MAKE IT STOP

Polly

“Is that why you call her Ghost Girl?” I asked. “Because of this book?”

Matthew nodded. “She IS the Ghost Girl, Polly. She looks just like her, and she floats around haunting people and—”

I opened the book. “What’s the story about?”

“It’s about this girl,” said Mark. “She lives with her family, and everyone thinks she is alive but really she is dead. She lives like that for years and years and nobody ever figures out. But all the kids she makes friends with—they—they—”

“She steals their souls!” said Mark. “She feeds on their souls and makes them dead like her. Then those kids are ghost girls too, and ghost boys, walking around the world, and everyone thinks they’re alive but really they’re dead.”

“It’s horrible, Polly! We don’t want that to happen to you. Don’t talk to her!” said Matthew. “She’s too dangerous.”

I turned the pages and looked at the pictures. They showed the girl playing with one child after another in lonely spots. Then there were pictures of the children back with their families, eating dinner, being tucked into bed, going to school—but now they all had the same haunted, mournful eyes of the Ghost Girl. I shivered.

“It’s just a story,” I said. “It’s not real. Rose is not a Ghost Girl.”

Mark shook his head.

“That’s what we thought at first, Polly, when we got this book out from the library a few weeks ago. We thought it was just a really cool fairy tale. But then when we noticed Rose one day, she has the same eyes, right? So we went back and got the book again and read it all over again. She’s a Ghost Girl, Polly.”

I started to laugh but it didn’t come out right.

“Rose is nice, really she is. She just looks a little … strange. But she cares about me. She doesn’t want to hurt me.”

“That’s how the Ghost Girl tricks you,” said Matthew, pulling at my sleeve. “She makes you think you’re her friend. Then she steals your soul. You gotta stay away from her, Polly!”

“I think this book is too scary for you,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to tell Mum that you shouldn’t be allowed to take it out of the library anymore.”

“No! No!” they both said at once, reaching for the book and pulling it away from me.

“Don’t tell Mum,” said Matthew. “She’ll ruin everything.”

“Look, you guys are really scared,” I said. “Mum should know.”

They looked at each other and some kind of silent twin communication took place. Mark turned to me.

“If you tell Mum about the book,” he said, “we’ll tell her you’ve been in the attic.”

Rose

“Let me go!” I yelled, and with an enormous effort I pulled myself away from Winnie’s grasping hands. I took a couple of steps away from her, until my back was up against the stone cold wall. Willie stood to my left, still staring at his sister. His face was blank again.

I stood panting, watching her. She was looking at Willie as if her heart would break. For some reason I noticed that she had the same lock of hair falling loose in front of her face that I had, the one that refused to stay behind my ear.

She turned back to me. “Please,” she said in a strangled voice, as if it caused her physical pain to say that word. “You’re the only one who can help.”

And there it was. Her eyes had that same beseeching, sorrow-drenched look I had seen on countless ghosts through-out the years.

“What can I do?” I cried. “Why do you even ask me? You know I can’t help you. You’re dead. There’s nothing to be done.”

“You can help,” she replied. “You can make it stop.”

“Make what stop?”

She took a step nearer, reaching out her arms in a gesture that took in the heavily falling snow, the sky, the bridge and Willie.

“This! Me! Everything! The ghosts. Me going on and on in that house, endlessly trapped in misery! I can’t get out, Rose. I’m stuck there, in that place, in that time, in that night. It never ends for me, Rose.”

She began to cry, great wracking sobs.

“I can’t leave. Willie can’t leave. My mother and father can’t leave. We’re all stuck in that awful night, that accident.”

The image of my grandfather sitting in his study, tears rolling down his cheeks, came to me. And the sigh and the smell of roses in my grandmother’s bedroom. And the pictures she took of me every Christmas, making me look like Winnie. I took a deep breath.

“My father can leave. He leaves all the time. He’s never home.”

“Look at him!” she said, pointing to her little brother, who stood frozen like a statue, only his eyes alive, staring at her. “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter how far he goes, that night is always inside him. He’s here on the bridge in that nightmare with me. Our whole family is locked in that night. It never got fixed. None of us can go until … until …” She stopped.

“Until what?”

“Until you go to Willie and tell him I’m sorry, that it wasn’t his fault I fell, that he couldn’t have saved me. Get him to let go of it and let go of me.”

I stared at her.

“Go to my father? Tell him I saw his dead sister on a bridge and she wants me to tell him she’s sorry? Are you crazy?”

“You have to tell him,” she replied. “It’s the only way to make it stop.”

“Why do I have to tell him? What’s it got to do with me?”

“You can see me. He can’t.”

She wanted the impossible.

“What do you think is going to happen once I tell him?”

“He’ll forgive me. He’ll let me go.”

“NO!” I yelled. “He won’t believe me. If I tell my father that his dead sister has a message for him, there’s only one thing that’s going to happen. Don’t you see, Winnie? I’m just like you! As soon as they find out I see ghosts they’ll lock me up!”

“Make it stop,” she said. “Tell Willie. Then I can rest.”

“You don’t get it,” I said fiercely. “I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you’re trapped in that house. I don’t feel sorry for you. When I look at you I see …”

What did I see? Myself. Everything I hated about myself. The hair, the pale face, the twisted features, the weirdness, the no-friends, the loneliness and the ghosts.

“Make it stop,” she said again and blinked out. One second she and Willie were there and the next they were gone. I was staring into empty space.