Page 57 of Persephone's Curse
I kept my eyes closed. Whatever spell was working, I didn’t want to disturb it. I waited for any sense of motion, any scrapingnoise of the planchette gliding against the board, any gasp from my sisters as their fingers were pushed by some unseen (undead?) force.
After a few moments of nothing else happening, I opened my eyes.
My sisters were sitting so motionless they looked almost like statues, their brows furrowed in concentration. Clara was biting her bottom lip; Bernadette’s nose was crinkled.
And beyond them—
Beyond them…
My breath hitched in my chest, catching for a moment before dislodging.
There was a…
There wassomeone.
Not Henry.
Not the right size or shape…
This ghost was smaller, feminine. A Farthing woman, like all the other Farthing ghosts I’d seen in my life. But I’d never seen one inside the house before…
The person we call isn’t always the person who answers.
I wrenched my hands back from the planchette and immediately the room grew dimmer; the candle flames, which had been too high a moment ago, shrunk back to a normal level. My hands stopped tingling. The ghost disappeared. My sisters opened their eyes.
“Did you feel that?” Clara asked.
“There was someone… There was someonehere,” I said, out of breath, pointing a shaky finger at where the ghost had stood.
Bernadette and Clara both turned to look at the now-empty space.
“Henry?” Clara asked hopefully.
“Not Henry,” I said.
“Persephone?” Bernadette asked, her tone somewhere betweenhopefulandmocking.
“No. I don’t know. I don’tknow.” I was getting lightheaded; I leaned over and put my head between my knees—there was something I was missing, there was something I wasn’t getting. The ghost had looked sofamiliar,the size and shape, theessenceof the ghost, it was as if I had seen it before. “I think it was a Farthing ghost,” I said.
“Well, that makes sense,” Bernadette said. “You always see Farthing ghosts.”
“But never in the house. The only person who’s ever died in this house is Henry. The next closest ghost is a few blocks away.”
“And thank goodness for that,” Bernie said. “One ghost per brownstone is enough, thank you very much.”
“Do you seethat?” Clara asked suddenly, and I noticed that she was the only one still looking at the board.
“Oh,” Bernadette said, glancing down, and I followed her gaze and almost saidohmyself but then found I couldn’t say anything, I could only stare at the planchette, which had been, a few minutes ago, in the middle of the Ouija board and was now, somehow, though none of us had felt it move, firmly pointing to the wordNO.
Please, Henry. Are you there?
NO
I searched formythologistsin New York City and found many incredibly sketchy websites and one potentially promising lead: theDepartment of Classical and Oriental Studies at Hunter College. There was a professor of classical mythology listed there: Natalie Beard. I figured it couldn’t hurt, so I sent her a quickhey, how ya doing, do you know anything about contacting ghosts?email, then set off on another nighttime walk.
This time I had a destination, and I headed to Trinity Churchyard, a twenty-minute subway journey I spent hovering somewhere above my body, thinking of the planchette, thinking of Henry, thinking of Evelyn, thinking of the ghost in the corner of the room. Had I called it with the Ouija board? Was it (hopefully) gone for good now?
Trinity Churchyard was attached to Trinity Church, which at one point held the title of tallest building in the United States but was now dwarfed by all the skyscrapers in the Financial District. The churchyard, a burial ground, was the final resting place of a handful of early Americans, including Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, Hercules Mulligan, and Richard Churcher, a child whose grave boasts the oldest carved gravestone in the city. (“Do you know the difference between a cemetery and a graveyard and a churchyard, kids?” my father would have said. I’ll save you the trouble of googling: a graveyard is generally attached to a church, and a cemetery isn’t. And a churchyard doesn’t have to have any graves at all, but it often does.)
