Chapter IX
IX
If you were liked by a god, favored by a god, related to a god, the great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Persephone, for example, the daughter of a daughter of a daughter
of a daughter
of a daughter
of a daughter
of someone with great, mythical power—
She might bestow a gift upon you.
She might bless you with the craft of weaving, making your fingers long and bendy and untiring, making your eyesight good enough to see all the little stitches in your work.
She might kiss your forehead and leave you with the power of foresight, women’s intuition, a prescience that is never quite explainable.
She might give you the power of opening up a doorway, of closing one again, of sending someone through …
We did all sleep with paper and pencils next to our beds, but Henry didn’t write any magical messages from beyond the grave, not the night of the séance or the morning I sat with Evelyn at her piano or any other night that week.
The tear in the sky was still getting bigger and it sort of shimmered around the edges, catching the light in strange ways.
I had started to think of it as a black hole, or maybe a reverse black hole, spitting things out of it instead of drawing things into it.
But if it got bigger, would there be a reversal?
Would it magnetize, turning on like a vacuum, sucking us all in, body by body, depositing us unceremoniously in the Underworld, pulling us in and spitting us out, from one universe to the next?
Evelyn was right; it was affecting all of us.
It was hard to sleep, hard to concentrate.
We felt like we were walking through thick fog.
I kept finding our mother staring out windows at nothing.
She still couldn’t see it, but I knew she felt its presence just like we did.
The only one who seemed blissfully unbothered was our father, and I knew it was because he didn’t have any Farthing blood—any god blood—running through his veins.
Bernadette, too, was on edge. I kept peeking over her shoulder to find her on her phone, frantically searching for new information on Melinoe. Her obsession with the goddess of madness had been rekindled, and she had taken to spitting out random facts with a fevered intensity.
Did you know some people thought she could shape-shift?
Did you know the ancient Greeks used to perform rituals in order to protect themselves from her nightmares?
Some people confuse her with Hecate, who was the goddess of magic, ghosts, and necromancy. But they were different people. Maybe they were friends, though? I’m going to see if I can find anything about them being friends.
Clara had started slipping into my bed at night; we’d browse through her mythology book together or talk or not talk. I sometimes was able to fall asleep with her beside me, but she was always gone when I woke up.
“Are you worried that Evelyn can’t play the piano anymore?” I asked her one night.
“I’m worried about a lot of things,” Clara said simply. “I’d like to just, like … go shopping. You know?”
“God, I’d really love that,” I agreed.
She snuggled into my side, pressing her cold nose against my shoulder.
She was wearing a flannel nightgown, somewhat old-fashioned, a gift from Aunt Bea last Christmas.
We’d all gotten matching ones. Black Watch, that was the name of the tartan pattern.
It had a bib collar with delicate lace. Bernadette had declared it very punk.
Evelyn had cooed over its softness. I had never worn mine.
“Since when do you call him Hen?” I asked.
“Just sometimes, late at night, when he used to watch me paint,” she said.
“Could you ever imagine…”
“Kissing him?” she guessed. “God no. How gross.”
“Yeah, I just don’t get it.”
“But love is weird like that. You know? It doesn’t make sense to question it.”
“I guess so.”
She wriggled closer to me, burrowing into the blankets.
Sometimes Clara was wise beyond her years and sometimes, now, she was exactly fourteen, younger, even, a little girl in a flannel nightgown who was, maybe, just as scared as I was.
“I think I might actually sleep tonight,” she said.
“I think I might actually go for a walk.”
“Are you sure? It’s getting late.”
“I’ll bring the pepper spray.”
“Are you going back to the crypts?”
“I think my crypt-dwelling days are behind me.”
“Good. It was creepy down there. Keep me posted?”
“I’ll text you every five blocks.”
Outside, the tear in the sky glowed and pulsed and spewed freezing air over our house.
I walked quickly, trying to get away from it, feeling its presence like a physical thing, like it had its own gravity, its own magnetic pull.
I knew it had done something to Evelyn, taken her music away from her, and I was worried it would do something to me next, or to one of my sisters.
I was worried it wouldn’t stop getting bigger.
I was worried it would swallow all of us up.
I was on autopilot, not making any conscious decisions about where I was walking but also completely unsurprised when I ended up at Dark Magic, pulling the door open and letting myself inside, immediately calmed by its now-familiar scent of lavender and sage.
“Welcome to Dark Magic; we’re having a buy one, get one sale on pocket crystals,” said a girl with platinum-blond hair and an eyebrow piercing.
“What’s a pocket crystal?” I asked.
“It’s a crystal that can fit in your pocket,” she said, and managed to not make me feel silly for asking such an obvious question.
“It’s okay, Gillian, she’s not an actual customer,” Maybe said, coming around a corner. My stomach did a little flip-flop that I tried my best to ignore.
“I actually am, if you’ll remember,” I said. “I bought that Ouija board.”
“Ouija boards are fun,” Gillian announced. “I swear one time I talked to Elvis.”
“What brings you to our fine establishment on such a cold and blustery night?” Maybe asked me.
“I thought maybe you wanted to go for a walk?”
Maybe considered this, looked around the store for a moment, noting the number of customers (a young girl checking out said pocket crystals, two men browsing a table of books).
“Gillian, keep an eye on things?”
“I’ve never met a friend of Maybe’s before,” Gillian said, leaning against a cabinet. “What’s she like outside of the store?”
“You don’t have to answer that,” Maybe said.
“She’s pretty cool,” I said. “She did a séance for us.”
“Oh, you’re the séance girl. Jon was telling me about you.”
“There are no secrets in the workplace,” Maybe said dryly.
“Well,” Gillian said, “not this workplace. Maybe other ones.”
“I’m going to get my coat. Text me if you need anything,” Maybe said.
“I will hold down the proverbial fort,” Gillian said.
Maybe wore her long coat with the hood again, and if we weren’t in the middle of Manhattan I would have said she was more suited for Middle Earth, a strange creature on a quest to destroy a ring.
Her skin was very pale and her cheeks got red quickly and I found it was easier to not look at her. Looking at her was too distracting.
“I take it he hasn’t come back?” she asked after we’d walked a bit in silence. My phone was buzzing in my pocket and I knew it was Clara, admonishing me for not texting her yet, but I ignored it. It was too cold to take my hands out of my pockets and type a response.
“Nope. Do you know anything about people losing their, like … abilities?”
“Abilities?” she questioned.
“Evelyn can’t play the piano anymore. I think it has something to do with the tear in the sky.”
“Huh. Like it’s…”
“I don’t know. Maybe … sucking something out of her?”
“Her life force?”
“Her soul?”
“Her youth?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know,” I said.
“Maybe she’s just stressed. It seems like you’re all pretty stressed?”
“When she presses the keys, no sound comes out.”
“That does feel like something more than stress.”
“Yeah…”
“What about Clara? Has she started painting anything else?”
“No, nothing.”
“That makes sense; she’s probably worried about painting any more prophecies. What about Bernadette? Is the medication still working out?”
“How do you know so much about my family?”
“When I like someone, I pay attention,” Maybe said simply, and I tried to ignore my itchy palms, the blush I knew was crawling up my neck (but, thankfully, hidden by my jacket).
We had, at that point, walked in a big square and ended up back in front of Dark Magic.
“Thanks for the walk,” I said.
“Of course. But I’m not counting this as a date, just so you know.”
“Oh, I wasn’t … I mean I didn’t…”
“A walk around the block is nice, and I’m down for it pretty much any time, but if I’m clocked in at work, I can’t also be on a date. That defies the logical rules of space and time.”
“No, no, you don’t have to—”
“Catch you later!”
Maybe walked back in the store without waiting for me to finish my sentence (which was probably a good thing, since I had no idea what the end of my sentence would have been).
My phone buzzed in my pocket again. The most recent of seven texts from Clara read Date over already? Judging from the other six messages, she had been closely tracking my walk around the block and obviously figured out that it both started and ended at Dark Magic.
I typed a quick response and started walking home: It wasn’t a date and aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?
We can sleep when we’re dead, she wrote, and then, a few minutes later, when I hadn’t responded: which might be sooner rather than later!!!
She included an assortment of goofy-faced emojis and I couldn’t help—even as I got closer to home and the black mark in the sky grew heavier and heavier—but smile.
When I got home, everyone was up and sitting around the attic, waiting for me.
“Clara’s had a feeling,” Bernadette said, yawning.