Free Of Grave Concern by Max McCoy Page B

over to the material.
    We doubt our gifts.
    And even when as adults we glimpse the world beyond—knowing, for example, when a family member is upon death’s bed, or being certain a letter from a friend you haven’t seen in a long while is about to arrive, or just having the sensation of having somehow lived through an event or conversation before—we are at first mystified, then confused, and finally frustrated.
    The frustration sets, Paschal said, because the revelations are all so damned random. It seems that we should be able to control this marvelous gift, that this spiritual telegraph should be able to serve man as reliably as the electro-mechanical kind. Faced with such frustration, Paschal said, we begin to deny and then to doubt our gifts—or our sanity.
    But with careful training, some control could be exerted over these other powers. There were a few important rules to remember: Ghosts always have unfinished business, and the dead never lie, although true ghosts will not usually respond to a direct question. If you want information from a ghost, Paschal said, you had to learn to listen. Demons will always respond to a direct question, he said, but will only answer truthfully if asked in the name of Jesus Christ or something else holy.
    Once spirit communication was established, Paschal said, it was possible to influence the weather, to change the turn of a card . . . and, with special training, to summon the dead. It was a risky business, he said. If not done properly, it could result in the spiritual ruin of the living parties involved.
    For Jonathan, it was a risk I was willing to take.

    After three years as Paschal’s apprentice, I was finally ready.
    We attempted the forty-nine-day magical rite that was required to establish contact with Jonathan. Granted, the rite itself was shocking, but Paschal said such an intense shock was required to break the grip our senses had on illusory reality and to forge a permanent connection with the spirit world. It would work, he said, if our hearts were pure.
    The rite failed.
    On the dawn of the fiftieth day—April 13, 1874—I found myself shivering on a slab inside one of the plastered and whitewashed tombs in St. Louis Cemetery Number One. In New Orleans, the dead are placed in vaults on top of the ground, to keep them from floating away. I had gone to the cemetery the night before, brushed away the bones of the previous occupants, wrapped myself in winding sheets, and waited for Paschal. By the time he got there, a few hours before dawn, my skin was about as cold as one of the permanent residents of the cemetery.
    That’s what Paschal wanted.
    For the past seven weeks, we had practiced intimacy in increasingly shocking ways: in public, with others, drunk on absinthe, and at midnight in the apse of a church. For the last month, Paschal had allowed me to eat practically nothing. I became pale, cadaverous—and compliant. The final sacrilegious union, he said, on Easter Sunday in the old cemetery, would complete the great rite and summon Jonathan’s spirit from the dark beyond.
    But in the cold light of that April morning in the old cemetery, there was nothing manifest in the tomb except crumbling plaster and peeling paint. It was raining outside. The lilies Paschal had brought were drooping, but the damned immortelles were as bright as ever. I pulled a sheet stained with sweat and semen around my shoulders, trembling, and watched a water moccasin slither across the wet floor.
    I held my head in my hands and thought with shame of Jonathan—and was stricken with terror because I could not remember his face. It was then I knew that I had to get out and leave Paschal behind, no matter how smart or well-meaning he was. While he pleaded with me to stay, I pulled on my dress and fled barefoot in the rain toward the Vieux Carré.
    â€œOphie!” Paschal called behind me.
    I tried to outrun him, but couldn’t.
    At Chartres