7 Souls

by Barnabas Miller; Jordan Orlando

  “Mommy,” she was crying. “Mommy, Mommy …” She knew that her mother saw Dylan Summer lying on the floor, not her daughter, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.

  “No, no, no,” Mom murmured, stroking Dylan’s scruffy hair away from Mary’s—Dylan’s—eyes. She was still holding the handset of the cordless phone. “No, please, not again, not again …”

  “Mommy … Mommy …”

  The hallucinatory feeling continued as Mary lay on the floor in the pool of Dylan’s blood and heard her own bedroom door bang open, heard Real Mary come out of her bedroom and scream at the top of her lungs.

  “Mommy …,” Mary moaned in agony. “Mommy, help me….”

  “The ambulance is coming,” Mom told her in a soothing voice, the one Mary remembered her mother using when she was a little girl. “I’ve called nine-one-one; I told them gunshot—they’re on their way.”

  Mary was fading in and out of awareness as her mother and Real Mary talked and Mom explained that she’d heard the gunshot and come out of the room. She tried to ignore the pain and focus on their voices. “Ow, ow, ow …,” she moaned. “Mommy, I’m dying; I’m really dying….” She wasn’t in control of what she was saying; the strange, dreamlike state continued as Real Mary’s BlackBerry rang and Real Mary took the call from Ellen that sent her downtown to her death. Mary tried to interfere—she grabbed her own ankle and said, “No, don’t—don’t go,” but her voice came out in a whisper and Real Mary easily pulled herself away and said something Mary couldn’t hear, and then she was gone, on her way to the Peninsula Hotel for the very last time—and Mary was alone with Mom, lying on the floor in Dylan’s dying, gut-shot body.

  “Please stay awake,” Mom begged as she caressed Mary’s—Dylan’s—forehead. “Don’t pass out—stay awake. I can’t take it—I can’t take this happening again.”

  That’s the second time she’s said that, Mary realized. It was hard to think with the pain flowing through her body and her ears ringing and the warm stain spreading beneath her, but she suddenly registered what her mother had said.

  “What do you—what do you mean ‘again’? Mom—”

  “Don’t talk,” Mom urged in a weak, faint voice, and Mary realized that Dawn Shayne was on the edge of panic—and not just because of the gunshot and the blood. It was something else. “Don’t talk, or you’ll accelerate going into shock.”

  “What—”

  “Shhh!”

  Mary’s mother was beside herself—Mary had never seen her in such a panic. She was crouched on the floor with Dylan Summer’s blood soaking into her bathrobe like scarlet paint, stroking Dylan’s hair and staring with wide eyes like her worst nightmare was coming true. “What do you mean ‘again’?” Mary rasped painfully—the effort of speaking each word made her light-headed. “If—if you tell me what you’re talking about I’ll be quiet.”

  Her mother gazed down at her, tears in her eyes, her face white, and nodded. “This happened before,” she whispered finally. “Just like this. I—I lost somebody I loved. I lost somebody I really loved, the same way. He was shot to death.”

  “You mean Da—you mean Mr. Shayne?”

  Is that how Dad died? And nobody ever told me?

  But Mom shook her head.

  “I did love Mary’s father. I did, truly. But”—Mom moved her head then, turning her face to one side as if ashamed or embarrassed—“but I was in love with somebody else. His name was Lawrence—Lawrence Schwartz. And he …” Mom’s eyes focused back on Mary. “You don’t want to hear this, Dylan. It was so long ago; ten whole years ago. Nobody remembers anymore; nobody cares except me and Ellen.”

  Lawrence?

  Mary was stunned. Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined such a thing. Mom was in love with a man named Lawrence?

  But the amazing thing was, she remembered Lawrence. The name brought an image into her mind: a middle-aged man in a dark green suit with no tie.

  Uncle Larry.

  All at once, the complete memory was there, as if it had never faded at all. He was always hanging around Mom when the girls were young, and they were supposed to call him “Uncle Larry.”

  I must have repressed it, Mary thought dazedly. Sure, I’ve repressed it, like all those shrinks on television say. Because it made me angry.

  The ten-year-old anger was coming back now; the pain and dizziness were like vodka, poisoning her blood as it drained onto the floorboards, making her drunk with remembered fury, the kind of deep, unchecked rage that only a neglected child could feel, even if she didn’t understand it.

  She remembered being forced to spend dismal hours with Mom and Uncle Larry and being told to keep it a secret from Daddy. Mom spent all her precious time with Uncle Larry. That was why she was always running late when she was supposed to be picking Mary up from gymnastics. Of course, she managed to pick Ellen up from school every day at three on the dot—all Ellen wanted to do was go home and read books. But once Ellen had been safely delivered back to the apartment, Mom would disappear off to Larry Land. That was where she was every day at five o’clock when Mary would sit waiting for her on the school steps, shivering in the freezing cold, her mittens tucked deep under the arms of her pea coat and her teeth chattering. Mary would convince herself that every passing cab would surely be her mother, but sometimes Mom wouldn’t come for hours. And sometimes she never came at all. Dad would show up—after Mom had called him with some lame excuse—and Mary would ride home in a taxi with her father, pressing against him, warming her hands beneath her arms and gratefully inhaling his Borkum Riff tobacco smell, telling him how much she hated Mommy for leaving her out there in the cold so often.

  “Dylan?” Mom sounded even more worried. “This is upsetting you—I can tell. Should I—”

  “Tell me,” Mary gasped. “Tell me what happened. Tell me who shot him. Please.”

  “Mort shot him,” Mom told her. “Mary’s father shot him—shot him dead.”

  What?

  Mary realized she was probably hallucinating; the pain and her mother’s touch and the glare of the overhead lights and the accumulated weirdness of the six souls she’d occupied were affecting her thinking. Did Mom just say that she was having an affair with Uncle Larry and Dad shot him?

  But she wasn’t hallucinating, or dreaming, and she knew it. She’d gotten over that comforting fantasy back when she was Scott Sanders. This was real, as real as it got.

  “Please,” Mary whispered painfully. “Please tell me.”

  “It was so long ago,” Dawn Shayne began. “Ten years ago, but I’ll never forget it. The worst day of my life … the day of our anniversary party. We don’t talk about that day. Mary acts like she doesn’t remember it.”

  But I don’t! I don’t remember it!

  “It was supposed to be a good day—our crystal anniversary. We had a big party, right here in this apartment. Mort and I had invited everyone. But something was wrong. From the moment I woke up, I felt … odd. Like the whole world was against me. Everything was off-kilter somehow. All of my friends—even my closest ones—were acting like they were out to get me.”

  This is sounding very familiar, Mary realized as Dylan’s body began shivering.

  “They all did such … such mean things to me,” Mom was saying. “All of them, all of my friends. I thought it was just in fun; just pranks you’d play on someone. I could have dealt with it if it hadn’t been for my family. When your family turns against you, Dylan, well … there’s no recovering from that. It kills something in your heart, and you just never recover.”

  “You mean—you mean your husband?”

  “I mean Mary.”

  And here we go, Mary thought, with that same feeling of sick inevitability that she always imagined accompanied capsizing boats as they sank, airplanes that suddenly plummeted, cars that skidded out of control and slid into incoming traffic. Here we go into the abyss—into the blank spot, the missing memory, the white field of snow.

  “Lar
ry was at the party,” Mom said. “I never looked at him—I was sure of that. But Mort knew somehow. I could just tell that he knew, and that day”—she shivered, and Mary felt the shiver through Dylan’s shoulder—“that day, he was different. He had a look in his eyes, a murderous look, that I’d never seen before. I realized he was going to do something violent, something dangerous. I knew we had to get the girls and get away, to escape. Larry had a little place north of Riverdale,” Mom continued, still stroking Dylan’s sweat-streaked forehead as the hot pool of blood spread beneath him. “A little farmhouse, about twenty minutes out of town.”

  A farmhouse. A farmhouse in the snow.

  Uncle Larry’s house.

  Mary was listening so avidly, her only real fear was that Dylan would die of blood loss before she got to hear the end of the story. The “visions” she’d been seeing all day weren’t visions at all—they were memories. Somehow the curse had dislodged the door in her mind that had been shut for ten years, and the memory of that day had spilled out. I was seven years old, she remembered. And we fled through the snow to the farmhouse.

  “We thought we’d be safe there,” Mom went on, her voice drenched in the sorrow and dread of her story. “So we got inside and lit a fire and we were safe … for about ten minutes. Morton had followed us, and he—he drove right there; he got out of the car and banged on the door like he—like a madman. There’s no other way to describe it. I begged Larry not to let him in, not to open the door, not in front of the girls, but he just went over and reached for the doorknob”—Mom was crying openly now—“and when he’d flipped the latches Mort just kicked the door open and sh-shot Larry, point-blank. The worst sound I’ve ever heard in my life … I hoped I’d never hear it again, and I never did. Until just now; until tonight.”

  “What did you do?” Mary croaked.

  “I screamed for the girls to follow me and I ran, out of the house, out the back door, into the snow, into the trees. I turned to look behind me and Mary was there, but I’d lost Ellen somehow, and when I turned to go back for her I fell.” Mom had lost control of her tears. She was sobbing like a child, trying to find spaces to breathe. “I fell into a ditch, some kind of hole in the ground, and I couldn’t get out.”

  You fell into the ravine, Mary thought. You fell into that pit and couldn’t get out.

  Just like me.

  “And she could have pulled me out,” Mom said firmly, her lip trembling as she stared straight ahead, nodding.” Mary could have saved me; she was strong enough. But she just stood there on the ledge, watching me try to scratch and claw my way out. I begged her … I pleaded with her. ‘Mary, just reach down and help me,’ … but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even try—she just stared at me, watching me struggle, and then she turned around and walked off into the snow. I screamed for her to come back, that Mommy wasn’t joking, that I was trapped, but she was gone.

  “I was in the hole all night long. There were snakes and worms and freezing water … I almost lost both my feet to frostbite, and I got hypothermia. The doctor said I could have died. As it is, the pneumonia ruined my lungs, and”—Mom shook her head, brushing gray hairs from her forehead, the crying apparently over—“and in the morning, when they found me, they found Larry dead from gunshot wounds, and Mort dead too, asphyxiated somehow, like the violence and the cold air had brought on some kind of toxic shock. ‘Domestic dispute,’ they said at the inquest, like it was some kind of debate or something. ‘Temporary insanity.’ But I lost everything permanently—and I never recovered. Not really. Why would she want to do that, Dylan? Why would Mary want to leave me alone in the cold? Like she wanted me to freeze to death?”

  (She tried to kill my mom! Ellen had screamed.)

  “But I know the answer. She didn’t love me, Dylan. Not at all. She hated me. And what just breaks my heart is that Mary hates me for being such a useless wreck … but she did it. She made me what I am, that day. They all did; everybody I loved. Everybody but Ellen.”

  I ruined her life, Mary thought. It’s totally true—I’m to blame for all of it.

  “You could say it’s my fault for cheating on Mort. But you have to understand, that door”—Mom cocked her gray-haloed head backward, indicating Dad’s study—“was closed all the time. He’d be in there for days, smoking his pipe, with his patient files and his dusty old books. He stopped caring about me, Dylan, but that doesn’t mean I stopped caring about him. Look, I still wear the present he gave me—the only nice thing that happened that day.” Mom was fumbling at her throat, pulling a gold chain out from beneath the frilled collar of her nightgown. “On the morning of our anniversary, he gave me this necklace. It’s Egyptian—isn’t it pretty?”

  She held the necklace’s pendant out, proudly, and Mary stared as it gleamed in the overhead light: an almond-shaped, ornamental Egyptian eye, carved from burnished gold.

  Another Eye of Tnahsit. Another amulet.

  Mary felt a wave of numb dread flowing over her as she stared at the necklace, its curves glinting as Mom turned it over and over in her hand.

  The spell! Mary was thinking furiously. She could barely focus on Mom’s voice. The Curse of 7 Souls! Dad cast it on Mom!

  She put the pieces together. It was easy to understand what had happened, now. Her father, Morton Shayne, had cast the same spell—the Curse of 7 Souls—on his wife, Mary and Ellen’s mother, ten years ago. He’d done the same thing Ellen had done: given her an ornament depicting the Eye of Tnahsit. And she’d had the same experience as Mary, the same horrible day (with everyone out to get her) concluding in death and tragedy.

  So who were your seven souls, Mom?

  But Mary knew part of the answer.

  (A giant figure, limned by moonlight, loomed over her, leaning down like a toppling granite statue—reaching for her. The huge man-shaped silhouette drew closer, its arm reaching forward, and she realized that its huge extended hand was holding something out toward her—a thin rectangle that glowed in the moonlight. A piece of paper—a note. There was writing on the note, which Mary couldn’t read in the dark, but it was like all the forces of the universe converged on that single page.)

  The vision wasn’t a vision—it was a memory. And as she recalled it all again, it was like a photograph coming into focus; the shadowed figure was suddenly illuminated as he toppled toward her. The dark man was her father, Morton Shayne, standing over her in the snow that covered the Riverside Park playground where he’d brought her, looming over her tiny seven-year-old figure like a giant. And the piece of paper he was giving her was clear; she could read it now.

  WHOM DO YOU HATE THE MOST?

  WHAT WOULD YOU DO ABOUT IT IF YOU COULD?

  TODAY IS THE DAY.

  He picked me, Mary realized. He knew how much I resented her—all that time waiting for Mom out in the cold. I complained to him, so he picked me as one of his seven. And, under the spell, I got my revenge—I left her in the snow to die.

  It wasn’t me. It was the spell.

  “That’s why I can’t remember,” Mary croaked. Her head was spinning like she’d had six shots of vodka—she could barely make her mouth form the words. “That’s—that’s what the book said.”

  “Oh my God, Dylan, you’re delirious—”

  “No! I understand it now,” Mary insisted, rallying her strength to raise Dylan’s scruffy head off of the floorboards. “You forget it when it’s all over. That’s why Dylan couldn’t remember anything, in the car. That’s why I’ve never been able to remember that day! And Ellen doesn’t know that.”

  “Dylan—”

  “Ellen thinks it was me. She thinks I left you there—and it wasn’t me! It was the fucking curse … and I can explain it.” With a supreme burst of effort, ignoring the agony in her—Dylan’s—abdomen, Mary rose on her elbows, getting ready to stand. “If I tell her, she’ll forgive me,” she panted, her vision doubling with the renewed pain. “She’ll forgive me. And she won’t go through with it—she’ll stop—she’ll stop the curse
.”

  “Dylan Summer, you lie back down this instant!” Mom cried.

  “I can’t.” As Mary’s vision doubled, cleared and doubled again, she saw the page from Horus’s book on the floor next to her—the page Dylan had accidentally torn out.

  (the Minions will forget all that they have done in Service of the Curse)

  “What are you doing?” Mom asked, alarmed, as Mary groped on the floor with Dylan’s numb, bloodied hands. “Stay right where you are! You can’t go anywhere!”

  Yes I can, Mary thought grimly, struggling not to pass out as she pressed on the floor and raised Dylan’s body to a sitting position. Her fingers were trembling as she reached for the stray page and shoved it into Dylan’s pocket. Yes I can—I have to.

  (Jesus, this is wrong. Ellen needs to see this—)

  “I have to go,” Mary rasped, coughing as bubbles blood of spurted from her lips. Entire new galaxies of pain were sweeping through her as she moved, but she had no choice. She realized she was rambling, deliriously. “I have to show her… have to show Ellen what the spell says. Minions can’t remember … not my fault …”

  Her mother was staring at her, white-faced. Mary could only imagine what Dylan’s blood-soaked, wild-eyed body looked like, but, judging by Mom’s facial expression, it must have been pretty bad. She tried to force herself to speak clearly.

  “She didn’t—Mary didn’t do it—on purpose,” Mary managed to tell her mother. “She loves you very much—she always did. She’s”—Mary could barely speak from the pain of wrenching herself upright and lurching toward the apartment’s front door—“she’s sorry for what she did. She’s very, very sorry.”

  MARY WAS DRENCHED WITH sweat, leaning on the edge of a No Parking sign in the dark shadows of Columbus Avenue, spitting up blood. There was a spattered, wet-blood trail behind her, leading out of her apartment building.