Page 62 of Persephone's Curse
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 youhere?”
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 toanswer 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 partnerflashed 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 Brontë 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 movieNational Treasure? With Nic Cage?”
A smile quirked at the corner of the priest’s mouth. “I have, actually.”
“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 therearecrypts. Where the Bleecker family is buried, right?”
“We don’t let people down there.”
“Haveyoubeen down there?”
“I have.”
“So youcanget down there.”
“Onecan,” 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 alsohappento 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 ofinthe ground, right? We don’t have a basement. Maybe if I’minthe 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.”
