Candle in the Attic Window(76)

I made one today.

There is a letter near my hand. It sits upon my writing desk, glaring up at me with my own shaking script, addressed to a man I despise. But I know that he is going to die. My gifts have told me. And I should let him die. He’s made the city worse; he’s hurt innocent people; he knows not what he toys with when he perverts a séance and goes grave-robbing in foreign lands. I am aware, with a knowledge as mysterious to me as ever, that his train will derail and that he, along with many other passengers, will die.

So, he should, by all intents and purposes, be left to it so the devils may take him.

And yet.

I was not left to die that day when everything changed. My life was once spared, on a winter’s morning in ‘63.

On the West Side, near the mid-town piers, I watched a boat come in, brimming with wounded soldiers up from the Carolina coast. It was not long after the Proclamation had been signed and announced, and New York was buzzing with the news, nervous murmurs of what it could mean for the Union, though it didn’t bring a swift end to the war.

“Mr. Olmstead’s on that ship,” I heard a woman say, nodding towards the waterfront. “Sanitation officer for the Union. I hear he’s seen more than his poet’s heart can bear.”

F. L. Olmstead. The visionary behind Central Park. An architect of natural beauty presided over unnatural, ugly and twisted remains of men that were once whole.

Two walks.

It was cold, there by the pier, and the crowd was anxious, women swaying from foot to foot, their hoop skirts moving to and fro like silent, tolling bells. Tolling for the dead. Hopeful for the living. Those assembled likely had a relative they were praying to see disembark. I wanted my cousin returned, James, a vibrant young man who was like a brother to me. As if it were a spell, I kept murmuring his name, an enchantment to bid him into my arms. I was not prepared for what would come.

Since childhood, I’d seen phantom shapes in corners, things I passed off as shadows, and I had a way of knowing unknowable things. Mother, sensing tell-tale signs, owned a similar ability and guided me with calm practicality, insisting I never make a show of what I had inherited. But my talents were unpredictable and inconsistent. The fate of James, for instance, to my chagrin, remained entirely shrouded to my senses.

But as I stood watching a vessel approach, its stars and stripes flying (the Confederates may have flown their own stars, but our flag remained that of the United States), I knew it was involved with the War. Goodness knows there weren’t pleasure crafts docking on these weather-worn planks; they had their own piers to separate themselves from the hard truths of the city. But not just the grey trappings of the ship anointed it as war property. It was the chill and the odd haze that surrounded it. Cool as the winter air may have been, it was suddenly arctic as the ship neared. And a halo came off her bow, her stern, a haze overpowering the haggard faces in Union blue peering from the rails ... hungry for their city yet haunted for it ....

While I couldn’t make out distinct forms, I sensed that I was watching as many dead come home as living, aboard that ship.

My nose started to bleed. A garish drop of crimson upon the bell of my pale wool skirts. Damn. A shift to my psychology was one thing, but messy physical reactions were quite another. I glanced about. Was anyone else affected by this dread chill and the aura around the ship, making it, too, seem like a phantom? It didn’t appear so – mostly, people simply scanned the paper listing recent New York dead and kept looking anxiously back to the boat, to see if anyone able to stand on the prow was one of their own. But a few knew. A few could feel what wakened in me.

Six average men and women held hands, facing the river as if they were bracing for a storm. Their noses weren’t bleeding like mine, but they stared around that ship. Did they see that same halo? They held tight and bent their knees as if anchoring themselves against a tidal wave of secondary impact – as if barricading against whatever that boat carried in its wake. One of them turned to glance at me, a striking middle-aged woman.

“It is up to us, those who see the world in ways the rest cannot, to affect the world for the better,” she said, and then smiled as if I’d nothing to worry about and turned again to the west.

It wasn’t until James floated face to face with me that I truly saw a ghost. And when that beloved face – transparent, grey and hollow – met my eyes, I fainted. Too close to the edge where I’d wedged myself in for a better view, I took a nasty tumble right into the Hudson.

A blow to my head took care of my consciousness.

Yet, I shall never forget what I saw in that in-between state.

The two walks.

There, on the edge of life and death, in this soul-defining moment, distinct presences were on the move. Threads of light and columns of dark, thin coils moving in different directions, were buffeted like leaves in a breeze down an endless corridor. Along this passage were windows, windows onto small scenes. Intimate, or epic. A family dinner. A coronation. A first kiss. A last wish. A battle scene. Somewhere in that scene lay James’ final breath. My hand seized at my chest, as if to massage my faltering heart. I, and these shafts of illumination and shadow, together we were captivated by the window-boxes of human existence. Both the lit and darkened threads vied for the scenes, pushing and pulling for dominance over these slivers of time. My life hung suspended between the world’s moments.

Then, all at once, it was as if the threads noticed I did not belong. I was mobbed. The light surrounded me and gave a huge push, while the dark matter simply hung to the corners, watching. Waiting. A vibrating string, positively singing with light, grazed my ear: