Go on, Ethan. See for yourself.”
I didn’t look back at my mom when I reached for the doorknob.
Even though she was telling me to go, I was still uneasy. I didn’t know what to expect. I could
see the painted wood of the door, and I could feel the smooth iron of the handle, but I had no way
of knowing if Cotton Bend was on the other side.
Lena. Think about Lena. About home. This is the only way.
Still.
This wasn’t Gatlin anymore. Who knew what was behind that door? It could be anything.
I stared down at the knob, remembering what the Caster Tunnels had taught me about doors
and Doorwells.
And portals.
And seams.
This door might look normal enough—any Doorwell looked pretty much like the next—but that
didn’t mean it was. Like the Temporis Porta. You never knew where you were going to end up. I’d
learned that the hard way.
Quit stalling, Wate.
Get on with it.
What are you, chicken? What do you have to lose now?
I closed my eyes and turned the knob. When I opened them, I wasn’t staring at my street—not
even close.
I found myself on my front porch in the middle of His Garden of Perpetual Peace, Gatlin’s
cemetery. Right in the middle of my mother’s plot.
The cultivated lawns stretched out in front of me, but instead of headstones and mausoleums
decorated with plastic cherubs and fawns, the graveyard was full of houses. I realized I was
looking at the homes of the people buried in the cemetery, if that’s even where I was. Old Agnes
Pritchard’s Victorian was planted right where her plot should have been, with the same yellow
shutters and crooked rosebushes that hung over the walkway. Her house wasn’t on Cotton Bend,
but her little rectangle of grass in Perpetual Peace was directly across from my mom’s plot—the
spot where Wate’s Landing was sitting now.
Agnes’ house looked almost exactly as it had in Gatlin, except her red front door was gone. In
its place was her weathered cement headstone.
AGNES WILSON PRITCHARD BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER & GRANDMOTHER MAY SHE
SLEEP WITH THE ANGELS
The words were still etched into the stone, which fit perfectly into the painted white
doorframe. It was the same at every house as far as I could see—from Darla Eaton’s restored
Federal to the peeling paint of Clayton Weatherton’s place. All the doors were missing, replaced by
the gravestones of the dearly departed.
I turned around slowly, hoping to see my own white door with the haint blue trim. But instead I
was staring at my mother’s headstone.
LILA EVERS WATE BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER SCIENTIAE CUSTOS
Above her name, I saw the Celtic symbol of Awen—three lines converging like rays of light—
carved into the stone. Aside from being large enough to fill the doorway, the headstone was the
same. Every nicked edge, every faded crack. I ran my hand over the face of it, feeling the letters
beneath my fingers.
My mom’s headstone.
Because she was dead. I was dead. And I was pretty sure I had just stepped out of her grave.
That’s when I started to lose it. I mean, can you blame a guy? The situation was a little
overwhelming. There’s not much you can do to prepare for something like that.
I pushed on the gravestone, pounding on it as hard as I could until I felt the stone give way,
and I stepped back inside my house—slamming the door behind me.
I stood against the door, breathing in as much air as I could. My front hall looked exactly the
same as it had a moment ago.
My mom looked up at me from the front stairs. She had just opened The Divine Comedy; I
could tell by the way she was still holding her sock bookmark in one hand. It was almost like she
was waiting for me.
“Ethan? Changed your mind?”
“Mom. It’s a graveyard. Out there.”
“It is.”
“And we’re—” The opposite of alive. It was just starting to sink in.
“We are.” She smiled at me because there wasn’t really anything else she could say. “You
stand there as long as you need to.” She looked back down at her book and flipped a page. “Dante
agrees. Take your time. It is only”—she flipped a page—“ ‘la notte che le cose ci nasconde.’ ”
“What?”
“ ‘The night that hides things from us.’ ”
I stared at her as she continued to read. Then, seeing as there weren’t that many options, I
pulled the door open and stepped out.
It took me a while to take it all in, the way it takes your eyes a while to adjust to sunlight. As it turns
out, the Otherworld was just that—an “other world”—a Gatlin right in the middle of the cemetery,
where the dead folks in town were having their own version of All Souls Day. Except it seemed like
this one lasted a lot longer than a day.
I stepped off my porch and onto the grass just to be sure it was really there. Amma’s
rosebushes were planted where they had always been, but they were blooming again, safe from the
record-breaking heat that had killed them when it hit town. I wondered if they were blooming in the
real Gatlin, too.
I hoped so.
If the Lilum kept her promise, they were. I believed she did. The Lilum wasn’t Light or Dark,
right or wrong. She was truth and balance in their purest forms. I didn’t think she was capable of
lying, or she would’ve sugarcoated the truth for me a little. Sometimes I wished she would have.
I found myself wandering across the freshly trimmed lawns, weaving between the familiar
houses scattered throughout the cemetery like a tornado had lifted them right out of Gatlin and
dropped them here. And not just houses—there were people here, too.
I tried heading toward Main Street, instinctively looking for Route 9. I guess I wanted to hike
to the crossroads, where I could take a left up the road to Ravenwood. But the Otherworld didn’t
work that way, and every time I reached the end of the rows of graveyard plots, I found myself
back where I started. The graveyard just kept going in circles. I couldn’t get out.
That’s when I realized I needed to stop thinking in terms of streets and start thinking in terms
of graves and plots and crypts.
If I was going to find my way back to Gatlin, I wasn’t going to walk there. Not on any kind of
Route 9. That was pretty clear.
What had my mom said? You imagine where you want to go, and then you just go. Was that
really all that was standing between Lena and me? My imagination?
I closed my eyes.
L—
“Whatcha doin’ there, boy?” Miss Winifred looked up from sweeping her porch a few houses
away. She was in the pink-flowered housecoat she wore most days back when she was alive.
When we were alive.
I stared. “Nothing. Ma’am.”
Her headstone was behind her, a magnolia tree etched above her name and underneath the word
Sacred. There were a lot of those around here, magnolias. I guess the magnolia carvings were the
red doors of the Otherworld. You were nobody without one.
Miss Winifred noticed me staring and stopped sweeping for a second. She sniffed. “Well, get
on with it, then.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I could feel my face turning red. I knew I wouldn’t be able to imagine myself
anywhere else with those sharp old eyes on me.
Turns out, even in the streets of the Otherworld, Gatlin was no place for the imagination.
“And stay off my lawn, Ethan. You’ll trample my begonias,” she added. That was all. As if I
had wandered onto her property back home.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Miss Winifred nodded and went back to sweeping her porch like it was just another sunny day
on Old Oak Road, where her house was sitting right now back in town.
But I couldn’t let Miss Winifred stop me.
I tried the old concrete bench at the end of our row of plots. I tried the shadowy place behind
the hedges along the edge of Perpetual Peace. I even tried sitting with my back up against the railing
of our own plot for a while.
I was no closer to imagining my way to Gatlin than I was to imagining myself back into the
grave. Every time I closed my eyes, I got this spirit-killing, bone-crushing fear that I was dead in the
ground. That I was gone and that I would never be anywhere again, except at the bottom of a water
tower.
Not back home.
Not with Lena.
Finally, I gave up. There had to be another way.
If I wanted to get back to Gatlin, there was someone who just might know how.
Someone who made it her business to know everything about everyone and, for about the last
hundred years, always had.
I knew where I needed to go.
I followed the path down to the oldest section of the graveyard. Some part of me was afraid I was
going to see the blackened edges where the fire had burned through the roof and Aunt Prue’s
bedroom. But I didn’t need to worry. When I saw it, the house was exactly the way it looked when
I was a kid. The porch swing was rattling and swaying gently in the breeze, a glass of lemonade
sitting on the table beside it. Just how I remembered it.
The door was carved out of good Southern blue granite; Amma had spent hours choosing it
herself. “A woman as right as your aunt deserves the right marker,” Amma had said. “And anyhow,
if she isn’t happy, I’ll never hear the end a it.” Both were probably true. At the top of the
gravestone, a delicate angel with outstretched hands was holding a compass. I was willing to bet
there wasn’t another angel in all of Perpetual Peace, or maybe any cemetery in the South, that was
holding a compass. Carved angels in the Gatlin graveyard held on to every kind of flower, and some
even held on to the gravestones like they were life vests. None held a compass—never a compass.
But for a woman who had spent her life secretly mapping the Caster Tunnels, it was right.
Under the angel was an inscription:
PRUDENCE JANE STATHAM THE BELLE OF THE BALL
Aunt Prue had picked out the inscription herself. Her note said she wanted another “e” on
Ball—making it Balle, which wasn’t even a word. According to Aunt Prue, it sounded more
French that way. But my dad made the point that Aunt Prue, being a patriot, shouldn’t have minded
having her last words written out in plain old Southern American English. I wasn’t so sure, but I
also wasn’t about to enter into that particular conversation. It was just one part of the extensive
instructions she’d left for her own funeral, along with a guest list that required a bouncer at the
church.
Still, it made me smile just looking at it.
Before I even had the chance to knock, I heard the sound of dogs yipping, and the heavy front
door swung open. Aunt Prue was standing in the doorway, her hair still in pink plastic curlers, one
hand on her hip. There were three Yorkshire terriers weaving around her legs—the first three
Harlon Jameses.
“Well, it’s ’bout time.” Aunt Prue grabbed me by the ear quicker than I had ever seen her move
when she was alive, and yanked me into the house. “You were always stubborn, Ethan. But what
you did this time ain’t right. I don’t know what in the Good Lord’s Myst’ry got inta you, but I’ve
got a mind ta send you out front ta get me a switch.” It was a charming custom from Aunt Prue’s
day, to let a kid pick the switch you planned to whip them with. But I knew as well as Aunt Prue
did that she would never hit me. If she was going to, she would have already done it years ago.
She was still twisting my ear, and I had to bend down because she was only half my height.
The whole posse of Harlon Jameses were still yipping, trailing after us as she dragged me toward
the kitchen. “I didn’t have a choice, Aunt Prue. Everyone I loved was going to die.”
“You don’t have ta tell me. I watched the whole thing, and I was wearin’ my good spectacles!”
She sniffed. “And ta think, folks used ta say I was the mell-o-dramatic one!”
I tried not to laugh. “You need your glasses here?”
“Just used ta them, I guess. Feel nekkid without ’em now. Hadn’t figured on that.” She
stopped walking and pointed a bony finger at me. “Don’t you try changin’ the subject. This time
you’ve made a bigger mess than a blind housepainter.”
“Prudence Jane, why don’t you stop hollerin’ at that boy?” An old man’s voice called from the
other room. “What’s done is done.”
Aunt Prue pulled me back into the hall, without loosening her grip on my ear. “Don’t you tell
me what ta do, Harlon Turner!”
“Turner? Wasn’t that—” As she yanked me into the living room, I found myself face to face
with not one but all five of Aunt Prue’s husbands.
Sure enough, the three younger ones—most likely her first three husbands—were eating corn
nuts and playing cards, the sleeves of their white button-down shirts rolled up to the elbows. The
fourth one was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper. He looked up and acknowledged me
with a nod, shoving the little white bowl toward me. “Car nut?”
I shook my head.
I actually remembered Aunt Prue’s fifth husband, Harlon—the one Aunt Prue had named all her
dogs after. When I was a kid, he used to carry around sour lemon hard candy in his pocket, and
he’d sneak me a couple during church. I ate them, too, lint and all. There was no telling what you’d
eat in church, bored out of your skull. Link once drank a whole mini-bottle of Binaca breath spray
during a talk on the atonement. Then he spent the whole afternoon and part of the evening atoning
for that, too.
Harlon looked exactly the way I remembered. He threw his hands up, a sure sign of surrender.
“Prudence, you’re near ’bout the most ornery woman I’ve ever met in my en-tire life!”
It was true, and we all knew it. The other four husbands looked up, a mixture of sympathy and
amusement on their faces.
Aunt Prue let go of my ear and turned to face her latest late husband. “Well, I don’t recollect
askin’ you ta marry me, Harlon James Turner. So I reckon that makes you the most foolish man
I’ve ever met in my en-tire life!” The ears of the three tiny dogs perked up at the sound of their
name.The man reading the paper stood up and patted poor old Harlon on the shoulder. “I think you
ought ta let our little firecracker have some time ta herself.” He dropped his voice. “Or you may end
up passin’ on a second time.”
Aunt Prue seemed satisfied and marched back to the kitchen with the three Harlon Jameses and
me following dutifully. When we reached the kitchen, she pointed to a chair at the table and busied
herself pouring two tall glasses of sweet tea. “If I had known I’d have ta live with the five a those
men, I’d have thought twice ’bout gettin’ married at all.”
And here they were. I wondered why—until I figured out it was better not to. Whatever
unfinished business she had with her five husbands and about as many dogs, I sure didn’t want to
know.
“Drink up, son,” Harlon said.
I glanced at the tea, which looked pretty appealing even though I wasn’t the least bit thirsty. It
was one thing when my mom was cutting me up a fried tomato. I hadn’t thought twice about eating
anything she handed me. Now that I had passed through the graveyard to visit my dead aunt, it
occurred to me that I didn’t know the rules, or anything about the way things worked over here—
wherever here was. Aunt Prue noticed me staring at the glass. “You can drink it, not that you need
ta. But it’s different on the other side.”
“How?” I had so many questions that I didn’t know where to start.
“Can’t eat or drink over there, back in the Mortal realm, but you can move things. Just
yesterday, I hid Grace’s dentures. Dropped ’em right down in the Postum jar.” It was just like Aunt
Prue to find a way to drive her sisters crazy from the grave.
“Wait—you were over there? In Gatlin?” If she could go see the Sisters, then I could get back
to Lena. Couldn’t I?
“Did I say that?” I knew she’d have the answer. I also knew she wouldn’t tell me a thing if she
didn’t want me to know.
“Yeah, actually. You did.”
Tell me how I can find my way back to Lena.
“Well now, just for the teeniest minute. Nothin’ ta get all hopped up ’bout. Then I skee-daddled
back ta the Garden here, lickety-split.”
“Aunt Prue, come on.” But she shook her head, and I gave up. My aunt was every bit as
stubborn in this life as she’d been in the last. I tried a new subject. “The Garden? Are we really in
His Garden of Perpetual Peace?”
“Darn tootin’. Every time they bury someone, a new house shows up on the block.” Aunt Prue
sniffed again. “Can’t do a thing ta stop ’em from comin’ either, even if they ain’t your kind a
folks.”
I thought about the headstones instead of doors, all the cemetery plot houses. I’d always
thought the layout of His Garden of Perpetual Peace was kind of like our town, what with the good
plots all lined up one way and the questionable graves pushed out near the edges. Turns out the
Otherworld wasn’t any different.
“Then why don’t I have one, Aunt Prue? A house, I mean.”
“Young ’uns don’t get houses a their own unless their parents outlive ’em. And after seein’ that
room a yours, I don’t see as how you could keep a whole house clean anyway.” I couldn’t really
argue with her on that.
“Is that why I don’t have a gravestone?”
Aunt Prue looked away. There was something she didn’t want to tell me. “Maybe you should
ask your mamma ’bout that.”
“I’m asking you.”
She sighed heavily. “You aren’t buried at Perpetual Peace, Ethan Wate.”
“What?” Maybe it was too soon. I didn’t even know how much time had passed since that
night on the water tower. “I guess they haven’t buried me yet.”
Aunt Prue was wringing her hands, which was only making me more nervous.
“Aunt Prue?”
She took a sip of her sweet tea, stalling. At least it gave her hands something to do. “Amma
isn’t takin’ your leavin’ well, and Lena’s no better. Don’t think I don’t keep an eye on them two.
Didn’t I give Lena my good old rose necklace, so I can get a feel for her every now and again?”
The image of Lena sobbing, of Amma screaming my name right before I jumped, flashed
through my mind. My chest tightened.
Aunt Prue kept on talking. “None a this was supposed ta happen. Amma knows it, and she and
Lena and Macon are havin’ a heap a trouble with your passin’.”
My passing. The words sounded strange to me.
A horrible thought surfaced in my mind. “Wait. Are you saying they didn’t bury me?”
Aunt Prue put her hand to her heart. “Of course they buried you! They did it straightaway.
They just didn’t bury you in the Gatlin cemetery.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Didn’t even have
a proper memorial, I’m ’fraid. No ushers, no sermons. No Psalms or Lamentations.”
“No Lamentations? You sure know how to hurt a guy, Aunt Prue.” I was kidding, but she only
nodded, grim as the grave.
“No program. No funeral potatoes. Nothin’ so much as a supermarket biscuit. Not even a book
a remembrances. Might as well a stuck you in one a them shoe boxes in your bedroom.”
“Then, where did they bury me?” I was starting to get a bad feeling.
“Over at Greenbrier, by the old Duchannes graves. Stuck you in the mud like a possum-bitten
house cat.”
“Why?” I looked at her, but Aunt Prue glanced away. She was definitely hiding something.
“Aunt Prue, answer me. Why did they bury me at Greenbrier?”
She looked right at me, crossing her arms over her chest defiantly. “Now, don’t get yerself all
bowed up. It was jus’ the tiniest excuse for a service. Nothin’ ta write home ’bout.” She sniffed.
“On account a none a the folks in town knowin’ you passed.”
“What are you talking about?” There was nothing folks in Gatlin came out for like a funeral.
“Amma told everyone there was an E-mergency with your aunt in Savannah, and you went on
down there to help her.”
“The whole town? They’re pretending I’m still alive?” It was one thing for Amma to try to
convince my grieving dad I was still around. For her to try to convince the whole town was more
than crazy, even for Amma. “What about my dad? Won’t he figure out something’s going on, when
I never come home? He can’t think I’m down in Savannah forever.”
Aunt Prue stood up and walked over to the counter, where a Whitman’s Sampler was already
opened. She turned the lid over, inspecting the diagram that listed the type of chocolate nestled in
each brown wrapper. Finally, she chose one and took a bite.
I looked at her. “Cherry Cordial?”
She shook her head, showing me. “Messenger Boy.” The rectangular chocolate boy was
missing his head now. “I’ll never know why folks waste their money on fancy candy. If you ask
me, these are the best durned chocolates on this side or the other.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Sugared up on drugstore candy, she laid the truth on me. “The Casters put a Charm on your
daddy. He doesn’t know you’re a bit dead either. Every time it looks like he might be sniffin’ ’round
ta the truth, the Casters double up that Charm till he doesn’t know up from down. It ain’t natural, if
ya ask me, but not much ’round Gatlin is. Whole place’s gone downright cattywampus.” She held
out the half-eaten box of candy. “Now have yourself somethin’ sweet. Chocolate makes everything
better. Molasses Chew?”
I was buried at Greenbrier so Lena and Amma and my friends could keep it a secret from
everyone, including my father—who was under the influence of a Cast so powerful that he didn’t
know his own son was gone, just like my mom said.
There wasn’t enough chocolate in the world to make this better.
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