Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  As if on cue, Mom appeared next to me. “Ready to hit the road?” she asked me. She looked down dubiously at the mason jar in my hand. “What’s with the jar?”

  I nodded. There was no way we were going to be able to undo what we’d done to Mischa that day without guidance from Mrs. Robinson or Jennie. “It’s just a… project.”

  Henry and Violet both looked panicky as I waved good-bye to them and promised in a shaky voice to text them later. It took all of my focus to act “normal,” not wanting my mom or anyone else at the funeral home to have any sense that I’d probably just sealed my grisly fate, as well as doomed the entire population of Willow. It felt like an absolute admission of defeat to leave without correcting my mistake. Mischa, or whatever was masquerading as her, could skip town that very afternoon. I might never see her again and have another chance to beg or bargain for my life, if there was a chance either might work. All I could do was follow my mom on wobbly legs toward the French doors.

  I didn’t bother taking another look at Mischa over my shoulder as Mom and I left. It was already painfully evident that the girl in the black dress splattered in cow’s blood was not Mischa.

  In the hallway as I waited for Mom to fish my coat out of the closet, I looked at the two drops of condensation in the mason jar I carried with a stabbing pain beneath my rib cage. What if I’d lured a soul out of Mischa’s body and caught it in the jar after all, only it wasn’t evil?

  CHAPTER 12

  I SWEAR, IF I DON’T go to another memorial service again for the rest of my life, it’ll be too soon,” Mom said as we walked across the parking lot.

  I couldn’t bring myself to chat, but Mom didn’t seem to notice. I climbed into the passenger seat, fastened my belt, and held the mason jar in my lap. Until I figured out exactly what had gone wrong, I had to consider whatever that jar contained to be precious cargo.

  Mom hesitated for a second before starting the car’s engine. “I’m sorry, McKenna. About everything that happened in the fall. I know you don’t want to tell me why you and Trey did what you did to that girl from Chicago. And I get it. I guess when I was your age, I kept secrets from my mother too.”

  “Mom, I—” I really did not have the mental capacity to get into an argument with her about everything that happened since Violet had moved to Willow in the fall. Knocking her down in the high school parking lot and stealing her locket was nothing compared to what Violet had done to Olivia and Candace, although my mom would never believe the truth.

  “No, no. You told me that there was something strange going on in this town with… so many tragedies, and I tried to convince you that they could all be explained by coincidence. But now, I’ve got to admit… this just doesn’t seem normal.”

  I appreciated Mom’s admission, but this was absolutely not the right time for me to unload the truth on her. There would probably never have been a good time to fill Mom in, at least not about all of it. Not about the night we played the game, or how we made Violet play it again in Michigan, and definitely not about having been in touch with Jennie. “I don’t know what to say, Mom. Sometimes bad things just happen. I think you and Dad were right. It doesn’t mean there’s a reason why.”

  Mom’s lips parted as if she was about to say something else, but then she started the car. As she backed out of the spot, her mood changed. “What if we stop by Bobby’s and get some pie? We haven’t done that in a long time.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, I would have enthusiastically agreed. But when she’d started the car’s engine, the radio had filled the car with music. And not just any music.

  “Love… is a burning thing. And it makes a fiery ring…”

  In pure terror, I looked at the radio in the dashboard. “What radio station is this?” I asked in a hoarse whisper.

  Mom idled at the exit of the funeral home with her right turn signal clicking. “I don’t know. It’s satellite. Glenn’s always changing it.”

  Whatever it was, I was certain that my mom didn’t regularly listen to music stations that would play Johnny Cash songs. My scalp broke into another fit of tingles, and this time they were strangely painful. “Mom,” I said in a trembling voice, not wanting to alarm her—not wanting to be right about what I suspected was happening at our house at that very moment. “We need to go straight home. Fast.”

  Mom pulled out onto State Street at a moderate speed. There weren’t any other cars headed in our direction. “Why? Are you okay?”

  I couldn’t find the words to even lie to her about having to go to the bathroom. With my fingers wrapped tightly around the mason jar, I just stared ahead through the windshield and thought about the text Mischa had sent me the day after the tornados touched down.

  This is your fault, and I’m going to make you pay.

  Maybe those spirits had completely taken over Mischa’s mind and body now, but they probably still had access to her memories. They’d been in her soul when she’d sent that text, anyway, and they’d obviously been paying close attention to me since that first night at Olivia’s house. So I knew as we drove the streets of our small town back to Martha Road that the deep sense of doom I felt wasn’t just an effect of paranoia.

  The bitter smell of smoke tickled my nostrils before we even reached our corner.

  “Oh God!” Mom shouted behind the wheel, noticing black smoking drifting upward from the middle of our block and instantly realizing that it was coming from our rooftop. She hit the gas so hard that my head was thrown back against my seat, and then she slammed on the brakes seconds later when she parked haphazardly in the middle of our street. Elderly Dr. Waldbaum, a retired dentist who lived down the block, was pacing in front of our house with his cell phone pressed to his ear.

  “No,” I said where I sat in the front seat of the car, watching Mom sprint across our lawn. All these months, I’d managed to elude the spirits. I’d tried to undo everything. Everyone kept telling me that I was so brave. But now I regretted my courage. It was a fair assumption that the spirits that carried out the curse had always been restrained up until that point by the will of the unfortunate person who was issuing death predictions. But they’d never been able to inhabit a human body as if it were their puppet before, like they could now. I couldn’t even imagine what they might be capable of with Mischa’s body as a host, leveraging her physical strength and the fact that everyone in town pitied her at the moment.

  They were coming for me. She was coming for me. Maybe I was going to die within the next ten days, but Mischa—or whatever she’d become—was going to make me suffer before then too.

  Ravenous flames engulfed our entire roof. The living room windows were blown out, but smoke and not flames escaped through them. Before Mom reached our front steps, Glenn burst through the front door with a soot-covered face, his right arm wrapped in a towel. He was carrying several framed photos. I heard the roar of sirens behind me as two red fire trucks whipped around the corner.

  In a slow-moving daze, I opened the passenger-side door and attempted to climb out, not realizing until I felt the strain of the seat belt against my chest that I’d forgotten to unfasten it. The fire trucks parked in front of our house, and Mom led Glenn to the driveway while the firemen rigged up their hoses to the closest hydrant. The sirens brought more of our neighbors out onto the lawn. I walked toward Mom and Glenn with a heart weighed down by the knowledge that this was my fault.

  “… smelled smoke, so I put the dogs out, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from,” Glenn was telling Mom as the firemen began tackling the flames. Another high-pitched siren blared at the end of our street, and an ambulance turned the corner, honking and slowing down to wait for curious neighbors lingering in the middle of the road to step out of its way. “By the time I went back into the kitchen, convinced I was imagining things, the flames had already broken through the wall.”

  Mom gently placed a hand on the side of his face. “Why didn’t you get out sooner? What were you doing in there?”

/>   “I thought I could put it out,” he said, shaking his head. “It just moved so fast.”

  A team of paramedics opened up the back doors of the ambulance and had Glenn take a seat on a gurney so they could check his vitals. Mom spoke with one of the firemen, and he took notes. She pressed her fingers to her temples, unable to tear her eyes away from our house as flames consumed it. Maude and Glenn’s dogs were running laps around the backyard and barking, and we all knew that his cat had been hanging out at the Waldbaums’ since the day before because Mrs. Waldbaum left food out for him.

  Glenn had managed to save the family portraits and framed photos of me and Jennie from the living room, but had burned his arm badly enough that the paramedics insisted on sedating him and taking him to the emergency room. Mom tearfully told him she’d follow behind the ambulance in the car after settling the dogs at the Emorys’ house. The ambulance pulled away, and one of the firemen told me and Mom that they believed the origin of the fire to have been electrical in nature, to which I wanted to shout, Yeah, no kidding! They assumed that it had started in the kitchen but had spread through the wall separating the kitchen from the living room, and when it finally broke through the drywall, it released overwhelming amounts of black smoke.

  “We’ll do our best to save what we can,” the firefighter assured us, “but there may not be much left standing by the time the fire’s put out.”

  I don’t think Mom could stand to watch the firefighters continue to blast water at our home, or to watch its blackened remains smolder once they were done. She’d already watched fire devour all of her possessions once before, and experiencing that once in a lifetime was enough. And I knew what Mom was thinking: The few remaining material objects that had once belonged to Jennie during her short life were gone now. It was obvious from the position of the flames that the garage and everything inside of it was destroyed past the point of salvation. For Mom, not a single thing in the house mattered more than that handful of items boxed in the garage.

  Not knowing what else to do with myself and not having anywhere else to go, I accompanied Mom to the hospital in Ortonville, carrying the mason jar along with me. Once Mom was settled in the waiting room, I told her I’d fetch her some coffee and a sandwich from the cafeteria, considering that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast that morning. As I passed the intake desk, I asked the nurse for a piece of tape and a marker, wrote MISCHA and my phone number on the piece of tape, and applied it to the side of the jar—just in case I happened to misplace the jar at some point and someone mistook it for trash. Once I walked the length of the first-floor hallway to reach the cafeteria, I sat down at a table and placed the jar before me.

  The smell of detergent overpowered the scent of french fry grease and stale coffee. I knew from past visits to the hospital that the noxious vapors would follow me out of the building when we left that night, clinging to my clothes and hair. I already smelled like a campfire, since tiny particles of my incinerated home covered my skin and clothing. I was so exhausted that my muscles ached, but the fluorescent lighting overhead was harsh enough to prevent me from getting drowsy.

  I probably should have called my dad to tell him about the house. There was a chance he might have thought I should extend my trip to help Mom get settled, since he would have known better than anyone how devastating this must have been for her. But there was still a chance he would have insisted that I change my ticket and fly back to Florida the next day instead of on Tuesday—which would have been perfectly reasonable if it weren’t for the fact that I’d accidentally made the situation with the curse exponentially worse that afternoon.

  So instead of calling him, I tapped Mrs. Robinson’s name on my contacts list, and fervently prayed that she’d answer.

  “Well, Happy Easter,” Mrs. Robinson greeted me cheerfully. “He is risen!”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. The religious significance of the traumatic day was totally lost on me.

  She sounded very pleased with herself when she asked, “Did your sister reach out to you yet? They put her behind kind of a curtain, can you believe that? It took me some time to find her—yes, it did.”

  “Yes. Thank you. I can’t believe you were able to find her, but I sensed her this afternoon. I haven’t had a chance to connect with her,” I admitted. It didn’t seem fair to burden Mrs. Robinson with the details about the house fire, so I didn’t mention that I was calling her from a hospital cafeteria. “Mrs. Robinson, I’m sorry to bother you. But something went terribly wrong today when we followed your directions.”

  Mrs. Robinson sounded surprised by this. “This was a very simple procedure. Draw the spirits out, catch them in the jar.”

  “I did catch something in the jar, but I don’t think it’s the five spirits of Violet’s dead sisters,” I said, side-eyeing the jar on the table.

  “Well, let’s back up. You had your rum and cornmeal?”

  I confirmed that we did.

  “And where’d you get that from?”

  I told her that we’d used rum from Henry’s parents, and plain old cornmeal from the grocery store.

  “And the drums? You had some kind of a beat?”

  I waffled before replying; we’d had something similar to drums, but maybe that was where we’d gone wrong? “My friends were tapping on coffee cans, like bongos. Not real drums, but close enough, don’t you think?”

  Mrs. Robinson sounded stumped. “Hmm. Yes, definitely close enough. I would have been worried if you’d said you’d just used a recording, because that wouldn’t have worked. What about your red brick dust? Did you put that down to protect your volunteer?”

  Cheryl hadn’t exactly volunteered, but I didn’t want to admit that. “Yes.”

  “And where’d you get your dust from?”

  I told her that I’d made it; I’d sat in my driveway for two hours tapping a brick with a hammer to fill half a jar with red dust.

  “Where’d you get the brick?” she asked.

  Now my mouth twisted and my breath dragged as I exhaled. My thoughts returned to the spectacle of Mischa’s damaged house, with its roof gaping open like an angry mouth. “There was a tornado in town earlier this week, and some buildings were damaged. So I went over to the house of a friend, where I figured some of the bricks would be scattered, and took one of those.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Mrs. Robinson said knowingly, confirming my fear. “This wouldn’t have been the house of the girl who’s possessed, would it?”

  I couldn’t even say the words it was. Now, in hindsight, my ignorance seemed so obvious. Maybe I wasn’t a voodoo priestess, but using something that belonged to Mischa was clearly a mistake.

  “You used a brick from the girl’s own home?” Mrs. Robinson asked. “Do you know why we use red brick dust in voodoo? Bricks build our homes. They are the physical manifestation of security. They’re used to build walls. Borders. If you used dust from your friend’s house, then you weren’t creating security around the person you were trying to protect. You were setting up—like, like—a force field around your possessed person. You lured those spirits out, but they didn’t have anywhere to go but back in!”

  My face burned with humiliation as well as anger at myself. Even after all this time, the spirits were outsmarting me. They’d even changed the atmosphere around Mischa’s house the moment I’d picked up the brick and I’d been too scared to realize what it meant. They’d been warning me, teasing me, cocky about my ignorance.

  “Do you think,” I asked in a tiny voice, “there’s a possibility that Mischa’s soul was lured out along with the evil spirits, and that maybe I caught her in the jar?”

  Mrs. Robinson fell silent for a moment and then hummed a little melody before answering. “I’ve never heard of that. But I guess it could happen. If you’re dealing with some real bad spirits, then I guess they could have pulled the good out along with them and then locked her out.”

  Locked her out. That sounded about right.

  As well as horrifying.
/>
  If we weren’t sure how we’d allowed her to be locked out of her own body, how were we ever going to help her get back in?

  “If Mischa’s not in her body, then can the loa do whatever they want with her?” I dared to ask.

  “Well, I would imagine they could.”

  I had to remind myself that it wasn’t fair to expect Mrs. Robinson to have an answer for every one of my questions. No matter what she’d seen growing up in Louisiana, I was sure that what was happening right there in Willow was more outrageous than anything she’d ever personally witnessed. “Is there any way to know for sure?” I asked. “I’m sorry to be so desperate, but I don’t have a lot of time to figure this out.”

  “Well, you’d have to get close to your friend again to observe her behavior. If someone’s possessed by more than one loa, then they’re probably fighting over which one’s in charge. You might be able to hear them talking over one another in her voice. Or see her shaking as they all struggle for power over her movements. Sometimes possessed people have seizures, and this is why; the loa’s inhabiting an unfamiliar body, and it doesn’t always know how to operate it properly.”

  Great, I thought to myself. It was already dark outside, and there was absolutely no way I was going to show up on the Galanises’ doorstep and demand to see Mischa. Not when I wasn’t even sure where Mom and I were going to sleep that night. I didn’t have a change of clothes with me. And it was truly by pure luck that Glenn and the pets hadn’t been killed that afternoon. I couldn’t risk infuriating the spirits again without having a solid plan in place to banish them; there was no doubt in my mind that they had sparked the fire in our walls the second they’d settled into Mischa’s body. Getting anywhere near Mischa before arming myself with knowledge was a bad idea, and it occurred to me for the first time since leaving Gundarsson’s that I had better hope like hell she didn’t come looking for me.