The Death Catchers

by Jennifer Anne Kogler

  We sat in the waiting room for an hour, without saying much of anything. Mom, Dad, Jodi, and Miss Mora all read their books. I mostly stared off into space.

  A tall, gangly woman with long hair pulled up into a ponytail, wearing green medical scrubs, stood in front of us. She held a clipboard.

  “Are you the family of Mrs. Mortimer?”

  “Yes,” Dad said, getting up. “I’m her son, Phillip,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “I’m the emergency room surgeon on call, Dr. Stuhl,” the woman said, without bothering to shake Dad’s hand. “Your mother has come out of surgery. We repaired her spleen and kidney. She also broke her tibia in two places.”

  “But she’ll be okay?”

  Dr. Stuhl frowned. “It won’t be an easy recovery, considering her age. But, yes, I believe she will be fine in time.”

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Dad said, and I could see the worry drain from his face.

  “What can you tell me about your mother’s history of reckless behavior?”

  “Excuse me?” Dad said.

  “Mrs. Mortimer’s records indicate that this is her third visit here this year. Broken collarbone, sprained wrist, lacerations on her legs.”

  “Her third?” Dad said again.

  “There must be some mistake,” Mom said, standing next to my father and putting her book on the waiting room chair.

  “I only mention it because wandering off in harm’s way can be an early sign of dementia.”

  “Dementia?” Mom asked, with no attempt to hide her distress. Her mouth dropped open and she snatched her glasses off her neck. “Bizzy may be suffering from many things, but I assure you, dementia is not one of them.”

  Dr. Stuhl hardened her look. “Well, I recommend you keep an eye on her, regardless. It’s a wonder she wasn’t more seriously injured.” Dr. Stuhl began to walk away. She turned back toward us. She looked at me, tapping her pen on her clipboard.

  “Oh, and she has asked repeatedly to see someone named Sweet Pea,” Dr. Stuhl said. “Any idea who that might be?”

  “Lizzy,” Mom said, pointing to me.

  Dr. Stuhl waved me toward her. Dad began to walk to Dr. Stuhl with me. “Only the girl,” she snapped. “It was a specific request. So if you’ll follow me, Lizzy Sweet Pea, I’ll take you to her.”

  I popped up from my seat, hopeful both answers and a Bizzy-on-the-mend were waiting for me down the long white hallway.

  The Making of an Epiphany

  Has something ever happened that made you think about everything else in a new light, Mrs. Tweedy? I know in literature it’s called an epiphany—usually this aha moment near the end of a story when the character learns something. It’s kind of like the character puts on colored glasses that make everything look completely altered. In books it usually happens all at once.

  After I heard Vivienne talk about the Last Descendant in the cemetery and then saw my first death-specter, there’s no doubt that I had the different-colored-glasses feeling. But things changed gradually. It was more like a leaky faucet filling up a salad bowl one drip at a time.

  The first shift was my perspective on my grandma Bizzy.

  When I saw her after her surgery, she looked older. Frail, even. Her arms seemed skinnier and there were tubes coming out of them. One of her legs was in a cast and the other was wrapped in a thin hospital blanket. Her hands were splotchy, black and blue. The worst thing was how pale she was.

  But there was this other part of her, something in her face that was transformed. It was like the Emily Dickinson poem Bizzy had quoted. Underneath the wrinkles and bandages, there stirred something else entirely. Maybe it was the defiance that comes with keeping a big secret. Perhaps it was a time-tested toughness shining through. Or it could have been subtle resilience that I’d never noticed before.

  She heard me come in. Her eyes snapped open.

  “Sweet Pea!” Bizzy exclaimed, sucking in air. “If you aren’t a sight for sore eyes!” Her raspy voice sounded as if she’d been yelling all morning.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked, venturing gingerly into the room.

  “Don’t be a dang fool! Come on over here and give your grandmamma a Yankee dime.” That was Bizzy’s way of asking for a kiss. As she raised her arm to beckon me to her, she winced in pain. She tried to cover it up by smiling widely at me.

  “How are they treating you?”

  “Here’s a pearl a’ wisdom for ya: only thing that’s a bigger threat to life than death is a hospital.”

  I grimaced.

  “I don’t wanna see that forlorn look, Lizzy. ’Fraid my ol’ body won’t heal up as quick as it used to, but I’ll be fine. Ya hear me?”

  Bizzy patted the side of the bed, signaling me to climb on the bed with her. I sat down gently.

  She put her cold hand over mine and tried to raise herself up.

  “We’re gonna hafta be quick, Sweet Pea,” Bizzy said, breathing more heavily. She looked around the room nervously. “Close the door.”

  I followed her command and then returned to my place beside her on the bed. Bizzy grabbed the sippy cup from the tray across her bed, took a swallow from its fluorescent plastic straw, then cleared her throat.

  “Seen any more death-specters?”

  “No,” I said, shuddering at the thought of another one. Bizzy studied me. I could hear the clock on the wall ticking the seconds away.

  “Was it because of me that Jodi almost got hit by the car?” I asked finally. “She wouldn’t have been in the street if I hadn’t called out her name.”

  “You were goin’ to warn her about your specter, weren’t ya?” Bizzy asked sympathetically.

  “I wanted to watch her and make sure she didn’t cross the street without looking,” I explained. “I wasn’t going to tell her anything specific.”

  “I shudda explained it better. The thing with a specter …,” Bizzy said, struggling to find the right words. “The thing with a death-specter is that tellin’ the subject of the specter about what’ll happen or tryin’ to hint they should change somethin’ that might kill ’em has the opposite effect you want it to. Try an’ tell a person to avoid a place she’s s’posed to meet her death and that’s exactly where she’ll end up.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Fate,” Bizzy said, “adjusts quicker ’n a hungry dog can lick a dish.”

  “So why do we see death-specters if we can’t do anything about them?”

  “There’s always somethin’ to be done! Think of a death-specter like it’s a garden weed. You cut what’s above the surface, and it’ll grow back in no time, bigger ’n ever. So you gotta get at the root to make sure it’s gone for good. When we’ve got time on our side, the best we can do is figure out the root of why the person ends up in harm’s way and fix that.” Bizzy took a breath and continued. “I certainly don’t have all the answers, Lizzy-Loo. But as far as I can tell, we only see unjust deaths. Deaths that are unnatural. If we figure out the why, we can do something about ’em.”

  It sort of made sense, but the heavy responsibility of it all was overwhelming.

  “When will it happen again?” I asked.

  “Depends on the person,” Bizzy said, shrugging her shoulders.

  “How often do you see them?”

  “When you get to a certain age, you stop havin’ ’em as frequently.”

  “How did you know that it was going to be my first today?”

  “The first is always on a girl’s fourteenth Halloween—the day the world of spirits connects with the world of mortals,” Bizzy said matter-of-factly.

  “So, I’ll definitely see more?” I asked, my anxiety growing. “There will be more names on my hand?” Bizzy looked at me and her eyes shifted back and forth in their sockets. I had never seen her so uncertain.

  “There will be more, yes,” she said with her head down.

  “It can be anyone?”

  “I only see the names of those I care about,” Bizzy said.

 
“That little girl from the accident … in the black dress. Who was she?” I thought of the tiny girl with the white hair. Her unearthly scream had given me chills down my spine.

  “That weren’t no girl at all. That was a screamin’ banshee.”

  “A screaming what?” I couldn’t stomach the thought that there was more to this new life I had to try to understand. It was too much.

  “Banshees … are creatures from beyond sent to usher souls from this world to the next,” Bizzy said.

  “So the girl was a spirit? Like the grim reaper or something? Because she sure didn’t look like a grim reaper.”

  Bizzy closed her eyes, sighing. “The thing about banshees is,” she began, “they’re escorts who come to usher a newly dead soul from this world. Whenever we save someone who was previously scheduled to pass on, a banshee arrives, like usual. Only, because we’ve saved the life, there is no soul to collect. A banshee is like a petulant child in that way. If it don’t get what it was sent after—the soul of the recently departed person—it throws a tantrum. Turns into a fiend. When this happens, banshees let off that piercing scream. But it’s not just painful for us, Sweet Pea, it’s more than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For Hands a’ Fate like you and me, a banshee’s scream is deadly,” Bizzy said quietly. I let Bizzy’s sentence sink in for a few seconds.

  “Deadly?” I questioned, shocked by the realization I had another thing to be afraid of. “But it’s a small child … how is that even possible?”

  “Banshees may look like small children to you or me, Lizzy, but I assure you, they ain’t of this world and they are very dangerous.”

  “How do you know that the scream is deadly?”

  Bizzy looked down for a moment. “Your great-grandmamma, my mama … she … well, she was killed by the howl of a banshee.”

  “What?” I said, baffled. Life as a Hand of Fate was sounding even more dismaying.

  “Saw it with my own two eyes when I was a little older than you. Your father will tell you his grandmamma died of a heart attack. That’s what the doctors said. But that weren’t it.”

  “Why didn’t you and I die when the banshee started screaming?”

  “Takes ’bout a minute. You destroyed it before then,” Bizzy said matter-of-factly.

  “I did?”

  “With the mirra. See, banshees are like ghosts and have no soul themselves, and a mirra reflects a person’s soul. If you force a banshee to look at itself in one, it’ll be reduced to nothin’ more than its most basic element—for the banshees, that’s the sands a’ time.” Bizzy looked at me with concern. “I’m not tellin’ you this to scare you, Sweet Pea, but so you’ll know to be on the lookout if a situation like that ever arises again. Do ya understand?”

  I understood all right: Avoid Banshees at all costs. Still, it seemed like all this was more than a “situation.” It was my life from now on. I thought about which question to ask next.

  “Bizzy, what does it mean when you cut a person’s thread of life?”

  All at once, Bizzy’s face changed. Her eyes narrowed. “Where did you hear ’bout that?” she asked, her voice cold.

  I sensed I had hit on something. I pressed on. “Is Agatha a Hand of Fate, too? Is she the sorceress that gave us this power? Is that why you visit her?”

  “Not exactly,” Bizzy said. I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.

  “There has to be more to all of this than we just have this gift and that’s that, right? Do you know her sister, Vivienne? Is she who we got this from?”

  Bizzy gasped. She gripped the side rails of her hospital bed. “How did you come by that name, Sweet Pea?”

  “Two days ago a woman named Vivienne was visiting Agatha at the cemetery,” I said, alarmed at Bizzy’s reaction. “Jodi and I overheard them talking about the Last Descendant and Doomsday and then Vivienne came outside and touched our heads. Jodi didn’t remember any of it. But I did.”

  “Though she may be able to control your body, because you are a Hand a’ Fate, Vivienne le Mort’s powers will never work on your mind.” There was something in Bizzy’s voice I’d never heard before. It was dread.

  “So you know who Vivienne is? You lied to me about why you’ve been visiting Agatha, didn’t you?”

  Bizzy deliberated for a few moments. She looked down at her hospital gown.

  “Yes, I lied, Sweet Pea,” Bizzy said, her voice spiced with regret. The machines behind her continued beeping monotonously. “And I swear I won’t ever lie again. I’ll tell you everythin’ I know.” She looked at me with her brimming, moss-colored eyes. “But if you did see Vivienne le Mort here in Crabapple, then we’re all in mortal danger. So I need you to think real hard on it and tell me precisely what happened that day in the cemetery.”

  Fragments

  If I had to guess your number-one grammar pet peeve, Mrs. Tweedy, I would say it’s sentence fragments. You really dislike it when a sentence lacks a subject, verb, or both. Maybe there’s a bright side, though. At least in an English paper, you can go back and edit a fragment to express a complete thought. In life, when a thought is interrupted, there’s often not much that can be done to correct it.

  I was almost finished explaining what I’d seen in the cemetery, about to launch into a flurry of questions for Bizzy, when the door to the hospital room swung wide open. Mom came in, holding a bouquet of lilies—Bizzy’s favorite flower. Dad trailed behind, fiddling with his newsboy hat in his hands.

  “We came to check on how you girls were doing,” Mom said, sweeping into the room, placing the flowers in a vase by the window.

  “Rita, you shouldn’t have,” Bizzy said. Darn right, Mom shouldn’t have. I was right at a crucial point in my conversation with Bizzy. I wanted them to leave immediately.

  “It was no trouble at all,” Mom said, adjusting Bizzy’s movable tray and cleaning it with a sanitary wipe.

  “They hire people to do that for me,” Bizzy said, frowning at Mom’s efforts. “How long am I in for, Phillip?” Bizzy asked.

  “They want to keep you overnight.”

  “For cryin’ out loud!”

  “Have you read How Green Was My Valley?” Mom asked, taking a thick paperback out of her bag and putting it on Bizzy’s tray. “You’re going to need some entertainment while you’re here, I know, and it’s such an easy book to get lost in … I thought it also might appeal to your Welsh roots.”

  Bizzy shoved the book off the tray. It hit the floor with a thud. She folded her arms defiantly over her chest. “Rita, I don’t want to read, you hear me? I want to talk to my granddaughter. Alone.”

  Every eye in the room shifted to me. Mom bent over and picked How Green Was My Valley off the floor. She gently placed it back on Bizzy’s tray, her face shadowed with defeat.

  There was a knock at the door. A nurse entered the room.

  “I’m afraid that Dr. Stuhl has instructed me to clear the room of visitors. The patient needs her rest.”

  “I’m no chi-ull!” Bizzy exclaimed.

  “It’s okay, Mother,” Dad said, grabbing her wrist tenderly. “We should be going, anyway. We’ll be back later to check on you.” He leaned in and kissed Bizzy on the forehead. “Lizzy, too,” he added, smiling nervously. “After school.”

  “A few shackles and bars and this place’d be forced to call itself a prison!” With that, Bizzy closed her eyes. Dad, Mom, and the nurse filed out of the room.

  Soon, I was the only one left with Bizzy.

  “No need to fret, Sweet Pea,” Bizzy whispered across the room. “Remember what I wrote in my note.”

  “Okay,” I said, unsure of what I was supposed to remember.

  Dad poked his head in. “Ready to go?”

  “Yeah,” I said, garnering a wink from Bizzy as I left the room.

  Though Mom wanted me to go to school, I’d had no trouble convincing Dad I was sick. When he dropped me off at home, he said Mom would swing by to check on me during her free p
eriod. Despite Bizzy’s assurances that there was nothing to worry about, I wasn’t convinced. I was convinced, however, that the key to it all was Vivienne le Mort. In my judgment, there was only one person who could tell me exactly who she was: Agatha Cantare. I did the math. I had an hour until Mom would arrive at the house—plenty of time to get to the cemetery and back.

  When Drake’s black Ford truck pulled up next to me as I made my way to Cemetery Hill, I viewed it as an unwelcome interruption of my quest for information. Of course, back then, I had no way of knowing Drake Westfall was essential to every answer I was seeking.

  Drake got his license when he turned sixteen a few weeks before. Since then, I’d seen his shiny black pickup all over town. I stopped jogging as Drake rolled down his window.

  “Hey,” he said, looking concerned. “Everything okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “What about your grandmother? Did everything go all right?”

  I felt my cheeks redden. Of course he meant my grandmother. “Bizzy’s out of surgery and doing well,” I explained.

  “Good to hear,” Drake said. His concern was off-putting. Even in the cloudy morning, his eyes gleamed. I tried not to look at them.

  “Do you volunteer every morning at the hospital?” I asked, looking down at the door of his truck. I wasn’t any good at chitchat.

  “Someone needed to switch with me today. I’m normally there at night, three times a week.”

  “Oh.” I wondered how he managed to squeeze volunteering shifts into his schedule. Between captaining the water polo team and working his way into the heart of every girl at Crabapple High School, Drake Westfall was a very busy guy.

  “Do you want a ride to school?” Drake leaned over and used his long, muscular arm to unlock the passenger door.

  “It’s illegal for you to give anyone under twenty a ride during your first twelve months with a license.” I sounded like such a goody-goody referencing the California Vehicle Code, I had the urge to cover my own mouth so I couldn’t say anything else. I was glad Jodi wasn’t around to give me a hard time.