Below is a fun fictional tale submitted by one of our supporters, just in time for the Halloween season!
It was Halloween night, and nature was cooperating in spectacular fashion. The air was cool, crisp, and clear. Trees were showering the sidewalks with amber-colored leaves, some gold mixed in for good measure. And a crescent moon, when it wasn’t obscured by a passing cloud, glowed an orangish yellow in the night sky.
Thomas was wending his way on foot toward the large quadrangle that sat at the center of campus. He and Sophia, whose arm was wrapped around his, were seniors. It would be the fourth and final time that they joined the mass gathering of students for the retelling of the story behind the ghost that haunted the school’s iconic chapel.
All of the upper-level students knew the story by heart. In the Fall of 1911, when the school was still in its infancy, a freshman named Abigail Elizabeth Hargraves was singled out by the other girls in the college’s lone women’s dormitory for a bit of innocent hazing on Halloween night. Or, perhaps, it was not entirely innocent. Abigail was apparently the prettiest of all the girls at the school, and the seemingly endless stream of suitors clamoring for her attention hadn’t been sitting well with her female cohort.
Motivations aside, the mischief began at precisely 10:00 P.M. The campus chapel was empty, silent, and completely dark. Abigail, receiving a boost from two of her sisters in crime, clambered into the building through a side window—the latch had been turned earlier in the evening by a co-conspirator who had dropped in for a bit of “prayer time” before curfew. Taking hold of the lit candle that was passed up to her, she was to navigate her way to the back of the church, climb the spiral staircase to the choir loft, retrieve a small porcelain ghost that had been planted there by one of the other girls, and then return to the window by which she entered.
What Abigail did not know is that there was no porcelain ghost. Rather, the girls in the dorm had fashioned a life-size specter out of a bed sheet, affixed it to a pulley, and left it suspended from a length of twine that ran across the ceiling of the loft. Abigail’s second step out of the staircase tripped a wire that released the ghost and sent it streaming directly toward her.
The resulting blood-curdling scream echoed throughout the school grounds. Abigail bolted for the staircase but, disoriented, she instead hit the railing to the choir loft at full speed and somersaulted over the top. By the time help arrived, there was nothing to be done. A very pretty but very dead 18-year-old freshman lie on the floor of the chapel’s center aisle. The priests who had founded the school were aghast. After holding a funeral Mass a few days later, the entirety of the women’s dorm was suspended for the remainder of the semester. None of them ever returned.
***
It did not take long for the stories to begin circulating about campus. Stories about candles in the chapel that would ignite or extinguish all by themselves. About doors that would inexplicably swing open or closed. The wooden steps of the staircase, people claimed, would methodically creak in sequence from bottom to top, with no one there to make them creak. And on it went. Eventually, the legend of the ghost of Abigail Elizabeth Hargraves took hold, and after a handful of years, that legend gave birth to a tradition: every year on Halloween night, the students would gather outside the chapel for a retelling of the events of October 31, 1911.
This year’s production began, as it always did, at 10:00 P.M. Nathan Harding, one of Thomas’s classmates, stood before a microphone on the landing at the top of the steps that led to the chapel entrance. A set of speakers sat off to his left and his right to amplify his voice, and the two wooden doors behind him were open wide. The building was fully lit. He raised his hands to quiet the crowd, and without any introduction he began retelling the story of Abigail Elizabeth Hargraves in somber but bracing tones.
As Nathan spoke, the crowd noticed the methodical switching off of the individual lights within the chapel. At the conclusion of the story, the final light was extinguished and the organizers of the event walked out of the front doors and onto the landing, flanking their leader and his microphone on either side. Nathan explained that the other students had completed a thorough search of the building to ensure that it was empty, and that all of the doors and windows were locked. It was now pitch-black inside. He shut the two wooden doors and, after raising his arm skyward to display the key he held in his hand, locked them from the outside.
A growing murmur ran through the crowd as he stepped back to the microphone. “The chapel is now empty and locked,” he announced. “But we’ve also placed a microphone inside with a wireless connection to these speakers,” he said, gesturing with his hands. “If the legend is true, perhaps Abigail will pay us a visit—” He was cut off by the sound of a loud wooden creak that burst through the speakers. It was followed by another, and they continued apace, the unmistakable sounds of someone making her way through the chapel and up the spiral staircase.
After a few moments, the creaking came to a stop and was replaced by a gentle sob. The more attentive students noticed a flickering light emanating from behind the round, stained glass window of the choir loft. Suddenly, there was a high-pitched, terror-filled scream, followed momentarily by the thud of a falling body crashing onto the floor below. The crowd of students had been frozen in place, listening with rapt attention, but now there were shrieks. Sophia’s grip on Thomas’s arm tightened, and the student organizers all bolted at once from the landing and disappeared into the night.
At that moment, the lights atop the lampposts that lined the sidewalks all went out at once, throwing the campus into darkness and eliciting a collective scream from the crowd. For about 30 seconds, what had been mere commotion turned to pandemonium. And then, just as suddenly, a bonfire erupted to life in a large fire pit at the center of the quad. Nathan Harding, grinning from ear to ear, triumphantly held a torch overhead. A cacophony of gasps and sighs was followed by an eruption of laughter. The lampposts were reignited, beer cans began emerging from coolers, and the students spontaneously burst forth into conversation as they coalesced into small groups.
Thomas was duly entertained. He judged it the best performance of his four years at the school. At the same time, there was a nagging sense of irritation that threatened to erode his good humor.
He was a hardened unbeliever in anything but the tangible and the scientific. No matter how good the performance, the screams and the shrieks were signs of a doltishness that had no place at a reputable school like this. Some of the students had even been talking about having a hard time getting to sleep that night. Really?? he wondered to himself. How did some of these people get admitted to college?
He then reminded himself that he shouldn’t be surprised: most of these students were spending over an hour each Sunday inside that chapel, something he found no less fatuous. But he clamped down on his irritation. Sophia was one of those students. Sophia. Thomas’s thought process was interrupted by a sudden awareness that she was no longer with him. He surveyed the crowd but caught no sight of her. She’ll be back, he thought to himself.
Shaking off the distraction, he jumped into the nearest conversation, soaking in both the beer and the warmth of the fire as the outside air cooled. Sophia eventually returned and joined him, but the look on her face told Thomas that something had left her shaken. She nevertheless entered the fray and chatted amiably with their friends. Thomas made a mental note to ask her what had happened, but by the end of the evening he had forgotten about it entirely.
***
The performance at the chapel, the roaring bonfire, the fraternizing that lingered into the early morning hours—it was all now just a memory. So, for that matter, was Sophia. The argument that Thomas had suppressed that night surfaced and resurfaced throughout their senior year. The breaking point came when Sophia skipped the spring break trip to Florida to attend a spiritual retreat.
After graduation, Thomas took a job at an investment banking firm in the same city that was home to his alma mater. He couldn’t believe how much money they were paying him—four years of dogged determination in the classroom combined with an outsized share of brainpower had been well rewarded. He lived in a posh apartment complex, a sports car sitting in his parking space in the garage beneath the building. He was putting in the time at the office, angling for an early promotion, but his social life wasn’t suffering for it; the nightlife in the financial district was the one thing his four years in college hadn’t fully prepared him for.
It was a Saturday evening—the calendar had just flipped from November to December—and Thomas had spent the entire day hunkered down in his apartment, prepping for the next in a series of exams that would eventually land him his certification. Deciding he needed a break, he picked up his coat and headed outside for a walk. The air was cool and crisp, and the light from a full moon was only sporadically muted as a patchwork of clouds scudded across the evening sky. For what seemed like no particular reason, he decided on a stroll through campus—it was less than a mile away.
The walk began uneventfully enough. But after a few minutes, the clouds had all moved through, and Thomas sensed an otherworldly intensity to the moonlight that illuminated the cityscape before him. It was as though the rays of light were boring through his skull and permeating his brain, stimulating his mind like a high-powered jolt of caffeine. He glanced up at the moon and his mind shot back to a few courses he had taken early in college, one in astronomy and another in physics. Involuntarily and yet instinctively, he began mentally rehearsing—to his own surprise—the formula that characterizes the moon’s elliptical orbit about the earth.
Thomas had now stopped walking. He stood on the sidewalk looking up as people passed by him on either side, his eyes drawn to a bright light that he recognized as Jupiter. He then located Saturn and Neptune, although he wasn’t sure how he so easily found them within the cluster of stars that lit that portion of the sky. Or how he was so certain as to their identity. Neptune! he thought to himself. I shouldn’t be able to see that without a telescope. As he continued to gaze upward, he could see, in a way he didn’t understand, the ecliptic that traced out the path of the planets through the night sky, almost as though he were looking at a diagram in a textbook. His mind and his vision had taken on a preternatural capacity that he couldn’t explain. He felt as though he had acquired a sixth sense.
Thomas resumed his advance, and, after a time, with the moon’s light radiating down upon him, a notion that he had consistently rejected throughout his high school and college years took hold of him: What if the mathematically quantifiable and scientifically decipherable character of the natural order was not pure accident? What if it was simply the observable consequence of a rationality that was intrinsic to that order. A rationality that had been infused—that had been baked into nature. Such a state of affairs would, in turn, necessarily imply a rational existence that was prior to all else.
Without realizing it, Thomas crossed the street that served as the boundary between city and college campus. His mind had been at work, pressing through the implications of a rationally created order, when he stumbled upon another thought, one that he found far more disturbing: the existence of such an order would be contingent. There was nothing, in other words, that would exist out of necessity, either in its origins, or at this very moment.
With the stock market that he watched every day of his working life, a bubble could burst or a bottom could drop out and send stock prices spiraling downward in a freefall. But those stock rices would eventually settle. The shares would still exist at the close of the market, and they would have a price. They would live to see another day of trading. Most of the time, anyway. This was different. The moon, the people on the sidewalk—the planet on which he stood!—could all evanesce into nothing, it seemed, on a mere whim. They could simply no longer be. Their very existence rested on some source of rationality and will that he neither knew nor could see. Most troubling was that he himself was one of those contingent existences.
Thomas, absorbed in thought as he continued his walk, was surprised to find himself approaching the center of campus. He noticed that the chapel was lit from inside. The quad was about as crowded as he would have expected for a Saturday night, with students mingling and strolling about. He aimlessly followed a sidewalk that took him on a diagonal path across the quad, landing him near the entrance to the chapel. The doors were open, and a woman was standing at the edge of the doorway, cradling something in her arm—it looked like a stack of programs. What is going on in the chapel on a Saturday night? Thomas wondered. He had the uncomfortable sense that the woman had been watching him, and for reasons that he could not fathom he walked toward the entrance.
As Thomas approached, he saw that the woman wore a blue dress. A veil covered her face, but it was sufficiently thin that he knew he was looking at a stunningly beautiful creature. He had never seen her before, and he surmised by her appearance that she was probably a freshman. There was almost a glow about her. Her facial expression and body language carried the suggestion that she expected him to enter. So compelling was this radiant teen girl that Thomas did something he had never done in his four years as a student: he set foot in Immaculate Conception Chapel.
As he was passing through the doorframe, Thomas was vaguely aware that the young woman took a program from her stack and held it out for him. “You’re going to need this,” she said, unmistakably, except that he did not audibly hear it. Without looking—his eyes were fixed on what lay before him—Thomas took the program and slid it into his coat pocket. The warmly-lit chapel was completely empty—that seemed odd in itself—but there was also a nativity scene in the transept, to the right of the altar, that gave off a captivating glow all its own.
Gazing about at the interior of the chapel, Thomas drifted forward until he found himself standing before the illuminated depiction of the first Christmas. The figures were carved from wood, and yet they seemed alive. If one of them had blinked or let out a sigh, Thomas would scarcely have been surprised. When his eyes came to rest on the infant in the feeding trough, he was overcome with the sense that he was looking at the elusive origin of the rationality behind all that is. He found the notion inconceivable, and yet, he perceived that the entire natural order somehow radiated forth from the mind of this infant. And, so also, the will upon which the contingent existence of the universe rested.
For a single fleeting moment, Thomas permitted his determined, hyper-analytical mind to succumb to the possibility that everything he had been sensing that night—the rationality, the contingency—might all be true. And at that instant, as if someone flipped a switch, the seeming sixth sense that accompanied him on his walk to the chapel vanished. The manger scene no longer gave forth with its own light. The figures in the scene, carved from wood, looked like nothing more than dead wooden carvings. Thomas instinctively spun himself around so that he was facing the back of the chapel; the young woman was no longer there.
He walked outside onto the quad and looked around—up at the moon and the stars, at the students walking about, at everything all around him. The overpowering sense of a rational origin to the entire order of things had disappeared. Thomas jumped up in the air and deliberately landed both feet on the frozen December topsoil with a forceful thud. It felt unyieldingly solid. All sense of contingency was gone.
On the way back to his apartment, Thomas stopped at a coffee shop that sat directly across the street from the edge of campus. He ordered a latte, slid into a corner booth, and slowly drew the liquid warmth into his body. The caffeine that now raced through his bloodstream helped fuel a debate in his mind: Had he imagined the whole thing, or was it real? A thought suddenly occurred to him, and in an instant his right hand was patting at the side of his coat. What resulted was a rare moment of cognitive dissonance. The program that the young woman had handed to him should have been protruding from that pocket, but he felt nothing. A check of his left outside pocket and his inside coat pockets yielded only a wallet, a cell phone, and a set of keys. He looked down to the floor of the booth: it was empty.
The internal debate notwithstanding, Thomas’s gut told him that the experience had been real. But where was that program? In a fit of frustration, he plunged his right hand to the bottom of his coat pocket, and to his surprise, something was there. But when he pulled his hand out, he found himself looking not at a church program, but at a set of Rosary beads.
Thomas had never owned a set of Rosary beads in his life, and he had no idea where this set could have come from. He mentally retraced his steps from his apartment to the college grounds and then to the coffee shop. He hadn’t physically bumped into anyone, and he was never close enough for anyone to slip these into his pocket. And why would they do that anyway? The chapel had been empty, except for the young woman at the door. All he knew was that the program was gone. And a set of Rosary beads now sat in his hand.
Thomas began examining the beads, and his mind went to work. They were cut from stone, and yet they were worn—not a new set. Someone spent a lot of time on their knees, he thought to himself, shaking his head. The shape and color of one of the beads was subtly but discernibly different from the rest. He looked at the crucifix—sterling silver was his guess. He turned it over and saw three letters engraved on the back of the cross beam: A.E.H. “A.E.H.,” he whispered to himself. Someone’s initials? Something nagged at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He repeated the letters to himself a few times as he sat immersed in thought. He fell asleep that night with those three letters on his brain.
***
It took a full day, but Thomas finally realized why the three letters provoked him. And yet, the realization left him flummoxed. He woke up early the next morning and headed for the center of campus. He wouldn’t be missed at the office before lunch. He had no plan—he was just hoping to find something that might help him make sense of the whole thing. He entered the chapel and saw a priest standing near the altar. Dressed entirely in black, a roman collar was visible at the front of his neck. Two freshly extinguished candles each sent a thread of smoke racing toward the ceiling. As he walked forward, Thomas shot a glance toward the nativity scene over to the right.
“You’re too late for Mass, son.” The gray hair atop the priest’s head was a tousled mess. An image of Albert Einstein flashed through Thomas’s mind.
“Oh, that’s okay, mist—I mean, Father.”
The priest was elderly, but the misstep was not lost on him. There was a subtle look of amusement on his face. “Can I help you?”
“I don’t know,” said Thomas. “I wanted to ask someone … I found something …”
Surmising that the ensuing conversation would likely take some time, the old priest looked at Thomas and said, “Let’s sit down, son.”
They headed for a front-row pew and sat. Thomas rotated himself sideways so that he was looking directly at the priest. The elderly man shifted as best he could. “Now,” the priest said, “what have you found?”
Thomas sized up the old priest quickly. He was an elderly man who still had his wits about him. Thomas suspected a patience that came with effort in the latter stages of a life in which he had seen and heard it all. But there was also a gentleness to his countenance, and Thomas decided that he would trust this old priest with his story. He recounted what had happened, from the moment he left his apartment until his return, including his time in the coffee shop. The priest listened quietly, nodding his head from time to time, but not uttering a word. If anything surprised him or struck him as unusual, he never tipped his hand.
When Thomas had finished, the priest held out his hand. “May I?” Thomas pulled the Rosary beads out of his coat pocket and handed them over. He watched as the old man held them in his battered and weathered hands, seemingly examining the individual beads and the center medal. Thomas’s focus intensified as the priest turned the crucifix over and ran a finger across the engraving.
“I was wondering,” Thomas began. He spoke in a hesitating cadence that betrayed his embarrassment. “I was wondering whether … You’ve been here at this school for a long time?”
“I have,” the old priest replied.
“I was wondering if there have ever been any credible instances … apparitions … of that freshman girl who died here back in 1911?”
“Why do you ask that question?” said the old priest.
“The initials: A.E.H.”
“Ah,” said the priest. “And you’re contemplating whether you may have had an encounter with the ghost of Abigail Elizabeth Hargraves, and whether she may have somehow found a way to pass along to you a set of Rosary beads that she owned when she was still alive.”
Despite the absence of any condescension in the priest’s voice, the question left Thomas feeling sheepish. “I guess so,” he replied quietly.
“Well, I’m sorry if I disappoint you, but there is no Abigail Elizabeth Hargraves. There never was. That whole story was concocted decades ago. I’ve always been amazed at how it picked up steam over the years. Everyone loves that one,” said the old priest amusedly. He permitted himself a soft chuckle.
“How do you know that?” There was a subtle but unmistakable defensiveness to the question that surprised even Thomas.
“Well,” said the priest, forbearingly, “perhaps you might find the archive section of the library more convincing than you find me. But there was never a student by that name, or even a similar name, enrolled here at the college. The whole story was made up. I hear that the students have turned it into quite the shindig every Halloween night. No harm in that, I suppose.”
“But what of everything I just told you? What about the Rosary beads?”
“What’s your name, son?”
Thomas had the curious sense that the question was asked for his benefit, not the priest’s. “Thomas … Thomas Hanson.”
The old priest nodded. He handed the Rosary beads back to Thomas and said, “Hold onto these. We’ll probably talk again. Meantime, I’ve got to go hear confessions. I wouldn’t be so busy,” he said, giving Thomas a wink, “if you kids didn’t drink so much.” Thomas watched him shuffle off to the back of the chapel and disappear into a confessional.
Never one to accept assertions without evidence, Thomas took the old priest up on his challenge. Exiting the chapel and walking to the far end of the quad, he entered the library and found the archive room sitting two floors below ground level. The school’s collection of records rested mostly undisturbed under the watch of an elderly woman wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, her gray hair pulled back into a bun. A gold-colored crucifix in desperate need of a polish dangled from a chain around her neck, and a shawl that had seen better days sat wrapped around her shoulders. Thomas imagined a house full of cats. The dust-covered name plate at her desk told him that he was looking at a Mrs. Edna Draper.
“I’m looking for records of student enrollment for the school year 1911–12,” Thomas stated inquiringly.
“Ah!” said Mrs. Draper. “Doing some research?” She disappeared for a moment and returned with a well-worn canvas binder that read 1908–1918 on the cover. Thomas sat at a nearby table, opened the binder, and found the annual student rolls. The old priest had been right—there was no student by the name of Abigail Hargraves, or anything similar, for the 1911–12 school year. He looked at each of the ten years included in the binder and found nothing.
As he stood to return the binder, he saw that the archives lady at the desk had been watching him. “Looking for Abigail?” she asked with a crooked smile. “Every four or five years someone comes looking. I’ve pulled that binder off the shelf more than most of the books in this room. Amazing how everyone falls for that one. There’s only one ghost in that chapel,” said Edna Draper, “and it’s not Abigail Elizabeth Hargraves.”
Thomas considered her for a moment and, looking at the crucifix around her neck, asked with a wry smile on his face, “The Holy Ghost?”
“You got that right!” said Edna.
“Thanks,” said Thomas, handing her the binder. He began his ascent to the ground floor.
***
Deciding that he had devoted more than enough time to Abigail Elizabeth Hargaves and the mystery set of Rosary beads that bore her initials, Thomas poured himself into his work. The next few weeks were entirely uneventful. The workdays were routine, as were the after-work get-togethers at the bars. Christmas lights, wreaths, and fake candles were out in full force, along with the tired playlists of Christmas songs that filled the elevators and the coffee shops.
Thomas and his father had a standing, albeit implicit, arrangement that saw Thomas driving home each year for a visit the weekend before Christmas. True to form, Thomas arrived at the house early on a Friday evening. It was empty. He grabbed a beer out of the fridge, wandered into the family room, and began looking at the photos that lined the wall along the stairs up to the second floor. He homed in on a family portrait from his childhood. His dad, a high-priced attorney, wore a tailored three-piece suit; Thomas mused that he dressed for family portraits the same way he dressed for work. His mom wore a pink blouse tucked into a blue pleated skirt. She was the picture of health in this photo—the cancer wouldn’t begin its assault on her body for another year or two.
Thomas’s eyes shifted to the four-year-old version of himself. He looked happy enough. He still had both parents, and his mom doted on him constantly. He began thinking about how the cancer had taken her. He thought back to the funeral and the way that his relatives had tried to console him. The memories of his mother had faded over the years, but he recalled with perfect clarity the confusion he felt at that funeral, not understanding why his mother was gone and would never come back. Over time, that confusion turned to anger as he saw other kids’ moms chaperoning school field trips, bringing snacks to baseball games, and hosting elaborate birthday parties for his friends. Up until a few days ago, he had not set foot in a church since his mother died.
Thomas moved slowly up the stairs, sporadically taking a pull from his bottle as he looked from one picture to the next. And then, about halfway up the stairs, he stopped. He walked back down a few steps and looked again at the family portrait. At that moment, he heard the sound of his father’s car pulling into the driveway, and he waited for what seemed an eternity as his father gathered his briefcase and suit jacket before walking inside.
“Hello, Thomas.” As was always the case, there was a businesslike tone in his father’s voice, but Thomas had little interest in nuance at the moment.
“Dad,” he said, “What’s this?” He was pointing at the family portrait.
Thomas’s father was caught off guard by the brusqueness of the reply, but he walked over and looked at the photograph.
“What does Mom have wrapped around her right wrist?”
Thomas noticed a subtle change in his father’s expression. “Those were her Rosary beads. She took them with her everywhere.” He paused for a moment. “She got them when she was in college—a semester abroad trip to Rome. She loved that set, even had her initials engraved on the back of the crucifix.”
Thomas quickly interjected, his mind running in several directions at once: “A.H.H.?”
“No,” his father laughed. “She got them before we were married. Her middle name was Emily. Agatha Emily Harper.” Thomas struggled to maintain his focus as his father continued talking. “We never spoke about this much, you and I. Your mother was a devout, holy woman. Even before the cancer diagnosis, she was always at Mass, always praying. The beads on that Rosary were worn down by the time she died. She wasn’t afraid to die. The only thing that upset her was that she wouldn’t be here for you as you were growing up. That made her sad.”
The ticking sound from the second hand on Thomas’s watch filled the room.
“Those Rosary beads …” said Thomas’s father. “I never mentioned this to you, I guess because I felt so bad about it, but I found out some time after she died that she wanted you to have them. Her sister—your Aunt Claire—told me.”
Thomas took a generous swig from his beer bottle. “What happened?” he asked. “Did you lose them?”
“No, not at all. I know exactly where they are.”
***
“She was buried with them.” Thomas spoke from the front pew of Immaculate Conception Chapel, having performed the requisite contortions that allowed him to face the old priest directly. “My dad had the undertaker wrap them around her right hand and wrist. It was the way he wanted to remember her. He said he was the last one to look upon her body at the funeral home before they closed the casket.”
The priest, seemingly looking at nothing in particular, nodded in acknowledgement.
“He told me that she had her initials engraved on the back of the crucifix. Agatha Emily Harper—that was her name before they got married. He mentioned that the beads were worn, and that one of them had been replaced. Apparently she dropped them once and the bead shattered. Everything that he could remember about them,” said Thomas, holding the beads up, “describes this set.”
There was another nod from the priest.
Thomas felt an agitation welling up inside. Maybe this priest isn’t so sharp witted as he initially surmised. He didn’t seem at all surprised or taken aback. There was no shock, no amazement. Thomas broke the silence.
“This is ridiculous!” he said, his frustration echoing throughout the chapel. “Tell me—How is this possible?”
“Possible!” There was a cynical, almost mocking tone in the old priest’s reply that caught Thomas off guard. The priest closed his eyes for a moment, breathed in heavily, and slowly exhaled. “You’re asking the wrong question, son.”
“Okay. What is the right question?” The exasperation in Thomas’s voice suggested that it was only by way of a heroic exercise of restraint that he omitted the address “Smarty Pants” at the end of his query.
“Why?”
“Because I want to know! What is the right question?”
The old priest smiled softly and shook his head. “That’s the question you should be asking: Why?”
Thomas said nothing.
“Let me ask you something, son.” His voice was a case study in disciplined patience. “Suppose that three weeks ago I had suggested to you that the ghost of Abigail Hargraves haunted this chapel. You’d have thought me a sorry old fool. And yet, just two weeks ago, you were asking me whether I knew of any credible sightings of her ghost. Now, suppose that you never discovered those Rosary beads in your coat pocket. You’d have never come here and asked me that question. You would have never had that conversation with your father, and you wouldn’t be sitting here talking to me right now. Why do you think you have those Rosary beads?”
“My mother wanted me to …” Thomas’s voice trailed off, and he raised his hands in surrender.
“You’re on the right track, son,” said the old priest, gently. “She wanted you to know that everything you experienced when you walked over here that night really happened. Everything that caused you, even if only for a split second, to question your basic assumptions about everything. It was all real.”
He paused for a moment, more for Thomas’s benefit than his own.
“A mother doesn’t stop praying for her kids when she dies,” said the old priest. “It’s a bit tricky, because there’s no time up there.” He gave a subtle upward gesture with his eyes. “But the answers to those prayers come at the right time—down here.”
At the start of their conversation, Thomas had been sitting bolt upright—there was almost an urgency to his posture. He now looked like a crumpled heap.
“I wish I could stay,” said the old priest, “but my work here is finished. It’s time for someone else to take over. I hope you’ll think about everything I’ve said. I’ll be praying for you, son. Merry Christmas.” With a reassuring smile and a wink of the eye, he pushed himself up out of the pew, shuffled to the back of the chapel, and disappeared into a confessional.
***
Wait—that’s it?? It had taken Thomas a minute to recover his wits. He looked around. The chapel was unoccupied. The air was heavy and still, and the building was eerily silent. And, oddly, he thought, there was no one in line for confession. “Father?” Thomas called out, but there was no answer. He walked back to the confessional and, after a brief pause, drew the curtain aside with a single swift motion of his hand. It was empty.
Thomas stood there in contemplation for a moment, having ascertained that there was no other way in or out of the booth. And then, on something slightly more substantial than a whim, he made straight for the library. Edna Draper was sitting at her station in the archives room, sipping a cup of tea and reading a romance novel. “More research?” she asked when she saw Thomas walk in.
“You’re onto me,” said Thomas. “Could I please look at those records again?”
Edna Draper, without taking her eyes off her book, reached over, picked up a binder, and handed it to him. “I figured you’d be back,” she said. Thomas glanced at her as he took the binder. He opened it where he stood and found the student roll for 1911–12. On the facing page was a list of priests who had been in residence at the school for the same year, serving as administrators and teachers. He hadn’t noticed it the first time he looked. “Are there any pictures from these years?” he asked Mrs. Draper.
“Back section, right after the divider,” said Edna Draper, still not looking up. Thomas obeyed and found himself looking at faded black and white photographs of the student body for each academic year. There were also pictures of the chapel, the dormitories, and a classroom building, as well as a group photo of the priests for each school year. He looked closely at the 1911–12 photo of the priests—they were standing on the stairs in front of the chapel. And there he was! The old priest stood in the second row on the end, complete with the Albert Einstein hair. He looked no different than he had fifteen minutes earlier when he stood up to walk into the confessional.
“Mrs. Draper! Who is this priest?” Thomas was holding the binder up so she could see the photo. The tip of his index finger rested just below the face of the old priest.
“Fr. Cyril,” she answered matter-of-factly, her eyes glued to her novel.
“You’re not looking!”
“Don’t need to.”
Thomas let out a sigh of frustration. He turned to the front of the binder and consulted the list of priests for the 1911–12 academic year. There was a Fr. Cyril Callaghan on the list. Thomas closed his eyes for a moment and contemplated. He then opened them. “Mrs. Draper? When we spoke the other day, did you mean The Holy Ghost? Or that there’s a ghost in the chapel, one who happens to be holy?”
Mrs. Draper finally looked up. One corner of her mouth curled just slightly. “You’re very clever, young man. Takes most people a lot longer than that. Whatever he said, I’d listen to him if I were you. Wisest man I’ve ever met.”
Thomas walked out of the library and onto the quad. He took in a deep breath and, as he exhaled, watched the warm air from his lungs form a cloud in the cold December air. He followed the sidewalk until he found himself standing in front of the chapel. There was a green wreath on each door. He pondered the nativity scene behind those doors, and he wondered for a brief moment if he would ever see the old priest again. He knew the answer.
Without knowing why, he turned around so that he was facing the firepit on the quad, its shape only vaguely discernible under the cover of snow. As he looked, lost in thought, the surrounding snowscape faded from his consciousness, and he found himself standing under a moonlit sky, observing the bonfire from Halloween night of his senior year. The crowd was immersed in conversation, the students warming themselves at the fire and drinking from beer cans. He saw himself standing with a group of friends, including Sophia, to the left of the fire.
Off to the right of the fire, in the midst of the crowd, he saw his mother, wearing the pink blouse and blue skirt that she wore in the family portrait from his youth. She was with the beautiful young woman in the blue dress and the veil. His mother looked just as she did in the portrait, except that she was wiping tears from her eyes. Despite their age difference, his mother’s posture before the young woman was one of deference—she was pleading with her. No one seemed to notice them.
As the two of them spoke, Thomas became distracted by one of the students in the crowd, someone he didn’t know. The student was conversing with friends, his back to the fire. He was closer to the firepit than anyone else, and, taking an inadvertent step backward as he spoke, he stumbled. Struggling to catch his balance, his arms waving wildly, he staggered and fell into the fire. He was instantly incinerated. The fire gave forth with an audible crackle and then exhaled a small black cloud of smoke. The socializing about the bonfire continued as though nothing had happened.
Thomas looked back over in the direction of his mother. He watched as the young woman in blue gently placed a comforting hand on her shoulder and, after speaking briefly, held out her other hand. His mother took the Rosary beads from around her wrist and gave them to her. They were then joined by a third woman. She was facing the other two, so that Thomas could only see her back, but he knew who she was. She wore a gray cropped wool blazer, and her brunette hair spilled out from under a rust-colored beret and settled onto her shoulders. It looked as though the other two women were instructing her, and she nodded as they spoke. Three more students were incinerated over the course of their conversation, to no reaction from the crowd. His mother and the veiled woman then walked away from the fire and slowly faded from his vision until they disappeared altogether. The girl in the beret turned and headed over to the opposite side of the bonfire. Thomas looked in that direction and saw that he was standing with his back to the fire, closer to it than anyone else in the crowd.
At that moment he was jolted back to consciousness—someone was shaking him gently by the shoulder. “Are you okay?” Thomas found himself staring at a man dressed in a campus security uniform. “Sir, do you need help?”
“No, I’m okay.” Thomas mustered a weak smile. “Thanks.”
The security officer walked off, but not without looking back twice before disappearing down a sidewalk. Thomas had unconsciously slipped his right hand into his coat pocket and clasped the set of Rosary beads that rested there. He pulled them out, looked down, and ran his finger over his mother’s initials. Looking again at the shapeless mound of snow on the quad, he made a decision. Pulling out his phone, he opened his contacts and swiped up, watching intently as names and matching photos rolled off the screen. He brought the scrolling to a halt when he caught a glimpse of a rust-colored beret. Hesitating briefly, he tapped.
“Thomas??”
Thomas heard the voice on the other end and froze.
“Thomas? Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m here.… Sorry, I didn’t think you’d answer. I was wondering … Do you think we could grab a cup of coffee? I wanted to ask you something. Or, I guess, show you something. Or maybe tell you something. I’m not sure which. But I think you’re the person I’m supposed to talk to.”
“I know. I’ve been waiting for over a year. Can you be at the coffee shop in twenty minutes?” “Yeah.”
“I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll be in the corner booth.”
