It’s a cold, wet landing into the puddle. Over my shoulder, the hulking fellow is squeezing through the portal and will shortly land atop me, surely crushing my bones. The mysterious young man with the pocket watch has disappeared.
Spirit shocks me with a jolt. It is momentarily paralyzing, and it locks my every muscle. I hate the sensation, but I know this message from past communication with the Other Side:Pay attention, Stella. This is information you will need later.
I work my jaw.WHY must you make your point so emphatically, Spirit? A squeaky toy duck couldn’t pass along the same message?
I slip and slide. I run.
The oaf pounds to the ground behind me.
My boots clatter on the cobblestones.
Alleys. The alleys are my best bet.
The one I pick smells of garbage and urine, but I slosh through the dark passage. Snuff growls at me for disturbing his dinner. “Back later,” I shout over my shoulder. He twitches his whiskers, a quickBring fish.
My corset is cutting into my ribs, making it difficult to run. I reach behind my back, loosen the strings, and stop to wriggle free of it from under my dress. I toss it in a rubbish bin, all while running far away from my Hester Street boardinghouse.
This neighborhood is dirty and crowded; a quarter of a million people crammed into one square mile. It’s largely Jewish and packed with immigrants. The fakirs, the Hindu wonder-workers, long ago established this part of the city as the epicenter of spiritual connection. It’s easy to get lost here. I love it.
When at last I’ve escaped Tattered Overalls in the winding New York City alleys, I lean against a cool, stone building and slide to sitting. My view is of the gleaming East River, the knots and cables and sway of the Brooklyn Bridge, the dozens of colorful boats dotting the shoreline. Brooklyn smokes and chugs in the distance. I heave to catch my breath. The stirring, the longing, creeps back into my belly.
Who was that young man? Why is he so familiar? Why is he sodisturbing?
But Spirit of course ignores my questions, choosing instead to focus on the brute:
You didn’t tell him he was fat and lazy.
I told you to tell him that!
Anger surges, hot and red. Ithinkit is my anger I feel, and not theirs. “Shut up!” I yell into the alley. It echoes back to me:Shut up!
It might not have been an echo. It might have been a taunt. Things like that, I never know. My identity, theirs, my anger, theirs… I don’t know where one ends and the next begins. It’s enough to drive one mad. Slowly, hauntingly. My face heats.
That jackass will never find that money.
Not after what he did to me.
“Shut up, I said!” I yank my hair at the roots. “Enough! Leave me ALONE!”
There is silence.
Perhaps this time, I’ve done it.
Perhaps this time, they’ll finally honor my wish and leave me be.
But then, I feel it: the slow, slimy chill of being watched. Usually I just hear Spirit, quick crackles of their voices, quippy and communicative. Sometimes they come through in flashes of light and images, like the herky-jerky movement you see when you squint through the eyepiece of a nickelodeon.
But rarer still, I canfeelthem. The Dark Legion. They are shadows and blood, their taste metallic, their caress hypnotic. Their movement, a darkening, a thickening, barely visible from the corner of my eye. Sickness and fear and anger surge along with the three spirits I call the Dark Trio—two tall, lumberingmale presences and one shorter one in a wide-brimmed hat. Their eyes are inky hollow pits, their tongues like snakes, their breath like garbage. They are monsters. They are fiends. I’ve not looked at them directly, ever. I instinctively feel that if I look directly at them, I’m inviting evil in. When the Trio approaches, I feel the sensation of falling. Free-falling, the absolute loss of control, and then the abrupt, breathless joltjustbefore you smack the ground.
I pant. I slide my eyes to detect them, but nothing is there. Nothing isever really there.
The dead are everywhere and nowhere. Like memories.
He’s fat and lazy and he only wishes he knew where I stashed that cash.
You didn’t let ME have a turn, Stella! My sister was there and I didn’t get my say.
I wanted to tell my mother not to worry. My MOTHER, Stella.
