“What do you mean?”
“Sleep is a little slice of death. And you’ve already had a big slice, haven’t you? All the cake you’ll ever need.”
“You kind of suck at metaphors,” I said.
The old man’s eyes flashed in the darkness. “English may not be my first language, but I’m good at many other things, and I’ve always wanted an apprentice. I can show you my tricks. All it will cost you is that little girl.”
I wanted to scream at him then, but the anger I should have felt was missing. The cold had a firm grip on my muscles, and the constant wind seemed to strip my emotions away.
My lips were tingling, though, a flicker of heat in all that dark.
“No thanks,” I said.
The old man’s fingers tugged at the corners of his pockets, which opened wider and wider. Somehow they were darker than the basement itself, depthless and hungry.
“Don’t you want to see what’s in my pockets?”
Finally I felt a trickle of fear, and my muscles jolted to life. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the knife. “Not even slightly.”
He looked disappointed. “A knife? How absurd. There’s no need for violence, my dear. I have no interest in anyone as lively as you.”
“Then leave me and my friend alone.”
“That little ghost is not your friend. They aren’t really people, you know.”
I didn’t want to hear this, and yet I asked, “Then what are they?”
“They’re loose threads of memory, stories that tell themselves. And if you know how, you can weave the most beautiful things from them.” He stroked his pockets with his palms. “Are you sure you don’t want to see?”
The horrible thing is, part of me wanted to look. Part of me wanted to learn all the secrets of the afterworld, no matter how terrible they were. But even listening to him felt like a betrayal of Mindy. I shook my head.
“There are lots of other tricks I can teach you. Nothing to be squeamish about.”
“Like what?” I asked.
His smile returned. He knew that my curiosity was hooked. “How to use a ghost’s breath to keep yourself warm here in the river. How to make the pestering ones fade. How to slice out the finest memories for yourself. You can taste the best bite of birthday cake your little friend up there ever had. Or feel what it was like to listen to her favorite bedtime story, all snuggled up in warm covers.”
“Are you serious? Those are your nonsqueamish tricks?”
“I’m as serious as death.” He took another step toward me. “You don’t know what you’re missing, girl.”
My hand tightened on the knife handle. Its metal flashed in the darkness. “Stay away from me.”
“I’m offering you wonders.” He was still drifting toward me. “Don’t insult me in return.”
“Stay away from me!” I took a step backward, and something cold and damp brushed against my spine, like wet leaves.
“What’s that behind you?” asked the old man very gently.
I wanted to turn around, but I was frozen, my fingers tight around the knife handle. A breath of a whisper played across the back of my neck, as if the wind had spoken.
But then something shifted in the air, the darkness growing warm around us. My tingling lips began to burn, and whatever had been behind me was suddenly gone.
I smiled and let the knife slide back into my pocket. “You’d better go. My friend is coming.”
“Your little friend?” The old man looked up greedily, smoothing his pockets with pale hands.
“This one’s too old for you.”
The man’s smile faded.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “I thought you liked cryptic bullshit.”
“You’re becoming annoying, my dear.”
“Annoying? Like being woken up in the middle of the night?” My anger was bubbling up from where the cold had tamped it down. “Like noises under your bed? Like old men who chase little girls?”
All false politeness had left his expression. His face was as cold as marble. “You should show some respect.”
I just smiled and looked past him. A wave of heat was sweeping through the darkness, along with a sharp and smoky scent. From the darkness Yamaraj strode toward us, sparks coiling around his feet, like someone walking through embers. The pinpricks of light scattered in the wind.
It was a magnificent sight, but the old man didn’t cower. He turned back to me a moment, his expression curious.
“You have interesting friends,” he said, and shoved his hands back into his pockets and spat on the ground in front of him. Then he stepped forward and seemed to fall into the earth, disappearing like a snuffed candle.
I stood there, breathing hard.
Yamaraj raised a hand, which flared hot and white. The light scattered the darkness of the basement, confirming that the old man was gone. At last I saw where we were standing, on a gray plain that shone like damp earth, stretching away endless and empty. Above us, where my bedroom floor should have been, loomed an empty sky. A column of smoke rose up from Yamaraj’s glowing hand, billowing wider as it climbed, bent into an arc by the constant wind.
He looked about carefully, and then dropped his hand. We were plunged again into a darkness that shimmered with shapes burned into my vision.
“Are you okay, Lizzie?” came his voice.
Even as I nodded, my hands began to shake. The other psychopomp might have looked like an old man in a patched suit, but something monstrous had lurked beneath his pale skin. I could still smell it in the sweet, heavy air around us.
“What did he want?” Yamaraj asked. I couldn’t blink away the fiery afterimages in my vision, but I could feel him coming closer.
“He wasn’t after me,” I said. The words calmed me a little.
Yamaraj was close now, warming the air around us, which only reminded me how cold I’d been a minute before.
“Except he wanted to show me something,” I said. “Something made from ghosts, I think.”
“But you didn’t look?” Yamaraj’s gaze held mine. His brown eyes cut through the darkness, and through my fear.
“No. I didn’t.”
His gaze softened. “Good. Some of us collect things, pieces of lives. Things you can’t unsee.”
A shudder went through my body then, a mix of leftover anger and fear. A chill clung to me, something I couldn’t shake. Part of me wanted to throw my arms around Yamaraj’s warmth, but I didn’t want to seem pathetic. Besides, last time just touching him had thrown me back into reality.
This wasn’t at all how I’d imagined things going when we met again. I’d wanted to impress Yamaraj with everything I’d figured out on my own, but here I was, cold and scared and dressed like a slob.
“Thank you for coming,” I said.
“Of course.” He looked around. “But how did you get here?”
“You mean . . . down into the river? That old man followed me home, I guess, from this ghost building we were exploring. And he was under my floor, and driving me crazy. I had to face him.”
“You were exploring.” A half smile, unintended and beautiful, played on Yamaraj’s lips. He was worried for me, but also impressed.
I couldn’t take my eyes from him. I’d pictured Yamaraj a thousand times in the last week, and now my memories were fitting themselves into the sharper details of reality. That hitch in his eyebrows, like the bend of a boomerang. The hard line of his jaw, and the way his dark hair curled behind one ear, but had been tugged free from the other by the wind.
“Did you say we?” he asked.
“Yeah, my friend. She’s this ghost that lives with me.”
His smile faded now. “Your friend? Ghosts can be hard to get rid of, Lizzie, once you let them into your life.”
“She was already in my life. She was my mom’s best friend a long time ago, and she’s been around me since I was born. She’s teaching me things.”
“What things, Lizzie?”
“How to see ghost buildings. How to walk inside them.” I remembered the old man’s voice singing in the school hallway, and shivered. “What was he? A psychopomp, like you and me, right?”
“He’s not like you and me.” Yamaraj turned away from me, his gaze scanning the darkness. “He’s something heartless and empty.”
“He said that ghosts aren’t people.”
“Some of us see the dead that way—as objects, as toys.” Yamaraj sighed. “But some people see the living that way too.”
“Great, psychopomps and psychopaths.”
He didn’t answer.
The heat Yamaraj had brought with him seemed to be fading, and I crossed my arms over my chest against the cold. Suddenly the reality of everything I’d seen that night was crashing down on me.
At least now I knew why Mindy was so afraid of psychopomps. The afterlife had a food chain, and we were higher on it than ghosts.
“The old man wanted to teach me things,” I said.
“There are things you don’t want to know.”
I held Yamaraj’s eyes for a moment. The problem was, I wanted to know everything, the good and the bad. Maybe being the old man’s apprentice wasn’t for me, but this was a whole new world, and I needed to explore it.
“So you teach me,” I said
“You’re already changing so quickly, Lizzie. I don’t want to make it happen faster.”
I gestured out into the formless darkness. “Because that’s worse than stumbling around down here, not knowing anything?”
There it was again, the look of longing I’d seen on his face in the airport. However worried he was about me, Yamaraj wanted to keep this connection between us. His lips parted once, then pressed together again.
Finally he said, “What do you want to know?”
It took a moment to answer. I wanted to know about ghosts, about the old man in the patched coat, about everything I’d seen. I wanted to know how Yamaraj had brought light and fire with him in the darkness, and why his touch threw me from the gray world back into reality.
But with that vast emptiness surrounding us, I asked a simpler question. “Where are we?”
“The River Vaitarna. It’s the boundary between the world above and the one below.”
“A river, like the Styx.”
“Everything old has lots of names.” He looked up at the empty sky. “The overworld is up there, full of the living and wandering ghosts. Below us is the underworld, where the dead reside. The river is the oil between the two.”
I looked around. “It doesn’t seem like a river. I mean, where’s the water?”
“We’re in it.”
As if to reinforce Yamaraj’s point, the wind whipped up, like an eddying current around us. It pressed his black silk shirt against his abdomen, and for a moment I could see every cord of muscles there.
I pushed my hair out of my eyes. “Okay, next question. Where are you from?”
“A small village, by a large sea.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s a little vague, since you’re supposed to be teaching me. You’re from India, right?”
“I suppose. But that was before there was an India.”
I nodded slowly, fairly certain that India had been around for a long, long time. “How old are you?”
“I was fourteen when I crossed over.” His smile admitted that he was playing games with my questions.
“You look older than that. Maybe seventeen?”
“Maybe.”
At first he didn’t say anything more, and we had a little staring contest there in the darkness. But I liked staring at him, and I won.
“This is the afterworld, Lizzie. We’re like ghosts, and ghosts don’t get tired or hungry. They don’t get older, either.”