Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  Anger simmered in Henry’s eyes at the mere mention of Violet’s name. “Are you serious?”

  “Mischa’s over there, and Violet called me in a panic. Mischa might be about to do something crazy.”

  “I texted you an hour ago, and you didn’t write back,” he said. “I thought you were mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad. I lost my phone,” I told him, wondering what Trey must have thought when he’d seen that text come through from Henry. I’d deal with that guilt later.

  Henry calmly ran his hand through his hair and studied me. For a second, my heart flooded with fear that he might tell me that perhaps we should step back and let Mischa do whatever was on her mind. But then he said, “Okay.”

  Henry pulled on a pair of jeans, and we hopped into his truck. It felt as if we were driving across town in slow motion even though the peek I stole at Henry’s speedometer revealed that he was driving way over the speed limit. When we arrived at the Simmonses’ property, Henry idled in front of the gate across the private drive leading to Violet’s house. He lowered the driver-side window and pressed the button on the video security panel to announce our arrival.

  But no one responded. We didn’t hear a crackle over the intercom signaling that anyone inside the house had activated the system to greet us or open the gate so that we could enter.

  “Maybe we’re too late,” I whispered, gazing through the windshield and past the iron stakes of the fence at the peaks of Violet’s mansion in the distance.

  Henry shook his head. “We need to get in there. We’ll have to climb over the wall.”

  My entire body felt like blocks of ice. “I’ll need a stool or something to stand on. It’s too high.” I already knew from experience that the wall couldn’t be easily scaled. Violet’s grandparents had put quite a bit of thought into keeping intruders off their property. “And there are chunks of glass embedded in the cement along the top. We’ll have to put down a blanket or something, or we’ll both end up needing stitches.”

  “We can use my coat, and I’ll lift you,” he said as he threw the truck into reverse. Just as he was cranking his steering wheel to pull back out onto the rural highway so that we could drive to a point at which the wall was lower than it was near the gate, the gate creaked as it opened inward.

  “Look! She let us in!” I exclaimed—although I didn’t know if it was Violet or Mischa who had opened the gate from inside the house.

  Henry slammed on the gas and we barreled down the private drive, under the canopy of tall trees that had made me feel as if I were entering another world the first time I’d visited this place. When we reached the fountain and roundabout parking area in front of the house, Henry parked haphazardly and we both leapt out of the truck in unison. I took notice of a dark green Mini Cooper parked next to the fountain and assumed it was Violet’s; she’d recently turned seventeen, and it was easy to believe her parents would buy her a brand-new car.

  “Do you think she’s going to answer the door?” Henry asked as we ran up the steps.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should get inside another way.” I grabbed the handle and pushed down the lever to see if the door would open, very afraid of what we were about to walk into, but the door was locked. My finger hesitated before I pressed the doorbell. There was a possibility that Mischa had killed Violet, and we were going to cross the threshold into a crime scene. In that scenario, there was also a possibility that Mischa was planning on killing the two of us the moment we stepped inside too. I was sure Violet’s house had a heavy video surveillance system. It was a possibility that either she or Mischa was already watching us standing there on the doorstep as we deliberated what to do.

  Just then, Henry startled. I followed his eyes to the big living room picture window on our left. We both saw just a flash of the curtains moving, and a quick glimpse of Mischa watching us before she vanished from view.

  I unleashed my fists on the front door and pounded with all my might. “Mischa, let us in! Open this door!”

  But when the door didn’t open within the next few seconds, Henry and I realized in unison that we were going to have to somehow break in.

  “The sunroom doors,” I said. “Around the back.”

  Without waiting for him to reply, I dashed down the stairs, intending to sprint around the side of the house, but then stopped so fast in my tracks when I heard the door behind me creak open that I almost fell over.

  “Inside.” It was Mischa who had answered the door, and she was positioned strangely, her body contorted inside the house so as to poke only her head through the doorway as she leaned back to greet us.

  “Stay behind me,” Henry commanded in a low whisper as I reached him on my ascent back up the stairs.

  When we stepped into the Simmonses’ foyer, we saw why Mischa had opened the door at such an odd angle. She held Violet in a headlock and had her hunched over in a way that prevented her from making eye contact with Henry and me.

  A bolt of terror shot through me. I wouldn’t consider my emotional maturity adequate for the task of negotiating the release of a hostage, and I was not prepared to watch Violet—or anyone else—die. There was truly no telling what Mischa might do, and what it would mean for all of us if she decided to snap Violet’s neck and make us witnesses to a violent murder. She had extraordinary upper-body strength for a young woman our age; she specialized in floor routine and the parallel bars in competitions.

  “No phones,” Mischa growled at us through gritted teeth.

  “Just do what she says,” Violet instructed us. “There are knives in the kitchen, and she isn’t playing around.”

  “Mischa, come on. This is ludicrous,” Henry, ever the peacemaker, said in a calm voice.

  Mischa fired back hatefully, “My sister’s in a coma. Every hour that passes, she suffers more brain damage. I don’t think this is ludicrous.”

  My heart ached for Mischa. Jennie and I had shared a bond so special before her death that I was, even then, eight years later, desperate to restore it in any way I could. Mischa and Amanda weren’t twins, but shared a similar bond. They were sisters, but they were best friends, too. I couldn’t imagine how Mischa would ever navigate the loss of her parents if she also lost Amanda.

  Henry gently continued, “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we’re all on the same side, here.”

  Mischa shook her head. She was wearing an oversize T-shirt over leggings, and looked like she hadn’t showered or brushed her hair in days—which may very well have been the case. “Violet’s not on our side! She started this—and I figured out how to end it. We need to play the game again!”

  I took a step back in fear and reached for the gris-gris I wore around my neck to be sure it was still there. I’d never seen Mischa look so disheveled and enraged before. Her state was understandable considering everything that had happened, but it was still jarring to see someone—a friend—who was usually so together look so completely… monstrous. “It won’t work, Mischa. We did play the game again, in January with Violet while you were missing. All it did was lift the curse off her and put it on you because it had skipped you.”

  “I know that! Don’t you think I know? You’re not listening!” she insisted. “We’ll play the game, and I’ll predict Violet’s death so that the curse moves back to her, and then she’ll have to kill herself—while it’s on her. It’s the only way to end this. The person who’s cursed has to die.”

  I didn’t want to be the one to tell her that when Jennie had shown me Violet’s death, it wasn’t supposed to happen for decades. And her death was peaceful. Serene. She could expect to live until a healthy old age… unless, of course, it was possible that our fates changed with each passing second, and the circumstances of Violet’s inevitable death depended on when and how they were being predicted. But even so—Jennie said that wasn’t the way.

  “I don’t have time to explain how I know this, but that won’t work. Even if we play the game right now, and make Viol
et kill herself—”

  Violet shouted in protest, “Hey! I’m right here!”

  “I know. Sorry. It still wouldn’t work. Technically, we’d be the ones forcing her to die, and the curse would just jump back to one of us,” I said, pretty confident in my assumption based on the answers Jennie had already given me. Seeing that the wildness in Mischa’s eyes wasn’t dissipating, I added, “That would put us right back where we started.”

  “You’re wrong,” Mischa snapped, her eyes filling with tears. A strange smile pulled itself across her face. “We don’t have to make her kill herself. She already knows how guilty she is.” She bent her neck to address Violet directly. “I don’t even know how you get out of bed and make it through the day, honestly. You’re a murderer, and you’ve killed more innocent people than we can even count. You owe me this. You owe it to all of us to save my sister’s life for what you did to Olivia and Candace!”

  “I already know for sure that your plan won’t work,” Violet said in a trembling voice, “because when I inherited the curse and realized what I was going to have to do, I tried that.”

  We all fell silent. I looked to Henry in surprise, and even Mischa took a moment to digest that. “Liar,” she finally said.

  “It’s true,” Violet insisted. Mischa loosened her grip on Violet just enough to allow her to stand up straight enough to look at us, and I was surprised at how different she looked from the last time I’d seen her. Her complexion was paler, which could easily have been explained by the brutal winter, but she had greenish rings beneath her eyes, and looked a little jaundiced, too. I remembered Cheryl mentioning Violet’s extensive absences from school and wondered fleetingly if she’d actually been sick that winter.

  “I overdosed and my parents sent me off to Arizona for six weeks of rehab. Last December—after I had to kill this girl I knew from school named Brianna. I was stuck there for Christmas and New Year’s. You can look her up, if you don’t believe me. I have a shirt from the rehab place upstairs in my drawer.”

  This genuinely took me by surprise. Violet had poured her heart out to me back in January, after we’d successfully lifted the curse off of her, but she hadn’t told me that she’d ever been that desperate to free herself from it. I hadn’t thought it would be possible to ever feel sympathy for her, but I did at that moment.

  “The thing is, the spirits won’t let you die. If the curse is on you, they just won’t let it happen! You can step in front of an eighteen-wheeler truck, and it’ll swerve out of the way instead of hitting you. You can be ready to jump off a bridge, and someone will come along at the last second and tackle you,” Violet explained.

  “You expect me to believe you tried all those things?” Mischa asked. She was silently crying so hard that her nose was running, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “I tried one thing—one thing that should have worked—and it didn’t. If you want to save your sister’s life, then I’m telling you… any of us dying is not the solution.”

  This was the first thing Violet had said that seemed to matter to Mischa. She erupted into sobs, and for a moment I thought she was going to release her hold on Violet. But then she yanked Violet toward her and gripped her even more tightly. “No. Amanda’s doctors are saying that she’s probably suffering permanent brain damage, and the longer she’s on the respirator and feeding tube, the worse her chances are for ever recovering. We’re playing the game again, now. I want this thing off me!”

  Henry and I exchanged loaded glances. That changed everything. On the drive over here, I’d thought we had more time to find a way to break the curse: twelve days until the next new moon, and three before I had to fly back to Florida. But Amanda’s time was running out fast.

  “Okay, okay,” Henry told her. “We’ll play the game again. Just let Violet go so that we can talk about the best way to do this.”

  Mischa shook her head. I was starting to wonder if Henry was going to tackle her to get her to release Violet. Violet was swinging her arms, having more difficulty breathing now that Mischa had strengthened her hold. If her face was turning red or even blue, we couldn’t tell because it was tilted toward the floor, and her dark hair obscured it.

  “We can call Kirsten at the bookstore and ask her to help us,” Henry offered.

  Still, Mischa adamantly refused. “No other people. We can’t wait around for anyone to drive all the way up here from Chicago.”

  “Mischa, let her go. She can’t breathe!” I cried out.

  “It’s going to be okay, Mischa,” Henry assured her. “We’re going to figure this out.”

  As much as I adored Henry and appreciated his being there, I knew that his words of comfort for Mischa were just meaningless platitudes. He may have lost Olivia to Violet’s game, but I still didn’t think he fully understood what we were up against. I thought of Amanda in her hospital bed, presumably hooked up to ventilators and IVs, and couldn’t stand the possibility of Mischa losing her entire family.

  Violet grunted and tugged at Mischa’s arm. She attempted to pinch Mischa’s skin with her fingernails, and Mischa swatted her fingers away. Mischa wrapped her other arm around Violet’s neck and squeezed even more tightly. Violet reached forward as if hoping to grab on to something to steady herself, but there was nothing in front of her. She kicked one of her legs out in desperation.

  Henry’s chest rose dramatically as he inhaled deeply. As if Mischa could sense that he was preparing to tackle her, she took a giant step back and shook her head. “Don’t do it,” she warned. “I can break her neck faster than you can get over here.”

  I could tell from the tremble in Mischa’s voice that she wasn’t kidding around. She’d worked out somehow in her head that killing Violet that day would make things better in one way or another, even though it was clear to me that we had two separate and distinct problems to solve. Which was why I said in a tiny voice, “Transferring the curse to someone else won’t save Amanda.”

  Before Mischa had a chance to react, I added, “I need to borrow someone’s phone.”

  CHAPTER 7

  HENRY GATHERED ALL OF THE cutlery from the butcher’s block and silverware drawer the moment we stepped into the Simmonses’ enormous kitchen, and he stashed them somewhere on the house’s second floor to keep them out of Mischa’s reach. It seemed like the announcement I’d made about having a plan in mind had calmed her down, but neither Henry nor I wanted to take a chance on having to witness a bloodbath that day.

  At my request, Mischa downloaded a radio app to her phone and tuned it in to AM 1354. I popped her AirPods into my ears, hoping I’d be able to hear Jennie’s voice coming through, even though I feared that if I was successful in being able to communicate with her, my rapt audience would expect me to deliver answers. And I knew Jennie had none.

  My only idea—sacrificing myself—wasn’t a good one. It was a rash, desperate attempt to buy more time until I could figure out how to lure the spirits out of Mischa.

  And I wasn’t sure if Jennie would agree to it.

  Or that Amanda would ever regain consciousness at this point—even if we successfully took her out of the queue to die.

  Mischa leaned forward across the table. “Can you hear her?”

  “I don’t understand what we’re doing, here,” Violet admitted impatiently. “Your dead twin sister is going to talk to you through the phone?”

  Henry glared at her and angrily shushed her with a finger held up to his lips.

  “Not yet, she’s not,” I said as I listened intently. Just as I was about to give up, I heard the crackle of static and Jennie’s voice greeting me.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” I said, and then felt like a fool. Who else would it be? Who else would be able to hear her? “I have a big favor to request.”

  Turning my head to avoid making eye contact with Mischa, I asked, “So… would it be crazy for me to allow Mischa to predict my death so that maybe her sister’s life is spared?”

  For a l
ong, uncomfortable moment, Jennie didn’t reply. Then she said, “Yes, it would be crazy. And dangerous.”

  “But would it work?” I asked, glad that none of my friends could overhear Jennie’s voice over the AirPods so that I could digest her reply before they could.

  I took Jennie’s silence as a yes.

  I held my finger up for my friends, suggesting they should wait, and I stepped into the sunroom.

  Once outside on the patio in the surprisingly cold afternoon, I asked, “If I let Mischa predict my death, would it be my real, natural death in the future? Or would the spirits come up with some kind of violent story that would happen before the next new moon?”

  “Don’t know,” Jennie admitted. “If they want you, then you’ll die before the new moon.”

  I stole a glance over my shoulder into the house through the glass panels of the sunroom. Panic and adrenaline were coursing through my veins as if I was about bungee jump off a bridge. No one was forcing me to do this, I knew. The next new moon was on April twenty-second—in just shy of two weeks. I wasn’t exactly giving myself an abundance of additional time to figure out how to get the curse off Mischa, but was possibly making all the difference in saving Amanda.

  “Is there any other way to save Amanda’s life?”

  “No,” Jennie told me. “She’s first in line.”

  Right. A life for a life, an even trade.

  It was all a big gamble.

  “Could you show Mischa a fake death for me? Something that would seem real to the spirits so that they’d back off Amanda—but that obviously won’t actually happen?”

  Jennie was silent for a long beat. “Not sure. The curse was originally put on Violet’s grandmother, and Violet inherited it. So she had a stronger connection to the spirits than Mischa does. They were able to make it clear whose soul they wanted, and provide visions of the death predictions to Violet for her to describe.