Chapter V #6
Never in my life had I been as forthcoming with people I had just met, but something about the priest and now this girl behind the counter made me either 1) trust them implicitly or 2) not give a shit about what they might think of me.
“I might be descended from gods,” I said. “And I think something about that gives me the ability to see ghosts. Only ones I’m related to. Well—mostly. And only women. Well—mostly. There’s one outlier.”
“What gods?”
“Persephone.”
“Well, that makes sense. She’s the Queen of the Underworld. You’d have a direct connection with the dead, if you were her descendant. And you’d also have a direct connection to her daughter—”
“Melinoe,” I interrupted. “I know.”
“She’s a cool god,” she said. “Goddess of nightmares, goddess of ghosts…”
“And madness, unfortunately. Look, do you know any other ways? To, like…”
“Contact the dead?” she guessed. “Sure. You could try scrying.”
“Scrying?”
“Nostradamus used a bowl of water. He predicted his own death, you know.”
“He did?”
“Yup. He was big into the occult, too. So maybe he had tapped into something.”
“A bowl of water.”
“Might as well give it a try.”
“Are there any risks?”
“If you pass out and hit your head and land face down in the bowl, you could drown,” she said thoughtfully. “Or more likely, you could lose your way in the labyrinthine maze of the eternal abyss.”
“When you say more likely, exactly how likely do you mean?”
“With your skill level, I’d say not very. Ironically, the more practice you have, the more dangerous it becomes.”
“Do I need anything to do this?”
“We sell scrying bowls,” she said. “But I’m sure you have something in your kitchen already that will work just fine.”
“Okay. Um. Thanks.”
“Good luck, little god of nightmares!”
I’m sure I don’t have to say that scrying out of a vintage Pyrex gooseberry bowl did absolutely nothing except wet the ends of my hair, which I forgot to tie back before dipping my head over the water.
I dumped the water into the kitchen sink and dried the bowl with a dish towel, placing it carefully back in the cabinet before turning back around to the kitchen, which was dark and quiet and empty and—
Not empty.
It was not empty.
The Ouija board ghost was back, standing on the other side of the kitchen island, just next to the kitchen table, just next to the spot on the wall where the full glass of water had shattered after narrowly missing Clara’s head.
The ghost was no more distinct than it had been last night, but still I felt that familiarity, that connection …
It was a Farthing ghost, it had to be, and without really thinking about it, I took a few steps and moved in front of the kitchen island, moved closer to the ghost, which seemed to turn its—her—head to watch me.
I was just a few feet away from it now, and when I paused, it extended its hand out to me, reaching for me …
It reached for me.
She reached for me …
“Evelyn?” I whispered.
And I swear, I swear, I swear—
She nodded her head yes.
The ghost—Evelyn?—disappeared right after it nodded and in the moments directly after, I felt weightless and untethered to reality.
It was my sister. The ghost was my sister. It was Evelyn; I knew that down in the very marrow of my bones, I knew my sister.
But if my sister was a ghost, did that mean my sister was …
Was Evelyn …
No.
No. If Evelyn was (I couldn’t even say the word, I couldn’t even think it)—
If something had happened to Evelyn, I would know. I would be able to feel it. I would know, in the same way I knew, when I walked in the door of our brownstone, if my sisters were home yet.
And I knew Evelyn wasn’t here but I knew also, I knew, I knew, I knew that she wasn’t dead.
Neither Clara nor I went to school on Monday. Bernadette called out sick from the flower shop. We went to a different diner for breakfast, taking a circuitous route to get there, so her boss wouldn’t see her.
The professor of classical mythology emailed me back just as my pancakes arrived.
Her response was bemused, indulging, concerned firstly with my well-being (I don’t know you, but you sound a little frazzled), and secondly with how she might, if she were so inclined, attempt to communicate with a ghost.
I read it aloud to my sisters:
Bang around the old places.
Visit a temple, if you can (there’s a very handy one in the Met).
Scrounge around in some grave soil.
Climb into a coffin (carefully).
Hold an urn in your hands and close your eyes.
Have a séance. Meditate. Light a candle at midnight. Etc., etc.
“The Temple of Dendur,” Clara said thoughtfully. “Fascinating.”
I made the decision not to tell either of them about Evelyn.
I didn’t want to fill them with the same worry, the same dread that I had gone to sleep with, that I had woken up with, that I carried around with me, that I felt settle and resettle in my body with every step I took.
Our parents were due back tomorrow and we would have to tell them that Evelyn had been missing for three days, since Friday night, and we had no idea where she was except I had seen her as a ghost in our house and I couldn’t think about what that might mean.
It started snowing while we ate breakfast, a light fall of flakes that lasted throughout the entire morning, resulting in an inch-thick dusting of powder. Everything a pale, soft white. Everything made beautiful and new, sounds muffled, footprints on the sidewalk, air that smelled cold.
New York looks like a postcard, Evelyn would have said, if she were with me as I headed into the Met, because why not, because I might as well explore all my options.
I was quiet as I walked through the lobby, past the Tomb of Perneb, past Egypt under Roman Rule, past the Facsimile Gallery, past Arts under the Ptolemies, past the Ramesside Period.
And then, finally, there it was, in all its serious impressiveness: the Temple of Dendur.
There was water in front of it, a U-shaped pool that was meant to represent the Nile River.
I heard Evelyn’s voice in my head, The ancient Egyptians knew a lot more about death than we do.
At breakfast, Bernadette had said But the Temple of Dendur was built for Isis and Osiris. It has nothing to do with death.
And Clara had answered, Everything the Egyptians did had to do with death. They were obsessed with it. There was a crypt attached to the temple. It was said to hold the bodies of two boys who drowned in the Nile—Pedesi and Pihor. They were the sons of a Nubian chieftain.
And I had said, How do you know that, you’re so weird.
And Clara had taken that as a compliment.
The Met was actually pretty empty, given that it was a Monday and still early.
There were about twenty or thirty people wandering around or sitting on benches and staring at their phones or examining the graffiti the temple had become famous for.
One of the better-known pieces of graffiti was carved in 1817, which proved that humans had basically been assholes forever, and a young kid with a can of spray paint was nothing new or original.
The temple was actually quite small, once you were inside it.
The walls were covered in beautifully carved hieroglyphics.
Two massive stone pillars framed the entrance, giving way to a square room.
Past that room was a doorway into another chamber, with a single small statue on display in a glass case.
Beyond the statue was a third room, but the statue’s case blocked the doorway.
There were three people in that second room.
I waited until they were gone, until I was alone, then I closed my eyes.
“Henry,” I whispered into the cool, echoing space. “Henry, are you here?”
Evelyn’s voice again, haunting me:
They understood the changeability of death. The thin veil that separates our world from their world.
“If it’s such a thin veil, you could stand to answer me, Henry,” I said, and I heard a polite throat clearing behind me, some kind stranger letting me know I was no longer alone and I was perhaps scaring them a bit with all my apparent talking to no one.
I opened my eyes, smiled weakly, pointed to earbuds I wasn’t actually wearing. “Phone call,” I said, relieving the poor woman of her concern.
It hadn’t felt right, anyway, being in the Temple of Dendur. Maybe whatever had made it sacred once had been ruined when it was carefully disassembled, shipped over to Manhattan, and pieced back together. No, I’d have to try something else.
I decided to go back to Trinity Churchyard, during the day this time, during actual visiting hours.
I let myself in through the front doors just after a family of four, two dads and their bored-looking teenage kids, a boy and a girl, who might have been twins.
One of the dads was reading excitedly from a brochure: “This is the third building erected on this site. The very first church built here was lost in the Great Fire of 1776. Man, I would have loved to see that. Huh, guys?” His kids grunted half-heartedly and his partner flashed him an apologetic smile and then they turned a corner and I turned a different corner and almost ran into someone in long, flowing black robes. The priest from last night.
“You again,” he said pleasantly. In the daytime he looked a bit less like an ethereal dreamlike figure who’d just departed the page of a Bronte novel (but just a bit).
“Me again.”
“I appreciate the newfound adherence to visiting hours, but shouldn’t you be in school?”
“Oh, I’m thirty-eight,” I said. “I just use very expensive moisturizer.”
“Hmm.”
“Have you seen the movie National Treasure? With Nic Cage?”
A smile quirked at the corner of the priest’s mouth. “I have, actually.”