“I wanted to banish him. I wanted him dead. I wished that the journey to New York had killed him. And who could I tell this to? Who would understand? I felt murderous and abnormal. And Lynelle was dead.

“I sat in the pew. My heart went quiet. He continued his efforts to get my attention. He was just Goblin, and when he cleaved to me, when he gave up the solid image and wrapped his invisible self around me I felt myself relax in his embrace.

“Aunt Queen flew home for the Memorial, but, as she was coming from St. Petersburg, Russia, and there was a delay out of Newark, New Jersey, she did not make it in time. When she saw her room decorated in Lynelle’s favorite blue, she cried. She threw herself on the blue satin comforter, turned over and stared up at the canopy, and looked like nothing so much as one of her own many slender flopping boudoir dolls, with her high heels and her cloche hat and her wet vacant weeping stare.

“I was so devastated by Lynelle’s death that I fell into a state of silence, and though I knew that as the days passed those around me were concerned about me, I couldn’t speak a single syllable to anyone. I sat in my room, in my reading chair by the fireplace, and I did nothing but think of Lynelle.

“Goblin went sort of mad on account of my state. He began to pinch me incessantly, and trying to lift my left hand, and rushing towards the computer and making gestures that he wanted to write.

“I remember staring at him as he stood over there at the desk, beckoning to me, and realizing for what it’s worth that his pinches weren’t any worse than they had ever been, and that he couldn’t make the lights blink more than very little, and that when he pulled my hair I hardly felt it, and that I could ignore him without consequence if I chose.

“But I loved him. I didn’t want to kill him. No, I didn’t. And the moment had come to tell him what had happened. I dragged myself out of the chair and I went to the computer and I tapped out:

“ ‘Lynelle is dead.’

“For a long moment he read this message and then I said it out loud to him, but I received no response.

“ ‘Come on, Goblin, think. She’s dead.’ I said. ‘You’re a spirit and now she’s a spirit.’

“But there was no response.

“Suddenly I felt the old pressure on my left hand, with the tight sensation of fingers curling around it, and then he tapped out:

“ ‘Lynelle. Lynelle is gone?’

“I nodded. I was crying and I wanted now to be left alone. I told him aloud that she was dead. But Goblin took my left hand again and I watched it claw the keyboard:

“ ‘What is dead?’”