Graveyard Slot

by Michelle Schusterman

  Hailey led the way into the woods behind the church, occasionally stopping to consult the pages in her hand. Inés had given us an extra copy of Brunilda’s journal entries, all translated into English, and Hailey had immediately gone through and found all the ones with a description of Brunilda’s favorite tree. She seemed to be taking charge of finding it, which was fine by me. Inés had also made a copy of Professor Guzmán’s photo of the church’s convent in 1891. He’d circled Brunilda’s face: long and narrow like his, with a thin, pointed nose.

  Jamie and I walked with Abril, who was filling us in on everything she knew about Professor Guzmán’s experiment. “Inés has been his student for three years,” Abril explained. “He’s the only psychology professor at the university who is interested in telepathy, precognition, things like that. Last year when his grandmother died, he found this trunk in her attic with Brunilda Cano’s belongings and personal records, and he learned she was a nun at this church.”

  “So Brunilda wasn’t famous?” I asked.

  “Famous?” Abril frowned. “No, she was just a nun.”

  “No, I mean her ghost.”

  “Most of the haunted places we visit are local legends,” Jamie added. “All the locals know all about the ghosts and their stories.”

  Abril shook her head. “Everyone always said the catacombs were haunted, but no one had ever heard of Brunilda until Professor Guzmán started these séances.”

  Oscar and Thiago followed us, lagging behind a little bit. It sounded like Thiago was trying to teach Spanish to Oscar. Or maybe Oscar was trying to teach him Portuguese. I couldn’t really tell.

  “As catacumbas são assombrados.”

  “Assombrados?”

  “It means haunted. Haunted? Com fantasmas?”

  “Ah . . . embrujado.”

  Abril sighed loudly. “You should be working on your English, like I am!” she called over her shoulder. “He is very self-conscious about it,” she added to Jamie and me. “But he’ll study abroad the year after next like I did. He needs to practice.” She yelled the last part, and behind us, Thiago muttered something that sounded like “mandona.” Abril rolled her eyes as he and Oscar snickered.

  “I don’t care if you think I’m bossy,” she said haughtily, shooting him a glare. “You know I’m right.”

  “All right, we’ll practice English,” Oscar said. I glanced back as he pointed at a spindly-looking tree. “Tree,” he deadpanned, and Thiago started laughing again.

  “I see it!” Up ahead, Hailey broke into a run. Our narrow path opened into a small clearing, and a massive willow tree stood in the center, leaves swaying gently in the breeze. I stopped, setting my Elapse to video mode and holding it a few inches from my face. On the display screen, Hailey sprinted toward the tree, ponytail flying. Jamie leaned closer to watch. Maybe a little closer than necessary. Not that I was complaining about that.

  “That’ll be a nice opening shot,” he said, his breath tickling my cheek. I nodded, pretty sure that if I tried to respond, it would come out as a squeak.

  Jamie stuck by my side as I filmed the others setting up the Ouija board. His arm kept accidentally brushing against mine, and once when I tripped over a root, he grabbed my wrist and held onto it several seconds after I’d regained my balance. The resulting swooping sensation in my stomach, combined with my now-typical anxiety that came with filming, made me feel like I was on a roller coaster that was sort of fun but also sort of terrifying. By the time Oscar was ready for the introduction, my hands were sweating and a soundtrack of thump-thump, thump-thump was playing loudly in my ears.

  I tried to hold the camera steady as he talked about Brunilda, but something was wrong. A buzzing noise filled my ears, drowning out Oscar’s words, and neon spots started flickering in front of my eyes. For a second, I swore I saw a shape through the viewfinder. One that looked a whole lot like the shape I’d seen in the mirror.

  “Kat?” Someone gently took the camera from my hands. I took a deep, shaky breath, blinking rapidly.

  “What are you doing?”

  Jamie frowned slightly. “I was talking to you. Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Oh sorry.” I shook my head, trying to get rid of the buzzing noise. “I’m just, um, distracted.”

  “Do you mind if I film this part?” Jamie held up the Elapse.

  “No, but why?”

  “Just want to try it.” Pretending to inspect the back of the camera, Jamie lowered his voice. “And because you look like you did in the catacombs yesterday, like you’re going to faint. If you don’t want to talk about whatever’s going on, that’s fine, but I thought you might want to get some water and sit down for a minute.”

  I swallowed. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “No problem.” He glanced up at me, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Although, you know, if you ever do want to talk about it . . .”

  I couldn’t help smiling back. “Yeah, maybe later.”

  Trying to look nonchalant, I headed over to my backpack and sat cross-legged on the grass. Rocks littered the area around the tree, dark gray and shiny. I picked one up and examined the marbled pattern, half listening as Oscar interviewed Abril. Should I tell Jamie about the whole Ana Arias thing? I knew it would hurt Oscar’s feelings if I confided in Jamie but not him. But if Oscar knew I suspected Ana was following us—if he knew she might even be possessing me—he’d find a way to get the whole story on the show, even if I resisted. Just like with the web series.

  When Oscar and Abril finished, Jamie filmed Hailey reading an entry from Brunilda’s journal. I sat with my eyes closed, turning the rock over and over in my hand as I listened.

  “The willow tree behind the church has long been a favorite spot of mine to read and be alone with my thoughts. But even this place, it seems, is no longer safe. I see the shadow in the church nearly every day now, dancing and writhing in the corner of my eye, always vanishing when I turn to get a better look. Only in the church, though . . . until this morning, when I visited my willow tree.”

  I rubbed my arms, my skin prickling with goose bumps despite the heat. When Hailey finished reading, everyone moved to sit around the Ouija board. Reluctantly, I pulled the tripod from my backpack and set it up before taking the Elapse from Jamie. (I’d tried “forgetting” the tripod back at the hotel so that I’d have to film the séance rather than be on camera, but Oscar had helpfully reminded me.)

  After turning the camera on, I adjusted the angle, trying to get everyone in the shot. I kept thinking of the shadow I’d seen in the viewfinder a few minutes ago and wondering if I’d imagined it. Imagined her. “Ana Arias,” I murmured to myself as I tightened the base of the tripod. “Why are you following me?”

  I squeezed between Jamie and Hailey and placed my fingers on the planchette. As usual, Jamie took charge of the séance. Closing my eyes, I tried to focus on his voice and not on the quiet whir coming from the camera.

  “Brunilda Cano used to sit under this willow tree and write in her journal,” he began. “Hailey’s going to read the rest of that entry, and I want everyone to imagine Brunilda right here with us. Concentrate on her words, her thoughts, her emotions.”

  There was a long silence, and I peeked through my eyelashes. Hailey sat solemnly, staring at the journal in her lap. When she spoke, her voice was much softer than usual.

  “The monster followed me here, lurking just out of sight, revealing itself only when I sat beneath the willow. I looked up and saw it hanging there in the branches, hollow-eyed and smiling.”

  A chill raced up my spine. I had to resist the urge to tilt my head back and stare up into the branches. But I could imagine it there, some shadowy thing lurking behind the leaves, watching us. Watching me.

  “I realized this monster is always with me, and always has been. It’s not trying to hurt me; it’s protecting me. It’s not trying to steal my soul;
it’s trying to save it.”

  Terror seized me. My heart was hammering so loudly, I could barely hear Hailey. I sat frozen, suddenly positive that if I opened my eyes, I would see . . . something. Brunilda’s empty-eyed monster grinning down at us. Or maybe Ana Arias, covered in dirt from her grave. Dozens of horrifying images flickered through my mind but I knew, I just knew, that whatever was with us right now was worse.

  Hailey continued reading, her voice trembling a little. Dimly, I wondered if she’d realized a monster had joined our group right there in broad daylight.

  “The clergy wants to perform an exorcism. I think I mustn’t let them. I think perhaps it would be best if this beast stayed with me.”

  The planchette began to crawl slowly, slowly across the board.

  Hailey fell silent. I forced myself to open my eyes, but my vision was blurry. The buzzing noise was back, too. I sensed it, whatever it was we’d conjured, hovering between the camera and me. But I was too petrified to look at it. All I could do was stare at my fingers, which felt magnetically attached to the planchette.

  “I . . . ,” Jamie said as our hands stopped over the letter briefly, then moved on to the next. “W . . . A . . . N . . .”

  Stop, I wanted to scream.

  “T . . .”

  Oscar said something I couldn’t make out through the deafening rush of blood in my ears. But I knew what he was saying, because I was thinking it, too. We both knew what the final three letters would be.

  Without thinking, I yanked my hands away from the planchette and crawled backward away from the board in a panic. There was a shout and a cry, and then I bumped into something. I looked up, and for a single, heart-stopping second, I expected to be staring right into the face of some sort of demon.

  But it was just my camera.

  It fell off the tripod and landed in my lap, the lens retracting as it shut off. I could see my reflection in the black viewfinder: disheveled, sweaty, panicked.

  What was wrong with me?

  Suddenly, I felt ridiculous. The last few minutes replayed in my mind, and I couldn’t understand why I’d been so scared. No, more than scared—petrified. I’d seen ghosts before. I saw Sonja Hillebrandt and the prisoners at Daems. I saw Lidia possessed by Red Leer. Emily Rosinski held a knife to my throat, for crying out loud, and that had been scarier than any paranormal activity I’d ever experienced. So why had I been so terrified sitting under a tree in the middle of the afternoon with my friends? It wasn’t like me.

  Maybe it wasn’t me.

  I finally looked up at the others, expecting to find them staring at me like I belonged in a straitjacket. But only Oscar and Jamie were watching me. Hailey was hugging her knees and gazing at the planchette, her expression troubled. At some point, Thiago must have gotten frightened, because he now stood several feet away from the board, arms crossed. Abril got to her feet and went over to talk to him, and he started shaking his head.

  “Sorry,” I finally managed to say, scooting back toward Jamie. “I don’t know why I freaked out like that.”

  He shook his head. “I know. I’ve never had that happen during Ouija before.”

  For a second, I thought he meant my panic attack, and I wanted to sink into the ground in humiliation. Then I realized Jamie looked shaken, too. In fact, everyone did.

  “I actually got cold,” Hailey said, brow furrowed. “I was so scared, and now I don’t know why. I felt . . . lost.”

  Jamie nodded in agreement, and a wave of relief washed over me. They’d felt it, too. Maybe I wasn’t losing my mind after all.

  “Kat,” Oscar said quietly, and I looked up at him. “It spelled I want.”

  The relief vanished as quickly as it had come, and my stomach sank. “Yeah . . .”

  “That message we got from Ana . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  He pushed the bangs out of his eyes, frowning. “Why, though? Why would Brunilda say the same thing?”

  I didn’t respond. I was afraid that if I started talking about it, the whole story would spill out: seeing Ana at the waterfall, seeing the message in the cave. But how much longer could I keep this to myself?

  “Well,” said Jamie at last. “I’m sure when you post this video, the fans will come up with tons of theories.”

  “They’re going to think it’s just a stunt,” Oscar said immediately. “Getting the same message twice like that.”

  “We don’t know for sure this message would have been the same.” I shoved the Elapse in my pocket. “She didn’t get to finish it this time. Anyway, I’m getting pretty tired of worrying about what people think. Let’s post it.”

  After dinner, Jess offered to help Oscar and me edit our video. I promised to meet them, along with Jamie and Hailey, in fifteen minutes. Then I returned to my room and sprawled out on my bed.

  Exhaustion weighted my bones in a way that made me wonder, vaguely, if I was coming down with something. My last thought before I drifted off was that Lidia took a lot of naps when she was possessed. But I was currently too tired to feel frightened.

  When I opened my eyes again, my room was pitch black. Stifling a groan, I rolled over and squinted at the alarm clock: 3:36 a.m. I could barely make out the lump that was Dad in the other bed, snoring deeply.

  My limbs felt stiff and sore as I pushed the blankets off. I was still wearing my shorts and Gremlins shirt; Dad must have found me napping and tucked me in. So I’d gone to bed at 8:30 p.m. That was kind of embarrassing. But my throat was dry and aching. Maybe I really was getting sick.

  I shuffled to the bathroom and groped around the counter until I found a glass. I filled it with water from the sink, blinking and gazing at the faucet. It was hard to tell in the dark, but it looked like the silver was scratched. So was the mirror, actually.

  Suddenly, I was wide-awake. Clutching my glass in one hand, I fumbled for the light switch. The fluorescent glare momentarily blinded me. When my eyes started to adjust, I wished I’d left the lights off.

  The faucet, the marble counter, the mirror, the tile floor, and walls . . . everything was covered in scratches, deep gouges like from the claws of a wild animal. But no animal could have done this. Because the scratches spelled three words, over and over again.

  I

  WANT

  OUT

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EXORCISE YOUR WAY TO BETTER HEALTH

  P2P WIKI

  Entry: “Exorcism”

  [Last edited by AntiSimon]

  The process of driving out a spirit, ghost, demon, or other being possessing a person, place, or thing. Though typically a religious ritual, exorcisms are occasionally secular. The ritual is conducted by an exorcist, who may use a variety of methods and objects to banish the spirit, most of which involve calling on some higher power. To date, Passport to Paranormal has never filmed an exorcism.

  UPDATE: Many fans believe P2P participated in its first exorcism during the Daems Penitentiary episode (EP #30). Although not captured on camera, one popular theory states that Kat Sinclair played the role of the exorcist by using her camera to drive Red Leer’s ghost from Lidia’s body.

  THE GLASS slipped from my hand, shattering on the floor. Someone screamed. No, not someone. Me.

  Shards of glass crunched beneath my feet as I fled the bathroom. A pair of strong hands gripped my shoulders, and I sucked in a breath, ready to scream again.

  “Kat!”

  Dad’s bloodshot eyes were wide with panic. I collapsed against him, squeezing mine shut.

  “What happened?” he asked, his voice unusually high. I’d never heard him sound this frightened before. Still holding me tightly, he leaned into the bathroom.

  “I didn’t do it.” My words came out muffled against his chest.

  “Honey, it’s okay. It’s just a broken glass, no big deal.”

  “What?”


  Slowly, I pulled away from him and turned around. No words. No scratches. The mirror, the walls—everything was back to normal, except for the broken glass scattered on the tile floor.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and took a tentative step forward. “Ow!”

  “Stop.” Before I had time to respond, Dad swept me up and carried me over to the chair. He knelt in front of me, carefully inspecting the bottoms of my feet. “Don’t move,” he ordered. I sat with my legs hovering a few feet off the floor while he grabbed the first-aid kit he had stashed in the closet and turned on the lights.

  “I don’t feel anything” I said as he began picking tiny shards from my left foot. “Am I bleeding?”

  “I don’t think so,” Dad replied, squinting. “Looks like there are a few tiny cuts, but it could’ve been worse.” He glanced at me. “So . . . wanna tell me what happened?”

  I squirmed when he started to apply ointment to one of the cuts. “I saw . . . I thought I saw something in the bathroom,” I said at last. “Scratches.”

  Dad’s brow furrowed. “Scratches?”

  “On the walls and mirror. It . . .” It spelled I WANT OUT. I exhaled slowly. “It scared me and I dropped the glass.”

  He closed the first-aid kit and studied me. “It’s not like you to see things.”

  “Yeah.” Because it’s not me.

  “I can’t remember the last time you had a nightmare,” he said. “Especially one that made you scream like that. Scared the hell out of me.”

  “Sorry,” I whispered. Then I realized what he’d said. “Nightmare? I wasn’t asleep!”

  “Well, there aren’t any scratches in the bathroom, right?” Dad smiled a little. “You conked out really early, and hard. I knocked over my suitcase when I came in and you didn’t even budge. Sounds to me like you were sleepwalking.”

  I started to shake my head, then stopped. What was the point of arguing? Sure, maybe I was sleepwalking. Or maybe the ghost of a dead Brazilian singer’s daughter, who might be possessing me, is making me see things. That’s also a perfectly reasonable explanation, right?