Page 63 of Persephone's Curse
I followed the priest through a locked door, down a corridor, through another locked door, then down a skinny flight of stairs. The air temperature changed noticeably. We reached another corridor, this one with a low ceiling crowded with pipes, and at the end of that we stepped carefully through what I can best describe as a hole in the wall.
The priest paused halfway through the hole, laid a hand on the wall, and said, “This was built in 1846.”
I half expected him to add ahow lucky are we, kids?but he continued on his way.
We reached the vault a minute later. It didn’t disappoint, in terms of vaults. Its walls were laid in brick, there were shelves for ashes and two dozen white, unlit candles, and the small room contained a silence rarely found in New York, one of those silences that almost had its own sound to it, a heavy, thrumming, vibrating silence that felt heavy on my shoulders.
“Wow,” I said.
“Wait for it,” the priest said, and he removed a matchbook from somewhere in his robes and diligently lit each of the candles, one by one, until the vault was filled with delicate, flickering light.
“Wow,” I repeated.
“There are a few other vaults down here, but this is my favorite,” he confided.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I’ll give you a few minutes, then,” he said. “If you promise not to touch anything or move too much or breathe more than absolutely necessary.”
“I’ll slow my heartbeat,” I promised.
“I’m too kind, that’s my problem,” he said, shaking his head. “I absolutelyhaveto start saying no. I’m going to pray on it.”
He left the crypt then, and the silence grew until my ears started buzzing with it. I sat down on the gravel floor.
“Henry, what thefuck,” I whispered.
Bernadette, after breakfast, had loudly announced that she was going thrifting. Her anger had grown and grown and grown and then disintegrated, vanishing, leaving a kind of catatonia behind. She had journaled that morning as she ate her omelet, pressing the pen so hard into the paper that she had torn it. She had closed her eyes, sat unmoving for at least three minutes, then carefully shut the journal.
“Henry, I swear to god, to all the gods in the world, if you don’tanswer meI will… I will…”
I couldn’t think of a reasonable threat, something I might actually do that Henry wouldn’t want me to do. I thought I might cry, let my tears fall on the tiny stones underneath my butt and consecratethe ground with salty water I had made myself. But I couldn’t cry. So I thought I would scream, letting my voice fill up this tiny room, loud enough to wake the dead (or at least one of them). But when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. Then I thought I would take a nap, but that seemed unlikely. I couldn’t nap under the best of circumstances, what made me think I’d be able to nap in an underground tomb?
Instead I stayed where I was, uncrying, unscreaming, unsleeping, and I laid my hands flat on the ground and I said, “Henry, please. Please, please, please. Answer me.”
I closed my eyes, then closed my hands into fists, scooping up some of the gravel, squeezing it so hard I thought I might have made myself bleed.
“Evelyn? Are you there, can you hear me? I’m so sorry, I’m sosorry. Please please please forgive me, if you come back, I promise I’ll make everything okay again, okay? Okay? Okay, Evelyn?”
And then someonedidanswer, but it wasn’t Evelyn, it was another Farthing sister, it was Clara, and she said, “Oh, Winnie,” in a sad, small voice.
She stood in the doorway of the crypt, dressed in layers and layers of warm clothes, just her face visible as she unwound a scarf from her neck.
“Clara,” I said. “What are youdoinghere?”
“I have to show you something.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
“I tracked you,” Clara said, still removing layers, pulling a wool hat from her head and then reaching into her pocket, withdrawing her phone and holding it up a little sheepishly.
“You can track me?”
“I installed an app on both your phones after Evelyn disappeared. I have a new, strict rule about not losing more than one sister per weekend.”
“But how did you…”
“You were sleeping, and I can be very quiet when I want to be.”
