THE CRACK

Polly

I dreamed I was back in the attic. A full moon shone in through a skylight, and the shadows of gravestones marched along the sloping roof. There was a loud noise, like a thunderclap, and everything shook. An earthquake? I shut my eyes. When I opened them, a huge crack had appeared, running down the wall of the attic. As I gazed at it in horror, it slowly started to grow wider.

I reached for Rose but I couldn’t find her. I could feel that same fading, draining feeling I’d had when the Door Jumper attacked me.

“Rose!” I called out, my voice a hoarse whisper. “Rose, help me!”

“Help you?” came a voice from the crack. I looked, and I saw Rose climbing through it with a strange look on her face. She was wearing the long black dress from the suitcase, the dried rose the color of old blood pinned to her chest. Her hair was longer, disappearing down her back in a swirl of shadows. “Can’t you figure it out, you stupid girl?”

She stood over me and smirked. Her face was Rose’s face, but it looked different: cruel and crazy.

“I am Winnifred,” she said, leaning down and breathing into my face. “I am Rose. We are one. And you are dead.”

With a howl of laughter she whirled around and snapped into the swirling, towering Door Jumper, surrounding me, hugging me, drowning me.

Rose

After supper I returned to my grandmother’s room. I turned on the pretty stained-glass lamp and looked around at the mess. Tissue paper, shoes and boxes in a jumble on the floor. The sad clothes laid out on the bed. A few boxes were piled in a corner, still unopened.

I sat down in the middle of it all and started putting away the shoes, carefully wrapping them in the tissue again. It reminded me of when I was little, putting my dolls to bed. I had gone through a stage of dressing them all in makeshift nightgowns and setting them in cradles and shoe box beds, all in a row. Every night I had to do it, before I went to sleep. My mother would try to hurry me up but I had to make sure each one was carefully tucked in. Sometimes the old lady ghost would appear, rocking and knitting, smiling at us all: dolls, child, mother.

I don’t know why, but there among the shoes and tissue I began to cry. I felt lost, as though someone had died and the world wasn’t the place it was supposed to be.

“Never mind,” came a familiar voice from the corner. “Never mind, dear.”

I looked up. The old lady had appeared in the easy chair by the window, knitting. I hadn’t seen her since the summer, when I was so ill.

“Who are you?” I whispered, getting up and drawing closer to her. “Why do you come to me?” I was at her feet now. She looked as solid as the chair she was sitting in. She was very old, shrunken and wrinkly, but her thick, arthritic fingers moved quickly in rhythm, and the needles clacked industriously.

“What are you knitting?” I asked, examining the soft, mauve wool that puddled on her lap.

She smiled at me. “It’s for you, Rose,” she said in her soft, sweet voice. “To keep you warm. You’re going to need it.”

I laid my head down against her knees then. I could feel her thin bones against my cheek, and she was strangely warm, for a ghost.

“Can you help me?” I asked. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

The knitting needles stopped clicking and she stretched out her hand and stroked my hair.

“Yes, I can help you, Rose,” she said softly. “I’m watching over you. Always. You’ll figure it out soon. Don’t worry.”

Then she was gone and I was leaning against an empty chair.