Speaking to Skull Kings

by Emily B. Cataneo

  Mémé sipped from her glass cup. “Because people are cruel, my sweetheart. They despise us because we are...not like them.”

  “But—”

  “Listen to me.” Mémé set down her cup, snipped at my hair with the scissors. “We’re different because we have a...a sort of a mission. Ever since my grandparents trudged down here through the forests and moved into this house, it’s been...well, sweetheart, you remember that summer when you couldn’t sleep because of the banging in the walls and rattling in the closets, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “And the rattling stopped after that postman came to visit us here?”

  “Yes.”

  “So?”

  “You mean...you have to give people...you give people to them? To the ghosts?”

  When Mémé didn’t answer, I jerked away from her scissors, craned my neck back to look at her impassive mouth beneath her eye mask. “How can we do that? Isn’t it wrong, to do that? What about those people? They didn’t do anything to us.”

  Mémé barked a laugh.

  “Why are you laughing, Mémé? Don’t laugh at me.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Mémé bent her head towards mine, kissed my hair. “I know it’s difficult to understand, but we have to do this. We have to feed them.”

  I pressed my arms against my stomach. What did it feel like for the ghosts to take you? Did it hurt? Did Mémé, my beloved Mémé, hold her hands over the people’s mouths so I wouldn’t have to hear them scream?

  Would I have to hold my hands over people’s mouths someday, too?

  “I suppose it is a kind of curse, to find ourselves in this situation, sweetheart,” Mémé said as she swept my hair clippings into a dustpan. “Now go wash your hands.”

  I scrubbed my hands in the bathroom until my knuckles rubbed raw. As I stepped back into the hallway, silver light trickled over my bare feet. In the kitchen, the basement door stood ajar, and two ghost-girls crouched in front of it, one of them clutching a china tea cup, the other balancing a paperback book on her knee.

  The clippings from my braid lay on the linoleum before them, glinting like dull metal in the glow from their ghostly hands and eager faces. Their fingers pawed at my shorn hair, examining it. One of them sniffed it and she emitted a breathy giggle.

  Mémé leaned against the counter, her arms crossed over her chest, and for the first time in my life my skin crawled at her mask, at her hidden eyes. Her mouth was set in a grim line.

  “Remember, sweetheart, we have to feed the ghosts somehow.” One of the ghost girls pressed her tongue against a clipping from my hair. “If we cannot bring people in from the outside, we’ll find other ways to feed them.”

  “Mémé,” I whispered.

  The ghost girl’s head jerked up, and a vacant little smile leapt onto her lips. She tiptoed forward, her Mary Janes silent against the linoleum. Her mouth opened; strands of my hair stuck to her flickering tongue. Her breath stank of the basement and of the rusted-over train tracks that ran through the woods a quarter-mile back behind our house. She giggled, and her pert nose veered close to my neck, and she inhaled deep and I shivered, shivered with a cold deeper than winter, more empty than the basement...

  “Mémé,” I whispered.

  Mémé turned to the sink, began to wash a tea kettle by the light of the ghost giggling before me. “I told you, sweetheart. People are cruel.”

  * * *

  I can still be different. I can escape the curse. I can flee to the ocean, far from this corner of the forest that never sees sunlight.

  I clung to that hope, and I withdrew from Mémé, with her fraying eye mask and her glass cup and the impassive curve of her shoulders as the ghosts sniffed me in the kitchen. I turned myself towards school, earning straight A’s, joining clubs—Mathletes, chess club, the literary magazine, track and field.

  No matter that my classmates talked over me, cut me out of discussions, acted as though I wasn’t there or whispered comments to each other so fleeting, I could barely catch what they said. I would become one of them. I would learn to shake the stench of ghosts off of me, break away from Mémé’s shadow, thwart the curse, somehow.

  Sometimes, when I looped round and round the track in the fragrant spring twilight, Jake watched me from the soccer field. But whenever I caught his eye, he would swivel back around and run to his teammates. Still, though, on long nights alone in bed, on lonely walks on the country lane leading home from school, those brief moments would light up for me, and I couldn’t help it: a smile would spread across my face.

  The next autumn, we were in the same English class, and he liked Coleridge too and even laughed once at something I’d said in a discussion.

  I would cling to those moments when silver would light up the hall outside my bedroom like a searchlight, when I’d step into the kitchen to the sound of laughter and a china teacup shattered on the linoleum, when I’d bump into Mémé lurking in the hallway and remember ghostly fingers pawing at my shorn hair.

  * * *

  The autumn when I was sixteen, the knocking and rattling started again.

  I tried sleeping with earplugs in. I tried napping during the day and reading at night. It didn’t work. I fell asleep in class and woke up to the laughter of my classmates around me. My eyes dried out from lack of sleep and my stomach twisted at the thought of food.

  “Sally,” Mémé rasped one day, as I stood in front of the refrigerator, trying to muster the desire to eat anything inside. “We can’t go on like this. This has to stop.”

  “I know,” I choked. “Just please...don’t take any of my classmates.” Don’t take me.

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Mémé drummed her fingers on the counter. “I’m not going to make it stop.”

  “No. I can’t do it. Please don’t make me do it.”

  “You have to become accustomed to it. Would you rather do it now, or when I’m gone?”

  “But Mémé, I—”

  “It’s the only way.” Mémé swept her hand at the walls around us. “They’re getting hungry.”

  * * *

  That evening, as bone-chilling autumn twilight fell outside the windows, I crouched on my bedroom floor. The closet rattled, and my fingers trailed over a watercolor picture of the sea in an oversized book of art prints.

  Then I snatched a canvas backpack out of my wardrobe, packed the book, a few sweaters, a dog-eared paperback. I crept out of my room, avoiding the creaky spots on the stairs, and slipped out into the dying leaves and wood smoke-smell of the evening.

  Buses and trains exist for a reason, and I forced myself not to look back as I struck out along the highway shoulder, putting step after step between myself and the rattling ghosts, myself and the peeling wallpaper, myself and Mémé’s mask and the softness of her hands on my head before she lay my hair before the cellar door.

  I reached the town’s lights with my body thrumming, my hands shaking. I’m going to escape. I’m going to the sea. Mémé can’t stop me. I’ll never have to feed the ghosts. I can run fast, and far, to a place where no one knows that I’m the Ouellette girl, where no one knows about the curse...

  The bus station loomed, a single loop at the end of a poorly paved street on the west side of town. I fled towards those lights, towards the silver-sided Greyhound bus. The door stood open, and the driver loitered down the loop, the sharp smell of cigarettes trailing away from him. I inched towards the bus, towards the destinations emblazoned on the side: Concord, Portland, Boston, points south, points away...

  “Hey, Sally.”

  Christine stepped out of the station, carrying a designer tote bag, wearing a cashmere sweater.

  “You going somewhere? Up to the mountains or something?”

  “Visiting family.”

  “Oh yeah? Did you buy a ticket?”

  The question hung between us, festooned the autumn night like the smell of wood smoke.

  “The ticket window wasn’t open.” The bus station closed in around me, my breath tighten
ing in my chest, my escape slipping away from me, the rattling of the closets roaring in my ears.

  “Maybe we should ask the driver where you can get a ticket. I’ll get him now.” Christine raised her eyebrows and raised her arm, nodding towards the silver smoke stemming from the other end of the platform.

  I shook my head and backed up, as Christine spread a smile across her face. The walk home blurred into a headache, a haze of the sleeplessness of the past weeks, of the dread settling in my stomach, of the hatred for Christine and her straight-toothed smile, and for Mémé and her ghosts, waiting for me...

  “Just in time for dinner,” Mémé said when I creaked open the front door. She served me a bowl of hot French onion soup, dripping with melted cheese and breadcrumbs. We didn’t speak as the dark whispered against the windows and the ghosts whispered in the basement, until she said, “You’d best get to bed, sweetheart.”

  “I hate you,” I said into my soup. “I really do.”

  Mémé sipped from her glass cup. “You need to get your sleep. You have a long day ahead of you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  The next day, I approached Christine in front of the school. “Hey, Christine, do you want to come over to my house and hang out?” I asked, shivering in the autumn chill. I dropped my voice. “I’ve got whiskey and stuff.”

  Christine scoffed. “Um, I’ve got other plans.”

  “What about the rest of you?” I turned to her friends, the bland-faced girls I’d known for four years. “Come on, are you scared?”

  But none of them would come with me. I approached classmate after classmate, offering them alcohol, drugs, friendship and adventure, but they all shook their heads, turned away.

  Sweat prickled under my armpits despite the chill. The sun was setting, the cul-de-sac in front of the school was clearing out. I pivoted on my heel and then I saw him. Jake.

  The rattling closets. The ghosts, sifting my shorn hair through their silvery ringless fingers. The pale orbs of Mémé’s eyes behind her mask.

  I shuffled forward, cleared my throat. “Hey. Do you want to come over to my house?”

  Jake raised his eyebrows, then turned to look at his friends, two boys bigger than he was. They shuffled their feet, fiddled with their backpacks. One of them, Rob, widened his eyes at Jake.

  “Sure, Sally,” Jake said. “I’ll come over to your house.”

  * * *

  As Jake followed me along the highway shoulder, itchy goldenrod scraping against our shins, my imagination leapt in fanciful flourishes and bounds. Maybe Jake liked me. Maybe, in another world where I wasn’t Sally Ouellette, he would become my boyfriend and I’d finally have someone to go to the ice cream shop with after school, someone to sit with at pep rallies—because I would have to start liking pep rallies—someone to take me under his wing and bring me into the world, the world where girls don’t have to trick their classmates and fellow townsfolk into stepping into the arms of hungry ghosts.

  But no. That would never happen, because if everything went according to plan, to Mémé’s plan, he would never return to the town again.

  Jake, who was one inch shorter than me but wiry, leapt over the stone wall dividing the road’s shoulder with the sere fields leading off to the forest. “Sally, you finish that paper on Coleridge yet?”

  “Today in study hall.”

  “Course you did.” Jake shoved his hands in his pockets and hissed out a whistle. “I still have to finish it up.”

  “It made me...it made me want to see the ocean. Writing about Coleridge, that is.”

  “You’ve never seen the ocean?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s only two hours from here. We go on weekends in the summer, all the time.”

  “That sounds great.” I shivered. The forest smelled like coming winter. Our house loomed ahead at the end of a dirt driveway, a rambling Victorian-era farmhouse with paint so flaking, you couldn’t even tell its original color.

  “This is it.”

  “Wow. The Ouellette house.”

  “Where the magic happens.”

  “You say the funniest things. You remind me of a Coleridge poem sometimes, you know.” As I unlocked the heavy wooden front door, Jake’s hand brushed against the small of my back.

  Why, why do I have to do this?

  Inside, I picked my way through the shadows of the front hall. In the kitchen, I seized the teakettle, filled it with water, and placed it onto the burner too hard. The sound reverberated around the kitchen. Jake was craning his neck, looking around, and I squirmed as I imagined what he would think of the embroidered pictures on the walls, the ancient floral china cups, the chipped plates, and the linoleum floor the color of a hundred thousand footprints marching across it over the years. He fingered one of the webby tapestries I had hung on the wall years ago, now heavy with dust and cobwebs. “What’s this?”

  “I made it. I put it there. To keep back...to make it seem lighter. You know. Keep back the darkness and all that.” I laughed as though I were joking.

  “That’s why friends exist, Sally.”

  “Yes, well.”

  “I know what you mean, though.” His eyes caught mine. They were very dark, so dark his pupil and iris looked like the same color in the kitchen’s dim light. “I think everyone feels like that sometimes.”

  “Let’s go down to the basement,” I blurted. “There’s...I want to show you something down there.”

  Better to get it over with. Just get it over with.

  I unlocked the basement door, jiggled the loose doorknob, and led the way down the open-back wooden stairs. The basement: an old workbench covered with tools untouched since my grandfather’s time. A rusty washing machine we never used. A half-finished bathroom, the tub filled with plaster, no toilet. The place smelled of mildew and spaces that have never seen the sun.

  But I could feel, more than see, a silver glow beginning in the darkest recesses in the back of the basement.

  What was I supposed to do now? Just wait for them? I rubbed my hands over my forearms, turned in a circle.

  But Jake’s hand grabbed my wrist and pulled me forward. His other hand fell between my shoulder blades and his eyes closed as he tilted his head towards mine. His mouth was chapped, but his lips were warm. I parted mine, screwed my eyes shut, and pressed myself against him as we kissed, as I allowed myself to fall into him. Jake kissed me, and his hands found my back beneath my turtleneck, and he lifted it up, off my skin, and as the fabric passed over my head I forgot everything, for a second, but him, and his fingers unfastening my bra, his mouth on my neck. As his hands passed over my bare skin, I spun myself a new future: I would seize his hand and we would run from the basement, run from the house, leave Mémé and the hungry ghosts behind, go to the ocean, grow tan, and spend our days alive.

  But then Jake broke the kiss and stepped back, and the glow in the basement grew stronger.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “Let’s go, go—”

  But the glow wasn’t coming from the back of the basement. It was coming from Jake’s hand. He had pulled his phone out of his pocket, and its screen illuminated his face: dark eyes slitted, mouth twisted up in a satisfied smile.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” Jake held up the phone, and the flash leapt through the basement. His thumbs worked feverishly over the screen.

  “Are you texting someone?”

  “No.” Jake laughed again. “No, of course not.”

  “Why did you come here? Did you come here because they—”

  The look that had passed between him and his friends. Rob’s eyes widening.

  Jake looked up from his phone. “Sorry, Sally.”

  Something was swelling inside me, something big and terrible and older than our house, older than our family curse, older than the forests that licked against our bedroom windows.

  “Look over there, Jake,” I whispered, and when he turned around,
he glowed as though he had been lit on fire by silver light.

  Here’s what it looks like when someone’s devoured by ghosts:

  They pour out of the dark at the back of the basement. They seep from between the uninsulated cracks in the walls. They crawl up from the floorboards. So many of them, so many girls, all bleeding together so you can’t tell where one ends and the next begins, their hair tangling together, their nail-bitten fingers scrabbling against paperback books, their gums pulling back over too-long teeth. They hiss and spread through the basement and they dive into the boy in front of you, stick their hands in his pockets, their tongues in his mouth, their feet on his feet as though they are children dancing with him.

  His phone will skitter away. His sneakers will drag against the floor. He’ll be too shocked to scream as they drag him towards the back of the basement, as he falls to his knees and they pull him forward.

  You’ll watch, and you’ll do nothing, and you’ll be glad of it when they haul him away and the silver light fades at the back of the basement.

  * * *

  Mémé found me crouching on the basement floor. She murmured shh, even though I wasn’t crying, and her deft fingers divided my hair into three and began to loop it into a braid.

  “Why, Mémé?” I said, stony. Why did we have to live in this house? Why did we have to feed the ghosts? Why were people—Mémé, Christine, Jake—so immeasurably cruel?

  Why was I glad, with every last part of me, that I’d stood by and let the ghosts drag him off?

  “Don’t you understand now?” Mémé’s fingers were soft but firm in my hair. “Don’t you understand why we do it?” She touched my chin so I had to look at her. She was crouched on the floor behind me, her hair covering her cheekbones and the edges of her eye mask and the front of her body, skinny like a ghost-girl herself. “You can leave, if you want.”

  “I can leave? What do you mean, I can leave? You threatened me—”

  “As long as we stay in this house, we have to feed the ghosts. But I never said you have to stay in this house. You’ll be eighteen next year. You can go to college. You can move far, far away from this place and never come back. I won’t stop you. Is that what you want?”