Mary (Bloody Mary)

by Hillary Monahan

  “Okay.” Kitty rooted around in her backpack, looking for her phone to entertain herself while I climbed from the car. The front stairs were perilous-looking, and I leapt my way to the top step, neatly avoiding the broken boards. My fist pounded on the dilapidated screen door. There was shuffling from inside the house. A chain lock slid open. A single green eye in a sliver of pale face peeked out through the crack. I couldn’t see anything beyond the hint of a woman, although I could hear the loud, static humming of a television.

  “You’re the haunted girl?” she asked, her voice just as crusty and grizzled as yesterday’s phone call.

  “Yes. I’m Shauna O’Brien.”

  She slammed the door shut. Confused, I knocked again, but there was no response save for a soft thudding and a muffled curse. I waited a minute, two minutes, three minutes, but nothing. Another knock and still she ignored me.

  “Cordelia? Hello?” I called. Angry and scared, I headed back down the stairs, avoiding the rusted nails and deceptive bows in the wood. Halfway down the steps, the front door swung open behind me. I turned back to look. Standing in an ankle-length skirt covered in hand-sewn patches and a threadbare Gatorade T-shirt, her hair cut ragged around her ears, was Cordelia Jackson.

  She was older than I expected, maybe midthirties, although her brown hair was shot through with steely gray. Her skin was pale. Pink, slicked-over scars slashed almost every piece of visible flesh. Her arms looked like they’d been forced through a paper shredder. Her face looked like she’d been mauled by a raccoon, and worst of all, she had a patch over her left eye. Three of the fingers on her left hand were missing, and two of her toes were gone, too. Either she’d fought in a war…or Mary happened. I didn’t want to believe it was the latter; I didn’t want this to be me.

  “I had to go check, to see.” Cordelia’s voice cracked, her eye dewing and her lips trembling. She looked away from me for a moment before a small, tight smile played around her mouth. “I checked the glass and she wasn’t there. For the first time in seventeen years, she’s not staring back at me. My God. I’m free. I’m finally free.”

  I sat on a spindly wooden chair in the corner of Cordelia’s living room. The chair legs were off-balance and wobbled whenever I shifted my weight. Fifteen feet. That was the distance Cordelia insisted be between us at all times. It was the only way she’d allow me inside her home.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m not going to lose her only to get her back because I let you in.”

  I didn’t take it personally. I was too busy taking in the condition of the house. Three steps past the door and I was besieged by a rank, coppery odor. I gagged. With the windows and doors closed, it was stuffy inside, and that made the aroma meaty and thick, like breathing slaughterhouse air. The humming I’d mistaken for a TV was actually the buzzing of flies. Everywhere. Clouds of them crawled over the black paper covering the windowpanes as if they were trying to escape. A dozen swarmed up when I sat down, and I had to keep swatting them away as they darted in front of my face. There were flypapers strung like streamers from the ceiling—curled, yellowing strips covered in shriveled black dots.

  “It’s the blood,” Cordelia said, seeing me watch the flies. “I paint the windows with pigs’ blood. No matter how many fly strips go up, they keep coming back. You’ll get used to the smell.”

  “What? Why would you…Why pigs’ blood?” I asked, my stomach churning, threatening to revolt on me.

  Cordelia sank into an ancient upholstered chair across the room, next to an industrial-size sack of salt. Her fingers toyed with the burlap’s fringe. She twitched then, a nervous tic in her cheek that she tried to hide behind her maimed hand. “Because it’s effective.” Cordelia leaned forward, staring at me intently with her one eye, her mouth pursed into a grimace. It put one of her worst scars into clear focus. The laceration bisected her thin top lip and traveled up along her cheek to curve into her nostril. “She gets better the longer she hunts you. Every scratch is a way to familiarize herself with your scent. The only thing that throws her off is to inundate her with another kind of blood. Pigs’ blood is pungent. Works for inside the house. It’s not like you can smear yourself in animal blood and go walking down the street, if you know what I mean. Bad enough the local butcher thinks I live off of blood sausage with all I have delivered.” She cackled, a dry, reedy sound that reminded me of Mary’s laugh.

  “So, wait, I’m stuck with her?” I asked.

  “That depends. What happened?”

  I told her everything. Cordelia listened with her head tilted to the side, her eye at half-mast. Her fingers twisted in her hair before she grabbed single strands and plucked them out only to drop them on the floor beside her chair. “That’s how it starts,” she said. “A scratch. And losing her grip on you is why she’s following you now. If you’d gone into the mirror as she intended, I’d still be haunted, but because you didn’t she wants you. It’s an obsession.” She lifted the stub of a finger to point at her eye patch. “She took that as a trophy years ago and has been with me ever since. She hunted me and now you because we lived. The scent of your blood is the way she finds you—through any glass, any mirror, any reflective anything.”

  There was a groan that sounded like a dying animal. It took me a second to realize the sound came from my own mouth. My shoulders slumped and my head fell forward, my hands sliding up to cover my eyes. Bloody Mary was truly haunting me. I was her meal of choice. Not Jess or Kitty or Anna, but me.

  Cordelia stood from her chair, walking through the living room to one of the tall bookcases she had lining the walls. Hardcovers and paperbacks stuffed on every shelf, additional books lying horizontally wherever there was space. “I’m not wrong, am I? She tried to pull you through a mirror and you got away,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, Cordelia,” I managed, though I sounded broken. I felt broken.

  “Cody. No one calls me Cordelia. Well, Becky did, but Becky’s dead now.” She paused, then shook her head, banishing a memory. “Something you need to understand, Shauna. Mary won’t be content taking just you. She wants you alone and vulnerable. She wants to punish you for escaping her.” I watched Cody pull a photo album from the shelf, her thumb skimming over the faded binding. “People like us have to make sacrifices to protect the people we care about. If you love them, leave them. Now. It’s a lesson I learned too late.” Her face softened, the strain of her admission making her mouth flatten into a grimace. She bent down and pushed the album across the carpet toward me. It came to a stop by my feet.

  I scooped it up, my hands shaking. The idea of losing my friends because they’d suffer for the crime of knowing me scared me. I was a leper. A dirty little secret they should thrust away before they got my disease all over them. I wanted to shriek and wail and throw things at the unfairness of it all. But I needed to stay calm. I needed Cody, the only person who could help me.

  I concentrated on the photo album. It was full of pictures of Cody when she was a teenager, most of them with friends or people I assumed were family members. The first few pages were normal enough; Cody’s happy, smiling, unblemished face appeared in stark contrast to how she looked now.

  I turned the page. There was a picture of a different girl with dark hair and a date written on the edge. Beside the date was the word Love.

  “Her name was Jamie. She was my best friend and one of the girls who summoned Bloody Mary with me. A few weeks after Mary marked me, she took Jamie through the mirror in my parents’ living room. I watched it happen. I watched her pull Jamie through. I begged, I pleaded, I even offered to go in Jamie’s place, but Mary wanted my suffering. Struggling was useless—Mary is too strong. She thrust me away and took Jamie.”

  Trembling, Cody paused to run her hand across her brow. Even after all these years, the loss still weighed on her. “I reported it to the police, but no one believed me. I was a goth girl, and Jamie was the only openly gay kid in the school. People thought I was making it up because of how I dr
essed, how I acted. Jamie and I were oddballs. They tried to blame me for her disappearance, but when they ran the DNA from the scratches on my face, they realized they had no case.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Cody let out a harsh bark of laughter. “For that? Oh, please. There’s a lot more to be sorry for. Becky was taken a few months after Jamie. Moira lasted the longest, but it was still less than a year after our summoning. Mary took my cousin John for the sin of coming to visit me a couple years after that. It’s not just the summoning people who are in danger here. It’s everyone around you.”

  If I had known Cody better, I would have told her how sorry I was for what she’d been through. Pity is a funny thing, though; some people want it, others don’t, and Cody had proven prickly enough that I didn’t risk insulting her. I delved deeper into the photo album, spotting more dates along the edges of pictures. I peered at the faces of people I didn’t know, feeling despondent.

  “Damn it,” Cody muttered. I peeked at her over the top of the photo album. She twitched and her hand snaked out to snatch at the air. Her fingers curled over as she brought her fist close to her chest. She whispered under her breath, dark hair sliding down to cover her face.

  “Pardon?” I asked.

  “Fly,” she said. She grinned at me. Her hand lifted and she stretched out her fingers. A smear of dead fly decorated her scarred palm. Cody pointed at the remains like this was some great feat. I didn’t know what to say as she flicked the bug bits away with a raspy giggle.

  She’d seemed so normal for a few minutes. Now I wasn’t so convinced. Mary had done a number on this poor woman.

  “I miss them, you know.” She lifted her skirt to wipe away the last of the bug goo, acting for all intents and purposes like the fly incident had never happened. “Every day I wish I’d gone into exile sooner. But I thought if I could hold on, eventually someone would summon her and get hooked liked I’d been. I knew I’d be free one day. I just didn’t know it would take so many years and cost my friends’ lives. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry it happened to you. I don’t wish Mary on anyone. I warned your friend away, but she didn’t want to listen.”

  Jess never listened, and because of it, I’d gotten haunted. The desire to curse was so overwhelming, my teeth clenched on the sides of my tongue. I wouldn’t lose it here in front of Cody. She had enough to worry about without my throwing a tantrum over my best friend.

  “Sounds like Jess,” I spat. “That’s how she is.” I glanced back down at the album. When the pictures finally stopped, I let out a long sigh. I hadn’t known any of the people shown, but I felt sad for them all the same. Cody, too. She’d had a life, and Mary had put that life on hold. She’d robbed Cody of what should have been her best years. At least it was over for her now.

  For me, it was just beginning.

  “Is there…” I stopped talking to take a deep breath, hearing the warbling in my voice. “Is there a way to put her away for good? A way to beat her? There has to be something I can do.”

  “Probably, but I’m not sure what it is. I’d guess it stems from her background.” Cody pulled one of those manila envelopes with a string tie at the flap from between two thick books. She removed a piece of paper and flung it my way. I immediately recognized it as the picture on the Solomon’s Folly site.

  “I’ve seen this. It’s online. That’s Mary Worth.”

  She nodded. “Moira hit the Solomon’s Folly library right after I got haunted. The original picture has water damage. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Mary’s tied to water. I think it has to do with the flood. That picture was recovered after the Southbridge River flooded back in 1962. The flood destroyed the Southbridge Parish—the church you see there. The town did what it could to salvage the church’s older artifacts, but most of the collection was moved to storage for protection. Moira conned the librarian into letting her take a look. She was always good on her feet like that. Much better than me, anyway.”

  Cody settled into her seat with a notepad she’d pulled from the bookshelf. She opened it, flipped to a page, and then left it on her lap, like she’d long ago memorized what she was about to say. “Moira also uncovered a few local articles. They explained a lot—about why Mary chooses young girls to haunt, anyway.”

  “She’ll only haunt girls? I thought she pulled your cousin John through the mirror,” I said.

  “She did, but she’ll only haunt girls like you or me because she’ll only answer a summons with four girls. Mary’s father died of fever when she was a child. And Hannah Worth drowned in the Southbridge River when Mary was seventeen. Mary insisted it was murder, but she refused to name a suspect.”

  It looked like Cody was going to keep talking, but she jolted out of her seat and spun around, head whipping from side to side. Her hands flew down for the burlap sack of salt. She shook it around her, salt flying all willy-nilly. She mumbled and groaned. “Mary, Mary, Mary,” she said over and over, the salt crystals spraying, some careening across the room to strike my legs.

  I stood from my chair and braced for the ghost. My eyes scoured the room, looking for Mary’s ugly face, but there was nothing shiny nearby. There was nowhere for her to hide. Cody had covered everything with masking tape or black paper.

  “Where is she?” I yelled.

  Cody ignored me, scurrying through the room with her salt pointed at the floor, a thick line trailing behind her.

  “Mary, Mary,” she said again.

  “Where, Cody?!” I barked.

  Cody stopped in her tracks, one foot in the living room, the other now in the kitchen. Her head swiveled toward me. She looked so empty for a moment, so fragile, but then she snorted and glanced away. Color blossomed in her cheeks like she was ashamed of her outburst.

  “I thought I heard—no. No, I didn’t.” She lifted her salt sack to her chest, cradling it like a baby. Her cheek rubbed against the coarse burlap. “Sorry, so sorry. This happens sometimes, after so many years. You hear something or see something and you react, because if you don’t react, you die. It’s that simple.”

  I sank down into my chair, my eyes never leaving her as she returned to her seat. She fell back into the old upholstery, the salt bag pressed to her heart. She never relinquished it, not even when she leaned forward to retrieve the notepad and envelope she’d dropped in her panic.

  She still looked embarrassed. I tried to smile, but it fell flat, and my attention drifted back to the picture in my hand. Hannah Worth. I traced my fingertip over her pale, plaited hair. “She was beautiful,” I said.

  “Yes. Yes, she was. Unfortunately it cost her, and in the long run, Mary, too.” Cody let out a sigh. By the stretching silence, I knew that our meeting was over. I wasn’t going to wait around for her to kick me out, and I didn’t want to give her a reason to hang up on me if I had to call her back.

  “Thanks for everything,” I said, standing and dropping the picture of the Worths onto my seat. “I should go, though. I need to get back for dinner, but you were really helpful.” Cody looked like she’d get up to show me out, but I lifted a hand and shook my head. “No, you stay over there where it’s safe. You’ve had enough of Mary. It’s cool.”

  I started for the door, but then she called my name again. I looked back at her. Clutched in her maimed fingers was a white envelope.

  “Mary dislikes big groups of people,” Cody said. “At first, anyway. The longer she hunts you, the less of a deterrent groups become. She also tends to avoid adults—especially women, especially moms. She was attached to her own mother. You might catch a glimpse of her here and there, but she won’t stay. Never underestimate her. Never.”

  She said nothing else as she tossed the envelope at me. It struck me on the side of my knee. I bent to retrieve it, pulling out a stack of photocopied pages.

  April 9, 1864

  Beloved Constance,

  I am so glad to hear that Boston is treating you well. I wish circumstances would have allowed for a visit before now, but M
other counsels patience. I think she tires of my exuberance. I’ve mentioned the possibility of leaving this horrid little village for good and moving closer to the city, but Mother insists that she prefers the quiet of the country. I think her resolve is faltering, though, especially lately. We tire of the nonsense.

  The town’s histrionics continue. It’s gotten awful enough that Mother begged the pastor to intervene on my behalf, though his cure is possibly worse than the illness with which he afflicted me. After my morning lessons, I report to church and he has me sit in his private quarters copying scripture. I write until my hand aches. When I ask for reprieve, he strikes my knuckles with a switch.

  At first, it was only an hour or two of daily tedium, but now it is four, and I can feel his eyes boring into my back all the while. He never leaves or moves. He simply stares. His attention is disconcerting. I am simply thankful that he looks upon me with loathing and not lust, as he looks upon our dear mother. I’ve deduced he keeps me near as a way of keeping her near. It is unnatural.

  You know my disposition, Constance, and I am not one to silence my tongue under the best of circumstances, but this man’s influence over the town is such that I fear I must abide his ridiculous rules or suffer dire consequence. When I refused to attend his lessons a few weeks ago—if such mindless labors can even be called lessons—Mother had difficulty selling her poultices. Mrs. Grant said “the store didn’t need them.” She’s been buying them every week for ten years! I cannot prove that Pastor Starkcrowe swayed her, but you know how devout Mrs. Grant is. You’d think that store of hers was built by the Lord Himself.

  If my suspicions are correct, the pastor punished Mother for my rebellion, which is a wicked, evil thing to do, especially with how little we claim. Halving our income is devastating. It’s the sole reason I returned to him; we simply could not afford the alternative. Mother says I shouldn’t assume the worst of Pastor Starkcrowe, that I have no proof of his interference, but I do find it strange that the very day I returned to his instruction, Mrs. Grant sent her son to buy Mother’s goods again. It was a Wednesday, which is definitely not their usual Monday delivery. Does that not cross you as odd?