Dead Voices

by Katherine Arden

  Mother Hemlock fell back, smoldering, screeching. She wiped embers from her eyes. “That was foolish,” she said, in the coldest voice Ollie had ever heard.

  But Ollie didn’t wait around to find out why it was foolish. She had bolted for the second archway, running for her life.

  But something stood in the other archway too.

  It was the bear. The dead, stuffed bear. It was standing on its hind legs, upright on its wooden stand. Blocking her way.

  Ollie slowed. The bear’s mouth was open. Huge white teeth showed in a snarl. One stiff paw was upraised to strike.

  And a sound was coming from it. A low, soft sound. She didn’t recognize it at first. It was too strange. Then she understood. The dead bear was growling.

  As Ollie watched, frozen, the dead bear fell to all fours. Licked its chops. Then, creaking, the dead bear charged.

  Ollie slewed around, found Mother Hemlock right behind her, her mouth pinched down in rage, one sleeve of her dress smoldering. She snatched at Ollie again, but Ollie dodged her and raced back through the dining room. The footsteps of the dead bear sounded close behind her, and she could smell its reek: a combination of dust and formaldehyde.

  Ollie, wild with panic, wove and dodged. The bear took a swipe at her; its claws snagged on the hem of her hoodie, and she heard fabric tear as she ran.

  It got darker the farther away from the fire Ollie went. She stubbed her toes again and again, banged her shins on debris she couldn’t see, snagged her socks on splinters, tried not to trip and fall. She was expecting every second to feel the bear’s claws sinking into her skin.

  A shrill cry from above was her only warning before, with a rush of wind and the reek of more embalming fluid, the talons of one of the dead eagles raked through her hair, cutting her scalp. Huge wings beat around her head, making her gag with their stink.

  But by then Ollie had made it across the dining room. She fended off the bird, shoved open the kitchen door, and threw herself through. She was only a step ahead of the thudding stride of the bear and, worse, the clacking footsteps of Mother Hemlock.

  Ollie slammed the door shut and put her back against it just as the door shuddered, like the dead bear had thrown all its weight at it. It was so dark that Ollie couldn’t tell whether her eyes were open or shut. The door shuddered again. Light, Ollie thought. I need light.

  In a flash, Ollie remembered the matches. She was still wearing her hoodie. She plunged her hand into the front pocket and retrieved the matchbook, a slim, crisp shape against her fingers. Her hand was shaking. Breathe, Olivia, said the memory of her mother’s voice, somewhere in the back of her brain. Breathe.

  She knew that if she managed to drop that book of matches, send it skittering across the floor, then in that ferocious darkness, she’d never find it again.

  The kitchen door shook. Ollie leaned against it with all her weight. But she knew it couldn’t last. She was tall and broad-shouldered and strong for her age, but she was still just an eleven-year-old girl.

  Gritting her teeth and working by touch, Ollie pulled out a match and found the rough side of the matchbook with the pad of her thumb. She hadn’t thought about the cold since she came through the mirror. There had been a lot else on her mind. But now she realized, by the sheer difficulty she was having using her fingers on the matches, that it was cold and getting colder.

  Ollie thought of the ghosts’ frostbitten hands, and she shuddered, almost dropping her matchbook. That won’t happen to me, she promised herself. It won’t.

  She took one more deep breath and struck a match.

  In the flash of its light, she had a swift glimpse of the lodge kitchen. It wasn’t the shiny, modern kitchen that her dad had made pancakes in that morning. Instead she saw wooden countertops and dusty pots; it looked like a museum kitchen, smelling of old food and rot and dust all at once.

  Her match was already flickering.

  She turned it back and forth, hunting for a door, praying there was one.

  She saw a face.

  And froze.

  She wasn’t alone in the kitchen.

  A little girl, wearing a long white nightgown, stood in the middle of the kitchen. She was staring straight at Ollie with her frozen-open eyes.

  She was pointing. The match was about to burn Ollie’s fingers, but she followed the direction of the ghost’s finger.

  Saw a cabinet, a little open.

  The match went out again, leaving Ollie trembling, and not alone in the dark.

  She threw herself at the remembered direction of the open cabinet door, scrabbled, and managed to drag herself inside, hiding just as the kitchen door burst open.

  A growl came from the doorway. She heard a sniff. Ollie hadn’t been able to get the cabinet door closed all the way. Her frantic heartbeat seemed to rock her body back and forth. She just hoped they couldn’t hear it.

  She kept perfectly still.

  The bear growled again. Its claws scraped on the floor. It crossed the kitchen. Then Ollie heard the cold voice of Mother Hemlock. “Well, where did she go, the little rat? Down the stairs? Or—is she hiding?”

  The dead bear’s clawed feet halted. Ollie, with a shaking hand, groped in the empty cabinet, looking for something, anything, that she could use.

  A flat piece of ceramic met her frantically groping hand. Plate? Saucer? She didn’t care. She picked it up and hurled it out of the cabinet, hard, so that it flew across the room and smashed into the opposite wall.

  The bear roared, and she heard its claws scrabbling—scrabbling away, like a dog, as it followed the sound. In that second, Ollie flung herself out of the cabinet, across the kitchen, and darted silently through the skinny door on the opposite wall. The door that led into the basement.

  She found herself sprinting down a dark stairwell, leading into blackness.

  12

  SETH ENDED UP playing the white side, like some kind of really bad joke. Maybe he had a sense of humor. He probably did, Coco decided. He’d laughed hard enough at tricking Ollie through the mirror. She tried not to think about the things the smiling man would find funny.

  Each chess piece, white and black, was laid out neatly in its place. Coco ran her fingertips over her ranks of black pawns and knights and bishops, feeling them icy under her hand. Part of her wondered where the chessboard came from. I didn’t see it. And then I did. Is that magic? Is there such a thing as magic?

  She didn’t know. There was too much she didn’t know. Suddenly she was desperate to win, if only to be able to get out, to go back, to find a library, and to learn everything she wished she knew.

  She wished she knew how good Seth was at chess. There was a chance he’d be way better than her, that he’d know impossible combinations, that she’d be checkmated in five moves. If that happened, then Brian would pay the price.

  Don’t think about that, she ordered herself.

  Coco was good. She knew that. But she wasn’t—whatever the smiling man was—old and mean and clever. And so, she was afraid. She licked her lips, wiped her sweating palms one more time. White always goes first. Seth moved his queen’s pawn, sat back and smiled at Coco.

  Here goes, she told herself. Clenching her free hand, she made her first move. To her surprise, her hand didn’t shake.

  He was good. Really good, even. But the opening gambits became the middle of the game, and they were still trading pieces. Coco was still playing. She wasn’t beaten. Slowly, the smile fell off his face.

  They played in silence, fast, and it was the hardest chess game that Coco had ever played in her life. For one, there were a lot of things she had to force herself not to think about. She couldn’t wonder if Ollie was all right, for example. She couldn’t wonder what would happen to her mom and Ollie’s dad if they woke up the next morning and Ollie, Brian, and Coco were all gone.

  Coco couldn’t even look up
and meet the eyes of the player across from her, because every time she did, her courage shriveled up to nothing. Every time he moved his hand, she saw the two forefingers, thin, spidery, the exact same length, a reminder that he was older than her, nastier than her, that he was enjoying himself. It was all actually a game to him. But it wasn’t to Coco.

  So she stopped looking at his hands. She only watched the pieces as he moved them. She pretended she was back in school, playing Ollie again in the middle school chess championship. She imagined it so hard that she could almost smell the cider and marker smell of Mr. Easton’s classroom.

  The battle raged across the board. They traded pieces. She set traps, and he evaded them; he set traps for her that she barely saw in time. Finally, they were at the endgame, still matched, and finally Coco advanced her queen, took a deep breath, then advanced her pawn.

  This is it. Please, she thought. Oh, please. She heard Brian beside her make a soft sound of protest, seeing the move she’d made. But Coco didn’t even look at him.

  Seth captured her queen, sat back, and grinned at her. “So much for that,” he said.

  Coco didn’t answer. Instead she advanced another pawn. “Check,” she said.

  “Last defiance?” he asked, moving his king out of danger. Out of the corner of her eye, Coco could see Brian clenching his hands so hard the nails were actually cutting into his palms.

  “Check,” Coco said again, doggedly, moving her bishop, and this time Seth actually frowned, and, while Coco held her breath, he put his queen in between his king and her threatening bishop. And Coco let out a quavering breath, moved her knight, and said, “Checkmate.”

  Brian put his head in his hands. He said a couple of very bad words. Then he said, “Coco, that was amazing.”

  Coco said, “Thanks.” Her eyes were still on the person across the table.

  Seth’s hands had gone still. A thick, ominous quiet hung over Hemlock Lodge. He stared at the board. He stared at Coco. This time she dared meet the faint red gleam in the dark of his eyes. She found herself asking, ridiculously, “Did he win? The knight by the sea?”

  “He lost,” said Seth. He stared at her a minute more.

  And then he laughed, a high, terrifying sound, and Coco said, “Stop it!”

  “Why?” he asked, still chortling. “The last time I was so excellently entertained, there was plague in Europe.” But he did not look entertained. He looked angry.

  Coco said, “You’re horrible and you lost. You lost. Give me Ollie’s watch.”

  He didn’t do anything. Coco shot to her feet. “You promised!”

  He got to his feet too then. “I did promise,” he said. “There is a way to win, but you won’t find it. Not even with this thing.” But he didn’t move to take off the watch.

  “We’ll take our chances,” said Coco. She waited.

  Slowly, Seth unfastened the watch from his wrist. His green eye flashed.

  Coco understood what he was going to do about half a second before he dropped the watch into her waiting hands. He had promised to give her the watch if she won. He hadn’t promised not to do anything nasty afterward.

  Without giving herself time to think, Coco reached out and snatched the watch from Seth’s grip; with her other hand, she reached down and scooped up the Ouija board and planchette, knocking over chess pieces left and right. “Run!” she snapped at Brian. “Run!”

  She pelted through the archway into the lobby, not looking to see if Brian was following her. Of course, he was. Brian was leading the whole school district in hockey assists that season. Brian was a team player, as their PE teacher liked to say. And he’d been watching her the whole time. Trusting her. Waiting for Coco to make the play.

  Even though she was sprinting out of breath across the lobby, Coco felt a little flicker of pride. She’d made the play, all right.

  They flew toward the stairs on the opposite side of the lobby. Brian was way faster than her, but he kept his steps even with hers and they hit the stairs side by side. Then Brian slowed down a little, looking up. “You sure, Coco?” he asked. The darkness in the hallway was thick. “We don’t know what’s up there.”

  “Nope,” she said. “We don’t.” But she kept on running up the stairs. She hated to do it. She could see that Brian did too. They were leaving her mom and Ollie’s dad just lying there asleep, defenseless.

  But Seth had said the game wasn’t about their parents. Coco believed that. She had to believe that. Because they couldn’t save Ollie and stand watch over the sleeping adults. They needed to get away from Seth and his tricks. They needed to go somewhere private and figure out what to do. Make a plan.

  So Coco ran up the stairs, into the darkness, and Brian went with her.

  “Why’d you grab the Ouija board?” Brian was taking the steps two at a time, bounding as he talked.

  “Because,” said Coco, panting. The Ouija board was awkward under her arm. “I saw it in the mirror.”

  “So?” said Brian.

  “I saw the board in the mirror. It was reflected in the mirror. In—wherever Ollie was. Nothing else was. Not me or you or Seth or anything. Not the blankets. But the Ouija board was there. I could see it on the floor behind Ollie. That seemed weird. So I grabbed it.”

  Brian nodded. He took it from her. “I’ll carry it. You’re clumsy enough without trying to carry anything.”

  He wasn’t being mean, just practical, Coco knew. They didn’t need her tripping over her own feet on top of everything else. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it.” He didn’t call her Tiny. Coco felt that surge of pride again.

  They were halfway up the stairs when she risked a quick look behind them. She didn’t see any sign of Seth. No, the lobby was totally empty and silent. The dead animals were glassy-eyed in the firelight.

  Somehow the silence was worse than any noise.

  “Brian,” said Coco, frowning. “The black bear is gone.”

  Brian had stopped when she did; now he scanned the lobby in turn. “So are the coyotes,” he said. His voice had gone flat and tense.

  Coco looked hard, squinting in the dark. Brian was right.

  He licked his lips. “You know, Coco, if scarecrows can come to life after dark—”

  A long, low snarl sounded through the lobby. Then another. Strange dry growls. A little like a dog, but choked, somehow. Like its vocal cords didn’t work right.

  Coco heard nails clicking, like dogs crossing a kitchen floor. The sounds were coming closer. There was a chorus of growls. The shadows in the lobby were moving.

  “The coyotes,” Brian whispered. “They’re coming. Coco, Come on!”

  He pulled her around and up the stairs just as howls broke out from every part of the lobby and the shadows seemed, all at once, to leap for the stairwell.

  Brian and Coco bolted up into the darkness.

  Below them, they heard a bark, and an answering howl. There was a louder clatter of dog nails as dead paws slipped on the lobby floor. Coco risked another look back; she heard the coyotes’ panting breaths, but didn’t see anything, and that was the worst of all.

  They were at the top of the stairs. The hallway stretched on into the dimness. But, strangely, unlike the lobby and dining room, there were electric lights on up there. The wall lamps were lit. But they weren’t glowing a nice yellow now. Just a faint green. They cast puddles of sickly light, in between stripes of darkness on the carpet. Both Brian and Coco hesitated at the top of the stairs. But then the growling came again, closing in behind them. They heard the padding of feet on the stairwell, the odd creak of formaldehyde-stuffed limbs.

  Coco glanced behind. Still didn’t see anything. “Brian—” she began.

  But he’d already grabbed her hand, pulling her along, and was fleeing again. “We have to stay ahead of them!” he said.

  “Brian!”
Coco tried again, even as she ran alongside him. She was panting; Brian was in a lot better shape than she was. He let go of her hand; she tried to keep up. But he was faster than her. He got a step ahead. Then another. Then Coco did trip on the carpet, went sprawling, and got rug burn on her hands as she fell.

  From the ground, Coco cried out, “Brian, Brian!”

  No answer. He couldn’t have gotten that far ahead! Coco scrabbled to her feet, turned around—but there were no coyotes.

  No one and nothing but her.

  Complete silence in the hallway. She couldn’t see Brian at all. Coco began to hurry along the corridor, following Brian, calling his name.

  But no one answered.

  After a few steps, something caught her foot and she tripped again.

  What had tripped her this time? Coco groped around on the floor. It was the Ouija board. “Brian?” she whispered. She gathered up the Ouija board. The planchette was still in her pocket.

  There was still no sign of Brian. Nor of the coyotes. The hallway was empty.

  Seth didn’t actually come up the stairs after us, Coco thought. But that doesn’t mean he’s not trying to stop us. Maybe he sent the coyotes. Or at least made us think there were coyotes. To scare us. To separate us.

  “Brian!” she called again.

  Silence. Coco was totally alone in the hallway. Eerie greenish lights burned every few feet. Between them were puddles of darkness.

  Right next to her, a door rattled.

  Coco jerked away. Not this time, she thought. I’m not getting distracted by spooky doors this time. She was about to hurry down the hall, looking for Brian, when a familiar voice spoke.

  It came from behind the door.

  “Coco!” it cried. “I’m in here! Let me out!”

  Brian. It was definitely Brian’s voice. Coco halted, rigidly listening. The door rattled again. “It’s locked,” said Brian. “Coco, help me!”

  How could Brian have gotten into the closet? She reached a trembling hand toward the door handle, just as, a few feet farther down the hall, another door rattled. “Hey!” cried Brian’s voice from the door ahead. “Hey, let me out! Ollie? Coco? Coco! Are you there?”