Giving up on his movie without much reluctance, Penrose came over to the desk to see what she was messing with. "That's a sugar skull. It's a Mexican treat for the Day of the Dead."
"Why do you have it?"
"I found it in the boiler room when we went in there and found that someone had thrown the coal all over the place. It may have been there for years. I suppose the vandal may have dropped it, but it seems rather stupid to go leaving clues around like that."
"Breaking into a house to dig around in a pile of coal is a stupid thing to do anyway. When's the Day of the Dead?"
"Yesterday, I think. I'm assuming that he broke in on Halloween night. It was the ideal time. Bob was asleep, I was upstairs rotting my mind with television, and the rest of you were out trespassing. No one would have heard anything."
"It's lucky for him he didn't go into the sand room. If it had started sucking him down, no one would've heard him scream."
Penrose agreed. He took the skull from her and brushed at the coal dust.
Elizabeth said, "Speaking of the sand room, are you sure the house isn't falling down?"
"Well, this whole section of the neighborhood is slowly subsiding into the tunnel, but I don't think that's the reason for the strange behavior of the sand pit. The sulfur that you smelled is a dead giveaway, so to speak, that there's something else going on."
"You mean like the disappearing Halloween candy and the ghost in the dining room?"
"What ghost?" Penrose looked up sharply and the skull crumbled in his hand.
"In the dining room. When I went through there on Halloween night, I thought I heard something and then it tried to cop a feel." She turned the memory over in her mind.
"There are no ghosts in this house." Grains of sugar and coal dust sifted through his fingers. He brushed off his hands and began to pace back and forth.
Elizabeth had never seen him so disturbed. "Calm down. Maybe I imagined it. I had on that corset and I could hardly breathe, after all. I'm sure there's a rational explanation."
"There's an explanation, all right, but it's not likely to be rational in the conventional sense of the word. These events have to be part of a larger pattern and I can only see a tiny part of it. I'm stuck here in this house. It's like I'm looking at the world through a keyhole and I can only see what happens to wander past."
He faced his bookcases. "I know I've read about something like this before." Walking along the bookcases, he reached through the glass doors and trailed his fingers along the spines of his books. He stopped in front of a stretch of books bound in leather of a malevolent blackness, unmarked even by titles stamped in gold. Frowning, Penrose removed one forbidding volume from the bookcase and paged through it.
"What's that?"
"I'm looking for references to sulfur, among other things," he said. "Would you like to help?"
He settled her at the desk with all five volumes of Child's ballads and instructions to look for references to the Devil and death, as per the sulfur and the sugar skull.
"Death? You can't be serious." Elizabeth eyed the stack of moldering books with consternation.
"Death as an autonomous entity, not death when people die. That would be nearly every ballad," he said. He returned to the books he had pulled out for himself.
They worked for a while, the murmur of the television interrupted only by the gentle turning of pages and occasional rhetorical remarks.
From Elizabeth, who threw her pencil on the desk in disgust: "Another rape. What was wrong with these people? These ballads were supposed to be entertainment?"
From Penrose: "Listen to this, 'Sulfur is the aspect of mercury, or quicksilver, that reveals the soul. Exposure to moonlight will loosen the forces that hold the brimstone in its solid form.' Now, the moon was full last night and down in the basement.what are you laughing at?"
Once she regained control of herself, she said, "You have a couple thousand books here. Is even one of them a chemistry book?"
"Well, no. But that's hardly to the point."
"Yeah, and I noticed that when you went through my books, you didn't exactly rip into my college textbooks. You want my chemistry book?"
"Less than a week ago, you didn't believe in magic and now you've managed to fit it into your world view. Why aren't you willing to accept this?" He waggled the alchemy book at her.
"Because I've taken chemistry."
They went back to their books, after mutters of "narrow-minded" and "ignorant" from both sides.
Later that night, Elizabeth was back in the kitchen, washing her dishes and wondering again where her sister had been all evening. The ballads had left her feeling mildly dismal and mickle crabby, and now she wanted someone to talk with, but Dirk had retreated to his room to call Kevin, Bob was too sleepy, and Penrose was still occupied with his books. He'd barely looked up when she dropped her Intro to Chem book on the desk in the library. She had spent the rest of the evening trying to make progress on the Boccaccio and procrastinating by reading newspapers online and then moving on to a rather less educational trip through the comics pages.
She was placing the last pot in the dish rack when she heard the front door open and then, followed by the moist sound of a fond farewell, close again. Her sister came back to the kitchen preceded by a huge smile and the aroma of baked sugar and cream.
"That isn't pumpkin pie," said Elizabeth.
"No, it's buttermilk chess pie." Alice raised the pie plate above her head and spun in a circle. "I have found me a pie-making man."
"When can I have some?" Elizabeth tried to get a look at the pie as it was whisked past her nose.
"It has to chill, so you have to wait till breakfast." Alice lifted up the foil to show her sister a creamy pie topped with toasted pecans.
"Pie for breakfast? Are we Amish now?"
"Ha, ha. Spoken like someone who has never had pie for breakfast." Alice put the pie in the refrigerator.
Attracted by the aroma of the pie, the boys both materialized in the kitchen. Elizabeth half expected Penrose to appear as well, but then remembered that he could not smell anything. Dirk and Bob were as disappointed as Elizabeth when they were told that they would have to wait to have any pie.
They begged.
It was not pretty.
Alice did not give in, but she offered to put the kettle on for them to have herbal tea. This did not go over nearly as well as the prospect of pie, but Dirk remembered that he still had a knapsack full of Halloween candy. By the time he returned to the kitchen with bags of Reese's Cups, small chocolate bars, and Peppermint Patties, Alice was pouring hot water for chamomile mint tea into a row of mismatched mugs. She made Dirk and Bob the same offer of pie for breakfast as she had Elizabeth. Their reaction made Elizabeth wonder if everybody in the world or at least the pie-eating regions, except her, had pie for breakfast on a regular basis.
Alice regaled them with tales of Officer Joe, the pie-making process, and some other tidbits she had learned from listening to the police scanner with him. "So, enough about me," she finished. "How about you, Elizabeth? Did Trip call?"
Elizabeth choked on a Peppermint Patty and had to melt it partially with hot tea before she could answer. "No, but I expect he's busy."
Dirk aggressively stirred a heaping spoonful of sugar into his tea. "You shouldn't have to put up with that. How long do you think it takes to make a phone call?"
"It's not like we're dating," Elizabeth said. "We've just gone out a couple times." She changed the subject by asking Dirk about Carl.
"Did he come here?" Aside to Elizabeth she said, "He was always going around like he owned the place and had plans. So snotty. He wanted to get rid of the portrait in the music room and make a shrine thingy for the velvet Elvis in place of it. And paint everything black. Made a total ass of himself and Dirk dumped him before he could mess anything up." Alice savagely bit a peanut butter cup. "So what did he want?"
"He wanted the Velvis back," Dirk told her.
"Really? Did you give it to him?" Alice was hopeful.
Dirk said, "No, but I think he had some friends break in and try to take it while he was talking to me. Did any of you leave the back door unlocked today?" Dirk described the scene by Carl's vehicle.
While he spoke, Alice gave Elizabeth a questioning look over the rim of her mug. Her eyes asked, You? Elizabeth shook her head.
Somewhere in the house a door slammed with a bang that made them all jump.
"It's just a draft. One of the windows on my floor is really loose in the sash and it creeps up," said Bob.
As if to prove him right, a sudden gust of wind rattled the windows on the back of the house and sent the branch of a nearby tree scraping ominously against the back porch. The lights flickered.
Probably just a perturbation of the ether, Elizabeth thought.
Outside the rising wind howled around in the gutters and resonated with a rich musicality that made them all exchange uneasy glances and start talking brightly of unrelated topics. Rififi scampered into the room, his fur bristling out in all directions.