Walking Through Albert Read online

  ‘But—’

  ‘No, Ren. You are coming.’ She pins me against the wall with her eyes and watches me give in.

  ‘Can I just ring Emma, then?’ I ask pathetically.

  ‘Sure you can. Just don’t be too long—I’m expecting your Dad to call and tell us when he’s coming home.’

  Emma sounds half-dead. ‘Nothing,’ she says.

  ‘He hasn’t got the herb?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Oh, Em. Well, like I said, don’t panic yet.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t be bothered panicking any more. I’m sick of the whole thing. I just can’t care.’

  ‘You can’t?’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, at the reception, hey? If the reception happens.’

  ‘Okay, ’bye,’ I say, but she’s already put down the phone.

  All through the concert I’m worrying—it’s as if, because Emma’s stopped worrying, I have to. Also, it’s boring, because I saw all this stuff at the dress rehearsal just this morning—I know the play off by heart, and I could lead the Italian choir myself if I wanted to, if Mr Martello keeled over from a heart attack.

  ‘Keep still, Ren!’ says Mum every now and again.

  ‘It’s boring!’

  ‘Keep still anyway,’ grumps Dad on the other side of me. ‘People behind want to watch the show, not your head bouncing up and down.’ I know he’s almost as bored as I am, except when Lee’s on.

  Finally, we’re in the car, driving home through the dusk. When we get home I’m in my pyjamas with my teeth cleaned before anyone has time to even yawn. ‘Goodnight, Mum. Goodnight, Dad. Come on, Lee, it’s bedtime.’ They all look astonished.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ says Lee from down below when the light’s off.

  ‘Nothing. Go to sleep.’

  ‘I’m not tired. Hey, Ren, you reckon Andy—’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll find out tomorrow. Go to sleep.’ I don’t want to talk to him about anything interesting—it’ll only keep him awake.

  ‘You’re planning something,’ says Lee. ‘You’re going over there, aren’t you? Like, tonight.’

  He’s pretty smart, my brother, especially considering I never told him about the last time I did this. ‘So what if I am?’

  ‘Well, so am I, then.’

  ‘You are not. Why would you want to come?’

  ‘Why would you want to go?’

  ‘To check on Emma. Just to see whether Andy’s come up with the goods yet.’

  ‘Well, I’m coming.’

  He’s very determined, and I worry at first that I might have to take him. But it’s been a big day for him—like, he was quite nervous about singing in the choir in public—and in the end I manage to bore him to sleep talking about school, mostly—I nearly bore myself to sleep, too, but I make myself sit up, and keep myself awake until Mum and Dad’s late movie is over by reading some comics by torchlight. I leave them enough time to get to sleep, then I flitter, silent as a bat, out the back door and over to Glenorchie.

  14

  Andy blows it

  I find Emma fast asleep on the landing, wrapped in a blanket. I shake her awake with my hand over her mouth, like people do in movies, and her eyes sproing wide open just like movie-people’s do. Then she looks cross and pushes my hand away. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘What are you doing here? I thought you’d given up on him.’

  ‘I had. But I couldn’t sleep. And those women in my new room kept going off, every time I turned over. ONLY missing! ONLY missing! That girl really loses it, you know. Dulcie. I think she goes a bit mad when it looks like Albert’s lost, as well as George.’ She’s sitting up now, resting her feet on the stairs and facing down into the hall. She rewraps her blanket around herself. ‘Gee, I’m hungry. There’s some leftover quiche in the fridge, but I don’t want to go through that horrible haunting there, the one that makes you faint.’

  ‘Yeah. Stay hungry. It’s way worse at night. Bulk scarier.’ I sit down and pinch some of her blanket for my knees. ‘So did you get onto Andy this afternoon?’

  ‘Nope. I tried, but he wasn’t answering. He probably knew it was me ringing to hassle him.’

  We sit there for a while talking about the wedding, as if of course everything will be all right by then, as if it’ll be a normal day like normal unhaunted people have. It’s very quiet, very quiet and strange, sitting in the dark house, just hoping that Andy’ll find some way to do his spell and set things right.

  ‘We should get up and move around again,’ I say. ‘We won’t know if he’s done anything unless we try to trigger things.’

  ‘I guess not.’ Emma gives a huge yawn and pulls the blanket closer around herself. She’s not going anywhere.

  And neither am I. The blanket’s too warm and I’m half asleep and don’t want to move. No, I’m three-quarters asleep, and Emma’s drooping against my shoulder. No, I was really, fully asleep for a second or two there—better rearrange Emma so she doesn’t roll down the stairs. I’ll just hook my shoulder between these banisters and let my eyes close for a minute ...

  Then we’re both wide awake, as if someone smacked us, or threw cold water over us, and the front door is wide open, and Andy’s standing there in the hall.

  Even from high up on the stairs, he looks tall. He’s wearing a cloak with the hood thrown back. He’s wearing boots. He looks dark and tall and powerful and scary. On the floor around him is a circle of some kind of dust, and I can’t tell whether it’s the dust or the three cups of flame in a triangle around him that are giving off that amazingly bad stink—sort of a combination of blood-and-bone fertiliser and burning rubber tyres.

  Andy stands straight, throws out his arms and starts to speak, softly at first, then louder, and I realise he’s talking that freakable kind of machine talk, humming and buzzing, making no sense—my insides curl up in terror listening. He stands there with his head back, in the shadow from the flames beneath. On his outspread hands, other lights begin to grow, white lights that spin and dart out little white flames.

  ‘Oh, man,’ I whimper. Emma and I are huddled up together like Hansel and Gretel in the woods; I’m kind of hoping Andy doesn’t even realise we’re here.

  His voice rises to a shout as he lifts his arms and brings the two hand-lights together with a great clashing screaming sound like a circular saw biting through tin. My teeth cringe; my eyes water. Andy roars, and hauls the lights apart and clashes them together, over and over again, and each time the noise is louder and the hall is thicker with the poisonous smell, and with the stuff that seems to pour off Andy’s body and out the edges of his cloak like cold black flames, like powerful water, pouring and pouring, filling the hall, funnelling up the stairwell and through the doors, filling the house so tightly and fully and darkly, it’s going to break to pieces, I know, any second! It’s going to blow up like a bomb!

  There’s one last shout, one last clash, and a flash and bang like lightning and thunder at the same time, blinding, deafening.

  Then there’s silence and darkness. All I can feel is Emma’s fingernails digging into the inside of my arm. I concentrate on the pain, because it’s the only proof I’ve got that I’ve survived the blast.

  Three dying flames appear in the darkness, and I make out Andy’s cloaked shape standing among them for a second before they snuff out. My skin’s crawling, all over, as if it’s turning into a layer of maggots. I move, just to check whether I can move, and the crawling goes mad, boils on and on.

  ‘We’re in a ghost,’ gasps Emma. ‘We’re in Dulcie, coming down the stairs.’

  She’s right. Dulcie’s sob of joy, and the rustle of her skirts, hang in the air, not starting, not ending, just sounding on and on. And at the front door the historical sunlight flares, melting Albert’s thin sickly frame to threads.

  Emma drags me clear of Dulcie’s rustling skirts. ‘It’s stuck!’ she yelps. ‘It’s locked open!’

  ‘Andy?’ I call out through my settling goose
flesh. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’ve done what I could, is what’s happened.’ His fingers are shaking as he picks up his fire-bowls. His face is a white mask under his hood, too tired to raise any expression.

  ‘And it didn’t work?’ You’d think Emma hadn’t doubted him for a second, she sounds so outraged.

  Andy says nothing, spreading his hands in the collapsed air. Albert’s ghost-sunlight beams through his fingers.

  ‘But what’ll we do?’ screeches Emma. She’s like a little witch herself, her black hair all scrunched up, her hand clawing my arm. ‘You can’t just leave it like this!’

  ‘I can’t ... I haven’t ...’ Andy’s turning towards the door. It looks as if he can hardly lift his feet. ‘... Have to find someone else ...’

  By the time we get to the door, all swirly and sick from forcing our way through Albert’s knotted-up feelings, he’s stumbling down the street in the waning-moon light.

  ‘You idiot!’ yells Emma after him. ‘You’ve wrecked everything!’

  15

  Sleeping beauties

  ‘Rennie! Wakey-wakey!’

  Behind my concrete eyelids I swim up from the deepest of deep sleeps. I don’t want to wake up, I really don’t. I know I’ve got a good reason why I don’t want to. I’ll think of it in a second. Just let me—

  ‘Ren!’ Mum’s voice is a lot closer now. ‘Emma’s on the phone. Her mum wants to know if you’d like to come over and give them a hand this morning.’

  I try to hoist up my eyelids. ‘Whasser time?’

  ‘Seven forty-five. It’s all right, I’ve already thanked her for waking us up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning.’ By the time I get my eyes open just the last fold of her nightgown is flicking out the door.

  I sit up. ‘Oh no,’ I say softly, remembering why I feel so terrible. ‘Oh, help.’ I fall down the ladder and lumber to the phone. ‘What’s happening, Emma?’

  ‘Oh, Ren, get over here. They won’t wake up!’

  ‘Who won’t?’

  ‘No one! Mum or Dad, or anyone!’

  ‘And the—are the whatsies, you know—’

  ‘The ghosts? Wide open, all of them. Please come, Ren! This’s too weird for me!’

  ‘I’ll get dressed and I’ll be over there.’

  Lee’s wide awake when I get back into our room, wide awake and pulling on shorts.

  ‘She didn’t ask you,’ I say.

  ‘I can help too.’

  I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Lee, it’s really scary over there. The ghosts are frozen open, stuck there in the air. Andy stuffed up last night. Emma says her parents and everyone won’t wake up.’

  ‘Dead set! Like in Sleeping Beauty?’

  ‘I guess like that. Unless they’ve died. Unless Andy’s magic killed them.’

  His head pops out the neck of some old rag of a T-shirt. ‘Mad. I still want to come.’

  I haven’t got the energy to fight—and actually, it wouldn’t hurt to have someone normal with us over there, someone who’s slept properly and can think straight. I start scrabbling for my own clothes.

  I thought Emma would be on the back veranda, away from all the ghosts, but she’s not. The back door gapes, and there’s nobody in the kitchen.

  ‘Emma?’

  ‘I’m in here! Help!’

  Against the sunlight and ghost light at the front door, a four-legged black thing is staggering about. My throat snaps closed with fear—then I realise it’s Emma, with someone collapsed on top of her. We run in to help her, knocked off course by Dulcie’s running rustles, buffeted by the ghost-man standing with his hands out.

  A great pile of flowers has been dropped inside the door, filling the hall with their scent on top of Albert’s ghost-frangipanis. ‘He’s the flower man,’ Emma says as I grab half of him. ‘He stepped in the door and passed out.’

  ‘Oh, great. Lee, move those flowers out of the way so we don’t wreck ’em even worse, and we’ll get him outside.’

  The flower man’s heavy, and getting him through Albert is a bit of a drama. Just like last night, Albert’s homecoming feelings explode into us—the middle of the doorway is a boiling mass of ghost-sunlight and ... overcome-ness. It’s really hard not to be overcome myself—and of course there’s no point waiting for it to finish, so we just have to push ourselves through, which is not a good feeling—the head and the guts don’t like it at all.

  As soon as he’s outside, the flower man jerks back to life. ‘Oh, what? Did I faint?’ He scrambles to his feet.

  ‘Yes, are you feeling all right?’ I don’t feel too great myself.

  He shakes his head to clear it. ‘Comes from missing breakfast, I guess.’

  ‘Was that all the flowers that were for us?’ says Emma.

  ‘Oh, um, no—there’s another few bunches in the van. I’ll just get ’em.’ All this while, his van’s been at the front gate, its engine purring.

  I mutter to Emma, ‘You’ve got a lot of people delivering things today, haven’t you?’

  ‘Heaps!’ Emma’s voice is tiny. ‘There’s a list somewhere. A long list.’

  ‘Here, I’ll take those.’ I block the flower man’s way up the steps.

  ‘Thanks, mate. Think you could find someone to sign the receipt for me while you’re at it?’

  ‘Oh, I can do that,’ says Emma, very coolly.

  ‘Ah ... is your Mum or Dad here?’

  ‘They’re upstairs working. It’s okay; I sign for couriers all the time.’ She practically snatches his docket book and pen. Very businesslike, she sidles in past Albert and checks the list against the flower-bunches. ‘And should we stand these all in water?’ she says, signing off and handing the pad back.

  ‘Oh yes; it’s going to be a stinker today. Get the buckets out. Have a happy wedding!’

  ‘Thanks,’ says Emma with a sickly smile.

  Inside, Lee’s running up and down the stairs.

  ‘Come on, Lee. Help us get some buckets for these flowers.’

  ‘It’s mad, Ren! You can play it backwards and forwards like a video. You run down, and she says Thank God! Thank God! You run up, and she says it backwards.’ He falls up the stairs, trying to say ‘Thank God’ backwards.

  ‘Stop it, Lee. You’ll hurt yourself. And besides, it’s—it sucks. It’s disrespectful, to Dulcie.’

  We just get the flowers all into buckets and icecream containers of water when the gate creaks on its hinges. Emma groans and goes out.

  ‘It’s Mrs Sanchez!’ she hisses back through the door. Having Albert between us makes her voice sound all damped-down and lispy. ‘She was going to come and vacuum!’

  ‘Good morning, Emma,’ Mrs Sanchez calls out from the front path. ‘A beautiful day for getting married, don’t you think?’

  ‘Bring her in!’ I mutter.

  ‘But she’ll—’

  Mrs Sanchez blocks most of the real-life sunlight pouring in the doorway. ‘How’s your mum coping with—’ And with a little sigh she sinks onto the hall carpet, her head coming to rest against a bucket of white roses.

  ‘See if you can find that list, Emma, so we know what we’re in for.’

  ‘Okay. I think Mum’s got it upstairs. Can you move Mrs Sanchez by yourselves?’

  ‘We can try.’ She’s not a small woman. Lee rolls up his sleeves and picks up her ankles.

  Boy, grown-ups are heavy, especially their heads, especially when they can’t lift a finger (or anything else) to help. It nearly kills us getting Mrs Sanchez into the study.

  ‘Maybe we should leave her on the floor,’ says Lee, but eventually, very clumsily, we manage to get her up onto the couch. We straighten her clothing and tuck her handbag in next to her.

  Emma’s inching sideways past Dulcie down the stairs, hugging one of her mum’s manila folders. She pushes through the ghost-channel and we all force through Albert onto the sunny veranda, where we collapse in goosebumps on the boards.

  ‘Man, this is so wild!’ giggles Lee
.

  Emma opens the folder. ‘Here, look. Oh, thank you, Mum! Look at this!’

  ‘Geez, I can see where you get your organising genes from.’

  ‘“Eight a.m. Flowers from market. Mrs S. to vacuum.”’

  ‘Tut-tut. Mrs S. was ... seven minutes late.’ Lee hangs his head upside down to look at Emma’s watch.

  ‘ “Eight-thirty: Maggie to do flowers—have vases ready.” They’re all out, on the study table. And Maggie’s bringing some big ones, too. Then—look at this—it all starts hotting up around ten—caterers, dance floor, chairs, Fia’s hairdresser, Mum’s and Gran’s hairdresser, “band to set up”, outside chairs and tables, portable fridge—oh Ren, what a mess!’ Emma’s shoulders slump.

  ‘Don’t panic. Look, it’s not hopeless. Andy told us to find someone else, didn’t he?’

  ‘What’s so great about that?’

  ‘Well, that means that there must be someone else who can undo what he’s done, or do it so that it works better, or whatever.’

  ‘And where do we find them—the Yellow Pages? In our dreams.’

  ‘No, listen, Em!’

  ‘But it’s hopeless!’ she wails.

  ‘No, listen, listen! Here’s the plan. Are you listening?’

  She shuts her mouth and nods.

  ‘Okay. Anyone who has to be here for the wedding, we bring inside. That way we can keep them here, asleep, just in case Andy manages to fix things up. Anyone like the flower man, who’s just dropping stuff off, we keep outside. Let them stack the chairs or whatever on the veranda, sign their thingies and send ’em away—get rid of them.’

  ‘So ... so we get Maggie inside, we send the chair men away ...’ Her eyes go down the list.

  ‘Yeah—go through and mark which ones sleep and which ones go. Then, when everyone’s here, we can work on finding another witch.’

  Emma gets going on the list with a red pen. Lee’s experimenting again, dipping his hand into Albert, then his head. His eyes go all faraway. ‘Boy,’ he murmurs, ‘you can see heaps. You can see anything you want.’

  ‘Get outa there, Lee,’ I say. I’m sure it can’t be good for him.