Hex Life

by Rachel Deering

  “We hit someone, Kai.” The sure firmness in her voice surprised her.

  “We didn’t!” Kai screamed at her. “Someone hit us!”

  “Kai… calm down. Breathe.”

  He did, taking heaving breaths that began to fog the car’s window. Charlotte wiped away the condensation with a crumpled napkin she snatched from the cup holder: she didn’t want any blind spots. Outside the windows, the stillness was unnerving. She waited for the man she’d run over to pop up and try to scare the actual life out of them, but he didn’t come. Nothing moved.

  “I know something is messed up, all right?” Charlotte told Kai, and he nodded, his eyes flooding with grateful tears that he didn’t have to shoulder reality alone. “I can’t explain what happened back at that house. But we ran over a man with the car—I ran over a man. I have to check on him. That’s the law, Kai. I can’t leave an old man in the road.”

  Kai’s gratitude vanished, replaced by bitter fright. “You still don’t get it!”

  “I need you to stay in the car—”

  “Don’t leave me! You better not leave me—”

  “—and I’m just going to check on him. To see if he’s alive.”

  “Alive? Alive don’t just-just—”

  “Breathe, Kai. Breathe. Or you’ll pass out. I’m serious. Look at my eyes and breathe.”

  She held out her hand, and he took it and squeezed hard. He forced himself to breathe more slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on hers, desperate to believe in her.

  Still, nothing moved outside. No corpse popped up like a jack-in-the-box. In the quiet, it was easier to forget the woman’s unnaturally loud screech at the house and worry more about the dead man who lay beneath her car. Never mind going to law school one day after her break from classrooms: she would go to prison for manslaughter. She and Kai both had been so shocked by the sight of the man that they’d fooled their eyes, making him a phantom.

  I probably killed someone. Her stomach curdled at the thought. If she’d had food in the past few hours, she would have spit it up. Put on your big girl panties, Grandmama used to say.

  Somehow, Charlotte navigated the lock and door handle with hands like jelly. She eased the door open, touched her foot to the road. Pressed hard to feel its solidness. She prayed as hard as she knew how that the man was alright. When she stood, adrenaline cascaded down her legs.

  At least no limbs protruded from the bottom of the car as she’d feared, like Dorothy killing the wicked witch with her house. Both the front and rear tires were flat on the driver’s side, the rubber clawed to strips. The sick feeling in her stomach turned rigid, twisting. Were the other tires flat too? They wouldn’t get far even with only two flats. She was afraid to check right away and learn that they were stranded.

  Charlotte lowered herself to her knees to peek beneath the car, expecting to see the pea-green jacket. But no man was under the car—only a scattered pile of large, sharp stones like the ones under the tree. Back at the house. At the makeshift grave site. Charlotte drew in a long breath, sucking in air. The road seemed to shake with her heartbeat.

  “I can’t see you!” Kai shouted.

  Charlotte pulled herself to her feet, looking away from the impossible sight, but not before she noticed that the other two tires had also been ravaged by the stones, rims shining through. Damn, damn, damn.

  As she straightened up, Charlotte’s mind tried to make sense of it: Had the car sent him flying into a ditch? She hadn’t seen any stones in the road, but she’d looked away at the radio. That many stones hadn’t appeared from nowhere—had they?

  “There’s no one under there!” she called to Kai.

  “I told you!” he said. He wasn’t surprised at all. He knew. “Come back in!”

  “I have to see if he got thrown.”

  Kai thumped his fist against the window, so scared and frustrated she thought he might break the glass or his hand, or both. “Just come back!”

  “Stop that, Kai. I’ll be right there. He could be only injured.” She said it although she didn’t believe it—she wouldn’t find a man sprawled in the ditch, and if she did he would be dead. But she had to be sure she wasn’t just in denial, trading an evening-news brand of horror for something else. The police would ask if she had looked. And he might be there, merely hurt or unconscious. He might.

  But no one was in the ditch on either side. While Kai kept thumping the window, she walked up and down in her clicking heels looking for the man’s coat, or his beard, or blood. Beyond the drainage ditches, she saw nothing but untended woods growing wild. She felt a vibration shiver beneath her feet and held her breath until the trembly sensation was gone.

  Kai honked the horn, pressing it for a long, unbroken tone. It sounded like sacrilege.

  She waved back at him. “Shhhh. Don’t do that!”

  Kai was pointing toward the road behind her. “Look!”

  A car was coming from the direction they’d just left, taking its sweet time. Not a car, she realized as she stared—a truck. A white truck with its oversized hood and cab. Like the one parked back at the house. Somewhere in the woods, a dog was barking.

  “The radio’s on again!” Kai yelled, panicked. She heard Elvis sing reverently about no sadness, no sorrow, no trouble, no pain, the volume too loud inside the car. Kai was covering his ears. “Charlotte!”

  Charlotte ran to the car. Each time she glanced back at the truck over her shoulder, it had gained an alarming distance. There might be both a driver and a passenger in the cab. She had to grab Kai and pop the trunk to see if she could find a weapon. Maybe she’d find a tire iron.

  “We have to run,” Charlotte said, breathless. She reached for the door handle the instant after she heard the CLICK of the locks, too late. But Kai’s hands were still plugging his ears. He hadn’t locked the doors, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Kai! Unlock the door!”

  But she could see for herself that he was trying, reaching across to the driver’s door, pushing every button he could. Panic had dried his tears. “It won’t open!” he said. “Get me out!”

  Charlotte kneeled to find the biggest stone she could. One just beyond the mangled front tire weighed at least five pounds. “Get in the back seat in a ball—hurry! Cover your eyes.”

  As she raised the stone high, she glanced back at the truck. It was close enough now that if it sped up, they would have no time to outrun it. She could see that the driver was a woman by the outline of her frizzy hair. The truck rambled on at its slow, steady speed.

  Charlotte heaved the stone at the windshield with all of her strength. A thin line of a crack appeared, but the glass didn’t break. The second time she hit it, the stone made a spiderweb in glass that would not yield. Instead, the stone broke in two. Charlotte let out a frustrated yell, kneeling to search for another stone.

  “Do the side window! I’ll fit!” Kai said. He was watching the truck’s approach and knew she didn’t have time to keep trying.

  None of the stones remaining under the car were as big as the first, but she found a slightly smaller one she smashed into the driver’s side window while she clung to it with her bare hand—and the glass shattered, falling away. But not enough. She and Kai were still batting at the remaining glass when they heard the guttural engine’s purr as the truck pulled up beside them, crushing smaller stones beneath it. She could not leave Kai. She reached for him as he squeezed himself through the jagged exit. A fixed glass shard dug into his shoulder, leaving flecks of blood on his white dress shirt.

  Two women laughed from the truck. The laughter chilled Charlotte and tried to make her run, but she held on to Kai while he tried to pull his leg through. She glanced at the driver sitting high in the cab—

  —and saw a black woman with honeyed skin and spiky plaits. Beside her sat a white woman with wild auburn hair; a young woman who did not look like the one she’d seen through the screen door. Both women grinned at them with badly yellowed teeth.

  “You’re not fixin’ to run, I
hope!” the black woman said. “Don’t you hear the dogs?”

  Charlotte did hear dogs then: a chorus of barking from the woods. Two dozen or more dogs might be waiting in the brush. Kai tried to run right away, but Charlotte held him back with her arm hooked around his neck. “Dogs,” she whispered.

  “I don’t care,” he said, wriggling like a fish against her grip.

  “We’re not the ones you ought to be afraid of,” the black woman said. She tapped her horn, and Kai went limp at the strangled sound. “Hey. Look at me—I said you don’t need to be ’fraid of us. Aunt Sally’s the one who hexed you.”

  “Meanest woman who ever lived or died—that’s Aunt Sally for you,” the white woman said. She was fanning herself with a Life magazine. “By the way, I’m Rose. That’s Malindy.”

  “I was named from a poem,” the black woman said with pride. “My mama liked it.”

  Charlotte didn’t answer. She couldn’t stop blinking to test if the women were real.

  “I’m sick to death,” the white woman, Rose, said. “Sick of Aunt Sally hexing and swallowing folks up in the ground. Then they’re gone and their kin never know where they went. I say people are people. That’s what I say. Just look at us—oh, she hates how we’re cousins.”

  “Just leave us alone!” Charlotte said, finding her voice. She was too afraid to move. All the while the women chatted, the truck idled ready to run her and Kai over with the slightest lunge. “Just—please—go back where you came from.”

  “Where you headed? Into that fog?” Malindy said. Charlotte nodded, hating herself for trusting this stranger with the truth—far worse than a stranger—only because her skin color felt like a promise. “That’s the way you’d better go, all right,” Malindy said, approving.

  “But she’ll swallow you up on the road,” Rose said. “See?”

  Rose pointed toward Charlotte’s feet. The asphalt beneath her black pumps had crumbled since she’d seen it last, as if she were forcing a great weight upon it. A gap near her big toe was already two inches across. Startled, Charlotte stepped back. More ruptures webbed the road.

  “That just gets worse and worse ’til it swallows you whole,” Rose said.

  “And the woods, they ain’t no better,” Malindy said, and she pointed too: at the treeline a large brown dog as big as a wolf stood with its front legs perched on a log, watching them. The sight of the beast was a worse fear at a distance than the truck up close. “She’ll set dogs on anybody Negro. Old, young, woman, child. Makes her no nevermind. All this fuss ain’t over Johnny,” Malindy said, and cackled to herself. “He shot himself cleaning his shotgun, dumb as the day is long. Sally just loves chasin’ coloreds, still mad ’cause Johnny was my papa in secret. Everybody knew it but her. I call her Aunt Sally because I don’t have another name for her.”

  “Uncle Johnny was better’n some,” Rose told Malindy. “I think she still loved him in a way, or wouldn’t she have shot him herself?” They spoke to each other as if they were alone.

  The dog at the roadside growled, stepping tentatively closer. Kai tried to lunge away again, but Charlotte held on. A dog that size would maul him to death, and there were others.

  The women remembered them again. “Way we see it…” Malindy began.

  “…Y’all better hop in back of the truck,” Rose finished. “We can drive you back to the edge of the fog. We can’t drive through it, but we can get you that far.”

  “What you doin’ way out here anyways?” Malindy said. “No one takes Route Nine unless they want to get lost.”

  “Real lost,” Rose said, and giggled.

  “They drove right over Johnny’s grave,” Malindy said to Rose, and they laughed again. “This one here did everything but lindy hop over his bones.”

  Their chatter, and the impossible choices, made Charlotte dizzy. A low cracking sound rumbled beneath her, and the two-inch gap in the asphalt widened to half a foot. Kai whimpered, stepping away. The dog barked again, more insistent.

  “Let’s go with them,” Kai whispered.

  Charlotte looked at him, surprised. The same thought had been teasing her, but she’d been sure he wouldn’t dare. He looked calmer than he’d been since before they passed through the fog. “Do you… feel something? Like at the house?”

  His eyes fervent, Kai nodded. “Yes. Let’s go.”

  He was right. She was sure of it. No matter how much she hated the idea, and she wasn’t close to understanding why, the truck was their best chance.

  Charlotte grabbed Kai’s hand, and they ran together. They both climbed into the truck’s bed with a leap, and the vintage vehicle sped forward as they were still pulling their legs into the prickly bed of pine cones, painful against her bare legs and palms. The truck was moving faster now than it had on its approach, pitching them against each other until they held on to the rusted sides, where the paint flaked off beneath her sweating palms.

  Dogs chased the truck, pouring onto the road from the woods. German shepherds, hounds, and oversized creatures that looked half wolf chased the truck with all their might, barking their loathing as spittle flew between their teeth. Only five or six were close enough for her to see their glowing eyes, but a dozen more trailed farther behind, with yet more appearing from the woods. Some of the dogs stumbled in the widening gaps in the road. Wherever the truck drove, the road gave way beneath it, trying its best to eat them. The women in front laughed while the truck swerved around gaps and cracks, as if they’d never had such a merry time.

  Charlotte was staring at the dogs, so she didn’t see the fog bank until they were in the heart of it, wreathed in gray-white mist. The truck stopped on whining brakes. The house was only half a mile from the fog, she remembered. Only half a mile, yet so much farther.

  “I can’t take you past here,” Malindy said, calling behind her.

  “Keep ahead of those dogs,” Rose said. “They’re all hers. All mean just like her.”

  Charlotte didn’t need to hear any more. She grabbed Kai’s hand again and they both climbed out. She had lost her shoes somewhere in her terror. Her stocking foot slipped on the chrome bumper, but she barely felt her knee and elbow scrape when she fell. The barking was still behind them, enraged and determined.

  Still clinging to Kai’s hand, Charlotte ran barefoot into the soupy gray.

  Within her first three steps, the fog was gone. And so was the barking, or the sound of laughter. When she turned the other way, the fog was gone too. She had known it would be. Some part of her had always known the fog wasn’t real in the way her skin and beating heart were real. The fog wasn’t as real as her memory of everything that had happened on the road.

  A modern gas station and convenience store waited within easy walking distance a hundred yards ahead, with a large sign on a highway pole. She knew they had driven past no such place, but that didn’t matter—it was there now.

  She looked at a highway sign as they walked toward the gas station, which of course said Highway 46 instead of Route Nine. If she asked someone at the gas station ahead, they would tell her there hadn’t been a Route Nine in Gracetown as long as anyone could remember, maybe as far back as the 1960s or 1950s. Maybe long before then. She was certain of it.

  She had left her car beyond the fog. She would have to explain that somehow.

  “We’ll say we got carjacked,” Charlotte said. “When we asked a guy for directions.”

  Kai nodded. “The guy with the beard. We’ll say it was him. And… it’s true.”

  Charlotte tried to remember if she’d bought the rental car insurance. She thought about her purse and cell phone she’d left behind, all gone. Then she wondered how long this family had been in the land of the dead. And how long Aunt Sally had stood hidden behind her screen door ready to vent her hatred.

  “I’m telling my dad,” Kai said. “But just him.”

  Charlotte was still trying to sort through it all without feeling dizzy again. “Tell him… what? He won’t believe you.”


  “Yeah, he will,” Kai said, sure of it. They walked in silence for a moment, then he said, “I’m never going to another funeral.”

  But he would, she knew. They both would. Their grandparents were gone now, so they would bury their parents next, and all their stories and secrets. Charlotte stared at their feet walking together on the unbroken road: hers bare, still pedicured, his with black shoes still shiny. This road felt no more real than the cracking one they had fled, and the only evidence of their shared ordeal was their breathing, still too hard and fast.

  Kai’s father must have felt this way when he’d been released from the Reformatory. He’d gathered stories while in that place that even his parents would never fully grasp, a wall of fog between him and the world, hoping the nightmares wouldn’t last. But they had. And now his son would have them too. But at least Kai and his father had someone to tell.

  Charlotte vowed she would never go to Gracetown again.

  WHERE RELICS GO TO DREAM AND DIE

  Rachel Autumn Deering

  I

  “If you had it all to do over again, how would you want to die?” He started to sigh but he caught his breath and swallowed it. He didn’t want to risk stirring the air in such a way that she might go away before him, so he exhaled through his nose—measured breaths—and inhaled just the same. He could smell her burning. If she left him now, he had little faith he could muster the strength to light the candle and summon her back.

  “You have a peculiar way of thinking,” she said. He could hear the flicker in her voice. She shifted uncomfortably and the light in the room changed and all the shadows leapt away from her, then gathered themselves again and crept in close to watch and listen.

  “You’re not the first person to say so,” he said.

  “No. I imagine not.”

  “The question stands.” He gestured for her to proceed. “If you care to answer.”

  “I try to avoid dealing in hypotheticals,” she said. “With all the time I have had to dwell on the bygone details of my death, I would have driven myself insane if I allotted any portion of it to dreaming of some alternate past. That hole is black and infinite.”