Anna Dressed in Blood

by Kendare Blake

  “You will go to no dance,” Malvina says acidly, rising up from her chair like she’s stalking prey. “You will go nowhere in that disgusting dress.” She advances on her daughter, squinting and swallowing hard, like she might be sick. “You wear white like a bride, but what man will take you after you let schoolboys lift your skirts!” She rears her head back like a viper and spits in Anna’s face. “Your father would be ashamed.”

  Anna doesn’t move. The only thing that betrays any emotion is the rapid rising and falling of her ribs.

  “Papa loved me,” she says softly. “I do not know why you don’t.”

  “Bad girls are as useless as they are stupid,” Malvina says with a wave of her hand. I don’t know what she means. I think her English is faltering. Or maybe she’s just dumb. I think that might be it.

  There’s bile in my throat as I watch and listen. I’ve never heard anyone speak to their kid this way. I want to reach out and shake her until she gets some sense. Or at least until I hear something crack.

  “Go upstairs and take it off,” Malvina orders. “And bring it down to burn.”

  I see Anna’s hand tighten on her bag. Everything she owns is held in a small brown cloth and tied together with string. “No,” she replies calmly. “I’m leaving here.”

  Malvina laughs. It’s a brittle, rattling sound. A dark light comes into her eyes.

  “Elias,” she says. “Take my daughter up to her room. Get her out of this dress.”

  My God, Thomas thinks. In the corner of my eye, I see Carmel put her hand to her mouth. I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to know this. If that man touches her, I’ll break the circle. I don’t care if it’s just a memory. I don’t care if I need to know. I’ll break his neck.

  “No, Mama,” Anna says fearfully, but when Elias moves toward her, she widens her stance. “I will not let him near me.”

  “I will be your father soon, Anna,” Elias says. The words make me sick to my stomach. “You must obey me.” His tongue flickers across his lips eagerly. Behind me I hear my Anna, Anna Dressed in Blood, begin to growl.

  As Elias advances, Anna turns and runs for the door, but he catches her by the arm and twists her around, so close that her hair flies against his face, so close that she must be able to feel the thick heat of his breath. His hands are already searching, clawing at her dress, and I look at Malvina only to see a terrible expression of pleased hatred. Anna is thrashing and screaming through her teeth; she swings her head back and connects with Elias’s nose, not hard enough to make it bleed but hard enough to sting like a mother. She manages to pull herself free and scrambles toward the kitchen and the back door.

  “You will not leave this house!” Malvina shrieks and follows, reaching out for a handful of Anna’s hair and yanking her back. “You will never, never leave this house!”

  “I will!” Anna shouts, pushing her mother away. Malvina falls against a large wooden dresser and stumbles. Anna circles around her, but she doesn’t see Elias, recovering near the foot of the stairs. I want to yell to her to turn around. I want to tell her to run. But it doesn’t matter what I want. All of this already happened.

  “Bitch,” he says loudly. Anna jumps. He’s holding his nose and checking for blood, glaring at her. “We feed you. We clothe you. And this is your gratitude!” He holds his palm out even though there’s nothing on it. Then he slaps her hard across the face and grabs her shoulders, shaking and shaking and screaming at her in Finnish that I don’t understand. Her hair is flying and she’s started to cry. All of this seems exciting to Malvina, whose eyes gleam as she watches.

  Anna hasn’t given up. She fights back and charges forward, slamming Elias into the wall against the staircase. There’s a ceramic pitcher on the dresser beside them. She smashes it against the side of his head, making him roar and let go. Malvina shouts as she runs for the door, and by now there’s so much screaming that I can hardly make out any of it. Elias has tackled Anna and has her by the backs of the legs. She’s fallen onto the floor of the foyer.

  I know that this is it even before Malvina comes out of the kitchen holding the knife. We all know it. I can feel them, Thomas, Carmel, and Will, unable to breathe, wanting more than anything to close their eyes, or to shout and actually be heard. They’ve never seen anything like this. They’ve probably never really even thought about it.

  I look at Anna, facedown on the floor, terrified but not nearly scared enough. I watch this girl, struggling to escape, not just from Elias’s grip, but from everything, from this stifling house, from this life like a weight around her shoulders, dragging her down and planting her in dirt. I watch this girl as her mother bends over her with a kitchen knife and nothing but anger in her eyes. Stupid anger, baseless anger, and then the blade is at her throat, dragging across skin and opening a deep red line. Too deep, I think, too deep. I listen to Anna scream until she can’t anymore.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Behind me I hear a thud, and I turn away from the scene, grateful for the distraction. Inside the circle, Anna is no longer hovering. She’s collapsed onto the floor on her hands and knees. The black tendrils of her hair twitch. Her mouth is open like she might moan, or cry, but there is no sound. Streaky gray tears roll like charcoal-tinted water down pale cheeks. She watched her own throat get cut. She’s watching herself bleed to death, redness soaking down into the house and saturating her white dancing dress. All of these things that she couldn’t remember were just slapped into her face. She’s growing weak.

  I look back at Anna’s death even though I don’t want to. Malvina is stripping the body and barking orders at Elias, who flees into the kitchen and comes back with what looks like a rough blanket. She tells him to cover the body, and he does. I can tell that he can’t believe what’s happened. Then she tells him to go upstairs and find Anna another dress.

  “Another dress? What for?” he asks, but she snaps, “Just go!” and he scampers up the steps so fast that he stumbles.

  Malvina spreads Anna’s dress out on the floor, so covered in red now that it’s difficult to remember that it used to be white. Then she goes to the closet on the opposite side of the room and comes back holding black candles and a small black bag.

  She’s a witch, Thomas mentally hisses at me. The curse. It makes perfect sense. We should have known that the killer was some kind of a witch. But we might never have guessed it was her own mother.

  Keep your eyes sharp, I shoot back at Thomas. I might need your help figuring out what’s going on here.

  I doubt it, he says, and I guess I doubt it too, watching Malvina light the candles and kneel over the dress, her body swaying as she chants in whispers, soft Finnish words. Her voice is tender, like it never was for Anna in life. The candles glow brighter. She lifts first the one on the left, and then the one on the right. Black wax spills across the stained fabric. Then she spits on it, three times. Her chanting is louder, but I don’t understand any of it. I start trying to pick out words to look up later, and that’s when I hear him. Thomas. He’s speaking softly out loud. For a second I don’t know what he’s saying. I actually open my mouth to tell him to shut up, that I’m trying to listen, before I realize he’s repeating her chants in English.

  “Father Hiisi, hear me, I come before you low and humble. Take this blood, take this power. Keep my daughter in this house. Feed her on suffering, blood, and death. Hiisi, Father, demon-god, hear my prayer. Take this blood, take this power.”

  Malvina closes her eyes, holds up the kitchen knife, and passes it through the candle flames. Impossibly, it ignites, and then, in one fierce motion, she stabs the knife through the dress and into the floorboards.

  Elias has come to the top of the stairs, holding a swath of clean, white fabric—Anna’s replacement dress. He watches Malvina in awe and horror. It’s clear that he never knew this about her, and now that he does, he’ll never speak a word against her, out of sheer terror.

  Firelight is shining up from the hole in the floorboards, and Mal
vina slowly moves the knife, stuffing the bloodied dress down into the house as she chants. When the last of the fabric disappears, she pushes the rest of the knife in to follow it and the light flashes. The floorboard is closed. Malvina swallows, and gently blows the candles out, from left to right.

  “Now you’ll never leave my house,” she whispers.

  Our spell is ending. Malvina’s face is fading like a nightmare memory, turning as gray and withered as the wood she murdered Anna on. The air around us loses color and I feel our limbs beginning to unravel. We’re separating, breaking the circle. I hear Thomas, breathing hard. I hear Anna too. I can’t believe what I’ve just seen. It feels unreal. I don’t understand how Malvina could murder Anna.

  “How could she?” Carmel asks softly, and we all look at each other. “It was terrible. I never want to see anything like that ever again.” She shakes her head. “How could she? She was her daughter.”

  I look at Anna, still clothed in blood and veins. Her dark-tinged tears have dried on her face; she’s too exhausted to cry anymore.

  “Did she know what would happen?” I ask Thomas. “Did she know what she was turning her into?”

  “I don’t think so. Or at least, not exactly. When you invoke a demon, you don’t get to decide the specifics. You just make the request, and it does the rest.”

  “I don’t care if she knew exactly,” Carmel growls. “It was disgusting. It was horrible.”

  There are beads of sweat on all of our foreheads. Will hasn’t said a thing. We all look like we’ve gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight.

  “What are we going to do?” Thomas asks, and it doesn’t look like he’s able to do much of anything at the moment. I think he’ll sleep for a week.

  I turn away and stand up. I need to clear my head.

  “Cas! Watch out!”

  Carmel shouts at me but she isn’t fast enough. I’m shoved from behind and as I am, I feel a very familiar weight being pulled out of my back pocket. When I turn around, I see Will standing over Anna. He’s holding my athame.

  “Will,” Thomas starts, but Will unsheathes my knife and swings it in a wide arc, making Thomas scuttle back on his haunches to get out of the way.

  “This is how you do it, isn’t it?” Will asks in a wild voice. He looks at the blade and blinks rapidly. “She’s weak; we can do it now,” he says, almost to himself.

  “Will, don’t,” Carmel says.

  “Why not? This is what we came here to do!”

  Carmel glances at me helplessly. It is what we came here to do. But after what we all saw, and seeing her lying there, I know that I can’t.

  “Give me my knife,” I say calmly.

  “She killed Mike,” Will says. “She killed Mike.”

  I look down at Anna. Her black eyes are wide and staring downward, though I don’t know whether or not they’re seeing anything. She’s sunk onto her hip, too weak to hold herself up. Her arms, which I know from personal experience could crush cinderblocks, are shaking just trying to keep her torso off the floorboards. We’ve managed to reduce this monster to a quivering husk, and if ever there was a safe time to kill her, it’s now.

  And Will’s right. She did kill Mike. She’s killed dozens. And she’ll do it again.

  “You killed Mike,” Will hisses and starts to cry. “You killed my best friend.” And then he moves, stabbing downward. I react without thinking.

  I lurch forward and catch him under the arm, stopping the blow from going straight through her back; instead it glances off of her ribs. Anna gives a small cry and tries to crawl away. Carmel’s and Thomas’s voices are in my ears, yelling at both of us to stop it, but we keep on struggling. With bared teeth, Will tries to stab her again, hacking through the air. I barely get an elbow up to knock his chin back. He stumbles away a few steps and when he charges I hit him in the face, not too hard but hard enough to make him think.

  He wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. He doesn’t try to come forward again. Looking from me to Anna, he knows I won’t let him past.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asks. “This is supposed to be your job, right? And now we’ve got her and you’re not going to do anything?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I say honestly. “But I’m not going to let you hurt her. You couldn’t kill her, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not just the knife. It’s me. It’s my blood tie.”

  Will scoffs. “She’s bleeding well enough.”

  “I didn’t say the knife wasn’t special. But the death blow is mine. Whatever it is that lets that happen, you don’t have it.”

  “You’re lying,” he says, and maybe I am. I’ve never seen anyone else use my knife before. No one except my dad. Maybe all that stuff about being chosen and part of a sacred line of ghost hunters was all bullshit. But Will believes it. He starts backing away, out of the house.

  “Give me my knife,” I say again, watching it as it’s leaving me, the metal glinting in the odd light.

  “I’m going to kill her,” Will promises, then turns and runs, taking my athame with him. Something inside me whimpers, something childlike and basic. It’s like that scene in The Wizard of Oz, when that old lady throws the dog in her bike basket and rides off. My feet are telling me to run after him, tackle him and beat him about the head, take my knife back and never let it out of my sight. But Carmel’s talking to me.

  “Are you sure he can’t kill her?” she asks.

  I look back. She’s actually kneeling on the floor beside Anna; she’s actually had the balls to touch her, to hold her by the shoulders and look at the wound Will made. It’s seeping black blood to strange effect: the black liquid is mixing with the moving blood of her dress, swirling like ink dropped into red water.

  “She’s so weak,” Carmel whispers. “I think she’s really hurt.”

  “Shouldn’t she be?” Thomas asks. “I mean, I don’t want to side with Will I’m-Bucking-for-an-Emmy-Nod Rosenberg, but isn’t that why we’re here? Isn’t she still dangerous?”

  The answers are yes, yes, and yes. I know that, but I can’t seem to think straight. The girl at my feet is defeated and my knife is gone and scenes from How to Murder Your Daughter are still playing in my head. This is where it happened—this is the place where her life ended, where she became a monster, where her mother dragged a knife across her throat and cursed her and her dress and—

  I walk farther into the sitting room, staring at the floorboards. Then I start stomping. Slamming my foot against the boards and jumping up and down, looking for a loose spot. It’s not doing any good. I’m stupid. I’m not strong enough. And I don’t even know what I’m doing.

  “It’s not that one,” Thomas says. He’s staring at the floor. He points at the board to my left.

  “It’s that one,” he says. “And you’ll need something.” He gets up and runs out the door. I didn’t think he had any strength left at all. The kid is surprising. And damned useful, because about forty seconds later he’s back, holding a crowbar and a tire iron.

  Together we hack at the floor, at first not making a dent and then slowly cracking the wood. I use the crowbar to pry up the loosest end and fall to my knees. The hole we’ve made is dark and deep. I don’t know how it’s there. I should be looking at rafters and basement, but there’s only blackness. Only a moment’s hesitation, and my hand is searching in the hole, feeling depths of cold. I think I was wrong, that I was stupid again, and then my fingers brush against it.

  The fabric feels stiff and cool to the touch. Maybe a little damp. I pull it out of the floor where it was stuffed and sealed sixty years ago.

  “The dress,” Carmel breathes. “What—?”

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly. I walk toward Anna. I have no idea what effect the dress will have on her, if anything. Will it make her stronger? Will it heal her? If I burned it, would she evaporate into thin air? Thomas would probably have a better idea. Together he and Morfran could pr
obably come up with the right answer, and if they didn’t, then Gideon could. But I don’t have that kind of time. I kneel and hold the stained fabric before her eyes.

  For a second she doesn’t do anything. Then she struggles to her feet. I move the bloody dress up with her, keeping it at eye level. The black has receded: Anna’s clear, curious eyes are there inside of the monstrous face, and for some reason that’s more disconcerting than anything. My hand is shaking. She’s standing before me, not hovering, just looking at the dress, crumpled and red and dingy white in some places.

  Still not sure what I’m doing, or what I’m trying to do, I gather it up by the hem and slide it over her dark and writhing head. Something happens immediately but I don’t know what. A tension enters the air, a cold. It’s hard to explain, like there’s a breeze but nothing is moving. I pull the old dress down over her bleeding one and step back. Anna closes her eyes and breathes deep. Streaks of black wax still cling to the fabric where the candles dripped during the curse.

  “What’s happening?” Carmel whispers.

  “I don’t know,” Thomas answers for me.

  As we watch, the dresses begin to fight each other, dripping blood and black and trying to merge together. Anna’s eyes are closed. Her hands are in fists. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but whatever it is, it’s happening fast. Every time I blink I open my eyes to a new dress: now white, now red, now blackened and mixed with blood. It’s oil and paint and things sinking into sand. And then Anna throws her head back, and the cursed dress crumbles off, cracking into dust to tumble to her feet.

  The dark goddess stands looking at me. Lengths of black tendrils die in the breeze. Veins recede back into her arms and neck. Her dress is white and unstained. The wound from my knife is gone.

  She puts her hand to her cheek in disbelief and looks shyly from Carmel to me, and over at Thomas, who backs up a step. Then she slowly turns and walks toward her open door. Just before she walks through it, she looks over her shoulder at me and smiles.