Chapter V #7
“So you know when he comes to the church and he finds the Templar Treasure? I was going to see if I could go there. Down there. To the crypts. There are crypts, right? I know there’s not like, a whole underground museum’s worth of treasure caves, like in the movie, but there are crypts.
Where the Bleecker family is buried, right? ”
“We don’t let people down there.”
“Have you been down there?”
“I have.”
“So you can get down there.”
“One can,” the priest replied, still smiling. “If one were allowed.”
“And what would one have to do to be allowed?”
“Being a living descendant of the Bleecker family would help.”
“Well, aside from being thirty-eight, I also happen to be a living descendant of the Bleecker family.”
“Oh, really? How fascinating,” the priest said. Then, after a moment, “Still trying to get your answer from the other side? Did my rousing speech do nothing for you?”
“I won’t touch anything. And I won’t be long. And I won’t be a bother. I just thought … It’s sort of in the ground, right? We don’t have a basement. Maybe if I’m in the ground, he’ll be able to hear me better.”
“And what was your name again?
“Evelyn,” I said automatically. “Evelyn Bleecker.”
“Well, Evelyn. Right this way.”
I followed the priest through a locked door, down a corridor, through another locked door, then down a skinny flight of stairs.
The air temperature changed noticeably. We reached another corridor, this one with a low ceiling crowded with pipes, and at the end of that we stepped carefully through what I can best describe as a hole in the wall.
The priest paused halfway through the hole, laid a hand on the wall, and said, “This was built in 1846.”
I half expected him to add a how lucky are we, kids? but he continued on his way.
We reached the vault a minute later. It didn’t disappoint, in terms of vaults.
Its walls were laid in brick, there were shelves for ashes and two dozen white, unlit candles, and the small room contained a silence rarely found in New York, one of those silences that almost had its own sound to it, a heavy, thrumming, vibrating silence that felt heavy on my shoulders.
“Wow,” I said.
“Wait for it,” the priest said, and he removed a matchbook from somewhere in his robes and diligently lit each of the candles, one by one, until the vault was filled with delicate, flickering light.
“Wow,” I repeated.
“There are a few other vaults down here, but this is my favorite,” he confided.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I’ll give you a few minutes, then,” he said. “If you promise not to touch anything or move too much or breathe more than absolutely necessary.”
“I’ll slow my heartbeat,” I promised.
“I’m too kind, that’s my problem,” he said, shaking his head. “I absolutely have to start saying no. I’m going to pray on it.”
He left the crypt then, and the silence grew until my ears started buzzing with it. I sat down on the gravel floor.
“Henry, what the fuck,” I whispered.
Bernadette, after breakfast, had loudly announced that she was going thrifting.
Her anger had grown and grown and grown and then disintegrated, vanishing, leaving a kind of catatonia behind.
She had journaled that morning as she ate her omelet, pressing the pen so hard into the paper that she had torn it.
She had closed her eyes, sat unmoving for at least three minutes, then carefully shut the journal.
“Henry, I swear to god, to all the gods in the world, if you don’t answer me I will … I will…”
I couldn’t think of a reasonable threat, something I might actually do that Henry wouldn’t want me to do.
I thought I might cry, let my tears fall on the tiny stones underneath my butt and consecrate the ground with salty water I had made myself.
But I couldn’t cry. So I thought I would scream, letting my voice fill up this tiny room, loud enough to wake the dead (or at least one of them).
But when I opened my mouth, nothing came out.
Then I thought I would take a nap, but that seemed unlikely.
I couldn’t nap under the best of circumstances, what made me think I’d be able to nap in an underground tomb?
Instead I stayed where I was, uncrying, unscreaming, unsleeping, and I laid my hands flat on the ground and I said, “Henry, please. Please, please, please. Answer me.”
I closed my eyes, then closed my hands into fists, scooping up some of the gravel, squeezing it so hard I thought I might have made myself bleed.
“Evelyn? Are you there, can you hear me? I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Please please please forgive me, if you come back, I promise I’ll make everything okay again, okay? Okay? Okay, Evelyn?”
And then someone did answer, but it wasn’t Evelyn, it was another Farthing sister, it was Clara, and she said, “Oh, Winnie,” in a sad, small voice.
She stood in the doorway of the crypt, dressed in layers and layers of warm clothes, just her face visible as she unwound a scarf from her neck.
“Clara,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“I have to show you something.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
“I tracked you,” Clara said, still removing layers, pulling a wool hat from her head and then reaching into her pocket, withdrawing her phone and holding it up a little sheepishly.
“You can track me?”
“I installed an app on both your phones after Evelyn disappeared. I have a new, strict rule about not losing more than one sister per weekend.”
“But how did you…”
“You were sleeping, and I can be very quiet when I want to be.”
“Creepy.”
“Look. I finished it,” Clara said, and her eyes were flashing, a trick of the light from the many candles behind me. She unlocked her phone, scrolled through a few screens, then handed it to me. It was a photo of her painting.
“It’s our—”
“Backyard,” she finished. “It’s our backyard.”
“And what’s that—”
“I have no idea,” Clara said. “But it doesn’t seem good.”
The painting showed our backyard in winter, as it was now.
You could just see the back of the brownstone, the wide windows and the door to the kitchen.
There were the dormant jasmine bushes and the trees behind them.
Movement in the branches suggested a strong breeze.
The grass was dusted with snow. It could have been today, actually. The amount of snow was right.
“I think it’s—”
“Today,” Clara interrupted again. “It’s today.”
The weird thing, the thing Clara had said seemed not good was directly above the backyard, in the sky.
The sky itself was a blueish gray and crowded with clouds, except for one dark slash, one blackish smudge, like my sister had taken a paintbrush and swiped it from left to right on the canvas.
The mark looked like it had been made carelessly, quickly—but it was the kind of effortless thing that you knew actually took a very long time to get exactly right in paint.
Underneath the slash, a sort of shadow. Strange dark shapes bleeding through.
But it was hard to focus on the slash. It was hard to make anything coherent out of it.
It didn’t look like anything real I’d ever seen before.
If you stared at it too long, it almost disappeared.
It blurred. It could have been a trick of the light.
The candles didn’t help; maybe outside it would have looked completely different.
“Is it a cloud?” I asked. “Like, a rain cloud?”
“I thought so, at first, something like that,” Clara said, shedding her jacket on the gravel floor. “But now I don’t think so. I get this, like…”
“Bad feeling,” I finished.
“A bad feeling,” Clara confirmed. “And look.”
Underneath the black mark, in the middle of the backyard, a small figure was sitting on a bench. She had her back toward us, but I could tell in the shape of her shoulders, in the tilt of her neck, it was Evelyn.
I tapped the screen of Clara’s phone to see what time it was, then handed it back to her.
“Text Bernadette,” I said. “Tell her to meet us at home.”
I didn’t think the priest was ultimately sad to see us go, but I made a mental note to bring him a thank-you card. Something along the lines of: I appreciate you for bringing me down into a private underground crypt and then letting my sister come, too!
Clara and I took the C from Fulton Street up to Eighty-First Street, then power walked the rest of the way to home. We didn’t know what we would find. We kept looking up at the sky nervously, scanning for an unnatural black slash.
Bernadette was waiting for us outside, like maybe she was too scared to go into the house by herself. She looked slightly more animated than she had that morning, fresh from thrifting and smelling like a mix of roses and lilac (even though she had called out of work).
“What are we doing here?” she asked, in lieu of hello or it’s so nice to see you both or why do you smell like hundred-year-old bones? Clara had texted only meet us at home and Bernadette had given it a thumbs-up.
Clara had already pulled up the painting, and she showed it to Bernadette now. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at it.
“What’s the thing in the sky?” she asked.
“We don’t know,” Clara said.
“Okay,” Bernadette said. “Let’s go in.”
The house was oddly cold, as if someone had turned the heat down, as if the winter chill had found its way inside. There was a breeze, too, like—
“Is the back door open?” Clara asked, brushing past me, hurrying through the living room and into the kitchen, us following closely behind.
And, yes, the door was open. The kitchen door that led down to the backyard was open, letting in so much cold air, letting in the wind; there was mail strewn all over the floor, some leftover fall leaves that hadn’t yet been buried by the snow.
“What the fuck?” Bernadette said.