The Spectral City. Leanna Renee Hieber

Maggie had wanted Eve to have of the few things left of her, before her family moved out of New York.

      Sitting at her writing desk she pulled out an engraved fountain pen that had been, in life, Maggie’s favorite writing instrument for letters, diary entries and the occasional ill-advised love note. Eve sat with it in her hand, weighing its heaviness, picturing Maggie writing with it, dreaming with it, exorcising her old demons with it.

      Plucking a fresh sheet of paper, Eve closed her eyes and let the pen take her hand. Maggie had imbued part of herself into the implement. She called upon the echo of her friend that had conversed so much in paper and ink with this vital object.

      True mediums might engage in any number of methods to transcribe messages from the spirit world. Eve employed any of them that struck her and in the moment, automatic writing seemed the only salve for the sharp, distinct pain that was growing just behind her forehead, as if her third eye were weeping and the tears were swelling up beneath her skin . . .

      If a migraine resulted from overwork or undue pressure, so be it.

      “Where are you, Margaret Hathorn?” Eve murmured to the air. “Give me a sign.”

      As Eve wrote the first phrase, her hand moving before she even had a grasp of the words, she heard a thousand murmurs echo a repetition of the earlier chilling warning that came softly from dead lips:

      Don’t let anything in . . .

      Then there was no sensation at all.

      Chapter Five

      When Eve awoke, it was with a wave of pain that crashed over her body as she gained consciousness. She was no stranger to pain—it was a state she often found herself in, one way or another, to varying levels, depending on her circumstances. She avoided too-bright light, she tried not to be overtired, she made sure to drink water and always travel with aspirin. Her clairvoyance and clairaudience came with pressures and pain associated with her eyes and head, and the only thing that eased the feeling like the tightening of a vise grip around her skull was letting the spirit world in, letting it pass through her field of vision and murmur in her ear as it pleased, in and out like an exhaled breath.

      Eve had long ago learned to live with the spirit world as a second luminous, transparent layer of movement and form as well as an additional murmuring layer of sound superimposed upon the living layer of reality. Having made a certain peace with aches and pains, today felt sharper than most.

      There was a time, three years prior, when she had applied and was accepted to Barnard Women’s college. Gran’s idea of putting the ghosts to work in a department was all well and good, she’d thought, but she wanted to be a fully educated woman. She’d excitedly begun her first semester studying history, having taken up residence in a small, simple dormitory just off Broadway, where she could see the edges of the Columbia green, its grand new concourses taking over the Morningside area.

      Of course, Eve saw and heard the spirits all through the halls and floating across the lawns, but she had assumed they’d leave her well enough alone to study. Instead, the migraines got worse. Ghosts who had ignored her before became insistent that she listen.

      “We are your course of study,” Vera had said, when Eve looked up from a book to find her dormitory room had become overrun with ghosts. She asked why they couldn’t leave her be to study for a night, and they all told her that they were her sole discipline, her sole purpose.

      In what became a workable truce, Eve left school and with the help of her mentors in the many months that followed, took steps to open the Ghost Precinct, provided the spirits let her alone enough to read books and study what interested her at her own pace. The migraines dimmed to the dullest of roars before fading entirely most days.

      But after last night’s session of automatic writing, she was sore in an entirely different way, as if she’d run miles and fallen on her face rather than just collapsing from strain on the writing desk. Her arm was numb and before her lay Maggie’s fountain pen with a drop of ink splattered onto the paper below it as if it had been a thumb-prick of black blood. She almost didn’t want to read what she had written.

      Whispers and cold, whispers and cold.

      All there is.

      Drawn in, something was wrong, I was found, now am lost.

      Am I between again?

      Whispers and cold.

      Don’t let anything in. Don’t open doors, I don’t know what’s around me.

      If I go somewhere, will I ever return? Did I live or did I die? Again. Did I die to live?

      There are thoughts in the void.

      Is everything overturned? Do I still exist?

      Someone is very wrong. The children know. Inversed.

      Don’t let anything in, not the monstrous hum.

      A phrase written there chilled Eve’s blood in the instant. She remembered that recurring phrase about not letting anything in, but the rest was done in a subconscious state, where memory was far away. The last line struck her most.

      Don’t play God lest you play the Devil instead.

      The automatic writing was personal, intimate. Was she actually able to access Maggie’s state of mind in some strange, transient place? It was baffling, but it seemed like she had listened in on a frightened internal monologue.

      From the earliest inclination of self, Eve wanted to help. She wanted to heal, soothe, and make things better for all around her. It was why the ghosts were so drawn to her. They wanted the same peace she wanted for them, and they came to her desperate, unwitting vampires draining her energy and life force. In order to survive, Eve had to toughen herself a bit, put up psychic shields, harden her heart and soul only so much as to not die of a broken heart like old romantic poets, exhausted and drained of all capability before she ever had the chance to fall in love herself. She couldn’t care about every little thing; she had to constantly prioritize.

      But Maggie. She cared about Maggie. Eve closed her eyes and pressed back tears of worry.

      “Beloved friend,” she murmured into the places of her mind and bidding the spirit that traveled back and forth across the veil with such impunity to hear her, “do not be afraid. You were the first of the spirits to ever bind your soul to mine, and I will never desert you even if you’ve lost your way in the labyrinth of eternity’s corridors. I love you . . .”

      She folded up the paper of this entranced writing session and carefully tucked the results into a small envelope. In a hissing gust and a suddenly plummeting temperature, the air around her taking on a preternatural glow, Eve turned to see that Vera had burst in on her and floated about two feet away, about a foot in the air, her arms folded in her floral shawl, glowering.

      “There’s something you’re going to need to write up,” the ghost said, agitated. “In Preventative Protocol.”

      “Well let’s get going to the offices then, you can tell me when I’m at my typewriter,” Eve said, stretching and sliding open the pocket doors. Vera nodded and vanished again as abruptly as she’d entered.

      “I pray Antonia did us all the extreme favor of making coffee . . .” Eve said to herself as she stepped into the entrance hall.

      Antonia, who was just tidying up, whirled to Eve, looking her up and down and pursing her lips in disapproval. “Why, of course I did, but heavens, did you not go to bed last night? Last I saw you, you went to the study. I didn’t think to check on you.”

      Eve chuckled. “I fell asleep face down on the writing desk.”

      “I’m sorry, you poor dear! I should have come down to see how you were faring.”

      “I’m not your responsibility,” Eve said, following her into the dining room where a warm carafe was still sitting on the hutch.

      “Of course you are—we all are each other’s