Page 66 of Persephone's Curse
He’s not here
He’s not here
He’s not here
And I did my best to hold onto her, but she was shaking so much I had to let go.
VI
There have always been accounts of people traveling from one world to another. The Pevensie children stepped through a wardrobe and into the snow-covered wonderland of Narnia. Alice fell down a rabbit hole and ended up in Wonderland. Dante Alighieri wrote an incredibly detailed account of Virgil guiding him into Hell. And Persephone herself spent half the year in our world and half the year under it, ruling over the dead. So it doesn’t seem so unreasonable, really, that a Farthing girl, a girl descended from Persephone herself, might be able to discover the secret of making such a journey.
Evelyn had been gone for three nights and claimed she’d been away for three years. I’d read as much Narnia as the next introverted nerd; I knew about fantasy world time distortion.
“The camera didn’t show you leaving the house,” Clara said later, when we’d convinced Evelyn to come in from the snow and change into more reasonable clothes. Bernadette had put on a fireand I had made us grilled cheeses that I personally wasn’t eating so much as tearing into tinier and tinier pieces.
I paused now, mid-tear, because something Evelyn had said to me outside the Met came flooding back:
They say she came to Manhattan before it was even Manhattan. That she planted a jasmine bush on a plot of bare land. They say her descendants would forever be drawn to it, like moths to a flame. They say that her footsteps left fragile places in the earth, places you could crawl from one world to another…
“Persephone’s footsteps,” I said.
Evelyn looked up at me and blinked. She was still moving slowly and blinking a lot, but she had wolfed down her own sandwich and the food had seemed to help; she wasn’t shaking anymore.
“Yes,” she said.
“The camera didn’t show you leaving the house because youdidn’tleave the house. You got to the Underworld from here. From inside.”
“The old story,” Evelyn said, her voice raspy as if she hadn’t used it in a long time. “Years and years ago, Persephone came to Manhattan and ushered in the spring. She planted a jasmine tree. Her descendants were bound to tend to it forever, drawn to it always. Wherever she stepped, her footsteps—”
“Left fragile places in the earth,” Bernadette finished. “We’ve all heard this one, Evie. It’s just a bedtime story for weird sisters.”
“No, Bernie,” Evelyn said. “It’s true. It’s all true. Everything Aunt Bea told us.”
“Did you meet her?” Clara asked, wide eyed. “Persephone?”
“No,” Evelyn said. “She wasn’t where I was.”
“And you got to the Underworld fromhere?” Clara pressed. “From inside the house?”
“It’s all kind of fuzzy now,” Evelyn said. “But I think so… I remember looking and looking and trying to find a way to get to Henry… and then I found it. I found him. But we couldn’t get back and… And I don’t know. We spent three years together and… Some of it was nice. I won’t lie about that; some of it was really, really beautiful, but we also kept looking for a way to come back…”
“What was it like?” Clara asked. “What did it look like?”
“The sky is a dark aubergine. And the trees were fuller. It’s almost a copy of our world, but… Different. Deeper. Darker. Oh, in Grand Central they have these columns, and the ceiling is alive, the stars twinkle and comets shoot by overhead and… There was dancing. A lot of dancing.” She looked faraway and dreamy when she said this; she looked like our Evelyn but she didn’t talk like our Evelyn and she didn’t smell like our Evelyn and her eyes looked two shades darker and her skin looked two shades paler, as if she hadn’t seen the sun in quite some time. And her hair was longer. Three years longer.
“I have to get back,” she said now. “I have to get back to him…”
“You can’t go back,” I said. “You just said you almost didn’t make it home.”
“But Henry’s still there,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Let’s say we did try and go back,” Bernadette said. “Do you think it would work again? The… portal? Are we calling it a portal?”
“A doorway,” Evelyn said. “It’s more like a doorway. And I don’t know if it would work again. Henry said those doors, they’retricky to figure out. Sometimes they’ll only work once. And I can’tremember…”
“In the story, the thing about the jasmine bushes…” Clara began slowly. “That Farthings will always be drawn to the jasmine bushes because Persephone planted them. Is that why Henrysmellslike jasmine? But he’s not a Farthing.”
“He’s not a Farthing, but he lived here,” Evelyn said. “In this house. And he died here. I think that’s why he never left. Why he became a ghost.”
