“Silence. Then came the vague formation of the apparition again, translucent, face without detail; then it dissolved.

“I went on typing on the computer keyboard: ‘The soul—that part of me which speaks to you and loves you and knows you—that part is sometimes called spirit. And when my body dies my spirit or my soul will leave my body. Do you understand?’

“I felt his hand clamp onto my left hand.

“ ‘Don’t leave your body,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t die. I will cry.’

“For a long moment I pondered. He had made the connection. Yes. But I wanted more from him, and a terrifying urgency gripped me, a feeling very near panic.

“ ‘You are a spirit,’ I wrote. ‘You have no body. You are pure spirit. Don’t you know where Lynelle’s spirit has gone? You must know. You should know. There must be a place where spirits live. A place where spirits are. You do know.’

“There was a long silence, but I knew he was right beside me.

“I felt him grip my hand. ‘Don’t leave your body,’ he wrote again. ‘I will cry and cry.’

“ ‘But where is the home of the spirits?’ I wrote. ‘Where is the place where spirits live, like I live in this house?’

“It was useless. I typed it out in two dozen different ways. He couldn’t grasp it. And it was not long before he began to ask, ‘Why did Lynelle’s spirit leave her body?’

“I wrote out the description of the accident. Silence. And finally, his store of energy being exhausted and there being no rainfall to help him, he was absent.

“And alone, cold and frightened, I curled up in my chair and went to sleep.

“A great gulf had opened between me and Goblin.

“It had been widening for all the years that I knew Lynelle, and it was now immeasurable. My doppelgänger loved me and was as ever fastened to me but no longer knew my soul. And what was all the more ghastly to me was that he didn’t know what he was himself. He couldn’t speak of himself as a spirit. He would have done so if he could. He could not.

“As the days dragged on, Aunt Queen made plans to go off again to St. Petersburg, Russia, to rejoin two cousins she had left waiting there at the Grand Hotel. She prevailed upon me to go with her.

“I was amazed. St. Petersburg, Russia.

“She said in a very sweet and winning way that it was either go to college or see the world.

“I told her plainly I wasn’t ready for either. I was still hurt by Lynelle’s death.