Walking Through Albert by Margo Lanagan
‘While you what? Emma, come in here!’ I yell towards the back door.
The rain’s like a wall at the edge of the veranda. Emma comes springing through. Now her ring-bearer’s clothes are spotty with rain as well as baby-drool. ‘Who is it?’
‘Some mad old woman,’ I hiss, my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘She says she wants to charge you. She must be hooking up to your parents’ bank account.’
‘I’m just connecting now,’ the woman creaks in my ear.
Lightning flashes outside—and inside, too. It thuds into my ear. There’s a short flash of white pain, and then I turn deaf and blind—everything whites out. All I can feel is slow, intense pulses of purple-white power feeding into me. All the thoughts I’ve ever had, and ever will have, happen all at once, and like the ghosts they lock open. Time freezes; I can’t move; nothing can move.
Vaguely I know that Emma is screaming my name, but I can’t quite hear her. Then the power-pulses are cut short, and the whiteness lets a little sight in. I can see through a sort of white veil that the phone is at Emma’s ear. Her eyes have rolled up so that only a white slit shows, and she’s rocking with the force of the stuff being poured into her, the witch’s charge.
I hang onto her arm and wait. Inside me my self’s been turned inside out and made into a container for this charge—I’m just a big bag, or a big balloon, for carrying this thing, carrying it to the place—I know the right place to take it, but I couldn’t tell you. I just know that I know, and that I’ll go there when the right time comes.
At last the handpiece drops from Emma’s fingers, and her eyes roll back into place. We head for the back door, jammed together—the charge is moving us like a magnetic force.
We stumble into the kitchen and around the table. Here it is, the mistake, the clumsy rip in the cloth of time. It’s big enough to swallow a person now—maybe two kids like us could fit through. All around it time-threads hang frayed, like tendrils of a climbing plant reaching for something to curl around. And look there, through the rip! There’s the person who made the mistake, who ripped time open. She’s small, and pale, and smudgy like Andy; she’s using three little pots of smoke and flame, and a circle of dust, just like he did; she’s murmuring those wormy words. She’s really nervous, much more nervous than Andy. You can feel how the power has got hold of her, instead of her being in control of it. The words tumble out of her mouth, and the hole yawns wide, and the time-tendrils waggle and search. Darkness and danger swirl all around us.
Emma grabs both of my hands. A sort of hiccup happens inside me, and the darkness shudders. The charge begins to flow out of us. Like a whispering white wave rushing back to a white sea, it pulls and pulls us towards the great torn hole, and we have to brace ourselves and lean against it so we don’t get sucked back with it. And it doesn’t pull only us; it reaches out beyond us, gathers the ghosts one by one from all the corners of the house and whisks them through the rip, slipping them back into their correct time, neat as playing-cards into a brand-new pack.
And as they fit into place, zot-zot-zot, around that group at the table, the rough edges of the rip pull together over the fading smoky scene inside, and the torn threads stretch and reach for each other and wind themselves together, and finally tighten closed.
With a little whoosh the last of the power twists out of us, and normal sight springs open in our eyes, and normal hearing pops open in our ears. And beyond the roar of the rain there’s a sound, a really unearthly yowling, as if whole tribes of cats are winding up to fight each other out in the back yard.
We run out onto the veranda, our hands over our ears.
Poor old Lee. He hasn’t got enough arms. All the babies want comforting; they’re all clinging onto him, some gone silent with terror, some wailing with big triangular mouths. Even Kevin’s onto him; he’s got him from behind and is hugging him tightly around the neck.
‘Come inside, come inside!’ Emma calls out to him. ‘He’ll need some help, I think.’ She leaps off the veranda and runs through the pelting rain. I jump down after her.
‘I’m not goin’ in there!’ Kevin won’t unlock his arms from Lee’s neck.
‘It’s okay! Let go of Lee—you’re strangling him!’
‘I’m not goin’ in that horrible house!’
‘It’s not horrible any more! The ghosts are all gone!’ I have to yell over the rain roaring on the marquee roof.
But he won’t let go. Finally we peel the toddlers off Lee and he carries Kevin, still hanging around his neck, over to the house. We dump the toddlers on the back veranda and go back for the two wailing babies in their strollers.
‘No! No!’ Kevin hangs onto the doorpost to stop Lee taking him inside.
‘It’s okay!’ says Lee. ‘Feel it for yourself! See? We’re standing right where there used to be a ghost.’
We’re standing right where Dulcie ran that day, thanking God for bring her brother back from the war. Only now there’s no one here but us, nothing here but now, with the thunder rolling away and the rain hissing down outside.
The babies quieten in Emma’s and my arms. The toddlers cling at our knees, looking all around the dark hall, which is filled with the scent of wedding roses. From all the corners of the house come muffled sounds of yawns and sighs and soft exclamations and drowsy movements.
Emma looks at me. ‘Well, it’s back to the present day, I guess.’
‘I guess so.’ Our voices sound the same, tired to the bone.
‘How are we going to explain all this?’ says Lee. We can hear voices rising in the study, in the front room, in the dining-room.
‘We’re not,’ Emma and I say at the same time. We laugh at what we both know. ‘We’re going to act as if everything’s absolutely, perfectly normal,’ I tell Lee.
‘And the grown-ups, because they want it so badly, are going to believe us,’ says Emma. ‘No one’s going to panic—’
‘—or hurry—’
‘—or get angry. Everybody’s going to have a lovely time. Now, Lee, you take these littlies into the kitchen and feed them something before the caterers take over. I’ll go and get everyone from upstairs, and Ren, you organise the wedding room and then send the reception guests out to the stables.’
‘Aye-aye, captain!’ says Lee.
‘Right you are!’ I say.
And we scatter.
19
Mud cake
‘So she was the one who held it all together,’ says Emma. ‘Not Albert.’
It’s nearly midnight and Trent’s Mobile Disco is going for it in the marquee. It was just too loud for us, so we’re sitting on the front wall at Glenorchie, eating the mud cake that was specially provided for the eight children.
‘Hum?’ says Lee.
‘Who are you talking about?’ I ask.
‘That other witch,’ says Emma.
‘You mean the woman on the phone?’
‘The witch in the kitchen, deadhead. You could tell she didn’t know what she was doing. Worse than Andy. She must’ve been really new at witching.’
‘Yeah, she was only doing it because they asked her to.’
‘Who did?’ says Emma.
‘Who asked who what?’ mumbles Lee.
‘Those two women with her—Florence and Dulcie, it must’ve been.’
‘Is that who they were?’
I make a face. ‘It has to be them, to make sense.’
‘None of this makes sense to me,’ says Lee.
I look at him around Emma. ‘It looks as if Florence and Dulcie asked this other lady—’
‘A girl, she’d be, to them,’ says Emma. ‘A housemaid, and not very experienced. Sort of shy, too—maybe I could find out who she was, from the Whitton papers—’
‘Anyway, they must’ve asked her to look into the future and tell them whether Albert was going to come home. Or to try to find out whether he was alive—’
‘To use the sight,’ Emma says.
‘Yeah. See? Albert still is the key
‘Yes, but the housemaid’s the reason why the hauntings happened,’ Emma insists. ‘She went and had a look, wherever, and then when she’d finished she didn’t put everything back in place. She sort of ... left the pathways open, or the windows, or whatever she was looking through.’
We eat and think. ‘Yeah, that sounds about right,’ I say. ‘So now all we’ve got to do ...’
Emma groans. ‘... is catch up on some sleep.’
‘... is work out how we can keep Emma at Glenorchie when the renovations are all done.’
‘Oh well, don’t get your hopes up too high about that,’ Emma glooms.
‘It seems really mean,’ says Lee, ‘that they keep on moving when they know how much you hate it.’
‘It sure does,’ I say.
Emma’s cake stops halfway to her mouth, then sinks back to her plate. She’s staring into the distance. ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask her. ‘Are you going to chuck?’
‘I don’t know if they do,’ she says. She looks at me. ‘I just realised when Lee said that: Mum and Dad might not, actually, know. That I hate moving.’
‘Em-ma!’ I don’t believe this girl.
‘Haven’t you ever said?’ Lee laughs—he doesn’t believe her either. Then he stops. ‘What, wouldn’t they listen?’
Emma takes a too-big bite of cake to cover up her embarrassment. Even in the near-darkness you can see her face is red. Eventually she nods, and says cake-ily, ‘I just never thought—it just didn’t occur to me!—to tell them.’
‘Geez, it’s a good thing we’re here, Ren,’ says Lee.
‘You deadhead, Em.’
‘What I wonder is, how did the lady on the phone know?’ says Emma. ‘I mean, did she just see we were in trouble? Can witches do that?’
‘No, she said, you dill—oh, that’s right, she only said it to me—said a young colleague of hers had told her about our problem. That must’ve been Andy.’
‘Oh.’ Emma deals with another huge bite of cake as she thinks about that. ‘Then why did he tell us we’d have to find someone else?’
‘He didn’t. I think he just was saying that someone else would have to be found, not that we’d have to do the finding. I mean, obviously he got in contact with her himself. She said she had him there with her.’
‘Did she say where she was calling from?’ asks Emma.
‘Well, there were the beeps when I picked up the phone. And she had to ask whether we were getting the thunderstorm, so she must’ve been in a whole different weather system ...’
‘Oh, heck, and I called him all those names, and yelled at him. I’ll have to go around and apologise, and thank him for everything.’
‘You could take him a piece of wedding-cake,’ says Lee.
I snort. ‘Geez, you can be a suck sometimes, Lee!’
‘No, I think that’s a really good idea,’ says Emma firmly. ‘Let’s go in and grab a piece for him before it’s all given away to the guests.’
‘Yeah, and get a drink, too—hey, we can go to the fridge without passing out, now!’
Emma laughs and hops off the wall. ‘I guess there aren’t many people in the world who are grateful for that!’
‘Not many people have fallen through a rip in time.’
We go up the front path to the house. Through the french windows, lit up all gold from the inside, I can see Fia in her white bride’s togs, actually looking nice for once, actually looking happy, in the middle of a group of guests. I can hear her laughter as we climb the front steps, and walk easily through the doorway into the clear air of the unhaunted hall.
Margo Lanagan, Walking Through Albert