The Night Tourist (8 page)

As soon as they returned to the gray, stone passageways of the underground, Jack realized that all the dancing had made him tired. But another feeling overtook him as well: a deep, visceral sadness. The gloom affected him so much that he almost didn’t want to find Edna, but instead rush back out of the underworld to the sunlight and his dad.

Euri spurred him on. “It’s just mourning sickness,” she explained. “We all feel it. Coming back in at dawn is a little like dying all over again. But this is your chance to find your mom! You may not find another golden bough again.”

Jack nodded, but as he followed her through passageway after passageway, he was tempted to retrace his way back to the stairs and track 61. His father, by this time, would be frantic.

They reached a metal door with a lopsided plaque that said
RECORDS DIVISION
, and Euri knocked on it. “Yes?” said a familiar voice.

With a loud creak, the door opened, and Edna motioned them inside. She looked completely different from the night before. Her red hair was tucked away in a hairnet, and though she was still wearing her dressing gown, a rusty metal pin was fastened to the lapel, which read,
EDNA GAMMON, RECORDS DIVISION. PLEASED TO HELP YOU
.

“What do you want?” she asked.

Jack smiled, but she stared back at him as if she’d never seen him before. Euri cut in. “We want to check the records for eight years ago. We’re looking for an Anastasia . . . What’s your mom’s last name?” she asked, turning to Jack.

“Perdu,” he said. “Anastasia Perdu.”

Edna turned to a file cabinet covered in cobwebs, opened a drawer, and pulled out a thick leather-bound book. “Perdu,” she repeated flipping through it. “Perdu. P—E—

“Here we go, the P-E’s.” She slammed the book onto her desk. Jack noticed that next to some ghosts’ names was a stamp depicting an elegant bridge. “What’s that mean?” he asked her.

“Moved on,” said Edna flatly.

Jack gave Euri a worried look, but she squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry. There’s a good chance she’s still here. And, look”—Euri pointed to a column titled
Favorite Haunts
—“as long as she’s still here, it’ll be easy for us to find her.”

“‘Peck,’” Edna droned, scanning the page with her finger.

Mrs. Peck had no bridge next to her name. Jack glanced at her favorite haunts: Bergdorf ’s shoe department and the Chanel counter at Bendel’s.

“‘Pellberg.’”

Mr. Pellberg haunted Katz’s Deli and the chess tables in Washington Square Park. Or at least, he used to, because he had a bridge next to his name.

“‘Pentaglio.’”

Mr. Pentaglio had no bridge and spent his nights at the Most Precious Blood Roman Catholic Church.

“‘Pentokoglopolus.’”

“Now, there’s a name,” Euri said with admiration.

“There it is!” Jack cried, pointing over Edna’s shoulder. “‘Perdu, Anastasia.’That’s her! And she has no bridge!” Then his fingers started to tingle as he realized something else. Unlike for everyone else on the page, there was nothing written in her
Favorite Haunts
column. The only mark was an asterisk. “What’s that for?” he asked.

But before he could even point to it, Edna slammed the book shut and hastily stuffed it back into the file.

“Wait! Did you see that?” he asked Euri. “She had an asterisk. It must mean something.”

He pulled at Edna’s sleeve. “What does it mean?” When she turned back to him, he noticed her face was ashen. “Leave,” she said to him, first softly then louder.

“Leave! It’s against the order of nature.”

Even Euri looked taken aback. “What is?”

But Edna just gave them a shove out the door. “The office is closed!” she said. Then, for the second time in twenty-four hours, she slammed the door in their faces. The lights in her office switched off. A chain rattled across the door followed by the thump of a dead bolt.

“What are we going to do now?” Jack asked.

He looked at Euri. She was pacing back and forth. “‘Against the order of nature,’” she mumbled under her breath. “People sometimes say that about ...”

She started and looked up at Jack.

“What?”

The lightest tinge of red spread across her face. “Suicide.”

“My mom didn’t commit suicide!”

Euri remained quiet. The silence seemed like another accusation. “She didn’t!” he repeated. “There was a high wind, and a scaffold fell on her!”

“I wasn’t saying she did, okay!” Euri hissed. “I’ve seen ...oh never mind. The asterisk must mean something else. Whatever it is, it doesn’t happen much.”

“Maybe my mom’s not here....”

“She didn’t have a bridge,” Euri interrupted. “So she hasn’t moved on. That’s one thing we know for sure.”

“But maybe she’s still alive?”

Euri shook her head. “Don’t kid yourself. Why would she be in the ledger?”

Jack tried not to show his disappointment. “How are we going to find her now?”

“We’ll find a way,” she said. “Just give me a little time to think. She’s got to be here somewhere.”

He let Euri take his hand and lead him deeper into the tunnels. As he followed her, he wondered why she was so anxious to help him. But before he could ask, she said, “Tell me about the sun.”

“The sun?”

“Yeah, remind me what it feels like. I haven’t seen it in seven years.”

Jack shrugged. “Warm, I guess.”

“What else?”

Jack closed his eyes and tried to think. It was hard describing something so familiar. “At Yale, on sunny spring days, students study on blankets in the college courtyards. They take off their shoes.”

“Just like people do in Central Park. And they put their bare feet in the grass,” Euri said with a sigh.

A few minutes later, she directed Jack to a rickety cot in the corner of a small room. “It’s time to rest. We’re in an old electrical control room. No one will find you here.”

“Are you going to sleep too?” Jack asked. He took off his backpack, leaned back on the cot, and stifled a yawn. Thinking about the sun had made him tired.

“The dead don’t sleep. But I’ll wake you in the evening. I think I know a place we can go where they know about unnatural things.”

Just before dusk, Euri woke Jack and led him through a crowded tunnel toward a different set of pipes. As he was funneled through them, Jack felt as if he’d been traveling through fountains his entire life—or death. The sensation of being squeezed through the pipes even felt good, like stretching out his muscles after a long sleep. Once again his fingers lost contact with Euri’s, but just for a moment. Then her hand clasped around his and they shot into the sky beside a tower of white lights. As they slowed down, Jack realized that the tower of lights was an enormous Christmas tree, at least eighty feet tall, perched above a sunken terrace. He remembered his parents taking him here long ago. “Is this Rockefeller Center?” he asked.

Euri nodded and pointed down at a gold-leaf statue of a flying Prometheus frosted with snow, suspended over a backlit fountain. In front of it was a skating rink, where living skaters stumbled and spun, oblivious to the glowing spout of ghosts that emerged from the fountain behind them. “That’s the Prometheus fountain,” she said. “It’s a popular scenic route when the tree is up.”

Again, he felt the drop in his stomach as Euri jetted up into the sky. “We can’t go too early,” she said. “The type of ghosts we want to talk to won’t be there till late at night. I can show you around more in the meantime.”

As they flew over the city, Jack realized for the first time since he had arrived in New York that he had a sense of where he was. He recognized Fifth Avenue with its fancy shops and wide boulevard, then Grand Central Terminal with its statue of the Greek god Hermes, the messenger, on top. Just south of the terminal, he recognized another familiar building. “Hold it,” he said to Euri. “That’s where Dr. Lyons’s office is.” Jack explained about his visit to the doctor, how he had found his golden bough there, and the photo that the doctor had taken of him. “It was strange. That was pretty much the entire exam.”

Euri listened attentively. “Did you ever see the photo?”

Jack shook his head. Euri dove straight toward one of the building’s windows. “Well, let’s take a look, then.”

Instinctively, Jack closed his eyes as they passed through the glass and floated into an office where a man in a rumpled suit was shouting into a phone, “I said five hundred shares, not fifty!”

“I think it’s a few floors up,” Jack said.

They floated up into another office, where a weary-looking young woman sat typing at a desk. “‘The Numismatic Society of Greater New York devotes Volume MCCXII of our newsletter to the 1943 zinc-coated steel cent,’” she read aloud.

“Not this floor,” said Jack.

They rose above the young woman’s head and into a small office lined with leather-bound antique books and lit up by a dozen small candles. Jack squeezed Euri’s hand. Dr. Lyons sat at his desk, his hands on a Ouija board indicator, and a stack of death certificates next to him. A red-haired ghost in a floor-length dress sat across from him, her hands also on the indicator. Dr. Lyons squinted down at one of the death certificates. “Are you Sally McGreevy?” he asked.

The ghost giggled and moved the indicator over the Ouija board to the letters
S-A-T-A-N
.

“Oh, please,” said Euri. “That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

The red-haired ghost swung around and looked nervously at Jack and Euri. “You’re not going to tell, are you? I’m just having some fun.”

“Now, now,” said Dr. Lyons. “We have to be honest with each other. I’m looking for a boy named Jack. Have you seen him?”

The red-haired ghost began to move the indicator toward the word
N-O
when Euri yanked her from the seat. “Hey, what are you doing?” the ghost shouted.

“Sorry,” said Jack as Euri took her place. “But we have business here.”

The red-haired ghost stomped her foot and then flew out the window. Euri slid the indicator toward the word
Y-E-S
.

Dr. Lyons leaned closer to the board. “Why should I believe you?”

“Tell him I took his subway token,” Jack said.

“You can tell him yourself,” Euri said. She stood up and gave Jack her seat.

He moved the indicator swiftly around the board.
T-O-O-K S-U-B-W-A-Y T-O-K-E-N
.

“That’s true,” said Dr. Lyons. “One of them is missing.”
W-H-E-R-E J-A-C-K-S P-H-O-T-O
, Jack spelled. “Who are you?” Dr. Lyons asked. “And is Jack okay?”

YES T-E-L-L H-I-S D-A-D W-H-E-R-E P-H-O-T-O
.

Dr. Lyons opened up the drawer and took out the photo. He placed it on the Ouija board. Euri laughed. “Either you’re not very photogenic or that camera is lousy.”

Jack peered down at himself. His hair was white, his body translucent—he was completely overexposed. But then he noticed something strange. “Look,” he said, pointing to the desk and couch in the background. “I’m the only thing that’s overexposed. Everything else looks normal.”

Euri stopped smiling. “That’s weird.”

Jack turned back to the Ouija board.
W-H-A-T-S W-R-O-N-G
, he spelled. But before he could finish, the red-haired ghost blew back through the window. “They’re over here,” she cried. “Just like I found them. Talking with the living!” The candles in the room blew out as an enormous guard tumbled through the window.

“Come on!” said Euri. Jack knocked the indicator off the board as she yanked him through the floor and into the Numismatic Society office. Then she pulled him through the window, and they flew away at top speed.

“That tattletale,” said Euri, once they were a safe distance away from Dr. Lyons’s building. “If I ever see her again ...”

But Jack wasn’t thinking about the red-haired ghost. “Are you sure I’m not dead?” he asked. “The photo ...”

“If you were dead how could you have had a whole conversation with Dr. Lyons after you arrived in New York?” Euri interrupted. “He saw you, right?”

“Yes, but he’s clearly no ordinary doctor....”

“He’s a doctor of the paranormal,” Euri interrupted. “He can communicate with the dead through the occult, but he obviously doesn’t see them. So if he saw you before, you’re alive. And you went to Grand Central afterward and other living people saw you, right?”

Jack thought about the woman who asked him if he wanted to listen at the whispering gallery, and nodded.

“Then you’re not dead,” Euri concluded. “Forget about the photo. Probably something was just wrong with the camera. I’ll show you more of the city till it’s late enough to find the sort of ghosts who might know about that asterisk.”

They flew across town and through the walls of a round coliseum-like building. “Madison Square Garden,” Euri announced as they emerged into a brightly lit stadium. Men in white jerseys and green jerseys ran up and down a shiny basketball court, their rubber sneakers squeaking on the wood as they shifted direction with the referee’s whistle. On ascending tiers of bleachers sat hundreds of living fans, and above their heads, as high up as the JumboTron, floated hundreds more dead ones. Jack didn’t watch a lot of basketball but he recognized the players in white. “Those are the Knicks?”

Euri nodded. “And those are the former Knicks,” she said, pointing to several tall ghosts in kneesocks and outdated jerseys who flew swiftly alongside the hometown players, clamoring for the ball. “Come on, let’s get a seat.”

Jack expected her to float up above the living fans, but instead she whizzed over the players’ heads and perched atop one of the backboards. Jack looked around, but before he could figure out whether anyone minded them being there, a stampede of players rushed toward them, and a tangle of arms shot into the air. Then the ball whooshed through the net and the backboard trembled. The living and dead fans began to roar as the whole stadium shook. Jack shouted along with the rest of the crowd. “This is amazing!” he said to Euri as the roar died down and the players raced to the other end of the court. Euri smiled, looking pleased. “Best seats in the house.”

After the Knicks game was over, as on the previous night, Euri kept them on an exhausting itinerary: the Apollo theater in Harlem, where they listened to the living and the dead’s comedy routines; FAO Schwarz, where they raced around the darkened store in miniconvertibles until Jack crashed into a giant stuffed zebra; Tiffany’s, where they floated through the locked vault of an entrance, and even Jack was impressed by the world’s largest diamond.

Finally, in the early morning hours, they sped west toward Seventh Avenue. Times Square burst into technicolor bloom, then in a flash it was gone. The buildings began to get smaller, the streets darker. Little restaurants and bars glowed warmly below. At the green-and-white sign for Commerce Street they began to descend. It was quieter here. Only a few people were out, shivering as they walked their dogs or hurried home from a night on the town. Steam billowed up from a manhole. Euri turned onto a small street. No one, living or dead, was on it.

“Damn,” Euri said, yanking Jack back the way they’d come. “This is the hardest place to find.”

After a few steps she stopped. “There it is,” she said, pointing to a small, arched door.

“There what is?” Jack asked. The door didn’t even have a sign, just the number 86.

“Chumley’s,” said Euri, pulling him through the door.