Hex Life

by Rachel Deering

  “Not if I shoot you dead.” Her father had just threatened to kill a white man. Even if he survived tonight, the sheriff would come for him.

  Shea ran inside and went to watch from the window, where she spotted a man sneaking around behind the house. She ran to the side window, peeked out, keeping track of him. As soon as he got around to the front, he would grab her father. As easy as she could, she let the curtain slide back in place and she ran to the back door, opened it, and screamed at the top of her lungs: “Daddy! They’re behind you!”

  The white man stopped, looked at her and then took off running toward her. At the front of the house, lots of shots were fired, so she didn’t run back inside. Instead she took off running away. At first she didn’t even think about where she was going, she just ran and ran as fast as she could away from the man. She did not look back because she was afraid that would slow her down, or worse, that he would be too close to her. If he was about to catch her, she didn’t want to know. She ran for the edge of the woods in the distance, which bordered the Peterson plantation. It was far, but once she was in there, she would be able to lose him easy. Just as she passed the side of the Peterson house, she chanced a look behind her and saw that the man was closer than she had hoped. She would never make it to the woods. In the distance, the shots had stopped but there was still lots of yelling, although Shea could not make out what was being said.

  At the back of the house, she made a right and then slid into an opening in the basement that she had discovered long ago. She hid there when she didn’t want the Mrs. or Sara to find her. The opening was barely noticeable if you weren’t looking for it and even if you did know, it was too big for a grown man.

  Shea took a moment to catch her breath and then walked over to the wall where the haint had come through. The girl dropped to her knees, exhausted. She thought about what the old woman had told her. Her mother would be angry, but she didn’t care. Shea put her hand on the wall.

  “I know you’re there.”

  After a moment, the figure appeared again, climbing her way out of the wall. She stepped down onto the floor like a two-legged spider descending its web.

  “Please, they’re gonna kill ’em.”

  The haint looked toward the front of the house, like she could see the goings-on through the wall. Then she turned back to Shea. “They lie. Always.”

  “I know.”

  “They lie of me.” The woman took off her turban to reveal the ragged, bleeding hole where her ear should have been. “Made me into a monster they use to scare their children.”

  Shea didn’t know what to say. Just as she opened her mouth, upstairs, the doorbell rang and then heavy footsteps walked across the floor. She looked up through the cracks in the floorboards, her eyes following the white man who had been chasing her, as he moved toward the basement. He knew she was there. The haint stared up, too.

  “They said you killed white people. They’re scared of you. Of what you did. And what you are. What they made you. She told me that.”

  The woman stared at her, showed her teeth. “I never killed no one. They… shamed me. Took my ear and then buried their crime in a shallow grave under this house.”

  Shea cried. For this woman. For her family. “I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes and listened to the man open the basement door. “They’re going to take everything from me, the way they took it from you.”

  The woman, who looked quite beautiful in the light, stared down at her. “What do you want from me, child?”

  Shea got to her feet; she only came to the woman’s waist, but she felt taller, more self-assured. “Haint me.” Thinking of the old woman’s words, Shea fell again to her knees. “I pray. Haint me too!”

  The woman let out a giant scream that shook the house from the belly to the roof. It vibrated throughout Shea’s chest. She held her heart, feeling it beat rapidly. But she didn’t feel scared, she felt powerful. The dead woman’s essence was alive in the land, in the house, and in Shea. The girl could feel her all around. Not inside of her, but as if she had always been a part of her.

  Upstairs, the white man stopped moving, covering his ears. As the dead woman’s scream reached the man, her form disappeared. Shea watched as the haint passed through him, his hair slowly becoming devoid of any of its once dark color. The dead woman had seen his soul and left him part of hers. He fell to the dirt floor, not dead, but not the same.

  Suddenly, the woman’s anger—a release Shea recognized because she was now part of the woman—moved through the room, up the stairs, and across the Peterson farm in a wave that shook every tree from their roots to the tips of their branches, jostled every grain of wheat, and toppled every blade of grass. Shea was swept up in the woman as her essence moved over the land, as the haint moved, so did Shea. Shea too moved—they were one. Upstairs the Mrs. and her children were staring out the opened front door, as if afraid to move or breathe. They watched the ghost and its host leave the house and sweep across the land.

  The pair moved quickly toward her parents. Shea saw from both her low position on the ground and from above, as the ghost could see. Finally she saw that some of the white men had gotten to their horses and fled. Mr. Davis and Mr. Peterson were picking themselves off the ground, having been knocked off their feet by the vibration of the haint. Then they walked away, Mr. Peterson toward his house, Mr. Davis down the road, his horse having run off.

  The dead woman stood over Shea’s parents, watching the white men. Shea’s father was on the ground, her mother holding his head. Shea ran to them.

  “Don’t worry,” her mother said. “It’s just a scratch.” She looked up to the dead woman, and back at Shea.

  Shea reached out to touch the haint but couldn’t. Her body was not real, but her emotions were overwhelming. Her anger not sated.

  It would never be sated as long as she was stuck here, Shea knew.

  “You can go, if you want. You shouldn’t have to be where you don’t want.”

  But the haint was not free. Her essence had merged with Shea, the girl could feel her deep inside.

  The old woman appeared, as she often did, seemingly from nowhere.

  Shea looked to her. “I did what you asked of me.”

  “You wanted this. You asked for it.”

  Shea nodded. She had. “Will she go away?”

  The old woman looked to the haint. “In this form, yes. But you asked not to be afraid anymore. You asked to be a witch.”

  “I don’t want to hurt her. Not like them.”

  “She’s not hurting, girl. She’s free. You’re both free.”

  The ghost felt alright, not hurt, not so angry anymore. After a moment, she walked into Shea, then faded, not gone, just not there either. Not like people, not like haint, like witch. That’s what the pair was, as one.

  * * *

  Three days later Shea, her mother, and father rounded up everything they owned and headed toward Harlem, New York. Shea’s father’s arm was bandaged, but otherwise he was feeling fine. Good even. Shea sat between her parents, not looking back at the Peterson farm as they went. Shea sat upright, watching the world go by, smoothing out the wrinkles of the good dress that she had worn for this special special occasion.

  THE NEKROLOG

  Helen Marshall

  I

  When I was fourteen I often wrote to you—my dark-eyed, laughing little cousin. It began as a school project. Did you know that? I always assumed Mom told Auntie but maybe you never knew. It doesn’t matter.

  You’d only just come to Toronto and were learning the ropes but Mom and Dad had abandoned the old country many years earlier. They’d made a dangerous crossing where the borders of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey converged, trekking beneath the blue-grey edge of the mountains through a forest populated by bears and wild boar, turncoat shepherds who’d betray you to the border guards. Bandits. Smugglers. Or so they told me.

  They settled in the southwestern tip of Ontario and pretty soon after I appeared on the sce
ne. Our town was small but pretty enough, surrounded by flat fields of monocrops. In the summer the air smelled of melting asphalt and the faint whiff of sulfur from the refineries where Dad took a job as an engineer. Sometimes they’d take me to the bridge where we’d devour vinegar-soaked chips and marvel at the crawl of traffic to the other side. They never went to the States themselves, though gas was supposed to be cheaper there and many made a weekly pilgrimage to fill up. They held only limited faith in their passports.

  I was used to begging for stories of what life had been before but Mom always met my pleas with silence. Then when I was seven a load of crates arrived from some distant relative. These offered some clues. A ring with a fingernail diamond, which had belonged to her great uncle, apparently a famous architect in Zagreb after the war. I seem to recall an urgent, whispered conversation with Dad when she discovered a birth certificate stamped with a six-pointed star. I was told never to mention this to anyone and Mom’s look was so serious, so desperate, that I never did.

  Your appearance in my life was fortuitous: as our friendship developed you seemed to me like a shadow sister, the person I could have been had mother and father stayed behind. You seemed glamorous in your own way. You spoke many languages and had a shuttered way of glancing out from beneath the dark fringe of your hair, which I loved.

  We only ever met the once. You’d just arrived in the country and so Mom insisted we drive the four hours through a haring February snowstorm to help you unpack. Having never taken such a long trip I brought five paperbacks with me and read them one by one. Outside the window was a dizzy shadowland fulgurated with glaring headlights. I squealed with excitement whenever our tires lost traction.

  You barely spoke. A year or two younger than me, you had the shoulders of an old woman, bent at an odd camber, but your eyes were bright and vivacious and we got on well. The two of us played dolls because that’s what you had: a trio of sisters with lifelike porcelain faces and golden curls that felt soft as real hair when I touched them. Uncle Kiril must have made them for you, I thought, because you couldn’t buy anything as nice as that.

  It was a strange game we played that day but everything in the apartment was strange: crushed biscuits with rosehip jam, the ritual of turning over your teacup so Auntie could read your fortune, men smoking indoors. Kiril, Auntie’s husband, was a taciturn man with a scar that bit into the knuckles on his right hand. He had the careful way of someone who’d recently suffered a tragedy. Later I’d see the same hesitation in your letters, oddly poetic with your never-perfect English.

  We only ever played with two of the dolls. One was always out of action. The doll’s house was a single room, which was made from a shoebox. There was a second shallow compartment underneath that may have been to store the dolls. You told me the word but I didn’t understand it.

  I remember you drawing straws to decide which would go under. How serious you were! You kissed the little doll on the head when she was chosen and said a sort of prayer. Then down to the bunker she went, her blond hair gleaming but never to be brushed by our careful hands.

  * * *

  So, that was how we met.

  My family didn’t go back to Toronto for many years. Mom wasn’t comfortable driving long distances and Dad feared the highway speed traps as he feared all policemen. Your family didn’t own a car, which seemed amazing to me, particularly as the years passed and the nature of your growing wealth became a regular subject of conversation at our family dinner. Auntie had taken a post at the university while Uncle Kiril opened a string of storage warehouses. But I was told things were different in Toronto where there were underground tunnels you could use to get most places—out of the cold, out of the rain. Cars were a needless expense.

  When I think back on it now, it seems strange to me that I ever really did meet you. Our letters were long and rambling, so full of childish misery. I was always complaining of the harsh treatment from my parents, how Mom screamed at me whenever I forgot to lock the front door though this was supposed to be the safest town in the country. Later we talked about boys. I wrote you a long list of ways I intended to impress Noah who I’d decided I would marry one day, including: ‘learn new tricks on my BMX’ and ‘make friends with his sister so you’re always just—there’. And it was you I told first when, a year later, he pressed his pencil-stub erection against me in the high school cafeteria as we waited in line for pizza. Surely this was love!

  But no. You were always so much wiser than me. “Trust no man,” you said, “don’t let him stick it in you. It’ll hurt even if he says it won’t. I promise.”

  I was impressed by that promise of yours. It spoke of volumes of experience I didn’t have. And though Noah invited me to the winter formal that year, your warning stayed with me and I said no. So in the end it was Carole Krueger who got stuck with his thing and had to finish the year at home instead of me.

  * * *

  I lost you in my final year of university, the same year I lost so many things I’d been careless with.

  I had applied to programs in the States. By that point I was hungering after some sort of change myself, a bit of separation from my parents who were always spoiling my serenity with their immigrant wariness, their catastrophizing. So I went to a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, which was lovely, at first, until one of the students went crazy and brought a duffel bag with semi-automatics to campus.

  These were the early days. Later there would be drills, instructions on barring the door, hiding in closets. I knew some of the students that died. For months afterward the footage from the news programs haunted me: a guy in a black vest and black trousers, his face not unlovely. He could have been anyone.

  But I hadn’t gone to class that day.

  I’d been smoking a joint in one of the derelict basement labs with my roommate Theresa. We were marveling at the abandoned equipment, shrouded in dusty white painter’s sheets, giggling, maybe kissing a little bit. I was in love with the way she could charm a circle of smoke from her lips. I had only ever seen one other person do that before.

  Watching her I was seized with the memory of that day, the smell of rosehips, Kiril clutching the cigarette between his fingers as Auntie promised Mom it would be a good year to take out a loan.

  Then I felt a touch on my forehead, a cobweb brushing against my temples. Suddenly it was as if a heavy cloud invaded my senses. My limbs turned to lead and I couldn’t move. I think I collapsed. I learned what happened afterwards, how Theresa heard the noises above us—we didn’t have cell phones, there was no way to know what was happening—but my nerveless body frightened her and she waited beside me, cradling my head in her hands until the police found us hours later once the violence was over.

  The doctor said it was Guillain-Barré Syndrome and I was lucky. If it had struck a vital system I could have suffocated in the basement. In the hospital room my mind drifted in a sensationless fog. For three days I was little more than a pair of eyes watching, a pair of ears listening. I drank in everything said to me. I said nothing in return.

  Two weeks later they released me, having lost a kilogram in weight, mostly muscle. At first I couldn’t walk. I had to relearn my writing grip, I couldn’t tell if a surface was rough or smooth. I stopped writing to you because it was too difficult. I couldn’t find the words I needed. I’m still sorry for that.

  * * *

  It took me three months to rebuild my nervous system but by then Theresa had graduated and taken a job on the West Coast. Mom was sick so I went back home. It was difficult at first. The outline of the place hadn’t changed. My bedroom was as I’d left it, painted a too-bright pink which now hurt my eyes. And as the months dragged on Mom didn’t seem to be getting better. But I felt comfortable with the difficulties of her condition as Dad didn’t. He sat in the kitchen and drank vodka as I read to Mom, repeating passages, whole pages, after she fell asleep.

  It was only as ‘the worst’ became inevitable that I decided to write to Auntie
to tell her. The two of them had grown apart. We’d become the poor relations and that had stung, I guess, when we’d had so much more to begin with. I was sitting with Mom in the sickroom. It had become that over the last months, dust goblins in the corners, the burnt-umber light bleeding in through the shades. She looked so puzzled when I mentioned you.

  “That can’t be right,” she said. “Emilia, you’re making things up again.”

  I shook my head.

  Then she told me what had happened, how Auntie and Kiril had a little girl but she’d died in ’87 from a rare condition of the lungs. Many children had died that year from freak diseases after the poisonous wash of Chernobyl. It was one of the reasons they’d left.

  I didn’t know what to say. I watched as she shuffled out from under the covers, a frail woman now. The jut of her spine cleaved the wings of two pale shoulder blades beneath her robe. From the highest shelf she tugged at an album and showed me the clipped nekrolog. There you were: small for your age, dark and wizened even then but smiling faintly. An old school photo.

  “Never mind,” I said at last, touching the nekrolog. “Get some sleep now.”

  But that night I dreamed you were playing at dolls. There were three of us you held in your hand but it was Mom you kissed so tenderly. You didn’t want to do it, but it had to be done. There was no choice. You’d drawn the straws and down she went into the dark place. But you were so kind with her, I remember that. Gently you held her like a slain child. Gently you composed her limbs. Gently you laid her body beneath the threshold, murmuring a prayer for protection, a hope for the future.

  II

  In the beginning was the word—that beautiful power-sprich—and before that was silence. But go back further and you’ll find another word, which was malformed and spoken in malice by the wrong tongue. Though it too created a world, that world was broken.

  Desi struggled over her words at first. I was told not to worry but it was of some concern to me at the time. Although all education was State-provided, I knew well enough not all education was equal. Bad teaching was a punishment to be endured. It could warp the mind. But good teaching could open a door through which the mind might gaze upon new worlds. I wanted that for my daughter. As we had neither a good name nor high status, I knew that few other doors would be opened for her. The world of a well-trained mind was the best I could hope for: she might see clearly, if nothing else.