Page 76 of Persephone's Curse
“Well, that ship has sailed,” Bernadette said.
I threw a pillow at her head. Clara started babbling about some TV show she was trying to convince us all to watch. Bernadette put the journal away and started playing with Evelyn’s hair, twisting it and braiding it, undoing it and starting over again.
Gradually, the energy in the room shifted: Evelyn was quiet and almost happy, Bernadette was focused and calm, Clara was silly and lighthearted. I was caught up in the moment, so content just to be in a room full of my sisters. The black tear wasn’t more than a distant thought on the horizon, a fly in the room that had momentarily stopped buzzing, resting on the windowsill, lulling us into a peaceful state of forgetting that it was there.
But it was there, all right.
It was there and we were right: it was getting bigger.
The good energy lasted throughout the night, the next morning. Evelyn and I set off across the park for school and I thought, in thatearly morning stillness, that we might not all be doomed. That we might, maybe, be okay.
Which is funny, really, in hindsight.
Because halfway across the park, Evelyn turned to me and said, “January first.”
“What’s happening on January first?” I asked.
“If we can’t figure out how to get Henry home by then, I’m going back. I would rather live there with him than—”
“Here with all of us?”
“That wasn’t what I was going to say,” she protested.
“But that’s the gist of it, right?”
“Winnie, he’s all alone…”
“He has a lot of other ghosts he can make friends with,” I said, and Evelyn didn’t answer that, just sighed and smiled in such a sad, apologetic way. “And January first is less than a month away.”
“I know,” she said. And then, as an afterthought, she took my hand, squeezed it, and said, “I’m sorry.”
VIII
Construction on the Farthing family brownstone was completed in 1894 by Blanche Farthing and her husband, Herman.
The house had always belonged to Farthings, would always belong to Farthings.
Blanche and Herman left it to their children, who left it to their children, etc., etc., until it reached four strange sisters with a ghost in their attic.
The ghost, Henry, wasnota Farthing, rather he was an anomaly, taken in by Farthings when his own family had died. You might say he was adopted by Farthings, adopted by the house, and you might also say he was adopted byPersephone,loved as if he were one of her very own.
The Farthing house was built on a very special piece of land, directly in one of Persephone’s footsteps. It was a house of the in-between, just like the Farthings were children of the in-between. It was a bit magical, that house, just like the Farthings were a bit magical.
And you might say that is why, when Henry died in the Farthing house, he never left, as if the house itself could not bear to let him go.
I took Clara with me to Dark Magic on Friday evening. I didn’t want to go by myself again and Clara wanted to see what the cute girl looked like, so it killed two birds with one stone.
The weather had turned in the last few days. It was cold, yes, obviously, it was winter in New York and it wasn’t a stretch to be cold, but there was somethingbehindthe cold. Somethingin additionto the cold. It was a very specific type of cold, a different kind of cold. It made everything feel a bit… hopeless. Quiet. Terrible.
“Does everything feel a bit—”
“Yes,” Clara said, interrupting me. We were paused at an intersection, waiting for a walk signal as cars zipped by. “It’s the tear.”
“The tear?”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “There’s something coming out of it. A coldness, a darkness… I think that’s the reason it’s getting bigger, actually. Things are like…” She made a slow movement with her hands, bringing them together and then sort of expanding them outward, stretching an invisible tear in the sky.
“Oh, well, I don’t like that at all.”
