last breath of life has been taken, many don’t go through the doorway right away. First off, there’s a lot of really fascinating action unfolding on the ground. Doctors and nurses performing useless medical heroics, loved ones wailingand weeping, high drama bursting out left and right. It’s like the season finale of
ER
, or the climax of an Italian opera.
Second, every ghost wants to go to their own funeral. And they always go. Always. After all, who
wouldn’t
be curious to see who shows up, who sends flowers, who fakes their way through crocodile tears, and who is truly hobbled by honest-to-goodness grief? What a show! Even for an audience of one.
The problem is, the doorway of light doesn’t burn brightly forever, and when the light goes out, the spirit is marooned in the in-between. Ghosts of people who still have an earthly agenda—something important they’ve left unfinished, one final task they feel they simply have to do—hardly ever notice that the light is fading, and if they do, they don’t care. But once the light goes out for them, it’s out. They’re stranded.
I can help them in two ways. First, I can find out what it is that’s keeping them here, in the land of the living. I try to resolve that earthly problem so the spirit can feel free to move on. I don’t yet know why the monks have been hanging around for eight or nine hundred years, but it sounds as though Mr. Grady just needs to locate the deed to a house. That’s the kind of problem I like. Simple. Straightforward. Except for gaining access to the house, of course, and then actually finding the piece of paper.
Once the real-life problem has been resolved, I can do one more thing to help a waylaid spirit move on. I can create a doorway of white light for them or lead them to a place, like a hospital or a funeral home, where the light is glowing for someone else, another person who has recently died. This white light illuminates the passageway to the next world.
It took me a while to learn how to create the light. When I was seven or eight, I realized that there was a difference between the spirits of people who had just died and the spirits of people who had been dead for three or four days. The doorway of white lightglowed brightly for the very recently dead, but not for the others. For them, the light had gone out.
Nona taught me how to open up that passageway for a spirit who has waited too long to cross over. It was summertime. We had just finished supper, hot dogs and corn on the cob, and she took me out into the backyard to look at the sunset. She told me to concentrate on the light of the fading sun, really to think about it and observe it, and then to try to visualize that very same light on the side of the barn.
I tried hard. Nothing. There was no light at all when I opened my eyes. I tried again and again, and on my fourth or fifth attempt, I was able to create a tiny pinpoint of light. I practiced for weeks and weeks before I was able to make the passageway big enough and bright enough for an adult spirit to fit through and to keep it open long enough so that the spirit actually had time to enter it and cross over. But once I learned how to do it, the gift never left me. I only have to envision the white light and a spirit can walk through it as easily as I was now reentering Mr. Winslow’s study.
Sylvia was perched stiffly on the edge of her chair. She looked pale. “There are a couple of letters. Tad’s gone to get them.”
“From who? Whom?”
“James Wescott at the British Library and Paola Moretti at The Cloisters. We wrote to them just before Finny died. I drafted the letters myself.”
“Who are they?”
“Two of the most respected authorities on illuminated manuscripts. Tad wasn’t sure what ‘book’ they were referring to; he just explained that the whole collection had been donated to the Athenaeum. He put them in touch with Amanda.”
I must have looked puzzled, because she added, “Amanda