Page 97 of Persephone's Curse
“Nothing will happen. Because I can fix it.”
“How?”
“It’s complicated. Just trust me.”
“No way. No, you have to tell me. You have to tell me what will happen and you have to tell me what you’re going to do to stop it.”
He nodded. “Okay. Fine. The tear will sort of…mergewith the house. It was Persephone’s domain, down there, for a long time, and she’s the one who planted the jasmine bushes, and she’s your relative and… Those things are trying to get back together now. To come back together.”
“Okay. So what does thatmean?”
“It means… the two points, here and there… the Underworld is sort of like a mirror image of our world. And those two points would come together. Like I said—merge. Like a… oh what’s that famous painting. M. C. Escher. With the stairs, you know. A sort of… paradox. You’d all be trapped inside this infinite loop. In between worlds.”
“I understand why you didn’t want to tell me,” I said. “Because it’s terrifying.”
“It’s a bit terrifying, yes,” Henry agreed.
“I guess we could leave, though? We could all leave before that happened?”
“I’ve thought about that. And I think it would pull you back in. I don’t think any of you—as Farthings—would be able to get away.”
“Great. That’s really great. So how are you going to stop it?”
“I’m going to patch the hole.”
“Oh. Okay. That’s easier than I thought it would be…”
“It sounds easy, yes,” Henry said, and he smiled sadly. “How do I explain it… So basically. I livedhere, right. When I was alive, and then after I’d died. And then, more recently, I livedthere. For quite a long time.”
“Evelyn said three years…”
“Ah, but I got there before her. So I wasthere,and I washere…and now I’m back here again.”
“Okay?”
“And I don’t really have a body, you know. Not like you. I’m just made up of… like…spirit. And that spirit sort of holds me all together. And that spirit has been here, has been there… And if it holdsmetogether, you could think of it as being, almost… sticky. I could patch up the hole in the sky. As in—Icould.”
It made no sense but it made all the sense, and I reached out to touch Henry now, to poke his arm, as if I might find him, in this moment, a little tacky, a little gluey, a little gloopy.
“Spirit glue,” I whispered before I could stop myself, and for one moment Henry and I looked at each other with wide, frightened eyes, and then, in the next moment, we fell into absolutely unhinged, hysterical laughter.
Anyone looking would have thought I was laughing by myself, holding on to the arm of nothing, beginning to cry even as I was struggling to catch my breath, laughing, laughing, laughing until I really was sobbing, sobbing and laughing and laughing and sobbing and holding on to the arm of a ghost who would save us all.
XI
Persephone spent the spring and summer months aboveground, tending to her beloved flowers, visiting with her beloved mother, Demeter, goddess of the harvest. But because Persephone had eaten one single pomegranate seed while in the Underworld, she was bound to return there every autumn and winter. Her departure from her mother was bittersweet, for Persephone hated to leave her, but she had also grown to love her husband, had grown to love her home amongst the dead.
For Demeter, saying goodbye to her daughter each year caused the harvests to die, the plants to go dormant, the earth to grow cold. Whenever you feel the sharp, biting breeze of a winter’s day, know that this is Demeter, yearning for Persephone, and in her deep, deep sorrow, keeping everything cold until spring.
Clara had a dream of a new painting but when she stood at her easel and tried to start it, nothing would transfer from the brush to the canvas. I watched her that afternoon, over and over, dipping her paintbrush into vivid oil colors that seemed to evaporate into thin air in the journey from the palette to the creamy stretch of canvas.
“I don’t like this at all,” she said after it became clear that itwasn’t working, after Bernadette took the brush herself and of course managed to paint a tiny swath of color in the bottom left-hand corner. It sat there like an accusatory brand, that little spot of paint. Eventually Clara removed it with paint thinner and an old, stained rag.
“And it wasn’t even a nightmare this time,” she said. “It was just a dream. A really nice dream, actually.”
If everything Henry had said was true, it would seem like the black tear was already devouring the Farthing girls.
We called Aunt Bea, up in Vermont, just to see how she was faring. She seemed less affected by the black tear because there were so many miles between her and it, but at the same time, she expressed a feeling of unease that followed her throughout her days.
