Giving Up the Ghost (19 page)

Boston was a city built on melancholy. It was the farthest geographical point from my birthplace I had ever been, the farthest north, and the farthest east. The farthest spiritually. The people sounded strange, the buildings were ancient, their customs alien. A freezing rain fell from a sky that was the same color as the harbor.

Old Statehouse Publishers was on Hancock Avenue, within sight of the state capitol. The door was a heavy oak affair, with a knocker in the shape of a pilcrow. Only moments after I tapped the paragraph symbol against the wood, the door swung open.

Garrick Sloane was a kind man of seventy with a fringe of white hair around his pink head and eyes that, behind his spectacles, looked to be 140 years old, and he ushered me inside.

There were books everywhere.

Not only were books overflowing from the desks and shelves, they were piled on the floor and jammed behind doors and perched on windowsills. You could hardly see any of the room behind or between the books. It was as if the books, like rabbits, had multiplied on their own.

Sloane apologized for the state of the office, muttering something about having to take an inventory one of these days, and led me back to an inner room with a fireplace. There was a cheerful Christmas tree in the corner of the room, so crowded by books on the floor that it leaned to one side. Sloane took some books that had been piled on the seats of a pair of chairs, relocated them to the floor, and we sat.

“Aren't you afraid of a fire?” I asked, looking at how near the books were to the hearth. “All it would take is one spark.”

“Oh, no,” he said, and nudged one of the piles with his foot. “We've never burned a book here, I assure you. Well, we may have scorched a few. But they are really quite safe where they are.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Ophelia Wylde, Ophelia Wylde,” he said. “What a pleasure it is to finally meet my frontier correspondent. I was excited to receive your telegram last week that you would be paying a visit in person. How were your travels? Expensive, I'll wager.”

“Dreadfully,” I said.

“You mentioned stopping in Virginia on your way,” he said. “Was your business successful there?”

“It was conclusive,” I said.

“Good, good,” he said. “Would you care for some tea and cake? Just tea, then? Certainly. I'll have Rogers fetch us some. Rogers! Oh, I don't know where the lad has gone. Is that the manuscript I spy beneath your arm?”

I handed over the pages containing the spirit telegraph adventure.

“Ah,” he said, thumbing through them. “A bit shorter than the last.”

“I was forced to leave some things out,” I said.

“What things?” His eyebrows—which were the same shade of yellowing white as the hair on his head—jumped above the rims of his glasses.

“Nothing important,” I said.

“But what about your personal code?” he asked. “The agreement will all be revealed to your readers. Are these things that our discerning book-buying public would want to know?”

“The things that are missing are of a personal nature,” I said. “Readers would not be interested, I'm sure. The adventure is quite complete without those pages.”

He nodded dubiously, then placed the manuscript on a side table. In a few moments a man of somewhat fewer years than Sloane, but even less hair, appeared. Sloane asked for two cups of tea. Rogers grumbled and went away.

“I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Sloane,” I said. “I have often wondered what your offices are like, and they are just as I pictured them. This building must be a hundred years old.”

“Two hundred, but who's counting?”

That made the building about as old as I felt.

“And you have started on your next?” he asked.

“Next what?”

“Your next adventure,” he said. “While we have done a good business over the years in publishing metaphysical texts, your cases of mystic deduction have been a modest success. Just enough to keep publishing them, you understand. So when may we expect your next?”

“I'm unsure.”

“What do you mean?

“I'm afraid this may be the final installment.”

“Say it is not so, say it is not so.”

“It may indeed be so,” I said. “This last case has taken something out of me that may be difficult to replace, Mr. Sloane. You have been very kind to me, and I am thankful for all of your help, and it makes me sad to think of disappointing those who would like to follow me on another adventure. But it may be time to give up the ghost.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Rogers brought the tea.

The cup warmed my hands, no books had caught fire, and I was relieved to be just sitting for a moment.

“Tell me, Miss Wylde,” Sloane said. “What else would you do?”

“Pardon?”

“If you are no longer pursuing cases and writing about them,” he said, “what would you do? Marry? Teach school? Something else?”

“Something else,” I said. “A former profession.”

Sloane sipped his tea.

“You were a confidence woman.”

“Yes.”

“A swindler, a cheat, a huxtress, and a hoaxer.”

“You know I was.”

“You only cheated those who deserved it.”

“Oh, we all deserve it, at one time or another,” I said. “You know my history. You've edited my books.”

Sloane smiled.

“Sounds like a life full of excitement,” he said. “Not without its risks, of course, but a life in which one could be richly rewarded for a modicum of effort. But Ophelia—I beg your pardon, but may I address you as such? I have more than a little avuncular feeling for you—there is a problem.”

“What, Uncle Sloane, would that be?”

“You cannot undiscover a country.”

“Pardon?”

“‘
The undiscovered country
,'” Sloane quoted, “‘
from whose bourn no traveler returns—it puzzles the will.'”

“
Hamlet
,” I said.

“That's Shakespeare's way of talking about death,” Sloane said. “It seems appropriate, in an inverse way, to your circumstance. A precious few human beings are allowed a glimpse of the undiscovered country of the dead; for better or ill, you are among this select lot. You are no charlatan, I am convinced, but the genuine article. How, then, do you resort to a life of fraud? A good confidence woman must first fool herself into believing what she is trying to convince her mark of. How can you do that, having surveyed the terrain? The simple matter is, you cannot. Human experience flows inexorably only in one direction. You, my dear Ophelia, have stood upon that peak in Darien, and related what you have seen—and now here we sit, looking at one another with wild surmise.”

I put down my tea.

My first thought was to tell him that he was mixing his literary references, and that Keats had it all wrong, that it wasn't Cortez and his men who stood on that mountaintop in Panama and saw the Pacific, it was Balboa. But I didn't want to argue the point with the old man.

“You are right,” I said, finally. “I am denied even a way to make a living.”

Sloane leaned forward and placed a gentle hand upon my knee.

“You have suffered something frightful,” he said. “Something more than that, I imagine, because you navigate fear uncommonly well. Whatever it is, my dear, the pain will pass. Not all of it, perhaps, and not all at once. But the day will come when you return to yourself, and the world will be right once more, and you will be glad for having not given up the ghost. Now, are you sure I cannot interest you in some cake?”

Consider your death
, as my inner voice had urged me.

It is the ultimate solution to that most urgent and personal of mysteries, yet who among us—at least those who are not gravely ill or sentenced to death or otherwise facing imminent and inescapable demise—gives it more than a casual thought? The pious tend to reflect not upon death itself but the life that is promised after; the grieving, upon the crushing loss at the death of another; and the wealthy, upon monuments of stone or charity in the vain hope that it may snatch a sliver of immortality from the great destroyer.

What happens to us at the moment of death is as unknown to us as the far side of the moon, yet it is exactly as common a human experience as birth. It is the surest and most democratic thing in the world, immune to wealth, power, beauty, wisdom, or worth. It strikes down the wicked and the just in equal measure. It is as unfeeling and as immutable and as bright and as hard as all jagged things.

Such has been my disposition that, since childhood, I have often remained awake, pondering such impenetrables until dawn smudged the eastern sky. I have never feared death, for I have ample evidence for the survival of the spirit, at least in some form, but probably not in any theology now imagined, not in Summerland or any of the hundred other hymns we whistle while walking past the local burying ground.

The dead talk to us endlessly. Sometimes they come as revenants, appealing to the living in cryptic and dreamlike language for help in squaring some unfinished business before they can cross over. But mostly, the dead speak to us in more prosaic form. Books bring us the essence of those who may be centuries dead, but whose voices remain vibrant through the centuries. Even though I feel my pulse thumping in my wrists as I pen these lines, and hear the scratch of the nib across the paper, and shiver from the night air slipping beneath the window sash—even though I am fully and consciously and gloriously alive as I write—I may be long dead by the time you read these words.

Consider, then, that I speak to you from the grave.

And I will end this tale at, well, the ending, where I began, or very nearly so; because time flows in only one direction, with nary an eddy; because one must complete the journey into uncharted time before it can be mapped; and because this is my story and it suits my purposes to do so.

 

 

Leaving New England behind, I returned to the agency in Dodge, but my misery lingered. The new year came and passed. The chill between Calder and me deepened. I accompanied McCarty, who seemed to remember little of his poisoning ordeal, to Boot Hill Cemetery to see the last of the dead exhumed to make way for new houses. And then, having grown tired of the voice in my head that urged self-destruction, I took the law book down from the shelf beneath the bust of Lincoln and prepared the papers necessary to file for divorce in Ford County from Jonathan Wylde.

I took the pages from my desk that were missing from the manuscript I had left with Sloane and thoughtfully added some new ones, including the one you read now, and put them in the post. And by the time you read this—whether in a few months, or a few years, or a hundred years—I will have sought out Calder at the Saratoga, interrupted his billiards game, and asked him to share a late breakfast with me. I imagine it will be scrambled eggs with ham, or perhaps bacon.

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Copyright © 2015 by Max McCoy

 

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7582-8197-5
ISBN-10: 0-7582-8197-8
First Kensington Mass Market Edition: December 2015

ISBN: 978-0-7582-8197-5

First Kensington Electronic Edition: December 2015