I opened my eyes and the past faded—another bittersweet dream. I took a long breath and let it out. Back to the present. Back to agony and trial. I lifted myself up from the antique porcelain embalmer’s slab that held me. The gunshot wound in my abdomen was gone. I was in the basement work-room of a house—a house I knew well, although I hadn’t been there in many years. Not that it had changed, not in an age. The scuffed and comfortably worn cabinetry looked to be from the 1930s. The walls were papered in faded scenes from the Gay Nineties, including a bespectacled man with perfect posture riding a penny-farthing. The high-wheeled bicycle fad had actually died earlier, around 1880, but the nostalgia of later generations stitched everything from that era together into a stiff-collared Frankenstein of Victorian uprightness. Next to the porcelain slab, a neatly folded pile of clothes waited for me on a stool: high-waisted mom jeans, brown-and-gold argyle socks, a 1990s Disney princesses T-shirt, and a red sweater. Resting on top was a handwritten note:
Welcome back! Wasn’t sure when you would rise. Wake us at any hour. -A
Padded house slippers sat by the stairs like a loyal dog. After dressing, I stepped into them and listened. The house above was dark and quiet. But then, I was fairly certain it was the middle of the night. I had died sometime after three in the morning on Sunday, which meant it was within a few hours of that, either way, on the following Tuesday. I walked up the steps, two of which creaked softly, and stepped through the door, which had been left open. Beyond was the ground-floor hallway of Harrowood House, a curiosity in dark-stained oak.
Except for the addition of quite a few potted plants, hanging and resting atop metal stands, it looked exactly as I remembered. Sepia-hued photos lining the staircase recounted the history of the house and its occupants. The Hywrod family, as they were then known, came from Wales, where they had lived since Celtic times. They moved to America when it was still a colony of the English and occupied a vacant farmhouse near the Chesapeake near the town of St. Michaels, whose peculiar church had been consecrated half a century earlier, in 1677, by the first wave of English settlers. Death stalked the colonies in those days, and within a few vibrant generations, the Harrowoods, as they became, secured a reputation and a small fortune, both of which had since faded. When the old stone farmhouse burned in the early 19th century, it only seemed appropriate to replace it with something grander. The house whose steps I ascended was a beautiful nineteenth century Queen Anne, which, rather confusingly, is an architectural style once popular in America and has nothing to do with the English monarch of the same name. Harrowood House had all the typical characteristics—an asymmetric facade, lots of Dutch gabling, a high spire, a wrap-around porch, even a hexagonal gazebo—but all of it seemed to have been put together incorrectly. The gazebo jutted from a second-floor corner and could only be reached by passing through a large stone fireplace that was never used. The bathroom adjoining a pair of third-floor bedrooms was so narrow, it was nearly impossible to stand in front of the pedestal sink. A daybed nestled in the noisiest corner of the house was embraced by a pair of baby grand staircases that connected the living room with the bed-rooms above.
The manor had been well maintained over its long life but was nevertheless showing signs of age. Curls of wallpaper winked from corners. Obsolete black wires for phone and electricity ran along the baseboards and door frames, irredeemably packed with dust. The hardwood slats of the floor groaned under foot, as if long-weary of being tread. The whole place seemed asleep. An antique Chinese cabinet greeted me from the hall at the top of the stairs. To my left were the paired guest rooms. To my right, the family room—modest by today’s standards but considered quite large at the time it was built. The upright piano that rested against the opposite wall divided the space into dining at one end and reclining at the other. The tall bay windows, which dominated the asymmetric facade from the front, were drawn with unusually long lace curtains that lifted your eyes to the ceiling. It was much higher than the hall from which I entered, which gave the room the sense of being larger on the inside than seemed possible from without. The antique wood dining table, which sat eight comfortably, ran in front of a large fireplace, tall enough to stoop under. The heavy stone mantle was covered in framed pictures. The adjoining kitchen shared the same fireplace from the opposite side, and I could see hanging pans and potted herbs choking the windows.
I walked to the fireplace mantle and lifted a black and white photo of a small crowd standing in a field. The men leaned on shovels. Not a single one of them was smiling. A grove of trees was visible to one side, as was the back of a horse-drawn wagon. On the ground behind them was a massive coffin, approximately eight meters long and two meters high—meaning not a single head rose above it. The neatly printed caption read: THE LAST NEPHILIM BURIED IN NORTH AMERICA (NOV. 1886). Just behind was a sterling silver frame holding a lock of hair in front of a photo of a single infant in a crib. The baby had a white knit cap on its head. Most of its body was covered in swaddling, but a single tiny hand was exposed. The child’s face was serene but its eyes were entirely black. Next to it was a picture that looked like it dated to the 1940s, or so I gathered from the dress. Three people, a man and what looked to be his wife and daughter, stood together in a high vaulted room before a leafless tree whose branches were capped in unlit candles. Dried wax ran down the limbs and dribbled from the ends of the twigs in long tails to the floor. A handwritten note at the top said “with Mom & Dad at the Istanbul watchtower.” I strolled further down and saw a photo of two men standing before a door built into the trunk of a giant redwood. The door was open. I saw a color photo of a family trip to Disneyland during the US Bicentennial, July 1976. In a tall gilded frame behind it, a pair of clean-shaven white men in broad-shouldered zoot suits stood on either side of a shirtless native man adorned with feathers. They had their arms around each other. All three were smiling. The frame was quite ornate and had a small engraved plate at the bottom that said: CELEBRATING THE END OF THE WAR WITH JOHN TENFEATHERS.
But it was the small, three-inch photo near the front that took my breath, for I was in it. It dated from the early days of the fotomat. Somehow the gaudy hues were still sharp. I wore my hair like Jackie Kennedy. I was beaming, as was the young woman next to me. We were both in one-piece bathing suits, our heads pressed together and our hands clasped. We looked so happy. The caption said “Amalfi 1964.” I took it from the mantle and ran a thumb over the warm faces, making sure they wouldn’t smudge, as memories do.
I became aware then that I was being watched. A little girl stood by the bay windows. Her face was in shadow. She wore a simple homespun dress with no shoes. Her arms were at her side. Her skin was brown. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. I knew immediately she was a ghost.
Seeing them is always an electric experience. There is nothing as eerie. Despite common misconceptions, most appear completely normal at first—no missing limbs or floating heads or dripping slime—and yet, somehow, you can always tell. Some distant, ancient reveille screams across the eons of our evolution, emerging as a strum of the archaic antenna in our brain stems, and the little hairs on our necks stand like soldiers, and our hearts skip.
My ghost and I stared at each other for a long moment, and I recalled the lessons of the dead.
When I was perhaps ten or eleven, a messenger with a great red plume visited our house, which was always a cause for great excitement. News didn’t come by wire or even printed page then. Whatever we knew of the outside world had to be delivered by the mouth or hand of a man on horseback. I remember running from my nursemaid and sitting atop the grand staircase in our home as my father’s valet handed him the wax-sealed parcel. I was disappointed at the contents. It seemed the occasion was nothing more than the death of a famous jurist, a legal adviser at court, whereupon my father said a few kind words and returned to his work. Later, at dinner, he announced he would make a journey of eleven days to attend the dead man’s funeral, which struck me as terribly odd. I had only ever heard my father speak ill of the man. In fact, I didn’t even know what a jurist was and only recognized the name because of the curses that always accompanied it out the door of my father’s private study. It seemed this man, Olyenkov, was callous and cruel, the worst kind of absolutist authoritarian, which angered my father, who was committed to the belief that the responsibilities of high position came in excess of its rights. And yet, here he was making token statements of mourning and uttering kinder words in death than he ever had in life.
As it happened, that was around the time I first read the play Antigone. Stretched across the Persian carpet in my father’s library, I didn’t understand why the titular heroine would defy the king and risk death simply to give her brother a proper burial, to sprinkle his body with dust and to speak a few of the old rites, just as I didn’t understand why my father spoke so kindly of a man he despised and made a difficult journey of several weeks, there and back, to do no more than nod solemnly over a corpse. I was too young to realize why all cultures, current and past, have prohibitions against speaking ill of the dead, and why even the Neanderthals buried their kin with ritual and ceremony: The dead can stir, and it’s best not to give them reason to. It’s best to forgive and to speak kindly so that they might hear and be at peace. It’s best to gather with others to do the same so that the departed are assured of their place in our memory and let go of the world. There are very few horrors in this world as genuinely hellish as a haunting, and they are so very difficult to end.
The little girl didn’t move, and neither did I. The pendulum clock on the wall ticked off the seconds without care. It seemed as though she was aware that a stranger had entered the house, but not through the front door—that I had been dead, but that I wasn’t anymore. And she had come to see. My heartbeat began throbbing loudly in my chest, and I realized I’d been holding my breath. When I couldn’t bear it any longer, I let the air from my lungs with as weak a sigh as I could effect before drawing in slowly. Sometimes the signs of life anger them—breath, warmth, laughter. The dead don’t usually know they are. They know only that something is wrong. I inhaled at a whisper, gripping the picture frame with two hands, not daring to move a single muscle. If she came for me, as she seemed wont to, there would be little I could do.
When finally I blinked, dry-eyed, she was gone. But I caught a second person in the mirror above the mantle. Anya. She was by the Chinese cabinet above the stairs, still wearing the dress we buried her in. But when I turned from the reflection, she was gone as well.
The sound of soft footsteps on old hardwood chased away the ghosts of the past, and Annewyn Harrowood stepped down the crooked staircase to the landing. Her thin hair was angel white, and she kept it neat in a simple bowl cut. She wore nothing but a full-length yellow nightgown under a thin robe, which it seemed she had grabbed in a hurry for she was still adjusting it over her shoulders.
“Annie,” I said with a soft smile.
I walked to her, arms outstretched, determined to get a hug whether one was on offer or not. She greeted me similarly, but with more distance than I’d hoped, and I ended the embrace after a moment.
She noticed the picture in my hand, and I gave it to her.
“We had such fun that summer, didn’t we?” she asked, looking at it fondly.
It was the summer we met. I quite literally bumped into her in the lobby of our hotel, causing her to drop the glass-bead necklace she’d just bought. We both watched helpless as it shattered on the floor. She was feisty, and we traded remarks. Later, after I received word that Beltran had been detained by work and would not be joining me after all, we ran into each other again on the beach. We frolicked together, splashing aggressively at first, each annoyed at having their aquatic rejuvenations intruded upon by such a distasteful person. But we were both wounded and vulnerable, and after I replaced the necklace with one grander, we became friends. Over the years, we were never able to see each other often, but we wrote many letters into which we poured our deepest thoughts and fears, including a few we hadn’t told another living soul. Distance, paradoxically, can encourage closeness. Secrets that begged insistently to be revealed could be unloaded safely in pen and ink, where they could do no further harm. As such, she knew more about me than anyone living.
“You look well.” I squeezed her arm.
She was stronger than I’d expected for a woman of her age, but still, she seemed diminished somehow.
“Do I?” she asked. “For ninety-two, you mean? It’s this old house, then. My grandmother lived her whole life here and made it to a hundred and seven before she passed. We buried her out in the family plot.” She nodded toward a dark window drawn with lace curtains. “And she stayed there, as the dead do in our care.” Annewyn viewed the framed picture in her hand with some distance, the way a great-grandmother might smile at her grandchildren’s children playing in the yard. She turned from it to me and examined my face. “But you haven’t changed at all,” she said. “You look exactly the same.”
“Don’t tell me you’re jealous.” I took the picture from her and walked it back to the mantle.
“Of course not,” she said with a snap. “I know what a burden it is, watching everything you know pass, as if carried away by a flood. Unable to hop in and join. Always stuck on the shore.”
She deftly avoided the word “alone.”
“I’m used to it,” I lied.
I replaced the frame, shifting it slightly when I noticed it was just out of place per the faint line of dust. It seemed she hadn’t added the picture for my benefit. It was part of the permanent collection, which instantly made me happier than I remembered being in a long time. I still had a friend. I hadn’t faded completely.
“I’m sorry I haven’t kept in touch,” I said with my back to her. “How long has it been this time? Eight years? Nine?”
“Oh, stop.” She walked around the table and pulled out one of the chairs. “That’s how life is. You had yours and I had mine. I don’t have any regrets and I hope you don’t either.” She sat.
“Just the one,” I said with a soft smile. “I was sorry to hear about Martin,” I added quickly. “You were both always so much in love.”
“Yes,” she said, looking down at the table and wiping her hand across it as it removing some stain or stray drop of water left from dinner.
“I’m sorry I didn’t make his funeral.” I pulled out a seat across from her and sat down. I heard the pendulum clock in the corner ticking. “I was...”
I wasn’t sure how to describe the events of the last few years: the sudden reappearance of the book and the hell it had unleashed on a world that seemed, since the fall of The Masters, to be comfortably done with magic.
“Can I offer you something?” she asked. “Coffee? No, that’s not right. You were a tea drinker.”
I glanced to the clock. “I don’t think I should. I’ve kept you up as it is.”
“Nonsense.” She stood from the table and gave me a wry, knowing look. “You know better than that. We work all hours in this business.”
“In that case, a cup of tea sounds lovely.”
That “business” was necromancy, which has something of a bad reputation. It’s come to stand for some of the most unnatural acts ever conceived, and while that’s not entirely unfair, the truth is considerably more mundane. The name itself doesn’t even refer to the raising of the dead, which is a rare and difficult task only ever accomplished by a powerful few, but rather to divination by spirit—contacting the dead for guidance and foretelling, an activity practiced by the shamans since time immemorial. But of course, if one can speak to the dead, one can do more than ask for guidance. One can ask for help—in the persecution of one’s enemies, for example—and that’s where the trouble started. Most acts of necromancy involved making it difficult for others to recruit spirits in that way. Annewyn and her colleagues interred the deceased in ways that ensured they stayed put: dispelling curses, sealing in stone or metal, staking and weighing down with stones, casting coins into coffins to pay for passage, and so forth—in short, the necromancer as a guardian and preserver of the community of the living. Of course, not everyone saw them that way.
I watched Annie shuffle to the kitchen in her nightgown and slippers. I still recognized my friend under all the years, but she was different. Reserved. As if there was something she didn’t want me to know.
“Do many of them stir?” I called.
“Less now than in the old days,” she called back over the clatter of a tea kettle. “You’re right that things have changed. Seems like we’ve come to the end, doesn’t it? Of the old ways. To be honest, I’m surprised they’ve hung on as long as they have.”
After a pause, she added, “Why? Who did you see?”
“A little girl. Just now. I think you scared her away.” Another white lie that was easier than the truth.
I heard water running and the soft burst of a gas stove.
“Ah,” she said. “That would be little Mattie. Likes a spot of blood, that one. Likes the warmth of it. Doesn’t understand the damage it does. I’ll put her back to sleep in the morning.”
“I hope she didn’t rise on my account,” I said.
“Who knows? She’s always been a light sleeper.” Annewyn stopped in the doorway where I could see her. “She used to stand over my bed when I was a girl. I would wake and there she’d be. Staring. She was a slave girl,” she said, as if that explained everything.
Annie shuffled past the door frame and into the pantry.
“Did she ever hurt you?” I asked.
“Just once,” came the reply. “She didn’t mean anything by it. The dead are not rational, as you know. But my mother made certain to teach her a lesson all the same.”
Annewauld Harrowood, Annewyn’s mother, was a fierce woman, all of four-foot-eleven, with broad shoulders and a crashing voice, like waves on a cliff. I’m not sure she ever entirely approved of my friendship with her daughter, who was beginning to stray even before I introduced her to the joys of the material world, to jewelry and clothes and dancing.
“Honestly,” Annie explained from inside the pantry, “that scared me more than the haunting. The sounds that poor girl made as Mother chanted her recitations...” She walked past again, shaking her head. There was a box of cookies in her hand. “It was terrifying. But. Mattie left the children alone after that.”
The “children” were Annewyn’s older sister, who hadn’t made it through her teens, her brother, the middle child, who died in the war, and a cousin who lived with them while his father was in Everthorn.
“You must have so many stories,” I said.
“Oh, sure. Everyone does in this business. It’s the one thing you don’t run out of, even after the money.”
“Are you still practicing?”
“A little here, a little there. There’s not much need these days. But it’s in the blood, you know. Aht!” Annewyn raised a finger from her perch by the sink. “That reminds me.”
She disappeared then and I heard a freezer open. There was the gentle pop of a rubber-lined door and the cold hiss of heavy refrigeration. She appeared a moment later carrying a clear plastic bag.
“It took some doing,” she said as she handed it across the table. “It’s getting harder and harder, you know, since all this terrorism business.”
I took it. It was cold. I popped the seal and removed the passport, tucked in the middle of a stack of neatly creased documents. I wanted to see who I was.
Cheryl Dunlop from Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
“Terrorism is just the excuse,” I said, mostly to myself. “The governments of the world would’ve done all of it sooner or later anyway. The Tsar would’ve done it two hundred years ago if he’d had the means.”
Annewyn fumbled about in the kitchen while I studied the smiling passport photo. There was very little resemblance. But that wasn’t the end of the world. She was much heavier than I was, and people expect you to look different when you’ve lost weight. I would have to fix my hair like hers and dress similarly. What a hideous outfit. And I’d have to don that happy, clueless smile. But as long as I did so in a smaller town, where the bureaucrats were less suspicious, then everything would go through and it would ever after be my picture on the replacement papers.
“Was it difficult getting my body through customs?” I asked.
“No more than usual,” came the reply. “What were you doing in Russia?”
I pulled out the death certificate to see how Cheryl had passed.
Car accident. No next of kin.
“You might want to burn that,” Annewyn warned me. “According to the system, it never existed.” She said it as if “the system” were a sentient horror.
There was a second death certificate behind the first. Milan Romanova. Resident of Long Island. Death by misadventure. I repeated my new name to myself several times to get used to it.
“Cheryl.”
It was all coming back to me. The art of resurrecting myself.
“Cheryl. Cheryl.” I had done it so many times, but each was different. “Hi. I’m Cheryl Dunlop. Nice to meet you.”
This time I felt more laden than ever. Hunted. Alone.
I took out the passport again and studied the picture. “I promise to be the best Cheryl Dunlop I can.”
Annewyn returned with a tray. She arranged the cups and saucers on the table and poured the tea, a light Japanese green, and slid one set to me. It was very hot, and I had to blow on the cup for several seconds before I could attempt a sip. Annie let hers cool. Steam rose in a spiral from the pale green liquid. She opened the box of crisp cookies, the kind that might be served at a funeral, and set them on a tray between us.
“Forgive me for saying it, Mila,” she offered hesitantly, “but it might be a good thing you’re away from him.”
I turned the cup in the saucer so I could lift it with my left hand.
“We heard about the fire,” she added.
“Really? Don’t tell me it was on the news all the way down here.”
“Oh, no. But you know how it is in our little community. Word travels. In fact, there’s a rumor floating about that he set it himself. To fool his enemies and cover his tracks.” She looked to me for confirmation.
“Is that so? Well, if that’s all people are saying, then we’re doing well. Usually the rumors about Etude are far worse.”
“Not gonna let an old woman gossip, I see.” A wry smile broke over her face, as if she’d been caught in a lie.
“It’s a long story.”
Silence.
I wasn’t being fair.
To my one friend.
I set my cup down. “Yes,” I admitted. “We burned the bistro. We had hoped it would buy us time.”
“Did it?”
“A little.” I nodded. “We split up. To draw them apart. At least, that was the plan. Etude insisted. Benjamin took the chair.”
“I see,” she said grimly.
Annie knew of the chair and what it hid. I had shared my concerns—my fury—over its continued use with her many times. It was one of many reasons she never trusted him.
“We were trying to keep it from them,” I explained. “Benjamin had been in the military. He knew of a base in the mountains with a deep hole where the government buries the dangerous waste from secret projects. It took time to set up, but we found someone on the inside.” I paused. “We were going to lose the chair forever in a place no one would dare look, a place too toxic for any man to tread.”
“But?”
The pendulum clock in the corner ticked as I took another drink.
“We were betrayed. Benjamin was ambushed. Alone.”
I sniffed and wiped my nose with my fingers, and Annie handed me a napkin.
“Thank you.”
The clocked ticked more.
“How bad is it?” Annie asked finally. “This house”—she looked up at it—“doesn’t just keep things in. It keeps them out. It protects us, but it also insulates us. Sometimes I feel we wouldn’t know if the world was ending.”
It took me a moment to find the words.
She saw me struggle. “That bad?”
I nodded. “They’re not only back, Annie, they’ve multiplied.”
“How? I don’t understand it. We all but wiped them out during the war.”
“That was fifty years ago,” I objected.
“Exactly. How could they replenish themselves so quickly?”
I smiled. “You might be surprised to know that young people consider that a very long time.”
“Yes, well, that’s how young people are.” She sighed. “You’re welcome to stay here, of course. As long as you’d like. We’d love the company.”
“You keep saying we,” I said with a wry smile. “And what is it you said in your note? ‘Wake us at any hour?’ Is that your way of telling me you have a new beau, Annie?”
“Ha! At ninety-two? I don’t think so.” She looked at me reluctantly. “Not a new one anyway.”
I scowled. “What do you mean?”
I heard someone on the stairs then, just as I’d heard her earlier, and my eyes lifted instantly. In the back corner, behind and around the stairs I had ascended, was a square landing from which rose the steps to the third floor. Those steps did not, as in most houses, follow the slope of the lower set but instead set off in their own direction, as if the floors of the house had been fit together incorrectly.
“Martin?” I asked, almost out of breath.
He was standing on the landing in a cardigan, casual khaki pants, and house shoes, as if he were the star of a 1960s sitcom. I got the feeling then that he’d been at the top of the staircase the whole time, waiting for the right moment to make an appearance.
“Martin?” I repeated. “Is that really you?”
Annie kept her eyes on the table.
He looked like a wax version of himself—one that might fall apart at any moment. His brownish-gray hair was plastered to his head like a little boy’s action figure. His skin was pale and had a slight acrylic sheen. His nose seemed crooked. And there was something terribly wrong with his eyes. But they looked at me warmly all the same.
“Mila,” he said. “Wunnerful to see you again.”
Martin Hightower was an Englishman from Bristol and sounded perfectly like it. I went to give him a hug but he stepped back gracefully and raised a hand.
“Very sorry. Touched by your affection, a’course, but I’m afraid I’m feelin rather fragile these days.”
He showed me his left hand. His pinky finger was missing. Apparently, it had snapped off.
I looked to Annewyn, my old friend, who finally took a sip of her tea.
She’d raised him.
Against all the proscriptions of her school, she’d raised her dead husband.
She moved to get up. “You’ll be wanting the stone, then.”
I looked between them. “It can wait until morning.”
“No.” Annie touched my shoulder warmly. “From what you just told me, it sounds like it can’t.”
There was a clatter on the lawn, and all three of us walked to the long bay windows in the living room. It was dark yet, but the moon shed enough light to make out the flock of blackbirds descending toward the house from the sky. They seemed to emerge from the very blackness of space, but as soon as they got close to the house, they began falling dead, one after the other until there was a pile on the lawn. I couldn’t tell if it was real or not. There were so many. Closer and closer they came, as if pushing against a barrier.
A bird hit the window and I jumped. Then another and another and another in a staccato that cracked the glass.
And then it stopped. The rest of the flock flew away.
We were quiet.
“What was that?” Martin asked.
“You’re both in danger,” I whispered. “They know I’m here.”