Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day Page 6

  “How do you know?”

  “City’s full of glass and mirrors. I’m a witch, and you’re the dead. I know.”

  “But we’re not all gone. I’m still here. Delia’s still here.”

  “I know.” Brenda’s frown deepens. “Jenna, I want you to understand that I’m not accusing you of anything. You didn’t do this.”

  I blink. “What?”

  “I had to consider it. You’re still here, and so many ghosts who are older than you, more established than you, aren’t. You’ve always been very committed to your own idea of ethical behavior. Many of them are not. You could have decided that they were a pox upon the living, and started luring them into glass. Don’t look so surprised. The best ghost-hunters have always been dead themselves. No one catches a ghost like a ghost does.”

  My voice feels as dead as the rest of me as I struggle to whisper, “But I didn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .”

  “I know.” Brenda isn’t frowning this time. She said those same words only a second ago, but now they’re soft, gentle, like she’s trying not to scare me. “You may not like how some ghosts spend their time, but you’d never interfere. You’ve always been willing to let others make their choices. It’s part of why I respect you. That’s why I know you’ll tell me the truth when I ask . . . Jenna, is Delia doing this? Did she decide she got to choose the afterlives of others?”

  “What?” My voice is back. That’s nice. It’s a little too loud. Heads turn, people looking curiously in our direction before they go back to their own food and conversations.

  Brenda looks at me, mouth tight, and asks, in a softer voice, “Is this your landlady?”

  “No. I can’t—no.” I shake my head. I know she’s wrong, I know it, but finding the words is difficult. At last, I settle on “Danny’s missing too. He used to have the apartment downstairs from me. Even if Delia were doing this, she wouldn’t hurt Danny. He’s one of her children.” She never had kids while she was alive. Her tenants—her dead ones, anyway—we’re her kids. We’re the ones who come over for the holidays and submit to her enthusiastic hugs, who hold her brushes when she’s painting in Central Park, who know how to take care of Avo when she decides she needs to go haunt her husband’s grave for a week every September.

  I believe Delia could hurt people. I believe anyone can hurt people. Humanity is endlessly capable of doing harm, and that doesn’t change just because someone has died. But I can’t believe Delia would hurt Danny.

  Dimly, I realize that I’ve accepted that the missing dead have been harmed: they’re not just off doing something interesting, distracted from the minutiae of the living by the appearance of a new haunted house or the ghost of a famous person. I died long after Marilyn moved on to whatever waits for ghosts on the other side of this world, but apparently, when she stepped out of her grave and into the light, she was greeted by a legion of adoring fans and interested onlookers. A famous ghost can pull people from hundreds of miles away, just because it’s something to do.

  “Delia would never hurt Danny.” It’s a statement of fact, small and simple and undeniable. “Sometimes she gives time back to muggers, to make a point, and I guess that hurts them. But she wouldn’t hurt Danny, and she wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “Whoever’s doing this hasn’t hurt you,” says Brenda. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” I worry the skin on my left thumb between my teeth. “I don’t get out much. I mostly just work and take care of the cats and try to be nice to people.”

  “Still, it would be possible to catch you alone. Not hard, even.” Brenda glances at her guitar. “I think we need to talk to Sophie.”

  “Sophie never makes sense.”

  Brenda smiles. “You just haven’t been talking to her under the right circumstances.”

  7: Streetwise, Shadowfoolish

  We find Sophie sitting in an alley with her back against the wall, rats all around her. They spill out of her lap like eggs from a basket, and they don’t flee as we approach, only lift their narrow heads and twitch their bristled whiskers and watch us come. The tilt of Sophie’s head mirrors theirs. Their fur is brindled brown, and so are their tails, with patches of shockingly clean pink. I’ve never seen this many rats in one place.

  They aren’t fighting. They aren’t attacking each other. A mother suckles her young in the shadow cast by Sophie’s knee; two large males groom each other on Sophie’s shoulder. It is a rodent Eden, and I don’t understand it in the least.

  Sophie’s gaze sharpens, fixing on my face. “Jenna,” she says. It’s like hearing the town drunk sober for the first time. She smiles at my surprise. “I didn’t expect to see you here. I’m sorry about the other night. I really don’t like the shelters, but I appreciated the change.”

  “Hi, Sophie,” I say. I’m confused. I glance to Brenda, who nods, encouraging me to keep talking. There’s a secret here, something I’m supposed to puzzle out on my own. Turning my attention back to Sophie, I look at her again. Her eyes are bright, like the eyes of the rats around her.

  Oh.

  “I didn’t know you were a witch until Brenda told me, and I guess that means I wasn’t looking close enough; I’m sorry,” I say. “I guess I didn’t want to know. I don’t get on so well with witches.”

  “Ghosts rarely do,” says Sophie, her voice filled with forgiveness. “It’s all right. You were always kind to me, even if you didn’t know why I get confused sometimes.”

  The rats are watching me, eyes tracking in tandem with hers. I hold myself still, not moving away from them, and ask the next logical question: “You’re not a street witch, are you?”

  Sophie shakes her head. A small rat—whatever the rodent equivalent of a child is—peeks out of her hair and snuffles its nose at me. “No. I’m not.”

  There are all kinds of witch. People can pull power from just about anything, if they love it hard enough, if it speaks to them with enough clarity. “You’re a rat witch.”

  “I am.”

  That explains why the street witches, the city witches, the urban witches, haven’t been taking care of her. No one loves the rats. They’re vermin, prey for cats and dogs and city-sponsored exterminators, skittering shadows in the gutters with nowhere to belong. But they do have somewhere. They have wherever Sophie is, the slope of her shoulder, the shelter of her upraised knee. She is their home, and they are her eyes and ears among the city.

  It makes perfect sense. It makes no sense at all.

  “I can talk to pigeons too, but they don’t like to come around when I’m with the nest,” says Sophie. “I don’t . . . do so well away from my rats. I’ve externalized myself for too long, and I don’t reinternalize fast enough to make sense.”

  I glance to Brenda, who reads my confusion in my eyes, and says, “Some witches—not all, but some—can push themselves outward, into whatever their powers affect. I can go out of my body into a cornfield, if I want to. If I have reason to. Haven’t done it since Bill died. There’s always a risk you’ll decide you like being something other than a human being, and decide to stay. The temptation was something I always felt strongly. Going out without having something to call me back seemed . . . unwise.”

  “I go into my rats,” says Sophie. She smiles, the rats moving around her like a brown and endless tide. “They show me things I’d never see if I was all inside myself. But sometimes parts of me decide they’d rather be rats forever, and then I only get those parts back when I’m here, down in the dark, with them. Don’t be sorry for me. I like this life better than the one I had before they came for me.”

  She doesn’t give details. I don’t ask for them. I spend my nights taking phone calls from the lost and the lonely, and I know all about lives that can look like purgatory, or even hell, compared to the simplicity of being down in the dark, feeling like you belong. At least Sophie found her freedom in something other than a razor’s edge.

  “How did you find out about the ghosts, Sophie?” asks Brenda, pulling us back on task. T
here’s a serenity in her voice that I remember from my mother’s. I glance at her, asking myself questions I never asked before. I know she was married, out in Indiana, out in the corn. Did she leave children behind when she came here to rediscover herself? She’s old enough that they would have been grown, moving on to lives of their own, ready to let their mother go.

  The world is full of stories, and no matter how much time we spend in it—alive or dead—there’s never time to learn them all. They just go by so quickly.

  “Jenna gave me her pie money,” says Sophie. She casts a shy smile in my direction. “I knew what it was, and it made me want to do something nice for her, because nobody gives me their pie money. So I thought maybe one of the other ghosts would know something nice I could do. Or maybe I thought they’d give me more pie money. I didn’t have my rats with me; I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I just went looking. And they weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere. So I came here, and I asked the rats if their ghosts were missing. They said yes.”

  “Wait,” I say. “Rats have ghosts?”

  This time, the look Sophie gives me is pitying and indulgent, the look of a teacher dealing with a recalcitrant child. “Of course,” she says. “Anything can leave a ghost, if it has something worth waiting for. They don’t need much time to move on, though. Rats only live four years, if they’re lucky. So I give them what they need, and they go where they go, and I miss them.”

  Sophie could be older than I am, older than Brenda, if she’s constantly bleeding time off into her rats. I don’t say anything. I just wait.

  “There are always ghosts in the sewers, skittering and scattering and not ready to come to me and ask to go yet,” says Sophie. “Sometimes they stay for years, or they wait until their loved ones are almost used up, and they take all the time from them, and let them have a little longer. But they’ve gone. They’ve all gone. I didn’t realize until I saw that the human ghosts were gone, too. All the rats I talked to thought that they were coming to me, asking to move on. They weren’t. They haven’t. No one has asked me to hold their paw and show them the next thing in a long, long time. Months, even. They’ve been going without me. Or they haven’t been going at all. They’re just gone.”

  Sophie makes more sense here, surrounded by her rats, but she still doesn’t follow the paths of human logic the way I would expect her to. I pause, and ask, “Are you saying they’re not reaching their dying days? They’re just disappearing?”

  “Exactly,” says Sophie.

  “And the human ghosts, they’re disappearing the same way,” says Brenda. “They’re not passing on. They’re just vanishing. You and Delia are the last ones I know of in the city.”

  “You said that already.” The words make me uncomfortable. They’re not an accusation, not quite, but there’s something unforgiving buried in them. Why do we deserve to stay when everyone else is going? Where are they going? Why?

  “I’ll probably say it again. Something’s wrong, Jenna. You’re not safe. You need to tell Delia she’s not safe either. Who would take care of that damn parrot of hers if something happened to her?”

  I blink. “You know about Avocado?”

  “Kid, I know about everything,” says Brenda, a small smirk on her lips. She turns back to Sophie. “Did the rats see anything?”

  “Yes,” says Sophie, and her voice is sorrow, her voice is apology, her voice is wind blowing past my gravestone in the middle of the night. It was always going to come to this. In a world of ghosts and witches, it was always going to come to this. I was a fool for thinking it could be anything else.

  Haltingly, she says, “A woman came. The rats didn’t see her every time, but they saw her enough times to think that she came every time. Sometimes, they just weren’t watching. A woman came, and she had a bag over her shoulder, and she approached the dead, and asked them questions, until they looked at her.”

  “That’s when she pulled out the mirror.” It isn’t a question. I know how witches interact with the dead—and nothing but a witch could have come in and pulled this many ghosts away.

  Sophie nods. “They were all different mirrors.”

  “They would have to be.” Ghosts can be prisoned in any sort of glass, but if you want to hold them—if you want to keep them there long enough to get some use out of them—you need a mirror that holds significance for them. Best are the ones that held their reflections while they were alive. “How did she know what mirrors to use?”

  “That’s the first real question,” says Brenda. “She must have known who they were. But some of those ghosts have been in the city for centuries. So how could a woman who doesn’t live here know which mirrors to use?”

  “How are you so sure she doesn’t live here?”

  “The rats don’t know her face. More importantly, I don’t know anyone who fits her description, and I know every witch and ghost in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Don’t look so surprised. I was a farmer before I came here. I keep track of my crops, for the sake of the fields around them.”

  I should probably be uncomfortable with Brenda referring to me as a “crop,” but under the circumstances, it’s almost comforting. It’s been a while since anyone was keeping track of me. “So you’re saying a witch came from out of state and stole all the ghosts?”

  “I am.” Brenda’s voice is grim. “I have an idea of what she’s going to do to them.”

  So do I. There’s only one thing the living ever want from dead who don’t belong to them: immortality. And if this witch has those ghosts prisoned in glass, she’s going to get it.

  8: Sleepover in Manhattan

  The cats don’t stir when I open the apartment door and turn on the light. I’ll need to go through before bed, checking them for signs of life. It’s not unusual to lose a cat every now and again, considering how old they are, and that’s why I bring them back here: to give them a peaceful place to die. Even so, I don’t want to deal with that tonight, and I hope they’ll hold on.

  “Nice place,” says Brenda, stepping through the door behind me. She’s looking shamelessly around, taking in my living room like a tourist taking in Times Square. She has her guitar slung over her shoulder, and a backpack she retrieved from a storage locker at a health club downtown. I’m not sure she has a permanent residence. I’m not sure she needs one. “How many cats do you have?”

  “It varies,” I say, unwilling to commit to a number before I’ve touched sides, felt the slow rise and fall of aged lungs and fragile rib cages. “I hope you’re not allergic. I only have the couch for you, and you’re going to wind up covered in cats by morning.”

  “I grew up on a farm, eating dirt and sexing chickens,” says Brenda. “It’ll take more than a little cat hair to do me in.”

  “Okay,” I say, uncertainly. I’ve never had a houseguest before, not in all the time that I’ve been renting this apartment. I’ve certainly never come home with a witch. For all I know, Brenda has a mirror of her own tucked into the bottom of that bag, something come from Mill Hollow and destined to be my final resting place.

  But no. She’s had plenty of opportunity to ambush me, and not just tonight; stretching all the way back to the night we met, years and miles ago. She had no reason to tell me about the missing ghosts, to take me to see Sophie, if she just wanted to take me captive. I have to trust someone, and Brenda seems like the best candidate for the position. She doesn’t have a mirror. She isn’t here to hurt me.

  “The couch is fine,” she says. “I’ve slept on worse, and I like cats. As long as there’s running water in the bathroom, I won’t have any problems.”

  “Delia keeps the place up to code,” I say. I don’t bathe—going insubstantial for hours every night keeps me clean—and I only have to use the toilet if I drink coffee or eat pie, but since I do both those things just about every day, running water is important to me, too. And then there are the cats to consider. Cats require water to live.

  “Good,” says Brenda. She walks to the couch and
plops down on the central cushion, between a geriatric calico and a black cat whose eyesight failed long before he came to me. She puts her backpack between her feet and begins stroking one of them with each hand. “I’m sorry to impose.”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” I say. If my mama could see me now, offering a guest a couch with no sheets, in a house with no food . . . “You, um. You know that once I go to bed, I won’t be here anymore, right? Not for a few hours, anyway.”

  “I know about going to grave,” says Brenda solemnly, and while I’ve never heard it called that before, the words are exactly right. I’m going to grave: I’m going where the good ghosts go, when they still belong here, in this world. “I’ll see you in the morning, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  Break a lot of mirrors; free a lot of ghosts. All we have to do is find them. “Good night,” I say, and walk the floor, checking my cats before I slip into my bedroom and slip out of my skin, back into my burial shroud. Then I slip into the bed, and the world is gone, replaced by silence and the absence of time. For those few hours, I am truly dead.

  What Brenda does while I’m gone is effectively a secret, because I’m not there. I have never been there. For the first few hours after I go to “sleep,” there’s nothing that can rouse me before my time is done.

  My gone-time transitions into more ordinary slumber, and ends with sunlight slanting colorlessly through the window like beams of dusty silver, and the washed-out smell of bacon sizzling on a distant stove. Scents, like colors, are mostly stripped away by the state of being insubstantial; they haunt me, the way I normally haunt the world. I roll out of bed, set feet to the air just above the floor, and will myself toward solidity. Bit by bit, the sunlight turns golden, and the smell of bacon turns rich and fatty and nostalgic, like waking up back at home, Patty curled sleeping on her half of the bed, the morning chorus chirping and trilling in the tree outside our window. Scent is very much a part of memory, and memory is a form of time travel. It takes us back, whether or not we want to go.