Copyright © 2014 by Hillary Monahan
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Cover design by Tanya Ross-Hughes
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ISBN 978-1-4231-8751-6
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
September 2, 1863
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
April 9, 1864
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
October 27, 1864
Acknowledgments
About the Author
This one’s for the horror guy. Enjoy, David.
September 2, 1863
Dearest Constance,
I regret to inform you that you are an abysmal sister. You snatched the only handsome Boston lawyer to ever grace Solomon’s Folly, thus relegating me to a life of wedded torment with a sheep farmer or some other dullard. I will forgive this grievous insult, but please remember my graciousness come the holidays.
I wonder how long it will be before Mother suggests you take me to the city so I may seek my own gentleman. Am I terrible to confess that I would enjoy the sights more than romance? She may have married at seventeen, but I do not feel so compelled. It is likely my impatience speaking. An endless parade of soft words, flowers, and idiocy sounds quite grating.
Upon reconsideration, the flowers would be nice. I would be content so long as my ardent gentleman gifted me with flowers and had the good sense to leave immediately afterward.
You asked about my wellness, and though I do not like to complain, I must indulge this one time. Your departure was the first in a series of disappointments. Last month, our beloved Pastor Renault moved to a congregation in the Berkshires. I wish him the best, but miss him already. He had such a kind, loving manner.
The new pastor is as pleasant to me as Cain is to Abel. I’m convinced Philip Starkcrowe was sent to test my faith. He is tall and bird-boned with pitch-colored hair and eyes like night. He is young for his station, too—perhaps a few years beyond twenty. It is strange to see him donning the robes. He looks as though he wears the clothes of a man much larger than himself. He is a boy tromping about in his father’s boots.
His voice is good, and his sermons are certainly impassioned, but there is darkness to his words. Where Pastor Renault spoke of God’s love, Pastor Starkcrowe talks of God as an angry shepherd. We are sinful sheep bound for everlasting torment. I’m surprised he doesn’t make us sing our psalms with mournful baa’s in lieu of honorifics.
There’s also the matter of his hypocrisy. You once jested that Mother is a princess torn from a storybook, but the pastor looks upon her like he has never seen a fair-haired woman. I may be innocent, but I am not ignorant, and there is an earthiness to his gaze that unsettles me. It unsettles Mother, too, though she’d never say as much. She is far too kind.
I, however, lack such grace. After Sunday’s sermon, the pastor came to thank us for our devotion. While speaking to Mother, he stared too long at her—pardon my crassness, Constance—but he stared too long upon her necklace. It was so bold! I tried to hide my disapproval, but I must have failed because he turned a furious eye upon me. He drew me before the congregation then, and with that loud, fire-and-brimstone voice, proclaimed that “while Mrs. Worth has a pleasing disposition, I cannot say the same for her youngest daughter.”
I may lack your sweetness and Mother’s etiquette, but I never thought myself so monstrous. It was mortifying. Everyone in the church heard him. Elizabeth Hawthorne had the nerve to smile at my embarrassment! You would think being schoolmates for years would garner me some affection, but she will not forgive me for that Thomas Adderly nonsense. It is not as if I welcomed his advances. He has onion breath and warts on his hands, yet Elizabeth still believes that I lured him away from her affections.
The rejection must devastate her Hawthorne pride. They do not breathe the same air as the rest of us commoners, don’t you know.
I loathe the privilege money affords some people. I rest well knowing that you will never struggle, but if you become an inflated harpy like Elizabeth, I will strangle you in your sleep, Constance. On this I swear.
Since the pastor’s histrionics, showing my face around town has become a nuisance. Just yesterday, Mrs. Chamberlain clutched her cross when I was in her presence like I could afflict her with a fiendish curse. I was tempted to hiss at her to see if she would hide beneath her bread counter. Mother would have murdered me, but I daresay it might have been worth it.
I apologize so much of this letter is ill news, my sister. Mother does say I spit vitriol when I am riled. Perhaps next time I will be a more uplifting correspondent. For that matter, perhaps I’ll find a suitable sheep farmer in the meanwhile and will write of my impending nuptials!
I love you and miss you,
Mary
“Bloody Mary.
“Bloody Mary.
“BLOODY MARY.”
Jess’s voice echoed like we were in a cave. Darkness has a way of making everything seem bigger and more claustrophobic at the same time. Four bodies crammed inside Anna Sasaki’s basement bathroom meant we were each nudged up against something cold and hard. Jess got the vanity, I got the toilet, Kitty was at the tub, and Anna had the linen closet door.
“Bloody Mary.
“Bloody Mary.
“BLOODY MARY.”
The lights were off in the windowless room. According to Jess, Bloody Mary had to be summoned by the light of a single candle. Ours flickered on the edge of the sink below the mirror. Though no one moved, and I barely breathed, the flame danced a jig on its wick as if held by invisible hands.
The whole thing felt eerie, despite my logical reasoning that the summoning was ridiculous. I’d played Bloody Mary at slumber parties with these same girls when we were twelve. Trying again in high school seemed a waste of time—but there was a strange exhilaration to it, too. The lure of the unknown. It was a good scare, the kind you got walking through a haunted house. The anticipation was far worse than the reality.
I bit my lip and stared at the mirror. Jess claimed there was a right way and a wrong way to summon Bloody Mary. This time we were doing it the right way. Positioning mattered. Salt mattered, too, because it purified against evil. Water mattered. Hand-holding mattered. Even the number of girls mattered. Before, the idea was to scream Mary’s name in the dark and scare yourself pretending to see a ghost. This was more deliberate. More believable. This time, it felt like we knew what we were doing.
The mirror stayed vacant for at least thirty seconds. I didn’t need to look at the shadowed faces beside me to kno
w they were staring as intently as I was. It was so quiet. Seconds ticked by. The longer we waited for something to appear in the mirror, the less convinced I became it would. The thrill of calling Bloody Mary dwindled. There’d been goose bumps on the backs of my arms when Jess first said the name, but now they were gone. A sinking feeling of disappointment rippled around our summoning circle.
I was about to ask Are we done yet? when I saw a flash in the mirror. I blinked, sure that it must have been one of our reflections. Then it happened again. A light streaked behind the mirror—a star across a night sky. Kitty’s hand flexed inside of mine. She’d seen it, too.
The mirror filled with fog, like condensation after a hot, steamy shower. But the fog was on the other side. The wrong side. Droplets of water streamed down the glass, cutting black rivulets through the gray.
Kitty twitched again and I clamped my fingers down on hers so she couldn’t jerk away. Jess had warned us about breaking the circle. We had to hold position or we’d be putting ourselves in danger. Bloody Mary hadn’t gotten her name because she liked hanging out with teenage girls. To keep her at arm’s length, we needed protective wards. The first and most important ward was the handhold.
Behind the mirror, the fog changed from a thick paste to a swirling mass of charcoal smoke. My goose bumps returned and my heart beat so hard, I thought it would pound through my lungs and splatter on the floor.
This couldn’t be happening. I tried to think of ways Jess could have manipulated the glass, but I’d checked the mirror before we started. The frame was solid bronze, the mirror far too heavy for a single person to lift. There wasn’t space for a movie projector in the room, and Jess didn’t have the tech skills anyway.
No, this was legitimate ghost activity, and there I stood, witnessing it with my three best friends. Anna murmuring under her breath. Kitty wheezing louder and louder. Jess saying, “Come on—come on,” over and over again.
“Look, Shauna. Look,” Jess said. I looked. A black silhouette emerged through the fog, walking toward us down a tunnel that ought not exist. No, not walking—shuddering. There was no fluidity to the movements. It was one jolting, shambling step into the next, like a zombie movie monster.
Blood rushed to my face. My toes curled inside my sneakers. Bloody Mary was real and she was walking toward the glass! I didn’t know what to do; I wanted to run away, but I desperately wanted to stay, too. It was horrifying and exhilarating, like that first big whoosh on an upside-down roller coaster.
Then she rushed us. An unnaturally fast blur of madness barreled our way from inside the glass. Her hand struck the mirror on the other side, though there was no sound to punctuate the strike. I yelped, the desire to crouch and hide warring with my mind’s insistence to absorb every last detail.
Most of Mary was masked by the fog, but her hand was as clear as my own. Her fingers were long and twiglike, with twisted, swollen joints. A sheaf of gray, shriveled skin hugged each appendage, peeling away from the tips. A deep gouge bisected her palm from pinkie to thumb, revealing her rotten, ragged flesh. Tarry blood seeped from Mary’s wound, smearing the glass in streaks of blackish maroon.
Gross.
And it got grosser when Mary curled her fingers over to rake them down the glass, her nails in a state of decay. Some were broken off at the nail bed, others had snapped into sharp, serrated razor tips. I expected to hear a shrill squeal from the mirror, but there was nothing. My mind filled in the audio track with nails on a chalkboard, the imagined sound sending another ripple of fear through my body.
I was so consumed by terror and fascination that I had forgotten about Jess, Kitty, and Anna. I should have been more careful. When Mary lifted her second hand to the mirror, this one just as desiccated as the first, Kitty jolted next to me like she’d been struck by lightning. She tried to wrench away, forcing me from my stupor. My fingers dug into Kitty’s sweaty palm to keep her steady, but I felt her pulling. She’d become a hundred-and-seventy-pound eel at my side, and there was only so long I could keep control of someone so slippery.
“Kitty, stop,” I whispered.
“No. Nooooo,” she groaned, another violent twist nearly pulling my arm from the socket. I doubt her resistance was conscious on her part. Kitty knew the dangers of breaking the handhold as well as the rest of us, but she was panicking. I clutched her wrist to anchor her to the group.
“Jess,” I hissed. “Do something.”
“What? Oh…” Jess said, seeing Kitty struggling beside me in the dark, Anna manhandling her on one side, me on the other. Before Kitty could escape the circle, Jess’s voice rang out strong and clear through the bathroom.
“I believe in you, Mary Worth!”
The hands and blood vanished immediately. The fog dissipated, as though a gust of wind had swept it away. We were left in a dark bathroom with an empty mirror and a flickering candle.
We never saw Mary’s face.
It started with the letter.
Jess had gone to Solomon’s Folly during April school vacation to stay at her grandparents’ lake house. Solomon’s Folly—or the Folly—is a sleepy old town without much going for it beyond its strategic access to other, more interesting places. Go south on the highway and you’re on Cape Cod. Go north and you’re in Boston. Farms, trees, and a lot of creepy graveyards constitute most of the town. Our hometown of Bridgewater isn’t much more exciting, but at least fast food and a movie theater exist here.
I’d spent half the summer at the lake house last year, canoeing and grilling and getting bitten by mosquitoes with Jess, my best friend since before I could remember. We met in kindergarten and have been friends ever since. Even when she’d graduated from “the girl I was in Girl Scouts with” to “blond, blue-eyed beauty queen,” we’d stuck together. I’m good-looking enough with my red hair and dark brown eyes, but Jess is a stunner. The all-American-girl-next-door flavor of stunner. The rest of us pale in comparison.
I declined the invitation to the Folly that April so I could perfect the art of laziness at home. I was working my butt off to make honor roll, and with four advanced placement classes, it wasn’t easy. Junior year is college transcript year, and if I wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t the University of Loser, I needed good grades for scholarship money. April vacation was the last chance I had to relax before finals came crashing down.
Jess had been positively industrious by comparison. Sometime during her vacation, she’d rediscovered the Bloody Mary legend. The letter from Mary Worth to her sister, Constance, was her sales pitch. The photocopy of the original was her way to get us on board with the summoning.
“There’s a rumor that Mary Worth is Bloody Mary,” Jess said, dropping a pile of papers into my lap as I devoured pizza in Kitty Almeida’s downstairs media room. We were gathered around a glass-top coffee table, me on the center cushion of the couch, Kitty seated to my left, and Anna perched on the floor by Kitty’s knees. Jess hovered behind us, looming over my shoulder like an oversize parrot.
“You mean that stupid game we played a million years ago?” Anna asked between bites of pizza. She had tomato sauce on her face. I threw a napkin at her so she could clean up. “Thanks,” she murmured, wiping her chin, then tying back her hair. Anna’s dad is Japanese, her mom is Irish. From Mom, she’d inherited a stocky build and freckles. From Dad, she’d gotten pretty brown eyes that she hid behind a pair of gold-framed glasses and perfect black hair that felt like water and hung to her waist.
“Yeah, the one where you nearly puked because I slapped the bathroom door when you were inside? Remember?” Jess asked with a snicker. It took me a minute to pluck that memory from the banks. It had been a slumber party at the McAllister house to celebrate Jess’s twelfth birthday. Someone got the brilliant idea to play Bloody Mary. Every one of the ten girls there went into the bathroom individually, shut out the lights, and called for Mary. And every one of us insisted we saw something creepy in the mirror—except we hadn’t.
Poor Anna was the last to go
. By then, Jess had grown bored of the game and decided to up the ante by grabbing the doorknob and shaking it to make Anna think the ghost was there. Anna hadn’t puked, but she had cried, and we’d all had to tell Jess what a jerk she was at her own birthday party. She’d always had a talent for being the biggest ass in the room. I loved her, but that love came with a great responsibility, like whacking Jess whenever she got out of line.
“Yes, that one. And thank you for reminding me!” Anna said. “This conversation is now a total waste of your time.”
“Wait. No, hold on. Read the letter.” Jess reached down to grab the papers from my lap, waving them under my chin. My choice was either to accept them or suffer the torment of a thousand paper cuts. The script on the pages was small but legible despite the cursive flourishes. Someone had taken great care to make it as neat as possible, and glancing at the signature on the last page, it was evident that someone was Mary Worth. Little black ink spots dappled the corners of the paper, and there were shadowy rings in places that indicated the original letter had some water damage.
When Kitty swooped in to read over my shoulder, the motion a little too “starving seagull on popcorn” for my taste, I shooed her away and read it aloud. The language was stiff, but the September 1863 date explained the tone. This was Civil War–era stuff, all “Four score and seven years ago,” and somewhere, my U.S. history teacher totally appreciated that I’d immediately linked the year to the Gettysburg Address.
“Whoa, this is over a hundred and fifty years old? Where’d you get it?” Kitty asked.
“Solomon’s Folly,” Jess said. “The town claims to be the source of a lot of urban legends. At least, that’s what my grandfather says. He’s a little weird, but sometimes he says cool stuff.”
Jess was failing to mention that they suspected Grandpa Gus was in the early stages of dementia, but I wouldn’t bring that up in front of the other girls. Jess loved her grandfather, even if he sometimes forgot his pants and wore a kitchen colander as a helmet for fun.
Mary (Bloody Mary) Page 1
