A Sanctuary of Spirits Read online

  Once inside Grand Central Depot, a noisy, dark, crowded place filled with glass and trestles, soot and steam, a building dearly overdue for an upgrade to a full station, Maggie gestured toward a particular platform.

  “Transit is with us, and if we’re quick, you can be back within the two hours I quoted,” the ghost exclaimed, wafting up train-car steps on the northern line. With a screeching rumble and a billowing burst of steam, they were off. Eve and the detective took a small bench at the rear of a car before pausing to consider whether it was wise to trust the demands of an excitable ghost.

  Greenwich Village, Manhattan

  Three mediums of the Ghost Precinct waited for their manager to return, sitting primly at their séance table on a crisp late autumn day. Hands clasped together, they were ready to begin. The lancet windows of their rear office had been cranked wide open to hear the clamor of New York City meld with the rustle of falling leaves and the constant whispers of the dead.

  Cora Dupris, Antonia Morelli, and Jenny Friel had been left alone at the Ghost Precinct offices after having given their leader, Eve, a bit of a hard time about leaving again on a whim with the detective to whom she seemed to have a growing attraction. They knew that to wait for her to begin their séance would waste a precious opportunity for new information regarding the many loose ends of their cases. The three young mediums came from vastly different backgrounds and circumstance but were brought together by their gifts and calmly began their ritual of communing with the dead.

  Cora, Eve’s second-in-command, a year behind her at age eighteen, struck the match.

  “Good spirits, come and speak with us, in the respect of your life and your cares in this world. Is there a spirit who would like our attention? We still seek our friend Maggie. We still seek answers for that which remains unsolved.”

  Two ghosts appeared, their transparent, greyscale forms fully manifest on either side of the table. The two girls, little Zofia and the elder Olga, were immigrants from Poland and the Ukraine who had died in the same garment district fire years prior. Their spirits, most keen on keeping other young people from similar fates or myriad abuses in the vast, churning, industrial behemoth city, quietly stood watch over the proceedings as devoted spectral assets to the Ghost Precinct. Zofia chose to remain a consistent haunt; Olga chose to manifest only during séances. Both girls were silvery, luminous, with dark charcoal hair pulled back from their sharp-featured faces. The darkened, singed hem of their simple dresses was the only reminder of how they’d died.

  The appearance of these precinct assets—ghostly, serene faces staring at their living friends—heralded the opening of the spirit realm to mortal ears.

  There was a rushing sound through the room, in an ethereal echo, as if a great door had been opened.

  “There’s a host of children,” Zofia said, uneasy. “And they’ve been wronged somehow.”

  “We are listening,” Cora responded, speaking loudly to the spirit world as a whole but nodding at Zofia to make sure the girl knew she was heard and understood. So often spirits spoke, trying to help the living, and were ignored.

  A thousand whispers crested around the mediums like a tidal wave, a jumble of woe, impossible to make out one word over the next. Little Jenny clapped her hands over her ears. Antonia, her tall, wide-shouldered body sitting starkly still and bolt straight, winced. Cora released a held breath carefully, slowly, as if she were lowering a great weight onto her delicate shoulders, untucking a handkerchief from her lace cuff to dab at the moisture that had sprung up on her light brown brow.

  There was another sound, a scuttling behind them, though they could see nothing. They felt presences they could not see. Ghosts were unpredictable in the ways in which they manifested. The scurrying sound, accompanied by the same wash of urgent whispers, swept over to the locked file cabinets against their rear wall.

  The young women turned their heads very slowly.

  Just because one worked with the dead didn’t mean they couldn’t be frightening. Spirits were often creatures of startle and shock.

  The precinct file cabinets flew open.

  All of the women jumped.

  “But we don’t even have all the keys,” Cora said, wondering how the ghosts could possibly have unlocked the dusty old wooden cabinets filled with incomplete and shoddily taken case notes from earlier decades of corruption and disarray.

  Below one of the four desks scattered about the long room, the center drawer creaked open of its own accord. Then another desk’s drawer. Then a third. Papers rustled, and a few flew out. Then a few more.

  Jenny edged over to the seventeen-year-old Antonia, who held her long arm out for the little girl who had become a surrogate sister, and the child tucked in against her. Antonia kept herself calm and collected, for Jenny’s sake if nothing else. The little girl didn’t need to sign, or write a note to be understood, her small form shook, making Antonia hold her all the tighter. The child didn’t need to have any further traumas added to her condition of selective mutism.

  “Spirits, what do you wish to tell us?” Cora demanded, finding her voice.

  “And why this display? You’ve never been the sort to give us poltergeists!” Antonia exclaimed.

  “Find us…” came a murmur that consolidated from the voices, the words racing around the room in a freezing chill, though no spirits could be seen to have made the declaration. It came from the fabric of the air itself, repeating again, in aching earnest. “Come find what we’ve lost!”

  Chapter Two

  As the train rumbled away from the depot, heading north, Eve felt driven by something beyond her control. The spirit world was like that, a runaway train, but so too was flirtation, and she was driven by another excuse for she and the detective to be together. Alone. Without a chaperone. For an extended period of time.

  For a moment back at the park she and the detective had leaned in, so close, intimate. She wasn’t sure how she felt about their near kiss, but she wanted more time to sort it out. The detective wore a pensive, faraway look, his elegant angles turned toward patches of dappled sun blinking through trees as the train gained ground level again. Perhaps he was as dazed as she felt about what was happening.

  She and the detective had agreed to “court” on the pretense of averting their parents’ mutual pressures about finding someone to marry. A convenient ruse. Whether the courtship was a mere act anymore wasn’t something Eve dared ask.

  “You know, there’s so much…” Maggie began, taking on a thoughtful gaze as the city rolled away, opening to patches of green and less dense buildings.

  “So much what, dear?” Eve asked, accustomed to reminding a ghost to make its point. Sometimes spirits were just as distracted as a young person trying very hard not to fall in love.

  “How much there is in the city to block us out,” Maggie said. “So much noise. It’s a wonder you and the girls can ever hear us. We’re going somewhere quieter.”

  “Can you hear her now?” Eve asked the detective. “Maggie?”

  He turned away from the window, looking at Eve and then off just behind her, near to where Maggie floated but not exactly. “Bits and pieces.”

  “Take his hand, Eve; if you want him to hear, you know that will strengthen the channel,” Maggie said. Eve tried to cool her blush, but it bloomed on her cheeks regardless. “And it seems to me you want to hold his hand, so…” Maggie murmured, a draft against Eve’s ear.

  “I do not—” Eve said to Maggie through clenched teeth.

  “What? What’s wrong?” the detective asked. His brown eyes ringed with striking blue pierced her, searching.

  “Nothing,” both Eve and Maggie said quickly.

  Eve did not take his hand, and they returned to their pensiveness as the Hudson Valley came into full and glorious view. The scenes of bridges, sweeping vistas, grand mansions and dramatic tree lines in full autumnal glory a
long a glittering, wending river rendered them reverently quiet.

  It occurred to Eve after taking in the picturesque scenery that she didn’t know what had happened to Maggie in the first place. “Maggie, tell me what happened the night you disappeared. Before you show me what saved you, what threatened you? Where were you?”

  “The Prenze mansion.”

  Eve shot a wide-eyed look at the detective.

  He cocked his head to the side. “Did I just hear the name Prenze?”

  “You did,” Eve said in an undertone, careful to check her surroundings. Other passengers, in a mixture of simple business wear or more elegant finery, seemed preoccupied with the view, newspapers, or books. Caution was wise, as the Prenze clan was prominent and powerful. The patriarchs were twins, one alive and one presumed dead, and they cherished their younger sister. None had children that Eve knew of. The Prenze family had made their fortune off dubiously healthful tonics, and the family name kept circling in Eve’s precinct for reasons she hadn’t yet determined. Because of their prominence, she didn’t want any gossip to escape via eavesdroppers. She didn’t need more detractors.

  “What about them?” Eve whispered.

  “There’s something wrong in that house, with that family,” Maggie stated, caring not a whit for the passengers who could neither see nor hear her, save perhaps for one wide-eyed child in a pinafore and straw hat staring all the way across the train car, but that couldn’t be helped. “I was drawn into the mansion by a child,” Maggie continued, “who wanted me to launch something off the mantel. Turns out the box was full of postmortem photographs. Caused quite the scene.”

  In a murmur, Eve repeated what Maggie had said, realized a parallel to another case, and explained it to Horowitz.

  “Vera, another of my valuable spirit operatives, was drawn in by a similar instance and asked to do a similar thing,” Eve explained. “But in the Dupont house. The complaint filed against my department for interference regarding the Prenze family must have come from Maggie’s experience, right before she disappeared.”

  “Odd that there’s a connection with the postmortem photographs,” Horowitz mused. “That seems too specific to be coincidence.”

  “Agreed,” Eve replied before gesturing that her floating colleague continue.

  “The man of the house ushered everyone out of the room,” Maggie explained, “after I’d launched the box of photographs. Cruel, he turned to me and raised the dial of the electric lights to a blinding, painful level. I blinked out as if there were a spectral knife in those lights. I was cast into a nothingness, thrown into utter darkness. Aware, and yet lost. It was hell.”

  “How, then, did you escape?” Eve asked in a breathless murmur.

  “Why, I begged for sanctuary, and I was granted it,” the ghost replied as if that were the only sensible answer. “Bless an express line, we’re nearly here!”

  The train squealed to a stop at Tarrytown.

  “The Sanctuary is in Sleepy Hollow? Really?” Eve asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  Maggie just laughed and wafted through the train wall. Horowitz stepped into the aisle and gestured for Eve to go ahead.

  On the train platform, Eve took a moment to get her bearings. A change of light sometimes meant spirits’ incorporeal forms were hard for her sensitive eyes to see. Donning her dark glasses was a help, as too bright a light was painful. Maggie floated at the less crowded end of the platform, leading away from the crowd, gesturing to them.

  “This way,” Eve said quietly to the detective.

  “Lead on, ladies,” he said amiably.

  Descending onto a gravel path, Maggie turned away from what would have led to the village’s main thoroughfare and headed instead toward a copse of trees that were darker and denser than one would expect. They walked along a shaded, gravel lane.

  “Washington Irving knew there was something odd and important about this whole area; he just didn’t know just how spiritually charged it all is,” Maggie stated.

  The gravel gave way simply to a footpath through close pines, and they followed that for countless yards, into a pine barren where the path gave way to a spongy floor of brown needles.

  “Are we…trespassing?” Eve asked the ghost hesitantly.

  “No, this is public land, an extension of a park along the riverside; it’s just that this specific parcel of land hasn’t been cleared.”

  They mounted a small incline and came to a place where pines and beech trees, intermixed in a strange assortment of dark and luminous barks, growing in patterns that weren’t usually so intermingled, opened to a little circle. A pile of stones sported tendrils of ivy across its cairn, and from this pyramid rose one stone-hewn side of a Gothic arch the size of an average person.

  It didn’t appear ancient or worn but was instead modern masonry, the ghost of a window whose chapel had never been finished beyond these initial stones.

  “What’s this?” Eve asked, gesturing to the unfinished monument.

  “It’s one of the living world’s few anchors to Sanctuary,” Maggie explained. “I was told a devout young Episcopalian woman wanted to build a chapel here for travelers’ rest and meditation. She had the support of local deacons but was foiled by her family after these first stones were set. Nothing else was done.

  “The church owned this part of the land and asked that it be added as a quiet addendum to the park,” the spirit continued, “to honor the young woman’s idea. It’s said the trees grew immediately thicker and denser, as if to hide this sliver of sacred stones. The spirits say that woman’s heart created a doorway even she couldn’t have known would open and that the unnamed woman lives still, perhaps never knowing the seed her heart planted. It’s the thinnest part of the veil between mortal and spirit world. It’s here where I tumbled out when I came through, when I asked the Sanctuary to return.”

  Eve turned and shared with the detective the things he hadn’t picked up on his own.

  “But you didn’t enter Sanctuary here,” Horowitz clarified. “You were ejected here?”

  “Correct.” Maggie nodded. “After the lights blinded me in the Prenze mansion, when I regained a sense of myself in the darkness, I could hear a few other whimpering souls but nothing else. I was there what may have been hours, but it felt like days.”

  “It was nearly a month,” Eve reminded her.

  The spirit wafted between pine branches that rustled in an autumn breeze as she related her trauma and in turn Eve shared with the detective; while it was clear from the turn of his head and the focus of his eyes he was picking up a few words, it wasn’t a connected narrative for him as it was for Eve.

  “I prayed and prayed, so very hard!” Maggie pressed her luminous hands together. “I tried reaching out to you, Eve, to the strong bond all our séances have built. I felt you close to me a few times, as I thought you and the girls might be reaching out for me too—”

  “We were, please believe us, Maggie,” Eve assured. “We tried everything to reach you. I think I did, once, in that darkness—a painful automatic writing session. But it wasn’t enough to break you out of that limbo. I even went into the depths of the Corridors for you—”

  “I know, dear friend.” Maggie floated close to pass a cold hand over Eve’s warm cheek. “You went too deeply toward death for your health, but I managed to shove you out toward life again, and that’s thanks to what I learned in the Sanctuary.”

  Eve circled the stone arch as Maggie explained the place. “Sanctuary is connected to the Corridors between life and death, but it maintains separate autonomy. It’s quite complicated. Sanctuary isn’t a space between life and death like the Corridors are; Sanctuary is a space permanently of and for death. It was made for the dead by the dead, as a refuge for those not ready to go on to eternal rest but needing a place to ‘live’ and to belong—a place of respite for spirits who have pending work with the living b
ut need a place to recuperate. The ways of the spirit world are complex and mysterious, even for you who deal with us daily. Our realms are not like those of the living, and Sanctuary is an even different place still.”

  “Do we, then, have permission to enter?” Eve asked warily.

  Maggie shook her head firmly. “No, you do not. There are places the living aren’t welcome. But you need to see this place, in case anyone else goes missing or if something strange from the spirit world can’t be reconciled. You might be able to come and ask for help from here, from the outside. One of the Sisters who maintain the Sanctuary might come and answer. They do listen. Especially here.”

  “The Sisters?” Eve raised an eyebrow. Maggie gestured to the half-finished arch before them.

  “It’s like an abbey, the Sanctuary,” Maggie explained, and Eve repeated her words quietly for the detective’s sake. “It’s maintained by Sisters, but its votaries and attendants come from all varieties of cloth and belief, all of them spirits. It was founded centuries ago when like-minded ghosts needed a cloistered, safe place to recover from trauma.”

  “By whom? Who founded it?”

  “None of us know, exactly. Her Holiness is hundreds of years old. It’s said she built the Sanctuary with her own spiritual gifts and since then it tethers to places like this…a place that a noble, innocent heart begged to be made a sacred place of peace.”

  Maggie reached out to touch the stone arch, this uncanny portal. A tiny piece of sandstone tumbled down the arch’s slope and onto the leaves below, moved by the phantom caress. Eve wondered how many stones were worn smooth not by time but by the gentle brush of spirits.

  “Some have guesses as to Her Holiness’s identity,” Maggie continued, “such as an early saint or reformer, but no one is certain. She carries music with her like magical spells, old, eerie—the stuff of divine mystery. She spoke to me through light. I did not see her; no one can see past her Living Light, as it is known. But I explained what our Ghost Precinct does, and I was granted leave and permission to tell you this. I was also asked to give you a warning.”