Ghost Chant

by Gina Ranalli

  It wasn’t a bad idea, really. But would she have the stomach for it? She thought she might, given her growing rage. Hell, she might even garner some genuine pleasure from the grisly task.

  The time constraint, though. That’s what this whole mess kept coming back to. She didn’t have time to undertake any fancy kind of body disposal, especially with law enforcement already nosing around.

  She had to think, but even more than that was the feeling, the itchy, insect-crawling feeling on the back of her neck, that she had to punish Maggie further. The child had clearly not learned her lesson and Cherie was damn well not going to let all this trouble she’d gone through go to waste.

  No, the brat would pay for everything she’d ever done to Cherie, every single fucking time she’d been a goddamn thorn in her side, from just being a weird, creepy kid to all the bullshit she’d put her through tonight.

  Cherie wasn’t about to let this night pass without getting the kind of revenge that would not—not ever—be forgotten.

  Children needed discipline and if Teresa Kerr was unable to provide it, well, Cherie sure as hell could. She had some experience after all—her own father had been an abnormally militant disciplinarian, though he’d been far stricter with Nikki than herself. But Cherie had witnessed more than enough corporal punishment to know what would straighten out a wayward child such as Maggie.

  With new determination, she marched upstairs and into the bedroom, closing the door behind herself before opening up the closet once again.

  Maggie was still crumpled on the floor, visible as not much more than a hunkered down shadow as the ceiling light did not illuminate much within the closet.

  Cherie scowled at the corpse, hands on hips.

  “You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?” she asked Maggie. “Playing all these games with me. These pranks.”

  She waited, eyes narrowed, challenging the dead girl to reply.

  But Maggie didn’t reply. She remained still as stone, mocking Cherie with her indifference.

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. The dead cat downstairs. I can only imagine what you hoped to accomplish with that little stunt. But guess what?” Cherie leaned forward at the waist, nostrils flaring. “It didn’t work, you little bitch. And nothing else you have planned will work either. You want to know why? Because I’m on to you. I never put up with your little bullshit games before and I’m not going to start now. Maybe your goddamn mother couldn’t control you but I . . .” She straightened up again and slowly nodded her head. “But I sure as fuck will. Fuck with me again, little sister. I fucking dare you.”

  Cherie smiled then, knowing she had the upper hand. No matter what this little bitch tried to pull on her, Cherie was still the one breathing, still moving around and able to get revenge. Soon Maggie would be in a pine box, or even better, in a pile of ashes or beneath rotting leaves deep inside a long forgotten forest.

  Fuck her.

  Cherie had won. It was that simple. Yes, the brat could play games for now. Let her. They were limited and Cherie was done being frightened. She knew what was what, knew the bullshit the kid was pulling was only temporary. She just had to get the body somewhere else. Lay her to rest. Isn’t that what all the spook fest movies and books said? Once a body is laid to rest, it stops fucking around with whoever is unlucky enough to be in its vicinity.

  So, fine. Cherie either had to dispose of the body elsewhere—bury it or something—or at least put it somewhere it could be found. The kicker was how to do it without getting caught, which would be difficult, given that the neighborhood was now crawling with the blue vermin and their fucking flashlights.

  Wait until morning, then? Would that be an option? Or would the police presence be even worse?

  Probably the latter, Cherie knew.

  Again, she considered dragging the body out of the closet and dismembering it in the bathtub. It was a disgusting prospect but—

  The doorbell sounded, shattering Cherie from her thoughts. She took a deep breath and glanced at Maggie again. “You stay put,” she told the corpse. “I’ll be right back.”

  12

  The uniformed officer at the door was a young black woman. Probably new to the force, Cherie guessed. She didn’t seem nervous, exactly, but she was certainly alert, despite the late hour.

  She asked Cherie all the questions she’d been expecting: Had she seen Maggie Kerr tonight or earlier today? When was the last time she’d seen her? Had she noticed any unusual activity in the neighborhood? Any strange people or vehicles? Had she heard anything? Maybe shouting or crying?

  Cherie answered all the questions calmly, wearing a mask of puzzled concern she eventually traded for one of horror and fear.

  The cop jotted things down in a notebook and told her detectives would probably also be by to question her sometime within the next half dozen hours, unless the child was located. She handed Cherie a card and even touched her arm reassuringly, reminding her to keep her doors and windows locked and to give them a call if anything she may have forgotten came back to her during the night.

  “Of course I will, Officer,” Cherie said, holding the fingers of her free hand up to her trembling lips. “Please let Teresa know I’m praying for her and Maggie.”

  The cop promised she would and then said goodbye, moving onto the house next door.

  Once she was gone and Cherie had closed and locked the door, as per instruction, she leaned her back against it, impressed with her own performance. This whole thing was just too easy. Maybe she’d missed her calling.

  From upstairs came a thud. Not particularly loud, but certainly noticeable.

  The satisfaction Cherie was feeling was abruptly destroyed. She cursed under her breath.

  She wanted to scream Maggie’s name, but abstained from doing so. Instead, she tossed the cop’s card on the counter and marched back up to the bedroom.

  The closet door was open. Had she closed it before heading downstairs? She couldn’t remember, but suspected she must not have. That would have been unfortunate had the cop wanted to come in and look around. On TV, cops sometimes did that.

  The cause of the thud, she saw immediately, was a shoebox full of old photographs that had been stored on the upper shelf inside the closet. Now it was outside the closet, its contents scattered all over the floor.

  Cherie saw pictures she hadn’t seen in years—family photos from decades past. Her sister gazed up at her from where she sat on a picnic bench in a campground, not smiling, but not frowning either. As she often had, Nikki looked more resigned than anything else.

  Other pictures showed her parents, sometimes together, sometimes not. In most of them, they looked happy enough in their various settings—in front of a Christmas tree, seated at a Thanksgiving table, at a cousin’s graduation.

  Cherie saw no photographs featuring herself, which was odd, but a lot of them were facedown, so it wasn’t particularly surprising.

  “Having fun, are we?” she asked Maggie, who was in the same position as always, giving away no indication she’d moved. And even if she’d been able to, the girl was nowhere near tall enough to reach the shelf where the box had been.

  “You’ll have to do better than knocking a box down to get a rise out of me now.”

  Stooping, Cherie began to gather up the photos and place them back in the shoebox, thinking, for the time being at least, she should find some other place to put it.

  The task was done in less than a minute and it wasn’t until she was replacing the lid on the box that she saw the writing on the underside of it. She frowned, holding the lid up to read what was written there in black block letters.

  Where o where

  is Maggie Kerr?

  We all know

  you strangled her,

  and hid her deep

  beneath your clothes.

  But we all know

  what Maggie knows.

  What o what

  will Maggie do

  when she comes ba
ck

  to look for you?

  Will you bleed

  or will you burn?

  Because now you know

  it’s Maggie’s turn.

  Cherie stared at the words in disbelief, a sudden chill causing goose bumps to rise on her arms. She swallowed, reading the childish poem a second time before dropping the lid as if it were on fire.

  This was not funny. Not funny at all. It wasn’t even annoying, as she would have expected it to be only a few short minutes ago.

  What this seemed to be, even more so than anything else that had happened this night, was proof.

  Everything else, she thought, could have had some rational explanation, even if that explanation had meant she’d only been hallucinating which, deep down, she’d thought she probably was. But this . . . actual words written down in . . . what? Grease pencil, it looked like. She wasn’t even aware of owning a grease pencil.

  The hallucinations—if that’s what they were—had been almost comforting. She had, after all, killed a child and knew right away what that meant. She was insane. And everything that had happened had proven that to her to some degree and she’d been filing these events away, knowing on some level she would eventually be telling cops about them. Lawyers and doctors too.

  Of course, she could be hallucinating the poem as well, but it didn’t have the same feel to it. Could her subconscious have made up a rhyme that quickly?

  Part of losing one’s mind, she felt, had almost been fun. The complete letting go, the break with reality, it was a bit of a relief, really. She’d been terrified at first, yes, but she’d felt she was getting the hang of it. Enjoying it for what it was. Something that couldn’t actually hurt her. It was like being an actress in a movie. She’d discovered her character’s motivation and that had not been fright, but rage.

  The body of the girl remained the same but the body of the woman had begun to shiver uncontrollably. Cherie feared, almost more than the threat of the poem, that sanity was returning to her and it was going to be far less pleasant than a broken mind.

  13

  Cherie didn’t know what to do next. She didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.

  The body in the closet looked real and it definitely appeared to be dead. The shoebox lid, with the black, juvenile rhyme written on the underside also seemed real. But how could both things be true at the same time?

  Had the frogs been real? The naked man?

  She felt her thigh, the place where she’d been stabbed. But . . . she’d stabbed herself. Hadn’t she?

  Turning, she faced the large bookcase on the opposite wall of her bedroom. She thought she saw something skitter over the tops of the books on the second shelf down, something small and shadowy and quick but then it was gone and she could only assume she’d imagined it.

  That side of the room was darker than the side she now stood on, cloaked in gloom, and she wasn’t anxious to go over there, but what she now wanted was on those shelves.

  Steeling herself, she moved around the bed slowly, almost as though she were walking on thin ice and afraid she’d fall through the floor at any moment. The next step could be the one that sent her down the rabbit hole forever.

  Her family had never been particularly religious but if there was a God—a good, fair Christian God—she could use him now. She would apologize to him later for her previous indifference, but now . . . now He had to help her.

  It was the only thing she could think to do, although it made little sense in the grand scheme of things: she located the Bible her grandmother had given to her as a child, saw it there on the middle shelf, stuffed between two volumes of the Game of Thrones series, the wrinkled black leather and the embossed gold lettering. Holy Bible.

  She wondered about demons and if she was being stalked by one or if she was one herself. She would take the Bible downstairs, maybe read it in the living room under a bright light with the window blinds wide open, so any passerby could see her and know she was trying to repent. If that was even possible.

  She doubted it was but she reached for the Bible anyway, pulled it free from the shelf by its spine and had just curled her hand around it when she felt the prickly hairs in her hand.

  The spine of the book was covered in thick, coarse whiskers, like those on a man’s face. Cherie cried out, dropping the book and taking a step away, the backs of her legs bumping into the side of the bed.

  More tricks? she wondered. Whether they were tricks of her own mind or tricks from Maggie didn’t much matter at this point.

  She bent down to study the book and saw the spine was only leather—no whiskers. At least none she could see in the dim light.

  Prodding it with her foot, she didn’t know what she expected it to do. Come to life and fly around the room like something out of a Harry Potter novel?

  The Bible did nothing but move a few inches across the carpet. She dared to touch it once more and the whiskers—if they’d ever been there—were now gone.

  She breathed a sigh of relief, the sound of the air whooshing out of her lungs startling her. Everything else was so quiet. So still.

  So dead.

  Picking up the Bible, she almost whooped with joy when it felt the same way in her hand as it always had, when she’d moved it from one spot to another, rarely ever opening it.

  Just holding it gave her a sense of comfort. So much, in fact, that she felt tears sting the corners of her eyes. Relief washed over her in a warm, soothing wave. She felt the presence of God, His love and forgiveness.

  She let herself fall into a seated position on the edge of the bed, her back to the closet and to Maggie Kerr. Opening the front cover was a little unnerving. She feared another weird little poem might have replaced the inscription from her grandmother, but no. Her grandmother’s cursive script, barely legible—something that had caused her and her sister endless amusement when they were children—was still there, faded blue ink reminding her to say her prayers and that she would always be loved and never alone.

  The words made Cherie smile a truly genuine smile for the first time all night and she thumbed through the book, anxious to get to the passage her grandmother had marked for her by pressing a deep red rose so long ago. A red rose for love.

  Cherie didn’t know what part of the Bible the rose was in—she’d never even read the passage it was supposed to mark—but she knew it was somewhere in the middle of the book, maybe slightly toward the back.

  When she found the right place, the Bible very neatly falling open to the exact page without much encouragement, there was no rose. Instead, there was a flat, very old, very dead mouse. Like its predecessor, the rose, the mouse was dried and nearly paper thin. The only part of it still maintaining any thickness was its long, wormy tail. One tiny yellow, snarled tooth protruded from its short brown snout. The only visible eye was closed and Cherie didn’t know whom to thank for such a small favor.

  She slammed the Bible closed and resisted the urge to scream, in terror mostly, but also in betrayal.

  Standing up again, she spun around and threw the Bible as hard as she could at the corpse of Maggie Kerr. Her aim was true and the book sailed straight into the closet and struck the dead girl’s forehead before bouncing off and settling in her lap. Maggie’s head jolted backward, banging into the wall behind her before her chin fell forward once more and all was still again.

  14

  Outside, the commotion was growing.

  When Cherie went back downstairs, her kitchen was awash in strobes of red and blue and as she peeked out the window she saw a dozen squad cars lining the street now. Far up the block, news vans were gathering.

  It was only a matter of time before another cop came knocking again. She wondered what her next course of action should be. Should she go outside and stand on her lawn, staring on with wide, frightened eyes and wringing her hands with worry as many of her neighbors were now doing or should she feign sleep, pretending to be respectful of the grim proceedings?

  She de
cided on the latter and moved through the house without the aid of electricity, lest any prying eyes look over in her direction.

  Her thoughts returned to somehow removing the body from the house, but again, she could think of no plausible way to do so given the current circumstances.

  Back in the living room, she sat on the sofa in the dark, chewing her cuticles until she heard a soft whisper just over her shoulder. The voice and the word caused her body to stiffen and her belly rolled as though a gallon of castor oil had been swallowed.

  “Too much pain will break your brain.”

  Instead of leaping up and whirling around, Cherie remained seated, facing forward, refusing to give the bitch the satisfaction of outwardly showing fear. She swallowed what felt like a peach pit in her throat, as sour bile threatened to rise and tickle the back of her tongue. The taste made her gag repeatedly but she was determined not to move until she was sure the voice would not repeat the dreaded phrase once more.

  She sat stock still for nearly five minutes until she could no longer stand the bitterness in her mouth. Her first instinct was to go upstairs and brush her teeth but the thought of being anywhere near that body again only caused her stomach to roll more violently. She opted instead for the pack of gum she always kept in her purse and returned to the kitchen to retrieve it.

  Once she’d popped two small sticks of peppermint into her mouth and began to chew, a calmness settled over her once more. She knew she should not—could not—be beat by that monstrous child.

  She returned to the living room and sat in the exact spot she’d recently occupied out of sheer defiance, almost daring the disembodied voice to speak to her again.

  It didn’t.

  The only sound she could hear now was her own chewing. Even the outside noises had been drowned out, or perhaps they’d just stopped. Either way, Cherie was grateful for the reprieve. The darkness, instead of filling her with unease, now comforted her, like a warm quilt wrapped around her soul.