The Time Travelers: Volume One Read online

  The musical Daddy had put on last year was West Side Story, which he’d postponed for years because you had to have boys who were excellent dancers. There was no such thing.

  But when Miss Bartten joined the faculty, she convinced the football coach that the boys needed to study dance for agility and coordination, and now had in the palm of her hand a dozen big terrific boys who could dance. This was a woman who knew how to get what she wanted.

  Daddy and Miss Bartten choreographed West Side Story … and on the side, they choreographed each other.

  Mom suspected nothing, partly because Daddy was knocking himself out trying to be Super Husband. He bought Mom dazzling earrings and took her to restaurants, and told her he didn’t mind at all when she had to work late … especially because Wall Street was forty-five minutes by train and another thirty minutes by subway, and that meant that Mom’s day was twelve hours long. Dad and Miss Bartten knew exactly what to do with those long absences.

  Annie sat on a window seat. How odd, thought Annie. I was sure the windows were boarded up. But none of them are.

  From here, she could not see the wreckage that tenants had made of the gardens and fountains. In fact, the slashing rain had the effect of a working fountain, as if the stone nymph still threw water from her arched fingers. Rain stitched the horizon to the sea. Sean of course noticed nothing: he was a boy upon whom the world had little effect.

  I want romance! she thought. But I want mine with somebody wonderful and I want Daddy’s to be with Mom.

  Fragmented sections of Annie glittered in the old ballroom.

  Violins, decided Annie, putting the present out of her mind. And certainly a harp. A square Victorian piano. Crimson velvet on every window seat, and heavy brocade curtains with beaded fringe. I have a dance card, of course. Full, because all the young men adore me.

  Annie left the window seat and danced as slowly and gracefully as she knew how. Surely in the 1890s they had done nothing but waltz, so she slid around in three-beat triangles. Her reflections danced with her.

  My chaperon is sipping her punch. One of my young men is saying something naughty. I of course am blushing and looking shocked, but I say something naughty right back, and giggle behind my ivory fan.

  The second falling came.

  It was strong as gravity. It had a grip, and seized her ankles. She tried to kick, but it had her hands too. It had a voice, full of cruel laughter, and it had color, a bloodstained dark red.

  What is happening? she thought, terrorized, but the thought was only air, and the wind that had held her hair in its fingers now possessed her thinking too. She was being turned inside out.

  It was beneath her—the power was from below—taking her down. Not through the floor, but through—through what?

  The wind screamed in circles and the mirrors split up and her grip on the world ended.

  Or the world ended.

  “Hey! ASL!” bellowed Sean. “Get me my metric wrenches.”

  But ASL did not appear.

  Sean went inside. How shadowy the Mansion was, with so many windows boarded up. The place had a sick damp scent now that the tenant families had been moved out. It did not seem familiar to Sean, even though he had lived there all his life till last month. He had a weird sense that if he walked down the halls, he would not know where they went.

  “Annie?” He had to swallow to get the word out.

  Sean, who did not have enough imagination to be afraid of anything, and could watch any movie without being afraid, was afraid.

  “Annie?” he whispered.

  Nobody answered.

  He went back outdoors, his hands trembling. He had to jam them into his pockets. She’d gone off without him noticing, that was all.

  He couldn’t concentrate on the cars. Couldn’t get comfortable with his bare back exposed to the sightless, dying Mansion.

  He threw his tools in the back of his MG and took off.

  Annie’s bike lay in the grass, wet and gleaming from the storm.

  CHAPTER 2

  Strat had been thinking of lemonade. He ambled toward the pullcord to summon a kitchen maid and looked through a ghost.

  His dry throat grew a little drier.

  Of course the heir to the Stratton fortune was also heir to a practical streak, and did not believe in ghosts. So it wasn’t one.

  Still, the sweat from the baseball game turned as cold as if he’d sat in the ice wagon. The white cotton shirt stuck to his chest, and Strat was sorry he’d tossed the baseball bat into the sports box in the cloakroom. He wouldn’t have minded having something to swing.

  Not only did the ghost approach Strat, it actually passed through him. He held very still, wanting to know how ghosts felt. Were they mist or flesh? Dampness or cloud?

  Real hair, long shivery satin hair, slid over his fingers. His shudder penetrated the ghost, which reached with half-present hands to feel him. Its touch missed, reaching instead an old Greek statue in the wall niche. It stroked the fine white marble and then fingered the fresh flowers wreathed around it.

  Strat decided against blinking. A blink was time enough for a ghost to vanish. He tried to breathe without sound and walk without vibration. The ghost moved slowly, fondling every surface. In fact, it acted like a plain, garden-variety thief, which just happened not to have all its body along. A ghost looking for something to steal.

  Don’t evaporate, thought Strat, following the shape.

  It lingered over a huge cut glass bowl, whose sharp facets were prisms in the sunshaft, casting a hundred tiny rainbows on a white wall. It paused in front of a mirror panel, studying itself.

  The ghost, and the ghost’s reflections, became more solid. More vivid. And more female.

  Strat was present at her birth.

  The fall ended as swiftly and completely as had the first.

  Out of breath and shaky, Annie struggled for balance. The wind was gone, but her heart still raced. The ballroom was strangely bright and shiny.

  And full.

  She was in an empty room, she could see how empty it was, and yet it was full. She had to take care not to bump into people. Even the air was different: it was like breathing in flowers, so heavy was the scent.

  And then—clearly—sweetly—

  —she heard a harp. A violin. And a piano.

  I did fall, thought Annie. Over the edge into insanity. Quick, walk outdoors. Check the oil stains on Sean’s fingers. See how he steps right in the puddles without noticing his feet are wet. Listen to him tell me to fetch and carry.

  But she did not go outdoors.

  She went deeper and deeper into the condemned and collapsing rooms of the Mansion. As the sky turned violet from the passing storm, so did the Mansion turn violet, and then crimson, and gold. It filled with velvet and silk. It filled with sound and music. It filled with years gone by.

  Annie Lockwood had fallen indeed.

  She tried to think clearly, but nothing had clarity. Some strange difference in the world filled her eyes like snow and her ears like water. She couldn’t see where she was putting her feet; couldn’t see even the things she knew she saw.

  The Mansion was changing beneath her feet, shifting under her fingertips. The world’s molecules had separated. She was seeing fractions. Had she fallen into prehistory? Before the shape of things?

  She had never known fear. She knew it now.

  And then, beneath her own fingers, shape began.

  The old walls, where paint had been layered on paint in a dozen ugly shades, turned into rich wallpaper that felt like velvet. Floors lost their splinters and grew fabulous carpets of indigo blue and Pompeii red. Ceilings lost their sag and were covered with gold leaf Greek-key designs.

  She began seeing people. Half people. Not ghosts; just people who had not entirely arrived. Unless, of course, it was she, Annie, who had not entirely arrived.

  I’m not real, she thought. The Mansion became real, while I, Annie Lockwood, no longer exist.

  In the g
reat front hall whose chessboard floor had always seemed such a reflection of cruelty, she looked up through banisters heavy with monsters. Etched glass, like lace printed on the windows, dripped with sungold. Twelve-foot-high armloads of heavy suffocating fabric fell from the sides of each window and crept across the floor. The staircase was both beauty and threat.

  Whatever she was, she still possessed sight. She had to turn her eyes away from the glare. She could half focus now, and in the shadows beneath the great stair was something dark and narrow. Half seen, or perhaps only half there, were half people. But they were full of emotion, and the emotion was Fury.

  Fury like a painting. There was fighting. Hissing and clenched fists and fierce words. How black it was, compared to the glittering sunshaft! Black that slithered with its own sound. Smoke like apples and autumn filled the air.

  And then somebody fell. It was like her own fall getting here: steep and jagged and forever. The sound of breaking bones was new to Annie’s ears, but there was no doubt what had happened. A skull had cracked like glass in that dark space.

  Annie whirled to get out of there. Around her, the walls became heavier and more real.

  I’m in the Mansion, she thought, but it feels like a tomb. Am I locked in here like a pharaoh’s bride with all my furniture and servants?

  She patted surfaces, trying to find the way out, as if there were some little door somewhere, some tiny staircase up to …

  To what?

  What was happening?

  A dining room now. Real cherry wood. Real damask. Real pale pink roses in a real china vase.

  The fury and the blackness and the smoke froze halfway into her mind, like history half studied.

  What had she seen on the stairs? A real murder?

  I don’t need a real murder, thought Annie Lockwood. I need a real way out.

  She waded through half-there rooms, reaching, touching, making wishes—and bumped into somebody.

  Strat followed her, hypnotized. She wore a white dress, rather short, several inches above her ankles. She wore no gloves. She had no hat. Although it was midafternoon, her hair was down.

  In the evening, when his mother back in Brooklyn Heights was preparing for bed, she would take down her hair. When he was a little boy, Strat had loved that, how the long U-shaped pins released that knot and turned Mama into a completely different, much softer person.

  His ghost was continuously becoming a different softer person. Strat gasped. The girl’s legs were bare.

  But she was almost his own height! This was no eight-year-old. Bare legs! Perhaps it’s a new sort of tennis costume, he thought, hoping that indeed tennis costumes were going to feature bare-legged girls from now on.

  They had installed a tennis court on the estate, and Strat was quite taken by the game. When he began Yale next year he intended to go out for baseball and crew and tennis. Strat did not see how he was going to do all the necessary sports and still attend class.

  Harriett and Devonny adored tennis and played it often, but Strat could not imagine either girl without white stockings to cover her limbs.

  His sister, Devonny, had no chaperon to chastise her for unbecoming behavior. Father, Mother and even Florinda thought anything Devonny did was becoming. Devonny might actually take up the bare-legged style.

  Harriett, however, had a so-called aunt, a second cousin who’d never married, poor worthless creature, and Aunt Ada was now Harriett’s chaperon, eternally present to stop Harriett from enjoying anything ever.

  Strat understood why Harriett wanted to marry young and get away from Aunt Ada, but Strat, although he loved Harriett, was not willing to marry young or even ever, as it did not seem to be a very desirable position.

  Certainly neither his father nor his mother nor any of his three stepmothers had found marriage pleasant.

  Devonny argued that all these women had been married to Father, and who could ever be happy under those circumstances? Whereas Harriett would be married to Strat, and therefore live happily ever after.

  Strat was about as certain of happily ever after as he was of ghosts.

  The ghost ahead of him touched everything. She ran her fingers over banisters and newel posts, over statuary and brass knobs and the long gold-fringed knots that cascaded from the rims of the wine-dark draperies.

  Strat didn’t risk speech. He simply followed her. In spite of the fact that the house was occupied by a large staff, plenty of family and several houseguests, the ghost seemed to feel comfortably alone.

  She passed through the library, the morning room and the orangerie where Florinda’s plants gasped for breath in the summer heat. Then she turned and headed straight for him. Strat stood very still, looking right through her, which was so strange, so impossible, and once more she bumped into him.

  She didn’t quite see him, and yet she said, Oh, I’m so sorry. Her voice was not quite there. Her lips moved, but the sound was far away, like bells on a distant island.

  Even though he couldn’t quite see her, he could judge that she was beautiful—and puzzled. There was a faint frown on her lovely face, as though she, too, was trying to figure out why she was here, and what she was after.

  She climbed the stairs.

  Strat followed.

  She touched the velvet cushions stacked on the landing’s window seat. Strat’s mother, who had had the house designed back before Father disposed of her, adored window seats. The house was tipsy with them. Nobody ever sat in one. They weren’t the slightest bit comfortable.

  The ghost girl touched the paintings on the wall. Mama adored Paris even more than window seats and had visited often, buying anything on a canvas. Father had not permitted Mama to keep a single French oil.

  Now the ghost girl touched the Greek statues in the deep niches that lined the second landing. It was very fashionable, acquiring marbles from ancient civilizations. They had more back in Manhattan in the town house.

  The girl proceeded to go through every bedroom.

  She went into Father’s bedroom, where luckily there was no Father present; Father lived in his study or on his golf course. He’d had his own nine hole course landscaped in a few years ago. It was too placid a sport for Strat, but it kept Father busy and away from his two children, and this was good.

  Now she went into his stepmother Florinda’s bedroom, and even into Florinda’s bath. Strat stayed in the hall. Strat happened to know that Florinda was there, preparing for tonight’s party, but no scream came from Florinda, although she was a woman much given to screaming and fainting and whimpering and simpering.

  Florinda didn’t see her, thought Strat. I’m the only one who sees her. She’s mine.

  Strat loved that. He loved owning things. He loved knowing that every dog, horse, servant, bush, building and acre of this estate were—or would be—his. Now he had his own ghost.

  All of her flawless. And so skimpily dressed! No corset, no camisole, no bloomers, no petticoats, no stockings, no hat. Strat yearned to imagine her without even the thin white dress, but it would not be honorable, so he prevented himself from having such a fantasy.

  The girl walked into his bedroom.

  This time Strat went along. Straight to the window she went, and that was sensible, for Strat’s tower had a view all the way down the coastline to the city of New York. Strat liked to pretend he could pick out the steeples of Trinity Church, or the new thirteen story Tower Building on Broadway, but of course he really couldn’t. What he could see was miles of congested water traffic on Long Island Sound: barges and steamers, scows and sailboats.

  Strat’s ghost gasped, stifling a cry with her hand, clenching frightened fingers on top of her mouth. She whirled, seeing the room and the furnishings, but not Strat. There were tears in her eyes. Her chin was quivering.

  Strat was not fanciful. He disliked fiction, reading only what he had been forced to read in boarding school. He’d dragged himself through The Scarlet Letter and A Tale of Two Cities and the latest nightmare, Moby Dick. Books
that long should be outlawed. Strat preferred to read newspapers or science books. Actually, Strat preferred sports.

  His stepmother, Florinda, and his sister, Devonny, were addicted to bad cheap novels full of hysterical females who fell in love without parental permission or saw ghosts or both. He’d never waste time on that balderdash. So it was amazing that he was imagining a half-there, beautiful girl. Strat hardly ever imagined anything.

  What would it be like to kiss a girl like that? Strat had done little kissing in his life.

  His experiences with girls were either in public, like the ever popular ice cream parlor, or chaperoned. Harriett, for example, was never available without Aunt Ada. This winter, Aunt Ada had come when Strat took Harriett ice skating; Aunt Ada had come when he took Harriett on a sleigh ride; Aunt Ada had come to the theater with them, and the opera.

  Strat was pretty sick of Aunt Ada.

  If Aunt Ada were to fall down the stairs and break her hip, Strat would eagerly find nurses to care for her, hoping Aunt Ada would spend many months, or maybe her lifetime, as an invalid.

  If there was one thing that his ghost girl was not, it was chaperoned.

  The girl slipped by him. He tried to catch her arm, but she ran too quickly for him, rushing down the stairs so fast and lightly she hardly touched them. Her little white shoes clicked on each gleaming tread. Mama, of course, had had carpet commissioned to cover the stairs; Florinda, of course, had had it torn up. Each stepmother seemed to feel that a gesture of ownership was required.

  The girl ran out the front door, unmanned at the moment by a servant, since the staff was so busy putting together the party. Strat tore after her. His own bike was tilted up against the big stone pillars of the porte cochere, and there, astonishingly, lying on the grass, was a second bike.

  Her bike.

  She got on, and Strat, laughing out loud this time, got on his. She half heard him laugh, turned, and half saw him. The fear that had been half there was now complete, and had her in its grip. “It’s all right,” called Strat. “You’re all right, don’t be afraid, it’s only me, I won’t hurt you. Wait for me!”