Girl of Nightmares

by Kendare Blake

  “Who?”

  “Miss Riika.”

  “Aunt Riika?” Thomas asks. “What could she know about it?” He turns to me. “I used to go over to her house when I was a kid. She’s not really my aunt, but you know, more like a friend of the family. I haven’t seen her in years.”

  “We lost touch.” Morfran shrugs. “It happens sometimes. But if Thomas takes you to see her, she’ll talk to you. She’s been a Finnish witch all her life.”

  A Finnish witch. The phrase makes me want to bare my teeth and put my fur up. Anna’s mother, Malvina, was a Finnish witch. That’s how she was able to curse Anna and bind her to the Victorian. Right after she cut her throat.

  “She’s not the same,” Thomas whispers. “She’s not like her.”

  My breath shakes out of my lungs and I nod at him fondly. It doesn’t bother me anymore that he sometimes breaks into my thoughts. He can’t help it. And the way I instantly seethed about Malvina must’ve lit his dendrites up like a Christmas tree.

  “Will you take me to her?” I ask.

  “I guess so.” He shrugs. “But we might not get anything besides a plate of gingersnaps. She wasn’t exactly ‘all there’ even when I was little.”

  Carmel lingers on the outskirts, quietly petting Stella. Her voice cuts through the smoke.

  “If the haunting is real, can this Miss Riika make her go away?”

  I look at her sharply. Nobody answers and after a few long seconds, her eyes drop to the floor.

  “Okay,” she says. “Let’s just get on with it, I guess.”

  Morfran puffs his pipe and shakes his head. “Cas and Thomas only. Not you, girl. Riika wouldn’t let you in the front door.”

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  “Because the answers they’re after, you don’t want,” Morfran replies. “Resistance is coming off of you in waves. If you go with them, they won’t get anywhere.” He presses the ash in his pipe down.

  I look at Carmel. Her eyes are hurt, but not guilty. “I won’t go then.”

  “Carmel,” Thomas starts, but she cuts him off.

  “You shouldn’t go either. Neither of you.” I’d speak up, but she’s looking at Thomas. “If you’re really his friend, if you care about him, then you shouldn’t indulge this.” And then she turns on her heel and walks out of the room. She’s all the way through the antique shop before I can say that I’m not an infant, I don’t need chaperones, or babysitters, or a goddamn counselor.

  “What’s the matter with her today?” I ask Thomas, but from the way his jaw is hanging open in her wake, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t know.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Thomas’s Aunt Riika lives in the middle of bumble-fuck nowhere. We’ve been driving on unmarked dirt roads for at least ten minutes. There are no signs of any kind, just trees and more trees, then a brief clearing leading up to more trees. If he hasn’t been out here in years, I have no idea how he seems to be finding his way so easily.

  “Are we lost? You’d admit it if we were lost, right?”

  Thomas smiles, maybe a bit nervously. “We’re not lost. At least, not yet. They might’ve changed some of the roads around since the last time.”

  “Who the hell are ‘they’? Road construction squirrels? It doesn’t even look like these things have been driven on in the last ten years.” The trees are thick outside my window. The foliage has come back to fill in the winter spaces. We’ve taken too many turns now, and my sense of direction is shot. We could be going northsouth for all I know.

  “Ha! There it is,” Thomas crows. I sit up straighter in my seat. We’re approaching a small white farmhouse. There are early shoots of a flower garden cropping up around the front porch, and a walkway of flagstones leads from the driveway to the front steps. As Thomas pulls the Tempo onto the pale gravel, he beeps the horn. “I hope she’s home,” he mutters, and we step out.

  “It’s nice,” I say, and mean it. I’m surprised there aren’t more neighbors; the surrounding property has to be worth something. Trees have been carefully planted around the yard, shielding it from the eyes of the road but opening up in front to sort of hug the house.

  Thomas bounds up the steps like an eager hound. This must’ve been what he was like as a kid too, coming to see his Aunt Riika. I wonder why she and Morfran lost touch. When he knocks on the door, my heart holds its breath, not only because I want my answers, but also because I don’t want to see the disappointed look on Thomas’s face if Riika isn’t home.

  I don’t have anything to worry about. She answers on the third knock. She’s probably been at the window since we drove up. I can’t imagine she gets many visitors way out here.

  “Thomas Aldous Sabin! You’ve doubled in size!” She comes onto the porch and hugs him. While his face is pointed toward me I mouth “Aldous?” at him and try not to laugh.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” Riika asks. She’s a lot shorter than I expected, barely over five feet. Her hair is loose and dark blond, shot through with white. Lines crack through the soft skin of her cheeks and pinch in the corners of her eyes. The cable-knit sweater she wears looks about three sizes too big and there’s support hose bunched around her shoes. Riika is no spring chicken. But when she claps Thomas on the back, he still jolts forward from the force of it.

  “Aunt Riika, this is my friend Cas,” he says, and like he gave her permission, she finally looks at me. I push my hair out of my eyes and flash the Boy Scout smile. “Morfran sent us for help,” Thomas adds quietly.

  Riika clucks her tongue, and as her cheeks pull in, I get the first glimpse of the witch she must be underneath the layers of floral print knit. When her eyes dart to my backpack, where the athame rests in its sheath, I have to fight the urge to back off the porch.

  “I should have smelled it,” she says softly. Her voice is like the pages of a very old book. She squints at my face. “The power coming off of this one.” Her hand snakes into Thomas’s and she pats it firmly. “Come inside.”

  * * *

  The interior of the farmhouse smells like blended incense and old lady. And I don’t think she’s updated the décor since the 70s. Brown shag carpet stretches as far as the eye can see, beneath cluttered furniture: a rocking chair and long couch, both in green velour. A glass hurricane light fixture hangs over a yellow Formica table in the dining area. Riika leads us to the table and motions for us to sit down. The table itself is a mess of half-burnt candles and incense sticks. After we sit, she squirts some lotion onto her hands and rubs them together briskly.

  “Your grandfather is well?” she asks, leaning forward onto her elbows and smiling at Thomas, one fist curled up against her chin.

  “He’s great. He says hello.”

  “Tell him I say hello too,” she says. Her voice bothers me. The accent and timbre are too close to Malvina’s. I can’t help thinking it, even though the two women look nothing alike. Malvina, when I saw her, was younger than Riika, and her hair was a black braided bun, not a mass of butterscotch and marshmallows. Still, looking into Riika’s face, images of Anna’s murder aren’t far behind. They flash up in my memory of the séance, Malvina dripping black wax onto Anna’s white dress, soaked with blood.

  “This is not easy for you,” Riika says to me severely, which doesn’t help. She reaches for a tin with cardinals painted on it and pries it open, offering the gingersnaps inside to Thomas, who grabs two handfuls. A wide smile spreads on her face as she watches him stuff a few into his mouth before looking back at me impatiently. Was I supposed to say something? Was that a question?

  She clucks her tongue again. “You are a friend to Thomas?”

  I nod.

  “He’s the best, Aunt Riika,” Thomas affirms over crumbles of gingersnap. She smiles at him briefly.

  “Then I will help you, if I can.” She leans forward and lights three of the candles, seemingly at random. “Ask your questions.”

  I take a deep breath. Where do I start? There doesn’t seem to be enough
air in the room for me to explain the situation with Anna, how she came to be cursed, how she sacrificed herself for us, and now, why she can’t possibly be haunting me for real.

  Riika slaps me on the hand. Apparently I took too long. “Give,” she says, and I turn it palm up. Her grip is gentle, but there’s steel beneath her fingers as she squeezes my bones together and closes her eyes. I wonder if she was the one who helped Thomas develop his mind-reading talent, if such a thing can be taught or developed.

  I glance at Thomas. He’s paused in mid-chew, his eyes intent on our joined hands, like he might see electricity or smoke passing between us. This is taking forever. And I’m not really comfortable with all this touching. Something about Riika, maybe the power emanating off her, is almost making me sick to my stomach. Just when I’m ready to pull free, she opens her eyes and lets go with a brisk pat on the back of my hand.

  “He’s a warrior, this one,” she says to Thomas. “A wielder of a weapon older than all of us.” There’s a pointed way that she isn’t looking at me and her hands are curled like crabs. They skitter across the Formica, fingers tapping the tabletop. “You want to know about the girl,” she says into her lap. With her chin tucked low her voice takes on a choked, froggy quality.

  “The girl,” I whisper. Riika looks at me with a sly smile.

  “You were the one who took Anna Dressed in Blood out of the world,” she says. “I felt it when she passed. It was a storm dying over the lake.”

  “She took herself out,” I say. “To save my life. And Thomas’s.”

  Riika shrugs to say it doesn’t matter. There’s a velvet bag resting on a gold plate; she empties out the contents and stirs them around. I try not to look too closely. I’m going to pretend that they’re carved runes. But I think they’re actually small bones, maybe from a bird, or a lizard, maybe from human fingers. She looks down into the pattern and raises her pale eyebrows.

  “The girl is not with you now,” she says, and my heart thumps. I don’t know what I’m hoping for. “But she was. Recently.”

  Beside me, Thomas inhales fast and sits up straighter. He adjusts his glasses and nudges me with his elbow, I think to be encouraging.

  “Can you tell what she wants?” he asks after a minute of me sitting dumb as a rock.

  Riika cocks her head. “How should I know that? You want I should call the wind and ask it? It would not know either. Only one person to ask because only one person knows. Ask Anna Dressed in Blood to give up her secrets.” Her eyes slant toward me. “I think she would give up much, for you.”

  It’s hard to hear anything over the pulse pounding in my ears.

  “I can’t ask her,” I mutter. “She can’t talk.” My head is starting to come out from underneath the shock; it’s starting to think ahead and trip over itself. “I’ve been told that it’s impossible to come back. That she shouldn’t be able to be here.”

  Riika leans back in her chair. She motions tensely with her hand, toward my backpack and the athame. “Show me,” she says, and crosses her arms over her chest.

  Thomas nods, giving the okay. I unsnap my bag and pull out the knife still in its sheath. Then I lay it on the table in front of me. Riika jerks her head, and I take it out. The flames of the candles flicker along the blade. Her reaction as her eyes move over it is odd, just an uneasy tic of emotion in the corner of her wrinkled mouth, something that looks like revulsion. Finally, she looks away and spits onto the floor.

  “What do you know about this?” she asks.

  “I know that it was my father’s before it was mine. I know that it sends ghosts who kill to the other side, where they can’t hurt the living.”

  Riika shoots Thomas a raised brow. It looks a lot like the old-lady version of the “get a load of this guy” expression.

  “Good and bad. Right and wrong.” She shakes her head. “This athame does not think on these terms.” She sighs. “You do not know much. So I will tell you. You think this athame creates a door between this world and the next one.” She holds up one hand, and then the other. “This athame is the door. It was opened long ago and since then has swung, back and forth, back and forth.”

  I watch Riika’s hand sway left and right.

  “But it never closes.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “That’s wrong. Ghosts can’t pass back through the knife.” I look at Thomas. “It doesn’t work like that.” I take the athame from the table and stuff it back into my bag.

  Riika leans forward and smacks my shoulder. “How do you know how it works?” she asks. “But no. It doesn’t work like that.”

  I’m starting to see what Thomas meant about her being not quite all there.

  “It would take a strong will,” she goes on, “and a deep connection. You said Anna was not sent away with this knife. But she would have to know it, sense it, in order to find you.”

  “She was cut,” Thomas interjects excitedly. “After the scrying spell, Will took the knife and stabbed her, but she didn’t die. Or pass on, or whatever.”

  Riika’s eyes are on my backpack again. “She is connected to it. To her it would be like a beacon, a lighthouse. Why the others cannot follow it, I don’t know. There are still mysteries, even for me.” There’s something strange about the way she’s watching the knife. Her eyes are intense, but disconnected. I didn’t notice before that they have an odd, yellow tint to the irises.

  “But Aunt Riika, even if you’re right, how can Cas talk to her? How can he find out what she wants?”

  Her smile is broad and warm. Almost joyful. “You must make the music come in clearer,” she says. “You must speak the language of her curse. The same way we Finns have always spoken to the dead. With a Lappish drum. Your grandfather will know where to find one.”

  “Can you help us do that?” I ask. “I’m assuming we need a Finnish witch for this.”

  “Thomas is more than witch enough,” she replies, but he doesn’t look too sure.

  “I’ve never used one before,” he says. “I wouldn’t know where to start. It would be better if you did it. Please?”

  Regret clouds Riika’s features as she shakes her head. She can’t seem to meet his eyes anymore and her breath sounds heavier, more strained. We should probably go. All these questions have to be taxing. And really, she’s given us the answers and a good place to start. I lean back away from the table and catch a draft moving through the room; it makes me realize how cold my fingers and cheeks are.

  Thomas is babbling, quietly sputtering reasons why it shouldn’t be him to do the ritual, and how he wouldn’t know a Lappish drum if it smacked him in the face, and that he’d probably wind up channeling the ghost of Elvis. But Riika keeps shaking her head.

  It’s getting colder. Or maybe it was cold when we came in. She might not have a good central heating system in such an old place. Or she just keeps the heat turned down to save money.

  Finally, I hear Riika sigh. It isn’t an exasperated sound. There’s sadness in it. And resolve.

  “Go and get my drum,” she whispers. “It is in my bedroom. Hanging on the north wall.” She nods toward the short hallway. I can see a sliver of what looks like the bathroom. The bedroom must be farther down. Something’s wrong here. And it has to do with the way she looked at the athame.

  “Thanks, Aunt Riika.” Thomas grins and gets up from the table to go after the drum. When I see her pained expression, I suddenly know what it is.

  “Thomas, don’t,” I say, and push myself away from the table. But I’m too late. When I get to the bedroom, he’s already there, standing frozen halfway to the north wall. The drum hangs just where Riika said it would be, an oblong shape a foot wide and twice as long, animal hide stretched taut. Riika herself sits looking at it, motionless in her wooden rocking chair, her skin gray and leathery, her eyes sunken in and lips peeled back from her teeth. She’s been dead for at least a year.

  “Thomas,” I whisper, and reach out to grab his arm. He jerks away with a cry and bolts. I curse under my
breath and grab the drum off the wall, then go after him. On our way out of the house I notice how it has changed, covered in dust and spots of dirt, a corner of the couch gnawed away by rodents. Cobwebs hang in the corners and suspend down from the light fixtures. Thomas doesn’t stop running until he’s outside, in the yard. He’s got his hands pressed against the sides of his head.

  “Hey,” I say gently. I have no idea what else to do, or what I should tell him. His hand comes up defensively and I back off. His breath comes in hitches and gasps. I think he’s crying, and who can blame him? It’s okay that he doesn’t want me to see. I look back at the farmhouse. The trees around it are sparse, and there’s nothing in the flower garden but hard-packed dirt. The white paint on the siding is so thin that it looks like it was done in a quick wash of watercolor, leaving the black boards to show through.

  “I’m sorry, man,” I say. “I should have known. There were signs.” There were signs. I just missed them. Or misread them.

  “It’s okay,” he says, and wipes his face with the back of his sleeve. “Riika would never hurt me. She’d never hurt anyone. I’m just surprised, that’s all. I can’t believe Morfran didn’t tell me that she died.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know either.”

  “Oh, he knew,” Thomas says, nodding. He sniffs and grins at me. His eyes are a little red, but he’s got it back together already. The kid is resilient. He starts back toward the Tempo and I follow.

  “He knew,” he says loudly. “He knew and he sent me here anyway. I’m going to kill him! I’m absolutely going to kill him.”

  “Take it easy,” I say once we’re inside the car, Thomas still muttering about Morfran’s impending demise. He starts the engine, and pauses.

  “No way. Don’t you get it, Cas?” He looks at me disgustedly. “I ate the fucking gingersnaps.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Thomas drops me off in my driveway, still grumbling about Morfran and Riika and the gingersnaps. I’m glad I don’t have to bear witness to that confrontation. Personally, I think that eating the cookies is a minor point compared to the part where Morfran sent his grandson to unknowingly visit a dead family member, but hey, everybody has their pet peeves. Apparently Thomas’s is dead peoples’ snack food.