What the Dead Want Read Online Free PDF

The last person who tried to help me with this was your mother.”
    Gretchen felt the hair on her neck rise. She didn’t know her mother had come back to the Axton house—Mona had never talked about it. It seemed unusual that shewould have left out something as interesting as trying to help clean up Axton mansion.
    Esther’s description of the house as “a little ramshackle” was more than an understatement. Gretchen took in the cobwebs, the peeling wallpaper, the water-stained ceiling, the chipped plaster. The sloping floors. Mold might be providing some of the only structural integrity to the place. She had no idea how anyone had lived in there for so long.
    â€œWe could just hire someone,” Gretchen suggested and then thought, like a wrecking crew.
    Esther waved her suggestion away without comment.
    Gretchen took out her phone again to check for reception—this time there were two bars. Thank God. She’d text Simon as soon as it didn’t seem too rude.
    When they reached the top of the stairwell, Aunt Esther pointed to the left and Gretchen walked into a hallway that was dark and narrow and lined with at least eight closed doors. The wallpaper was peeling—some of it coming down in great flat sheets that they had to step over.
    The smell of dust and plaster and mold was certainly going to make it impossible to stay there for any length of time. Her eyes were already beginning to itch. She didn’t know how the old lady could look so strong. She must not have any allergies.
    Gretchen snapped photos as they walked. On the walls, there were at least half a dozen framed and sepia-tinted portraits of what were likely long-dead members of the Axton tribe. The combination of perfect preservation and total neglect was amazing. She felt it had some profound meaning but didn’t know quite what. The house was literally in a kind of slow-motion tumble, floors creaking, layers of dust thick enough to leave footprints in. But the ostentatious wealth of the family—the portraits, the rugs, the furniture, the millions of little objects—had never been sold or taken or simply thrown out.
    She stopped walking abruptly when she saw that farther along the hall, an enormous gray wasp nest sat precariously atop a vase that stood on a corner table. She could hear the wasps buzzing inside, and the vase, which was decorated with images of Greek soldiers, was shaking ever so slightly.
    â€œDon’t mind that,” Esther said. “I haven’t been stung once.”
    Gretchen snapped a picture of the wasp nest, then turned around and startled. At the end of the hallway was an ornate mirror that had gone dark and mottled with age. Deep inside it she thought she saw something peering out intently at her, then dart suddenly and flicker away.

    T HE T ROUBLING D ISAPPEARANCE OF M ONA A XTON
    B Y H EIDI N ORTON
    Mona Axton, a firebrand in lower Manhattan’s art scene and one of the most important figures in American spiritualist photography, has gone missing, opening a torrent of speculation.
    Ms. Axton’s interest in the occult began in the 1980s when she lost many friends to AIDS. A photographer herself, she documented the disease’s impact on the art world, and then created “ghost images” of her friends walking in the city after their deaths. Her work from this period hangs in MoMA. Ms. Axton’s gallery also holds the rights to a majority of Victorian spiritualist photographs and ephemera. She had long been a subject of controversy in the art world, and her disappearance has been no less divisive, some calling it a tragedy, others a publicity stunt. Still others believe she has finally “crossed over” in order to document the lives of the undead.
    Ms. Axton had been traveling on business. She was expected home three weeks ago and failed to return. Anyone with information on her whereabouts is urged to contact the police.

SEVEN
    M ONA BELIEVED IN