He gave me a vague look. “Oh, a few hours ago, I suppose.”
“What has kept you so absorbed?”
“Why, what do you suppose? You left it for me to decipher.” I saw he had been at work on Alcinda’s drawing book.
“You have managed it?”
“It was not too difficult, but as my head was none too clear when I began, I made some false starts. But once I’d cracked it—what an intriguing story! I can hardly wait to hear the rest of the case—some mystery, I presume, surrounding the young lady’s sudden demise and disappearance of her body?”
I stared, then slowly shook my head. “Sudden demise, yes, but the body was buried. Some weeks after, her sister saw what at first she took for a ghost in the graveyard.” I recounted the story as efficiently as I could, referring him to the pencil sketch.
He gave it a long, hard look. “Mr. S, I presume.” He rose then and handed me his notes. “You may like to read Miss Travers’s account while I make myself more presentable. It is—odd. You are ready to go out?”
I nodded uncertainly. “Yes, but where—?”
“To the cemetery, of course.”
(What follows is J. J.’s transcription)
To be reunited with my beloved mother is all I have ever wanted—to feel her presence and know she is close to me. When I was a little child, I used to talk to her every night. After rote prayers to a God I could not imagine, I turned more eagerly to share my hopes, fears, and experiences with my beloved Mama. I used to think that she answered my questions by responding to me in dreams, or leaving hidden messages in daily life, things that to others would appear meaningless, that only I would notice and understand.
As I grew older, I lost my faith, yet never managed to give up the belief that Mama, wherever she may be, is still watching over me. But it is hard to only believe, to take it on trust, never to know. Never to know, that is, until it is too late, and I, too, am dead. Until that time, my conversations with her would remain one-sided, and I would continue to be haunted by the fear that I was only talking to myself—that no one was listening—that there was no one to hear my questions and confessions because there is no survival of physical death, no spirit independent of the body.
I don’t want to believe that. I am, perhaps, too intellectual, too modern, for my own comfort! How lovely it would be to sink into the warm comfort of established religion …
Some part of me does still believe. I think that when I die, I will be reunited with Mama. But if I die when I am wrinkled and toothless and wandering in my wits, like that old crone we see sometimes at the back of the church, mumbling away to herself and disrupting the services with her laughter … why, I might not even know my own mother, or she know me—horrible!!
I don’t want that. I want death on my own terms.
I know what I am about to do is not without danger. I admit, I am frightened, but now that Mr. S has shown me what is possible, I must see for myself.
The Ancient Egyptians had their guides to the afterlife, and the Buddhist Masters in the High Himalayas also—many cultures have found it worthwhile to instruct the living and prepare them for the life to come, but our own “civilized” society prefers to pretend that death cannot be known except once, finally, at the end of life. Mr. S has told me that death does not have to be the country from which no traveler returns; he has gone there and returned himself, more than once, and has agreed—at last!—to share his knowledge with me.
He is a strange man. I appreciate his wisdom in the ways of the afterlife, and am ever so grateful that he has agreed to help me, but he makes me uneasy. Sometimes, when he looks at me, I feel he wants something, that he expects that I understand what he wants from me, but then, just as I think he might try to make love to me—instead, he remarks on my youth and innocence, and advises me to wait a few years before embarking on this great adventure.
So perhaps I have misinterpreted those looks. But it is too late, far too late, for him to stop me. He has told me what must be done and provided me with the means, and I mean to do it tonight.
He would be cross if he knew I was writing this—even so carefully hidden—for I promised not to say a word to anyone, about him, or about the plan we have agreed. And I have told no one, although the temptation to share it with Felicity was strong. But she is still a child. She might tell Father.
I write this to say that I am going to die tonight, but my death will not be—is not meant to be—forever. I have no wish to be a suicide. I want my second death, the real one, to be only after many, many years of living. This first death is an exploration, a way of learning the truth.
If it goes wrong, I am deeply sorry, but that is a risk I must take. Felicity, if you have deciphered these words, let me tell you that I love you dearly and if it is permitted to me, I shall continue to watch over you from another plane, as I feel my own mother watches over me. I hope you will understand, and forgive me, if I have gone, a bit too soon, to a better place. We will meet again.
The cemetery was quite new—Alcinda’s mother must have been one of the first to be interred there—and when we arrived at the unassuming gates that led into the Park Grove Cemetery, we saw at once that, unlike the larger modern graveyards of London, it had not been designed as a destination for visitors who might wish to spend a quiet hour of reflection, but for the sole purpose of storing dead bodies underground.
In my childhood, I had played in the local churchyard, and I remembered family excursions to Highgate Cemetery, where my uncle and aunt and a grandfather were buried. I had imagined Alcinda’s visits to her mother’s grave taking place in a similar setting, watched over by solemn stone angels and women in classical draperies, surrounded by weeping willows and mournful, ivy-clad trees. I expected mausoleums and family enclosures, statues, tombstones decorated with curious symbols, all that attractive paraphernalia of mourning that so often appeals to girls of a certain age and disposition.
But this modern cemetery, despite its evocative name, had few trees, no groves, and was nothing like my idea of a park. We saw not a single statue or decorative monument, and the gravestones were uniformly plain. With the graves laid out on strict gridlines, the effect was strict and utilitarian, reminding me of a school dormitory or a military barracks. My contemporaries may mock the sentimental, elaborate rituals of mourning that we grew up with, and one might well argue that the dead care not where their bones are stored, but the Park Grove Cemetery was like a glimpse into a well-organized but brutally impersonal future, offering nothing to comfort the living. There was little reason, one would have thought, to ever visit this place after the funeral, which made Alcinda’s obsession seem all the stranger.
“I see now why there were no sketches of crumbling, ivy-shrouded tombstones or statues in Miss Travers’s drawing book,” said Jesperson as we strolled along one straight dull path after another.
“But not why she bothered to bring her book and pencils along at all.”
“Surely the secretive Mr. S did not allow her to sketch him from life.”
I agreed it was more likely that she had drawn him from memory.
“Let us see if there is a caretaker here, who might recognize his face,” he said, and we turned back towards the entrance, where we had noticed a tidy little gatehouse.
At that moment, the rain, which had been threatening for so long, finally burst free of the heavy grey clouds above our heads, and we arrived not as the sober, mournful visitors we had hoped to appear, but out of breath, disheveled, and damp.
A small, spry, bald little man in hairy tweeds opened the door almost as soon as Jesperson’s knuckles collided with its outside surface. He was eager to welcome us inside, all the while making so many apologies for the rain that it might have been his personal responsibility that it had fallen.