My last sight as I passed through the portal was of those two men, their faces in eerie shadow as they stood in the flickering yellow light of the glass lamps. I knew the chances of survival were slim, but events had moved so quickly that I had no time to fully absorb the truth of it. I hadn’t said good-bye to my mother and Cris. They would never know what had happened to me. If I expired in the spirit realm, there wouldn’t even be a body to bury.
As I stepped backward, careful not to look over my shoulder, my mind skipped wildly over bits and pieces of knowledge I’d read concerning the spirit realm. Vague generalities regarding water and wind. None of it was useful. I had nothing to guide me.
I pulled the door closed behind me. I had arrived.
Even the selfsame door had changed. What had been clean,dry wood appeared gray and cracked, as if lashed by the sea for a hundred years. I traced my fingers over the peeling paint. Water pearled on the fissures, cold to the touch. Remembering my first and most urgent task, I reached down to tie the rope to the handle. My hands were trembling. I used a Spanish bowline on the rusty iron handle, which was more like a bracket than a knob. It seemed secure, despite my unsteady fingers. And with this first step completed, I turned to face the spirit realm.
I could see nothing but mist in every direction. The air pressed heavily upon me, lighter than water and heavier than fog. A wan light shone through. I looked upward for its source. Far overhead, a pale blue surface rippled, and beyond it a silver light gleamed. I gasped, suddenly panicked. I felt myself at the bottom of a lake, looking up through the water at the gleam of a full moon. But no—this was no lake. I could breathe, however strange and thick the air around me.
Below me, smooth stones, uneven and loose, gave the impression of a vast riverbed. The lead boots kept me grounded, and I felt desperately grateful for them as the heavy air batted around me in currents, an animated thing that wished to carry me away. I felt its insistent tug, like the ocean’s determined undertow. The idea of moving through these currents toward some unseen and unknown destination seemed insane, impossible. I would stand here for hours—days—before diving into the current. What if I never returned? Could I stay here by the portal and wait for the men to give up and leave? No. One point of consistency among the misguided books about the spirit realm was the fact that living beings couldn’t survive long in the realm; these men would outlast me.
Could I find another portal? Yes—yes, I could do that! A sense of elation coursed through me. I might find another portaland emerge safely in some other part of the living world. But how? I turned to look at the door behind me and saw that indeed it was attached to the tumbledown cottage. But here, the cottage was in even worse repair—only a shell of crumbling stones, with almost no roof to speak of. I took a few plodding steps around the building, waving my arms through the fog. Nothing. The Manse, and everything else, simply didn’t exist. I couldn’t see far, but it seemed to me that the cottage stood like an island, surrounded by an ocean of mist.
Then I became aware of the sound: a churning noise, the distant roar of unseen waves, filled the air. I noticed a gentle clinking sound, as of a spoon tapping a glass. No—not a single spoon. Several, each chiming a different tinny note.
I stood still, listening. The notes had seemed arbitrary, but now I realized they weren’t. They composed a simple song, and it was a song I recognized. A lullaby, sung in Spanish, that I’d only ever heard from my mother’s lips. It repeated, unhurried, and repeated again, and I heard the unspoken words as my mother used to sing them:Por donde vas, por donde vas, aún en sueños me encontrarás. A chill ran up my spine.
Slowly, I turned, trying to locate the source of the music. I began walking into the fog.
For a few plodding steps, I couldn’t be sure that I was headed in the right direction. And then, suddenly, a current of air brushed the fog aside, and a shape appeared momentarily some thirty feet away, tall and totem-like, only to be swallowed up again. I made for it. The tinkling sound continued, and I bent my will toward it, surrendering to the siren song and hoping beyond reason that it held something for me besides an uncanny allusion. As I struggled onward, the shape ahead loomed, dark and massive. Not until I could touch it with my outstretched hand did I see what it was: agiant pillar of wood, some two feet wide and immeasurably high, with a dozen ropes tied fast like moorings. The ropes stretched out into the fog in every direction toward their invisible vessels, anchoring them.
I saw then where my mother’s lullaby came from: a cluster of glass bottles, strung by their necks from one of the ropes, chiming gently against a rusted iron chain. They swayed and chimed, swayed and chimed, but I couldn’t see by what mechanism or miracle they moved in such precise harmony. As I stared at them, I realized that the largest bottle among them wasn’t empty. It held a roll of paper. And as the bottle swayed, I saw three bold letters written along the outer edge of the paper, clearly visible through the green glass:S A M.
I gasped. No doubt my thoughts were confused, but it seemed to me that somehow, in this unlikely place and despite all odds, my mother was guiding me. If I’d stopped to think, I would have realized that this was impossible: My mother was alive. She couldn’t, by any means, reach into this alien place. But I felt her presence nonetheless, and I scrambled up to the mooring, eager to retrieve the message.
I fumbled with the cork, struggled with the paper, and finally withdrew the damp scroll. It read:
FOLLOW THE BLUE CABLE. FASTEN YOURSELF TO IT, FOR CURRENTS IN THE WEER ARE STRONG.
I read and reread the words, and though I could make no sense of the last statement, the first two were clear enough. I made a loop with the rope, passing it over the blue mooring line, pulling it under, and then stepping into the loop. Then I tested all theknots, tested the pull of the blue cable: all were secure. With my mother’s song chiming behind me, I walked out into the fog. I left the living world behind, passing farther and farther into the realm of the dead.
It was a journey I never intended to take. But I chose it. I thought I was buying my liberty, and in truth it was all the contrary. I was only falling into greater and greater debt. There is no besting the Cisneros Society. Just when you think you’ve found the way to live with them, you discover they didn’t mean for you to live at all.
Sam: A Proposition
A portal is created when a natural death transpires on a threshold: an opening with a door that closes completely. It must be anaturaldeath. In the early days of enchantment, an enchanter whose name is no longer remembered murdered one of his servants upon a threshold as a means of creating a portal. The experiment was a resounding failure. Instead of carrying him alive to the spirit realm, it simply killed him.
—César Castellanos,Understanding the Realm of Thews
Tuesday, September 11, 1888
Clementine could not understand the bargain she had made. I had no doubt that she believed she had scored a victory. Equally, I had no doubt that the Cisneros Society would make her regret she had ever made the bargain in the first place.
At the moment, however, she had more pressing concerns. Clem and Rosetta retreated from the courtroom, accompanied by their lawyer. Judge Richardson had commanded an orderly exit from his courtroom, buying them a few precious minutes of headway. They’d barely turned the corner of the block when the commotion of a hundred male voices erupted from Judge Richardson’s courtroom, spilling quickly onto the courthouse steps. Now it sounded less like an audience and more like a mob.
I urged Clementine onward. When she ignored me, I filled Smythe with a sense of urgency, for I could already see around the courthouse what they could not: small packs of young men, frenzied with mixed fury and glee, fanning out to pursue their prey. “They went this way,” someone shouted.
“My offices, I suggest,” Smythe said hastily to Clem and Rosie, hovering a protective arm around them as he glanced over his shoulder.
“Yes,” Rosetta agreed, already out of breath.
“Not too fast, Mr. Smythe,” Clem said, pulling Rosetta to a slower pace. I noticed that she’d arranged the indigo shawl over her arms, concealing where the papers had struck.
“Of course,” Smythe agreed. “Directly, but not too quickly.”
Mr. Smythe, with his long legs, walked almost at a normal pace along Lynde Street. He turned every so often to look anxiously over his shoulder.
They’d arrived safely—or so I thought—at the firm’s offices, when someone traveling at great speed suddenly burst around the opposite corner and nearly collided with Mr. Smythe, who, in response, drew himself up to his fullest weedy height and adopted an imposing glare.
