“We know you too. You go to school with us.”
“Did you ever consider talking to me before this?” They both knew the answer.
“Maybe I should have.” His voice was low. “You spoke to your parents?”
“Yeah.” Vera nodded.
She told him about the conversation, which unfortunately included very little advice about what they should do, other than get “the kids” out of there and wait.
“Well, when do they get back?”
“In a week. Maybe.”
He sighed like that wasn’t fast enough. She agreed.
“What about a priest?” he asked. “Don’t they do exorcisms?” He said the word like it was ludicrous. It was, to most people.
“They said it’s extremely hard to get approval from the church. It’s one of the reasons they have jobs. The church hopes they can debunk most of the claims.”
“But couldn’t a priest come to see what’s going on, maybe start the process?” He slid off his sunglasses, rubbing his eyes. The purple circles under his lashes were so much worse than her own; they were practically bruises, as if he’d been punched by life.
“We’ll do everything we can. But involving the church includes a lot of red tape. It’s our last resort. My parents are still the best option.”
“Yeah, if they were here.” Maxwell grunted.
From behind the oak trees, a gaggle of voices climbed up. Kick it! Get ready! Come on! A whistle screeched.
“I heard my mom’s voice last night begging for my help.” Maxwell’s tone sounded broken, as though he’d relived the moment a lot.
“We’re going to help her. I promise.” Could she promise that?
A burst of clapping rang out from the trees. Go, Jack! Get there! Hustle! The voices overlapped, echoing against the bubbling surface of the water. A music-box jingle from an ice cream truck joined the cacophony, eliciting the Pavlovian response of salivation from anyone under the age of eighteen. Vera’s cheeks puckered as she pictured hands slipping into wallets—Okay, just one. Here’s five dollars. Simple. Normal. Happy.
“You know what I can’t get out of my head? The way my mom looked.” Maxwell’s burned-out gaze turned her way. “It’s weird, but since this all started happening, my mom has never looked better. It makes no sense, because she’s not showering—like, at all—but still, she’s glowing.”
“Well, she’s beautiful,” Vera agreed.
“She is. But last night, when you were there, she looked…”
Grotesque, Vera thought, but she didn’t say it. Neither did he. “How did she look this morning?”
“Like she could walk a red carpet.” He flung up his hands. “Some friend stopped by to see her, and I claimed she was sick, but really she was sleeping. Actually, she was snoring like a bulldog, which she never did before. But even asleep, she looked perfect. It’s like she’s morphing.”
“I know.”
Mr. Gonzalez looked similar with his rotten teeth and swelling pupils. How had she forgotten to tell her mother about him?
A shriek rang out from downstream, and Maxwell’s chest leaned toward the sound, toward his friends. He tugged on his hat as laughter cartwheeled along the water.
“We should have invited you to the creek,” he blurted. “I should have invited you.”
Vera didn’t move, his words rounding out a jagged little piece of her heart. She’d spent her last day of school in solitude under a tree, like she had so many Saturdays and Sundays before. She often avoided going downtown, because it was lonely seeing classmates you’ve known your whole life hanging out in groups who never considered inviting you.
“Thank you for that.” She bit back a surge of emotion.
“It’s true. We’re idiots. All of us. Some worse than others.” His tone turned heavy. “And honestly, the creek’s not so great. There are a lot of days I wish I hadn’t been here. This freakin’ town…” His gaze grew distant, and Vera suspected she knew where his thoughts had pulled him.
The crash. Their classmates.
“Were you there that day?”
Maxwell nodded, eyes on his friends downstream.
It happened on one of the last September days warm enough for a swimsuit, and still the police had no explanation other than “maybe the kids swerved to avoid an animal.” Their parents were suing. In a town used to constant mourning, this loss hit especially hard—five healthy, popular, gorgeous teenagers dead on a beautiful day.
“Everyone was there.” Then Maxwell cringed as if to apologize because, of course, Vera wasn’t. “We weren’t even drinking. When I think of all the times kids should have gotten into crashes and didn’t…”
Vera couldn’t imagine anyone getting into a car with a drunk driver, but she was also an outsider worthy of a Ponyboy nickname, so her experience with peer pressure was rather limited.
“It looked like this.” Maxwell gestured to the teens in the distance. “We were hanging out, having fun, then Rocco started acting like a jerk, which wasn’t like him.” He turned to face her. “He pushed Brooke off the bridge.”
“What?” Her eyes bulged. Vera hadn’t heard that. The bridge at Devil’s Pool was higher than any platform dive. At the wrong angle, hitting the wrong rock, it could kill someone.
“I know, but Brooke had been standing up there a long time. She wanted to jump; she was just chickening out. So Rocco pushed her. It was a dick move, for sure, but we thought he was joking around and took it too far.”
“Now what do you think?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Brooke hit the water hard, and when she came up, she was hysterical. Everyone started fighting. And Rocco, he looked, I mean, he looked like he could have killed someone.” Max shook his head. “He was normally the life of the party.”
Vera didn’t know him, but she was at the memorial. Everyone called Rocco a class clown. They spoke of his humor, his carefree spirit.
“Did you know he lost his dad in the explosion, and his mom lost half her leg?” Maxwell asked.
Vera nodded. She saw Rocco’s mom at the services, collapsed in sobs as she physically leaned on her relatives, burying another loved one.
“That family is so wrecked now.” Maxwell dropped his head back, squinting at the sun beneath the brim of his hat. “I don’t know what happened in that car, but the only thing that makes sense is they were fighting. They must have been fighting while he was driving, and he got distracted.”
In the nine months since the crash, this was the first theory she’d heard that actually made sense.
“Did you tell the cops? Their parents?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t change the fact that no one saw the accident. How can you prove they were fighting? And even if they were, it’s just what happens in this town. People die. All the time.” When he peered at her, his expression, his words, mirrored her own. “It freakin’ sucks here.”
Vera nodded. “It’s like the town is cursed.”
A wind gushed, carrying the tinkling toy sound of the ice cream truck moving on to its next location. Downstream another girl dropped, her body kicking and flailing, her scream wild. Their classmates cheered as she fell.
“Are you going to stay away from us now, like your mom said?”
Vera looked into Maxwell’s eyes, and her response was simple. “No.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Crash
Filling every seat in a cobalt-blue Honda Accord, five teenagers leave the banks of a muddy creek. The gathering is an annual tradition, marking the last swimmable day before the trees put on their colorful show and yank the town toward the winds of winter.
A sixteen-year-old boy sits behind the wheel, the radio blaring to drown out the din of his friends’ shouts. They’re arguing. All of them. He’s been impolite. He caused a scene. They needed to leave
. He ruined their fun.
Their wasted words batter against him.
Meaningless.
His girlfriend grabs his arm, stretching from the passenger seat and jerking his hand from the wheel. He likes how that feels, letting go, losing control. She squawks like the birds overhead. Yap, yap-yap-yap! Yap, yap-yap-yap! He imagines her with a yellow beak. He pictures her tiny, unevolved brain.
He didn’t push her; he released her. He gave her a glimpse of what’s to come.
Soon.
The end is already reaching for a hug.
He rolls down the windows to let it in, hot wind blasting his face. Tangy sea salt hits his tongue as he traces a bird’s path in the air, its wings flapping with enviable chaos. In the back, a girl cries for silence. She reaches between the seats for the radio, and he swats her hand, stinging her wrist.
She is not in control. None of them are. Not even him. He knows this. He knows the truth.
He adjusts the brim of his canary hat, turning it backward as he pumps his shoulders to a thumping rhythm.
The guys in the back join in, howling at the music, the wind.
They feel alive.
For now.
He smiles.
Life is fleeting. Death is forever.
He presses on the pedal, the double yellow line curving, bright in places, covered in tar in others. It blurs. Life blurs.
He feels resistance against his foot, the pedal pressed to its maximum.
The girlfriend shouts. Shriller this time. Slow down. Please. Slow down.
The boys in the back continue hooting, whooping, and cheering. The wind rushes at them, spinning and spiraling. A bird swoops at the windshield.
The car is powerful. It is unstoppable.
So is he. He is following the teachings.
The girlfriend reaches for his arm, pulling, crying. He drops both hands to his lap. Challenge accepted.
He smiles wide as his eyes focus on the item atop the dash. The Angel of Tears.
He thinks of his father. His mother’s leg. Their pain is temporary.
He just needs to ascend.
The girlfriend lies across him, grabbing the wheel, her body spread on his lap. He likes how that feels. She strains, and his foot presses harder. Friends lean from the rear, grasping for the wheel, vying for control. It is pointless. Don’t they see?
They must accept it. They must worship it.
Death is forever.
He laughs, roaring, enjoying his final moments with such fierceness tears prick at his eyes.
He shifts to his girlfriend and smiles with all his teeth as the car fails to bank the turn. He watches her eyes as they leave the road. Isn’t it thrilling?
They veer straight. Together. All of them.
They soar off the rocky New England cliffside.
He laughs all the way down.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Max
Max tossed his clunky key ring onto the mail table, the front door slamming as he caught an odd shift in the air, the twinge that tells you something’s different in your home.
“Chloe?”
She spent last night at her friend Alexis’s house, and she was being dropped off in a half hour. No mother, especially Mrs. Tenn, would leave a seven-year-old in an empty house.
But his house wasn’t empty.
“Mom?” His voice shook.
It had been two days since Vera had been there, a day since they’d walked to the footbridge, and that time had been blissfully uneventful, because his mother slept the entire duration. Thirty-six straight hours. If his mom got up for a drink of water or to use the bathroom, Max hadn’t seen her. Every time he cracked her bedroom door, he spied her sprawled beneath a white sheet, not only breathing, but snoring like a potbellied pig in the mud, deep throaty grunts that ripped through her chapped lips. He wanted to check her for fever, place the back of his hand against her forehead the way she’d done so many times for him, but he was afraid to get too close. It had come to that.
A whisper echoed through the house.
No, whispers. More than one.
“Mom, is someone here?” His gut tightened, the way it does before a punch.
The murmurs continued, a low hum.
He checked his watch. Anyone who would visit his mother, in this state, was not someone he wanted to meet. And Chloe would be home soon.
He’d called his grandparents in New Hampshire this morning. He didn’t tell them what was going on (Hey, Pops, everything’s fine, it’s just Mom’s possessed by this demon….). Still, they heard the concern in his voice. Only, they were a four-hour drive away, and they worked Monday through Friday. They couldn’t pick up Chloe until the weekend.
It was Tuesday.
The voices intensified, their tones deep, almost rhythmic, like chanting. It was coming from his mother’s bedroom.
His breath quickened as he began to pace. There are people in my house, possibly possessed people with my possessed mother, and my sister is coming home any minute. Seriously, what the f—
His foot slammed into the curved leg of the coffee table.
“Goddammit!” he shouted, grabbing his big toe as he hopped.
“Ah, ah, ah.” The voice was crystal clear.
He whipped around, heart bouncing to his tonsils.
“Careful what you say.” It was her, her voice traveling from down the hall, but she might as well have been standing in the room. “He can hear you.”
Max hunched over, gripping his throbbing toe, leg bent in a figure four as the other leg half squatted to balance his weight. The sound of her voice was not only loud, it was three Darth Vaders mixed with a Maleficent.
Max released his toe and stood upright.
“Join us,” a voice said. That wasn’t his mother.
“We are ready.” This one was male.
Horror movies catch a lot of flak for characters stupidly investigating “strange noises,” but really, the reason is simple—in moments of terror, your mind and body stop speaking. Right now, Max’s head shouted RUN! in all CAPS, but his legs moved toward the voices. She was his mother. He had to see.
He robotically marched to the windowless hallway. All the bedroom doors were closed and the lights were off, making the beige walls seem black even in daytime. The clock ticked its swinging pendulum behind him. A car honked from the street, a peppy double beep. Hello, it said.
His pulse hammered beneath his skin, and the voices whispered, “The time is near. You are so blessed.” Yet Max heard, “Come here, little boy, come closer. We won’t hurt you….”
The taste hit him first. His tongue slapped the roof of his mouth—smoke. Not fireplace smoke, not kitchen smoke, not even the stench of burning leaves, but the rank clouds of cigarette smoke from the dark beer-soaked bar downtown.
He’d never seen his parents hold a cigarette. Patrons couldn’t even light up in the parking lot of the restaurant. Besides, there was no shop that sold a pack anywhere within walking distance. He had the car all day. But the smell was distinct.
Max’s shaky hand reached into the pocket of his shorts, and he slid out his phone. Vera was at the top of his text conversations.
He pounded with his thumbs:
Something’s happening. People are here. I need you.
He slipped the phone back into his pocket, trusting she’d come.
He halted in front of his parents’ door and could feel eyes sizzling from the other side. He groped the handle with a clammy hand and took one last breath of conviction.
Then he pushed.
The door swung open.
His mother stood near the closet, a vision in a long white sundress. Kneeling before her were two strangers dressed in black—black jeans, black T-shirts. One had a blond ponytail, and the other a graying blac
k ring of fuzz around a balding brown skull. Their heads were bowed, small votives were lit on the ground around them, and smoke was everywhere.
Clouds plumed from his mother’s nose and puffed from her mouth, thick and white, but there was no cigarette in her hand, no ashtray nearby. The smell. Holy shit, the smell. It was overwhelming. Max coughed, searching for what had to be a burning carton, but he saw nothing.
“Welcome, Maxwell.” The blond ponytail turned his way. She wasn’t much older than he was, with thick dark liner around her eyes and lipstick that was too purple.
“You know my name?”
“Of course,” replied the older man. He had a graying goatee to match his head and the shoulders of an athlete.
“What…what are you doing here?” Max coughed, fist at his mouth.
“They’re here to see me,” Mom replied. The smoke came from inside her, like the cigarettes burned in her gut. “Where’s your friend?”
“She’s…at home.” Max choked, throat on fire.
“Do tell her to stop by,” Mom croaked. “We’d love to see her. I’m feeling so much stronger now.”
For two days, his mom grunted and writhed, tossed and turned. Max welcomed her absence, and Vera sounded relieved. The sleep gave them moments of peace, along with time before her parents got home. Only, now it seemed Mom wasn’t resting at all. It was like she’d undergone a metamorphosis.
She. Was. Smoking.
“Who are you people?” Max gagged, eyes squinting from the gritty air.
“Friends,” the girl replied, rising to her feet. She was maybe five feet tall if Max was being generous, and she looked like someone he could be friends with. Yet she’d just been kneeling for his mother.
“Get out of my house,” he ordered.
“Oh, don’t be rude,” his mother scolded. No, that wasn’t his mother.
“Don’t tell me what to do. This is my house.”
His mom puffed her chest, standing tall with an odd expression, a familiar expression. “Actually, Maxie-boy, it’s my house.”
That was the voice of his father.
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