by Mailie Meloy
Outside in the distance, there were shimmering particles. They reminded her of glinting snow, or fireflies on a summer night. Benjamin believed that his mother was out there. But he hadn’t said how beautiful the lights were. Janie thought with longing of her grandmother, who’d died when she was ten, and whom she’d loved. She felt her mind drawing toward the lights, out of the After-room, and she felt pressure in her lungs, and a hoarse gasp in her throat.
She heard Doyle say her name from a great distance, very sternly: “Janie! Breathe!”
Breathe. She couldn’t be distracted. That was how Benjamin had got into trouble. She couldn’t go chasing her grandmother. Breathe in. Breathe out. Her throat relaxed and she stabilized. She listened to the strange silence.
Then she saw the gray figures outside the boundary of the room, much closer than the glinting specks, and drawing nearer. The ghosts knew she was here, just as Benjamin had said. She tried not to panic.
“Mr. Burrows!” she called, with her mind, as in a dream.
What if the apothecary wouldn’t talk to her? The ghostly figures were coming closer. She tried to remember Keats, who had only wanted to see the girl he loved. These people were missing something, that was all. But they still made her shudder. There were so many of them. She began to see individual forms: an old man, a woman, a child.
“Mr. Burrows?” she called. “Mr. Burrows!”
Finally she heard a voice. It was the apothecary, his voice flattened, with no resonance or echo. It wasn’t coming from inside a body. It had the effect that Benjamin had described, of a great effort to make speech possible. “You shouldn’t be here,” it said.
“Sorry,” she said. “But we need your help.”
There was a silence.
Janie was curious about something. Benjamin said he had called for his father for some time before hearing his voice, too. But that didn’t make sense. They were making contact with his father’s mind, but that mind didn’t notice them right away. It was elsewhere. “Where were you just now?” she asked.
“With my wife,” he said. “Almost. If I concentrate very hard, I can just feel where she is.”
“Oh,” she said. She felt she had touched on something very private. “Where is that?”
“I’m not sure, exactly,” he said. “I won’t know until I can go. But I know that she’s there and I’m going soon.” The apothecary’s voice was different than she had ever heard it. Happier. Dreamier.
“Um—” Janie said, “is it okay if you don’t go yet?”
A silence.
“Because Jin Lo needs our help,” Janie said. “She’s looking for a man who stole a nuclear shell, but she can’t find him. And the reason he stole the shell is that his son was killed. So if I can talk to the son, I think he can help us find the father.” Another silence, but Janie took this one as encouragement, and went on. “The son died in the shelling in China three months ago. I just need to talk to him.”
“It isn’t safe,” the apothecary said.
“You told Benjamin we had to help Jin Lo,” she said. “So we’re trying! You should help us!”
She felt Benjamin’s father sigh, and recognized the sound from his arguments with Benjamin.
Then she felt the apothecary begin to search—his mind grown vast and spacious. She remembered Keats dissipating, in the book-lined library, becoming not himself but part of something larger. But this was different, because she was inside the apothecary’s mind. She could feel him ranging over continents, and also over this strange separate universe. It made her want to hunch down on the ground and cover her head with her arms, but there was no ground, and she had no arms.
After what seemed like a long search, although she couldn’t guess how much time had passed, she saw a single misty gray shape moving toward her. It was a young man in an officer’s trim uniform. He came through the wall of the After-room and stood looking around, a troubled, summoned presence.
“Hello,” she said.
He looked around for the source of her voice. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I came to talk about your father.”
“Do you know what he’s done?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“He’s gone mad!” he said. “He thinks he’s doing it for me!”
“My friends want to find him and stop him,” she said.
“Stop him how?”
“I don’t know, talk to him,” she said.
“Will they kill him?”
“No!” she said.
The ghost moaned. “He’ll be ruined, his reputation destroyed.”
Janie tried to make her voice gentle. “I think that’s already happened,” she said. “It’ll be much worse if he sets off the bomb.”
He nodded. “I know. So what do I do?”
“Tell me where he is.”
“I need to talk to him first.”
She wasn’t sure how to put this tactfully. “But—you’re dead.”
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?” he asked, his thin, echoless voice rising. “And you’re alive, I can feel that you are!”
“I am, but I—”
“I need to talk to him!” he cried.
“I can send a message,” she said, desperate. The powder was going to wear off soon, and she was losing control of the situation. She could feel her hold on the room slipping.
“I have to go,” the ghost said, looming toward her. “I can change his mind. I’m going.”
“Wait, no!” she said.
“I have to.” His spectral arms reached for her.
“No!” she said.
The apothecary’s voice joined her, crying, “No!” His voice was in her head and everywhere.
But it had already begun. A strange coldness passed through her, so deep that her bones ached. Then a screaming wind blew inside her mind. She couldn’t hear anything but the gale. It was a howling alien wind, an otherworldly chill.
Finally the feeling passed, and she was left exhausted. Someone was shaking her, pulling her back into her body.
“Janie!” a voice was saying. “What happened?”
She struggled to open her eyes and saw two worried faces staring down at her. For a moment she didn’t know who they were. It was Vili who was shaking her. He looked stricken. And there was the orange-haired magician—Doyle. He was the reason all of this had started. She was lying on the rug in Vili’s apartment, shivering and sweating. She must have collapsed onto the floor when the ghost passed through her.
Passed through her. He had used her as a bridge to the living world, like Keats had done. Benjamin hadn’t described it as so violent, or so cold. She didn’t know how that one hazy figure could have such force.
“Did you find the son?” Doyle asked.
She nodded. Her hair felt damp. She wished the two men wouldn’t hover over her, their faces like floating balloons. “He went to his father,” she said.
“What do you mean, he went to him?”
“To talk him out of using the bomb,” she said. She tried to sit up, but a spinning dizziness hit her, and she sank back down to the floor.
“But how could he go?” Vili asked.
She closed her eyes. The light hurt them. “Like Keats did—” she began, but it was too tiresome to explain.
“Janie!” Vili said, shaking her until she looked at him. “Stay awake! Did you find out where the commander is?”
“No! Don’t shake me!”
“Well,” Doyle said, sitting back on the floor. “Cherchez le fantôme. The bad guy’ll be the one with the ghost, right? Tell your China girl that if she finds the ghost, she finds the bomb.”
“Stop calling her that,” Janie muttered.
“Her name is Jin Lo,” Vili said. “And I can’t tell her. I have no way to contact her.”
Janie covered her eyes. She wished they would stop arguing. She willed all of this to pass.
Chapter 37
The Grand Canal
Jin Lo surveyed the boat traffic at the mouth of the Grand Canal: barges and freighters and sampans and junks, all moving expertly around each other in a kind of waterborne dance. She had to concentrate to avoid collision. She wondered what kind of boat the commander might have chosen. For the first time, she felt that Ned Maddox might be right, that their task was impossible. Thomas Hayes could be anywhere. A needle in a haystack. A sampan in the Grand Canal.
She had hoped for a sign or a push from the apothecary, but none came. So perhaps she had only imagined that he was signaling to her in flashes, sending her inspiration, because she wanted so badly for him to be nearby.
Ned Maddox stood beside her, looking at the traffic. “You know this canal is a thousand miles long, right?”
Jin Lo nodded.
“Any idea what we do now?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that,” Ned Maddox said.
Chapter 38
The Breach
Janie lay on Vili’s couch, wrapped in a throw blanket, looking at the ceiling. Vili was at his desk writing a message to Jin Lo about the ghost of the commander’s son, even though he didn’t know where to send it. He’d said he would try the last telegraph office she’d used. Janie thought he just needed a task, to feel like he was doing something. Doyle was having a drink, the ice clinking in the glass.
There was something on the ceiling, or at the ceiling, and Janie rubbed her eyes, wondering if she were hallucinating. But she wasn’t. A mist hovered there. Then tendrils of fog began to emerge and slither down the walls, pooling near the floor and gathering shape.
“Vili?” she said, pushing herself to sitting. “Do you see this?”
Vili looked up from his coding. “See what?”
“These—figures?” she said, because they were becoming figures now. There were five, then six or seven. They began like Giacometti sculptures, narrow and elongated, stretching up from the floor, and then they took full human form. They were identifiably male and female, but transparent and hazy, like the ghosts she had seen in the After-room. They stood about like uncertain guests at a party, confused about where they were.
“Do you see them?” she asked Doyle.
“No,” he said, setting down his drink. “But I can feel that they’re here.”
“Do you know what they want?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. There was dread in Doyle’s voice. He’d been so blithe about talking to dead people when he wasn’t actually in their presence. “Their thoughts aren’t very clear.”
“I think they followed me,” Janie said, disentangling herself from the blanket. There were at least fifteen of them now. It was hard to count, the way they drifted.
One of the spectral figures—a tall man in a suit—glided through the closed door to the street, and was gone. The others watched with interest, then moved to follow him.
Janie stood, unsteady on her feet. “Wait!” she said.
The figures paused and looked at her. She was trying to think it through: The commander’s son must have opened up some kind of rift, when he came through—a passageway between worlds. That was why it had felt so overwhelming, so violent and cold. But how big a rift? Could all the ghosts come through?
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.
A girl in a loose dress shrugged, then passed through the thick plaster wall and was gone. A fat man followed. The others waited for Janie to speak, as if they wanted instructions.
“I think you should go back,” she said.
One of the ghosts laughed. It was a bright, brittle sound, and Janie jumped.
“Già siamo arrivato,” the woman said.
“Can you hear them?” Janie asked her friends.
“No,” Doyle and Vili said together.
“She says they all just got here,” she said.
“Ciao!” the woman said, waving good-bye, and she disappeared through the wall.
“Um,” Janie said, trying to summon her Italian to tell them to go back. “Dovete—ritornare. Non dovete stare qui.”
“Dov’è Mario?” a man demanded, looming toward Janie. She felt a deep cold coming off him, and stepped back.
“I don’t know!” she said. “I don’t know Mario.”
“Isabella?” another man asked, drawing close. It was ghastly and disorienting to see the others right through his face.
Then they were all shouting names and requests, crowding around her. There seemed to be more of them now. She retreated until she was against a wall, and she could feel their collective breath, like a cold wind.
“Sonia!”
“Giovanni!”
“Stanislas?”
“Marianne!”
“I’m sorry!” she said. “I don’t know any of your people! I don’t know where they are! Io non so! Perdoneme!”
There was a disappointed silence.
A stout older woman asked, in a Midwestern accent, “Honey, are we still in Rome?”
“Yes,” Janie said.
“Oh, fiddlesticks,” the woman said. “I’m from Kansas. I need to get back there.”
A nebulous girl in a sundress laughed brightly and said, “That’s easy. You just click your ruby slippers together and say, ‘There’s no place like home.’”
“Oh, of course!” the woman from Kansas said. She clicked her ghostly heels together and vanished.
“She did it! I was only joking!” the American girl-ghost said.
A small boy in shorts stepped forward, shivery and indistinct. He seemed to be having trouble hanging on to his presence in the room. In an English accent, he said, “I want to see my mummy.”
“Oh!” Janie said. What had he died of? He was so young. “Where does she live?”
“In Trastevere,” he said, deliberately: an important word he had memorized.
“When did you—die?” Janie asked.
“I’m four.” The boy held up four drifting fingers.
The girl in the sundress took his hand and said, “We’ll find her. Think about where you last saw her.”
The boy closed his eyes, and then they were both gone. One by one, the others began to vanish after them.
“They’re all leaving,” she said to Vili and Doyle. “I can’t stop them!”
“Try harder!” Doyle said.
But what was she supposed to do—tackle the ghosts? Most of them were gone by now. They had plans and destinations. The few stragglers seemed dazed by their return to the living world.
One young man tried to take a book from a table, but his hand passed through it. He swore to himself in English.
“Excuse me,” Janie said. “Did you die in Rome?” She thought it would help to understand why they had come.
“Yes,” the young man said.
“What happened?”
“I caught a fever on a summer abroad,” he said. “Like the heroine of a novel—very romantic.”
“Are you looking for someone in particular?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not really. I just miss the world. I miss reading books. I miss sunshine on my face. All the little ordinary things. I keep thinking of that line from Auden, ‘Find the mortal world enough.’ Because the mortal world, you see, it’s amazing!” He gestured with his shadowy arms at the comfortable couch, the floor lamp spilling warm yellow light.
“Do you know when you died?” she asked.
“Two years ago,” he said. “It feels like yesterday. My name is Anthony. Would you say it?”
“Anthony?” she said, uncertain.
“Ah, nice,” he said. “Thank you. I’ve missed that. And would you open the door for me?”<
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“You can pass through it,” she said. “The others did.” What was the point of keeping one nostalgic ghost here, when he just wanted to see sunshine, and all the others had left? She couldn’t force the ghosts back through the ceiling.
“I know,” Anthony said. “But just for the pleasure of it. Of walking through a real door. I never appreciated anything properly while I was here!”
So Janie opened the door, feeling miserable. She’d barged into Benjamin’s After-room without permission and brought back a horde of homesick ghosts.
“Thank you,” Anthony said, with real feeling.
“You’re welcome,” Janie said.
He looked up at the door frame as he drifted beneath it, and sighed. “I thought I’d never do that again,” he said. And then he was gone.
Chapter 39
Death in Rome
Janie went out into the street with Vili and Doyle, to see what damage she had wrought. It was mid-afternoon, and she needed to check in with her parents and tell them that she’d found Benjamin and he was fine. Except that she’d lost Benjamin again, and had no idea if he was fine. And now there were ghosts everywhere.
The ghost of a young man was haranguing the old woman who owned the bakery. The old woman could hear him, but not see him, and she protested—she said she had always loved him. To Vili and Doyle, she looked like she was talking to the air. So it seemed to be love or attachment that allowed people to hear the voices. They could hear a ghost they knew. They just couldn’t see them, as Janie could.
The transparent young man was complaining that the old woman had married his best friend. The woman said it was thirty-five years ago, and what had he wanted her to do when he died? Starve? She had needed help with the bakery!
Vili calculated. “Thirty-five years ago, he might have died of the Spanish flu,” he said. “Millions did.”
“I hope they don’t all come back,” Doyle said.
“This was your brilliant idea,” Janie reminded Doyle.
The ghosts, single-minded in pursuit of their old lives, didn’t move out of the way of people walking down the street. They just passed straight through, causing the living people to shudder with cold and look around in confusion.
