someone else.”
The girl smiled a tentative smile. “I don’t think I’d ever mistake you for anyone else,” she said. “If I heard your voice from the bottom of a well in a deep, dark wood in the middle of a storm, I’d know it was you because I love you so much. And you love me too, best of anybody. Better than Anton, even. You know you do.”
“Who is Anton?”
The girl looked long and hard at Drozde.
“Oh,” she said at last, with a tinge of what sounded like hurt or bitterness. “All right. I’m not supposed to say that to you. I’m going to get into trouble now. But really, I don’t know who it’s meant to be a secret from, when nobody else can even see us!”
“No,” Drozde agreed guardedly. “I don’t know either.” She had never met a mad ghost before, or thought it possible there could be one. She got up out of the bed, wrapping the blanket around her. The proximity of the dead girl was unnerving her, as was this impossible conversation. The ghosts she’d seen in the past had no use for words, but clearly the spirits of Pokoj were different.
“I think you should go now,” she said. “It must be almost morning. Ghosts don’t walk in the daylight.”
The dead girl rolled her eyes. “Yes, we do,” she said. “Don’t be silly. We walk whenever we want to. It’s just that people can’t always see us in daylight. And you said daylight might be bad for us because the light wears us thin like old sheets. But then you said no, it was only that we’re like whispers in a room and the sun is like a big shouty voice that drowns us out. But it doesn’t stop us being there; it only stops other people seeing us and us seeing each other. It doesn’t hurt or anything.”
She smiled brightly, as if she was a little pleased with herself to have delivered this long speech so faultlessly. Drozde felt cold stone against her shoulders and buttocks. She’d drawn away from the child without realising it, until she was backed against the wall of the small room.
“Anyway,” the girl said into the strained silence, “it’s not going to be morning for ages yet. Can we go for a walk?”
“A walk?” Drozde echoed.
“Yes. It will be nice. We can watch Amelie come.” Drozde hesitated. The house seemed very forbidding in the dark, and the chill air on her skin did nothing to make the prospect of a midnight stroll more inviting. But there was a perversity in her nature that made her advance towards what frightened her, and there was no denying that this precocious child with her senseless assertions frightened her badly. She felt there was something here that she needed to understand, and she wouldn’t achieve that understanding by hiding from it.
So she rose and dressed—which just meant slipping her smock and shirt back on and lacing up her boots. She hadn’t taken off her stockings or her shift. “Show me, then,” she said, and the girl clapped her hands in delight. She led the way, her movements as natural as those of a living girl. Most ghosts drifted like flotsam, but this one moved purposefully and her feet seemed to touch the flagstoned floor at each step rather than stepping through it or hovering above it.
The candles had all guttered in the kitchen, but the fire had been built up well and was still filling the room with a faint red glow. Molebacher and some of the other sergeants had drawn chairs up to the fire and drunk until they passed out. Drozde could see their outlines against the firelight and hear the rumble of their snores as she threaded her way through the room, still following the dead girl and avoiding by unexamined instinct the other ghost she’d seen earlier on the kitchen floor.
Once they left the kitchen behind them the great house was almost entirely silent. The officers and their wives were meant to be sleeping here, Drozde knew, but she saw no sign of them. It would be difficult for her if she did, for if one of them heard her and awoke then she could make no ready explanation for her presence.
She had the moonlight as a lantern, there being no curtains on any of the high windows. And the little girl was her guide, showing her stairways and passages that took her deeper into the house, away from encounters and explanations. This aroused mixed emotions in Drozde. She had no desire to be where the house’s living occupants could see her. On the other hand, to trust herself to the dead ones seemed just then a questionable strategy. The girl was amiable enough, and certainly not threatening in the least. She had called Drozde by her given name, and asserted the warmest of feelings for her. But how could those feelings be genuine when the two of them had never met until this moment? In spite of herself, Drozde felt uneasy, and the feeling heightened when they reached a servants’ staircase that was narrow and lightless, panelled in on both sides.
“I won’t be able to see in there,” she pointed out.
The little girl frowned. “I think there may be candles,” she said. “There were candles once. There. In a big bucket.” She pointed to the wall at the foot of the stairs. There was no bucket to be seen. “Well, take my hand,” she suggested instead. “Just until we get to the top. There are windows in the gallery, so you’ll be able to see up there.”
“Take your hand?” Drozde repeated. “How is that going to work?”
“It’s easy. We did this, remember? You taught me.” The girl reached out, and the tips of her fingers brushed Drozde’s bare forearm. There was a definite sensation, as of a faint breath very close against her skin.
Tentatively, she reached out, palm open. The girl put her small hand inside Drozde’s, and Drozde closed her fingers slowly. It was like holding on to a sigh.
They went up the stairs in this manner. The ghost’s touch was palpable, but not of very much use. Still, the direction was straight up. Drozde used her free hand to feel her way.
At the top of the stairs there was, as the girl had promised, a gallery or walk. There were windows all along one side looking down into a well of shadow that must be a courtyard, and on the other wall hung great numbers of paintings. They seemed all to be landscapes, or at least those that were touched by the moonlight were so. All were in much the same style, too, with hills and cypress trees and the occasional waterfall, as though someone had painted them all at once, with one brush and one pot, in the same way as you’d daub a wall with roughcast to keep out the damp.
The little girl clearly liked them, though, and walked down the gallery counting off each in turn. “Saw that one,” she muttered, more to herself than to Drozde. “And that one. And that one. Not that one.”
“Saw them?” Drozde enquired. “What do you mean?”
The girl turned to face her again, all seriousness. “In the collection. When I came here. I like to remember that time. Do you want to see Amelie? See her come, I mean? Tonight is when she comes.”
“I think I’d like to know who you are.”
“Yes.” The girl nodded. “I know it’s important to remember, Drozde. Every night and every day. And I do. Honestly. But can I not tell it tonight? I don’t think it’s my turn, and Arinak keeps count. You know she does. And so does Mr. Gelbfisc.”
Every word this strange creature spoke seemed only to add to Drozde’s feeling of disorientation. “I have no idea who those people are,” she said, “or what it is you’re talking about. Just tell me who you are. Where you come from. Did you live here in Pokoj before the family moved away?”
There was an awkward silence. The girl seemed as false-footed by these questions as Drozde was by her bizarre soliloquies. “Come and see Amelie,” she said at last, stepping around the impasse.
She beckoned to Drozde and ran ahead down the length of the gallery. At its further end, under a shuttered window, there were several stacks of pictures and picture frames of various sizes, which had been leaned against the wall there at some time in the past and forgotten.
“There,” the girl said, pointing down.
Drozde knelt and leaned in close to peer into the narrow recesses behind the frames. In one of them something moved. She started back in surprise, but a mewling cry from the interior darkness told her what it was that was in front of her. In the gloom she could barely see it at all. She undid the shutters on the window and threw them back, letting the moonlight in.
It was a full moon, huge and perfect. The little girl seemed pleased to see it. She looked from its face to Drozde’s, smiling broadly as though the moon was a joke that they shared. She pantomimed reaching up and taking it down out of the sky, then tucking it into the pocket of her skirt. “You won’t miss it,” she said. “It was never yours in the first place.”
Drozde was mystified all over again. “What?”
The girl raised her eyebrows and repeated the words, her face full of exhortation like a teacher asking a child to recite. When that didn’t work, she coaxed: “What Mr. Stupendo said. When he did his trick.”
Unable to sound the depths of this nonsense, Drozde decided that the simplest course was to ignore it. She squatted down to look at the cat, since that was what the girl had brought her here for.
The cat was not very much illuminated, her fur being jet black, but Drozde was able to see now how very big and round she was. Pregnant, clearly, and about to drop her litter. She hissed and gaped her mouth to show her sharp teeth, not at all appreciative of her audience.
“We should leave her to it,” Drozde said.
“No, no.” The girl wrung her hands. “Please. I love this part. You have to see.”
Drozde sighed heavily. “It could be hours before she—” The cat shifted her weight and thrust one of her hind legs vertically up into the air, at the same time bending her head into her own crotch. Pale against her fur, a tiny half-liquid thing was trembling there, like a teardrop or a pearl. The cat miawled once, and the kitten was squeezed out onto the floor. Streamlined by the birth canal and the birth juices that drenched its fur, it was as blunt and smooth and shiny as the brass pendulum of a clock. The cat commenced to lick it into shape, even as a second head crowned between its legs.
One by one, five tiny shreds of life emerged and were delivered by their mother’s tongue. As soon as they could move they sought her teats, some of them squeaking like bats, others intent and silent.
Then came the sixth. It moved once but afterwards fell still. The mother cat sniffed at it, nudged it with her nose and licked it tentatively. But when it did not respond, she turned to her living offspring.
“That’s Amelie,” the little girl said with proprietary pride. “She’s mine.”
“And what will you do with the kittens?” Drozde asked dryly. She didn’t bother to point out that a ghost couldn’t own anything.
The girl shook her head. “No. That’s Amelie.” She was pointing at the sixth kitten, which lay a few forlorn inches away from the meal its siblings were enjoying—the bounty that it would never taste.
“She’s dead,” Drozde pointed out.
“No, she’s not. She’s going to be, but she’s not. This is when she was alive. Just watch.”
The forlorn little object, which had seemed as lifeless as a nail or a splinter, stirred and shook and uttered a thin, all but inaudible wail. Its mother leaned over its five siblings, now all securely locked onto teats, to nuzzle it briefly with her nose. The kitten arced its little body into the movement, like a flower following the sun.
Drozde’s skin prickled. The ghost girl’s words still made little sense to her, but it was clear that she’d known the kitten would revive. Perhaps she had some additional sense, an instinctive feeling for the edges and corners where life and death butted up against each other.
“What’s your name?” she asked the girl again.
“You call me Magda,” she said, after a slight pause.
“Do I?”
“Yes. Because my name isn’t a name where you come from.”
“Well, it’s been very nice to meet you, Magda, but I think I have to go and sleep now. It’s late.”
The girl looked startled, her arms half-rising in a gesture of dismay. “But the others . . .” she blurted.
“What?”
“They’re waiting for you. They won’t like to miss a night—especially not this night. You have to come, even if it’s only for a little while! You have to come and talk to them!”
“Another time,” Drozde said. “Not tonight.” But the girl would not abandon her pleas, and in fact became more and more importunate, hanging at Drozde’s shoulder as she descended the stairs.
“I have to sleep,” Drozde repeated.
“But not until you’ve talked. Silence is what breaks us, you said. You don’t want us to break, Drozde, you don’t. And the other one went away so you could come, so it has to be you that listens tonight or nobody will and it won’t count and everyone will just stand there and look at each other until—”
“Enough!” Drozde hissed. “Enough, Magda.” Now that she was back on the ground floor again she was reluctant to raise her voice in case she woke Molebacher from his slumbers, but she had to stem this torrent. “Who went away? What are you talking about?”
“I’m not to tell.”
“And why does it have to be me that listens? Listens to what?”
“The stories, of course. The tellings.”
“It’s too late for stories.”
“No! It’s too late for anything else!”
The ghost girl’s face was so earnest, so full of anguish, that Drozde had no choice in the end but to relent. “All right,” she said. “All right, I’ll come. But this had better be something more important than a cat dropping her litter.”
“It is,” Magda promised, virtually bouncing up and down in the intensity of her eagerness. “It’s very important. It’s the most important thing ever!”
This time she took Drozde to the ballroom that she’d visited earlier in the day. Drozde wasn’t keen to enter. She felt she knew, now, who the others were going to be.
But the same stubborn streak, the need to prove herself unshaken and unshakable that had led her to follow Magda in the first place, made her step forward now into the cold, echoing space.
“I’m here,” she said.
The echoes answered her. But not only the echoes.