“He’s not like you and me.” Yamaraj turned away from me, his gaze scanning the darkness. “He’s something heartless and empty.”
“He said that ghosts aren’t people.”
“Some of us see the dead that way—as objects, as toys.” Yamaraj sighed. “But some people see the living that way too.”
“Great, psychopomps and psychopaths.”
He didn’t answer.
The heat Yamaraj had brought with him seemed to be fading, and I crossed my arms over my chest against the cold. Suddenly the reality of everything I’d seen that night was crashing down on me.
At least now I knew why Mindy was so afraid of psychopomps. The afterlife had a food chain, and we were higher on it than ghosts.
“The old man wanted to teach me things,” I said.
“There are things you don’t want to know.”
I held Yamaraj’s eyes for a moment. The problem was, I wanted to know everything, the good and the bad. Maybe being the old man’s apprentice wasn’t for me, but this was a whole new world, and I needed to explore it.
“So you teach me,” I said
“You’re already changing so quickly, Lizzie. I don’t want to make it happen faster.”
I gestured out into the formless darkness. “Because that’s worse than stumbling around down here, not knowing anything?”
There it was again, the look of longing I’d seen on his face in the airport. However worried he was about me, Yamaraj wanted to keep this connection between us. His lips parted once, then pressed together again.
Finally he said, “What do you want to know?”
It took a moment to answer. I wanted to know about ghosts, about the old man in the patched coat, about everything I’d seen. I wanted to know how Yamaraj had brought light and fire with him in the darkness, and why his touch threw me from the gray world back into reality.
But with that vast emptiness surrounding us, I asked a simpler question. “Where are we?”
“The River Vaitarna. It’s the boundary between the world above and the one below.”
“A river, like the Styx.”
“Everything old has lots of names.” He looked up at the empty sky. “The overworld is up there, full of the living and wandering ghosts. Below us is the underworld, where the dead reside. The river is the oil between the two.”
I looked around. “It doesn’t seem like a river. I mean, where’s the water?”
“We’re in it.”
As if to reinforce Yamaraj’s point, the wind whipped up, like an eddying current around us. It pressed his black silk shirt against his abdomen, and for a moment I could see every cord of muscles there.
I pushed my hair out of my eyes. “Okay, next question. Where are you from?”
“A small village, by a large sea.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s a little vague, since you’re supposed to be teaching me. You’re from India, right?”
“I suppose. But that was before there was an India.”
I nodded slowly, fairly certain that India had been around for a long, long time. “How old are you?”
“I was fourteen when I crossed over.” His smile admitted that he was playing games with my questions.
“You look older than that. Maybe seventeen?”
“Maybe.”
At first he didn’t say anything more, and we had a little staring contest there in the darkness. But I liked staring at him, and I won.
“This is the afterworld, Lizzie. We’re like ghosts, and ghosts don’t get tired or hungry. They don’t get older, either.”
I stared at him. “You mean, I’m not going to age anymore?”
“You will in the overworld.” He looked up at the empty sky. “Whenever other living people can see you and talk to you, you’re getting older every second, just like a normal person.”
“So you must never leave.”
He shook his head. “I’ve spent a few years in the real world, since I crossed over that first time. A few days here and there, but that’s all.”
“Oh.” My eyes dropped to the black expanse beneath our feet. “So you live down in the underworld? That’s where Yami was taking all those people.”
He nodded.
“What’s it like down there?” My thoughts went to Mindy’s fears. “Is it a good place, or a bad place?”
“It’s quiet, mostly. Only the memories of the living stir the dead, and most of the dead have been forgotten. We do what we can.”
“We?”
“There are many of us, living people who’ve found the underworld. We each have our own people. We learn their names, so they don’t fade away.”
I nodded, remembering what Mindy had said, that my mother’s memories kept her from disappearing. “But millions of people must die every year. How can you remember them all?”
“We don’t. Most wander lost until they’re forgotten. Some are taken by people like that man you met, and used. The lucky ones find us.” Yamaraj stood a little straighter. “My people are only a few thousand, but I know all of them.”
“A few thousand, out of millions? That’s kind of depressing.”
“Death can be that way.” For a moment, he looked older.
“So I’ve noticed,” I sighed. “Is there anything you can teach me that’s not depressing?”
Yamaraj thought a moment, then a smile played on his face again. “How about this: The river isn’t just a boundary. It’s also a way to travel.”
He held out a hand, and I stared at it for a moment.
“Are we going somewhere?”
“Name a place you’d like to go.”
“Seriously?” My eyes blinked a few times. “Like, the Eiffel Tower? The Great Pyramids?”
“That depends. You need a connection to the place you’re going. Memories of having been there, some kind of bond. But yes, the River Vaitarna connects the entire world.”
I stared at him, wondering what places I had a real connection to. I’d lived in the same house all my life. There were my elementary and high schools, of course, but the idea of going to another empty school building gave me the creeps. I couldn’t exactly show up at my friend Jamie’s house, or my father’s apartment in New York.