Chapter VII
VII
Of course, if you were descended from Persephone, you were also descended from her daughter, Melinoe, and if you were descended from Melinoe, you might find yourself blaming her for any ill fortune that befell you, such as madness, ghostly communication, nightmares …
You might call any bad dreams messages; you might wonder what she was trying to tell you …
That night I dreamed about zombies.
A bit on the nose, sure, but it was fucking terrifying, and when I woke up, Clara was sitting on the edge of my bed, that book in her hands, Mythology by Edith Hamilton.
I checked my phone; it was four in the morning.
She had a little book light attached to the hardcover and she didn’t look up when I moved.
“You were groaning,” she said.
“A step up from neighing,” I replied.
“A message from Melinoe?”
“You know, I’d really love being related to a nice goddess. A goddess of, like, bunnies. Or rainbows. Or hugs.”
“Hestia,” Clara said, turning pages in her book until she found what she was looking for, reading aloud: “‘Hestia, the goddess of hearth and home, known to be kind and forgiving, the perfect hostess and a protector for all of her followers.’”
“Yes, that’s what I want,” I said. “I want a protector. Not a harbinger of nightmares.”
“You said you had someone you could ask,” Clara said. “Someone who might know how to bring Henry back. She works in a store? What store?”
“You wouldn’t know it.”
“Dark Magic? That place on Columbus?”
“How do you know it?”
“Where else are you going to get a Ouija board at ten o’clock on a Saturday night? And who else would have told you to try scrying alone on the kitchen floor?”
“How did you know I tried to scry?”
“It’s dangerous. It’s not something you should mess around with. You could have—”
“Lost my way in the labyrinthine maze of the eternal abyss?” I guessed. “Yeah, I know. But here I am.”
“This is so messed up,” Clara said.
“I know.”
“It feels creepy that I painted it. Like it got inside my head or something.”
“And nobody else can see it. Just us. Why is that?”
“Not even Mom and Dad,” Clara confirmed. “I asked them earlier.”
I pulled up a photo of the painting that I’d taken on my phone. It really was beautiful. Maybe the best thing Clara had ever done. Never mind I couldn’t look at it for more than a few seconds without feeling a chill roll down my spine.
We looked at it for a few moments together, then Clara said, “Go talk to that cute girl at the store. Maybe she’ll have some insight.”
“I didn’t say it was a cute girl.”
“Sometimes I just know things,” Clara said. “I think I get it from Aunt Bea. Or Persephone.”
“Good night,” I said.
“Good night. Aim for the head.”
More surreal than perhaps anything in this absolute mess of surrealness was the action of going to school.
Eating breakfast (Dad had made frittatas), walking across the park with Evelyn, sitting through classes, walking back through the park, getting home, changing into something a little nicer (the Dark Magic girl was cute, okay), setting off outside again.
The normal rote actions of everyday life seemed absolutely hysterical.
I laughed out loud in history class, and there is so rarely an appropriate time to laugh out loud during a history lesson (“Sorry, I was … thinking of something else,” I mumbled weakly).
I left the house for Dark Magic feeling marginally more normal, breathing deep, refreshing lungfuls of the chilly air.
I saw Bernadette outside the flower shop and crossed the street to say hi.
“Where are you going?” she asked. She was wrestling a big, unruly bouquet of lilies into a tall black bucket.
“To talk to a girl about summoning a ghost who’s actively refusing to be summoned.”
“Oh, the cute girl. Nice. What’s her name?”
“I don’t know, actually.”
“Very on brand for you.”
“What do you mean—”
“It’s just like, the most obvious question to ask a cute girl. But it escapes you. Will you help me with this?”
I squeezed the stems of the lilies together and helped guide them into the bucket. Bernadette kissed me on the cheek and refused to answer any more questions about what my brand was.
I hadn’t been to Dark Magic in the daytime yet and the outside of the store looked significantly more normal in the rush of late-afternoon crowds.
I had never had a job before, but I could see myself working in a place like this, donning black clothing as a sort of uniform, braiding my hair out of my face, adopting an expression of pointed disinterest.
I pushed into the space and the inside looked different, too.
It was brighter, for one thing; the sunlight filtered through the store windows and washed everything in a thin, winter glow.
The person standing behind the register was, unfortunately, not the cute girl.
It was a very tall man with soft pink hair and a lime-green jumpsuit.
He didn’t quite fit into the aesthetic of the store but he also did look strange enough (in a good way) to be here.
He smiled when he saw me. He was much more smiley than the girl had been.
“Hey, there. Welcome to Dark Magic. What brings you in today? Horoscope book? Tarot cards? Crystal collection?”
“Oh, no, I actually was, um, this is weird, but there was this, I was wondering if you could—”
“Maybe,” the man said, his smile getting wider.
“Sorry?”
“Maybe,” the man said. “Her name. Maybe. Like—maybe you didn’t come in here to ask about the cute girl who works nights, but I have a feeling you did, and her name is Maybe.”
“Maybe,” I repeated, feeling a slight rush of warmth around my neck area (pale skin, easy blushers, curse of the Farthings).
“I mean. I was, yeah. Asking about her. Going to ask about her. She helped me and I wanted to say, um … thanks. So, um. You know. Thanks. Thanks also to you. Thanks to both of you.”
“She’s on at seven most nights, goes to school during the day.
She’s one of the coolest people I’ve ever met, but don’t you dare tell her I said that.
I’m Jon. Can I help you with something? I know I’m not as sultry and attractive as our dear Maybe, but I still know which crystals will dispel bad dreams. Have you been having bad dreams?
Sorry for presuming, I just get the feeling.
Also don’t tell her I said that, the sultry and attractive bit. ”
I laughed—half nervous, half genuine. “I do have bad dreams, actually, but I have another question, sort of a weird question. I don’t really know if—”
“Try me. I’ve worked here for a while. The dress code hasn’t worn off on me, but I do know a lot about weird shit.”
“I mean, this is going to sound very strange…”
“We sell antique Victorian baby teeth on eighteen-karat gold necklaces,” Jon deadpanned.
“Let’s just say, hypothetically, there was, like, a place where …
you go. After you die.” To Jon’s credit, he wasn’t smiling anymore, he was listening carefully, nodding his head slightly, no indication that he was internally making fun of me at all.
“And in this place, there’s a … spirit. A ghost. And you want the ghost to come back, you know.
You have to … talk to it. This person. You have to.
It’s imperative. Anyway. How might you … do that?”
“You want to summon the dead,” Jon said, putting it far more succinctly than I had. “Look, people have been summoning the dead for ages. You’re not asking to reinvent the wheel here.”
“I’m not?”
“Definitely not. People are fascinated with death. They want to understand it. They want to talk to their loved ones who’ve passed.
In my case, I wanted to find out where my grandmother hid her very expensive emerald-and-diamond necklace.
” He paused, considering. “I also wanted to say hi, of course. But the necklace was very important to me, and she’d hidden it very well. ”
“Did you find it?”
“In a can of garbanzo beans, beans still in there, can resealed. Don’t know how she managed it.”
“You contacted your grandmother from beyond the grave and she told you where to find her necklace?”
“No,” Jon admitted. “I just got hungry one day. But anyway. What you’re asking isn’t impossible.”
“Okay…”
“It isn’t easy or even likely, but it’s not impossible.”
“Okay…”
“You’ll need a medium. A good one. Not a hack Instagrammer who’s directly responsible for the overharvesting of California white sage.”
“Right. So how do I—”
“Obviously, I know one. She might be down. She’s particular about what cases she accepts.”
“All right. How do I contact her?”
“She’s here most nights at seven.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Maybe,” he confirmed.
“All right. I guess I’ll come back.”
“Here,” he said, reaching under the counter, withdrawing two small bundles.
“Cedar,” he said, putting the first one down, a small pallet of three-inch long sticks, tied together with twine.
“For protection.” He put the second bundle on the table.
This one I knew was lavender, a dried smudging bundle of it, greenery mixed with delicate purple flowers.
“For the invitation of spirits. And also, they both smell lovely.” I started to take my wallet out of my bag, but he waved his hand at me.
“No charge. Any friend of Maybe gets the smudging sticks for free.”
“Oh, well, we’re not really friends—”
“You will be,” he said, with a simple conviction that mirrored Clara’s, whenever she said things that weren’t true yet but that we knew would become true eventually.
Walking home, still early evening but also quickly getting darker (East Coast winters), I stared at the dark slice in the sky. I should have asked Jon if he could see it. I’d ask Maybe, maybe. And was it … getting bigger?
I stopped on our front stairs, halfway up, staring at it, directly above our home.
Above the slash, the moon was bright, its own crescent slice in the darkness. Next to the moon, there was one bright star.
“Mars,” Dad said, suddenly behind me. I’d been so engrossed in my skygazing I hadn’t heard him approach.
“What?” I said, jumping a little.
“Is that what you’re looking at? Mars?”
“The planet?”
“The planet, yes, my love. That little bright thing next to the moon.”
“That’s Mars?”
“Indeed. Isn’t it almost impossible to comprehend? We’re here, on this planet, going about our days, going to work, going to school, living our lives, and there, in the sky, there’s just this other planet. Another planet. How wild is that?”
“Wild,” I agreed.
“Is that what you were looking at? You seemed pretty intensely observant.”
“Well, I didn’t know it was Mars. But yes.”
“Right on.”
“Do you see anything else?” I asked cautiously.
“What do you mean?”
“Any other … things in the sky?”
“Well, the moon’s a lovely little crescent tonight. I’ve always loved a crescent moon. It looks like the blade of an axe, ready to strike, doesn’t it?”
“Sure. And anything else?”
“Not quite dark enough for any stars yet. Is that what you mean?”
“Or just … anything … else?”
Dad shifted his gaze from the sky to my face, his expression bemused and adoring (in a house full of Farthing women, this was Dad’s default expression).
I knew Clara had already asked our parents if they could see the black slice in the sky, but I thought, if it really was getting bigger, it was worth checking again.
But clearly it was still only visible to us, for some reason I didn’t understand and didn’t want to think too much about.
“I thought I saw a shooting star,” I said weakly, by way of an explanation.
“Ah,” Dad said, touching his finger to my nose. “I hope you made a wish.”
He started up the stairs to our front door and I followed him, tearing my gaze away from the sky, forcing myself to move.
“It’s getting bigger,” Clara said that night. Attic, all four of us, after dinner.
“I noticed, too,” Evelyn said.
“I found a medium,” I said. “This weekend we can try to contact Henry, and we can ask him if he has any ideas on how to get him home, and we can ask him about the black mark.”
“I think I know why he couldn’t come back with me,” Evelyn said. “I think it’s because he’s dead. And if you’re dead and you go to the Underworld, you don’t get to come back.”
“Otherwise we’d have a lot of zombies on our hands,” Clara said, shooting me a knowing look.
“Well, we’re going to try,” Bernadette said decisively. She had a journal open on her lap and was scrawling so quickly her hand was almost a blur. She had the uncanny ability to journal and talk at the same time, never missing a beat.
“When will Mom and Dad be out of the house next?” I asked Clara, who somehow always knew their schedules. “We need to have a séance.”
“Saturday,” Clara said. “Dinner party downtown. At least four hours of parent-free house.”
“Perfect. I’ll see if she can do it then,” I said.
“The cute girl?” Evelyn asked.
“I wish, for once, there wasn’t a collective pool of sister gossip here,” I said.
“Well, that ship has sailed,” Bernadette said.
I threw a pillow at her head. Clara started babbling about some TV show she was trying to convince us all to watch. Bernadette put the journal away and started playing with Evelyn’s hair, twisting it and braiding it, undoing it and starting over again.
Gradually, the energy in the room shifted: Evelyn was quiet and almost happy, Bernadette was focused and calm, Clara was silly and lighthearted.
I was caught up in the moment, so content just to be in a room full of my sisters.
The black tear wasn’t more than a distant thought on the horizon, a fly in the room that had momentarily stopped buzzing, resting on the windowsill, lulling us into a peaceful state of forgetting that it was there.
But it was there, all right.
It was there and we were right: it was getting bigger.
The good energy lasted throughout the night, the next morning. Evelyn and I set off across the park for school and I thought, in that early morning stillness, that we might not all be doomed. That we might, maybe, be okay.
Which is funny, really, in hindsight.
Because halfway across the park, Evelyn turned to me and said, “January first.”
“What’s happening on January first?” I asked.
“If we can’t figure out how to get Henry home by then, I’m going back. I would rather live there with him than—”
“Here with all of us?”
“That wasn’t what I was going to say,” she protested.
“But that’s the gist of it, right?”
“Winnie, he’s all alone…”
“He has a lot of other ghosts he can make friends with,” I said, and Evelyn didn’t answer that, just sighed and smiled in such a sad, apologetic way. “And January first is less than a month away.”
“I know,” she said. And then, as an afterthought, she took my hand, squeezed it, and said, “I’m sorry.”