Silent as the Grave

by Zoe Aarsen

  “Don’t your parents have fancy designer drugs around here? We could crush Ambien into a cup of tea or something,” Trey said.

  Violet shook her head in frustration. “You obviously don’t understand how sleeping aids work. And besides, you guys should know by now what happens when the spirits suspect we’re up to something. Even if we could disable Mischa’s body, they’d still know what we were doing and try to stop us.”

  Henry piped up, “Why don’t you ask that woman?”

  “Mrs. Robinson?” I took a moment to explain for Trey and Violet’s benefit who Mrs. Robinson was.

  “Call her,” Violet urged me. “It can’t hurt.”

  With the time difference between Wisconsin and Florida, it was seven fifteen in the morning in Tampa. Far too early to be making phone calls on a Monday. But most of the residents at the assisted living facility were up with the sun. I just didn’t know whether or not Mrs. Robinson was one of them.

  Mrs. Robinson’s phone rang three times before she answered and greeted me with, “Who is this?”

  “It’s McKenna Brady,” I replied.

  “McKenna Brady,” Mrs. Robinson repeated. “When are you coming back to work? I need you to bring me some needles and black thread. One of these girls on the housekeeping crew complained to the building manager about my salt, and I need to teach her a lesson.”

  I smiled in spite of my anxiety about the day ahead and the grim likelihood that I’d never return to Oscawana Pavilion. “Mrs. Robinson, is there a way we can convince a possessed person to come with us to a safe location?” After I explained to her that Jennie thought she might be able to banish the spirits to the dark place, Mrs. Robinson thought for a moment. “The only way I can think of to get the loa to do anything at all is to offer them something they’d want.”

  Intimidated by the three sets of eyes fixed expectantly on me, I turned my back on the others and walked into the kitchen before saying, “Well, they want souls, and they’ve already got mine. I don’t know what more I could offer them that I could actually give them.”

  Mrs. Robinson hummed a few notes that didn’t sound like they belonged together in a melody. “Well, they do love making deals. You know, that game you played with them really was a deal—just a shady one. You had to figure out the terms on your own, after the fact.”

  I shuddered. Of course. A deal.

  In a tiny voice, I asked, “Why would they want to make a deal with us when they can just take whatever they want?”

  “That’s the thing! They can’t just take things outside of the rules of the spell. To do that, they always need to make an agreement. They need your cooperation. At the end of the forty days that Jesus spent in the desert, the devil took him up to the top of a mountain and tried to tempt him into proving that he was the son of God.…”

  I couldn’t recall Mrs. Robinson ever mentioning the Bible before, but I guessed it wasn’t impossible for her to know her Bible stories and also believe wholeheartedly in voodoo.

  “So he could trick him into handing over the Lord’s kingdom. The loa are like the devil,” she continued. “There’s always something more they want, and it always has to do with power over our world. They can’t get enough of it,” Mrs. Robinson explained.

  There were five of them—I’d seen them with my own eyes—and only four of us. And among us, there were only three souls they had yet to claim. Based on what Kirsten had told me about spell interaction, and how the spell cast by Trey’s mom had subverted Grandmother Simmons’s original spell, I wasn’t even sure they’d want Violet’s soul, or Trey’s. In the fall, Violet had told us that they “didn’t have a story” for Trey, which meant they would refuse to predict his death. If we stood any chance of successfully luring Mischa over to Violet’s house that day under the guise of making a deal, all we really had to offer them was Henry.

  And I really, really didn’t want to do that.

  After a prolonged moment of silence, Mrs. Robinson must have sensed my terror, because she added, “You’ll have to take some precautions. I would recommend you make some voodoo dolls, if you’ve got the time.”

  “We don’t have much time. Do you really think the dolls would help?” I asked.

  Mrs. Robinson went on to explain why the dolls were important; that their purpose had been distorted in mainstream media. They were most effectively used for protection rather than to inflict pain and suffering on others. We were going to have to make voodoo dolls of ourselves as a way of deflecting the full force of the spirits’ power. “They don’t have to be anything fancy. Just make sure they’ve got heads, arms, and legs.”

  She also said that black pushpins were essential; the color black was associated with power, and we’d want to stick a pin in the head and chest of each of the four dolls we created to bolster our individual strength. “And you’ll need to take the pins out of your doll at the right moment for your sister to do whatever you’re thinking,” Mrs. Robinson reminded me. “She won’t be able to reach any of your souls either, as long as the pins are in.”

  Making dolls and even finding black pushpins were the least of my worries that morning. Staying focused the entire time we were dealing with Mischa, and convincing her at exactly the right moment that I was going to die—so that Jennie could swap our souls and do her part—that was going to be a lot more difficult.

  “You don’t actually have to follow through on the deal once you get them where you want them,” Mrs. Robinson assured me. “You just have to be careful if you’re planning on double-crossing ’em. Because they’ll know, and they’ll be ready to trick you.”

  I appreciated Mrs. Robinson’s reminder to be cautious, but I was already well aware that the spirits were capable of outsmarting us at every turn. She didn’t ask me to let her know how everything went. We both knew that if I wasn’t successful, I wouldn’t be calling back.

  No one seemed relieved when I shared Mrs. Robinson’s advice with them, although I did my best to sound confident about our chances for outsmarting Mischa.

  “Let’s text Mischa right now and invite her over here,” Henry suggested.

  I shook my head, wishing it would be that simple. “I don’t want to give them time to think about what we’re up to. We need to put them on the spot and force them into an immediate decision to come here.”

  “Okay, so we go to the funeral,” Henry agreed.

  “We confront Mischa there, tell her we want to offer her a deal—but we’ll only discuss it here, at my house. And then what?” Violet asked me.

  I tried to remember exactly what Jennie had told me. “I need you guys to remember not to specify what kind of deal we want to discuss, okay? And it’s super important that after I tell Mischa what we want to negotiate, none of us respond to anything she says or does, got it? We don’t want to accidentally consent to anything she proposes, and she will definitely try to trick all of us into doing exactly that. So… no head nods, no blinking—be mindful of every single thing you do.”

  Violet and Henry had questions about what would happen once we got back to the Simmons house. “It’s better that you don’t know,” I explained. “Because if you know, then they’ll know.”

  Then I told them about the voodoo dolls. I expected all three of them to balk at the idea of us stitching together toys in the precious few remaining hours we had, but Violet announced that her grandmother had been an avid sewer and dashed up to the second floor. She returned five minutes later with fabric, scissors, needles, and a pincushion that looked like a tomato, loaded with colorful pins.

  “I’ll be honest, I did not expect that I’d be making a doll version of myself when I drove over here yesterday,” Henry mumbled as he sat cross-legged on the floor whipstitching two pieces of fabric together. “Or… ever.”

  The one thing Violet didn’t have on hand was stuffing, so we dissected the embroidered throw pillows in the living room and used their innards to fill our dolls. Per Mrs. Robinson’s instructions for personalizing the dolls, ea
ch of us cut off a small lock of our own hair to stuff inside with the fluffy white Poly-fil before we sewed up the heads—except Trey, whose hair was too short. Instead, we clipped his fingernails and brushed the clippings into the doll he’d made of himself.

  Violet distributed black pins from the pincushion to all of us, but we were three short and had to resort to coloring the heads of purple pins black with a Sharpie. When we were done, I arranged the four dolls on the music rack of the baby grand piano in the corner of the room. The dolls wouldn’t be visible to anyone standing in the living room unless they stepped around the piano as if intending to play it.

  It was almost ten in the morning. My eyes fell upon my own voodoo doll, on which I’d drawn eyes and a smile. Someone was going to have to remove the black pins from my doll’s head and chest at the exact moment when someone else was going to attempt to kill me. This entire afternoon was going to have to operate like a well-choreographed Broadway show, and I hadn’t assigned any of the featured roles yet. I was running out of time, and I couldn’t blame anyone but myself for my indecision.

  My phone buzzed over on the end table where it was charging.

  MOM 9:54 A.M.

  Visiting with Glenn this morning. I’ll pick you up at Cheryl’s around noon?

  Contacting both my mom and dad that morning and having what might very well have been my last conversations with both should have been a top priority. But I knew that hearing either of their voices would wreck me, saying anything that felt like good-bye would feel like a concession to the spirits’ power, and I might chicken out if I thought too much about the danger I’d be leaving my parents in if I failed that day. So instead, I texted Mom back and informed her that I’d be going to the Portnoys’ funeral with Cheryl, and Cheryl would drop me off at the Emorys’ house later on.

  “The funeral starts at Gundarsson’s, and then everyone’s driving over to the Mount Zion Cemetery,” Violet told us as she read Mr. and Mrs. Portnoys’ obituaries on the Willow Gazette’s mobile website.

  “No way are we going inside,” I announced.

  Henry said, “One of us will have to. You usually have to get a sticker to put on your windshield that says you’re part of the funeral procession.”

  “We don’t need the sticker. We can just drive with the other cars,” Trey insisted.

  “Seems like a perfect way for us to get separated from everyone else if something’s trying to stop us,” Henry said in a cautionary tone. “Like, if we come across a red light, and everyone else drives ahead? That’s the kind of stuff they like to do.”

  “We need the sticker,” I agreed. “Can’t take any stupid risks today.”

  “I can’t be the one to go inside,” Violet said, holding up her phone toward us as if it was the reason. “Pete’s been texting me all morning about whether or not I’m going. If he sees me there, it’ll just complicate everything.”

  “That can’t happen,” I agreed and turned to Henry. “Henry will go inside. But you have to avoid Mischa at all costs, okay? Try not to even let her see you.”

  “I need to be there,” Trey insisted when Henry suggested that his presence would become a distraction if he was recognized—and it certainly would be, considering that so many of our classmates would be in attendance. “I don’t want McKenna facing off with Mischa unless I’m around.”

  While I was flattered by Trey’s wanting to protect me, we agreed as a group that having Trey cause a stir and possibly draw cops to the cemetery would be a disaster. However, we might still need his help in dealing with Mischa before we got her back to the Simmons house, so he’d come with us. “We’ll take my car,” Violet announced. “We can all fit inside of it. I don’t like the idea of us splitting up.”

  There was some debate about the danger of us all riding together, relying on one vehicle. But eventually Henry shrugged, consenting to this strategy, even though I knew he probably didn’t like the idea of Violet being behind the wheel. In high school, Henry had been a big shot. It had to bother him that there wasn’t much of a leadership opportunity for him in our loosely planned endeavor, but I appreciated how cooperative he was being.

  And finally, we all came to the consensus that there was no point in discussing our plan anymore. We were talking in circles, and it was after eleven. We needed to start getting ready to head into town, even though my eyes were burning with tiredness and a headache loomed on both sides of my head behind my ears.

  “Maybe you guys should, like, call your parents or something,” I suggested, consciously omitting the second half of that sentiment, which would have been just in case.

  Violet and Henry looked at each other with hopeless frowns and shrugged, both coming to the same conclusion that I had earlier. It was probably in everyone’s best interest to not reach out to parents and engage in conversations that might turn into farewells, for whatever advantage that might give Mischa over us.

  I didn’t dare look over my shoulder at Henry as I ascended the grand staircase to the second floor with Trey trailing behind me. If Henry’s feelings were hurt that I was spending time alone with Trey, I couldn’t allow myself to be distracted by guilt.

  Already, the day had taken on an air of mourning, even though we hadn’t left the house for the cemetery yet. Violet had generously washed and dried the black dress I’d worn the previous day to the shiva, and it hung on a hanger over the top of the door of her private bathroom. She had washed Trey’s clothes too, the ones he’d worn since he had escaped from Northern Reserve. Despite both Trey and I being fully aware that this might be the last few moments we’d ever get to spend together alone, we both dressed in silence. Trey pulled on the navy pants and white T-shirt that were part of his Northern uniform, and then wiggled back into the black sweater that Violet had presumably pinched from one of her father’s drawers for him.

  “Zip me?” I asked as I stood in front of the full-length mirror that was balanced against one of Violet’s walls. In the mirror’s reflection, I watched Trey step up behind me and pull the zipper of my dress up my back. When he reached the top, he gently touched my shoulder to urge me to spin around to face him. When I did, he pulled me toward him, winding his arms around my waist and holding me against his body while burying his face in my neck.

  We stood like that for what felt like several minutes until he whispered, “Can’t we just stay here forever, like this?”

  “I wish we could. You know that I wish we could.” I pressed the side of my face against his chest, hearing his heartbeat beneath Mr. Simmons’s sweater.

  Trey’s shoulders lifted as he inhaled deeply, his exhale a downward glissando. “Whatever happens today, we’ll be together. Whether it’s here, or somewhere else, later.” Placing his hands on my shoulders, he leaned back so that he could look into my eyes as I felt tears welling up.

  “Okay” was all I could manage to say. When we’d parted ways in January, he’d asked me to wait for him. Our lives were intrinsically woven together. We belonged with each other; we were two parts of a larger whole in much the same way that Jennie and I were linked across the divide between life and death. Trey and I had both been a part of this network of evil and consequences for far longer than either of us had been aware.

  “Later today, when we get Mischa here, I might need you to… ,” I began, and then the request vanished from my tongue. There was no way that Trey could be the person who would pretend as if he was about to kill me that day—certainly not if he had to follow through on the threat if the spirits who inhabited Mischa called his bluff. He wouldn’t be able to bring himself to harm me; they would know it because I knew it. The undeniable truth, which made my heart ache, was that Trey would hurt himself before he’d ever hurt me. He would sacrifice himself before he’d let me die.

  “What?” Trey asked as he looked deeply into my eyes. His face was so perfect, his features so beautiful, I didn’t want to consider the possibility of death depriving me from ever seeing him again. “Anything. You know I’ll do anythi
ng for you.”

  But he couldn’t do the one thing I needed him to do, and I couldn’t ask him. And so my decision was made, as uncomfortable as it was going to be to ask Henry to own that task.

  “Explain all of this—everything that’s happened—to my mom one day,” I said. That was a request I could make of him on which I knew he’d follow through.

  Trey solemnly nodded and then pulled me against his chest again. He said into my hair, “Let’s hope we pull this off today so that you can tell her yourself.”

  An hour later, as I followed Trey out of the Simmons mansion and stepped over the threshold, I looked over my shoulder once more at the house’s first floor. I took in the oil portrait of Grandmother Simmons hanging over the grand staircase, the stodgy furniture in the living room, the flocked wallpaper and hardwood floors. We’d done a minimal job of cleaning up our indoor campsite, leaving folded blankets on the coffee table and pillows stacked on antique sofas. If everything we were about to attempt actually worked out, the next time I’d see this place, it might be within the last few minutes of my life.

  A few feet ahead of me, Henry paused to wait for me as Trey and Violet climbed into the car. This was the moment when I needed to ask Henry to kill me when we returned to the house, but I lost my nerve when he smiled at me and said, “You could sit this part out, you know. We could go to the funeral and tell her she needs to meet with you here to make a deal.”

  His thoughtfulness astounded me; he was always proposing ways to soften the burden on me, even if his suggestions weren’t realistic. But that struck me as equally problematic as it was endearing, considering what I needed him to do when we returned. “Henry,” I began, knowing that everything I was about to say put the entire plan’s chance at success in jeopardy. It might very well have been the equivalent of closing the lid on my own coffin now that I knew what was in Henry’s heart. But I couldn’t ask him to risk his life if there was a chance he was doing so with any expectations.

  “Before we do this, I need you to understand that Trey and I… we’re…” I couldn’t find the right words to communicate that I’d made my decision, or more accurately, that there really had never been a decision to make—even though I cared so much about Henry that it was painful for me to make sure he understood the truth.